by John Barth
And there, reader, is the rub. Our man is no boy; would he ever imaginably have put his wife and our all-but-delivered family at risk; would Katherine ever imaginably have let herself and them be so put, not to mention initiating the adventure that so put them; would we be spinning out a book of some size thereabout, called The Tidewater Tales: A Novel—if this were merely one instance more of restless denies amusing themselves until the doctor comes? The storymaker Peter Sagamore is stuck: For seven several reasons, if not nine, the man literally does not know where he will go next, what do; and that state of affairs terrifies him, when he looks it in the eye. It frightens the bejesus out of K. S. Sherritt, too. What you’re reading, reader, is P’s and K’s story. But what husband and wife are living, and trying rather desperately just now without success to read ahead in, is not their story. It’s their life.
MORE ON THIS SUBJECT, BUT NOT FROM THE SAME SOURCE
A wave of remarkable despond breaks over us as we exit the narrows and head for the anchored ketch. We profoundly do not want to follow it back to Nopoint Point and the First Guest Cottage. Neither do we now want to proceed with our whimsical, yes, but nonetheless fairly desperate expedition. No need to speak further just here of the reasons; we don’t want to do anything that we can think of to do next. More than halfway to K IV, Peter Sagamore, who has been standing expressionless at the tiller, lets go of it with a grunt, sits down heavily on the cockpit seat, puts his head in his hands. Story rounds up by itself into the wind and luffs quietly. Alarmed by this extraordinary irresolution—unknown among Sherritts and by no means characteristic of Sagamores—Katherine nevertheless understands that for her to take the helm herself at this volatile moment (as she had done at a less volatile one ten years before, near this very spot) would be an entire error. But does going whither the wind listeth include drifting into a day beacon, or down upon Katydid IV, or right aground?
Here is a moment when, in stories, something happens because it must: Mere narrative pressure, dramaturgical suction—manifest in such expressions as Just then, or Suddenly, or Even as she looked desperately about her for some sign—calls The Next Thing into existence, and the narrative proceeds for good or ill. That is our art’s great lie (one of them), for in fact we and our little craft really can simply wash ashore or be ignominiously taken in tow by an uncomprehending Hank and Irma, who will come to realize with dismay that, under our apparently irresponsible larkishness, their able son-in-law was desperate almost to the point of literal catatonia; their never-before-nonplussed daughter so anxious on his, on our, account that she simply can do nothing about the situation and its maybe seven several causes.
As a child in the pre-television 1940s, on the family’s twice-a-month expeditions from Hoopers Island up to Cambridge, when he and his brother and sister were sometimes treated to a movie at Schine’s Arcade Theater, Peter Sagamore intuited that the hero of no matter how perilous a wartime shoot-’em-up was by the nature of fiction rendered perfectly safe, from death if not from injury, right up to the climax of the story at least: as safe as Styx-dipped Achilles in the first nine years of the Trojan War. Whereas in fact gray rainy nature can not only kill us, as she will eventually in any case, but kill us quite stupidly, meaninglessly, interrupting our story between any two of its words to smash us into hamburger with a jackknifed trailer-truck, or eat us leisurely alive with cancer apropos of nothing, or in any of her million ways derail our lives without foreshadow or significance. Perhaps this fact of life goes without saying; perhaps not. At age seven and eight, Peter Sagamore tried explaining it and its corollaries to his parents: how John Wayne, at the beginning of some film they had just seen together, might imaginably have flung himself parachuteless from a B-17 at 15,000 feet or under the wheels of an express train without fear of dying, since if he died there could have been no movie, and there was a movie. Said Fritz I spect you’re right. Nora felt the boy’s brow for fever. Twenty years later P mentioned it amused to Katherine Sherritt, who understood immediately what he meant but confessed to its never having occurred to her. Our conversation then was apropos a “story” in Peter’s notebook called “Apocalypse,” never submitted for publication and here printed for the first time, in its entirety:
APOCALYPSE
One drizzly Baltimore November forenoon, as from an upstairs workroom window of our little house I mused over the neighbors’ lawns—some raked clean, some still leaf-littered—and considered whether
For that, Peter had explained, is how—in the first-person narrative viewpoint from which each of us leads life—the world can end, whether at that whether “I” am felled by a coronary or thermonuclearly incinerated by an ICBM meant for Washington, D.C., but slightly diverted by a minuscule error in its inertial guidance system. The twin facts are (first) that we are on the one hand so lulled by ubiquitous narrative convention that we may indeed forget, reading a realistic story, that in it even the meaningless is meaningful, it having been put there by the author just to remind us that real life comprises much meaninglessness. When, in a story, nothing happens next, that is the thing that happens next: The nothing becomes a thing, which, we may be sure, the author will quickly cause to be followed by the next thing, a more conventionally dramatic thing, and on goes the story. Whereas (second) in fact, nothing is no thing, and our story does not at all necessarily go on, for the reason that our lives are not stories.
