This Is Not the End
Ten
Short Pieces
by
Shelby Davis
Smashwords Edition
(CC)
BY-NC-SA-3.0, 2009, by Shelby Davis
lists
all
ye know on earth
death and mumbling
immanence
insect
ron
the
appreciative life
harold
preservation
the thing with
feathers
Lists
My
mother’s shopping lists were ordered by rules known only to her.
As you slid your finger down the columns of groceries and toiletries,
you would invariably be stopped by something along the lines of
“2dozjumHerbal Essences” or “1pepperoni TC,” with the “TC”
underlined twice and flanked by gnarled masses of pencil
scratch-outs. When we were kids, we dreaded accompanying her to
Wal-Mart, or worse, the Cosco at the edge of town, where the echoing
rafters and limitless aisles seemed to mock the confusion into which
we were inevitably thrown when handed torn-off fragments of the list.
Of course, it was easy enough to see in hindsight that
“2dozjumHerbal Essences” was merely the bastard child of two
drunkenly weaving columns--we had been supposed to get two dozen
jumbo eggs and a bottle of my mother’s favourite brand of shampoo
(ever inventive in creating proprietary abbreviations--“TC”
standing for, what else, thin crust pizza--my mother scrupulously
wrote out brand names in full).
It was a little like
ordering chemicals for a laboratory, sans
any knowledge of chemistry--or, for that matter, laboratories,
although my ignorance of the distinction between baking soda and
baking powder cannot be entirely the root of my confusion.
Eventually I--and my siblings--learned the difference between tomato
paste and tomato sauce, and could readily distinguish one brand of
laundry detergent from a similarly-styled knock-off, but my
shame-faced trips back to the mothercart never ceased. I would track
her down, most often in the produce section--she was usually loath to
trust us with the delicate task of selecting the very best fruits and
vegetables--and hand her back my portion of the list, asking for an
explanation. Usually it amounted to a failure of awareness on my
part--get the kind of soap we always get, of course! If I pointed
out that we were in the habit of buying several different brands at
different times, I would be informed that it had been weeks
since we had bought Brand X, and we only got Brand Y when my father
took the children shopping, and the slowly-diminishing pile of Brand
Z had been entirely due to a single purchase, a regrettable
experiment unfortunately conducted with a bulk package. This cycle
of pattern-recognition failure continued even after I left for
college--when I came home, every few weeks, and in later years, on
breaks, it was a remarkable point of contention that I didn’t know
what cereal my siblings ate for breakfast every morning. When I
pointed out that we had never bought Chocolate Sugar Warheads when I
was in the house, I was immediately reassured that I had indeed had
them bought for me.
“Besides,” she added, “it was your
father that got that box last week.”
Perhaps we dreaded
these shopping trips so much because the magnitude of a mistake could
be enormous. Ever thrifty, my parents bought in bulk--the idea of
buying a single toothbrush was anathema to them, as was the thought
that one could purchase toilet paper in anything less than a full
pallet. We regarded the label “Family Size” the way professional
chefs regard upscale kitchen appliances, as something that might hold
some promise of fulfillment for the masses but were pale imitations
of the real stuff. Because of this, a mistake at the store could
disrupt family life for a month, consigning us all to an inferior
brand of butter for however long it took to consume eight pounds of
it. If that wasn’t bad enough, my parents hated to shop as much as
we hated to accompany them--with the consequence that, despite having
six mouths to feed, trips were infrequent--and thus
protracted--debacles.
When I married, it was at my parents’
church. I stayed with them beforehand. I debated getting a hotel
room, but my parent’s wouldn’t hear of it--who stays in a hotel
when they have family? I also suspected they didn’t like the idea
of Kelly and I sequestered in a hotel together--better to keep an eye
on this strange newcomer and invite her to stay, too. The first time
we went shopping, it was just my mother and I, but the second time,
Kelly accompanied us, reaching for her own cart when we arrived and
taking, just as I did, a portion of my mother’s list. I worried
that she would see a side of my mother that she wouldn’t like, but
if she did, she didn’t say anything. My mother, also, was
gracious, and when Kelly pulled her own cart alongside my mom, laden
with 2 rather than 1% milk, mom kept her mouth shut. The next day,
however, I noticed that my father made a run to the convenience store
right after breakfast, returning with two gallons of 1% milk. The
gallons of 2% languished in the fridge, and as far as I know, were
still there when Kelly and I pulled away from the church and started
the drive to South Carolina.
It wasn’t so much the
anal-retention practiced my mother with such precision, but the
arcane and private language that made shopping a nightmare. All too
often, a list intended for her private perusal--she did not
infrequently go shopping alone--was handed off to someone else, and
symbols denoting quantity and flavour became riddles, cryptograms
whose meaning could not be inferred from a document so inconsistently
written--a bottle of olive oil may be designated extra virgin, but if
no qualifier is given the next time, does the absence indicate a
reversal, or has the one-time injunction become the new
norm?
Scientists in search of meaning have claimed that the
chaotic portions of the universe are merely acting out rules too
complex for us to follow--that while God may not play with dice, the
game is sufficiently complicated that one iteration of the pattern
occupies the entire lifespan of the universe. I’d like to think
that my mother’s shopping lists are merely symbolic reflections of
that pattern, each fitting into the rational incomprehensibility of
the world. Especially now, as she lies in the hospital bed, her mind
a buzzing mass of synapses and half-formed thoughts, I miss the
scrawled litanies, the hybrids of computer-printouts and penciled-in
post-hoc corrections. Especially now, I have to trust that the
incomprehensible sibilants and moans are symbols, something that has
meaning for her, something that ultimately means exactly what she
means to say, and that brings me, head hung low, closer to her side,
in order to understand.
