Everyone Else Stopped Moving
When the traffic stopped on Douglas Avenue, I assumed somebody had stalled at the light. I was carrying a coffee I had paid too much for and rehearsing an argument with my son. He wanted to move to Oregon with his girlfriend. I had explained, more than once, why this was impractical, and he had stopped answering my calls.
The light turned green, but nobody honked. Across the street, a woman stood with one foot off the curb, sunlight shining on her white sneakers. A delivery driver leaned from his window with his mouth open. I watched the light go yellow and then red before noticing that a pigeon above the intersection had not completed a single wingbeat.
I set my coffee on the sidewalk and walked between the cars. The woman’s raised heel remained an inch above the pavement. When I touched her shoulder, she did not resist or yield, and her sweater felt like fabric stretched over concrete. I said something apologetic, then something louder. Her eyes stayed fixed on the opposite curb.
At the coffee shop, the barista held a pitcher above a cup. Milk hung between them in a smooth white curve. I passed my finger through it, and the part I touched fell onto the counter while the rest remained suspended. The espresso machine hissed until I switched it off. Afterward I could hear the refrigerator running and, from somewhere farther back, the steady drip of a faucet.
I checked my phone. Nothing loaded, but the clock continued counting minutes, and a message from my son remained on the screen.
I’m not asking you to agree. I just want you to be happy for me.
For several hours I looked for someone who could explain what was happening. The police station was full of people interrupted at their desks. At the hospital, a nurse stood beside an elevator with one hand pressed to her lower back. I walked through rooms I had no business entering and returned outside when I reached a bed surrounded by equipment I did not understand.
By evening, or what my watch called evening, I had become less frightened. The sun had not moved. Nobody needed anything from me, and there was no reason to hurry home.
I went to a steakhouse I had always considered too expensive. A waiter stood beside a table holding two plates, and I took one from his hand. The meat became warm beneath my fork. I sat by the window and ate it with a glass of wine, watching the unchanging traffic. When I finished, I left sixty dollars beside the plate because I could not quite persuade myself that the rules no longer applied.
The next few days were better than I would later admit.
I slept whenever I wanted and ignored my watch. I found a department store with a good mattress display and spent a night beneath sheets that cost more than my rent. I took a wool coat from a mannequin even though it was September, leaving money on the floor beneath its polished shoes. At an electronics store, I set up a stereo I could never have afforded and played an album straight through without checking my phone.
The music sounded wonderful. I turned it up until the glass doors vibrated, and for a while I enjoyed knowing nobody would complain.
Before all this, I had spent most days bracing for something. My wife had left two years earlier. My mother had died the following spring, and the company where I worked had begun describing layoffs as an opportunity to reconsider our priorities. My son’s move had seemed like one more thing I was expected to accept graciously.
Now nothing could get worse while I slept. I began staying in a house on the east side of Wichita because its owners had been out when everything stopped. There was a deep bathtub, a kitchen full of groceries, and a bedroom with blackout curtains. I kept it clean and told myself I was taking a break.
I went to see my son during what I called the second week. He was at his girlfriend’s apartment, sitting on the floor beside an open moving box. She stood in the kitchen with a dish towel over her shoulder. His phone lay beside his knee, displaying the message he had sent me.
I sat across from him and explained my objections again. He looked patient, which irritated me until I remembered he could not look anything else. After a while, I asked whether he thought they could really make it work out there. The apartment remained quiet, and I eventually went through the cabinets to find something to eat.
I visited several times after that, but I stopped talking about Oregon.
The weather varied from one part of town to another. Downtown stayed bright, while a strip of rain hung over the western neighborhoods. I could walk between the drops if I moved carefully. Those I touched soaked into my clothes, leaving narrow passages behind me that remained open when I returned.
In one of those neighborhoods, I found a boy about to fall from his skateboard. His front wheels had caught a broken section of sidewalk, and his body leaned forward beyond any chance of recovery. His mother was several steps behind him, reaching out with the frightened expression people have before they know whether something will hurt.
