Every Third Thought (16 page)

Shaking her head, “So you say now. But by our new president-elect’s Inauguration Day you’ll probably be telling me that
you’re him
: that you swam ashore down there in Mexico, deserted the Army, took the name George Irving Newett, and lived happily ever after.”

“Hey, I
like
that!”

“Sometimes I really wonder about you, Gee. . . . ”

Yes, well: me too.

Another deep breath, exhaled. “Love you anyhow, though.”

And me too you.

Presently: “So, then: Are
we
fictitious too, like your made-up stories and my made-up poems? Figments of somebody-or-other’s half-assed imagination?”

Shrug: Not for us to say. But from
our
point of view, at least, here we effing are, love, with a few chapters, verses, and seasons yet to go, we hope, before things get grim—including what looks to be a long winter ahead for that president-elect....

“So go write yourself another G. I. Newett novel while the iron’s still hot,” recommended Amanda Todd. “Or at least lukewarm?” Forefinger against temple, then aimed more or less Geeward: “Like, to begin with, did your maybe-make-believe buddy’s Last-Things lists include Last Words, and you could take it from there?”

Glasses empty but bottle still half full, we did indeed then go (next morning) to our separate-but-equal workspaces—where Narrator at His, after thanking once again his Muse of Muses, spent some pleasant December hours recalling and reconstructing a number of those Ned Prosper Last-Things Lists, which he now divided, like the seasons of the year or of one’s lifetime, into serial categories. There were, to begin with, his Last Things of Youth, of which several have been mentioned already, and which typically had a twinge of sadness but not regret, they marking also one’s commencement to some presumably bigger/ better next thing or stage: Last Year or Day of Studenthood at (Wherever)! Last Academic Degree! Last Day as a Virgin! As a Teenager! As a Bachelor or Bachelorette! By comparison, Ned’s Last Things of Mature Adulthood, as he experienced or projected them, had been less exclamatory: Last Day in a particular dwelling-place, job, or town, say, before shifting to some new and presumably better Next, like trading in one’s dear old car for its jim-dandy replacement. Last Year or Day of being in one’s twenties, one’s thirties, forties, fifties.... And then, if one lived so long, the Last Things of Later Age, with their more autumnal flavor: last fulltime job; last year before retirement; last
day
on job; last regular salary-check before pension. Last new car. Last house before “downsizing” to assisted-living establishment or nursing home, like Mandy’s mom with her daughter’s help. (
Who’ll help
us
?
G. wonders parenthetically:
Daughter in Dubrovnik? Son in Siam?
) There were, Ned had noted, things understood in prospect as one got older to be Probably Last, such as In-All-Likelihood-Last Visit to some favorite European country or to one’s own country’s farther reaches like Alaska and Hawaii—as opposed to such First-Visit-Presumed-To-Be-Lasts as, say, Bora Bora, Tasmania, or Antarctica, none of which N. managed in his abbreviated lifetime nor yet G. as of this re-listing, although who knows, he and Mandy might yet.... And contrariwise, those many things not suspected at the time to be Last which however turn out to have been: Last Tennis Game or Ski-Run before knee or shoulder injury rules out for keeps those so-enjoyed sports; Last Sex before petering out, so to speak, into incapacity and/or indifference. Last Get-Together with Whomever before His/Her untimely demise. Last “Normal” Day—felt at the time to be merely ordinary, but in retrospect to have been bliss indeed—before routine physical exam reveals inoperable pancreatic cancer....

And Last G.D. List of G.D. Last Things, okay? Because on Third Thought, who gives a flying fuck?

Well: Old Fart Fictionist George Irving Newett, once upon a time, did in fact give or perhaps receive a Flying Fuck, in the W.C. of a then-new triple-tailed four-engined propeller-driven Lockheed Constellation high over Kansas or maybe Nebraska
(on his first-and-only book tour, for his first-and-only published novel), to or from or with Never Mind Whom, he being then between marriages, and rather to his own surprise managed pretty well both that F.F. and that not-yet-O.F.F.’s First Novel, by George, all things considered.

But that’s another story, declared G.I.N. to his Montblanc Meisterstück on the New Year’s morn, understanding that while his every Third Thought henceforth might be the grave, that still left First and Second Thoughts to get stuff done in—or
on
, whatever. Like, what the hell, maybe a novel about
that
? In, let’s say, five “seasons”? Having to do with . . .

He’d just see.

“You do that,” seconded Amanda Todd (not aloud, lest she interrupt His musings as he has evidently interrupted Hers, but in effect, by opening the door of His study just enough to wiggle her fingers bye-bye, as she does when stepping out of Hers for a bit on whatever Mandy-errands warrant setting aside her versifying) and followed that “Ta-ta” with her “Backin-a-bit”
mwah. . . .

