He mixes a Scotch, presses the suit he will wear tomorrow morning, removes the Ixodes from his pocket and places it on the nightstand next to his wallet. He sits in the dark, eating the ice, recalling happier days.
Alaska. He had joined a geological survey, exploring uninhabited regions in northern Birkin County. They had flown in by Piper Cub and landed, late at night, on a dirt road between water and ice. On the plane a graduate student from the University of Oklahoma, who’d done fieldwork the previous summer, suggested that each member of the survey take sulfur pills. “If you sweat sulfur, the insects’ll leave you alone,” he said, and passed around a Dopp Kit full of tablets. In the mountains the mosquitoes were big as birds, and more colorful.
Grizzly bears also posed a problem, especially in wooded areas where the snow was beginning to melt. To warn the bears of their approach the geologists draped cowbells around their equipment. One young man played Bob Dylan (badly) on the harmonica.
Hunters from Seattle and San Francisco shot caribou from helicopters at night. Adams couldn’t see the sport in this but tried it one night, unsuccessfully, to see what it was like.
He was young. Just married. Endless vistas.
In 1978, when the focus had narrowed for him and he was very much a married man, seismologists began to question existing plans of the Izu Trench and the Okhotsk Abyssal Plain. The Plain, they felt, was perhaps twice as deep as previous calculations had indicated. In Tokyo, on his last assignment abroad, Adams met the Japanese cartographers who would accompany him to the coast. At a sushi dinner the day before they left, a man named Onu spoke of a recent survey he’d done at the foot of Mount Fuji. The survey had been interrupted by a manhunt in the foothills. A twenty-one-year-old Tokyo woman, who had recently broken her engagement to a young banker, was missing. A week later, police turned up not only her body but the badly decomposed bodies of six others, four male, two female. “Fuji has come to be known as Suicide Mountain,” Onu said. The 6,250-acre Aokigahara woodland at Fuji was, Adams learned, the most popular spot for self-destruction in all of Japan. Annually, thirty to sixty people—businessmen, usually, or pregnant women disowned by their families—made a suicide pilgrimage to Fuji. “The forest is one of the most picturesque in Asia,” Onu continued. “It has a sacred, gloomy aspect, and most of these people simply wander into the woods, lose themselves in the foliage, and starve. Their skeletons are often found under leaves.” As he spoke he fingered prawns and gracefully scooped slivers of tuna into his mouth.
The following day Adams and his crew flew to the coast. From there they chartered the Glomar Challenger and sounded depth charges along the northern edge of the trench. Shrimp boats hovered near them all afternoon, waving their nets in the sun. The ship’s captain, an American who’d spent the last eight years on the Sea of Japan, explained to Adams that American shipping was dying. “Can’t compete with foreign prices,” he said. He was returning to the United States next month to guide a ferry. “I can make more as a ferry pilot than I can as the captain of a ship.” He showed Adams the radar system—a constantly changing, transparent map—and provided cheerful explanations of the ship’s workings.
The crew drank beer, watched a school of sharks in the warmer waters of the continental slope, and compiled their charts. On the way in, early evening, they toasted the coastal lights and listened to a Japanese broadcast of the World Series.
Disappointed with the initial results of the mission, Adams remained in Japan for another four months, taking time off to visit other parts of the country. At Aokigahara, his access to the forest was limited by yet another manhunt: a party of schoolchildren had wandered away from their class picnic and had not been seen in two days. The police had reason to suspect that the children had lost themselves intentionally, to fulfill a suicide pact. When Adams expressed astonishment, a Japanese tourist assured him, “Japan, unfortunately, has one of the highest child suicide rates in the world. Our school system is very rigorous and many children succumb to the pressure.”
In the forest Adams paused to rest in a small clearing. The wood’s magnetic rocks confounded compass readings but he had kept his eye on a line of trees. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, relaced his shoes, and started to move on when he heard a rustling in the leaves. He paused. Again. Adams turned and crept toward the shade. There, kneeling in the dirt, were two little girls wearing checkered dresses. Their bangs were long. Adams crouched. One of the girls began to giggle. Her friend, startled at first, joined her. Adams sat back on his heels and watched the laughing little girls.
