The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  * * *

  ONE NIGHT, AROUND MIDNIGHT, TOO TIRED TO SLEEP, with your guitar you wander into the park where, under a crescent moon, the grass seems to glow. At the north water fountain, you bend to slurp, then sit on a bench serenading yourself. As you do, a voice out of nowhere says:

  You play so beautifully.

  You look up at a short, pudgy, dark-skinned boy with a droopy, hangdog face.

  Oh, please – don’t stop. Go on!

  As you keep playing, the boy says, Do you mind? and sits down next to you on the bench. His soft voice drips with sadness as he tells you he works the graveyard shift at Hewlett Packard. I get home too early to sleep and too late to talk to anyone. Honestly, he says, I’m a bit depressed. Are you sure you don’t mind my sitting here?

  You shake your head and continue playing. You play so beautifully, he says again. Would you consider doing me a big favor? Would you come back to my apartment and play your music for me there? I have a color TV and some movies we can watch. You can sleep on my sofa, if you get tired. It’ll be nicer than staying in the park, right?

  So you go to his apartment. By then you don’t really give a shit. You’re not afraid, but only because you don’t give a shit. You understand too that whatever else this kid may have in mind, his loneliness is real. Besides, you’ve dealt with horny men making passes at you before. In the past you’ve had no qualms about telling such men to fuck off. But this is different. First of all, he’s younger than you. And he seems so thoroughly, so sincerely lonely. You resent that life has left people like him so alone. You want to avenge his loneliness. To the conditions that give rise to it you want to say Fuck you!

  So you go home with him.

  The boy’s apartment is in a modern building, a single room with an attached kitchen modestly furnished, with white plush carpeting and bare white walls. While he fries up some Jiffy Pop popcorn and mixes a batch of cherry Kool-Aid, you peruse his video collection, settling on Escape From Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood.

  Halfway through the movie you fall asleep. The boy’s whispers wake you. Hey, he whispers. Do you trust me enough to let me give you a back rub?

  While the boy kneads your shoulders you drift into a dream, one you’ve had several times before by now. You dream yourself back into the hop field across from the teacher’s house. In the dream, as you lie there tracing the constellations, a gang of farmers carrying burning torches enters the field to set fire to it. The dream ends as it always does, with you standing at the center of a ring of fire.

  You wake up under a blanket with the Hewlett Packard boy sleeping next to you. You reach over and give him a massage. Before leaving you put the blanket on him.

  HELD TOGETHER BY GOOD LOOKS, ATHLETIC BUILD, articulate mouth, and conspicuous (if not always faithfully cultivated) talents – singing, drawing, writing: attention grabbers. The fact is everything he did was for show. He exercised not for fitness, agility, or strength, but to look fit. He wrote and painted not to express something deep inside him but to draw attention to himself (and away from his deficits). People assumed incorrectly because he labored so that he was disciplined and dedicated. In fact, he was desperate to compensate for certain qualities that, however unconsciously, he knew he lacked. He knew, for instance, that he was not that strong. He understood, too, that he was terribly afraid of any situation in which he had to compete with others on a level field: for without his superficial qualities to lend him an advantage – without his good looks and articulate charm – he was sure to fail, not because he lacked resources but because he wasn’t used to fighting for things that, for the most part, in the past, had come to him easily, so accustomed was he to getting the benefit of the doubt (in fact, he did not need that benefit, for initially people didn’t doubt him: he presented well). He was supremely sensitive; he took a great interest in what others thought of him. But caring what others think isn’t the same as caring. The words of the Preacher, the son of David, King in Jerusalem, were never more apt. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is. But then, as with all unpaid bills, the day would dawn when his would come due with interest.

  * * *

  YET ANOTHER DRAFT. WHY DO I KEEP AT IT? ONE REASON: the simple belief that if I get it just so, then – and only then – will I know who I am.

  Read Cesare Pavese’s diaries (The Burning Brand). When reading the diary of a suicide, one is conscious of the number of pages remaining, of the thinning out of entries as one approaches the apotheosis, which, if such a work may be read as a novel – and in a way it must be read as a novel – has its climax in the very last sentence. For Pavese, that last sentence, the climax and resolution, is: “I will not write any more.”

