by Lore Segal
“What did I do wrong?” cried Jimmy. “Did I ruin it?”
“Let me.” Jimmy got gratefully out of the hot seat. Sweng sat down and punched a button. The witchery ceased.
“What did you do?” cried Jimmy. “Should I have known how to do that? Now what are you doing?” But answer came there none. The computer man punched buttons, gazed into the responding screen, punched and gazed. Useless for Jimmy to cry to him out of our common world, “I wish you would tell me what you’re doing!” The computer man’s soul had entered the computer. Jimmy watched and waited till the man rejoined himself, rose, and said, “You’re O.K. now. Call the Computer Center if you have a question.”
“Don’t leave me!” cried Jimmy, but the computer giant ducked his head and cleared the door of Jimmy’s office.
“I like it!” Jimmy reported to the conference table, where the institute people brought their democratic lunches. “I’m typing in lights! Words stay forever malleable, changeable like the words in my head! I love it when the screen produces a ghost line. You know how you know it’s a ghost line?”
“It doesn’t throw a shadow?” asked Alpha.
“It can’t see itself in the mirror?” suggested Leslie.
“Little dogs bark at it?” proposed Ilka.
“Close! The little blinking cursor won’t move along the ghost line; it moves only along the true line. That’s sort of wonderful!”
Jimmy had mislaid his office, so Ilka walked him back. She laughed the third time they met on the stairs. It turned out that Jimmy was looking for the corridor that led to her office to ask her, “What’s the name of whats his name’s assistant?”
Martin Moses turned out to be whom Jimmy was looking for. “Which one is he?”
“Tall, funny. You talked with him for half an hour at the reception.”
“I talked with a lot of funny people. Whose assistant did you say he is?”
“Zack’s.”
“Which one is Zack?”
“Nose in the middle of the face. Mouth like a keyhole.”
“Ah. What does Zack do?”
“Jimmy, don’t you have a listing of the members?”
“Probably underneath all the papers on my desk.”
“Jimmy, there’s a list—with your name newly penciled in—pinned on the cork board in the little lounge outside the kitchen.”
“Which way is the kitchen?”
“Poor old Jimmy!” Eliza Shakespeare said to him. “It’s hell to be new in a place and not know your way around, not know how it works.” Eliza had dropped in shortly before five, and Leslie broke out a bottle of vodka. Someone got ice from the kitchen. Nobody felt like going home.
Ilka said, “My project is to not nag Jimmy.”
They said, “That’s right! You leave Jimmy alone!”
Ilka was surprised when, on their drive home, her mouth opened and said, “I was wondering, Jimmy, I mean, typing, is not exactly what you were hired to do, do you think?”
Jimmy said, “Not typing. Entering. I’ve got to get my desk cleared.”
“I was only wondering,” said Ilka and thought, wondering isn’t nagging, “when you’re going to get going on the conference?”
“When I’ve got my list entered in the computer.”
Ilka thought she must surely be going to stop, however, she said, “I was only wondering when you’ll finish getting it entered.”
“Me too,” Jimmy said. “That’s just what I’ve been only wondering.”
Ilka said nothing all the way up the narrow path to their front door. Poor Ilka! She came from a race of women who assumed that their men would drop things and fall over them, which the men generally went ahead and did. Ilka assumed that Jimmy was going to screw up and she minded for him. In the kitchen she ran herself a glass of water, swallowed it. Because of all Ilka did not say all the while they were undressing, she felt, when their paths crossed coming into, respectively out of, the bathroom, that she deserved a holiday from so much refraining and asked Jimmy, “When do you think you’ll have enough essays for the book?”
“I’ll let that simmer till I’ve got this conference under my belt.”
From here on, all that Ilka refrained from saying to Jimmy freighted the air of the little borrowed house. It thickened the atmosphere in Jimmy’s old Chevrolet, in which they rode to and from the institute together. Jimmy felt it whenever the air inside which he moved up and down the institute stairs or along the corridors briefly coincided with Ilka’s air. Poor Jimmy!
A time passed. A Tuesday morning, and there was a memo from Alpha asking Jimmy to bring his list to the meeting at two. Jimmy turned the computer on, called the Computer Center, and asked, “How do I read my list?”
