Kevin stared at him. He took a deep breath, let it out. “That may be part of the price you pay. I don’t like your plan, and I don’t like the way you’re keeping at it despite arguments against it that seem obvious to me. So, we’ll just have to see what happens. We have to do what we have to do, right?”
Taken aback, Alfredo didn’t answer. So used to getting his way, Kevin thought. So used to having everybody like him.
Alfredo shrugged. “I guess so,” he said morosely, and drained his glass.
Dear Claire:
… My living room is coming together, I have my armchair with its reading light, set next to the fireplace, with a bookstand set beside it, piled high with beautiful volumes of thought. Currently I have a stack of “California writers” there, as I struggle to understand this place I have moved to—to cut through the legends and stereotypes, and get to the locals’ view of things. Mary Austin, Jack London, Frank Norris, John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Ursula Le Guin, Cecelia Holland, some others … taken together, they express a vision that I am coming to admire more and more. Muir’s “athlete philosopher,” his “university of the wilderness,” these ideas infuse the whole tradition, and the result is a very vigorous, clear literature. The Greek ideal, yes, love of the land, healthy mind in healthy body—or, as Hank says, moderation in all things, including moderation of course! You can be sure I will remain moderate in my enthusiasm for the more physical aspects of this philosophy.…
… Yes, the political battle here is heating up; a brush fire in the canyons to the east of town burned several hundred acres, including one structure, the house of Tom Barnard. The fire was not natural—someone started it, accidentally or deliberately. Which? No one can say. But now Barnard is planning to sail off with my wonderful Nadezhda.
Then again, few are as Machiavellian as I. The police, for lack of other evidence, have declared it a fire started by accident—with the file marked for the arson squad, in the event other questionable cases like this occur. In other words the Scottish verdict. It’s the end of that, but I keep my suspicions.
Meanwhile the obvious parts of the battle continue apace. The mayor’s party has started to do what is necessary to get a town referendum on the issue. If they get the referendum on the ballot (likely), and win it, then all our legal maneuvering will have been in vain.
I try to remain sanguine about it all. And I have assuaged my grief in the loss of Nadezhda by associating more with Fierce Doris. Yes, yes, just as you say, growing admiration and all that. She is still as hard as her bones, but she is sharp; and around here a little waspishness is not a bad thing. I have entertained her by taking her to see some of my more arcane pursuits, and behaving like a fool while engaged in them. Always my strong suit when it comes to pleasing people, as you know.
Doris responded in kind by taking me to see her new lab. Yes, this is the way her mind works. This was high entertainment. She has gotten a new position with a firm much like Avending, “but ahead in just the areas I’m most interested in.” So, I said, her great sacrifice in quitting Avending was actually naked self-interest? Turned out that way, she said happily. Her new employer is a company called SSlabs, and they are developing an array of materials for room temperature superconducting and other remarkable uses, by making new alloys that are combinations of ceramics and metals—those metals known as the rare earths or lanthanides, I quote for your benefit as I know you will be interested. What do you call it when it is partly ceramic and partly metal? “Structured slurries”—and thus the company name. Exact elements and amounts in these slurries are, of course, closely guarded industrial secrets. Great portions of the lab were closed to me, and really all I got to see was Doris’s office and a storage room, where she keeps rejected materials for use in her sculpting. Seeing the raw material of her art made me understand better what she had told me about allowing the shapes of the original objects to suggest the finished sculptures; the work is a kind of collaboration between her and the collective scientific/industrial enterprise of which she is a part. The artist in her stimulated by what the scientist in her reveals. Results are wonderful. I will enclose a photo of the piece she gave me, so you can see what I mean.
… Romance here has gone badly awry for my friend Kevin, alas; his beloved Ramona has returned to her ex the mayor, leaving Kevin disconsolate. I have seldom seen such unhappiness. To tell you the truth I didn’t think he had it in him, and it was hard to watch—somewhat like watching a wounded dog that cannot comprehend its agony.
