Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

The ballroom/auditorium has a stage built out of indifferent material, the plywood of it peeking out from where the gray indoor/outdoor carpeting has worn away. A huge handmade calendar hangs in the middle of the stage, and the rest of the wall is decorated with clocks, watches, sundials, egg timers, hourglasses, and above that is a blue-and-white banner that says windsor day countdown to y2k! Facing the stage are a hundred or so folding chairs, nearly all of them occupied. Paul’s memories of school are of a world of women, but there are quite a few men with white or gray hair, men on their second families, determined, this time, not to miss events in the lives of their children. Right now a small boy with shoulder-length hair plays a guitar that is almost as large as he is and sings “Stairway to Heaven” in a plaintive, unstable voice.

  Paul takes an empty seat next to a woman named Joyce Drazen, here with her husband, Leonard Fahey, with whom she runs a mail-order business in antique maps and globes. Their daughter, Nina, is a junior, and Joyce has already tried to enlist Kate in the plan to help Nina get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, though help might not be the correct word, since Nina herself has said she would rather attend a nearby state university, where her best friend has already been accepted. Joyce, convinced that Nina’s talent as a writer will be her ticket to the college of her mother’s choice, and convinced as well that all Kate has to do is read Nina’s work and she will write a glowing letter of recommendation, has recently appeared without warning, bearing some of Nina’s schoolwork—an essay about the Dred Scott decision, another about penguins.

  Paul has his own relationship with Joyce and Leonard, dating back several years to when they hired him to repair a maple globe, thirty inches in diameter, made in Vietnam and consisting of over a thousand pieces. The oceans alone were made of nearly seven hundred wedges of wafer-thin wood, all fitted together in a jigsaw pattern, the continents a rainbow variety of bright colors, the lettering in gold, as were the longitude and latitude lines. Joyce and Leonard had bought the globe from a library in the Adirondacks, and it had arrived with a piece of France missing and severe cracks in Australia. Other dealers in wooden works of art and antiquities had told them that Paul Phillips was the man to see about putting the globe into saleable condition, and though there were some hard feelings when Paul completed the job in three months rather than the agreed-upon three weeks, his restoration was clearly impeccable. He had, in fact, done more work than the agreement called for, discovering that half of Alaska was made of mahogany rather than maple and replacing the discordant piece without ever mentioning it to Joyce or Leonard.

  Now they want a screened porch, they want to replace their windows, they want to rescue an old barn at the back of their property, which is slowly collapsing in a long, splintery sigh of defeat, but so far Paul has not been able to schedule them in. Joyce makes a comic frown and wags her finger at him as he takes the seat next to her.

  Normally, Paul reacts to her jokey scolding with a smiling sheepishness, but today he feels an impulse to grab her finger and tell her—tell them both—that if they ever want him to work on their house again they had best back off and wait their turn, and this sudden sour spurt of temper is so unexpected and yet so stark and clear that he feels bewildered. It is like catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror you didn’t know was there.

  “Our junior class is full of amazingly talented young men and women,” Sam Robbins, the eleventh-grade English teacher, says. He has a cap of gray curls, a cardigan and bow tie, and, judging by the cheers that greet his appearance onstage, he’s a great favorite among the students. “We have a magician and juggler in our midst, some fantastic musicians, visual artists who I predict will be showing in the great museums of the world within ten years, and some amazing writers. One of our writers—Nina Drazen-Fahey—is going to read a poem. She tells me it’s about what will happen in our world when our computers all have nervous breakdowns. On a personal note, I’d like to add that if the computers break down it will be all right with me. As Picasso once said, ‘Computers are completely uninteresting—all they can do is give answers.’”

  Robbins raises his chin, as if to stem a surge of outrage, but there is only a bit of laughter, and a general shifting of weight and shuffling of papers. “Well, as I said, this is just my minority opinion. And so let’s bring up Nina, okay? Nina?”

