Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “Not at all. The man’s a healer. A shaman. He’s performing a public service.”

  “By getting himself killed, you mean?”

  “By not getting himself killed,” the doctor said. “By stepping outside the walls, and confronting something wild and scary in the dark. And then again the next night. And the next. Until it’s second nature. Until he doesn’t get spooked anymore, he doesn’t look away. Believe me, you’ll want to look away in the leprosarium tomorrow too. Everyone does. But you won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because, it’s why you came.”

  Teddy no longer had any idea, if he ever had, why he’d come. The stubbled moon, the stench of offal and blood, the moronic heh-heh-hehs of the hyenas, their noisome ravings…the whole night seemed hostile, unpenetrated. Even as the hyenas fed on their suppers, they kept nipping at each other compulsively, unable to hold back, to let each other alone. Letting each other alone was not in their nature.

  “You wanted to know what it was like here, you said. Back in the wild old days of Burton and Rimbaud, and for centuries before that? Well,” Dave said, “it was like this.”

  The hyena man stuck another strip of meat in his jaw. The blood ran down his chin in dark strings. He stared directly at Teddy, showing his teeth. He appeared to want to communicate something.

  Madness. And yet Teddy could not for the life of him look away.

  “Your turn,” Dave said.

  13

  All That Stuff That Comes Later

  “I don’t care about the movie. It’s just good to be out.”

  “If you call this out,” Oren said.

  “It’s out enough. Look how lovely everything is,” Gail said. “What more could you ask for?”

  Oren shrugged. It was the question of his life; it had begun to take on, over time, an almost religious weight. Unfortunately the more it weighed, the less prospect there seemed of an answer.

  But later for that. It was Saturday night and they were going to the movies like an ordinary couple. Whether there was any such thing as an ordinary couple was yet another heavy, semireligious question, he supposed. According to Heidegger, the ordinary was always extraordinary. But suppose you were one of those people who perpetually longed for the extraordinary; did that mean you really longed for the ordinary? Or was longing for the extraordinary the most ordinary longing of all?

  Oren was feeling pretty ordinary himself at the moment—extraordinarily so, in fact—and in a good way. Because it was lovely out; any fool could see that. The air was warm. The sun, that plump aristocrat, lounged on its chaise of silken clouds, dispensing its golden favors. Fragrant white blossoms sifted down from the trees, feathery and buoyant, like a parody of snowfall; he felt their soft landings in his hair. Up ahead, under the slanted marquee of the Carthage Twin, the other ordinary couples were pulling out their wallets. True, unlike them, he and Gail would not be sitting together, or holding hands, or sharing a box of the Twin’s rubbery popcorn, or breaking off hunks of dark chocolate bedded in foil, let alone engaging in the sort of furtive and delirious groping that kept not just theirs but indeed all theaters, and that great thronged projection room the planet itself, in business. No, none of these pleasures would be available to them. Still, just to coexist for a few hours in the intimacy of that darkened dome, watching other peoples’ dramas play out for a change—that would be no small thing.

  Except when they arrived at the ticket window, the movie they’d hoped to see was sold-out. And the other, to judge by the garish semiotics of the poster, looked not just mildly but offensively stupid.

  Stymied, he jammed his hands into his pockets. “What do you think?”

  “Oh, I don’t care,” Gail said. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t care either.”

  “You choose.” That her voice was still light did not entirely disguise its edge of insistence. “It doesn’t matter to me, honestly. Whatever you think.”

