Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  I sat there, sweating and holding, and my sweat seemed to be pine-scented, as if my body had absorbed the sickening pine scent from those dangling dispensers in the cab and was now dispensing it on its own.

  I had the earpiece of the telephone pressed so hard against my ear that the receiver, as if held there by a suction cup, could have stuck on its own without me holding on to it, but I held on. I was not connected to anyone, nor was I, strictly speaking, disconnected. I was on hold. I was on some whole new kind of hold. The telephone receiver I was holding and which, in turn, was holding me felt like a component of some elaborate life-support system to which I was connected. Circuits and cables and fiber optics extended from my office into offices and homes and dormitory rooms of everyone I had ever known. Into homes of people I was yet to know. I was on hold with Janice from Jerry’s office, but there was a growing dread that the next voice I heard would not necessarily be hers. It could be someone else. Anyone.

  Some moment was upon me, whose nature and purpose I did not know, but it was mysterious and huge and approaching. Some moment containing something incontrovertible. Like the first moment or the last moment of conscious existence.

  And this moment, or something within it, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, would speak to me.

  Until now, the danger of something real occurring, a thing I dreaded and avoided at all cost, had always been the danger of the real from without. The danger of something real happening to myself and my son, my friends, my father, my mother, my wife, the women I took to bed, anyone and everyone, but always someone on the outside. Now, however, it seemed that the danger of something real occurring was a danger from within.

  It would speak to me from within myself. From a depth I never suspected I possessed. From some mind within my mind.

  There was not a second to lose. If I heard that voice, my dread informed me, I would be lost. If I allowed the contact to be made with that thing deep within me, it would be a contact from which there would be no return.

  In desperation and self-defense, I reached out for my New York Times and pulled it toward me. I opened it at random and started to read. I reread what I had already read, but that was fine. The spell, the stupor, if that’s what it was, was broken. My terror subsided. The empty ballast of my mind filled up with whatever fluids of information I needed to once again regain my equilibrium and lose contact with myself.

  I lit a cigarette. I was no longer merely holding, I was smoking, I was reading the paper.

  I turned the page.

  13

  In the Metro section of the Times, I found a little article I had somehow managed to miss the first time around. A teenage mother in the Bronx, carrying a baby in her arms. Both of them killed by stray bullets. Another case of random violence.

  Freed to think again, I sat there at my desk, smoking and thinking about this strange new phenomenon of stray bullets and randomness.

  More and more people were becoming random victims. Randomness was acquiring epidemic proportions. It was becoming a statistical category.

  There was nothing in the article about the death of the teenage mother and her child to suggest any doubt that the cause of death was total randomness. For all I knew, there were now forensic experts who could examine the extracted bullets and scientifically prove that those bullets were genuine strays. Bullets without a motive.

  Surely, I thought, if bullets can be included in this category, why not people. I myself, I thought, have probably played the role of a stray bullet and will probably play the role of a stray bullet again in somebody’s life. And they in mine. It seemed inevitable. The laws of probability were quite meticulous, but improbability obeyed no laws and was left to wander lawlessly through the world.

  The telephone suddenly came to life. It was Janice from Jerry’s office. She mispronounced my name, as she always did. For some reason, she just couldn’t remember to include the “a” in Karoo and always called me Mr. Kroo.

  “Mr. Kroo?”

  “Yes, Janice.”

  “Dr. Kolodny can see you next week. Is Tuesday all right with you?”

  I told her that Tuesday was fine.

  “How’s eleven fifteen for you?” she wanted to know.

  Eleven fifteen was not just fine for me, it was perfect. It suggested a doctor who went through patients on an assembly-line basis. Complete physicals every fifteen minutes. This Kolodny, I thought, is my kind of guy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  GOING TO THE cleaners on Saturdays was as close as I came to having a religion. It was a chore I cherished. It gave me a sense of spiritual renewal to go to the cleaners. My place of worship was Kwik Kleaners on Eighty-fourth Street, just west of Broadway.

  They knew me by name there.

  “Hello, Mr. Karoo.” The woman behind the counter smiled at me.

  I gave her my dirty clothes and left, carrying over my shoulder two sport coats, three pairs of slacks, and half a dozen shirts. All on wire hangers. And all of it encased in a thin, transparent plastic bag.

  Instead of turning north and going home, I turned south, down Broadway. I always took a little Saturday stroll after I picked up my clothes from the cleaners. It felt good, almost athletic, to be carrying that plastic bag of clothes over my shoulder.

  It was another unseasonable day. February and winter in name only.

  Brought out by the mild weather, the homeless were everywhere, sitting, standing, lying down, talking to each other and to themselves, panhandling, selling junk.

  Some had shaved heads like the inmates of Buchenwald. Others had more hair than biblical prophets and seemed to consider themselves as such.

  A phone freak, totally involved in the bogus telephone conversation he was having, shouted at the top of his lungs into the receiver of the pay phone: “What can I tell you? I don’t know what to tell you. I just don’t know what to tell you anymore. I mean, what do you want me to say?”

