Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  Finally, gingerly, he stepped off the curb, and we crossed in the fullness of time to the north side of Seventy-eighth Street. The Apthorp Pharmacy was just ahead, on our left. Ah, I decided. That’s where he’s going. To get his prescription filled. Like fifties teens around a soda fountain, the old men and women hung out at the Apthorp Pharmacy, waiting for their prescriptions.

  But, no. Once on the other side of the intersection, he turned right, as if intending to cross to the east side of Broadway.

  He stopped at the traffic island separating the uptown Broadway from the downtown. There, as slowly as he had walked, he slowly sat down upon the westernmost part of a long park bench, his destination.

  I sat down myself, neither too close to him nor too far away. I took down my sail, my plastic bag, and folded it across my lap. I lit a cigarette.

  There we sat.

  7

  And there we continued to sit.

  From time to time, I took in the old man. He seemed to be taking nothing in except the sunshine. He had come to this bench for the sun. His spa.

  Whose father, if anybody’s, was he, I wondered. If nothing else, he had been at one time somebody’s son. Their darling, maybe. Their sweet baby boy.

  Cheap sentiment made me feel a little high. In a blubbering mood. People who knew me well, friends I once had, used to admonish me that I tended to get sentimental when drunk. Embarrassingly so. My problem now was that this tendency remained despite my inability to get drunk. All my drunken tendencies remained, except drunkenness.

  My father had brought his camel-hair overcoat at Marshall Field’s on State Street, when that store was the store in Chicago. The coat had fit him well when it was new and he was healthy. The sicker he got, the more his head seemed to shrink, dehydrate, so that when I last saw him wearing it, the coat overwhelmed his head.

  The old man next to me had a similar problem. A dry little turtle head sticking out of the formidable shell of the overcoat.

  His scrawny neck was more wristlike than necklike.

  The feet of his short legs barely touched the ground. The shoes he wore were brown and far too large for his feet. His thin ankles stuck out of them like rake handles. A bit of hairless shinbone showed above his sagging socks. On the shinbone, a grayish scab of some kind.

  It was the used shoes he wore, those big brown brogans, that gave him away as indigent, homeless. If you didn’t look at his shoes, you might have mistaken him for a retired civil servant living in a rent-controlled apartment, on an adequate pension. But not with those shoes.

  My father, perverse to the very end, despite his advanced cancer and total insanity, died of a heart attack. My mother, as she later informed me, found him collapsed on the living room floor.

  Whose father was he, once again I wondered, smoking, looking at the old guy, who didn’t seem to be looking anywhere. He could have been anybody, anybody’s father, and in that sense he could have been mine as well.

  8

  So we sat there, as clouds of various shapes sailed across the sky and the earth sailed on around the sun.

  A syrupy nostalgia for my unhappy marriage returned, as it always did.

  If nothing else, my marriage had provided me with a sense of home, and since home for me by definition was a place from which I wanted to flee, my unhappy marriage had given me hope that escape was possible. Without a home of one’s own—not an apartment, not even a wonderfully spacious apartment like mine, but a home, a sense of home—without it, there was no hope of escape.

  The advantages of an unhappy marriage were not easily dismissed.

  My many, many diseases.

  All Billy wanted from me was to spend some time alone with me, but what he wanted I could not give him. I had no idea what to properly call this disease. Middleman disease? Third-party disease? Observer disease? Whatever its name, the disease precluded my ever feeling at ease with somebody without an audience to observe us.

  It wasn’t just Billy. I hoped he knew. I hoped he knew it wasn’t just him. All my relationships with people had, in one way or another, become public spectacles.

  Guido was my best friend, my last remaining friend, we had been friends for years and years but in all those years I had never been alone with him. The few times I went to his apartment during the tenure of his two marriages, it was to attend a party he gave. When he came to my apartment, while I was still living with Dianah, it was to attend a party we gave.

  As mad and vindictive as my father was before he died, his madness did not keep me from visiting my parents in Chicago. His death, and the prospect of being alone with my mother, did. The last time I saw her was at his funeral.

  If I never had to be alone with a woman, truly alone, if the sex act, for which I sometimes desperately yearned, could be performed in public, light there in some restaurant, before coffee and dessert, or in the lobby of a theater during intermission, my love affairs with women would last a lot longer.

  It was not the fear of intimacy. I was ready and willing to be indiscriminately intimate in public. To open up myself and to embrace the openness of another in turn. But being alone in an apartment with a woman, or my son, or my wife, or my mother, always made me feel that we were waiting for somebody else to come. Somebody who was far more capable of appreciating what we were doing than the two of us were. Some middleman. Some third party. Some monitor who could make sense of it all and allow us, through his eyes, to make sense of it ourselves.

  Even a simple phone call to Billy was an endeavor that was much easier to bring off when I had somebody listening to my conversation with him.

  I’ve called Billy from Guido’s office and, although he insisted on leaving while I talked, I made sure the door to his office remained open, so that the secretaries outside could overhear what I was saying.

