“Manuscripts?”
“My history of the town. From trading post until today.”
“I’d forgotten about that.”
“And my bibliography.”
“Bibliography?”
“On death.”
“I thought you were joking about that.”
“It’s no joke. I now have over a thousand sources.”
“What about the history? Is it finished?”
Mohr shakes his head. “I never meant to finish it.”
“Why not?”
“Where to end it?”
“You could end it anywhere, couldn’t you?”
Mohr turns loose a big dentured grin. “Little by little and was by was.”
I stand up and pace out to the road. There is no traffic, and the afternoon has already begun. The sun has long since burned off any dew or moisture on the ground, and I can feel the verdant blooming and budding all around. I tell Mohr to wait while I go up to check on Schroeder and Sylvia.
Instead of ascending on the far side as I did earlier, I walk up the main path, trying to make as much noise as I can. I stand under the elm tree at the top and call over to them but receive no response, then make my way across the top of the mound. Side by side, naked in the grass, they do not stir. The fire is completely out. In the sunlight their bodies are pale and small and look like matter left to the elements. Schroeder is lying next to a reeking puddle of vomited whiskey. Sylvia is curled fetally beside him, covered partially by the sleeping bag, the empty bottle an arm’s length away. But for the subtle rise and fall of her abdomen, she looks dead.
I shake Schroeder, but he only rolls onto his face. I tug the sleeping bag out from underneath Sylvia, whose skin is mottled and blue, and open it out and spread it over the two of them.
I return to the base of the mound. The archaeologists have arrived. Three of them, two women and a man, are talking to Mohr, who is seated in sartorial splendor on the bench pointing with his cane as he makes the introductions. “Lucian of Samosata. Drs. Palmer, Norris, and Middleton. They have come to excavate the mound.”
We shake hands all around. The archaeologists are all dressed alike in tee shirts and jeans and down vests with the insignia of their university emblazoned on the breast. Dr. Palmer is the leader, a woman in her for-ties with spiky blond hair and a cracked red complexion. Dr. Norris is large and hairy with a cigarette-singed beard and turquoise jewelry and an aura of mild dissipation. Dr. Middleton looks to be the youngest of the group and could be an Indian herself. She is a tall woman with an olive complexion, deep brown eyes, and a long black pigtail that falls over her shoulder and hangs to her waist like a coil of rope.
“Are the rites of spring over up there?” Dr. Palmer asks.
“I think they need to be carried down. They’re both unconscious.”
“Unconscious?”
“There’s an empty half gallon of whiskey on the ground next to them.”
“Jesus Christ,” Palmer says, annoyed.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” Norris says and ambles off toward the van. The other two follow him over and begin to unpack equipment while Norris fidgets with a cellular telephone and paces back and forth as he places the call for help. Mohr and I remain at the picnic bench watching the production unfold with mild interest. They unload a tripod and several small crates. “Surveying equipment,” Mohr comments. “To unlock history.”
The ambulance arrives, and after brief consultation the medics follow me up the mound, carrying their portable kits and two pole stretchers. The sheriff arrives as we are about halfway to the top, and now the base of the mound is a turmoil of revolving lights and idling vehicles. Mohr is seated at the picnic bench talking with Dr. Palmer and the sheriff. The other two archaeologists are fussing with equipment next to their van.
The medics kneel next to the unconscious bodies and begin their ministrations. They peel back eyelids and shine lights, take pulse and blood-pressure readings, test reflexes. Then they cover them up and place them on stretchers. The sheriff huffs up next to me.
“If it isn’t the happy wanderer,” he says, keys jingling. “I should’ve guessed you’d be up here.”
“I came to watch the archaeologists,” I reply as dryly as I can. We both watch as the medics adjust the blankets and straps on the stretchers.
“What’s the verdict? They gonna live?” the sheriff asks.
“Alcohol poisoning,” a medic responds. “Acute. Class four, I’d say.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means they’re drunker’n shit.” He struggles to adjust the straps on Schroeder.
