Desire Provoked

by Tracy Daugherty

  He calls two light cones up on the screen—a pair of pale blue pyramids, points touching in the center of the graph .

  The upper light cone he labels accessible future: that is, the realm of events that can possibly follow the present. The bottom cone’s the accessible past: the realm of events leading up to now. The white space outside the light cones is the inaccessible future and past. He has, in effect, drawn the basis of a map defining the regions of the universe knowable from a given point in space and time.

  To make the map more accurate, he must concentrate the surface area of the light cones. When he does so, the shape of the cones fluctuates wildly, indicating that the line between future and past can easily blur, even at short distances.

  Next, he calls to the screen a wormhole. On a flat plane, a wormhole is formed by drawing two openings opposite each other and stretching them into a single tube. If, as some astronomers believe, dead suns form wormholes in space, the topology around them is highly unstable.

  Further, Adams discovers that if he quantizes all the data on the screen, emptiness acquires a complex topology. It looks like an arterial system, a tightly fused matrix of tubes. To fully understand the shape of space-time, he needs a four-dimensional image.

  He switches off the system, gets up, stretches, and walks to the window. Tattered paper flutters in the street, against the curb. A couple strolls down the walk. Tiny caterpillars of motion inhabit the space between him and the street where, tomorrow morning at eight, he will enter the building.

  In Ecuador, where Adams once headed an international group, the Quechua Indians, an educated and happy people, believe the future lies behind them. “A man does not have eyes in the back of his head,” said one. “Nor can he see the future. Does it not make sense, then, to place the future behind you?” Similarly, the past, an “open book,” lies ahead.

  Adams feels like a Quechua.

  At work his supply of ink is low. He hasn’t been to the storeroom. Grease pencils aren’t precise and lead pencils aren’t dark enough. He’ll try it anyway.

  1:00 He can’t see the grids he has made. The lines are simply too light, and his eyes begin to ache. He should have used the computer.

  2:00 Deerbridge Road.

  2:15 Deerbridge Road disappears. County records are uncertain.

  4:45 Deerbridge Road reappears.

  At home, he tries to call the kids. No answer.

  At dusk, Jordan returns. He is standing close to the house and appears to be fiddling with the faucet. For the first time, Adams feels panic more than curiosity or annoyance. Still in his suit he leaps out the door, past the barbecue pit and the tree. The man turns, opens the gate, flies up the walk. Adams, in pursuit, loosens his tie. The man jumps a fence. Adams follows. Shrubs. Thorns. The barking of a dog. Pale blue television light flickers through blinds. The laughter of the neighbors. Loose bricks in the yards. Dog shit, the smell of lilac. Adams can’t keep up—Jordan is much younger than he, and in better shape. “Goddamn you!” Adams calls. The man heaves a plastic garbage can at him. Adams brushes potato skins from his suit, runs up the empty street past the dance hall and Rosa’s house. His shoes hurt. The man has disappeared. Did he have a car waiting?

  Adams sits on the curb. The night is humid, tar shines on the streets. He can turn left, make a right, or go straight. He can walk backwards up the street until he reaches a dead end.

  An airplane passes overhead.

  He’s not sure where he is.

  He clambers over a wire mesh fence and finds himself in a garden. Peppers, tomatoes, beets. A pigeon coop.

  As Adams speaks, Mayer remains impassive, remote.

  “And you’ve positively identified him?”

  “Well, I think so. It looked like he was doing something to the house. You’ve treated the man. You must know he’s nuts.”

  Mayer shows him nothing.

  “I want to know the best course of action. I’ve already called the police. I could try them again, or maybe it would be better if you did it. I need a rational plan; otherwise I’m going to fly off the handle. Enough is enough.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt for you to call the police again, ask them to patrol the neighborhood if they will. In the meantime, I’ll speak to Mr. Jordan and we’ll determine what needs to be done.”

  “He is nuts, right? He sure looked like it the day he came running out of your office.”

  Mayer says only, “I’ll speak to him. There’s been no damage to your property, is that correct?”

  “Not that I can tell.”

