Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  “And then she went away and Ellen came back and touched my arm and said, ‘How are you, any questions?’ I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t have any questions—this is so peaceful I find that I’m crying.’ And I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my bathrobe and felt grateful. And then I had the operation, and I spent the night in a room with a very loud grouchy woman who moaned and farted all night long, and I’ve been in sort of a fog since. I’ve been listening to the music you gave me. Tell me about that Brazilian piece in which the woman sings.”

  “Bachianas Brasileiras,” I said. “She’s singing about the moon. My dad used to play it for me, and I thought you’d like it.” Then the doorbell buzzed. Smack barked furiously. He’s vigilant about doorbells. I looked at Roz.

  “Oops, that may be him,” she whispered.

  “I better go,” I said.

  “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  Harris had arrived bearing a ceramic pot of flowers wrapped in plastic. We shook hands coolly.

  “I’m just on my way out,” I said, waving. “Bye-bye.”

  • • •

  TODAY’S SECRET WORD is “garbanzo.” A very warm and nauseatingly friendly hello to you all on this tender summer day. You may be interested in “the poet’s day,” aka my day.

  I opened my eyes this morning and I saw that the sky was blue, with two clouds shaped like ZiL limousines waiting for passengers near the horizon, and I saw that there were some cable TV lines outside the window. The cable lines were no surprise, because they’ve been there for many years now. All the cable companies string their wires along the same upright wooden bar lines, as if they’re trying to write a song.

  I lay in bed blinking and thinking. The dream I’d just had was about finding an old bicycle horn on a shadowy set of subway stairs somewhere near Columbia. The blue rubber bulb was faded and cracked but the horn still croaked. The stairs were covered in old, slippery magazines and trash—the footing was dangerous. I put the bicycle horn in my pocket and made my way carefully down to the noise and heat of the station. In the back of my copy of Tony Hoagland’s What Narcissism Means to Me I wrote a note about my dream, and I read one of Hoagland’s poems, “How It Adds Up.” He says that he listened once through a door as someone, “obviously not me,” made love to his girlfriend.

  I went downstairs and pushed the button on the coffee machine, and I opened the door so that the morning air could come in through the screen, and I fed the dog and let him out. He found his place under the car, where he’s dug a low, cool spot for himself in the driveway sand. He sits there for hours sometimes. He’s getting older.

  I put a waffle in the toaster and ate it, with some local maple syrup from an unbeautiful beige plastic jug, and thought—not for the first time—that what I should really do with my life is be a designer of syrup jugs for all the maple syrup boiler-downers who live around here. Surely there’s a better color of plastic jug than beige. There’s a maple farm in Alfred, Maine, that makes an exceptional dark amber syrup that’s enough to make you throw your arms out and thank the fates for this concoction, which is better than laudanum and better than morphine. Better than Yukon Jack, almost. It’s similar in a way to Yukon Jack in that it’s sweet and viscous.

  I rinsed off the plate and put it in the dishwasher and thought that tonight I might run the dishwasher. I run a load every three or four days, so it’s a big deal for me. Then I wrote a fast loop with a massive kick drum from the Deep House Kit and a Round Reggae Organ doing karate chops up on top. First I tried singing, “I’ve figured out—what I’m going to do.” I scrapped that and sang, “He’s no good for you, he’s no good for you.” That worked better. The man across the street began chainsawing a tree, which interfered with my recording, so I closed all the windows, imagining what people would say if I ever had a dance club hit: “And he recorded it all at his kitchen table!” The refrigerator hum bothered me while I was singing, so I used a quarter to turn its thermostat off, and when I did I remembered how much Roz had liked the hummus.

  Hummus is made of chickpeas, plus a lot of garlic. And then I thought: garbanzo beans. Chickpeas are garbanzo beans. Garbanzo, garbanzo, garbanzo! It’s a great word partly because it has a slight suggestion of garbage in it, garbage gone gonzo, and yet it’s not garbage at all, it’s a bean. It’s a living edible bean that some call a chickpea. Sometimes you’re in the mood for a short, peckish, two-syllable word, “chickpea,” and sometimes you’re in the mood for a long, suggestive word like “garbanzo.” It’s all a matter of mood.

