But all the man knew, or whatever you'd want to call him, all the man knew when he could finally be awake, after a run of troubled shifts of earthly Restaurant Week behind the bar, having maintained a fascia-like balance between regular and newbie, between familiar and foreign interloper, was that he was tired, worn down.  And good thing, then, to have a day off.  The first one, awkward, unhappy, he woke, started with yesterday's green tea chilled from the fridge in a reused wine bottle, then making some more, then turning on the over to preheat to 375 degrees, for the purpose of cooking the duck bacon he had found the night before in the Safeway after his long shift and cleaning up and organizing all alone, as he liked it...   That, as he knew, was the happiest part of the week, when he had finally gotten through all the labors they had asked of him, all the responses, all the actions, all the procurement and delivery, when he could put on some of his own favored music in the dimly lit bar-room, and let his mind wander, in as close as he could find to a state of peace in his apparently troubled world and life.

Then the transmissions could come again, unhindered, less interfered with.   The Pogues doing an old Irish song, or The Dubliners, or Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers...  now and again hearing a song less familiar, one about a Donegal sailor, a shipwreck, an icy angry sea...  Waltzing Mathilda...   Songs that took the focus off the grave habit of serious common to any town's business leadership and real estate deals, political dealings, bureaucracies, even as necessary as they might be...

There in the night he found again, alone, sipping some red wine, but not too much, a root of poetic power, more so than the discouraging lack thereof, potency rather than impotency...

And even on the sad day off, as his birthday approached, he with no plans for it, he knew he could spend at least a little bit of time sifting the airs for little bits and pieces, remnants of the great transmission that earlier fishermen, perhaps not unlike him, had honestly caught in their own nets, blind but willing, lucky, as, in Shakespeare's image, a blind man catching a hare.

In the meantime, he had a cough, which had been going on for weeks.  There was a pain of some tightness in his left shoulder when he reached out for something so.  The sun was not long for the sky, a light pale blue chalked slightly... as he puttered about, with tea, the duck bacon, the leather couch, his Adidas track pants, a tea shirt with the logo of the Tour de France, and his green chamois shirt from LL Beans, with a Parker Jotter ball point pen in his breast pocket.  He had not started the day vomiting from nasal congestion as he went to the small kitchen to hydrate, as he had earlier in the week as he struggled to get up.  Yes, it was damn physical the whole thing, having to absorb it, as he breathed through his nose over the sink, feeling almost half queasy all of a sudden.  The things you internalize...  "Yes, I'm getting too old for this.  There must be something else."

Maybe he would go for a little walk, here in this quiet part of town, where the transmission from Tralfamadore were more loving, present and lively, picked up by groves of pine on the bluff above the silent river.  Here there was some life, in the form of nature.  Here, the messages sent by the heavens to the earthlings were not already built up into sterile palaces of concrete and stone, codified, sterilized, institutionalized.  Here, out here, away from the pavement and commerce of many people in suits disappeared, fading out as the old ghosts of the living battles that had happened in their way, ghosts of Civil War soldiers who might have peered anxiously at their brethren stuck into enemy uniforms on the other side of the great river...  Here, at least it was quiet, not that anyone really likes quiet for all that long.

Yes, the body is tired, drummed upon by inconvenient tasks, but the spirit is willing.  Get thee near the river, before retiring to the old G.I. brick apartment house.



By the green ceramic tea pot with a bamboo motif, a small enamel silver Christian cross of a Byzantine style on the Ikea coffee table just beyond the laptop.  A tiny antenna, a receiver, a radio for the transmission...  Yes, perhaps there is a cost, a personal one, in hearing the great transmission, the little bits of messages received, frustrated by the poor reception, breaking up even as you might hear them... To be taken as fools, for at least we know we do not possess the logic now the words, but those we blurt out with so little to go on, scarce of an educated path or habit...   No wonder then that there are painters and people of music, craftsmen...


So, he bundled up modestly, with his older pair of sneakers on, left the apartment while there was still some light out to the west above the great wall of the reservoir's eastern bank, out beyond the tree tops of Virginia in the distance on the other side of the great river.  And indeed, the grass was still under his steps, and in the cold a woman was walking a dog, and looking at her phone screen.  He went further on, toward the grove of 100 foot tall pines, small cone, large cone, California...  different species who had all contributed to a nice soft bed of needles, then through the brush and onto the old trolley track, and as a plane flew overhead and the long lights of car lights proceeding both in and out over on GW Parkway, he looked up and saw Venus straight to what he took to be south, bright in the sky.