|
The
Impossibly
Excerpt
However, one must
be cautious in passing judgment upon the phenomenon;
for, although the phenomenon is the same, the reason
for it may be exactly the opposite.
-Kierkegaard, The
Concept of Dread
The first time we met it was about a stapler, I think. I knew the word, and
she didn’t, so I stepped forward, slightly, and said
it. The shopkeeper smiled, and she smiled, and the shopkeeper
reached under the counter and produced a box. It was
a fine box, smooth white on the outside, dark corrugated
brown on the inside, and contained a nice-enough looking
gray stapler that the shopkeeper demonstrated, first
opening the mechanism and loading it with a generous
strip of his own staples, then closing it on two sheets
of a yellow ledger. He pulled lightly on the two sheets
to demonstrate that they would not, if not pulled on
too strenuously, come apart, stressing, as he did so,
that no stapler could be expected to perform satisfactorily
given unsuitable material. He then asked if the stapler
would be used for heavy or light jobs, and, as the answer
was both, put two small maroon boxes of staples on the
counter, and asked if there would be anything else.
At this point I wandered off.
Though not far.
A moment later I was asked to come over again.
Hole puncher, I said.
The shopkeeper said he was very sorry, but that
item was currently out of stock.
When we had left, she asked me to repeat each
of the words I had used in the shop, which I did, then
she asked me to repeat each of them again more slowly,
which I also did, then she took out a pen and a small
notepad and had me write each of the words down, which
process I found quite hypnotic. As I did not write either
of the words very neatly, she took back the pen and
the notepad and very carefully closed one or two of
my vowels. She then put away the pen and the notepad.
Not quite sure what to say, I told her I thought she’d
gotten a bargain, which wasn’t true, and she told me,
though smiling pleasantly, that she thought she’d been
ripped off. That seeming to have been that, I started
to walk away. But then she called me back. There were
three other words she had been unable to come up with
in her wanderings that day, and she wondered if I could
spell them out if I knew them, so that she could write
them down. Two of the words I did know, and one of them
I did not, and then, with something only slightly different
on my face, I did walk away.
In those days I was in the middle of two or three
things that seemed to take up unnecessarily large amounts
of my time, but of course there was no getting around
them. One of these things was setting in motion the
acquisition of a certain item, which was proving to
be very difficult to obtain. Another was the process
of establishing whether or not the poorly functioning
washer / dryer in my apartment was under warranty, etc.
I was told there were papers. I knew there were papers,
but where were the papers? Then in the middle of the
night, literally in the middle of the night, I knew.
I told the man on the phone that the papers-behind the
washer / dryer on the floor when the leak had occurred-had
become wet and then damp, and were now, although I had
more or less dried them out, very much stuck together.
There was a silence on the other end of the line, then
I was told that I would have to bring the papers to
the shop where they could be deciphered, and where,
I might add, once I had put the crumpled mess in front
of him, they were not.
So there was this and one or two other amazingly
similar though of course really quite different things
I was involved with at that time, or at least involved
with part of that time. Part of that time I was involved
with nothing, a nothing that mainly consisted of lying
on the floor staring at the ceiling.
The ceiling was new to me.
As was the floor.
I kept, also, becoming confused about the placement
of the windows, and bumping my shoulders on bits of
unexpected masonry, and waking up in the morning or
in the middle of the night scared.
Though this has never, in my case, been unusual.
But also from the floor, you could hear the river.
I had seen the river. It was not as big a river as I
was used to, nor, however, was it as small as I had
been advised to expect. I had not expected anything
at all as regarded the number and variety of bridges,
and so, in my wanderings, had been consistently, pleasantly,
surprised.
As I lay in the middle of the floor, the river
made a rich smooth sound so that it seemed as if there
was an extra layer of fresh paint pouring constantly
across my new apartment’s walls. Or something like that.
After a time, then, of nothing, or anyway of
practically nothing, I would get up and go over to the
phone, but never because it was ringing.
Then one day it rang. It was my downstairs neighbor
inviting me to come down. I did. This neighbor’s apartment,
though apparently the same overall size and shape as
mine, was completely, as to layout, different, and confusingly
so. Whereas my apartment was composed of a single short
corridor and one fairly large room, this neighbor’s
apartment seemed to consist of many short corridors
and many small rooms. Apparently, the neighbor explained,
each of the apartments in the building were different
from each other, which was clearly the root cause of
any number of problems, especially, for example, in
the area of tenant relations.
I was offered a cup of coffee, which I accepted,
in a small room that overlooked a very small, somewhat
grim courtyard, or airshaft, it was an airshaft, of
which my apartment did not afford any view whatsoever,
thus providing me with an explanation for why, on wet
evenings, I had been able to hear rain falling behind
a four-foot stretch of my wall.
That had been troubling me.
