Postcards From The Apocalypse (Which Is Strangely Dull)

I have to begin. Even if it’s faltering, inadequate, or barely “writing” at all, I have to stop waiting, stalling, staring out the window, and start typing. The trouble is, I don’t feel I know anything much anymore. I know only warm and cold. Almost everything is cold, but some things are warm, and that’s where I focus.

I think about what a writer should be, and all I can come up with is: a) inconsolable, and b) committed to consolation. If I can’t offer consolation, I should not write.

There are consolations, even now. They are in us and between us. Watch out for cold people, growing colder through Covid. Go toward people who don’t submit their souls to a drawing, a drawing of a virus. The knobs sometimes have the exact look of Shreck’s rubbery antennae, and still still they don’t come out of the spell. It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. “Somebody’s got to be kidding, Cel,” my friend Rob used to say, all the time.

I live above a garage in a small apartment out in a field, across from a pond, in Northwestern Connecticut. My two cats, Jack and Lewis, live here with me, and it’s an ideal life for them: They go outside every morning, down the steps of the deck, around to the back of the house where they explore the bramble patch, maybe walk down to Bettie’s house, come back upstairs, and if the weather is nice, relax in the sun. I’ve placed a bird-feeder and a seed tray down by the bramble patch, and it’s been remarkably popular with the local birds, who astonish and delight me.

I moved here last summer. So far I have made one friend, and he is a horse. He lives alone in a field down the road, and one day last fall, I went up to the fence and he came over. I couldn’t believe it! I called my friend Anne, who has nine horses and I asked her how I should interact with him. She said horses are all about the forehead so I bent mine toward his and in this way our friendship began. I asked her how I could safely offer him an offering of food and she said carrots are safe, but no more than one apple a day, so that became what I brought him each day: A bag of carrots and one apple, cut in four pieces. My stepmother, Sara, told me to keep my fingers aligned so he didn’t bite my fingers when I fed him. At first I felt certain I could never mean anything to him, but one day I drove past him, to park down the road, and he lifted his head, as though he recognized my car. I was speaking to my friend Anna in London and I was beside myself with excitement that he seemed to have recognized my car. He came running toward me as I approached, that day, and my heart started beating, bringing me out of a numbness that had encased me since Rob died, shortly followed by my father died, on May 6 last year.

Our little routine became this: I would come down, he’d see me, stand and look at me from across the field, and then begin to either walk or trot to the fence. I would press my forehead into his and ask him how he had been, and then start to snap the carrots in half and feed them to him. Then I would say: “Want to go for a run?” and start jogging along the fence, and he would very charmingly trot slowly next to me, trying not to out run me. What an incredible feeling, to run with a horse. We would run back and forth a few times, then I’d feed him the rest of the carrots, and then came the hard part. Walking away from him, as he looked at me with his gentle big brown eyes, became more and more painful each time.

Why was he alone? Why was I alone?

Speaking for myself, I’m always alone. The things that have happened to me since 1971 have made me develop a singular obsession with not letting anything else “happen,” until I can process everything that already has. 1971—that’s how far back I would have to go if I ever began to tell the story, or stories, of everything that happened, everything that went wrong. Some things went right. And many things were interesting.

My life, my survival out here, became all about the part of the day I got to see him. He made me happy, because he was pure trust with no words, but he also made me sad, because his life, like mine, was isolated, waiting for something that never came. Was this the life of a horse? When I drove down to see him, as I got close to where I would park beside the road, my heart always began to ache a little. Everything I could not solve, like his loneliness, or mine, or what cold force had stopped everything from happening, moving, being as things ought to be.

One day a man came down the road when I was with him and I thought: “Uh oh, I’m in trouble.” But it was a nice man, who, it turned out, also came to feed the horse each day. “His name is Zinger,” he told me. He was rescued, I think he said, from a race track. He did have a friend, it turns out—another horse— but the friend had died about a year ago. “When Covid started,” the man said, and I looked away, not wanting to speak a single word about the beastly storm of loss we call Covid. I don’t think a “virus” has done anything to us. It’s something else. But people love to invoke “Covid” as a cold-drip language of loss—a way to justify the way everything has to be so sad, why all creatures have to live without any of our basic needs being met.

I didn’t expect his name to be “Zinger,” but I had not wanted to invent a name and then have to change it. There was yet another man, named Bob apparently, who also came to feed Zinger most days. His owners, who live in a big white house across the road, had said it was ok to feed him. I refrain myself from knocking on their door to beg them to get a friend for Zinger. They must have their reasons for not doing so. People always have their reasons for not meeting the emotional needs of creatures.

One evening I came to visit Zinger at dusk. There was wet snow in the field, and it shone blue as the darkness fell. Suddenly the church bells began to ring and we both stood still, listening. I could just make out Zinger’s ears in the dark, pointed straight up, listening to the church bells. “Do you like the sound of the church bells?” I asked him. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

“We’re not allowed to go to Church anymore,” I said. “But we can still listen to the Church bells.”

Zinger snorted, and swished his tail.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said, as a familiar pain gripped my heart.

I couldn’t believe he would spend the rest of the night in that cold, wet field. Then again, I don’t know what horses lives are supposed to be like. I just wanted him to have a friend.

Once when I was leaving him, he set off on a gallop around the field, snow flying as he galloped. It was as if he was showing me what he was, and what he was made to do.

I once felt I was made to be a “journalist.” It’s not worth talking about. It’s all water under the bridge. Animals are worth talking about.

I sit by my window and watch the birds alight on the trees, swirls of bright colors, so balletic, swift, and perfect. I don’t need to be anything, sometimes, except a thing that has eyes to see them.