The Full Catastrophe

by David Carkeet

  NOVELS BY DAVID CARKEET

  From Away

  Double Negative

  The Greatest Slump of All Time

  I Been There Before

  The Error of Our Ways

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  The Silent Treatment

  Quiver River

  Copyright

  This edition first published in the United States in 2010 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers. Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  Copyright © 1990 by David Carkeet

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may he reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system now known or to be invented, without permission in from the

  publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection

  with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-292-9

  Contents

  Novels by David Carkeet

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  For Barbara

  BOSS:

  Are you married?

  ZORBA:

  Am I not a man?

  And is not a man stupid?

  I’m a man, so I’m married.

  Wife, children, house—everything.

  The full catastrophe.

  —Zorba the Greek

  One

  The St. Louis Arch loomed into view through Jeremy Cook’s bug-spattered windshield. He crossed the Mississippi like many a pioneer before him, squinting against the sun, his stomach lurching with fear of an uncertain future.

  Cook was in transition. He hated to be in transition. He liked things to stay the same. He wanted tomorrow to be like yesterday. He wanted to know that where he was going was where he had been.

  WHERE HE HAD BEEN: the Wabash Institute, a linguistics think tank attached to a daycare center, where for six years he had happily crawled around on the floor and watched young children learn to talk. His specialty had been toddlers in the one-to-three range, whose world he entered as easily as if he had never left it. Sometimes, at the end of a long day, he would go home actually confused about his own age, yielding sidewalk space to the rather threatening third-graders in his neighborhood.

  The Wabash Institute, stuck in the outback of southern Indiana, had suited Cook in all ways. His colleagues had thought well of him and he had bathed warmly in their appreciation. Among the staff of seven linguists he had found only one good male friend, but that was all he needed, and he had found other friends among the divorced mothers who used Wabash for daycare and the occasional female graduate students and postdocs who stopped by Wabash for a spell of linguistic fieldwork and a bit of bed and breakfast down the road at Cook’s place.

  These many led, in time, to one special one: Paula, a summer intern who stuck around for eight months longer than she had planned, thanks to Cook, moving in with him while she finished writing her Ph.D. dissertation. But when she went to M.I.T. to defend it, she never came back. This made Cook feel like some branch office of a graduate fellowship program. His one great fear the whole time she had lived with him was that she would think he was not smart enough for her, despite his two books, his many articles, and his sharp comments on her dissertation chapters as she wrote them. Apparently he had somehow botched it, because the day she left she said to him, “Which would you rather be—clever or warm?” Being a man of careful language, he had objected to the question and thoroughly trounced it.

  He had had a year all by himself to savor his victory. He heard from her just once in that time, by postcard, sent from the excitingly named town of Jones, Oklahoma, about six months after she had left him. He hadn’t been able to figure out much about her life from the card. All she had written was “Well?”

  The Wabash Institute followed the example of his love life and went to smash. Its demise came in the common way: the money ran out. As it became clear that this was happening, most of the linguists planned for the future and found jobs on college faculties or at other outposts of linguistics. But not Cook. He refused to believe Wabash could come to an end and, much to his colleagues’ concern, took no action.

  “It’s because you’re all alone, Jeremy,” Wabash’s mean secretary had told him, treating him to this summation at the final spring picnic before Wabash broke up. “You don’t have anyone to help you make decisions. When you’re sick there’s no one to take care of you. When you have a bad day there’s no one to talk it over with. There’s no one to help you plan your life. You’re all alone. You’re all by yourself.”

  Cook had found this moment somewhat humbling. Uncharacteristically, he had said nothing to her. But, characteristically, he had brooded over it. At the picnic everyone was paired up except for him. Husbands and wives—they drove him nuts. They were so damned connected, with their linked fingers and blurry-edged egos. Watching them in action, he felt more than ever like a mere friend. He sensed that at the end of the picnic he could say farewell to everyone there and drop dead the next day, and no one would give him any thought at all.

  WHERE HE WAS GOING: to the Pillow Agency in St. Louis for an interview, maybe even a job. One good thing had happened at the picnic—a colleague told him of an opening at this agency for a linguist. Cook had written and obtained an interview, which was scheduled for four-thirty this afternoon.

  Cook knew little about the Pillow Agency. He knew it was well funded from the estate of a St. Louis businessman who had made a fortune in rat poison, or something like that. He also knew that its focus was language and society, but from odd perspectives. He remembered hearing a lecture at a Linguistic Society of America convention in San Francisco by a representative of the Pillow Agency—a wizened fellow whose grim subject was language death. The lecturer told one depressing tale after another of last speakers of languages like Cornish and Dalmatian going to the grave and selfishly dragging with them whole branches of family trees. He dwelt somewhat morbidly, Cook recalled, on their deathbed snorts and croaks—the last feeble vibrations of these choking tongues.

  If this study was typical of the work that went on there, at this point in his life Cook felt that the Pillow Agency and he were made for each other.

