I'm Trying to Reach You

by Barbara Browning

  The next thing I knew, the eccentric hippie was leaning over me, propping my head up and offering me a sip from the bottle of water he’d been balancing on the top of his head. He was saying, “Just take it easy, man. Have a little water. You just gotta watch your heart rate.”

  The woman with the dyed hair had also dismounted and was watching me with some concern. She asked the hippie, “Do you think I should call somebody?”

  I said, “No, really, I’m okay…”

  She said, “Maybe it’s low blood sugar. Did you eat enough today? It’s not good to exercise on a totally empty stomach. I have a banana in my locker. Does anybody have some Gatorade?”

  I’d fainted, of course. It wasn’t my heart rate, and it wasn’t low blood sugar. It was sheer terror. And then I realized: the silver gift bag was gone. So was Jimmy Stewart.

  I scrambled home as quickly as I could. Jorge opened the door for me and could see something was wrong. He said, “Escuse me for asking, sir, but are you feeling okay?” I said I was just a little dizzy but I’d be fine.

  When I got up to my sublet I started flipping out. I double-locked the door. I checked in the closets, the bathroom, and the balcony just to make sure nobody had snuck in while I was out. I knew I didn’t have enough evidence to call the cops. I wondered if I should at least let a friend know the mess I’d gotten myself into – but whom to call? Sven couldn’t do anything from Stockholm, and besides, this would just upset him. Same went for Ellen who was still staying with her mother. Randy and Jeremy were extremely nice, and might even appreciate the Hardy Boys elements of the story, but would they actually take it seriously? Dan and Fang seemed kind of young and innocent to rope into something like this. José Muñoz would surely suggest something pragmatic, like approaching the Campus Police – not an option as far as I was concerned. If Jimmy had buffaloed Galina at the Torch Club, I was sure he could hoodwink some second-rate campus security guards.

  I knew I couldn’t get any work done, and any further sleuthing at this point would just put me over the edge. No use trying to read or otherwise “distract” myself. I poked around the bathroom and found a bottle of NyQuil. I poured myself a dose in the little plastic cup and gulped it down. And then I poured another. I didn’t have a cold, and I wasn’t trying to harm myself. I just wanted to go to sleep. I brushed my teeth and lay down in my bed, hoping desperately that when I woke up, this all would have been a dream.

  No such luck. I fell asleep all right, but after a fitful night of creepy dreams, I woke with the first crack of light piercing my curtains. I glanced at the clock: 6:42 a.m. I washed my face and brushed my teeth. I made some espresso in my little espresso pot. While it was bubbling, I did some stretching and then went to the door to get The New York Times.

  Sitting there, right next to the Times, was my silver gift bag.

  Oh. My. God.

  I reached down and picked it up. Everything appeared to be intact. The manuscript was there, along with my sketchy notes, and the little book by Miss Ambrose.

  But there was something else in there. An envelope.

  I picked up the newspaper as well, and brought everything inside, setting it all on the coffee table. I went back into the kitchen and poured my coffee, lightening it with half and half. I took a sip to steel myself. I returned to the living room and sat on the sofa. I breathed deeply. This was the moment of truth. I reached into the gift bag.

  My hands trembling slightly, I opened the envelope and pulled out a carefully creased piece of onionskin paper, practically covered, top to bottom, edge to edge, with single-spaced, typewritten text.

  My heart pounded as I read it.

  Jimmy was onto me. He’d seen my notes. He knew I was writing a novel and he knew I’d been stalking him for material – him and his friends. Well, all right then. He could understand that. As an artist himself, he knew that one always walked a fine line between using people and paying tribute to them, and that in the end it was the integrity of the artwork that would take precedence over the feelings of the “little people.” In this case, himself, the tiny dancer, and her pal the freshener. And while Jimmy was well aware that, for his part, certain aspects of his demeanor might lend an air of mystery or comedy to my project, he wanted to make sure, just for his own peace of mind, that I really understood where he was coming from. He knew this may not end up in my novel – it was between him and me. Man to man. One artist to another.

