2 Abbott and the Disturbing Images
The one-year-old child in the home video that Abbott shot but did not want to watch tonight is doing some adorable things that Abbott and his wife had forgotten, even though they believed when they saw those things, only a year ago, they would never forget them. For instance, she is putting a ceramic serving bowl on her head. Abbott and Abbott’s wife watch without smiling. Abbott is stunned, and he does not know what his wife is. The family room, past and present, looks post-tornadic. That child, so alive right now on the television, is missing, gone forever. That ceramic serving bowl, a wedding present, has also disappeared. Abbott does not want to pick a fight. He does not want to spoil the evening with gloom. But how else to say it—mortality permeates home video. Those tragic anti-drunk-driving television commercials from Abbott’s youth—the ones featuring home-video footage of joyous children subsequently killed by drunk drivers—those ads did not create the association. They presumed it, utilized it. Nevertheless, Abbott keeps his mouth shut. “You’re right,” Abbott’s wife says after only a few minutes of adorable footage. “You’re right. Let’s not.” A child is a Trojan horse, a thing of guile. The rout is commenced.
3 Abbott and the Terrible Persistence of Romantic Thought
Yesterday morning, compelled as if by some binding treaty or biological imperative or perhaps The Farmer’s Almanac, many of the men in Abbott’s neighborhood rose early to clean their gutters. Abbott, more vulnerable to this kind of suburban pressure than he’d care to admit, today borrows a ladder and climbs it roofward during the hottest part of the day. The rain gutter is an apt synecdoche of domestic existence: From the ground it appears practical, functional, well conceived. But when you stand on a borrowed ladder and peer into it, you realize what a gutter is. A gutter is a flimsy trough of sludge, secured by rusty hardware. Rainwater is not so much channeled and diverted as collected and absorbed. All along the front of his house Abbott is alternately repulsed and terrified. He is afraid of falling off the ladder and sustaining compound fracture or death. The warning is right there on the top step, accompanied by a picture of a tumbling man who also appears to be on fire. Abbott knows that one instant everything is OK and then the next instant everything is not. He knows that it’s always the husbands of pregnant women who get buried by sinkholes or lashed by falling power lines. But he continues scooping the muck into a black garbage bag, and by the time he reaches the gutter along the back of his house, his dread and aversion have abated, and his eye and mind begin to wander. He sees that the roof over his family room runs flat until it hits the roof over his garage, where it rises at a soft angle for three feet or so before peaking and dropping steeply down the other side. Abbott, now accustomed to the ladder and his repetitive gutter-cleaning movements thereon, knows that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who would climb onto the flat roof one lovely summer night with a blanket and a bug-repelling candle and a bottle of cheap wine in order to recline against the gentle slope of the garage roof and gaze up at the vastness with a wine-bent conception of the sublime so limited as to be soothing, and those who would not. Of the latter type, Abbott knows that there are two subtypes: those who would not, beyond adolescence, even think to climb onto the roof with a frayed backpack one lovely summer evening, and those who would envision it deeply and repetitively, but never, ever do it. Abbott belongs to this wretched latter subtype, the worst possible. All that vestigial poetic yearning, useless and malignant. Abbott’s wife, inside the house, comes to the kitchen window below the section of the gutter that Abbott is cleaning. Her face in the window is level with his thighs, and so naturally he imagines her sucking his penis and swallowing his semen. “Are they bad?” she asks. “The gutters?” “Yeah.” “They’re not that bad,” he says, lying for no reason at all. She says, “The baby is really kicking today.”
4 Abbott Celebrates the Birth of His Nation
Abbott knows what’s going on out there. Blankets on lawns, scared birds circling the dark, the smell of burnt meat, sulfur. Somewhere a minivan in neutral is gliding silently toward the pond. Abbott is unpatriotic, unwashed. He pours another drink, kills a mosquito, sedates his dog with laced cheddar. He can hear, in the distance, the Sousa and bottle rockets. He reads Billy Budd, Sailor for the first time in seventeen years. He had forgotten how sad it is, or more likely he had never quite known.
