by Chamber Four
My dad cleared his throat and tugged at the neck of his shirt. It was his black Huskers one. “Arthur has been sneaking his father’s car and driving around.”
“Where?” I asked.
“He tried to get other boys, younger ones, to go with him,” my dad went on, like I hadn’t said anything. “Apparently a couple did. Arthur parked behind someone’s garage and made them do things. Sexual things.”
I swallowed.
My dad looked up at me. Then he looked away, over at my brown curtains with the tan jungle scenes and no animals.
My stomach hurt. I thought about training.
“One of the boys had to go to the hospital. The police were called. Arthur won’t be able to hurt anyone anymore. He’s going to jail for a long time. That’s what you have to do to molesters. Lock them away.”
My mouth tasted throw up. Steven and me just trained for when we got girls. Nicky too. We didn’t do that sick stuff. I wasn’t one of those molesters. They were worse than anything, worse than people who killed people. Training was Steven’s idea anyway. I couldn’t go to jail for that. But Nicky, what if he told somebody? What if he said it was my idea? They might put me in jail and tell everyone I was one of those.
My dad put his hands together, almost like he was praying. “Peter,” he said again. His voice cracked a little when he said it.
I waited and tried to swallow again, but it felt like I couldn’t. Maybe he knew already. Maybe Nicky’d told.
“Did—” He stopped again. “Did Arthur ever try to get you to do anything? Anything that made you feel uncomfortable?” His head was down, but his eyes were looking up at me. He looked terrified.
“No!”
“You have to be able to tell me, Peter,” my dad pleaded. “You have to know you can talk to me. If something happened like that, it isn’t your fault.”
“He never did anything!”
My dad took a deep breath and exhaled loud. “Good.”
I tried not to look at him, but he was looking at me. I just wanted him to stop. I already told him nothing happened. It made me keep thinking of training. My head wouldn’t stop twitching, like I couldn’t get my neck to sit right.
“You know what to do if anybody ever tries anything like that, right?”
“Yes,” I said too quickly.
“Run and tell an adult,” he said. “Tell me. Don’t do anything that makes you feel funny. That’s how you know. If it makes you feel funny, then it’s bad. Right?”
“Right.”
He sighed again and stood. Then he walked over and hugged me. Hard, hard enough to hurt a little. Like he was trying to keep me from running off. I went limp, waiting for him to let me loose.
“All right, then,” he said when he finally let me go. He stood up real straight and backed up a step, hooked his thumbs in his pockets and took another deep breath.
I was still sitting on the bed. I hadn’t moved.
“Your mom should have dinner ready soon,” he said, looking over at my bedroom door. “She’s making roast.”
I nodded. He nodded too. Then he turned and walked out of my room, but he didn’t shut the door. I ran over once he was gone and shut it. Then I sat back down on my bed.
In Hope We Find This Nation
By Christopher Linforth
Pym Dark came into my office and sat opposite the potted bamboo and Seurat print. His notebook, he said, contained ideas, proposals, contingencies for a new aesthetic—although, when I saw it, they were crossed out, leaving sequences of black oblongs and irregular circles reminiscent of Morse code. What his book had once held, he said, was connected to the persistence of vision, a long-debunked theory that argued perceived motion originated from the afterimage. To muddy the situation, I’d been a proponent of the theory, albeit a modified version that incorporated Freud’s ideas about repression.
In our meeting, Pym recited a line from his mother: “Art is a figment of the intellect.” He hadn’t thought much of these words when they were originally spoken. Even months after experiencing this idea in bodily form—a woman—he was still wary of what it meant. Sometimes, he said, he could smell the woman’s faint scent: a mix of liniment oil and body salt. This recurring sensation could be described either as a manifestation of a hope that he would see her again or as a symptom of his condition.