“I can see that, Charlie,” the sheriff says, ill humored. “What’s the class four business?”
“Means they’re comatose. No response to stimuli. No reflexes.”
The sheriff bends to pick up the empty whiskey bottle lying at his feet. “Goddamn. I’d be comatose too drinking this shit. You boys gonna manage with those stretchers?”
“One at a time we will.”
“Want us to give you a hand with ’em?” The sheriff waggles his thumb to indicate he means the two of us. “Horace here is in pretty good shape. Isn’t that right?”
I ignore the question and step back as the two medics position themselves to lift Schroeder. “What you can do is watch to make sure she doesn’t vomit and start choking.”
“I think we can handle that,” the sheriff says.
They hoist Schroeder up. “He’s one heavy bastard,” the medic grunts. Schroeder, with his dirty blond locks falling over his shoulder, lips dry and slightly parted, looks as innocent and semiretarded as I’ve ever seen him. I glance down at Sylvia, who doesn’t bear the same look of innocence but, strapped tightly down under the blankets, looks tiny and gaunt and wasted. Her face is a void, dark hair knotted and tangled with bits of grass. I try to remember how she looked that day in the grocery store on her search for kiwis. It was only three months ago, yet it seems to me that she has aged.
“Some orgy they had,” the sheriff says as the medics carry Schroeder away. He picks over the clothes piled next to the fire pit and begins to search the pockets. “Uh-huh. Here we go,” he says and removes a small plastic bag and a pipe from Schroeder’s leather jacket. He opens it and sniffs. “Sinsemilla. Them two’ll be out for days.” He puts the bag and pipe into the pocket of his windbreaker and continues to search the clothing. I turn to leave, but the sheriff stops me. “Hold on a minute, bud. I got a few questions for you.” I stand a few paces back while he finishes rummaging. He gathers the clothes back into a pile, then stands up, dusting his hands. “Booze and dope and puke,” he says with a disgusted expression. “I seen too much of this shit to think it’s cute. Families oughta be ashamed of what these kids are doing to themselves. Buncha degenerates.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never been drunk before.”
He turns to me as though I’ve challenged his integrity. Then his look softens a little. “Of course I have. Everybody has. But it’s a lifestyle with these kids. I see it every day.”
“Maybe they’re bored.”
“Bored, hell. They’re spoiled.”
“Maybe it’s fun.”
The sheriff looks down at Sylvia and shakes his head. “She don’t look to me like she’s having fun.” The medics return and pick up the stretcher. As we walk down the path together I outline what I have seen for the sheriff.
He interrupts. “Wait a minute. Isn’t that the girl who was raped out here last year?”
“I don’t know.”
“She looked familiar. Goddamn! It was her.”
I say nothing. As we pass through the gate at the base of the mound he pats me on the back. The comradely gesture strikes me as strange, and I realize that our little exchange up top has somehow made him see me in a different light, as though we share an outlook and values, kindred spirits of a sort. I’d like to disabuse him of the idea but see no point in it.
An hour later he has asked his questions,
inspected the archaeologists’ various permits, and departed.
The archaeologists are taking their first measurements. I escort Mohr up the path, carrying his folding chair and a loaded picnic basket. He declares that he has come for the entertainment. The archaeologists are amused, and Dr. Norris calls Mohr the founder of a new sport—spectator archaeology—and promises hours of competitive digging.
We set up our little picnic underneath the elm tree. The archaeologists discuss how they will proceed so as not to harm the tree but are not making any promises. Norris thinks it will have to come down. Middleton thinks they can work around the roots. Palmer is noncommittal.
