by Daniel Klein
And then Michael had another hapless brainstorm. “You know where we should be putting our efforts now, Terry? We should think about other ways we can make Stephanie stand out from the crowd, don’t you think?”
“No, what I think is that you’re full of crap. That’s what stands out to me.”
“I don’t think that kind of talk is necessary, Terry.”
“Fuck you, Dowd!”
Michael hung up. He decided to give Cyzinski some time to cool off and then to take him out for a drink and smooth things over. Cyzinski, however, keeps phoning almost every day, and Michael has taken to having his assistant tell Cyzinski he is not in.
“Going out for a run, Daph!” Michael calls up to his daughter before heading out the door. He does not wait for a reply because there never is one. Even though Daphne routinely breaks the house rule and locks her bedroom door, Michael is pretty certain she does not smoke marijuana up there; he surely would be able to smell it. What she does seem to do is listen to god-awful music for hours on end while sitting at her computer. Babs says Daphne has one of those teen blogs where kids share their gripes with other kids all around the country. No harm in that, Michael figures; it is probably a good way for her to get things off her chest.
The moon is high and almost full, casting sharp shadows off the plane trees that line the driveway and sparkling in the puddles that dot the lawn. As always, Michael draws in several deep breaths in quick succession as he sets off on his way, and as always he is thrilled by the freshness of the country air. No matter what little setbacks he has encountered lately, he knows he could never go back to city living.
Turning onto Pickwick Road, Michael’s left foot slaps into mud and he skids an inch or two, but he immediately catches his balance and keeps loping along, smiling broadly. That little slip and his smooth recovery invigorate him; rather than slow his pace, he accelerates, almost hoping he hits another slick patch so his reflexes can snap on and make him right again. So it is that when he approaches his regular quarter-way point—where Hobb Hill branches off of Pickwick—and hears a car behind him, he does not break stride, but simply hops over to his right where he lands in a silty stream of runoff and slides a good six inches in the stuff, his other foot aloft as ballast as if he was a figure skater. And he keeps running. He feels terrific. Even as the oncoming car whizzes past him and wallops him head to foot with mud, the feeling stays with him. He is a glider, not a plodder.
At the old van Deusen farm, Michael makes a U-turn and heads back for home. Without really thinking about it—or much of anything else, for that matter—he has come to the conclusion that it is time to start trusting his instincts again. Sure, there will be a slipup here and there, but he still has the gift, no doubt about it. And when all is said and done, his instincts are what have brought him to where he is today. This is what Michael Dowd is thinking as he sees a pair of headlights come off Hobb Hill and head in his direction. Once again, he springs into the gutter ready to glide on one foot, but this time he slides sideways rather than forward, and as he tries to catch his balance, he flops onto his side on the road where the oncoming car swerves across the center line and makes for him. It bounces over Dowd, crushing the femurs of both his thighs. The car does not stop.
* * *
Lila was late getting to work this evening. Flip’s cruiser had again been parked across the street from Grandville High at the end of the school day—the idiot simply cannot grasp the meaning of ‘No’—so Lila took the school bus into town and then the Loop Bus back to the restaurant to avoid another stupid confrontation with him. As a result, no sooner had she changed into her work gear than she was sent onto the floor to wait on a table of early birds—a New York second-homer family that had obviously run out of daylight activities prematurely, it being mud season, and that, predictably, wanted to know if they could still order off the lower-priced lunch menu. No, they could not.
For this reason, Lila was unable to slip out the Nakota kitchen door for her regular startup toke with Pato until the New Yorkers were served. But now, standing outside that door, she finds she is in no hurry to get to Pato. She is listening to a voice that comes from the vicinity of the dumpster. It is softly singing a love song in Spanish—something about black flowers—accompanied by an instrument that sounds like a ukulele, only more resonant.