After another unsuccessful semester at Harvard he’d taken the train to New York to stay with a high school friend, Philip Lomez, a grad student at Columbia. Pym thought Manhattan would be the ideal place to develop his theory of aesthetics during the summer break. Years before, he’d visited with his mother, taking in the sights and staying in a hotel near Times Square. They’d seen the Statue of Liberty and a man vomit on one of the pedestal walls. The man tried to scrape the vomit off with a branch, but instead he left odd markings that resembled a cave painting: a bison or perhaps an auroch.
In Philip’s one-bedroom walkup in Morningside Heights, Pym slept on the couch. For the first week he rarely left the building. Instead he sat in Philip’s vinyl recliner, smoked Philip’s cigarettes, and drank Philip’s coffee while leafing through immunology textbooks from the living room shelf. Between them was a book he’d never read, a paperback edition of Le Temps Retrouvé. As he held the novel and tried to decipher the cover—an Impressionist watercolor of an alleyway—he challenged himself to get through the four hundred or so pages in one or two sittings. Occasionally, when he took a break from reading, he would look out onto the street, where he could see a busy deli and a hair salon at the bottom of a large gray tenement.
By the second week, Philip had set for Pym a new schedule: every day at nine he left the apartment to catch the D train to Bryant Park from which he walked one block to the Public Library. That building, Philip said, would be a distraction-free and scholarly location where Pym could write down his theories. Pym was glad for the change, as he’d not got past the opening section of Proust’s novel—the dense and alien French prevented him from making any serious progress.
Most days he was first in line at the main entrance. Sometimes an elderly man with a short, graying beard and a white shirt lashed with faded black suspenders stood near the steps, studying the patterns of dried gum that littered the pavement. Pym sat on the low wall facing the library and pretended to read the Daily News. The man ran his finger over the bumps and petrified tooth marks. When security opened the doors, the man wouldn’t move; he didn’t seem interested in what was inside. He was only focused on drawing imaginary lines from one piece of gum to another.
One morning Pym spoke to him. He sat beside him on the steps and pointed to a headline in his newspaper.
“Odd that,” he said.
“What?”
“This phrase: ‘Double Bind Receives Grant.’”
“I don’t trust words,” the man said, standing up. He paced around in a circle, making sure to avoid the gum. “Give me your coffee.”
Pym felt sorry for him. The man’s shirt cuffs had thick dirt rings and his pants had large ketchup stains near the crotch. Pym found three-dollars in his wallet and offered them. “This should be enough.”
“No, your cup.” The man took it from Pym, removed the lid, and poured the coffee on the ground in a strange zigzag motion. Geometric shapes, crumpled trapezoids and wonky parallelograms were set off from one another like a child’s version of the Nazca Lines.
They both stared at the patterns, which evaporated a few minutes later. Pym gestured that he was going inside, but the man ignored him, his focus still on the ground.
On the third floor, through hallways and marble flooring that smelled of Clorox, was Room 315. People knew it as the Rose Reading Room, a century-old public area to sit and study. As Pym entered he liked to look at the ceiling with its three murals of swirling pink clouds and light blue skies. Below, a line of offices and help desks divided the room. Each side was a fractured mirror image with slight, almost imperceptible differences. Both had rows of oak tables with bronze reading lamp
s and leather-bound reference books stationed at the ends.
He sat at the tenth desk, on the right-hand side. He preferred it because the sunlight stayed there longest, from morning to late evening. The corner position suited his wish that everything should be in front of him. He laid out his notebook and pencils, making sure to cover the 369 on the desk as the multiples made him uneasy. During the day tourists appeared; they took pictures, then exited sharply, leaving the room in silence. Their appearance and abrupt disappearance usually went unnoted; only when they spoke loudly and their voices echoed did they receive a cold stare or a roll of the eyes from an annoyed patron. One time he heard a woman complain that, “Non-members are moving the books.” He could only see her jacket, the rest of her obscured by a tour group. Her voice, though, seemed familiar, like he’d heard it before, perhaps in the coffee shop near the library, or back at Harvard, or even from his childhood. As the group left he noticed the woman was no longer there and that the room was being emptied by a burly attendant who twirled his finger in the air and said, “Ten minutes. We close in ten minutes.”
