The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

by Polly Horvath

  “Yes,” said Jocelyn. “But in the end, it was a waste of time being afraid of crocodiles, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, yes, perhaps you’re right, well … didn’t mean to dredge it all up again,” he said as if he had mentioned it even once up until then, but perhaps, I thought, he was keeping a tight rein on his desire to talk about it with us, guessing we preferred to be left alone, not to have to think about it if we chose not to. It’s so hard to know why anyone really does anything. “Anyhow,” he said, rising and putting a marker in his book and shuffling his papers together, “help yourselves to whatever you’d like. I do beg you, whatever you find anywhere. Help yourselves to the um…” He looked around the room wildly as if desperate to find something that would tempt us from our sorrows. “Help yourselves to the books!”

  There were books in every room. The kitchen was full of shelves of cookbooks and books on food, on the customs of dinner, everything related to the ritual of eating, the gathering, the growing, the hunting of food. Similarly the bathrooms were full of books about water, oceans, sea life, novels like Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea that had nautical themes; Treasure Island was there, and Robinson Crusoe. Uncle Marten seemed very methodical in this way. The living room and dining room had built-in bookshelves that reached to the high cathedral ceilings. It was impractical if you wanted something from a top shelf, but I guess Uncle Marten had already read those books a long time ago because those shelves were festooned with cobwebs.

  All the books on the living room shelves were leatherbound. I asked Uncle Marten where he found so many leatherbound books, and he said he had them custom-done, books he liked or, after reading their reviews online in The New York Times, thought he would like, he ordered and had sent to a bookbinder and bound in leather before being dropped off on the island. It must have cost a fortune. This, more than the size of the house, so large for one person, underscored for me the kind of money Uncle Marten had. It was such an unnecessary thing to do with money. As if you didn’t know what to do with the dollar bills that kept piling up.

  I came from a house where every dollar was earmarked. Where carrot tops were saved for soup. Where you didn’t buy a book you could get from the library. I didn’t mind him having so much, why shouldn’t he? And why shouldn’t he spend it as he liked? But the difference in the way people lived interested me. There was a kind of comfort in the Baggie full of vegetable peelings for soup always in our fridge. It had my mother written all over it. That’s a kind of comfort he would never know because he would never have to. There was no need for the security of the soup bag. He could afford to fly in soup from a fine restaurant if that’s what he wanted. But it wouldn’t be the same. On the other hand, there was probably a kind of comfort for Uncle Marten when another leatherbound book was dropped on the island. That’s all those things ever were, comfort, they didn’t mean more than that. Like a rug being pulled from beneath us, Jocelyn’s and my familiar comforts were gone. I wondered if someday I would regard the arrival of a new leatherbound book with the contentment of continuity. If it would ever be my life. Even if it was, it would never be my life as it had been before, believing that all rested solidly in permanence. Not knowing that everything built could be unbuilt in the blink of an eye.

  MARTEN KNOCKERS

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME since I thought about anyone on earth being connected to me, and so when I heard that my brothers were dead and I was responsible for two girls it hardly seemed possible. Who were they and why would they suddenly be appearing on my doorstep? It was like having cats drop down from the sky along with the rain. It was familiar ordinary things behaving in unexpected ways. They weren’t there and then they suddenly were, and none of it made any sense really. I didn’t know what to do with living things suddenly appearing. Oh well, I thought, I’ll just move over and give them a couple of rooms. I had, fortunately, quite a lot of rooms. I hoped they liked books. I had a lot of those, too. I couldn’t really think of much else I had to offer them, but perhaps they wouldn’t require much. Cats didn’t. My roommate in college had a cat, and as I recall all it required was a bit of water and some dry cat food. Of course, I knew better than to give the girls cat food. I didn’t mean that literally. And I supposed they would leave me alone to continue working. That was the crucial thing.

  As soon as I made my fortune and quit being a stockbroker, I built myself a large Victorian-style mansion and filled it with books because I couldn’t wait to go back to what I liked best, reading and studying and this time without the kind of nonsense you got at a university. I’d really had enough of all that when I was going for my degrees. You’d think it would be about knowledge at a university, but it isn’t. It’s about all kinds of other things that are, I suppose, what make up most people’s lives. I saw that if I got a university job, my life as a professor would be full of things like acquiring a university wife or, worse, another professor as a spouse, someone who would always tell me I was saying the wrong thing, and having to go to endless parties with other professors and pretend to be interested in their self-interested pursuits and listen to their dull prattle and eat shrimp balls and iffy homemade sushi made by someone in, as I recalled from attending university functions, khakis and Birkenstocks. You always knew when you were at a party because the professors switched from blue jeans to khakis. As a graduate student I did not have to worry about clothes protocol, but if I became a professor I would have to and I was sure I would forget to change into my khakis and arrive in blue jeans and become a social pariah. And this is what I would worry about. Not undiscovered knowledge—but pants. I would spend endless hours worried about my pants. I decided I’d rather make a heaping mound of money and worry about what I liked. But I was aware, of course, of the disappointment the family, what was left of it, felt when after what had appeared to be a promising blossoming into respectability and normalcy, I returned to my shameful oddness.

