The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

  So they could play goats and tigers all afternoon.

  Nothing has happened to Ralph since that time.

  Locking up the back, he passes through the workroom into the shop proper. Here everything is immaculate, the cleanliness an intensified kind of silence. The glass shelves cast both shadows and reflections: as Ralph strides through, the room ripples.

  It’s like sunlight on the surface of the ocean, seen by a swimmer grasping up for it; and Ralph is like that swimmer in his graceful, weary, practiced movements. As he leaves, and stretches up to draw the steel security door down over his incurious reflection, he’s briefly aware that he’s going home:

  then again only of wind and a shape –

  something like a locust, but round enough to hold water –

  which might, in porcelain, impress him as capable of playing goats and tigers through the afternoon, while, at a neighboring table, its comatose, agape brother overlooks Lake Pokhara.

  Shouldering his satchel, he begins to walk home.

  21. Boulder: 109b Pine Street

  The building has subsided and the basement flat appears compressed beneath the gabled upper stories. The lawn is brown. There’s a bashed, discolored picket fence, and a rusty mailbox. The light is outdoor-artificial, streetlight light, giving the scene the queer stiffness of diorama.

  Ralph comes walking down the sidewalk.

  As he comes to 109b, its door flies open and a small, squarish figure hurries out. It’s an Asian man wearing a bandana tied around his head like a sweatband. Spotting Ralph, he calls out and comes toward him. They meet at the gate.

  “It – dangerous man, in my house,” the man stammers. “He is crazy, please. I think for police . . .”

  The man’s breath stinks of beer. He staggers and, catching himself, makes a tiny, suppressed yelp.

  In the open door, Ralph sees a shadow. It is maneuvering finely as if untying a diabolically complex knot. That motion, and the varying lights made as it blocks and bares the lightbulb behind, give the impression of a pitch-black creature with many limbs, among them tentacles.

  Staid Ralph interprets the situation: Drunks arguing.

  Then he looks back at the panicked man’s boxy, Asian face, and goes absolutely still. He takes the man by both arms, just beneath the shoulder, steadies him, and frowns into his face.

  In fluent Tibetan, Ralph says that it really makes him angry when drunken gooks jump at him out of the bushes. It makes him want to stick a knife in someone, in fact, and he might do that right now. Then he shoves the short man away from him with a slight, powerful movement of the wrists. He has used the English word for “gook.”

  The man stumbles back and forward again. He raises one hand as if to shield his eyes. His face changes, cleared and sobered by dismay.

  He says, in Tibetan: “Oh, no. It’s you.”

  Then the drunk, stocky in his Levis and floppy-collared lumberjack shirt, stoops, swings to the picket fence, and vomits painfully over the drab lawn.

  18. “Colorado Ceramic Arts”

  It’s a pottery shop with associated workspace whose lease Ralph took over when his old friend and colleague Rita Perkins died. He has been in sole tenancy for five years. Before that were eight years when he worked with Rita, learning from her the fine points of glazes and stains, firing techniques and appliances – all the tech stuff they couldn’t teach him in Bhaktapur.

  1He met Rita during the time of his long meditations.

  1.1In town to buy provisions, he happened to wander past her shop.

  1.2In the window were the usual eyesores made to please tourists:

  •vases “in the shape of”

  •gilt cupids

  •pink vats the size of dog beds

  •a bust of Reagan

  1.3Used to long stillness, Ralph stopped and looked at them for one and a half hours.

  2Finally Rita came out. “Something catch your eye?”

  2.1Ralph smiled. “It’s just, I’m a potter.”

  2.2She had heard it all before: “Well, get the hell away from my window. If there’s one thing I will not tolerate, it’s good taste.”

  3She used to call herself “Rita Perkins, Frontier Lesbian.”

  3.1Her girlfriends were a rabble of table dancers and Marines.

  3.2She had orange-dyed hair and cowboy jewelry.

  3.3On her vacations, she hunted deer.

  4They stood in front of the shop window silently a while. Because neither left, the mood was apologetic, though it was unclear who was sorry and for what. When Ralph finally looked over, Rita was smiling, her eyes wet from suppressed laughter.

