The News of the World (6 page)
Read The News of the World Online
Authors: Ron Carlson
WHEN
you hold a woman you know quite well, press her softly into, say, a mattress, one hand under her neck, the other on the swelling of her hip, her skin so smooth as to seem forbidding and inviting at the same time, if she moves once, say to reach under your arm and to pull you forward, your mind will go right on by progesterone counts and histograms into a warm lyric zone where it will disappear in a dandy stinging swelter.
In such a swelter, my limbs lost in Story's, one night in May, at a moment when my eyes were about to roll away, I again saw my three fingers come creeping over Story's shoulder; and in the blurred proximity of the warm moment, they looked like the same three blank-faced old men arriving to witness our coupling. At the time I thought it was an odd vision for such a crucial time, but it was the beginning of an odd era, a time when causeâeffect would take on new meaning, when order, sequence, science would whirl away.
That night when we rolled apart, I first dreamed of moons and geese and drowning, and then sometime late in the night I saw a perfect and vivid vision:
A man wearing a turquoise steerhead with jeweled horns does a low, steady hop around a campfire, swinging a stone phallus on a gold chain and singing with the insistent drums: HAH-MAH, LOH-LAH, HAH-MAH, LOH-LAH! He stops. He twists a glass vial of some thin red nectar onto the flames. They reach up in a hissing flash and light the area. In the new flare, the man thrusts his painted hand into the abdomen of a splayed chicken, tosses the entrails out in a splash, and beginsâas the fire crawls back down to the logsâto read the throw, fingering the shiny organs apart as his shiny eyes begin to fill with the future.
I won't say much about the next few days, except that I did not start painting. I spent all my free time between morning and afternoon classes in the library and the library annex. With the good weather, the buildings were empty, all the undergraduates gone outside to court, and my research was simple. After I exhausted the campus libraries, I went down to Bigville Memorial, built of hewn granite and given to the town by Hugo Ballowell's great grandfather. I spent more than one day there, in fact, I used up the rest of May, not even looking up as the light changed at midday or in the evening, and I ended up in a corner of the basement. I found everything. The two volumes I selected had to be catalogued before I could take them home.
The Dark Arts
and
Life Before Science.
Together they weighed twelve pounds. Mrs. Torrey looked at me as if I was unhinged while I waited for her to write the library cards, but the heft of those books as I hauled them down to my studio seemed the first real thing in my quest. At last, I thought, I am finally doing something.
I ROWED
the boat into dark Mugacook. Okay. Okay. Okay. Now. I've done all my homework. The first sperm to reach the ovum is the only one to enter. Of the millions of sperm sent out, only hundreds reach the ovum, and only the first to touch it enters. Upon entering, he swells and bursts, spilling the twenty-three chromosomes he's been carrying. That part is beyond me.
I rowed the old red rowboat and said aloud, “Okay, okay, okay.”
When I perceived I was in line with the lighted church spire in town and the dozen lights of the Ballowell main house, I rowed toward town another five pulls and shipped the oars. It
felt
like the middle of the lake, but I didn't know; it was dark. I picked up the basketball, my old Voit. I'd scored layups on ten driveways in four states with this ball. I felt the ball in my hands. It was a little flat, but I mounted it on my fingertips for the shot, feeling the old worn nubble, and sent it up in a perfect arc, rocking the old wooden boat a bit more than I meant to. I grabbed the gunwales to keep from going in the dark water myself, and I heard the sarisfying
bip
! of the ball's splash.
The sperm's journey is the equivalent of a three-and-a-half-mile swim, so I was going to have to swim from the town beach over to the boathouse and then head for the middle. I rowed back. I pulled the heavy boat up on the sand, dragging it well clear of the water, and I undressed, putting my clothing over the bow. Then I curled onto the cool sand and tried to grow quiet. I was too excited. I could feel, smell, sense the whole round lake lying beside me, and somewhere in the middle, the basketball. I squeezed my eyes shut in joy. This is it. I could feel a warmth in my shoulders and in the backs of my legs; this was really working.
But I'd left nothing to chance. Tomorrow, the garlic would arrive, and I'd pick up the jade. I had ordered the chickens and the birdseed and the rice. I'd become part of a process that had me in its sweep, and in a second, I was on my feet, yipping like a monkey as I rushed in four long strides right into the warm waters of Lake Mugacook.
The medium of the water enveloped, moved me. I was flying, floating, gliding. The trees along the water's edge drifted by as if the lake were quietly turning for me, taking me with it. I closed my eyes as I swam for minutes at a time. By the time I took my first real breathâor so it seemedâI looked up and saw the square white face of the boathouse smiling at me. Behind me, in the middle of this huge lake, the deepest lake in Connecticut, was a basketball. I turned, kicking hard, headed right for it. I imagined the other millions of sperm swimming behind me, wandering, loitering, taking the wrong turn into Cookson Swamp or Succor Brook, drowning in the acid at the top of the vagina, their tails being eaten by antibodies.
