The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  It’s got to come naturally, organically, he says. When it does, we’ll know the planets are in alignment.

  You spend the next week struggling to name your band, weighing dozens of possibilities. At last, after seven days of deliberation and contentious debate, you arrive at a name: Fleegle!, after a stuffed frog owned by the three-year-old daughter of one of the divorcees with whom you rode in the cherry pie van, one with plastic yellow bug eyes and a lolling red tongue.

  You practice your songs on the rooftop of the Ghetto, where Ajax moves into the room between yours and Froggy’s. You spend hours up there, your voices and guitars reverberating through the streets of Corvallis.

  There’s nothing like writing a song. Of all the artistic pursuits you have engaged in, nothing provides such instant gratification. The best songs happen quickly, in an hour or two, and occasionally all at once, with words and music conjoined like Siamese twins at birth. Others burst into flower at unexpected moments. You’ll be walking down a street late at night, typically, on your way back to the ghetto, when suddenly a song comes to you, urged on by the rhythm of your boots against the pavement or the breaths escaping your nostrils or the blood throbbing in your ears. If unworthy, a tune might fade away in an hour or two, but even if temporarily forgotten the worthy melodies come back home to roost like homing pigeons, sometimes with a set of lyrics wrapped around their legs. Suddenly you find yourself humming a tune as if it always existed, as if it were inevitable, only to realize it’s one you invented yourself. You feel like a rich person then, like you just earned and spent a million dollars all at once.

  YOUR FIRST GIG is at the Lamplighter. Sally and Marlene – the divorcees – are both there, along with Sally’s two children. With some difficulty, over the rustles and murmurings of the crowd, the scrapings of chairs, and the clinks of cups and silverware and shouts for beverages at the bar, you tune your guitars. Before the gig, along the riverbank, from one of Froggy’s hand-carved antler pipes you partook of his twin’s high-octane marijuana. You wonder now if that was a good idea.

  The house is packed, but not for Fleegle’s sake. There were two others performers ahead of you, and two more will follow. From their front center table, Sally and Marlene smile at you. Your groupies.

  The gig goes well. When the M.C. signals that your time is up, you hand the stage over to the next act. By then your guitar case winks with nickels, dimes, and quarters. There are even a few dollar and larger bills folded under the hastily scrawled sign:

  PLEASE FEED THE HUNGRY FLEEGLE!

  * * *

  TO SUPPLEMENT THE INCOME FROM YOUR GIGS, YOU and Ajax worked the night dishwashing shift at a Mexican restaurant. For three-fifty an hour you scrubbed pans encrusted with hardened queso, congealed guacamole, and refried beans. You heaved steaming dish racks from the Hobart machine, swept shredded cheese and lettuce from walk-in refrigerator, and scraped and hosed crud from the convoluted interstices in the Rubbermaid floor mats.

  To further supplement your income, you helped Marlene clean houses. By then you and she were lovers. You washed windows, folded sheets, vacuumed and waxed floors. Sometimes you’d end up making love on the beds you were supposed to be making. It surprised you to discover that people who subscribe to Reader’s Digest and Prevention have full-length mirrors over their beds.

  Your gut was still bothering you. At Ajax’s recommendation, you visited a holistic practitioner whose office was on the top floor of a two-family house on the Willamette. A sign on the side of the house said:

  Dr. Harold E. Soda

  Holistic Health

  An arrow on the same sign pointed to a flight of stairs leading to a screened door on which you knocked. A plump man with bushy white hair and granny glasses answered. He led you through a kitchen to a small, paneled room with a rubber examination table. You heard the sound of a rushing stream. You assumed it was the river outdoors, then realized it was artificial. On one wall there was a poster of a yogi master sitting cross-legged with his palms held up in his lap and his head enshrouded by a tutti-frutti aura. On the opposite wall a chart showed a human cranium divided into segments – like a map of the United States – with each segment a different color.

  Dr. Soda had you strip and lie on a rubber table. He examined you with a stethoscope like a regular doctor. He checked your eyes and ears. Then he left the room.