Like always, Pym wrote until the last second. His ideas were not constructed in the normal sense; instead he relied upon a series of repeated descriptions, one replacing another with only minute changes. These passages of text were only approximations of intent, word-images that signified the crux of his theory: enlightenment through repetition. Later, he didn’t relate his strange ideas to Philip, relying, as he did, on his generosity and the contents of his icebox. Pym was unsure of what Philip sought in return, apart from a signed copy of the treatise. It was possible Philip thought more fondly of their years together in high school or perhaps he empathized over the health of Pym’s mother.
As the days passed at the library, Pym saw, on each occasion, the same people. None of them knew each other by name, but they created a community separate from the tourists with its own space and code of nods and shrugs. Every morning a middle-aged Korean woman, dressed in a business suit and with dyed hair tied up by a red band, would sit two desks away. She had a black notebook in which she worked on an art monograph for an exhibition at the Met. On the table she would lay out 10x12 photographs of naked men and women stretched, hung, crushed, and ripped apart—the bodies bruised and tattooed with khafs, dalets, and gimels. He recognized these Hebrew letters from a linguistics class taken sophomore year, but the purpose of the letters’ placement eluded him.
The second member of Pym’s triad was a well-dressed man in pin-stripe pants and a tightly pressed blue shirt, who took a seat close to the dictionary on the lectern. He would arrive at noon with a thick sheaf of paper and a mechanical pencil. On the quarter hour, he took the list of words he’d been jotting down for the previous few minutes and looked them up, scrupulously writing down their meanings. Once, as Pym passed the man’s desk, he found a list left behind: diactinism, diad, diadelphous.
He wasn’t sure of the significance or what exactly the project entailed. The first word had something to with physics and the sending of radioactive waves; the second, usually spelled with a Y, concerned the unification of a man and a woman; and the third referred to plants, in particular the joining of stamens. Three branches of investigation: physics, sociology, biology. The words seemed to encompass a compendium of knowledge and lexicography. Each came from Greek and related Latin roots pertaining to the idea of two-ness. The purpose, though, remained obscure. It occurred to him that, perhaps, the man was a college professor or an academic crank completing his magnum opus.
Unlike his classes, the man’s investigations inspired Pym to learn more about the nature of intellectual inquiry. In turn, Pym’s behavior reminded me of one of Freud’s early cases and I double-checked Frampton’s Methodologica to aid my analysis. After I compared notes, I watered the bamboo and pulled out some dead shoots. “The plant’s dying,” he said. I’m not sure these were his exact words as soon after, when he noticed the Dictaphone underneath my paperwork, he convinced me to delete the tape before he would continue his account.
In the library, he searched the shelves in hope of finding a suitable text. Sorting through hundreds of books on literature, history, and visual art, he found a four volume set half-hidden by a wooden cart stacked with dusty encyclopedias. The books were first editions, vellum-bound with a gilt spine. Each had a similar illustration on the front: an amphora patterned with a geometric shape—circle, triangle, square, pentagon—and the title In Hope We Find This Nation. Written by an Englishman, Edward Lawrence, the books detailed his personal account of New York after the First World War. Volume one contained a scant biographical note: his birth year (1894) and the fact after his wife died from influenza he’d traveled to America on the USS Plattsburg with the returning soldiers. In New York, wary of the recent subway accidents he’d read about in the newspapers, he explored the city by foot, writing in his notebook a lengthy description of the Model T Ford, the prices of bread and whiskey, unusual restaurant names, details from a Ringling Brothers billboard, and observations about parts of the city inhabited by the Irish, the Jews, the Chinese, and the Italians. When he could, he collected items in his buckskin satchel, often completely filling it with bus tickets, medicinal salves, political pamphlets, slick magazines, and stereographs of the Flatiron Building and the Statue of Liberty. During the late evenings, he sat in a Bowery flophouse and wrote up his findings.