I swam for a long time. It became real swimmimg, my arms finally heavier than the water, and I could hear myself breathing, blowing water out. It was a big lake. When I crawled to where the middle might have been, I sighted the church spire, a lighted sliver over the town. I turned to line up with Ballowells' lights.
There were no lights.
I stood in a treadwater position and swiveled. No lights. Ballowells had gone to bed. Ballowells had turned out every one of their seventy thousand lights and they had gone to bed. I had no idea where I was. For a while I was under the water, which I did know, and I came up several times saying the word “Okay!” spitting like a seal. Across the lake I could still see the white line of the church spire. It was a mile and a quarter to the rowboat, then through the grove, down the pond road a half mile, across Route 43, and up the steps into the church. My knees ached like burning rubber.
I was under, then way under, and then up for air. Each time I cracked the surface my “Okay!” had more water in it, and finally I couldn't even hear the word. This was not a hospitable environment. I went into my drown-proofing moves, but I kept going down too far and had to kick to mouth air. Something touched my toe, something small, but it was enough. I panicked. The antibodies were eating my tail. In a frenzy of side straddle hops, side strokes, leaping waves, I called “Whoa!” and went down.
The water played a lugubrious synthesizer tone in my ears as I fell freely through the thermoclimes past two, three zones of colder water. Small hot squiggles crawled across the inside of my closed eyes. I was swaying back and forth wonderfully. It was like the time I was playing one on one with Billy Wellner at his house. We were playing around his pickup and I perfected a shot where I would drive around the rear of the truck and then lean back into the fence and throw a set shot up off the board and through the hoop. I made the shot nine times in a row and beat Billy 22â2. All he could say was, “You're wrecking the fence.”
Then.
Then I touched the basketball, and it was in one hand, then both hands, and my knees closed around it too, as we bobbed past forty-six million stars in outer space.
THE
voice behind the flashlight said, “Get up.” It was our constable, Gill Manwaring, I could tell, and he was trying to sound real tough. Story herself had hired Gill as constable.
“You better get up, fella.”
I lay still, wrapped around the ball, in the same fetal position in which I must have washed upon this shore. He hadn't recognized me. His boot ran up under my kidney. “Up!”
In a voice I recognized as Raymond Burr's, I said, “Hey, Gill.” I rose, not unlike a cow would, a piece at a time, and looked into the flashlight. “What time is it?”
“Dan?”
“Yeah.” I stood facing him, holding the ball nonchalantly in front of my private parts. He lowered the light and I came to understand there was a personage standing behind Gill.
“You all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Late night swim got away from me. Can you take me around to my boat? It's at the grove.” My eyes adjusted by steady, painful degrees in the starlight, and I could see that this was the three acre front lea of the Ballowells', and that Annette Ballowell was backing steadily toward her dark and significant mansion.
It wasn't until I sat my bare ass on the seat of Gill's Rover that I lifted the ball onto my lap and saw the disturbing and exciting truth: it wasn't the same ball. It wasn't my ball at all.
THE
next morning when I removed the thermometer from Story's mouth, she looked up at me. “It's the deep end you're over, isn't it.”
I read the thermometer with new intensity. “Ninety-seven point seven.”
“Why don't you just paint household objects until it takes. You'll get it. You'll see it again. School will be out this week, and you can just take some time.”
“I'm going to do that. I'll be all right.” I nodded and heard the angry little tides inside my ears. “I'm going to paint everything.”
When Story left for Town Hall, I burst into action. I didn't have class until four, so I ran to the studio barelegged in my Sears robe and stretched three canvases, 60 by 60, my shrunken hands atremble. I could feel the heat. I was in motion; I couldn't do it fast enough. I had one palette wet under cellophane and without changing it a bit, I started in.
The volleyball that had saved my life in the confidential waters of Lake Mugacook ten hours before was a Sportcraft Professional Model manufactured in New Castle, Pennsylvania. In postal blue magic marker script along one seam was the name: Allen. Luther Allen was a retired broker who clipped coupons on his lakefront property in town. His children and grandchildren came up from New York and New Haven on weekends.
On the first canvas, I broadbrushed the curve of one side in vermilion. I had to hold my head cocked a certain way as the lakewater gurgled up and down my eustachian tubes. Many times when I changed positions, water ran out of my ears. I worked fast because I figured I had two hours tops before Story ran into Gill Manwaring and I'd get a phone call. If I could grab a secure start on three canvases, it might testify to my equilibrium. But as my hands moved across the paintings, working all three in one stroke, then one for twenty minutes, I wondered. They didn't look like volleyballs as we know them.