  Oren knew what he thought: he thought he’d have liked to stop standing around running old lines from Marty and go in and see a movie, any movie. All he wanted was a couple of hours in cool, anonymous darkness, free of the ethical, moral, and, increasingly, sexual discomforts to which his affair with Gail Hastings had consigned him. But he also knew what Gail thought, or rather how. Knew that for all her apparent blitheness she was less frivolous (i.e., more uptight and humorless) than he was; that she had zero affection for the tropes and traditions (i.e., glibness, fart jokes, gratuitous nudity) of Hollywood comedy; and that as a consequence she’d sit there enduring the thing stoically (i.e., miserably, resentfully) but also checking her watch every so often—the face glowed in the darkness, a blue, flickering, iridescent moon—and sighing audibly, as she did whenever he screened for her something from his repertoire of personal favorites. When it came to movies, it wasn’t just the silly comic stuff that bored Gail. They all did. Indeed, the whole elegant narrative arc Oren had labored to master back in Intro to Screenwriting—setup, plot points, complication, resolution—left her sunk deep in the cushions, lips compressed to the vanishing point, gazing at the screen with the lidded resignation of a teenager trapped in a car with her parents. Nothing new or interesting, she seemed to be thinking, could possibly come of this.

  “But you’re enjoying it,” she’d protest when he reached for the remote. “You don’t have to turn it off on my account.”

  “It’s only a movie,” he’d say, with a breezy Gallic insouciance that had never come naturally to him, or for that matter unnaturally, though he’d been working on it for years now, ever since his first midnight screening of Breathless back on Roger Barstow’s sofa in Alphabet City. Of course that was only a movie too. So what? Oren liked movies, preferred them in fact to that other passive indoor diversion, his life; and though perhaps someday, when he was Gail’s age, say, he too would grow tired of movies and consent to see only the most obscure, plotless, low-budget offerings, with no-name actors who did not speak English and whose faces were grooved in unfamiliar, unshapely, half-ugly ways, he hoped that day did not come soon. Because few such movies came to the Carthage Twin. And even when they did, they did not stay long.

  Still, going to a movie was a means, not an end, part of his ongoing campaign to normalize their time together, provide a few shared experiences that weren’t strictly sexual. Especially as the strictly sexual wasn’t going so well either at the moment. More and more he felt the pressure of some expectation in bed, some act of aggression, some minor savagery, and in response to this pressure his body had begun to register its own protest. It would not be moved. But Gail seemed on a mission these days to satisfy herself by any means necessary, and she had. Even now, an hour later, under the marquee, she glowed a little in victory, her eyes creamy, her lips full and shapely like the spout of a pitcher. People she knew were checking her out surreptitiously from the lobby. She paid no notice. Little kazoos of private pleasure were buzzing inside her. She hung against Oren’s arm with her hair rumpled, humming to herself. Where to now?

  But there was nowhere to go. Their hours in Don’s bed had ruined them. It was as if they’d awoken from an uneasy dream to find the sun gone down, the windows glazed in frost, and themselves helplessly conjoined on the mattress, an ungainly, twin-like creature with multiple limbs and a doubled back. Just getting out of bed was a trial. And what then? Where should they bend their steps? The doors of the prosaic were closed to them. Gail had a daughter at home and loathed his apartment even more than he did. Going out to dinner was a nonstarter. They had no mutual friends. It was too warm outside to swim indoors and too cold in the lake to swim outside. He had no bike or aptitude for tennis, and no power on earth or in heaven would induce him to take up golf.

  The only place he could think of to go was Chez Blackburn—their winter palace, their fortress of solitude. But that too was off-limits to them now.

  Don had been sent home from rehab. On the surface of course this was a good and hopeful thin
g, a sign that, after four months, his progress was sufficient in the eyes of the insurance company to recommend discharge. But what it really meant was the opposite. His recovery was no longer statistically probable. The insurance company, unwilling to pay out tens of thousands of dollars in a losing effort, would wipe him off the books and cut their losses. They’d sent Don home with a cane, a part-time Bosnian attendant, some heavy-duty prescriptions, and a sheaf of printouts detailing the various regimens he should follow for his various physical therapies. That tidied up their account sheets and made everyone feel better.

  As for Don, and any hopes he may have nurtured for a triumphant restoration to home and hearth, that was another story. For Don it was more like house arrest. He spent his days on the sofa in his terry-cloth robe, unresponsive and immobile, staring out at a gray, tenebrous sky. His eyes were like marbles, bright but opaque; they reflected more than they admitted. Behind them his brain was either busy reorganizing itself—borrowing live neurons from its undamaged hemisphere and swapping out the dead ones—or else it had gone under completely. In the silence of the house there seemed no way to know.