  After all, murder is - or should be - an art. Not one of the “seven lively,” perhaps, but an art nevertheless.

  :)

  But seriously, Mr. Adams. Are you interested in solving this case or in making me look foolish?

  The way the evidence has piled up against me, I can’t say I blame you much. I have no defense against forged papers! I stand guilty as FRAMED! But I’ve got a few things I want to say. I tried to say them once before, and I got stopped colder ’n a mackerel. Well, I’d like to get them said this time, sir. I’ve got a piece to speak, and blow hot or cold, I’m going to speak it.

  He realized his collaboration with Nethermost might seem improbable. But for all their apparent differences, there were certain values they shared: above all, an appreciation of life itself. The freshener was with them on this. And in their own weird ways, all those dead genii had been, too.

  Jimmy acknowledged this simplistic explanation might not win him so many points in my “egghead” set. But he wasn’t making any apologies.

  I’d like people to remember me as someone who was good at his job and seemed to mean what he said.

  My mother used to say to me, “in this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.” For years I was smart. Yeah, that’s probably the first thing you noticed about me that you liked - my colossal brain. I recommend pleasant. And you may quote me.

  Jimmy registered some skepticism regarding the Derridean analyses of the questions of love and loss in my manuscript. He directed me to check out his marginalia on page 214, where next to my footnote on Heidegger’s distinction between “properly dying” (tod-eigentlich sterben) and “perishing” (verenden) he had scrawled, emphatically, “??????!!!!!!!!” My theoretical bag of tricks was just not doing it for him, and in all honesty, I’d have to say he had a point.

  I wouldn’t give you two cents for all your fancy rules, if behind them they didn’t have a little ordinary everyday human kindness, and a little lookin’ out for the other fella, too. I have my own rules and adhere to them. The rule is simple but inflexible… it will be clean, and it will involve the triumph of the underdog over the bully. Well, don’t knock it. That’s the American Dream. And in this world today, full of hatred, a man who knows that one rule has a great trust.

  You know, everybody’s afraid to live.

  Every time I think about how lucky I am, I feel like screaming.

  I let that one sink in.

  I wondered if he was going to make mention of “the Duke” – and of course he did. And while the very act of typing his handle now sends a shiver up my spine, I confess that Jimmy Stewart’s defense of him had a quiet dignity I found almost redemptive:

  Courageous. And decent. He was also far from perfect. He made his mistakes as I have made mine and you have made yours. All in all, I would say they were unintentional. Mistakes of the heart, I would say.

  Well.

  The closing lines of Jimmy’s letter were simultaneously so self-knowing and so psychotic, I really didn’t know what to do with them. They were Schechnerian performance theory pushed to its logical conclusion, which was nothing less than transcendence, and utter madness:

  I am James Stewart playing James Stewart. I couldn’t mess around with the characterizations. I play variations on myself. I’m the inarticulate man who tries. I don’t really have all the answers, but for some reason, somehow, I make it.

  Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing a Jimmy Stewart impersonation myself.

  What did I feel? What would you feel? Shame. Terror. Recognition. Love.

&nb
sp; Two days later, the moth posted another video.

  It was clearly produced in tender collaboration with Jimmy Stewart, whom I could no longer bring myself to refer to, even to myself, as the email jerk, even if he’d made up the moniker himself. He was, in truth, the inarticulate man who tries, foraging out into the world with his undersized guitar, his miniature racquet, his outmoded attempts at gentlemanly decorum, his mistakes of the heart. She had apparently understood this before I had.

  It completed the cycle of Satie’s Gnossiennes. But this time, the instrumentation was neither classical nor psychedelic – it was creaky, homemade, and fragile. The left hand chords clinked delicately on a toy piano, while the melody was sung in a haunting, tremulous falsetto. The choreography was pantomimic in that same earnest way that her very first dance had been – but this time the narrative she told was one all too familiar to me. It was my own. She danced my anxious prowl, my fumbling investigation, my groping ascent on the StairMaster. She danced my awkward flail, my graceless clink, my humiliating fall. She danced the lines of my pedantic research, my stammering exegesis, the blurted agony of my realizations.

