Where I'm Calling From

Then he said he wanted me to see something. He punched it and gave it everything he could. I fastened my seat belt and held on.
    “Go,” I said. “What are you waiting for, George?” And that’s when we really flew. Wind howled outside the windows. He had it floored, and we were going flat out. We streaked down that road in his big unpaid-for car.

Blackbird Pie

    I was in my room one night when I heard something in the corridor. I looked up from my work and saw an envelope slide under the door. It was a thick envelope, but not so thick it couldn’t be pushed under the door. My name was written on the envelope, and what was inside purported to be a letter from my wife.
    I say “purported” because even though the grievances could only have come from someone who’d spent twenty-three years observing me on an intimate, day-to-day basis, the charges were outrageous and completely out of keeping with my wife’s character. Most important, however, the handwriting was not my wife’s handwriting. But if it wasn’t her handwriting, then whose was it?
    I wish now I’d kept the letter, so I could reproduce it down to the last comma, the last uncharitable exclamation point. The tone is what I’m talking about now, not just the content. But I didn’t keep it, I’m sorry to say. I lost it, or else misplaced it. Later, after the sorry business I’m about to relate, I was cleaning out my desk and may have accidentally thrown it away—which is uncharacteristic of me, since I usually don’t throw anything away.
    In any case, I have a good memory. I can recall every word of what I read. My memory is such that I used to win prizes in school because of my ability to remember names and dates, inventions, battles, treaties, alliances, and the like. I always scored highest on factual tests, and in later years, in the “real world,” as it’s called, my memory stood me in good stead. For instance, if I were asked right now to give the details of the Council of Trent or the Treaty of Utrecht, or to talk about Carthage, that city razed by the Romans after Hannibal’s defeat (the Roman soldiers plowed salt into the ground so that Carthage could never be called Carthage again), I could do so. If called upon to talk about the Seven Years’ War, the Thirty Years’, or the Hundred Years’ War, or simply the First Silesian War, I could hold forth with the greatest enthusiasm and confidence. Ask me anything about the Tartars, the Renaissance popes, or the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. Thermopylae, Shilo, or the Maxim gun. Easy. Tannenberg? Simple as blackbird pie.
    The famous four and twenty that were set before the king. At Agincourt, English longbows carried the day. And here’s something else. Everyone has heard of the Battle of Lepanto, the last great sea battle fought in ships powered by galley slaves. This fracas took place in 1571 in the eastern Mediterranean, when the combined naval forces of the Christian nations of Europe turned back the Arab hordes under the infamous All Muezzin Zade, a man who was fond of personally cutting off the noses of his prisoners before calling in the executioners. But does anyone remember that Cervantes was involved in this affair and had his left hand lopped off in the battle? Something else. The combined French and Russian losses in one day at Borodino were seventy-five thousand men—the equivalent in fatalities of a fully loaded jumbo jet crashing every three minutes from breakfast to sundown. Kutuzov pulled his forces back toward Moscow. Napoleon drew breath, marshaled his troops, and continued his advance. He entered the downtown area of Moscow, where he stayed for a month waiting for Kutuzov, who never showed his face again. The Russian generalissimo was waiting for snow and ice, for Napoleon to begin his retreat to France.
    Things stick in my head. I remember. So when I say I can recreate the letter—the portion that I read, which catalogues the charges against me—I mean what I say.
    In part, the letter went as follows:
    Dear,
    Things are not good. Things, in fact, are bad. Things have gone from bad to worse. And you know what I’m talking about. We’ve come to the end of the line. It’s over with us. Still, I find myself wishing we could have talked about it.
    It’s been such a long time now since we’ve talked. I mean really talked. Even after we were married we used to talk and talk, exchanging news and ideas. When the children were little, or even after they