So my two favorite Rose Colony members were Mangrove and Tinkle. We three men naturally sought one another out on the back terrace and then ate dinner together at one of the smaller satellite tables, where we were joined by Sophie and Don, my two breakfastmates, and the ancient painter, named Janet, who appeared to be locating her food perfectly well, further mystifying me as to the nature of legal blindness. Meanwhile, Tinkle sat next to me and I looked upon him as the younger, smaller brother I never had, even though he was a year older than myself.
The Rose Colony, as I just tried to explain with my wedding celebration analogy, was a hothouse for emotions. Things grew quicker here than in the real world. It might have taken me years to feel close to Tinkle if we had met in the real world, but at the Rose Colony, by our third meal together, he was already a boon companion.
Beaubien, who had skipped the pre-dinner-drinks binge, was at the large table, and every now and then I felt a psychic stinging on my neck. She was obviously directing mental ice picks in my direction. Ava never came to dinner, which pained me, but I drank plenty of wine and was hopeful that I would see her later.
We had Cornish game hens, mashed sweet potatoes, and salad, and the dining room was abuzz with the usual sounds of eating, as well as conversation about a notice that Dr. Hibben had placed on the mail table before dinner. Herewith, I reproduce:
Dear Colonists,
Our physical plant is old and our greatest DANGER is fire. We need everyone to be very careful and responsible. Also, if anyone took Sigrid Beaubien's slippers, please return them to me. This is a community whose purpose is the accomplishment of serious work. We must not forget that. Let's try to get back into the spirit of things with a pleasant evening of drinks at my house after dinner. Come by around 8:30.
Dr. Hibben
From what I gathered, this was unprecedented. No one could ever recall a director of the Rose Colony having to take such an action. Occasionally individual colonists had to be warned or even excommunicated, but never had the colony at large been chastised. And so a herdlike fear was palpable—that if we didn't shape up, we would all be punished, even if we were innocent of the crimes that had so far been committed: sheet-burning and slipper-stealing.
As a way to counteract this group anxiety, or perhaps to enflame it, a history of bad colonist behavior, essentially Rose Colony lore, was the primary subject of our dinner-table discussion. Mangrove recounted a particularly florid tale, though his speaking voice was notably serious and flat, without affect. It was the voice of a major depressive.
“There was this English writer a few years ago, this was during the winter, who was nuts,” he said solemnly. His eye patch was shiny and his good eye beamed out equal portions of intelligence and despair. “He was sneaking into people's bedrooms and leaving teacups of his urine under their beds.”
“I heard about that,” said Sophie, who was wearing a black T-shirt, her favorite color. “What could he have been thinking?”
“What an idiot,” said Don, the acne-scarred sculptor, who was interesting to look at—the crevices in his face were compelling and his half-thumb was also good visually. “If I found him in my room, I would have beat the shit out of him. What's his name?”
“Philip Goldberg,” said Mangrove.
Of course, a Jew, I thought to myself. We're always so disturbed.
“The whole thing is disgusting,” said Sophie. “How could such a person be allowed in here?”
“They've been letting kooks into this place for years,” said Janet.
“He did publish a novel that was well received in England,” said Mangrove.
“How'd they pin it on him?” asked Tinkle.
“I'm not sure,” said Mangrove. “I arrived a few weeks after he had been asked to leave. But what I think happened is that one person found a teacup, told somebody, and then everyone began looking under their beds and discovered they also had teacups.”
“But how'd they know he was the one?” asked Don.
“Again, I'm not sure,” said Mangrove. “But they just knew it was him. He was strange. And then I think he did confess to Hibben when confronted.”
“I wonder what he's doing right now,” I said.
“Why?” asked Sophie.
“Whenever I hear about interesting people, even if they're interesting in disturbing ways, I wonder what they're doing at that precise moment. Though this fellow is probably asleep, if he's in England, which isn't very fascinating to think about, but at least the world at large is safe from him wreaking havoc.”