  In her diminutive interpretation, my story suddenly made sense. It wasn’t the shocking drama I had imagined. It was the pocket-sized solution to the mystery that had been dogging me for months.

  Perhaps you’ve figured out what this story is about. It took a while for me to see it myself. It was a mystery, but it wasn’t the one I thought it was.

  It was the impossibly ponderous question I’d been unable to articulate myself: Why do the people we love have to die?

  The answer was simple, unsatisfactory, and dumb.

  Because.

  It was my story she’d danced, so I knew I needed to leave a comment. But that meant I had to stop just lurking and give myself a name. I had to register on YouTube. I considered the possibilities: PansyAmidLaggards, SlangySadParadigm, MyAddlingAsparagus. SagPiddlyAnagrams. Finally I chose: PudgyGrandmasAlias. And under this byline, I left my simple response: “Thank you.” I also subscribed to her channel.

  AhNestermostFun promptly piped up: “I’m nobody! Who are you?”

  Without waiting for me to answer, ACabFreshenerOnTypos jumped in: “What am I, after all, but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over: AgelessFavors, GolfAverseAss, LasersOfVegas… To you, your name also; Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name? LissomePenknifeDichotomy, CoifedSemimonthlyPinkoes…”

  ThyMusketEmailJerk interrupted: “quit ur sqwaukin we got wrk to do. mybe we cn do gfi wth a twst. I alwys thot it needed a twst. u dnt like that. r we an indy bnd or are we lounge sngrs?”

  They were obviously off on a roll, discussing the next collaboration. I backed off and waited to see what would happen.

  THE GIRL FROM IPANEMA

  It appeared three months later.

  Why so long? It was something of a grand finale, and it looked like it had required the coordination of a number of individuals. Everybody turned up in the moth’s bathtub, one by one: the moth herself, of course, coyly swiveling her hips around the basin; that skinny adolescent (he got a hair cut!), poking his long fingers at a toy piano; the delicate older gentleman dancing with his eyes closed… Jimi Hendrix showed up! Decked out in suede, he shredded while leaning into the tiled corner of the tub. The mysterious falsetto hid behind the frosted glass of the shower enclosure. But another singer displayed herself plainly: it was that handsome woman from the pas de deux. “You’ll know Her – by Her Voice.” She was a mezzo-soprano! That was a surprise.

  Yet the greatest revelation was this: as the unmistakable, orgasmically beautiful howl of the cab freshener’s electric guitar emerged, the camera revealed her identity: a woman, small, roughly the moth’s size, though muscular, manhandling her axe with an authoritative sexuality, her peroxided hair splaying energetically around her concentrated face. Her bassist, too, flung her locks sidewise as she explored the deepest groove of “The Girl from Ipanema.”

  The freer of vassals is, was, had always been – female.

  The last to appear was Jimmy Stewart. Quiet, dignified, he solemnly fingerpicked his baritone uke, finding a narrow opening in that cacophony to add his simple accompaniment. And as the melody faded away, he looked up at the camera. It was a look of total candor.

  He was one more freak in the odd assemblage of that bathtub extravaganza. One more American minimalist who had his own rules and adhered to them. He never wanted to hurt the moth. They were two peas in a pod, babe. Two peas in a pod.

  Jimmy Stewart was the moth’s dear friend, along with all the others. The toy pianist was her son. The freer of vassals was her lesbian lover.

  They were family.

  What, you may wonder, had been happening in the other realms of my life during their artistic hiatus? Well, with the onset of the spring semester, things had started to pick up again at NYU. Steve Kurtz came, and I attended a public lecture he gave with Fang. He was extremely intelligent without being intimidating. He recounted an interventionist project he’d staged with some Canadian students. Being Canadian, they wanted to apologize as a form of political activism. Apparently he helped them to mount a lot of apologetic messages in public places, and once again he was suspected of “terrorism,” but when he explained things to the Canadian police, they were also apologetic.

