Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel (5 page)

Water steamed. How had I managed to allow, into my home, this man who released lethal vipers into a residential area? I could hear him exhaling through his mouth, when he insisted, “Precautions have been taken.”

“Naturally. Of course. Milk and sugar?”

“Fine.”

“Decaf okay?”

“Sure.”

I measured grounds from bag to filter, took milk from the refrigerator, and said, “The funniest thing happened. I went down to the basement to get the plumber’s snake, and there were two of them. How about that. Two snakes. I knew I had one, I remember buying it, in fact. But not two. It was strange. Two snakes.”

“Let me get this straight. You thought you had one snake, but there were two?”

“Right.”

“That
is
strange.”

The pot whistled. I poured boiling water and considered the Freedom Field issue. Specifically, the wisdom of broaching this difficult topic in my own kitchen. You could hear everything in this old house, and Meredith might or might not have been soundly sleeping, and Jerry’s airplane hangar proposal, quixotic though it was, might appeal to my wife. Why risk that? No, my “home school” concept was definitely the way to go. Better keep mum on the subject of Freedom Field. Coffee dripped and I said, witlessly, “At any rate, now if I get a clog while you’ve got one snake, I’ll still be fine, because I’ll have the other.”

“That’s the truth.”

“That’d be quite a coincidence, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m of a mind, Pete, that there is no such thing as coincidence. I agree with some of the fellows down at Rotary who say the cosmos abounds in mysteries invisible to us in our waking state, worlds within worlds, and that our task in life is to open our inner eyes, perceive reality in its totality, and embrace the million levels of Universal Consciousness.”

It was my first indication of the nonsecular nature of the local chapter of Rotary International. It worried me. I sipped coffee and listened to Jerry say, “Friday we’re sponsoring a theriomorphism workshop luncheon at the Holiday Inn—why don’t you and your wife come as my guests?”

“Oh, gee, well.”

“This is going to be the Rotary luncheon of the year, not counting your informative and entertaining talk on persuasive methods of the medieval Inquisition. You don’t want to miss this. And Pete?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s potluck, so, if you could, if you wouldn’t mind contributing a salad?”

“A salad.” Why didn’t I just say no? Jerry offered, “Or dessert. Dessert or a salad, whichever’s easier. Would that be possible?”

“Sure, a salad.”

A nice tossed green one with fresh cherry tomatoes, lots of cukes, red and green bell pepper, basil, watercress, fennel, and many leaves of other things. Together Meredith and I and a crowd of red-faced Rotarians and their well-dressed wives (Rotary Anns) sat around hotel banquet tables and listened to a visiting anthropology professor at the junior college say, “Pick an animal, any animal, fish, fowl, beast. Concentrate on aspects of the animal. Is it big? Small? Cute? Does it eat other animals? What color fur? If the animal is a bird, what color are its feathers? What song does it sing?”

“This is stupid,” I whispered to Meredith.

“It’s your fault we’re here. Why don’t you give it a chance?”

The anthropologist said, “Why don’t we all think about it for a minute? Okay, everybody got one?”

“Yes,” “No,” “Wait,” people said. Meredith whispered, “What’s yours?”

“I don’t know, what’s yours?”

“Coelacanth.”

“The prehistoric fish?”

“I need a volunteer,” declared the professor. Meredith raised her hand, and the man at the podium said, “Yes, back there. Tell us your name and the name of the animal you’ve chosen to become today.”

“Meredith Robinson. Coelacanth. It’s a kind of fish that scientists believed extinct until one was caught off the coast of Africa.”

“Excellent. Come forward. Sit here. Would someone please dim the lights?” I watched Rotary guys watch my wife. Bill Nixon, Tom Thompson, Abraham de Leon, Dick Morton, Terry Heinemann, Robert Isaac—all the usuals, plus others. Jerry and his wife, Rita, sat up front. The professor soothingly said, “Close your eyes, breathe deeply, and tell us about the coelacanth. Everybody else, let’s all breathe deeply too, and be thinking about our own animals. Go ahead, Meredith.”

“Well, it’s five feet long, deep slate blue, with bony, protruding fins and big jaws with scary teeth. It goes back seventy million years. It moves slowly, it dwells in dark water.” The professor nodded. Audience members inched forward in their seats. Meredith said, “At night it swims upside down with its head pointed to the sea bottom, bobbing along.”

