Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  I used to really want to be a snorkler. I had black swim fins, and my grandparents took us on a cruise of some Greek islands—oh, forget it. Not now.

  I’m down to the nub end of this Fausto cigar. I actually singed an eyebrow hair relighting it, if that’s possible. Sometimes a cigar is just a bassoon.

  When you played a long tone on the bassoon, the veins would come out in your neck and in your forehead, and your hands would feel thick with an oversupply of blood, but still you would keep playing the note, pumping it fuller and fuller, because the note was everything—this hump-shaped swell of non-music was all that you were aiming to achieve. It was premusical music. It taught control. Control was everything. I was determined to become the greatest bassoonist that the state of New Hampshire, that the world, had ever known. I was very ambitious back then.

  Billy Brown always knew the weeks when I had concentrated on long tones, because those were the weeks in which I sounded especially bad. The practicing broke me and exhausted me and hurt my jaw. I was completely devoted to this expensive folded cylinder of maplewood with the metal U-turn at the bottom. The spit gathered there like a noxious underground lake where a spit Kraken lived. It was a postwar Heckel, made in Wiesbaden, Germany. It came in a wooden crate, like a plain coffin, with the word FRAGILE stenciled on it.

  Ten

  ROZ WROTE that she’s feeling better. She sent me a whole list of three-word lines, including “crack the nut,” “drop the pants,” “shake the stick,” and “learn to dance.”

  What do I know about sex? People taking their clothes off and fucking their way around the house? Fifty Shades of Marvin Fucking Gaye?

  Roz was—no doubt is—a wonderful sexpot. We used to pour each other tiny glasses of Tyrconnell and put them on our bedside tables. Tyrconnell was our sex drink. Let me tell you, the Irish did a lot more than save civilization. The first time she sipped it, Roz described how it tasted. Her first sip, she said, tasted of primeval forest. Then the second sip: slate patio. Third sip: patio furniture with slippery steps down to the garden. Fourth sip: meat, meat with heavy, dark green vegetable matter on an earthenware platter. Fifth sip: swallowing the platter. Sixth sip: recovery, bisque-colored envelopes.

  Sometimes along with the Tyrconnell we used to read each other Victorian pornography, skipping the incestuous parts, which isn’t easy, because there is an astonishing amount of incest in Victorian pornography. Why is there so much incest? Aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers—was sex with near relations really the be-all and end-all of the era of Palmerston and Disraeli? When it isn’t incest, it’s birchings and floggings and nuns and priests. Nunnery stories can be good, though. Dirty doings in the confessional can be good. And harem stories can be good.

  • • •

  I FEEL LIKE a traveling sprinkler that’s gotten off the hose. I don’t know where I’m going. I’m unprepared. Good for me. I could make some extra money this summer shrink-wrapping boats. I should do that.

  I want it all to seem easier for me than it is. I want people to think that I’m a fountain of verbal energy. I’ve never really been a fountain.

  There’s an excellent children’s poem about a drinking fountain. The poet’s name is Marchette Chute. I was fascinated by the drinking fountains in high school, with the warm, suspect water that came up past the steam pipes. There was usually some flesh-colored gum lying like a tiny naked baby Jesus in the drain. I was thirsty, and yet the water burbled up and just barely crested past the germ-laden part.

  At a mattress store where I worked briefly, there was a drinking fountain that offered very cold refrigerated water. I used to stay up all night writing poems and then go to work hauling mattresses around, and to stay alert I would put a Reese’s peanut butter cup in my mouth and start chewing it and then take a sip of water and the cold water would mix with the chocolate and the sweet peanut butter and the two would help each other. Cold fountain water through a Reese’s cup, nothing better.