  The would-be merchants among the homeless sat on crates, surrounded by rubbish they were trying to sell and which nobody in his right mind would buy. Old Newsweek magazines. One with a picture of Nicolae Ceausescu on the cover. Last Sunday’s New York Times Arts and Leisure section. Unstrung tennis racquets, cracked frames. Dented bicycle wheels. Mismatched pairs of shoes. Decapitated dolls. Aluminum pots and pans, blackened with oxide. Old bathroom scales. Old toilet seats. Baby bottles with hardened, discolored nipples.

  The sight of these homeless had at one time evoked a profound feeling of compassion within me. But there was no holding on to it. My subjectivity, or my objectivity, disease, I still didn’t know which to call it, but this disease of mine made me see the plight of the homeless from so many different points of view that in the end the sight of them became simply a view like any other view.

  What that sight of these people evoked in me now were feelings of a different kind.

  Nothing, I now thought, could be discarded anymore. Not the rubbish that had been thrown away and that they had reclaimed from garbags cans to put back into circulation on the sidewalks of Broadway. Nor the rubbish of these people themselves, human rubbish, officially discarded but without an official dumping place to keep them out of sight. The public and the private sewers were full, backing up and overflowing, disgorging into circulation again what had been discarded.

  2

  The southwesterly wind, blowing uptown as I strolled downtown, caused the thin, transparent plastic of my dry-cleaning bag to flutter in the breeze. The sound it made brought many images to mind.

  A letter falling down a mail chute.

  A moth beating its wings against a windowpane.

  A sail in need of trimming.

  It was the sail image that caught my fancy on this day.

  A year or so ago I had read a story in the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times about what space travel might be like in the not so distant future. Men would sail through space, according to this story, in schooners rigged with enormous solar sails mor
e than a mile high. The artist’s rendition of one of these solar schooners was so lovely it took my breath away.

  Something in me responded to that image. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The solar schooner, and the mile-high Mylar sail rising above it, became an image that frequented my dreams.

  Finally, one night, while I was taking a long hot shower, an idea occurred to me. My one and only so-called original idea for a movie.

  Ulysses. Homer’s Odyssey, but set in the future.

  There would still be a battle of Troy, but it would be set somewhere in space, and after the battle Ulysses and his crew would head back home in their solar schooner, back to Ithaca.

  Solar winds blow them off course. They encounter great cosmic currents called the Rivers of Time, which sweep them away into unexplored and unheard-of regions of space and time. Trials and tribulations follow. Cosmic maidens and cosmic warriors. But through it all, my Ulysses remains a family man at heart, yearning only for his home, his faithful wife Penelope, and his beloved son Telemachus.

  Nothing came of my idea. I approached several studios with it, but none were interested in pursuing it.

  Although nothing came of it, it still made me happy to think about it from time to time and from time to time I added further plot complications and incidents to my story line. There were even times when I felt certain that I would sit down and write it someday.

  3

  The panhandlers, the homeless, the drunks, derelicts, and phone freaks thinned out after Seventy-ninth Street and were replaced by Saturday afternoon shoppers and other productive members of society.

  My reflection in the shimmering sea of shopwindows I sailed past did not look all that bad, so long as I kept moving.

  I was putting on weight, that much was indisputable, but I could still pass for a strapping six-footer who was a bit on the burly side. The plastic bag of dry cleaning slung over my shoulder gave me the appearance of some vital businessman on the go.

  In keeping with the image, I gave myself over to the calendar in my head of appointments and upcoming events.

  There was my Tuesday appointment with Dr. Kolodny at eleven fifteen A.M.

  According to Jerry, I would be fully insured with GenMed by the end of the week.

  Give Billy a call at Harvard. Tell him the happy news.

  Lunch with Guido on Friday.

  Another divorce dinner with Dianah. When?

  Jay Cromwell was coming to town and according to that Bobbie woman he wanted to see me. February twenty-second and twenty-third.

  It wasn’t like me to remember dates, but these I remembered.

  Cromwell’s arrival loomed as the most anxiety-provoking feature on the landscape of my mental calendar.

  4

  Jay Cromwell was a film producer by profession, but he could have been a head of state or some charismatic religious figure with messianic powers.

  It was in his voice. In his eyes. His teeth. In that oversized horrific forehead of his.

  (When you sat across a table from him, it was like confronting a warhead with human features.)

  He was the only man I knew personally who was truly evil.

  He was evil the way the grass was green. He was a monolith of such fathomless treachery that at times I actually enjoyed his company, for the simple reason that, in comparison to him, I was the moral force of my time.

  The inclination to feel this way in his presence was, of course, a symptom of yet another disease I had.

  My Cromwell disease.

  I had collaborated with him in my capacity as a rewriter on three different screenplays. The third one belonged to that young man who showed up uninvited to the sneak preview of his film in Pittsburgh.

  The image of that young man in the lobby of the theater after the screening, trembling with rage and lambasting us until he broke down and started crying, was transformed by Cromwell over dinner that very evening into an incident of broad comedy.

  The way Cromwell laughed while retelling the story of the young man’s histrionics. The way he threw back his head and laughed so that. all his teeth showed. The way I laughed along. The way Cromwell scrutinized me while I laughed.

