by Jesse Ball
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Could I have a glass of water again, I asked. He nodded, and went out into the hall to fetch it. When he had given me water before, I hadn’t noticed him leave, but perhaps he had. He returned and stood there, handing me the glass. I took it and drank. He sat. I was embarrassed, I said. She had never disclosed any of this before, and now, there in the mountains, I felt we were coming to the heart of my unsuitability. So, I told the interlocutor, there in the daybed, she said to me, in complete seriousness, she said, about my father, in that conversation in our house, three weeks ago, in which he mentioned out loud that darling of his mind, the Hruezfeldt dam, a thing which, to my knowledge he had never done—always before he had called it the dam or the backbone, already he had been so kind and solicitous in this conversation as to mention the dam by name—and you told him, fiercely, that perhaps a different source of power could be used to replace the dam, you said it loosely, easily, a different source of power, and then the province wouldn’t need to rely on water, on that form of power, which after all was only one of many ways. After all, during your time in the civil corps, you had worked on other forms of energy, so you said. Water was not the final ends and means. You said it matter-of-factly and without rancor, but the offense you gave was enormous and sudden. I remember in particular the callous way you threw in this colloquialism, ends and means. The whole table was horrified. My father reeled back in his chair. Make the Hruezfeldt dam, the enormous Hruezfeldt dam, into a sort of architectural folly? Declare the work of our hands, of our fathers’ hands, and of their fathers’ hands, all some sort of mistake? The Hruezfeldt dam? Was I speaking about that dam or about some other? It had been frightening, said Rana, to hear my father spoken to in this way, and indeed, she had never seen him respond in that manner to anyone, never having needed to. You recall that I spoke for you, saying that, of course, we were speaking extremely theoretically about it. We, in the dining room of a house nowhere near Hruezfeldt, some of us never having even been there, never having even seen the dam itself, were extremely theoretically discussing it. I told him, she said, that this young man, you, understood the matter was not the Hruezfeldt dam, but the province itself and the political map. Perhaps, I suggested, she told me, perhaps, I said to my father, that an alternate suggestion was to redraw the political map of the province. So she said to me, remembering her interaction with her father, and so I told the interlocutor. Do you recall, she said, how, as soon as my voice, with its known cadence, rose in the family dining room, my father appeared assuaged? Do you recall how as the gentle good sense of my measure, so quickly suggested, washed over him, he fell at peace at once. He merely nodded, and took another bite of his food, the matter forgotten. The only glimmer of it was when we rose from the table and he dismissed himself, he went to bed early. Do you remember it? She pressed my hand, there on the daybed. It wasn’t your fault, she said, but you simply can’t understand him, or any of them. It would be like trying to run a race beneath a road while the rest of them were running upon it. You would always finish last. There we were, sitting in the lodge that her father had bought as a child, and I had learned this truly momentous thing: I would never become a part of her family. Also, I learned a corollary and equally momentous thing: she did not care. We would go away together and never see any of them again. She would make occasional trips back to see them, but I would not be in attendance. There would be no reason for it, she said. She delighted in planning these details of our life. For her, my absolute rootlessness, the fact that I had no family, had little connection to anyone, lived in a boardinghouse, wrote inconsequential ideas in little notebooks, and generally was beneath all notice—for her, that was wondrous. My very nonentity made it easy for me to be assimilated instantly and totally into her plans. She was one, I confided in the interlocutor, who could not speak of something if there was the least chance it was not realistic. She did not want to waste her time in unrealizable projects. For her, she could take no joy in them. All the same, with her family’s vast wealth, many projects that seemed to me from the get-go foolish or impossible, were to her completely sensible, inevitable even. That I could be without a doubt incorporated into her plans made it easy for her to chart with pleasure the things that she would want to do, and made it conceivable that these plans, fleshed out in her mind, could be said out loud to me, and related. I have never before, she told me, planned with anyone. Even my brother, whom I loved dearly, and even all my other brothers and sisters, who were already grown when I was a child, even they have never heard me plan. They believe that I have no plans, that I go from day to day planless. Of course, to them, this is sensible. They live extremely coherently within the traditions of our family. You will, I’m sure, meet them all briefly, at one or another family event where you are absolutely required. You will see that they are of a piece. I am to some degree viewed as a wild person. I have had friends, for instance, who are not in the family. This is a liberty my mother never had. Indeed, I went to school outside of the home, another strangeness. You could say that I was a sort of experiment that my father made. It has turned out well, I told her. Yes, very well, she agreed. Shall we go outside, I asked her, for it had begun to rain, and the raindrops were sounding on the porch roof. I helped her to a chair on the porch and we sat there, staring out into the rain. Sometimes, she told me, I feel that we are in the clouds here. Of course, it’s nonsense. We are not that high up, but I sometimes enjoy thinking that we are. I looked out at the clouds, and I felt that she was right. She was right that we were in the clouds, and that we were not in the clouds. This occasioned a small happiness that ran along my spine and out to the cuffs of my shirt. Rana looked at me very seriously, then. That chair was the chair that Seamus Mendols always sat in. He was my father’s rival. He would visit and they would argue, angrily, for hours. Nothing was good enough for him. He was angry at my father for not living up to what Seamus Mendols had expected for him. He was angry