  And he asked if he could use her shower, which was a way he had then of getting to know people.

  5Once, when Rita was gone, he missed her.

  5.1He resented all the girls he hired to help out in the shop, after Rita’s death.

  The Rita Years

  1In the Rita years, he slept in the workshop or the woods. In either case he used a sleeping bag with no mattress. He had clothes and tools. He had soap and ID cards. Beyond these essentials, Ralph eschewed “paraphernalia.”

  2For a very long time, he was studying Tibetan Buddhism at the Naropa Institute. He brushed up his Tibetan and learned kindergarten Sanskrit. At night he meditated for two hours, minimum. The bulk of his wages he donated to Tibetan liberation groups. He ate plain white rice and never masturbated.

  3Finally he had lost his faith. There was no revelatory moment or incident, and, in some respects, he remained Tibetan Buddhist. He still assumed that OM was the sun and HUM the soil, into which the sun’s rays descend to awake the dormant life. But he did not say OM or HUM anymore, and felt no anxiety, ever, on that account.

  Personal Information

  1Ralph couldn’t stand love.

  1.1Its bottom line was: bars, restaurants and cinemas.

  1.2Although they pre-existed Earth, even stars were deemed “romantic.”

  1.3“What are you thinking? What are you thinking? What are you thinking? What are you thinking?”

  1.4He always felt like taking a long walk after sex.

  2Friends came to him with their problems.

  2.1Friends could sit with Ralph for hours.

  2.2Friends passed the time as if it was cheap fuel.

  2.3Topics of perennial concern included:

  •recent purchases

  •places to get good Chinese

  •how others have wronged me

  •this guy made a bundle

  2.4Once a woman sat in Ralph’s tent with a catalog of camping equipment, telling him aloud what each item cost.

  3He had lost touch with his family, once and for all.

  The Years Post-Rita

  1Shortly before Rita’s death, Ralph saw her in the hospital.

  1.1In the course of the visit, he joked that “What are friends for?” was a hard question. People thought it was rhetorical; let them answer it.

  1.2She rose up on her elbows, haggard and fierce. Scarlet blotches appeared on her drained cheeks.

  1.3“You should have the cancer,” she spat. “You’re the walking dead.”

  2He believed that people should be honest, generous and kind to each other. What they felt, during, made no difference. Personal attachment was tomfoolery. No one would miss you one second after they were dead. He wasn’t sure if he had ever felt “lonely.”

  This much he knew, but others might know better. Therefore he resolved to experiment with normal living.

  3He began to spend evenings in a sports bar on Pearl Street. There he drank beer and watched ball games on wide-screen TV.

  3.1When he failed to show up at the bar, he felt guilty. Working all night was a secret vice.

  3.2He had a long-term thing with a Women’s Studies professor who did not love him. They got stoned together and took her Labrador for walks.

  3.3He got an apartment.

  3.4

  The furnishings were bland and appropriate, the walls bare. N
othing caught the eye. Nothing got in. The solitude there was not just Ralph’s but universal; and it was generous and unimpaired as skies must look to mountains. There Ralph began to create real art.

  The new works were undecorated and white. Their shapes were sad revisions of the shapes he had once made on a hand-turned wheel in Bhaktapur as a boy. There were even some based on the elephant’s-head coathook, a tourist bauble which he made ugly afresh, this time not in collusion with the viewer. All his new ceramics had this trademark unfriendly quality. They might be bowls, but not bowls from which to eat soup. They were bowls in which to float a single violet, only to find it has vanished overnight.

  At this point, people started finding Ralph spooky.

  He was known to sometimes carry a knife, which, to his easy-going, hippie associates, was creepy like carrying a hatchet or a chainsaw. He told stories that took place in a Florida state penitentiary. Every time he passed a policeman, he muttered. These details were unnervingly at variance with his tranquil persona. If Ralph were a character in a Hollywood film, it would be about werewolves.

