Desire Provoked

by Tracy Daugherty

  “They’re like kids,” Adams says.

  “Yeah, but it don’t bother me. I’m a star now. Video King.” His band is called Curveball and they’re appearing on MTV in heavy rotation, he says, “wearing leather and abusing chicks. In our next shoot, we’re going to desecrate a church. We’ve picked an old cathedral in Monterey they were going to tear down anyway. It’ll be like that haunted house, remember?” When they were little, Kenny and Adams crept into an abandoned house that their friends claimed was haunted. Inside they found the shell of a player piano with a few rusty wires still intact, broken boards, exposed nails in the floor, and cracking plaster. Adams, older than most of the boys, wasn’t afraid of ghosts. He tugged on a loose flap of wallpaper and was surprised when part of the wall came with it. The plaster was simply cardboard and chalk, eroded now. He could level this house with his hands. Happily he ran about the room punching holes in the walls. Kenny whooped and joined him. Then, for some reason, Adams felt a presence in the room. He spun around, the heel of his shoe shattering a wedge of glass on the floor, and saw a craggy, vulturous man, hands heavy at his sides. Veins ran like rivers in his temples. Adams trembled at the sight of this horrible ghost; then the man spoke, ordering them out “this very minute.” The boys ran, and watched the tall figure from a nearby field. He owned the gas station across the street from the house. Taking a Coke from his machine, he sat out front in a chair near the pumps.

  “Anyway, Mom and Dad know I have a steady gig, but they don’t know what kind of gig. It might shake them up to see me in leather.”

  “You’re a long way from your roots.”

  Colored lights circle Morty’s eaves like a spangled hem on a Spanish dancer’s dress. Inside, a man is stuffing doves into a hatbox. The birds reappear as bouquets.

  From the back of the room Adams sees Pete, Denny, and Bob pick up their instruments. The magician performs his final trick. Pete’s shaved his head. His shirt says YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE. The band launches into a Laurie Anderson tune, backed by a Linn drum machine:

  I met this guy, and he looked like he might have been

  a hat check clerk at an ice rink.

  Which, in fact, he turned out to be.

  And I said, Oh boy. Right again.

  “They’ve adapted their style to compete with Bullets,” Morty explains. “On the more complicated numbers, Zig sits in with them.”

  “They’re awful.”

  Morty shrugs, insinuates his hand into Adams’. “Didn’t I tell you this was going to be an entertainment capital? Thursdays, we got chipmunks shimmying to a chainsaw. It’s a dynamite act. Good to see you again, Sam. Grab yourself a beer on me.”

  “Things have changed,” Bob tells him at the break.

  “For the worse, I’d say.”

  “You don’t know the numbers we’re doing now.”

  “It’s the same beat over and over. What’s to know?”

  “Precisely. We don’t need to pay a drummer—”

  “You sound like shit, Bob.”

  “I think we sound just fine.” He turns to Zig for confirmation.

  “Leave me out of this, man.” Zig slumps in his chair. “I’m stoned anyway, like on the edge and falling.”

  “I’ll audition for you,” Adams says.

  “You haven’t been asked, Sam.”

  At the next break he rolls out his bass drum and sets it in front of the back curtain, behind the amps. Zig follows with his cymbals. “This is a radical move, man.”

  “How do you cut the power to this thing?” Adams says, indicating the drum machine. Zig hits a button.

  “What are you doing?” Bob yells from the edge of the stage.

  “Folks, I’m auditioning for the band,” Adams says into a mike. The crowd is indifferent.

  He settles himself on the throne, picks up his sticks. Twice as many people in the audience as in the old days. Morty’s been hustling.

  He hasn’t played in six months. His fingers are nimble from his work on the practice pad, but a solo—cold?

  He starts with a standard ride on the hi-hat, one-and-a-two-and, one-and-a-two-and, brushing the snare on the offbeat, then rolls into a rumba on the tom. His foot’s slow, nothing fancy on the bass.

