Philosophy Made Simple

by Robert Hellenga

  Rudy had to admit that Aristotle had a point. Would he be happy, he started to wonder, if he won the sweepstakes? He closed Philosophy Made Simple and retrieved the sweepstakes envelope from the flap and learned that he was in fact a “verified sweepstakes winner,” though it wasn’t clear just what he had won. He read through a lot of fine print. There were prizes in his category that ranged from two hundred fifty thousand dollars to one thousand dollars to “many thousands of substantially lesser cash prizes (as stated in the official sweepstakes rules).” He started to shove the brochure back into the seat pocket, but then his eye was caught by another stern notice: “Failure to claim prize will result in loss of your cash award. Company is not responsible for unclaimed cash awards.” There was no entry fee or purchase necessary for Rudy to claim his award, but in fact they wanted him to buy some perfume — real perfume, not cologne or toilet water. Perfume that might cost a hundred dollars in fine stores in New York and Paris, but which he could buy for only five dollars: Chanel No. 5, Climat, Rapture, Miss Balmain. The perfumes came in different-shaped bottles, but it was hard to tell how big they were. One resembled a tomb or cut-glass mausoleum; another was squat and round and dark, like a sea creature that had been flattened out. One had a stopper shaped like a bird. One was hard to figure out: it looked like a fried egg that had been folded in half, with a yolk that was much darker and yolkier-looking than the pale yellows of the other perfumes. The name Alexandra Dali was written in script on the white part of the egg. Was Alexandra Dali Salvador Dali’s wife? His daughter? His granddaughter? Rudy had no idea. But the egg looked like the sort of egg you might see in a Dali painting.

  You didn’t have to order any perfume to enter the sweepstakes or claim your prize, but they made it very difficult for you if you didn’t. You’d have to cut out your randomly generated number from one place and paste it on a three-by-five card, and then you’d have to cut out other bits of information from other parts of the official form and paste them on different parts of the card. And you’d have to cut out the “NO” paragraph from the lower left-hand corner of the Grand Prize Claim Document and affix it to the card too. There wasn’t enough room, and if you failed to arrange them in a certain way, you would be disqualified. You would also be disqualified if you used staples or cellophane tape. What the hell! Rudy stuck the ad in Helens briefcase. He’d deal with it later. But two hundred fifty thousand dollars. A quarter of a million dollars. What would he do with it? He wasn’t sure. He closed his eyes, tried to imagine. He could get close to the feeling he’d have right after he’d opened the letter telling him he’d won, how he’d hold himself together, not tell anyone but the dogs for a few days, just riding high, till he’d gotten used to the idea.

  When he was a boy he used to have daydreams like the one he was having on the plane — waking fantasies, about success, about love, about how women would want to be possessed by him, how everyone would be forced to acknowledge how extraordinary he was. But he’d thought that when he got older, when he’d grown up, he wouldn’t do that anymore. Now here he was, no better than a kid. It wouldn’t have occurred to him in a million years that his dad or his mom might have had thoughts like that. He could see his dad, standing in the door of the empty packing shed, looking out at the empty trees. Three years in a row they lost the entire peach crop, before the Depression, before Rudy’d gone up to Chicago to work for Becker. What had his dad been thinking?

  “Well,” he’d say, “looks like you and me can eat the whole crop.” And they’d wander up and down the rows, looking, and find maybe three or four peaches. But what was he thinking, imagining, dreaming? And his mom, her hands up to her elbows in soapy water, looking out the kitchen window. What was she looking at? The pump? The packing shed? Or something beyond? What was her heart’s desire?

  He put Philosophy Made Simple back in his briefcase and opened the letter from his nephew, Gary, in East Africa. Gary was the son of Rudy’s older brother, Alfred, who’d been killed in action in World War I when Rudy was only ten. It was a belated Christmas card. “Dear Uncle Rudy” Gary wrote,

  I meant to get this off in time for Christmas but didn’t get around to it. Everything is chaotic, and in fact I’ve been down with a parasite called giardia, found in the water here, so now 1 drink bottled water only, which is a nuisance.