Not troubling me enough to find anything out,
but troubling me enough, if you understand what I mean.
So we sat in the small room and steadily advanced
our interaction on the now very clear connection between
the phenomenon of differing layouts of apartments in
a given building with the differing quality of tenant
relations, and it really did, at least for the duration
of the interaction, seem like a very clear connection,
and we agreed on everything, and even at one point shook
hands. It was after this handshake that I was offered
a tour of the apartment, so that, it was explained,
even though startling differences between our apartments
surely existed, they would be-once I had reciprocated
the invitation-collectively understood differences,
and so, in the happenstance, more manageable. The tour
was both very short, and, somehow, very long. In “the
office” I saw, sitting alone on a shelf above a small
red table, a recently purchased hole puncher, which,
when the tour was finished, I borrowed.
I never laid eyes on that neighbor again, although
on one occasion I heard sounds. As for the hole puncher,
after a few days, I left it sitting outside the neighbor’s
door.
It was autumn. When I had completed my various
tasks, though of course I hadn’t really completed any
of them, I began to wander.
It was and is a city of parks split by a river,
and in the autumn, both in the parks and along the river,
there was and is the daily pleasantry of dead and falling
leaves that made small scraping sounds and hit against
my face and hands, and at night when I was at home and
alone again continued to fall or to seem to fall and
to scrape and to hit against me. So in and around this
city of parks split by a river plus streets and houses
and small public squares I walked, and the cars went
by, and I sat in establishments and the people passed
and / or surrounded me. In one establishment I struck
up an acquaintance or two but of course both of them,
after some days, vanished. One conversation I remember,
though not too fondly, was about appliances and their
correspondences and about the mutual fund of electricity
from which they sucked. My acquaintance actually used
the word “suck.” This was all said at a very skillfully
modulated half-whisper. Frankly, I could not stand the
idea of appliances sucking away at electricity, but
nodded and listened and contributed and half-whispered
in return.
That acquaintance vanished.
The other acquaintance, who also, as I have said,
vanished, was the sort of acquaintance for whom one
buys drinks and yet from whom one maintains a certain
distance, or at least tries to, the exercise becoming
quite impossible whenever there is laughter or confidentiality,
and there is frequently laughter and confidentiality,
or at least in this case there was. I did not inquire
about the vanishment of the first acquaintance, but,
for the sake of appearances, I did about this second,
and was informed quite matter-of-factly that he / she
had been ravished off the face of the earth.
It had been days and days since I had placed
the hole puncher outside my neighbor’s door.
One morning, a tall woman wearing a hat and sunglasses
tapped me on the elbow as I was about to cross the street
and said, tomorrow. A little later that day the same
woman sat down beside me on a bench and said, next week.
For some days after that it rained, and most
of the time I stayed indoors. Three times during that
rainy period, however, I went to the shop to buy pens.
The first pen was a blue felt tip, and when I returned
home, I stood on tiptoes on a chair, held the base of
it crimped between the tips of my thumb and first two
fingers, and drew a series of unsuccessful clouds, unsuccessful
in part because, as I realized upon their completion,
clouds are not blue, not even in outline, in part because
I don’t draw well. The second pen was a red felt tip,
and its story was that I almost immediately lost it.
The third was a platinum nib fountain pen, which I had
wrapped as a present, but the following day, after an
unpleasant exchange with the shopkeeper, returned.
Then for a time I was very seriously and legitimately
involved in some business, and that took me along and
engaged me completely for that time, which was not inconsiderable,
and the early portion of the autumn swept along.
At the end of the business I found myself sitting
in a park at a table in one of the outdoor cafés watching,
through a shower of leaves, the last of the business,
item in hand, walk away. Then it had walked away, and
I thought, well that, anyway, is something, which it
was-I had done everything they had told me to and had
a well-filled envelope in a bag at my feet.
The waiter came over. The waiter went away. Across
the park a small recorder ensemble began playing. And
at that moment she sat down.
Then began those days, starting with that day,
and we sat there and we talked.
Oh, well, you know, not much, I said.
It seemed to me that her hair had grown. She
said it had just been cut. Then she said, I need you
to help me with another word.
What word?
A ricer.
I told her I did not know this word in any language,
but that if she would explain it to me I would do my
best to find out.
She did explain it to me, though not immediately,
and I did find out and a ricer was acquired, a ricer
that is still, I imagine, sitting there on one of her
shelves.
She had a world of shelves, and on each of them
sat an almost impossible number of objects, the words
for which were known or unknown, most by the end, I
think, were unknown or unknowable, but for the moment
that is getting ahead of myself. Generally speaking,
I seem more likely to get behind myself. Once, for example,
as the two of us were walking down the street, I was
somehow walking down the street behind us, and we got
farther and farther ahead of me, so that when we turned
into a store and looked at red velvet dresses and talked,
she later told me, to a salesperson with an orange hat
and a cracked tooth, I missed the turn and kept walking
and ended up falling in a ditch.
