The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  You carried him to the hospital on your back, you say.

  There were no taxis. What else could I do, leave him in the street?

  Curtis turns to give the teacher an admonishing look. The teacher grins.

  So, how long will you be visiting? Curtis asks.

  You say you don’t have any definite plans, by which you mean you have nowhere else to go. A few days, maybe, a week at the most, if that’s not too long. If it’s not too much of an inconvenience.

  You say this with an awe-shucks smile. Curtis sticks out his lower lip and nods, his arms folded over his white robe. He excuses himself then, saying he needs to go back to his studies, nodding toward the kitchen table. The teacher gathers up his own books and goes into the living room, where he lights an oil lamp with a long sooty snout and sits at one end of the sofa. You join him, standing nearby as he opens and turns the pages of a heavy textbook. By the lamp’s flickering glow, his face looks exhausted and old.

  So now you’ve met Curtis, he says, turning a page.

  Yeah. He seems nice.

  He’s a damn liar. He saved my life. He carried me halfway across Old Delhi. If not for him, I wouldn’t be here.

  I don’t doubt it.

  In the ensuing silence you think: now’s a chance for us to really talk, to catch up on things. What should we talk about? you wonder. My artistic struggles? My attempts at self-actualization? Not a great idea, you tell yourself, those attempts having thus far netted such meager results. You consider sharing some of the highlights of your wayward existence over the past year or two, then reject these as – if not too pathetic – too banal, too trivial, the prosaic adventures of a purposeless young man. We could talk about the past, reminisce. Remember this, remember that? (Damn it, Peter, I don’t want to be relegated to a shit-pile of old memories … waking memories of those self-satisfied, dried out little turds – Bethel personified – who made my life a living hell when I lived there.) Better scratch that topic, too. We can talk about the boat people, you consider. But you don’t really want to talk about boat people. You don’t care about the boat people. You don’t give a fuck about the boat people. How about the land the teacher said he was going to buy for the community, for Castalia: there’s a decent subject, why not talk about that? On second thought, maybe it would be better to talk about something less serious, like the books you’ve read, or life in general (or the boat people – no, not the boat people; anything but the goddamn boat people). Then again, who said you needed to talk at all, maybe you could just play a game of chess or something?

  You’re about to suggest this when the teacher looks up from his book and smiles. It’s the first time he’s smiled at you. He asks you if you’re hungry and tells you there’s plenty of food in the refrigerator, cheese and bread. You tell him you’ve already eaten (you’re starving), but that you might nibble on something later.

  The teacher nods and goes back to reading his book. You wait for him to say something more. He turns a page. You wait.

  He turns another page.

  Returning to the kitchen, you find it empty. Curtis has gone off to study. You see the band of orange light under his door. You find cheese and bread in the refrigerator and eat alone at the table. Afterward you wash, dry, and put away the saucer you’ve used, then go to your room and read for a while by candlelight before going to sleep.

  YOU DREAM YOU’RE a millionaire living in a castle whose walls are made of solid, thick blue glass, the same pale watery blue color as those railroad insulators you used to collect with the teacher. Around the castle there is a moat, which, in the dream, turns into an ocean whose towering waves are the same blue color as the glass castle they threaten to wash away.

  Then you’re in the ocean, under the waves, looking up through the blue water, preparing to breathe your last watery breath when you realize your lungs have turned into gills and you’re a fish, no, not a fish, an embryo, that you’re back in the womb, the one you shared with George, your twin.

  Where is he? Where is George? Where is your twin brother? You look everywhere but can’t find him. Then you realize it’s yourself you can’t find, yourself you’re searching for.

  TWO SUMMERS AGO, I TOOK AUDREY TO SEE A COVERED bridge. The last day of July, the end of a month-long summer visit, and I wanted it to end perfectly. The weather cooperated, dry and sunny, low puffy clouds grazing across the sky. We rode north to New Milford, where we followed old Route 202 to New Preston, past Lake Waramaug to West Cornwall. As I drove the rental Hyundai and Audrey slept in her car seat, I remembered taking the same route with my father, exploring the same towns. It was the sensation of those times, among the happiest in his life, that I wanted to re-create for Audrey. As we rode past cornfields and red barns, down leafy winding roads, the silver Hyundai morphed into a cream-colored Simca, my father’s car, while I became his father, and Audrey turned into me.