  He commissioned some vats and salable figurines, but most of the stock of Colorado Ceramic Arts Ralph fashioned himself. He also sold through shops in Denver and Taos, and via specialty catalogs. Despite this industry, however, Ralph had mounting debts, verging – at the time he met Eddie – on bankruptcy.

  The competition undercut him, selling cheap, slip-cast ware. New fire regulations had entailed steep building expenses. Then there was a break-in, and he had to replace a lot of glass. At the best of times, he was not a natural salesman.

  So when a friend came to offer him a cut-price supply of dope, Ralph leapt at the chance, hoping the deal would patch the gaps in his accounts, as marijuana sales often had in the past.

  Initiating Incident: “Business Opportunity”

  The deal came with a story; that alone should have alerted Ralph. Jigme Dorje, a former Buddhist monk, now full-time drunkard, had made a friend at his last rehabilitation center. This friend was involved in selling grass flown in from Hawaii. The low price offered was contingent on Jigme’s participation. Jigme had no money whatsoever, and needed a backer. So Ralph was informed by Valley Girl Jenny, an old acquaintance from his Tibetan scripture class.

  Through all the easy-going exchanges that led up to the handing over of the money – the cryptic answerphone messages, whispers at the shop’s till, the preliminary meeting with Jigme over cream-cheese bagels – Ralph felt a gut certainty that he was being ripped off. Yet, because he couldn’t logically justify the certainty – and because he urgently needed the money – he went through it all as if hypnotized, even saying, when it transpired that the money had to be handed over two days before the drugs appeared:

  “Never mind. I know I can trust you,”

  in a voice not his own.

  The money was still in the envelope from the bank. It felt chunky. Handing it to someone was like giving them something huge and unwieldy: a safe, for instance. When it was done, and Jigme had left, walking too fast, Ralph immediately began to sweat.

  Long before the two days had passed, he was raging, all the more furious for having known all along.

  22. 109b Pine Street

  Jigme staggered back from his vomiting and half-fell against the worn picket fence. At that moment, Eddie appeared, bombing out of the lit doorway with his trademark briefcase swinging. Charging up to Jigme, he bared his teeth in frustration. He arrived at the sidewalk shouting “Gotcha!,” pulled up and stopped a few inches from his quarry, hugging the briefcase to his chest in triumph.

  Ralph said to Jigme in Tibetan, “Should I help you now?”

  “Dude!” went Eddie, noticing Ralph. “Do you speak Chinese? I mean, translate for me, I totally beg you.”

  Ralph said, “Sure.”

  Eddie raised the briefcase to the heavens and kissed it in thanksgiving, then put it down at his feet and said: “Look, it’s not like I’m fucking asking much, I’m not even asking, I’m begging people to take my cash, is that wrong? Am I a fucking criminal? Tell him.”

  Ralph said to Jigme, in Tibetan, “I don’t care what problems you have, I need my money back.”

  “Right,” said Eddie. “I want to start a guru business. I need, all I need, right, is someone to come and pretend to be the Great All-Knowing Monk from Fuckhead Monastery, like this little shit would be perfect. I’ll buy the goddamn clothes, all right? And I don’t care, he can say the Great Lord Gewgaw says he’s got to eat the ripe flesh of virgins, okay, just don’t tell me cause I got this crazy phobia of jail. Tell him.”

  Ralph said to Jigme, in Tibetan, “Three thousand plus three hundred for not cutting off your head. You think I’m some American, too scared to cut your head off ?”

  Jigme put his hands to his blanched cheeks and said, “No!” hoarsely.

  Eddie went frantic: “Look! You little goddamn worm, I’m just about really sick of this. You think you’re the first? I’ve been to see every piece of holistic shit in Colorado, and all I can say is, the basic child’s principle of investment for return is fucking lost! Lost!” Then, to Ralph, “Look, are you even talking here, or is it Papa Brick Wall and Baby Brick Wall. Jesus.”

  Ralph said to Jigme in Tibetan, “Wednesday. Three thousand three hundred dollars. If this man was not here, I’d break your arms right now. Look.” And from his satchel, he produced the aforementioned knife, unsheathing it in the same motion.

