Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821) (13 page)

*

Someday the world will build a highway with an overpass leading to a cloverleaf feeding to an off-ramp to a parking area that will be full of tourist buses full of visitors hungering in anticipation, there to join the multitudes tramping hour after hour clutching snack-bar goodies as they marvel through the corridors of my blog, then to reboard amid the waves of satisfied oglers clutching geegaws, key chains and can openers and T-shirts from the gift shop adjacent to the restrooms near the parking lot of my blog, but until that day comes I hear the steady pulse and recoil of the sea and see the moonlight through the skylight and reflected off the polished banisters and I know that if it is only justiny, whether she or he is alone or stands for secret lurking others now or in the future, I have made it and it is good.

*

A first appreciation has come. A tentative thing, a shred of sensibility, something that tiptoed in on little cat feet and graced me with praise. A he or she, I can’t tell from the byline: justiny.
I wuvvv your blog
, justiny said in a note, a seashell-pink crayon scribble on a fragile curl of
tissue, the equivalent of a whisper, a thing I found stuck to my boot as I made my proprietary rounds, polishing brass railings and marble doorknobs and suchlike, and which I might so easily have failed to notice. I had a moment’s impulse to whisper back: My blog loves you too, justiny, in its way. But I think my blog’s love is more cosmic or Buddhist, more impassive and impersonal, than to need always to answer. My blog is for all ears that might listen, and who knows how many that might be? justiny happens to have piped up. (Barely.)

*

Though I promise myself I’ll be patient, I find myself visiting my blog ten or twelve times a day, tracing with my echoing footsteps the boundaries of its magnificence, wondering when I’ll know—or if I’ll know—when another sensibility has sensed its noble call, the siren or lighthouse of my mind beckoning to theirs, and come to the doorway of my blog, entered and roamed and learned that they are not alone out here on the fringe of the real but that others have come before them and blogged so that they might feel less lonely. But I myself am not lonely. It is enough to have my blog.

*

I Sing My Blog Electric!

I made my blog in the shape of a tesseract.

I made a blog and it is good.

A small blog, of clay and wattles made. Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, and I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, and I will hear the ocean water lapping with low sounds around the pilings, while I stand in the foyer of my blog, within the exoskeleton of its architecture, feeling myself to be its deep heart’s core.

My blog is as big and small as my desiring.

I tried counting my blog’s rooms and found myself retracing my steps.

It has many doors and yet there is only one way to enter it.

I tried painting my blog in oils and ran out of canvas.

I shall follow mine blog wherever mine blog shall lead.

I offer this, my blog, to the world, but I do not require the world to need it or accept it, for it is my very very own blog.

*

I made my blog strong, I made it with my hands, fitted the joists and the beams and the floorboards neat, planed the crooked surfaces, sanded the knots where there were knots and varnished the sanded knots until a blind man couldn’t tell you their location. It was a fine labor of many days and it stands, my blog, by the salty beseeching sea, a stone’s throw from where the searching tidal claws at
their highest point mark the sand. My blog is an outpost on forever.

*

I have had a lovely inspiration: a blog at the ocean’s edge, a blog-by-the-sea. I think I shall call it
The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear
!

Paul Espeseth, who was no longer taking the antidepressant Celexa, braced himself for a cataclysm at SeaWorld. He wondered only what form cataclysm would take. Espeseth had tried to veto this trip, making his case to his wife with a paraphrase of a cable-television exposé of the ocean theme park, one that neither he nor his wife had seen. Instead, his wife had performed judo on his argument, saying, “The girls should see these things they love before they vanish from the earth entirely.”

So here he was. The first step, it seemed, involved flamingos. After he had hustled his four-year-old twins through the turnstiles and past the souvenirs, the
stuffed-animal versions of the species they’d come to confront in fleshly actuality, his family followed the park’s contours and were met with the birds. Their red-black cipher heads bobbed on pink, tight-feathered stalks, floating above the heads of a crowd of fresh entrants.

“Wait your turn, girls,” his wife said. Yet, seeing that no turns were being taken, Espeseth led Chloe and Deirdre by the hands and together they jostled forward into the mob to find a vantage on the birds. His wife stayed back, tending the double stroller draped with their junk. Closer, Espeseth saw that the birds were trapped on an island, a neat-mowed mound of grass ringed with a small fence and signs saying
PLEASE DO NOT FEED
.

