Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford Page B

shifter into my C-4 so that the next thing I know the EMS will have me on a board, hauling me back across to Toms River Community, where I’ve been before and do not ever want to see again. There’s nothing I can do—the familiar dilemma for people my age. So what I do—an act of pure desolation—is hug Arnie back, clap my arms around his leathery shoulders and squeeze, as much to save myself from falling. It may notbe so different from why anybody hugs anybody. Arnie’s hugging me way too hard. My eyes feel bulgy. My neck throbs. The empty space of car seat yawns behind. “Everything could be worse, Frank,” Arnie says into my ear, making my head vibrate. He is surely right. Everything could be much worse. Much, much worse than it is.

Everything Could Be Worse
    L AST T UESDAY I READ A PIECE IN THE N EW Y ORK T IMES about how it would feel to be tossed out into airless space. This was a small box on a left-hand inside page of the Tuesday Science section, items that rarely venture into the interesting, personal side of things—the stuff a short story by Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury would go deeply into with profound (albeit totally irrelevant) moral consequences. These Times stories are really just intended to supply lower-rung Schwab execs and apprentice Ernst & Young wage slaves with oddball topics to make themselves appear well-read to their competitor-colleagues during the first warm-up minutes in the office every morning; then possibly to provide the whole day with a theme. (“Careful now, Gosnold, or I’ll toss that whole market analysis right out into airless space and you along with it . . .” Eyebrows jinked, smirks all around.)
    Nothing’s all that surprising about being tossed out intoairless space. Most of us wouldn’t stay conscious longer than about fifteen seconds, so that other sensate and attitudinal considerations become fairly irrelevant. The Times writer, however, did note that the healthiest of us (astronauts, Fijian pearl divers) could actually stay alive and alert for as long as two minutes, unless you hold your breath (I wouldn’t), in which case your lungs explode—although, interestingly, not your skin. The data were imprecise about the quality of consciousness that persists—how you might be feeling or what you might be thinking in your last tender moments, the length of time I take to brush my teeth or (sometimes, it seems) to take a leak. It’s not hard, though, to imagine yourself mooning around in your bubble hat, trying to come to grips, not wanting to squander your last precious pressurized seconds by giving in to pointless panic. Likely you’d take an interest in whatever’s available—the stars, the planets, the green-and-blue wheel of distant Earth, the curious, near-yet-so-far aspect of the mother ship, white and steely, Old Glory painted on the cowling; the allure of the abyss itself. In other words, you’d try to live your last brief interval in a good way not previously anticipated. Though I can also imagine that those two minutes could seem like a mighty long time to be alive. (A great deal of what I read and see on TV anymore, I have to say, seems dedicated to getting me off the human stage as painlessly and expeditiously aspossible—making the unknown not be such a bother. Even though the fact that things end is often the most interesting thing about them—inasmuch as most things seem not to end nearly fast enough.)
    T EN DAYS BEFORE C HRISTMAS, AS I PULLED INTO MY driveway on Wilson Lane, I saw a woman I didn’t know standing on my front stoop. She was facing the door, having possibly just rung the bell and put herself into the poised posture (we’ve all done it) of someone who has every right to be where she is when a stranger opens the door—and if not every right, at least enough not to elicit full-blown hostility.
    The woman was black and was wearing a bright red