  “All right, Mr. Adams. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I know how upsetting something like this can be. If you’re having trouble sleeping—”

  Mayer follows him into the hall. Jordan is walking toward them from the far end. Adams starts, but Mayer holds his arm. “Please, Mr. Adams, let me speak to him before you say anything, all right?”

  Adams straightens his coat. “You asshole,” he says to Jordan.

  Inevitably, the call from Pamela’s family. He’s surprised it didn’t come sooner: perhaps they were hoping for a reconciliation by now. Her father, Jurgen, accuses Adams of neglecting Pamela’s needs. Without irony, Adams asks, “What are her needs?” It seems to him that her needs were ill-defined even at the time of their wedding. Would she be a journalist or an artist? Would she travel with Adams or remain at home? Perhaps she married him because, given her family background, marriage was prudent for her; yet Adams, with his passport and maps, was the most impractical of husbands.

  When they met she was taking an Old English course. “Your eyes are Nordic,” she said, winter-cearig” which, roughly translated, meant “winter-sad.” The fact that she found him moody pleased him at the time. He enjoyed being a serious young student.

  Jurgen wanted to marry them but Adams refused politely, feeling that to grant him this privilege would be to approve in advance any intervention Jurgen might wish to make in their marriage. Adams hired a Unitarian minister, and throughout the ceremony Pamela’s parents, in the front pew, criticized his performance. “His voice is a little shaky,” Adams heard Jurgen whisper. “Such a monotone,” said Pamela’s mother.

  Now, on the phone, Jurgen’s telling him the story of Abraham and Sarah, who survived hardships with unending faith and love and were able to conceive a child even after their bodies were withered and broken.

  Whenever Jurgen preaches, he quotes liberally from a variety of sources. Like Pamela, he is proud of his German ancestry, and is particularly fond of Nietzsche and Hegel. He has misconstrued Nietzsche’s Will to Power as “willpower” and erroneously paraphrases him in a Christian context. Hegel pops up in his apocalyptic sermons. “History’s coming to an end,” Jurgen shouts. “The Book of Revelation says so, the great Lutheran thinker Hegel says so.”

  Listening to him, Adams loses trust in narrative. In Jurgen’s hands narrative is simply a form of typology, a chain of causality, leaving no room for accident. Adam was the forerunner of Moses who was the forerunner of Christ who became a scapegoat for all mankind… Well, Adams thinks, you see the trouble that’s gotten us into.

  He has drawn enough jagged coastlines and isolated islands to be a firm believer in accident.

  In sum, he does not get along with Pamela’s father.

  The only member of Pamela’s family he enjoys is her uncle Otto. A rounder and a scoundrel, Otto is one of the richest men in Pennsylvania. He quit school in the fifth grade, learned sign-painting, and along with his father designed billboards all over the East Coast. When his father died, he discovered that the old man owned much of the East Coast, though he’d lived like a pauper all his life. Otto inherited so much land that the Army Corps of Engineers had to consult him each time they planned a project in the Delaware basin.

  “You can’t really own a piece of land,” he once told Adams. “It’s there for anyone to sleep and piss on. Besides, my inheritance never stopped me from sinking to my proper level in life.” With buckets of silver a
nd buckets of gold he formed images up and down America’s highways, meanwhile accumulating interest on his holdings—money he rarely touched. He didn’t drink much before the age of fourteen, but “did quite a bit,” he said, “after that.” He preferred to live like his father and had no use for the rest of Pamela’s family. “Tight-assed Lutheran Krauts,” he called them.

  Adams agreed, but did not want to upset Jurgen any more than the separation already had. He sounded old.

  “It’s all for the best, Jurgen. We were going in different directions. Pam’s found a whole new career—”

  “Don’t go blaming Pammy for your oversights.”

  “We both made mistakes.”

  “Excuses won’t wash with God, Sam. Marriage is a sacred institution.”

  “Jurgen, please, I want you to stop worrying about it. Let Pam and me work this out ourselves, all right? In the meantime, you take care of yourself.”

  “I’m fit as a fiddle. Don’t change the subject.”