  He exited Interstate 70 into the bowels of downtown. The city seemed crazed with noise and motion. Either a parade was imminent or Indiana had completely ruralized him. He located his building and worked his way from there to a nearby parking garage. As he hurried to the garage elevator he found himself all aquiver, shivering from the cold (it was a mild day, but the garage held a chill), flinching from the screeches and honks that echoed off the concrete, and quaking from job-interview nervousness. Out on the street, a demented pigeon flew straight at his face and made him duck before it veered upward. St. Louis knew he was coming and was ambushing him with everything it had.

  But he set his jaw, mustered his resolve, and discovered, upon his prompt arrival on the twelfth floor of the Hastings Building, that the Pillow Agency was closed
for the day. Not a soul was in sight.

  Cook wandered the halls and knocked on doors. He took the letter scheduling his appointment from his suit coat pocket and reread it. He looked at his watch (already set back for Central Time), checked it against the hall clock, examined his wallet calendar—in short, brought every paltry arithmetical fact to bear on the problem, more to dodge than to reach its obvious solution: the Pillow bastards thought so little of him that they had forgotten about the appointment.

  Two

  Just to be sure, just to make certain, just to be one hundred percent clear on the subject, Cook took the elevator back to the ground floor of the Hastings Building and reread the directory. The Pillow Agency occupied offices 1201 through 1209. Had he checked all of those? Maybe not, he told himself—although he had and knew it. He headed back to the elevator, glancing at the security guard at the front desk and wildly coveting his job.

  “Steady, boy,” Cook told himself as he boarded the elevator. When it stopped he bolted out with determination.

  The change that had occurred in his brief absence took his breath away. Doors that were formerly sealed shut now stood open. Attractive women passed in and out of them, glancing back meaningfully at him. Music—Rachmaninoff, wasn’t it?—wafted down the hall to him, seemingly borne by currents of perfume. The atmosphere was vibrant and industrious, with an undercurrent of lush sexuality. The Pillow Agency must have been on a break a few minutes earlier. Some break! He admired that kind of ability to swing into and out of action. Oh, he would fit right in here.

  Fool that he was, the notion WRONG FLOOR! as an explanatory principle came to him late in the game, after he was already inside one of the offices—room 1101, to be exact. When the idea struck him he reddened and backed out quickly, after only about eight people had the chance to look up from their desks and wonder who he was and why he was so unemployed.

  The elevator that had tricked him was gone. As he waited for another to take him to the twelfth floor, he wondered just how long this particular funhouse barrel-ride would last. He had been on many before—extended stretches of closely observed idiocies punctuated by near-criminal faux pas. It was the loner’s nightmare.

  “Easy, boy. Easy,” he said aloud to himself—and, it turned out, to the woman behind his right shoulder, who had cruelly materialized from thin air. He grew suddenly angry, not with himself but with the linguistic law that licensed speakers to address themselves, but then revoked the privilege when others were present, even though these others committed self-speech, too. He tried to think of a way to mitigate his error, but what could he do? Tell the woman he was practicing talking to his dog?

  An elevator arrived. Cook got in. The woman did not—spooked, no doubt. He managed to ride the one-floor distance alone without major incident. He exited and went to the right, back to the hall with rooms 1201 through 1209—still locked, each office as inaccessible as a dune-covered pyramid. At room 1209 he kept going, making two turns until he found himself entering an opulent waiting room near the elevators. He had come full circle.

  Behind a counter sat a middle-aged woman dressed in a gray business suit and wearing round, rimless glasses. A large sign over the counter read THE BUSINESS PEOPLE.

  “I’m looking for the Pillow Agency,” said Cook. “Are you connected with them at all?”

  The woman looked at him without expression. She had been doing nothing behind the counter, and she continued to do nothing. Her glasses reflected pure white light in his face.

  “They don’t seem to be here,” Cook went on.

  “‘They’?” She gave the word a wavering, befuddled tone.

  “The Pillow people. Could they have left any kind of message for me?”

  The woman let out a laugh, but without any change of expression. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “Jeremy Cook.”

  “No message,” she said without checking anywhere. She said it so quickly that it partly overlapped his name.

  Cook sighed and looked somewhat pointlessly around the empty waiting room. “Could you take a message from me for them?” he asked.

  “I could.”

  “Would you?” Cook was so frustrated by the woman’s style that it took him a moment to see that she had a pen and pad ready for his dictation. This gave him a rush of mike-fright, and he had to collect his thoughts.

  “Um, ‘To Mr. Pillow. From Jeremy Cook.’ Um, um, ‘Sorry I missed you.’ No, wait, um, ‘Sorry I missed you …’ Wait. Wait.”

  The woman slowly raised her eyes from the pad to Cook, as if to say, “In the world of business, when men dictate, they dictate.”

  “Um, okay, ‘To Mr. Pillow. From Jeremy Cook. Sorry I missed you. It’s four-thirty p.m., Friday.’”

