What I Didn't See (16 page)

Serenity is, of course, a transitory state, just like living. Whatever Miss Jackson may wish to believe, humans being humans, eternal peace is found only in the grave and not always even there. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.

But why spoil things with the long view? Let's leave me there in the moment, flooded with love. Patwin is talking and I am trying to make him happy by agreeing with everything he says. I agree that my infatuation with Tu-api is at an end. I agree that, circumstances being different, I would have considered Miss Jackson or even, God forbid, Miss Whitfield. I agree that when the weather grows too hot and we all go to our separate homes for the summer, I will put serious effort into finding a girlfriend who is alive. I agree that love can be usefully examined with the tool of Marxist analysis. I hand over my photograph and watch Patwin tear it up, both of us pretending there is someplace he can put those pieces where they won't last forever.

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Once when I was four or five I asked my grandmother to tell me a secret, some secret thing only grown-ups knew. She thought a moment, then leaned down close to me and whispered. “There are no grown-ups,” she said.

According to my father, my grandmother was one of those remarkable women who completely reinvented themselves during the seventies. He remembers her as a sort of Betty Crocker figure. She wore lipstick, pumps, and aprons. She put up fruits. One day she metamorphosed into Betty Friedan. She phoned over to him in his dorm room at college. “Mom,” he said. “I've been trying to get you. I need a shirt mended, and I need it by Friday. Can I drop it by?"

"My sewing basket is in the laundry room,” she said. “Pick a spool that matches the color of the shirt. Knot one end of the thread and put the other end into the needle. Use the smallest needle you can manage. I'm in jail. This is my one phone call. We've agreed to refuse bail. You can get the needle and thread when you go by to feed Angel. It's her night for the Tuna Platter."

Grams had joined the San Francisco Fairmont sit-in to protest racist hiring policies. She appeared on the news that night, being dragged into the police van; my dad's entire dormitory watched it. Her form, my father always said, was perfect. It was the first of many such phone calls. There was the Vietnam War. There were the nuclear tests. She chained herself to a fence in Nevada. The last wild-water rivers needed to be saved. By the time I was born, my grandmother had an arrest record the size of a Michener novel. One of my earliest memories is of my father, hanging up the phone and reaching for his coat to go and feed Angel, who was by this time an ancient Siamese with a sensitive stomach. “She won't eat if I feed her. You should see the look she gives me.” My father shook his head. “ ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.' “

Her husband, my grandfather, died before my father's first birthday, shot down in the Pacific, in the battle off Samar. The angriest I ever saw my grandmother was one time when my father suggested that if her husband had been alive, she might not have been quite so unrestrained. “Your father gave his life to make the world a better place,” she said. “So don't you think for one minute he would have minded making his own supper in the same cause."

I, myself, at five was deeply in love with my grandmother. At sixteen, when I liked no one else, I still made an exception for her. If Grams had ruled the world, the people at my high school would have known how to treat me. You could go to her with problems; her advice was always good. She had the best possible combination of imagination and pragmatism, and she never told you you didn't have a problem when you thought you did.

I was not the only troubled person who found her serenity and sympathy irresistible. She drew a parade of eccentrics into her parlor, where they played bridge and she played straight man. When I was sixteen and had my wisdom teeth out, I was allowed to recuperate on her couch. I lay under the overhang of her enormous split-leaf philodendron, with Angel2 rumbling against my legs and a knitted afghan made in Grams' Betty Crocker days wrapped around my shoulders. Out the window the sparrows dipped and shook in the bath.

The bridge table that day included a British-Indian woman named Dot, who, for reasons of faith, ate nothing but oatmeal and black tea, and a psychic named Sam. Grams' partner was a man whose name no one knew, but who called himself the Great Unknown. Doped to the gills, I floated in and out of their conversation.

"Do you think you hear the bullet that gets you?” the Great Unknown asks as I drift away. “I mean in a battle with all the other noise. Do you think you hear the one that's all yours?” He takes a trick, gathering in the cards.

When I wake up next, Dot is dealing. This is worth waking up for. She ruffles and riffles; the cards fall in a solid sheet from one hand to the other, click satisfyingly onto the table. “But what does
normal
mean?” the Great Unknown asks, collecting and arranging his hand. “We use the word as if it means something."

