by Evan Dara
Marcus purses his lips, nods. He clasps Neil around the shoulders, gives a single comradely shake. Starts walking with him back to the loading area, its broader light.
’Ll keep my eyes open, Marcus says. Let you know if something turns up. That’d be good for you.
Thanks, man, Neil says.
’S OK, Marcus says.
But, you know, ironic, Neil says.
Oh?, Marcus says.
I mean, Marcus, my man, Neil says. I mean, you ever wonder, you ever just take a second to wonder what all’s going down around here? What all them’s getting away from?
Yeah, Marcus says. Sure.
I mean, it’s obvious, Neil says. I know what they’re getting away from.
He pulls out a cigarette, match-lights it up.
Look at what remains, Neil then says, exhaling. The cold …?
Well—
No, man, Neil says. You.
He laughs, sputterily. Marcus laughs, too. On the loading dock, someone tugs a rope-cord attached to a large, rippling, metal door. It slams down on the areas edge.
On his way home, Marcus stops on North Street, over by Willard. He knocks at number 370, waits, knocks again. Starts to head back to his car when he hears the door open.
Marcus turns. Hey, Mr. Devigny, he says. Hey, Ezra.
Ezra looks at him, turns. Walks back into his dark hallway.
Marcus approaches the house. How you doing, he says.
Marcus enters the home, gentles the door shut. He walks behind the slow-moving oldster, atop the cloudy plastic tarpaulin that covers the hallway floor and that always, to a degree, sticks to the feet. The hall is dark but lights burn in the room at its end, making the model airplanes hanging overhead look to be on night voyages.
How’s this and that, Marcus says when he hits the illuminated living room. Just thought I’d say hello.
Some new program from Fairley’s?, Ezra says.
Marcus chuckles. He looks around for a place to sit, doesn’t find one. He flusters.
Ezra, man, he says. You still at it? Your deal still going on?
Marcus bends further, looks deeper. But still he stands. Every chair, every segment of couch, including armrests, is covered with halved pairs of pants, hillocks of socks, or folded shirts. The wooden radiator-top is striped with ties, and all the room’s tables layered with papers, ledgers, and photographs. Above and between them lie the three old flopped-open suitcases, which Ezra, his back to Marcus, immediately returns to filling, lading the stiff valises with various samples of the surrounding objects. Every time a bag goes full, Ezra draws back and stares at it intently. Then shakes his head with a diagonal jolt, re-approaches the contained stacks, unloads huffily, and starts the roundelay again.
Hey, Ezra?, Marcus says after two minutes of this.
Come on, E, Marcus continues, after another pause. I mean, can’t you – if you’ll permit me – can’t you find anything just a little better to do with your time?
Ezra snorts, pauses, doesn’t turn. Goes back to examining, selecting, and lifting. Find me something better, he then says. Go on.
Marcus puts his hands on his hips. OK—
Meets all the criteria, Ezra says. It’s creative. Analytic. Non-sedentary. A real good workout.
Ezra scoops up socks.
It’s what I’m trained in, Ezra then says. It’s what I did every day at the hardware store. That was the point. Select, convince, bag. Just doing it for myself.
Marcus waves an unseen hand. Looks once more for a seat.
Then Marcus chuckles again. OK, Ezra, he says. You got something you love, you stick with it. If you know what I—
Don’t love it at all, Ezra says.
He picks up a striped shirt. Not one bit, he says.
Ezra puts the shirt in a case, pulls back to eye and assess. Just don’t know what to take, he says.
Marcus leans against a bookcase. Looks out a night-filled window.
Hey: I can help with that one, Marcus then says. You just take your time.
—
On his way home, in his car, Marcus feels like an alto flute. Filled with impassioned air, sounding, trilling, but larger, sturdier than the usual instrument. He will set up a charitable foundation for the world-forgotten victims of the Second Congo Civil War. He will create an institute to establish and promulgate universal standards for journalism, posting lists online of those who sign on to his program and lists of those who will not. He will market A-burg as a movie lot, a ready-to-use backdrop for dramas of every sort. He will—
—
He sits down to supper. The mung beans are very fine this Friday night. Starchy and flavorful, offering resistance then the dense reward of an easy yield. As are his turnips, very good. His appetite is hearty, as always – but his skills with oven and steamer have also progressed, he tells himself: he is the author of all this. After fifty minutes, he leaves little behind, rinds, peels, and husks. The final indication of a cooker’s achievement. Of excellence.