  MELINE

  UNCLE MARTEN had been a source of endless speculation among the family—our rich, strange relative. The only one of us with any money. Grownups think because they are taller than children their voices carry above their heads, never landing in their ears, but I heard it all, my parents talking about all kinds of things. I heard them when I was supposed to be sleeping and when I was in one room and they were in another or even when I was supposed to be eating and they were drifting about talking from room to room, sure I was too occupied with my food to notice or care about their conversations.

  I had only been mildly interested in eavesdropping on my parents’ gossip about family members, but now I was glad I had. I was not supposed to have heard my dad telling my mom how Jocelyn’s mother thought Uncle Marten had acquired a vulgar amount of money. He said Jocelyn’s father thought it wasted on him. My father admitted he was a little jealous and couldn’t understand why Marten wouldn’t want to help his less fortunate younger brothers, although, naturally, if Marten had ever offered him money, he would have returned it in short order. But still, he couldn’t help wondering that he didn’t even offer. It was the lack of the offer that was so curious to him. He knew his brother wasn’t stingy. As far as he knew, he didn’t hate his family. He hadn’t ever even seemed to care about luxury or money. Why then go off alone to some island to sit on all that money like some queer bird on an egg? Who was his brother in the end?

  My mother, on the other hand, thought it was lovely that Uncle Marten had so much money. So much money to do with whatever he liked. Imagine, Meline! she would say to me while shaking out clean, freshly laundered shirts and smelling them happily. They had just come in off the line on the balcony. She loved folding clothes. Imagine! My mother never wanted what other people had. It was like a small burst of exploding light within her all the time, her happy realization of the good things that were. Whether she or someone else had them was never the point for her.

  MARTEN KNOCKERS

  ONCE I SETTLED into my brand-new completely secluded house, I burned the midnight oil, quite
literally sometimes when the power went out, trying to find newness in the world. Trying to find bits and pieces that others hadn’t. I have a theory that important things have been left out of the great store of human knowledge and that that is why nothing makes any sense. The great store of human knowledge, after all, is really not so great. What do we really know? It’s more like a giant jigsaw puzzle with three quarters of the pieces missing from the box. In fact, we’re not even sure those pieces are out there anywhere, so when we look, it’s really actually pretty futile in a way. That’s one way to think about it.

  Once when Meline was particularly lucid and wasn’t just wandering around with a strange, determined look on her face and lichen in her hair, she asked me what I would think if I found one really good piece of knowledge that made a whole section fit together and make sense. Would I feel I’d done what I’d set out to do with my life? But she didn’t get it at all. My dream was to find many, many pieces. It’s why I bought the island, it’s why I wanted to live alone in such an isolated way. Because without distractions, and with lots of money and no one I had to kowtow to or be obligated to in order to continue my studies, I could study from day to night and night to day again if I wished, and in such a luxury of time and information without the limits of focus I hoped to find many things.

  Most of the discoveries made are not very good and they’re made by nincompoops in order to advance their careers, so they’re made out by the nincompoops themselves to be of much greater import than they are, and then others get on the bandwagon and build their own nincompoopy schemes and theories from the building blocks of these careerists and nothing of any real importance gets added to the store of human knowledge. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to discover something without any desire for personal glory, but just to benefit mankind? Of course, mankind probably didn’t care about the motive behind the discovery, did it? It just wanted its soup quick and microwavable. Probably, Meline, I told her, the ancients had microwaves. Lots of information has been lost and needs to be rediscovered. If we could dig up everything they knew …

  “Who will dig it up—you?” asked Meline.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not an archaeologist. No, anything I discover will be new. Maybe it will be lost knowledge rediscovered, but that comes to the same thing. Anyway, the point is to have as much knowledge as possible.”

  “And do what with it?” Meline asked.

  I just shook my head. I do feel that if you don’t already understand scholarship for scholarship’s sake there is no point trying to explain it to you. You should take up another hobby. You should knit.

  Twice a year I would leave the island for academic conferences. There I would give papers and so get a chance to share what I had found. Disappointingly, my papers always seemed to be better than everyone else’s. I realized that I had the luxury of time to do only my research. I didn’t have to teach as well. But even so, I would think the other presenters would occasionally come up with something better than they did. I always held out hope that I would meet interesting people and not come back to the island confirmed in the mediocrity of academics. But time and time again, I’d arrive home thinking that anyone who has chosen academia has to be too stupid to find his mouth with his fork.

