by Marshall Harvey

The newspaper announcement of the reading emphasized that his life had become spare, focused on bare essentials. His clothing, food, and writing materials exhibited a noticeable absence of detail. He often dressed in a single color, ate only a sandwich for lunch or dinner, and scribbled his letters and stories onto the same large yellow pad.

The audience noticed his trembling. Many of them had heard about his sclerosis. The announcement reported him as saying that he had fought the stupid thing as though struggle had become his only mode of existence. He opened the reading by correcting that report: "I only said that I have been fighting a stupid thing."

The audience was polite without exception. They waited patiently and overlooked his fumbling, most of all probably because his clumsiness seemed not to bother him. His listeners could feel his having grown used to it, beyond it. They waited for his voice to transcend his predicament because they believed in him.

Many of them had heard him read before, so they knew some of his habits. At the session a year earlier, he had delayed his reading for minutes after his introduction while he glanced through his material. When the reading was over, he silently reread the conclusion of his last story, and it was several minutes before he looked up for questions.

Tonight it seemed as though he might divulge secrets as he looked out and over their heads, but he only stirred his coffee.

He flipped through the pages, seeking the story he had wanted most to read. He had worked on the story for most of the week, from 10 a.m. to well after midnight. As he looked for the story, he shook and spilled a few drops of coffee onto a page on the lectern. Events like this were not new, but he had never met an obstacle at a reading with such pestered stubbornness.

When he appeared to locate what he was seeking the audience gave a general sigh of pleasure, but their reaction did not affect him. Usually he viewed a reading as an act in a play in which the writer was a protagonist and the audience too was a protagonist, but tonight he felt no kinship with his audience, no closeness. Whenever he lifted a page of his manuscript everyone saw, heard paper flutter and crinkle in his inadequate hands.

His hands shook more by the minute, but their shaking did not bother him. He saw his first wife’s funeral as he continued to search. Her body was white. She wore a brilliant red dress. She lay in the open casket at the front of a funeral tent in the plains of Oklahoma. A thin man with a large Adam’s apple intoned "The Old Rugged Cross." The memory of having heard that song four years after their marriage made him shake. The shaking of his hands added to the anxiety he experienced and he forgot about time as he continued to look for the manuscript.

He could see in the eyes of the audience no peace, no love of ideas. His audience lacked the ability to reflect soberly about life. They had lost the desire to love an aspect of life displayed in a swatch of color or in an unforgettable phrase heard for the first time, all because he was sick and tired of fighting a stupid thing.

For the same reason, he wanted to recite a senseless poem he had written. For the moment he could not even remember the first line of them poem. His hands kept shaking as he turned one page, then another. "I have death in case of emergency," he had joked to himself one day. He flipped through pages, half-unable to read them for anger, as though the story would bring his own meager surprise a little closer, but as he searched, the imminence subsided in his mind until he searched for the story only. He remembered why he had written it—he wanted the company of his wife because she had already crossed the line.

  When someone leaned back in a folding chair and broke it and the writer’s hand tipped over his half-full coffee cup, he felt the intensity build to a head. The near simultaneity of the two events—the breaking of the chair and the spilling of the coffee—he viewed as a necessary part of the drama because, for a moment, he lost his obsessiveness.

Although it made him sad whenever he thought about it, he was a person who occasionally found himself enjoying the plights of others. Because he now perceived himself as though from a distance, he viewed the spilling of his coffee, in a certain sense, as an enjoyable part of his reading. Although he felt as though he were viewing someone else, he knew that his doing so with cruel humor was less cruel than it would have been had he actually been watching someone else.

Yet in spite of his preoccupation, his audience was understanding even after minutes of watching him shuffle his papers amid the spilled coffee. At realization of their empathy, the moment only became the more poignant for him.

For a moment he imagined that someone had stolen the story about his wife. The thought made him want to laugh.

He collected the pages his coffee had not touched, and as he did so, he found the story he had sought, clipped to the end of a story he had not read.

After writing the story about his wife’s death, he had watched himself become preoccupied with trivial concerns. Of course! He had looked for little frustrations to increase his sense of self-importance because writing the story had cheated his narcissism of its depth. At this sudden realization, the angry spirit within him saw its own reflection and fled, gone for the day.

He searched the faces of his listeners and smiled. "This is the last one tonight," he said affectionately. "If I lose it again, at least I will know where to find it." He read loudly enough and slowly enough to give special emphasis to his words, and with a deepening love for those who were there to hear him. He sank slowly into an involvement with people who smiled curiously at him, as though he were one who experienced a strange and special pleasure.