Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  Tracy Chapman puts me through a moral Simpactor, breaking me into tiny pieces of uniform diameter so that I can absorb my own inadequacy. I think Tim may be wrong—“Change” may be the greatest protest song ever written. It’s good partly because it offers no specific event or action. It’s not protesting anything by name. It leaves it all up to you. It’s just a series of questions. It asks these questions and prompts you to try to answer them, just as the Quakers ask questions. They have a list of questions called the Queries. Sometimes a woman reads one at Kittery Friends Meeting. One of the queries goes something like: Are you acting with love toward others? And I have to say, No, I’m not. Often I’m not. When I say catty things about Picasso or Ezra Pound, that psychotic, hateful fraud, I’m not bathed with generous feelings. When I imagine sneery songs about Barack Obama, I’m not a loving person at all.

  I was making a second deviled-ham sandwich, using what remained in the can, and thinking about the importance of the inductive method, with “Change” on auto-repeat, when I heard some odd loud popping sounds. At first I thought they were something in the song that I hadn’t noticed before, and then I realized that they were from outside the house. They seemed to be coming from the barn. I stopped the music and listened. I heard two loud explosions and then a sort of rolling thunder accompanied by an awful wooden twisting noise that didn’t bode well at all. The dog was barking furiously. I went outside in time to see a large cloud of what looked like smoke ploofing out from the undercroft of the barn, down where I stored the canoe and my father’s collection of plastic packaging.

  I said some bad words. Was the barn on fire? Maybe caused by one of my Fausto cigars? No, it was a cloud of dust that was coming from underneath. I went up the ramp and pulled open the barn door, which takes almost superhuman strength because it sticks. Half of the first floor was gone, fallen down into the underbarn, and with it had tumbled about a hundred boxes of books and papers. Most of my collection of old anthologies was down there, the edges of the books visible from torn and squashed boxes—also my father’s art books and his books on the history of chairs, and my mother’s books of medieval history, and boxes of family photographs and letters—all mixed in with miscellaneous junk, a catcher’s mitt, a sun-faded life jacket with mildew stains, my bicycle that I hadn’t ridden yet this year because the chain is broken, Roz’s old bicycle with the bent basket in front, scraps of plywood and planking, a sledgehammer. I saw one of my traveling sprinklers on its side, looking rusty and pathetic, on a box of something marked FRAGILE—STORE ON TOP. I was looking down at a huge hole in the barn with a lot of my life in it. I surveyed the scene for a moment and said, “Fuckaroo banzai.” I didn’t want to go below, in case more of the barn would give way and crush me dead.

  I went inside and called Jeff, the barn repairman. A few years ago he’d fixed a sill that had been eaten to a punky powder by bugs. I left a message for him. “Hi, Jeff, it’s Paul Chowder, I hope you’re well. I’ve got a little situation here. Half the first floor of the barn has just collapsed. Things seem to be stable now, but I’d like you to take a look before I start hauling up the boxes.” I left my cellphone number.

  Then I went back out. I took another look at the damage and shook my head. I noticed, however, that the steps to the second floor were intact. By holding on to a wooden hook on the wall I was able to sidle sideways over to them and climb upstairs. My little music studio was fine. The microphone was pointing unperturbed at my empty white plastic chair. My keyboard was just where I’d left it. My guitar had slipped from where I’d leaned it against the table, but it was unharmed. I stood in the middle of the perfect second floor, with its neat pile of swept-together bird droppings under one of the tiny side-sliding windows that don’t slide, and I laughed with relief. It’s just boxes, I thought, it’s just stuff. Everything’s fine. Everything’s just fine.

  • • •

  I WENT BACK to the house and gave Smack the rest of my sandwich and sat at the kitchen table for a while. Roz didn’t answer her cellphone, so I left her a message. I called Allstate and told a nice woman with a Hispanic accent what had happened. She said, “I’m very sorry to hear about the damage to your barn. We can help you with that.” She took down some details and told me to take pictures and said that a claims adjuster would be there later that afternoon. I thanked her and sat for a while longer. I took some pictures of the damage and wrote a paragraph for the record describing what had happened. I unrolled some wire fencing across the low entryway to the underbarn so that no pets or other animals would stray in. Then I climbed back up to the second floor. What the hell. Make some music in the wreckage.

