The Full Catastrophe

by David Carkeet

  It was Dan, playing without music—a ragtime piece Cook didn’t recognize, which is to say it was not “Maple Leaf Rag.” Cook approached and listened for a while. He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around. Beth was holding out a closed fist, indicating she had something to give him. He automatically extended his hand, open under her fist, and she dropped a tiny heart-shaped earring into it.

  “Something told me you wanted this,” she said.

  Cook smiled his thanks and pocketed the earring.

  “What a blusher you are!” said Beth, and she laughed lightly and went up the stairs.

  When Dan finished the piece, Cook urged him to go on playing, but Dan sprang to his feet, as if energized by the music, and said he was going to watch the news. He invited Cook, and they went upstairs to the den. Beth joined them on the couch, and Robbie, drawn by the TV noise, came in and sprawled across the floor. Cook surveyed the scene—the Wilsons at home, he figured, as they basically were when he wasn’t around.

  They watched the last few minutes of a local news broadcast, with Dan making wisecracks all the way through it. For the network newscast at five-thirty, Dan was commander in chief of the remote channel changer, and he danced from NBC to CBS to ABC, fleeing commercials and reports he found boring. Robbie preferred the commercials to anything else, and when they came on he would yell “no no no” or “you’ll like this, you’ll like this,” but Dan would zap them. Beth didn’t seem to mind his channel-changing at all. Cook, however, was nearly unhinged by it. He had to fight the urge to wrestle Dan to the floor and take possession of the remote changer. He wasn’t opposed to the channel-switching as such. He just wanted to do it himself.

  At dinner Cook marveled to find garbanzo beans in the salad Beth had made. Succotash, and now garbanzo beans! It was really amazing what people could do with food when they put their minds to it. He rubbed his tummy in approval for Beth.

  She rolled her eyes and said, “You getting your tongue back tomorrow?”

  Cook nodded, even though he didn’t actually know this.

  “You said there’d be activities,” Robbie said. “Some activity. Hunh! There’s more activity in a … in a …”

  “In a graveyard,” said Dan.

  Robbie thought this was the most hilarious thing he had ever heard. But he abruptly sobered up and said, “Uh-oh. There’s one more little bit of homework I’ve got to do. Parts of speech.” He glowered at Cook. “We’re on prepositions.”

  “Ah,” said Dan. “‘To.’ ‘For.’ ‘In.’”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Robbie said impatiently. “I’ve got to find a sentence with one at the end of it.”

  “A sentence ending with a preposition?” said Dan. “I always thought we were supposed to avoid those.”

  “Yeah. She said that, but she wants us to have one anyway. I don’t know why.”

  Beth said, “Maybe so she can teach you how to say it differently.”

  “Whatever,” said Robbie. “I need one.” He looked from his mother to his father. Then he looked at Cook. A colleague of Cook’s had once said that a true linguist always had an example handy, no matter what the construction.

  “Well?” Robbie said. “You guys got one?”

  “I’m thinking,” Dan said, making a strained face.

  Beth, too, was frowning in thought. She laughed. “It seems like they happen all the time when you don’t want them to, but thinking of one is—”

  “‘Look out!’” said Dan.

  Everyone stared at him.

  “‘Look out.’ ‘Come in.’ ‘Roll over.’”

  “Hey,” said Robbie. “Great.” He bolted from the table, shaking the water glasses, and grabbed his notebook and pen from the kitchen hutch where he had left them.

  Beth said, “I don’t think those are prepositions.”

  “Hunh?” said Robbie, looking crushed as he came back to the table.

  “What do you mean?” Dan said.

  “They seem different.” Beth threw a glance at Cook.

  “How do you mean, ‘seem different’? In, out, over. They’re prepositions.”

  “But they seem different.”

  Dan’s face went a little wild. “You can’t just sit there and say they seem different. You’ve got to support what you’re saying. You’ve got to—”

  “Okay, okay. Calm down. For one thing, there’s no other way to say them. With the kind of sentences Robbie’s talking about, you can always say them differently by moving the preposition around.”