  The effort of expression has a bearing not only on the form but on the thought and on the whole inner being. So long as bare simplicity of expression isn’t attained, the thought hasn’t touched or even come near to true greatness. … The real way of writing is to write as we translate. When we translate a text written in some foreign language, we don’t try to add anything to it; on the contrary, we are scrupulously careful not to add anything to it. That is how we should translate a text that isn’t written down.

  SIMONE WEIL, in a letter to Gustave Thibon

  “The present invention has high efficiency and requires only one or more field windings which are placed on a stator. These windings can be pre-wound on insulated cores and completely fabricated before assembly. Instead of a commutator, a plurality of make and break contacts on a single conductor are used to produce a unidirectional torque which turns the rotor.” From U.S. Patent No. 3,387,151: “ELECTRIC MOTOR.”

  XXI.

  The Oregon Country Fair

  Corvallis, Oregon, 1980

  YOU COULD HAVE LEFT. YOU COULD HAVE HITCHHIKED back home or written your parents to ask for plane fare. They would have been happy to send it to you. Instead, you hung on in Corvallis. Why? You had no real friends or business there. You were far from everyone and everything you loved.

  You didn’t want to go home, not yet. You weren’t ready to admit defeat. Another part of you still hoped for some kind of reconciliation with the teacher, still imagined that somehow you and he would patch things up, that he’d come to you with an apology, begging forgiveness. You would of course forgive him and you’d be friends again. You would be readmitted into the Kingdom of Castalia. Everything would go back to being the way it was.

  A couple times you walked all the way to the teacher’s house and stood across the street from it. You did nothing else, you just stood there.

  Meanwhile, you had your guitar and your notebook and your thirty-dollar room and Froggy, who wanted you to go with him to the Country Fair.

  You didn’t want to go to the fair. You felt too blue for happy crowds. Physically, you hadn’t been feeling so good, either. You’d been going to the bathroom a lot. Diarrhea. At first you thought it might be all the coffee you’d been drinking at the Beanery, or the generic brand food-stamp-approved peanut butter you’d been living on since running out of traveler’s checks (the ones you bought with your father the day he told you that you were “over drawn”). Or maybe it was those stale apricot Danish rings you had been eating courtesy of Froggy’s supermarket source, or the pot you and he smoked by the bushel (though Froggy didn’t have the runs). Anyway, you couldn’t afford the five-dollar admission fee. Besides, you had no way of getting there and were damned if you were going hitchhike.

  Early the Saturday morning of the fair’s opening, Froggy knocked on your door.

  Guess what? I got us a ride to the fair! he said. You’re coming, aren’t you?

  YOU RODE IN the back of a panel van filled with cherry pies to be sold at one of the fair’s booths. Maybe it was the van’s ceaseless jouncing or the smell of all those fresh-baked pies, but to feel depressed in the back of that van was impossible.

  There were five of you jammed into the cargo van: you, Froggy, Kelly (one of the cashiers at the Beanery), and tw
o other women, Sally and Marlene, both in their thirties and divorced. The women had volunteered to help sell the cherry pies, made from locally grown red and white Queen Anne cherries. Half of the proceeds would go to charity, and the other half to Hank, the baker, who drove the van.

  With every big bump in the road the women screeched, and you grabbed on to each other while laughing and taking turns sampling piping hot morsels of cherry pie that fell in their boxes onto the floor of the van, where they broke apart, steaming.

  Minus two pies, the van arrived at the fairgrounds. Hank didn’t mind. A big cheerful fellow, his beard and belly jiggled when he laughed.

  Help yourselves, Hank said. Just leave a few for the customers!

  You still lacked the five-dollar admission fee.

  Leave that to me, said Hank. Minutes later, he returned with a purple vendor’s pass that he pinned to the lapel of the yellow-green suede vest that Froggy had given you.

  Wear it in good health!

  You and Froggy helped carry the pies to a booth by the main entrance. Not far from there, Froggy found the perfect spot to sell his carved deer antler pipes. He spread out an Indian blanket that Winston had given him and arranged the pipes in a semicircle on it.