At the sink, rinse-water falling over his fingers, he turns his head abruptly and sees incongruous light. There it is again, on but not just put on, the single bulb behind neighbor Baker’s shade. A nimbus arising from a layer of beige, enunciating the night. Marcus dries his hands on the small towel, hanging from a cupboard pull, and moves to his side window.
Unsure if he should approach the glass, then entirely sure, he takes the closer look. The bulb, a lasting blast and its outglowing aura, reveals neither shadow nor movement. Still, it startles. Is there anyone in there? Should he call the police?
He finds himself thinking a phrase: All at once am I, several stories high. Then he is thinking a name: Etta Jones. The data merge, and his soul makes a little swirl. When the warm surge leaves, he realizes: Mr. Baker is listening to a record. Though probably a CD.
Marcus gives a start, reconvenes, smiles. It’s an album that he owns, too. Etta J’s Don’t Go to Strangers. Doesn’t listen to it much, but it is his. Not a favorite, but still, always nice to know it’s there. Or wait: Has the same burglar who roped Baker to a wooden Savannah chair copped, on another run, a few of Marcus’ neglected discs? Marcus laughs to himself.
Twenty minutes later he steps into the evening, looking forward to a leg-toning, uptempo constitutional. Steering clear of center city and the night shims, he walks up and down Greene Street, then to Isham, then over by the cemeteries. Stripped of distraction, sharpened, he thinks, he is looking at these things with a mind remade whole, and not needing any secondary testimony. Finally, he has become the master of his time, a self-helping man whose life – its resources and perceptions, its judgments and enjoyments – is advancing with the license of a higher order of beings. For the first instance in his existence, he will be able to attend to the voices that all hear in solitude, but are trained to dishonor.
And so, finally, he will be able to actualize himself. He will publish his System of Omnilectics, the necessary expansion of dialectical thought that, leaving both Boethian idealism and Hegelian materialism in the dirt, shows that progress arises from the collision of innumerable impinging factors, with little scalar relationship between inputs and outputs. He will write a Universal Declaration of the Responsibilities of Politicians, setting out standards for independence, financial probity, public service, and more that all elected officiais can voluntarily sign – or not. Better: next year will bring elections, and he will launch his Universal Declaration while running for mayor of Anderburg. Just let Farina try to stand up to it – to him. There will be no contest. Marcus, no doubt, will be embraced. Because he does not need it.
On Mansfield Avenue, Marcus’ current wander-street, the night is quiet. Roofs and chimneys multiply the quarter moon. Marcus takes a pause, leans against a curbside willow, receives pats of chilly air as he inwhistles a joint. Soon after, he realizes he’s hungry; he knew he should have prepared a bit more squash. But no food shops or restaurants remain to be open in town, and he won’t enter there, anyway. Then h
e remembers: he has a wedge of panforte in his parka. He had bought it at Dough Boy’s, way back when, and had wanted to give some to Neil but had forgotten. He pulls the panforte from his coat’s inner pocket, unwraps, snacks. The thing is seriously good, its evolving honey-pepper payoff. Rice paper and thin plastic have kept the brown mass fresh, all the way from – still impressive – Siena.
While chewing, he sees a graffito in the willow, small letters erratically carved with nothing as sharp as a knife:
Marcus snorts: further proof. The intrusion almost makes him leave the peaceful, lyric spot. But he decides against it: never sacrifice fineness to barbarism. His tree is just brilliant for leaning. He takes his time, finishes his snack, licks his thumb and two fingers, pockets the molted plastic. He detaches from the willow and straightens up, then sees another graffito beneath the first. Larger, more deeply gouged into the bark, and no less messy, it seems to have come from another hand, at a later time:
He can not stop himself from growling. Who are these people?, he thinks. What comes first: desecrating language or desecrating trees? Does one enable the other? He remembers Margaret Atwood – War is what happens when language fails – and shakes his head. He sends himself home.
