by John Crowley
Stan watched her, her beautiful absorption, and felt a sudden spasm of grief for her, all that youth regained, only to be given up again, maybe, probably. Would that reborn sex drive now evaporate?
Not the time to raise that point either.
He lifted his glass and looked through the pale wine at the pale sky scribbled on by still-leafless branches. Perhaps, without a choice, they’d soon be returned to the calmer waters they’d been sailing on not long ago. Which actually he couldn’t think would be so bad. But—this occurred to him—it might seem bad as a place returned to rather than a place arrived at. Returned to with new baggage as they said now.
You can’t un-know something you have come to know.
For the first time Stan seemed to see that these developments ever-arising in time weren’t opening outward the life he would live, he and she, as once they had seemed to do; instead they were filling it in, gradually or abruptly, like discoveries filling in the blank terra incognita in an old map; and they would go on doing so, lands and peoples, until in the end there were no more.
3. Mount Auburn Street
Harry Watroba kept a lookout for signs that he was transitioning into old age. For instance he had come to notice how, like a cheerful oldster, he took increasing satisfaction in tidying, in small-job completion, in preparation and storage, in refreshment of the spaces around him. Shaping up the last redoubt? It didn’t seem so, but certainly he was becoming more like the ant than the grasshopper he’d been in youth. Also he was growing more miserly, a sign of age in many cultures, as he knew: the slippered pantaloon counting over his coins. Right now he was scrubbing the accumulated calcium and minerals from an old stainless-steel tea-kettle that had become so coated with thick white stuff the water could hardly come out. He’d had to find a thin sharp thing (an ancient silver nut-pick, in the end) with which to poke down through the stubby spout and clear the holes that the water would, or rather wouldn’t, pour out of; scrape with a green scrubbie the interior, and—as long as he was at it—the greasy and water-spotted exterior too. The water in this place he’d come to live in was phenomenally hard. The kettle belonged to the place, not to Harry.
Harry’s own kettle, an even older and more battered one, had been lost forever when Harry’s house burned down, or up—Harry pondered the difference, what made one preposition preferable to the other. And “lost”: the catastrophe had given him many reasons to consider the various and differing occasions for that word. I lost my wife, we say, though (excepting the case of a separation at a mall or in a crowd) we know just where she is. The lost in I lost my way seems to be a rather different word than it is in, say, I lost my hat, or in I lost that fight.
Another thing Harry had lost in the fire was the nearly complete draft of a major revision and updating of his popular (even briefly best-selling) book A Rhetoric for Everyone. He had certainly lost the book even though he knew where the scorched remains of the pages and the sturdy binder that had held them were: they were with his library, down in the wetted ash and blackened lumber of his former office in the nice Colonial Revival house in the hilltown where he had lived for decades. He’d lost the computer on which it was almost done being typed, and the disks on which several drafts were stored, and those also on which it was backed up, and he knew where those were too. Because of the fire he had also lost, different sense, his wife, Mila: she blamed him (justly enough) for the fire, and had moved in with her mother in a nearby city. In various losings then, his home, his book, his occupation, his wife, his way, his future, and his (weirdly longstanding) innocence.
The old tea-kettle now shone, glowing like an athlete after exercise. The dent on one side made it all the more appealing: refreshed and ready, but old and reliable too. Baraka: long ago Mila had told him this Arabic word meant “the holiness human things acquire through long use.” Only recently had it occurred to him to look this up and confirm she was right, and she wasn’t. Which left a gap in the language, for surely a word for the condition he’d thought baraka described was necessary and gratifying.
He put the kettle back on the stove-top where it resided.
For a couple of months after the conflagration Harry’d moved in with his daughter Hope and her daughter Muriel, in the spare room, feeling a weird sense of privileged stasis, like a soul in the quiet forecourt of a not-yet-determined afterlife. That couldn’t continue, and without making an actual decision, or to avoid making one, Harry had rented this small and uncertain-looking little house beside a stretch of highway, a town away from his old home.
Despite doing not much of anything, he had somehow managed to accumulate a large number of belongings in the time he lived with Hope and Muriel. Clothes, of course, to replace the lost contents of his closets; Old Navy mostly, as he felt guilty about spending more than necessary of the diminishing savings that were both his and Mila’s. Sales at Old Navy astonished him: jeans and shirts and cotton sweaters with prices that seemed to hark back to Harry’s youth, thence reduced to next to nothing, buy one get one free. Hope had at length loaded all this and the rescued books and papers and winter boots, the laundry, and a little radio into the Subaru and trucked it up on a sunny Tuesday when she had a late shift at the hospital and Muriel was in school.
She stood on the threshold now looking in. “Why didn’t you go the whole distance and just move into a damn trailer?”
“Actually I looked at a few,” Harry said. “Immobile homes.”
She crossed her arms before her.
“Furnished,” Harry pointed out. “A deck.” He was able to show her the whole place from the doorway, which she seemed reluctant to pass through. “A river. Just there.”
Hope went to her car and pulled stuff out, shopping bags and boxes; Harry came to help. “How long’s this supposed to last you?”
