Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

  1 I used the casual unscabbarding move of retraction I had admired years before in practiced Polaroid owners, who with negligent ease pulled the thick, pre-SX-70 pane of film through rollers that crushed its chemical jellies into a facedown snapshot, and who then walked in little circles, looking at the sky, as they counted chimpanzees to themselves, finally hunching to peel back just the corner, and then more confidently the rest, of the wet, slick black-and-white image, leaving behind a stratiform baklava of trash, composed of the negative set into its baroque casement of multilayered paper, on the back of which you could often find interesting lichen-scapes of green and brown developer seeping through.

  2 Quite a pile by then: I saved them because I had always liked drawing on the shirt cardboards saved from my father’s shirts, although his cardboards had been white and glossy on one side and legal-sized, while mine were gray and smaller; also I had found that a shirt cardboard, curved into a trough, made a nice receptacle to hold under your chin as you trimmed your beard, something I had been doing more frequently since starting the job. (At that point, I had not yet rediscovered its usefulness as a dustpan.)

  1 The earliest point on this topological time-line, however, came when I was somewhere between three and five years old. I watched my mother select a T-shirt for my sister from a wooden folding structure made of thin dowels over which you draped clothes to dry. The T-shirt happened to have been washed inside out: my mother turned it upside down and reached into the torso of the shirt with one hand, as if fishing for something in a deep bag, and took hold of a sleeve; then she reached in with her other hand and took hold of the other sleeve. She raised her elbows, and the T-shirt began to fall around the two fixed sleeve-points; a last flip and it hung, no longer upside down, and no longer inside out, from her fingers. I felt my brain perform an analogous inversion, trying to take in the seeming impossibility and wonderful intelligence of what she had just done. I felt a pang of missed opportunity in not having invented the trick myself—up until then, I had been using pure trial and error to turn my T-shirts right side out: I would push a sleeve in through its hole and get nowhere; tentatively curl the bottom hem back; push the neck partway in and wait for the miracle;—only after several minutes did I get the shirt truly reversed, and it never happened in a way I could later remember. After watching my mother, I practiced her moves until I understood how they worked, repeating, “inside . . . out . . . inside . . . out,” as if it were stage patter. I found out, observing a baby-sitter, that other people knew the trick as well; and according to the baby-sitter my mother hadn’t taught it to her—rather, the sitter knew it because that was simply the way everyone turned things inside out, all over the city of Rochester. Soon I created a special order in the taxonomy of human dexterity to cover this kind of trick: it was better than being able to whistle, snap your fingers, stand on your head, use the overlapping fly of your underpants without strangling your miniature dick, crack an egg with one hand, or play the Batman theme on the piano, because the dexterity was based on a leap of mind that had understood the need for a set of seemingly incomprehensible preparations before a single transforming motion that, like the final flowering of the NBC peacock, disclosed your purpose. I retroactively upgraded shoe-tying into this category, and later included (1) holding a pillow with your chin over the open clean pillowcase, rather than trying to push a corner of the pillow into the retreating flaps of a horizontal pillowcase; (2) placing your coat on the floor, inserting both arms in both armholes, and flipping the coat over your head; (3) forming a simple knot (the base shoe-tying knot) in a string by crossing your arms like Mr. Clean, taking hold of the ends of the string, and uncrossing your arms; (4) pre-bunching the sock before you put it on, though as I have said, I eventually abandoned the practice.

  1 I reached the conclusion as I was driving home fast in the dark, on the highway that only a few days earlier had borne the garbage truck that had reminded me of the railroad spike and the white-background trick. I had been thinking that only after I had become a commuter had I noticed the way cigarette butts, flicked out narrowly opened windows by invisible commuters ahead of me, landed on the cold invisible road and cast out a small firework of tobacco sparks, and how the sight had the same effect on me as the last shot of a scene in Risky Business: a late-night Chicago subway train sends off a flare of sparks in the darkness, bringing to a close with a crisp high-hat cymbal “Kssh!” the lulling electronic rhythms of the soundtrack—except that these cigarette sparks were the farewell explosions of such intimate items, still warm from people’s lips and lungs, appearing just beyond your headlights and then washed out by them, as you passed the still wildly spinning and tumbling butt that was traveling at forty miles an hour to your sixty-five. This had reminded me of how I used to open the window on car trips when I was little and release an apple or pear core into the bolster of air and noise and watch it shrink away into the perspective of the road behind the car, still bouncing and spinning fast—suddenly changed from something I held in my hand to something not mine that would come to rest on a stretch of highway which had no particular distinguishing feature, a place between human places, as litter; and I was wondering whether the people who tossed their cigarette butts out in the darkness did it simply because they preferred this to stubbing the cigarette out in their ashtray, and because they enjoyed the burst of cold fresh air from the quarter-opened window as they flicked it away, or whether they knew what moments of sublimity they were creating for the nonsmokers behind them, and did it for us—had they noticed those same fireworks trailing other smokers’ cars? Did they, with the addict’s sentimentality and self-regard, associate this highspeed cremation and ash-scattering with the longer curve of their own life—“Hurled into the darkness in a blaze of glory,” etc.? I was turning these various thoughts, some of them new ones and some repeaters, around in my head, when the conclusion arrived.