I sprawl out in the coolness of the grass and listen to their discussion and watch the sun-dappled limbs of the tree swaying overhead. Schroeder and Sylvia. I can’t think of it as a gross mistake anymore. The outcome was too pathetic. A misadventure, an accidental bacchanal. A spontaneous inversion of the ordo amoris, neither in nor out of harmony with anything, echoless, without consequence. Still, I can hardly comprehend it—and not for any abstract moral reason but only because it is not on any map. I can put it in terms of Lucian’s geography, where the Fountain of Coma gushes before the Temple of Reality and Illusion. The temple is open to those who can pass by the fountain without being tempted, but the plaza outside is littered with the unconscious bodies of those who prefer the comfort of sleep. Among them I see the bodies of Sylvia and Schroeder, who will wake up in the detox ward wondering how they got there.
My own secret is that I have suppressed and denied all my erotic impulses. Autarkeia means not having to be reminded of them. It is deliberate, an effort to acknowledge the loneliness that is the condition of our organism. And to live with it. In the bios theoretikos I inhabit, the flesh is mitigated by this simple acknowledgment. Mind over matter: the sublime sublimation. The meat-hungry world becomes more and more distant, and all the sorry flailing and wailing begins to seem a little absurd, if not plain funny—the hands down the pants, the slobbering, panting, gimme-gimme of it all that lasts as long as the body lasts and determines so much of its living. As a strategy of nature it is beautiful. Sure it is. That our bodies are driven to leave a substitute behind is very convenient. But I find ducking nature’s urges much more sublime than merely going along with them. And whether we give them up out of high purpose as I am attempting, or sublimate them for the sake of civilization, or take the bypass and practice the instincts for sport and entertainment—fucking and feeding and fighting and fleeing—the end is just as inevitable and just as difficult to face.
“Do you think about sex much?” I ask Mohr.
“Almost always,” he answers.
I prop myself up on an elbow to face him. Seated in his collapsible chair, the Victorian gentleman with his khakis and walking stick and cut-crystal wine glass. “Isn’t it a little strange?” I pause to formulate exactly how to put it without using the word death.
Before I can continue Mohr answers with an emphatic “Yes!” He grins and takes a sip from his wine glass. “But it’s sex!”
I pull at a clump of grass. Dr. Norris pounds a wooden stake into the ground nearby, cigarette smoke curling through his beard into his eye. Mohr keeps his gaze focused ahead as though he were watching a game and stoops to lift the bottle from the grass. “More wine?” I hold my glass out for him to fill. Dr. Norris looks over and nods his approval. “Save me some,” he calls. Mohr lifts his glass and toasts him. Dr. Palmer, crouching over a map spread on the ground, motions her colleagues over.
“I wish I could dig too, damnit,” Mohr says. “I would enjoy getting my hands dirty.”
“When was the last time?”
“I got my hands dirty?”
“No. The last time you had sex.”
Mohr looks down at me and arches his brow, lifting the brim of his hat. “That’s a very personal question.”
“You don’t have to answer.”
He shifts his gaze back across the mound. “And I won’t. Except to say that it was a very long time ago.”
“Do you miss it?”
After a few moments, he answers. “No. What I miss is having someone to have sex with.” He looks down from his chair, a confessional smile playing on his features. Then he looks back at the archaeologists, sips from his glass. “But tell me, Horace.”
“Lucian.”
“Sorry, I keep forgetting. Why all this talk of sex? Are you becoming desperate?”
The question comes as a surprise, at least the way Mohr has formulated it. Desperate? I hadn’t thought about it in exactly those terms. But since the morning prurient thoughts have been welling up inside me. I’m trying to figure out how those two got together, what Sylvia wanted with Schroeder. I am conscious of the half truth of my answer. I am not desperate. That is Mohr’s archaic term for it. But why can’t I get the image of the two of them out of my mind? The two of them fucking. “Schroeder is the kid who broke into my house and stole my notebook last summer. You were there, remember?”
Mohr nods.
“And Sylvia is the woman who was raped last summer. Right out there in that field.”
Mohr tilts the brim of his hat back. I tell him the story of my encounter with Sylvia, leaving out the one important detail. “What would make her want Schroeder—of all imbeciles?”
Mohr is silent. Dr. Middleton veers over. “Bored yet?” She takes her long pigtail and tucks it into her vest.
“Not in the least,” Mohr answers cheerfully.
