Melissa left for Iowa this morning. She is helping with a dog show down there through the weekend, and she took none of our dogs, which means she has driven to Iowa to spend four days with everyone’s dogs but her own. She is back Monday. Until then the house is me and three dogs, and the house does not quite know what to do with the arrangement, and neither, entirely, do I.
It is rare for me to be alone this long, rare enough that I had to think about when it last happened. And here is the part I cannot explain with arithmetic: she was gone last week too, two days in Illinois for a volleyball tournament, and it did not feel like anything. This feels like something. Same wife, same highway heading out of town, same dogs underfoot. The difference is not information.
It is certainly not communication. We message on Signal, the encrypted chat client, a habit we fell into years ago for reasons neither of us could reconstruct now, and we use it at absurdly short range: from opposite ends of our own house, from the yard while the dogs are out. The thread does not care where she is. The messages arrive from Iowa exactly the way they arrive from the kitchen. Whatever is missing this weekend, it is not bandwidth.
What will I do with the time. That is the question that has been walking around the house with me since the truck left, and I recognize it, because it is not actually a question about a weekend.
My therapist and I have been circling a larger version of it for a while now, in the context of retirement. It is too early to retire, bbut at some point the question stopped being hypothetical and became a planning horizon. And every time it comes up, the same proverb lets itself in: an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.
Most people get to hear that as folk wisdom. I do not. The devil and I have a signed agreement; his seal is on my chest, over the right pectoral, put there so I would not forget what the arrangement was. When the proverb mentions the devil’s workshop, I hear a contract clause.
Fear is the wrong size for what I feel about it. It is a worry. I am project-centric to the bone; I need an objective the way the dogs need the feeding schedule, and the worry is about supply: whether, with the job gone, there is enough objective left to organize a life around.
So this weekend is a pilot study, whether I asked for one or not. Four days of the condition retirement would make permanent. And in the way of well-designed trials, the instrumentation picked this exact window to go down. Melissa is in Iowa. This is the off week for my therapist. The two people who make up the outside half of the protocol, the half I have written about, the telling-someone half, are unavailable simultaneously for the first time I can remember.
I know that I will be fine. Notice the sentence. It is addressed to its author.
There is also a standing order on file. NO PLAN B, tattooed across my abdomen. A better essayist would tell you he chose the abdomen because that is where the surgeons went in, in 2021, when the body tried to close the account. Placement was arbitrary. The left arm is a sleeve, the chest belongs to the sigils, the left leg is spoken for from ankle to knee, ravens cross my shoulders over a boreal forest. The abdomen just happened to be available: the last open ground on the map, and the words moved in. They mean what the end of Trainspotting means. There is one direction. Choose mortgages. Choose washing machines. Choose life.
Here is what the first day of the trial actually produced.
I would love to report that the workshop stood empty and I stood in it, facing down the proverb. The truth is I had staged the workshop in advance. Last week I bought a power cord for a 2011 MacBook Pro I had found in the basement, which means some part of me looked at an upcoming stretch of solitude and scheduled an appointment for it. Thursday night, wife in Iowa, dogs fed, I went down the stairs to see if the machine would boot.
It booted. The chime, a sound I had not heard in years, played into the basement like nothing had happened to anybody.
The disk was a core sample of us, fifteen years down. Years of photographs. Homework from a graduate course in advanced machine learning, from back when machine learning was a course you took and not a weather system you live under; the homework compiled, for what it is worth, and the field it came from grew up and got a job finishing my sentences. The obituary for Melissa’s father, which she wrote, and probably wrote on this machine; it was there, and the machine had kept it, and that is all I want to say about that file.
And a 3D model of a prosthetic foot.
The foot requires explanation, and the explanation is the best thing on the disk.
We used to keep chickens. Among them was a buff Polish hen named Cream Puff, and one winter the frostbite got both of her feet, and one foot died entirely and fell off. Anyone who has kept livestock knows the accounting that is supposed to happen next. A one-footed chicken is not a going concern.