“What list is that?” asked the Computer Center.
Jimmy said, “My list of potential participants. I’m the new director of projects at the institute.”
“Call up your SPAD Retrieval Screen.”
“What’s that?”
“Symbolic Program for Academic Disciplines.”
Jimmy called back a few minutes later and said, “My manual doesn’t have ‘Retrieval.’ The index skips from ‘Reset all places,’ to ‘RFTCONV.EXE.’ Please, are you a person with a name and a heart?”
“My name’s Joel.”
“Mine is Jimmy and I’m about to be a pain in your neck. Walk me through this retrieval maneuver, please.”
“What are you looking for?”
“How about one crack international lawyer, one world class theologian, alternately ethicist, maybe a star doctor …”
“What’s your value for law?” asked Joel.
“Comparatively high.”
“What’s your code?”
“Do you mean a number? On a scale from one to ten, say eight. Shall I enter eight?”
“What values do you want to run against it?”
Jimmy asked Joel if he knew Turkish. Joel was sorry but he had to meet his dad for lunch.
“You have a dad!” said Jimmy.
“You can say that again. Keep entering your values, punch Enter, enter the answer to the question on the Dialog Box, and punch Enter.”
When the Dialog Box asked Jimmy “DWZ MSG 3714 A12 ?” he punched the Escape button. The screen replied, “FATAL ERROR.” Jimmy punched Escape again, and again the screen replied, “FATAL ERROR,” and flashed off and on. Here’s where Jimmy punched the Control button. The machine answered, “FATAL ERROR,” and began to softly and mechanically roar. Jimmy punched Shift, he punched Caps Lock, he punched Scroll Lock, Control, Escape, Alt, Prtsc, Sys Req. The screen responded:FATAL ERROR
FATAL ERROR
FATAL ERROR
FATAL ERROR
FATAL ERROR
FATAL ERROR
and flashed, and roared, and Jimmy let out a howl that brought Ilka, Celie, Barbara, Wendy, Alpha, Leslie Shakespeare, Zack, and Alvin running to his door.
“I’ll reschedule for four,” Leslie said to Jimmy. “Will that give you plenty of time?”
Joel did not get back from his lunch till quarter after three. “Did you enter your password?” he asked Jimmy.
“I have a password?”
“You have to make up a password,” said Joel.
“I wish I were dead,” said Jimmy.
“Can’t have more than eight characters. Enter I-W-I-S-H-I-W-E, punch Enter. What does your screen say.”
“ID, question mark?”
“Enter your ID … You don’t have one? You have to request an ID from the security administration in writing.”
Wendy passed Jimmy standing outside the door of the conference room. Jimmy said, “I’m breathing and waiting for my heart to slow down.”
“Your heart is slowing down!” worried Wendy.
“As a matter of fact it’s speeding up. Before it strangles my breathing altogether, here goes!” Jimmy opened the door and Alpha, Joe, Leslie, Nat, Ilka, Yvette, Zack, and Alvin turned and looked at him.
Jimmy said, “I didn’
t know there was a security administration. What all else might there be that I don’t know!” Leslie looked at Jimmy with frank and, it seemed to Jimmy, appropriate, irritation. Jimmy looked affectionately at Leslie—a fine head! A beautiful man, and an honest one. Jimmy liked it that he was not able to seduce a smile out of Leslie.
Leslie said, “Bring in the old directories.”
Jimmy said, “I haven’t got the old directories.”
“Where are they?”
“Lila put them away. I got Lila to clear my desk before she left to join her husband in Indo-China.”
It turned out that the senior fellows had their own lists of prospects, and that Jimmy’s job was to locate their present whereabouts and get off the letters of invitation.
“Use the directories in the University library,” said Leslie.
Alpha said, “This is getting a bit late. People have schedules for the next year.”