  A rim-shot, a machine-gun roll on the snare, snap ‘em to, faster and faster, with hits to the high tom, a little action on the Zildjian, subtle now then loud, make ‘em cry, cowbell in the middle of the phrase, slow it down pick it up, building to a run on the snare, faster, louder, draw it out, make ‘em suffer, like a long, slow hump, then he’s off, rim bass tom high low bass tom high tom bass tom, wrestling with the Dark Angel. A smoky dirge, the heartbreak blues. A series on the cymbals and he’s done. Not quite. Now then. The crowd is on its feet.

  Pete and Denny take the stage, laughing excitedly. Zig says, “Teach me that?”

  Bob picks up his bass. “All right, you son of a bitch,” he says with grudging pleasure. “Let’s play.”

  “An old one,” Denny says. “It’s been a long time.”

  When they slide into Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, Art Farmer, he feels the wings close in around him, the heavy thudding of the angel’s many hearts.

  Than writes from California:

  Things are going well for me here. I just got a raise, and may do some more traveling at the end of the year for Arco. In the meantime I have met a nice young woman who owns a Vietnamese restaurant with her brother in downtown Los Angeles. Nothing serious, but I enjoy spending time with her.

  I found your brother’s name in the phone book, but so far he has not been home when I have called.

  A Soviet scientist I met defected before I left Svalbard. The story I heard says he stowed away on the Polarstar, which pulled in beside his mining vessel in Barentsburg. The Norwegians discovered him halfway to Longyearbyen, and he asked for asylum. He seemed to me a very smart man, careful about his work. I’m glad to know he’s all right.

  I thought of you the other day, Sam. I saw on the news an American military advisor in El Salvador. His goal was to “bring order to Central America.” It reminded me of the conversations we had. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I can’t resist citing one more example of why I distrust the Western passion for reason. At the height of the war in my country, a team of political scientists from Michigan State University arrived to study military tactics, write articles on the special police, and so on. At one time it seemed there were more professors than soldiers in Vietnam. One of the men came up with a blueprint for evacuating villagers. He relocated the entire population of an area into a compound surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. It was like a dormitory, only padlocked and dark. And he dressed the refugees in uniforms—a different color for every village—so he could identify them as he studied their “refugee mentality.” He tried to ease the pain of the situation by placing South Vietnamese, rather than American, guards in the compound. But the place was too crowded, too anguished. In time the guards, under stress, began to shoot noisy children.

  People they didn’t like they kept from the food. I heard of one place where they were chopping each other’s hands off—couldn’t tell the refugees from the guards. So I don’t trust order, I’m afraid. It’s not human nature.

  Well, forgive me. The news report struck close to home. But it’s impossible to dwell on such things when the sun is out and the beach is warm. Come visit. Perhaps your brother could take us to some concerts, and I could reserve a tee-off time at Pebble Beach. Say hi to Carol when you write.

  Pamela drops by. The kids want to spend the weekend with some friends. Does he mind not seeing them? He had baked a pumpkin pie and bought three tickets to a basketball game, but he says, “No, it’s all right.”

  She hesitates in his doorway, so he asks her if she’d like a glass of wine and some pie. She accepts.

  “I’ve decided to have the operation,” she tells him. “Oh?”

  “My doctor convinced me. And it’s not so bad. They can’t get all the tissue, but they can get
enough to significantly reduce the chances.”

  “But it’s not a hundred percent effective?”

  “No.”

  He dabs whipped cream onto her wedge of pie. “Well, if you’ve made up your mind.” “I’m scared, Sam.”

  He sits opposite her with the spoon in his mouth.

  “I’m told that for six to twelve weeks after the operation, the sensation in my breasts will be reduced. Some women never get full feeling back in their nippies, but most do.”

  “Your breasts are lovely, Pam.”

  She blushes and so does he.

  Deidre was a burst of autumn as a baby, red hair, brown eyes, reaching for Pamela’s breast, or tumbling on the pink nursery floor, mouth open, waiting for the words to come. Toby, a beautiful mid-winter snowdrift, pale white skin, thick black eyebrows, blessing Adams with beatific smiles and pleas urable grunts. The range of color in a kid as he speeds toward your life and then away, leaving you wordless in the wake of the brilliant violet-to-red rainbow of the Doppler Shift.