5 In Which the Celebration Continues Deep into the Night
Poor welkin-eyed Billy, devoid of sinister dexterity. The days can be long without it, Abbott knows. He’s lying in bed beside his wife, who is almost certainly awake. These two heads on pillows, maybe three feet apart. Budd’s tragic impressment by the Royal Navy has Abbott remembering the day, nearly thirty years ago, when he learned about military conscription. His father had made some casual remark about his exemption from the draft, young Abbott had asked for a clarification of terms, and his parents, still married then, had explained. What a concept. What a blow to moral intuition. (This was roughly six months before the intuition-razing twelve-hour television miniseries Roots.) Abbott can recall the backyard patio, the dandelions, the squat tin shed flexing in the heat. He received his parents’ warm but dubious assurance that he would never be conscripted and then went upstairs and closed his door. Thirty years ago in a backyard. Abbott, lying now in bed, has an idea. He might put his forehead right against hers if she’ll turn around. The firecrackers still cracking out there, the sedated dog snoring at the foot of the bed. “Hey,” he whispers, turning on his side to face his wife’s shape.
6 The Heating and Cooling Specialist’s Tale
“I come to this guy’s house in the middle of the afternoon, and he’s home. I figure he’s probably a professor. I’m a little early, and he seems kind of startled to see me. He comes to the door holding his daughter.” “How old is she?” “I don’t know, I can’t tell anymore. Two? The guy’s arm is completely covered with butterfly stickers, and he’s wearing all this costume jewelry. Like that kind Sarah used to love. Three or four bracelets and probably ten necklaces this guy’s wearing. His daughter is just in a diaper, and she has magic-marker streaks all over her chest and legs. They’re listening to Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes. You know, I’ve been there, those long days, no big deal, but this guy looks a little sheepish, even after I tell him I have a daughter and try to make funny faces at the girl and all that.” “You scared her, didn’t you?” “She just looked at me. Then the guy shows me into the kitchen, and I see his dog, this big Lab, jammed into a tiny space between the dishwasher and the cabinet, and the dog is trembling and drooling like crazy. Just like Otis used to do when it thundered, except today it was beautiful. And I think maybe he’ll try to explain the dog, but he doesn’t say anything. So I say, ‘Your refrigerator isn’t working?’ And he tells me that it’s just not keeping the food very cold. I open it up, and I look in, and it’s filled with juice and fake meat, so now I know the guy is a professor.” “You look at people’s food?” “Hey, I don’t judge. And the first thing I always check when there’s a problem with a fridge—just in case—is the little temperature dial. You know? Like you turn it one way to make it—” “I know what the dial is.” “And sure enough, I move this huge thing of apple juice and about three gallons of milk to look at the dial, and it’s turned all the way to the warmest setting. So that’s the problem with the fridge. That’s why he called me out there.” “Oh, God.” “I know.” “I think even I would know to check that dial.” “And I know this guy is going to be humiliated about this, so I’m trying to explain the problem while still facing into the refrigerator, and I’m moving very slowly and trying to make it seem like it’s requiring some expertise to, you know, turn the dial to a higher number. And I tell him that’s the first thing he should always check when there’s a problem.” “Were you an ass about it?” “No, not at all. I was serious and professional. This could happen to anyone, and that’s what I told him. I told him I see it every day, which believe me I don’t. And
when I finally close the door and turn around, the guy is kind of smiling, but he won’t make eye contact.” “That’s horrible.” “I am taking no pleasure in any of this. And he’s still holding his daughter, and she’s patting his head and saying, ‘Good boy, Dad,’ over and over. Then we just stand there in the kitchen, and it’s awkward. The only noise is the dog, who is trembling so hard in that little nook or whatever that you can hear it. And then I have to tell him it’s forty dollars for the visit. It’s supposed to be sixty—and Ray will give me shit about it—but I just can’t do it to this guy.” “You’re sweet. You are.” “And he says sure, sure, and he writes me a check while holding his daughter, and she’s sticking a dinosaur into his ear and saying, ‘Dino in Dad’s ear.’ And then he hands me the check, and things are still kind of awkward, so I point at Sarah outside in the van in the driveway and tell him I’ve got my girl with me today. And I tell him she’s sixteen and we’re on our way to go upgrade her cell phone. And we both look out the window at her—she’s got her feet up on the dash, and she’s painting her toenails.” “No, she wasn’t.” “Yes, she was too. And she had that bored-looking kind of scowl on her face.” “I know the one.” “And honey, I have no idea why I’m talking so much to this guy. I just want to leave. This is more than I usually say in a week on the job. But then for some reason I tell him what I promised myself I would never say to anyone because I got so sick of hearing it when Sarah was little, but I said it.” “I don’t believe it.” “Yes, I did. I said, ‘Man, enjoy it now because it just goes by so fast.’” “Wow.” “And now I’m mortified, too, and the situation has gotten unbearable. The dog I swear seems like his heart might explode.” “What did he say?” “He didn’t say anything. He kind of laughed, and then I laughed too. Then he shook my hand and took the girl back into the playroom before I even put away the paperwork and got my tools. When I left, he was down on the floor, throwing her way up in the air and catching her.”