Deidre crying. “Toby hit me.”
“Apologize to your sister.”
“No,” Toby says.
Adams sends them to bed.
All night, sniffles from their rooms. Adams gets up, feels his way along the wall. He winds up in the kitchen, annoyed that he cannot find his way around the house in the dark. In the field behind his yard two boys, bundled against the cold, light a Roman candle. The cardboard tube explodes, knocking the boys face down into the weeds. Before Adams can reach the back door, the boys leap up, apparently unharmed, and slice a path through the stickers. Adams calls his kids, feeds them ice cream and cakes. “What’s wrong, Dad? What’s the matter,” Deidre asks, holding out her cone. “Can I have some more?”
When Pamela was pregnant with Toby, she craved foods that didn’t exist. “Is there something that tastes the way furniture polish smells?” Adams made a meatloaf that nearly fit the bill, but nothing quite satisfied her and she moped around the house, miserable. To cheer her up, Adams bought an ottoman on which she could recline, and several cans of Lemon Pledge to polish it.
Yesterday Pamela arrived with a U-Haul for the ottoman and the oak wardrobe she had left behind. Adams is glad to have the furniture out, but the change is unsettling. He goes to Morty’s early, orders a couple of beers. Bob arrives at eight-thirty and tunes his bass guitar. Before the first set begins, Bob addresses the band. “We were shit last week. Sam dragged on nearly every tune.”
Pete and Denny turn to look at Adams.
“‘Dock of the Bay’ saved us but let’s tighten up, all right?”
There is something about guitars and cords and amps that changes a man. During the week Bob and Denny are polite businessmen, Pete a smooth announcer, but let them strap on a Fender or pick up a Gibson and they develop a slouch, mumble “Hey,” and squint whether the room is smoky or not.
Tonight the combo will alternate sets with a punk band Morty has hired to appeal to the teenagers. Orphaned by Bullets, they’re called. The drummer has blue hair.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he tells Adams. Adams is rubbing his cymbals with Brasso and a rag.
“It changes the molecular structure. Your cymbals turn into wax paper.”
He’s nineteen, pimpled, answers to Zig. His drums are plastic, transparent, flat as tables. A long extension cord connects his toms to an outlet behind the bar. The drums ping when hit, and reverberate for several seconds.
Adams’ set looks clumsy next to the modern equipment. Zig gapes at Adams’ snare. “Where’s it plug in?” he says.
Pete is sitting at a table next to a short young girl. “Sam, this is Mary.”
“Hi. I’m Sam.”
“You’re good. I heard you last week.” “Thanks.”
“Mary goes to high school,” Pete says, grinning. He offers her a cigarette. She says something about living on her own. It’s not clear to Adams how she can rent an apartment or stay out late without her parents’ consent.
“So, what do you do when you’re not playing the drums?”
“I draw maps.”
“Neat.” Her T-shirt says RELAX. “YOU know what, I think we should have an adventure when you guys get off,” she says. Her toes are painted red. “Buy some shit and go sleep on the moon.”
“Time to swing,” Pete says, tapping Adams’ arm.
Adams follows him, takes his place behind the drums, and counts them into the first set. After te
n minutes the band’s in gear, they’re relaxing, but the air remains charged, keeping the songs tight. The set moves nicely, and when they kick into “Dock of the Bay” they’ve never been better. Melody and rhythm work together like two bodies long accustomed to the steady timing of affection.
Orphaned by Bullets sounds a little like hash brown potatoes being shaken in a jar. Pete and Denny fall on each other with laughter, order extra Scotch-and-waters. Adams and Bob, gauging the crowd reaction, listen intently to the tunes. In the eighties, punk is the come-together shout, but Orphaned by Bullets’ sound is unlike any variation of rock and roll Adams has ever heard. Each member of the band, dressed in gray plastic overalls with dabs of wild paint in his hair, seems to be playing a mathematical progression on his instrument unlike the progressions performed by his cohorts. They are hardly a band at all in the traditional sense of the word, but the young crowd, which had been perfunctorily polite during the combo’s set, is eating it up.