  Twenty

  WHAT I REALLY WANT to do right now, I thought, is make a superfunkadelic dance beat. I want people to hear my music and smoke illicit substances and drink mojitos and chew Ecstasy, if that’s what they do, and dance. I want to make people dance. I began layering a seventh-chord rhythm using the Steinway Hall, with another keyboard called Late Sixties Suitcase for the offbeats, and on the fourth offbeat I jabbed in a chord from a clavichord instrument called the Dry Funky Talker—a Stevie Wonder sort of instrument. On top I snuck in a flatted sixth chord for an extra magic-ass squirt of funkosity. I brought in a low, fast double hit for the bassline, a C and a D, using the Bottom Dweller Bass, and I reinforced it with steadily humpty-dumping quarter notes from a different instrument, the Progressive Rock Bass, at a hundred and twenty beats per minute. I was in the middle of quantizing the bassline—forcing it to stick exactly to the beat—when Roz called.

  “Are you all right, baby?” she said.

  I told her I was fine, that the barn was still standing, and that the insurance guy was coming.

  “What about all the boxes? Your dad’s books?”

  “Not good. And the canoe is underneath them.”

  “Oh no, the canoe! What can I do? Can I come over?”

  I knew she was very busy. “You’re probably finishing a show.”

  “Well, it’s kind of a madhouse here today. Nortin Hadler’s scheduled for an interview. This is the first time he’s been willing to talk to us. I could come later tonight.”

  “I’d love that,” I said. “But it’ll be late, and really I’m perfectly fine right now. You want to come this weekend? By then I’ll know the damage.”

  She said she’d come on Saturday morning.

  I said that would be great. I coughed.

  “Are you still smoking cigars?” she asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Because that sounds like a dry cough. Is it a cigar cough?”

  “No, I just swallowed some saliva.” I coughed again.

  “That’s definitely a cigar cough,” she said.

  “Maybe it is. Mark Twain smoked twenty cigars a day. When he stopped, he wrote nothing. The man at the guitar store—I mean the cigar store—the man at the cigar store says that a cigar takes the serrated edge of life and makes it into a straight blade.”

  Roz said, “They’ll be cutting a tumor out of your neck with a straight blade if you’re not careful.”

  “Jesus, honey. Let’s put that aside. It’s just a temporary crutch. The music is the thing, and it’s going forward at a hundred and twenty BPM. I’m hot, I’m smoking, I’m on a roll. In fact, I’m up on the second floor of the barn at this very minute writing a dance song.”

  “What? Come down from there. That’s not safe. The floor just collapsed.”

  “You’ve got to take some risks in life.”

  “Please, baby, come down from the barn. Will you at least promise me you’ll come down from the barn?”

  “I promise. It’s nice of you to worry.”

  She said good-bye. She’s so thoughtful. It took three trips to move my equipment to the kitchen table. I clamped on my headphones and listened to what I had so far. It needed more. I went to work with the Trance Kit of sounds, which has a good kick drum and a n
ice synthesized clap with a hint of rimshot in it for the second and fourth beats. Then I had an idea: I played the plink of the egg slicer on top with some echo synced to the eighth notes. Tasty. I brought another chord rhythm on the Funky Talker. It sounded pretty good, frankly. I laughed and pursed my lips and windmilled my arms. It was pure retro Stevie Wonder, but with a dance beat.

  Now I needed some vocals. I hooked up the pre-amp and adjusted the microphone so that it was right at my mouth, and I sang random things. “Egg slicer, ooh, ooh! Slice that egg, ooh, ooh!” Then: “Guan—tan—a—moe-hoh!” I ran my voice through Logic’s phone filter so that it sounded not like me. I sang, “Why can’t you close—Guantanamo?” Then: “Make no mistake—you betrayed our faith.” I’m so tired of hearing Obama say “Make no mistake.” “Make no mistake,” he said in his Nobel Peace Prize speech, “evil does exist in the world.” Which is why he has to ship arms to Libyan rebels and fly drones around everywhere and spread violence and kill people. It’s sickening. Make no mistake? His whole foreign policy is one long string of mistakes. And we’re supposed to get excited about health care. More tests, more drugs, more colonoscopies, more needless invasive procedures. Fuck it!