“A feeding technique?”

“Maybe.”

“How’s the water?” I could see Meredith’s head settle forward as she softly answered, “Cold.”

“Feel the cold. Breathe that cold. Inhale that water. What do you feel?”

“Colors.”

“Colors?”

“Blue, black, indigo.”

The anthropologist stepped from the stage and came forward into the crowd gathered around tables set with plates that were littered with discarded skeletons of poached red snapper (the luncheon’s fish course, provided by Jerry and Rita); he collected white small bones from several plates and carried the bones back to the stage area and scattered them in a circle around my wife’s chair. He produced a portable cassette deck and loaded a tape that played hollow drum rhythms. He intoned along with the drums, “There is a circle of sea and you are in it, Coelacanth, bobbing above the ocean floor where the lonely crab rests on rocks where no mollusk grows. Blue squid drift on black tides lit by lanternfish. The solitary shark pays a visit but that doesn’t concern you. You are the last of the ancients. Swim your swim!”

I watched Meredith’s head and shoulders gently moving. Rita Henderson clutched her husband’s arm. Men I knew and others I didn’t sat still with their wives, all focused on my wife’s feet suddenly dancing like bottom fish above bone-strewn hotel carpet. The visiting professor commanded, “Rise, Coelacanth. Cavort in the blue cold.”

Meredith did rise. She hopped from foot to foot inside her private bone circle, head hanging, arms shivering, hands with tapering fingers churning air—she was working up a sweat. People in the audience swayed along with the echoing taped drumbeats. Everywhere, heads oscillated and feet tapped. Abraham de Leon was particularly into it: his mouth fell open, his tongue wagged, his body visibly trembled. I couldn’t imagine what kind of animal he was. And Tom Thompson! Unlike Abe, Tom did not tremble so much as quake. He bounced in his chair in a violent manner that caused other guests to stare at him and cough suggestively, but Tom was immersed in his own head and taking no notice; and soon the whole room was shaking to the sounds of drums getting louder and the instructor’s voice calling out, “Single-celled protozoa, insects, small birds and wildfowl; warm-blooded animals and sleepy reptiles; crustacea, fish, aquatic mammalia—everybody join in with Meredith the coelacanth, let’s go, creatures, dance it!” Rotarians and their wives staggered from chairs and wobbled to the front of the room and encircled my wife in a bestial conga in which I alone did not participate. I remained at my table. I hadn’t even chosen an animal.

The visiting professor came over and said, “Excuse me, is she with you?”

“Yes.”

“In some societies, special individuals are selected to enter alternate states of consciousness and ritually explore the spirit realm. Most of the people in that conga line merely imagine themselves as animals, but she’s actually
become
her animal. I’ve seen it before. It’s rare. She’s a natural. She has a gift.”

“Really?”

“I’d like to spend time with her, monitor her rhythms, observe entry conditions, coach her in the methodology of closure. The novice can easily become lost between worlds and, in rare cases, suffer psychotic episodes. Trance experience is something our culture doesn’t prepare us for.”

From the conga line: grunts and hoots rising above the rumbling of many feet. Meredith in the vortex danced. The professor said, “She’s learning to swim.”

“I was learning to swim,” Meredith said later. Sweaty businessmen and their wives gathered around. All eyes were on my wife, who told the crowd, “Water held me. I was able to accept myself as a fish, and to feel the pain of living. I didn’t need assurances that I was worthy of love.”

And at home that night, she told me, “As a person, I always needed someone to hold me, but as a fish I was buoyant, able to hold myself. Now I’m a little buoyant, but I also need to be held, because I feel heavy inside. I miss the friends I made in the ocean.”

We were lying in bed with the covers pulled up. We held cups of hot milk with honey.

“Friends?”

“Other coelacanths. More than friends, actually. One was my mother and one was my father, and I had schools of brothers and sisters. I knew them, and they knew me. They didn’t wonder where I’d come from, because I’d always been there with them. As I am now. Even while lying with you, here, in our house, in our bed, I’m down there in cold water, swimming upside down, brushing against another coelacanth, making my presence felt and feeling the presence of another, before going off to a deep place to look for something precious.”

“Something precious?”

“A rock or a piece of coral. Something smooth, something shiny, something black.”

