Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

  “Probably not,” my father said. “But maybe.”

  “And I live with you?” I said.

  “Yes, yes,” my mother said, putting her glasses back on. “In the basement.”

  I wanted to meet my ex. Eventually my parents confessed that they knew where she was living, but all they would tell me was her name, Violet. For the time being there’d be no point in going after her, my parents said. She had a fiance. My parents admitted he was both cute and successful.

  I, meanwhile, was not cute. I had back pimples, a flabby stomach, faintly yellow teeth. I had a hairy ass. I was also somewhat nerdy, apparently, as the bookshelf in the basement was lined with comic books and anime and movies about monsters.

  “You ought to get a job,” my father said, hobbling downstairs to visit me one afternoon. I was, of course, smoking, thinking, in the dark. “Get your mind off of things. Some sweat might do you good. Don’t you think?”

  Most humans are born with a purpose. I had been born without. I had no useful skills. I had been born an artist, had degrees under my bed from Columbia. I had no aptitude for repairing elevators, analyzing investments, changing somebody’s oil. My brain was wired for color, for shape.

  “Something part-time even,” my father said.

  “It’s not like I haven’t been looking,” I said, blowing smoke into my cigarette.

  Which was true. I’d looked into several positions downtown—illustrator positions, graphic design. But nobody had called back—I couldn’t even get an interview, let alone an actual job.

  My father offered to call around—he thought that maybe he could get me a job on the black box assembly line at his old factory, or that his friend from church might be able to get me a job as a dispatcher at the fire department where she worked. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, though. Some job that just as easily could have been done by a machine.

  Weeks passed that way. A month. The moon circled in orbit around the planet. The tides rose and fell in the ocean. The planet rotated in orbit around the sun. I killed time in the basement, drawing comics all day, carefully removing the ink from the paper.

  * * *

  According to my records, I didn’t actually know anything about the fourth dimension.

  “Your transcripts say you have a D-level understanding of high school physics,” my mother said, wiping dust onto the kitchen windows. “And absolutely no understanding of college physics at all. You just weren’t born for that type of thinking.”

  I knew what the fourth dimension was, though, and once I started thinking about that, I couldn’t stop thinking about what that meant. I usually avoided talking to my mother about it. Actually, I usually avoided her and my father and the upstairs altogether. But after hearing the garage door open and close that morning, I went sneaking around upstairs, looking for my ex’s address or phone number—I did this at least once a day—ransacking the drawers, the cupboards, my mother’s desk, my father’s dresser. I didn’t actually know what I would do if I ever found it, other than maybe just walk past her apartment once or twice and try to get a glimpse of her. Maybe call her, once, and then hang up after she said hello.

  But then my mother came into the house with a bag of garbage and caught me hunting through the cabinet under the telephone. I’d just found a creased scrap of paper with a phone number printed in the center and my wife’s initials, V.G., penciled in nearby. I quick crumpled the paper in my fist and tried to sneak back downstairs, but my mother saw me and made me come back and sit down at the kitchen counter. She said she wanted to talk to me. She said she had been worried about me. She wanted us to have more of a relationship. All I could think about was calling the phone number in my fist, so I started talking about the topic I knew she’d get bored of soonest, which coincidentally was the topic I wanted to talk about most.

  “But look,” I said. “So humans are three-dimensional—like a cube.”

  “You’ve tried explaining this to me before,” my mother said, starting on the windows over the sink. My parents kept a framed photo on the windowsill of a younger me with my arm thrown around a dog. “Talk to me about something else. Tell me about your day. I want to hear how you’re feeling.”

  “Now hold on,” my father said, hobbling into the kitchen with some measuring tape and a wrench, wearing indigo overalls. He sat down at the counter. “At least hear him out. Come on, you know about cubes. Cubed ham? Cubed cantaloupe?”

  My mother ignored him.

  “Sure,” I said. “Like cantaloupe. Like ham. But we’re also traveling through a fourth dimension, which is time. So a four-dimensional image of me might look like this—it would be me from birth to death, all of the space that ‘I’ had occupied for the time that ‘I’ had existed. It’d be like looking at a tube version of myself, a blurry worm of me-shaped colors that would appear in our basement in the twenty-first century and then wriggle across the surface of the world for thirty years and ten months before getting sucked into your womb in the twentieth century and disappearing.”

  “Don’t bring my womb into this,” my mother said. She pointed at my fist. “What’s that in your hand?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s in my hand. But fine, think about it like this. I’m three-dimensional. So, say I look at another three-dimensional object. Like a sculpture of a clock tower. When I look at the sculpture, I see the entire shape of it all at once. Because I’m three-dimensional too. But imagine if a two-dimensional creature—like a stick figure from a comic strip—looked at the sculpture. It would only see part of the shape—just a square, that is, of the cube. If the two-dimensional creature moved up and down the sculpture, it would see more squares from the shape, but still, it wouldn’t be able to make much sense of the squares, or to see the sculpture, the way that we can, as a clock tower. Maybe a two-dimensional creature could conceive of the concept of height, in an abstract way, but it wouldn’t be able to actually see height—it could only truly see objects in terms of length and width.”