All
Ye Know on Earth
I
was driving on Highway 35 on my way home from work. Up in front of
me was a giant billboard advertising yet another jeweler, in ten-foot
letters and bright silver watches like massive alien machines. The
traffic slowed and stopped on the ramp as it bottlenecked further
into the city, and my head turned to examine the sign and the blocked
view of the cityscape and land beyond. Past it was another
billboard, with the name of a casino as its only text, filled with
collaged images of money, plush rooms, and dancers. A quarter mile
further brought me to an advertisement for business management
solutions. Another few hundred yards and I was urged to try the new
sandwich at the new sandwich place. The sun set and the signs stayed
bright as automatic light switched on.
The city grew dark and
the hills beyond feebled out, existing only in our minds and finally
not even there. All that remained were the well-lit and shiny
reminders that lawyers were standing by to take my case to court, and
that somebody’s air conditioners would outlast somebody else’s.
I had an idea.
I made the call the next day. It would
put me back a good half grand, but it would be worth it. There would
be no design meeting; I sent them the image and it was printed. A
few weeks later it went up.
Now on my commute, when I paused
in the crush of metal bodies, I looked up and saw mountains by
Maxfield Parrish, reaching up to the clouds in impossible cragginess,
rivulets and gushing streams painted down their sides, with the sun
striking vibrant oranges and reds into the shadows of the rocks.
There were trees in copper-patina green and still pools quieter than
the middle of winter but warm as the first day of summer.
No
doubt people thought it was the first part of a two-stage advertising
gimmick, or a filler to be used when no one was renting space on the
sign. But I was happy.
The other signs were next. One by
one, I placed the calls and sent the pictures to offices and printing
shops. Van Gogh’s epic wheat field, with the brooding sky and
blazing earth, was pasted over the turnpike, and commuters looked up
in astonishment at the approaching crows, bigger than life and
settling to rest before them. Several other signs received his
fields of poppies, the lilacs at Auvers and the mulberry trees, the
olive groves and irises. I didn’t stop there. Cezanne adorned the
5th
street exit, with a breathtaking view of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the
landscape spilling away beneath us in brash yellows and greens, in
beautiful smears and daubs of colour. Homer covered the signs along
the east end in huge washes of cliffs and trees standing alone
against the cold, of rivers and autumnal foliage, and tropical palms
ripe with fruit, and the placid blue of open ocean, and with jungles
teeming with rampant life. A giant sky opened over the turnoff for
Highway 675, fields and twisted oaks miniscule under titanic clouds
and birds so far away they seemed to brush the limit of the sky, and
van Ruisdael was before ten thousand people daily.
I went
further. I had to move out into the manufacturing district, the
nightlife zone, the suburbs. Renoir’s peaceful meadow stilled the
riot of the interstate. Manet’s own garden graced the air above a
textile mill. Sisley bestowed the fields of Veneux-Nadon on a crack
house and the on-ramp that over-arched it. The pretentious
mcmansions, not so rich yet that they could escape an ad for
toothpaste peeking over their back lawns, woke one morning to instead
see a country lane by Gauguin warmed by soft sunlight. A daycare
went about its business to the backdrop of Eragny in spring, courtesy
Pissarro--and I was done.
I was done. My money was gone, the
checks were already bouncing, and I did not know what I would do
next. But I was happy. The city was covered in colour, colour
rampant and exploding, with valleys and waterfalls where none had
been, with open sky and trees, and flowers--flowers everywhere. The
people walked and drove to the accompaniment of all nature. The
night the last billboard went up, I climbed the broadcasting tower,
the skyscraper that stands in the middle of the city and commands a
view of it all. I looked out, and saw the hills beyond. My
billboards were pale dots, blotches of light here and there on the
ground. Beyond lay the glittering nebula of humanity, in their homes
and workplaces, streetlamps and headlamps and window panes and office
space swirling before my eyes. I saw them for what they were. Their
own efforts told me what was being lived. The lights in neighboring
towers flicked on and off like so many stars twinkling, accompanied
by the blinking red bulbs fastened along the length of the radio
towers on the horizon. Under it all the ground undulated slowly,
gaining momentum as the houses thinned, until there were no houses
left and the earth rose up in a chain of hills, meeting the infinite
sky.
Death
and Mumbling
I
thought I might get some good ideas if I went down to the
hospital.
I always have stayed away from hospitals. People
died or were born. But now I thought I might get some idea if I went
down to where it was all happening, the being born and the dying.
Mostly the dying. It was the dying that interested me.
I sat
on a bench in a sort of waiting room. I wanted to call it a green
room; it wasn’t a place where the patients would wait to be called
by the doctor; it was a place where the relatives would wait while
the patient was in their room. It had a coffee bar, and comfortable
couches, with trendy, muted colors on the walls and floor.
Everything was clean and modern without being cold, a homogenized
balancing act designed to keep everyone calm during their stressful
time. It was a green room; patients were “guests”; their
families were “guests” as well. Here was where the families
would sit and be feted while they waited to be called out to perform,
to smile and encourage or to don faces of appropriate mournfulness.
The old ones would put on smiles, the young ones would look sad.
I
think I went there because it seemed to me that it was the place
richest in emotional impact. It reeked of spent emotions, and the
emotions were made all the stronger, here in the green room, by the
efforts at suppression--the muted walls and gourmet coffees and
scones, the overstuffed loveseats and couches, as if those in grief
should not be permitted to sit on benches or folding chairs. It
absolutely reeked of hush and hidden feeling. It was worse than a
church. It was worse than a highschool hallway. It was more
universal, more basic, something even the children could comprehend.
#
It was a funeral procession of the sort one sees in
the smaller towns. The police cars escorted the hearse and the black
funeral-house cars, slowly, with lights silently flashing. There was
also a retarded man of the sort one sees in the smaller towns.
Unlike his metropolitan counterparts, he was not seen passing his
time at bus stops, nor was he institutionalized. He did not work as
a janitor, or cashier at a thrift-store, or a factory. He appeared
to have no job. Everybody knew him because he spent his time walking
up and down the town’s sidewalks, pushing a shopping cart. Unlike
the carts pushed by the homeless, his did not appear to contain the
sum of his worldly possessions, or at any rate not the possessions
one would think conducive to a life on the streets and under bridges.
