For some years, however, our friend struggled to complete his doctoral dissertation. His achievements were more than sufficient to serve as the basis for an excellent paper, but he wanted to crack a particularly knotty problem that had so far eluded his superiors, and thus make the dissertation worthy not only of his degree, but perhaps even of commercial publication and international recognition.
Then, one night, in a burst of inspiration, our friend solved the crucial problem. He jotted the solution down on a few scraps of paper, worked it out in detail on his laptop computer, then left his apartment at a dead sprint to wake his colleagues at the lab.
At this moment, however, his bad luck returned, and he was assaulted by armed thugs, who stole his computer and wallet and beat him unconscious. When he recovered from his injuries, he discovered that the weeks leading up to his inspiration had been erased from his memory by the trauma, never to be restored. Worse yet, his computer was never found, and the notes he had taken in the middle of the night made no sense to him whatsoever.
When he was released from the hospital, he returned to work, assuming that if he continued his research in the same vein that he remembered conducting it, he would again hit upon the big idea. But two years later, the solution still had not come to him. It seemed that it was not in the nature of epiphanies to be repeated. This realization so discouraged our friend that he gave up on his field entirely. Today he drives a taxi in a large Midwestern city, and keeps the cryptic notes taped to his dashboard, in the hope that their meaning will become clear again.
He is occasionally asked by his passengers about the notes. Upon hearing his story, most tell him that he shouldn’t have gone out alone after dark. Our friend takes a perverse pleasure, he tells us, in dropping these people off at an inconvenient place, such as over a steaming subway grate or directly in front of a street vendor.
Live Rock Nightly
Tired by a long country drive, we stopped at a roadside tavern for a drink and something to eat. The tavern filled the first floor of a two-story brick building, and in the parking lot stood an illuminated board which read APARTMENT AVAILABLE LIVE ROCK NIGHTLY.
While eating we engaged the bartender in conversation, and discovered that he was the owner of the establishment. Emboldened by the food and drink, we brought up the reader board, suggesting that he might rent his apartment more quickly were he to remove the reference to live rock music.
The owner nodded sadly, and confessed to us that his teenage daughter had lived in the apartment once, but some years ago had died in a drunk driving accident, the result of an evening spent in another bar a few miles down the road. The owner, his eyes brimming with tears, said that he blamed himself for the accident, as he had refused to serve his daughter in his own bar, where she had been employed illegally as a cocktail waitress. With her gone, he had had to hire a legitimate waitress, and as a result the tavern was no longer profitable and had begun to lose money. Renting the apartment would make his business solvent, but he still hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it out, and in fact did not want to face the task. At the same time, actively not renting the apartment was financially unjustifiable. The sign, he explained, was a compromise between his business and emotional needs. It had stood unchanged for two years, even though the band had broken up and live music was no longer played here. The owner admitted that the place was about to go up for sale.
Of course we were sorry to have asked. We left the owner a large tip, though once we were out on the road, driving with extreme care, the tip struck us as a tacky, even insulting, gesture, and made us feel even worse about our rude question.
Intact
Our elderly aunt, long ago widowed, has spent the past ten years touring the world as part of an old ladies’ travel club, despite a chronic social paralysis that prevents her from so much as taking the bus to the grocery store without a companion. When she returns from these distant places—which have included Thailand, Egypt, China and Brazil—and we ask her to describe her experiences, she always tells us, after some consideration, that she had a wonderful time and enjoyed the other ladies’ company. She offers no other details.
At a recent family gathering, conversation lingered on a grisly subject: the crash of a commercial airliner over the Atlantic Ocean, which resulted in complete destruction of the plane and the death of all its passengers. One of us commented that such a crash constitutes a double tragedy, as the passengers lose not only their lives but their identity, because they are blown to bits and scattered in the deep ocean.
All of us were surprised when our aunt spoke up. She said that this would never happen to her. Whenever she flies, she told us, she paints her fingernails and toenails the same unusual shade of purple, to aid salvage workers in the identification of her remains. In addition, she ties a length of heavy twine to one of her toes, then runs the other end up through her slacks and blouse to her hand, where she ties it to one of her fingers. This way, if she is blown apart, the top half of her body will be tethered to the lower half, and she can enjoy a decent Christian burial more or less intact.
The silence following this revelation went on for some seconds, as we all imagined the sight of our elderly aunt’s shattered corpse, held together with twine. This silence deepened when it occurred to us that she had herself imagined this very image, perhaps many times. Since then we have reinterpreted her reticence not as a symptom of some pitiable neurosis but as bold composure in the face of a morbid imagination.
