by James Sallis
He’d laugh at my description of the morning ritual, of course.
And laugh he does, turning back from the window, looking first at me, then with mock surprise at the erection due south.
Oh dear. Look what’s happened.
The yard (I see now, as he steps out of the window frame) taken over by butterflies.
Those became—with no planning whatsoever, as so often happens in life—the years of higher education. I was working as baker for a faux boulangerie near the college. Wasn’t ever much of a baker, really, but I could fake it, same way the boulangerie did. Baby baguettes, popovers, croissants, cream horns, tarts. In by 4 a.m. to prep, through for the day by ten. Seeing students with their book bags, laptops and comfortable shoes, I got the notion to go back to school, and to maybe stay this time. I’d tried it a couple of times before and it never took.
Most of the students were half my age, the instructors not much closer. Everyone called me Miss Pullman. An advisor suggested that I start out slow, taking classes of particular interest to me, so I did. Like English 250: Life Themes, readings from world literature on a webwork of the great questions—death, individualism and community, the nature of reality—bolstered with compositions from twenty-year-olds about their own fascinating lives. Or American History: Unfolding the Narrative, which might well have been titled Remedial Thinking. Everything we are taught is false, the instructor told us the first day. Quoting Arthur Rimbaud, I’d later learn.
Don’t expect miracles here, I certainly didn’t. Lives rarely go into the oven as goo and come out beautifully golden. So, no boom or big bang, no moment when the frame freezes on a closeup, eyes clear and bright as the sound track throbs with meaning. Rather, a seepage. Slow waters coming in under the door, misplacing old toys and rugs and favorite shoes.
Can we choose who we are?
Can we choose what we believe?
Are those two questions blood kin?
To what extent are beliefs determined by choice, to what extent by the circumstances of our birth and, by extension, what we’re exposed to?
And that’s just—that was for me—the beginning.
Dr. Balducci taught by quotation and discussion. He’d start with something like what Rimbaud said, dangle it out across the room for discussion, eventually come back to the quotation’s source and what it meant in that particular time, that particular life. Always the particular, he said, always. Abstractions will hold a pillow over your face till you die. There is no theory of everything. There is no theory of anything.
My favorite quote, the one I come back to most often? Ask who benefits, and from whom. Lenin. Try reading the latest statement from your politician, millionaire TV evangelist or corporate CEO through that.
A third-generation Italian-American, Dr. Balducci carried his pedigree with him. Still got shivers when he heard accordions, he said, still had family sitting on stoops and playing dominoes on sidewalk card tables back in Brooklyn, though “I do seem to have misconstrued the whole wise guy thing, going for my PhD.” When he found out what I did, he told us about his grandparents’ bakery, family-owned to this day, and the following week brought in Italian cookies for the class. He confessed that he’d been trying for most of his adult life to get through Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian. Kept giving it a go, he said, kept getting bogged down. The copy he brought in bristled with Post-its, each inscribed with the date he’d fetched up there in the dark woods with Dante, Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.
Second year at the college, History of the Novel, I’m reading Frankenstein, finding out it’s not at all the book I thought it was.
“Cursed and forever alone,” Yves says, “its soul in torment, the monster tears apart its birthplace and flees into the countryside, right?”
“More or less.”
“But that’s not the end, that’s never the end.”
“No.”
“Every novel, every poem, is the same single story, one we go on telling over and over again. How we try to become truly human, and never succeed.”
Cheerful we were not, that night.
Often when things happen you realize you’ve felt them coming for a long time.
I was just getting home from class when Adrian, Yves’s partner in the new alternate-energy business, called. His secretary had walked into Yves’s office and found him sitting erect and smiling before his desk computer, methodically erasing company files.
At the hospital I learned that by law I couldn’t be given information on his condition and in fact, unmarried, had no standing at all. Yves, they told me, was under observation. They’d alert me if and when I might be admitted to see him.
That happened four hours and pocket change later, in a creepy, bare room on the eleventh floor. You buzzed to be let into that wing. The entrance doors were at the end of a long day room, and when the buzzer sounded, all heads turned from the TV to look. Most turned back. Some followed as you walked with the nurse who’d come to the door to meet you.
Yves sat, eyes dull, in a plastic chair whose color put me in mind of spoiled eggplant. He said something with muted gutturals, tried again and got out, “Stupid, huh?”
“On a scale of all else that happened around the world and in Washington today, barely a one.”
“So hard to make an impression these days.” He pointed to a window opening onto the nurses’ station. Posters with inspirational sayings hung beside it, edges curling. “They’re watching, to be sure you don’t slip me drugs. Or worse. And by the way, you have two heads.”
“In which case it sounds like you’ve had drugs enough.”
“Could be. I feel unbelievably calm, and at the same time that I’m about to leap from my skin.” He was silent a moment. “Interesting.”
If he wanted to talk about it, he would. I knew that. So we sat quietly, which minutes later brought a face to the window. I nodded and smiled. He shot her the finger.
“They think they have all the answers.”
“And you?”
“Not a single lonely pitiable one.”