There were no clothes or bedroll. There was a blanket, but the
sort--light, and blue, about two feet to a side and delicately
fringed--in which one would wrap an infant. There was no food, no
tightly knotted plastic bags. There was a radio and some odds and
ends--I remember a baby doll and a radio, in particular. The baby
doll was naked, with a gigantic head of blonde hair, who would
occasionally ride in the child seat of the cart. The radio played
loud sports and oldies. It was because of the radio that the man was
frequently startled; people would come up behind him on the sidewalk,
and he would not hear them until the very last moment. As they
passed he would jump and burst out a garbled exclamation about not
seeing them. The garbled explanation was the same, word for word,
stutter for stutter, each time.
He was thought to live with
his mother or and older sister. It would explain the lack of an
apparent job, as well as the lack of apparent means in his cart with
which to live alone.
Sometimes
he rode a bicycle. He was permitted to ride it in the annual Fourth
of July and Memorial Day parades, just as he was permitted to wander,
unsuspected and unmonitored, through downtown and quiet suburbia
alike, where children playing on the lawn would politely ignore him.
He was riding his bicycle now, easily keeping up with the
respectfully slow pace of the funeral procession. He was actually
ahead of the hearse, between it and the front police car. Whenever
they reached a stoplight, he would stop as well, putting one foot to
the ground, propping himself up, and when the light changed, the
hearse would wait while he forced his whole body into pushing the
pedal down, slowly overcoming his inertia.
I followed. When
we got to the cemetery, the retarded man had to get off his bike.
The main entrance road was paved, but the parallel roads branching
from it, turning the gravestones into members of neat grassy strips,
was dirt. He pushed the bike over the rutted ground, slowing down
the hearse and the cars that followed behind. The police car got a
little ahead, until the driver realized what was happening. He idled
in the dirt path until the bicycle caught up. The air was cold and
the retarded man briefly disappeared in the cloud of exhaust and
vapour that had formed at the rear of the police car.
In a
short while, they reached the plot, with the hole for the casket
already dug. While the minister read the eulogy, I watched, standing
in the back. I had come to know this family from long observation at
the hospital. The dead man had been in his forties. I wondered if,
after the body died, the tumor continued to live for a little while.
Perhaps those cells were even now multiplying, albeit slowly and more
slowly, until they would grind to a halt along with the rest of him.
Was the tumor really a separate thing, that it could do that,
exulting in its victory, like the winner in combat jumping up and
down on the corpse of his opponent?
I
hoped no one would notice me. It was a fairly large group, about
thirty in all, and I was wearing black like the rest. The immediate
family would probably recognize me if they did notice: we had
exchanged words over the months of the deceased’s decline; I had
invented a backstory about my own aunt’s convalescence to explain
my perennial presence.
The retarded man was also standing in
the back, opposite me. He was about ten feet behind the tightly
packed group of mourners. It had begun to rain, a terribly clichéd
graveside drizzling rain, and the mourners were tightly packed under
the funeral-home provided canopy. The retarded man stood in the
rain, one arm wrapped around the other, which awkwardly pointed down.
He constantly shifted on his feet, as if the sound of spattering
rain had awakened his bladder in him and he was fighting its urgings.
It was the same pose and motion I had seen him take outside the
hospital. He sometimes came by when I was there, and I could observe
him through the vast glass front of the building.
The
green room was made to be light and airy while still private, so it
had been positioned in the lobby, to the side, but separated by
zigzagging screens nine feet high, and a virtual ceiling had been
suggested by lights that hung above the screens, a smattering of
globes dropped from the real ceiling, high above. I could only see
him if I stepped around the screens and stood in the narrow and
bright space between them and the plate-glass window, in the avenue
trod only by custodians and the more rambunctious children. The
retarded man would pace back and forth outside, sometimes with his
cart and sometimes not. If he did have it with him, he would stop
periodically to arrange the items inside. Once or twice he stopped
and looked at me. His pacings and circlings would become wider and
wider, stretching into the parking lot, into the expectant mother
slots, the hospital boardmembers slots, the grassy medians with
picnic tables and cigarette cans, until he wandered off, to pursue an
invisible track somewhere else in the town.
When the dirt
was being dropped on the lowered coffin, cars began driving off, back
to the funeral home, where they could be exchanged for brightly
colored minivans and SUVs. A few stayed until the very end, when the
steamroller arrived from some discrete corner of the yard and began
flattening the mounded earth. I had wandered off in order to avoid
being conspicuous, but had continued to watch from a nearby parallel
road, standing next to a mausoleum, carved with a serene Christ in
place of the center columns. The dead man’s sister and mother
stayed until the end. I had lost sight of the retarded man in the
dispersion, and now I walked down to the funeral home employees, who
were disassembling the canopy.
“Why was that man here, the
one on the bike?”
“Him?” said one. “He’s the dead
guy’s brother.”
#
This is the part where the Greek
chorus comes on stage and says a word from our sponsors. Trying to
force an idea out of an emotion just leads you to death. Even
children understand dying, and Christ as caryatid suggests we don’t
get it ourselves. This is all the meaning I can get out of it.
Immanence
He’s
standing on the subway platform, reading from a book of poetry he
published himself, making too free use of repetition and
alliteration, and something in me wants to tear off my clothes and
join him. I want to drop my suitcase where I stand and push the
revolution forward with him, I don’t want to document this, write
about it, use it for my own purposes--this exists only for itself and
not for contemplation.
I am running along the side of the road
and it is dark. Something flickers and gleams, moves around the tall
grass to my right, and I pull up only to resume my stride; it is not
an animal but a piece of trash, blowing in the wind, when suddenly it
rears up, a goblin, a ghost with eyes staring at me, and I regain my
calm again as I realize it is just a mylar balloon printed and shaped
like a moth. There is still a chill around me, however, as I move
closer in my involuntary course toward it, as I realize the balloon
is tied to, commemorates a child’s death, the wooden cross littered
with plastic flowers and other balloons. The demon facing me hisses
shrilly, shrieks, and a bus runs by on my left, inches away,
inaudible in the general roar of nighttime traffic but easing on the
brakes two hundred yards from the intersection ahead.
