McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “All sounds fine to me,” Scott replied, and that was all he had time for, because they had arrived.

  IV

  Perhaps it’s a holdover from the broken toothglass—that omenish feeling—but the plot of trucked-in dirt looks like a grave to Lisey: XL size, as if for a giant. The two crowds collapse in around it in a circle, becoming one and creating that breathless suck-oven feel at the center. A campus security guard now stands at each corner of the ornamental velvet-rope barrier, beneath which Dashmiel, Scott, and “Toneh” Eddington have ducked. Queensland, the photographer, dances relentlessly, his old-fashioned Speed Graphic held up in front of his face. There are big patches of darkness under his arms and a sweat-tree growing up the back of his shirt. Paging Weegee, Lisey thinks, and realizes she envies him. He is so free, flitting gnatlike in the heat; he is twenty-five and all his shit still works. Dashmiel, however, is looking at him with growing impatience which Stefan Queensland affects not to see until he has exactly the shot he wants. Lisey has an idea it’s one of Scott alone, his foot on the silly silver spade, his hair blowing back in the breeze. In any case, Weegee Junior at last lowers his big old box of a camera and steps back to the edge of the crowd’s far curve. And here, following him with her somewhat wistful regard, Lisey first sees the madman, a graduate student with long blond hair named Gerd Allen Cole. He has the look, one local reporter will later write, “of John Lennon recovering from his romance with heroin—hollow eyes at odd and disquieting contrast to his puffy child’s cheeks.”

  At that moment, beyond noting all that tumbled blond hair, Lisey thinks nothing of Gerd Allen Cole, omens or no omens. She just wants this to be over so she can find a bathroom stall in the bowels of the English department across the way and pull her rebellious underwear out of the crack of her ass. She has to make water, too, but right now that’s pretty much secondary.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” Dashmiel says in the carrying but somehow artificial voice of a carnival barker. “It is mah distinct pleasure to introduce Mr. Scott Landon, authuh of the Pulitzuh prize– winnin’ Relics and the National Book Award–winnin’ The Coster’s Daughter. He’s come all the way from Maine with his loveleh wife to inauguarate construction—yes, at long last—on our vereh own Shipman Lah-brey! Scott Landon, folks! Let’s hear it!”

  The crowd applauds at once, and enthusiastically. The loveleh wife joins in, patting her palms together automatically, looking at Dashmiel and thinking, He won the NBA for The Coaster’s Daughter. That’s Coaster , not Coster. And I sort of think you knew it. Why don’t you like him, you petty man?

  Then she happens to glance beyond him and this time she really does notice Gerd Allen Cole. He is just standing there with all that fabulous blond hair tumbled down to his eyebrows and the sleeves of a white shirt far too big for him—he’s all but floating in it—rolled up to his biceps. The tails of this shirt are out and dangle almost to the whitened knees of the old jeans he wears. Instead of applauding Blondie has got his hands clasped rather prissily together in front of him and there’s a spooky-sweet smile on his face and his lips are moving, as if he’s saying a prayer . . . but he’s looking straight at Scott. As the wife of a public man (some of the time, at least), Lisey at once pegs Blondie as a potential problem. She thinks of guys like this as “deep-space fans,” although she’d never say so out loud and has never even told Scott this. Deep-space fans always have a lot to say. They want to grab Scott by the arm and tell him that that they understand the secret messages in his books; deep-space fans know the books are really secret guides to God, Satan, or possibly the Coptic Gospels. They might be on about Scientology or numerology. Sometimes they want to talk about other worlds— secret worlds. Two years ago a deep-space fan hitchhiked all the way from Texas to Maine to talk to Scott about Bigfoot. That guy made Lisey a little nervous—there was a certain walleyed look of absence about him, and a knife (sheathed, thank Christ) in one of the loops of his backpack—but Scott talked to him a little, gave him a beer, took a couple of his pamphlets, signed the kid a paperback copy of Instructions to be Left in Earth, clapped him on the back, and sent him on his way, happy. Sometimes—when he’s got it strapped on nice and tight—Scott is amazing. No other word will do.

  The thought of actual violence does not now occur to Lisey— certainly not the idea that Blondie means to pull a Mark David Chapman on her husband. My mind just doesn’t run that way, she might have said.