His sleep is calm that night, launched, gently, by a few minutes’ reading of The Very Clever Crocodile.
—
Morning again, and lights go on inside before out. Marcus rises, bathrooms, jostles his hair in a hallway mirror, walks through his home flicking switches. He turns on a radio to check for news, turns it off when he gets sports. Returns to his bedroom to put on houseclothes.
It’s Saturday, start of splendid weekend. Two full days of tangible ampleness. Grand chances for him to work on everything that must be worked on.
Marcus fires up his coffeewater, then walks through the washing-machine room to the rear of his house, where he opens his exterior door and reaches into the drop-box. The bag tugs back: it holds double provisions, his passage to Monday. Marcus puts more shoulder in, hoists out the heavier sack. Straightening, he scans its contents, turns back indoors.
But then there is something different. And it hangs there, hovering, freighting the air around him.
But it has always been there. Even before.
The squash.
The tomatoes.
The walls – and roof – of his house.
The panforte.
The—
Where to stop…?
—
He knows. He sees. His obligations. His responsibility. He holds, smoothes, the coppery squash in his hands. He reaches in the sack and feels, weighty and tumbling, dozens of additional good, sustaining, delectable things. How many times has he done this before? How many times has he forgotten?
It is astonishing: He has participated in a lifestream of such events, but unconsciously, automatically, without awareness. Suddenly, he has become actively, acutely, aware. Omni-aware. The things, the everything, and what they are offering him. The immeasurable meaning of their actuality. The iridescence of their gifts. Every unity and every particle. Each one worthy, every one fine. Where would he be without the drop-box?
It floods and arcs, it illuminates his future: He will step, deep, into humility, and so free himself, for the first time, to receptivity. To his good fortune, his unimaginable luck. To the beauty of the clouds, the absence of clouds, the engineering of his fingers, oboe-call, boot tread, stoplights, consonants, the endless landscape that he has inherited and that needs not one semi-byte of upgrade. To live free and entirely committed, and so make himself able to record a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, in words hard as cannonballs. To become alive to the presence of presence. Then watch this lead him, invincibly, to the sunfields of gratitude.
For that is the axle, he sees. The spring in the bow. Gratitude is the only appropriate response, the emotional equivalent of truth, the revivifier app that makes all things function, turns everywhere into home. He feels this at the ardor-point where knowledge becomes force. To be should be to be grateful. And now, here, most of all, he is grateful for having found that out.
—
That afternoon, sitting on the couch in his heated living room, Marcus folds laundry, socks, and pants. It affirms – and reflects – the superabundance of existence, it certifies all circumstances and things. It makes all things kings! Gratitude liberates life’s fullness, it is the antidote to taking anything for granted. To taking everything for granted.
And more: Gratitude turns the arbitrary into the essential. It makes misfortune into education. It converts enemies into teachers. Problems become gifts; failures opportunities. Gratitude transits the soul from the agora of endless disputation and disappointment to the noon coast of appreciation, its unbreachable horizons.
It is the way out.
He decides to make a list: things he has to be grateful for.
His health.
His eyes.
His house.
Sarah Vaughan. Haydn. Anita O’Day.
His ears.
His financial advantages.
His openness to betterness.
His adaptability.
His—
He abandons the list. There is just too much. It is the sweetest defeat he has ever known.
—
It is evening, and he is walking the streets. It is afternoon, and he is taking his first daytime constitutional. His imagination Googleviews new-found powers, novel and unanticipated schemas, exploded possibilities. The snap in his stride is being fed by currents lacing through his psyche: Gratitude makes mine into enough. Gratitude turns now into a downbeat. It makes here into a garden.
He starts taking notes. In his living room, in bed, during his walks through the residential parts of town, he eavesdrops on his self-forging thoughts and shimmers at what he hears. Not every thought, but most, end up shorthand-scrawled – gr transfrms – onto his pad. He flips this book up so often that, between the tiny, Slinky-like metal coils, the punched pages begin to shred.