I do
not want to be this person. The child was not my own, not claimed by
me in death, not known to me in life, but there is nothing to prevent
it from having been. The madman on the subway platform is my kinsman
in life underground, as are the housekeepers and old men, too scared
to drive, too poor, too unstrung to drive across the surface. My car
lies somewhere as a twisted pile in someone’s junkyard. I do not
know why. It is possible that I wished it gone, just as I wished
myself an exit from function just as sharp, as clean and as definite.
Let us be honest. I do not feel guilty about the child.
They are unhurt, and I doubt I would feel lingering shame even if it
were otherwise. The child was the pretext, rather than the reason,
for pushing my car into the tree. In the light of my subconscious,
we must conclude it was no accident. This subconscious drive, I have
decided, is what draws me to the subway performer--and, for that
matter, to the grave of a child. They, together, present the polar
opposites of what I, so recently, was; namely, the conscious
obedience to the subconscious contrasting with the utter disregard
for self-consciousness altogether. This, I feel, represents two
entirely irreconcilable states which are nonetheless both preferable
to the present condition endured by so many.
This monograph
has run too long. I suddenly see ahead the subway, running
impossibly above the ground, approaching the intersection to which
the bus is headed. A collision is immanent. I cannot help feeling
responsible, but realize the futility of that emotion. For the time,
I am the poet, but the child cannot be far away now.
Insect
I
frankly haven’t the slightest idea what the difference is between a
moka
pot and a cafetiere,
but I’m going to pretend I do.
“Delicious,”
I say, setting down my cup. “Way better than that stuff you get at
Starbucks.”
Everyone else nods their heads in agreement, but I
can’t help but wonder if they’re just being polite. Jason is
pouring cream into his cup with a practiced hand, letting the white
stream fall from the pitcher’s lip in a smooth and slender column
that blooms across his coffee’s surface like a carnivorous plant
photographed in stop-motion.
“Did
you hear about Tibet?” he asks.
“Yeah,”
I say, “Terrible.”
“What’s
really shocking,” says my boss, “is the complete ignorance
of, well, most of America about what’s going on right now.”
“Terrible.”
chimes in Jason. “and what with the death of newspapers, soon
practically no one will be able to easily come by a well-formed
opinion.”
“Did
you hear the New York
Times might be going
bankrupt?” my boss asks.
“Now
that,” Jason says, draining his cup, “would be a tragedy.”
Our
biscotti has arrived and I’m reluctant to take the first piece. Is
Dr. Burns paying again? It makes me feel awkward, because and
despite the fact that she paid the last time--and this was
at her invitation. Jason, for all his savior
faire, did not appear
to know how a Turkish coffee tasting was really supposed to go last
time, and did not question when Dr. Burns ordered for all of us.
Tracy, similarly, followed the doctor’s lead and silently
acquiesced when she took the check from the waiter dressed in a vest
and what I took be MC Hammer pants. At any rate, it’s not too
weird for the boss to pay, right? After last time, I had gone home
and dug out a 1984 copy of Emily Post, but that wasn’t much help.
There was no heading for “Research Assistants” nor did I find a
chapter on “Student/Professor Luncheons.”
“Now,
really,” Dr. Burns is saying, “biscotti is an Italian invention,
but I like it with coffee, don’t you?”
We
agree. That’s what I like about my boss, didactic, as, I suppose,
all professors by definition are, while unpretentious, which would
not be so difficult if she hadn’t apparently picked up so much
stuff entirely tangential to classical antiquities. An SUV pulls up
outside and we can see it through the gauze curtains that are drawn
across the floor-to-ceiling windows. Jason makes a face as we see a
single occupant extricate himself from the cockpit and step heavily
to earth.
“Did
you hear they’re going to put a new bike path in, connecting the
university and downtown?” he asks.
“Yeah,”
I say, “it’s a pity it won’t be done until after I’ve
graduated.”
“What
was the completion date?”
“2016.”
I say, because I remember exactly what I read in the newspaper three
weeks ago.
“And,
what, what with the bureaucratic hold-ups and stuff, what’d you say
it takes a year or two past that?”
“Probably,”
we all agree, Tracy, Dr. Burns, and I.
Jason
has a fine shell of cynicism, and I have to keep reminding myself
that he’s twenty-seven, far older than he looks, and already has a
B.S. from another university. Still, I can’t help but wonder if in
this case the pessimism is part of a self-conscious faux-erudition,
much like my affected use of the word “pity.” We’re in a
coffeehouse, eating loukoum,
and we know it.
“It’s
a shame people don’t ride bikes more,” says Dr. Burns, “but I
think a lot of it has to do with the lack of bike lanes; it’s just
not safe downtown.”
“And
decent places to lock up,” I add, remembering a headline I’d seen
in Slate
that said something to that effect.
“Right.”
Jason says, and embarks on a long and, frankly, brilliant explanation
of the history of the ups and downs of bicycling in America, all the
way back to the draisine,
the penny farthing, and Susan B. Anthony. This starts him and Dr.
Burns on a discussion of rational dress and the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood.
Jason
is like the friend your mother gushed over when you brought him home
one day for lunch, the one you vowed would never again set foot in
your house lest he again open the door for your sister or address
your parents with a “sir” and “ma’am.” Sure, you’re
their one and only son, but can’t you look at Jason and see how
nice and well-mannered he is? He’s the research assistant Dr.
Burns would have hired had she the decision to make over again. I
came armed to this fete with my own conversational topics and various
bon mots
fresh-picked from wikipedia, but I can’t seem to find an opening
where I can bring up my knowledge of fletcherization or the LaGrange
points.