  Rosa cooks spaghetti Raphael: garlic, a thick tomato sauce, artichoke hearts.

  “I talked your wife—”

  “Ex-wife.”

  “Out of having that silly operation.” “Did you?”

  “Actually, I shouldn’t take credit for it. She decided herself, but I was against it all along. Parmesan?”

  “Thanks.”

  “She’s a smart lady. A little naïve, but time’ll take care of that.”

  “She’s nearly forty years old, Rosa. If she doesn’t know the ropes by now, she never will.”

  Rosa shakes her head. “She lost fifteen years being married to you.”

  “Now wait—”

  “I’m not criticizing you. But it’s true—you both figured it was her job or her desire or whatever to stay home with the clothes. It’s the way you were brought up. She has a lot of catching up to do outside the home and she’s sharp. Her heart’s in the right place. She’s committed to art and politics, but she expects too much from them, maybe … really thinks she can make a difference overnight, but she’ll learn. Already I can see her developing a sense of irony about herself. That’s good.”

  “This Black Muslim kick you’re on—isn’t that a bit naive?

  Rosa rolls her noodles with a fork, like a stockbroker reading ticker tape. “You’re too young to remember Henry Wallace, but in 1948 he ran for president against Harry Truman. He was vice president under Roosevelt until he got fired, sort of, for opposing the war.”

  “I’ve heard Pam’s Uncle Otto talk about him.”

  “Well, he became a one-man party and say what you will about him, I believe to this day if he’d been elected we’d have avoided Korea, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs—all that crap. I really do. But of course he didn’t have a chance—that’s what I was naïve about. Truman managed to slap the ‘communist’ label on him, and that buried him. So I been there already. I’ve had my hopes up. Frank, my late husband, and I flirted with the Communist party for a while but then we heard about the Stalinist purges. We couldn’t believe that these people, who we thought were going to guide us in establishing harmonious communities all over the world, could be capable of such horror. So I been to the dance and had my foot stepped on. I got the proper sense of irony about myself, but I’ve also got the desire to be active still. Pam just doesn’t know how hard it is yet—that’s her only fault. But she’s not the kind to quit. She’ll learn, and learn to laugh.”

  “She quit on me.”

  “No.” Rosa looks at him seriously. “The circumstances changed for both of you. But there was no quitting.”

  I hope your decision to live with Jack has proved to be a happy one.

  I’m lying.

  No, not really.

  Be smart.

  P.S. They found oil on Spitsbergen. We were a good team.

  He tapes the card to a rock about the size of a small cat, puts the rock in a box marked FRAGILE. It will cost a fortune to mail, but Carol will be pleased. It is neither pretty nor valuable, just a rock.

  “The system is carefully balanced, though operations appear random,” Carter says. “It’s important for the operations to appear random. People need to believe they have some degree of personal freedom, hmm? Freedom is possible only in a random universe. Therefore, if the integrated nature of the process were revealed, people would rebel and destroy the system. There’d be chaos.

  “Don’t confuse me with the nature of things, Sam. It’s bigger than all of us. I’m just a component, like you or anyone else. The man on the street fears technology. He thinks the future’s a cloud of waste. I’m saying that the system is self-perpetuating and self-correcting. Minor destruction is inevitable as the system purifies itself, but annihilation is not built into the program. Mistakes condition the future, and I’m telling you the future is preservation.”

  Adams remembers his last visit with the children. He stopped at an arcade so Toby could play a video game. Screaming men in motorcycle helmets ran around the screen trampling dim figures called phantoms. Sometimes the phantoms ate the arms and legs of the little men, but as long as the head or torso remained, the player continued to function.

  Adams spreads his maps out on the table: the world, the earth’s crust, the planet’s gravitational and magnetic fields. The charts are scientifically accurate and up to date, yet Adams feels something is missing.

  Legends are comprehensible. Purposes well defined. Where does the problem lie?