  1 You can never be sure whether people have noticed this kind of evasion or not. I ran into Bob Leary at the copying machine several weeks after our near encounter—his department’s copier was being serviced—and perhaps in reaction to my cowardice in the lobby, I was booming and hearty and friendly with him, introducing myself and firing up a minute or so of conversation about the decreasing margins in the now mature copying-machine business, and the use of air suction as an element of the paper-feed mechanism that nobody could have foretold. This was all it took: from then on we were perfectly at ease with each other, smiling and nodding when we chanced to see each other in the hall or the men’s room—we even worked together briefly on a thirty-page cross-departmental requisition for a fleet of trucks. The ignominy of my having veered away from the escalator that day in order to escape an intersection with him never colored our years of chortliness.

  1 I could guess exactly what she was doing, and the knowledge pleased me. She was going through the copies she had made of her résumé, making sure that the copies that she would casually hand out at anyone’s request were not the bad ones with the “New Hapmshire” typo, although she wasn’t throwing out the “Hapmshire” résumés, but saving them for the interview after the one in this building, in case she didn’t have time to revisit a copy center between times, since the second job was one she probably didn’t want anyway. I nodded to her in a way that might have been interpreted as patronizing, but was meant to convey fellowship, since I had hung around lobbies with résumés that had typos, wearing a new suit, at one time myself.

  1 And escalators are safe: their safety the result (I now believe) of a brilliant decision to groove the surfaces of the stairway so that they mesh perfectly with the teeth of the metal comblike plates at the top and bottom, making it impossible for stray objects, such as coins or shoelace-ends, to get caught in the gap between the moving steps and the fixed floor. I gave no direct thought to the escalator’s grooves that afternoon, and indeed at that time I had indistinct notions as to their purpose—I thought they were there for traction, or possibly were purely decorat
ive; grooved to remind us of how beautiful grooved surfaces are as a class: the grooves on the underside of the blue whale that must render some hydrodynamic or thermal advantage; the grooves left by a rake in loose soil or by a harrow in a field; the single groove that a skater’s blade makes in the ice; the grooves in socks that allow them to stretch, and in corduroy, down which you can run your ballpoint pen; the grooves of records. During the period that I rode the escalators with untied shoelaces, I spent the winters speed-skating (an escalator step, incidentally, looks like a row of upturned skate blades) around and around an outdoor pond behind old Italian skaters with raisin faces and hooded sweatshirts who held their skate guards behind their backs and moved with long, slow unvarying strokes; and the summers I spent listening to records: twice a week or so, I rode the very short escalator to the second level of the Midtown Plaza Mall, and as the steps of the escalator pulled in their chins at the top, I would get a first shot, directly at eye level, of the stretch of floor that led past the boxlike theft detectors and into the carpeted region of Midtown Records. There, with let-your-fingers-do-the-walking motions, I would leaf through the albums: if there were multiple copies of the same album I got a primitive nickelodeon animation of the artist sitting still at the piano, looking pompous, under the ornate yellow Deutsche Grammophon title bar; often a slight vacuum between the shrink-wrap of one album and the next pulled the succeeding one a few degrees along before it fell back.