“Nice day for a picnic.” She kneels down by one of the stakes that Dr. Norris has pounded into the ground and ties the end of the string to it. She unrolls the string, going from stake to stake until, slowly, a grid begins to take shape on the surface of the mound. It includes the burned logs and the area of grass where, earlier, Sylvia and Schroeder lay. Dr. Palmer continues measuring and marking and referring to a chart spread on the ground. As Mohr’s silence prolongs itself I recall Sylvia’s words to me that night at her house. I hadn’t understood them at the time, hadn’t seen her gesture as anything other than a drunken misstatement of anger and frustration. Now I realize that she meant to charge me—all men—with this one base motive: the need to know the sexual constitution of every woman and to aspire to become part of that constitution.
As if reading my thoughts Mohr suddenly asks, “Is it possible that you are a little jealous, Horace?”
“Stop calling me Horace. I’m Lucian.”
“I’m sorry. Lucian.” Mohr looks at me from the corner of his eye and then resumes following the movements of Dr. Middleton, who with her ball of twine is still pacing out the rows of the grid.
I don’t answer him. Jealous? Is it possible? What is there for me to be jealous of? I have never desired Sylvia. How then could I be jealous? Mohr’s question riddles my brain with uncertainty, and now I must consider the possibility. If jealousy is what I am feeling, then it must be the most primitive, primordial kind—sexual envy. Entangled instincts. Competition. The desire to substitute one’s self for all other possible selves, the desire to be the one singular being occupying and reproducing the universe.
Mohr’s enthusiasm for the dig is greater than his stamina, and by late afternoon I am porting him and his empty picnic basket down the side of the hill. The archaeologists interrupted their work long enough to share the cornucopia—fruits and cupcakes and cheeses and a second bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. Dr. Norris, crumbs in his beard, estimated that it would be a few days before they began to uncover anything and recommended waiting a few days before resuming the watch.
At the car Mohr confesses that he has overextended himself. “It will take me a few days to recover from this,” he says from behind the wheel. The sun is dropping toward the horizon. My shadow stretches along the ground beside the car. Schroeder’s motorcycle is still parked underneath the tree. A bright orange tag dangles from the handlebar. It reads Tow. I lean on the window while Mohr fusses with keys and straps and adjusts the mirror. He is saying something about an o
pera he was taken to as a child. I ask if he is alert enough to drive, and he reassures me that he is and pulls away slowly, pausing to honk his horn and wave before driving away.
Ambling back to town, still lightheaded from the wine, I find myself following the shortcut that Ed Maver took to the hospital that hot summer day.
An ambulance is parked at the emergency entrance, and a stretcher is being tugged out the rear doors. I stand aside as the stretcher is wheeled through the glass doors. A plastic bladder drips fluid into an arm. A blue-green oxygen mask covers a face.
Tom Schroeder Sr. is in the emergency room. He is sitting alone, one leg crossed over his knee, a magazine open on his lap. It looks as if he has come directly from the golf course. After a short wait at the information desk I walk over.
“How is he?” I ask.
Schroeder glances up from the magazine with a puzzled expression, trying to place me. “They’re waiting for him to come out of it.” He flips the page of the magazine. “Do I know you?” he asks.
I sit down, leaving an empty seat between us. “We met last winter. You were pulling out of your driveway.”
The elder Schroeder searches his memory, flipping the pages of his magazine. He has one of those domesticated faces that abound in advertisements for hardware and lawn products, flabby and plain with wide-open features that do not lend themselves easily to preoccupation or very deep thought. It is not a face that seems acquainted with sorrow or tragedy either, and I wonder at what depth beneath the regular-guy features the grief over his wife’s suicide is submerged. Or if it has simply been jettisoned.
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“Lucian.”
“Right.” He nods his head. “Now I remember.” The passing untruth of his statement turns with the last page of the magazine in his lap. He flips it into the empty chair between us. “You’ve come for the girl, I guess.”
I nod.
Horace Afoot Page 22