Diarist’s Days

An immortal man sees the worlds in snapshots, decades like a diarist’s days. He wants to place himself in history for a time, a phase, like adolescent intensity. But he forgets that history, like fiction, is taught interpretively with just enough detail to make the story stick. He forgets that everyone is a character eventually. 

Sometime later (he stops counting by decades and instead by the fashion of people’s shoes) he decides that history, as a system of records, is wholly ill-conceived of and abandons it entirely in favor of poetry. Later still he finds poetic practice too restrained, doesn’t like how words break a page into lines. He makes pictures then, idiosyncratic, ruddy things. They are considered far too sentimental for the times.  

He resurfaces again sometime in the 1950s. It’s all stripped shirts and scraped knees and baseball. All the kids drink milk and are neat and white or haphazard and white and live on lanes and drives. Every sound has the texture of the crackle and pop of a needle against vinyl or the electric whir of a typewriter. 

He buys a house then, with war bonds and takes care to keep the lawn neat until he doesn’t. The green flays out, reaching when he gets too tired to trim it back. There are so few neighbors there, no one to demand order in his window boxes and flowerbeds, remnants of a victory garden. So the grass gets flyaway and he lets his hair grow long. He starts buying puzzles from the local bookstore and eating T.V. dinners, every night like another lonely Christmas meal. 

When the money runs out he returns to history, to school and the regimented order thereof. He keeps his textbooks stacked on his desk in the shape of houses and skyscrapers. They pile up and topple and get righted until he has three degrees and four library cards and a city laid out topographically in text and notation. 

He begins consultant work for the government. He becomes an academic lynchpin for some minor cold war melodrama. He knows several spies. None are faceless enough for his tastes, he likes his revolutionaries like he likes his diners: interchangeable outsider places. Later, he fades into irrelevance behind ping pong diplomacy and “Mr. Gorbochev, tear down that wall!” He thinks about history and wonders how his life reads. He thinks of all those records, blacked out redactions and all. He wonders how the last forty years look laid out like a city on someone’s desk. But mostly he makes puzzles and eats T.V. dinners.