All Things Considered is coming from Pittsburgh, battered by static. It sounds feeble and distant, partial and disabled. It might be posthumous. What are they saying? Tractors in Thailand and Tunisian Theater? The tumultuous tale of Tin. Tsunamis in Taiwan?
Malcolm McCarty is losing his linearity. He’s thinking about blueberries and Patricia in the anointed yellow summer of creeks and bridges and sly moons. He doesn’t know why he’s lying on his study floor in what is now inexorably night. Something is cleanly and queerly pounding in his head. Not an aneurysm, he decides, but a newly formed, uncharacterized disease.
It’s a retrovirus, a hybrid mutation hatched from the millennium itself. It’s come from the juxtapositions of travel that should never have been taken conjoined with alien objects, texts and sacramental vases stolen from tombs. Some artifacts have glyphs that explain everything. Why the Buddha came and went and what he thought when he pretended to smile. You can trace the first characters with your fingers, but you’re holding this stone under the eerie distorted neon of Shanghai dusk. The air is humid and soiled and his hands are violently shaking. Hands so cold they’re turning his arm numb.
“You don’t know women,” Patricia screams. “You fucking asshole.”
Can his wife be saying this? He studies her mouth. He tries to read her lips. A huge 0 is forming. Is it another vastly inappropriate anatomical reference? There’s a buzzing in his ears, not insects, but birds in cages. It’s the Hong Kong market, warehouses the size of airplane hangars, boxes and crates and bamboo cages of canaries and parakeets stacked to the ceiling, all a glistening sordid yellow as if they had swallowed torches.
A disciplined man does not drop to the floor like a wind-ripped maple leaf. First they decay, infected and jaundiced. They’re contagious, spread to the pines, and it becomes a forest of hepatitis.
“Call 911,” Mac instructs. “Now.” Each word is a stone, carried on his back across snowdrifts, and mortared with his blood. He isn’t talking but building pyramids, one enormously heavy boulder at a time.
Why isn’t this woman placing his head on her lap? Why isn’t she dialing the telephone and taking his pulse? Can’t she see he needs a blanket? Why is she turning away, walking past him and staring out the window?
“Mac, all those spelling tests and optional extra credit essays. All those book reports and book reviews and book revisions that always come at Thanksgiving. What did it get you, really?” She turns and stares at his face.
His wife is a stranger who purports to understand calligraphy and claims an affection for gardening. She’s entirely false. He’s observed her in the orchard and she rarely prunes a branch. She feels revulsion for the ground and her headaches are a too convenient camouflage. Patricia is a fraud with a collection of cripples and illiterates she captures and enslaves. She’s a pathological liar with a secret agenda, scrapbooks he’s forbidden to touch and dresser drawers that are locked. That’s where Rachel’s bracelets are. How has he come to this juncture with such a person?
Patricia is doing something with flames. Perhaps it’s a ritual of propitiation. She’s removing a paper from her pocket. It’s a document. She’s setting it on fire.
“The results of your echocardiogram,” she reveals. “Seems you have a bit of a valve problem.”
Patricia lights a cigarette with the flame that’s charring the paper. A vault problem? Her cigarette is infecting the air, making the individual molecules harder to gather and trap.
He realizes the sheriff wasn’t threatening him. It was a warning. “Sheriff Murphy.” Malcolm tries to sit up. He’s resting on his elbows. “Call. Now.”
“Sheriff Murphy? The Romeo of Wood’s End? You’re so Elizabethan,” Patricia muses, inhaling and exhaling streams of silvery smoke. “Let’s not even go there.”
She expels flames because she’s a dragon. She’s Zima, the river goddess who drowns children. She rides a camel with four humps and wields an acetylene torch.
“You’re MacBeth’s wife,” Malcolm McCarty realizes.
“You’re a pompous little prick,” Patricia laughs. “I’m Medea.”
Professor Malcolm McCarty is having auditory and visual hallucinations. It’s from the sickness pitching him to the floor that’s rocking like a vessel at sea. Of course, such diseases are inevitable. He’s simply the first to encounter this particular virus or spasm or whatever it is taking his breath absolutely.
Bob Lieberman knew something was coalescing in the electronic stew. A global patois rose from the verbal graffiti and smiley yellow faces. It’s savage. Flames come out of its mouth.