THE STORY OF OUR LIFE IS NOT OUR LIFE. IT IS OUR STORY.
And in our story, Katherine Shorter Sherritt Sagamore looks about us now in the most desperation she can recall having entertained since the day (much worse than this one, to be sure) Porter “Poonie” Baldwin, Jr., held a cocked and loaded pistol to the nape of her neck and, among other terrorizings, forced her rectum. The expression on her face so startles her mother, watching our non-progress through K IV’s binoculars, that Irma drops those dandy Fujinon precision opticals—fortunately they are sheathed in rubber, and the lanyard is around her neck—and grips the teak cockpit coaming, her own face drained. And, crazily, there bobs by Story’s drifting bow just then . . . a container—a Day-Glo orange canister, actually—which in fact, taking it maybe for a crab-pot buoy, Kate scarcely registers in her distress.
But look again: The thing’s free-floating, and it’s the shape and color of a popular brand of marine signal canister. Crab-pot buoys aren’t that. Look, she says to Peter, and dumbly points. Distress-flare canister. Wonder what’s in it.
He looks; looks dumbly back. USCG-approved Alert-and-Locate-signal canister, so what, we have one already. The house is on fire; the ship’s going down; who needs a distress-flare canister?
But the thing has done its narrative job, which was to be The Next Thing. Our low trance is broken. Says Kathy dully, but with resolve, Let’s go back up to Dun Cove and regroup, okay?
BACK TO DUN COVE, OKAY?
Back to Dun Cove, okay?
On her second saying, Peter Sagamore gives his head a vigorous shake. Yeah, sure: Dun Cove, regroup. On with the story.
By the way, says K, that canister there might really have something in it besides search-and-locate signals. Make a pass by and let’s see; then I’ll call Mom and Dad.
We do, the man of us still dazed by his unexpected sudden view over the edge of the known world. Be it understood, friends, that what has shaken and appalled him is not his having his nose rubbed in the unpredictability of his personal future: the reminder that while what he doubtless had in mind for himself, when he thought about it at all, was a fairly uninterrupted flow of professional inspirations large and small—fairly smoothly turned into paragraphs and public pages, fairly regularly enlarging his readership and repute into a fairly successful and honored elder age enriched by long and happy marriage—what fate might have in store for him is early poop-out, ever-dwindling reputation, perhaps untimely demise, perhaps disease, failed marriage, wretched parenthood, death of spouse or child, psychological ruin, derelict old age, not to mention explosion of worl
d. Who knew? Such dark night thoughts by day are not what had P momentarily there by the Adam’s apple; anyhow not purely and simply. It was rather the reminder of what so goes without saying that we are ever forgetful of it: that Nature is not naturally narrative; that whatever the nature of natural cause and effect, it is not except by accident dramatically meaningful. K. S. Sherritt might yet miscarry as before or give birth to monsters, or she might healthily deliver a brace or two of dear and robust babies: Dancer and Prancer, Cause and Effect, Pure and Simple. Peter Sagamore’s biography might turn out to follow any of the paths aforementioned—and all will be equally “meaningless,” inasmuch as in fact, so far as we can tell, we are not characters in a story.