  I used to want to start a museum of the water fountain. I saw an old water fountain from Paris in an antique store. I wanted to amass a collection and open a museum that would be listed in one of those books of eccentric museums. You’ve seen that book, Little Museums? Because when you consider it, a drinking fountain is probably the most important single piece of plumbing that you drink from without a glass or a cup. Can you think of any other piece of plumbing that allows you to drink from an arch of cold water, when it’s functioning correctly at least? I think you’d be hard pressed. “I turn it up,” writes Marchette Chute. “The water goes / And hits me right / Upon the nose. / I turn it down / To make it small / And don’t get any / Drink at all.” A classic poem.

  After I first met Roz, I called her up at work and said, “Roz, I have the most terrible hangover, do you have any recommendations?” She said, “Yes. Go to the drinking fountain and bend down and go into one of those altered states of hypnotic drinking, where your throat just goes ng, ng, ng, ng and you think you’ll never breathe again but will simply drink at this fountain for your whole life.” I said, “Okay, I’ll try it.” I called her back and said it had helped. That’s how we got together.

  • • •

  WHAT IT COMES down to, for the working poet, is this. Either you can go have the eggs Benedict at the place with the copper tables, and it’ll cost you nine dollars, plus a big tip—sometimes as much as five dollars in tip if you occupy a whole booth for a long time, wearing a big pair of headphones when it’s crowded—or you can make a sandwich for yourself, and wash an apple, and cut some carrots, and eat it in the car, and it’ll cost maybe two dollars. You can eat five times as many meals if you don’t go to the place with the copper tables.

  On the other hand, it’s helpful to be around people. You can listen to the jokey fat men flirt with the older waitress.

  “More coffee, my good sir?”

  “Yes, please, precious, and on second thought I’ll have another side of home fries.”

  “Aren’t you a big spender today.”

  “I don’t pay alimony and I don’t pay child support. I’ve got all the money in the world.”

  “How nice for you.”

  I think my brakes are really going. They’re soft and they make a scraping sound. My penis is soft and it doesn’t make a scraping sound.

  What I miss about Roz is of course her lady parts and her pleasure frown and her funny talk. She has a kind of genius for coming up with odd but friendly words for things. She’s a namer of unnameables. But the main thing I miss is how nice she is to people. When her friend Lucy’s father died she made a card and baked her a loaf of cranberry bread. She’s full of ideas about what other people would want. She’s the opposite of selfish. Her unselfishness was a revelation to me. She was, and is, full of this quality that I’ve come to take seriously, which is lovingkindness. Lovingkindness, all one word.

  I tried for a while to get her to come to Quaker meeting with me, because in many ways she’s an extremely Quakerly person, but she didn’t want to. Her mother is Irish Catholic and her father is Russian Jewish, and in her case that mixture resulted in an incredibly nice human being who has no interest even in a religion as disorganized and uncodified as Quakerism.

  I feel sad that we’ve become so formal with each other now. But that’s what happens. We’re more relaxed with each other via email, which is a bad sign.

  • • •

  HELLO MY TINY MUMBLES, welcome to the Chowder Hour of Razorwire and Shiny Festal Splendor. Glad you could join me. I’ve found a new chord on the guitar and with it I’ve written part of a song called “Love Is an Amazing Magnet.” I’ve also embarked on a song about doctors, inspired by Roz’s radio show. I stayed up late rhyming “Nexium” and “thyroxin,” and I wrote way too many verses, some of which are:

  The doctor’s in

  The nurse is hot

  Swab some cotton

 
Cause you’re getting a shot

  Tell me a symptom

  I’ll tap your vein

  I’ll pap your smear

  And scan your brain

  Crap in a baggie

  Piss in a cup

  Another appointment

  For a follow-up

  Tubes in your pipes

  Wires in your head

  Keep you alive

  Till you’re practically dead

  The chorus is “Oh babe, I can’t wait, for you all day.” I’m going to play Roz some of my songs, and then she’s going to say good-bye to Harris the doctor and get back together with me. Because I know her. It’s time. But what if I try and it doesn’t happen? Then I’ll be sad—much sadder than if I hadn’t tried, because it really will be the end.