  I spent fifteen minutes trying to substitute “garbanzo” for “Guantanamo” in the Guantanamo song. I’d like to say it was a perfect fit, but it wasn’t. I sang, “Wash it away.” And then, “Dance it away.” Then, “Rinse it away.” Then I went back to “Wash it away.” “Wash” is a good word. Sometimes you’re in the mood for a word like “wash.” There’s a part of England that’s called the Wash—a low area on the east coast where the ocean washed over the land before they lured in the Dutch engineers in the seventeenth century and built the dikes. The past washes over all of us. And when it washes over us, it comes and it goes. It’s a palindrome of oceanic activity.

  I’ve got a headache now, frankly, and I’m out of Faustos. I’m reduced to smoking a mild no-name cigar from a sample pack, and it’s just not the same. If you’re going to smoke a cigar, you might as well smoke a dark one from Nicaragua that really smacks your brain.

  Thirty-three

  I’VE BEEN SHRINK-WRAPPING in the afternoons. It’s hard work, and I’ve slowed down a bit with the songwriting. I did make part of a short one. Raymond sent me a toothsome bassline and some beats and I added chords on the Talky Klav and some Middle Eastern sounds using a plug-in I’ve discovered called Alchemy. A plug-in is a whole separate piece of software, with its own samples, that works inside Logic. Alchemy has some exotic instruments, including one that’s halfway between a harp and a xylophone, and a whole set called Steamworx made by a sound designer, Martin Walker, who sampled an old clock and his dog’s water bowl and many proto-industrial sounds of rending and crunching and letting off steam. In an instrument called Churchyard, Walker includes a note: “An entire horror film soundtrack could be played with this preset!” But I wasn’t interested in making a horror film soundtrack, no, thank you. What I wanted, as always, I guess, was to write a love song. My chorus goes, “I’m curious, just a bit curious, whether fate will hurry us, to a nice place.” Raymond said kind things about it, although it isn’t exactly his sort of music. He really is a great kid, and it’s a completely different feeling to be writing a song with the help of another person.

  This morning, Jeff and his crew were working on the new floor to the barn and they made a lot of noise. They left at about eleven, and in the beautiful quiet I made another mix of “Take a Ride in My Boat” and of “Marry Me,” panning the instruments to the right and left for a good stereo effect. I smoked two Faustos and a Bone Crusher and felt burpy and sick and burned a hole in my pants. Then I spent an afternoon at the boatyard and got paid. I drove to Kittery Trading Post and walked up and down the racks of canoes. There was a new red Old Town canoe marked down because it had a minor scratch. I bought it, along with two new orange life jackets, and strapped it on my Kia.

  At six I called up Roz to find out how she was.

  “I’m having my staples out tomorrow,” she said. “Ellen the gynecologist is going to be paying a house call!”

  “And you feel good?”

  “I’m much more mobile. I can make it from the bed to the bathroom in under five minutes.”

  “Great. Listen, I have three questions for you. The first one is, I found a book of yours in the bookcase. It’s The Genius, by Theodore Dreiser. Do you want it or should I keep it here for you?”

  There was a brief, complicated silence. “You keep it there, I think.”

 
“I read a little of it, something about a faded crumpled memory of a hat. It was pretty good.”

  “I’m glad you’re reading it.”

  “And the second question is—do you want to go dancing with me at Stripe?”

  “What’s Stripe?”

  “It’s a dance club, right here downtown on Chapel Street.” I told her that Nan’s son Raymond was DJ’ing there soon and that Nan and her boyfriend Chuck were going to hear him. “You wouldn’t have to dance, obviously,” I said. “But if you’re feeling mobile already, maybe by then you’d like to get out into the world and do something. I don’t think you ever met Chuck.”

  “I don’t think I did,” Roz said.