The directories through 1959 were bound in matte red, thereafter in dark blue that must have run out in ’67 , when the blue became fractionally grayer or was that a different directory? Jimmy took one of them down. It opened at page 1247. Jimmy went to the table where the librarian sat and asked her if it ever happened to her that she read a sentence that would not turn into meaning. The librarian was a little woman, not young, with a tender indoor pallor. Jimmy smiled into her eyes, but the librarian was not a smiler and hadn’t the flirtatious instinct. She asked Jimmy what he was looking for. Jimmy followed her across the room saying, “This is interesting: knowing how Washington works—who and where everybody is—or how, if you don’t know, you can find out—makes me understand what all I don’t know about the scholarly world.” The librarian kept walking, Jimmy kept talking. “Do you remember being a little kid and knowing you didn’t know what there was out there to know and not knowing what to ask?”
The librarian said, “Second and third shelves,” and walked back to her chair behind the information desk. Jimmy took down “A-P,” navy with self lettering. He was going to make it all the way to the “D’s” without looking at the clock.
Jenny Bernstine called Ilka. “I met Jimmy at the library. Is he O.K.?”
“I don’t think so,” said Ilka. “He’s living underwater and doesn’t dare take the time to come up to breathe.”
Weeks had passed. Alpha put her head in Jimmy’s door and said, “Dyer says he hasn’t got our letter.”
“It’s in the batch I got off yesterday,” lied Jimmy. His scalp prickled.
“Oh, good!” Alpha said, “Do remember, Jimmy, to always put copies of all outgoing correspondence in the ring folder in the lounge, so every member can keep track of what everyone is doing.”
“I’ll run it right out.” Jimmy waited for her to close the door behind her. Using both his hands for shovels, he churned the new agglomeration of papers on his desk.
Alpha phoned from her office to say, “I called Paul back to say the letter’s in the mail, but he’s leaving the end of this week. Better send a duplicate to him in Oxford.”
“Will do,” said Jimmy. Jimmy called Joel. “Sorry but come over and help me, please. Now!”
Jimmy assumed eyes behind the horn-rims, a mouth inside the beard, feet—sockless—inside the frayed tennis shoes. “I need the address of a man name of Dyer, and I don’t know how to call my list up!”
Joel sat in Jimmy’s chair, punched, gazed, and asked, “Did you Control KD it? Looks like the job abended.”
“Abended is what?”
“DB zapped.”
“What does it mean? I mean so what do I have on the computer?”
“You don’t,” Joel said and he returned to his Computer Center.
“What are you doing on the floor?” Ilka stood in the doorway.
“Putting my papers in order,” said Jimmy. He had pulled the bottom drawer all the way out, upturned it on the carpet, and was aligning papers and envelopes according to their size and kind. “I can’t find Dyer’s address. Maybe it’s D-I-E-R.”
“How likely are you to find it in the drawer in which you keep your blank institute stationery?”
“So unlikely that when I fail to find it I won’t jump out of the window.”
“Why don’t you ask Alpha!”
“NO!” shouted Jimmy. “I can’t.”
“Why, Jimmy, can’t you ask Alpha for an address?”
Jimmy put his head into his hands and said, “Did you know panic can be located? The prickling is on the inside of the scalp; there’s a grinding sort of roiling and it’s right under the ribs in the place you’d expect to feel hunger. And there is a simultaneous silent roaring not, interestingly, in the ears.”
“Jimmy, you want me to go ask Alpha?”
“NO!!!” shouted Jimmy and he leaned his cheek against Ilka and put his arms around her shoulders like a pugilist hanging his weight round his adversary’s neck for a moment’s breather. He said, “I earnestly wish that I were dead.” Ilka, stroking his hair, aborted her answering thought.
Jimmy said, “Marry me, Ilka!”
Ilka said, “All right,” and waited for something friendly that she must surely, on the occasion, be going to say to Jimmy.
“So. I guess Jimmy and I are going to be married.”
“We’ll make you a reception,” said Eliza. “Our gooseberries are ripe! Do you and Jimmy like gooseberries?” She reached for the cookbook on the shelf behind her.
If Eliza had asked Ilka, “And are you happy?” Ilka would have said, “Sure. I kind of love Jimmy,” but Eliza said, “Gooseberry, gooseberry, gooseberry. Here: Gooseberry. Gooseberry jelly; Gooseberry pudding, baked; Pudding, boiled! Chhhh! Gooseberry sauce for boiled mackerel? Hm. Gooseberry tart, trifle …”
Ilka said, “You don’t know what it’s like waking every morning wishing the person in your bed, whom you are really fond of, weren’t really there.”