His arm is numb. He can’t he feel his hands. An enormous aviary is puncturing his jaw and exiting through his forehead. All the stone steps, temples and bronze bells, carved wooden bridges, rivers and orchids, blueberries and gazebos are losing their clarity and dissolving.
Professor Malcolm McCarty knows he has the right to define and name this phenomenon. But it’s virulent and accelerating. In the sky, an armada of zeppelins pass trailing banners announcing Feast of Old Men Feeding Demons, Night of the Burned Boy and Woman Lost at Sea. He watches them glide by. How will he assemble the data, derivation and trajectory? Jesus Christ. He will die first.
A GOOD DAY FOR SEPPUKU
Tommy Sutter rides his bike along Maple Ridge Road from Wood’s End to the college. It’s precisely twelve miles from his house on Lincoln Street to the campus and he’s ridden this road thousands of times
Sometimes he passes Professor McCarty and waves. Professor McCarty teaches at the College of Northern Pennsylvania and only wants to talk about bicycle construction, the intractable stupidity of his students and books. Has he read Catcher in the Rye yet? What about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? His wife, Patricia, comes out on the porch to announce that they’re retiring to Florida. Tommy nods and pedals on.
He has an affection for the campus. It’s an outpost where the forest is tamed and paved paths lead to known and predictable destinations. The four-story brick buildings rise at measured distances from one another, asserting order, the unquestionable triumph of the scientific method, and the value of geometry.
He enters through the main gate, where a twelve-foot-high marble statue of Galileo stands on a granite pedestal. An inscription detailing his life is engraved on a bronze plaque. Tommy’s memorized it, but he feels the act of reading it justifies his presence.
He watches football games — he’s seen Penn State, the Nittany Lions from Altoona, and the Pittsburgh Panthers. The college has an ice-skating rink, and a chess and science club. He’s a member of both. He enjoys the sense of other people, their accidental jostling and sudden random clusters, how strangers brush arms or legs, then suddenly splinter into distinct smaller tributaries. It’s like a chemical reaction.
Tommy Sutter’s boyhood is solitary. His father, Joshua Sutter, is the Wood’s End veterinarian. Everyone calls him Captain. There are constant emergencies. His father’s suitcase is packed and he can disappear in minutes. Cows cough with respiratory disease and yellow mucus leaks from their eyes. They have stillbirths, lesions on their teats, infections and parasites. Horses come down with influenza and tetanus, pulmonary hemorrhages, and colic. They get leg fractures, skin cancer and encephalitis. Sheep have bloat, meningitis, fungus and fevers.
The country folk bring Dr. Sutter deer and lamb meat, chickens, and bags of corn, tomatoes and carrots. They bake breads and blueberry pies. When they come to town, they stop by the clinic with baskets of eggs, jars of applesauce and milk in gallon jugs. It isn’t payment for services rendered, they’re all in debt, but token offerings acknowledging his father as intrinsic to Wood’s End. The clinic is part of the spine of the town — necessary as JJ’s General Store, the sheriff’s office, United Methodist, St. Stephens, and the post office.
His father gives the meat to Sheriff Murphy. His mother doesn’t want flowers and she refuses to make stews. She’s a vegetarian. The storeroom is litter
ed with Mason jars of decaying Irises, and Lavender and Mint are buried beneath the acrid smell of alcohol, Betadine, astringents and pipe and cigarette tobacco. Ivermectin for the horses is a subtle and insistent musty scent like apples in mud. Pink antibiotic leaks from gallon bottles and looks like bubblegum.
The clinic storeroom is off limits. His father smokes cigarettes in secret there and paces in circles. He keeps his files on the floor and can immediately locate what he needs. He’s memorized precisely where each case is — baskets of roses gone stiff, foul eggs and collapsed tomatoes form a perimeter along the back wall. There’s one oak cabinet and it is locked.
Then there’s an outbreak of bluetongue that could kill off half the sheep in the county and his father leaves for a week. Goats stop eating, get infested with worms and turn mean from arthritis. The fields are actually composed of wounds, abscesses, dysentery and viruses, foot rot, liver flukes and lesions.