For the moment, though, which for the moment
was just the moment and not the moment I was about to
reach or had just missed, etc., what I did not know
was the word ricer, and was nervous about the possible
consequences of that ignorance, so that all the way
through her explanation it seemed to me that, explanation
finished, she would abruptly stand up to leave, maybe
forever, and in my nervousness once she had finished
speaking, I, in fact, stood up rather abruptly, and
she said, are you going somewhere?
No.
Well then sit back down.
While the pleasant part of the autumn lasted
we met quite often at that café in that park, and then
it got too cold.
But in the meantime, having concluded my business,
my days became either days in which I was to see her
or days in which I was not. During the days in which
I was not I examined my tools, checked various ropes
and wires, and expended perhaps more energy than was
necessary in bathing. Also, I found time to lie in the
middle of the floor, looking up, or not looking anywhere,
or only at the backs of my eyelids.
At one point or another over the course of that
first conversation I told her about borrowing the hole
puncher, and about why I had borrowed it, and she said
she found that charming.
Her hair grew longer, as did mine. She commented
favorably upon this development, and it was not until
she had countered that favorable comment with another
on the same subject that was less favorable, but really
only slightly less favorable, that it was cut. So you
can see that it was a confusing time. Both very clear
and very confusing, which is likely news to few, and
perhaps even to none.
I know all about that, for example, said a new
acquaintance in the old establishment, quickly switching
the conversation back in the direction it had been going.
So now, at any rate, I knew, is what I mean.
Then my friend came to town.
Once upon a time, this friend and I had lived
together in a very small room in a very large city with
big buildings and a big river, and at night or in the
early morning after we had finished working I would
talk. I would talk and talk, and he would doze and doze,
and then he would tell me to shut the fuck up. This
arrangement continued for a remarkably long time. Once,
however, upon the conclusion of a particularly tricky
job, one that had gone wrong in several ways, I said
something and my friend went berserk and, after a short
interval, went away, and that was, or had been, the
history of our friendship. Now here he was again. He
had arrived, he said, near the end of a tour he had
been taking and was much refreshed and was visiting
me.
So.
So.
Still up to it, I suppose, he said.
John is his name.
Yes, I am, John, I said.
John clapped me on the back, told me I needed
a haircut, and said, how about some dinner, I’m buying.
It was a cold night in late November, and he
said he would like to have some turkey. I told him that
I thought this would take some maneuvering. He said
he was willing, if I was, to maneuver. I was. We did.
It was an interesting night.
No, they all said.
John’s tour had taken him to several places since
I had last seen him, and the quality of his hostility,
when it came-and when they kept saying they did not
have turkey it came-had been tempered, though I could
not imagine by what. It had become a hostility, at any
rate, the engine of which was a not unsubtle use of
tone and syntax and carefully measured unreasonability,
rather than, as preface to action, blunt volume added
to a somewhat stock selection of words. I suggested
at one point, for example, a chicken or pheasant or
game hen substitute for the turkey. He suggested, at
some length, using words like “mock” and “erudition,” not.
On we went.
No, I am sorry, we do not serve turkey, said
yet another man in a white shirt and black vest with
just a touch too much oil in his hair.
Yes, but do you have turkey?
No, we do not have turkey, I am sorry.
Ah, and while I do believe that you are sorry,
I do not believe you do not have turkey, why wouldn’t
you?
We do not, sir, have turkey, nor do I have for
you any explanation.
And all I am asking for is an explanation.
Please leave.
Etc.
We did, finally, and following something a little
like the interaction I have just described, get our
turkey-they had some, by chance it seemed, in the freezer.
Neither of us at the end of eating it entirely believed
it had been turkey, but it had been called turkey with
maximum enthusiasm by the man whose head John had placed
in the sink, and it had been appropriately garnished,
so we didn’t complain.
It was a very pleasant meal. John told me a little
bit about where he had been and how long he had spent
in each place and who he had spent his time with. He
then told me that he was ready to go back to work, but
that his line of work would now change, or would now
perhaps change-he hoped so.
I raised my eyebrow. He winked.
He then quoted something that he had memorized.
Quoting was new for John.
I told him I approved.
That night he lay in my bed, and I lay on my
floor.
Like the old days, a little.
It was not quiet outside the window, it was a
variety of sounds, not such pleasant sounds as it occurred,
so that it was not quite possible to hear the river
if you had not yet heard it to listen for, and John
had not, but I had and I lay there listening.
Life’s years do not fill a hundred, is what he
had quoted, earlier, at the restaurant, and I was thinking
about this quote, a little, as I lay there listening
for the river.