Unlike most young women her age, Lila has little attraction to music of any kind, and none to love songs. She is of the opinion that love songs are not about any real experience, but about an experience invented by love songs. Growing up in a house where for a good month of every year her mother and her little troupe of wannabe actors yodeled songs like “If Ever I Would Leave You” and “Hello, Young Lovers” and, the most nauseating of all, “Some Enchanted Evening,” Lila is convinced that if any of them ever really fell in love, they certainly would find something more fulfilling to do than sing about it.
So it is that Lila surprises herself listening to the Spanish love song. She knows just enough of that language to understand that the love it sings of is a transient thing. The song is no zippy cheer or cloying whine; its intent is not to set feet tapping or elicit moans of saccharine sympathy. The song is stark and painfully sad. Even if she could not understand a single word of the lyric, Lila would know that the song’s ultimate concern is time itself, and the futility of trying to hold it still. It is not simply the melody that conveys this to her, it is the voice itself.
She cannot guess the age of the singer. The voice has some of the squeaks and overtones of an adolescent, but it also contains a tremor of yearning that Lila associates with people who are much older. What Lila is hearing for the first time is a voice that expresses feelings she did not know she, herself, possessed. It is a revelation.
When the song is over, the audience of Spanish busboys responds with subdued applause, and Lila hears Pato ask for another. That is when she walks to the dumpster and sees the singer, a young man with high angled cheekbones and thick black hair who is taller than any South American Lila has seen before. He has large brown eyes that match the ache in his voice. He is beautiful. Pato offers Lila the joint smoldering in his hand, but she declines with a quick shake of her head.
“I’m Lila,” she says, extending her hand to the young man.
“And I Hector.” He slings his cuatro over his shoulder before taking her hand.
“You’re new,” she says.
“Every minute,” Hector answers, and he smiles.
Lila laughs. “What about this minute?”
“Very new for me,” Hector says.
Takaaki calls Lila from the kitchen door, telling her that Table Five is ready to order dessert, so that is it. Business is unusually brisk for a mud season Friday night, so Lila only sees Hector when she dashes in and out of the kitchen where he has been assigned the starters’ job of stripping soy beans. They smile to one another, quickly and shyly. That is all.
But during a lull in customer traffic at a little past nine, Lila calls Wendell from the restaurant pay phone and tells him she has a ride home. In fact, she does not have one—she has no idea how she will get home—and she feels guilty lying to her grandfather. She also feels ridiculously childish, but that does not bother her.
At eleven-thirty, after helping with cleanup, Lila changes back into her regular clothes and puts on her leather jacket and Mucksters boots. She says goodnight to Takaaki who, unusually perceptive among her sister waitresses, touches Lila’s cheek and says, “He is very pretty.” When Lila exits the kitchen door, Hector is standing apart from the other Spanish boys. She steps up to him and says, “I can show you our town, if you want.”
“I would like it.”
Walking along the highway, their conversation jumps from one unfinished sentence to another so rapidly that Lila does not even try to keep straight the people and places of Hector’s odyssey from his mountain village in Colombia to here in western Massachusetts, although the sheer distance of his journey electrifies her. In truth, even if Hector were spe
aking slowly and without an accent, Lila would have difficulty following his words; her ears cannot begin to compete with her eyes as they trace the delicate contours of Hector’s face, drift to his long, tar-black hair, and then to his deep-set eyes that are at once mournful and full of life. From those eyes, Lila can discern what he has lived through more perfectly than from any words. The enchantment Lila feels looking at Hector is a totally new experience for her, and his beauty is only part of it. She senses a deep familiarity in his foreignness; he is the other world she has relentlessly dreamt about suddenly made flesh and blood. She reaches for his hand just as he reaches for hers. The lyric of “Mis Flores Negras” notwithstanding, time stands still.
When they reach the iron bridge that crosses Wright River, marking the point where Route 7, for a mile and a half, becomes Grandville’s Main Street, a passing oil truck showers them with mud.
“Now you know why we call this mud season,” Lila says, laughing.
Hector wipes his face, then holds his hand in front of his eyes. “They make houses of this in Bogotá.”