His father picks up his doctor’s bag and dozens of keys sway between his fingers. They’re held by a large bronze disc. It’s the Governor General’s Gold Crescent Award. His father drilled a hole in it to accommodate all his keys. He has keys for the clinic and storeroom, the locked oak cabinet, the house and Buick, and numerous small silver and gold keys in odd shapes he doesn’t recognize. Tommy assumes they’re for camouflaged doors his father keeps hidden. The tiny keys are delicate and look designed to fit jewelry boxes and dollhouses. Or mailboxes in other counties.
Sometimes his father has to go to the horse farm outside Harrisburg. He’s signed a contract, after all. They have seventy thoroughbred racehorses and need him to examine a new arrival. Two horses are shivering. One is limping and off his feed. There is blood in the barn.
Sam Markowitz often telephones from Erie. He’s scheduled twelve surgeries in three days, and he’s desperate. He begs his father for help. Sam is seventy-nine. He has glaucoma and his hands tremble. Latex gloves give him hives, he wheezes and can’t breathe. Poor Sam can’t retire. His wife has cancer and Sam has to keep up their insurance. His father can’t refuse. Then he might drop by Cornell for an emergency conference on rabid red fox and rabid raccoons. A frat kid got bitten and the trustees funded a research grant six hours later.
“All frats are naturally rabid,” his father observes. “This kid’s a business major with a room temperature IQ. I wouldn’t give him a tetanus shot. Truth is, I wouldn’t give him a tourniquet.”
Joshua Sutter has a reputation as a man of fierce convictions. When he makes up his mind, it doesn’t change. Some consider him arrogant and stubborn. But it’s generally agreed that he’s smart in an uppity way, and he has steady hands.
His father is 6’5” but seems larger. He uses his whole body unapologetically when he speaks. He bends his knees, and his hips move side to side as if performing a two-step. He spreads his arms wide for emphasis and his limbs punctuate the air.
Joshua Sutter has a melodious voice and a deliberately slow delivery. His movements are calculated and languid. He wants to be certain you see him coming. His father rarely raises his voice. He’s committed to the discipline of modulation. He claims it’s part of being professional.
His father’s red hair is long, past his neck, and falls around his face in ropey tendrils like kelp. Tommy thinks his father’s hair is a distraction — like the red cape of a matador and the misdirection of magicians.
Joshua Sutter is given to overly nonchalant entrances and exits that conceal quiet flourishes. His father actually has a repertoire of sly moves. He’s sleek and subtle and travels inside shadows. His Buick is the color of winter. It has 300,000 miles on it, and a bumper sticker that says Make Love Not War.
His father is always getting in or out of the Buick, humming “Tambourine Man” and “The Times Are A-Changing” with a corncob pipe jammed between his teeth. His riverboat gambler’s hat seems to float on top of his red hair, perched like a large nesting bird. His hat is ivory and made from shantung straw. Its wide brim conceals his forehead and bends at an angle, permanently shading his brow and left eye. He has black, red and white hatbands. Sometimes he wears his red and or black, triple-rose brocade vest, and has an entire drawer just for his sleeve garters.
His curls tangle and swirl like ocean waves he doesn’t bother to brush. He carries his doctor’s bag and suitcase in one hand, and presses a bottle of scotch to his chest with the other. Keys dangle from his middle fingers and a hundred dollar bill is folded into a little square in his palm. When they shake hands, the money transfers to Tommy’s palm and adheres to his skin.
“Keep yourself in feed,” his father says. “Have a problem, call 911.”
Just before he drives away, with the engine already running, his father motions him closer. This is the conclusion of their ritual. His father reaches in his pocket and presents him with a silver dollar. “Buy a lottery ticket,” he advises. Then the car is gone.
Tommy believes his father can will himself into invisibility. He’s magical and his doctor’s bag and big brown leather suitcase are somehow suspicious. His father is a circus with rings of acrobats, clowns, strong men and limping horses smelling like rained-on apples. He’s the grand master. His suitcase must be filled with confetti, ready to burst in a storm of gold flecks, and silver sparkle fireworks that could escape and resound like ricocheting bullets. Then plumes of purple smoke would pour through the house and into Lincoln Street. He has miniature missiles in his suitcase, and milk snakes coil in his folded brocade vests and sleeve garters. His father invented the universe. Time didn’t exist until he devised watches and clocks.