We went on sitting quietly until the nurse who owned the face at the window came in to tell me it was time to go. I asked her about visiting hours. Told Yves I’d see him after work tomorrow and said, “We’ll get through this.”
He laughed.
In memory that laughter resounds through the blur of following weeks, home from work, stop off at the hospital, make classes, shove in a wee wedge of sleep, circle back to the hospital, study there or at home, try for another wedge, go in, prep and bake, repeat. By the time Yves came home, just over seven weeks, there was little laughter left.
I’d leave for work or school with no idea what the day might bring. Serial phone calls for no reason. A ravaged house, as though large animals had been at play, upon return. A great abiding blankness.
For all of one week he rarely got out of bed. Another he spent watching a channel showing only vintage sitcoms, Danny Thomas, Dick Van Dyke, Joey Bishop, I Dream of Jeannie, Hazel, and eating nothing but bread toasted with Velveeta.
In early April, seven weeks in, the therapist he was seeing (or mostly missing, since Yves canceled half the appointments) recommended that he return to the hospital for evaluation. They used that word a lot. Evaluation.
“Not to worry,” Yves said, “back in a jiff. A quick tune-up. Tighten bolts, check belts, blow out the carburetor—start ’im up!” The old Yves peeking out for a moment from deep inside.
Ensuing months brought two further hospital tune-ups, new psych and behavioral therapists, and a barrage of drugs, though I was never sure how many of these he really took. Early on, I was peripherally involved in therapy. One session, the dead-serious therapist and dead-stubborn Yves sat staring at each other the whole hour. With another, a handsome possibly transgender woman, he wouldn’t stop talking. Then there was the time he became a movie c
ritic, responding to each question or comment with talk of plot dynamics and structure, the word storyboard surfacing frequently.
I’d felt the confusion and pain of others many times in my life, but had never been part of an anguish so absolute that it bleached all color from the world. Making the least decision had become insurmountable. The scales on which choices are made were out of commission. Everything was paper wrapping that came undone when you touched it.
One day in November Yves had been sitting staring out the window, me beside him reading for class. He turned to me and after a moment said, “The truth is up there, everything we need to know, written on the wall. I can read it, I just can’t ever remember what it says once I look away.”
Then he asked me about the book I was reading.
Not long after, I come home from work, the door’s unlocked, the house is crazy neat. Cushions pushed into place on the divan, chairs at the kitchen table squared away, windows above the sink wiped clean. It’s been one of those days my sponge won’t bubble right, the gluten doesn’t develop as I knead, dough takes twice as long to rise, and if I’m not at wit’s end, that’s the next stop on the train.
The day before, as everyone filed out of class, Dr. Balducci had asked that I stay behind. Your work is excellent, Ms. Pullman, no problem there. He slipped his book bag over one shoulder. John Updike called it signaling through the glass, he said. You stand up here looking out on all the faces, and sometimes you know, you sense, that something’s wrong. You run the catalog in your mind: That this is none of your business. A breach of privacy even to bring it up. No relevance to the course or why we’re here.
But I suspect, he said, that if I’m picking up on this, others are too. Perhaps you’d want to be aware of that.
Dr. Balducci lifted a hand, knocked with one knuckle at the invisible wall.
Yves was in the bedroom, pill bottles and bourbon on the table alongside. He hadn’t thrown up yet but did just as I came in. What came out was nasty, full of plastic, and bits of pill, and stink. I turned him on his side, checked and found a thready pulse, called emergency services. Once they’d come and loaded him aboard, I packed my single suitcase and drove to the train station. I called the hospital from there, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. In the background I could hear phones ringing, alarms, anonymous voices.
Years earlier now. Nothing but police shows on TV, it seems, Latin America the hot spot for politics. I couldn’t have quoted Rimbaud or Lenin if you held me down with a broken bottle of mescal to my throat. I was baking pies and cakes at a mom-and-pop, meat-and-potatoes café, I’d gained twenty-six unwelcome pounds, I had as best friend the owners’s gay son who’d gone off to the state college and come home with a marble bag full of grand ideas he was ever so eager to share.
When we can no longer distinguish corporate power from government power, he’d say, we’re on our way to fascism. It’s never a slide, always a creep. Add god power and media power to the mix, and there you are. Here we are. Fascism, but with control in the hands of big business rather than government.
Mussolini said that, he’d say, more or less.
And that was the beginning, I guess, of this store of quotes and misquotes I’ve lugged around like a cotton picker’s sack the rest of my life. Wallace Stevens wrote that whereas an idea is one thing, words can always be found to replace it.
A quote, for instance.
All the TV cops had sad lives. Deep scars. Wounds. Dark suggestions lurked just offstage; flashbacks happened in soft focus or black and white, often the same one, or variations, again and again; confessions stumbled from mouths in the last five minutes. These scars and wounds were supposed to explain the cops’ lives, account for everything they did, every single action, every single inaction. Why they drank their morning coffee out of a child’s chipped bowl, went silent when someone used the word periwinkle, never carried money, had six pair of the same shirt and pants.
My own personal cop failed the TV test miserably.
Sullen, uncommunicative?