“I can’t say how long,” Harry said. “The insurance company is havering.” Good old Scots word, related to hovering, meaning something between pausing in uncertainty and dithering. The insurance company had been alerted to the presence of possibly flammable materials stored in the basement, the proximate cause of the fire, and no funds from the policy had yet been seen. Harry and Mila were still paying the mortgage on the place, which didn’t leave much for alternate digs.
Flammable things had formerly been called inflammable, till warnings and tags became so common in the world that the ambiguity in that prefix became a problem. (Harry’d discussed it in Section 20 of his book, “Affix a Prefix.”) The opposite of the old inflammable had been uninflammable; it was uncertain, now, what the opposite of flammable could be—nonflammable, probably. But really, who needed a warning that something would not catch fire?
“So are you going to get a new computer? Can you get online here?”
“Dial-up,” Harry said, with a smile that he could tell from Hope’s face was deeply annoying to her. A large truck just then going past the house on the road could be felt as well as heard. That was a drawback; Hope indicated it with a thumb, saying nothing. Harry shrugged, nodded in assent.
“All right,” she said, fishing for her keys. “I gotta go.”
“Tell Muriel I live by a river.”
“She misses you.” She kissed her father’s cheek.
That had been a dreary day in late autumn. The place was a little nicer now, due mostly to the melting of the filthy snow around it and the soft pour of sun throughout a longer day, but not much. Harry didn’t mind it, could stand even the mildewed davenport and finger-grimed television and all the other signs of terminal impoverishment. He did, though, find himself tucking his arms and knees in a fetal ball in the lumpy bed at night, child or pup trying to comfort itself. And when he was here all day, nothing to do, he had to go out, every hour or two through the day, and sit in the aluminum lawn chair a while and look at the little river or stream or creek (he hadn’t learned its name, or even if it had one). On this mild April day wearing a beret and overco
at, his gloved hands crossed.
Inconceivable as it seemed, he would have to bestir himself. He might cease moving altogether if he didn’t.
It wasn’t quite true that Harry had lost everything connected to the new draft of A Rhetoric for Everyone. He possessed a large folder of notes and scraps of paper with queries to follow up on, photocopied book and magazine pages on which he had circled examples of this or that notion, and many complete pages of early drafts, a heap of disordered stuff that had tended to travel with him in his old shoulder bag; that’s where it was the day of the fire, in the bag on the passenger seat of his Oldsmobile station wagon, when he’d come up the hill to his house smelling the awful wet-cigarette-butt smell of a fire just put out. That it was all he now had of the book made it worse, in some ways, than nothing; but he did have it. He planned to start in on transposing it to a single document, and cutting and pasting that document into the beginning of some sort of draft. He thought of Carlyle rewriting his entire history of the French Revolution after John Stuart Mill’s maid used the only manuscript to start fires in the fireplaces. There was no lack of such tales. No one would care to hear his.
What had kept him from beginning was the horror of typing it all into the computer. He could not have dreamed, not in detail, that such a thing as a personal computer with word processor would come into being when as a young man he had hunched sweating and swearing over his Royal Standard, punching at keys with two fingers (the index of the left, the medicus of the right, for no reason he knew). His machine had forever needed and never got a cleaning and oiling, which would have reduced his toil somewhat. No more than most men of his age and time, even those who earned their living by writing, had Harry ever tried to learn to type for real, any more than he’d learned to sew. What he could imagine was one day being rich enough to deliver his work, typed on smudgy erasable paper, interlined, overwritten, cut up and taped together, to a real typist, to be returned to him perfect and clean.
But then that modern miracle had come to pass, and now typing was a world easier though still not exactly swift or pleasant, not for him, and the luxury of that long-imagined typist was unjustifiable. After much indecision he had brought to this place a computer to replace the deformed and dead one at the old house. Unlike that one, this one came to him used, or pre-owned, but like a good but aging servant dismissed and thrown on the job market it was surely capable of handling the new additions to or upgrade of his book, as the agreed-upon term was. It’d come from the shop to which the University students and their thriftier or more poorly paid instructors went, where ancient and less-ancient drives, monitors, laptops, and printers were piled like old clothes at the Salvation Army. Harry actually loved computers, and knew enough about them to pick the correct components, but he had to fight a tendency toward nostalgia and not buy a system redolent of his first encounters with the phenomenon. A final choice had taken him several visits, but now it was set up and awaiting him in his front room, before it a maple kitchen chair with a knitted seat-cover. Two years before, all machines made such as this one was, from grand data centers on windswept prairies to the innards of digital clocks, had been thought to be at risk of stopping dead—their systems could not, it was said, understand dates past 1999. Y2K was the neat designation for this catastrophe, which had passed with no harm done, as Harry out of an inherent optimism had supposed it would.
Faced with typing up the mass of notes and snippets of printouts and loose papers, WordPerfect or no, Harry had been driven to an additional purchase he thought he might regret. And now from the back deck where he sat he heard the arrival of the UPS truck, and the drop of a delivery onto his miniature front porch. He knew what it was. It wasn’t a gift. It wasn’t a master-key or an arcanum. It was one of those conveniences that promise you can increase your work output for no increase in effort, and present this as an opportunity, even a delight.