  By then it was 9:53. The festival gates opened at ten. You were about to wander off when Hank said, You’re not fixing to leave without breakfast, are you?

  He held out a tray of brownies. You took a brownie and ate it, washed down with hot coffee from a thermos bottle Hank carried under his arm. The brownies tasted odd, you thought, more green than brown. Even with all that cherry pie in you, you still felt hungry. You took another brownie and washed it down with more coffee.

  Hank looked on intently.

  Good? he asked.

  Mmmm.

  A bell tolled. The fair began.

  THE OREGON COUNTRY Fair consisted of over five hundred booths arranged along a figure-eight shaped dirt trail covering fifty acres of wooded farmland, featuring New Age clothing, crafts, technologies, therapies, and foods. The booths all had names like Lucy in the Sky, Blessed Beads, Obsidian Wind Chimes, Mountain Spirit Herb Co., Touch the Earth, Fresh Picked Rainbows, and Cosmic Karma, and sold everything from geodesic dome kits to utopian bliss balls, from bungee cords to stuffed unicorn dolls, from elderberry smoothies to Sunshine Burgers.

  No sooner did the starting bell go off than the figure eight swelled with gray hippies and New Age farmers in patchwork denims and utilikilts and floppy striped engineer’s caps, all stirring the trail dust in their Birkenstocks.

  To the twangs of steel guitars, the tweets of recorders, the hoots of bamboo flutes, the chimes of thumb pianos, the warbles of yodelers, they went around and around. So did you, carried along the sweeping curves of the great figure eight by a current of bodies as swift and strong as the Willamette’s.

  There were African tribal drums. There was a marimba band. There were madrigal groups and medieval quartets in Renaissance garb. Like the fulminating waters of two colliding rivers, the competing strains of music merged and clashed.

  The sun rose up higher, drenching everything, heating the hard-packed earth under your feet. Like nets catching schools of shiny brilliant fish, the overarching trees caught the sun and held it, until the nets burst and hard yellow sunlight drizzled down, as sizzling hot as frying oil. Everything sparkled with hot bright sunshine.

  You took off the yellow vest that Froggy had given you and carried it under your arm. The more you walked, the more sensitive you grew to the touch of strange bodies, to their unfamiliar dimensions, gaits, and postures, till you could no longer stand being touched by them. Like a surgeon in scrubs entering an operating room, you walked with your hands held up high between them.

  A pair of stilt-walkers in motley passed, followed by a marching band, followed by the spirit of Walt Whitman in gray machinist’s overalls juggling three oranges and offering free lessons, with Dunbar Aitkens, the inventor of the Glass Bead Game, close behind. You were put in mind of the crowds at Coney Island or Fifth Avenue during the holiday season, or Seurat’s Grande Jatte, of shadows, hoop skirts, and parasols rendered in countless persnickety little colored dots.

  Around and around you went. Among the faces sweeping by you saw, or imagined that you saw, people from the near and distant past. You saw pug-nosed Bobby Mullin (who beat you up for not believing in God) and Lenny Polis and Vic Virgilio and other neighborhood kids who shared the corner bus stop and sorted screws from you father’s inventions for a quarter per hour. You saw Karen Finklestein at whose backyard party you and George disgraced yourselves in gladiatorial combat. You saw some past teachers, including Mrs. Schnabel with her port wine stain, and Mrs. Decker, your kindergarten teacher who kissed you on the cheek once in exchange for a crayon drawing of the Empire State Building – or was it the Queen Mary? Or the Elizabeth?

  Past more faces and memories you walked. There was Mr. Jerome of Jerome’s Five & Ten Cent Store, in shirtsleeves and on crutches, and Mr. Somers, owner of the Bethel Hobby Shop, smoking his pipe, and Dante Vaghi, the woodworker, also the town’s flying saucer prophet. These and other memories assailed you as you circumnavigated the colossal figure eight, the Infinite Path, the ouroborus swallowing its own tail.

  You’d done two circuits and started a third when you ran into Hank again, striding sweatily alongside you bearing the tray with a lone brownie left on it.

  Last one! he said.

  You gobbled it down.