Because of my own experience with E in the last year in Chicago, I felt that I knew what he was going through, and although I am not good at this kind of thing, I determined to help cheer him up. Besides, if I didn’t, it seemed uncertain that my house would ever become habitable. Work on it has slowed to a remarkable degree.
So I decided to take him to the theater. Catharsis, you know. Yes, I was wrong—there is theater in Orange County—I discovered it some weeks ago. A last survivor down in Costa Mesa, a tiny group working out of an old garage. It only holds fifty or sixty people, but they keep it filled.
Kevin had never seen a play performed—they just aren’t interested here! But he had heard of it, and I explained more of the concept to him on our way there. I even got a car, so we could arrive in clothes unsoaked by sweat. He was impressed.
The little company was doing Macbeth, but only by doubling and even tripling the parts. Kevin had heard the name, but was unfamiliar with the story. He was also unfamiliar with the concept of doubling, so that in the first two acts he was considerably confused, and kept leaning over to ask me why the witch was now a soldier, etc. etc.
But the way he fell into it! Oh Claire, I wish you could have seen it. This is a society of talkers, and Kevin is one of them; he understood the talkiness of the Elizabethans perfectly, the verbal culture, the notion of the soliloquy, the rambling on—it was like listening to Hank or Gabriela, it was perfectly natural to him.
And yet he had no idea what might happen next! And the company—small in number, young, inexperienced, they nevertheless had that burning intensity you see in theater people—and the two principals, a bit older than the rest but not much, were really fine: Macbeth utterly sympathetic, his desire to be king somehow pure, idealistic—and Lady Macbeth just as ambitious, but harder, hard and hot. The two of them together, arguing over whether or not to murder Duncan—oh it crackled, there was a heat in their faces, in the room! You really could believe it was the first time they had ever made this decision.
And for Kevin it was. I glanced over at him from time to time, and I swear it was like looking at a dictionary of facial expressions. How many emotions can the human face reveal? It was a kind of test. Macbeth had taken us into his inner life, into his soul, and we were on his side (this achievement is necessary for the play to succeed, I believe) and Kevin was sitting there rooting for him, at least at first. But then to watch him, following his ambition down into brutality, madness, monstrosity—and always that same Macbeth, still there, suffering at the insane choices he was making, appalled at what he had become! Fear, triumph, laughter at the lewd porter, apprehension, wincing pain, disgust, pity, despair at the skyrocket futility of all ambition: you could read it all on Kevin’s face, twisting about into Greek masks, into Rodin shapes—the play had caught him, he watched it as if it were really happening. And the little company, locked in, absorbed, vibrant, burning with it—I tell you, I myself began to see it new! Thick shells of experience, expectation, and habit cracked, and near the end, when Macbeth stood looking down at Birnam Wood, wife dead, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, I sat in my chair shuddering as much as Kevin. Then Macduff killed him, but who could cheer? That was us, in him.
When the “house lights” came on Kevin slumped in his seat beside me, mouth open—pummeled, limp, drained. The two of us left the garage leaning against each other for support. People glanced at us curiously, half smiling.
On the drive home he said, My
… Lord. Are there more like that?
None quite like that.
Thank God, he said.
But several of Shakespeare’s plays are in the same class.
Are they all so sad?
The tragedies are very sad. The comedies are very funny. The problem plays are extremely problematic.
Whew, he said. I’ve never seen anything like that.
Ah, the power of theater. I blessed little South Coast Repertory in their little garage, and Kevin and I agreed we would go back again.
… I don’t know whether to tell you about this or not. It was very odd. I don’t know … how to think of it. The things that are happening to me!
One night I went out into the backyard, to pick some avocados. Suddenly I had an odd sensation, and as if compelled I looked back into the house. There under my lamps sat a couple, both reading newspapers, one on the couch, the other in my armchair. The woman had a Siamese cat in her lap.