  I’ve called Billy from my apartment when I had a woman there. By talking to my son on the telephone, I avoided being alone with that woman, and by having her in my apartment, listening to me, I avoided being alone with my son on the telephone. It was a perfection of sorts, in which nothing, absolutely nothing real could occur while the phone call lasted.

  These phone calls, of course, were never of the kind that did anything to satisfy my son’s hunger for contact with me. That was because I wasn’t really talking to him, I was playing to some third party. My son was merely the medium through whom I talked to others about my fatherhood.

  I knew this was wrong. I knew the harm it was causing us both. The problem was not one of lack of insight on my part.

  My insights were many. I was full of penetrating insights. But they led to nothing except an ever-growing private collection.

  What I needed was more than just an insight. What I needed was some super insight that could go to the very source of all my diseases.

  This recurring notion, however, was tempered by a recurring dread. Super insights did not necessarily lead to the kind of clarity we could bear seeing. The first thing Oedipus, King of Thebes, did when he at last saw clearly was to gouge out his eyes.

  I sat there, thinking my thoughts. The old man in my father’s overcoat, I assumed, thought his. Buses, cabs, cars, delivery vans roared past us in both directions. Subways thundered beneath our little traffic island. People walked past us to get to the east side of Broadway. Others, to get to the west side. Clouds sailed by overhead. So did a Fuji blimp. Nobody else sat down on the bench. The two of us sat there, the old man and I, “like two chess pieces of an abandoned game.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1

  MONDAY, THE WIND began to blow. It began in the early morning and picked up in intensity as the day went on. By the time I left for the office, it was blowing so hard the maintenance man was taking down the canopy outside the entrance to my building to keep it from shredding.

  The wind pushed me up Eighty-sixth, toward Broadway. Seagulls from the Hudson River, blown off course, screeched overhead. The newspaper vending machines, chained to utility poles, rattled and shook
in the wind as if they contained some pandemic trying to get out.

  I skipped lunch, as an athletic gesture to my physical exam the next day, and stayed in my office and listened to the wind blow.

  Through my window, I saw sheets of newspaper swept out of trash cans and become airborne. Some flew low and away toward Fifth Avenue. Others, caught in updrafts, wheeled and spiraled high above Fifty-seventh Street. People walking east lurched like drunks being given the bum’s rush by the wind, hurrying against their will. Those walking west, into the wind, struggled, shielding their eyes. Individuals and little groups walking backwards, like members of some strange religious sect. People getting into cabs. Cab doors flying out of their hands when they opened them. And then the struggle to close them again.

  Despite Jerry’s assurance about the kind of doctor this Kolodny guy was, I had some anxiety about my exam. But it was just a trace. It could have been induced by the drop in the barometric pressure that was causing the wind to blow.

  I couldn’t even remember the last time I had had a complete physical.

  The telephone rang.

  2

  It was from Cromwell’s office in California, but it didn’t feel like a long-distance call. Ever since the breakup of AT&T and the subsequent rush of other companies into the long-distance field, the quality of the long distance “sound” has gradually lost all sense of distance. The fiber optics that some of the new companies use has produced a reception so disturbingly clear, it destroys any sense of separation between you and the person at the other end of the line. The sound of their voice is like something implanted in your brain, or like a tiny CD playing in the earpiece of your telephone. I consider the loss of that sense of distance in long-distance calls a tragedy.

  The person calling me was Cromwell’s assistant. His name was Brad. But it wasn’t the Brad I once knew who had been Cromwell’s assistant at that time. It was another Brad.

  This Brad told me how the Bobbie woman had told him that she and I had had a wonderful chat. Brad, speaking for himself, wanted to make sure I understood what a thrill it was for him personally to speak to me. I was, as far as he was concerned, one of the true pros of the entertainment industry.

  He sounded very young. Early to mid-twenties.

  I pondered the mystery of his name while he showered me with praise. Almost every studio executive or producer I ever knew had a young man named Brad for an assistant. Brads were the Marias of the movie industry.

  This Brad, like the others I had known, had a very easy, mellifluous voice, as if he had been trained from childhood in some music conservatory to talk on the telephone.

  “As a student of film …” he went on.

  There was something touching about all the Brads I had ever known. They were all partial to certain phrases like “brainstorming.” They not only used them, but they actually seemed to believe that such storms took place on a daily basis in their line of work.

  I had no idea what happened to these young men when they got older. Nobody wanted an old Brad for an assistant. Cromwell went through Brads almost as fast as he went through young girls. And none of the Brads that I had ever known managed to climb up the ladder of the movie industry hierarchy. I didn’t know a single movie executive or producer named Brad.

  Cromwell, according to Brad, was definitely coming to New York and wanted to see me about a project while he was in town. Was I free to have dinner with him on the twenty-second?

  “I’m available,” I told Brad, “but I’m not free.”

  Brad laughed. When he laughed, he bleated like a sheep, or a young lamb. But a sheep or a young lamb with its throat slit. Gurgling and bleating, but laughing, as if he were happy to have his throat slit.

  Would ten o’clock at Cafe Luxembourg be all right with me?

  Yes, it would.

  Would I mind leaving my afternoon free the next day, just in case?

  No, I wouldn’t.