  It had been a good month, so far: I’d been a good daddy, as good as could be expected under the circumstances. Audrey occupied practically every moment of each day. I hadn’t written a word, I couldn’t even read: a page or two in the bathroom of my mother’s condo with the fan running to mask the sound of Judge Judy castigating litigants at full volume (my mother is hard of hearing). I sleep to Audrey’s schedule, to bed by nine after scrubbing her while she plays with her rubber ducks. Sometimes I bathe with her, ridiculous in my black Speedo, her mother having insisted I wear it since, according to her, Audrey is getting “old enough to start being aware of certain things.” Later, as she brushed her teeth per my instructions – up and down and not back and forth – hidden from view, I’d hang the dripping Speedo on the doorknob and put on the frayed, faded terry cloth robe that was my father’s. In the twin bed we shared, I’d read Audrey a book chosen from a stack on a chair, Caps for Sale being her favorite. Then I’d switch the lamp off and lie in the dark with her knees to my spine, staring up into darkness, my regrets rolling by like floats in a small-town parade. One of those floats replicated the lobby of a Chicago hotel during a thunderstorm where Audrey’s mother, having surprised me there, slapped me across the face before hustling our infant daughter into the rain in search of a taxi with me in pursuit. An hour later I sat in a deserted ballroom with a cell phone to my ear listening as my twin brother ran down the list of reasons why I shouldn’t commit suicide, my daughter chief among them.

  The covered bridge turned out to be a fiasco. Walking toward it we passed the window of a children’s boutique in which a child’s dress was on display, patterned with colorful owls. Audrey loves owls. She begged me to take her inside. “Later,” I said. “After we see the covered bridge.” She insisted; I resisted. We ended up back in the Hyundai, which by then the sun hat turned into a convection oven, with her screaming and kicking and crying as I enforced a time out, or tried to. For twenty minutes we struggled. It took my tears to end hers.

  She fell suddenly silent.

  “Are you all right, Daddy?” she asked.

  I bought her the dress.

  U.S. Patent No. 3,938, 896. IMAGE COLORIMETER. “A colorimeter includes an objective for focusing an object image on a first half of a viewing screen. A standard light reference beam is projected onto the second half of the screen. A moving shutter alternately blocks the first half then the second half of the screen. A light detector is responsive to the alternating images on the screen as they pass through color filters. The detector output may provide information of spectral distribution or color deviation of the object, relative to the standard reference.”

  XIX.

  Good, No Sense Prolonging It

  Corvallis, Oregon, 1980

  THE NEXT MORNING, WITH THE TEACHER AND CURTIS both gone off to the university, you pedal the bicycle back to the Beanery. On the way you see a billowing gray-brown cloud rising over a hop field and smell the pungent smell that comes with it. The cloud spreads like a curtain, covering the eastern sky.

  You’ve got your guitar with you. You hold it in one hand a
nd steer the bicycle with the other.

  At the Beanery you peruse the bulletin board again, then buy a mug of coffee and sit on the bench outside playing a song. As you do a man close to you in age with limp brown hair and dark thin lips sits next to you. He asks what song you’re playing. You tell him it’s something you wrote yourself. He says it’s pretty and asks you to teach it to him. His name is Frohlinger, but he goes by Froggy.

  You teach him the song, and afterward he invites you to the boarding house where he lives, explaining that he has a full drum kit there.

  We can jam together, he says. Then afterward, if you like, you can stay for lunch. I got a friend who works at the supermarket. He brings me day-old Danish rings and stuff like that. The other day he brought me half a rack of barbecue spareribs, but usually it’s a Danish ring, don’t ask me why. Guess they go stale fast.

