Like white fire it burns, this endless pain that is my jaw. I clench my teeth together, but it does little good—the relentless throbbing segues from the highest point to the lowest on my erratic spectrum of pain. This is a breathing hell for me.  
      From behind comes the arrogant, impatient horn of a Beamer, followed smoothly by a hand angrily gesturing at me through the windshield. The light dangling above me is green, and I consider pulling forward, but the ill-timed outburst from the driver at my rear is the final fray in my afternoon. Rather than gassing the car forward, I drop the stick into reverse and stomp the gas pedal to the floor. My own rather abominable Toyota lurches backward, a lumbering behemoth in comparison to the tiny foreign car. 
      The hideous crunch is wonderfully satisfying, accompanied by the loose-change tinkle of the shattering headlights. I don't end my assault with the initial impact, but continue to burn the rubber from the tires, driving the BMW backward into the delivery van behind it. 
      My open windows invite the stench of smoking rubber inside, and I breathe it deep as though it were some sort of anger-releasing steroid or other such drug. It's beautiful here inside my little haven—the sun is spinning through a prism dangling from my rear view mirror, casting broken shards of rainbow light across the upholstery and dashboard.  
      I can't push the Beamer backward any further—the sheer weight of the van beyond it is too much for my much smaller car to engage. The door to the BMW shudders open, seemingly twisted. It hangs lopsided, like a man's ear that has been severed greatly from his head. From the car emerges a woman in a tight-fitting dress, and I briefly feel a pang of oops. Then her mouth opens and from it, spilling through the open window and into my own ears, I hear hateful, vile words, complemented by the pristine, upward thrust of her middle finger. 
      A wicked grin comes to my face, a grin that one feels only when something fantastically naughty has been committed. I feel somewhat like a child egging my neighbor's front door, only to watch, gleefully horrified, as the door opens and the egg smashes against the polyester chest of Mr. Hargreaves. 
      I notch the gearshift into first and give it a bit of gas, letting the tires speed forward through their own rugged skidmarks to take me through the red light and over the rise beyond. 
       
I wrote about Susan that evening, leaning over the darkened wood of my old desk, aided only by the pale green glow of a banker's lamp. The house was dark, a gathering place of quiet shadows and discontented memories, and I let them swirl about my hand as I wrote, wrote, wrote. 
      Writing about her was not the waterfall release of emotion that I had always envisioned; rather, another way to lie. For all talk of being honest only when one is alone, I found it harder, if that is possible, to pen my dark deeds and thoughts, even knowing that no eyes would ever see them. 
      You never quite understood me, I scrawled, accusing her of uncaring even now, months after her death. Not then; not now. You were blind—why couldn't you simply open those heavy-lidded eyes to see that, for all my declarations of love, I never really wanted you around? Any clear-headed person could have ascertained that. It was painfully obvious to me; yet I never spoke.
      Her photograph, the first one she ever gave to me, stared over my head from its vantage point above the fireplace. She presented me with it one morning in '65 when we met in the park, sprawled happily upon a faded, flannel blanket in the dewy spring grass. "It's me," she said with a smile. "My girlfriend took it when we went to Mexico together." The photograph was indeed a living work of art. Susan was framed by the deep blue of the gulf, clouds reflected, interrupted, on the surface of the gently breaking waves. Susan herself was the true beauty, however; her eyes, green and alive, whispered poetry no man could deny hearing. Those eyes, I later surmised, were the key to truly knowing Susan—and the key to unlock the heart beneath those eyes was a key I never happened across. 
      I abruptly flinched and gripped my jaw as it suddenly caught fire and ripped jagged rifts through my nerves, propelling me out of the chair and to my knees on the floor. I fumbled, almost blind with pain, in my left breast pocket for the amber canister of pills that the surgeon had prescribed, hands shaking like a junkie as I wrenched open the cap and spilled the black-and-pink capsules into my wrinkled palm. A short jerk of my wrist tossed the pills into my spasming mouth, and I swallowed, waiting for the relief that took so long to come.