I was startled—in fact, terrified. But then the man looked up, over his spectacles at the woman; and I felt a wave flow through me, a wave of something like calmness, or affection. It was so reassuring that all of a sudden I felt welcomed, somehow, and again as if impelled I went to the glass door to go inside, unafraid. But when I slid the door to the side, they were no longer visible.
I went in and felt the couch, and it was cold. But there was such a calmness in me! A kind of glow, an upwelling, as if I stood in an artesian well of kindness and love. I felt I was being welcomed to this house.…
Now I suppose I won’t send this letter. You will think I am losing my mind. Certainly I have considered it. Too much sun out here, California weirdness, etc. etc. No doubt it is true. A lot of things seem to be changing in me. I who spent a night with geese and coyotes, I who saw crows burst out of a tree— But I didn’t tell you about those things either. I’m not sure I could.
Still—and this is the important thing, yes?—I am happy. I am happy! You would know what an accomplishment that is. So if I have ghosts I welcome them, as they have welcomed me.
I suppose I can always cut this section and leave the rest.
10
For several nights running I barely slept, falling only into that shallow nap consciousness where part of the mind feels it is awake, while another part feels an hour passing between each thought. I would wake completely around three, feeling sick, unable to return even to the miserable half sleep. Toss and turn thinking, trying not to think, thinking.
At dawn I would get up and go to the canteen and drink coffee and try to write. All day I would sit there staring at the page, staring into the blank between my world and the world in my book. Until my hand would shake. Looking around me, looking at what my country was capable of when it was afraid. Seeing the headlines in the newspapers scattered around. Seeing my companions and the state they were in.
And one day I stood up with my notebooks and went outside, around the back of the canteen to the dumpsters. The book was in three thick spiral ring notebooks. I sat cross-legged on the concrete, and started ripping the pages away from the wire spiral, about ten at a time. I tore them up, first crossways, then lengthwise. When I had a little pile of paper I stood and threw the pieces into the dumpster. I did that until all the pages were gone. I tore the cardboard covers away from the spirals, and ripped them up too. The twisted wire spirals were the last things in.
No more utopia for me.
After that I returned to the canteen and sat just like before, feeling worse than ever. But there was no point in continuing, really there wasn’t. The time has passed when a utopia could do anybody any good, even me. Especially me. The discrepancy between it and reality was too much.
So I sat there drinking coffee and staring out the window. One of my dorm mates, he sleeps a couple beds down, came by with his lunch. Hey Barnyard, he said, where’s your book.
I threw it away.
Oh, no, he said, looking shocked. Hey, man. You can’t do that.
Yes I can.
Next day, same time, he came by with a ballpoint and a gray lab notebook. Something from the hospital no doubt.
Here, man, you start writing again. Deadly serious look on his face. You got to tell what happens here! If you don’t tell it, then who will? You got to, man. And he left the notebook and walked away.
So. I will not write that book. But here, now, I make these notes. To pass the time if nothing else. I observe: there is less desperation here than one would think. There is a refusal of despair. There is a state beyond panic. There is a courage that should shame the rest of us. There is a camp, an American internment camp, where every day people are taken to the hospital, where the others help them out, and carry on. There is a place where people on the edge of death make jokes, they help each other, they share what they have, they endure. In this hell they make their own “utopia.”
* * *
Life at sea suited Tom. Nadezhda and he had a tiny cabin to bump around in, a berth barely wide enough to fit the two of them. At night the rhythmic pitch over the groundswell translated to the roll and press of her body against him, so that she became an expression of the sea, an embrace of wind and wave. He had forgotten the simple pleasure of sharing a bed. At dawn, if she was still sleeping, he rose and went on deck. The raw morning light. There he was, on the wide ocean’s surface, where a few constants of light and color combined to create an infinity of blues. To sail on a blue salt world, ah, God, to think he had gone a lifetime without it, almost missed it! It made him laugh out loud.