Dragon Naturally Speaking it was called. How had it come by such a name? Harry was reminded of the weird literal translations that used to appear on old Chinese menus. Why not Dragon Speaking Naturally? Harry the Dragon collected the package from the porch, opened it, and drew out the product within. He smelled the sharp odor of its newness, and touched the sheen of the cellophane that covered its box, which was likely not actual cellophane but a modern successor.
The usual stack of floppy disks, which held the program, were half the size of the old floppies and encased in stiff plastic, but still and likely forever to be called “floppy.” A pleasant half-hour was spent installing these. A headset, like those used by telemarketers and 911 operators, went over the head and pointed a small microphone at the mouth. Feeling faintly silly, Harry pressed the wire loop into his grizzled hair, and discovered that there was on his new old computer a place to plug it in, naturally.
Things got curiouser: in order to train the program to understand his peculiar, that is particular, speech (“Adjectives on the Move,” Section 21 of his Rhetoric), the training manual instructed him to read passages from Alice in Wonderland in a distinct yet relaxed and natural voice as they appeared before him on the screen. Fine. When that process was done, the promise was that he would be able to read aloud the notes, bits, examples, vocabulary, hints, wonderments, and fun facts from his notebooks as effortlessly as a lawyer reading a will to a roomful of descendants.
Having at length (his computer proved less trainable than Harry had expected) been certified, his particularities processed, Harry tried out a few simple sentences of his own. “Perfection of form is the most perfect content,” he said aloud to program-and-computer—a phrase he’d actually once written in his nicest hand on the bathroom wall of some john somewhere. He watched as it produced a sentence not resembling his very much. He tried again. Defection affirms the nosed turf at contend. He tried again, and then again. Puff action of form is the mows Purvis condemned. There was of course a way to tidy up the natural errors the poor thing made, but having to do that made the speaking not a bit more easeful than simply typing as fast and as well as he could. Harry thought of Henry James dictating his serpentine sentences to a typist, who probably did far better than the Dragon. She had been, of course, a human.
Harry disengaged from the headset and went to take a nap.
Like a toddler in a talkative family, the Dragon did learn, and on a rising curve—getting better faster every day. The nonsense that persisted, like a toddler’s, could be amusing: the program always took a guess, no matter how odd; it never just ran a line of question marks or X’s. Harry decided that it, or he, had passed the tests, pulling a C+ or B- anyway, and on a bright and hopeful summer morning he chose a section from his notebook pages to dictate.
These were some little puzzles that would go into the section “Text and Context,” showing that dictionaries could not finally settle questions of meaning, that words were simply too cunning for that, and without losing the definiteness of their definitions, could alter to match their surroundings in the same way the fabled chameleon does. Two related stories were presented, and the reader was to come up with two words to fill the two blanks in the summation that followed each story, in one order after the first story, and the reverse order after the second.
Harry began reading the first of the puzzles aloud. Headings and explications he’d add later, when he’d composed them.
I owned a pair of rare Bugatti Type 57s roadsters, he read aloud. They cost a fortune. One of them I never drove. But in the second one I tooled around the neighborhood, enjoying the stares—until I flew through a stop sign and tangled with a lowly SUV. The Bugatti was totalled.
Well done, Dragon! Harry had only a few corrections (boo got he) to make. He inserted the fill-in-the-blanks sentence by hand:
My ______________ car was no longer _______________.
Then the second story:
The other Type 57s lived in my heated garage after that, and I watched its market value rise—that is, until the latest
market downturn. It rapidly become nearly worthless, as did the garage, the heavily mortgaged house, and the stocks I had bought on margin. In order to avoid bankruptcy I had to sell everything at fire-sale prices, and the Bugatti, no less precious than it had been, went for a song.
My ______________ car was no longer _______________.
Mila had shown no interest in this riddle, as she had in some other games that he produced for the book. Why did he want to write stories about expensive sports cars, especially imaginary ones? A lawyer, she was invested in the ways in which words had power and did things in the world; toying with them just for the fun of it, or even to uncover their interesting innards, was to her a habit of Harry’s not much different from his constant sing-humming bits from classical music or jazz standards.
“You never finish,” she said once in impatience. “You just do your little diddle-diddle-doo and then nothing. There’s no conclusion. No closure.”
“I do the theme,” Harry’d replied. “I can’t whistle-hum the whole symphony.”
“Just don’t do it then,” she said. “Do something with a payoff. Or don’t do it.”
Mila. God how long he’d loved her.
As he thought this, sitting in a house where she was not, a new switch-the-words puzzle occurred to him. Unwilling to draft it in speech (though that was advertised on the Dragon box as possible), he removed his headset and turned away from the screen, took a pencil and a pad, and balanced it on his knee to scribble.
My place of residence, he wrote at speed, where I have lived for many years, has been terribly damaged in a fire, and all my books, cherished memorabilia, old kitchenware, and inherited furniture, lost. It could be rebuilt perhaps, but to me it could not ever be the same.
My ______________ is no longer a ______________ .