  Believing firmly in symmetry in those days, I tried to make comparisons between the grooves associated with these two seasonal activities, skating and record-playing. If explorers were lowered into a highly magnified groove left by a speed-skater’s blade, one of my own grooves in the ice of Cobb’s Hill Pond, for instance, now irrevocably melted, and stood in that immense tilted valley, our beards whitened with condensation, exhausted from the previous two hours of slow traversal, our packs laden with chunks which we had collected for later labwork and which, like small moraine stones that still retain the characteristic parallel scratches left as the weight of a glacier forced other stones slowly past them, might hold markings only my skate blade could have made, we would see dark gleams here and there, among the great crushed, laterally displaced plasticities resulting from the millennium of that single skate stroke, and near them fragile growths that demonstrated what the professors had always maintained—that ice was slippery because it momentarily melted under the pressure of the blade’s edge, then refroze when the blade was gone, mounding into brittle crystalline shrubbery that evaporated, even as we watched, into a whitish mist. Those dark gleams would prove, as we drew closer and bent to inspect them, to be small sheared pieces of metal—skate-blade wear.

  If you made a negative of that image of my skate blade’s gorge, you would arrive at the magnified record groove—a hushed black river valley of asphaltic ripples soft enough to be impressed with the treads of your Vibram soles: an image cast from a master mold that was the result of a stylus forced to plow through wax as it negotiated complex mechanical compromises between all the various conceptually independent oscillations that stereophony demanded of it; ripples so interfingered and confused that only after a day with surveying equipment, pacing off distances and making calculations (your feet sparking static with each step), are you able to spray-paint “Bass Clarinet” with some confidence in orange on an intermittent flume of vinyl, as workers in Scotchgard vests spray-paint the road to indicate utility lines beneath. Cobblestone-sized particles of airborne dust, unlucky spores with rinds like coconuts, and big obsidian chunks of cigarette smoke are lodged here and there in the oddly echoless surface, and once in a while, a precious boulder of diamond, shorn somehow from the stylus by this softer surface, shines out from the slope, where it has been pounded deep into the material by later playings, sworn at by the listener as if it too were common dust. That was needle wear.

  As in the later case of the frayed shoelace, what I wanted here was tribology: detailed knowledge of the interaction between the surfaces inflicting the wear and the surfaces receiving it. For skating: Were there certain kinds of skate strokes that were particularly to blame for the dulling of the skate blade? The sprinting start, the sideways stop? Was very cold ice, or ice with a surface already crosshatched with the engravings of many other blades, liable to dull my blades faster? Was there a way to infer total miles skated by the wear inflicted on the edge of a blade? And for records: Was it the impurities in the vinyl that wore down the needle, or was it the ripples of vinyl music itself, and if it was the music, could we find out what sorts of timbres and frequencies made for a longer-lived needle?

