“It’s for my wife that I hire you,” the owner of that joint had said. “It’s worth it to me, what I pay you, if my wife leaves me alone. Okay? So—night watchman.”
“And who watches the place in the daytime?”
He snapped his fingers. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in the daytime.”
Men like that, business owners, men of property, sized me up at a glance. They assigned me jobs, paid in cash, where I could sit and think my so-called thoughts and look like I was doing nothing, which, as often as not, was exactly what I was doing.
It was nice to put me in a window and ask nothing of me, but I knew that sooner or later Edgar would spy me in his peregrinations as he planned his bright future in the growing field of kindergarten.
It took four days. I was busy throwing a flat-blade screwdriver at the wall to see how many times its sharp end would stick, keeping score in two columns on a yellow legal pad, when Edgar walked past and saw me in the window and stepped in, dragging a small white dog on a leash.
He said, “Did you watch any of those videos I e-mailed you?”
“You can’t bring that animal in here. It smells like a skunk shitting bleach.”
“Say hello to Particle. I used to call him Wave.”
“Potato.”
“What?”
“Potato potato.”
A siren whined down the street. Edgar’s forlorn little dog began to grunt and snuffle. It was trying to howl, but you can’t eat scraps under the table for seven years, or forty-nine dog years, and then one day up and decide to let out a howl. All it could manage was a kind of chewy sneeze.
I’d been expecting Edgar: he had e-mailed me a poem he’d written, all eighty-six pages of it. No matter what lazy fun you might be having on a Saturday night—maybe you are performing your assigned exercises, muttering, “I accept myself, I accept myself,” gritting your teeth until you worry they will crack; or maybe you are watching a television show in which a researcher injects himself with gonadotropic hormones, followed by an interview with a med-school dropout who claims to have transplanted a monkey’s head onto another monkey’s body—while you fritter away your precious life in trifles, you can rest easy, knowing that Edgar manfully craps out sodden lumps of poetry, shaking his bathroom with the thunder of his spirit. What had he eaten for dinner? His poem stank in my nostrils.
Edgar said, “What about that thing I sent you to read?”
I had purchased an emergency potato and put it in my top desk drawer, and when he saw it in my hand he got moving in a hurry—or perhaps it was my cologne, Air of Menace. Down the road he went. I waited until the coast was clear and I took my break.
I smoked a cigar by the river in the heat and the glassy stillness. A cormorant found a fish. A night heron trailed his legs behind him as he flew. A cloud of gnats danced frantically in the hot light. Small white butterflies fought, or teased one another, or courted: I didn’t have enough information to understand their relationships. All I was good for that year was watching waterbirds.
Edgar is not his real name, by the way. His real name is Martin.
His loneliness was terrifying to me. It presented me with a struggle between abstract fellow feeling, morality, large-mindedness, Have mercy on a sinner like yourself—none of them my strong suit—between those high ideals on the one hand, and fidelity to felt experience on the other: for a nickel I would proctologize him with a straight razor, dear God, please let him die.
He didn’t deserve it. Edgar was a sensitive, odd, unhappy man who had taken far too many drugs and had not yet sweated them out, that was all. I had known others like him. This much I understood, and I wanted my understanding to cancel him, to eliminate him, like a proof or a problem in a child’s geometry homework. The problem has been solved, let us move on.
But the world is not my private fiefdom, it is our common property. One morning I spotted Edgar at the grocery store, stumbling, stunned. I had just finished working out at the YMCA and was still sweating, pushing my cart full of blackberries, cantaloupe, bunches of arugula, tomato juice, and there stood Edgar, a man like me.
He seemed upset to encounter me, and why not. Edgar, in the dairy aisle, saw me seeing him and he winced, he froze, he was afraid even to wave—or was it my own fear it seemed I saw myself seeing in him? He, too, had wanted a new friend. It was not entirely his fault that he was a fool.
Pretty soon my girlfriend wasn’t speaking to me. She left town. Fine. When would she be back? When she came back. That’s fine. I picked up a two-piece fried-chicken box with macaroni and cheese and black-eyed peas, and I settled in to watch television all night by myself. I watched Solo Boxeo on Univision. I watched The Game.
The Game is 128 minutes long, thirty-eight minutes longer than a movie should be. It is the story of Nicholas Van Orton’s forty-eighth birthday. Nick’s brother, Conrad, connects him to CRS, an outfit that designs a persecution experience for him: “the game.”
It soon becomes difficult for Nicholas to distinguish the texture of life itself from the design of the game. Faced with a pedestrian having a heart attack on the sidewalk, he asks, “How do we know he’s real?”
He kills his brother, then, baffled and grief-stricken, throws himself from the roof of a skyscraper—but he falls onto an inflated pillow placed specially to catch him. The game is over! His brother is alive! And all of his friends are waiting for him at his birthday party!
My notes follow.
12 min 06 sec Outlandish, degrading, crass stupidity. Crimes against the human mind.
48 min 35 sec Pure corn.
01 hr 05 min “I have a gun.” WHAT TRASH.
01 hr 24 min Not only is it not credible, but the extent of its implausibility is itself beyond belief.