  Dan wasn’t having any of this. “Write them down, Robbie. They’re fine.”

  “I’m not gonna write them down if they’re wrong,” Robbie said flatly. “I’ll look like a fool. You want me to look like a fool? Is that what you want?”

  “You’re not going to look like a fool,” said Dan. “They’re good enough examples.”

  “Oh, great. Now they’re just good enough. Come on, Dad. I want to take a really good one in.”

  “They don’t have objects!” Beth said proudly. “That’s it. Prepositions always need objects.”

  “It’s understood,” said Dan. “It’s an understood object.”

  Cook nodded to himself. He knew this was coming. Understood material—the last refuge of a grammatical scoundrel.

  “‘Look out’?” said Beth. “What’s understood in that?”

  “‘The window,’” Dan said soberly. “The full sentence would be ‘Look out the window.’”

  Beth laughed. “You mean when I say ‘Look out,’ I always mean ‘Look out the window’?”

  “Not always,” said Dan. “It could mean ‘Look out the keyhole,’ or ‘Look out the periscope.’”

  Beth gave him a gently disapproving look. “I thought you were being serious,” she said.

  “Maybe something is understood,” said Dan, his excitement showing that now he was serious. “‘Your eyes.’ When we say ‘Look out,’ we’re saying ‘Look out your eyes.’” Dan looked at Cook, who stuck his lower lip out, as if in thought. The theory was worth that, at least.

  “So is it good or not?” Robbie said.

  “No,” said Beth.

  “No,” said Dan, surrendering with a little laugh. “Come on, Jeremy. You can help us here. Just one example?”

  “Be a sport, Jeremy,” said Beth.

  “Yeah,” said Robbie. “You’re really needed now, and you’re just sitting there. You’re being a little extreme with this silence of yours, you know.”

  Cook had already spoken up for Dan and Beth that day. He figured Robbie had a turn coming, too. He cleared his throat. He spoke:

  “A little boy was upstairs in his room. It was nearly bedtime, and he was waiting for his father to come read him a story, as he did every night. He went to the top of the stairs and waited. In a few minutes he heard his father coming, and he got excited. But when he saw the book his father had chosen, he was disappointed. It was a book he didn’t like at all. He said to his father—now listen to what he said, Robbie—he said, ‘What are you bringing that book that I don’t want to be read to from out of up for?’”

  “Oh, wow!” said Robbie, his eyes widening as he began to scribble it down. “Say it again. Say it again. Say it again.”

  Cook and Dan cleaned up from dinner. Beth went to the piano and played some Gershwin—“Who Cares?” and “The Man I Love.” She played very well but quite slowly, as if she heard things in the music that made her pause and listen before going on. A little later, they walked Robbie down to his friend’s house and went on to the theater, which was right around the corner in the Loop. It was nearly empty. Beth sat between Cook and Dan. As they waited for the film to begin, Dan said he hoped that he and Beth wouldn’t fight about it. Cook frowned a question, and Dan said, “We see a movie, we fight about it. You name it, we’ve fought about it.”

  Beth said, “He can’t name it, honey. He can’t talk.”

  “You name it then,” Dan said.

  “The African Queen,” said Beth. “We’ve nev
er fought about The African Queen.”

  “We’ve never seen it together.”

  “Yes we have,” said Beth. “On TV.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Sure we have.”

  “When?”

  “A couple years ago. We watched it in the sun-room just after it was built. I remember thinking it was the first of many movies we’d be watching in there.”

  Dan shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

  Beth sighed. “How about The Sting? There’s a movie we both liked. We didn’t argue about that one.”

  “We argued about the music,” Dan said.

  “We did?”

  “You liked it, I didn’t.”

  “But it’s ragtime music,” said Beth. “You like it. You play it.”

  “But I don’t like it orchestrated. It’s meant for solo piano. We had this big argument about it.”

  “Terms of Endearment,” said Beth, forging ahead. “There’s no way we could have argued about Terms of Endearment.”

