AUTHOR: CHARLES RANKIN
TITLE: Readers’ Questions on Science (Animals)
LENGTH: From p. 68 (“Why does a cat wash its face?”) to p. 89 (“How does a bear catch fish?”)
DUE: October 12
AUTHOR: THE AMERICAN NURSING ASSOCIATION
TITLE: Conversing with the Terminally Ill
LENGTH: 16 pages
DUE: October 19
AUTHOR: FRANK DESITO JR.
TITLE: A Study of Writers’ Pathology, Chapter Three: “Writers on Hay Fever”
LENGTH: 23 pages
DUE: October 23
AUTHOR: RENÉ CLAIR
TITLE: The Italian Straw Hat (English translation of the film script)
LENGTH: 39 pages
DUE: October 26
Too bad the clients’ names weren’t included! Who had commissioned these translations (and “urgently,” no less), and for what reasons? I hadn’t a clue. Was there a bear patiently standing beside a river somewhere waiting for my translation to arrive? Or a tongue-tied nurse unable to speak a word to her dying patient?
Tossing the photograph of a cat washing its face with one paw on the desk, I drank my coffee and ate one of the rolls, which tasted like plaster of Paris. My head was starting to clear, but the fever was causing some numbness in my fingertips and toes. I reached into my desk drawer for my Swiss Army knife, selected six HB pencils, and took my time sharpening them to a fine point as I eased into work.
My cassette tape of an old Stan Getz album was the musical background for my efforts that morning. It was a dynamite band featuring Getz, Al Haig, Jimmy Raney, Teddy Kotick, and Tiny Kahn. Whistling Getz’s solo to “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid” from start to finish along with the tape really picked me up.
I broke at noon for a lunch of fried fish at a crowded restaurant five minutes’ walk down the slope and followed that with two quick shots of orange juice at a hamburger stand. From there I continued on to a pet shop, where I spent ten minutes playing with an Abyssinian cat, poking my finger through an opening in the front window. A typical lunch break.
I went back to my office and leafed through the morning paper until the hands on the clock pointed to one. I sharpened six more pencils for my afternoon’s work and pinched the filters off the rest of the pack of Seven Stars, lining the cigarettes up on my desk. The girl brought in a hot cup of green tea.
“How do you feel?”
“Not so bad.”
“How’s the work going?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
Outside it was still overcast. In fact the gray seemed only to have deepened since morning. When I stuck my head out the window I thought I sniffed rain. A few autumn birds cut across the sky. The drone of the city was everywhere, a mix of countless sounds: subway trains, sizzling hamburgers, cars on elevated highways, automatic doors opening and closing.
Shutting the window, I put on a tape of Charlie Parker’s “Just Friends” and dug into the next translation, “When Do Migrating Birds Sleep?”
I wrapped up work at four, gave what I had translated to the girl, and headed out. Instead of lugging an umbrella, I wore the thin raincoat I kept in the office for times like this. I bought an evening paper at the station and spent the next hour being tossed around in the packed train. I could smell rain there too, although a single drop had yet to fall.
I had just finished shopping for dinner at the supermarket in front of the station when the rain began. The drops were too fine to see, but the sidewalk at my feet was turning a darker shade of gray. I checked the bus schedule, then made my way to a crowded café nearby for a cup of coffee. Now the smell of rain was unmistakable, on the waitress’s blouse, even in my coffee.
I watched the streetlights flicker on one by one around the terminal as the buses came and went like giant trout cruising a mountain stream. Long lines of office workers, students, and housewives stepped up to disappear into their dark interiors. A middle-aged woman leading a black German shepherd passed in front of my window, followed by a bunch of schoolkids bouncing a rubber ball. I stubbed out my fifth cigarette and gulped the last dregs of my coffee.
I took a long look at my reflection in the window. My eyes were a bit hollow with fever. I could live with that. And my jaw was dark with five o’clock (five thirty, actually) shadow. I could live with that too. The problem was that the face I saw wasn’t my face at all. It was the face of the twenty-four-year-old guy you sometimes sit across from on the train. My face and my soul were lifeless shells, of no significance to anyone. My soul passes someone else’s on the street. Hey, it says. Hey, the other responds. Nothing more. Neither waves. Neither looks back.
If I stuck gardenias in my ears and flippers on my hands some people might stop and turn around. But that would be it. Three steps more and they would already have forgotten me. Their eyes saw nothing, not a damn thing. And mine were no different. I felt empty. Maybe I had nothing left to give.
The twins were waiting for me.
I handed my brown shopping bag to one of them and headed for the shower. Not bothering to soap or even remove the cigarette from my mouth, I stood there under the spray and stared at the tiled wall. The bulb had been out for some time, but I could see something wander across the dark wall and disappear. It was the shadow of something I could no longer touch or summon back.
I stepped out of the shower, toweled off, and fell into bed. The coral-blue sheets were fresh and wrinkle-free. I lay there puffing on my cigarette and looking at the ceiling as the events of the day came back to me. Meanwhile, the twins were cutting vegetables, grilling meat, and boiling rice.
