The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  The man’s thin eyes gleamed; his suntanned face was leathery as a catcher’s mitt. He asked if you were a writer or something.

  Unless you want to be bugged a bar is no place to write. Knowing this, at some level you must have wanted the attention, but not from some old guy with gin-soaked eyes and a leathery face. Hoping it would make him go away you said:

  I’m no writer; I’m just a bum.

  It was the wrong thing to say. The man’s eyes burst with indignation.

  Did I just hear you right? A bum, is that what you just said?

  He laid into you then, this old man you’d never in your life seen before.

  A bum! Why of all the – ! How dare you even think let alone say such a thing like that about yourself, a guy with talent like you! Talent – that’s what you’ve got. I wish I had talent like that! A bum, you say! He shook his head. Don’t you ever, ever again in your life talk that way about yourself in front of Old Bill. I mean it!

  He grabbed your wrist, held it to his leathery cheek, and made you swear after him:

  Swear to Old Bill you’re no bum. Swear it!

  I’m no bum, you swore.

  You got talent. Say it!

  I’ve got talent.

  You’re a winner!

  I’m a winner.

  You’re gonna make it!

  I’m gonna make it.

  Never give up!

  Never give up.

  That’s the spirit!

  Old Bill slapped you hard on the back, gave your shoulder a squeeze, and left The Mad Hatter’s Lounge.

  IN ALBUQUERQUE YOU slept under the stars. With a guy who picked you up in his red vintage Studebaker pickup truck you spent the next six days cleaning storm-ravaged yards. At sunset after working all day you would hike up into the mountains to soak in a carbonated spring. One night you stepped out of the spring into a nest of fire ants.

  East of Ash Fork a pickup truck carrying paperless day workers drove you twenty miles off course before the driver, hearing your screams, dropped you off.

  In a café on Telegraph Avenue you met Darla who might have let you kiss her and maybe do more had you not been so foolish as to ask first. She suggested that you hitch your next ride on the Golden Gate Bridge.

  That way, she said, if nobody stops you can always jump.

  Less than three miles north of Cloverdale, California, you cursed the Winnebagos streaking by in the rain. You took refuge in a motel bar, where, with the help of your nineteen-cent Bic ballpoint pen, your wisdom teeth broke through the gums. To numb the pain and wash the blood down, the barmaid gave you a free shot of well brandy.

  You were nursing the brandy and your gums when a man about your age with dirty fingernails walked in out of the rain with his bulldog-faced companion. The companion kept saying, I mean it, Jamie, I ain’t kiddin’, I’m gonna leave right now, I swear to god you better come on or I’m goin’ on without you.

  After the bulldog left, Jamie took out a wallet photo of his three-year-old daughter and told you how after he got his wife pregnant her dad gave him five hundred dollars for an abortion. I took the five-hunnerd, bought me some coke and Thai stick and with the leftover twenty-five got us married in a Vegas motel.

  As Jamie said this, a flood of fresh blood gushed from your gums into your mouth. You went to the bathroom to spit it out.

  Two brandy shots later you decided to pitch a tent in the Redwood National Forest. While Jamie stole some firewood from the motel porch, you made out with the barmaid in the drizzly motel parking lot.

  By the time you got to the redwood forest the fog was so thick you couldn’t see the gigantic trees. You got a fire started in time for the rain to whoosh down again. When it soaked through your ponchos you ditched it into a nearby latrine.

  Curled up and soaked on the concrete floor, the gums of your wisdom teeth (which so far had shed only blood, no wisdom) aching, you dreamed you were a millionaire in a Hugh Hefner-style smoking jacket, giving sightseers a tour of your redwood mansion. You were deep into this dream when a female voice said, Beg your pardon. You opened one eye to a woman stepping over you on her way to a stall.

  BACK ON THE highway, standing there alone with your thumb out, you recalled your father’s words as you’d stepped out of the bank that day. I think you’re overdrawn. Do you know what I mean by that?

  It struck you that Old Bill’s words had been the antithesis of your father’s.

  You stood there for an hour before giving up and walking two and a half miles to the nearest rest stop. While they emptied their septic tanks, you begged the Winnebago drivers for a ride to Eureka. Please, you said to them. I’ll give you my driver’s license, you can have my wallet, I’ll give you my guitar, just get me out of here!

