“This violence,” Papa said, and now I could see him fighting panic. “May I ask if he’s already drugged when it happens? Or if he’s just refusing the sedatives? Because in the first case, couldn’t the drugs themselves cause the behavior? And in the second, he hates pills, Irwin does.” Papa heard his voice rising, heard his anger and fatherliness and frustration all spilling out. But he couldn’t stop himself. “Chewable vitamins, baby aspirin even. He spits ’em, hates ’em, can’t handle ’em at all. That’s normal for Irwin, Major. And the songs. They’re juvenile, I know, and the lyrics are silly, some of them. But he’s sung them since childhood, and not just at church. In bed at night, at work, in the hallways at school, football practice—the other players used to gripe to the coach. He always sings. Always prays too. This kid is loud, Major Keys. And he wears his heart on his sleeve. It’s an embarrassment at times, we know, but he really does love his cockeyed Jesus. It’s what’s inside him, you see. So it’s important, crucial even, isn’t it, that you and your staff not try to just wipe that away?”
When Papa finally fell silent, the Major said nothing. He just hung on the line, breathing, until my parents fully grasped the fact that their intimate understanding, their years of experience, their whole history with and love for their son meant absolutely nothing to him. “We understand ‘normal,’” Keys said at last. “And I can see that you’re a doting mother and father. That’s commendable, in its place. And it may prove helpful, after his release. But your son, I must remind you, is psychotic. And it’s the psychosis we’re working to eliminate, not his virtues, whatever you imagine those to be. It’s been very instructive, this chat. Most helpful. I’m grateful to you both. But now, once again, I’m afraid I’m out of time.”
“But can we come down and see him?” Papa asked. And now he looked and nearly sounded like a pathetic, pleading child. “Can we come down tomorrow? The whole family, I mean?”
“During visiting hours, I suppose. If you think it serves a purpose. But it’s a very long drive, Mr. Chance. And you’d have to visit him one at a time.”
“But it’d be worth it, we wouldn’t mind the drive at all, if there was any way you could just—Listen, Major. Please. Couldn’t you ease up on the drugs enough so we could talk with him? Because he’s probably confused. And all together we could explain, or try, what he has to stop doing, how he needs to behave, to get out of there. Because Irwin really is, how would you say it, on sort of a different program. But he’s not dumb. And he’s not mean. So if you’d just let him out of the haze, I think maybe he’d—”
“Frankly, Mr. Chance,” the Major interrupted, “my best advice to you is to be patient. I warned Irwin’s wife that it’s far too early for the kind of visit you’re describing. I also warned that the sight of Irwin might upset you at this stage. But we’re making progress, believe me. We are helping your son. And right now you can help him too, Mr. and Mrs. Chance, by trusting us. We’re very experienced in these matters. So give us time. Show a little faith. Is that too much to ask?”
Papa managed, by sinking again into a squat, to lie that it wasn’t.
Mama couldn’t make herself say anything at all.