“Seems like the teacups were sort of an English thing,” said Tinkle rather astutely.
“A sick thing,” said Don.
“I think you're right about the teacups,” I said, addressing Tinkle. “Maybe that was his clue, a real English clue, so that he would be caught, like a serial killer who wants to be discovered.”
Then the conversation moved on to other desperate characters who had lost their minds at the colony, and the list was rather extensive. But I wasn't upset by this, inured as I was at this point to the colony's resemblance to an asylum.
After dinner, Mangrove, Tinkle, and I made for Tinkle's chambers to have a conference with his whiskey bottle. We had about an hour before regathering with everyone chez Hibben for more white wine, though supposedly he sometimes provided gin. I was hoping that Ava would make an appearance there. I was still wearing my hummingbird tie and seersucker jacket, thinking it best to stick with the costume that she had responded favorably to earlier in the day. I could have given over to gloomy disappointment at not seeing her at dinner, but I was happily—and drunkenly—floating along with my two friends.
Mangrove, being the eldest and a natural leader, took the easy chair in Tinkle's room, the one with the stick shift that I had inhabited the night before. I assumed Tinkle's desk chair and Tinkle sat on his bed. We each had a healthy glass of whiskey, which we sipped like gentlemen, and Tinkle passed around cigars. He put on his fan, and we blew our smoke out the window.
We were silently enjoying one another's masculine company and I eyeballed our tall, melancholy leader, Mangrove. He looked quite dignified with his long legs and eye patch. He was closer to fifty than forty, but his bicycle riding kept him in good shape.
So there I was staring at his eye patch and then suddenly I said to him, unable to take it anymore, “How did you lose your eye?” I hadn't intended to blurt this out, but there it was.
“I haven't lost an eye,” said Mangrove calmly.
I was too shocked to say anything, but not Tinkle. “What's with the patch, then?” he asked. Tinkle was his drunken, assertive self, as opposed to his more reserved, sober self, which I had encountered that morning.
“I'm trying a radical depression cure,” said Mangrove. “I'm seeing a holistic psychiatrist in New York. He's attempting to shift the use of my brain over to the left side. I have become almost entirely right-brained, which is the creative side, and by overrelying on that side, I opened myself up for a severe depression when I had an emotional trauma. The doctor said that I was the most depressed person he had ever met who was still alive.”
“But the patch is on your left eye,” I said.
“The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body,” said Mangrove.
“I forgot that about the brain,” I said. “It's like sailing. I hate when the left is right and right is left. You'd think, though, that it was the left side that would control creativity, but that must be my liberal bias. I have to say, though, this is all rather confusing.”
“Is it working?” Tinkle asked Mangrove, and I wondered as he said that if an eye patch would help Tinkle with his misfiring. I was curious, though, as to which side of the brain controls the penis. I figured that since it's in the middle, probably both sides of the brain control it, which makes sense, because if one side of the brain breaks down, you still want your penis to work. So Tinkle would probably have to wear patches over both his eyes.
“I'm
not sure if it's working,” said Mangrove. “I've only been doing it a few weeks.”
“So you're trying to slosh some activity over to one side, to the left side … with the hope of getting some balance, like a seesaw?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Mangrove. “There are parts of my brain that haven't seen serotonin in years.” He spoke with such seriousness that everything he said had the weight of grave truth, and it was fascinating to contemplate a brain that had areas starved of serotonin.
“Your brain must be like Mars,” I said passionately. “There must be barren, dry canals.”
“What caused your brain to dry up?” asked Tinkle, who of course had the opposite problem of overliquefaction.
“A young girl,” said Mangrove. “A student at Columbia. She was in my writing class. I fell in love with her. She fell in love with me. For a semester. I've never recovered.”
“When did this happen?” asked Tinkle.
“Ten years ago.”
“You've been depressed for ten years over this girl?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you in touch with her at all?” Tinkle inquired.