Tommy thinks his father can pull rabbits and lambs from his special riverboat gambler’s hat. He can extract water buffalo, mammoths, and make golden eagles fly from his hands.
Tommy frequently examines the Buick. He’s disappointed when nothing is added or subtracted. He knows precisely what’s in the trunk — remnants of a tool kit, a parka, card decks, playing chips from the Flaming Arrow Indian Casino south of Altoona, a Frisbee, and two bottles of scotch. In the glove-box his father keeps chocolate bars, two cartons of Marlboro 100 cigarettes, and his expired driver’s license.
Tommy watched his father install a cassette player. But he didn’t buy anymore cassettes. He only plays three tapes —The Best of Bob Dylan, The Best of Frank Sinatra and The Best of Cream. On a recent reconnaissance, Tommy realized his father doesn’t have a single map in the car.
“Maps are for people who care where they’re going,” his father said, corncob pipe in his mouth, hat covering his forehead. Then he’s walking out to the gray Buick that’s so identical to the gray air, it’s camouflaged.
Tommy Sutter spends his boyhood in the vast green chambers of the forest that begins at the backyard gate. The forest is an inland sea with wind currents the texture of waves. He’s disguised and protected here. Trees are mysterious and practice their own forms of sorcery. They communicate with gestures revealing their intentions. They are agile mutes and natural mimes. Their language evolves seasonally. Branches sway suggestively to one side, offering a deer path he follows, zigzagging to the creek beneath stands of sepia and glazed young oaks.
He jumps the creek to ridges of brazen scarlet and vermillion maples. They’re a battalion of renegades. He calls that Revolution Hill. Low slopes are intricate displays of leaves turning cinnamon, cordovan and oxblood. They remind him of the leather and high- ceilinged rooms at the college. He names this path Library Road.
Some maples look dipped in wine, burgundy and sherry. A good chemist could take the separate elements of autumn and distill them. The first chemists were alchemists. A superior chemist could put them in a bottle and drink it. That’s the hazard of maples and the lure of clarets and grenadine.
Oaks are sturdier. Their strewn leaves resemble buckskin, pelts, leather patches and gourds. He could gather them, and devise clothing and weapons. Or he could graft them on for hands. Tommy is certain he could survive winter.
The forest is an engine, a wind-fueled
orchestra. Oaks are anchors and provide a steady rhythm. On the banks of 5 Eagle Creek, the maples are younger and subdued. When dry, their leaves rustle like tinny castanets. That’s Gypsy Ridge. The west-facing slopes go brown and brittle early. He can step on them for percussion. He calls this section Death Row.
He knows where he is and rarely encounters anyone. It’s his forest and he can orchestrate it.
Tommy was angry. The week began with a rare family discussion about his request to join Boy Scouts. He needed twelve dollars for dues and a uniform. His father said no.
Tommy offers to clean cages in the vet clinic. He’ll wash the storeroom floor.
Betadine and iodine leak from ten-gallon jars and fall in streaks like stalled creeks polluted with rust. Pink antibiotic drips thick like spit-out bubblegum. The floor is encrusted with what fell and lodged between the layers — pens and keys and business cards, cotton balls, swabs, gauze and coins are permanently laminated. Each year the county health department cites the clinic for multiple violations.
“That’s my Sargasso Sea,” his father said. “I like it as it is.”
Tommy rarely has a specific desire that he can articulate. He doesn’t want a Walkman, a Star Wars video or a guitar. But Boy Scouts is an urgent necessity. He must make fire from sticks and the movement of his wrists. He wants to learn Morse code and how to send smoke signals. For an astronomy badge, he’ll identify constellations and the Pleiades meteor shower in August when the troop camps out for a week at Hamilton Mountain.
Tommy doesn’t know how to say he longs for companionship. He can’t recognize his loneliness, how remote and distant he is, how stranded. He’s sympathetic to the moon, barren, pock-marked and futile. Rogue asteroids excite him. They’re fearless delinquents without rules. When satellites lose orbit, and are condemned to fall back to earth as incinerated pieces, he mourns their fiery extinction. He has no idea why.
A Good Day for Seppuku Page 19