John had raised his glass and I had raised a
forkful of turkey and he had said, Life’s years do not
fill a hundred, and I had said, who said that? and he
said, no one said that, someone wrote that, so I said,
who is that by? and he said, Anonymous.
We lay there.
Here was a little hard truth is what I was thinking.
I see you’re not wearing your glasses, he said.
During the time we had lived together I had slept
with glasses.
No I’m not, I said.
But you’re still having those dreams? he asked.
Yes, I said.
The same dreams where you see all the . . . ?
I nodded.
With the hooks?
They are no longer hooks.
What are they?
I told him.
That’s festive. You taking anything for that?
No.
You want something?
No.
You want to hold an event?
No.
Well, we’ll hold one anyway.
It took some organizing. Most of which, John
explained, would involve rounding up a base of participants
upon which the body of the event could be built. I told
him about a couple of recent acquaintances, ones who
hadn’t vanished. I also told him about the downstairs
neighbor. I don’t know why I did this, and sometimes
still feel guilty about it. But at any rate, having
greeted my dismal offering with great esprit de corps,
he said I could leave it all, a few details excepted,
to him. He started with the downstairs neighbor and
was gone for some time. This is when I heard the sounds.
Did you see the neighbor? I asked when he returned,
and he said, that neighbor is not coming. Then
he tried in the direction of my acquaintances and, an hour or so later, said
that the acquaintances, if he had, in fact, gotten hold
of the right ones, would very likely, and probably in
company, attend. He then set off to recruit some more.
I set off for the park.
As I have already stated, it was late autumn,
but this day in late autumn it was not overly cold,
and we had agreed to meet where we had always met, even
though there was no longer any outdoor café, just a
couple of greenish metal chairs set against the base
of a chestnut tree.
Hello.
Hello.
She stood a moment. She touched my face. We sat.
It was, in fact, a little too cold, after all,
with the wind, to be just sitting there, so we got up
and walked around the park.
I do not know what it is about habit in those
situations that builds up some sort of a diminishing
effect as regards the world, so that, slowly and steadily,
given that common and accustomed locus of circumstance,
and a certain measure of complicity, the world’s effects
on one’s person are lessened. I heard once that both
actors and soldiers experience a similar phenomenon
when they are playing their respective parts. We were
most assuredly playing our parts. I can’t stress enough
how alone in each other’s presence we had already come
to be.
We were not so alone, however, walking, as the
walking together business was new.
Although the park with its light wind and scattered
crowds and bursts of pigeons was lovely.
My friend is in town, I said.
Really? she said, so is mine.
We exchanged names of friends.
That’s funny, she said.
She laughed.
She had a beautiful laugh, just beautiful, like
that.
John and her friend Deau later met at the event
and stood in the corner, in the kitchen I think, talking
together for a long time. I think, if I remember correctly,
John spilled some wine on Deau, or was it the other
way around?
As I say, it was funny, somehow, the name business,
and the fact of the effect on me of her laugh.
Later, in another city, a city on the coast,
we walked together down a sloping street toward a harbor,
and, this is why I even mention it, she laughed again.
That was because of a pair of monkeys.
So.
She asked me if I was ready to meet her friend
and to see her apartment, and I said, yes.
We had, now, definitively it seemed, reached
the period of the end of the warm weather and the beginning
of the cold, and it would be some time, if ever, before
we could comfortably recommence our meetings in the
park. This is what I thought as we walked along and
talked about various words and objects, though also,
and I suppose this was a function of the changes that
were in the process right those seconds of occurring,
about other things.
She was asking me was I interested.
In what? I said.
She told me what it was.
I said I was, then I didn’t say anything for
a moment, then I said, yes, definitely.
At times, you see, after I was no longer hearing
it, I was still hearing it-I am still hearing it-her
voice, in a slight but quite crystalline echo, perfectly.
This was distracting, and, when it was happening, often
caused her to wonder aloud about what I was thinking.
We had not yet developed a vocabulary that could
accommodate, in this line, any kind of elaboration.
I’m not quite sure, I would say.
And she wouldn’t say anything.
Then we arrived at her apartment. I have already
mentioned the impossible number of shelves that coexisted
in those few rooms. It was a dizzying spectacle, one
no doubt exacerbated by the number of objects those
shelves supported. Obviously, the number of objects,
of which there were many, many per shelf, must, in real
terms, have far exceeded the number of shelves, but
in my mind, strangely it does not. In my mind, strangely,
there are more shelves than objects, and, accurate or
not, this was the case right from the start.
Deau was not there. She had left a note. In which,
in a large, round hand, she explained that she had just
popped out. I have never been able to subtract that
large, round “popped” from my impression of Deau, though
I admit I haven’t tried.