  Scott acknowledges the applause—and a few raucous rebel yells—with the Scott Landon grin which has been caricatured in the Wall Street Journal (it will later appear on any number of Barnes & Noble shopping bags), all the time continuing to balance on one foot while the other holds its place on the shoulder of the silly shovel. He lets the applause run for ten or fifteen seconds, whatever his intuition tells him is right (and his intuition is rarely wrong), then raises one hand, waving it off. And it goes. When he speaks, his voice seems nowhere near as loud as Dashmiel’s, but Lisey knows that even with no mike or battery-powered bullhorn—and the lack of either here this afternoon is probably someone’s oversight— it will carry to the very back rows of the crowd. And the crowd helps out. It’s gone absolutely silent, straining to hear him: every golden word. A Famous Man has come among them. A Thinker and a Writer. He will now scatter pearls of wisdom before them.

  Pearls before swine, Lisey thinks. Sweaty swine, at that . But didn’t her father once tell her that pigs don’t sweat? She can’t exactly remember, and it’s sort of an odd train of thought anyway, isn’t it?

  Across from her, Blondie carefully pushes his tumbled hair back from a fine white brow with his left hand. Then he clasps the left with his right again. His hands are as white as his brow and Lisey thinks: There’s one piggy who stays inside a lot. A stay-at-home swine, and why not? He looks like he’s got all sorts of strange deep-space ideas to catch up on.

  She shifts from one foot to the other, and the silk of her underwear all but squeaks in the crack of her ass. Oh, maddening! She forgets Blondie again in trying to calculate if she might not . . . while Scott’s making his remarks…very surreptitiously, mind you . . .

  Her dead mother speaks up. Dour. Three words. Brooking no argument. No, Lisey. Wait.

  “Ain’t gonna sermonize, me,” Scott says, and she recognizes the patois of Gully Foyle, the main character in his all-time favorite novel, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. “Too hot for sermons.”

  “Beam us up, Scotty!” someone in the fifth or sixth row on the parking-lot side of the crowd yells exuberantly. The crowd laughs and cheers.

  “Can’t do it, brother,” Scott says, “transporters are broken and we’re all out of lithium crystals.”

  The crowd, being new to the riposte as well as the sally (Lisey has heard both at least fifty times; maybe as many as a hundred), roars its approval and applauds. Across the way, Blondie smiles thinly, sweatlessly, and continues to grip his left hand with his right. And now Scott does take his foot off the spade, not as if he’s grown impatient with it but as if he has, for the moment, found another use for the tool. She watches, not without fascination, for this is Scott at his best, not reading scripture but strutting showtime.

  “It’s nineteen-eighty-six and the world has grown dark,” he says. He slips the three feet or so of the little spade’s wooden handle easily through his cupped hand, so that his fingers rest near the thing’s business end. The scoop winks sun in Lisey’s eyes once, and then it is mostly hidden by the sleeve of Scott’s lightweight jacket. With the scoop and the blade hidden, he uses the slim wooden handle as a pointer, ticking off trouble and tragedy in the air in front of him.

  “In January, the Challenger shuttle explodes, killing all seven on board. Bad call on a cold morning, folks. They never should have tried to launch.

  “In February, at least thirty die on Election Day in the Philippines. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, meanwhile, responsible for the deaths of a hundred times that number—maybe four hundred times that number—l
eave for Guam and, eventually, Hawaii. No one knows how many pairs of shoes babyluv takes with her.”

  There’s a ripple of laughter from the crowd. Not much. Tony Eddington is finally taking notes. Roger Dashmiel looks hot and put out with this unexpected current-events lesson.

  “The nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl kills thousands, sickens tens of thousands.

  “The AIDS epidemic kills thousands, sickens tens of thousands.

  “The world grows dark. Discordia rises. Mr. Yeats’s blood-tide is still undimmed.”