Her breaths grew slow and deep, her breasts rose and fell. Katydids made scratchy noises in the pollenating mango outside our window. Wind blew a tree branch scraping claw-like against the house. A small time passed. I gave my sleeping wife a peck on the cheek, then threw off the covers, got up and dressed, and padded downstairs to the night-light-lit kitchen, where I sipped instant decaf and peered into the freezer at vaporescent packages of food piled in a heap atop the collected remains of Jim Kunkel.

I dug my hand beneath Tupperware containers and alligator baggies. I touched a cold baseball that must’ve been the heart, and a small item that was probably a gland, and next to that a larger thing. The liver? I grabbed the extra-big package and heaved it out. It wasn’t Jim’s liver, it was his foot—a substantial piece of flesh, 12
DD
or
E
at least. It felt good to hold. It weighed a lot. I tossed it in the air and it flipped neatly end over end and fell back into my hand. Nice. The foot, not being an organ, did not seem
momentous
in the way Jim’s frozen heart, liver, adrenal glands, lung tissue, and genitals seemed momentous. To be sure, the Foot has its place in myth and legend; it carries psychohistoric weight. In our culture, the Foot as Symbol is not unimportant. Nevertheless, for me, at that point in time (hours, only, since Meredith’s initiatory ichthyomorphic trance experience with its insomnia-inducing implications concerning self-identity and marital compatibility—“It’s like sex, Pete. Once you’ve entered that other body, you’re always there, even when you’re not. I’m not a coelacanth, I’m a person and I’m here, this is where I am, this is who I am. I’m Meredith. But I’m a coelacanth, too.”

“Can I become one, can I come with you?”

“That’s the thing, Pete, you have to be there already, and you weren’t. I’m sorry, honey.”)—at that point in time, as I was saying, Jim’s frozen foot seemed perfect for an inaugural burial excursion. I could figure out how to do things right, and not rush. I could work out the funerary process, the digging and lowering into the earth and chanting of sacred texts, in a more relaxed way with a foot than with probably, say, a heart. Yes. With the foot I had an opportunity to get comfortable with the ritual aspect of nighttime burial. Later I could progress to Jim’s frozen hand and the more difficult (symbolically speaking) internal parts. The viscera.

I figured I’d just chuck the slightly freezer-burned foot in a knapsack and walk around town until I came to a place that felt right for burial.

I left the house at around midnight and crept up the driveway to the road. I wore canvas sneakers, athletic socks, safari shorts, a tee-shirt, and the bright purple knapsack containing Jim’s cold, hard foot, a garden trowel, a box of candles and matches to light them, a library copy of
The Egyptian Book of the Dead,
and some fig bars for a snack. The darkness that night was total; clouds obscured the stars and moon; the only light descended from streetlamps spilling pools of white over damp leaves of roadside shrubs, shiny parked cars, and the road itself, where I walked alone over gravel that crunched underfoot.

At Wisteria I turned left toward town. I passed a vacant lot, which I rejected because of a chain-link fence I’d have to scale, and because several lamplit windows in surrounding houses gave easy viewer access to that neglected, overgrown locale. After a while I came to the Chamber of Commerce. Here I turned right onto Water Street, which is where Meredith’s mother lives. No lights on at Helen’s bungalow. I hurried past Meredith’s mother’s Oldsmobile, and continued on to where Water dead-ends into Osprey. Right on Osprey would lead me to Jerry Henderson’s. I went left. A sea breeze was blowing up the road. Osprey Avenue runs all the way to the ocean, about a mile, but I didn’t want to go to the ocean; I desired dark soil for this virgin implantation, not grainy wet sand overrun with fiddler crabs. So at the next intersection I veered right off Osprey and walked along Pompano Place. Here were more and more elaborate pits; every householder along this moderately wealthy drive had installed one. And there were walls bordering Pompano too: cinder block, coral rock, and timbers solidly rising, garnished with barbed wire and alarm-system warning decals.

At the end of the street sat the home of a former pupil, a boy named Ben Webster who, years before, had distinguished himself with a science fair essay on Annual Coastal Erosion Due to Global Temperature Shifts and Resultant Polar Ice Cap Meltdown Contributing to Rising Sea Levels.

No light shone from the Websters’ palm-shrouded house girded in electric fencing. I passed by and entered the gumbo-limbo hammock known as Turtle Pond Park.