Her apartment. There was the stapler, in its
place, and there was a shiny bright hole puncher, much
like the one belonging to my downstairs neighbor, and
there was an electric pencil sharpener, not plugged
in, and there was a pyramid composed of twenty perfectly
white rectangular erasers. In the kitchen, on one of
the shelves that had not yet been filled but that would
soon be, sat the ricer, next to a small blue colander,
next to a short stack of red condiment dishes, next
to a white crock pot, slightly cracked at the rim, next
to a large green bowl.
More.
There was a lot more.
I told her I was impressed by the number of objects
she had accumulated.
She told me to come over to the bed.
Eventually, Deau popped back in.
It was a very large apartment and despite the
proliferation of shelves and objects we all, once the
two of us had dressed, sat at a great distance from
each other.
Hello, Deau called across the room to me.
Hello, I called back.
One of my unpleasant dreams involves the inadequacy
of my voice to carry across even short distances, and
while perhaps you wouldn’t think that was much of a
dream, I can assure you that it is quite effective.
I forget at which point we moved our chairs closer
and had drinks.
Doing so was Deau’s suggestion.
This is slightly stupid, she said.
Deau, coincidentally, was about to begin a tour
of some kind, and she was going to begin it in the next
place she went, this first place being a preliminary
stop, connected to, but not a part of, she said, her
tour. I told her that my friend, John, was also on a
tour, but that he had long since gotten it started,
and that this was by no means a preliminary stop, and
that it seemed to be doing him worlds of good.
Who is your friend John? said Deau.
I looked at her.
She looked a little like her handwriting.
If her handwriting had also been slightly, perhaps,
serrated.
Hmmm, I thought.
Just exactly what kind of a tour are we talking
about, Deau? I considered asking her, only it was a
question I hadn’t even asked John.
Actually, I had never asked John much of anything,
and still haven’t. I had, I remember sitting there thinking,
once asked him where he was from, and he had taken me
there, and had both shown and introduced me around.
Say hello to my mother.
What do you mean?
I mean say hi to Mother, come over here.
I don’t think so.
Get over here.
What the fuck is that?
The conversation took a turn, it took several
turns.
At one point I was informed by Deau that I was
now in the presence of a young woman who was both wonderful
and very strange, which combination of descriptives
seemed to add up in Deau’s mind to pleasantly eccentric.
Who are you talking about? I said.
We all three looked for a moment around the room
with all its shelves.
I remember at this juncture thinking it was pretty
strange to keep a stapler on a shelf you couldn’t easily
reach. I also remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable
at having been made privy to Deau’s opinion, presumably
about the woman I was smitten with, no matter how well-informed,
or, especially because it was well-informed, and I remember
suddenly wishing that it was still warm out and that
we were still sitting at the café near the tree.
Why is the stapler sitting way up there where
you can’t reach it? I asked.
At this, she smiled, leaned forward a little,
and said, I didn’t put it there for me.
Who is it for then?
She didn’t answer.
Oh, I said.
Stand up and see, she suggested.
I did. And found the stapler perfectly in reach
of my outstretched hand. There was a short stack of
multicolored paper sitting next to it. I picked up a
couple pieces, placed them under the chisel end of the
stapler, and pressed. There again came the short, crisp
clunk resulting, this time, in sheets of blue and turquoise
paper being crisply joined.
I don’t know.
I found it strange, and in fact despite all of
it, persist in finding it strange, to have been thought
of, in some way so exactly, while I wasn’t there.
The whole business, if you will indulge me for
a moment, made my arm feel like a treasure.
Thank you, I said.
John had the event all organized. It was up to
me to pick up the chips and the pretzels and the small
pickles, or anyway fairly small pickles just not big
ones, and the crackers and the meats, and it was up
to me to pick up the liquid things too. I started with
the meats and pickles. The ones I found were plenty
small and rather handsome. I then acquired a variety
of meats in several forms and brought them home, and
then went back for the crackers and chips and pretzels
and some cheese too, I decided, and more chips and some
nuts for variety. Then I moved on to the liquid refreshments.
What a glory is a beverage store. It is too many colors
and too many varieties of shapes of container, and all
the containers contain too many different kinds of liquids,
and too much, and that they slosh, that it is in their
nature to slosh, and that too many of them I had known
too well and too recently.
It took three trips to get home with all of it,
sloshing.
That’s that, said John.
Then it was the day of the event.
It was a very nice event, and, insofar as my
dreams afterward were concerned, it did have a temporary
palliative effect, as had been the case with other events
in the past, although I have never been sure just why.
Marry the crowd! John yelled at me as at one
point we stood at the drinks table.
Was that a quote? I asked.
Pass it on, brother, he said.
I passed it to the guy standing next to me. This
guy said it to the guy next to him, a very old guy with
a nose like something in a documentary on gross anomalies.
Who are you? I said walking up to the old guy. He said
something. I didn’t quite catch it. I started to ask
him again, but just then someone yelled, the event!
