The other roommate sheepishly admitted that he had seen a white man in glasses fire a semiautomatic out the window of a rusted blue Volvo without plates of any kind, which had gone straight down the street through several lights before vanishing into traffic. He also said that he himself had screamed, which may have accounted for the noise our friend heard.
The discussion metamorphosed into an argument, which in time would evolve into a web of grudges that would never be forgiven.
When our friend, a year later, left the city to return to our town, he told us that he had done so not out of concern for his safety, as many assumed, but because he was tired of not knowing what was going on.
Switch
One night, while our cat was curled up on my lap, placidly purring, I noticed that his collar was somewhat crooked, and in the process of righting it I happened to catch a glimpse of the identification tag that hung from it. The tag, a worn stamped-metal disc, told me that the cat’s name was Fluffy.
Our cat, however, was named Horace. Reading further, I discovered that the tag bore not our permanent address, but an address on our old street in a faraway town we had lived in temporarily.
I gave the matter some thought, and concluded that there were two possible explanations. One was that, while we were living in the faraway town, our cat’s collar was switched with another cat’s, perhaps as some kind of prank. The other was that we had accidentally gotten hold of someone else’s cat and abandoned our own.
Initially I dismissed the second possibility, as it had been five years since we lived in that town, and this cat had very much come to seem like ours, and the town we lived in permanently his rightful home. But as I reflected, I realized how very unlikely a prank the switching of collars was; and simultaneously I began to recall changes in our cat’s personality around the time of our move which, quite naturally, we assumed to be consequences of the move itself, but which now suddenly seemed like the consequences of his not being our cat.
On impulse, I got up and called the phone number printed on the tag. A woman answered. I asked her if she had lost a cat named Fluffy, and after a long pause she replied that yes, she had, many years ago, and did I have some information about him? I told her that I had found his collar, unconnected to any cat. Did she want me to send it to her? After a dramatic pause, the woman told me to go ahead and do so, and I did the next day. I also ordered, through a pet supply catalog, a new tag with the name Horace printed on it.
Though I no longer consider this to have been a cowardly act, I went through several weeks of self-doubt at the time. As for now, I can only hope that the original Horace was taken in by a kind family.
The Wristwatch
While walking, on a cool day in late spring, over a bridge spanning one of our town’s mountain gorges, I checked the time. At that moment, my watch band broke, and the watch tumbled from my grasp and out of sight.
Three weeks later, a pair of acquaintances invited us to go canoeing. We drove to their weekend cabin on the lake just north of town, where we shrugged on our life jackets and readied a pair of boats for launch. While paddling through calm water along the shore, I spotted something shining in the mud beneath the surface. Convinced it was my watch, I leaned over to grab it, nearly pitching my wife and myself into the lake. But my effort was successful, and I soon held the object, rusted and caked with silt, in my palm. It was a bottle cap.
That evening we all sat around a campfire, chatting and enjoying the fresh air. When the chill of night set in, I put on my sweatshirt and found the watch in the front pocket. It had fallen there, not into the creek.
Underlined Passages
While visiting a used bookstore, a man who had suffered a run of bad luck bought a paperbound work of philosophy, hoping that a new paradigm for looking at the world would help him turn his life around. He brought the book home and studied it carefully, underlining key passages with a ball-point pen. The new ideas were indeed helpful, and he grew happier in both his marriage and his work, rediscovering skills he had forgotten he possessed and generally changing his outlook for the better.
One evening, while gathering old items for a yard sale, he discovered in a dusty cardboard box a stack of books he had read years before, when he was a student. Among them was another copy of the very work of philosophy he had recently bought and that had changed his life. When he opened the older book, which he had no recollection of ever having read before, he realized that he had underlined exactly the same passages that he had in his new copy. It occurred to him that if he had absorbed these ideas in the past, and they eventually gave way to the miserable period that had preceded reading them the second time, then it was inevitable that he would enter another, similar, period of ill fortune and despair, and in fact at that moment he began to sink into a depression that would only widen and deepen in the months to come.
Eventually he and his wife grew apart and they filed for divorce. Over several wordless days they separated the possessions they had shared for so many years, and soon he moved into an apartment.
Shortly before the divorce was to be finalized, the man discovered that he had somehow retained both copies of the fateful book, and in the process of throwing them out noticed that the older copy bore his wife’s name on the inside front cover. He realized that the dusty box had not contained his books from college, but his wife’s, and that he could not recall reading the book the first time because, in fact, he hadn’t.
He quickly phoned his wife and they agreed to call off the divorce. They are now in counseling, working to understand their new circumstances.
