A pity, that, though I was more concerned about the spacious lawn, which I determined to be dry and inactive. What a smart decision to spare it wear and tear by selling antiques on the cobblestones, in case the grass recoiled at being flattened with furniture and trampled. How could that not put a damper on business?
Society matrons, gaunt and plump and statuesque, roamed the maze of jetsam, and gold badges with “OHS” in red enamel were pinned to the lapels of their designer casual wear. They hobnobbed with friends in similar pastels and with prospects who ran the gamut from three-piece suits to patchoulied (and Wiccan?) Goth youth to suburbanites in polo shirts to doddery retirees in the drab outfits of fixed incomes. Professional dealers must have cleaned out the best stuff hours ago. Nonetheless, trade was brisk.
Browsers swooped in on carnival glassware, mandolins, china sets, ladderback chairs, deco makeup mirror, wicker bassinet, sometimes from right under my nose, putting it out of joint even if none of these items was my cup of tea. The nerve of people! I plotted the rest of my route so as to minimize face-to-face interactions. Also didn’t linger over anything of a bulk to inflict hernia while hauling it to my car. I’d finished one empty-handed circuit of the merchandise and exercised my rule of thumb to save this trip from being an unalloyed bust: must-have purchases seldom leapt at me from this kind of teeming miscellany till the second go-round.
A wax-cylinder phonograph, replete with outsized green lily of a sound horn, had vacated its corner of an oak buffet table, to expose a stack of sheet music. Wow, the “$1” penciled in each upper-right corner shouldn’t have stopped these from flying out of here. Hank Thompson, Ernest Tubb, Loretta Lynn, the Louvin Brothers, Webb Pierce, Red Foley—the hit parade went on and on. Vintage country with colorful, snazzy cover art. Not that I was in the market myself. I neither played nor owned a piano. If any of this eye candy came home with me, I’d admire it a day or two, stash it in some drawer, and forget about it forever.
All the same, no harm in ogling some charming graphics right now. But what was this? It was also marked a dollar as if it belonged in this lot, by someone who may have endured too much writer’s cramp to care that it wasn’t sheet music. In point of fact, it was a two-pocket folder, on slightly embossed stock like rough parchment, in a lime green that I associated with the ’80s. And indeed, on a yellowing sticker, more or less in the middle of the front cover, had been typewritten, Some Centennial Notes on the Gorman County “Aerolite,” 1882–1982. By Francis Thayer. Submitted to Misk. Univ. Facult. Annu. The left pocket held a sheaf of brittle foolscap in a florid, fading script. The right pocket held a draft of Thayer’s article.
I felt giddy without understanding why, and clutched the open folder two-fisted with baffling intensity. A meteor in Gorman County? News to me. Its relationship to lake-bottom portal wavered beyond my reeling intellect, as did the occurrence of two unrelated cosmic phenomena within a few decades in the same penny-ante county. The abbreviations, I gathered, referred to a yearly journal of articles by the faculty at Occam’s erstwhile university, on its last legs by 1982. It may have gone belly-up before Francis Thayer’s contribution had seen print, making this copy rare if not unique. Not bad for a dollar. I clasped the folder against my chest as I foraged on.
I was feeling lucky. But with wall-eyed gaze full of the wide view, I narrowly avoided tripping over the paintings, one propped in front of the next, that jutted across my path like a peninsula. I stooped to thumb through the canvases, blocking even more of the way and scowling daggers at everyone squeezing by who didn’t mutter “Excuse me.” The art was also trying my patience. It would have constituted a dismal sampling of the “thrift shop” variety, had thrift shops existed when these paintings were new. Terminally dull in terms of color, subject matter, technique, composition. Redeeming eccentricity was uniformly absent in family portraits, still-lives of fruit in bowls or flowers in vases, historic tableaux. A puritan maiden at her spinning wheel occupied the lower right corner in a hall where only a dark, gaping fireplace and a diamond-lattice casement broke the monotony. Everything was brown or black or smudgy white. A Revolutionary War scene projected no less ennui, as a line of redcoats and a line of bluecoats at opposite edges of a green plain blasted their muskets at each other, without casualties on either side.