So it was Imagination Time at the Chances’, and Try to Sleep and Not See This, I Dare You, Time. It was Close Your Eyes and Watch Irwin on the Gurney Time, rolling down the white corridors, strapped down, preferably unsedated (“Better that they feel it,” a nurse had confided to Papa), singing some one of his favorite songs, “Down in My Heart,” say, or “Yes, Jesus Loves Me.” Too scared to ad-lib, just the straight Sabbath stuff now. But it was this singing, Keys assured us, that lay at the heart of his “dyscrasia”—a fine term, dyscrasia, pettifogging, mist-enshrouded, immune to puncture by any sort of point, verbum sapienti sat est, eh, Major?, one magic word, dyscrasia, and Keys’s ignorance became science, Irwin’s singing became raving, his faith became violence, his memory became delusion, the joy joy joy down in his heart became his disgrace, and his mind could be raped and emptied with moral exaltation. “Trust us, Mr. and Mrs. Chance.” It was dyscrasia that brought the Cong Boy Phantasm to life, dyscrasia that cost noble Dudek his teeth, dyscrasia that fired off every time the sedatives ran down, forcing another nurse with a syringe, or better, two orderlies with a terribly snug but stylish jacket to come running—Snowmen, Irwin called them, when an unintended lapse in medication once allowed him a moment’s speech. So back in Camas, on the Deccan Plateau, by the Juan de Fuca Strait, in the back bedrooms, classrooms, dugouts and train cars of our lives, we the lifelong admirers and teasers and cultivators and sharers of his dyscrasia heard him constantly—singing as they rolled him into the place he called the Snow Room; singing as he smelled, through all the layers of antiseptic, the stench of terror that burst through the pores of the myriad mad who lay in that room before him; singing as they doubled the straps on his wrists and ankles (Keys: “his robustness a problem”), the Snowmen laughing at the futile little lyrics, Jesus loves me, this I know as the conductive salve was rubbed into his temples, For the Bible tells me so as the electrodes were taped to the salve, Little ones to Him belong as they slid the thing like a Little League batter’s helmet onto his head, They are weak but He is strong as they jammed the soft plastic mouthpiece straight into the singing—“Spit this out” (the fierce Snowman named Denny) “and your lunch’ll be the sausage your teeth make of your tongue”—impossible to make words now, so trying to hum through the mouthpiece, to hold fast to a chorus or melody, to a Name, or to naked love alone, when the explosion came. Then the unbearable lull, the insane-making wait, any man or woman, any poet-saint or bodhisattva on earth a gibbering lunatic now, knowing as they waited that their plastic-clogged humming could not possibly be enough; knowing that no mind, in mid-explosion, can hold to even the simplest thought; knowing they’d be blasted away, erased, pure white again; and not knowing whether a rebuildable rubble, a few shards of selfhood, would remain when, from the wreckage, the body next arose.
We all had decent imaginations. We knew about how it would go. Because Zaccheus kept clutching as he drifted down the Mekong, because the boy kept winding his watch, because of the mathematical theories of Christ and Coach Basham (“seventy times seven,” “a hundred and ten percent”), we knew how hard Irwin would try when it hit: Yes, Jesus loves me, yes, Jeeeuuach! Aeeucch! Aeeucch! But we also knew there could be no remnant of his mind in the body that slammed up and down on the table, no remnant of song in the voice going ungh! ungh! ungh!, no similarity between the delicate blend of muscle, affection, nonsense and faith we called Irwin and the thing the orderlies rolled, still jerking and flopping like a fish with no river, back down the long white halls.
We knew this, were scalded by it. We saw and heard it night and day.
And still we couldn’t help him.
7. Tony Baldanos’ Sneak Photo
Tony Baldanos—the Portland Tugs’ backup catcher—was a passionate amateur photographer. He was no lowbrow Kodachrome shutterbug either. Though economic considerations reduced him, during baseball season, to cheap color film and Fotomat slides, his photographic aspiration was to one day create classic black-and-white landscapes in the Edward Weston, Ansel Adams tradition. His motivation was sound too: as a third-year second-string catcher, Tony knew he might soon be needing a second-string career. But, as is often the case with Two-Art Artists, his baseball and his photography were terribly at odds.
Ballplayers need sleep, second-stringers especially so. But on the average baseball day Tony didn’t even get to play. He therefore convinced himself that there was no harm in working on a photographic series he called “Motel Dawns.” The series was not ambitious. It only required him to rise with the muezzins each morning, to wake up just enough to step outside with his camera, and to take an eastward-facing color photo of whatever neon-lit motel and city the Tugs happened to be ensconced in—with the hopefully beautiful or incongruous or artfully depressing or somehow interesting urban dawn dawning in the background. He would
then, according to plan, jump back into bed and catch up on his baseball rest. The crimp in the plan, though, was that the artistic process got Tony so excited that he couldn’t get back to sleep. So when—eight or twelve or sixteen hours later—Manager Howie Bowen would decide to pinch-hit or play him (never with any warning, never with any warm-up, and usually terribly late in a late-night game), Tony would be half sick with the need for sleep. As a result, he would play ball about like Ansel Adams. And so would think afterward: I’ve had it as a ballplayer! And so would reach, as he crawled into bed that night, for his camera (to be sure his backup career was loaded), then for his alarm clock, which he’d set once again for dawn.