  At last a driver had you hop in the back of a truck he was towing. You got out your guitar and strummed it with the wind whipping your hair.

  In Eureka you boarded a Greyhound bound for parts north. You sat next to a heavyset Native American who’d been a professional forest fire fighter. Thanks to the smoke he’d inhaled he wheezed whenever he laughed. Meanwhile a tall, thin, shoeless, homeless man named Joe swayed in the bus aisle, bragging to anyone who’d listen that he had been in and out of jail a dozen times for tax evasion. Shoeless Joe harassed every passenger on the bus, especially the rasping fat Indian.

  Shoeless Joe: Say there, Chief Broom, where’d you get all that beefsteak?

  Fat Indian: Hwee, Hwee, hwee.

  Shoeless Joe: Lemme ask you something, there, Sitting Bull. What do you do when all that forest fire smoke blows your way?

  Fat Indian: Duck! Hwee, hwee –

  Shoeless Joe: And if you can’t duck, Chief Beefsteak, whatddya do then, huh?

  Fat Indian: Breathe it! Hwee, hwee –

  Shoeless Joe: Can’t all that smoke kill you?

  Fat Indian: Yup! Hwee, hwee, hwee – …

  In the darkness of the rumbling bus, you wept. Precisely why you cried you weren’t sure. Anyway you weren’t in a position to say.

  But I am. You cried because you were lost. You cried because you were confused. You cried because at twenty-three you no longer had any idea who you were.

  The fat Indian, aware of your tears, hugged you without a word.

  The Hop Field

  From Patent Number 2,964,641: “A graph showing a typical group of recognition signals produced when an engraving is identified.”

  SINCE MOVING HERE, A GOAL OF MINE HAS BEEN TO SWIM all year long without a wetsuit. It’s warm enough here to do that. This past winter the temperature of the lake dropped no lower than 51° F. One can train oneself to swim in temperatures lower than that.

  Lynne Cox has done so. Cox is an American long-distance open water swimmer and author. She has twice broken the record for crossing the English Channel: nine hours and fifty-seven minutes in 1972, and nine hours and thirty-six minutes in 1973. She has also swum the Bering Straight, from Little Diomede Island in Alaska to Big Diomede Island in what at the time (1987) was still the Soviet Union. To this day scientists are still not sure how she was able to do it, with no wetsuit and the average temperature between 44° and 43°. A few years later she swam for over a mile in the waters of Antarctica.

  My ambitions are far humbler, the difference between 44° and 50° being that between discomfort (and a good deal of shivering) and possible death by hypothermia. Two things I have learned, though: first, that there is nothing more invigorating and healthful than swimming in cold water, the colder the better, up to a point; second, that much of what we experience as discomfort in cold water comes down to attitude. How we approach the water matters. If you say to yourself, “By God – I’m going to freeze!” you will probably experience something like that. On the other hand, if as you ease yourself into the water with the equivalent of an orgasmic sigh, saying to yourself, “This is nothing – really nothing; it’s not really that cold at all,” you will discover to your surprise that it’s just so – not that cold at all. By the time you�
��ve swum ten strokes, you’ll be convinced. It works. Try it.

  It’s the same with writing – especially with writing a book. I tell my students this. You have to go in slowly and talk yourself out of any fear. Or just take a plunge – don’t give a shit. (Jump, Papa, Jump!) But whatever you do, don’t sit there dwelling on how cold the water is.

  * * *

  MORNING NOW. THE SKY OVERCAST, THE AIR GRAY. A bird sings. Yesterday I had a tree expert out here to look at a big white pine near the dock that has shed half its needles. As I suspected, the tree is dead, a victim of the bark beetles that have attacked and killed so many pines here and elsewhere. There is nothing for it; it has to come down, and the sooner the better, before the beetles go from it to the next.

  The tree is at least seventy-five feet tall. He quoted me $1,000 for the job. I’m no good at bargaining with contractors. Instead of saying, “That seems pretty steep. Sure you can’t do me any better?” my first impulse is to be agreeable. So I agreed. Only later did my neighbor tell me he paid just $1,200 to have three equally tall pine trees removed. At least it will be done quickly – this Tuesday. With luck the other pines will be spared.