  He looks down, looks fixedly at nil but graying earth, and Lisey is suddenly terrified that he is seeing it, his private monster, the thing with the endless patchy piebald side, that he is going to go off, perhaps even come to the break she knows he is afraid of (in truth she is as afraid of it as he is) in front of all these people. Then, before her heart can do more than begin to speed up, he raises his head, grins like a boy at the county fair, and shoots the handle of the spade through his fist to the halfway point. It’s a showy move, a pool shark’s move, and the folks at the front of the crowd go ooooh. But Scott’s not done. Holding the spade out before him, he rotates the handle nimbly in his fingers, accelerating it into an unlikely spin. It’s a baton twirler’s move, as dazzling—because of the silver scoop swinging in the sun, mostly—as it is unexpected. She’s been married to him since 1977—almost nine years now—and had no idea he had such a sublimely cool move in his repertoire. (How many years does it take, she’ll wonder later, lying in bed alone in her substandard motel room and listening to dogs bark beneath a hot orange Nashville moon, before the simple stupid weight of time finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage?) The silver bowl of the rapidly swinging spade sends a Wake up! Wake up! sunflash running across the heat-dazed, sweat-sticky surface of the crowd. Lisey’s husband is suddenly Scott the Pitchman, grinning, and she has never been so relieved to see that totally untrustworthy honey, I’m hip huckster’s grin on her husband’s face. He has bummed them out; now he will sell them the doubtful good cheer with which he hopes to send them home. And she thinks they will buy, hot August afternoon or not. When he’s like this, Scott could sell Frigidaires to Inuits, as the saying is . . . and God bless the language pool where we all go first to drink our fill and then to strap on our business.

  “But if every book is a little light in that darkness—and so I believe, so I believe, so I must believe, for I write the goddamn things, don’t I?—then every library is a grand bonfire around which ten thousand people come to stand and warm themselves each cold day and night. We celebrate the laying of such a fire this afternoon, and I’m honored to be a part of it. Here is where we spit in the eye of chaos and kick murder right in his wrinkled old cojones. Hey, photographer!”

  Stefan Queensland snaps to, but smiling.

  Scott, also smiling, says: “Now—get one of this. The powers that be may not want to use it, but you’ll like it in your portfolio, I’ll bet.”

  Scott holds the ornamental tool out as if he intends to twirl it again, and the crowd gives a little hopeful gasp, but he’s only teasing them. He slides his left hand back down to the spade’s collar, his right to a position on the handle about a foot from the top. Then he bends, digs in, and drives the spade-blade deep, dousing its hot glitter in earth. He brings it up, tosses its dark load aside, and cries: “I declare the Shipman Library construction site open!”

  The applause that greets this makes the previous rounds sound like the sort of polite patter you might hear at a prep-school tennis match. Lisey doesn’t know if young Mr. Queensland caught the ceremonial first scoop, not for sure (she wasn’t looking), but when Scott pumps the silly little silver spade at the sky like an Olympic hero, Queensland catches that one for sure, laughing as he snaps it. Scott holds the pose for a moment (Lisey happens to glance at Dashmiel and catches that gentleman in the act of rolling his eyes at Mr. Eddington—Toneh). Then he lowers the spade to port arms and holds it that way, grinning. Sweat has popped on his cheeks and brow in fine beads. The applause begins to taper off. The crowd thinks he’s done. Lisey, who can read him like a book (as the saying is), knows better.

  When they can hear him again, Scott bends down for an encore scoop. “This one’s for Yeats!” he calls. Another scoop. “This one’s for Poe!” Yet another scoop. “This one’s for Alfred Bester, and if you haven’t read him, you ought to be ashamed!” He’s starting to sound out of breath, and Lisey, although mostly still amused, is starting to feel a bit alarmed, as well. It’s so hot. She’s trying to remember what he ate for lunch—was it heavy or light?

  “And this one . . .” He dives the spade into what is now a fairly respectable little divot (Queensland documenting each fresh foray) one last time and holds up the final dip of earth. The front of his shirt has darkened with sweat. “Well, why don’t you think of whoever wrote your favorite book? The one that, in a perfect world, you’d check out first when the Shipman Library finally opens its doors to you? Got it? Okay—this one’s for him, or her, or them.” He tosses the dirt aside, gives the spade a final valedictory shake, then turns to Dashmiel . . . who should be pleased with Scott’s showmanship, Lisey thinks—asked to play by ear, Scott has played brilliantly— and who instead only looks hot and pissed off. “I think we’re done here,” he says, and makes as if to hand Dashmiel the spade.

  “No, that’s yoahs,” Dashmiel says. “As a keepsake, and a token of ouah thanks. Along with yoah check, of co’se.” His smile—the rictus, not the real one—comes and goes in a fitful cramp. “Shall we go and grab ow’sefs a little air-conditionin’?”

