They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhales some of their previous owners' atoms and molecules. The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Instead you were vain and selfish, capable of love but always giving less than everything you had. You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you'd been decent and loving and talented and brave. You live in three rooms of your twenty-room triplex, whole areas cordoned off like cholera wards. You are waiting to die without ever thinking about death itself. Every sports coat you own is too big because you continue to shrink, your shoulders like a rumor behind all that fabric. Social engagements require strategy and hearing-aid calibrations. You no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and building doorman. “He carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket.
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