In the sixty-first year of his life, Liam Pennywell lost his
job. It wasn’t such a good job, anyhow. He’d been
teaching fifth grade in a second-rate private boys’ school.
Fifth grade wasn’t even what he’d been trained for.
Teaching wasn’t what he’d been trained for.
His degree was in philosophy. Oh, don’t ask. Things seemed to
have taken a downward turn a long, long time ago, and perhaps it
was just as well that he had seen the last of St. Dyfrig’s
dusty, scuffed corridors and those interminable after-school
meetings and the reams of niggling paperwork.

In fact, this might be a sign. It could be just the nudge he
needed to push him on to the next stage --- the final stage, the
summing-up stage. The stage where he sat in his rocking chair and
reflected on what it all meant, in the end.

He had a respectable savings account and the promise of a
pension, so his money situation wasn’t out-and-out desperate.
Still, he would have to economize. The prospect of economizing
interested him. He plunged into it with more enthusiasm than
he’d felt in years --- gave up his big old-fashioned
apartment within the week and signed a lease on a smaller place, a
one-bedroom-plus-den in a modern complex out toward the Baltimore
Beltway. Of course this meant paring down his possessions, but so
much the better. Simplify, simplify! Somehow he had accumulated far
too many encumbrances. He tossed out bales of old magazines and
manila envelopes stuffed with letters and three shoe boxes of index
cards for the dissertation that he had never gotten around to
writing. He tried to palm off his extra furniture on his daughters,
two of whom were grown-ups with places of their own, but they said
it was too shabby. He had to donate it to Goodwill. Even Goodwill
refused his couch, and he ended up paying 1-800-GOT-JUNK to truck
it away. What was left, finally, was compact enough that he could
reserve the next-smallest-size U-Haul, a fourteen-footer, for
moving day.

On a breezy, bright Saturday morning in June, he and his friend
Bundy and his youngest daughter’s boyfriend lugged everything
out of his old apartment and set it along the curb. (Bundy had
decreed that they should develop a strategy before they started
loading.) Liam was reminded of a photographic series that
he’d seen in one of those magazines he had just thrown away.
National Geographic? Life? Different people from
different parts of the world had posed among their belongings in
various outdoor settings. There was a progression from the contents
of the most primitive tribesman’s hut (a cooking pot and a
blanket, in Africa or some such) to a suburban American
family’s football-field-sized assemblage of furniture and
automobiles, multiple TVs and sound systems, wheeled racks of
clothing, everyday china and company china, on and on and on. His
own collection, which had seemed so scanty in the gradually
emptying rooms of his apartment, occupied an embarrassingly large
space alongside the curb. He felt eager to whisk it away from
public view. He snatched up the nearest box even before Bundy had
given them the go-ahead.

Bundy taught phys ed at St. Dyfrig. He was a skeletal,
blue-black giraffe of a man, frail by the looks of him, but he
could lift astonishing weights. And Damian --- a limp, wilted
seventeen-year-old --- was getting paid for this. So Liam let the
two of them tackle the heavy stuff while he himself, short and
stocky and out of shape, saw to the lamps and the pots and pans and
other light objects. He had packed his books in small cartons and
so those he carried too, stacking them lovingly and precisely
against the left inner wall of the van while Bundy singlehandedly
wrestled with a desk and Damian tottered beneath an upside-down
Windsor chair balanced on top of his head. Damian had the posture
of a consumptive --- narrow, curved back and buckling knees. He
resembled a walking comma.

The new apartment was some five miles from the old one, a short
jaunt up North Charles Street. Once the van was loaded, Liam led
the way in his car. He had assumed that Damian, who was below the
legal age for driving a rental, would ride shotgun in the van with
Bundy, but instead he slid in next to Liam and sat in a jittery
silence, chewing on a thumbnail and lurking behind a mane of lank
black hair. Liam couldn’t think of a single thing to say to
him. When they stopped for the light at Wyndhurst he contemplated
asking how Kitty was, but he decided it might sound odd to inquire
about his own daughter. Not until they were turning off Charles did
either of them speak, and then it was Damian. “Swingin’
bumper sticker,” he said.

Since there were no cars ahead of them, Liam knew it had to be
his own bumper sticker Damian meant. (BUMPER STICKER, it
read --- a witticism that no one before had ever seemed to
appreciate.) “Why, thanks,” he said. And then, feeling
encouraged: “I also have a T-shirt that says
T-SHIRT.” Damian stopped chewing his thumbnail and
gaped at him. Liam said, “Heh, heh,” in a helpful tone
of voice, but still it seemed that Damian didn’t get it.