This artistic struggle is why—on May 29, at 4:55 A.M.—Tony Baldanos was half dressed, out of bed, and looking out the third-floor window of the Whitetail Motor Lodge in Spokane, Washington, when he spotted what he considered a photo opportunity. What he saw didn’t fit into his “Motel Dawns” series, but Tony dug out his camera and took the shot anyway. It turned out so nicely that the first print he ever had made of it—a now badly faded color 8 × 10—sits on my desk as I write these words. Tony presented it to me because that day, May 29, happened to be my twentieth birthday. But enlarged and framed prints of the same photo now hang on walls in the homes of my mother, my Uncle Truman, my Uncle Marv and Aunt Mary Jane, every one of my brothers and sisters, and in the homes of several ex-Tugs, all with the same little inscription hiding, handwritten, on the back:
“Art heals.—Tony Baldanos, 1971.”
The first thing most people notice in the photo is the bright purple and pink of the sky over the black, pine-covered ridge in the distance. Maybe the next thing most eyes are drawn to is the same pink and purple reflected in the Spokane River, which eddies from the upper right corner of the photo, down through black silhouettes of junipers in the foreground, and on out of the frame. Fishermen like to point out the swirls on the pink river surface, and usually surmise that they’re trout rises. But those who know the river there (Uncle Truman, for instance) say they’re most likely squawfish. Freddy—a gung ho birdwatcher—once said that the white patch in the largest juniper could be a small hawk or prairie falcon, or at the very least a magpie. Bet, though, thinks it’s trash—maybe Styrofoam, blown over from the freeway on the other side of the motor lodge.
Be that as it may, about the last thing anyone notices is the thing that caught Tony’s eye in the first place: the man on the big riverside boulder in the foreground. He’s wearing a plaid flannel shirt, brown leather belt, baggy tan trousers, but you can’t really see the colors: everything but his head is in silhouette. As Tony opened the shutter, though, the first rays of morning sun were striking his hair, turning it a vivid, almost flaming silver. And at the very same moment the man was exhaling smoke, which the same ray of dawn sunlight turned a lovely pale pink.
On the rock beside him stands a large Styrofoam coffee cup. (“Another falcon!” Bet likes to tell Freddy.) Beside the cup is a morning paper, folded open to what Tony sensibly assumes is an account of the previous night’s doubleheader, which the Tugs and the Spokane Indians had split. The man on the rock had pitched five outs in the losing game, and had given up two runs on a single. But he’d inherited loaded bases. The story of his life. The story of all our lives.
It had been a wet spring—lots of rain cancellations: there would be another game against the Indians clear down in Portland that night, and a second doubleheader the very next day. The silver-haired man would almost certainly see action, and so would (like Tony Baldanos, who is now a successful but somewhat bored commercial photographer, but a near-legendary Babe Ruth baseball coach) very much need the sleep he was missing. He also did not need the cigarette. Yet it’s the cigarette, more than anything except maybe the hair, that makes the photograph so striking in terms of color, and so haunting to those of us who know the man.
Whatever his needs, he had been sitting on the boulder since well before dawn, wearing the expression Irwin used to call “the Face” on his face. And his thoughts—though the face in the photo betrays nothing—were almost certainly so tormented that he couldn’t have cared less how he himself was feeling. And yet that torment was misplaced. The man was making the same blunder, there on his rock by the river, that our entire family was making that day. We could all feel, we all knew in our bones or blood that something we loved, or someone, was rapidly dying.
Our mistake?
We thought that someone was Irwin.
CHAPTER SIX
The White Train
When I lived at Naples, there stood, at the door of my palace, a female mendicant to whom I used to pitch coins before mounting the coach. One day, suddenly perplexed at the fact that she never gave me any signal of thanks, I looked at her fixedly. It was then I saw that what I had taken for a mendicant was rather a wooden box, painted green, filled with red earth and some half rotted banana peels.