  But probably not. The same neighbor told me, “With pine trees you have two choices. Take ’em all down at once, or watch ’em come down one by one.” The principle here being (if I understood my neighbor correctly) that if something’s bound to die sooner or later, let it die sooner.

  Not a principle I care to apply to too many things. Certainly not to my own life, or to these memories that, like my poor pine tree, have the equivalent of bark beetles gnawing at them.

  “FIG. 2 is a schematic view showing some of the internal elements of the light source and receiver.” From OPTICAL GAUGE FOR MEASURING THE THICKNESS OF A CONTINUOUS WEB. U.S. Patent Number 3,518,441, filed June 30, 1970.

  XVI.

  Corvallis, Oregon, 1980

  YOU’RE LYING IN A HOP FIELD. IT’S TWO A.M. THE SKY is dark, the surrounding mountains darker. You look at the stars, trying to name the constellations. You think you see Orion’s Belt, but you’re not sure. Twenty-three years old and you still don’t have the constellations down.

  The year is 1980. The hop field is in Corvallis, Oregon, population 30,000, a town of farmers, students, and aging hippies eighty miles south of Portland. The name derives from the Latin cor vallis, or “corn valley.”

  You arrived here two hours ago with your guitar, a notebook, and a folder full of letters, having hitchhiked across the country to see your former eighth-grade English teacher, a two-week journey that began with you standing with your thumb out on a freeway ramp in Connecticut and ended when the gloomy bus dropped you off at the edge of town, five miles from here.

  * * *

  AT FIRST CORVALLIS LOOKED LIKE ANY SMALL TOWN after nightfall. Stores and buildings hunkered under a half moon, ice cream parlor, drug store, a movie theater showing an Indiana Jones caper. It might have been Bethel, your own hometown, save for the smell of coffee suffusing the moonlit air.

  In the shadow of the bus depot you adjusted your backpack. Four of your fingers had blood blisters from carrying your guitar case. You took a folded badly battered envelope from your back pocket. By the light of a streetlamp, as if you hadn’t long since committed it to memory, you studied the return address: 65 Goodnight Avenue.

  You started walking.

  Two dozen yards later a set of twirling red and blue lights blinded you. The cruiser pulled over. The cop pointed his flashlight in your face. He asked you for your ID. You produced your Connecticut driver’s license. He asked what you were doing in Corvallis at midnight. You told him you were there to see a friend. What’s your friend’s name?

  As you answered, you were reminded of a similar incident ten years earlier back in Bethel, when that policeman pulled you and the teacher over and interrogated you, how the teacher told him (not in so few words) to fuck off. You remembered how impressed you’d been by that, how cool it seemed to you, how the cop cursed, spit a tawny projectile of tobacco juice, laid rubber, and took off. You considered saying something of the sort to this concerned, dutiful enforcer of the law. But you were too exhausted, too brittle, too anxious to get where you were going to pull a stunt like that.

  Are you aware, the cop said (holding his big flashlight by the neck with three fingers, like a doctor holding a stethoscope, its beam still blinding you) that it is illegal to stand off the curb in the state of Oregon? Disorderly conduct. I could arrest you. Are you aware of that?

  Nossir, you said. I was not aware of that.

  Since you’re from out of state I’ll let you go with just a warning this time.

  The cop lowered the flashlight.

  Now please step back onto the sidewalk. Long as you’re on the sidewalk you may hitchhike legally in the state of Oregon.

  He was about to drive off when you asked for directions to Goodnight Avenue.

  Five miles straight ahead to your left.

  You thanked him.

  Just stay on the curb, said the police officer.

  IN THE SKY over a river the moon glowed. You shivered. Buildings turned to houses, then into fields. Off the macadam compounded with mica moonlight glittered. The mellow coffee smell was replaced by an acrid odor of fertilizer. A plane’s red anti-collision light flashed through the darkness.

  You’d walked for over an hour when you saw the street sign rising black against the night sky. Goodnight Avenue. A half mile down the road you found the mailbox. 65. On the same side of the road, a field so bright with moonlight it looked like an ocean. On the other side, the silhouette of a one-story house.

