And that night, when Stern's wife came home, he said, "I think I'm out of it." In bed, he relaxed his grip on the headboard, and then, just as swiftly as it had come over him, it more or less disappeared.
He told someone in his office, "I had the mildest nervous breakdown in town. I didn't miss a day of work. It was pretty lousy, but all of a sudden you just come out of them." The two phrases "hanging on to desks" and "jumping through my tail" had great appeal to Stern, and he used them often to describe what had happened to him. He remembered a hairless boy with moonlike jowls who years back had worked for his company and had begun one afternoon to run into the water cooler. For two years, the boy had disappeared, taking mute and vacant vacations with his wife, renting clapboard houses and just sitting in them; Stern remembered seeing him on the street, looking white and clean as though someone had sponged him down. He looked up this boy's phone number now, called him, and said, "I just came out of one like yours. No water cooler, but I did a lot of hanging on to desks. I had to do it to keep from jumping through my tail. What are you doing with yourself these days?"
"Just sitting around," said the boy.
Stern had not thought of time or weather or clocks and dates and punctual changes of underwear, and he was certain that great clumps of dust had settled over his life; somehow, though, as he had choked and skidded and clutched at people's arms, he had managed to mail things, too, and pay dry cleaners. He expected to find his son making far-off, wistful comments about "new daddies" he would like to have, and yet the very first of the new evenings the boy tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Now can we play?"—as though he'd been waiting for Stern to finish tying a shoelace. "Yes," said Stern, falling to the floor. "I'm down here on the floor trapped and the only thing that can get me up is if someone touches a secret place on my ear three times and then taps me with a banana." The boy followed instructions delightedly, and Stern leaped up to shake his hand, saying, "Thank you for saving your daddy. I now owe you one hundred giraffe tails."
Stern looked at a calendar and saw that it had all worked out fine, ending on the first sharp and crackling day of October; now he would be able to draw winter down on himself and his family like a shade, huddling in his house and taking soups for strength. He had been too agonized and out of breath to think about his stomach, and it amazed him that it was not leaping with a fresh crop of ulcers; it seemed to be doing all right, the glue holding firm on a cracked china cup. Maybe that was the trick. Go into a tumbling, frenzied period and your stomach simply wouldn't have time to concentrate on ulcers. The idea was to set up small, diversionary troubles in other parts of your body, way out on your fingers or inside your head. But what if now, with things quieter, a new batch got under way?
He wanted to take the previous weeks in his hands, crush them down to snowball size, and examine them close to a light bulb so that he would understand them if they happened again. It seemed a time to talk, finally, about dramatic central things, death and wills and horrible, long-buried family crises from which lessons could be drawn. First he called his insurance man, who said, "Before we go any further, remember, you can't dictate from the grave." And then he called his mother, telling her, "I really want to have a talk now. You don't know what hell I've been through."
"I know what you've been through and, believe me, I could tell you a few things. I could tell you things that would stand your hair on end."
"All right, tell me them then."