7 In Which Abbott Is Linked to Fetal Research In New Zealand
Because of the weak dial-up connection tonight, the Internet video of the stranger’s sonogram loads slowly and plays haltingly. The image is grainy and blurry. Nevertheless, after viewing the clip six or seven times, Abbott can pretty clearly see that the fetus is sobbing. The narrator, a professor at the University of Auckland, explains that the unborn child, twenty-eight weeks old, is responding to a vibro-acoustic stimulus (or a loud noise, if Abbott understands correctly). The narrator, nine thousand miles from Abbott, points out the rapid phases of inspiration and expiration, the three augmented breaths, the heaving chest, the tilt of the head. When a fetus cries like this, researchers call it fetal crying. Two hundred days, roughly speaking. “Wait,” Abbott’s wife says later, “it can cry before it can breathe?” Abbott lies completely still. He has never been so vibroacoustically cautious. “Even the chin quivers,” he says.
8 Abbott Recoils from The Natural Order of Things
Abbott means no harm. His daughter is frightened of spiders, even the kind called daddy longlegs, and Abbott is attempting to relocate the spider by gently grasping one of its legs. His daughter is weeping and running in circles, and so perhaps he rushes the job. The leg comes off. These things are as thin as hairs. He is not at all surprised when the seven-legged spider makes a swift escape through the grass. He is surprised, however, when its recently severed leg also escapes, twitching nimbly across the bright yellow ledge of his daughter’s inflatable pool. One must not be rash in ascribing human attributes to a detached spider leg, but the leg does seem to move with determination, courage, and a complete lack of self-pity. And later this day, Abbott, driving home from the Big Y out on Route 9, passes a construction site where an out-and-out meadow of two-foot weeds grows on the steep slope of a mound of truck-dumped dirt. The weeds sway and bend for the sun just like real plants. This bogus hillock will no doubt be dozed anon; the grading vehicles are parked on-site, ready. Nevertheless, the weeds just keep photosynthesizing. Their seeds are dispersed carelessly, ingeniously, in the summer breeze. This is the Holy Land, apparently. They all grow another sixteenth of an inch as Abbott drives past. “Enough,” he yells at the construction-site weeds. His daughter sits in the backseat with her pronouns all mixed up. “You want some songs,” she says. “You want a peanut. You want.”
9 Abbott Glimpses, As If from a Distance
Mornings, Abbott often finds the evidence of his wife’s sleeplessness: a used tea bag in a mug, a wrinkled pillow, a novel tossed on the couch. And of course her occasional notes, written on scraps of ripped paper and left by the coffeemaker. Months ago, when they began appearing, the notes were darkly comic, apologetic, tender. They digressed into observation and affection before requesting that Abbott please allow her to sleep in the morning. Often they included the time. The ripped scraps of paper were larger then, and the entreaties frequently ran to the back side of the paper. The notes have steadily gotten shorter, the scraps smaller. Abbott’s wife has now nearly abandoned rhetorical flourish, arrangement, punctuation, penmanship, and the small rightward arrow that signifies continuation. Long night—sorry. Or, the last time, simply: 3:30 bad. Abbott has saved all these notes in a manila folder without knowing why. There are three digital clocks in the kitchen—one on the microwave, one on the stove, one on the coffeemaker. They must be awful in the night. The insomniac cannot even take comfort in their small discrepancies because Abbott synchronizes them after each electrical outage. They are unanimous, imperious. This morning he sees, as he enters the kitchen, the aggressive display of time, as well as that tiny shard of white paper by the coffeemaker. Though he is morbidly curious about the note, he does not by now need to read it to know what it means. His wife must know this too, because the note, Abbott comes to learn, does not have a word on it.