“Haven't seen or talked to her in about nine years. But I've been stalking her.”
“What do you mean?” asked Tinkle. “How can you stalk her if you haven't seen her?”
“I've been stalking her in my mind. Wherever I go, I look for her. I think she's in California, but even when I ride my bicycle here in Saratoga, I'm looking for her. If someone knocked at your door right now, I would hope for a moment that it was her. It's what has caused the ruts in my brain.”
“More whiskey,” I said to Tinkle. Pathos-wise this was almost as bad as Tinkle's confession of the night before, and it was eerily similar in theme to Kenneth's search for the man who had raped him. I thought of mentioning that Kenneth was in a similar boat, but it was too complicated to go into, and furthermore I didn't know if Mangrove would appreciate my drawing a parallel between Kenneth's rapist and his, Mangrove's, young coed.
“Yes, more whiskey,” said Mangrove. “Though I probably shouldn't drink too much more. As it is, probably only two percent of my brain is functioning and I don't want to undo what the eye patch might be achieving.”
“Maybe if you only swallow on the left side of your mouth,” I offered. “That's what I do when I get mouth ulcers.”
Tinkle generously poured out more medicine in all our glasses.
“I need to drink for my condition,” said Tinkle to Mangrove. “So don't feel pressure to keep up with me.”
“My condition is drinking,” I said, not wanting to be left out of this discussion of maladies, though neither fellow seemed to take notice of my admission.
Mangrove said to Tinkle, “What's your condition?”
“Sexual problems,” said Tinkle, and I thought to myself, Oh no, here we go again, and I girded myself, but before Tinkle could give me a second helping of penis cancer woes, there was a frantic knock at the door. It startled all of us, coming so soon after Mangrove had spoken of his long-lost coed knocking at the door. We froze. Could it be? Had she somehow tracked him down to the Rose Colony after all these years?
We were drunk enough to consider it a possibility, and we all wanted it to be her, because our hearts, united by the Rose Colony's strange hothouse forces, were momentarily beating and dreaming as one. What one friend wanted, we all wanted. Tinkle put his cigar in the windowsill and slowly walked to his door to answer the persistent knocking. Mangrove followed him with one depressed, expectant eye.
Tinkle opened the door and standing before us was not Mangrove's Columbia love. Rather, it was her spiritual opposite—Beaubien! The light of the hallway was behind her and her dark hair glowed like a solar eruption. It was not the first time a person seemed to be bursting into flames in front of me. A memory of Uncle Irwin superimposed itself over Beaubien, and this doubling of two nemeses added to my considerable discomfiture.
But it wasn't me she was after.
“Reginald!” she cried. “There's a bat in my room!”
For a man with a dried-out brain, who had just been hoping that the love of his life might at long last have come to him, he moved with incredible agility. Drink down, cigar in windowsill, he dashed out of the room. We all followed him, though I held back some, not wanting to be too close to Beaubien.
Mangrove, taking two stairs at a time, and holding on to the banisters like a gymnast, flew down to the second floor, went into his room, and came out wearing thick canvas gloves and carrying an enormous bat-catching net. The net was preposterously large, the kind of thing you'd see in the Three Stooges movies when a white-coated worker would be trying to catch people for a loony bin. Tinkle, Beaubien, and I then followed Mangrove down a carpeted, wood-paneled hall, until we were at Beaubien's room. For the moment at least, her hostilities toward me were dropped, as we now faced a common enemy.
The four of us went into her room, and I wondered if it was all right that no one took their shoes off, but maybe Beaubien didn't have a shoe policy, and only left slippers outside her door, which wasn't quite rational. Then I reasoned that whatever shoe policy she employed would most likely be dropped in an emergency situation, such as the one we were confronting.
Her boudoir was large and dominated by a four-poster antique bed, with a faded pink bedspread. Antique lamps and bureaus completed the picture of a very charming, turn-of-the-century bedroom.
