Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder Page A

ago, they would never forget them. For instance, she is putting a ceramic serving bowl on her head. Abbott and Abbott’s wife watch without smiling. Abbott is stunned, and he does not know what his wife is. The family room, past and present, looks post-tornadic. That child, so alive right now on the television, is missing, gone forever. That ceramic serving bowl, a wedding present, has also disappeared. Abbott does not want to pick a fight. He does not want to spoil the evening with gloom. But how else to say it—mortality permeates home video. Those tragic anti-drunk-driving television commercials from Abbott’s youth—the ones featuring home-video footage of joyous children subsequently killed by drunk drivers—those ads did not create the association. They presumed it, utilized it. Nevertheless, Abbott keeps his mouth shut. “You’re right,” Abbott’s wife says after only a few minutes of adorable footage. “You’re right. Let’s not.” A child is a Trojan horse,
a thing of guile
. The rout is commenced.

3 Abbott and the Terrible Persistence of Romantic Thought
    Yesterday morning, compelled as if by some binding treaty or biological imperative or perhaps
The Farmer’s Almanac
, many of the men in Abbott’s neighborhood rose early to clean their gutters. Abbott, more vulnerable to this kind of suburban pressure than he’d care to admit, today borrows a ladder and climbs it roofward during the hottest part of the day. The rain gutter is an apt synecdoche of domestic existence: From the ground it appears practical, functional, well conceived. But when you stand on a borrowed ladder and peer into it, you realize what a gutter is. A gutter is a flimsy trough of sludge, secured by rusty hardware. Rainwater is not so much channeled and diverted as collected and absorbed. All along the front of his house Abbott is alternately repulsed and terrified. He is afraid of falling off the ladder and sustaining compound fracture or death. The warning is right there on the top step, accompanied by a picture of a tumbling man who also appears to be on fire. Abbott knows that one instant everything is OK and then the next instant everything is not. He knows that it’s always the husbands of pregnant women who get buriedby sinkholes or lashed by falling power lines. But he continues scooping the muck into a black garbage bag, and by the time he reaches the gutter along the back of his house, his dread and aversion have abated, and his eye and mind begin to wander. He sees that the roof over his family room runs flat until it hits the roof over his garage, where it rises at a soft angle for three feet or so before peaking and dropping steeply down the other side. Abbott, now accustomed to the ladder and his repetitive gutter-cleaning movements thereon, knows that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who would climb onto the flat roof one lovely summer night with a blanket and a bug-repelling candle and a bottle of cheap wine in order to recline against the gentle slope of the garage roof and gaze up at the vastness with a wine-bent conception of the sublime so limited as to be
soothing
, and those who would not. Of the latter type, Abbott knows that there are two subtypes: those who would not, beyond adolescence, even think to climb onto the roof with a frayed backpack one lovely summer evening, and those who would envision it deeply and repetitively, but never, ever do it. Abbott belongs to this wretched latter subtype, the worst possible. All that vestigial poetic yearning, useless and malignant. Abbott’s wife, inside the house, comes to the kitchen window below the section of the gutter that Abbott is cleaning. Her face in the window is level with his thighs, and so naturally he imagines her sucking his penis and swallowing his semen. “Are they bad?” she asks. “The gutters?” “Yeah.” “They’re not that bad,” he