The complex Liam was moving to sat opposite a small shopping
mall. It consisted of several two-story buildings, flat-faced and
beige and bland, placed at angles to each other under tall, spindly
pines. Liam had worried about privacy, seeing the network of paths
between buildings and the flanks of wide, staring windows, but
during the whole unloading process they didn’t run into a
single neighbor. The carpeting of brown pine needles muffled their
voices, and the wind in the trees above them made an eerily steady
whispering sound. “Cool,” Damian said, presumably
meaning the sound, since he had his face tipped upward as he spoke.
He was under the Windsor chair again. It loomed like an oversized
bonnet above his forehead.

Liam’s unit was on the ground floor. Unfortunately, it had
a shared entrance --- a heavy brown steel door, opening into a
dank-smelling cinderblock foyer with his own door to the left and a
flight of steep concrete steps directly ahead. Second-floor units
cost less to rent, but Liam would have found it depressing to climb
those stairs every day.

He hadn’t given much thought beforehand to the placement
of his furniture. Bundy set things down any old where but Damian
proved unexpectedly finicky, shoving Liam’s bed first one way
and then another in search of the best view. “Like,
you’ve got to see out the window first thing when you open
your eyes,” he said, “or how will you know what kind of
weather it is?” The bed was digging tracks across the carpet,
and Liam just wanted to leave it where it stood. What did he care
what kind of weather it was? When Damian started in on the desk ---
it had to be positioned where sunlight wouldn’t reflect off
the computer screen, he said --- Liam told him, “Well, since
I don’t own a computer, where the desk is now will be fine.
That about wraps things up, I guess.”

“Don’t own a computer!” Damian echoed.

“So let me just get you your money, and you can be on your
way.”

“But how do you, like, communicate with the outside
world?”

Liam was about to say that he communicated by fountain pen, but
Bundy said, chuckling, “He doesn’t.” Then he
clapped a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “Okay, Liam, good
luck, man.”

Liam hadn’t meant to dismiss Bundy along with Damian. He
had envisioned the two of them sharing the traditional moving-day
beer and pizza. But of course, Bundy was providing Damian’s
ride back. (It was Bundy who’d picked up the U-Haul, bless
him, and now he’d be returning it.) So Liam said,
“Well, thank you, Bundy. I’ll have to have you over
once I’m settled in.” Then he handed Damian a hundred
and twenty dollars in cash. The extra twenty was a tip, but since
Damian pocketed the bills without counting them, the gesture felt
like a waste. “See you around,” was all he said. Then
he and Bundy left. The inner door latched gently behind them but
the outer door, the brown steel one, shook the whole building when
it slammed shut, setting up a shocked silence for several moments
afterward and emphasizing, somehow, Liam’s sudden
solitude.

Well. So. Here he was.

He took a little tour. There wasn’t a lot to look at. A
medium-sized living room, with his two armchairs and the rocking
chair facing in random directions and filling not quite enough
space. A dining area at the far end (Formica-topped table from his
first marriage and three folding chairs), with a kitchen alcove
just beyond. The den and the bathroom opened off the hall that led
back to the bedroom. All the floors were carpeted with the same
beige synthetic substance, all the walls were refrigerator white,
and there were no moldings whatsoever, no baseboards or window
frames or door frames, none of those gradations that had softened
the angles of his old place. He found this a satisfaction. Oh, his
life was growing purer, all right! He poked his head into the tiny
den (daybed, desk, Windsor chair) and admired the built-in shelves.
They had been a big selling point when he was apartment hunting:
two tall white bookshelves on either side of the patio door.
Finally, finally he’d been able to get rid of those
glass-fronted walnut monstrosities he had inherited from his
mother. It was true that these shelves were less spacious.
He’d had to consolidate a bit, discarding the fiction and
biographies and some of his older dictionaries. But he had kept his
beloved philosophers, and now he looked forward to arranging them.
He bent over a carton and opened the flaps. Epictetus. Arrian. The
larger volumes would go on the lower shelves, he decided, even
though they didn’t need to, since all the shelves were
exactly, mathematically the same height. It was a matter of
aesthetics, really --- the visual effect. He hummed tunelessly to
himself, padding back and forth between the shelves and the
cartons. The sunlight streaming through the glass door brought a
fine sweat to his upper lip, but he postponed rolling up his
shirtsleeves because he was too absorbed in his task.

After the study came the kitchen, less interesting but still
necessary, and so he moved on to the boxes of foods and utensils.
This was the most basic of kitchens, with a single bank of
cabinets, but that was all right; he’d never been much of a
cook. In fact here it was, late afternoon, and he was only now
realizing that he’d better fix himself some lunch. He made a
jelly sandwich and ate it as he worked, swigging milk straight from
the carton to wash it down. The sight of the six-pack of beer in
the refrigerator, brought over the day before along with his
perishables, gave him a pang of regret that took a moment to
explain. Ah, yes: Bundy. He must remember to phone Bundy tomorrow
and thank him at greater length. Invite him to supper, even. He
wondered what carry-out establishments delivered within his new
radius.