Gram opens with one heart.

"I don't know anyone normal,” says the Great Unknown. “Do you?"

"I know people who can pass,” says Sam. “Pass."

"Three clubs,” says the Great Unknown. “So our polity is based really on deception and hypocrisy. The dishonest dissemblers triumphing over the honestly deranged."

"So normal is abnormal,” Dot says. “So everyone you know is normal. It's a sort of koan. Pass."

"Why in the world would you jump to three clubs?” Grams asks the Great Unknown.

"I know why,” says Sam.

"Well, of course you do,” Grams says to Sam. “If only you'd use your powers for good instead of evil."

A little while later I am aware of Grams shuffling. “I don't care if they want to hang suspended by their feet in gas masks and scuba gear,” she says. “In fact, I admire their imagination. I just don't see why they insist on calling it sex."

I wake up next in tears. The air has the early tint of evening, Angel is gone, and my mouth is full of blood. Up until now, the extractions have been good fun—sleep, and dreams, and narcotics. But the anesthetic is wearing off. There is a
pop, pop, pop
of pain pulsing in my jaw, and my mouth tastes of the ocean.

"Do you think you could eat something?” Grams asks, giving me a large pill and a glass of warmish water to chase it down.

"No.” I am really crying now. “This is awful.” My speech is muffled. I realize I have layers of gauze shoved into the back of my mouth. I pull them out and they are soaked red and smell of sickness.

Dot and Sam and the Great Unknown crowd around my couch. It's the final scene in
The Wizard of Oz.
“Don't cry,” says Dot. “We can't bear it.” She strokes my hand open, traces along the lines with a fingernail. “Very good,” she assures me. “Very deep, distinctive lines. Very little confusion in your life."

"I suppose that's good,” the Great Unknown says doubtfully. “Do you really believe in palmistry?” The Great Unknown prides himself on hardheaded skepticism.

"I trained in India,” says Dot.

While Dot is reading my palm, Sam is reading my mind. “Mind over matter,” he suggests, and then recoils, presumably from what I think of his suggestion.

I am in such pain, it makes me want to be rude. “I don't believe in palmistry or ESP. I'm so sorry.” I am, of course, no such thing, and Sam knows it.

"If I was Tinkerbell, you'd be sorry,” says Sam. “Real sorry.” He clears his throat two or three times. “I sense that I'm developing a cough."

"Here's what I don't believe in,” says the Great Unknown. He ticks them off on his fingers for me. “I don't believe in astrology, numerology, pyramid power. I don't believe in the tooth fairy, sad for you, because you stand to make out well today. I don't believe in God, although I accord him the capital G, as a courtesy to those who do.” He pauses here to nod to Grams, who has always been a churchgoer, then picks right up. “I don't believe in phlogiston, extraterrestrials who abduct you and probe Uranus, the organ box, Silva Mind Control, Scientology"—he has come to the end of his fingers and starts with the first one again—"or witchcraft."

"Abracadabra,” says Grams, and pulls a red bandanna out of her sleeve for me. I wipe my eyes and blow my nose. The bandanna smells of Grams and her Estee Lauder cologne.

"I think that our inept government could never keep a secret as big as a CIA-slash-Mafia-slash-Cuban conspiracy to kill JFK,” says the Great Unknown. “Or fake the Moon Landing, although I could be wrong about that one—that one might not be too hard.

"What I do believe in is the desperate fight against the perils of routine living that they all represent. I believe in each man's need to feel that he has somehow been chosen. It's not everyone who has a submarine.” He fixes Grams with a stern look. “The rest of us must simply make do with Elvis sightings.

"Life is a series of evasive maneuvers,” he observes in conclusion. “You have to envy anyone with the means to make a clean escape."

"But I could never do that,” says Grams. “I could never leave the rest of you behind."

Perhaps it is a little late to be bringing up the submarine. Not quite cricket, not exactly Chekhovian of me. There is no doubt that the submarine looms very large in my family lore. It was designed and built by my great-grandfather—not my grandmother's father, but her husband's. In my defense, let me just add that it's really a very small submarine, very unimposing, a one-person affair, no more than fourteen feet long.