What
Dr. Burns has done is managed to upend my comforting knowledge that
all specialists are just that, and no more. She is the only liberal
arts professor I know who keeps a chart of the periodic table of
elements taped to the back wall of her office, and what makes it
worse is that while she’s being pretentious, the façade has a
perverse edge: she really never needs to refer to it, having
committed the bulk of its information to memory. Its presence is a
deceptive consolation, not a boast. In high school, I comforted
myself when faced with the well-worn trench I had dug in the 84th
percentile by deciding that the high achievers were thoroughly
one-dimensional, while I was a Renaissance man. The first few
semesters of college had confirmed this: the psychophysics professor
who knew all there was to know about the transduction processes of
the eyeball, but was stymied by a question I asked about lacrimal
glands; the literature professor with twenty-seven published articles
on Wordsworth who nonetheless had difficulty mentally calculating the
number of years between 1798 and 1832. Dr. Burns made her name in
analyses of 5th
century Athens, but had on the side of one of her many bookcases a
poster depicting Ernest Rutherford, below which was written, “In
science, there is only physics; all else is stamp collecting.” If,
say, psychology was being accorded the intellectual status of
philately, I could only imagine that extolling the virtues of a
Grecian urn was somewhere on par with nose picking.
“Did
you hear in the news they found a new painting by Hunt?” Tracy is
asking.
No,
we all say, tell us more.
“It
was in someone’s attic. They’re cleaning it up right now, but it
might go on tour after it’s spent some time in New York. I forget
exactly what the article said.”
My
recent subscription to the New
Yorker is serving me
in very poor stead right now, as I know nothing about this. There
was an interesting interview in Architectural
Digest a year or so
ago about restorative processes, but I can’ remember enough details
to bring up anything useful. My grasp of details is, in fact, on
loose footing no matter where the conversation turns: it has only
just occurred to me that the loukoum
we’re eating (or rahat,
as Dr. Burns informs me it is called in Romanian countries) is, in
fact, Turkish Delight, which up until now had only been something I
had known about in connection with a showing of Kismet
my uncle had once taken me to at a community theater.
“You
know there’s a show in Britain about the Pre-Raphaelites?” Jason
asks. Tracy’s indeterminacy has given him license to reference
television, but he still adds, “I heard about it on the BBC.
Apparently Germaine Greer really bashed it or something.”
I
brace myself. Dr. Burns, while hardly the bra-burning type, and
never one to succumb to the faddish practice of plastering
rainbow-colored triangles to her office door, has her own firm views
on gender, and I know that whatever I do understand of what follows
will probably be something I can only limply assent to. I’m slowly
realizing that any self-assessment I might have had regarding my
progressive opinions are going to need to be revised; what counted as
dangerously outré
in Tennessee barely qualifies as baseline-civilized in any outpost of
academia north of the Maxon-Dixon line.
“Try
the burek,”
she says.
“I
thought that was phyllo,”
says Jason.
“Phyllo
is the dough, yes,” she says, “but you use it to make any number
of things.”
“Like
baklava,” says Tracy.
“Right.”
Dr. Burns takes another sip of coffee. Her cup is smaller than
ours, filled with the thick sludge of which our more familiar
beverages are a pale American comparison. Americano,
as I learned during our last meeting here, is itself a dilution,
espresso watered down until it approaches the strength of your
familiar Krups.
“I
was talking to my friend in culinary arts the other day,” says
Jason, “and apparently there’s a sugar shortage.”
“Well,
that depends on who you ask,” says Dr. Burns, “it really has to
do with all the ethanol being produced now. Domestic production is
fine, but other countries are using cane to make ethanol, which
produces a shortage overseas.”
“And
there’s a drought or something in India,” says Tracy, putting
down his burek
and, I suspect, relieved to be able to contribute something again.
“Right,”
says Dr. Burns, “but the real issue is the ethanol. And,
unfortunately, America is such an economic power that foreign
governments will probably try to limit their own people’s purchases
in order to have enough to sell to American corporations.”
It’s
statements like these that make me wonder why she even needs
a research assistant. True, I’m handy at cleaning the coffeemaker,
but the evidence of her discriminatory abilities regarding the brewed
bean are causing me to suspect that even there I am incompetent.
“But
the ethanol,” Jason asks, “it’s important to push ahead on
that, right?”
He’s
hesitant, but I’m even more cautious. We narrowly dodged the
bullet with the advent of the SUV outside, but discussions of fuel
economy will inexorably confront me with the fact that while I’m
convinced global warming is real, I just haven’t been sold on the
idea that humans are solely responsible. It’s a feeling half-way
between the atheist unable to convert to his friend’s religion and
the twelve-year-old’s sight of his peers in the school shower: I
know I’m inadequate and an outsider, but surely it’s only a
matter of time before I become one of them?
“Well,
what we need to do is get rid of the trade agreements and pay
whatever the rest of the world is paying,” Dr. Burns tells us, “and
stop using our consumption-monopoly as a way to manipulate the
price.”
“Yeah,
I guess that makes sense,” Jason says.
Dr.
Burns then tells us about a plan by an Israeli entrepreneur to sell
electric cars on a cell-phone model, in which the company owns the
vehicle but customers pay per mile. Not once have we addressed a
topic about Aristotle or the Penelopesian War. Jason and Tracy, I
know, are both well-versed in classics, having had Dr. Burns in the
past; Tracy even worked as a field intern for a while, going to
Greece to help dig stuff up. He’d maintained a passing connection
to her since then, remaining the perpetual student and taking
scattered part-time classes at the college with no real major in
mind. Jason had transferred in after I had, and had apparently made
such an impression on Dr. Burns that he was included in this
attempted round table as a matter of course. His grasp of
quantitative analysis was a big factor, I knew; while I had entered
the classics program to escape the threat of ever having to take any
math more difficult than introductory algebra (from the Arabic al
jabr), Jason’s
previous degree was in computer science. Far more than its practical
applications, the worth of this accomplishment was the demonstration
that here
was a liberal arts student who could crunch the hard numbers and
think the concrete thoughts. For someone whose master’s thesis had
involved Fourier transforms in the authentication of Tuscan frescoes,
this was an invaluable accolade.