Next! My exasperated sigh stalled in midflow. Overwhelmed by gilt rococo frame was just another bleak, mundane piece of hackwork, till my casual scan resolved crude strokes into forms. To label this landscape “primitivist” would be arch flattery. Disturbingly swollen tree trunks with leafless boughs dominated the field of view, under a sky the blue of diluted milk, out to a yardstick-straight horizon two-thirds up the canvas. In the foreground, roots of trees were awash in coarsely stippled gray sand that ended in an irregular, wavy shoreline of sorts, halfway to the horizon. The rest of the distance to the horizon resembled scorched earth. The artist, I wagered, had been operating en plein air, because multiple overlaps and overlays of paint bespoke an inability to tell if the alleged sand weren’t really violet or pink or beige. As experience had taught me, the dust from elsewhere was of ambiguous color, where it could be identified at all.
My left hand still pressed Thayer’s documents to my pulsating chest. My right hand lifted the painting by its scalloped frame while I stood up. A few white chips were off-putting, like bone, in the gilded plaster. My eyes were bugging out, weren’t they? I didn’t care. Nor did I care when my jaw dropped, after I swiveled the painting around and deciphered the penciled scrawl on one of the ill-fitting slats used for backing: “The Blasted Heath. 1926.”
This picture was definitely good for the proverbial thousand words, and they came gushing into my head. Based on my fan mail from nonagenarians, I’d been thinking in terms of a temporarily open portal somewhere in Gorman County, circa World War I and again this past summer. But here was badly rendered testimony to the desolation wrought by continuous alien influx, conspicuous enough to attract Sunday painters, even earning a nickname out of Macbeth. Remarkable only that the aversion to reservoir water and the rumors of haunted forest weren’t more firmly entrenched! How long had official channels been discouraging reservoir naysayers? How long had that suppression received input from whatever had been crossing the portal all along?
“Aren’t those colors just incredible?” I flinched as if I’d been busted. A statuesque OHS dowager in coral pantsuit, perhaps she who’d phoned two weeks ago, must have read me as an easy mark. I tried blinking my pop-eyes back into their sockets as she trumpeted, “These days, a gallery would hail something like this as ‘outside art,’ I guess you’d call it.” Uh-huh. Humored her with a tentative nod. A sticker spanning most of a plaster chip in the frame’s lower-right corner was asking $30. The dowager was beaming at me, as at a sure thing, prematurely.
“I don’t know. Thirty dollars.” I pursed my lips to simulate fading interest.
“Why, the frame alone is worth more. When we put this out, I imagined someone would buy it just for that and throw the picture away.” That was some harsh subtext. Meet my price or this canvas is a goner!
The Yankee in me couldn’t give up on dickering quite yet. I stopped hugging the folder and held it midway between us. “Okay then, thirty. And can you throw this in too?”
Her squint went straight to the price in the upper right, as if the rest of the item were invisible. “It’s a dollar.” Intoned with flinty finality. As if I needed her to demonstrate how the rich stayed rich. Even when they were crying poverty and dumping assets.
“All right.” I produced my wallet, and she whipped out a receipt pad from jacket pocket. Hell, her polyester outfit was practically as historic as a lot of the inventory here.
Had to console myself that chances of any more Gorman County views among the unseen paintings were infinitesimal, because this outlay had eaten up most of my cash. Struggled for good-humored parting wishes as I accepted the receipt and pinned it against the folder with my thumb. “Guess every little purchase h
elps. Good luck making whatever it takes to keep the pipes from freezing this winter.”
She declined to dignify that with the least change of expression. Turned on her heel, on the scent of bigger spenders.
I pondered the apparent lax security while seeking an exit from the labyrinth. Neither fence nor wall enclosed the sale. Did this gaggle of beldams seriously expect the honor system or their hobbling patrol to deter theft? Were they about to chase down perps at the end of the driveway, or even notice them amidst the commotion? On closer survey, however, the perimeter wasn’t really so porous. Beefy guys in dark suits, rougher around the edges than the other attendees in formalwear, were strolling back and forth without straying into the clutter, ignoring it but sizing up the clientele, especially anyone, like myself, heading out. A few of these watchdogs were somehow familiar. Yes, they were members of the plainclothes detail that upheld the peace at City Hall, whence someone from the third floor must have assigned them. Officialdom’s sub rosa contribution to the event.
