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Show 64 As for chasing around, he scarcely had time to squeeze two meals and a quick afternoon with Melanie into the few daylight hours left to him before he had to be at work. Sometimes he had to skip lunch. He had not found time to get a haircut all summer, and during some weeks he was not even able to get to the bank to deposit his check. There was a pile of registration and housing material from UCLA on his desk that he had not yet sorted through from lack of time. He had not read a book or drawn a line since June. He had not washed his car. It was the worrying, he decided, that was most corrosive and kept your body run down. You had done something stupid and you had entered a strange country. You walked the same streets, drove the same car, the same people looked at you, but they were not seeing what they thought they saw. You tried to conceal the fact that you were depressed all the time, and when you spoke to anyone you spoke a language remembered from another time. You spent long periods of time staring at inconsequential things, the shadow cast on the wall by the ivy creeping over the kitchen window, the spoon beside your cereal bowl in the early afternoon. He did feel as though they should mention it to someone, but when he suggested the bishop Melanie told him she really didn't think that was necessary. She felt as bad about it as he did, but it could have been lots worse, and if he wanted they didn't have to do it any more. They were lying in the grass below one of the trails in Mill Creek Canyon, and she didn't know quite what to do with him. She reached behind her and he heard her wiping her hand clean on a clump of weeds. His headache had moved down from his forehead and pulsed behind both eyes. He hadn't been able to kiss her because she didn't want to catch what he had, and kept turning her head. "I feel like a piece of shit," he said. |