In the end, the very nature of the tools in question seemed to force his hand. In a fit of despair over his indecision, he used the hammer to destroy his computer.
Since then, his hammer has not done him much additional good; his family is straining to make ends meet with the meager income provided by the woodworking trade, a trade for which he has little natural aptitude and the market for which, in our lively rural milieu, is glutted with skillful practitioners. But when asked if he regrets his decision, he replies that he does not. He stands by his hammer, which he holds up against the computer as a sturdier and more enduring, and thus, in his opinion, superior, technology.
Last Meal
Our many trips to a local diner have resulted in our acquaintance with its short-order cook, a man in his late thirties whose intensive self-training and obsessive attention to detail have resulted in an uncanny ability to make, from such rudiments as eggs, potatoes, meatloaf and cold cuts, rough-hewn delicacies of surprising originality and variety. So pleased does he seem while at work, and so satisfied with his creations, that we were once given to ask if he’d ever made a meal he didn’t like.
After some thought, he told us that he had once been employed as the head chef at a state prison, where one night he was asked to cook a last meal for a murderer who had been condemned to death. The murderer had requested a porterhouse steak, medium rare; french fries; a bowl of raspberry sherbet; and a glass of iced tea. As per state prison regulations, it was also required that he be served a green salad. The prisoner was to be executed at midnight and would be served dinner at 7:30 p.m., after the other inmates were through eating.
Though he had little sympathy for the murderer, the cook was opposed to capital punishment and decided to make the meal a special one. He chose an excellent cut of meat and prepared it with a thick, hearty mushroom gravy; he seasoned the fries lightly with paprika and garlic powder and made the sherbet by hand, with real fruit, in an ice-cream maker he brought from home. The iced tea he brewed several hours in the sun, using the finest first-flush Darjeeling he could find, and he garnished it with lemon and a sprig of mint. The salad contained no fewer than six fresh, flavorful greens.
Unfortunately, the meal was returned to the kitchen barely touched, the meat gone cold and tough, the sherbet melted and the fries congealed and pasty. The cook was devastated. It was bad enough, he told us, that he had made an unpalatable meal, but far worse that he had, in the process, ruined a condemned man’s final hours.
My wife and I immediately pointed out that the meal might well have been wonderful, but the man’s life was about to end, and he was likely too lost in thoughts of death to eat. The cook said that this was nice of us to suggest, but he knew the truth, and would regret that meal for the rest of his life.
Since then we have always, after eating at the diner, commented generously on the high quality of our food.
Too Well
A man we know, whose friends are few and not especially close, works as an inspector of industrial machinery, a job that involves much travel and which rarely brings him into contact with others. Among the tools of his trade is a voice-activated tape recorder, with which he records his comments and recommendations about the machinery he inspects. The tapes are transcribed by a secretary he rarely sees and the transcriptions returned to him for editing into a formal report.
One particularly hectic week, our acquaintance lost his tape recorder, along with the tape inside, which held his notes from a recent inspection. After several days of searching, he was forced to buy a new recorder and schedule another inspection of the same factory.
A few days before he was to reinspect the factory, he found his old recorder: it had fallen into the plastic cubbyhole on the driver’s-side door of his car, and been hidden there by a folded map. Relieved, he sent the tape to his secretary and canceled the new appointment.
Soon he received the transcription of the missing tape. His notes, as expected, were intact, but attached to them were several pages of gibberish, which after long consideration he identified as his own thoughts, the ones he’d had during the past week of silent drives to inspection sites. He realized that his tape recorder must have been turned on when he dropped it, and that its voice-activation mechanism had sprung into action each time he spoke in the car. Evidently he had been talking to himself, something he never knew he was doing. Still more surprising was the nature of his spoken thoughts: they were expressions of pure melancholy, of longing, of dread at the prospect of the empty, lonesome days before him. One entire page consisted of the phrase “I have no friends,” repeated over and over.
He has since made an effort to strengthen his friendships; indeed, it is this very effort that allowed us to hear his story, as he shared it with us over a dinner he made himself in his immaculate and empty house. Unfortunately, intimacy does not come naturally to our acquaintance, and the evening grew very uncomfortable after the telling of his story, and we went home far earlier than expected. Since then we have tried to think of a woman we could introduce him to, but so far have failed to come up with anyone who might like him. We did suggest that he call his secretary, who after all has heard his voice more than anyone else he knows. But he says that she knows him too well. About this he may be right.
The Expert
A café opened in our town which specialized in unusual gourmet coffees from estates throughout Central and South America, Africa, India and the Pacific Islands. The entrepreneurs who ran the café hired a grizzled adventurer and self-proclaimed coffee expert, whose job was to fly once a year to the oldest and most remote estates, and gather the coffees that would be offered at the café for the rest of the year. The expert was paid handsomely and reimbursed for his considerable expenses, but his work paid off: the café became one of the most popular and lucrative businesses in our town, and the entrepreneurs celebrated their success by reinvesting their profits in more treacherous and far-ranging coffee-research expeditions.