He sleeps less than six hours a night, and this only when physical fatigue withdraws him. Some days, he does not know if it is 2 p.m. or 10. What is sunlight?
By the next weekend he has concluded: He must become Bach. He must do something with his bounty. Anyone can spin a melody, but what makes a thread sing is to weave it into a triple fugue. He cannot only ride his rapture, he must turn it into something both concrete and alive. Another benefit: gratitude incites to be to become to do.
Within minutes, he learns that inspiration itself inspires. Marcus jumps on the net, and finds astonishment: Gratitude – the justifier of time – is essentially unstudied, un-understood, unknown. He races every search engine on the dropdown list, but all he finds is sprays of froth. Not a line of science. Not one rigorous inquiry. Nothing at all concerted. For this universal boon, there is not a group or structure to investigate or pay tribute.
And so his lift finds its cruising altitude. Marcus will set up a center for the study of gratitude, a place to test and develop and learn. Immediately, Marcus sees that his center will be important, a huge contribution to human affairs. It’ll be the fovea for an incandescent new vision of our blessings, capacities, and purposes, sold as an R&D lab for the renewable energy source known as joy. As a side benefit, it will also, surely, regenerate A-burg. Without question, it will bring in investment, energy, enthusiasm – people. But the right kind of people, the kind who are instinctively attracted to this kinetic subject. Spurred by the G center, A-burg will become a magnet, a model – an American Bilbao, spilling out unknowable benefits in as yet undiscovered directions. It will put A-burg on the map.
Marcus lays down his notepad, leaves go a long breath. There, sitting on his woven couch, in his ordinarily brown, not-too-large living room, during one of the day’s billion afternoons, he has done it. He has found a radiant filament that no one has before him seen. He has made thunder. And he doesn’t care. Not a bit. He is just an instrument. A vehicl
e. What counts is that his coffee tastes good. Hearty and – good. His full and simple acknowledgment of this fact is why his idea will – must – work.
—
Monday morning, woken, washed, day-prepped, he waits until ten-fifteen – give them time to settle in, sip their cups, deal with the exclamation points on their desks – and calls over to City Hall. He had found the general info number online, and couldn’t resist its concluding three zeroes. The phone rings for two minutes, then for four more, after punctuation from his index finger. For the third shot he puts the phone to speaker and turns on his computer – before lunging when the line clicks and his call is put on hold. Something, Mozart, keeps him company until, after interminableness, a taped message offers apologies, relates tales of across-the-board busy-ness, and asks him to call back. He decides that he will not.
In the run-up to that afternoon, he plans and lists. He puts numbers on paper. And decides the word he’ll lead with is revitalize. His G Center will revitalize A-burg: it will bring in streams of purposeful visitors and the idly curious, along with enough start-up businesses to commission a new, advertiser-supported map. It will lead to a bonanza for hotels, motels, and other accommodations, short-term and longer. Restaurants, markets, sundries-shops, and more will have a reason to return. Single-handedly, the Center will create – ignite! – a market for A-burgs depressed housing stock, raising prices within two years by thirty-five percent. (He made this figure up.) The town will easily reclaim its title as Tourism Capitol of Vermont. The tax base will go through the roof.
He processes all this as a standard letter – two pages of text, five of bars, graphs, and bullet points – and puts four copies into a plastic folder. After lunch, a light plate of rice, apples, and chestnuts, he reads the letter another two times, then once more. And decides to change none of it. Such is the nature of gratitudinal discovery: it puts him on his game.
A few minutes past two, he heads out, seemingly just an afternoon man with parka and envelope. Of course he will stay off Church Street – the shim presence on this main drag would even put a crimp in him – and so walks into town via Clarke and then up to South Winooski. Even there, his eyes semi-close when met with the sight of strangers strolling among strangers, strangers passing dark-gulf storefronts, and empty parking spaces, and empty wastebaskets, strangers affecting intention, and unalive to all of it. Only motors for their coats, they’re strewn inventory in a yardsale of normalcy, nothing more.