The lights went out.
There was a scream.
The lights came back on.
John was on top of someone.
The lights went out again.
They were out for a long time.
Later, a tall, skinny woman wearing sunglasses
and a floppy hat came up to me and whispered, marry
the crown, pass it on.
I passed it on to John.
John said, I just did, and grinned.
The room was crowded.
The crowded room spun around me.
Anyway, the first time she saw my apartment there
were upwards of a hundred people in it. I exaggerate.
But there were many, perhaps too many. Or at least this
is how I put it to myself, because after a time, without
telling me, she left.
I am an awful drunk. If I am not much present
at the best of times, when I am drunk I devolve into
something I think it would not be unfair to characterize
as vaguely reptilian. I sit and sit and occasionally
my eyes move. The last time I had been drunk-I mean
before I got very drunk at the event and retracted,
like something that might be happiest under a heat bulb,
into a corner-I had been drunk in the presence, to speak
euphemistically, of someone I was supposed to have been
watching. I was supposed to have been watching him in
case he chose at that late stage to say anything, but
instead I sat on the floor behind him and took small
sips from a large bottle I had been left with and got
drunk, and when he did say something, in a very small
voice, I said nothing, and alerted no one, and I stared
at the back of his head, and drank, and after a time
announced to myself that I no longer noticed the smell.
The day of the event was very sunny and then
it was very rainy, and I was outside, attending to a
few last details, in that rainy part of it.
It was not nice, this rain. It was a cold, thorough,
ruin-your-fucking-universe kind of rain and I cringed
each time great splashes of it hit my face.
It is unlovely to repeatedly cringe in public,
and I found myself saying to myself, quit it.
Others heard me.
In fact, one person who heard me said, excuse
me, and we struck up a conversation. It was not, to
tell the truth, much of a conversation. Sometimes, I
am capable of striking up successful conversations with
complete strangers. Once, John watched me sit down at
a table with someone in a crowded restaurant and talk
until that other person, quite some time later, stood
up to go. This incident greatly astonished John, who,
though subjected during that period to my nightly outpourings,
had never once before seen me address more than four
or five words to anyone besides him. In fact, one time
as the two of us stood at a counter with two acquaintances
of the more pleasantly gendered persuasion, John described
my almost total silence, as we stood there, as a condition-a
condition I struggled with, gallantly. And I must say
I frequently find myself returning, when I reflect on
the varying success of my interactions, to the notion
that I am struggling with some sort of condition.
I must be.
It is as if part of me falls into some great
dark pit, though always only part of me.
Incidentally, this conversation I was having
was with someone wearing large, reflective sunglasses.
Someone, I note again, who was tall and thin.
These are all details.
I am made nervous by events.
Strange things happen at them.
I took up a position in the kitchen. Then by
the window. Then by my bed, for a moment, then by the
door.
Finally, they arrived.
Hello, said Deau, very roundly breezing past
me.
Hello, she said.
I brought her a drink and a plate of pickles
and meats.
You have to meet John, I said.
Kiss me, she said.
It was quite an event. To his credit, John had
managed to dig up a huge number of participants. I brought
up the subject of John’s excellent technique and pointed
over toward him. John, cleaned up now, was spinning
around in the center of a small group with one of my
pillows on his head. We stood there by the door, each
drinking what I had brought over and nibbling on the
pickles and meats. Comfortable. In fact, wonderful.
But she didn’t stay long.
Later the next week, she said to me, after a
certain point, and it is a very clear point, I cannot
tolerate events, and that is why I left, but it was
very nice to see your apartment and to meet John.
That’s fine absolutely anything is fine, I said.
I did not actually see them meet, but at one
point John came over to me and said, okay, wow, then
he went over to the kitchen, and a little after that
is when he spilled wine on Deau, or vice-versa, and
they laughed, and the two of them made the plan that
the four of us should go away somewhere, perhaps to
the country.
Given the circumstances, it was a wonderful trip.
There is always this question of circumstances.
Just before she left the event, for example,
we kissed, right next to the table where I had piled
the food, which had, by this time, been thoroughly massacred.
We kissed and kissed, and when we were finished she
explained to me that part of the point of her initiating
the kiss, at that moment, had been that she was about
to leave, and that insofar as she had imagined the event
before arriving, that imagining had involved a kiss,
any kind of kiss at any moment involving me, and that
the earlier kiss by the door when she arrived had been
nice but insufficient, and that was the reason for it,
if it needed a reason, and she was happy, even if she
had not stayed long, that she had come.
Yes, I said.
Yes, I said again.
Yes.
John rented a car and the four of us drove off
toward the country.