  “Anyway, we wouldn’t stay long. We’d just sit and be supercool older people and take in the ambience. I’ll bring the sunglasses.”

  “That’s a nice invitation—” Roz didn’t say anything for a while.

  “It might be fun,” I said. “Raymond’s going to be playing some of his songs and remixes, and he says he might play something that he and I worked on together. I used the words that you sent me in it. It’s called ‘Take a Ride in My Boat.’ You didn’t know you wrote a song, did you?—but you did. So do you want to go with me?”

  “Sure, I guess. It depends on how I’m feeling. But yes, if I can.”

  “Great. And the third question is, Can I come over tonight and hear about your lurid Vicodin dreams?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear about those—just a lot of group groping in trees. And tonight isn’t so good, because Lucy’s moving back to her own place tomorrow and this is our last dinner together. She’s been an incredible help, but she needs to sleep in her own bed. So I’ll be on my own tomorrow. You could come by after I’ve gotten my staples out.”

  “Will Harris suddenly show up with a potted plant?”

  “No chance of that, he’s in Washington. There’s a big pharmaceutical conference where he’s planning to ask some awkward questions. Come by tomorrow.”

  • • •

  WIKIPEDIA HAS a short article on Tibetan music, which seems to have influenced Philip Glass’s soundtrack to Kundun. I listened to some of Kundun and then I listened to a man in Tucson bang Tibetan bowls and blow on his didgeridoo. It probably wasn’t at all like what Roz had heard during her Reiki massage, but it wasn’t bad. I made some more adjustments to my songs and burned a CD of them. I emailed one of the songs, the one about the right of the people to peaceable assembly, to Tim, and I called the boatyard to say I couldn’t do any shrink-wrapping that afternoon. After de-cigarring myself thoroughly, I drove Smacko to Concord. I opened Roz’s door a bit and called her name.

  “Up here!” she said. She was sitting in bed, watching Judge Judy. “Please don’t look at me, I’m a mess.”

  “You look pretty.”

  “No I don’t, but Judge Judy is fascinating.”

  “She’s full of wisdom,” I said.

  “She gets to the heart of the problem fast,” said Roz. “This one’s about a hit-and-run. That’s the boyfriend.” We watched Judge Judy look at a photograph of a car and pepper the plaintiff with pertinent questions. Then a commercial for dryer sheets came on and Roz turned off the TV. The dog had found some of her dirty laundry and was napping contentedly on it. “So what’s been going on? Tell me everything.”

  “Did I tell you that Tim got arrested at a drone protest in Syracuse?”

  “No. Tim is unstoppable. He’s impressive. I wish he’d stayed together with Hannah.”

  I asked her if the gynecologist had come and taken out her staples.

  “She did indeed,” said Roz. “She came and she was very chatty and proud of her handiwork. She said I was doing well.”

  “Are you?”

  Roz pushed at her pillows. “Well, Harris and I are taking a little break. We had a very long, very exhausting talk—he’s a talker—and I think it’s for the best. He wasn’t terribly happy about running into you here.”

  “Oh, geez. Jealous.” I pulled my chair closer to the bed.

  “Jealous, and just not—not—not what the doctor ordered. Speaking of which, can you help me with something? I need you to put my mind at ease.”

  “Tell me,” I said, leaning forward.

  “Here’s the situation. It feels like Ellen maybe forgot something. I was telling her about the book you gave me, the Mary Oliver book—I loaned it to her, I hope that’s all right.”

  Of course, I said.

  “I love the poem about the deer. Anyway, she got so interested in talking about all the poetry that she’d read in college, and how she wants to read more, and doesn’t have time to read, and on and on, that, I think she maybe, um—”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t take out all the staples.” She reached under her sheet, looking around the room as she felt for something with her fingers. “I think I feel one right at the edge of the incision. But maybe not. Maybe it’s just an illusion. Maybe it’s just the edge of where they cut. It’s still quite numb down there. But it really feels like a staple.”