"I'll see you tonight," she said to me as she glanced over her shoulder, holding the door open behind her. "Seven at the Garden. Don't forget—and don't forget your lunch meeting with Sykes. Make a good deal today," she went on. "The garbage disposal's broken again." 
      I nodded, and mindlessly waved a limp wrist at her—Go on, get out of here, it seemed to say—and went back to relentlessly tapping away at the typewriter. The front door clicked shut, complementing the unhappy sigh I knew she was breathing as she strolled down the walk to her car. 
      She was taken from me two short hours later, and I was alerted to this by a shaky voiced policeman speaking on my answering machine—I never answer the phone or door when I'm writing, but the sheer nervousness in the man's speech persuaded me to bend my own rule. He informed me, slowly and carefully, that my wife had been killed, a terrible car accident, went quickly, never knew what hit her. I thought about this and told him that I would be down to the station as soon as possible to sort this out. He thanked me and hung up. 
      I spent half an hour putting the finishing touches on a piece about poachers in Zimbabwe before I shrugged into my coat and made my way downtown.

I've always believed that life's true joys can only be found in those dark places that most are terrified of journeying to. For some, it's the drugs: the powders and the lines that send a man's brain spiraling higher and higher into the vast, electric atmosphere of ecstasy. Likewise with the drink. For others, it's sex: somewhere in between the sweat and the trembling, in between the lust and love—that's where they find themselves, and they lay looking down into their own face, gasping and completely aware of every breath as it hisses in and explodes out. 
      For me, there is no joy. There is no where, no when. No why. There is only the endless waking and sleeping, constantly remembering to keep breathing. 
      I've tried drugs, to no avail. The only good the stuff did for me was land me in jail long enough to withdraw and kick the habit. Sex has always bored me, even more so with Susan, whose mystique vanished as soon as she stepped out of her underwear that first time. Alcohol—never developed a taste.  
      They say that by the time you're forty, you've either accomplished your dreams or you'll never have a chance.  
      I'm fifty-two, and I'm not even sure what my dreams are just yet. 
      
Susan loved Broadway, I wrote, my left hand pressed against my smoldering jaw. In 1977 we stepped out to see Death of a Salesman. Susan wasn't quite taken by that one, but I was. The feeling of plugging away at something for a lifetime and seeing your return suddenly vanish—this was a feeling that by now I knew all too well.  
     I avoided holding her hand as we drove home. 
      We met in the 1963 en route to a demonstration in California. Susan was standing in the back of a severely battered Ford pickup, turning in concentric circles, arms outstretched like angel wings, when I yelled at her from the window of a friend's van. As the pickup and the van drove on, parallel and slow, we talked back and forth. Five minutes later, Susan slung her backpack over her shoulders and leaped from the bed of the truck. I shouted at my friend: Stop the van! He did, but only after my persistent nagging, and Susan climbed through the side door. She kissed me right away, a fat, wet kiss on my cheek, and we rode to Berkeley, arms entwined. 
     Our memories of those first few years are so much sweeter than the ones that followed, when the endless haze of nationwide unity and freedom eventually began to burn away, leaving us all—by all, I mean those hundreds of thousands that found a little something to believe in—disheartened and feeling sure that our angels had been gunned down. Susan made the transition from free-falling butterfly to mundane suburbanite quite well, and couldn't understand why I was never able to let go of the phenomenal feelings of belonging that swelled in me during those years.  
      I guess that our true falling-away began in September of 1969, when I spent the afternoon in an old tree-house down by Miller's pond, slapping away the mosquitoes and scrawling furiously in a small leather-bound notebook. To this day I believe that what I wrote then was so much a piece of me, so amazingly honest, that I'll never accomplish that again. I felt alive while writing it; now, writing again in the same pages, I can only hope to recreate the single moment of my life in which I really knew myself. 
      Susan didn't get it. She read it and her first words were, "I don't remember it this way." It was then that I began to feel something was missing from her—not just a hole in our relationship, but a distinctly gaping hole in her own memories, in her very persona. 
      The piece I speak of was later published in Rolling Stone, which greatly endeared itself to a generation of writers burned by the sixties and seventies, providing us with our own personal soapboxes. Burn the Country Down, they ran in bold letters above the three page essay, followed by my preferred title: Looking Back: Thoughts of an Activist and His Own Private America. The piece was quite a smash, and it jump-started my critically-acclaimed-and-dwindling career, elevating me to a status somewhat relative to that of Hunter S. Thompson, a man I met only once and pray I will never meet again. For while I have my memories, my beliefs, and my own opinions—however similar to Thompson's the world may think them—I am not crazy. Thompson is quite insane, and his works of fiction bleed of insanity.