  Joyce and Leonard’s sturdy-looking daughter mounts the steps to the stage with the dignity of a martyr, accompanied by only a light sprinkling of applause. Her parents beam proudly, though their love seems to include some apprehensiveness, as if they fear Nina’s life will not be easy. Joyce applauds emphatically, while Leonard, who is holding a video camera to his eye now, must content himself with clapping his left hand against his thigh.

  Paul looks at his hands resting in his lap, and then covers them with his jacket, as if they were shameful things.

  Nina takes a few moments to adjust the microphone to a comfortable height, and gently clears her throat and begins, holding the page upon which her poem is written down at her side. Her voice is unexpectedly forceful.

  Hey, hey Y2K

  How many lives have you ruined today?

  Town and village, crossroads and junction

  All laid low by computer malfunction

  IBM and Gateway

  Apple and Dell

  All flashing and crashing

  A cyberspace hell

  Who would have guessed it?

  Who would have known?

  My knees are knocking

  My mind is blown.

  Leonard extends his free hand in Joyce’s direction and she rubs her palm over his, in a silent celebration of their daughter.

  If you’re thinking of flying

  I beg you: hesitate

  Without computers

  How will your plane navigate?

  If you’re thinking of money

  Well I don’t want to cause you stress

  But since the banks will be broken

  I recommend a good mattress.

  As the poem trots toward its conclusion, Paul finds something in it oddly soothing, and he sinks into a waking dream of universal anarchy, a world of chaos, not only ungoverned by God but immune to the entreaties of humankind as well, swept over by an all-destroying mania brought on by every computer’s being abandoned by its internal clock and therefore sinking into a lobotomized state, unable to monitor the worldwide transit of money, the takeoffs and landings of jets, the traffic of the shipping lanes, the flow of electricity, the phones, the schools, the mail, the hospitals, that final zero in the year 2000 exploding in civilization’s brain, a ruptured blood vessel of data that brings us to our knees.

  Last night, Paul had walked through the front room, where Kate was watching TV, and they listened to a senator from Utah going on about what was going to happen to all of us when the twentieth century’s end crippled our computers. The senator was in a gray suit, a red tie, oval glasses, he had an ingratiating but invincible smile. Even as he delivered his apocalyptic message, the smile endured—he probably meant it to be reassuring, but it was unnerving.

  The senator placed his hands on his radiant desk. “When people say to me, ‘Is the world going to come to an end?’ I say, ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t know whether this will be a bump in the road—that’s the most optimistic assessment of what we’ve got, a fairly serious bump in the road—or whether this will, in fact, trigger a major worldwide recession with absolutely devastating economic consequences in some parts of the world…We must coldly, calculatingly divide up the next weeks to determine what we can do, what we can’t do, do what we can, and then provide for contingency plans for that which we cannot.”

  “What the fuck?” Kate had said. “For the first time in my life I’m making money and now the monetary system has to collapse? Where’s the justice in that?”

  Yet now Paul sees a glimmer of hope in the impending chaos of Y2K, a rough, approximate justice in, of all things, his escape from justice. If this impending doomsday for a
ccountants is real, or even half-real, so much will be lost, so much data will disappear, it will be like the world will have to start from scratch, a universal amnesty.

  In the meanwhile, Ruby and four children from her third-grade class have mounted the stage. All of them are wearing black pants and black T-shirts, except for Ruby, who must have forgotten about the agreed-upon costume and is wearing blue jeans and a red-and-tan cowgirl shirt, though it’s conceivable she simply saw herself as the lead singer in this quintet with the others in black taking on the doo-wop duties.

  The third-graders are singing the old Cyndi Lauper song “Time After Time.” An unseen piano is accompanying them and the five children seem ardent and uncertain. Ruby is the largest of them, and a full head taller than the child next to her, a wiry little red-haired boy with bony arms and a freckle-splattered face. Ruby seems to be in her own world. She is looking off to the side, possibly for help.