  “It’s four forty-five,” the woman said sharply.

  “I know, but I was here promptly at four-thirty. That’s the whole point, you see.”

  “You want me to backdate the memo?”

  Cook couldn’t tell from her tone if this was a stroke of genius or a suicidal plan. But he said, “Yes. That’s it. Backdate it. Write ‘four-thirty.’”

  She did so. “Anything else?”

  “Um, ‘Will return …’ Are they open Saturday?”

  “They are not.”

  “Okay. ‘Will return Monday morning.’ No, no—make it ‘Monday a.m.’ That sounds better, doesn’t it? ‘Monday a.m.’?”

  The woman ignored his question and folded the note. Cook’s eye fell on a stack of mail at the edge of the counter. On top of it was the latest issue of Linguistic Inquiry. He smiled—the journal was like an old friend in hostile territory, especially this quarter’s issue, because it would contain the results of the latest round of grant proposals to the Kartoffel Foundation. He was interested not for himself but for Paula, whose recent application he had supported, without her knowledge, with a warm letter of recommendation.

  “May I look at this?” he asked, reaching for it.

  “Mr. Pillow’s mail? You’re asking for permission to look at Mr. Pillow’s mail?”

  “I meant the journal,” Cook said, lifting it from the stack and opening it to the back page.

  “It came in the mail,” the woman said. “It is part of the mail. It is mail.”

  “Just a peek,” he said, and Paula’s name leaped out at him—a winner. He grinned. Then he turned the journal over in his habitual way and idly checked the table of contents on the back cover. He let out a sharp yelp. The woman stared across the counter at him. “Look what they’ve done to me,” Cook said, pleading for sympathy. “Look.” He showed her the table of contents. He jabbed a finger at the title of the lead article: “Why Jeremy Cook’s Theory of Kickapoo Adverbs Is Preposterous.” But all he got from the woman was another flash of light from her eyeglasses. She went on with her business, attaching a piece of tape to the note she had written and carrying it around the counter and out of the waiting room.

  Cook sighed and opened the journal to the article. A quick skim showed that it fulfilled the promise of its ugly title. The author was one F. F. Sweet—a name Cook didn’t recognize. It stood alone, without the customary institutional affiliation. (Denounced by a layman! Cook thought bitterly.) But one so informed about Kickapoo had to be an academic. He was probably an unemployed one. (Can’t land a job, Cook thought. Too much of a bastard!) F. F. Sweet’s only identification was “Washington, D.C.” (Good. Populous, strategically important. Likely to take a direct hit when the time came. Maybe soon! Cook hoped shortsightedly.)

  Cook knew that the healthy response would have been to take pen in hand and show how this attack on his work was wrong—after reading it, of course. But there was a flaw in the plan: the article would make no sense to him. He had published his Kickapoo adverb theory some seven years earlier, while still in graduate school. Once he had conquered the subject he promptly forgot all about it.

  But F. F. Sweet, it was clear, was Mr. Kickapoo Adverb himself. F. F. Sweet had a stranglehold on Kickapoo adverbs. F. F
. Sweet spent holidays roaming rural roads and deer trails of the upper Midwest in search of garrulous Kickapoos squatting around their campfires, talking about time, place, manner, degree.

  “This round goes to you, F. F Sweet,” Cook said aloud. Then he added a line from an old movie he’d seen late one night on TV, drunk. “Under other circumstances, I might have called you ‘friend.’” This was so outrageously false that it made him laugh and contributed to his next act.

  He took the journal out into the hallway and pressed the elevator button. When the elevator doors opened he looked down at the floor. “Good,” he said. The space was just the right size. He bent down and wedged the bottom of the journal into the crack between the elevator and the hall floor. It stood tall there. He lifted his foot, and with one swift stomp he shot the journal through the crack, sending it careening into the elevator shaft like a damned soul hurled into hell.

  Cook returned to his car and studied his street map of St. Louis. Then he drove out of the parking garage and headed for 1-70 again. But he would not go east—where he had been—but west, to a motel near the airport, where according to the P.S. in their letter the Pillow bastards had reserved a room for him.

  On the highway he calmed down and calculated how long he could live on his savings. It was impossible to spend money in southern Indiana, and as a result he had increased his net worth just like someone who knew what he was doing. His money was presently sitting in an account where a dinky return was offset by the fact that he never had to think about it. He had few expenses, drove an old car (a 1972 Honda Coupe), and traveled little (where was there to go?), and if he gave it a little fix-up, he could live rent-free in a summer cottage in northern Wisconsin owned by his sister in Chicago. He would set out for it the next morning. He had always wanted to live alone in a cottage for a while, just to see what kind of work he could do in complete isolation. He had a title for his first project, and a helluva title it was, too: “Kickapoo Adverbs: Response to F. F. Sweet.” All he needed was six months free and clear to relearn everything he had forgotten about the stinking subject.