In the living room he arranged the chairs in what he hoped was a
friendly conversational grouping. He placed a lamp table between
the two armchairs and the coffee table in front of them, and the
other lamp table he set next to the rocker, which was where he
imagined sitting to read at the end of every day. Or all
day, for that matter. How else would he fill the hours?

Even in the summers, he had been accustomed to working. St.
Dyfrig students could be counted on to require an abundance of
remedial courses. He had taken almost no vacation --- just one week
in early June and two in August.

Well, think of this as one of those weeks. Just proceed a day at
a time, is all.

On the kitchen wall, the telephone rang. He had a new number but
he had kept his existing plan, which included caller ID (one of the
few modern inventions he approved of), and he checked the screen
before he lifted the receiver. ROYALL J S. His sister.
“Hello?” he said.

“How’s it going, Liam?”

“Oh, fine. I think I’m just about
settled.”

“Have you made up your bed yet?”

“Well, no.”

“Do it. Now. You should have done it first thing. Pretty
soon you’re going to notice you’re exhausted, and you
don’t want to be hunting for sheets then.”

“Okay,” he said.

Julia was four years his senior. He was used to receiving orders
from her.

“Later in the week I may stop by and visit. I’ll
bring you a pot of beef stew,” she said.

“Well, that’s very nice of you, Julia,” he
said.

He hadn’t eaten red meat in thirty-some years, but it
would have been useless to remind her.

After he hung up he obediently made his bed, which was easily
navigated since Damian had positioned it so there was walking space
on either side. Then he tackled the closet, where clothes had been
dumped every which way. He nailed his shoe bag to the closet door
and fitted in his shoes; he draped his ties on the tie rack that he
found already installed. He’d never owned a tie rack before.
Then, since he had the hammer out, he decided to go ahead and hang
his pictures. Oh, he was way ahead of the game! Picture hanging was
a finishing touch, something that took most people days. But he
might as well see this through.

His pictures were unexceptional --- van Gogh prints, French
bistro posters, whatever he’d chosen haphazardly years and
years ago just to save his walls from total blankness. Even so, it
took him a while to find the appropriate spot for each one and get
it properly centered. By the time he’d finished it was after
eight and he’d had to turn all the lights on. The ceiling
globe in the living room had a burnt-out bulb, he discovered. Well,
never mind; he’d see to that tomorrow. All at once, enough
was enough.

He wasn’t the slightest bit hungry, but he heated a bowl
of vegetable soup in his miniature microwave and sat down at the
table to eat it. First he sat facing the kitchen alcove, with his
back to the living room. The view was uninspiring, though, so he
switched to the end chair that faced the window. Not that he had
much to see even there --- just a sheet of glossy blackness and a
vague, transparent reflection of his own round gray head --- but it
would be nice in the daytime. He would automatically settle in that
chair from now on, he supposed. He had a fondness for routine.

When he stood up to take his empty bowl to the kitchen, he was
ambushed by sudden aches in several parts of his body. His
shoulders hurt, and his lower back, and his calves and the soles of
his feet. Early though it was, he locked his door and turned off
the lights and went into the bedroom. His made-up bed was a welcome
sight. As usual, Julia had known what she was talking about.

He skipped his shower. Getting into his pajamas and brushing his
teeth took his last ounce of energy. When he sank onto the bed, it
was almost beyond his willpower to reach over and turn off the
lamp, but he forced himself to do it. Then he slid down flat, with
a long, deep, groaning sigh.

His mattress was comfortably firm, and the top sheet was tucked
in tightly on either side of him as he liked. His pillow had just
enough bounce to it. The window, a couple of feet away, was cranked
open to let the breeze blow in, and it offered a view of a pale
night sky with a few stars visible behind the sparse black pine
boughs --- just a scattering of pinpricks. He was glad now that
Damian had taken such trouble to situate the bed right.

Most probably, he reflected, this would be the final dwelling
place of his life. What reason would he have to move again? No new
prospects were likely for him. He had accomplished all the
conventional tasks --- grown up, found work, gotten married, had
children --- and now he was winding down.

This is it, he thought. The very end of the line. And he felt a
mild stirring of curiosity.

Then he woke up in a hospital room with a helmet of gauze on his
head.

Excerpted from NOAH’S COMPASS © Copyright 2011 by
Anne Tyler. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books. All
rights reserved.