  Having nothing better to do, you go with him. The boarding house is four blocks away, across the railroad tracks that bisect the town: a three-story Dutch colonial painted a mix of grays and browns, like an early cubist painting by Picasso or Braque. Inside, you notice a coat of gray dust on everything. Froggy explains how for weeks after Mount St. Helens erupted ash kept blowing into the town. Long after getting cleaned up everywhere else, it remained there, in the boarding house.7

  Subsequent research suggests that no ash from the Mount St. Helens explosion ever made it to Corvallis, Oregon. Yet that is what you were told and what you will remember.

  Everyone’s welcome at the Ghetto, says Froggy. That goes for volcanic ash, too.

  On the way to Froggy’s room you notice a sign taped to a door:

  ROOM FOR RENT $30

  SEE WINSTON

  Froggy’s is the third room down the hall to the left. Ten by ten with a hot plate and a cube refrigerator. In addition to the drum kit, the room holds the disassembled parts of two Harley Davidson motorcycles, approximately.

  I’m hoping to get at least one of them working by Christmas, Froggy says, rolling a spliff. Gonna give it to my twin brother, Stew.

  You’re a twin?

  Yep. Stew lives with our grandma in Montana. Got this huge marijuana crop growing in the middle of a cornfield there. Sends me some now and then. Sent me enough by now to rate a motorcycle, only I’m shy a few key components, like a working engine.

  I’m a twin, too.

  You are? No shit! Wow! That’s fantastic!

  You smoke some dope and play a few songs, with Froggy on drums. You’re halfway through a song when Froggy’s supermarket connection drops by with a Danish.

  Lunch! says Froggy.

  Instead of staying for lunch, you head back to the Beanery, where you write in your notebook until sundown.

  On the way back to Goodnight Avenue you see another field burning, this one to the west, with flames the same tawny orange color as the low-pitched sun.

  BY THE TIME you get back to the teacher’s house it’s twilight. The Toyota is parked in the driveway. The hood is open. A lantern-bearing figure stoops over the engine. You ask if something’s wrong. Curtis looks up. A comet of grease streaks across his forehead.

  Timing chain, he says.

  You nod. On my way here I noticed a field burning, you say. I saw the same thing this morning, too. What is that?

  The hop farmers, Curtis answers. They set their fields on fire to nitrogenate the soil. It’s called a controlled burn.

  The house is dark. The smell of scorched teakettle lingers. You find the teacher in the chicken coop gathering eggs. Through a narrow window covered with chicken wire tawny light streams, highlighting whirling dust motes. A half-dozen hens cackle. With his gloved hand, the teacher removes an egg from under a chicken and puts it into a basket he’s holding. He glances at you and says:

  How was your day? As you answer, he extracts another egg. He holds it up to the light to examine it, the way you once examined glass insulators, then puts it into the basket. You start telling him about Froggy and the Ghetto when you realize: something’s wrong. He isn’t listening. He’s distracted, refusing to make eye contact.

  You watch him gather more eggs.

  At last the teacher speaks, saying that he needs to talk to you, that something serious has come up. As he says this the salty stench of chicken shit, which has been there all along, makes you want to run screaming out of the chicken coop, or maybe it’s just your sense of what’s coming. Meanwhile, the dusk air has turned a deep orange, the color of the smoky Chinese tea you and the teacher used to drink in his carriage house. The dust particles look like sparks from a welder’s torch.

  You know those boxes in your room, on the windowsill? the teacher says.

  You nod.

  One of them had two hundred dollars in it.

  You say nothing.

  It was our rainy day fund.

  You wait.

  The money’s gone. All of it. Curtis thinks you stole it.

  I didn’t.

  I know that. Don’t you think I know that? That’s not the point. The point is we’ve got a problem.

  No shit, you say.

  I’m sorry, the teacher says, but you picked a bad time to visit. Curtis has been under a lot of stress. We’ve both been under lots of stress. You can’t imagine how much stress we’ve both been under. This doctoral program is a bitch. But that’s not the worst of it. The fact is Curtis doesn’t like you. Even before you got here, whenever I’d mention your name I’d see it in his face. He knows all about you, that you were a former student of mine. There may be some rivalry there. It’s not out of the question.