  I resolved after that dinner, long before I learned of the young man’s suicide, never to have anything to do with Cromwell again.

  That was almost two years ago.

  But although I had had no contact with Cromwell since then, I was still made to feel that I was on hold with him. That he had me on hold.

  The problem with my resolution never to see Cromwell again was that it was a private resolution.

  My resolution, as far as Cromwell was concerned, was nonexistent. He was free to think that the only reason there had been no contact between us was that he had not initiated any, making no offers or overtures in my direction.

  My resolution, therefore, although still intact, was completely untested.

  The prospect of his arrival and his desire to see me presented me with an opportunity to set the record straight and break all relations with him in public.

  He had risen considerably in the eyes of the world since our Pittsburgh preview. He had become, in a business full of superstars of one kind or another, the first acknowledged superproducer. There had been lengthy profiles of him in Time and Newsweek, in which the writers had praised his genius for knowing what the public wanted, his unbroken series of huge commercial hits, and “his zest for life, not just his own life but his zest for the lives of others.”

  All the better, as far as I was concerned. The bigger he was in his own eyes and in the eyes of the world, the more heroic would be my harangue.

  “Listen to me, Cromwell, and listen well,” I could hear myself telling him to his face. “I may not be a superproducer or super anything, I may just be a human being, but in the immortal words of e. e. cummings, ‘there is some shit I will not eat.’ And furthermore …”

  My private harangue was cut short. I was about to step off the curb and cross the street when I saw, shuffling toward me from the other side of the intersection, my dead father.

  5

  I froze, one foot still on the curb, one off.

  He shuffled toward me slowly, like an old sea turtle walking upright. He looked neither left nor right as he crept across the intersection.

  The shock of seeing him made me almost drop my Kwik Kleaners bag. Even the dead can’t be discarded anymore, I thought to myself.

  He was so slow of foot that by the time he finally reached the other side where I stood, I had plenty of time to get my bearings again, to come to my senses, and to realize the silly but understandable mistake I had made.

  It was the wrong old geezer in the right camel-hair overcoat. Dianah, true to her word, had given away my dead father’s clothes to some Upper West Side church group to distribute to the homeless. There, a little old man had come, and this overcoat fit him as it had fit another little old man in Chicago, a former judge, my father.

  I knew the coat well. As well as an art student might know the work of a master. The straight, rectangular outside pockets with flaps. The buttons that were still all there. The wide collar and the ragged tip of the right lapel, which my dad, in his madness, had chewed in one of his fits. In another fit, he had taken an indelible china marker and drawn a large, crude facsimile of a human heart on the outside of the coat. In his mad ignorance of the human anatomy, or in his mad rejection of it, my father had placed the heart on the right side. My mother had the coat dry-cleaned after his death, but a black china marker stain remained.

  It was one of those unbearably hot summers in Chicago the summer that my father died, but toward the end he complained constantly of being cold. We had to turn on the furnace for him. The thermostat was set at eighty-five and there he sat, wearing that camel overcoat, his teeth chattering from the cold, his little body shivering while I, wearing only my sleeveless T-shirt, dripped sweat in his company.

  It is not that his hair fell out that summer, rather it became finer and
finer, like thistledown, like cobwebs. When the furnace kicked in and the air from the registers blew, it made his hair move in various directions. At those times, he was like someone already dead, sitting on the bottom of the sea, invisible currents playing with his hair.

  “Where is your heart?” He demanded to know from me that summer. “Where is it? Show it to me. Here is mine. Right here!” And with his tight little fist he pounded that facsimile he had drawn on his chest.

  At times I was tempted to tell him that the heart was on the wrong side but, as if in concurrence with his accusation, I didn’t have the heart to do so. The few times I tried to object to something he said, the judge in him roared into life.

  “Objection denied! Clear the courtroom!”

  During my visit that summer, his favorite form of capital punishment for me, when he saw me as the bad son Saul, was beheading.

  “Tomorrow at dawn,” he roared. “Since you have no heart, off with your head. Off with your head, you miserable dog!”

  When he saw me as the good son Paul, I sometimes tried to plead insanity as the cause of my brother’s many transgressions. But my father wouldn’t hear of it. His long career as a judge had inured him to that defense.

  “Insanity’s no excuse. The sentence stands. Off with his head!”

  There were times that summer when I lay in bed at night feeling as if the sentence had already been carried out and that I now existed solely as a head upon a pillow, completely separated from my body.

  I moved aside to let the little old man in my father’s overcoat shuffle past me. A close-up of his face revealed that the only resemblance between him and my father was the resemblance of one shriveled-up old man to another. Nothing more.

  6

  Why, then, did I turn around and follow him? I asked myself that very question, but could think of no satisfactory answer. But follow him I did. Citarella fish store, La Caridad restaurant, all the places I had passed heading south I passed again heading north, walking at a turtle’s pace.

  The old geezer stopped at the next intersection and just stood there, despite the green light, as if trying to remember what chore had prompted him on this Saturday to set himself in motion.