  In any case, Don’s house was off-limits now. They were in exile, banished from that garden. They had to venture out and take their chances on a Saturday night like everyone else.

  Overhead, the gulls made plaintive little half-cries, finding themselves off course as usual, no seas in sight.

  “So okay, let’s bag the movie,” Oren said. “It’s pretty out, like you said. Let’s just walk.”

  Gail’s eyebrows vaulted northward. “Together?”

  “Either way. I’m happy to walk behind you if you like. It’ll give me a chance to check out your ass.”

  “So that’s what you do back there. I thought you were just a natural follower.”

  “That too.”

  “I don’t know about this.” She glanced around at the pedestrian traffic; for the first time she seemed to register the extent of their exposure. “Where would we walk to?”

  “Who cares? We don’t need a destination. We’ll just walk.”

  “I think I need a destination,” she said. “I’m a more conventional person than you.”

  “Fine. How about a drink?”

  “We just had a drink.”

  “Dinner then.”

  “I’m not hungry, are you? Anyway it’s Saturday: there’s no place good we could get into without a reservation.” She pulled back her hair and affixed it with an elastic band. “What about the bookstore? That might still be open.”

  “Sure.” She’d just been complaining, a few hours earlier, of having too many books at home she hadn’t yet read. But he let that go. “Why not?”

  “Why not,” she repeated carelessly.

  But any lingering doubts soon dissipated into the plush and amiable quiet that held sway over the street. Okay, it wasn’t a movie, but the evening cinematography had a beauty all its own. The maples and spruces that lined the sidewalk, dormant just the week before, were now splitting themselves open, sprouting buds, spilling out shoots. And here was Gail, humming beside him, her linen jacket brushing the hairs on his forearm (they rose obediently to her touch), the beads on her necklace ticking like a watch. They paused on the bridge and gazed down at the river, murmuring placidly below. The surface was glassy, as if in denial of its own lower currents, which were intent on the falls. Or at peace with them, he thought.

  What was it, this harmonic force that came blasting through the twilight like a pipe organ and made Carthage seem in that moment no longer precious and insular in a bad way but in a good way, rare and cherishable and (for he knew his existence here was only a passing experiment) poignant, like chamber music in a village church, or a fairgrounds glimpsed from an airplane? Here was the human community that he’d sought and avoided for so long. Retired men in fishing hats hitting tennis balls in the park. Kids selling candy to raise money for the lacrosse team. Young families out biking after dinner, the parents peeking over their shoulders, the kids in their absurd helmets and training wheels tootling along behind them. The rituals and protections of family life. Would he ever join in?

  Through the open doorway of the bookshop they could hear the bland acoustic music its owners preferred, guitars and banjos twanging in a minor key. Gail strolled right in and was warmly greeted, like the regular she was. Oren lingered outside. It was a small shop and it seemed politic to maintain some distance, so he pretended to be absorbed in the window displays while he in fact checked out his hair. It looked windblown, displaced; he tried to pat it down where it was lopsided. Inside, Gail was scanning the bookshelves, her head cocked, her weight poised adroitly on one leg, like a ravenous bird greedy for crumbs. What was she looking for now? No wonder her husband had run off—the intensity of her search was boundless, prodigious; he too would be broken and lost in it. Overwhelmed.

  She glanced up. Well? she seemed to ask. Coming in?

  But he had given himself to this woman, however grudgingly, however incompletely; there would be no getting himself back now. He pushed the door open. Despite the bell’s loud jingle no one looked up. The owner was on the phone, the clerk was boxing up an order. And now Gail was talking to the sole other customer, a fellow in a black sweater. He looked, Oren thought, with his scarf, his serious dark-pored face, and his mass of inky backswept hair, like some visiting lecturer or chamber musician, someone who smoked unfiltered cigarettes and stayed up late talking to colleagues in Berlin or Milan. Behind him were the stacks of new memoirs. Everyone had a story.