  The teacher wipes the back of a gloved hand across his forehead and looks down at the ground. Even in the chicken coop’s dying light you can see the exhaustion and frustration in his eyes. By then the sun has gone down. You can barely see the outline of the teacher’s face, just the ruddy gleam in his eyes. Together you feel your way through the dark into the house. As you do the teacher whispers:

  Please don’t tell Curtis that I’ve spoken with you. In fact I’d rather you don’t speak with him at all. It will only make things worse.

  From the house you hear the sound of running water in the kitchen. Curtis washes his hands in the sink.

  Good yield? he asks.

  Seven, the teacher says. He puts the basket of eggs down.

  You help set the table. As you do, the teacher cracks all seven eggs into a bowl and beats them with a hand-beater. The omelet is cooked and eaten in silence. The teacher has barely finished eating when he gets up and puts his dish in the sink.

  I’ve got an early day tomorrow, he says. I take it the car is working?

  Should be, Curtis says.

  The teacher nods.

  See you both later tomorrow. Goodnight, he says.

  WITH THE TEACHER gone, you help Curtis wash, dry, and put the dishes away. Then you go into your room, take A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man down off the shelf, and try to read, but can’t. You look at the boxes on the windowsill, trying to guess which one held the purportedly stolen money, choosing the carved wooden one with the mother-of-pearl inlays. You open it, half-expecting to see two hundred stolen dollars there.

  You try to sleep but can’t do that, either. So you take your guitar from the case and sit on the futon strumming lightly, lightly. …

  The door to your room bursts open. The teacher stands there. Didn’t I tell you we’re trying to study? Are you so inconsiderate? Have you learned nothing?

  He slams the door behind him.

  You hear a roaring sound like the sound a seashell makes when you press it to your ear, only louder. The sound keeps getting louder until it sounds like a jet airplane taking off. Then it changes to a buzzing noise like the noise the fluorescent bulbs in the Building made when they were about to die, then to a ringing sound, like what you hear after you bump your head hard into something. Then there’s no sound at all, just the walls of the room pressing in on you as you stand there with your face in your hands.

  With your th
ings packed and the candles blown out, you lie staring up into the darkness until dawn, when a rooster crows and a car engine starts. You look out the window and see the Toyota backing out of the driveway.

  You shoulder your backpack, pick up your guitar, and step into the kitchen.

  The teacher stands there.

  I thought you left, you say.

  That was Curtis, says the teacher.

  He sees the pack on your back and you holding your guitar.

  Leaving? he asks.

  You nod, expecting a conversation.

  Good, no sense prolonging it, says the teacher.

  You walk past him and out the front door.

  Field and Search

  “MAGNETIC AND OPTICAL DIFFERENTIAL THICKNESS MEASURING INSTRUMENT.” U.S. Patent No. 3,258,686, June 28, 1966

  SOMETIMES THE MIND GOES BLANK AS THE WHITE PAGE, as void as a spider’s empty web.

  I get up from my desk. I’d pace but there’s not enough room in my loft for pacing. So I walk downstairs and wear out a strip of carpet behind the sofa. Since the house is small, the kitchen is a mere three steps from the sofa, so I end up pacing to the refrigerator, where I search inside for – god knows what: Milk? Juice? Yesterday’s sautéed filet of frozen mystery fish? Salvation? I take out the orange juice, pour myself a splash, drink. I don’t feel saved. I linger for a moment in the refrigerator’s cold before closing the door; to keep looking in there is futile. I turn to the French doors, look at the lake. When in doubt there’s always the lake. I put on my sandals and head out the door. On second thought: should I take my Speedo and towel? No, just go to the dock, I say to myself. Go and stand there and consider how lucky you are to be empty in such a beautiful place.

  I walk down to the dock. My sandals slap at its gray boards. I check for the latest webs my spider neighbors have spun. There’s a fresh beautiful one across the ladder. I destroyed one just like it the other day coming out of the water after a swim and felt awful. I had to remind myself that spiders have nothing better to do than spin webs. By ruining one I was keeping a spider employed in this state where unemployment levels touch 10 percent. Is it the same spider, I wonder, who week after week keeps building the same web across my ladder, making it impossible for me to use it without committing an act of destruction?