I don't visit Susan's grave often; flanked by those of her dead parents and edged with dark and dying weeds, it's a somber and depressing site. Perhaps the more repressed reason that I do not visit her grave is because I do not miss her—not in the respect that most men miss their departed wives. What I do miss is the memory of her—with her passing, those moments during which I would stare at her across the kitchen table and remember her, braids and bell-bottoms flapping, as she ran through the woods behind the college, or as she proudly took my hand and introduced me to her oft-stoned friends, are gradually dissipating like strings of smoke in the rain. 
      "Did it," I said, standing over the misshapen mound of earth and tossing a rubber banded bouquet of bluebonnets atop the grave. "They're giving it to me this Saturday. You never expected this, did you? Neither did I—at least not this late in my life. I would have anticipated a recognition such as this after writing Sleeping Nation, Drowning World. They want to give me the Pulitzer. Chemical Halo. You never read it. Probably wouldn't have enjoyed it, anyhow." 
      I stared at the rain-softened tombstone for a long moment, tracing with my eyes the letters that spelled out her name, and realized how stupid it was to be standing here talking to Susan. We never spoke of these things in life—why now, in death? 
      I slipped my old hands into the pockets of my windbreaker and walked away, carefully stepping over graves and broken flower stems, leaving the wet grass and gray clouds that were my wife's only company far behind.

I feel somehow that the many days I've lived have been wasted.
      Over the course of thirty-five years I've carved out the sort of life that many might consider successful. By calculatory standards, I would perhaps agree. Success, however, is not a reflection—to me—of how many books I've sold or awards line my study wall.  
      I spent twenty years with a woman that never measured up to the woman I fell in love with when we first met. In a similar vein, I never truly loved to write—as some men just happen to be good at throwing a ball, so happen I to have a writer's hand.  
      I know that nobody—myself included—will ever read this once I've penned the final word and closed this familiar cover. And in a strange and unnatural way, perhaps this will be my purging, and when I am done, if I am fortunate, these unhappy demons that have gathered for so long will finally bid me adieu and slip away, leaving me to what I am and will remain for the rest of my days: an old man, all alone in a world that has outgrown him.  
      Susan, believe me when I write that I never intended to hurt you. You gave me your best—and though perhaps we should have gone our very different ways fifteen years ago, I thank you for the every memory you hung on my wall.  
      This is my farewell—to myself as much as to the rest of the world. For the pleasure I've given you, I am happy to have done so; likewise I thank you for the wonders you have shown me.  
      Good night, fair world. Sleep the sleep of gods. 
       
      Jacob Edward Sayles 
      August 1999

I set aside the pen, my hand clenching up in tired, arthritic pain, and I swept closed the covers of the small notebook, content that it held only my most reputable works. Outside my home, the night had slipped in quietly, and the sounds of children playing had vanished, replaced by the softly strumming crickets.  
      Accompanied by the dull beating of a thousand hammers within my jaw, I pushed away from the desk and shuffled through the rooms of the house, gathering each book I'd ever written and magazine I had ever published in. I returned to the living room and, one by one, placed the writings upon the charred wood that already lay in the fireplace.  
      I thought of Susan, dancing in the back of that truck, and I felt my breath seize up. My eyes blurred, and I took a deep breath as I began to stack the many pieces of work atop the wood. The notebook I saved for last, placing it on the top of the pile, where it sat sadly, almost mocking me. 
      It took only a single match to set the pages ablaze, and they rippled in the threatening heat as laundry on a line. I got to my feet and went to the recliner Susan had bought for me so many years ago, a chair I had never used or liked. It sat before the fire, bathed in the orange glow and seemingly afire itself. I lowered myself into it for the first time. 
      The fire swelled, and as the books crackled and folded in upon themselves, the notebook itself began to melt, the leather surface warping and twisting. Scraps of paper, black and feather-light, floated from the fireplace and caught a faint breeze in the living room. It reminded me of a season; a darker, sadder autumn I had never seen. 
      I closed my eyes, and there, an old man among the drifting and burning remains of his life, I waited for the end of the world to come. Surely it cannot be far.