Coefficient

The foam pillow, one of several retrieved from his parent’s house after the sale, smelled of Bengay. Meant for the guest bedroom, which his wife at the time redecorated in what she called “Victorian Chic”—an effort, under compromise, to both appropriate and purge the room of gothic memorabilia abandoned (at last!) by the youngest son of his first marriage—the pillow had been remaindered to the upper shelf of the closet, beside the  Comedy mask he’d been unable to part with (its mate, Tragedy, featured in the property settlement of the first divorce). When he slept with his head on the foam pillow, he dreamt of leaning back onto the vinyl seats of Mike’s ‘65 Pontiac Bonneville and drag racing along Grand View Parkway in Traverse City, Michigan, and of how Mike would remove the ring-buoy-sized air filter from the carburetor, convinced that it would help them go faster.

The feather pillow, one of two 100% Real Down pillows his second wife left behind, smelled of windowsills—moth dust and insect casings. It languished feebly on “her” side of the queen-sized maple cannonball bed they’d purchased to replace what she’d called “the bridal suite,” a double-sized frame (no headboard) that she’d asked him to donate to the Salvation Army. (“A way to reduce,” she said, “your thinking of anyone else when we screw.”) When he slept on the feather pillow, he dreamt that he was stranded and panicky in an airport in Europe—Brussels, maybe—because he couldn’t locate his nine suitcases, his four kids, his wife, or the bread he’d bought to go with the hard sausage and cheese they’d meant to smuggle back into the States and which was packed already in one of the suitcases the older kids had been instructed to supervise carefully, as packages left unattended would be scooped into what looked to be an industrial floor cleaner modified by a U.N. demolition team, taken out onto the tarmac, and exploded into inedible fragments of porc and Edam.

The other feather pillow (the “match”) anchored the couch in the family room. It smelled a little like the beer he’d spilled when he’d fallen asleep watching a Julia Roberts film—either from the VHS collection his first wife left behind or from the DVD collection his second wife added to—and a little like the fishy breath of the kitten he’d rescued from the county animal shelter (and named “Julia” and raised for nearly a year before its disappearance . . .). He doesn’t dream, when he falls asleep on that pillow. Or at least he doesn’t recall any dreams.

Now it’s summer again. And most nights he can be found in a sleeping bag in the yard, his pillow a rolled-up beach towel. The towel smells faintly of dune grass and coconut oil, though due to more pronounced odors of the neighborhood’s automobile exhaust and recently mown grass, it would be difficult for anyone besides him to smell it. He’s had the towel since college, off-white with a (faded) cartoonish figure of a pink cow laying in the sun, its udders exposed. Below the cow are the words: “Roast Beef.” For years he thought it was funny. When he sleeps with the towel beneath his head, he dreams of his first wife before she was his wife and of how warm her skin had seemed, how lightly damp, the first time she let him—led him—to touch her here, as if the stars would always be aligned just so, as if the source of the light that reached him was not already gone.