  Then I thought of a stanza in a Charles Causley poem. I hit the space bar to begin my egg slicer loop and I sang

  O war is a casual mistress

  And the world is her double bed.

  She has a few charms in her mechanised arms

  But you wake up and find yourself dead.

  That was much better than any lyric I could write. Causley’s father died of injuries suffered in World War I. Could I make a hot bumping antiwar dance song out of Causley’s stanza? Probably not, but even if I could, they wouldn’t be my words. I’d have to get permission from his executor, and it would be a whole wrangle. I had to supply my own lyrics.

  • • •

  I WAS OUT by the half-dead apple tree dancing to Phatso Brown’s remix of “Apes from Space” when the man from Allstate arrived with his clipboard. I showed him the scene of the accident. He made some measurements and took a lot of photographs. He was an enthusiast of post-and-beam construction with a beard, and he seemed to know what he was looking at. He asked about the heap of boxes. “They’re mostly just old papers and books and probably they’re fine,” I said. “As long as it doesn’t rain.” The underbarn has a sand floor and it floods when there’s a heavy rain. There was a canoe down there, too, I added—only a bit of it was visible. He asked about its value.

  “What can I say?” I said. “Green fiberglass canoe, Old Town, some happy hours on the river. It probably cost a thousand dollars. Maybe more. It was a birthday present from my ex-girlfriend.” He nodded and made a note. I left him to perform further calculations and sat in the white plastic chair making an intensive auditory study of the dance songs in my iTunes library. There are so many great dance songs—and yet there’s room for more. Or so I thought. I wanted to start a dance song with a woman saying, “And I’ll see you later.” Maybe I could convince Roz to say it. I listened to “Safe from Harm” by Andrew Bennett, and “Save the Last Trance for Me” by Paul Oakenfold, and “Healing of the Nation” by Sherman, and “La Luna” by Blank & Jones, and “Striptease in Istanbul” by Nublu Sound, and parts of four songs by Underworld.

  Underworld is good. I discovered them by chance on a long plane flight. I was poking at the touch screen, looking for something to listen to after watching a very good documentary on Picasso and Matisse—Matisse comes off well, and after his operation he uses a pair of large shears to cut colored pieces of paper—and I saw a song on a list called “Bigmouth.” It was a dance number with an insanely honking harmonica and no words, and it was by Underworld, a band who had also created something called “Mmm . . . Skyscraper I Love You.” Back in the eighties they were doing things I would like to have done—chopping up found voice clips ahead of the game—although they were too tolerant perhaps in their early days of zappy saw-toothed sounds, as everyone was. The song I liked best by them was a more recent one called “Bird 1.” “Bird 1” is about something—I don’t know what—something about a white stick and a shaft of sunlight and a fly and a chainsaw of tiny firecrackers. I’m always a sucker for a shaft of sunlight. It’s stoned, I guess. It’s “poetry.” The chorus is splendid. “There is one bird in my house,” sings the main Underworld man, Karl Hyde. Not “a bird,” but “one bird.” There’s basically only one chord for most of the song, as well as one bird. There are a great many words in the song, however. Most of them don’t rhyme, and as in many great songs, the words aren’t terribly important. I would like to write something like this.

  Where is my lighter? I’m simply unable to light a cigar stub outdoors with just a match. I haven’t mastered the technique.

  The Allstate man said he had everything he needed. He said it looked like about five thousand dollars’ worth of structural damage, plus eighteen hundred for the books and the canoe—assuming the canoe was a total loss—and he’d be able to get me a check this week. We shook hands and he drove away. He had a sticker on his window that read “Proud Parent of an Honor Student.” I liked him.