I looked none of them in the face, lest that stir their suspicions, and made sure my white receipt was in stark high-contrast sight upon lime-green folder, till I was on the street. This guest shift, I theorized, was racking up overtime on the city’s dime. The administration, on the brink of insolvency or not, could always scrape something out of the till to help genteel friends.
12
Believe it or not, I didn’t touch Thayer’s notes that weekend. Too preoccupied pulling together Monday’s make-or-break appeal to Atwood. And as often happens, I foolishly neglected my time-tested, if strictly personal, life lesson: the more effort I invested toward a goal, the more I wanted it, the worse the results.
The enchanting receptionist was less upbeat than previously. Marshaled only the thinnest modicum of a smile, and I tried not to read too much into it. Atwood was correspondingly less welcoming, less collegial. I thanked him warmly for his time and his open attitude. He shook my hand and bid me sit as if he had a train to catch. “Well, let’s see what you’ve got.” Today his poster for Méliès’s Voyage dans la Lune seemed more symbolic of my far-fetched chances than of a kindred spirit in the wings. Best not pay it any heed.
My spiel was well-rehearsed. My laptop had new batteries. I aspired to the most compelling spin on what wasn’t exactly the material as promised. The screen was positioned at a corner of the desk between us, ensuring I knew what he saw as I spoke. Opened with a couple of clips of Wil’s sweaty, bedraggled face in close-up, to depict his pathologic lethargy, even though he wasn’t mimicking Lucinda’s squirming muscles or undulant eyebrows. I included the business of panning to the saw in Wil’s hand, on the principle that it was better for my credibility than no context at all. Quick-fade to the root at its most agitated, and while that sequence looped for a minute, I emphasized the reservoir’s proximity and the virulence of a toxin that afflicted plants and people with the same freakish symptoms. And whose effects, in reference to footage of writhing uprooted weeds, continued after the host had been killed. Right then, thoughts of crawling, decaying Morgan pushed uninvited into my mind. Banishing them took some doing.
I stole a glance at Atwood and instantly regretted it. Impatience was creasing his forehead and smoldering in his eyes, as if he were itching to interrupt me but wanted to give me enough rope first. That ill-will sideswiped my confidence into the gutter, but I rattled along to the bitter end, with an impassioned plea to wrangle more stringent water tests from state or federal agencies, if the city couldn’t afford their own. A strong finish during dry runs, but in the event it was whiny and, more damningly, inadequate. I wracked my brain for more to say. Something from outside the box, in Atwood’s trendy parlance.
Yes, I had blanked out, inexcusably, on one incident till now. The grouchy codger’s rotten fish, those many weeks ago, downstairs in Permits and Licenses! My first omen of malignity in the reservoir! In desperation I fairly babbled about it, ruefully aware that my delivery was reducing a valid postscript to a pitiful non sequitur. But how could Atwood turn a deaf ear to this easily substantiated warning about a public food supply, demanding belief in nothing more esoteric than bacteria or industrial leakage, regardless of the messenger’s emotionality? Though as I recalled, I’d done precisely that to the old coot, hadn’t I? Given him short, skeptical shrift. Couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. I lapsed into mortified silence. Braced for karmic ax to fall.
Unsmiling Atwood pushed at the edge of his rosewood desk, and rolled his chair back on squeaking wheels, as if from too much on his plate. “Concerns about diseased trout might be better served by the Bureau of Game and Fisheries or the Parks Department.” Ouch. My own advice to the codger, come home to roost in more urbane phrasing. “As for the rest . . .” A fraught pause conveyed his disappointment. He leaned forward. “You and I could both be doing the taxpayers some good right now, but I let you take up valuable time, with the understanding you’d obtained more evidence of a particular unnamed disease. Instead, you come pawning off this completely irrelevant sensationalism, something you might have rigged very easily with a few CG effects. I’m not saying that’s what you did, but that’s the first objection anyone would raise. And what is it you’re propounding here? An even more grandiose, outlandish disaster in the offing. The vegetable kingdom is mobilizing? Really!” Atwood’s diatribe sounded almost as well-rehearsed as my show-and-tell, as if he’d counted on me to exasperate him, and in that respect I hadn’t disappointed him at all.