“Where is it?” asked Mangrove with urgency.
We scanned the room, and then Tinkle spotted it: “In the corner, against the wall.”
Sure enough, fixed to the wall, like a raised lump of light brown mud, was a bat with folded wings. Mangrove approached with great stealth, but the bat sensed something and suddenly was in flight, swooping right at us. I don't know if the others screamed, as all sound was drowned out by my own piercing yell. For once I had responded immediately to danger. It's clear that being at the Rose Colony was giving me greater access to all my emotions, including terror.
Luckily, Mangrove, with the concentration of a samurai, was not thrown off by my cry. He swung the net with a beautiful, harmonious motion and plucked the bat right out of the air. Then with an efficient twirl of the net handle, he made it so that the net closed upon itself, creating a pouch from which the bat could not escape.
“You did it!” exclaimed Beaubien.
“Try not to hurt it,” said Tinkle, displaying his sympathies for bats.
“You're incredible,” I said to Mangrove.
Mangrove smiled humbly, and then with humanitarian intent, he ran from Beaubien's room, with the three of us following at a safe distance, to free the creature outside.
We went through the mudroom, where a number of colonists were reading newspapers before going to Hibben's for drinks. They all exclaimed with great excitement at the sight of the bat. Then once outside, Mangrove heroically opened the net with another dexterous twirl, then laid it on the ground, leaving a slight opening. The bat, stunned, didn't move, then, sensing liberation, it scampered a few inches and took flight into the quickly darkening night sky to rejoin its brother and sister bats.
Beaubien approached Mangrove, who now held his net alongside him like Neptune's trident, and she put her pretty hand on his arm. Their former alliance could be seen in this touch.
“Thank you, Reginald,” she said. She looked quite beautiful in that moment. Then she went back into the Mansion, without looking at me or Tinkle.
We three men stayed outside for a few moments, relishing the night air and Mangrove's triumph, and then went back in ourselves for one more counseling session with Tinkle's whiskey.
Back in our earlier positions, drinking glasses in hand, I said to Mangrove, “For someone who only has about two percent of his brain working, you're remarkable. Think what you can do when the serotonin is running freely.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“I think we only use about ten percent of our brains as it is,” said Tinkle.
“So all you need to do is get back that dried-out eight percent.”
“That's the hope,” said Mangrove.
“I wonder what Darwin would say about this ninety percent of unused brain?” I asked. “Did we ever use it? Or are we gearing up to use it? Maybe we use it and we're not aware of it. Maybe we're teleporting everywhere and leading multiple lives. Maybe the world population is quite small—just a handful of brains transubstantiating all around the globe. I wonder, though, if people collide in the ether if they're teleporting about like that. What do you guys think? Lately, I've been really hankering for an out-of-body experience.”
Well, you have to be careful what you ask for—which our spiritual leaders are always reminding us—and in this case it held up. Right after delivering my speech on transubstantiation, I blacked out.
Luckily, I wasn't gone very long this time, roughly thirty minutes or so, and I came to at Dr. Hibben's drinks party. In my own special, alcoholic way, I had teleported across the colony grounds.
And when consciousness was restored to me at the party, I was alone, though in a large, hot group of people. I was standing in front of a mantel that was above a dormant fireplace, and I was looking right into Ava's dead eyes. I reached up and felt the contours of her dead nose and my soul shivered. You see, on the mantel was a life-size bronze bust of the woman I had fallen in love with.
CHAPTER 29
I encounter a fish, then a mythological creatureI try to survive a heated conversation with Dr. HibbenThe idea of using snorkeling equipment as a means of coping with cocktail parties is something to considerCharles Murrin makes a brief appearance and I meet Mrs. Hibben and she makes quite an impactKenneth expresses his sympathiesMangrove proposes something, which, to be honest, frightens me
Wake Up, Sir!: A Novel Page 24