One morning several years into the café’s existence, an electrical fire claimed the rear half of the building it occupied. Though the seating area was unharmed, the storeroom was completely consumed, along with all the coffee the expert had just brought back from his journey to Kenya, Guatemala and the Oaxaca region of Mexico. For days, the rich smell of roasting coffee filled the air, and the remaining supply quickly dwindled to the edge of nothing.
The café had reached a crisis, and the entrepreneurs had to take drastic measures. They went out to the supermarket and bought several cases of its store-brand beans, then brought them back, ground them and served them to their regular customers.
The entrepreneurs were surprised to learn that, while the customers noticed the difference, they didn’t seem to care. After a few weeks, the owners fired the expert. They explained that while the contrast between the coffees was drastic, and they would miss the delicious blends from all over the world, they preferred to hang on to their money. From then on, they said, they would buy their coffee from the supermarket.
The expert, already known in our town long before the entrepreneurs arrived as a misanthropic crackpot, responded by burning the café entirely to the ground. He was captured with his matches and gas can at the supermarket, which he had planned to torch next.
From prison, he told reporters that the well-documented humiliations and privations of incarceration paled in comparison to jail coffee, which was very nearly the worst he had ever tasted.
The Uniform
In the early days of the Cold War, the United States government spent significant amounts of money testing the effects of nuclear explosions on buildings, roads, cars, trains, household items and, ultimately, living beings. Since no military personnel, of course, were willing to sacrifice their own lives in the tests, a substitute for soldiers had to be found, and the government soon settled on pigs for this purpose.
To make the tests as authentic as possible, Army scientists ordered that military uniforms be fitted to the pigs, and a local
company was contracted to do this. It happened that the company was owned by my future father-in-law, a retired Army officer who had fought in the war and had dedicated his civilian life to textile manufacture, the family business. The project was secret, and the uniforms were to be made in pieces by employees working alone. The pieces would be assembled by my father-in-law personally, and no one else was to see the finished product.
My father-in-law, however, found the completed uniforms to be quite sharp, and got the idea that one would look good on his beloved pet, a German shepherd named Ace. He particularly liked a certain detail of the uniforms—an embroidered name patch with the word PIG stitched onto it—because among Ace’s distinguishing characteristics was a tendency to eat messily and in haste. He ordered his employees to make enough material for a couple of extra uniforms, which he sewed together at home, tailoring them perfectly to Ace’s measurements. Whenever the two went out, Ace wore his Army uniform, and occasionally my father-in-law would pin a few of his own medals onto the dog’s chest, if the dog had been especially obedient or kind on that day.
It wasn’t long before an active officer from the base saw my father-in-law and Ace in a bar together, and when they returned home they found two military police awaiting them. The MPs confiscated the uniform and my father-in-law was reprimanded severely; in addition he was subjected to a harsh grilling and forced to provide a list of everyone in town who might have seen the uniform. From then on, whenever he was seen in town with Ace, the dog wore nothing but his collar.
Years later, when my wife’s parents moved closer to our area, my father-in-law brought the duplicate uniform with him. Since Ace’s death he has had several dogs, all German shepherds of Ace’s approximate size, all of whom he named Ace and who have all, on occasion, worn the forbidden uniform.
Recently he and the latest Ace met a retired Army officer who was once stationed at the base where the nuclear testing was to have taken place. My father-in-law boldly told him where the dog’s uniform had come from. To everyone’s surprise, the officer remembered my father-in-law, and told him that he had, in the old days, been regarded as a suspected spy. The officer further admitted that there had been a thick file at the base with his name on it.
Immediately my father-in-law set out to get a copy of this file, and after much wrangling and red tape, acquired it through the Freedom of Information Act. It contains dozens of black-and-white surveillance photos of him and Ace, a few of my wife’s mother and several of long-forgotten houseguests; there are also hundreds of pages of descriptions of their mundane domestic activities, and the addresses and telephone numbers of all their old friends. The file and uniform are my father-in-law’s favorite conversation pieces, and he proudly brings them out whenever he has visitors.
Master
Our friend recently left his job as system operator for a local Internet service provider. Since he was known as a computer expert, and loved his work, we were surprised to learn he had quit, and so one evening had him over for dinner to find out what had happened.
He told us this story: late one night he was awakened by an alarm he had rigged on his own computer, to alert him of problems with the ISP’s servers. His computer told him that the system was refusing subscribers, so he dressed and went in to the office to see what was the matter. There he discovered that the system had crashed. He worked all night and well into the next day to alleviate the problem, which proved to have originated with a software bug.
Exhausted from the hours of effort, he brought the system back on line, only to find that something terrible had happened: the e-mail that had been stored in subscribers’ accounts over the past twenty hours had somehow been erased. Retracing his steps, our friend found that the mistake this time had been his own; he had inadvertently cleared all stored mail when he reset the network.