“We could make hundreds of them with all the mud we’ve got in Grandville,” Lila says.
“No, just one house. For us,” Hector says. They have just crossed the river when he says this. Ahead of them, about a quarter of a mile into town, is the red neon sign hanging outside Cohen’s Hardware and Plumbing, and beyond that, the traffic light at the corner of Main and Melville. Lila puts her arms around Hector’s neck and they press their mud-flecked lips together. It tastes to Lila like the sweet center of the Earth.
III
~ The Other World ~
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Among the retirees enrolled in the spring term session of ‘Phil of Flicks’ is an unusually supple-minded man in his seventies who made millions with a string of video rental shops on Long Island—Spiros Papacristo. Not only does Papacristo possess an encyclopedic knowledge of films—he once prided himself on his ability to make personal recommendations to each individual customer—but he has a philosophical turn of mind. As he had never read a philosophical tract nor taken a philosophy course before now—indeed, he had not attended college—this aptitude came as a surprise to both him and his teacher.
After screening It’s a Wonderful Life, Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, and Sliding Doors in successive class sessions, Professor Blitzstein presented a thumbnail sketch of the concept of cause and effect in modern philosophy, starting with David Hume’s billiard balls. No sooner had Herb finished when Spiros raised his hand.
“If everything has a cause, then every cause has a cause too, right?” he said.
Herb nodded enthusiastically.
“So the whole thing—you know, everything in the universe—is the effect of something else, going back and back forever.”
Herb was so thrilled he could have walked right down the aisle of his classroom and hugged the man. He knew where Spiro was heading with his astonishing native reasoning—to the question of how it all began: What was the First Cause? And so Herb immediately began mentally rehearsing his reply, a comparison of the idea of creatio ex nihilo—that the First Cause came into the void out of nowhere—with the even more mind-boggling idea that cause and effect have simply always existed, so there is no First Cause, just causes reaching back infinitely. But as it turned out, Spiros Papacristo, a forward-looking man since he arrived in America as a teenager from Crete, had the future on his mind, not the past.
“So all these causes are still out there, right? Popping away every minute of the day, just the way they did starting on Day One, right, Professor?”
Herb was not only enraptured by Papacristo’s snap induction, but thrilled to at last have an opportunity to talk about one of his all-time favorite philosophers, the little-remembered Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, and his imaginary wily demon. The Laplacian Demon is an all-knowing mega-mind that can comprehend every cause out there and therefore can predict with certainty the future down to the smallest detail.
“In other words,” Herb said, addressing himself to the only student still listening, “everything that happens was predestined to happen, and it always will be. Kind of takes a load off, doesn’t it?”
Spiros Papacristo burst out laughing.
As could be predicted, Spiros Papacristo wanted to hear more about this heady stuff and so, after class that night, he invited Herb to the Soup and Sandwich for tuna melts and coffee. There, they talked for hours on subjects that are usually reserved for bright and eager college students in their late teens and early twenties. Herb was even inspired to confide in his star student an idea for a new course that has been playing in his mind for years, the course he calls, ‘The History of Now.’
“When does ‘now’ begin and when does it end?” Herb asked as Papacristo smiled delightedly. “Is the present so infinitesimal that we can never be fully conscious of it?”
At about the time Ted Sturget, Soup and Sandwich’s night cook, was ready to close up, Spiro raised the question of how we decide to partition off time into specific periods. “It’s like trying to divide up the water in a bathtub,” Spiros said. “Who says the Golden Age of Greece started in this particular year and ended in some other one?” he asked, citing the one period of history that every modern Greek schoolboy learns about in first grade.