  Mr. Cromwell, Brad informed me, wanted to make sure I knew that he would have called me himself were it not for his hectic schedule. In addition to everything else he was doing at the moment, Mr. Cromwell was asked, and he accepted despite his hectic schedule, to serve as one of the organizing forces of the Vaclav Havel thing.

  “And you know how he is when he gets going on a project,” Brad said, and laughed. Because of the fiber optics, and the static-free, distance-free reception on the line, his laughter had the verisimilitude of a hallucination.

  3

  I lay in bed, unable to sleep. I could hear the wind blowing outside and the sound of my heart beating.

  I spent some time embroidering the harangue I would loosen upon Jay Cromwell.

  I wondered what kind of a girl would accompany him when I saw him. He always showed up with some very beautiful, very young girl. Some were almost children. Most of them tended to be refugees from a devastated country in vogue at the moment. Vietnamese girls. Russian Jews. A Christian girl from Beirut. A beautiful black girl from Soweto.

  Police sirens outside. First one. Then another. Then, a minute or so later, the sound of an ambulance siren heading in the same direction.

  Suddenly, I remembered a nursery rhyme that Billy used to get wrong as a little boy and I smiled at the memory.

  Baa, baa, black sheep,

  Have you any wolves,

  Yes sir, yes sir,

  Three bags full …

  It struck me (I was a man of countless insights) that my relationship to my son was that of a father, a loving father, but a father who cherished the memory of a son long dead, and not a father with a living son.

  I moved on to other thoughts.

  My heart continued to beat audibly. Like the sound of a little, lonely drum beating on itself.

  4

  My appointment with Dr. Kolodny was at eleven fifteen, but my lifelong mania for punctuality made me arrive at his office ten minutes early. His office was located on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks south of the Metropolitan Museum. The large waiting room could have been furnished by the same interior decorator who had done the McNabs’ Dakota apartment. Italian lamps. Chrome, wood, leather, and plants everywhere.

  “Can I help you, please?” The receptionist was young and very professional-looking.

  “Yes, I have an appointment,” I told her, and then I thought it best to inform her about the kind of shyster service I expected. I leaned toward her and lowered my voice. “I’m here for one of those insurance physicals.” I gave her a little wink and added, just to make sure, “Jerry sent me. Jerry Fry.”

  “What is your name, please?”

  “Saul Karoo.”

  She checked her ledger and found me.

  “Yes, Mr. Karoo. You’re a little early and we’re running just a bit late. It’ll be twenty minutes to half an hour before Dr. Kolodny can see you.”

  She gave me, since I was a new patient, a white clipboard with a questionnaire to fill out.

  I sat down and started filling it out. Cigarettes were invented for doing just such chores as this and I was keenly aware of nicotine deprivation while I wrote. Name. Address. Telephone number. Height. Weight. Date of birth. Place of birth.

  Halfway through the questionnaire, I got weary of my own life and the factual information that constituted it. So I started lying and filling in the blanks with invented details. Normally, I needed no excuse to lie, I just did it, but this time I even had an excuse. I didn’t come here to have a real physical, so why should I need to provide real answers to these questions?

  Under occupation, I wrote: commodities broker.

  I checked off that I was a nonsmoker.

  I had two grown sons.

  Both of my parents were still alive.

  No history of cancer or diabetes or anything in my family. I had a family with no medical history whatsoever.

  As for me, I said that I had regular medical checkups, every six months.

  There was a question marked “optional” inquiring about my religious denomination. I lied
and said I was Jewish.

  The character that emerged from my lies seemed in many ways a lot more substantial and considerably more comprehensible to me than I was to myself.

  5

  Dr. Kolodny’s office was a complex of offices shared by three other doctors. The waiting room was three-quarters full.

  There was a pile of magazines and newspapers on the long, low glass-top table in front of my chair. I picked up the New York Times and went right to my favorite section of the week, Tuesday Science.

  The illustration on the front page was an artist’s rendering of a human chromosome, enlarged thousands of times to focus upon a single gene.

  The accompanying article, which I devoured, had to do with a potentially revolutionary reappraisal of psychosis. According to the spokesman for a team of scientists responsible for the study in question, there seemed to be strong evidence to support the thesis that the vast majority of patients suffering from various forms of neurological disorders had a certain gene (see the illustration on the front page) in common. This gene had peculiar nodules around its oblong shape, giving it a vague similarity to the letter S. Hence its name: the S-gene.

  Its very shape, the scientists speculated, seemed to determine its function. Each nodule seemed to trigger a set of responses over which the patient had no control. They were still a long way from a cure, but the discovery of this S-gene was a major breakthrough.

  It seemed to me, as an avid follower of the Tuesday Science section of the Times, that some of the most exciting scientific research of the past few years had been in the field of biochemistry and biogenetics. In the last half a year alone there had been articles linking diabetes and genes, dyslexia and genes, alcoholism and various other forms of addiction and genes. Studies conducted in penal institutions found almost conclusive evidence that psychopaths, murderers, and rapists were victims of genetic triggers over which they had no control. Evidence that crime itself, instead of being a social problem, or a personal problem, was instead a problem of biology and genetic disorders.