Thanks be then for our story, in which we are! In which now we fish that Day-Glo canister out of Harris Creek with a crabnet; try to unscrew its top to see whether the thing’s full of old flares or seawater or what; find out we can’t. (It’s Kath who’s trying it; Pete’s still unfocused. She hands it to him; he wrenches the top loose in one motion and hands it back to her. Perpend this detail.) Now she finishes unscrewing the top, looks in, says Wow, and fishes forth a worn-out black beret—the emperor’s old clothes?—which she promptly pops onto her head, right dashing she looks in it, too, and . . . what has she here? A rubber-banded roll of ruled, three-ring loose-leaf binder paper sealed up in a transparent plastic food-storage bag, secured with a twist-tie? Hey, wow, she says: a real live message in a bottle, and tries to read through the Baggie what looks to her to be a pen-scrawled title page. EXEDUC, is it? EX-EDUCATION, is it? Some joker is polluting our birth-waters with cranky pedagogical tracts?
She puts the whole business aside (P’s still reviving; light rain resumes) and calls K IV to tell the folks we’re heading back to Dun Cove to regroup, recoup, reconsider. Canister or no canister, message or no message, that irresolute, open-ended, vertiginous minute is still what’s mainly upon our minds. Irm’s on the binocs while Hank’s on the radio: What’s going on? What was in that thing you fetched up? Did Katherine check that hat for lice before she put it on?
Peter now believes he understands, by the way, his early-morning dream; in any case, shaking his head hard again, he sees a sense to it, even a parable.
THE PARABLE OF THE PYTHON AND THE CHICKENS
It is true, we agree, that legend on Chip Sherritt’s T-shirt: Hedonists doubtless have more fun. What’s more, those chickens in that python cage in that reptile house of that Berlin Zoo in that dream of Peter Sagamore’s did well to go on chickening till their turn came, inasmuch as no amount of valor, organization, or ingenuity on their part could alter their particular fate. Pete in the busy whole cast of his mind, Kate in that still inner sanctum of her heart, agree with Robert Louis Stevenson that except for the ephemeral pleasures of sex and a few other satisfactions, the human facts of life and death and history are so dismaying that only some reflexive numbness or self-mesmerism keeps even the most favored of us from going screaming mad. A good morning’s work, a fine afternoon’s sailing, half an hour of love, a good dinner and a balmy evening’s anchorage divert us, and we may be grateful for such diversion, inasmuch as the python does not go away. It is the sea we sail upon, the warp and woof of ongoing history, the very ground beneath our feet. The wonder then is not that courage, magnanimity, altruism, mercy, and the rest are rare; it is that here in the reptile house they occur at all.
So we reflect, beating steadily up-creek while K chats with K IV. She acknowledges, without detail, that it was hairy out there, all right, and announces our intention to wait out the weather in snug Dun Cove, reading relaxing eating reconsidering. You’re sure you’re all right, asks anxious Irma, who will not soon forget what she saw in those binoculars. Says Katherine We’re all right. Maybe not all there, but all right. Tell Chip we found a gen-you-wine message in a bottle, but we haven’t read it yet.
Irma hopes it’s not more naughtiness; Andrew has heard enough naughtiness for a while. Well, they guess they’ll head on home; she hopes we’ll follow soon. Wait: Daddy wants to talk to Peter. Katherine sighs and declares she enjoyed the sport of sailing a whole lot more back when Story had no two-way radio. Henry Sherritt’s unamused voice says crisply Pete?
The age of word-processor technology is upon us, about to make writing, as Peter Sagamore and the author of our bottled manuscript have known it—the muscular cursive of pen on paper, connecting drawn letters into a literal flow of language—as quaint a handicraft as fletching or scrimshaw. Yet it still bemuses P.S. in 1980 to chat by wireless with a man he cannot see, in a bridge-tender’s station around the bend or aboard a boat growing smaller astern, not to mention on the moon. He takes the microphone: Here, Hank. Over.
But Henry Sherritt can’t think now just what it was he wanted to say. Katie’s all right?
We raise eyebrows, but have no heart for irony. Instead of saying I’ll ask her, P gently repeats our intention to make ourselves cozy till the weather improves and then do whatever seems appropriate to the situation, always keeping the homefolks posted. Just now we’re going to make late lunch and read a good book. He goes further—calculatedly, Katherine sees in his expression as his eyes check hers: Katydid is welcome to raft up with us for the afternoon. . . .
No, well, they guess they’ll head on home. We-all take care, now; over and out. Hold on: Chip wants to know did you read that message yet?