“We can’t compete for this audience,” Adams tells Bob.
“You’re right. I figure jazz—straight jazz. They’ll think it’s something new. Next set, we open with ‘Take Five.’”
“These cats are great!” Pete shouts across the table.
“Shut up, Pete,” says Bob.
Adams calls Jill from a pay phone near the kitchen. She had wanted to come tonight to hear him play, but Carter dumped a box of paperwork on her at quitting time.
“How’s it going?” Adams asks.
“Slowly. Carter’s up to something.”
“Like what?”
“Can’t tell. What he gave me is incomplete, but it’s complicated, that much I can see.”
“Does it involve more real estate?”
“Somehow. I got a feeling things’ll be hopping in another month or two.”
“Listen, I get off around two-thirty.”
“Come by. I’ll be up.”
Jill’s est terminology annoys him—she knows this and teases him with it—yet sometimes it’s strangely accurate. The word “impact,” for example, with its soft plosive p, reminding him of sitting on a plane, without peanuts or gum, a popping in his ears, a sudden descent.
“How did your wife’s leaving impact you?” she asked one night. He fell and fell.
“Are you ever uneasy, doing stuff for Carter?”
“No,” she answers. “It’s my job.”
“Right. Balzac said ‘The individual is not expected to be more scrupulous than the nation.’”
“I don’t know about that. I just figure he’s building his own karma. In the next life he’ll come back as an old chamois in a car wash. I’ll wipe my dipstick with him.”
Adams enjoys hearing her talk late at night after playing at the club, delights in the gentle pressure of her head on his arm.
The second marriage, they say, is the one for love.
He strokes her hair.
The first, too.
The phone wakes him from a dream: perfume, silken clothes.
Jill hands him the receiver. “Hello?” he says.
“Parum-pum.”
“Kenny?”
“What’s up?”
“It’s late. What’s happened?”
“Nothing, man, just checking to see if you’re still kicking.”
“What time is it?”
“One.”
“Three here.” He should never have given Kenny Jill’s number.
“Good news. I’m fixed.”
“You are?”
“No more going broke. I’m fixed with a band now.”
“Great.” Jill turns over, asks him who it is. “My brother.”
“What?”
“Nothing, Kenny. That’s great.”
“We’re doing a shoot for MTV next week. Song called ‘Thoughts You Never Had.’ Rock’s tribute to Nancy Reagan.”
“Gonna get rich.”
“Damn straight.”
“We’re splitting the bill with a punk band now. They’ve got synthesized drums and a Linn drum machine.”
“I hate that fuckin’ Linn,” Kenny says. “Glorified metronome.”
“Goddamn tin can.” Adams enjoys his brother.
As Kenny talks, Adams’ dream comes back to him: he was swimming in a sea of women’s clothes, with an erection like a wooden mast. Perfume sprayed his face. His body was heavy, sopping with the scent. He touches Jill’s bare shoulder, leans back on the blue-striped pillow, and drifts away again, Kenny’s voice a distant warning from shore.
No one, he thinks, properly appreciates the difficulty of beginning. He is entering coordinates into the computer. Latitude, longitude, the Tome Pepsi sign hanging by a nail on the wall, facing north, of that brown adobe bar in Ciudad Acuña, the river in south Texas where he lost his high school ring, all reduced to a set of binary numbers, neat, concise.
Caprice, he thinks, occupies much of the world’s space.
A sign on the wall says, PROPER NAMES/DANGEROUS WORDS . The gallery is nearly empty. A series of pedestals in the center of the room support copper cylindrical tubes—he recognizes these as more sophisticated models of the equipment Pamela used to tinker with in the garage. Atop the copper tubes, attached with wires, striated plastic cylinders rotate slowly. Images appear inside the cylinders. In one, an image of Pamela, strands of her dark hair blowing violently across her forehead. As the cylinder turns she raises her arms. She is holding a camera. With a sardonic smile she snaps the viewer’s picture. Then she lowers her arms and closes her eyes. Another cylinder reveals, bit by bit, a house frame, crossbeams and posts. As the cylinder turns the frame crumbles in a funnel of dust.