  “By all means,” Scott says, looking bemused, and then hands the spade to Lisey—as he has handed her so many other mostly unwanted mementos over the past twelve years of his celebrity: everything from ceremonial oars and Boston Red Sox hats encased in Lucite cubes to the masks of comedy and tragedy . . . but mainly pen-and-pencil sets. So many pen-and-pencil sets. Waterman, Scripto, Schaeffer, Montblanc, you name it. She looks at the spade’s glittering silver scoop, as bemused as her beloved (he is still her beloved, and she’s come to believe he always will be). Every last speck of dirt has slid off, it seems; even the blade is clean. There are a few flecks in the incised letters reading COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY, and Lisey blows them off. Then she looks at this unlikely prize again. Where will such an artifact end up? She’d say Scott’s study over the barn, but in this summer of 1986 the study is still under construction and probably won’t be ready for occupancy until October . . . although the address works and he has already begun to store stuff in the musty stalls of the barn below. Across many of the cardboard boxes he had scrawled SCOTT! THE EARLY YEARS! Most likely the silver spade will wind up with this stuff, wasting its gleams in the gloom. The one depressing surety is that it’ll wind up in a place where one of them will stumble across it twenty years from now and try to remember just what in the blue smuck—

  Meanwhile, Dashmiel is on the move. Without another word— as if he’s disgusted with this whole business and determined to put it behind him as soon as possible—he starts across the rectangle of fresh earth, detouring around the divot which Scott’s last big shovelful of earth has almost succeeded in promoting to a hole. The heels of Dashmiel’s shiny black I’m-an-assistant-professor-on-my-way-up-and-you’re-not shoes sink deep into the earth with every step. Dashmiel has to fight for balance, and Lisey guesses this does nothing to improve his mood. Tony Eddington falls in beside him. Scott pauses a moment, as if not quite sure what’s going on, and then also starts to move, slipping himself in between Dashmiel and Eddington. He delighted her into forgetting her omenish feeling

  (broken glass in the morning)

  for a little while, but now it’s back

  (broken hearts at night)

  and with a vengeance. She thinks it must be why all these details look so big to her. She is sure the world will come back into more normal focus once she has, in Dashmiel’s words, grabbed herself a little air-conditioning. And once
she’s gotten that pesty swatch of cloth out of her butt.

  This really is almost over, she reminds herself, and—how funny life can be—it is at this precise moment that the day begins to derail.

  A campus security cop who is older than the others on this detail (she will later identify him from Stefan Queensland’s news photo as Captain S. Heffernan) holds up the rope barrier on the far side of the ceremonial rectangle of earth. All she notices about him is that he’s wearing what her husband might have called a puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice on his khahi shirt. Her husband and his two flanking escorts—Dashmiel on Scott’s left, C. Anthony Eddington on Scott’s right—duck beneath the rope in a move so synchronized it almost could have been choreographed.

  The crowd is moving toward the parking lot with the principals . . . with one exception. Blondie is not heading toward the parking lot. Blondie is still standing on the parking-lot side of the commencement patch. A few people bump him, and he’s forced a few steps backward after all, onto the baked dead earth where the Shipman Library will stand come 1989 (if the chief contractor’s promises can be believed, that is). Then he’s actually stepping forward against the tide, his hands coming unclasped so he can push first a girl out of his way to his left and then a guy out of his way on his right. His mouth is moving. At first Lisey again thinks he’s mouthing a silent prayer, and then she hears the broken gibberish— like something a bad James Joyce imitator might write—and for the first time she becomes actively alarmed. Blondie’s somehow weird blue eyes are fixed on her husband, but Lisey understands that he does not want to discuss Bigfoot or the hidden religious subtexts of Scott’s novels. This is no mere deep-space boy.

  “The church bells came down Angel Street thick as falling oak trees,” says Blondie—says Gerd Allen Cole—who, it will turn out, spent most of his seventeenth year in an expensive Virginia mental institution and was released as cured and good to go, thanks very much, and these words Lisey gets in the clear. They cut through the rising chatter of the crowd, that hum of conversation, like a knife through some light, sweet cake. “That rungut sound, ar! Like rain on a tin roof! Dirty flowers! Ya, dirty and sweet! This is how the church bells sound in the basement!”