  Has she practiced this song? Does she know the words to it? When the children sing, “Sometimes you picture me/I’m walking too far ahead,” Ruby touches her head, unconsciously. She appears lost and not completely functional, and though, as the tallest of the quintet, she has been placed in the center, the other children have subtly moved away from her and re-formed as a quartet, with Ruby vaguely behind them, where she now looks out at the audience, wide-eyed and alarmed, as if she has just awakened from a dream.

  Paul feels nauseated on Ruby’s behalf. Normally, Paul thinks she is extraordinarily fortunate to have Kate as her mother, lucky for the safety of a home where the next month’s mortgage is not an issue, lucky for the humor, lucky to be taught through example that women can achieve extraordinary success. His own sister, Annabelle, had no such luck, being raised by their depressive mother, with raccoon circles around her eyes and the smell of medicine on her breath. “She was my role model,” Annabelle has said. “Everything I know about pajamas I learned from Mom.”

  Similarly, what great life lessons could Paul have learned from his father? The choreography of running away from a family? The egomaniacal stubbornness of giving your life to painting when the paintings themselves could barely be given away? The wisdom of keeping your door unlocked so as to not make it overly difficult for someone—preferably someone young and impressionable—to find your body?

  No, Ruby was a lucky child, lucky to be healthy, lucky to be loved—yet now, making clownish, outsized gestures one moment and slipping into a catatonic stillness the next, she looked neither healthy nor loved, and she seemed to have no idea of how she was appearing to others.

  But how can we ever see ourselves, let alone see ourselves as others see us, when the person seeing is the same as the person seen? And when our senses are clouded by wishes and fears and preexisting images, what chance do we have to glimpse ourselves as others see us?

  Joyce nudges Leonard, rather emphatically, and he lifts his camcorder again, capturing Ruby and her classmates as they trudge through the song. Ruby is fading further back—what has happened to that poor girl?—her face all but obscured by the suddenly raised arms of her classmates as they sway back and forth in a ticktock motion and chant “time after time” over and over. Paul feels a lurch of pure, pulverizing terror.

  When the millennium assembly is over, a platoon of older students efficiently moves the chairs to one side and the old Norris ballroom is the reception area for the parents and children who mill around, drinking punch out of paper cups and eating pastries off of paper plates. It takes Paul a while to wind his way through the crowd and find Ruby, and when he does, she is sitting on the three-step staircase leading to the stage, along with a small, angry-looking boy in a White Zombie T-shirt and gelled blue hair.

  She looks at Paul as if surprised to see him here. There is no theatrical widening of the eyes. All expression leaves her small, smooth face, and what remains is the plain prettiness of a powerless little girl. “Were you here?” she asks.

  “Sure. I was sitting in the back row.” He points, but there are no more rows, just adults and children in a milling mass, with the flash of strobe lights going off steadily—all those wonderful children and jolly parents and everyone happier than they are.

  “I gotta go,” the blue-haired boy says, Ruby’s partner in misfit-ness. She doesn’t say anything back to him and doesn’t even glance in his direction as he heads aimlessly into the center of the room, craning his neck as if on the lookout for someone.

  “I’ve always liked that song,” Paul says. “Cyndi Lauper, right?”

  Ruby shrugs. Her face is blotchy and her eyes sparkle; she looks as if she has been slapped. Paul has never tried to be a father to her—he would rather assume an avuncular role. But even an uncle needs to be a protector, and in the months in which he has lived in the same house with Ruby, driven her here and there, shared meals with her, read to her at night, he has never seen her look so meek, so crushed. The brash, blaring little girl, so brimming with personality, so full of drama and poses, may have tried his patience now and then, but this tender, wounded, undefended girl is almost more than he can bear.

  “Did you have lunch yet?”

  “Sort of,” she says.