The Mary
A job I had one spring could be reached easily on foot through parks and residential neighborhoods, and so, in the months I held the job, I saw the same scenery twice daily, and came to enjoy imagining the lives of the people whose houses I passed. One house gave me particular pleasure, as in its backyard stood a weather-beaten white statue of the Virgin Mary, balanced on top of a round red picnic table. I liked the slapdash presentation of the Mary, and fancied that the house’s inhabitants were pious in a rough-edged, practical way, unconcerned with the trappings of high-minded, pompous religiosity. In my mind, these were people of substance, not of fashion, which is how I liked to see myself in those days.
But this impression was shattered when summer came, and when passing the house I saw that the Mary had been replaced by a large canvas umbrella, and the table covered with empty beer cans and snack bags. In the same mental breath that I registered this change, I realized that there had been no Mary, only the furled umbrella whose folds, in my self-aggrandizing mental state, I had mistaken for the draped vestments of the Virgin. The house was not owned by a religious family, but more likely rented by a group of sloppy college students.
After this epiphany, my menial office job no longer seemed like the honest living I’d convinced myself it was, but a humiliating waste of time without any redeeming features. It was not long before I quit.
Intruder
When we came home, I sensed a difference in the house. A book I had been reading on the sofa now lay on the kitchen table. There was the smell of a candle lit, then blown out. A bottle of beer I’d finished drinking but left on the desk was now standing in the sink.
My instinct was that there had been an intruder. But I dismissed the possibility: we had not been gone long, and those items that had been upset were not the sort of things that would have interested an intruder. More likely, I had upset them myself and forgotten.
But in that case, there had been an intruder after all: the version of me that had done these things. Or perhaps the real intruder was the version of me that noticed the change. This made more sense, since the house as it was belonged to the version of me that had made it so, and the version of me that did not recognize it was a stranger.
The difference was that the intruder would take up permanent residence in the house, and its true owner would never return. Then it must be so, because I am still here.
Trick
A famous magician, best known for the television specials on which he caused boats, airliners and even entire buildings to vanish, was accused of the murder of one of his assistants, a beautiful young woman of twenty with whom he was said to have been having an affair. Many of us awaited the trial eagerly, for the young assistant was a local girl made good in show business, and her death a tragedy for us all. What was worse, she had been stabbed to death with a dagger and, in what appeared to be a horrible kind of magician’s joke, cut in half.
On the morning the trial was to start, our newspaper reported, the prisoner was led into the courtroom by armed guards and seated next to his counsel, a prominent defense attorney whose sharp tongue and encyclopedic knowledge of the law had earned him fame almost as great that of the celebrities and business leaders he defended. All in the gallery were surprised, however, when the magician’s attorney immediately raised an objection. The prisoner who had been brought into the courtroom was not, the attorney insisted, the magician. A closer examination revealed this to be true. Though this man looked something like the magician—the same neat beard, receding hairline and jutting brow—he was clearly someone else. There was considerable confusion while the bailiffs tried to find the accused and those in the courtroom attempted to learn who, if not the magician, this prisoner was. Further chaos erupted when it was announced that the accused could not be found, and that his proxy had not, until that very morning, been a prisoner at all. In fact, he had gone to bed at home the previous night and awakened in the magician’s prison cell.
After taking pains to prove his identity to the authorities, the man told his story. He had turned in just after his dinner, complaining of a sudden and irresistible exhaustion, and fell deeply asleep the moment he climbed into bed. Those gathered in the courtroom began to surmise that the magician had somehow had the man drugged, and then managed to switch places with him during the night.
It then occurred to the man that his wife was still at home, and might be in danger. Police arrived at their house to find the woman unharmed but unable to remember anything she had done for the past several days. The couple lived in the country nearly a hundred miles from the prison, without pets or children, and the nearest neighbors reported no unusual activity during the night. No further clues were discovered. After a few months reporters stopped bothering the couple. Our town, meanwhile, digested the bad news and got on with our lives.
No one has yet discovered how the magician was able to make the switch, but all agree that it seems to have been some sort of trick.
Crisis
A priest of our acquaintance occasionally suffers a crisis of faith, and at these times we often encounter him in a local bar. He sits on a stool watching himself in the mirror behind the bar, and drinks steadily until he has mastered his dilemma. Then he returns to the rectory and sleeps well into the next afternoon.
One recent evening he described his newest crisis: he was unsure of the true nature of sin, and how it related to his ultimate salvation or damnation. He explained that he had, in the past, broken one or more of the ten commandments, and in the wake of his transgression begged the Lord for forgiveness. For instance, he had of late taken the Lord’s name in vain upon smashing his thumb with a hammer, coveted an attractive young parishioner, and bought a lottery ticket, which he supposed was a kind of idolatry. After his penance, however, he wondered if the Lord really had forgiven him. If He had, then what was the point of the commandments? Surely they had no meaning if breaking them could be forgiven so easily. On the other hand, if he wasn’t forgiven, then his damnation was certain, and there was no good reason to follow them to the letter anyway.