  He returned carrying a wooden box from which he withdrew a long thin needle and twirled it between his thumb and forefinger. With a wad of moist cotton he sterilized the big toe of your left foot. You’ll feel a tingling, he said, twisting the needle into your big toe. Into the callus of the heel of the same foot he twisted another needle. While inserting more needles into parts of your left foot he asked you about your recent past, if you had undergone any traumatic experiences lately. You told him what you felt to be pertinent. Interesting, Dr. Soda said, twirling another needle into your flesh.

  This friend, this teacher, he meant – or means – a great deal to you?

  Yes, you said. He does; he did.

  Hmmm. (Another needle). How recently did these events occur?

  Just over two months.

  Dr. Soda nodded. I think I know what you need to do …

  He left the room again, returning this time with a slip of paper he handed to you while you dressed. The slip said: eucalyptus, licorice, licorice root, comfrey, chamomile, slippery elm … You are to drink an infusion of these items, Dr. Soda instructed, twice a day for two weeks. He then leaned close and, as though divulging a powerful secret, whispered: You’ll need a piece of blue glass.

  Blue glass? you said.

  Three inches square, approximately. Fill a clear bottle with tap water. Not bottled or distilled. It must be tap.

  Tap, you said.

  Put a tablespoon of the infusion into the water, cover the bottle with the piece of blue glass, and place the bottle in direct sunlight.

  Direct sunlight, you said.

  When it’s been exposed to direct sunlight for a day, drink the water.

  Drink the water, you said.

  Repeat for ten days.

  Ten days, you said.

  Dr. Soda stood. As you put your socks on he smiled proudly as though you were already cured. Then, remembering something, he leaned close again and whispered:

  Don’t tell anyone. If you tell anyone, the cure will lose its power.

  Having accepted thirty dollars in food stamps as payment, Dr. Soda patted you on the back and showed you the door.

  ONE WEEKEND LATE in August, you, Ajax, Froggy, Marlene, Sally and her two daughters squeezed into Sally’s 1963 Volvo station wagon and rode to Mary’s Peak to watch the lunar eclipse. As you hiked the trail, Ajax spoke of the Grand Alignment, saying how in 1982 for the first time in more than a hundred years all nine planets of the solar system would line up in a ninety-degree arc on the same side of the sun. The stresses resulting from said alignment would alter the angle of earth’s axis and the speed of its rotation, causing geological faults to tear open everywhere, resulting in catastrophic eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves, and other calamitous events.

  San Francisco’s gonna plunge into the Pacific, Ajax predicted. I wouldn’t put much stock in Seattle, either.

  As you reached the summit, on cue, the eclipse began. It turned the world gray and blue, like one of Picasso’s Blue Period masterpieces. On the spot, with your guitars, you and Ajax composed a song titled “Silver and Blue” that you played and the others sang along to, with Froggy shaking a pair of maracas.

  From Mary’s Peak you drove down to the Pacific coast. To the roar of the surf you built a driftwood bonfire and ate smoked Chinook salmon.

  Maybe it was the blue water you’d been drinking, but you felt better than you had in a long time. You were young and healthy with your future ahead of you and the past with all its blunders and disappointments left behind.

  * * *

  YOU HAD JUST RETURNED FROM THE COAST WHEN YOU saw the teacher for the last time
. You and Marlene were having breakfast together at the Beanery when he came in and stood in line for coffee. Since you last saw him, the teacher had grown a mustache. You disapproved. It made his never-that-strong-to-begin-with chin all but disappear, while giving him that rub me the wrong way and I’ll bitch slap you silly look that you had come to associate with crusty gay men.