  Gail laughed, curling a hand at her throat. Clearly no matter how long Oren stood there waiting to be introduced, the results were bound to be awkward. So he went and browsed the CDs and DVDs instead.

  Lately, and he wasn’t proud of this, it was his habit in bookstores to ignore the books. He’d had it with books. Had it with hoarding himself alone in a room, lost in intangible spheres. Fortunately ignoring books was easy to do these days, especially in bookstores, where, with all the CDs and DVDs for sale, the calendars and diaries, the espresso drinks and cookies and scones and so on, you could hardly find the books.

  Though to be fair, the Carthage bookstore didn’t sell cookies or espresso drinks. For that matter it didn’t sell many books. Like most independent establishments in the area it barely held on. And Oren wasn’t helping. Because in the end, which was not so far from the beginning—they’d been out on the town, if you could call it that, for less than an hour—Gail bought three paperbacks and a hardcover at full list price, and he bought nothing at all.

  “Here,” she said, when they’d arrived back at her house. “I got you a present.”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Oddly enough, I did. I find myself wanting to treat you to things. It’s this bizarre compulsion I have to put my stamp on your life.”

  “Thanks.” She makes me sound like an envelope, he thought. “Should I open it now or later?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to decide that for yourself.”

  “You really didn’t have to.” He slipped the bag with the book down below the seat. He was unaccustomed to receiving presents for no reason. “So?”

  “So what?”

  “You know so what. The guy in the bookstore. With the Italian shoes.”

  “Richard? I told you about Richard.”

  “I’m more or less sure that you didn’t, actually.”

  “I met him in yoga. He just moved here. He bought that frame shop over on Essex. Don’t you remember, they had that article about him in the Carthage Courier?”

  “And reading the Courier would interest me why?”

  “I don’t know. Me, I live in this town. I like to know who’s getting born, who got married, who just died. I guess I’m old-fashioned that way.” She squinted out into the dusk; two squirrels were chasing each other across the lawn. “Richard’s a dear man. You’d like him. He’s from New York. He reads, he meditates. I think he might even be Jewish.”

&nb
sp; “Great. That makes, what, three of us now? In another ten years we’ll have a minyan.”

  It didn’t bother Oren that he was no longer the newest, youngest, most New York Jewish guy in town. If anything it was a relief. The torch of the Law had been passed; he could reclaim his hand.

  “Let’s go in.” Gail’s hand was poised on the door handle. “I’ll make tea.”

  “Won’t your daughter be home?”

  “Mimi? On a Saturday night?” Gail looked incredulous, amused. Never mind that the two of them were now home on a Saturday night. “No chance. Her boyfriend’s in the senior play, and there’ll be the party afterward. You’ll have to find a better excuse.”

  “What play?”

  “Ibsen. A Doll’s House.”

  “Isn’t Ibsen sort of depressing for high school? Whatever happened to Bye Bye Birdie? South Pacific?”

  “They do those every year. The director wanted a change. Unfortunately I made the tactical mistake of encouraging Mimi to try out. Talk about your kiss of death.”

  “Some people would rather watch plays than be in them,” Oren said.

  “Some people get too used to watching. They need to be pushed.” Gail’s breath billowed up against the windshield. “Look, if you don’t want to come in, you don’t have to come in.”

  “Of course I’ll come in.” But he didn’t want to. For some reason—the bad sex earlier, the missed movie, his low blood sugar, the good-looking guy in the bookstore—all he wanted was to go home, pour himself a drink, heat up some leftover chili, and settle in front of the television with a magazine…all the great new habits he’d acquired in that winter of house-sitting. Granted, it did not feel quite the same, indulging such habits in his own house—it felt just a wee bit pathetic in fact—so as they got out of the car, he said, by way of apology, “Who’s he playing? Mimi’s boyfriend I mean.”

  “The husband. What’s his name. Torvald.”

  “Poor guy. Well, if nothing else it’s good practice.”