  The country here is beautiful, the natives are friendly and speak French. Vivian and I spent six months learning Kikuyu at the Institute training school in Zurich, Switzerland, but its a difficult language and we’re still having trouble, and it’s very expensive here.

  The way things are going it seems to me the Lord Jesus Christ is coming very soon, in fact any minute. I fervently hope so. This is a very wicked world these days and I wonder at God’s patience with humanity.

  I hope you had a nice Christmas and will have a good year.

  Lovingly,

  Gary and Vivian

  There was some literature from Gary and Vivian’s employer, the Christian Bible Institute, an international organization dedicated to the task of translating the Bible into every single language in the world, including Kikuyu, and a request for support. He crumpled it up and then smoothed it out again so he could slip it in the flap with the airline magazine and the letter from Edgar Lee Masters.

  What kind of Christmas message was that? “The Lord Jesus Christ is coming very soon, in fact any minute”? What got into people? People will believe anything. But these beliefs weren’t like ordinary empirical knowledge. They couldn’t be treated in the same way, because they weren’t based on anything that could be examined or evaluated. But what about Plato? What about Aristotle? What about me?

  He didn’t give another thought to Gary’s letter till the next morning, when he woke up at three o’clock in the Starlight Motel on the border between Mission and McAllen. He had a hangover and couldn’t get back to sleep. He’d drunk too much Lone Star beer and eaten too much chili at a diner on Highway 83. His head and his stomach were both churning, like electric motors that were running at different speeds, pulling against each other, and there was a neon sign that made a loud buzzing noise as it blinked on and off, on and off, outside his window It made you realize why a lot of people preferred Howard Johnsons and Holiday Inns, where there were no surprises, no crumbling tiles in the bathrooms, no little boxes of roach powder in the closets. He lay there in the dark thinking, What am I doing here? What on earth am I doing here? It had seemed like a good idea back in Chicago, but it didn’t seem so hot right now. A man his age ought to be thinking about retiring, not raising avocados.

  He reached over and turned on the clock radio on the stand next to the bed. He turned the dial but didn’t get anything except a lot of static. There was lots of space between stations down in Texas. He finally picked up a talk show way down one end of the dial, on the right. He started back the other way and then reversed. There was an urgency in the slow Texas voice on the talk show that spoke to his condition. Something was wrong, really wrong:

  “What we’re telling people to do,” a woman’s voice was saying, when he found the station again, “is to stay home with their families, to read their Bibles, and to pray. That’s about all you can do at this point. Bob and I will be leaving the station at five a.m. to join our families. Until then, we’re here to take your calls.” She gave the number.

  “Should we go down to the basement?” the next caller wanted to know.

  “No, we think you should stay right in your living room. Going to the basements not what will save you.”

  Rudy switched on the lamp and sat up in bed. Another missile crisis, or worse — only this time it would be LBJ climbing into the ring with Brezhnev. He’d seen something about it in the McAllen Monitor that had been lying open in the diner:

  U Thant Predicts

  WWIII if US Doesn’t

  Leave Vietnam

  But he hadn’t read past the header. This could be it. My last night on earth. The missiles might be in the air already: Titans, Mi
nuteman Is, Soviet SS-8s. NASA headquarters in Houston would be a prime target. Mission Control. He thought he heard a siren, but it was only the buzzing of the neon sign. That’s when he thought of Gary’s letter again: “The Lord Jesus Christ is coming very soon, in fact any minute … I wonder at God’s patience with humanity” Could this be IT? Christ himself pushing the button, all she wrote, end of story?

  Rudy was wide awake. He had to go to the bathroom, but he wanted to listen. It took him a while to figure out what the folks at the station were worried about: not a nuclear attack but the Second Coming.

  Momentarily relieved, he slipped on the Italian silk robe that Helen had ordered for him from Marshall Field’s shortly before her death, sat down on the edge of the bed, and continued to listen. It turned out that a former computer scientist, while working as a janitor at NASA, had secretly programmed the big computer — the one that was keeping Gemini 9 on course — to determine scientifically the date of the Second Coming, which was going to be tomorrow, at sunset in Jerusalem. Ten seventeen a.m. Texas time. He went outside and got a bottle of Dr Pepper from the pop machine.