So many times the magic in painting transpires in the twelve inches between the palette and the canvas, and your head, hand, or heart better get out of the way. I felt that warmth in my arms now, and I tried to proceed with caution or reason or passionless purpose, but I might as well not have been there. This was not the way I used to paint. I ran from the studio several times, whenever my neck would get too sore, and I dressed a piece at a time, retrieved the hammer, all my roofing nails, the butcher knife. My garlic was arriving at noon.
When the phone did ring, Story simply said, “What's going on?”
“Story, I've got a start on three good pieces. Can I call you back?”
“Dan, what's this with Gill?”
“Don't worry. Don't worry. Don't worry. I'll tell you later. All about it. I gotta go.” And I did go. I found myself an hour later in the studio, one canvas finished, the others running to a close. The first looked like nothing, like a rose moon in a blue blanket, I don't know, but God it thrilled me! Some of the edges floated like folded velvet; I'd never done that before. I'd never seen it done before! This was no landscape that I knew. The whole time I'd been in the studio, I'd only had two thoughts. One was simply a picture of Story's face as she hung up the phone: that worry. The other was so profound it powered me through the day. I wanted, more than anything, for my children and grandchildren to come visit and play volleyball on the lawn. The picture made sense and gave reason to everything in my life.
The garlic man, not a farmer but Cummings from the Food Center, had to come all the way through the house and he startled me, appearing at the studio door. I hadn't heard him for all the water in my ears.
Cummings was also the butcher, and as he stood at my studio doorway in his bloody apron, he seemed one of the Fates come to abbreviate me at last.
“I've got your garlic,” he said, and the first glorious strains of the herb drifted my way.
“Good!” I must have said it a little too loudly as Mr. Cummings stepped back and raised his hands in self-defense. To assure him that I meant no harm, I placed my brush and palette aside and asked him in to see what I was doing. He folded his arms over his apron and browsed my canvases, nodding steadily. The spectacle of the three huge canvases, flashed and spiraled with those strange colors, and the volleyball sitting on the table behind them seemed to confuse Mr. Cummings, but his nodding quickened. His assessment was only “Yep,” followed by seven or eight small “Yep, yep, yeps.” It didn't strike me until we had unloaded two hundred pounds of garlic onto the front lawn, that Mr. Cumming's yepping had been identical to the sad and final pronouncements of a doctor whose suspicions have been confirmed.
When he left, I didn't hesitate. I took up my hammer and jammed my pockets with the short galvanized roofing nails, and wondered why the opinion of one of the most prominent village tradesmen didn't bother me; why in fact, I took his incredulity as encouragement; why, in fact, I felt absolutely encouraged by everything in the world: the flat noon light, the impending thundershower, Mudd Miller's black Honda motorcycle leaking oil on his driveway across the street. Oh, I just breathed it all in and began tacking the garlic to my own sweet home.
I framed all the doors in garlands first, in case there wasn't enough garlic, tapping the nails through the center of each bulb, spacing them three fingers apart. Then I ringed the windows, the basement windows, and the storm cellar door. The oil each clove gave its nail slathered down my wrists to the elbows, but after twenty minutes, I couldn't smell a thing. It all gave our house a fuzzy, gingerbread look, not unbecoming and kind of festive. By the time I finished, I was high, high with a new taut certainty that I was unquestionably on the right track, and high with a sort of major garlic sinus dilation. My eyes felt poached.
I ran to the studio to retrieve my car keys, but was again arrested by the three paintings and worked for a furious moment on the third. This “volleyball” was becoming more elongated than the other two and looked like, I'll say for now, a rose setting sun in a green and ocher sky. But something told me that when I looked into the canvas I wasn't looking all the way to the horizon. Something was trying to get out; I love that sense. When the phone rang, I came to and strode out to my old Buick. I sat still in the driver's seat for a moment, listening to the phone ringing. It sounded like a vague, intermittent alert for the future going off in garlic house.
In my book,
Life Before Science,
it said:
Garlic and garlic substitutes were often used by tribes in Africa, Asia, Austrailia, and England to heat a childless domecile. The huts were festooned with fresh garlic once a month, and the man and the woman wore garlic in various forms sewn into a garment or on a string around the neck, or crushed into the hair. Some tribes were known to use a garlic mattress, which was rumored to have never failed. In many societies the smell of garlic was synonymous with fecundity.
YOU
lay yourself open to attack by a powerful creeping chagrin if you drive miles away from home one fine afternoon, as I did, guided only by your overwhelming desire to have children and by a lurid, illustrated half-page advertisement from the back pages of the scurrilous local shopper
The Twilight Want Ads.