“Can you see them?” he stage-whispered down at the girls, as if the clump of exotic birds were something wild spotted in the distance, a flock that could bolt and depart. In reality, they’d had some crucial feather clipped, rendering them flightless, the equivalent of crippling an opponent in a fight by slicing his Achilles tendon. The birds had no prospect of retreat from the barrage of screaming families pushing their youngest near enough for a cell-phone pic.

“I’m scared,” Deirdre said.

“They’re scared, too,” he told her.
As am I
. The flamingos were the first thing for which nothing could have prepared him. Having already watched with his girls a hundred YouTube videos of orcas, having already scissored magazine pictures of orcas and cuddled his children to sleep in beds full of stuffed orcas, Paul Espeseth had
hardened his soul in readiness for orcas—their muscular poignancy, their mute drama, the chance that they might in full view and to a sound track of inspirational music disarticulate one of their neoprene-suited trainers at the elbow or the neck. But the designers of the park had outsmarted him, softened him up with flamingos, like a casual round of cigarette burns to the rib cage preceding a waterboarding.

The girls found their boldness and pushed up to the front, then relented, and were supplanted in turn by other eager, deprived children, presenting their faces in what he imagined was for the birds a wave of florid psychosis. In the context of their species, these flamingos were like space voyagers, those who’d return with tales beyond telling. Except that they’d never return. You might as well have immersed the birds in a bathysphere and introduced them to the orcas, or dosed their food with lysergic acid.

“Let’s go,” he said, tugging the twins away. Their morsel hands had begun to sweat in his, or he’d begun to sweat onto them. “There’s a lot … else.”

“Orca show!” both girls yelped. It was what they’d come for.

“The show starts at eleven,” he told them. “We’ve got a little time. And there’s stuff on the way. Sharks.” He’d gathered the implications of the map at a glance: Short of parachuting in, you couldn’t get to Shamu Stadium without first passing other enticements. He steered for sharks and giant tortoises, if only as a gambit for skirting the Sesame Street Bay of Play and a roller coaster called Manta.
He had standards. SeaWorld should keep the promise of its name: close encounters with fathoms-deep fauna, not birds, not Elmo, not Princess Leia or Cap’n Crunch. He hardly felt in command of his family’s progress here, as they curved on the pathways. He felt squeezed into grooves of expertly predicted responses and behavior, of expenditures of sweat and hilarity and currency from his wallet and also his soul. He was as helpless as a pinball coursing in a tabletop machine. Not one of those simple and friendly, gently decaying machines he’d known in Minneapolis arcades in the seventies, either, but a raging, pulsing nineties-type of pinball machine, half a dozen neon paddles slapping at his brain.

It seemed too much to hope for another Legoland miracle. Two months earlier, Espeseth and his wife and their twin daughters had gone south to visit Legoland. Legoland had been tolerable. Legoland had had variations, textures, edges. It featured some bad zones, including, outstandingly, the bogus municipality called Fun Town, but others were okay, better than okay, like the clutch of restaurants on Castle Hill. There, while the twins got their picture taken with the Queen, and jousted on Lego horses riveted to a train track, he’d been able to sneak off to Castle Ice Cream and obtain a double espresso. That had been something. Hidden with his espresso in a shady quadrant of the castle courtyard, he’d silently toasted his daughters as they’d one after the other rounded the rail. Though he supposed he had Legoland to blame: Its tolerability had led him too easily into agreeing to SeaWorld,
which even on Celexa, he now saw, would have been another prospect entirely.

*

His shrink, Irving Renker, had given him a warning about the effects of leaching Celexa from his brain. Espeseth had at the time of the conversation been free of the medicine for just two days. He was quitting under Renker’s guidance, such as it was. “Prepare yourself,” Renker told him. “You might see bums and pickpockets.”

“See in the sense of hallucinate?”

“No,” Renker said. “You won’t hallucinate. I mean see in the sense of
notice
. You may disproportionately notice bums and pickpockets. Creeps. Perverts. Even amputees.”