On the drive the two of us fell easily into the
habit of discussing objects and words. John and Deau
did not participate in our discussions and did not appear,
at any point, to have any interest in doing so, but
that didn’t bother us, and as we stopped along the way,
we made several acquisitions, which would appear, later,
on her shelves.
It was an excellent drive.
I did, however, of course, still harbor one or
two creeping fears, but I was not cringing, and there
was no rain, it was sunny, the event was over, and I
was the better for it. Speaking, however, about rain-the
rain that day of the event. At the end of our lame conversation
the tall, thin individual I was talking to invited
me, quite firmly, to enter a nearby building and go
upstairs.
I do not know why I said yes to what they asked
me to do when I got upstairs, I did not have to say
yes, that had always been part of our agreement, but
I did.
That I had said yes was why I said to John, a
couple of days after the event when we were recovered
and were discussing travel plans, let’s go here.
Why? said John.
I’ve heard it’s beautiful, I said.
John has never approved of my engagement with
this world, a world for which he has always found me,
rightly I suppose, ill-suited. Quite a number of years
before, in fact, he had helped me to get started in
another line, one that for various reasons I did not
pursue.
But we did go where I proposed because my lie,
this particular lie at any rate, was not, or so I then
thought, detected.
Of course I knew you were lying, John later said.
That week, before our trip to the country, I
slept beautifully.
And then we were driving up to the tops of the
low round hills that occur on that drive and down them.
At one point, as we had stopped the car at the
top of one of these hills and were looking out over
a vista of undulations, in the direction of the ocean,
Deau announced that her tour had now begun, and that
she was ecstatic that we were all with her, so at our
next stop in a little town we toasted the beginning
of her tour with a glass of wine, then lightly burned
our mouths on some delicious stewed apples. Deau and
John had a certain level of unusual gourmandise in common.
It was Deau, for example, who had insisted we order
the stewed apples. And this had endlessly charmed John,
who had insisted the meal before that we select only
the most colorful dishes available-borscht, pomegranate,
horned melon, and candied plums.
Stewed apples was, we agreed, an excellent word
and concept, and before leaving the restaurant we acquired
a handsome jar of it. So you can see that it was all
going along very well.
At that business meeting on that rainy day it
was like this. I had never before met the woman I met
that day and she was persuasive, strangely. I had met
many other women and not-women in the course of my career,
but not this one. She was one of the ones I had heard
about, or perhaps the only one, it’s difficult to say.
I think, probably, it was more than just her-that
behind her, so to speak, were other women and not-women,
with other cigars, in other rooms, who had other perhaps
more important individuals than me doing projects for
them. I do not of course mean to imply that if the woman
with the cigar had superiors, or even just partners,
that they were all smoking cigars and wearing gloves,
etc. This seems unlikely. Boss types, it has been my
experience, all have their own special stamp. In my
previous place of residence, for example, I had worked
for a person who had in his office a very complex model
train system that was always in operation, at every
meeting and otherwise.
The organization that I was currently working
for, by the way, was reputed to be immense and immensely
effective, although largely staffed by part-timers like
myself.
Probably not much like myself.
Or only maybe.
At any rate, the woman with the cigar who I was
standing in front of was definitely a boss. Perhaps
there were more-unnerving-to-look-at bosses, perhaps
there were not. Once, I had been told, someone at a
meeting had seen an eyeball set on top of the model
smokestack on the model train in my former boss’s office,
but there are many such stories, actually.
She sat there smoking the cigar, which is an
endless thing in a meeting, never finished, and I was
standing in front of her, and I could see myself reflected
in miniature in her sunglasses, and it was a small room.
Yes I’ll do it, I said.
Also, however, she had a stutter, quite an intense
one, and sometimes into the center of the stutter she
would insert the cigar, and, the story of the eyeball
on the model smokestack notwithstanding, I still have
not seen or heard of anything quite as impressive as
that.
This is all about why I said yes.
You’ll find I have precious little to say later
about why I changed my mind.
What? I said.
She was speaking to me, not in the car anymore,
we had left the car and were now, the four of us, installed
in a hotel in a small city on the coast, and the two
of us were in our room, and she had been speaking to
me. Here is what she said:
It is not the objects, not the objects at all.
It is not the words either, although often they are
lovely and the contrasts are surprising when you have
one in your head shaped like a rectangle and then you
have another in your head shaped like a square, for
example. That is lovely, as is the sound of your voice
saying them, when you say them, but it is not the fact
of the objects or the fact of the words, really, it
is the fact of establishing the correct establishments
on which to place them, that is all.
Each uncombined expression can mean one of these,
she said, i.e., what, how large, what kind, related
to what, where, when, how placed, in what state, acting,
or suffering. See? For example, a woman may be five-foot
six and a writer, a student of philosophy at her desk
at midnight, sitting down and writing, and suffering
from the cold.
Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place,
time, position, state, action, and affection, she said.