  “Mm,” I said. “You should call her and ask her to come back.”

  “I don’t want to call her. What if there’s no staple there?”

  I waited, then said, “Do you want me to look?”

  “No, because it’s a disgusting incision, but yes. If you could just put my mind at rest that all the staples are gone.”

  “Happy to do it. Should I do it now?”

  “Let me get arranged. Turn around for a second. I need to maintain what’s left of my modesty.”

  I turned around while Roz adjusted the bedclothes.

  “That’s the best I can do,” she said. When I turned back, she had folded the sheet back and tucked it around her hips, leaving a bit of herself exposed. “It’s this place right here,” she said.

  I knelt by the bed and looked at her pale skin and the very white and pink healing scar where the surgeon had cut. I was surprised that they’d been able to get Roz’s whole uterine fibroid complex out through a cut that size. I could see two rows of tiny holes where the staples had been, and there were still traces of yellow antiseptic on the thin-lipped incision. “It’s discreet,” I said.

  “Not all that discreet, but she told me that if they’d waited any longer they would have had to cut this way, up and down, and I didn’t want that.”

  “No, you never want that,” I said.

  “Two pounds of meat came out of me. A real Sunday roast.”

  “Jesus, Roz. It looks like it’s healing well.”

  “Yes, but could you just have a look right—here.” She tapped a place on the end of the wound.

  I looked. “It’s red and it’s a little swollen,” I said. Then I saw a glint of something silver. “You’re right, there’s a staple right in here. It’s sort of hidden. It’s right here!”

  “Dang, I knew it.”

  “You should call Ellen. She should come back and take it out.”

  “I guess I should. I really don’t want to, though. It’ll embarrass her. She’ll know she messed up.”

  “Well, she sort of did.”

  Roz looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “The staple remover is just over there,” she said. She pointed to a plastic bag on a side table near a lamp. I went over to it.

  In the bag was some gauze, a tool that looked like a hole puncher, and about twenty bent staples. I looked at the tool and at the bent staples. I whistled.

  “What do you think?” Roz said.

  “About taking out your staple? I guess I could give it a try. But I’m worried I’d do it wrong and maybe hurt you.”

  “It’s not that hard. I watched her do it. I thought it would hurt, but it didn’t. She was chatting away.”

  “Yes, but she removes staples all the time. She’s a trained professional.”

  �
��And yet she missed one.”

  I decided I really had to step up to the plate. “Let me practice first,” I said. I fished out one of the staples from the bag and used my fingers to bend it to its original angular C shape, so that the V-shaped kink in its back was gone. Then, holding it in the air, I gave it a trial pinch with the staple remover. The two staple ends lifted. It didn’t seem too hard. It certainly wasn’t as difficult as pulling a staple out of a piece of paper. I washed my hands in the bathroom. Over the towel holder was a woodblock print of three eggs in a nest.

  I went back to the bed and knelt. “You ready?”

  “I’m ready.”

  I steadied my arm on Roz’s leg and took a breath. “Here goes.” I angled the machine so that the tiny pointed nippers were over and under the visible silver segment of staple. “Does that hurt?” I said.

  “No.”

  I squeezed. “I’m squeezing now,” I said. “Does that hurt?”

  “Nope.”

  I squeezed some more. The staple bent upward and its sharp edges withdrew from Roz’s soft, vulnerable skin. Her sheet had shifted a little and I could see the edge of her pubic hair. It wasn’t a sexual thing—it was just a part of the whole experience.

  “Got it!” I said.

  “Ah, how wonderful,” said Roz, pulling up the sheet. She put her hand on her chest. “Relief.”

  I put the last staple in the bag. “The offending scrap of metal is officially gone,” I said. I noticed my hand was trembling.

  “Now I’ll stop fretting,” Roz said. “Thank you for all your help. You’ve been a wonderful, dear person through this whole ordeal.”

  “Nothing to it,” I said. “My pleasure. And I have another question for you. Would you like to get married? Because I think it’s time.”