Hello?

Having drafted and more or less edited his latest Whatever and, per house custom, passed the ms. to his Ms. for the judicious, sometimes stern but always on-the-mark critical response that she’ll get to in her own good time, Author/Narrator G.I.N. is taking a well-earned breather and, he hopes, refreshing his ever more easily exhausted Muse by touching a few of his favorite literary touchstones, as he inclines to do between projects in hope of re-inspiration by reorientation with those longtime navigation-stars. Also by tending to some not-unimportant domestic and home-office chores.

In the first of these enterprises, Touchstone Retouching, he has, e.g., reskimmed the first-century C.E.
Satyricon
, by mischievous and lively Petronius Arbiter, both to remind himself
of what the randy Romans were up to when not busy conquering the known world and to re-salute the progenitor (whether they knew it or not) of all subsequent comic/satiric prose fictors, from Cervantes, Diderot, Sterne, and Swift down (and he means
down
) to George Irving Newett. In the same spirit he has unshelved, wistfully hefted, and respectfully
re
shelved without reopening his much-but-not-recently-thumbed copy of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, with index-tabs reverently applied back at mid-century in a junior-year Modern Lit class at Tidewater State U. indicating each section’s correspondence to a book of Homer’s
Odyssey
. “Telemachus,” “Nestor,” “Proteus,” “Calypso,” “Lotophagi,” and the rest: G.I.N.’s baptism by total immersion in the High Modernism that his own literary generation would find to be a hard act to follow. And he has picked up, put down, re-picked up, and almost despite himself reread one complete volume of a two-volume
Arabian Nights
(salvaged, like those other touchstones, from the remains of his&Mandy’s library in their tornado-wrecked Heron Bay Estates home), impressed this time less by the Special Effects—magic carpets, magic words, wish-granting genies in washed-up bottles—than by the descriptive details of bejeweled palace gates, ugly faces, merchandise for sale by wily merchants in the bazaar. In a word,
texture
: never Author Newett’s strongest suit. Impressed too, as always, by Scheherazade’s skillful nesting of interlinked taleswithin-tales to save her life and rescue the king from his murderous, kingdom-wrecking misogyny—the way G.I.N. nests parentheses within dashes within serial subordinate clauses as
if to postpone ending the sentence in progress and having to begin another. In S.’s case,
Entertain me or die!
In G.’s case . . .

Don’t ask.

Whether all this ritual re-touchment will re-inspire or rediscourage the toucher remains to be seen.

As for Enterprise Two, those not-unimportant domestic and home-office chores: Author/Narrator is not a
complete
technological illiterate, but he’s a decidedly Senior Citizen who, over the decades between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the current global economic slump (2009 and counting), has graduated from manual to electric typewriters, thence through a series of ever less clunky, ever faster and more sophisticated desktop computers (used in this household only for word-processing, e-mail, a bit of Internet browsing, and simple home-office spreadsheets; never for video games, movie-watching, music-downloading, news-reading, “blogging,” and the like). At his age and stage he can be excused, he trusts, for lamenting the need to replace his also-aging, possibly storm-damaged, anyhow now dead “old” Apple iMac (bought a mere nine years ago!) with its new state-of-the-art flat-screen counterpart in the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, when one was lucky to be a pensioned-off academic in a modest but suburban low-rise condominium on Maryland’s Eastern Shore instead of a laid-off thirty-something trying to meet mortgage- and kids’ tuition-payments. He and Mandy have done their bite-the-bullet bit for the economy, he reckons, by replacing not only his “old” computer but his “old”
cell phone as well (popped off his belt-clip, evidently, while he and Ms. Missus—currently at work in her minimal home office across the hallway from his—were bicycling a few weeks ago in nearby Stratford and the adjacent Matahannock riverside park). One hopefully supposes that even a Fart too Old for iPods, MP3s, BlackBerries, Palm Pilots (and whatever high-tech gadgets will have already replaced those by when anybody reads this list) will eventually get the hang of these two new purchases, as he quite got the hang, if by no means mastered the full capabilities, of their predecessors. For the present, however, he’s overwhelmed by all their bells and whistles: so
many
applications, each with its array of options and settings! And the two hypergadgets
interlinked
(or at least interlinkable, he gathers, according to their respective User’s Manuals), as their predecessors were not. Why would one’s computer desire intercourse with one’s mobile phone, and vice versa? Ah: because the latter isn’t just a telephone these days, like its lost predecessor and Mandy’s fortunately-still-with-us “old” one, but also a camera (as is the computer too, Zeus help us, he now discovers!), a text-messager, and half a dozen—maybe a dozen and a half—other things as well, whose “files” his computer may want or need to “access” and conversely (or
perversely
), if he ever learns how to apply those applications.