The man talked all the time, in full sentences, and they made perfect sense.
War-torn? Wounded?
Disgustingly happy. Solid, secure, there.
Alcoholic?
A middling addiction to coffee.
And driven? Well, okay, that part’s true.
We met when he stopped me for a bad tail light. Not broken, he said, more like stuttering? The restaurant had over-catered a school reunion the day before and I was on the way to donate leftovers to a retirement home, had boxes of wee sandwiches, small but proud cakes and half-cups of potato salad stacked on the back seat. When he handed me the warning ticket and started away, I figured, Hey, there’s enough to go around, and called after him. Asked if the guys at the station would like some food.
He opened one of the boxes I gave him.
What, no doughnuts?
I looked at his name tag then.
“Random? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“My mother was a great believer in chance—and not much else.”
Four days later he called, starting off by apologizing for using his position to intrude on my privacy, and hoped that I might agree to meet him for coffee, a drink, or dinner.
Why not all the above? I said.
That first play date lasted three hours, our second most of a weekend he had off. Within the month we were living together, first at his ground-floor apartment that felt like a neatly-kept bureau drawer, then at a larger one that came empty on the second floor of his complex. Decidedly on our way up, Random said, who can dispute it?
So there we were, me going in on the cusp, not quite late night, not quite early morning, doing my baked goods before the kitchen got busy and occasionally staying over to run the grill (keep my chops up) when Karl was a no-show, Random working some nights, some swing shifts or doubles, both of us sleeping when we could grab a few hours. Standing joke was: We pass one another in the hall long enough to wave. The two of us really should get together some time.
We live in snow globes, don’t we? Pick them up, shake them, years swirl about us and settle. Scouted out by an upscale restaurant, no idea how this happened, I jumped track from coconut cream pies to patés and unpronounceables. Discovered the wondrous autonomy of online study and, for all my distrust of what everyone called being connected, got my degree. Took up mountain biking and left those twenty-six pounds behind on the trails. Cherished Random, though not at all, I insisted, randomly.
Then the night I lay watching car lights glint off leaves wet from earlier rain and the phone rang. Before, I’d come suddenly awake from dreams inhabited by brightly lit corridors, empty apartments and shadowy interrogators and, unable to get back to sleep, turned on the radio that I kept set for just such sleepless nights to a local station featuring old-time radio dramas. Something about political intrigues and doomed love in ancient Rome, but I didn’t hear much of it.
On what he called in as a routine traffic stop, Ran had been shot. The stolen car was left there at the scene; they never identified the shooter. Ran died before I got to the hospital.
6.
Here’s where the story begins, I guess. After Yves. Long after Ran. However hard you stare at maps and plan, you rarely get where you think you’re going. But sometimes stray pieces of your life come together, the way military service, that college degree I’d earned for no particular reason, and exposure to police work from living with Ran got strung together the day I walked through double doors on Hob Street and applied for work as a cop.
It was the first time I’d talked to anyone about the desert and how I got there, the skinny kid with the RPG and Oscar, and I still don’t know why I did. But my mouth had developed a life of its own, and Cal Phillips, himself a veteran of (his words) one of those wars no one talks about anymore, listened. Said he knew I had the job half an hour before I did.
I’m not about to claim there wasn’t down time. No right angles in nature, few straight lines in life. I didn’t walk out of the hospital and halfway across the continent into Cal’s office. Lot of rough roads and mornings on the way. But I’m not going to fill in the blanks here, or try to pretend everything connects. It doesn’t.
By then I was living in Farr, the kind of place that has period gingerbread houses shouldered up against modern cookie-cutters, where hardware stores and gas-and-live-bait shops cling to town’s edge, where you hear the whisper of old-country vowels in local speech. Legend had it that there’d once been twin towns but Nearr had up and moved away. The night before I went to see Cal, I lay in bed with the radio turned low thinking about Yves’s anguish, Ran telling me his mother believed in chance and not much else, Daddy saying we’re from good hillbilly stock, we don’t call police, we take care of things ourselves. I was seriously low on money and sorely in no mood to cook.
Once I’d run on and on and finally down, Cal said, “I’ve got a list of questions here. Supposed to ask you why you want this job. What are your best qualities. Where do you see yourself being in ten years. Screw all that. You want some coffee? Let me tell you about our town.”
When we were done, he pointed one impossibly long ebony finger to a poster on the wall behind me. It showed a pile of rags and stray belongings—could there be a person under there?—in an alleyway. “I do have one question,” he said. “What do you think about that?”
in the time you’ve been discussing
the latest celebrity’s tummy tuck
44 veterans have committed suicide
I turned back to him. I was empty, and just shook my head. He told me I had the job.
The house sat back off the street, plain white and unadorned, from simpler times when, mistakenly or not, we understood the American dream to be collaborative rather than competitive. Remains of a brick barbeque pit clung to the side yard along with a picnic table that looked as though the legs on one side had been gnawed at by an industrious beaver. Clap the salad bowl down at the high end and catch it at the low as it slid. A well-used Dodge in the driveway put me in mind of a dog whose master wouldn’t take it for the walk it badly needed.