five minutes to five

His name was Bill. He was the second old man to approach me today. The first told me my pants remind him of a hot rod, so, when Bill approached, my defenses were up. He wore a baggy sweatshirt and a ballcap; he carried a cane. There was a tentativeness in his gait that made me understand the depth of his sincerity. I overheard the young woman at the counter tell him, no, we don't carry domestic beer, a subtle lilt of judgement or dismissiveness in her undertone. Alright, then I'll have a pale ale he says, and shudders a little when she tells him it'll be four dollars. He digs through his pocket, hands her a bill, and carefully refolds the change with trembling hands and tucks it back in his pocket.

His nose is purple; his hair is a subtly greasy white, his wrists are papery and bruised, his eyes far away and sad. He's come for the VA, he tells me—after asking me to move my purse and taking the seat next to me—but he got here too late, and now it's closed until Monday. He'll have to stay in a hotel all weekend. He had a heart attack on Wednesday, he says, and then they found a spot on his lung. His wife died recently, he tells me, and now he's sick too, a far-off sort of floundering in his eyes. He coughs; it is the quietest, deepest cough I have ever heard. It is like ice breaking a hundred miles beneath the surface of the earth.

I ask when his wife died. January twenty-second, he tells me, five minutes to five. For a moment his eye contact is piercing, but then he looks away; I get the sense that I couldn't reach him if I tried. He looks as if he is drowning. Slowly. He is drowning and he is not fighting it. He says something incomplete about not knowing what to do with his days, about spending too much money. All I can do is listen, offer my attention. I offer to look up directions to his hotel; I lecture him good-naturedly about allowing his worried son to take care of him. Allow him this, I say, It is his turn. He tells me he is 72. He talks of driving trucks all across the country. He does not get too deep—not beyond his five minutes to five. Of course, I can't really imagine anything deeper. He was between busses, he tells me, when he collapsed, on Wednesday, and woke up in the hospital. A heart attack. And then they found a spot on my lung, he tells me quietly, repeating his story. He is making it true, or untrue, scrambling to find the truth in it, grappling to take ownership of this, his story. I see it in his face, the struggle to make it his own, the distance from this new truth, from everything that's happened since five minutes to five on January twenty-second.