iii.

He worried himself, like a slow death, mostly with pointless things.

At 2 o’clock in the afternoon he awoke in a sweat. His head was throbbing from the booze he had to drink at a bluegrass show. He had too much to drink and his body was pushing the toxins out as if a fever. He moved around and felt the wetness.

Eleanor looked in on him. Her Carolina-blue shirt, with Peace stitched in red, soothed him. She recounted with her soft smile his mood last night when he came stumbling through the door.

He listened. It troubled him. He tried to recall but it came only in blurry vignettes. She described his face and his stagger. The stagger! He wondered if anyone whom he knew had seen him in public, in the city, staggering.

Disgusted by his pride, he quickly excused this digression by pointing out that he had had such a stressful week at work, and that everybody else does it. He likened himself to the protagonist in Death of a Salesman, a play he had never read. He reveled in this fleeting notion.

______________________________________________

Mike had come in the fall. He praised Albert in a sincere and endearing tone for his accomplishments since nearly failing out of college. Bliss.

ii.

The cold bathwater he plunged into brought the memory of Armenia back. He had drawn a bath after a jog in the oppressive summer heat. His pulse beat with a thud. This memory rose with the water as he sank into their claw-foot tub.

One brought the other: he recalled negotiating in the Turkish-style bathhouse at Gyumri. He stood at the edge negotiating the plunge into the cold pool, while Magner was there urging him on, dripping wet and beating his overblown pink chest.

“I’m a man, I’m a man,” he repeated.

Then he jumped. And the cold water shocked him as he bobbed, eyes closed and gasping for air. There it was winter.

He opened his eyes again. Supine. He smiled in the tub and entertained this wool-gathering about that cold and foggy, dimly lit backwater of Armenia -- where the buildings crumpled and the wrought-iron balconies collapsed from the devastating earthquake of ’88 which left people homeless, bereft and weary with more woes.

He was glad to be home.