What we did instead was move her into a dog crate in the basement, where she convalesced for the better part of nine months, and then, with the help of a research lab at the University of Minnesota, we printed her a foot. This was 2015 or 2016, early enough that printing anything was still a small adventure, let alone printing orthopedics for poultry. The foot worked as intended. And then, in the way of the best assistive devices, she recovered to the point of not needing it. She lived to twelve. Twelve, for a backyard hen, is a lifespan you would not believe if a stranger told you. Her last colleague, Nelly, also made twelve, and died about a year ago, and we are currently between chickens, on a break, because the arithmetic of loving short-lived animals is one we know by heart, and we know exactly what we would be signing.
I keep looking at what this says about the workshop. The proverb assumes that an idle mind, left unsupervised, lets the devil in. The historical record of this household’s idle hours is a foot for a hen and a boot chime from 2011. If this is the devil’s workshop, the devil has a weak portfolio.
There were also the photographs, and one of them I already knew, because a print of it closes Overburden: the summer of 1996, the sun going down red behind the Hull Rust pit. I pulled it up on the old screen with the idea of running an experiment. I wrote this month about the old light, the way memories from before the diagnosis play back warm, over-saturated, graded by an instrument that no longer exists, and it occurred to me that a photograph is a control group. Actual pixels. Actual color, fixed in 1996, indifferent to what my archive has done with the evening since.
The experiment failed in under a second. I cannot see that photograph. I look at it and no part of me processes color values; I am on the rim of the pit with the sky going red, playing the evening back on the original equipment. The archive intercepts its own audit. Every check I try to run on memory converts, on contact, into more memory. I keep hitting this same wall in different rooms of my life: the instrument cannot be pointed at itself.
Which is why the reliable instruments have always been other people.
The house, meanwhile, is running its own experiments. Elsa, the youngest hound, spent the first stretch of the day conducting a room-by-room search for Melissa: thorough, professional, repeated. Then I fed everyone, and the search was called off. They trust the bringer of food. Miles has taken up a position on the bed, and I want it noted for the record that he did not take Melissa’s side. He took mine. Her side of the queen stays empty, the hound has annexed mine, and I will probably finish tonight where I finish many nights, asleep in the recliner in the living room, because I fall asleep there mid-evening and cannot be bothered to relocate.
I can feel the essay wanting to do something with that. The empty side of the bed. The man in the chair, keeping something that could be described as a vigil. I have written that when paranoia arrives I check it against the facts and release it like an undersized fish, and it turns out the same net works on symbols. The facts: the chair is comfortable, I sleep there whether she is home or not, and when she is home she does not wake me. She lets me sleep in the chair. There is no vigil and there is no conspiracy. A man fell asleep watching something, in a house where that is allowed. Throw it back.
Melissa and I get ice cream every couple of weeks. I get a Butterfinger Blizzard, despite never otherwise eating candy bars; she gets chocolate soft serve with chocolate sauce. Nothing sacred in the particulars; they just quit changing somewhere along the way. If I go this weekend, alone, I might get a sundae instead. I have not decided. It is currently the only open decision on the calendar, which tells you what kind of trial this is.
I am writing this on Thursday night on purpose. By Monday the weekend will have been whatever it turns out to have been, and the likeliest answer is nothing: four quiet days, dogs fed on schedule, an old laptop humming on a workbench. If that is how it goes, the worry I have been describing will evaporate without residue, the way anticipation always does, and there will be nothing left to write about. Sunday, this would be a report. Tonight it is the weather.
So, the plan. Feed the dogs at the appointed times. Answer Iowa when it messages. Keep the workshop door open and see what walks in, knowing what has walked in before: a hen’s foot, a boot chime, a programming language. Decline the symbols. Possibly the sundae.
She is back on Monday. The dogs will hear the truck before I do.
Quiet Mind, Loud Brain 
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