  It occurs to him that the world itself is missing from his maps. On one, the planet has been reduced to a photographic reproduction. On another, to a set of numbers. Each new interpretation is an extra inch of kite string, but the string is endless, and the kite, out of sight, keeps tugging beyond his ken.

  When Deidre was a baby she learned words quickly: Mommy, Daddy, Toby (which for several months she pronounced simply ‘bee). She picked up personal pronouns—he, she, you—but struggled with “me.” The last name she learned was her own. Pamela would hold a mirror in front of her chubby face, say “Baby” or “Deidre.” She was delighted by her own reflection and dutifully repeated the words, but made no connection with the image until much later.

  Most of our words are directed away from us, Adams thinks. Intrigued, he sets out to map the human mind.

  For weeks he gathers models, from Aristotle’s theory to the latest neurological research. His first thought is to unify the best models with current ideas to form a definitive map. There are so many models, however, each with its own value and charm, that he decides to make a series.

  There are mythic models, psychological models, linguistic, philosophical, political, scientific models. Some choices have already been made by virtue of historical significance. One cannot exclude Freud. Existential philosophy should not be ignored. And thinking of Than, he decides to draw a map of the mind according to Hegel.

  A Pennsylvania probate court declares Otto incompetent, closes his bank account, and secures his holdings for the present.

  “You’ve stripped him of his civil rights,” Adams tells Pamela on the phone.

  Pamela, in Pennsylvania, depressed at having to do family business, leaving her latest work to hostile critics (who have grown tired of her Dangerous Words), snaps, “You sound like his lawyer.”

  “I’m concerned about him.” “He’s a drunk.”

  “And Jurgen’s a louse for doing this.” “It’s been very hard on Daddy. He’s not in good health.”

  “God’s punishment.”

  “Let’s not argue about it, all right? Have there been any more reviews?”

  Adams had decided not to mention them, but her attitude upsets him and he reads them to her slowly.

  To begin with, the base structure of the brain: numerous diagrams exist showing right and left hemispheres, frontal lobe, etc. Problem: how to make a drawing of the brain that isn’t just another wiring chart? CAT scans are colorful, but less precise than the best road maps. After long consideration Ada
ms chooses for his Point of View oxygen and glucose, the two most active elements in the brain.

  On the computer Adams sketches gentle hills interrupted by valleys, some in shadow, with deep gullies. Dark sky, cobweb stretched across it like a silvery dome. The cobweb represents the arachnoid, a vaulted bridge connecting the crevices of the brain. Cerebro-spinal fluid flows like a system of rivers into the valleys, widening into lakes where thoughts splash like noisy children. He gives each lake-child an oversized flashlight, representing electrically charged cells. Next problem: Is the brain the mind? Centuries of debate between behaviorists, idealists, dualists, etc., have failed to answer this question.

  Constraint (if he agrees that the mind is intangible): a map must refer to a physical landscape.

  Whether the mind’s assumptions are learned or a priori he cannot show on his map, nor can he determine whether mind is attached to substance and weight.

  “He said they were going to take us all somewhere else because we were involved in subversive activities here. This made us very sad because we did not know what subversive activities were.”

  A Guatemalan peasant. Adams has noticed that the Third World makes up most of Rosa’s dead these days, since she has become politically active again. On Tuesday evening Maurice Bishop told her, “In spite of my clash with the CIA, I didn’t understand the true meaning of destabilization until I abandoned my body and entered the cosmic realm.”

  Rosa tightens her grip on his hands.

  “Compañeros, Christian greetings from a poor Indian farmer, slain shamelessly on the night of the purge…”

  Hegel says there are no bare facts. Things enter into our experience because we conceptualize them. The yard. The barbecue pit. The field behind his house. The boys’ rockets. He will never in his life encounter an object he doesn’t have words for. Even when something’s strange to him, he is able to describe its shape, color, etc.

  All things, then, exist as ideas. But every thesis has an antithesis. Every positive a negative.

  Negation, Hegel says, is the creative force of the mind.