  A light burned in one of the windows.

  You picked up your guitar and stepped toward the house. As you did, the tension mounted in your shoulders and neck. Your tongue and mouth went dry as if coated with dust. Your breath quivered.

  YOU WERE SHAKING all over.

  At the front door you stood, hearing your heart race, thinking nothing has changed. Ten years have passed but I’m still thirteen, you thought, still standing across the street from the teacher’s front door, wondering what to do. Still as naive and needy as ever.

  And what did you have to show for all those years? Had you saved any lives, led any uprisings, fought any wars? You’d filled a bunch of notebooks with sketches and scribbles, learned to play the guitar, written a few songs. Fiddling while Rome burns. Do any of us really self-actualize? The teacher’s pet, his prize pupil.

  Now look at you.

  You turned, re-crossed the road, and kept walking, into the hop field, the one you’re lying in now, gazing up at the sky powdered with stars, trying to pick out the constellations. Among the stars, one star stands out, brighter than all the others. You reach for it with your eyes. With your eyes still reaching you fall asleep.

  Controlled Burn

  From U.S. Patent No. 4,218,525, filed Sept. 21, 1949 for RESERVE TYPE BATTERY, “a reserve battery comprising a cell, spaced electrodes in said cell, a filling aperture in said cell, a frangible sealed ampule containing electrolyte, a plunger adjacent said ampule, a conduit between said ampule and said cell aperture, a body of sealing material, and means for moving said plunger into contact with said ampule to crush same and force electrolyte through said conduit and aperture into said cell, said means being so constructed and arranged that upon further motion of said plunger the body of sealing material is disposed across the aperture to seal same.” The illustration (“FIG. 2”) is “a cross-section view taken on line 2-2 of FIG. 1.”

  TODAY THE WRITING GOES SLOWLY. JUST GETTING WORDS on paper feels awkward and strange, like the timid first steps of a recovering stroke victim. Two weeks ago, while tending his yard, my neighbor two houses down, a man named Mitch in his mid-sixties, suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side. I saw him yesterday sitting in the passenger seat of a red SUV that had pulled up to his mailbox. I had been raking leaves. I’d assumed he was still in the hospital. I dropped the rake and ran over
. His son was at the wheel and Virginia, his wife, in the backseat. He was trying to take the mail out of the box, struggling. Letters in various-sized envelopes trembled in his grip. It took all his will to keep from dropping them all and failing at this undertaking, which, two weeks earlier, would not even have earned that designation. Still, under the pale baseball cap and behind the large aviator-style glasses he wears, he looked chipper.

  “How are you?” I said. Mitch nodded and smiled. That’s when I realized he couldn’t speak. In the backseat Virginia answered for him:

  “He’s doing fine.”

  Just as a few days ago Mitch wouldn’t have thought twice about collecting his mail, there was a time not so long ago when I wouldn’t have thought twice about turning my thoughts into words in this notebook. I would have approached that task (again, if it could be called that) with as little fear as I’d approach any humble chore, washing dishes or raking leaves. I recall (with a blush of embarrassment) the letters I used to write regularly to friends, long ones into which I poured whatever came to me: idle descriptions, thoughts, ideas, feelings, hopes, worries, plans, bits of novels and stories, word-sketches of paintings in progress, I’d just write and write – or type, rather, since back then I still used a typewriter, my Remington “Noiseless” that weighed thirty-five pounds and, with two fingers snapping out sixty-five words per minute, sounded like a machine gun. It didn’t matter what I wrote, just as long as I filled pages. When I’d filled enough pages to challenge the limitations of a first-class postage stamp, I’d sign the last page, shove the sheaf into an envelope, and send the letter off. It never even occurred to me that I might bore the pants off my correspondent. I was baring and sharing my soul, that’s how I saw it, giving what I had to give. Between friends, what could possibly be wrong with that? How could they fail to be touched by my uninhibited outpourings – my essence excreted in typewritten words on paper? I had no idea then that I was honoring a great Japanese literary convention, following the brush, practicing flow: writing zuihitsu.