  Eddie ducked and grabbed his briefcase, raising it shield-fashion. “Jesus Christ!” he said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Jigme slouched against the fence as before, stroking the bandana down over his eyes as if to gentle them. Thus half-blinded, he said, in a hoarse, practiced whine, in English, “Tell them I am dead. Tell them my father is killed by Chinese and my mother has dead from hunger in Lhasa. Tell them I am one fat ghost with the soul for a woman. No one should be unhappy for me. I don’t understand, they say to me. I need to drink more beer so I can sleep.”

  Then Ralph lost his temper. He screamed in English: “You were born in India! Your mother lives upstairs! I’m not one of your college fucking kids who thinks your ass is sacred!”

  A passing car slowed, allowing its headlights to become a presence, a harsher mood in the scene. It went by and then came to a stop some yards down Pine Street, idling there as if pondering.

  Ralph said to Eddie, collecting his shattered cool, “I don’t know why you want this guy. You realize he’s an alcoholic?”

  Eddie shrugged, his eyes following the knife. “People are into Tibetans. Like, who am I?”

  The car that had passed, a silver Mustang, now reversed and stopped again level with Ralph, Eddie and Jigme. The driver’s door opened, and a small blonde woman leaned out. In the spot of brash carlight, her petite face was red. She screamed at Ralph, “What are you doing, still hassling him? Haven’t you done enough? Aren’t you satisfied?”

  Ralph said in a cool, carrying voice, “Did you stop to give me my three thousand dollars?”

  “I just don’t get how you can be so incredibly greedy!” she screamed. “Can’t you get it through your puny brain that Jigme’s sick? Can’t you comprehend that?”

  Ralph grabbed Jigme by the knot of the bandana, as if it was a handle tied there for this purpose, and yelled, “Sick is nothing! This is dead! It’s dead as of ten o’clock Wednesday if I don’t get my money!” He shoved Jigme forward and let go, allowing the man to stagger forward blindly.

  The woman leapt out of the car and ran to Jigme, pulling the bandana free of his head as if it were some vicious animal. She yelled at Ralph as she frogmarched Jigme to her car, “You’re evil! You think you’re some kind of gangster? You’re just evil, you’re evil!”

  through which Ralph, in an auditorium boom: “Three thousand dollars, Jenny! Three thousand dollars!”

  She wrestled Jigme into the back and jumped in the driver’s seat, slamming each door so hard the Mustang shuddered. As she pul
led out, Ralph turned to Eddie with a rueful smile, as if to say, see how they try my patience.

  Eddie stared at him for some time. At last he bent to fetch his briefcase, shaking his head. “Thanks a million,” he said. “You’re a real friend, Jesus.”

  Ralph continued to smile.

  “Yeah, just grin at me, I love it. I mean, you have to, you are obligated to at least buy me a drink, cause – just smile, great – cause, you know, I’m actually in shock, my mother just died? She’s being fucking embalmed as we speak, and I’m not just saying that because you totally failed to help me when I asked you like a human being. It actually happens to be true this time, which is what really fucks me up.” He looked back at Jigme’s door and said wistfully, “It’s like the boy that cried wolf. It’s like the boy that cried fucking wolf.”

  “Well, I’m walking home,” said Ralph. “You can come with me if you want a drink, but I’ve got to get back and change my clothes.” He ticked one fingernail against a clay spot on his jeans.

  “Yeah,” Eddie shook his head, “What are you, a mud wrestler? Honest to God, I weep for America.”

  Ralph started walking then, and Eddie, after a pause to assert that he might just not, came hurriedly behind.

  23. Boulder: 1203 13th Street

  The walls are freshly painted white.

  The wooden floor shines.

  There is no:

  •television

  •stereo

  •computer

  There are no:

  •rugs

  •personal mementos

  •pictures on the wall

  •shelves

  There is nothing on the glass coffee table.

  On the beige canvas couch is one book, closed on a stiff leather bookmark; a dual-language edition of the Bhagavad Gita.