From Survivor's Notebook Dan O'Brien (bio) Phaeton My brother and I drove all morning to Vermont where my grandfather and Gloria, his second, marginally younger wife, were gifting an old car to my brother who, just out of college, had secured a respectable job and a premature (in almost everyone's opinion) engagement; but first for some reason, and for the only time I can remember, we would help Grandpa Welsh with his bookkeeping in the guestrooms above their detached three-door garage. The carriage house as they called it. Soon my parents would be staying weekends in this carriage house whenever they dropped me off or picked me up from the liberal arts college that my grandfather was paying for in secret (at least a secret from me) and one night I saw a shooting star from the finely pebbled drive that wound through their ornamental apple orchard and felt, for an instant, a prince in the world. But on this day I was newly sprung from high school, summer was here, and Gloria brought us turkey and mustard on rye that I was surprised to surmise she'd prepared herself, while we opened envelopes and shuffled manila folders and read large cryptic figures aloud to our grandfather as he sat at a diminutive kitchenette table recording his losses and gains in a tall Dickensian ledger with a pen clutched in the spotted, gnarled claw of his hand. He'd made his money in the garment industry in Manhattan, selling nondescript business shirts sewn in sweat shops in China, South Korea, Bangladesh … In a few years he'd be dead and my parents would sue Gloria and my mother's sisters over his will. His finances had been a real mess, my mother complained for a long time after, byzantine at best, and once I heard her compare [End Page 346] his bookkeeping to my writing: convoluted and dense and probably purposefully obscure. He was a genius though, even she had to admit, in his way. His Vermont house must have been new or new to them because when our work was done in the afternoon our grandparents gave my brother and me a tour—that orchard, a man-made pond stocked with glimmering koi, an airy atrium of a kitchen gladdened with the clattering of their wire-haired dachshund with the German name (Klaus?); and their master bedroom glimpsed in passing from the hall. So the great man slept! Maybe still had sex of some kind. Could I be remembering his bed so vividly because I have a bed, in my middle-age, post-cancer for both my wife and me, in which we do barely anything save sleep? My grandfather's silk sheets and cloudy damask headboard with buttons like rivets reminded me then of the upholstery in a casket, or one of those horse-drawn carriages called a "Hansom" or a "Phaeton," I believe. My brother drove his new-old car home while alone I drove the wagon. To keep myself awake (we'd driven five hours that day already) I masturbated in the fast lane with the sun-spangled mountains receding, until a galaxy of spermatozoa arrived in my hand. By nightfall I was home and kissing my girlfriend beneath the birthday-scented lilacs in the front yard of a classmate's house while the party raged inside. [End Page 347] Unpublished A middle-aged poet, who has recently died of cancer, gave an old poet, somehow still living, a manuscript. This first poet was rumored to have shot her lover in her youth—a poet too; down south. In New England whenever I saw her she was all nervy jaw and tobacco-teeth and taciturn to me. I lived in the old poet's house, minding his bills and water pipes, while he and his wife, another poet, sabbaticalled in Paris. Every wall in every room was lined with shelves crammed with books; the effect was positively pathological. I read and slept in the old poet's study where his atheist wife, a German-born survivor of the Third Reich, insisted he keep his books on religion and the occult...