  Adams’ family is easier. His mother and father divorced just after Kenny was born. She stays at home with migraines, he runs a miniature golf course on the outskirts of Red Cloud. When she wasn’t in bed with pain, she was arguing with the old man in the clubhouse next to the eighteenth green. The final fairway led to a clown’s face, sad as a frozen dinner, with pointed eyes and a grinning mouth. The tongue was a red slide up which the ball rolled into the hole located just behind the clown’s uvula. Adams remembers sitting on the tongue, watching his parents threaten each other with putters.

  Though neither is happy when he calls and tells them his troubles, they listen and forgive.

  A note from Mayer: “Re our earlier conversation. Mr. Jordan has been under an intense emotional strain of late, factors having to do mainly with overwork. At my request, Mr. Carter has agreed to allow him some time off. You’ll be happy to know that Mr. Jordan’s problems are not serious. He is not a threat to you, nor has he ever been. I am satisfied you will not be bothered again.”

  Part Three

  THE pleasure he took in naming his children is the same pleasure he feels in finishing a map. State names, county names, city names. The names of rivers, marshes, fjords. What the seas are called, the continents, the winds hushed deep in coves. The first name of a forest. The original word for a ridge. Irish, Icelandic, Nordic. Indian similes, Eskimo symbology, the nomenclature of the Vikings. Script (so ferociously ornate it reveals the cloistered monk’s distrust of words), bold strokes (the explorer’s hand), primitive type. German, Russian, French.

  The world map of John Speede, 1626, revealing in the Southern Unknowne Land the County of Parrots, so named because of the “extraordinary and almost incredible bigness of those birds there.”

  Ptolemy, the father of design, advising, “We shall do well to keep the straight line.”

  Columbus wrote that the world resembles a woman’s breast, terrestrial paradise flourishing at the spot that corresponds to the nipple.

  Adams has mapped amazing ground. Six years ago, on a summer field trip to Mexico, he and his party lodged at a ranch thirty miles south of Mount Ciénega, an active volcano. Lava had altered the face of the landscape, diverting rivers, forcing villages to relocate, contaminating Sonora’s water supply. Adams had been asked to make preliminary sketches for revised maps of the region.

  A nearby university used the ranch for agricultural research, but graciously allowed the American party to stay in the main house. Adams’ room overlooked the barn and the smell of rye grass and the chuffing of horses in their stalls reminded him of Red Cloud.

  One night, unable to sleep, Mount Ciénega rumbling in the distance, he dressed and walked outside. The mosquitoes were thick; fallen berries snapped beneath his feet. Slapping the back of his neck he entered the barn. It was still. The animals were tense. He waded through the hay and was startled to see, in the corner, a thick white snake wrapped around a cow’s hind legs, its mouth firmly attached to the udder. The terrified cow stared at the slats in the side of the barn.

  Pamela has prepared cold zucchini and buttermilk soup. “I’m on a vegetarian diet,” she says. “Did you know that for every sixteen pounds of soy and grain fed to cows, we only get one pound of beef? The Institute for Food and Development says eating meat is like driving a Cadillac.”

  Toby won’t touch the food. Neither will Adams. Deidre is eating with a friend.

  “I understand you’ve been saying some nasty things to your mother,” Adams says.

  “He called me an uncool bitch just before you got here.”

  “Is that why you came over?” Toby says. “To yell at me?”

  “No. But I don’t want you calling your mother names. Not to her face, and not behind her back.” “Bitch.”

  “Do you hear me?”

  Toby mutters something else.

  “I mean it, son.”

  Toby stands. “Bitch!” he shouts.

  “If you call her that one more time—”

  “How do you know I’m talking to her?”

  “All right, is it me you’re upset with?”

  Toby sits.

  “Is that it?”

  He props his elbows on the table. “I’m not upset,” he says. “And I’ll do whatever I want.”

  “You’ll do your homework.”

  “If I feel like it.”

  “You’ll feel like it,” Adams warns him, “after dinner.”

  “We’re doing geography,” Toby says. “It sucks. All those stupid maps.”

  “Your feelings toward me have been noted. But you’re still going to have to do your homework.”

  Toby pushes himself away from the table. “I’ll do whatever I want.”