I, meanwhile, was contrarily serene. Why not? No mistaking what kind of ride I was in for. Might as well batten down and coast along. “But that’s the issue, exactly. The crisis is bigger than I’d guessed, and it’s accelerating. So many disparate elements. The diseased fish, the crop failures, hive collapse, the abnormal weeds, the infant mortality. When you add them up, how can you ignore the implications?”
“Because they’re only implications, and you can’t keep handing me these bigger claims with evidence for them in inverse proportion. As you said, they’re disparate elements. Apples and oranges. They don’t add up to anything.”
“But that’s why you have to authorize more tests in the reservoir. To provide that evidence.”
“No. Based on the quality of your presentation, I couldn’t justify the time and expense.”
“That’s kind of a Catch-22, isn’t it?” And more puzzling, why hadn’t Atwood invoked executive privilege and kicked me out yet, as I might have if I were him? The one answer I contrived led me deeper into paranoia. Suppose Atwood and Westcott and Mr. Marsh and others in City Hall were under alien influence. They’d have to tread a fine line between low-key behavior that wouldn’t attract attention and callous suppression of inquisitive Homo sapiens. How else to explain Atwood’s gross intractability? His about-face from cordiality into sarcasm?
“Listen, you’re not the only observant person in town. What makes you so much smarter than newspaper reporters and hospital orderlies and county agents? If anything, they have more on the ball than you do, because they know better than to blow unrelated happenings out of proportion, and they shut up about them rather than incite public anxiety, and they don’t embark on quixotic crusades to divert limited resources that can hardly prop up our infrastructure as it is.”
Or conversely, if the water were dispersing an alien fifth column throughout the population, maybe that explained the lack of outcry at everything going on, or the insistence by Wil, and God knew how many other parents, that nothing was wrong with an energetic dead baby.
“So please, take your laptop and get back to work and let’s not hear about this again. I also can’t imagine your sickly friend would appreciate a camcorder stuck in his face anytime soon.” He stood up. Arms motionless at his sides. Handshakes would be inappropriate now.
Strange, but as I exchanged a parting nod with the more subdued, less fetching receptionist, I wasn’t utterly demoralized. Conceivably I was in shock. Or it may have been the solace of an audacious plan in formative stag
e, whose germ Atwood himself had planted by suggesting I take my rotten fish to the Bureau of Game and Fisheries. As for why I hadn’t been fired by now, alien intellect may well have subscribed to the aphorism about keeping friends close and enemies closer.
13
Atwood had slammed the door on any cooperation from City Hall, but the lime-green cover of Thayer’s folder amounted to a new door onto parts unknown, for me to open at will. I might even luck into refreshing new territory for the OGAM Chronicles due Friday. If my chutzpah held out, the episode might also function as testing ground for my theory that Westcott and his ilk wanted to maintain covert tabs on me, and therefore I could call their bluff to some extent. On the other hand, my chutzpah might not hold out. Or I might want to save it for that audacious plan Atwood had accidentally inspired, and that had miles to go before it gelled.
That evening, while nursing a single-malt apéritif and throwing together my usual inauthentic stir-fry of tofu, broccoli, and potatoes in a cast-iron skillet, I debated whether I maybe was in shock. Atwood’s scathing denouncement of my “crusade” still wasn’t bumming me out, though I felt it should have, even if I’d seen it coming. My ingrained cynicism may have been paying its rent at last, or was I in the process of falling apart in earnest? In any case, to make up for my lousy day, I resolved to pore over Thayer’s folder tonight. After refilling my shot glass with a digestif, I started on the yellowing notes in the left pocket, but there was scant reward in them. They were excerpts from a very technical report of 1882, rife with outmoded scientific jargon in a fancy but smudged, spidery script.
Sketchy narrative of a meteor impact in the barnyard of an isolated farm, and the ensuing nineteenth-century equivalent of a short-lived “media circus,” and the meteor’s annihilation in a lightning storm took up much less foolscap than the enumeration of results and values for “borax beads,” “occluded gases,” spectroscopy, “aqua fortis,” “aqua regia,” “Widmannstätten figures,” and other oldfangled chemical analyses, if that’s even what they were. I skimmed the pedantic scrawl in vain for conclusive links to the reservoir’s anomalies.
The Color Over Occam Page 10