  “Let’s see,” said Dan, his face showing a little nervousness. “Let me think. That’s the one where …”

  Beth laughed and turned to Cook. “My favorite movie, and he doesn’t even know what it’s about. This happens all the time.”

  “I confuse it with Tender Mercies,” Dan said.

  “They have nothing in common,” said Beth.

  “It’s the titles. They sound so alike. The consonants and vowels.” Dan brightened and looked at Cook. “Hey—linguistics. Help me out. Aren’t they similar?”

  Beth laughed. “You don’t need him to tell you that. Of course they’re similar. But you’re the only one in the world who confuses them because of it.”

  “Which one was Jack Nicholson in?” Dan said to Beth. “Come on. Tell me that much. Was it—”

  “Oh shut up.”

  “Let me try to think of one,” said Dan. “Let’s go at it geographically. We both like Venice, right? How about movies set in Venice?”

  “Blume in Love,” said Beth, glancing at Cook, a smile flooding her face. “Now there’s a movie.”

  “Don’t Look Now,” said Dan.

  Beth’s smile faded. “I name a love story, he names a horror movie.”

  “A love story?” Dan frowned. “Blume in Love? Which one is that? I always confuse it with …” He caught himself—caught the imminent reprimand—and mumbled something.

  “What?” said Beth.

  Dan cleared his throat. “I always confuse it with Klute.” “God!” Beth said, raising her hands in despair. “I can’t believe it.”

  “They sound alike,” Dan protested. “The long u. The I.”

  “Can you believe him?” she asked Cook. Then she gave him a skeptical scrutiny. “You haven’t registered a reaction to any of these movies. Have you seen any of them?”

  Cook raised a single finger.

  Beth laughed. “One? Which one? Let me guess. The African Queen? The oldest one?”

  Cook nodded.

  “Geez,” she said. “Where’ve you been, exactly? You’re like someone from another planet.”

  “Brother from Another Planet,” said Dan. “Now there’s a film.”

  Beth was watching Cook. “I suppose you haven’t seen that one, either.”

  Cook glumly shook his head.

  “What’s the story with you?” she said.

  “Hey,” said Dan. “Let’s get Jeremy, hunh?”

  “I mean it,” she said, turning to Dan. “I can’t figure him out.”

  “I think it’s linguistics,” said Dan.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything takes place on two levels for him. He’s on the other level as much as he’s on ours. It makes him seem strange. But he’s just thinking.”

  “Is he?” said Beth, turning back to Cook and staring at him. “I wonder.”

  But she had to stop wondering, and stop staring, because the lights went down.

  It was quite a film. Cook squirmed for two hours as he watched a potato-faced German do all sorts of damn fool things, some of them criminal, for no apparent reason and with no sign of emotion. It was wholly without meaning. Cook’s only comfort was that nobody talked excitedly at the dinner table and waved their utensils around, the way they always did in French movies. He really hated that. When he sensed that the potato-face was nearly done with his deeds, a familiar dread swept over him: When the movie ended he would have to say something about it, or look stupid. But then he remembered his privileged muteness, and he rejoiced. He relaxed so thoroughly that he dropped off to sleep.

  When he awoke to the rolling credits, Dan and Beth were standing up. They were silent—all the way out of the theater, down the sidewalk, and around the corner to their street. It was an ambiguous silence. Had the film baffled them speechless? Were they ostentatiously avoiding an argument? Or were they mocking Cook? He never found out. When they reached Robbie’s friend’s house, Dan and Beth burst out laughing, apparently at their silence, but they said nothing that explained it.

  Robbie was in a lively mood and he chattered all the way home. He told his parents that they had done exactly the right thing in not buying him a Nintendo, because he could play on Tommy’s whenever he wanted to, and it was so expensive, and it was almost too much fun, really, and if he had one he’d be addicted to it for sure, and he was glad not to have one. To Cook’s ears, it sounded as if Robbie would positively kill for this thing, whatever it was. Still, Cook thought, sour grapes was a defense mechanism we all had to learn sooner or later. He was a little surprised at Robbie’s precocious mastery of it. Maybe only children were like that, though.