  “Like this,” my father said, demonstrating with the measuring tape. “Length and width.”

  “Don’t encourage him,” my mother said, attaching the clean sheet of paper towel to the roll by the stove.

  “But so now imagine if a four-dimensional creature looked at the four-dimensional shape of me,” I said. “It wouldn’t see me in terms of now or before or then. It would see my four-dimensional self, all of me, as a single shape, a sculpture. When it comes to time, we’re the comic strip characters. We’re inside a four-dimensional sculpture, observing three-dimensional fragments of it as we move along.”

  “Move your elbows,” my mother said, taking another sheet of paper towel out of the garbage. “I’m dusting the counter next.”

  “I think it’s all very interesting,” my father said, patting me on the back in a friendly way. “I still think you need to get a job.”

  Talking to my parents about it was pointless. But still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, because it all seemed so arbitrary. Why did we happen to be observing the shape of things in this direction? Couldn’t we just as easily be observing it in the opposite? What would it be like, to be read backward? How would the meaning of everything change?

  If the shape of everything was a constant—if all of time already existed, and we just couldn’t see it—then there would be no such thing as cause and effect. Or if there was, cause and effect would exist in both directions. Each event would be a spike in the surface of the sculpture, producing a slope on both sides. Any “cause” would have ripples of “effects” toward both ends of time.

  My parents kept telling me that depression was a medical condition, just the result of chemical imbalances in the brain.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people go through periods of depression. It doesn’t mean there’s actually any reason for you to feel that way—it just means your brain has been fueling up on the wrong chemicals,” my father said.

  But maybe there was a reason for my de
pression—maybe it just hadn’t happened yet. Maybe my depression was connected to something larger, something so heavy and massive that it created enormous ripples in both directions, and maybe that’s where I was now, in the current, with my brain swaying from the force of the waves.

  After my parents fell asleep, I snuck back upstairs to call the phone number on the scrap of paper from the cabinet. A bored-sounding woman picked up the phone. V.G. turned out to be a drugstore on 77th.

  * * *

  I’m probably not making much sense, maybe not any at all. I need to talk about this though, because all of it actually happened—the fiasco at the cemetery, the architects’ storm, the woman in cat-eye glasses. And also the afternoon my parents told me to start packing my belongings to move out of the basement, which started when a dog was born in our driveway, that same bony hound from the photo on the windowsill. My mother called me upstairs after it happened. The veterinarian had dropped off the body earlier that night while my father was out working on the gutters.

  “I went up into the attic looking for a tarp to cover its body for the time being,” my father said, digging through the garbage under the sink, searching for some sort of chew toy. I wasn’t wearing any socks, and the dog was licking my feet. The dog had white fur and black ears. “Then your mother backed over it with the pickup.”

  “You shouldn’t have left it in the driveway,” my mother said, scratching the dog on the back of the neck. She kept telling the dog to sit. The dog didn’t seem to be trained. “I told you that the tank needed to be emptied. I was going straight to the gas station after dinner. I told you that, in those exact words.”

  “It came to life right under the tires. Nasty way to be born. Looks like that was just what it needed, though,” my father said.

  “Did you know we were getting a dog today?” I said. I was upset about it. The dog kept wagging its tail and licking everything. I hated how happy it was. It made me feel even worse about being so depressed.

  “We’d seen pictures,” my mother said, nodding toward the photo on the windowsill. “But we didn’t know when it’d be born. It’s harder to tell with animals. The Department of Health doesn’t monitor that kind of thing.”

  “Do you have any pictures of me and Violet?” I said.

  “No,” my father said, pulling a piece of mail out of the garbage. “We don’t have many pictures of you at all.” He flipped the envelope over, looking at the address. “Here,” he said, “it’s for you.”

  To which I said that I didn’t care about mail or the dog because life was meaningless and I was ugly and overweight and pathetic and still hadn’t found a job and had nothing to look forward to and the weather was always so cloudy and gray. I was going back downstairs, I said. But apparently my mother had finally had enough of listening to me whine, because then she went off on a long rant about how lucky I was just to be alive. I didn’t see that as being much of a blessing, I said, and then she really got upset.

  “Do you have any idea how lucky you are to live where you do?” my mother said. We lived in Queens. “A country known for its generosity,” my mother continued. “Do you have any idea how much garbage we collect from other countries? How many pigs and chickens and herds of cattle that we spit up every year? Which we then use to improve the quality of the soil and the water and the air around the world? To benefit all of humanity? To make the climate comfortable? Do you have any idea how many fruits and vegetables we send off to nourish the plants in other countries?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Not just fruits and vegetables,” my father said, sitting down at the counter. “Cedar groves, maple groves, entire rainforests. We’ve taken those people’s deserts and turned the land into paradise, stocked with sugarcane, mangos, parrots and monkeys in the trees.”

  “If you had any idea how many trillions of pounds of plastic that we’ve removed from the ocean. How many trillions of gallons of pesticide. How many trillions of gallons of sewage. How many trillions of gallons of gasoline that we convert to crude oil to be pumped into the ground,” my mother said.