10 The Broken Heart It Kens
In the basement Abbott presses shirts he will not have occasion to wear for three to four months. Each one has an ink stain, the insignia of his guild. This last wrinkled shirt is gray with two black dots on the shoulder. Abbott has moved into the final stage of ironing, during which he attempts to iron out the wrinkles that he previously ironed in. The monitor hisses quietly on the ironing board, Abbott’s daughter having long ago stopped singing a Scottish folk song about a captured Jacobite Highlander who will never again see his true love on the banks of a beautiful lake, and whose soul, after his body is executed by English soldiers, will travel through the spirit world, arriving home in Scotland well before his extant rebel comrade, who will walk home alone over the Earth. The static of the monitor and the sibilant chugs of the iron, combined with the dim light of a dust-covered, low-watt bulb and the stale subterranean air and the metal shelves full of rusty cans of paint and turpentine, make Abbott feel as if he is the sole survivor of a calamitous event in some remote expeditionary outpost. His shirts are beautiful, though, like Gatsby’s. They remind him of the purpose of art. He unplugs the iron and pockets the monitor. He picks up the neat warm rectangular bundle of stained shirts, turns off the light, and begins to climb the stairs in darkness. Somewhere between the bottom of the stairs and the top, he strikes his knee against a metal bracket that connects the railing to the wall. He falls to a sitting position, grips his knee with both hands. His pressed shirts tumble down the dark stairs. The pain is immense, and it does not abate. Rather, it escalates, takes on new dimensions and nuances, opens into meaninglessness. The pain lacks value and context. If Abbott’s wife were here, she would turn on the light and say, “Oh, God, ouch. What did you do?” She would offer him the ice that he would refuse for no conceivable reason. She would say, “Here, let me see it.” She would look at the knee and, no matter what she saw, she would grimace. The pain would stand for something; it would exist in a sense for his wife, for the marriage. It would conceivably lead to some kind of physical intimacy, perhaps right here on the stairs. Abbott and his wife might explore the erotic potential of a serious knee injury. But she’s not here and he can’t call fo
r her. Or he won’t. This pain—his shoulders are shaking, his teeth chattering, as if he has been pulled from an icy pond. Abbott cannot determine if he is nearer the top or the bottom. Ascension, though, is out the question, so he scoots painfully down, over the pile of his ironed shirts. Streetlight enters the room through the small ground-level windows at the top of the basement walls, and the pupils of Abbott’s eyes automatically dilate so that he can make out shapes and edges in the dark. He hops on his noninjured leg toward his bourgeois cache of unused furniture. He sees a plastic-wrapped crib mattress leaning against a rocking chair, and he topples it to the ground. Abbott lies down on the tiny mattress, his legs extending far off the edge. The plastic covering crinkles beneath him as he adjusts his body. The smell of mildew makes him feel as if he himself is rotting. He has seen images of spores, magnified many times. When his breathing finally slows, the basement becomes quiet and he can hear the hum of the fan in his bedroom, directly above. He can hear his wife turning in bed. For a few minutes he considers masturbation. A passing car’s headlights briefly illuminate the room, and Abbott sees an old flashlight on an old bedside table, within reach. He picks it up and turns it on. Its light is weak and yellow. First he sits up and shines the light on his knee, which is still vibrating with pain. He fears and expects to see something commensurate with the sensation—chips of bone under skin or a lurid contusion or grotesque swelling—but his fear turns to disappointment when he notices that there is not a mark on it. His knee just looks like the knee of a guy in his late thirties. Next he shines the light on the stairs. The shirts are strewn, as if they had grappled at the top and then tumbled down. Their backs look broken. A blue one has an arm outstretched, as if trying to break its fall, or to reach for something out of reach.
Abbott Awaits Page 5