  Eleven

  THE GUITAR LESSON did not go well. My fingers didn’t want to cooperate and I had some trouble with tuning. I tightened the E string too hard and snapped it—classic stupidity—and the teacher, who was a pleasant aging hipster sort of gentleman, showed me how to replace it. That was helpful. He also showed me “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the proper way to strum it. That was a good song to start with, because Dylan’s singing is sometimes a little shaky—not as shaky as mine, but he’s no Harry Nilsson. I asked the teacher who his favorite singer was. “That’s an impossible question,” he said. But he said he liked people like Steve Winwood.

  Quaker meeting is in eight minutes. I’m parked in a space across the street. I don’t want to go in, because I stink of cigar. But I am going to go in anyway, because I like the goodness in these people and I always feel better after I’ve gone.

  • • •

  AND NOW MEETING is over and I’m back in the car. One of the elders, Chase—the man who sang “How Can I Keep from Singing?”—was shaking hands at the door when I went in. Meeting was crowded and there were a number of young children. I sat down in an empty stretch of pew far enough away from the next person, a filmmaker I knew slightly, so that I thought he wouldn’t smell me. I put my finger through my key ring and closed my fist around my car key. People were smiling and looking around, as they do while latecomers arrange themselves. The last to arrive were a mother and her three children, followed by an older man in a white shirt who sat next to me. He was a bit out of breath from hurrying, and I heard his breathing gradually slow down. I listened to the clock for a while and thought about how many people were wearing plaid. One woman had gotten her hair cut short in a way that looked very good. I closed my eyes and felt that time was moving faster, maybe a little too fast. The windows were open, and the door was open, and the sound of a passing car traveled slowly through the room. After that there was stillness. A little boy held his mother’s gold watch, turning it in his hands and smiling a secret smile. Then the silence changed and deepened, and for several seconds it was perfect and I felt a sort of ecstasy. Then someone shifted and adjusted a pillow for her back, and I could feel my pew bend when the man next to me crossed his legs. Again a car sound poured softly in through the windows and out the open door. We were permeable. We were a meeting permeated with openness.

  After fifteen minutes Donna the clerk said, “We want to thank the children for worshipping with us. Can they shake hands around the room?” The children pushed themselves off their pews with serious faces and shook hands with the people who sat in the first rows of pews that faced the center of the room. There was a shockingly beautiful girl of about six with a barrette that was not doing a good job of holding her hair. She nodded politely as she shook the knobby hand of the oldest of the elders, a thin, tenderly smiling woman who wore hearing-aid headphones. Then the children left and I listened to them thumping down the stairs to the basement. Muffledly I heard the teacher call, “Don’t touch the stuff on the table yet!”

  Then again the clock and the silence. I looked down for a long time and bent over, leaning my elbows on my knees, still holding my car key, and then I remembered the helpful tip about posture and I imagined the hooks in my rib cage and sat up. I opened my eyes and I saw that nobody was smiling now and many people had their eyes closed. Time seemed to be going even faster, as if it were a train picking up speed. Many minutes went by. I wondered who would speak. Nobody did. I looked at the clock. It said ten after eleven. I wanted someone to speak. Surely someone would offer testimony about something. But I noticed that the woman who sometimes talked about her birdbath wasn’t there. She was often the first to speak, and once she spoke others did. Silence was all very well, but in order to feel the silence you need a few words.

  I didn’t think that I should say anything, because I’d said something about chickens the last time I went. On the other hand, someone should speak. I checked the clock. There were only ten minutes of meeting left. A woman got up and I thought she was going to say something, but she just left to arrange the after-meeting food in the other room. Please someone say something!

