The Death of All Things Seen

by Michael Collins

  Norman didn’t believe in the Kinsey Report and the decided swapping out of a politics of economics for a politics of sex. This was part of the great distraction of late modernity. As for his sexuality, well, he would watch out that he didn’t end up strangling kittens, or whatever was said that went on in the minds of the sexually repressed or the sexually confused.

  He told Joanne about the kittens, just to be on her guard. She shook his hand, like a deal had been struck. He could trek across the border anytime he felt the need. She had been through enough. She understood that warranties and marriages weren’t worth a damn, not in the way they used to be, and honesty was as rare a commodity as gold.

  *

  They took a long, meandering journey south to Florida and Disney World, planned by Joanne, for what she called a greater inspiration and view of the world, and, of course, for Grace. They did it on a strict budget. Norman agreed to it and gave Joanne control of the purse strings. In so doing, he bestowed on her a sense of permanence in this new existence.

  In the latter stages of the house negotiations, Norman had given Joanne Power of Attorney, after she had insisted she could do better, which she did eventually. She came out almost $6,000 ahead of the initial offer, bargaining hard and holding fast when Norman would have caved in. The great secret to negotiating was not to analyze your own worries, but to assess what the other side gained or lost in walking away from the table.

  Joanne, it turned out, had deep insight into how certain aspects of life worked. Norman discharged the debt he had paid off on her credit card. He called it her commission.

  *

  Joanne was asleep, her mouth half-open in the sunshine. They were across the Kentucky border. Norman tuned the radio to an a.m. station. He came upon the last of the spring baseball games played out in the Arizona Cactus League. He had his hands on the wheel in the earnest way of someone who had mastered a new skill.

  It stalked him, that old life, the absence of it made greater suddenly. He recalled a lazy afternoon long ago, Walter drinking cold beer after mowing the lawn, catching the tail end of a game on a small transistor radio. What Walter had loved about the game were the stats and the cluster of the teams with their old-fashioned stripes, knickers and stockings, the antiquated side of it, when, even into the seventies, heroes like Babe Ruth were still revered, despite how in vintage footage Babe looked like a big-diapered baby and was no athlete, or not in the way they were now, but Babe had delivered on what was asked back then. He had swung at dreams, led the way toward manhood with a trot around the bases, his cap tipped, reverent and appreciative of the applause, and the other greats of the game, known ultimately for the gravitas of their courage. Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech at Yankee stadium, declaring that he was the luckiest man alive, and dead two years later, an account his father could not tell without crying.

  It was there again. Walter calling the Cubs ‘bums’, the pennant race lost early, his relationship with them contentious, and yet he stuck with them out of loyalty. Walter attentive to the line drives, the walks, the loaded bases and the sacrifice fly – a play that had always smacked of an invention dreamt up by shakedown mobsters, or tied to political gerrymandering, when there was a deep humanity underpinning it. The assumption, that, under certain circumstances, you might be asked to make sacrifices for the team, and that a quirk in the scorecard, in the very game itself, might protect you and allow you to keep the sheet clean. This national pastime, at its essence, it tended toward the appointed time when each man in the wind-up and strike stood alone at-bat.

  That was it, when it came down to it. A game that could be communicated in words alone, in the voice of commentary, so it was no great loss if you weren’t there. In fact, it was a game better heard than seen, and decidedly set up that way in the ungodly number of games that constituted a season – the double-headers and clusters of mid-week games – so, in the end, it was TV that diminished the game, exposing the paucity of attendances and the slowness of any real action, an accommodation cameras could never quite invest with an essence of mystery, and even less so with the advent of color, when the texture of reality took from what was and would always be a game of nostalgia and ghosts.

  Hours passed.

  *

  Norman drove deep into the Kentucky Mountains, before descending into an overgrown valley where a shadowy town stood by a carving, meandering river.

  Joanne roused, her finger on a map like a field marshal. She denied that she had slept. There were quirks between them, but Norman could see the look on her face, the miraculous sense that you just close your eyes and wake into another world.

  They stayed at a schoolhouse turned historic hotel in the heart of coal mining country. The brick façade glowed in a brown dinge of light behind laced curtains.

  It rained in sheets in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Through a series of tall picture windows in a classroom turned spacious bedroom, they played cards and Scrabble made of real wooden blocks, aged and played with by schoolchildren over a matter of decades.

  Joanne made a meal in a small alcove, Norman standing alongside her, helping, aware of the solid wood chairs, the rounded tables and bone china, the bite of a breadknife with a worn handle and the teeth of a saw, all of it of a vintage of great permanence.

  Joanne had on a wedding ring. Norman noticed it, this unannounced union decided upon by her alone. It somehow did not involve Norman, or it involved him, but in a way that acknowledged how love was always one-sided and kept alive more so by one partner than the other. He felt the advantage and disadvantage of what she quietly offered.

  He looked askance at her, her hair flat against her head in an unadorned plainness of domestic life. She was in a shirt with the sleeves rolled above her elbows. It was something that would be decided, her faithfulness, over days, weeks, months and years, this decision of hers, and better configured in looking back on what had been decided and not voiced.

  *

  They were in a valley cut from a river, encased in an earthen mass of dead foliage, the layers of past life dating back millennia, predating the rise of humans, the V of the valley blocking sunlight so the day was more shadows, greyness and fog.

  It took the reach of the sun across the cosmos to find them, the void of distance, a faint light eventually finding them on occasional days of blue skies, so it was not such a great burden to go into the mines against the characteristic slate grey of a webbed fog. You limited the possibilities, cut yourself off from alternatives.

  Beneath the earth it was simply all darkness. You came up to the possibility of rain or sleet or maybe sun. It was a veneer, this world of light, when the greater reality of the universe was darkness. He heard a church bell toll that might have been for him alone, if he believed in miracles.

  It was the two of them, and Grace, the compact of a life and the reach of Florida in the offing, but for now they were arrested here in the quiet of a schoolhouse, this weigh station between the past and the present. He liked this about Joanne, how she had found the schoolhouse in some informational flyer and sought it out, because places like this argued for simple choices or no choices at all.

  Choice, or how it was now envisioned and experienced, was a new phenomenon, and what people decried when it was denied them was, in fact, the opposite of the truer essence of life and how it had been lived for the greater part of human awakening.

  He was mindful of this against the scroll of fog and the diaphanous leech of true color, so Joanne was a shadow beside him. He watched her out of the corner of his eye. She cracked a series of eggs in a deft one-handed way, so it was a magic trick, the sudden glob of yellow like a contained sun run into a ceramic bowl. This was a late afternoon lunch materializing before his eyes – scrambled eggs and bacon, a pot of coffee on the stove over the blue whisper of a crowned gas ring.

  There were memories laid down, a series of acts that defined her presence, back at the apartment, her panties stained with a rusty blood, the discoloration of the water in
the bathroom sink, the intimacies of the body’s workings. There were nylons, too, wrung and hung casually over the shower railing.

  He liked all this. He would not have anticipated it, but, when it was presented, he thought, here was a life, and he was a part of it. He sensed her creating it for him in the simple act of making lunch, and that a life was not any one thing, but a series of concatenated actions that created a greater context when viewed in their totality.

  Norman poured a cheap, screw-top wine into a tumbler. They were in for the afternoon, locked in shadows. In a small library on the second floor, Norman held the weight of books stamped and worn, a hardback cloth threadbare and shiny with the oil of thumbprints – a library containing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

  He looked through a porthole window, saw a small church and, beyond, a hole in the ground where men had descended daily. In observing it, he understood better what an education must have offered in the past for those who could make a living above ground, what a powerful inducement it must have been to study here, and to witness Hell, to see a hole consume and disgorge human life and to know there was an alternative in books, to study and hear the concussive explosive blasts deep underground, the horror and ever-present danger always there and that took so many.

  In the associated history of the area, there had been worker unrest and strikes. Norman paged through a book with accompanying black-and-white photographs of miners in an age when people made a living here on coal.

  He went out eventually into the pouring rain in search of a statue and found it by an abandoned spine of rail track – a bronze statue of a miner wearing a hard hat with a miner’s lamp, a pick in his hand. Veins showed in a defining grip and strength that was little needed anymore, though, in standing alongside it, it put into perspective the life Norman’s father had inhabited, the reach of Mayor Daley and the Machine, and how protective a class of men had to be to ensure dignity and a living wage.

  He checked the toll of death in the mine and the surrounding mines at a small museum dedicated to miners above a post office. The deaths were all accounted for in handwritten ledgers. The museum had been underwritten by Loretta Lynn, the famed Coal Miner’s Daughter, a woman of great beauty and voice, who, for a time had brought the plight of the miners into the American consciousness – what they had offered the nation, and, in return, how they had been treated, the insidious slow death of black lung and the sudden cave-ins – solidarity, the only foothold the working class had against management.

  Norman felt it, a gathering sense of what was then needed, and needed again, the rallying defiance of a generation, of a class consciousness that had been eclipsed somewhere during the Reagan Presidency.

  He found a computer with an Internet connection back at the small schoolhouse library, and, searching archives, he found footage of the old Mayor Daley of his father’s vintage, Daley, glad-handing, tipping his hat along a St Pat’s Day parade route, in a coronation of the ordinary, a river run green with Irish pride and the color of money.

  A voiceover echoed Daley’s 1968 post-Democratic Convention statement, ‘Gentleman, get the thing straight once and for all – the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder,’ a gaff glossed over by a reporter who, in the spirit of the times, declared, ‘We reported what he meant, not what he said.’

  There was accommodation of interests and sympathies then, words not parsed and put under scrutiny, when it was so damn hard to get said right, what needed to be said, when, for most of your life, you spoke around a feeling and never fully understood it.

  For Norman Price, it accounted for honesty, when contradictions, missteps, were an essential divining rod of how life was lived, and that there was nothing inconsistent in holding any number of contrary opinions on any number of subjects. It was the human condition.

  Norman looked up into the glare of light. He had witnessed it even in the new politics of a supposedly unfettered history that came after the corruption of Daley, how Obama, a would-be presidential hopeful a year earlier, had mysteriously not recollected his former church pastor’s alleged statements against white injustice and American Imperialism, suggesting either that Obama was a liar, or that there were Truths one told among one’s own kind, or to oneself, that fed only a part of the font of who one was, and that a person could hold two histories simultaneously, two contradictory histories, and still somehow be true to oneself.

  At times, survival necessitated looking beyond apparent incongruities.

  For a moment, Norman thought again of Mr Ahmet, a great friend to his father – Mr Ahmet who, as a lawyer, had spent the greater part of his career defending the indefensible because it needed defending, so careers in such circumstances often ended with inevitable regrets, in willful compromises where a different set of laws and underlying truths superseded what might be arbitrated and made sense of in a court. What Mr Ahmet had hated – he, of all people, a lawyer – was factuality, too much evidence and not enough understanding.

  It was deeply appreciated. Mr Ahmet’s humanity evidenced in the comportment of how he carried out his duties. It was a way of negotiating life that Norman had never fully understood in his aloneness. This was how cities had once survived. Chicago, to be sure, this city that had sanctioned only so many histories, so there could be only one St Patrick’s Day, so that Mr Ahmet and Joanne’s Armenian boyfriend’s father, with his little known nation’s genocide, were left bereft, their histories held sacred in small Orthodox communities and yet somehow, their histories had survived among their kind.

  They were gone the following morning, time collapsing in the run of mile markers and state borders crossed, the subtle and almost unnoticeable change until it was upon them. The retreat out of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the sharp flint brilliance of an azure tropical light replacing the dappled interlace of a forest canopy with its slow dialed movement of bluebells and ephemerals, small faced flowers tracking the sun like a congregation of faithful in the slats of a radiant, life-giving light.

  There was so much to be observed and praised.

  *

  Captain Cody’s outside Daytona had an All-U-Can-Eat seafood salad bar buffet done as a sandbar on an isthmus of castaway islands set against a wallpaper background of the bluest sky imaginable. A low level hush of breaking sea surf underscored the tranquility of this island paradise made real, the floor sprinkled with sand, the buffet done up like a shanty beach shack draped in fish netting and garlands of seaweed and fake starfish.

  Norman was in the process of sprinkling a benediction of crumbling crackers over a bowl of hot chowder. They were in a clam-shaped booth.

  Grace sat wearing a pirate’s patch over one eye, just like Captain Cody. The waitress called her ‘a pearl’, not once or twice, but every time she refilled Grace’s Pepsi. Grace was so taken with the name that she called herself Pearl.

  The name Grace belonged to an affectation bestowed by Kenneth. She materialized in this new name, with an orientalism and beauty that eclipsed the Christian idea of Grace. The name, bestowed on her so casually, augured a cosmological order. This child would become his daughter in the best way he could accommodate and be her father. He would try his very best.

  Norman felt the flutter of providence. All round him, half-alighted painted seagulls hung, suspended on filaments of invisible fishing line, turning in a breath of air conditioning. The restaurant’s namesake, Captain Cody, was a grizzled plaster cast with disconcerting blue doll eyes. Every so often, the cheap mechanical pulley apparatus mouth opened like a trap door, and he said, in a cragged English accent, ‘Ahoy, Matey’, and brandished a cut-throat sabre in a jolting contraption of wires. This all miraculously conjured daily, during the early bird lunch for $7.95!

  Norman looked across as Joanne said, in a quieting conspiracy, ‘I’d stake a wager there’s not a woman of childbearing age in a vicinity of ten mile
s. I’m Queen Bee.’

  She made a buzzing sound that immediately annoyed Norman, but he just smiled.

  Norman was writing on a napkin with the logo of Captain Cody. A hot, radiant sun fell across the table. He was aware of other convergences. Helen’s sickness had been uncovered at a buffet like this, the single greatest debt paid out of her will, the six-minute Medevac airlift that cost $11,000.

  Maybe Captain Cody’s was tied to a medical conglomerate. It seemed feasible. These cheap eateries, the hook, given there was a great trawl in the catchment of monies associated with end-of-life care. Everything else here was the lure – the sun, the palm trees, the beach and the sunsets.

  There was no great hurry. The tickets to Disney were for the following day. They whiled away almost two hours. The sun grew in intensity until the asphalt wavered.

  Norman regretted having declined valet parking with the reflexive opinion it was a great trap when tipping was at one’s discretion, and the service that much better for there being no set charge, no social frontloading of fees or hidden taxes. It’s how they liked it down here. You were underwriting nobody else. Individual rights remained intact. In tipping, you helped the economy while equally inflating your own benevolence for a dollar bill stuffed into the brown hand of a valet.

  There were refills on the refills on refills, or that’s how Joanne described it in rising and coming back with another Pepsi in a beaded goblet in keeping with pirate booty. She held the Pepsi up like a chalice. This bad choice would end back home, but this was the grail of an earned vacation, a souvenir goblet to cherish and bring home for ninety-nine cents.

  Toward the end, a garish fluorescence eventually killed the tropical mood. The waitresses were off smoking in a booth. Grace walked the aisles and eyed Captain Cody, circling him, prying. He was a great source of curiosity.

  The waitresses got a kick out of it, while another waitress in her sixties, some castaway beauty of pageants, a one-time mermaid who had not fared so well on land, came out in waders and hosed down the remaining ice with steaming water, and the magic that had been the shanty beach shack was laid bare.