by Wheeler Light

They are the largest fries I have seen in my life, each the size of its own potato. The man next to me orders a beer and no food while I order food and no beer. I wonder if there is some part of him that completes a part of me, but I am too shy to ask. “What are you that I am not?” I would say. Because I do not say, I do not know who he is and therefore, who I could be.

At home, the old piano is new in my living room. In the mornings before work, I look at its dark oak lacing itself with the morning light to become a light kind of dark oak. “I should play it,” I imagine saying to myself. I imagine the keys, my fingers dancing with the keys, tossing themselves from one dance partner to another, playing the music for their own technicolor dance floor. I want to play it, but I won’t. I am a bad pianist who paid good money to dream of being better.

The piano is at home which is not where I am going. I am going to a work conference. I’ve been going to the conference for a long time, so many years I forget the first one. The conference is always the same. My coworkers and I gather around a hospital bed to see how things are going with the man in the bed. His condition has never been good, though it has been different kinds of bad. It is as though he is attempting to show us the dynamic range of one life’s misery—it is a long overgrown drainage ditch of pain.

Juxtaposition is not unlike apophasis. The man is incredibly dirty in the sterile hospital room. His nails are clipped perfectly short, but dried blood has collected on the cuticles. His face has been shaved while the precancerous growths no longer get removed. He is too close to death for his doctor to worry about new threats. He is not defined by what he is not—rather, what he is not accentuates what he is. The cleanness makes him dirtier. All we can remember further solidifies all that he has forgotten.

On the flight, I get a ginger ale. A ginger ale at altitude is not the same as a ginger ale at sea level. At altitude, the lack of oxygen allows the sweet ginger to double as though mistaking a mirror image for a twin. I read my friend’s book she is working on. It is about pain. It is not only about pain—it is also about pain’s opposite which makes the pain in the book all the more relatable. Reading the book is not unlike staring at the man in the bed. When he groans and rolls over, we note that he has groaned and rolled over. When we adjourn from the room for lunch, the memory of the groan is somehow louder than the groan itself. It is like taking a deep breath. We fill our lungs because we know what will come next might knock the wind out of us.

The conference goes as expected. He has gotten worse, though in a new way. He has become so miserable, he has come back around to being happy again. He smiles up at us as we take notes. “What is my name?” I ask the man and shake my head at the response. My colleagues all ask the same question. He does not know. If this were a story, we would find the memories and place them back inside his head. We would dip his scabby face into the river of forgetting, and he would emerge healed.

On the music stand are several books of music I have attempted reading. I am more for writing. Because I do not know, all the knowledge is new to me, and in me is some amount of knowledge I haven’t discovered. The man next to me at the bar typed fast on his keyboard, and I thought about asking to look at his hands, though again I didn’t. He drank his beer. I thought about telling him about the conference I was headed to. If I told him about the conference, I would ask if he had any advice for how to remember. The issue with forgetting is not that the past is gone, but rather we lose the present. I took a bite of one of the irregular fries, and it was nearly perfect. Crunchy, salty, gigantic. Not regular in any way, really. The flight was unremarkable, just like the future is until it’s gone.

Last year, the man in the bed called me by my brother’s name. I was shocked. How could he have known my brother’s name? Through all these visits, I had begun to forget, too, how he was my brother’s father. How he used to be somebody I knew, or who he used to be is someone I still know. Someone dying is not unlike meeting them for the first time—meeting a stranger and wanting to know who they are. Them being dead is not like them not being alive—not being alive, a condition by which they can be revived through remembering. At the work conference, I remember who my father is, the perfect silence cut through by labored breathing.

Wheeler Light received his MFA in writing poetry from University of Virginia and lives in Denver, CO. He is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Rattle, The Penn Review, Barely South, Inscape Journal, and Allium, among other publications. You can find his work at www.wheelerlight.net.