Throwback Thursday: ‘As If My Every Word Has Turned to Glass’ by Robert Jeschonek

I’m not getting through to him.

The 60-year-old writer narrows his eyes as if he fully grasps the passage I’m reading aloud, but I know he doesn’t. As he sits in his recliner in the sunroom of his Malibu mansion, the words wash over him as always, like raindrops skating down a window without making an impression.

Never mind that those words have spoken so eloquently to so many men and women the world over. They might as well be gibberish to him, or at least ramblings in a foreign tongue he only barely comprehends, even though he once wrote those words with his own mind and soul and hands.

Watching his face, I speak one more sentence, which I know by heart: the last sentence of the book. “‘And so I stand here, thirsting for one last word from her lips so sweet and so dead, dying for one last chance to revisit all at which we failed in such wretched disgrace, none of which I would change in the slightest, even knowing what I know now.’”

As the last syllable trails off in the late-summer air, I continue to stare, waiting for what I know is coming. His bright blue gold-flecked eyes (impossibly bright!) tick left-right left-right as if he is pondering what he just heard, assembling a cogent critique or some rare new insight.

Then, his eyes shine even brighter with the sudden flash of a grin. “Pretty story.” His hands bounce on his blue plaid pyjama-covered knees. “Thank you, Doctor … Doctor …”

He can’t even remember my name.