  • • •

  I WANTED TO TELL the Quakers about Debussy’s sunken cathedral. I kept formulating an opening in my head. “A little more than a hundred years ago, a composer named Claude Debussy wrote a piece for piano called ‘The Sunken Cathedral.’ He was a man with a big forehead who loved the sea. His most famous piece of music is called La Mer, the sea. And in one of his early songs he set to music a poem by Verlaine with the words ‘The sea is more beautiful than cathedrals.’ But when he wrote his tenth piano prelude, ‘The Sunken Cathedral,’ ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie,’ he was no longer young and he was harassed by money worries and he had symptoms of the cancer that would kill him and he was thinking that life hadn’t turned out quite the way he had expected.” I wanted to tell them all this, but I couldn’t because it was late, and it was really too much to say in meeting. I always felt a little like a godless impostor among these genuinely worshipful folk.

  There were only four minutes of meeting left. I hoped that the woman with the big white hair would say something—she often spoke at the very end of meeting. She was sitting with a slight almost smile and her eyes were closed. Everyone seemed content with the silence. I’ve been reading a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I thought maybe I should say something about Hopkins’s articles on sunsets for Nature magazine. After the Krakatoa explosion, Hopkins wrote three articles for Nature describing the unusual colors of the sunset that he’d meticulously recorded in his notebooks. But there was no time to say that, and it was too raw, really, to be a message anyway. Then again, at 11:29 a.m., I thought I absolutely must stand and tell them about the sunken cathedral. I wanted to say that Debussy played enormous still chords and out of them you can see the smoky blue water and the decayed pillars of the ruined church and the long blue fishes steering themselves down the nave and poking their snouts at the lettucey seaweeds. I wanted to say that in 1910 Debussy felt a great disappointment. That he wrote a friend that sometimes he wished he was a sponge at the bottom of the sea—éponge, a usefully squeezable word in French. But then he came up with this piece of music, the tenth prelude, and in it he created a great shadowy still place underwater, this place of peacefulness where when you listen to the music you can go and watch the medieval fishes swim. I wanted to say that he’d always wanted to noyer le ton, to drown the tonality, and he did it by closing the lid of the piano and holding down the sustain pedal and letting the elements of the chords pile up. I wanted to say, “He was sick, he couldn’t play the piano as virtuosically then as he had in music school, when he could noodle for hours and amaze his fellow students with harmonies they’d never heard before, but out of his sense of disappointment and out of his money worries and out of his new sense of his own mortality he built an ancient crumbling lost ruin that nobody had known about, and we can hear it and see it hanging there or standing there on the seafloor in the silence.” I didn’t say it.

  Then it was one minute after eleven-thirty and Donna turned to shake hands with the man next to her, and she s
miled, and everyone smiled and shook hands with the people around them. Donna thanked us for choosing to worship there and a visitor introduced herself. She was from Eliot, Maine. A woman announced that the soup kitchen needed volunteers. Another woman reminded us that a man was giving a talk on solar power on Wednesday evening. Then two members grasped the handles on the large wooden panel that closed off meeting from the room where the potluck food was, and pulled it up, not without effort because it was more than two hundred years old and stuck in its frame, and when they’d pushed it up above six feet, another person propped it into place with a long pole. I nodded hello to the old man and to several others and walked out into the marvelous morning sunlight. The woman from Eliot was behind me. “You’re a visitor,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I shook her hand. Something made me say, “Most of the time there are messages. Usually people say a few things during meeting. It’s not always totally silent.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Do people generally park on the street?”

  I said that generally they did, yes.

  “Because I didn’t know and I parked up there.” She pointed to her car in one of the spaces in the small lot behind the meetinghouse. “After I did I wasn’t sure if that was all right.”

  “Oh, it’s perfectly fine,” I said. I waved my keys at her. “Have a nice Sunday.”

  “You, too.” She waved her keys at me.

  I walked to my car and lit up the stub of my Opus X cigar and smoked it until the label began to burn. It’s made in the Dominican Republic and wrapped with leaves grown from Cuban seeds.

  Twelve

  THIS IS PAUL CHOWDER, sitting in a plastic chair. I want—I want—I want to tell you something new. I feel that I have a new thing.