  Fang initiated the filiform wart performance but fortunately it didn’t take. I didn’t tell her I thought it was all for the best, but Steve Kurtz did. She started a new project measuring trace amounts of residual sexual fluids on US paper currency.

  In February I gave Bugs Bunny’s sister a small heart-shaped box of Russell Stover chocolates for Valentine’s Day. She seemed to like this.

  Sven and I exchanged texts saying, “<3.”

  Ellen came back from her mother’s at the beginning of March. She was a little plumper and it suited her.

  There was another little glitch with the rent check that month, but I managed to straighten things out.

  The Dean of the Faculty of the Arts at the University of Malta wrote to request an interview with me via Skype. We scheduled it for April 1st. I realized that was April Fool’s Day.

  Randy and Jeremy had a party at their place in Manhattan and I went with Ellen. It was Jeremy’s birthday (Pisces – coincidentally, he shared his birthday with Ruth Bader Ginsburg). I made pralines. I spent most of the evening speaking with their neighbor, who was some kind of Latvian aristocrat and very, very old. Jeremy told me she stood out in front of the building and had one cigarette every evening, no matter how cold or rainy it might be. I think he said she was 93. She used to live in Buenos Aires.

  Richard Schechner wrote to tell me that my paper had been accepted for publication in TDR. That was the good news. The bad news was I received another e-mail from Ramon Gonzalez asking me for a title for my spring semester presentation. It was scheduled for May 4.

  I had made zero progress on the revisions to my academic manuscript. Still, instead of giving him one more time that ungainly title of my dissertation, I gave him the revised title I’d made up for the more “accessible” version I’d imagined I’d have finished by now.

  At the end of March, Dan, Fang, and I attended a lecture at the department by Neal Medlyn, “the Paris Hilton of performance art.” Neal Medlyn is the author of the book Sexual Buttocks and also Ars Nova, an opera based on the works of Lionel Ritchie. This was going to be a tough act to follow.

  My Skype interview seemed to go fairly smoothly.

  Sven arrived April 5. On April 6 I took him to a public event honoring Mario Montez, the Warhol superstar who got his start with Jack Smith. Mario was in full drag and looked really beautiful. He sipped his water through a straw, evidently in order to avoid messing up his lipstick. He was without irony and completely straightforward in discussing his career as an actor. We were very moved.

  That week we watched Unfaithfully Yours by Preston Sturges. In
the film, a snooty orchestra conductor (Rex Harrison) thinks his wife is having an affair. He fantasizes three different responses to the situation while conducting three different Romantic-era compositions. To Rossini, he imagines killing his wife and framing her lover for the murder. To Wagner, he imagines himself generously sending her off with her new lover and a big fat check. And to Tchaikovsky, he imagines bravely playing a game of Russian roulette with his blubbering rival (in this version, it’s unfortunately Rex Harrison who blows his brains out). I’d have to say it’s not often I consider myself “Wagnerian,” but in this case, I did. Of course it turns out the wife wasn’t having an affair at all. Sven found the movie a little hokey.

  He seemed to be feeling a little less vulnerable these days. He’d decided to try the FOTO regimen. His numbers were still excellent, and his stomach problems were starting to diminish.

  :)

  I looked on the Air Malta website and noticed that there was a very convenient and reasonably priced direct flight between Stockholm and Luqa.

  I avoided thinking about my income taxes until April 15 and at the eleventh hour used some tax return software I downloaded. Believe it or not, despite my abject circumstances, I owed the IRS money. I requested a deferred payment plan.

  The weather was improving. On nice days, Bugs Bunny’s sister again took to sunning herself just outside the entrance to our building.

  The last week in April, I sat in front of my computer wondering what the hell I was going to say in my final presentation in the department.