* * *
At dawn he had the deck almost to himself. Those on watch were usually in the bridge, an enclosed glass-fronted compartment spanning the deck just before the mizzenmast. Once he came across a group that had stayed up all night, to see the green flash at sunrise.
The crew was about equally divided between men and women, and most of them were in their twenties. Their work, their play and their education all spilled into one another. Partying and romance kept them up late every night; they were the most high-spirited group of young people Tom had ever seen, and he could see why. Quite a life. The young women were especially rambunctious. That first rush into an independent life! All youth responds to it, but some are aware it wasn’t always like this, that even their parents didn’t have such opportunity. So these women cavorted like the dolphins that surfed in the bow wave during certain magic dusks and dawns, tall, dark, hair and eyebrows thick and intensely black. Tom watched them like Ingres in the baths, laughing at their sexiness. Perfect dark skin, rounded limbs, heavy breasts, wide hips, like women from the Kama Sutra who had stepped off the page and forgotten their purpose, become as free as dolphins.
* * *
Occasionally he went down to the ship’s communications room and called home. He talked to Kevin and learned of the latest developments there, and gave advice when he was asked. He also called Nylphonia and his other friends from time to time, and conferred with them about the search through Heartech’s records. There were tendrils of association between Heartech and the AAMT, but they were tenuous. “We’d probably have to bust AAMT to get Heartech, and that won’t be easy.”
“I know. But try.”
* * *
Thunderheads, slate below and blooming white above, showed how high the sky really was. A line of them lofted to the south like a stately row of galleons, and then the ship was underneath them. Ganesh rode waves like low hills, wind keening in the rigging. The sailors on watch wound the sails in on power reels, touching buttons on the bridge’s huge control board. The masts’ airfoil configurations shifted, metal parts squeaking together. Tom and Nadezhda sat in chairs behind and above the sailors, looking out the broad glass window. Their captain, Gurdial Behaguna, dropped by to look over the helmswoman’s shoulder at the compass readout. He nodded at them, left. “He’s pretty casual,” Tom said.
Nadezhda laughed. “This is a small blow, Tom. You should see it in the North Pacific.”
Tom watched spray explode away f
rom the bow, then come whipping back on the wind and crash to invisibility against their window. “That’s the return route, right? So I suppose I will.”
She smiled, reached for his hand.
* * *
Another day later Tom went aloft with the bosun, Sonam Singh, who had on a tool belt and was going to do some repairs on a tackle block at the starboard end of the main moonsail yard—that is to say, the sixth and highest sail up the mainmast, above the main course, the topsail, the topgallant, the royal, and the skysail. It was as high on the ship as you could get, some two hundred and forty feet above the deck; to Tom it felt like a million. He looked down at the little mouse-sized people scurrying around the model ship down there, and felt his hands clutch at the halyard. They were climbing the weather side, so that the wind would blow them into the halyards rather than away from them. The mast’s movement was a slow figure eight, with a couple of quick catches in it. Glancing behind he saw the broad V of the wake, its edges a startling white against the sea’s brilliant blue. Fractal arabesques swirled away from the ship’s sleek sides. The horizon was a long way away; the patch of world he could see was as round as a plate, and blue everywhere.
“Clip yourself onto this line,” Singh told him, pointing to a cable bolted at intervals to the underside of the slender moonsail yard. “Now put your feet on the footrope”—which looped three or four feet under the yard—“and follow me out. And if you would please grab these handles on top of the yard. One step at a time. Okay? Okay.”
Tom was in a harness like a rock-climber’s, which was clipped to the line under the yard. Even if his foot slipped and his arm gave away, he would still be there, hanging by his chest, swinging far above the deck, but it beat the alternative. “I can’t believe sailors used to climb out here without these,” he said, shuffling down the footrope.
Pacific Edge Page 28