For Herb, the simple answer would be that people basically need to make neat portions of things to keep their minds focused so, along with everything else they think about, they divide history into neat portions too. But he senses that Mr. Papacristo is reaching for a different kind of answer, one that has preoccupied Herb, himself, since he was a kid. It is about Beginnings and Ends, and it is at the core of his incubating course:
In the narrative of a human life, what is the beginning and what is the end? Do ‘birth’ and ‘death’ do the trick? Or is that as arbitrary as saying the Golden Age of Greece began in 506 B.C. and ended in 404 B.C.? Do birth and death leave out too much of what makes a person who he is, all the causes that led up to his life, and all the effects that followed from it? But then again, wouldn’t such a fully inclusive drama murmur on endlessly—an eternal Now?
* * *
To a musician, it would sound like utter dissonance or perhaps a newly-uncovered, cacophonous medley of American classics by Charles Ives, but to the people of Grandville the sound in the air is unmistakably and joyously the music of their annual Memorial Day parade, a salute not only to their fallen soldiers but to the unofficial conclusion of Mud Season. The symphony begins at the head of the parade with a fife and two drums played by members of the Grandville Chamber of Commerce, Syd Cohen, Whitney Pierce, Jr., and Mel Gustal, chosen more for their willingness to don Revolutionary War garb—and in Gustal’s case, a faux head bandage—than their musicality. Pierce, the piccolo player, is interpreting “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” but he can barely hear himself over the blaring trumpets and trombones of Grandville High’s marching band just behind him. The high school band is playing a pasticcio of Sousa, Humperdinck, and the Beatles, as arranged by its music director, Mrs. Hammond who, remarkably, is conducting while marching backwards. As always, the band’s volume is formidable, possibly in compensation for its intonation. Only a buffer of solemn-faced, uniformed veterans separates them from the next wellspring of music, the speakers mounted on the hood of a vintage Buick convertible. From these issue the recorded strains of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir which, having just completed, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” is belting out “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.” Bill Lakspur, the chairman of the Grandville Board of Selectman, is driving the open convertible, one hand on the steering wheel, the other waving to the folks lining Main Street. Some of the Boy and Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts and Brownies, plus a representative of the local constabulary, Flip Morris, all strolling behind the automobile, appear to be singing along with the Mormons. Bringing up the rear of the parade is the final lyrical touch, Stephanie Cyzinski’s recently dumped boyfriend, Matt Maxwell, and h
is garage band, The Tombstones. All four boys are playing electric guitars, a rat’s nest of wires and electronic gadgets snaking around their torsos and leading to a car battery and a pair of TDK Outloud speakers that ride behind them in a Gemini hand truck pushed by Matt’s younger brother, Paul. The Tombstones are playing and singing Matt’s latest composition, “Sick and Tired,” a protest song of sorts, one he wrote with the hope of impressing Stephanie; however the lyrics, even when audible, are unintelligible.
“No doubt about it, we were right to vote down Gary,” Herb says. He is standing with Franny at the open window of his apartment over Digby’s Music Shop on Main Street. They can see—and hear—the entire sweep of the parade from their commanding perch.
Franny nods in the affirmative. Gary had proposed to the vigil group that they march in the parade, carrying their placards whilst singing “I’m Not Marching Anymore.” Both Tiffany and Gloria had objected on the grounds that it would be disrespectful to the veterans and their fallen brothers, and that put an end to the idea. Not only because Tiffany and Gloria are mothers of new recruits, but because they enjoy a special ‘grassroots’ status as a result of their social background, they are the group’s arbiters of Grandville good taste. What Herb meant, however, was that even if they had sung the antiwar anthem in the parade no one would have heard them.
“Holy shit!” Herb says. He is pointing toward the gaggle of veterans—a little under thirty in all—that is now passing under the window. From their uniforms, faces, and gaits, the men and women appear to be grouped by the wars in which they fought: in the lead, three World War Two army veterans, two with canes, one with an aluminum walker; next, about a dozen men and women from the Korean conflict; next, a dozen from the Vietnam War; and finally, two veterans of the Persian Gulf War, both of them women. Herb is pointing at the Vietnam contingent. He grabs up a pair of binoculars, stares intently through them, then hands them to Franny. “Fantastic!” he says.