  Or was most of the wear to the stylus in practice incurred before it ever touched the record, by a human thumb? That was a possibility. If my sister had been playing one of our oldest family records, like My Fair Lady, which were allowed to rest on the carpet when not in use—were in fact visibly hairy—there would be a blue-gray fez of dust left on the stylus, made apparently of the same material that coats the filter-screen of the clothes dryer and the inner surface of gerbil nests, and this inanimate harvest was mine to whisk away. Great men from Hirsch-Houck Labs, echoed by the owner’s pamphlet that had come with the Shure cartridge, strongly advised you never to perform the whisking with your stereo system turned on, because you might cause “transients” that could overtax the powerful and obliging magnets within your speakers; but the risk had to be run, as far as I was concerned, because the act of removal was confirmed only when the growl of your own thumbprint, each groove sonically magnified, filled the room as you ever so gently drew it under the stylus—playing its unique contour-plowed furrows just as you would soon be playing the spiraled record of one unique studio session in the life of a pianist—and My Fair Lady’s fuzzball had fallen away, revealing the tiny point of contact itself, curiously blunt, shaped like the rubber mallet used to elicit a motor reflex from the knee, hanging insectivorally there in space, ready for a new Deutsche Grammophon. The album was still sealed; and here you experienced a further sort of groove before playing the actual record: the soundless and perfectly unresistant parting of the album’s plastic shrink-wrap as you pierced it with your thumbnail and drew it down the temporary groove (between what you knew to be, although this was not visible beforehand, two separate sides of cardboard), taking a moment to consider the unusual properties of this shrink-wrapping material, so strong and stretchable until locally breached, and then willing to continue the tear almost of its own accord, a characteristic nicely exploited by the designers of cigarette packs, who build into the cellophane a little colored tab that initiates the tear and a guide-band of thicker plastic that shepherds the effortless undoing around the top of the package. You withdrew the record without ever making contact with the musical surfaces, using a tripod grip: thumb at the edge, two fingers in the middle on the label. Though brand-new, the record would have attracted ambient dust in its passage through the air and onto the turntable; hence you used a record-cleaning system such as the one we had: a separate tonearm-like device that held a fan of superfine bristles to the record in front of a red cylindrical brush that caught any bulk debris. This cleaning arm rode the record slightly faster than the real tonearm, drawn ahead possibly by its multiple inner bristle-points of contact (a puzzle I never really solved), and thus it finished about five minutes before the music did on that side. The record-cleaning system was strongly reminiscent of the yellow street-sweeping machines that were introduced in my childhood, with sprayers in front that wetted approaching debris so that circular spinning brushes could hustle it inward from the curb, into a place of invisible turmoil where a huge bristled reverse-roller at the rear flung it up from the street into a receptacle built into the interior of the machine. If only the record-cleaning systems we used could have worked as well as those street-cleaning machines, which left behind a clean wet track, decorated with ringlets of scrub marks at the outside of the swath and straight sweepings in the middle, even when they swung out from the curb to avoid
parked cars and then veered back in to reengage, with obvious satisfaction, the baked mud and leaves and bleached litter of the curb. But no record-cleaning system really worked well; and supposedly the antistatic cleaning solution that you dribbled onto the cylindrical dust brush left an unctuous residue in the grooves, smoothing infinitesimal joys out of the sonic reproduction. Still, we used it; we wetted the brush with solution and laid it in place on the spinning record. And then, ignoring the turntable’s bothersome hydraulic cuing mechanism, which had you positioning the skittish tonearm high above the spot you wanted it to land on, you braced your hand against the base of the turntable (in a manner similar to my old way of stabilizing my hand against the sneaker’s upper while tying it) and used your thumb to exert a slight, trembly upward lift on the cartridge’s gull’s-wing finger-hook. Counterweights—brushed chrome disks on calibrated screw threads that could be turned precisely to the desired gram weight (and what controversy there was over what the proper weight should be!—some holding that a two-gram handicap would gradually ruin your records; but stern columnists in Stereo Review asserting on the other hand that an insufficient load would possibly allow the stylus to hydroplane over loud passages, or to take off like a skier running a mogul on surface irregularities, coming down injuriously hard on the passages that followed)—caused the tonearm to float upward at the slightest thumb-prompting, as if under the dustcover of this machine a special moon’s gravity prevailed. You held the cartridge over the smooth outer perimeter of the revolving record; warps made the surface rise and fall, often in a heartbeat rhythm—fwoom-hoom, fwoom-hoom—and onto this moving, pliant surface you finally allowed the stylus to establish gentle contact, so that it too now bobbed along with the waves of warpage, producing as it first landed a concussion like the setting down of a heavy trunk on the carpet, followed by an expanding sigh and at least one big pop that reinforced the feeling that you had now entered the microscopic spell of the technology, in which sounds were stored in a form so physically small that even an invisible particle within a thread-thin groove could resound like the crack of a circus whip, during which sigh you settled back on the carpet from your squatting position. And then the music began. After three minutes of intent listening, once the emotion of the microscopy had worn off and the piano had wandered into passages that were less good or less familiar than the opening, I would begin to read the record jacket, and then, later still, would myself wander into the kitchen to make a sandwich and read Stereo Review, returning twenty minutes later, near the end of side A, to listen to the technology finish: you rode the last grooves as if on a rickshaw through the crowded Eastern capital of the music, and then all at once, at dusk, you left the gates of the city and stepped into a waiting boat that pulled you swiftly out onto the black and purple waters of the lagoon, toward a flat island in the middle; rapidly and silently you curved over the placid expanse, drawing near the circular island (with its low druidic totem in the middle, possibly calendrical) but never debarking there; now the undertow bore you at a strange fluid speed back toward the teeming shore of the city—colors, perspiration, sleeplessness—and then again back out over the lagoon; the keel bumped first one shore, then the other, and though your vessel moved very fast it seemed to leave only a thin luminous seam in the black surface behind you to mark where the keel had cut. Finally my thumb lifted you up, and you passed high over the continent and disappeared beyond the edge of the flat world.