01 hr 54 min Dirt, boredom, filth, lies.
An overeducated dope like Edgar, a former seminarian and a drug casualty, had never had a chance, not from the moment the actor at the twenty-three-minute mark said, “You want to know what it is? What it’s all about? John, chapter nine, verse twenty-five—whereas once I was blind, now I can see.”
I remembered, with atypical clarity, watching Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry Callahan in The Dead Pool in a motel in Phoenix, or was it Tucson, or possibly Flagstaff, explaining to a bored girl that the movie’s obligatory car chase, in which a bomb-equipped remote-control car pursues the hero, was a brilliant parody of the genre’s tired conventions, but it was only the drugs I had taken performing their predictable alchemy of transmuting two hours of television into a lecture.
“You peed on me again last night while you were asleep,” the girl said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
John 9:32—“Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind.” Whereas I was blind, now I am still as blind as I ever was, but alas, I have become convinced that I can see.
I was impatient to discuss this and other topics with Edgar. I crouched in the damp bushes in front of his porch, waiting for him to return from his Wednesday-night graduate seminar. His little dog barked for two or three minutes before giving up its feeble pretense of guarding the perimeter. I knew the students often went out together for a drink after class but my knees and hips were strong, my hamstrings and lower back were flexible, I could wait all night in the dark. I was going to explain everything. I wanted to surprise him.
LETTER FROM DEVILS TOWER
WHEN HE OPENED his pay envelope and saw that Ermin, the bakery’s owner, had shorted him for the second time in a month, he wrote a note. “You owe me eight hundred dollars,” the note said. “I finished my route. I took the van and sold it. I’ll bring you the balance Monday morning.”
He stapled his note to the screen door. He got back in the maroon van full of dusty trays and pulled out of the lot across the street from the bakery. He headed east on Oak Street and turned left on Floyd, and at Saint Catherine he took the on-ramp for I-65 North.
It wasn’t a bad job, even if it was rough o
n his knee. He enjoyed driving, with its seductive illusion of getting somewhere, as if motion and progress were identical. He liked to look at maps: X marks the spot, you are no longer here.
He often dreamt of driving clear across the country. Those double yellow lines kept coming at him. “I notice that in this fantasy you are alone,” a caseworker had once told him, and it was as if she had said, I notice that your hair is hair-colored.
For a long time he had been the kind of person who didn’t have a cell phone. But one evening, after dinner, his wife had become enraged and had said, When are you going to get a cell phone, and he had said, I thought maybe it would be simpler to have a tracking device installed in my cervical spine, and his wife had said, For Christ’s sake, will you just grow up and get a cell phone already, and now he was no longer the kind of person who didn’t have a cell phone.
He crossed over the Ohio River into southern Indiana. There was nothing to stop him from throwing it out the window: his old life through a figurative window, his phone through an actual van window, everything. What would Jesus do, Jesus didn’t have a cell phone.
He struck the phone on the knob of the gearshift several times, hard, until its screen cracked, chikt. He rolled down his window and threw the phone out of the van. Now he was that kind of person.
He pulled over and walked back and waited for a pause in the traffic and got the phone. It was ringing.
“Margaret tells me you won’t be coming home this weekend,” his wife said.
That Margaret, he thought. “How is Margaret?” he said.
“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling.”
“Not even myself.”
“Why won’t you just admit what you’re up to?”
“I don’t know that a man can be asked to admit what he has never taken the trouble to hide. If you see my point.”
“I do see it,” she said. “If you look to the left and right of my nose, you will observe my eyes, which I use for seeing. But I understand if you have to fuck her. To say goodbye. I understand if you have to fuck her to say goodbye.”
“I don’t want to fuck her goodbye,” he said.
“Just don’t fuck me on the same day,” his wife said. “If you have to fuck her, I understand.”
Karen was wearing a pale-green sweater even though it wasn’t cold. She had cut her hair short again. He liked it long, he liked it short.
Once, when her hair was short and she had sent him a photo of it on the cell phone, he had cut his off, too, and stood in front of the bathroom mirror at home and pretended to be her.
“What are you doing?” his wife had said, and he had said, “What do you think I’m doing?”
“You drive a van?” Karen said.
“Never mind. What time do you get off work?”
“How does right now suit you?” She got in. “This van smells like a biscuit. I guess you remember I don’t go all the way on the first date.”
“I don’t know if I go all the way at all anymore.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “You look terrible.”
She’d gone to school for years to study library science. He didn’t see how it could be so complicated. It seemed like a hoax.
“Where are we headed?”
“Kingman,” he said. “Barstow. San Bernardino.”
She drummed her fingers on the dashboard, thrup. “Then it’s going to be a while.”
“With my arm hanging out the window. And by the third day, your arm is so sunburned that you have to roll your sleeve back down. That’s what America means to me.”
“Here. Hold this.” She pushed her purse at him. He was being tested for subservience. He did not move.
“Be careful,” she said. “Don’t touch it. You might break out in little purses and purse yourself to death.”