Irving Renker was a Jewish New Yorker who’d crawled out of his archetype like a lobster from its shell, still conforming to that shell’s remorseless shape but wandering around fresh, tender, and amazed. Renker advocated physical exercise and could be seen navigating the crests of Santa Barbara’s hills on his bicycle, wearing a helmet and shades as well as an office-ready sweater, blue slacks, and leather-soled shoes. Espeseth had never seen him in the flats, let alone near the beach. He suspected that Renker’s wife did all their grocery shopping. Renker’s office was in an in-law apartment nestled in the scrubby hills behind his home, itself raised on stilts to meet the angle of the terrain. Renker’s front-window drapes were always drawn, thwarting curious eyes. Was there a secret
intellectual-Jew hovel there, with book-lined shelves, Sigmundian fetish masks, funky unfumigatable Persian carpets? No way to know. The consultation room was bland: framed abstract watercolors, beige upholstery, brass clock.

Renker’s conversation included, along with the phrases “Keep it simple” and “Don’t overthink,” terms like “black folks,” “Oriental,” “gypped,” and “bum.” Once, as Espeseth reminisced at length about sitting with his three brothers in the front seat of his father’s pickup truck on a fishing expedition, Renker had murmured, “Yes, yes, that’s known as ‘riding Mexican.’ ”

Espeseth never confronted or corrected his shrink. Instead, he’d gently offer examples of appropriate speech, in this case by replying, “Does this mean that the Celexa was, what, making me blind to homeless people? Or more likely to get robbed?”

“It’s a question of emphasis,” Renker said. “You may tend to notice scumbags, to the detriment of those standing to the right and the left of them. I don’t want to suggest you’ll become paranoid, but you may also project scumbaggery onto ordinary people.” That his shrink believed in “ordinary people” was a bad sign if Espeseth dwelled on it; he tried not to. It was what Renker said next that he couldn’t shake off. “In withdrawal from Celexa some patients have described a kind of atmosphere of rot or corruption or peril creeping around the edges of the everyday world, a thing no one but they can identify. A colleague of mine labeled this ‘grub-in-meat syndrome.’ Better to be prepared than have it sneak up on you.”

Grub-in-meat syndrome?

No one, not shrink Renker, not Espeseth’s wife, certainly not the twins, no human listener outside the containment zone of his skull knew that Paul Espeseth had renamed himself Pending Vegan. His secret name was a symptom, if it should be considered a symptom, that had overtaken him months before he quit the Celexa. Could it be a side effect? He’d hoped it would abate when he went off the drug. No such luck. Pending Vegan wasn’t completely sorry. His new name was a mortification, yes, but he clung to it, for it also held some promise of an exalted life, one just beyond reach.

How had his researches begun? Espeseth, when that had been his only name, had checked out of Santa Barbara’s public library a popular account of the world’s collapse into unsustainability under the weight of its human population. He’d gone from that to reading several famous polemics against the cruelty of farms and slaughterhouses. Next, a book called
Fear of the Animal Planet
, which detailed acts of beastly revenge upon human civilization. It was then that Espeseth felt himself becoming Pending Vegan. A knowledge had been born inside him, the development of which only inertia and embarrassment and conformity could slow. Fortunately or unfortunately, Pending Vegan was rich in these delaying properties.

The great obstacle would be in explaining his decision to his daughters. Pending Vegan admired Chloe’s and Deirdre’s negotiation between their native animal-love and the pleasures of meat-eating. It struck him as a
hard-won sophistication, something like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s capacity to keep two opposed ideas in mind at the same time. The girls’ early rites of passage seemed to consist mainly of such paradox-absorbing efforts. That, for instance, Mommy and Daddy fought but loved each other. That human beings were miraculous and shyness ought to be overcome, yet also that they should violently distrust the too-eager stranger as a probable monster. That an hour of television or the iPad should be judged an intoxicating surfeit, while parents binged on screens at every opportunity. Pending Vegan routinely spent three hours sitting on the couch, watching his football team lose. The Vikings, talisman of his ancestral roots. Yet, unlike the Redskins and the Chiefs, they never had their name and logo criticized as racist. No one felt sorry for white people, which might explain his fascination with Jews, who seemed to have it both ways. Had Irving Renker been eavesdropping on Pending Vegan’s thoughts, he would have chortled.
Quit drifting
.