  After the last trip I slammed my briefcase onto the table and stormed to bed. Conferences invariably put me in a bad mood. I went so full of expectation, I imagined some kind of idyllic community of scholars sitting together, sharing our enthusiasm, piecing our knowledge into some kind of great quilt, but then I would simply get lost in the muddle of people, the universities and conference centers, the hotels and dinners and cocktail parties and speaking with professors. All those people looking at me funny, thinking I was some kind of mad genius, a Howard Hughes character. And then I got the letters. People wanting money to fund projects, fund careers, fund themselves, fund travel. “Fund off,” I would think to myself, ripping them into shreds.

  One professor, wanting research money, buttonholed me at a cocktail party, praising my paper extravagantly. “And you don’t even have expertise in this area,” she gushed.

  “I live on an island, madame,” I said. “I have a lot of time to think.”

  People were, by and large, exasperating.

  And now, although my two young nieces behaved very well, I hadn’t a clue what to do with them. Even though, between my work and their grief, we hardly saw each other. Of course, I was very upset about the loss of my brothers and I realized that the girls must be even more upset about the loss of their fathers and mothers, but collective mourning is not my style. You do not move to an island if you are fond of group activities. I felt badly, though, really dreadful about what I could only guess they were going through. But beyond that I really did not know what to do for them. And I was ashamed that I did not enjoy having dinner with them, especially because it was the only time I spent with them, if you could call sitting at the same table and reading while eating spending time, which I did because it was certainly more time than I had spent with anyone else in the last twenty years or so. Really, by my standards we were becoming quite intimate.

  Finally, after a week, my conscience smote me even about this. I realized it was not a worthy thing to do, to shun my responsibility for their care even to avoiding dinner conversation. That, despite myself, if I was going to take on this newfound responsibility I would have to change. Or at least amend some of my habits. My heartfelt belief was that all meals should be eaten hunched over a desk with your nose in a book and everything you were eating chopped up and eaten out of a bowl with a spoon, the better to scoop it up without having to lift your eyes from the page. I continued to eat breakfast and lunch this way but stopped reading at dinner, although I still brought a book and notebook and pen down with me, hopeful that Meline and Jocelyn would be somehow uninterested in me and I would be granted a reprieve from all this noxious stimulation.

  The second fact I had to face about the dinners was that my nieces didn’t seem to be enjoying their hot dogs and mac and cheese. Not even when I tried to enliven things by topping the hot dogs with Cheez Whiz. They ate stolidly, uncomplainingly, but occasionally wincing, and I felt ashamed and furtive and muttered things like, “I know I read about this in a magazine somewhere. At least I think I did. What did they call it? Dogs topped with cheese? No, that wasn’t it. Sunny dogs! Yes, I think that was the rather perky name for it. Sunny dogs. You put Cheez Whiz on the dogs, the sun so to speak, you see. Oh well,” I said softly, feeling defeated. “Oh well.”

  Jocelyn and Meline startled every time I spoke. Then they dropped their eyes, apparently as embarrassed as I was by the hole I was digging for myself.

  Worst of all, instead of thinking about the missing element in the unified field theory, I found myself thinking about the food situation the rest of the night. I wasn’t used to defeat or to behaving in ways of which I was ashamed or making up stories about reading recipes in magazines. I knew I must amend this immediately and stop making embarrassing gestures to cover up my lethargy about food. Perhaps I ought to start eating better myself. I didn’t keep up with health issues. I wasn’t as young as I used to be. I’d already lost my hair. Most of it anyway, except for two rows at the sides of my head. If I wasn’t going to learn to plan meals and cook, perhaps it was time to let someone else worry about the food. After all, even I knew that hot dogs and mac and cheese were not acceptable dinner fare for all. It was never, not once, served at any of the fancy conference dinners I went to, it wasn’t even served at the less fancy rubber chicken dinners. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I’d never seen it served anywhere at all. Not even on planes.

  I had gotten the idea from the television one night in a hotel room at a conference in Manitoba when I’d seen a Kraft commercial and a happy mom, a happy suburban Canadian mom, who was somehow even blander, safer, and more reliable than a happy suburban American mom, putting a plate of macaroni and cheese and hot dogs in front of her three tow-haired little boys, and the boys�
� sheer delight in being served such cheerful suburban bland Canadian food and the mom’s pleasure in being able to provide the kind of food that would make her otherwise rather lifeless little brood brim over with excitement. It was so much happiness spilling over everywhere, so much undeserved, mindless contentment from so simple a thing, it was so easy for them, there were no dark skeletons there, here were lives so simple that a plateful of bland foodstuffs initiated an attack of sheer rapture, and I’d thought, yes, that looks easy enough. I can do that. I have not sunk so low into the depths of human despair, the deep endless well of the dark night of the soul, that I cannot be salvaged by a little mac and cheese. I can be my own woman of the house and serve such things to myself. Perhaps to be bland is to be good. Perhaps we are saved not by our passion, our pain, or our search but by our utter indifference to any of that nonsense. Perhaps it is not truth and the struggle to find it but really blandness that will set us free. Perhaps I should join their lifeless but utterly contented party. At least, when all’s said and done, with a case of mac and cheese and a freezer full of hot dogs, I will never have to cook.