Since he knew that customers depended heavily on their e-mail, he decided to send a message to all subscribers, alerting them that twenty hours of mail had been lost, and apologizing for the inconvenience. But when his employer caught wind of this plan, she stopped him. Mistakes like this happen, she reasoned; nobody would even notice, and those who did would resolve the problem on their own. Sending a message admitting the error would cause more harm than good.
Our friend was tired and upset, and wearily came around to his boss’s way of thinking. But that night, unable to sleep, he put together a search program that would, over the next week, examine—for certain key words and phrases indicating jealousy, anger, remorse, or accusation resulting from the loss of important messages—every e-mail that passed through the network. This was strictly illegal, but a negative result would put our friend’s mind at ease, and he figured nobody would ever know.
About that, he was correct. But the results of the search were far from negative. Dozens of e-correspondents, he discovered, had suffered catastrophic fallout from the lost messages, including the break-up of romances and friendships, the termination of jobs and, in one case, ill health resulting from missing medical advice. Mortified, our friend began an intensive campaign of reconciliation, sending anonymous flowers and gifts and apologizing profusely under assumed names. But it was all to no avail. The damage had been done and could not be reversed.
After dinner, our friend burst into tears. He told us that he had some money saved up, but jobs were at a premium in our area and he had little hope of holding out long enough to find one he was qualified for. We suggested that he apply for system operator jobs in other towns, but our friend ruefully refused. There should be no system operators, he said. What single mailman served so many thousands, or delivered in such volume? Such responsibility, he believed, should be shared by many, for any compassionate person would crack under its strain. He begged us to cancel our own Internet subscription and return to written correspondence and actual, as opposed to virtual, commerce. Our need would drive our system operator mad.
I am embarrassed to admit that our Internet and e-mail usage has not changed. We still see our friend, but he remains unemployed.
Money Isn’t Everything
Thanks to an investment that he described as purely unpremeditated, the result of an overheard conversation in a fast food restaurant, a man we knew struck it rich on the stock market, and then, years later, on the very eve of the market’s collapse, sold everything, an act he insisted was impulsive, and due to no particular knowledge on his part. Soon after making these fortuitous decisions, the now-rich man got married and moved into a beautiful new house. His life, by all accounts, was one of ease and satisfaction.
Rumors spread, however, that this happiness was short-lived. When we saw the man on the street, he explained. His wife had found another man, he told us. In addition, his dog had died, his favorite sports team had fallen upon hard times, and the political situation filled him with despair.
Wasn’t it true, we asked him, that the real cause of his unhappiness was that he felt trapped by his affluence, which he knew, deep down, that he didn’t really deserve?
Oh, no, he explained—if it weren’t for his wealth, he would probably be even more unhappy.
But didn’t he have to admit that, ultimately, his money had done nothing to enhance his life, and had created unrealistic expectations for his future happiness?
Not at all, he said—his money had greatly improved his lot, and he went to sleep every night thanking his lucky stars it had come his way.
Though we parted that day on excellent terms, we have not attempted to contact the man since. It would be difficult to socialize with someone too stubborn to admit that money isn’t everything.
5. Parents and Children
When my wife was pregnant with each of our children, I imagined clearly their future appearance and demeanor. It was young men that I imagined, but my wife gave birth to daughters. Today, when I see my grown daughters, I often have the strong but incorrect impression that I have someone I would like them to meet, and realize that it is the imaginary men I thought they might become to
whom I want to introduce them, and with whom I believe they would really hit it off.
Lost
When I was two, I wandered away. My mother was washing dishes in the kitchen and watching me through the window, and in the glare of the setting sun mistook a bucket upturned on a mound in the sandbox for my body, hunched over in concentration. When the telephone rang and the police said they had me, my mother laughed and told them I was home, playing in the sandbox. She had to go out into the yard herself before she would believe them.
No harm had come to me, and apparently I didn’t cry. But the pedestrian mall where the police found me was a dozen blocks from our house, and by my mother’s reckoning I could not have been gone more than ten minutes. I was able to walk, of course, but not so quickly nor with such purpose and determination. So how did I get there?
In the car on the way home, my mother asked me that very question, and I am said to have answered, Somebody. I would not elaborate and giggled when pressed. This does not sound like me, of course, but what do I know? My imagination, my sense of humor, my willingness to reveal myself: these things could not have been then exactly as they are today, and I have no reason to doubt my mother’s memory.
The point of this story used to be the mystery of my kidnapper. Now, however, I see it another way. Until I disappeared, my mother had either accompanied me at all times, or left me with my father, or a neighbor or babysitter, someone who could account for the time with me she’d missed; she could know what I’d done and seen and said, and where I’d been. But she could not know the make of the car I was conveyed in that day, nor the shape of the person who’d taken me, nor the names of the people who passed me and wondered whose child I was and what I was doing alone. My life had diverged completely from hers for the first time.
Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Page 7