“I
doubt they’re going to come to any real solution anytime soon,” I
interject.
Everyone
looks at me, and I realize I’ve made a mistake. The comment was
negative, pointless, and, worst of all, I have no real reasons with
which to back it up.
“I mean,” I stammer, “the
corporations are backing gasoline cars too much; there’s no way
we’ll be able to move forward as long as they’re showing a profit
on their F-150s and Escalades.” That was safe, I thought, but I
could see from their faces that they assumed I’d next be decrying
the HPV vaccine or public housing.
“I
think,” says Dr. Burns, “that the profit margin on the new
hybrids is actually quite high.”
“And
the tax benefits are only getting larger,” Jason adds.
“Well…
good,” I say. “I hadn’t realized.”
In
a way, I think they are over-reacting. But I also realize that I
will never display the intellectualism required in this circle.
There is a difference between being a Renaissance man and being a
dilettante. We sit in silence for a moment more.
“God,”
I say, swallowing my food, “this corek
is really chewy. I’m practically having to fletcherize
it.”
#
When I bring a stack of copies into Dr. Burns’
office the next Monday, I place the Tyson article on top.
“The
noblest science, eh?” I say, nodding at the article, my tone of
voice suggesting a long familiarity with a discipline that might
entail casual danger and strenuous mental gymnastics.
“Hm?”
I
hold up the piece, its top page swarming with contour plots
illustrating the effective potential of a two-body system.
“Oh,
that was just something I was curious about after seeing an article
in Scientific
American. Do you
like physics?”
“Well--”
I indicate the Rutherford poster.
“Oh,
that?
I don’t buy that stuff. It’s just there to remind me not to be
a bitch about my specialty.”
“Really?”
I look at the poster for clues that it’s been placed there in an
attitude of irony, as if the placement of the thumbtacks or the
slight slant of its orientation might indicate that the message is
not to be taken at face value.
“Well,
yeah, Rutherford was a great man, but that statement is incredibly
arrogant. I’d much rather be a Renaissance woman than an expert in
anything. I can’t remember who it was, but there’s a quote:
‘Specialization is for insects.’”
“Huh.
Me too, I guess. I mean, I want to be an expert, too, but--”
“Of course you do.” she said. “That’s why I hired you. Jason’s interested in having coffee again next month. You up for it?”
Ron
“Ron,
would you read verses two through twelve, please?”
“Um,
okay. Uh, ‘And he opened his mouth, and taught them saying,
blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Yeah,
blessed are the hookers, and smokers, and pot heads--”
“Ron!”
“--and
pornos--”
“Ron!
Please!”
Ron
was opening and closing his Bible like it was a bellows, rapidly
flapping the pages, his head thrown back and rolling side to side.
“Ron,
I’ll ask you again to behave yourself. Tim, could you pick up?”
“Sure.
‘And He opened His mouth, and taught them…”
#
Ron
was a demon. We got out of PE for a few days when our class had its
mandatory sex ed segment. The first day Ron raised his hand.
“Uh,
Mr. Brinkman, is that the same thing as jism?”
“Yes,
Ron, now--”
“What
about spooge?”
“YES,
Ron, it is, but semen is the preferred--”
“What
about cum?”
“Ron!
Yes! Now be quiet!”
We
were floored. Most of us had no idea where he was getting this, but
we loved him for giving us new, illicit words. The guys snickered
and the girls looked down at their desks, but some of them looked
sideways at Ron.
On
the playground a cluster almost formed around him as he stood, head
down, leaning against the wall of the cafeteria. We found ways to
approach him and say a few things in passing, a comment here or there
and a veiled angling for more info. We would walk across the asphalt
as if to talk to someone on the other side, setting out for a
straight course but midway through deforming our trajectories like we
were comets tugged at by a dirty-blonde sun. He had positioned
himself by the electricity meter, and one of us would swoop down and
away, pausing for a few seconds, to be replaced by another. I was
artless.
“So, Ron, how come you know so much about this stuff?”
No predicate was needed; it had been supplied by the anglers who
came before me.
“Read
my dad’s old books.”
He
was chewing gum. There was a can of grape soda in his hand.
I
was transparent enough to walk away at this point, without greeting
or farewell, and let the next inquiry come up behind me.
#
His
mother dropped him off every Sunday at the church. Our paths in all
things were parallel--same Sunday school class, same homeroom, same
swimming lessons at the Y and Boy Scouts patrol--and neither of us
ever missed. We and the teacher were the three constants in that
Sunday school class, and over the course of a year we watched as
project kids dragged in by evangelistic families came and went, and
as future juvenile delinquents appeared a few times each year as
their grandparents mustered enough authority to insist they come
along. There were visiting cousins and the children of
occasional-attenders, “C&E” kids who only came during
Christmas and Easter. The church’s bus ministry brought in a
rotating cast of do-rag-sporting twelve-year-olds and loose-pantsed
sixteen-year-olds who still occupied the eighth grade, who sat in the
back and smirked and were gone the next Sunday. The pastor went on
leave that summer and his family went with him, and his son, who was
in our class, missed two weeks. At times Ron and I were the only
people there, in which case the teacher made a conscientious effort
to split eye contact between the two of us as she talked about the
succession of Old Testament judges and the law of the prophets. I
wondered when Ashley would be back in class and whether my slacks
were too short, and whether my socks were showing. I wondered about
this jism,
and about my soul. Ron sat and stared ahead at the teacher, and
sometimes flipped furiously back and forth in his Bible, or someone
else’s. The classroom had basket of mismatched Gideons and
disintegrating copies of obscure translations, like Darby’s or
Worldwide English; the collection grew as people involuntarily
contributed by leaving their Bibles under pews or in the bathroom,
and Ron, it appeared, kept a mental inventory of the pile, expressing
suppressed delight when a new Jerusalem Bible or New American
Standard Bible appeared at the top of the basket. Sometimes he would
sing, under his breath: “Sunday morning, Brings the dawn in, It’s
nothin’ at all…” Occasionally he would raise his hand.