  • • •

  IT’S EVENING NOW. Some fine fleshy clouds. I’ve squandered an hour setting Lewis Carroll’s “Soup of the Evening” to music. My mother used to read that poem to me and laugh and say how good it was, and it is awfully good. My tune may be marginally better than the one that Willy Wonka sings in one of the movie versions of Alice in Wonderland, and then again it may not. And the question is, Do we need another musical version of “Soup of the Evening”? I’m soaked with sweat.

  All songs are protest songs, as somebody once observed—was it Bob Dylan? Every song presupposes enough peace and quiet that the song itself can be sung, the guitar strummed, the words heard. There’s no way people can be dancing if there are explosions and cries of anguish outside. In fact, most people are peaceable most of the time, regardless of what they say. Yeats says, “Our master Caesar’s in the tent, the maps are all outspread. His eyes are fixed upon nothing, his hands under his head.” Something like that. In other words, Caesar is lying very still. He may be planning mayhem and flank attacks and organized massacre, but he needs quiet while he strategizes. The poem is called “Long-Legged Fly.” If you’re a stop-lossed land warrior getting drunk in your Humvee listening to “Beer for My Horses” to get hepped up for a retributive foray into some tiny dirt-poor village in Afghanistan, you’re just a person sitting in a Humvee while that song is playing. Even if you’re the biggest, meanest, tattooedest thug of a bar-brawling jackalope who beats up defenseless people every other night, even if you hate music and never listen to it, you need to eat and sleep and recover from the cuts and bruises on your knuckles and regain your pointless rage. You are nonviolent except for the brief periods when you’re violent. For what that’s worth. I called Tim and tried this line of reasoning out on him and he wasn’t terribly impressed. He’s gone hyperpolitical because it’s an election year.

  He said, “Why don’t you write a book about trying to write a protest song?”

  “I guess I sort of am,” I said.

  I’m having problems writing lyrics. They’re either too simple, or too clever-clever, or too sexual. It’s reassuring to go back to listening to dance songs, because usually there are very few words. In one of Paul Oakenfold’s songs there are five words at the beginning, shouted by a television preacher: “I said praise the Lord!” After a while there’s a recorded outgoing message from a woman from 976-4PRAYER. That’s it. And it’s a good song. A good protest song.

  Twenty-one

  I DON’T WANT TO GO TO BED YET. My piano technique is getting a little better, I think. I learned to play piano on our beat-up, difficult-to-tune Chickering, with carved floral decoration. Some of the keys had cigarette burns or missing ivories or both. I took lessons with Mrs. Trebert, who explained to me that her name was unusual because it was the s
ame backward and forward. Bach would have liked her name: it was a backward canon at the unison. It was her husband’s name, actually. He was very sick and pale and quiet. He sat in a warm, dark room while Mrs. Trebert listened to me play Bach and Béla Bartók. My favorite piece was by Bartók, in A minor. The left hand went back and forth between two notes, an A and an E, and the right hand played something equally uncomplicated. Béla Bartók was a Hungarian composer who was hired by Koussevitzky to write a piece for orchestra that has a gigantic solo for three bassoons. When Bartók was in Europe he wrote dissonant, despairing pieces, but for Koussevitzky he wrote something sunny and accessible and immortal.

  One week, when I went to have a lesson, Mrs. Trebert said her husband had passed away. She cried and I felt that I was shrinking to the size of a cashew in the presence of such unfathomable unhappiness.

  My failure to practice also made her sad, and only six months after her husband died I told my parents that I didn’t want to have piano lessons anymore. Instead I learned to play the bassoon. I learned a lot of terminology, like “senza vibrato,” which I thought meant “with vibrato” but actually means “without vibrato.” Vibrato is just when you add a wobble to a note. You can wobble the note by making it louder or softer, say with your diaphragm if you’re a singer or a wind player, or by moving the pitch up and down slightly with the rockings of your abused fingertips if you’re a string player or Segovia. Electric guitar players get to use a special twanger to stretch the strings and produce vibrato, which is how Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Opera singers sometimes use too much vibrato and it drives everyone mad.