Just the tabloid illustration mocked me: a crude wood block print featuring, or so it said, Mrs. Argyle, “Gypsy Wizardress, Alchemist, Seer, and Tax Advisor,” her face seemingly radiating small lightning rays of power andâwhat I took to beâunderstanding.
So I set my mouth against the thorough feeling that I was a fool, and I followed the directions Mrs. Argyle had given me over the telephone, driving toward the village of Boughton, where I had never been.
The interview that followed, in the woody turnout three point four miles from Boughton, with Mrs. Argyle, is still a mystery to me. Her rusty Ford van was there along with the two jade talismans hanging from the rearview mirror. I stood around for a while, trying to look innocent, and then finally I put two hundred dollars on the seat, as I'd been instructed in our call, took the necklaces, and left.
Driving home was a different matter. Cruising the rural roads in Connecticut after twilight in the early summer, past farmers' fields and the little roadhouses, their pink Miller Beer signs just beginning to glow in the new darkness, with two
guaranteed
jade talismans in my pocket, I began to swell with confidence and good cheer. I sang songs that I made up (with gestures) and grinned like an idiot. I never saw Mrs. Argyle at all. I motored toward Bigville, my mouth full of song, the jade glowing at my side.
At garlic headquarters, my house, Story was waiting. I could see my sweet mayor and Ruth Wellner, my favorite county attorney, having Piels Light on the rocks with a twist in the living room. Piels beer is the only thing Story drinks, always on ice with a twist, and I had come to see the brown bottles with their cadmium orange labels as little symbols of pleasure and ease, perhaps celebration. But this time as I walked through the kitchen and saw the bottles standing on the counter, I don't know, I was worried. Our normal life was amazing; why did I want to tamper with it? But then I thought: okay, if this is what I have to do to create another human being, to have a son or daughter with whom to play catch and Scrabble, and to show Picasso and Chagall, and to teach how to fish and to cook a good garlic sauce for spaghetti squash, someone to send to the fridge for another beer and who will chase his sister through the house with a pair of scissors and to lend the car keys to and to ground for two weeks for being late for some ridiculous curfew and to spend two hundred thousand dollars on and to leave all my stuff to, my collection of Monster Magazines, my hand-tied flies, my railroad watch, though it is broken, and someone to fake-right, go-left past for the hoop, and to paint a thousand versions of before I die, then okay, I'll do it. I entered the living room.
Ruth Wellner gave me the hardest ride with her eyeballs I'd ever had. “Hi, everybody!” I said. “How's the township?”
Story smiled at me, which is great about her. She always smiles at me at first. Then, of course, she said, “What's going
on,
Dan?” I thought for a moment that she had read my mind or had seen the two lumps of jade in my pocket, but then she went on: “What have you done to the house?”
“Oh! Yeah.” I hadn't thought of an answer, especially in front of the county attorney. “It's a conceptual piece I'm trying.”
“Garlic?”
“This one's garlic.” I said, wishing I'd grabbed a beer. “It's been done with apples.” I nodded, believing what I'd said myself. “It's only a temporary piece,” I explained, waving my hands as a kind of truce. Ruth leaned back and shook her head imperceptibly, a subtle gesture they all learn in law school which means: “I don't believe a word of it, you lying bastard.” But Story smiled at me again, a new smile this time, the ancient smile of women who know their men.
“You missed your class, you know.”
“Oh, sure,” I said affirmatively. “Sure, sure. That's wonderful.” And it was wonderful in my crazy head. I could see my students waiting for the keys to unlock their lockers, grumbling and then drifting away. Mary Ann Buxton would have drifted right to the department chairman's office to offer him most of an earful, but it was wonderful. I smiled. I put my hand over the two charms in my pocket and I realized that I was moving through the most centered and affirmative period of my life. And though I couldn't see them all clearly, there were still things to do.
IN
the morning, I placed the thermometer in Story's mouth and sang three minutes from the theme song of
High Noon,
making the “Do not forsake me, oh my darling!” really mournful, and then read the little gauge: “Ninety-seven point nine. Or ninety-eight flat, I can't tell.”
I felt an almost impossible intensity, an anticipation that ran me with chills. All my magic was aligned for tonight, all my preparations.
“You're in a ⦠mood,” Story said cautiously, giving me an odd side glance.
“Good night's sleep,” I said trying to suddenly appear mature. I stood and the song rose into my throat. “On this our we-e-edding day-ay!” I sang and headed for the bathroom.
In the shower steam rose around me rife with garlic, the very smell of babies hovering in the air. There was nothing wrong with us. Tonight was the night.
Story came into the bathroom just in time to hear the best rhyme in my song: