Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  Until an elderly Egyptian orderly recognized the language as ancient Sumarian.

  It was six o’clock. Time to close the store. Dave wasn’t sure if he should go home or straight to the hospital.

  He went home. He took his temperature. Ninety-nine point two. Not a good sign.

  Whenever Dave really starts to get into potential diseases, he likes to do Tai Chi. He only knows a couple of the movements but he repeats them over and over and they seem to center him. Before dinner he went into the backyard and started to do Tai Chi. Morley has been around long enough to know what is going on when this happens. When she saw Dave in the backyard awkwardly spinning, stretching and bending she called out through the window.

  “Dave,” she said, “there’s no such disease.”

  What did she know?

  Dave knew he was going to die. The best he could hope for was that he might become a world-famous medical case and attract the attention of someone who could help him. Maybe along with the Sumarian he would develop the ability to solve complex mathematical equations, and Dr. Oliver Sacks would come from New York City to examine him. Dr. Sacks would watch Dave work out equations on a big blackboard in a university classroom and they would make a movie about him starring Robert Redford. Dave imagined himself going to the opening with his only friend in the world. The old Egyptian orderly. No. He would die before the movie was finished. He wouldn’t get a cameo role, just a cryptic mention in the credits: This movie is dedicated to the memory of Dave.

  He knew what he had to do and he knew he had to do it fast. He had to kill the fly. Until he killed the fly he was not going to be able to function as a normal human being.

  The only thing he could think of doing was to cut off the fly’s supply of oxygen.

  Sadly, this was Dave’s supply of oxygen too.

  Working on this sort of medical problem—which essentially involves auto-surgery—is not something Dave likes to do at home in front of his family. He was too anxious to eat dinner.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said.

  He told Morley he had to go back to work.

  He let himself into the store and spent half an hour squatting on the floor behind the counter—trying to hold his breath for longer than a minute. Using one hand to squeeze his nostrils closed, and placing a strip of duct tape across his mouth, and kicking his feet as if he were being throttled, Dave was able to last a minute and fifteen seconds.

  The problem was that after each attempt, he sucked in air so desperately and deeply that he was pretty sure that had the fly been trying to abandon ship it would have been driven back so far by the force of his inhalation that it would never find its way out again. He was pretty sure he could feel it reeling around his bronchial tubes like a drunk after an all-night binge.

  That’s when Dave realized the fly probably wanted out as badly as he wanted to get it out. They weren’t enemies. They were partners. This is what people who run management seminars call “a shift in paradigms.” Dave should help the fly, not punish it. He should show it the way home.

  He stared at the table lamp on the counter beside the cash register. He removed the shade and flicked the light on. He slowly opened his mouth as wide as he could and began to sink down with his mouth wide open—trying to get his lips as close to the bulb as he could.

  Which is what he was doing when his eyes caught movement at the front door. He looked up and saw Jim Scoffield staring at him, with his mouth hanging open, even wider than Dave’s.

  Dave straightened up and unlocked the front door.

  “I was walking by,” said Jim defensively. “I just happened to look in.”

  “I swallowed a fly,” said Dave. “It’s in my lungs. I thought it might be attracted to the light. I thought it might fly out to the light.”

  “That’s moths,” said Jim.

  “What?” said Dave.

  “Moths,” said Jim. “It’s moths that are attracted to light.”

  Dave stared at his friend.

  “What are flies attracted to?” he asked.

  There was a long and awkward moment of silence.

  Jim said, “How do you know you have a fly?”

  “I can feel it . . . it’s a buzzing sort of feeling . . . like blowing on grass.”

  Jim said, “Do you have a vacuum cleaner?”

  Dave glanced toward the back of his store.

  Jim brightened. “We could use the crevice tool. The one for behind the radiator.”

  Dave said, “Are you out of your mind?”

  Jim said, “You’re the one with the fly in his lung.”

  Dave said, “I do have a fly in my lung.”

  Then he said, “Put your hand over my mouth and hold my nose so I can’t breath.” He started to turn around. “Don’t let go unless I start to pass out.”

  Jim shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said doubtfully. He rolled up his sleeves and shifted his weight from foot to foot trying to find his balance.

  He slipped his arms over Dave’s shoulders.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, dropping his arms. “What do I do if you pass out?”

  Dave turned around in exasperation. “You wipe your fingerprints off the door and go out the back so no one can see you.”

  Jim nodded earnestly.

  Dave couldn’t believe him. He was almost yelling now. “What do you think you do if I pass out? You give me mouth to mouth until I start breathing.”

  Jim cocked his head. “There’s an idea.”

  Dave said, “What’s an idea?”

  “We could drown it,” Jim said. “We could go to a pool and you could suck in a lungful of water.”

  Dave looked alarmed. “What about me?”

  “We’ll go to the Y,” Jim replied calmly. “Where they have life-guards. They’ll know what to do about you. They’re trained for that. You look after the fly—they’ll look after you.

  Instead of going to the Y, they went to Horgarth’s Humidors. Dave bought a twelve-dollar cigar.

  “I’ll smoke it out,” he said.

  He chose a Cruz Real, number 19. Dark and sinister looking—like a burnt stick.

  When he took it to the cash register, the man behind the counter tried to talk him out of it.

  “That’s a little on the strong side,” he said.

  “Good,” said Dave.

  “Actually,” said the man, “it has a sort of numbing effect. You wouldn’t want to smoke this cigar before a meal. It tends to remove your sense of taste for a couple of hours.”

  “Good,” said Dave

  “It is made in Mexico,” said the man.

  Dave smiled.

  He figured there might be pesticide residues that would work in his favor.

  “Anything else?” asked the man.

  “A pack of matches,” said Dave.

  He lit the cigar on the street and took a long deep drag and held the smoke in his mouth. Then he inhaled it and nearly passed out. It was like the moment that afternoon, which seemed so long ago now, when he had inhaled the fly. He folded over as if someone had punched him in the stomach, and coughed for two minutes straight.

  Jim stood beside him and said helpful things like “Are you all right?” and “I’m not so sure you are supposed to inhale those things.”

  When Dave stood up it was as if he was surfacing from underwater.

  “I like these Mexican cigars,” he said. “They have a sort of nutty flavor.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to have a brandy with those things?” said Jim.

  It was well after midnight when Dave got home.

  He collapsed onto his bed beside Morley’s sleeping form. He was still wearing his clothes and shoes. He did an inventory of his body. His head was throbbing, his stomach was somersaulting, but he couldn’t feel any buzzing in his chest. To be perfectly honest he couldn’t feel much of anything. Except bad. Except nausea.

  When he closed his eyes, the room began to spin. He dropped a hand to the floor to steady himself
. And that’s exactly the position he was in when he woke up. At eleven o’clock the next morning—lying on his side with his mouth hanging open.

  His lips were parched and cracked. His mouth felt as if it was full of ashes.

  His head throbbed with pain.

  Every few seconds a sharp noise bounced unpleasantly around his head. Whack. Whack. Whack.

  It was like torture.

  “Morley?” he said. Without moving, without rolling over.

  “I phoned Brian,” she said. “Brian opened the store.”

  Whack.

  He rolled over.

  Morley was poised by the window, a rolled newspaper raised in her right hand.

  There was a fly on the window. Walking toward the ceiling.

  Morley drew the paper back.

  “I keep missing,” said Morley.

  “Wait,” said Dave.

  Dave inhaled deeply, and began to cough. There was a burning rawness in his chest, the feeling that his lungs had been seared by smoke—but no tickle, no buzzing.

  “Don’t kill it,” said Dave. “Just open the window. It will go out by itself.”

  Morley shrugged and raised the screen. The fly circled the ceiling a few times and then darted out the window. Dave raised his head from the pillow and watched it disappear into the crisp morning air.

  I’ve Got You Under My Skin

  Christmas Presents

  One night at dinner, a Sunday night in late September, Morley pushed the dog’s nose off the edge of the table, looked around and said, “I’ve been thinking about Christmas.”

  Dave gasped.

  Well, he didn’t really gasp. It was more a hiccup than a gasp. Although it wasn’t a hiccup, and it could easily have been misconstrued as a gasp.

  Everyone at the table turned and looked at him.

  “Excuse me,” he said. He smiled nervously at Morley. “I said excuse me.”

  Morley began again.

  “I’ve been thinking about Christmas,” she said.

  “Me too,” said Sam.

  “And I was thinking,” said Morley, “that it would be fun this year . . .” Dave was shaking his head slowly back and forth, unconsciously, staring at his wife while a confliction of emotions flickered across his face like playing cards—despair, hope, confusion and finally the last card . . . horror.

  “I was thinking,” said Morley, “it would be fun this year, and more in keeping with the spirit of Christmas . . .”

  Dave was leaning forward in his chair now, staring at Morley the same way Arthur the dog stares at the vet: with a doggish mixture of forlorn hope and wretched presumption.

  “I was thinking,” said Morley, “it would be fun . . . if we made presents for each other.”

  Morley’s words met dead silence.

  Then Stephanie dropped her fork.

  “What?” she said.

  Sam said, “Everything I want is made out of plastic. Does anyone know how to mold plastic?”

  Morley said, “I don’t mean every present. I don’t mean we have to make everything. I thought we could put our names in a hat, and we could all draw a name, and we’d have to make a present for the person whose name we drew.”

  Sam said, “I like exploding stuff too. Exploding things are good . . . Especially if they are made of plastic.”

  Stephanie said, “Gawd.”

  Dave was nodding, a small smile playing at his mouth.

  Two nights later Morley wrote everyone’s name onto a piece of paper. She tore the paper up, folded the pieces and put them into a pot.

  “No one say who they get,” said Morley.

  “What if you get yourself?” asked Sam.

  But no one got themselves. And no one said who they got. In fact no one seemed particularly interested in who got whom. Morley had hoped that everyone would be excited. But no one was, at all.

  Several uneventful weeks went by, autumn settling gracefully on the city as the family settled into the routine of their lives. It was a beautiful autumn. An autumn for gardening and walks and stock-taking. The days were bright and blue, the leaves yellow (for weeks, it seemed). A forgiving, perpetual autumn. Until, that is, the winds began to blow. One night there was a storm, and it rained and blew, and the next morning the trees were bare. Soon the clocks were turned back, and a gray-ness descended on the city.

  It was October and everyone was busy. Only Morley, who was the busiest of all, was thinking about Christmas. The night they had pulled the names out of the pot Morley had waited for the last piece of paper. When she unfolded it, she read her son’s name. She had thought long and hard about what she could make a ten-year-old boy for Christmas that he would enjoy. And she was stymied. She didn’t know plastics. She didn’t know explosives.

  Anyway she wanted to make her son something . . . meaningful.

  Dave was no help.

  “There’s something about boys you have to understand,” he said. “They aren’t meaningful.”

  Nevertheless, Morley wanted to make Sam something he would treasure as he grew older. Like a fountain pen, or a fishing rod, or a National guitar. She had wondered about a chess set for a while. She decided that although, with help, she might be able to make a rudimentary chess board, she would never, never in a million years be able to make the chess figures, and she had abandoned the idea of a chess set, along with sleeping bag, baseball glove and backpack.

  The idea of building a chair for Sam came to Morley like a bolt out of the blue. She saw a brochure advertising a night course at the local high school. Ten Monday nights, two hundred dollars, all materials included. Morley checked the calendar. She would be finished a week before Christmas.

  It was just what she was looking for—something she could make for Sam that he could use now, but something, if she did a good job, he could use for the rest of his life. Something that he might even hand down to his children.

  Morley imagined building a big, comfy chair. A chair you could get lost in. She imagined Sam as a grown man reading the paper in the chair she had made. She imagined him surrounded by his family. She imagined him saying, “Your grandmother made this for me when I was ten.”

  She enrolled in the course and promptly missed two out of the first three classes. The first time it was work. The second time her mother had the flu. She had to take her supper.

  She didn’t miss any more after that. She applied herself as diligently as she could. And although every step was a struggle—each screw, nail and saw-cut a mystery of momentous proportions—and although her chair was emerging so much slower and tenuously than all the other chairs in the class, Monday, the night she got to work on it, became Morley’s favorite night of the week.

  She loved going to her chair class. The only thing that spoiled it was that no one else in her family seemed to have embraced the holiday project. She was alone on this Christmas journey.

  She asked Stephanie about it one night.

  “You don’t understand,” said Stephanie. “We’re different, Mom. You’re into the spirit of Christmas. I like the other stuff.”

  “The other stuff?” asked Morley.

  “The shopping,” said Stephanie, “the clothes.”

  “Shopping and clothes?” said Morley.

  “And the TV specials,” said Stephanie.

  Then one morning, when Sam was getting up from the breakfast table, he looked at Morley and said, “I want to learn how to knit.”

  The biggest challenges of motherhood, for Morley, were always the surprises. She had long since abandoned the idea of priming herself for the next stage of her children’s development. She had long ago accepted that no matter how she prepared herself she would always lag behind Sam and Stephanie. If Morley could count on her children for one thing, she could count on them to pop up, at the most unexpected moments, with the most bizarre ideas of life and how it worked. She could count on them to hold fierce opinions so contrary to what they had believed, even the day before, that they would leave her open-mouthed an
d totally unequipped to respond. Like the afternoon Sam had returned from the co-op nursery school and announced with quiet determination that he had “quit.” Like when five-year-old Stephanie crawled, sobbing, under the kitchen table, and refused to come out until her mother promised never to serve hot dogs for lunch again. Never! I don’t believe you, she sobbed, when Morley made the promise. Like the spring Sam developed a pathological fear of Big Bird, which became a fear of all birds, a fear that lasted for months.

  And now he wanted to learn how to knit.

  Morley had given up trying to teach Stephanie any sort of domestic skill. It had never occurred to her that Sam was the one who wanted instruction.

  Morley gave Sam his first knitting lesson that night, in his room.

  “Shut the door,” he said.

  She soon found out that teaching a ten-year-old boy to knit was about as easy as building a chair.

  She didn’t have the words for it.

  She sat him beside her on the bed, and they both held a set of knitting needles out in front of them, as if they were about to fly a plane.

  “Watch me,” said Morley as she ever so slowly made a loop in the red yarn and slipped it onto the needle.

  She was trying to teach him how to cast on.

  She glanced at him. Sam staring at his hands in despair.

  Morley took his needles and did the first row herself. She handed them back and said, “Okay. Now, do exactly what I do.”

  After an hour or so, he sort of had it. More or less.

  “What is it you want to knit?” asked Morley.

  “A coat,” said Sam.

  “Oh,” said Morley.

  Sam had drawn Stephanie’s name.

  Morley had to teach him again right from the beginning the next night. And once again two nights later. He did fine as long as he kept going, but every time he put the needles down he lost track.

  By the beginning of November Sam was good enough to sit in front of the television and knit while he watched TV. Whenever Stephanie appeared, he would thrust the needles into Morley’s hands or stuff them under the couch. Morley hauled an old black-and-white portable out of the basement and set it up on his bureau. He sat in his room all weekend, the needles clicking away like a train.