“What’s the cash back limit?” I asked the grocery check out clerk.
“Three hundred,” she said.
I laughed. “I thought it’d be forty or something.”
“We’re running a business here,” she said. “This ain’t no two-bit operation. We’re here to fulfill your dreams.”
But if I can’t understand you, what good is it? I blaze hot at technology failure, and my face burned as I adjusted my headset. There was nothing but static on the line.
I have to go, I said, and I dropped back to that strange place between asleep and awake, where the static recedes to an unsteady background rush, like the noise of a nearby highway.
The music’s stutters more as it goes, but this is how I learned to dance, years ago, and how I’m still learning. ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, everything all a-jangle. The conductor already left the stage, but the music, it never quite resolves.
Aldrich Ames grew sloppy with his chalk marks. He left so many, even the neighbors commented there must be a spy among them.
Like Ames, I took to drawing marks on mailboxes, leaving messages that the right person might find and carry with them. I am no spy, but I developed my cut-outs, ensured I could reach someone I did not get to see.
But eventually, carelessness blew covers. My phone rang with calls from strange numbers. When I answered, once, the voice at the other end asked, Who is this?
Are you seeing anyone? my friend’s mother asked, and I bubbled out more information than the answer required.
When I paused to breathe, she asked, Is it a forever thing?
I don’t use that word anymore, I said. I’ve been wrong more than once.
Well, you just sparkle when you talk about him, she said. You realize that?
I’m very lucky, I said. Things are good. They’re very, very good.
Some might appreciate the muffled world on one side of their head, the way conversation comes at a slight angle, the way things don’t totally penetrate the fog created by less acute hearing.
But this soft edge to hearing, this slight pressure in my right Eustachian tube, takes me back to a tearful, angry night, a time when I couldn’t parse direct language in a noisy bar. That night, the wall of sound built by minutes, each sound melding into something concrete and indistinct.
I can’t hear you, I said. And I’m too tired to read lips anymore.
For this party, we hang tattered streamers, balloons just deflated enough to wrinkle at the surface, strings of lights with bulbs missing. We can still celebrate, even in a room that’s a little less dim than it might have been. We are grateful for parallel circuts.
So many on the guest list will be unable to answer their invitations, their RSVPs disappearing like smoke.
Should we raise a glass?
Perhaps, but make the toasts quietly, quietly. Do not drown out the whispers of the ghosts in the corners of the room.
100 Proof 