“Mrs.
Rheims, what’s shittim
wood?”
“It’s
a kind of wood, Ron. Is that where we’re reading?”
“What
kind
of wood?”
“We’re
in First Samuel, Ron. There’s no wood like that here.”
“But
what kind of wood is shittim
wood? Jeeze, God really likes this stuff.”
“That’s
enough, Ronald.” Mrs. Rheims half-closed her eyes.
“He
keeps saying to build all this stuff out of shittim
wood.”
“Thank
you, Ron. Now, David came to Ahimelech because…”
Everybody
who had a Bible began to surreptitiously flip to the concordance.
Ron spent the rest of class finding passages with “pisseth” in
them, and showing them to me with a confidential look that seemed to
say “Eh? Good, right?”
#
However bad Ron was, his
sister was worse. Her tantrums were legendary among the church
mothers, and most of us had seen at least one of these one-woman
brawls. We all knew Ron and his sister were taking meds, although
rumors of what they were taking, and what they were taking it for,
ranged widely. Even Ron thought Laura was crazy; he told us she was
out of control, a terror. He regaled us with stories of massive
blowouts and epic scenes at school and the grocery store. There were
crises at the community swimming pool and fights that nearly ended in
hospitalization during craft classes. He told us more. There were
stories about his dad and how he left, about things his mom had done,
about the goings-on in his household. The stories had a strange,
surreal feel to them, with Ron’s logic appearing disjointed or
entirely absent. There was often no flow to the stories, no orderly
sequence of events; they were an undirected parade of outrageous
images and characters. The people in Ron’s stories--almost always
limited to himself and the members of his own family--acted without
motivation or consequence. There was no lead-up to his sister’s
purchase of three hundred plush animals; they were simply there,
filling the living room. There was no reason for a lengthy (and
hilarious) speech by his mother on the evils of his father; it simply
occurred, isolated in time. He once explained to me that he had
drawn a crucifixion scene for art class at school, but it wasn’t
suitable for female viewing: Jesus was nude, as were the criminals on
either side. This, Ron assured me, was historically accurate, every
Bible illustration and stained-glass window I had seen up until this
time notwithstanding. I doubted his authority on matters of Biblical
illustration; one time I caught him drawing ridiculous schlongs on
the Apostle Paul and various Roman soldiers in a picture Bible, and a
stain on the robe of a fallen Saint Stephen.
We
were both Boy Scouts, Ron and I. Our parents thought it would be
good for us, and while we never commiserated per
se, we were friends
to the extent that neither of us knew anyone else in the patrol.
When we went camping, we shared a tent. Ron prayed at night, lying
in his sleeping bag with his butt in the air, caterpillar-style, face
turned to the side and lips protruding. They were ritualized
prayers, following a formula, yet still highly specific to the events
of the day, litanies of sins and requests for others--usually for
others to shape up and stop bothering Ron. He was a terror to the
scoutmasters, who mostly left him alone except to tell him to quiet
down or watch his language. When he refused to go on a hike with the
rest of the patrol, though, sitting himself down in protest by the
embers of the campfire and kindling the tip of the twig he held in
his hands to flame, the scoutmasters insisted, making remarks later
among themselves that they couldn’t have him burning the forest
down while they were away. He chased squirrels and threw sticks in
the pathside creek that flowed in and out of view. Occasionally he
ran ahead and disappeared from our sight, into the leaves, to be
followed by cries--every time--from the scoutmasters, telling him to
come back. But the scoutmasters never moved from their positions at
the head and rear of the line of scouts, and Ron would eventually
reappear and resume walking with, and around, the group.
Occasionally he would burst out singing that he was heading to the
wild country, to Alaska, where he belonged, and everyone would yell
for him to shut up.
It
was Scouts that brought Ron to my dad’s attention. He had heard of
Ron and seen him a little, at church and at school, but it was
because of scouting that we started giving Ron rides home. His
mother would drop him off at the weekly meetings, and my dad would
pick us up, after it was dark (dark even in the summer), and we would
make the long drive through country roads, past the edge of town,
through a rich subdivision full of giant houses and sprawling lawns,
to the woods, where a ranch-style house sat under live oaks and
Spanish moss. Ron, according to himself, was scared of his own
house. It was haunted, and a corpse of a black man lay under the
foundations. He had once seen in the window the face of a rapist in
the news. The golf course was near by. Rich people played there,
people like his dad, who hadn’t left them anything when he went
away (except the refrigerator, the lawn mower, and 23 volumes of
Readers’ Digest condensed novels. No motivation, no consequence.).
His dad was a lawyer, his dad was in Nevada and he (Ron) had watched
Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas last night.
His dad had called once and Ron had told him that his (Ron’s) mom
had cancer and his sister had the flu. Suddenly he stared singing,
to us now, softly, in the car, about a cat in a cradle, and a little
blue boy who Ron urged to blow his horn.
I
had once had a book that contained, along with other nursery rhymes,
a poem about Little Boy Blue. It was one of those books for infants,
with cardboard pages designed to withstand drool and spastic,
grabbing arm movements, and it had, at some point in my early
childhood, disappeared in a box of items for the Goodwill, or younger
cousins, or the curb. But the picture of Boy Blue, fuzzy with
memory, and with the end of the story forgotten, had stayed with me,
and I had tried, at various points growing up, to get a parent to
tell me the rest of his story. They didn’t know what book I was
talking about. They had forgotten the book. There was a nursery
rhyme, they said, but when they recited it, it was too short. There
had been more about the boy, I knew, and I never found out what it
was.
When
we dropped off Ron my dad waited, the engine idling, until he had
gone up the driveway and through the front door, unlocking it with a
key he carried on a dog-tag style chain around his neck.