  Sitting at his kitchen table thumbing through the evening paper, Rudy would have laughed at this sort of stuff. But he was a thousand miles away from home and had three bowls of Texas chili from last night’s supper still sloshing around in his stomach — nothing but shredded meat and jalapeño peppers, no beans, no tomato sauce — along with three or four bottles of Lone Star beer, and he’d been brought up as a Methodist, even though he hadn’t been to church in twenty years, except for weddings and funerals and a few times after Helen’s death, so it was pretty upsetting.

  What was he supposed to do in the meantime? That’s what callers wanted to know. They wanted instructions. Practical advice. Just the idea of it was unnerving. People shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast such nonsense. Rudy was annoyed. But he didn’t turn off the radio. He listened to a string of commercials and then the Bob and Helen Show came back on the air. Helen, Rudy’s wife’s name.

  The next caller was a woman from Hidalgo named Marge, with a message for her husband: “Gene, please come home.” She was on the edge of tears. “I’m sorry. If you can hear me, come back.” Someone else wanted to know what Bible passages would be good to concentrate on. Helen suggested John 3:16-21, “For God so loved the world …” Bob voted for the parable of the vineyard, Matthew 21:28-41. And then a mother from Weslaco followed Marge’s lead by trying to reach her daughter, who’d run off with a Mexican farmworker: “Debbie, this is your mom. Your dad and I been prayin’ for you every minute of every day and every night. Won’t you please call us right away, before it’s too late. We love you so much.” Sobbing. There was a call from somewhere in Mexico. Bob and Helen spoke to the man in Spanish. Rudy knew enough Spanish to know that they were talking about betrayal and infidelity, and then the man started to sob too — masculine, Mexican sobbing that was different from anything Rudy’d ever heard, but easy enough to understand.

  He finished his Dr Pepper. The calls kept coming in — husbands and wives, moms and dads, children too, all reaching out with the same message — Come home, or if you’re too far away, call us before it’s too late. We want to talk to you once more before the end. We want to tell you we love you, we just want you to hear it one more time; we just want to hear your voice.

  Who were these people? What were they doing up at three thirty in the morning? Then it hit him. They were people just like him, listening to the radio because they couldn’t sleep, because they were lonely. Did they know something he didn’t know?

  He got to thinking: What if it was the world’s last night? What would he do? If he called the station, who would be listening? His daughters? They were all too far away; and they wouldn’t be listening anyway. Besides, if he wanted to call them, he’d call them at home. At least he could reach Meg and Molly at home. But what about Helen, his wife?

  It was a foolish impulse, but he yielded to it like a man yielding to a sudden and irresistible temptation. He picked up the phone, dialed 9 and the number of the station. It rang four times and then someone answered — not Helen or Bob but an operator who was taking the calls. There were three people ahead of him, she said, could he hang on? She took his name and put him on hold and he started to hear music, a song he hadn’t heard in years:

  Dee-eee-ee-e-eep river,

  my home lies o-o-ver Jor-do-uh-uhn.

  Dee-eee-ee-e-eep river, Looord,

  I want to cross over into campground.

  It was a song the mens chorus used to sing at the campground in Berrien Springs, where he’d gone with his mom and his aunt Martha every summer when he was a kid. He was thinking about the campground — the wooden cabins, unpainted and sagging, and the white porcelain chamber pots, and the men’s deep voices — when the operator told him he was about to go on the air, and then he was on the air and Bob was saying, “Hello? Rudy? Hello? Rudy, are you there?” And suddenly finding himself short of breath, he said, “I’ve got a message for my wife, Helen. Helen, this is Rudy If you can hear me, please call me, I’m at the Starlight Motel in Mission, Texas, the number is” — he had to look closely at the phone to get the number. “I love you,” he said. “Good-bye.”