  “Okay, okay, I get it, America is great,” I said, wishing my parents would let me go downstairs to get back to brooding.

  “You ought to start volunteering,” my mother said. “That’d give you some perspective.”

  I opened the door to the basement, but then my father said, “Anyway, here’s your letter. Seal it up when you’re done and one of us will walk it out to the mailbox.”

  I reached for the envelope. I took out the letter. It was an official notice from the County Clerk, informing me that my divorce had officially ended.

  “What does this mean?” I said, looking at my parents.

  “How about that, Charlie Brown?” my mother said.

  “That must mean she’s finally left her fiance,” my father said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Wait. What does that mean?”

  “It means you’ll be moving in with her,” my father said.

  “You’re married now, after all,” my mother said.

  “Moving in with her?” I said, suddenly nervous. “When? You mean tonight?”

  * * *

  I didn’t actually have to move in with her for a couple months. I did get to meet her once before the move, though.

  I had been hoping that when we finally met, seeing her would spark some intense feeling in me, would overwhelm me with emotion. I didn’t want to be depressed anymore. I thought maybe being married would help.

  However—meeting her was, well, disappointing.

  It’s not that she wasn’t cute. She was beautiful, had a plump face with fierce brown eyes and a mole on her cheek, and wore a puffy ultramarine coat with an elegant gold watch that made me think she must have a sophisticated sense of fashion. I liked looking at her face more than any painting or sculpture or comic ever.

  I still felt just as depressed as always, though.

  The first time we met, we didn’t even kiss.

  * * *

  We got an apartment in Brooklyn, in an ancient brownstone covered with gnarled ivy. Violet was almost overly nice—I arrived to find that she’d already stocked the apartment with oil paintings and clay sculptures, although she’d only just moved in earlier that evening. I had never seen the apartment before, but walking into the bedroom, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of deja vu, as if remembering that exact scene, somehow knowing what would happen next. Snow was floating up toward the sky out the windows.

  “I should give you a minute,” Violet said, standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

  I unpacked all of my belongings, which amounted to a couple pairs of slacks, a couple of shirts, a pair of sneakers, and a shoebox full of comic books in plastic sleeves. Also the green ticket labeled with the “175,” which had become sort of my lucky charm—I’d been carrying the ticket around ever since being born, and over time the ink of the numbers had darkened in my pocket, and the bends had smoothed, and the wrinkles had flattened, although the rippled water stain beneath the numbers was as warped as ever.

  I stacked the comics into a tower on the floor of the closet. Violet had gone to the trouble of getting me leather dress shoes and a tailored suit. I hadn’t told her my measurements, but the shoes and the suit fit perfectly.

  That night we slept in the same bed—a twin mattress, barely enough room for the two of us, but still, we went the entire night without touching once.

  Violet did reach for me one night about a week after we moved in together, but otherwise she never made any attempt to have sex with me. I never made any attempt to have sex with her either. It’s not that she wasn’t attractive. I was almost absurdly attracted to her—she seemed so much more beautiful than it was actually possible for anybody to be. But sex was the same as any other human activity. It just didn’t interest me. Nothing at all excited me. I couldn’t enjoy anything. I felt exhausted all of the time. I spent days in an almost catatonic state, sprawled across the sofa, feeling hopeles
s and numb, just trying to muster enough energy to hobble into the kitchen and smoke a clove at the window.

  And then other times, without any warning whatsoever, I would feel almost manic, hardly even sleeping, spending hours online poring through job postings, looking for anything, art gallery vacancies, courtroom illustrator vacancies, wallpaper design vacancies, openings for cereal-box cartoonists, even jobs completely unrelated to art, retail positions, janitorial positions, absolutely anything. I would paint all afternoon, sculpt straight through the morning, hardly even acknowledging when she came home or went to bed, and then work straight through the night, drawing comics at the kitchen table.

  And still nobody had offered me even so much as an interview, and when the mania hit me, I was anxious, couldn’t sit still, brushing the color from my paintings, stroke by stroke, down to the umber, down to the gesso, then down to the canvas itself, until the canvas was blank and empty and pure, leaving me to start on another. I’d been working on paintings that were abstract and ugly, all blacks and grays and reds, always exactly the same—a series, almost, of the same shapes again and again and again, like skinny black volcanoes spewing funnels of smoke toward the top of the canvas, with splashes of lava along the bottom. The paintings were hideous. The paintings were terrible. I kept doing the paintings anyway. And the sculptures—the sculptures were horrible little creations, all twisted and rutted. I knocked the shape out of the sculptures, worked the clay into perfect cubes, and sealed the clay into wrappers.

  And then the exhaustion would hit me again, leaving me in a trance on the sofa, bloodshot and stubbled. Violet would talk to me sometimes when she got home, but she never had anything all that interesting to say. She worked for a marketing firm. Her company was in the midst of a quarrel with a client that specialized in cheesecakes. Mostly she talked about that.