I tried to lift him, but he would not move. I brought cushions from a nearby porch and arranged them beneath his head and shoulder. Then I sat on the curb, waiting for something I had already learned would not happen.
After that, I began looking for accidents I could prevent. I turned off stove burners and moved knives from the edges of counters. In a restaurant, I found a glass suspended beside a table and placed a towel underneath it. These errands gave me a reason to leave the house, though I sometimes wondered whether I was making things worse. I had no way to know what would happen to the milk I had touched or the food I had eaten if everything started again.
The silence became difficult gradually. At first I dealt with it by playing music or leaving televisions running with whatever movies I could find on disc. Eventually I knew when every laugh and cough would come. I started recordings in separate rooms so they overlapped, but hearing an argument through a wall was comforting only until I remembered choosing it.
I drove out of Wichita in a pickup whose owner had left the keys on a gas pump. I found the same stillness in every town. Once, near Emporia, I saw a man standing beside a car on the shoulder and pulled over so hard that I nearly hit him. From a distance, the angle of his body had looked like movement.
I walked around him several times before getting back into the truck. For the rest of the drive, I kept the radio on static.
I stopped keeping track of days after my beard had grown past the point where I recognized myself. Food lasted until I touched it, and I learned to take only what I intended to use. I cut my hair with kitchen scissors and went through other people’s medicine cabinets for bandages when I slipped.
One afternoon, in an apartment above a closed insurance office, I read a letter left unfinished on a table. A woman had been writing to her sister about their father, who apparently refused to stop driving. She was angry and worried and trying to make a joke of it. I read the letter several times, then searched the apartment for an addressed envelope so I could find the sister.
I had no idea what I meant to do when I got there. I wanted to hear the rest of the complaint.
Eventually I returned to my son’s apartment with the coat I had stolen and a bag of groceries he could not eat. I washed the dishes in the sink, then put them back dirty because I worried that a changed apartment would frighten him. His girlfriend had left a list on the refrigerator, and I read it while standing beside her.
They needed an air mattress, a tire rotation, and enough money to cover the deposit. At the bottom, she had written a reminder to invite me over before they left.
I sat on the floor beside my son. His face had remained twenty-four while mine had changed enough that I worried he would not know me. I told him I had been wrong about the move, then spent a long time explaining exactly how wrong, including things he had never accused me of.
“I wanted you close enough that I wouldn’t have to miss you,” I said. “I made that sound like concern about your finances.”
He kept looking at the phone. I tried to remember the last thing he had said to me aloud and found I could recall only my own answer.
I began sleeping on their couch. Each morning, by whatever measure I still used, I opened the curtains and sat with them for a while. Sometimes I talked. Sometimes I washed my face and went out to check on the boy with the skateboard.
On one visit, I removed two of the cushions because they looked likely to catch his arm awkwardly. His mother’s hand remained inches from his shirt. I stood beside her and said that he might break a wrist, but the hospital was only a few miles away and she would know what to do. I was no longer sure whether I was reassuring her or asking her to begin.
I do not know how long passed before I heard the glass break. I was near the restaurant, carrying a pair of shoes I had found for my son, and the sound was followed by a chair scraping across the floor.
Inside, a server was apologizing while a woman lifted her feet away from the fragments. I watched them until the server asked whether I needed a table. Behind me, an engine started, and someone outside leaned on a horn.
I ran to the apartment. By the time I reached the stairs, my chest hurt so badly I had to stop and hold the railing. My son opened the door before I knocked, looking past me toward the street and then back at my face.
“Dad, what happened to you?” he asked. He caught my arm as I tried to answer and helped me inside, calling to his girlfriend for water.
I sat on the couch while they argued about whether to call an ambulance. My son was frightened, and I could not make him understand enough to stop him. When he reached for his phone, I let him call and kept hold of his other hand.