  He hung up the phone immediately. He’d heard his own voice on the radio just a fraction of a second or so after he’d spoken the words, as if someone else in the room had been repeating the words right after him, and then Bob was thanking him and taking the next call.

  He tied the belt of his robe around his waist and went out for another Dr Pepper, something to clear the cobwebs from his throat. He lay down on the bed and nursed the soda as he listened to the calls that kept coming in. He could hear the phones ringing in the studio, and a couple of times, just as he was drifting off to sleep, he woke up with a start, thinking that the phone beside the bed was ringing, that someone was trying to reach him. But when he picked up the receiver, all he got was a dial tone. By the time Bob and Helen signed off and went home to wait for the Second Coming with their families, Rudy was fast asleep.

  Sunset in Jerusalem

  Creaky’s grove was halfway between Mission and Hidalgo, forty acres, twenty-nine and a half under cultivation. A man can raise a lot of avocados on twenty-nine and a half acres.

  Rudy picked up the real estate agent at an office at the edge of town and they followed a farm-to-market road south till they came to a fork. The agent, whose name was Barney, indicated the right fork, pointing with his whole arm, his hand held flat, vertical, as if he were giving himself directions. Barney, whose car was in the shop, was too big for the little two-door Chevy Nova Rudy’d rented at the airport. His stomach rubbed against the dash, so that he had to spread out his knees and cross his feet over each other, and his head kept banging against the roof. He filled the silence with plans for golf courses, hospitals, retirement communities, condominiums — all the things Rudy was trying to get away from. “Highway 83s the longest main street in the US,” Barney said. But what really bothered Rudy was that Barney seemed to have an instinctive understanding of what was driving Rudy himself: “It’s a great thing to live on the land,” Barney said. “There’s times of heartache and weariness, but there’s times of great satisfaction too. Be your own man, your own boss, live your own life. See the sun come up in the morning, when everything’s still. Listen to the birds. Go out into the grove at night, hear the trees grow, hear the fruit ripen. It’s like you’re part of nature, part of God’s great plan of things.” He spoke without turning toward Rudy, who was looking, in the rearview mirror, at the trail of dust they were leaving behind them.

  Rudy had in fact felt some of these things, but he hadn’t put them into words. The words made him uncomfortable. Made the whole thing seem sad and pathetic, like putting a panther in a dirty little cage. Pretty soon the poor thing gets dispirited and just lies there. Something like that had happened to Rudy. He was trying to recover the feeling that had led him to Texas in the first place, a feeling that
he could only compare to the migratory bird business of Christmas Eve — spreading your wings, as if you were a bird preparing to take off and leave the world behind. His old life began to call out to him, to present itself to his imagination in warm, rich colors. Harry Becker had always treated him right. He’d miss the South Water Market with its big awnings, the fruit and vegetables piled up on the sloping sidewalks, the hum of the rollers, the chuffing of the big semis, the clatter of dice in Neumann’s Market Bar. He’d miss his house too, the polished parquetry — scratched by the dogs but still beautiful — of the dining room floor, the porte cochere, the eyebrow windows, the balcony. And all the work he’d put into it: the new soil pipe, a downstairs bathroom, insulation, painting, the curved storm windows he’d framed himself for the bay window, and the bookcases he’d built in Helen’s study; the Purington paving bricks in the patio, which Helen called a terrazzo, the grape arbor. You’ll never escape, his old life seemed to say. You’re rooted in this house. It will shelter you and your children and your children’s children.Love and work, that’s what’s here —your history, your past is embedded here. This is where you belong.

  He was ready to turn around and head back when they came to a little trailer park — two rows of silver Airstreams, nestled together like cows in their stanchions.

  “Winter Texans,” Barney explained.

  The park was protected by an army of yard ornaments: concrete statues of the Virgin Mary and St. Francis, birdbaths, big round reflecting balls supported on little pillars, rear-view cutouts of women bending over to tend their gardens and of old guys in straw hats taking a leak, pink flamingos, deer, a grotto sparkling with bits of colored glass. Just beyond the trailer park Rudy saw an elephant — not a concrete one but a real one — standing in front of a small pole barn and painting at an easel.