ABSTRACT
As he lay there, filled up with strangers, he wondered who would miss him first. The clerk who sold him beer once a week in the corner store. The woman who walked past him each morning with her dog, stopping to smoke a forbidden cigarette a block down the street. The dry cleaner, mechanic, gas station attendant. He wondered who thought of him—the teacher who, every year, hears the closing line of his junior-year term paper, not because it was elegantly phrased, but because of the metaphor that dangled in a particularly odd way. The man in prison who said the name Dewars more than any other proper noun, mourning that “one for the road” he drank in 1982 and all that it caused. The woman who sat next to him in the coffee shop last month and noticed that he had her dead father’s eyes. He wondered how it could be that he figured more prominently, if only by accident, in the mental lives of these otherwise forgotten acquaintances, simply because he had happened to be there, to intersect for an instant in the paths their lives took. These are the contents of a life, he thought—all these crossings that carve out a place in the world in such unremarkable ways.
