Three weeks after he received the bleakest report yet about the progress of the cancer in his bile ducts—unresectable, irreversible, a brief twisted flare in the eyes of the doctor that belied her composed expression—Herman developed insomnia. At first it struck him as a silver lining, since it meant more time to enjoy his remaining life, but then he realized that he had never enjoyed life, not even before the tumors, and the fatigue left him feeling nauseated, unable to maintain even the slightest of erotic fantasies, and even a touch crazy, to the point where he became so angry at the insomnia that sleep was newly impossible. At that point he began to write. As a younger man, he had always believed that if life was suddenly circumscribed, it would fill him with both the desire for meaning and the ability to locate it, and he wrote in that spirit. He wrote about his parents and his sister, who he loved. He wrote about men from the army he hated. He wrote about religion and about artwork. He was expansive in his efforts: most of the writings ran to ten pages at least, and one of them, about a sidewalk singer he had seen in 1974 and, after putting five-dollar bills in her guitar case every day for a month, he had worked up the courage to ask out, after which he had taken her home for surprisingly acrobatic congress, had married her, had realized the folly of that commitment (as had she, he hastened to add), had divorced her but still put money in her guitar case regularly, if you knew what he meant, that particular story, called Sidewalk Joan’s Sidewalk Song, topped out at more than one hundred pages. After Herman’s death, his brother found a box filled with these writings. He took them home, spent a week reading them at all hours of the day and night, and declared them gobbledygook.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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