I can’t do it, of course. I can’t say, again,
what she said, not ever, not exactly. It is all there,
inside me, is what I mean, but I can’t say it, not even
for myself. It seems tragic that in matters of the heart
one should have to suffer, even in discourse with one’s
self, from this sort of aphasia.
Lately, for example, I have been thinking of
an instance in which, to say it in general terms, she
came across the room toward me, and even though it was
considerably more than this, it is only in these general
terms that I am ever able to say it.
She came across the room toward me.
It was too many shelves, at the end of it. It
was a hell of shelves. From where I sat that day, I
kept losing count of them. Over and over I would count
and then lose count, and then begin again.
The next morning the four of us set out to visit
the city. John and Deau were already walking with incredible
synchronicity, and it was agreeable to follow them up
the steps of that building and under the arches of this.
She looks happy, she said. John’s happy too, I said.
Old men limped along pulling carts and young women went
by on scooters. We stopped at a flower shop where I
bought her a daisy and a tulip and a rose and a carnation
and a sunflower and a narcissus and a gladiolus and
a lily and a tulip and a sunflower and a ranunculus
and she said, they’re lovely, thank you. In one place,
we drank tea poured from above the server’s head, and
in another we ate fresh-made ice cream mashed green
with pistachio nuts. Sometimes John would drop back
and take my arm, and sometimes she would walk ahead
and disappear with Deau. Once they disappeared for quite
some time, and John and I sat down before steaming bowls
at a table under a hideous bluish candelabra in a warm
room that smelled of cinnamon and saffron, and, very
powerfully, of what we were told was goat.
John, I said.
Tell all, he said.
Nothing.
We sat and sat and took care of another round
of steaming bowls and talked. John talked about Deau
and I talked about her and found I didn’t really have
much to say. Then we paid and left and found them sometime
later wearing completely different clothes.
Actually, they found us. Sitting on the terrace
of another establishment sipping yellow drinks and watching
old men play a game with shiny steel balls.
It was then that we walked down through the gently
sloping streets of the warm city and saw the pair of
monkeys, which made all of us, but especially her, and
I do not know why especially her, laugh.
Then we slept.
I woke.
You were shaking, she said.
I was shouting? I said.
Shaking, you were shaking, you are shaking, stop.
I did stop, gradually, and then it was the second
day in the small breeze-swept city on the coast.
I have changed my mind.
The personage sitting across the table from me,
at a table with a view of the ocean and several rooftops
belonging to the coastal city, did not blink, did not
move, in fact never moved, not once, and after I had
repeated myself twice more I left.
Nobody interfered with me as I walked out, which
is unusual. Part of me, to tell the truth, had been
hoping for a little immediate interference, which is
quite standard and would likely have encouraged me to
undertake a course of action that could have significantly
minimized the interference that followed.
I thought of the woman with the cigar and of
the cigar inserted into the center of her stutter all
the way back to the hotel where they were sleeping in.
I thought, also, of an old man I once saw smoking
a small homemade cigar through a hole in his throat
and how that man had only had one eye and something
very wrong with one arm.
That place was far away from anywhere anybody
has ever known me.
And I think that soon, very soon, I will go away,
to such a place, to stay. Even if once I arrive I find
myself obliged to sit in close quarters with just such
an old man, smoking, in just such fashion, etc.
Which is to say that, getting ahead of myself
again, if you have never smelled it, then you should
never have to smell it-the smell, I mean, of burning
flesh.
She was not sleeping in. She was sitting up in
bed and looking across the room to the window, which
had a view much like the one I had seen from the room
I had just left. Here, however, there was a certain
amount of that fine winter light that comes into such
rooms at such times in such parts of the world, and
it was falling across her knees and her bare arms wrapped
around her knees, which were pulled close to her chest,
and a line of light was running along one of her forearms,
and she was smiling.
It was stupid, really stupid, all things considered,
to have agreed to it, and then to have changed my mind.
It was even stupider not to have thought to smooth it
out. While not necessarily encouraged, a certain amount
of noncompliance is admitted by the organization, and
it would have been straightforward enough both to have
failed to carry out my assignment and to have mitigated
the significant recrimination I could now look forward
to. Of course I had thought about it. There was an easy
way. Much about the business is actually quite easy
once you’ve been at it a while. I could have, for example,
picked up the phone, or at the very least double-checked
the address of the package I had dropped in the mail
on my way back from telling them that I had changed
my mind. But there is in me a small speck of something
hard, something stubborn, something immensely intractable,
and I didn’t.
There, in the center of the cigar smoke, she
had used the word “important,” and I was to think of
that word a little later, as I sat there, thinking of
preposterous causalities and staring at those shelves.
That afternoon the four of us drove away. We
had been to the city I had suggested. Now we were going
to the country.
Also
available by this author:
|