He felt his headache coming on and took three tiny white pills. Karen turned the radio on and off and said, “Let’s play a game. Each of us will tell something he doesn’t like about the other person. I’ll go first. You don’t have a headache yet, you can’t be sure you’re going to get your headache, but you take a pill. It’s wasteful, showing that you are a bad steward of your resources. It’s impatient, anxious, panicked, I might even say cowardly. Your turn.”
His phone rang. “Can it possibly be true,” Margaret said on the other end of the line, “that you have blocked both of Ermin’s phones? You got shit jammed up back here. I am not delivering no dinner rolls on a bicycle.”
“It’s not that I’m not interested in your personal problems, Margaret. It’s that, like any other self-respecting psychiatric caregiver, I charge two hundred and fifty dollars an hour to listen to them. That’s more than four dollars per minute.”
“Tell me just one thing. Where are you?”
“Monaco. Antarctica. Beautiful downtown Samarkand.”
“Send me a postcard, baby,” Margaret said.
“Why don’t we stop and get something to eat?” Karen said. “You’re too skinny. You look like an anteater.”
He was looking at her but he couldn’t hear her. He was listening to the other people in the diner. “I feel as if you’re trying to control my every thought,” the woman at the table to his left said to the man with her, almost certainly her husband.
“Try to focus,” Karen said. “I’m going to call my sister.”
He thought he was staring into blank space, but space was not blank. Space was as full of people and objects as ever. He was staring at steak and poached eggs with Cholula sauce, wheat toast. He shifted his weight on the lumpy red vinyl of his seat.
He was staring at the waitress. “Do you want something else?” the waitress said.
“What do Americans want?” he said. “Read any newspaper. We want to kill each other. It’s not hard to understand.”
“I’ll bring your check,” the waitress said.
Karen came back and sat down. Now that she had his attention, she didn’t want it.
She said, “There’s not much more to tell. My cousin Calvin? He dressed up like a circus clown and took a kitchen knife and robbed a woman out in front of a strip-mall jewelry store. And our spaniel died. Sarah has bad dreams about it. She says the dog comes back and speaks to her.”
“What does the dog say?”
“Please don’t ask me questions like that.”
“I knew a man who said he could talk to the spirits of dead animals.”
“What kinds of animals?”
“It was a hamster in the story he told me. His college-age son came back over the break with a pet hamster. The boy takes off and the father is supervising the hamster. He doesn’t like to see a living thing in a metal cage, he says. He lets it out to run around on the floor in the daytime. At night he puts it back in the cage. One morning, he sees that the hamster has broken its jaw, almost broken it off, trying to gnaw through the metal bars. It dies. And in his dreams the dead hamster explains to him from the spirit realm that he had shown it freedom, and it loved freedom too much to stay in the cage.”
“It’s a nice story about freedom. My favorite part is how it changes ‘I killed my son’s hamster’ into ‘I have magical powers.’ ”
“I want hamster freedom.”
“You are talking about hamster death,” she said. “You ought to try being a woman sometime. You’d learn a lot.”
“Will you look at this jerk?” he said, gesturing to a nearby table, half hoping to start an argument with her or with someone else, it didn’t matter. “Playing with his mashed potatoes. Like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
“That movie is better than people say.”
“What people?”
“It’s a movie about faith. They’re staring into the sky, saying, ‘Oh my God.’ Waiting for the angel Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, to show them glad tidings. Or for Christ Himself to knock them flat on the road to Damascus.”
“They would be,” he said. “Waiting. What point is there waiting for s
omething like that to happen. When you think of everything you yourself could get done.”
“And you think because there’s no point to wanting what you want, you just aren’t going to want it anymore.”
“I am gnawing through the bars of my cage.”
“You didn’t pay much attention to your friend’s story,” Karen said. “Go on and tell yourself you can bite your way to freedom with your mighty mouth. I see your mouth moving. You think you’re biting, but you’re just talking. I see the cage. The cage is still there.”
Richard Dreyfuss had not even looked at them. He was far away, in a Wyoming of his mind.
The little girl with her hair in two braids who seemed to run the motel handed him a coupon for painkillers. The coupon had been cut out neatly from a larger sheet of newsprint and dotted lines ran along its edge. “Am I that ugly?” he said. She cocked her head, studying his eyes, then went into a back room and came out with the painkillers themselves.
“You do not have to buy them,” she said.
His whole life, the drugs that killed pain and the drugs that had caused it, the present wife and the disappeared ex-wife gone off to North Africa somewhere, all of it had begun years ago as a kind of performance art. Who was he fooling? Not even himself. Some nights he stared at the ceiling and wished he had snapped out of it and gotten a sex-reassignment surgery, or something else contemporary. Instead he had made a face and it had stuck this way.
The motel walls were striped. The upholstery was striped, the bedclothes were striped. The room was full of lamps with their cords.
In bed, the procedure was as had long ago been established. Nothing could excite her except being ignored.
If he yawned and watched television, or pretended to watch television, she came, or pretended to be able to keep coming, until she had to vomit, or pretended to vomit. She locked the bathroom door behind her. The entire production was less convincing than he remembered.
The Correspondence Page 6