  You’d changed, too. Your hair was longer, practically an afro. You had a suntan. So did Marlene. Having spent the night on the beach, you drove to Newport for bowls of Mo’s clam chowder (pat of butter, dash of paprika sprinkled on top). Afterward you strolled past the tuna boats lined up at dockside, Pride o’ Washington, Taurus, Faye III … watching fishermen empty catches out of the brine solutions where they’d been frozen. As you and your date walked by, one fisherman wolf-whistled and shouted, Hey, there, sweetheart! When you turned, the fisherman said, Not you, pal, I was speaking to the lady, though you’re pretty cute yourself! From there you drove to Lighthouse Cove, where, in a sandy patch between volcanic rocks with people milling all around, you made impetuous love. As Marlene undid your drawstring pants and took you in her mouth you lay there with your head on the sand gazing up at the clouds, held in perfect suspense between arousal and fear. Afterward, as you climbed the bluff, with two hundred feet over and under her, Marlene suddenly froze. I can’t, she had said. Like Cary Grant at the end of North by Northwest, you rescued Marlene/Eva Marie Saint, the surf booming below. There followed a crackle of applause from some spectators on top of the bluff, the same people who (you suspected) had watched you having sex earlier.

  No sooner did your eyes meet, yours and the teacher’s, than you averted yours. You and Marlene were sitting by a window with your seat facing the counter. You were glad Marlene was with you, glad to be sitting with someone and not by yourself. You were especially glad that the someone was a good-looking woman. From behind, the teacher may not have been able to see how good-looking she was. But he could see that she was a woman, and he saw you talking with each other, smiling and laughing, having a good time. He saw you not being lonely or sad or bum-like or needy, saw you doing just fine without him, in other words.

  You wondered: would the teacher come over? There was no question that he’d seen you, that you had both seen each other. From where he stood it would have been impossible for him not to see you. You, on the other hand, might have failed to see or recognize him, especially with that silly mustache. And you were with someone. It would be up to him to come over and greet you. When he did, you would be cordial, you’d be gracious. You’d say, Well, now, this is an unexpected treat. How nice to see you! How’ve you been? Let me introduce you to my friend, Marlene. Marlene, meet ——, my former teacher. We go way back, don’t we? Pull up a chair and join us, why don’t you?

  Yes, you would be gracious, as gracious as possible, so gracious the teacher would ask himself how he could have been so petty, so spiteful, so cold and discourteous to someone so gracious, so magnanimous. Oh, it would be a fine moment, a moment that would make up for almost everything, almost. Finished with your breakfast, you would get up and say, Gee, I wish we could stay and chat a little bit longer, but Marlene and I have to be heading off, don’t we Marlene? We’re going to spend a few days at the seashore (a white lie). Yep, we’ve got ourselves a little place there (a not-quite-white lie), nothing fancy, just a little old bungalow on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Lots of whales out there this time of year. Nothing better than looking out to sea first thing in the morning with a cup of hot coffee and seeing a whale blow a spouter out there on the horizon, huh, Marlene? Especially after a good night of vigorous heterosexual lovemaking. Well, now, it’s sure been nice seeing you. Sorry to have to run. See you around.

  Then off you’d go, you and Marlene, arm in arm, with your former teacher left behind to tally up his losses.

  When you looked up again the teacher wasn’t there.

  He’d bought his coffee and gone.

  THIS MORNING THE CHIME OF A TEXT MESSAGE WOKE me. I picked up my phone and saw the time: 7:57. The loft was icy. I put on my slippers and went downstairs to raise the thermostat, which I’d lowered before going to bed. The thermostat setting: ; the temperature: . Humidity; 57%.

  According to Wikipedia, 57 C.E. (LVII) was a common year, starting on a Saturday (today is Saturday) of the Julian calendar when it was called the Year of the Consulship of Caesar and Piso, or, less frequently, year 810 ab urbe condita. Fifty-seven is the sixteenth discrete semiprime and the sixth in the (3.q) family. Together with fifty-eight it forms the fourth discrete bi-prime pair. It has an aliquot sum of twenty-three and is the first composite member of the 23-aliquot tree. Though it is not a prime number, fifty-seven is jokingly known as the “Grothendieck prime” after a story in Notices of the American Mathematical Society wherein German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck mistakenly provided fifty-seven as an example of a prime number.

