Primordial: An Abstraction

15

After I finish my last exam, I remember that I have a family. A wife and kids. I blame the epistemological slippage on memory and especially history. As I articulate in my first book, a manifesto intended to both counter and facilitate a certain Icelandic philosopher’s “aesthetic of impertinence,” “History is that which hides in the deepest graves of our brainyards and dies for good the moment we try to exhume it.”

I call my wife.

“Wrong number.”

I try another number.

“Wrong number.”

I try another one.

It’s ringing.

It’s ringing.

It’s ringing.

It’s still ringing.

“Hello?”

“Wife?”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s me.”

“Oh.”

We have a conversation.

“But your temper,” she concludes.

“Temper. Right.”

“Also, you don’t understand me. You don’t even know what I want. You haven’t asked. I’m not going to ask you for something you can’t give.”

“Give. Want. Understand. Yes.”

My youngest daughter gets on phone. She sounds happy.

“Daddy! Daddy! Last night I had a nightmare about the shadow of the moon! I miss you.” She begins to cry. I tell her it’ll be ok — there are no such things as shadows of the moon.

I decide to spend the holidays on campus, in my dorm room, alone, smoking clove cigarettes, drinking green tea and red wine, and doing push-ups, sit-ups, and chin-ups. I quit smoking years ago but cloves aren’t like real cigarettes and I only inhale them during moments of extreme anxiety.