Within an hour, Pym had read the first chapter. The prose had an ornate style that let sentences go for pages, clause upon clause building an interior structure that mimicked an adding machine’s computations. The material drove him on so fast he didn’t notice the tears until they hit the page. He told me the pain started as a small irritation in his left eye, a feeling that something was scratching at his sclera, slowly peeling it off in thin strips. Saline eye drops from a nearby drugstore temporarily soothed the discomfort and allowed him to continue reading. My initial note had this down as incidental, but as he explained the later events of that day I changed my opinion to something more unsettling.
In the library, he’d found the lights flickering in an odd sequence of short and long pulses. The pulses were a mix of bright white and soft yellow that somehow altered his vision, leaving a gray film over his sight. No one close to him seemed to be affected, or even have noticed the phenomenon. Somewhat alarmed, he coughed loudly in the direction of the Korean woman.
She turned around.
“What’s happened to the lights?”
She glanced at the chandeliers and then down to the bronze lamp on his table. “They look fine.”
“Are you sure?”
She collected her photographs, placing them into her notebook, and moved to a table on the other side of the room.
In his peripheral vision he could see shadows with no substance, lucid shapes compressed into a dark wafer figure. A stick-thin woman in a cream halter dress emerged. She had a shaven head and stood near the center of the room, but close to the exit, and her gaze was fixed on him. He considered that maybe she was the same woman he’d heard complain days before, that maybe she liked to sit on the other side, where she pursued a similar project to him. He closed his eyes and counted to three. On reopening them, she had been replaced by the attendant who studied Pym with interest and the Korean woman, who whispered in the attendant’s ear and pointed Pym’s way.
* * *
The hair salon outside Philip’s apartment had a strange name. The rusting sign, and the photographs of women in the window, reminded Pym of a typical Lawrence experiment in which he would collect business names and list them to resemble a Surrealist poem. He repeated the name over and over. Something about “A Cut in Time” wouldn’t leave him alone. It seemed to contain remnants of Proust, unstable memories of the past. Perhaps as a diversion he told me the hair salon was populated with a clientele different from the deli next door. The deli attracted a working crowd from the nearby insurance office and the strip of franchise stores half a block away. The salon entertained middle
-aged women with graying hair hidden under hats and scarves. They left with colorful bobs, blond highlights on straightened hair, or perms that bounced as they walked.
After hours of staring, the view became a postcard: a solidified image of what he thought was outside. His attention to the scene, to the piqued detail of ordinary life, was a hangover from his indulgence in the printed word. For the old magazines and newspapers Philip owned soon ran out. Even after Pym attempted to translate Le Temps Retrouvé with his poor French he still had too much time to think about the woman at the library and the work of Edward Lawrence. Even when Philip, or his girlfriend, Annie, would talk to Pym, he only half-listened.
“You know I like having you around,” Philip said. “But it’s not good for either of us to have you sit here all day.”
“There’s an interesting view.”
Philip went to the window, looked outside, and then turned to Pym. “So come on, what happened?”
“Writer’s block.”
Philip smiled. “It’s been a week. I’ve got exams coming up and Annie’s complaining about the mess.”
Pym stood and positioned himself between Philip and the collection of wine bottles, yellowing newspapers, and coffee cups with cigarette butts sunken at the bottom. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
“You were always like this, even in honors English.”
“Like what?’
“Blind to what’s going on.”
“That’s unfair.”
Philip picked up a cup and peered inside. “I’m just trying to help.”
Pym stepped past him to the window and craned his neck to see the tall buildings of midtown. “I’ll go back tomorrow.”
* * *
The next day he didn’t see the woman. Maybe he’d imagined her, or perhaps she’d been just another tourist, another chance meeting given too much significance. For years he’d believed in coincidence. As a child he wrote his own horoscopes, changing his sign to fit with what happened the day before, showing the typed up and dated columns to his friends as proof. Often they told their parents and he was invited to dinner to talk about his strange gift. He never accepted the offers, though, choosing instead to spend his nights pasting the horoscopes into his scrapbook and thinking about what he should do the next day.