—Max Jacob
Well into his year’s research on the internationally known poet-saints of medieval Maharashtra, Peter discovered a subtradition he’d never previously heard of. Most of the poets involved were low-caste. Some were illiterate, their work collected only recently in Indian books of songs. But among them were several whose verse and apparent spiritual attainment had been of a very high order. In the missive that followed his “unplugged” letter to Dr. Ramchandra Majumdar back at Harvard, Peter described some of these poets, and explained a few of the difficulties in studying them (scattered and bowdlerized manuscripts, archaic and idiosyncratic dialects, reliable scholarship nonexistent, lives lost in folk legend). But he also shared his excitement over the apparent blending of Sufistic and Vedantic imagery he’d found in some of the verse, and included a few rough translations in his letter, including this, by a sixteenth-century seamstress, Anjana by name:
You hide your heart from the Dark Lord’s arrows
Then beg to be the post that pierces His ear.
You dodge the dagger that would spill your blood
Then ask to be the pen in His hand.
“Bring the wine of love!” sing the hired qawalis
While in your vineyard grapes rot on the vine.
“Grind me to dust!” they wail, as you
Bathe, then carefully dress for dinner.
Singers sell yearning like courtesans their favors.
Is this rented noise your refuge, O king?
Anjana says: Empty prayers are the smile on the face
Of the assassin. Arrows still yearn in the
Quiver. The ink still yearns in the pen.
The dust lies at your doorstep.
The Dark Lord listens.
In another prompt and heartening reply, Dr. Majumdar predicted that this “wondrous subtradition” would soon lead Peter not only to a second full-year grant but to the publication of a book of “much more than merely scholarly appeal.” “But we have nothing at all on these poets here,” the doctor added, “so be sure to lay the groundwork for a complete proposal before you return.”
Peter therefore set to work on a second, simultaneous, full-scale research project. Fourteen-hour workdays became routine. Physical exercise and plain human intercourse became almost nonexistent. He also chose, so far as travel and research plans would allow, to become nocturnal, sleeping through the heat of the days and working all evening and night. As a result, he encountered the Indian crowds, chaos and squalor hardly at all, the tension inside him eased dramatically, and he decided that he had finally found his niche, that this hard, cerebral work was his calling, that the troubling inner conflict with India had resolved itself at last.
All winter and spring he lived and worked this way. He meditated twice a day, lived his waking life in libraries, traveled when he had to; he grew pale and quiet, emaciated himself on a diet of fruit, nuts and endless cups of chai, worked his brain hard, collapsed from exhaustion each dawn, slept like a rock. He seldom hurt, seldom laughed, never cried or shouted. He never answered our letters. He didn�
��t remember his dreams. The Dark Lord listens.
Secunderabad/India/late May/1971
Even on a long train journey, from Madras across the peninsula to Nasik, Peter kept to his owl-like schedule, working through the night in his private berth, falling to sleep in his bunk at dawn. But sometime after a brief, accidental wake-up in Hyderabad (luggage banging against his door as the train crept out of the city), Peter fell into a dream in which he was dying of some kind of fever—cholera or typhoid (“I theenk most poseebly both,” a disconcertingly happy Hindu doctor kept telling him). And the dream grew so protracted and painful that he finally woke himself with his own groans—
to find that his sheets really were drenched with sweat, that he could hardly breathe, that his body was burning up.
Tearing open his window shade, he groped for a catch, lock or lever. But in first-class air-conditioned cars the windows don’t open. He fell out of bed, pulled on his pants, flung open the door of his berth, and found himself gaping into the bloody—or no, just betel-stained—mouth of a tiny South Indian porter who began screaming, over and over, a sentence that sounded like “Sahib yabbetahgabbetah!”
Peter’s first thought was that the man was trying to quarantine him. Then he realized that the porter too was sweat-drenched and short of breath, that the train was not moving, that it was the air inside the car, not his body, that was burning up. He asked, in Hindi, what had happened.
“Sahib yabbetahgabbetah!” came the reply.
He tried English, then what he hoped was Urdu.
“Yabbetahgabbetah! Yabbetahgabbetah!”
Moving the porter aside, he started down the corridor, saw that the entire car had been vacated, found an open window in a bathroom, stuck his head out, and saw that both the men’s and the women’s first-class cars were not only empty but sitting alone on a side track. He realized what must have happened: while he’d been sleeping the air-conditioning had failed, the stifling cars had been uncoupled, and the passengers had been moved to replacement cars.
The Brothers K Page 59