Katherine says It’s a longie. In a Baggie, which she’s looking at as she talks. Tell Chip there’s a genie inside in the shape of a longhand manuscript called SEX EDUCATION colon Play. And tell Mom that the colon is the punctuation mark, not the large intestine. Over and out, now, Dad; we’ve got stuff to do.
Asks everybody aboard both vessels It’s called what?
SEX EDUCATION: Play,
Katherine Sherritt Sagamore repeats, holding the bagged roll sideways in the gray light of the cabin. She has given it a turn to urge that title page into better view. Stage play? Foreplay? Recreation play? Don’t ask her. Over and out and let’s open this Baggie.
But extraordinary as they are, the contents of that canister are not our first concern. Kath keeps the beret on, but sets aside the roll of papers. Before we turn into Dun Cove we see Katydid IV make sail and stand upriver toward the Tred Avon; then here we are again, anchoring this time for variety’s sake where the two forks join, the cove to ourselves on a rainy cool Monday. A few short tacks put us where we want to be; while Katherine dries off below, Peter luffs up, goes forward, drops and sets the anchor, lowers and furls the dripping sails, and rigs a boom tent to help keep rain out of the cabin. Kate’s fixed lunch. We’ve food enough left to make shift for dinner, she announces; breakfast will be bread and coffee. After that, it’s retreat or reprovision.
Lightly but seriously we kiss across the dinette table upon which our Baggied water-message sits as centerpiece, flanked by paper plates of Portuguese sardines, sliced purple onion, halved cherry tomatoes, wedges of Gouda, celery sticks, stoned-wheat crackers, paper cups of apple juice. Peter adds his foul-weather gear to hers in Story’s wet-locker, washes his hands, sits on the opposite settee. His wife looks good in that beat-up old beret.
Well. Another T-shirt motto, maybe? THIS IS THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THE REST OF OUR STORY? Proposes Katherine Let’s don’t talk about it.
All right. Though it’s not our general way, at times there’s much to be said for saying nothing. It is cozy in the little rain, no? The cabin’s cool enough for jeans and sweatshirts. Peter’s plenty worried, but you can’t just go on being plenty worried. We munch lunch.
Aren’t we going to open it?
Says Peter I’ve read enough manuscripts this semester, but he picks the thing up, reads its title through the plastic, undoes the twist-tie, plops the roll onto the table. Who can’t wonder what SEX EDUCATION: Play might be and what it’s doing with an old beret in an orange jug at the confluence of Harris Creek and Knapps Narrows?
What I wonder, says Katherine Sherritt—re
membering how her husband had shortly before managed, with mere more muscle, the thousand-and-first thing in our history she’s tried to do herself and couldn’t, though she is no weakling—is not why God made men stronger than women in the first place, but why He goes on doing it when it’s no longer useful for survival of the species, if it ever was. That proves He’s male. Why couldn’t I get that canister open? Hey, don’t hog that water-message. Says Peter, dabbing at the sheaf of papers with his paper napkin, I’m not hogging; I’m blotting. That canister left a wet spot on the table. Kate complains You’re reading, too. It’s a playscript, P reports, adding that there is no God and that furthermore He didn’t do what K says He did, make men stronger than women; what He did was distribute physical strength between the genders on a scale best represented by staggered brackets, thus (he puts the manuscript back down in the wet to make staggered brackets with his thumbs and forefingers, thus—[]—and Katherine snatches the moment to snatch the top page; snatches two or three by mistake; hands back all but the first, which she presumes he has perused to his satisfaction; all it says is SEX EDUCATION: Play). You’re up near the top of that right-hand bracket. So you agree with Plato, Kate charges—echoing May Jump, who hates this particular passage in Book Five of the Republic because she fears it’s true—that while a great many women are superior to a great many men in a great many respects, on the whole men are superior to women. Says Peter That proposition is a minefield of equivocations into which only a fool would blunder. Hey: This really is some kind of a playscript. Read it first, if you want to; I’m in no hurry.
Read, read, bids Katherine. But don’t hog. And so for the next while, over lunch and after, as the universe continues its explosion and Earth spins upon its blood-greased axis through Monday, 16 June 1980, we read SEX EDUCATION: Play.