Get him outta here!

No, don’t bother: At age all-but-fourscore, he’ll
be
outta here soon enough. Meanwhile, with an ever-shifting mix of dismissive annoyance, curiosity, exasperation, fascination, and
frustration, in the morning hours officially reserved for museand home-office deskwork he has found himself tinkering with these intricate new toys. And it’s in the course of his fiddlingwith /exploring/trying-out/fucking-up their miscegenative interconnections—Googling the time-differential, e.g., between Maryland and Morocco
¹⁶
while still linked to the cell phone via some wireless technology that he hasn’t read up on yet in the manuals—that he first hears her voice:

A woman’s voice, neither old nor young by the sound of it: a serious but pleasant, mature female voice from somewhere in the space between computer (on hutch desktop along one wall of home-office/study, the area G. calls “Production”) and cell phone (temporarily on “Business” work-table on opposite wall, along with cordless phone, desk calendar, file drawer, and the like): i.e., in the “Creation” workspace where he longhands the first drafts of his O.F. Fictions and where—but
from
where? Digital weather-alert radio? Electric pencil sharpener?—he hears that voice again, this time interrogatively:

“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” he admits to himself or whomever. Could it be Mandy, maybe, calling his new cell phone from hers, or from the cordless on her desk? Not likely she’d do that before he’s finished with its set-up and ready for a test call.
Anyhow, she’s busy with her Muse just now, he assumes, as her husband would rather be with his than futzing around like this. But now that he’s into it, he’s more or less hooked.

The classic cell-phoner’s question—and that really
does
sound like Amanda’s voice, sort of, but as if she’s mimicking some outsourced tech-support service person in Mumbai, or speaking in italics.

“Well,” he says aloud this time—and mighty odd it feels, as if speaking aloud to himself—“I hear
somebody
. The question is who—or
whom
, I guess—and from where? Can
you
hear
me
?”

No reply, so he supposes not—and screw this: He’ll go take a piss, replenish his coffee, and update Mandy on his nonprogress with their new gadgets. But having bladder-voided, flushed, rezipped, and washed hands for the second or third time since daybreak (a bi-hourly rite among enlarged-prostatenear-octogenarians, its last step given particular attention in the current swine-flu scare), he finds to his mild surprise his wife’s study unoccupied: door open instead of ajar, desk lamp off, and computer dark, as they would not normally be if she were, e.g., merely visiting their other bathroom. Nor does he find her in the kitchen when he refills his thermal mug and turns the autodrip percolator off for the day.

“Mandy?”

Probably putting some paid bill in the mail. Or maybe—it being a sunnybright and breezeless tidewater morning, mild
for mid-March—even musing with her notebook out on the condo’s riverfront pier, as she sometimes enjoys doing. Come (belatedly) to think of it, didn’t she finger-wave him a See You Later not long since? En route back from the kitchen, he detours to their living room’s river-facing windows: no sign of her down there. So okay, she’s somewhere between—in conversation, maybe, with a neighbor also posting mail at the building’s communal mail-drop, or scanning the community notice-board beside it. No problem, for pity’s sake, and he knows she wishes he didn’t fret so whenever he briefly loses track of her (not that he frets
much
, but still . . . ), just as
he
wishes she’d let him know when she’s stepping outside for a bit or otherwise getting temporarily out of touch, the way he routinely keeps
her
posted on
his
movements even at the risk of interrupting her musings. Okay, so this time she did that, if he remembers correctly—but how often, shopping together in supermarket or department store, he’ll turn from whatever wares he’s been regarding and find her vanished, whom he’d thought close by! Then the systematic look down each aisle and section, from Produce to Dairy, Men’s Wear to Jewelry, until he locates her—sometimes
not
locating her until the second check, she perhaps happening to round one end of an aisle as he rounds its other, or he perhaps not spotting her behind some other shoppers. “Why does it
bother
you so?” she’ll ask: “If we happen to get separated, just wait for me at the check out.” He
is
a bit obsessive about it, he’ll acknowledge, to the point even of bad dreams on that theme: losing her not in the Stratford Safeway or Walgreens,
but in the swarming Tangier
souk
, say, where an otherwise appealing little beggar-waif whose guide-services we’d politely declined had trailed after us calling “
Dur-r-ty Chews! Dur-r-ty Chews!”—
as if all guideless non-Muslim tourists were
ipso facto
Jewish and
ipso facto
et cetera. But it was in Tangier also—the city that inspired Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Scheherazade
suite and Matisse’s odalisque paintings—that G. I. Newett had felt closest to his favorite storyteller, especially at evening prayer-call time, when the muezzins summoned the faithful with amplified chants from the lighted minarets of mosques near the Newett/Todds’ hotel.