at my father for having children who had failed to do things as great as the things that my father ought to have done, the things my father had not done, but that Seamus Mendols had expected of him. Seamus Mendols could drink any amount of liquor and get nowhere near drunk. He could reason like a logician, and he picked apart everything that anyone said, as if it were a necessary function of the conversation, that it be reduced to its barest, most functional essentials. The lessons in logic that we all received, even my father, a so-called finished person, a true gentleman, the lessons we received from Seamus Mendols during the summer months of my childhood, were truly something. Seamus Mendols hated the days of the week. He disliked the base-ten numbering system. He argued against clothing that required zippers or snaps. He was writing a book, had been writing a book forever, the publishing of which, at some point in the future, would be a great corrective. No one but my father had seen this book. He would not speak of it, but sometimes Seamus would say to my father, in passing, as they spoke of something else, as in 3:12:92, referring to a passage. Then, my father would nod, and understand, so thoroughly had he read this work of Seamus Mendols. My brother was inadequate. To Seamus Mendols, my brother was a sort of joke. My sisters and brothers who were long grown, but whom Seamus Mendols had watched grow, sitting on that same porch, long before my birth, they were, if anything, richer jokes than my brother was. However rich the joke of my brother was to Seamus Mendols, the sisters and brothers who had preceded him were richer. That so many little beings could issue forth from my father, and none of them, not a one could make any motion to complete the work that was my father’s to do was to Seamus Mendols a frightening, sad, and inevitable confirmation of the world’s slothful indifference. Of the world’s impassive, perfect indifference. Its slothful indifference. He could not decide. He would sit in the chair repeating first the one and then the other back and forth. My own arrival, Seamus Mendols greeted with animation. He thought of me as a sort of antidote to the general horror of my family. She is your better, he would tell my father again
and again. Of course, it was not true. My father knows everything I know, and then beyond that, he knows other things the existence of which I have not guessed at, and he moves through all of it with ease. I, meanwhile, make my small attempts. Seamus Mendols saw these attempts and rewarded me for them, for each one, with a cheerfulness that was quite rousing. It was his idea that I go to a college, that I be educated in public school. He spoke to my father, and I was their little experiment. When Seamus Mendols died, at the house he kept just up that road over there, my father said, I will never come back. He has not returned to this town since that day. That is how dear Seamus Mendols was to him. My mother, my father could bear. He can speak to her and live with her day in day out. But, I believe the person whose company he most enjoyed was Seamus Mendols. The chair you are sitting in right now is the chair he spent years of his life in. There is no such thing as feeling the effects of that. Seamus Mendols does not linger in that chair. But perhaps you can enjoy the view, and feel the import of it. When I was here as a child, no one but Seamus could ever sit in that chair. My father did not make a rule of this, nor did he enforce it. It was unspoken.
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It rained all that day and into the next. When the rain passed away, I made another suggestion: that we take a short drive. There is an old mill we could go to, I saw it on the road, so I told her. I have never been there, she said, though I lived here for such a long time. We passed it often, and a feeling of mystery has long lain about it. The idea that we should go there, I love it, she told me. Let’s take some things with us and have a picnic. As she dressed, I began to tell her about an experience I had once had. Years ago, I said, when I first joined the civil corps, I traveled to many far places. In one of them, we were working to build a bridge that would connect two small towns. The idea was that these two small towns, each one on the opposite side of a river, would, when the bridge was built, become one single city. Although there had long been antagonism between the two towns—a history going back decades, perhaps even hundreds of years, of rancor, still it was believed the bridge would solve everything. We lived in tents along one side of the river. This was a relatively new part of the republic. There were still measures there in place that did not exist elsewhere, that no longer exist anywhere. One was prison. There was another worker, an older man, who shared my tent, along with three or four other older men. One day, he found that someone had been going through his things. He found that some old photographs of his had been taken, photographs of his wife and child. I did not understand why it was important then. It was beyond me, but he was enraged. There outside the tent, he confronted the other men, including one who he thought, he was sure of it, was the thief. We were using heavy steel cable to make the bridge, and there were pieces of it, cut pieces, lying around the camp. One was in his hand, and he struck the thief with it. To me it seemed an inconsequential blow. The cable was heavy, very heavy, and the blow was slow. I watched his arm travel through the air slowly. The thief did nothing to stop it. He seemed frozen. The cable went to the space where his head was, and moved the head out of the way, it moved the head to a place adjacent from the place where it had previously been. The one who had taken the photographs fell to the ground and was completely dead. He probably stopped breathing before his body reached the ground. So, I told Rana, as she dressed for our outing. She loved stories of this kind, and I could see by the way she drew her clothes on over herself that this was a good time. Where, for another audience, I might have stopped then, seeing that I had horrified them, for her I continued, so I told the interlocutor. I told her that, of course, the man was taken away. He was imprisoned in a place not ten miles away. There was a tribunal that decided on his fate, and he was put away. I worked on that bridge for another year, and every week or so, I would travel to the prison to visit him. It was a mid-size place, with a high electrified fence surrounding it. I would come, and there would be a group of other people waiting to visit. We’d all stand in line and, at some point, would go inside. While we stood in line, we would talk with each other. I remember the first time I went, I was standing with a woman my own age, whose husband was incarcerated. She asked me whom I was visiting, and I told her that it was a friend of mine, a man I had often played cards with. I got carried away, and began to speak romantically about his fate. I was there on the line, a young man myself in a place far from where I had grown up, full of my own life, and in describing the condition and affairs of my friend to this young woman, I went overboard. I said that he was unfairly sentenced, that he had had his reasons for doing what he had done, and that they were good reasons. I spoke very rationally and explained all about why he didn’t deserve to be in the prison, in a way that admitted no doubt in my mind that we were all of us, she and I, and the others in line, a part of an injustice. I imagined that her husband was wrongfully inside, or I came to imagine it in the course of my speech. Although at the beginning of my foolish little speech, I knew that my friend was guilty, and that this woman, that her husband was probably guilty, too, by the end, I had been carried away. I had tried with my speech to establish camaraderie with her on the basis of this injustice. She would have none of it. She turned away, actually refused to look at me, and said, my husband is in prison for raping a woman who lived in the apartment below us. He has no right to have visitors, but still I come, I don’t know why. I stood there in the line, actually trembling. Now, I told the interlocutor, when I said this to Rana, she was not at all horrified, as everyone else had been. Each person to whom I had told this story had been moved to distaste, had looked at me in a sad new light. That I should have such a story and feel compelled to say it out loud, it was horrible. If it were true, then it was awful. If it were an invention, it was almost worse. Which was worse, the invention or the truth—actually, it was hard to say. That was the usual reception of my story. But, Rana, just brightened up. She had finished dressing. She was settling a light jacket over her shoulders. She said to me, I would love to go and see that bridge. Can we?
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And we set out driving for the mill, and in the distance ahead of us, we could see the storm receding. We are pursuing it, I said. Then she reminded me of the storm map that she had bought me, and we fell to speaking of my room in the boardinghouse again. Have you, I asked the interlocutor, has anyone ever done something for you so completely beyond all possibility of repayment that you just stand there agog, helpless in their presence? That is how it was for me. When I brought her to my room, there in the shabby boardinghouse, a place where half the windows were boarded up—rooms in which people still lived were boarded up, a boardinghouse because people stayed there, but also, because it was falling apart, it was held together by shabby boards—I brought her there, showed her my room and its absence of things, and she in all her good grace was pleased, delighted, fell even more in love with me, and went off. That it should have happened that way was amazing, but what happened next was this. I went to work at the antiques store where I had a position, and when I came back at night, expecting the same—some pieces of cheap paper, a pallet, a chair, what I found was this: I had given her a gift, I had presented my life to her as numerous notes on paper, taped in the absence of things, as shadows of a sort, in order that she could see whom it was that she had met, when she had met me. For a long time, I had hidden my things, my gathered physical life from her, but finally I had gone to present it to her, and I had failed, I had waited too long, my things were gone; yet, I had created this simulacrum, and given that to her in its place. Knowing her capacity, I knew that she could take my descriptions and hold them all gently up together at once, and that she could feel what the room had been like, and judge me. I wanted that judgment and so I had given that gift to her. Then, she had come back in the days following, she had come back, and, she must have had some help. I don’t know how she did it, how she could have performed such an action, but, using my meticulous descriptions, she searched through the city for ea
ch and every one of the belongings named and described on my sheets of paper. Using the descriptions, she matched each to an object as like to it as possible. She brought these objects together, and set them down, each and every one, in the place I had said they should be, and recompleted the room that had been stolen. Somehow, she had stolen into the room, bypassing the lock, and she had replaced every one of my things. A framed photograph of a lunch counter, endlessly continuing its perspective off into the bottom right, a hundred stools or more, punctuated again and again and again by a neatly dressed sodajerk with a white hat. A small painting of a rat, in the Chinese style. An old fountain pen, half size, with a notebook into the binding of which the pen fit, and in the binding of which there was a small pot of ink actually bottled and held fast. A large Spanish folding knife, tied in a cloth and hanging from a nail. A pair of glasses of extremely heavy prescription, useful as a magnifying glass. An empty birdcage, with a bone flute propped in it. A small crank phonograph, nonfunctioning, and two cracked records. A suit of clothes, finely embroidered, for a child, hung on the wall. A map of the Maginot Line. A canvas bag on a peg full of broken ivory piano keys. A Venetian rooster mask. An old-fashioned bullhorn, hung by the window, half painted red, half painted green, with the number 71 in white emblazoned on the green side. I had worked in an antiques store for a long time, and had built up a small collection, a fine but small collection. Somehow she had scoured our city, and perhaps sent out to others, who could say, and had found something like to every thing I had once owned. To these she added one item: on the table, she left all the slips of paper in a tall glass jar, and on the jar she put a note: love, let us replace every imagined thing with a real thing. She did not even need to be there to see my happiness. She was at her parents’ home. I went immediately there, and she disclaimed it. She smiled to herself and said, someone else must have done it. Do you have another lover?