Spell
A woman with whom I once worked raised two small children, whose curiosity and perceptiveness made private conversation in their presence difficult, if not impossible. Since she was rarely apart from them, she developed the habit of spelling out certain words, such as D-O-C-T-O-R or C-A-N-D-Y, to prevent them from becoming anxious or excited at inconvenient times. Eventually the children grew older and learned to spell, but my colleague continued her spelling habit, now employing it as an educational tool. She subjected the children to impromptu quizzes, asking them to point to the H-O-U-S-E or the S-T-O-P-S-I-G-N, and soon much of her speech around the children consisted of spelling.
Unfortunately, this habit spread to her speech at the office as well, and persisted long after her children had grown up and moved away. For some years she avoided any speech at all during the workday, or spoke slowly and carefully to prevent lapses. But the habit proved too strong for her, and today she spells with great frequency, presenting a new P-R-O-P-O-S-A-L or buying lunch for a C-L-I-E-N-T. The habit intensifies when she is under stress, and at these times she will occasionally grab a pen and paper and write out what she wishes to say. This compromise does seem to satisfy her urge to spell, and is easier for the listener to comprehend.
It is not unusual for her business associates to spell back at her, or even, after a long workday, to spell a word or two at home to their spouses, regardless of whether or not they have, or have ever had, children of their own.
The Mad Folder
I used to live in a large apartment building, where I had many friends, all of whom lived on the same floor as I did, and whom I’d met coming out of the elevator.
The building had twenty-two floors, but only eleven laundry rooms. This meant that those on an even floor, like me, had to share their laundry room with the people below them. But there were ample machines for everyone, and this posed no problem.
One night a neighbor of mine stopped me in the hall to tell me something. He said that about an hour before, he had moved his wet laundry to a dryer, then went out to get a bite to eat. When he came back, his dry laundry had been neatly folded and placed in his laundry basket. He was holding the basket when he told me this, and it was filled with the clean, folded laundry.
After this, many of us had a similar experience. A launderer would leave the building, or simply return to her room to watch TV, or, in one case, just pop next door to the video game room, and return to find her laundry carefully folded and stacked. This experience became a kind of jo
ke around the floor, and we began to speak of a “mad folder.” A few of the more listless among us would actually leave their laundry in the dryers on purpose, in the hope that the Mad Folder would get to it some time soon. But the Folder was unpredictable, and as often as not this labor-saving strategy was a failure. Our feeling was that the Mad Folder was a kind of random benevolence, and it was wrong to try to lure the Folder with neglected laundry. We began to think of the Folder as belonging to us, like a kind of patron saint, and we would do silly things like offer toasts or say prayers at our many cocktail parties.
One night I went into the laundry room with some dirty clothes and fell into a conversation with a woman from the floor below. While we talked, she removed some clothes from a washer and put them into a dryer. We continued talking, and at some point a distant dryer finished its cycle, and without missing a word of our discussion she crossed the room, removed the laundry and began to fold it.
I asked her if that was more of her own laundry she was folding, and she said that it wasn’t. She told me that she liked folding laundry, it calmed her and she enjoyed imagining strangers discovering their folded clothes. She said she did it all the time.
I invited her back to my apartment and one thing led to another. For several days we carried on, calling in sick to work and making love at all hours. Lying by my side in my bed one night, the Mad Folder told me that she was glad to have met me when she did, because she was not getting on so well with her roommate and in fact was planning on moving out of the building. Did I mind if she stayed with me for a few days? Since our affair had been nearly unceasing and was conducted exclusively at my place anyway, I agreed to her plan.
That was a mistake. I came back from work the next day to find all my clothes washed and folded and put away in my drawers. Furthermore, the bed was neatly made and my closet rearranged and organized. My books had been alphabetized and kitchen implements sorted and secreted in the cabinets; and the refrigerator, purged of its rotting food and scoured clean, looked almost completely empty.
I told the Mad Folder that it wasn’t working out, and after a terrible fight—I had, after all, promised to let her stay—she stormed out, never to be seen again.
When I told my friends what had happened, they refused to believe it. Then the folding stopped. At first, our relationships went on as they had before my affair: in fact, our socializing seemed to intensify, as if in compensation for our loss. But soon the Folder’s disappearance began to take its toll. In the hallway, conversations stopped abruptly when I appeared. The laundry room took on a new desolation, and people walked around in wrinkled clothes. Eventually I spied several floormates doing their laundry two floors away, in a foreign laundry room.
That ought to have been my cue to move away, but instead I haunted the laundry rooms each night for weeks, folding whatever dry laundry I found. This continued until a woman caught me folding her underwear, and I was informed that if I didn’t put it down immediately, she would call the super to beat me up.
Until I left the city for good, I did my wash at laundromats, a different one every week.
Sickness
A friend of ours lost a small child to a terrible disease. So awful was this illness, and so prolonged the child’s death, that his wife suffered a nervous breakdown and, since she and our friend had ample money for professional help, checked herself into a spa to recover. She asked our friend, however, to remain at their palatial home and eradicate all traces of the child’s existence. Such was the depth of her grief. When he had completed this task he was to contact her, and she would return. We spoke to him at the time and he seemed confident that he would finish quickly.