“Not every morning,” said Eliza.
“I don’t believe you!” cried Ilka. “You can’t wish Leslie weren’t there! Eliza, Jimmy is not going to hack it, and he knows it, and he’s frightened. Leslie does everything he does right!”
“That’s right,” said Eliza. “You don’t wake up every morning next to somebody who does everything right. You think Leslie and I don’t look across the bed and wish each other dead?”
“Yes. I think you don’t.”
“Here: Gooseberry fool!” said Eliza. “Green gooseberries: to every pint of pulp add one pint of milk or a half pint of cream and sugar to taste. Leslie loves gooseberry fool.”
The fool was a delicious fool, and Leslie made a ceremony of the superb champagne. They sat where of all places Ilka most loved to sit—in the Shakespeares’ living room. Ilka’s mother had come from New York, and there were the Bernstines and the Stones, the Cohns, Zachariah and Maria, Alvin and Alicia, and Yvette Gordot. Why was Ilka surprised that they had got to love Jimmy?
“We’ll buy a house,” said Ilka.
Jimmy said, “Wait till my retention meeting. What if I get fired?”
Ilka started looking for her house.
Alpha called Jimmy’s office and said, “It’s a jinx. Paul thinks it’s the English postal service.”
“I’ll get out a duplicate of the duplicate.”
Jimmy sat in Eliza Shakespeare’s kitchen. She filled his glass with white table wine, and he said “Thanks!” Eliza filled her own glass. Jimmy watched Eliza move from the sink to the icebox to the stove. He said, “Ilka has made a lap, and bent her head over it. Her arms bend forward at shoulder level, and again at the elbows, and the wrists—a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree embrace, an egg-shape. An egg turns a single shoulder to everything on the outside—including me! Thanks.” Eliza had refilled his glass. “Shouldn’t the father be an insider? She doesn’t even nag me any more!”
Eliza set a plate in front of Jimmy and watched him taste. “This is unbelievable. Aren’t you going to eat?”
“Maybe not just yet.” Eliza helped him to salad and refilled
his glass, and her own. She lit herself a cigarette. Jimmy said, “You know what ambrosia is really? It’s what tastes like the smell promises. Imagine coffee tasting like the smell of fresh ground beans; fresh ground pepper, bananas. This is that sort of a taste!” Eliza refilled their glasses. Jimmy said, “You know what writing my book feels like? Like having got up from a very large, very rich and greasy meal and having to make yourself sit down to eat a very large, rich, greasy meal: it’s what of all things in all the world, you most want to not do. Does Leslie tell you all my fuckups?” Jimmy told Eliza about aligning the blank institute stationary: “If I create this Platonic order, mustn’t everything, by definition, be where it ought to be, and wouldn’t I find the letter I ought to have written to an Englishman called Dyer or maybe DIE R? Or DINER? DRIER? DRINER?”
Eliza said, “Let’s creep upstairs and poke around Leslie’s desk!”
“You want Paul B. Thayer,” said Eliza. “Old Oxford buddy of Leslie’s. Theologian at Brasenose!”
Jimmy sobbed and put his arms around Eliza and kissed her and she kissed him. All the way down the stairs she kept picking his hands like so many burrs off her nape, her hip, her breast but let him keep his head on her shoulder and finish sobbing before she got him inched out the door.
Jimmy was not going to the Summer Fiesta with Ilka and the Shakespeares. Jimmy was going to the office to get some letters written—get on top of things.
The Concordance Institute on a Sunday put Jimmy in mind of the lush melancholy of August in Manhattan when one’s friends have gone away. All afternoon Jimmy thought he could hear, over the sound of paper against paper, a distant music, squalls of laughter. By the time he had his briefcase filled with the work he could do at home, the day had come to the long blue moment for which Nat Cohn was still seeking the exact adjective. Ilka might be home by now. Damned if he was going to walk all the way by the Northgate. He could cross South Meadow, cut through the project and come out a block from home before it got really dark.