“Want a beer?” one of them asked.
“Yeah.”
208 came to the bed with a beer and a glass.
“Music?”
“That would help.”
She walked to my shelf of LPs, pulled out Handel’s recorder sonatas, placed it on the turntable, and lowered the needle. My girlfriend had given it to me for Valentine’s Day some years earlier. Beneath the recorder, viola, and harpsichord I could hear the sizzle of grilling meat like a basso continuo. My girlfriend and I had made love over and over while this record was playing, grinding away without a word to each other even after the music had ended and the needle crackled.
Outside the window, a silent rain fell on the golf course. I had just finished my beer and Hans-Martin Linde had just played the last note of the Sonata in F Major when dinner was ready. We had little to say to each other during the meal, which was rare for us. With no record playing, the only sounds were those of rain on the eaves and three people chewing meat. When we had finished, the twins cleared the table and made coffee. Then we sat together drinking it. The coffee smelled so good it seemed to have a life of its own. One of the girls got up to put a record on the turntable: Rubber Soul.
“I don’t remember buying that,” I called in surprise.
“We bought it!”
“We put a little money aside from what you gave us.”
I shook my head in dismay.
“You don’t like the Beatles?”
I bit my tongue.
“That’s too bad. We thought you’d be happy.”
“We’re really sorry.”
A twin got up to take the record off the turntable, dusting it carefully before sticking it back in its jacket. We sat there in silence. I let out a sigh.
“I didn’t mean it,” I apologized. “I’m just a little tired and on edge. Put it back on.”
The girls gave each other a glance and giggled.
“There’s no need to be polite. After all, this is your house.”
“Don’t worry about us.”
“Please, play it again.”
In the end, we listened to both sides of Rubber Soul with our coffee. I could feel myself calming down. The twins seemed happier too.
When we had finished the girls took my temperature. They stared long and hard at the thermometer. Ninety-nine point five, one degree higher than that morning. My
head was woozy.
“That’s ’cause you took a shower.”
“You should go to bed.”
No argument there.
I undressed and got under the covers with the Critique of Pure Reason and a pack of smokes. The blanket smelled of the sun and Kant was impressive as always, but the cigarette tasted like soggy newspaper on a gas burner. Shutting my book and closing my eyes, I was half tuned in to the twins’ voices when the darkness dragged me down.
8
The cemetery stretched across a broad plateau near the crest of the mountain. Pathways of fine gravel crisscrossed the rows of graves, with trimmed azalea bushes scattered here and there like grazing sheep. Tall mercury lamps, curved like royal ferns, stood along the paths, casting their unnatural white light into every corner of the vast site.
The Rat had parked his car in the woods at the southeast corner of the cemetery and was sitting with his arm around the woman, gazing down at the town. At night it looked like a viscous mass of light that had been poured into a flat mold. Or a shower of gold dust deposited by some giant moth.
With her eyes closed as though she were fast asleep, the woman leaned on the Rat; he could feel her pressing against his shoulder and side. It was a strange weight. In it he could sense the fullness of a woman’s existence: loving a man, bearing children, growing old and dying. The Rat pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket with his free hand and lit one. Now and then, an ocean breeze mounted the slope to ruffle the needles of the pines. It appeared that the woman might really have fallen asleep. The Rat brought his hand to her cheek and touched a finger to her thin lips. He could feel the moist warmth of her breath.
The cemetery looked more like an abandoned town than a graveyard. Over half the site was vacant. That was because the people who planned to be laid to rest there were still alive. Sometimes they would come with their families on Sunday afternoons to check out the grave sites they would one day occupy. Yes, a fine view, they would say, looking down at the cemetery from higher on the mountainside, flowers for every season, nice fresh air, a well-tended lawn with sprinklers—how about that!—and no stray dogs to steal the offerings. Best of all, they would think, it’s a bright and wholesome place. Satisfied, they would sit on a bench and eat their box lunches before returning to their busy lives.
The caretaker smoothed the gravel paths every morning and evening using a long pole with a plank on the end. He also chased away any children who might be after the carp in the central pond. Finally, three times a day—at nine, twelve, and six—he would play a music box version of “Old Black Joe” through the cemetery speakers. Why play music there at all? It blew the Rat’s mind. Still, the darkening cemetery at six o’clock in the evening with the strains of “Old Black Joe” wafting across it was quite a trip.
The caretaker took the bus back to the world below at half past six, leaving the graveyard in total silence. Then the cars started to arrive, each bearing a couple come to make love. In summer, cars were lined up among the trees.
The cemetery held special significance for the Rat in his youth. Back in his high school days when he was still too young to drive an automobile, he had whisked up and down the riverside road time and again, always with a different girl on the back of his 250cc motorbike. He had embraced each while looking down on the same lights of town. Many sweet scents filled his nostrils, only to vanish. Many dreams, many sorrows, many promises. Yet in the end nothing remained.