  “I’m pretty hungry,” Paul says. “Why don’t we go and have a big Y2K lunch at the George Washington Inn? They make these amazing hamburgers.”

  “I have school,” Ruby says forlornly.

  “That’s okay,” Paul says. “I heard on the radio that the public schools are on half-day. We could get in on that.” He extends his hand to her and pulls her out of her sitting position. “Where’s your teacher?”

  An hour later they’ve had their lunch and are walking around Leyden. There are a few children around this afternoon but they are for the most part unknown to Ruby, kids who attend the public school. A couple of ten-year-olds clatter past them on skateboards and Ruby gives what seems to Paul a longing look at them over her shoulder. It occurs to Paul that Ruby might be happier going to Leyden Central School, and as he has the thought she unexpectedly takes his hand.

  As the afternoon wears on, the air seems to soften; it is nearly winter but the air is warm, and the sky is dark blue with masses of white clouds. Paul and Ruby go to the candle and incense shop, the ice cream parlor, the boutique selling South American sweaters, the diner where the old guard still likes to congregate over hamburgers and fried eggs, and the health food counter where the new people eat dandelion greens and drink special teas from Africa. When there are no more shops to go into, and the sky is suddenly darkening, returning to its stern autumn hue, they drive home and collect Shep for a walk in the woods.

  “Look at him wagging,” Evangeline says, as the dog greets Paul. “He wouldn’t give me even a courtesy wag.”

  Paul takes Ruby for a walk in her own woods, trees and stones and dirt she may one day come to own herself. He wants her to love it here, and to know there’s a place where she belongs. “Can I tell you something, a secret?” he says to her. Despite the warmth of the early afternoon, a brief damp snow has fallen; the gold and red leaves blanketed on the ground now bear a sheen of translucent ice. He holds on to the child’s hand as they walk. Twice she has stumbled, first over a tangle of vines, then over the pulpy remains of a log. The trees are black and silver against the sky.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” Ruby says. She swings their arms back and forth, as if his holding her is part of a game, but her grip is adamant. She is wearing a parka with a hood, jeans, hiking shoes. Her clothes seem tight.

  Paul stops, gestures at the numberless trees around them. “I think you should pick a tree, some tree you really like, and then I’m going to take that tree down and use the wood to make you something.”

  “What will you make me?”

  “Well that depends on what tree you pick. Different woods are for different things.”

  “But what if I pick the wrong kind?”

  “You can’t, honey, there is no wrong kind. In nature there is no wrong.”

  “God says some things are
wrong,” Ruby says.

  “You know that’s not your mom’s kind of God, honey.”

  “Well it’s mine,” Ruby says.

  “In nature, it doesn’t work that way,” Paul says. “In nature there is no right and wrong, there’s just life and death.” He hears a sound, and it startles him—but it’s Shep, who has found an appealing branch half buried in the leaves and is dragging it along.

  Ruby looks out at the trees, unnamed and mysterious.

  Shep drops the branch and cocks his head, looking at Paul suspiciously. He has somehow become worried that Paul is going to run away from him, and even as the deep, moldering scent of the forest floor urges the dog onward, he continues to throw anxious glances over his shoulder. But something new seizes the brown dog’s attention and for a few moments he paws and snuffles at the ground, dislodging bright, crunching leaves, twigs, and black organic matter, moist and stringy like the pulp of a pumpkin.

  “What’s Shep doing?” Ruby asks.

  “He’s got something,” Paul tells her, to which she nods sagely.

  “I wonder if he misses his old family,” she muses.

  Shep has dug out an inch or two of dirt and has his nose in the small hole, inhaling its information. There is something down there and he would like to kill it.

  “Shep!” Ruby cries, if only to break the spell.

  He looks up, his eyes glittering, his nose ringed with dirt. “Come here, Shep,” Ruby says, clapping her hands. The dog shifts his gaze to Paul and Paul nods curtly, privately, and the dog trots over to the little girl.