Most of the cylinders contain words. Wirklichkeit is here. So is Marriage, a vague, faded pink, floating as if underwater.
Pamela’s other words:
Odyssey
Acceptance
Pageant
Stasis
Leftovers
Distant Warning
Thrombosis
Vertical Ruins
On the gallery walls, framed holographic images illuminated by black light: spectra of various lengths and intensities, silver, gold, and blue. Names of actors and politicians (Strom Thurmond, Veronica Lake), a more traditional collage reminiscent of Picasso.
The catalog says, “Saussure writes, ‘In language there are only differences,’ emphasizing the centrality of choice. A term’s meaning is determined by a host of other terms not chosen. Ms. Adams’ work renders dramatically this structuralist principle. Her words, free of referents as they are free of frames and museum walls, are tangible negations resisting interpretation. In representing only themselves, their meanings attached to words that the artist did not choose, they fill the gallery space, almost invisibly, with absence.”
In the fall the valley turns green. Scholars and mystics have joined hands in attempts to explain why our seasons misbehave. Weathermen pepper our skies with balloons, diviners scratch the earth with sticks. Legends, and curious accounts in leather pouches found in the hollow of a tree, suggest that the valley was once a lake. Dogwood bloomed on its banks, peacocks danced in the hills.
Fishermen reported seeing water sprites, twinkling, no fatter than fingers, change into bulbous squashlike creatures in the middle of the night. What appeared to be falling leaves drifted slowly out over the lake, then turned into metal filings, which rained down hard upon the men. Nothing was safe. The shape-shifters smashed turtles, birds, trawlers, anything that settled on the lake.
On shore a chubby boy, an orphan, lived on the pumpkins of the fields. He longed to swim. As he had no family, the villagers assumed responsibility for him. They warned him of the danger in the water, but he seemed to have an intimate knowledge of the lake. He spoke of the colors at the bottom as though he’d been diving. Some people suggested that he came from the lake; after all, he had no family. Where did he come from?
One night, having informed the fishermen that he was tired of treading the earth, he jumped into the sha
llows and swam. From time to time the townsfolk saw him in the middle of the lake, riding a shaggy white buffalo. Eventually the boy wrenched a horn from the animal’s head and tossed it ashore. A tree laden with heavy fruit sprang up where it landed. Next the boy surfaced gripping a black obelisk. The obelisk was slippery; often the boy lost his grip, but finally managed to fling it ashore. An artesian well burst forth, spraying water high into the air. The villagers danced beneath the spring, feasting on heavy fruit as the boy battled tumbleweeds, crates, panes of glass. Each time he hurled an opponent ashore it became, instantly, a source of beauty and health. The people were delighted.
Finally one creature remained—the mother squash, the biggest in the lake. The boy caught his breath, ate a chunk of pumpkin, submerged. He was underwater for hours. The lake boiled. Orange steam rose in patches off the water. The water began to blaze. Women from the village tossed ice into the deepest part. A mixture of blood—male and female, mother and son—hardened on the surface, burst into flames. It burned until the lake dried up. Afterwards there was no sign of the boy or the squash—just a salt deposit, as if from giant tears. For years boiling rain seared the dogwoods in the valley. The grass dried up in summer.
He turns out the light. “Good night,” he says.
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“That was neat. Will you tell us another story tomorrow night?”
“Sure. Go to sleep now.”
He sits up with a drink, then falls asleep in his chair and dreams about the valley he had mentioned in the children’s story. When he wakes up he goes to his drafting table and on a thin sheet of paper tries to recall the dream: “Each morning before the valley is awake the little girls escape. Their curtains blow through windows, like blouses opening. They’re out to catch the fathers.
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