  The current sweeps you back to Bethel, to the teacher’s cottage, with its Japanese-style table. That Japanese table (it occurs to you as you keep walking) was a sandy seashore crowded with teacups and chess pieces, with the rooks forming the parapets of a castle made out of sand, Castalia.

  The sun hangs high overhead. Sweat drips down your forehead. You wipe it with Froggy’s thrift store vest.

  The crowd thickens, spinning you in its motley arms, trapping you in the endless Möbius strip, snaring you in the circular logic of Epimenides’ Paradox:

  THE STATEMENT ON THE HANDOUT IS FALSE

  THE STATEMENT ON THE BLACKBOARD IS TRUE

  The faces keep coming. There’s Mr. Peck, who once said of your father, He is the most egocentric human being I have ever encountered. And – riding his rusty Raleigh alongside him – your genius inventor papa himself, saying, Do you know what I think, Peter? I think you’re overdrawn. Overdrawn – do you know what I mean by that?

  Within the swirling sea of faces you see Jeff Ajax, who taught you guitar and owes you ten bucks. He wears an Oregon Country Fair T-shirt and holds a walkie-talkie to his bandana-scarfed head.

  Only you haven’t imagined this. It’s really Jeff Ajax standing there directing traffic at the confluence of the figure eight.

  AJAX EXPLAINS HIS delay, how he spent the past two weeks holed up in a teepee in Pendleton, Oregon, with someone named Prairie Rose, writing his first novel.

  It’s called The Oregon Country Fair, he says. I’m almost finished, got about thirty pages left to go. I’m hoping to beat Kerouac’s record. On the Road took him a whole three weeks. Slowpoke. Oh, by the way, here’s the ten bucks I owe you.

  He asks you how your reunion with the teacher went.

  Not well, you say.

  Let me guess, says Ajax. He kicked you out.

  How did you guess?

  It’s not all that surprising, he says.

  He offers you a joint. You’re already stoned but take it anyway. As you take turns smoking it, Ajax advances his theory on why the teacher “kicked you out,” namely that you have come to the end of an initiation rite.

  In some cultures, Ajax explains, the Minoans, for instance, or the Hamar people of Ethiopia, the initiation rite takes the form of running naked across the backs of a row of cows with the village women watching. With the Sambia Tribe of New Guinea, feminine boys are reborn as warriors by giving them regular nosebleeds and forcing them to drink the semen of their elders. Among the Mardudjara aborigines, you’d get your teeth
knocked out and have to swallow your own foreskin (whole, without chewing), and the Algonquin Indians would take you into the wilderness and have you drink a potion that makes you forget your childhood.

  Whereas – Ajax continues, taking another hit on the joint – the Zulus of South Africa coat you in white powder before a drunken witch doctor circumcises you with his spear, while the Ni-Vanuatu of Melanesia, they’d make you bungee jump ninety-eight feet over solid ground with a liana vine tied to your ankle. Which is nothing compared to the Matis tribes of Brazil, who beat you with rattan sticks and inject frog poison into you. On the other hand, if you were an Amazonian Mawe, you’d have to wear a glove packed with stinging bullet ants. As for the nomads of Nairobi, they expect you to kill a healthy adult male lion using only a spear.

  But if you ask me, says Ajax, your initiation with this teacher of yours sounds a lot more like the Peruvian shamanistic initiation rite, where you spend years locked up with the shaman priest in his dark rain forest hut until such a time as the shaman thinks he’s taught you everything he knows, whereupon he swings the door to his hut open and you stumble out into the blinding daylight.

  Friend, says Ajax throwing his hairy arm around you, it looks to me like the shaman priest finally decided it was time to kick you out of his hut. Congratulations!

  * * *

  ALONG WITH AN OLD BASSIST FRIEND FROM AJAX’S CORVALLIS days, you, Ajax, and Froggy form a band together. With the money he made from selling out his collection of antler pipes, Froggy buys a used microphone and an amplifier.

  Before you can perform anywhere you need a name for the band. Ajax maintains – insists – that without the right name a band is doomed. Nor is it something that can be forced, he says. Ajax is one of those people who think everything happens for a reason. Like your father, you, on the other hand, feel that things mostly happen when they happen for no good reason. But Ajax voices his beliefs with such conviction that you can’t help falling under their sway.