And it's not as if the submarine were on the mantelpiece. No, sadly, the submarine lies sunk in the furry scum of Lake Emily. Lake Emily is a small body of water, a pond, really, with an oily surface and no fish more interesting than perch. It occupies the northwest corner of the Gutierrez property about fifty miles north of my grandmother's house.

For the longest time the submarine was in my grandmother's garage. I've been inside it often, and it's not all that thrilling. It had a stale, metallic smell. Here is my objection to submarines and space travel: not enough windows. What difference does it make if you're in outer space, or underwater, or wherever, if you can't feel, or hear, or see, or smell it? You might as well be locked in a closet. But my grandmother tells me it's too dark to see under the water anyway. “The fall is the lovely part,” she says. “The water goes from blue to gray to black, as if you're out in space, falling through the stars."

Maria Gutierrez and the Great Unknown took the sub out one day to see how hard she would be to handle, and, having forgotten to tighten two screws in the bottom, filled her up immediately with water and ran her aground. They learned a lot in the process, however, and the Great Unknown was all for hoisting her up, drying her out, and taking her straight to Scotland. Grams was not opposed to this project, but she had been working with the World Hunger people, and cranes and divers would have to be organized, and she hadn't gotten around to it. Besides, she wanted the Great Unknown to work out for a while first. She was not sure he was physically fit enough. Like her, he was in his sixties. We thought. The submarine was built for a younger man.

Although my great-grandfather spent the latter half of his life convinced he was being stalked by the Fenians, it was a point of honor in my family to consider him a genius. The party line was that he was one of those nineteenth-century men who were masters of many fields, sort of like the explorer Richard Burton. Genius and madness have a particular affinity for each other, my father says, which doesn't mean that there's not a whole lot of madness and only modest amounts of genius in the world. My great-grandfather had little formal education, but a wonderfully prehensile mind. He was a tolerable musician, a decent artist in the pen-drawing school, and spectacularly good with gadgets. One day, no one remembers why, he played the violin for eight straight hours. In doing this, he strained a nerve in his left hand from which it took him some weeks to recover. This lack of music brought about a period of frustration and general twitchiness that just about drove his wife crazy. “Go take a walk,” she told him. “Learn to ride a bicycle."

The bicycle is a wonderfully designed machine. My great-grandfather had been enchanted with them from the very start. Riding them was a different matter. He came back with a sprained ankle and had to be put to bed. The situation reached crisis proportions.

But one morning, when his wife took him his breakfast, she found him calm and clear-eyed, scribbling away on the inside covers of several books. “Are you aware that most of the world is underwater?” he asked her. “What mountains we have never climbed. What caves we have never explored. What jungles!” The year was 1910. My great-grandfather had suddenly noticed that women were about to get the vote. When that happened, he believed, they would embark on a devastating national shopping spree. In anticipation, he was looking to get out of paying his taxes. The first tax-time after women got the vote he planned to spend safely underwater.

The big surprise was that he actually built her. He started with a thirty-inch model he could maneuver through the rain barrel. It was propelled by a spring and the insides of a pocket watch. The fourteen-foot version used a bicycle chain and pedals. Pitch and direction were controlled by levers in the nose. These were adjusted by hand. To propel the boat took all four limbs. It took strength and coordination. It took practice. She was merely a prototype. My great-grandfather was a family man; the final submarine was supposed to be large enough to hold his wife and son. This early model he called the
New Day,
in honor of Day, the tragic inventor of an early sub.

Day's version was much like an ordinary boat, only it had an airtight chamber inside. Day occupied the chamber and then his associates sank the boat by piling more than thirty tons of stones on it. It worked like a dream. But the same associates were less zealous in raising the craft. Day was sealed tight in his chamber and could only be brought up by removing the stones, which were now under several yards of water. This required divers and continuous effort. Somehow, there was a miscommunication between the associates. Each thought the other was organizing the ascent; each had private and pressing business elsewhere. Day was never recovered. It was a story and name that made my great-grandmother very nervous.