  “Go to your room,” Pamela tells him. “And stay there.”

  Toby leaves the kitchen.

  Pamela smooths the tablecloth in front of her. “I don’t know what to do with him. I’ve talked to a couple of doctors.”

  “He doesn’t need to see a doctor. For God’s sake, Pam, we just split up. It’s bound to be confusing—”

  “Poor man, he’s become so boring boring boring.”

  “It needs to be discussed. You’re like Fort Knox these days. I never see you, never hear from you.”

  “If it’s the money—”

  “To hell with the money.”

  “I can’t deal with him, Sam. Last week he sat here throwing lighted matches at me.”

  “Lighted matches?”

  “Let me try a doctor.”

  “All right,” Adams concedes. “But on a trial basis. I want to know how he’s coming, and if there are no good signs within a month, we do something else.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your family’s always been quick to push the panic button.”

  “If you mean my father—”

  “That’s right. He’d have Toby in juvenile court. It’s a wonder he hasn’t locked Otto up.”

  “He should be. He’s a drunk.”

  “He’s not as bad as Jurgen thinks.”

  Pamela folds her arms. “He has too good a time.”

  Adams knocks on Toby’s door. “Come in.”

  Toby jounces on the side of the bed. Once. Twice. His shoulders drop, he slumps and places his elbows on his knees.

  “What is it,” Adams asks. He sits on Toby’s American Bicentennial desk with the bald eagle decoupaged on top. The desk was a gift from Otto one Christmas—he had taken a sudden shine to the children.

  Above the desk, a poster of a woman in a leopard-skin bikini, gazing provocatively from the crotch of a tree. She is famous, though Adams can’t recall her name, acts in a television series and does commercials for a popular soft drink.

  Toby’s room is clean, almost empty.

  “What’s bothering you, Toby?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  Toby jounces on the bed.

  “Things have been pretty rough.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Let’s talk
about it.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Would you rather talk to your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you giving her such a hard time?”

  “I’m not.”

  “She said you threw matches at her.”

  Toby doesn’t answer.

  “It hasn’t been easy on her, either, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Well then, why don’t you give her a break?”

  “She’s always busy.”

  “She’s very talented.”

  “Does she hate you?”

  Adams stands, smooths his pants. “No.”

  Toby jounces higher. “When you’re married and you like each other, you fuck a lot, right?”

  “Are you trying to shock me with your language, is that what you’re trying to do?” He feels the leopard woman’s eyes on him as he moves around the room. “Because if that’s what you’re trying to do, it won’t work.”

  “Don’t be an igno, Dad.” Toby stops jouncing. “Everybody says it. But Mrs. Sorge, the principal, heard me and now I’ve got detention for a week.”

  “For saying—”

  “Fuck.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No.”

  “What else?”

  “We were on the playground.”

  “And?”

  “I peed on a girl’s shoes.”

  Adams resists an impulse to laugh. “You must like her a lot.”

  “Yeah.” For a second Toby smiles, then his face hardens. “Mom wants to ground me.”

  “I think you deserve it, Toby.”

  “She can’t stop me from doing what I want.”

  “She can take your money away from you and make you sit in your room.”

  “No she can’t.”

  Adams believes him.

  “She doesn’t care what happens to me.”

  “You know that’s not true, Toby.”

  “And she hates you. I can tell.”

  Maybe I should wrap a steel tube around his neck, pin him to a tree with wooden pegs.

  When Toby was six he joined the Indian Y-Guides, a father-son organization sponsored by the YMCA. Adams went to meetings, wore a silly headband and feather, helped Toby make bulletin boards, letter holders, hot pads. (The leader of the “tribe,” a retired fireman, nixed Adams’ suggestion that they all make tom-toms—“too damn noisy.”) In early Decern-ber the Y-Guides took a bus to an abandoned state park, now overrun with weeds. The nights were cold, Toby cried, peed in his sleeping bag, lost both his shoes. He was never, after that weekend on the plains, a “joiner.” Refused the Cub Scouts, church groups (shook Jurgen mightily), Little League. They would never explore together, father and son.