Rain Man by Randall Sokoloff (story reading .TXT) 📖

Strange things happen to me when it rains. I am not sure what it is but if you asked my wife she would tell you. It is almost as if a spell comes over me, leaving me little choice about the way I behave. Lifting an eyebrow or moving a leg feels like an athletic activity. My shoulders are stiff, filled with cement. I can feel the weight of the rainfall all over my back, chest and neck- and I get so heavy inside that it is often impossible for me to get out of bed.

I sit with my back propped up by an aging pillow against the wall. The blinds are open allowing the blurred light of day in. I look out my window at the rainfall as if I am watching a film on a screen. The raindrops seem to hold my entire life story within their liquid membranes. They fall like pebbles that self-destruct all over the ground.

I am fascinated by the dark coloration of the sky, which always reminds me of being stranded underneath a brown tablecloth as a child. The sound of the wind and rain rubbing itself up against the windowpane has the intensity of a burglar that wants to break in.

You could say that when it rains I am under the weather. Since I have not had a regular job in years I have had the freedom to rarely have to go outside. I am comfortable enough in my bed or in a chair. All the ills of human kind could be corrected if humans could just be content sitting in a chair or bed, the French Philosopher Pascal once said. I agree with him but when the sun is out I will wonder outside my door.

I will get lost on my sunny day walks because usually a month has passed since I have walked alone. The feeling of sun on my skin reminds me of frozen food coming to life. I can almost hear the cells in my skin sizzle. Sometimes I will stop and look at the girls or watch a soccer game. I admire youth- and all that young people have because in my old age all of that is gone.

When rain falls I try and catch it with my eyes. Since the day that I was born I have done so with the greatest of success. I can stare out the window and fill my imagination with water. I can swim around inside until my entire body is cold and wet. I laugh and play like I once did many years ago.

When it rains I am fascinated by how the brown colors turn green.

I am also fascinated by the branches and orange leaves that lay strewn all over the streets like appendages that have fallen away from the body on which they belong.

The birds seek shelter on my windowsill and I sing with them as they perform various symphonies in the rain.

My wife has been concerned about what she calls my "rain man" behavior. When I was a young man in my early forties my behavior was not so bad. I had difficulty getting out of bed on rainy days but I was still able to get up with a push. I would have to put whiskey in my tea before I went to work at the library, but I remember even then something silly coming over me on rainy days.

Even when I was in my fifties I would laugh like a mad man in the rain. My laughter was not that of normal people who chuckle with friends over a fine meal. Instead my laughter was frightening and possessed the trace of something unholy.

It is not easy for me to talk of myself in this way but as a man grows old he lets go of all the illusions he has worked so hard to create.

It was not until I was in my late sixties that rain started to feel like bricks stacked up against my bones. My depression became surreal because it made the clocks stop ticking and the oven refused to work. On rainy days my depressed moods would also cause the freezer to thaw, the heater to blow out cold air and the one car my wife and I owned refused to work.

My wife’s concern grew out of the notion that not only was the rain affecting my mood but it was also starting to affect the necessities of her life. Not only was her husband relegated to his bed for the duration of a rainy day- but also she was stuck inside with broken clocks, a cold heater and no car to get her where she needed to go.

Now that I am in my late seventies I do strange things on rainy days. I look at the books, clothes, pictures that I have collected over the span of my life. This is what human beings do. We are like magnets picking up reminders of ourselves wherever we go- hoping that when we are long gone the things we owned will be constructed into some semblance of who we once were.

I have collected enough material things so that future generations will be able to construct at least twenty blue prints of the man I once was. While lying in bed I watch nature rage outside while inside all that I own gather cobwebs. I laugh out loud because it all seems so absurd. A life covered in cobwebs. Then I will notice some tears falling from my eyes, which I assume is the collected rainwater leaking from my imagination.

Coffee often does not help nor does my morning two-hour meditation. I sing out loud like a Yogi practicing mantras but when I am done I am still stuck inside of me.

My wife found a way to combat what she calls my satirical morbidity by shinning a lot of lights down upon my bed. Hundreds of lights on a string decorate my ceiling like the endless stream of stars in the sky. My wife has worked hard stringing these hundreds of lights together. I have had the joy of watching her climb all over the bed, hanging lights from ceiling and walls and reminding me of when we were both young.

As she stretches to hang lights I can still see some semblance of the body that she left behind on her way to old age.

I try and worry about the electric bills but at the end of a mans life it seems like the worry cells are all but burned out. I have been worrying all my life and as much as I want to worry now it is difficult for me to do anything but laugh and cry.

At eight in the morning my wife turns on all the lights and leaves them on all day. When the lights are on I get out of bed and go to the window and watch the rain. I say hello to the birds that look at me like they are seeing a part of themselves. I observe the yellow leaves and broken branches covering the streets. The rain falls down like bowls of rice from a Chinese food restaurant high in the sky. For a brief time I am not bothered by anything at all.

Sometimes when the lights are shinning bright and I am lying in bed staring at the ceiling- I am convinced that my soul has left my body and is drifting through the cosmos with no destination in sight.

The cosmos that shines on my ceiling sky seems to be a good defense against my morbid moods. The cat is no longer terrified by my laugh. The microwave works and the freezer does not defrost. The car starts, clock ticks and I can feel happy that my wife is able to get to where she needs to go. I get out of bed, stretch and can feel apart of my youth return to me as I bend and touch my toes.

My wife returns home with grocery bags filled with supplies for our survival and I relish in the smile on her face as she notices how I have dusted the cobwebs off of all my things. I am drifting away, I tell her- but she laughs at me and says dinner will be ready at five. She is not as affected by the falling rain as am I.

When the sun is out I am a different man. I am out of bed slightly before eight without any pain in my knees or behind my eyes. It is almost as if as the rain clouds dispersed during the night someone came and carried away the bricks from inside my body.

I make myself a cup of coffee that does need to be strong enough to anger my nerves. I sit at my desk and take care of the things that a responsible man is supposed to take care of.

My wife is happy to see me at my desk, dressed and seemingly in charge of the direction of my day. When the sun is out we know it will be a day that everything around the house works and the laughter does not have a trace of madness or desperation in it. We go out for lunch. We work in the lavender and rose filled garden, which is a testament to our love. We are both happy to be alive, enjoying the splendors of surviving into old age. It is only when we hear on the radio that rain is expected to return- that I begin to change and my wife starts to prepare the bedroom for a rainy day.

Publication Date: 10-14-2009

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