  Then Robbie said Cook’s preposition sentence and laughed. He said he was going to send it in to “Our Own Oddities” and win ten bucks. Dan explained to Cook that this was sort of a contributors’ “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” in the Post-Dispatch, and Robbie had been submitting items to it for years—banal coincidences from his life, pictures of oddly shaped vegetables, that sort of thing. As soon as they got home, Robbie asked Dan to help him write it up. Beth said it was getting late, but Dan said they could whip it off on the word processor, and he and Robbie went to the computer in the corner of the dining room. Robbie loaded the program and Dan typed it for him, talking him through many of the commands as he used them. They ran the printer and checked the result, and then Dan took Robbie up to bed.

  Beth went upstairs to kiss Robbie good night. When she returned she put on a CD and stretched out on the couch with her eyes closed. To Cook the music sounded like the score for some movie about space travel he had shamefully neglected to see. When Dan came back downstairs he read the sports page and mumbled. It was obvious that neither of them was interested in producing any more data. This suited Cook, who was surprised at how worn out he was from just one day of “Watch. Say nothing.”

  Dan put the paper down and announced he was going to bed. Beth rose from the couch and turned off the CD player. Cook, who had been sitting quietly, awaiting developments, stood up. They all looked at one another.

  “Beth and I were talking a little bit about this, Jeremy.” Dan nodded to himself, looking sure of what he was about to say. “We think it’s okay. I mean, it’s okay.”

  “Yeah,” said Beth. “It’s okay.”

  They spoke heartily, with lots of nods and warm looks. If they felt that good about it, Cook wondered why they didn’t just pick stronger words and save themselves the wear and tear of body language. But maybe they couldn’t. Maybe this was the best they could do.

  At any rate, Cook went to bed with an actual smile on his face.

  Eleven

  “It’s good to hear your voice this morning, Jeremy.”

  Cook, freshly showered and wearing a towel around his waist, had just opened the bathroom door on the third floor and found Dan on his knees with a pallet of plaster, filling cracks in the wall on the landing. Cook gave him a curious look. Good to hear his voice? What had he meant by that?
>
  Dan sat back on his heels, remaining on his knees and looking up at Cook. “Lots of people sing in the shower, but I guess linguists talk in the shower. And a funny kind of talk it is, too. ‘If Dr. Cook knew anything about Timbuktu …’ That was it, wasn’t it? It came and went, out of the blue.”

  Cook smiled vaguely, trying to be friendly. Fearing this might not be enough, he threw his head back and laughed before hurrying on to his room, postponing the conclusion that he was losing his mind until he had tried to figure this out. Self-speech in the shower fell within his range of sane behavior, though it did push the envelope a bit, as he hated to say. What worried him was (1) he couldn’t remember having said what Dan said he said, and (2) it made no sense to him. He cared nothing for Timbuktu; it was as remote from his thoughts as it was famous for being from everything else. And “Dr. Cook”? Was he so insecure that he had to proclaim his credentials to the shower walls?

  Dim signals began to tap in memory’s vault. Dr. Cook—a figure of fairly recent derision in linguistic circles, if memory served, and it did, damn it. “If Dr. Cook knew anything about Kickapoo …” That was one of F. F. Sweet’s memorable sentences—or part of one. How had it concluded? “… then he wouldn’t be the sidewalk turd that he is”? Cook couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter.

  Yes it did. Why hadn’t he kept Pillow’s copy of the journal instead of shafting it? He should be studying the article so that he could write a defense of himself.

  No he shouldn’t. It didn’t matter.

  Yes it did.

  No it didn’t.

  Repression was good, almost as good as death, but unlike death, it leaked. His volubility in the shower demonstrated that. But it didn’t follow that he should give himself over to this fight. That would be a backward step both scholastically and developmentally. He should let it go. In time, the rupture would heal and the leaks would stop. The self-speech would disappear from his waking life and fade to passing mutters, obscene and flecked with spittle, from deepest sleep.