However, the job was not as simple as he had anticipated. He had no trouble dispatching baby toys and clothes, photographs and crayon drawings. He hired a cleaning service to rid the house of the child’s smell. But it quickly became evident that items less directly involved with the child nonetheless stirred up painful memories, and he had to dispose of these as well: his own clothes, upon which the child had spit up; their furniture, on which she had played and slept; the car that had ferried her to and from the hospital; the kitchen appliances, which they used to prepare her meals. It wasn’t long before our friend was having the floors removed and the lawn and shrubs torn up. We saw him very infrequently during this period. Though he was compelled by what obviously had become a kind of sickness, he always looked clean and neat, doggedly on his way somewhere related, no doubt, to his mission.
Just recently we noticed that a wrecking ball was at work knocking down our friend’s house, and bulldozers were chugging across the property, flattening the landscape. We have also heard from our friend’s wife. She checked out of the spa within a month and in time divorced our friend, for which we can’t blame her, given that she would likely have found herself on our friend’s list of things to eliminate. She has remarried and is planning on starting a new family.
Our letters and phone calls to our friend are not returned. Once we baby-sat for the doomed child, in the days before she grew ill, and it seems likely that we are regarded as too closely affiliated with her memory. This suits us well, however, as it seems possible that our friend, if given the opportunity, might kill us.
Unlikely
M., once our close friend, gradually became unbearable as her life’s disappointments led to bitterness, finger-pointing and crude gossip. We took our time returning her letters and phone calls, finally refusing to answer them at all, and eventually the letters and calls stopped entirely.
Then, just when we thought we would never again hear from her, she contacted us with the terrible news that she had been diagnosed with cancer, and was beginning treatment immediately. Horrified, we apologized for our past inattentiveness to her problems, promising to stay in close touch during her time of need. It seemed to us now that our complaints about her personality had been petty and perhaps even inaccurate; indeed, it was hard to remember exactly what we had found so unappealing about this friend, whose bravery in the face of death revealed her as a woman of strong, even extraordinary, character.
After a battle of several years, M. succeeded in defeating the cancer, and her doctors reported with pleased surprise that the disease was unlikely to recur. We sent her a large fruit basket in congratulation, accompanied by a letter expressing our gratitude for her years of loyal friendship.
However, our friend’s restored health did little to prevent further personal and professional failures, which amassed in much the way they had before she was sick, and she again resorted to monotonous grumbling, accusation and slander. Once again she became difficult to bear, and again we cut her off, more confident than ever in the rightness of our reaction, even going so far as to surmise that her illness may have been the result not of random misfortune or genetic error but of her own bad habits, such as smoking, overeating and indolence. When recently we learned through the grapevine that she had suffered a relapse and was not expected to survive, we were saddened, but remained convinced that such a thing was unlikely to happen to us.
Smoke
A house to the west of ours cannot be seen from our windows, as it stands in a shallow depression surrounded by tall trees. But it is possible to observe, on cold mornings, the woodsmoke that rises from the house and disperses in the air. Since my study faces west, I have a good view of the neighboring property, and for years, when I found it difficult to concentrate or needed to relax, I would gaze out the frosted window at the endlessly rising and vanishing white smoke.
One winter morning some years ago, while watching the smoke rise from the trees, I noticed an abrupt change in its quality. It turned blue and then black, varying in volume from a thin plume to a heavy cloud, and back again. I studied the shifting smoke for the better part of an hour before returning to my work.
It wasn’t until a week later that our neighbor was arrested for murder. She had used a shotgun to kill her abusive husband and—with the help of her two children, an ax and a saw
—chopped his body into pieces, then burned the pieces in the woodstove. The bone chips that remained were dropped down the outhouse pit. To my horror, the neighbor identified the morning I had been watching as the time of her crime. She is now in prison, and her children are under the care of foster parents and several psychologists.
New owners gutted the house, which sold for next to nothing, and furnished it with a fireplace where the woodstove, removed by police as evidence, once stood. White smoke has again appeared on the horizon. Consequently, I have installed a shade on my study window, which I pull down on cold mornings to obscure the sky. Only in summer do I raise the shade completely.
Flowers
We met an acquaintance on the street looking uncharacteristically glum. His face, usually animated and friendly, had become frozen into an attitude of misery, a condition all the more surprising because he had recently married a beautiful and intelligent woman, and had seemed deliriously happy in the immediate wake of the wedding.
Over drinks, our friend told us his tragic story. He had courted his wife with relentless abandon in the months after they met, and when it came time to ask her to marry him, he bought a gigantic bouquet, which he presented to her as he proposed. So eager was he to hear her accept his proposal, and so ardent was his love, that, without a moment of forethought, he promised to bring her flowers every single day they were married, should she say yes. Of course she accepted, and they were wed some months later.
Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Page 12