#
I
remember his mother vividly, if not clearly, much as if I had formed
my entire conception of her from Ron’s stories. She had spent some
time in the Army, and she attempted to control her children with a
military discipline, which, by its very nature and hers, could only
be sustained in short bursts, which resulted in Ron and Laura being
farmed out as much as possible--keeping busy with Scouts and
afterschool activities. Ron learned to swim each summer, and every
winter participated in a Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, but he
never went away to camp (except the weekend Boy Scout camping trips),
or to visit relatives. They had no family, Ron told me, except for
some crazy distant cousins out West. They stayed at home with their
mother, who one imagined had given up smoking for the kids’ sake
but was forever longing and irritable because of it. She stayed at
Sunday school a few times instead of dropping Ron off, to see what
went on there, and did the same once or twice for Scouts. She would
sit in the back row, in a folding metal chair, with her purse and a
canvas bag, an orange rape whistle on a lanyard around her neck,
along with a large pen and her glasses. I knew she was nearsighted,
but she still wore the glasses on a chain, like they were only for
reading, as if she didn’t need to put them on again to drive or see
across a room.
I
watched them after the Scouts meeting, because their van’s battery
had died--Laura had left the interior lights on--ON PURPOSE, her
mother shouted at her--and they were standing around while she tried
to fix it. She reminded the kids that they were disabled, and
medicated, and had to try extra hard to be good because of it. She
told them the deck was stacked against them--by way of motivation, I
suppose, to make them go to a good college and stay away from bad
influences. When my dad saw their car trouble he offered her a jump,
and when that didn’t work he drove them all home. In the car Ron
dominated the lack of conversation from the middle of the back seat,
filling the void with lines from movies spoken a
propos
of nothing and with no explanation afterwards of the significance of
that particular quote. When he mentioned his dad, his mother told
him to shut up. When he revealed an intricate scam he had devised
for tricking the CEOs of Hasbro, via the return policy on Furbies,
his mother told him to not end up like his dad. “Oh, yeah.” Ron
had said, and been quiet for a few seconds.
One
year both my mother and Ron’s forced us to go to Vacation Bible
School. Ron and I saw each other in the halls, but were never in the
same class. But we ate lunch together, which consisted of snack size
pretzels and potato chips, with Hawaiian punch, doubtless in an
attempt to pacify the greatest possible number of children, as
perceived by the organizers of Vacation Bible School. It went on for
a week, and by the end I felt sick. I said as much, as we ate, and
Ron agreed, voicing a yearning for some broccoli. He insisted they
ate nothing but vegetables at home, except his sister, who demanded
gummi bears. And his mother drank vodka. I didn’t believe it,
because Ron was the kind of guy who would have his soda confiscated
by scoutmasters after he drank three on the bus ride up to the
campsite and was revealed to have seven more in his backpack. “She
mixes Peter Paul and Marys,” he told me.
#
I lost
touch with Ron after he changed schools during his sophomore year.
He stayed in the area, but I only heard bits and pieces--we never
bumped into each other or tried to meet up. I wondered if I would
one day see him on the news--if his army-boot wearing mother had ever
lost it and driven the family van into the swimming pool at the rich
country club near their house, or if she had been arrested for
torching city hall, or driving out to Nevada in hopes of castrating
their father. I hoped Ron had done well, though. Of all the project
kids and twelve-year-old gangster-posers that got dragged through or
lured into that Sunday school classroom, none of them compared to Ron
and his family.
But
last year, Ron held an estate sale. Mom and Sis had boarded the
van--the same van, with the unreliable battery--in the middle of the
night and had taken off, and they hadn’t come back. It was the
night of Ron’s high school graduation, and he would, I found out
later, be attending a college in the next state come fall. Planning
to raise some funds, and betting no one would ever come back to claim
the stuff, Ron had a yard sale. From the depths of the house spewed
every thing imaginable. His sister’s three hundred plush animals
were there, along with several real stuffed animals, a lion and an
antelope among them. There were three refrigerators, twenty years’
worth of Better Homes
and Gardens, and--I
am not making this up--a model UFO, twelve feet across with a single
seat behind the lovingly crafted dash. There was an antique German
wall clock and a bathtub. There was a set of billiard cues, but no
balls or table. There was a record player, and a pile of records.
I
came because Ron had advertised in every paper in the town--there
were only two--and on nearly every telephone pole. There were flyers
on the bulletin boards of every public building, and I’d found
flyers in the trays at the local McDonald’s--he had been
industrious, everything short of a spot on the radio.
I
picked up some records from the pile. Simon and Garfunkle, Harry
Chapin--Ron walked up behind me.
“Yeah, those were my dad’s.
A buck for the whole lot, okay?”
“These were your dad’s?”
“Yeah. Every last one. Never listened to ’em.”
I
took them.
“Good luck, Ron.”
“Thanks.”
I
never listened to them either.
The
Appreciative Life
He
picked me up at my house, and after getting back on the main road he
turned up the volume on the radio.
“Why do you even listen
to that stuff?” I asked. It was schlock-rock, simple and unadorned
wailing backed by incessantly grating guitars.
“I don’t
really know.”
“You don’t actually like it, do you?” I
knew he didn’t; I knew what he preferred. His apartment walls were
lined with recordings of classical, even archaic music, European folk
instrumentals. Maybe rock, once in a while, but he had had something
amplified and pitch-altered on every time we’d been together
lately.
“I think we listen to pop music to punish
ourselves,” he said. “An aural bed of nails to compensate for
our sins.”
“Those sins being…?”
“I don’t
know… sometimes, don’t you ever get so sick of everything you
just want to cram your ears full of garbage to spite it all?”
This
was not normal second-date dialogue, but Phillip and I had known each
other for a long time.
“It’s like you’d rather inflict
pain,” he said, “like you want to inflict pain on yourself, just
for pure spite against… the stuff around us.”
“You’d
choke on garbage to get back at a culture who would do it for you
anyway?”
“Yeah, kind of. Does that make sense?”
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