You could see, if you cared to look, that death had spread its roots throughout the sprawling site. Every once in a while, the Rat would take a girl by the hand and wander along the gravel paths of the overly manicured grounds, past the graves. The names and dates of those buried beneath were written on the stones. They were the bearers of past lives, in evenly spaced rows that went on forever, like shrubs in a botanical garden. For the dead there was no murmuring wind, no fragrance, no feelers they could extend to find their way in the dark. They were like trees cut off from time. The dead had entrusted feelings, and the words to convey them, to flesh-and-blood people. He and the girl would return to the trees and hold each other tight. The pathos of the world of the living filled everything around them, the scent of the ocean on the wind, the fragrance of leaves, the chirping of crickets in the grass.
—
“Did I sleep long?” the woman asked.
“No,” said the Rat. “Not long at all.”
9
Each day was a carbon copy of the last. You needed a bookmark to tell one from the other.
That particular day was filled with the smell of autumn. I wrapped up work at the usual time, but when I got back to my apartment the twins were nowhere to be seen. I flopped into bed with my socks on, lit a cigarette, and let my mind wander. There were so many things I wanted to think about, but none took shape. Sighing, I sat up and glared at the white wall opposite the bed. I was stymied. Come on, man, I told myself, you can’t stare at this damn wall forever. But that didn’t help, either. It was what the professor who oversaw my graduation thesis told me. Good style, clear argument, but you’re not saying anything. That was my problem. Now I had a rare moment alone, and I still couldn’t get a handle on how to deal with myself.
It was weird. I had been on my own for years and had assumed I was getting by pretty well. Yet now I couldn’t remember any of it. Twenty-four years couldn’t disappear in a flash. I felt like someone who realizes in the midst of looking for something that they have forgotten what it was. What was the object of my search? A bottle opener? An old letter? A receipt? An earpick?
I gave up and grabbed my Kant from beside the bed, when a note fell from between its pages. It was written in the twins’ hand. “Gone to the golf course” was all it said. This worried me. I had warned them never to go there without me. The golf course at night was not for neophytes. You never knew when a ball might come flying out of nowhere.
I put on my tennis shoes, wrapped a sweatshirt around my neck, and left the apartment. Scaling the chain-link fence, I crossed the gentle rise, skirted the twelfth hole, passed the small arbor that served as a rest stop, and cut through the woods. The setting sun split the trees on the west side of the course, splashing the fairway with light. In the dumbbell-shaped bunker near the tenth hole, I found an empty box of coffee cream cookies the twins must have left in the sand. I rolled it into a ball, stuffed it in my pocket, and stepped back to erase our footprints with my toe. Then I walked across the small wooden bridge that spanned the stream, climbed the hill, and there they were, sitting halfway up the outdoor escalator on the other side of the slope, playing backgammon.
“Didn’t I tell you not to come here alone?”
“But the sunset was so pretty,” one of them replied.
We descended the outdoor escalator to the field of pampas grass and sat down to enjoy the view. She had it right—the sunset was amazing.
“You shouldn’t throw your garbage in the bunkers,” I scolded.
“We’re sorry,” they chimed together.
“I got hurt once playing in the sand. Back in grade school,” I said, showing them the tip of my left index finger. A tiny scar like a piece of white thread ran across it. “Someone buried a broken soda bottle in the sand.”
They both nodded.
“Of course, you can’t cut your hand on an empty box of cookies. But you still shouldn’t throw stuff in the sand like that. It’s a pure and sacred place.”
“We understand,” one of them said.
“We’ll be careful,” said the second one. “Do you have any other scars?”
“Sure I do.” I showed them the whole lot. A veritable catalog of injuries. The place where a soccer ball had damaged my left eye. (The retina was still affected.) A scar near the base of my nose, also from soccer. I was heading the ball when an opponent’s tooth clipped me. The seven stitches on my lower lip, from when I fell off my bike. Dodging a truck. Then there was my broken tooth…
We stretched out together on the cool grass, as
the plumes of pampas grass rustled in the breeze.
—
When the last rays were gone, we headed back to the apartment for dinner. I had finished my bath and downed the last of my beer when they finished grilling the trout. There was one for each of us, with canned asparagus and a huge bunch of watercress on the side. The trout tasted like something from the good old days—a mountain path in summer. We took our time picking every last morsel from the fish with our chopsticks. All that was left on the plate was white bones and a pencil-sized watercress stalk. The twins washed the dishes right away and made coffee.
“Let’s talk about the switch panel,” I said. “It’s been bothering me.”
They nodded.
“I wonder why it’s dying.”
“I think it sucked in more than it could handle.”
“Yeah, it just burst.”
I thought for a moment, coffee cup in my left hand, cigarette in my right.
“Is there anything we can do?”
They looked at each other and shook their heads. “No, it’s too late.”
“It’s returning to dust.”
“Have you ever seen a cat die of blood poisoning?”
“No,” I answered.
“At the beginning its paws and tail get hard as a rock. At the end its heart stops. It takes a long time.”
I sighed. “But I hate to let it die.”