  Fifty-seven also = the varieties of foods claimed by the H. J. Heinz Company since 1896, when, while riding a train in New York City, the company’s founder and president Henry Heinz saw a billboard advertising “21 varieties of shoes.” At the time, his company was already producing more than sixty products, but he considered fifty-seven a luckier number than sixty, and it had a better ring to it. Today, though Heinz still uses the “57 Varieties” trademark, it makes over 5,700 products.

  Psalm 57: “Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast.”

  Every fifty-seven years, the phases of the Moon return to the same hour of the same day.

  The message on my phone was a birthday greeting. I was born fifty-seven years ago on Feb. 15, 1957. Today I am fifty-seven years old.

  From “RESERVE TYPE BATTERY,” Patent No. 4,218,525

  XXII.

  The Hospitality of Circumstance

  Corvallis, Oregon, 1980

  YOU LEFT CORVALLIS IN NOVEMBER OF 1980 AFTER A long dry Indian summer, the rainy season having just begun. The day of your departure you returned once again to the teacher’s house.

  It was around two in the morning. You couldn’t sleep, visited again by the insomnia that would only grow worse with time. For a while you lay there tossing and turning on your stained mattress in your $30 room.

  Then you got up, got dressed, and went out.

  It was raining – a drizzle at first. As you kept walking, the rain fell harder. You carried a blue umbrella courtesy of Winston, your landlord.

  At first you weren’t sure where you were going. You walked without a plan or destination. You’d walked for over an hour when it occurred to you that you were on your way to the teacher’s house again.

  Before long you were face to face with the sign saying Goodnight Avenue, feeling remarkably similar to how you had felt that first day in Corvallis, as if all that had happened since had been a dream, nothing more. You’d only just arrived in Oregon. Your former teacher hadn’t yet seen you. You had not met Curtis; he and the teacher had not accused you of stealing two hundred dollars from a wooden box or contrived other means to expel you from their home. You had not rented a room in a funky boarding house, nor performed in a band, nor made love with a blond divorcee on the lee side of a sand dune on the Pacific shore. You carried no guitar and no backpack, just the blue umbrella, its source a mystery. You’d come three thousand miles with nothing more.

  You passed one dark house after another till you stood there, across the street from the teacher’s house again, dark as it had been that first night, the same flickering amber light burning in one of its windows. The Toyota was parked in the driveway.

  This time things will be different, you said to yourself as you stood there. This time when I knock I’ll be greeted with a smile. The teacher will throw his arms around me and hug me. With a gentle hand on my shoulder he’ll escort me in. We’ll have tea, talk…

  Then you were back in Bethel, in front of th
e carriage house with the iron hitching post, thirteen years old again, standing in the rain not knowing what to do, or knowing but not having the guts to do it. The incipient butterfly, the puer aeternus.

  To be carried away, to be plucked from the common herd: that’s what you longed for while pacing the sidewalk in the rain in front of that former carriage house with the blue door. You longed to walk through that blue door into a destiny all your own. And you did – but only after being invited in. You were too shy to knock.

  You walked back to the Ghetto and packed your things.

  Background of the Invention

  “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.”

  THE TRAGEDY OF GROWING OLD IS THAT THE YOUNG PEOPLE living inside us have no idea what’s going on. For them time stands still. Only the aging body suggests – through sagging skin and thinning hair, tiredness and aches and pains (“a touch of bursitis”) – that time has passed. Still the inner child remains eternally young and hence in a constant state of perplexity.

  Recently I read about a radical experiment that took place in a converted monastery in New Hampshire, where a group of elderly men and women spent five days in a sort of time warp, with vintage books arrayed on the shelves, midcentury paintings, and Perry Como playing on the radio. No mirrors on the walls or reflective surfaces anywhere. Everything in their environment designed to make its occupants feel as if time hadn’t gone by, that they were twenty or twenty-five all over again.