He wondered, then, if this very soul-searching was a form of absolution, and if so, did his opportunistic awareness of that fact negate its effectiveness? And of course it was possible that this very awareness of the possible value of the soul-searching represented an honesty and integrity that the Lord might well appreciate. Which is to say that the ascetics and saints were either truly blessed, the only people who would get into heaven; or, they were trying much harder than they had to and consequently were fools.
It is worth noting that we have seen our friend the priest at the pulpit from time to time, and neither his message nor his delivery is in the least bit inspiring. However, when we see him at the bar, he is charming and thought-provoking, and in the wake of these encounters we always report guiltily to church.
Twilight
Employment is scarce in our town, and for a time, when I was young, I made ends meet by working as a clerk in a coffee shop.
During the summer, the town draws its share of tourists, particularly from France. We have something of a literary reputation, and some of the French are said to compare it to Paris’s famous Left Bank, where writers and artists lived and worked in the early part of the last century. One afternoon I was washing tables after the lunch rush when a small crowd of tourists walked in, glancing impatiently about and speaking quietly to one another in French. Soon one of them approached me and asked a surprising question in hesitant English: Where was twilight?
I told them that they were in luck, because sunsets in our town were particularly spectacular. I suggested they walk out to the inlet and go to the end of the pier there. Look west, I said, when the sun goes down behind the hills; the heavy summer air would intensify the light so that a marvelous palette of colors would be cast onto the bottoms of the clouds and reflected on the water below.
They listened politely to my description, then a man stepped forward and, in more convincing English than his companion, explained that his friend was looking for the toilet. Embarrassed, I pointed the way.
Later that evening, when my shift was over, I walked home along the lake and saw them out on the pier, watching the sun set. I stood watching them watch until it was dark.
Familiar Objects
There are things I see and seek out and touch so frequently that they take on an iconic degree of familiarity, such as my wristwatch and keys and wallet. I look for these items so often that I begin to see them even where they are not: my keys appear in a pile of broken windshield glass in the gutter; a gleaming quarter spied between the slats of a picnic table takes the shape of my wristwatch; my wallet can be found in a woodpile.
I see my watch and keys and wallet wherever I go, even in places I am visiting for the first time. I see them whether or not I am actually looking for them, even if I have them on my person. The part of my mind in charge of searching for them has searched so often that it has become a separate and independent entity, always alert and at work.
This part of my mind would love for my wallet, watch and keys to be everywhere at once—for duplicates of each to be spread across every surface and wedged into every crack and crevice—so that I could take note of them and be reassured at all times. But there is another part of my mind, the dominant part, that recoils at such a thought.
Because this latter part is dominant, I am sane. But should the former part gain the upper hand, I would become mad, believing that those familiar objects were always everywhere around me.
Fingers
A friend told me about a traumatic memory he has of his childhood. In the house where he grew up, and where his father still lives, there is a hole in the floor in the corner of the living room, drilled there to allow passage to the cellar of a steam pipe which was removed when the house was converted to electric heat. This hole allows a narrow view of the cellar below. My friend recalls hearing, at about age five, his father at work downstairs with a power saw. He peered down through the hole just in time to see his father slip on some poorly stacked boards and inadvertently slice off two fingers with the saw, the index and middle of the left hand. He remembers his father’s howl of pain and the spatter of blood on his workbench, and the subsequent arrival of an ambulance.
I have met my friend’s father, and he is indeed missing those fingers. He has a habit, when speaking, of rubbing the stumps
on his forehead.
When, in middle age, this friend shared his recollection with his father, the older man told him that he had lost the fingers in an industrial accident at the factory where he worked, and backed up this version of events with a yellowed clipping from the company newsletter, which described the incident and commented on his recovery and return to work. The father also pointed out that his workbench was not below the hole in the living-room floor and never had been, and that had such a thing happened he would not have called for an ambulance, but bound the wound and driven himself to the hospital. Furthermore, there could have been no poorly stacked boards in or around his work area, as he was unfailingly tidy and cautious with his tools. He suggested to my friend that maybe he was remembering the ambulance that brought his mother to the hospital, where she died of heart failure at an early age, and conflating it with the slaughter of some rabbits, which he, the father, had raised in cages in the cellar during the lean times of my friend’s childhood.
My friend eventually came to believe his father’s explanation, but he says that the memory of the severed fingers remains clear in his mind, and is all the more disturbing to him now that it appears to be false.
Plausible
I got up once in the middle of the night and went out to the street in my robe, where I saw giant yellow machines, bought by the city for the purpose of clearing wet leaves from the gutters, slowly trawling the curbs with their red lights flashing. Their engines made a throbbing noise, and if I closed my eyes I could imagine that they were tanks, occupying our town at the close of a long, hopeless war.
Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Page 3
