Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (22 page)

Big Idea

Whether due to some degree of personal recklessness or simply to the vagaries of fortune, our friend frequently found himself in situations that brought financial ruin, emotional distress and physical injury. For some years these recurrent problems prevented him from achieving his life’s goals; indeed, they left him unsure even of what those goals might be. Then, fed up at last, he returned to college to study an obscure and byzantine science he had picked almost at random, immersing himself completely in his research and quickly establishing himself among his advisors as a formidable and unusual intellect. He co-authored several influential papers with his teachers, won many honors, and was fully expected to emerge from school at the very top of his field.

For some years, however, our friend struggled to complete his doctoral dissertation. His achievements were more than sufficient to serve as the basis for an excellent paper, but he wanted to crack a particularly knotty problem that had so far eluded his superiors, and thus make the dissertation worthy not only of his degree, but perhaps even of commercial publication and international recognition.

Then, one night, in a burst of inspiration, our friend solved the crucial problem. He jotted the solution down on a few scraps of paper, worked it out in detail on his laptop computer, then left his apartment at a dead sprint to wake his colleagues at the lab.

At this moment, however, his bad luck returned, and he was assaulted by armed thugs, who stole his computer and wallet and beat him unconscious. When he recovered from his injuries, he discovered that the weeks leading up to his inspiration had been erased from his memory by the trauma, never to be restored. Worse yet, his computer was never found, and the notes he had taken in the middle of the night made no sense to him whatsoever.

When he was released from the hospital, he returned to work, assuming that if he continued his research in the same vein that he remembered conducting it, he would again hit upon the big idea. But two years later, the solution still had not come to him. It seemed that it was not in the nature of epiphanies to be repeated. This realization so discouraged our friend that he gave up on his field entirely. Today he drives a taxi in a large Midwestern city, and keeps the cryptic notes taped to his dashboard, in the hope that their meaning will become clear again.

He is occasionally asked by his passengers about the notes. Upon hearing his story, most tell him that he shouldn’t have gone out alone after dark. Our friend takes a perverse pleasure, he tells us, in dropping these people off at an inconvenient place, such as over a steaming subway grate or directly in front of a street vendor.

Live Rock Nightly

Tired by a long country drive, we stopped at a roadside tavern for a drink and something to eat. The tavern filled the first floor of a two-story brick building, and in the parking lot stood an illuminated board which read
APARTMENT AVAILABLE LIVE ROCK NIGHTLY
.

While eating we engaged the bartender in conversation, and discovered that he was the owner of the establishment. Emboldened by the food and drink, we brought up the reader board, suggesting that he might rent his apartment more quickly were he to remove the reference to live rock music.

The owner nodded sadly, and confessed to us that his teenage daughter had lived in the apartment once, but some years ago had died in a drunk driving accident, the result of an evening spent in another bar a few miles down the road. The owner, his eyes brimming with tears, said that he blamed himself for the accident, as he had refused to serve his daughter in his own bar, where she had been employed illegally as a cocktail waitress. With her gone, he had had to hire a legitimate waitress, and as a result the tavern was no longer profitable and had begun to lose money. Renting the apartment would make his business solvent, but he still hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it out, and in fact did not want to face the task. At the same time, actively not renting the apartment was financially unjustifiable. The sign, he explained, was a compromise between his business and emotional needs. It had stood unchanged for two years, even though the band had broken up and live music was no longer played here. The owner admitted that the place was about to go up for sale.

Of course we were sorry to have asked. We left the owner a large tip, though once we were out on the road, driving with extreme care, the tip struck us as a tacky, even insulting, gesture, and made us feel even worse about our rude question.

Intact

Our elderly aunt, long ago widowed, has spent the past ten years touring the world as part of an old ladies’ travel club, despite a chronic social paralysis that prevents her from so much as taking the bus to the grocery store without a companion. When she returns from these distant places—which have included Thailand, Egypt, China and Brazil—and we ask her to describe her experiences, she always tells us, after some consideration, that she had a wonderful time and enjoyed the other ladies’ company. She offers no other details.

At a recent family gathering, conversation lingered on a grisly subject: the crash of a commercial airliner over the Atlantic Ocean, which resulted in complete destruction of the plane and the death of all its passengers. One of us commented that such a crash constitutes a double tragedy, as the passengers lose not only their lives but their identity, because they are blown to bits and scattered in the deep ocean.

All of us were surprised when our aunt spoke up. She said that this would never happen to her. Whenever she flies, she told us, she paints her fingernails and toenails the same unusual shade of purple, to aid salvage workers in the identification of her remains. In addition, she ties a length of heavy twine to one of her toes, then runs the other end up through her slacks and blouse to her hand, where she ties it to one of her fingers. This way, if she is blown apart, the top half of her body will be tethered to the lower half, and she can enjoy a decent Christian burial more or less intact.

The silence following this revelation went on for some seconds, as we all imagined the sight of our elderly aunt’s shattered corpse, held together with twine. This silence deepened when it occurred to us that she had herself imagined this very image, perhaps many times. Since then we have reinterpreted her reticence not as a symptom of some pitiable neurosis but as bold composure in the face of a morbid imagination.

Spell

A woman with whom I once worked raised two small children, whose curiosity and perceptiveness made private conversation in their presence difficult, if not impossible. Since she was rarely apart from them, she developed the habit of spelling out certain words, such as
D-O-C-T-O-R
or
C-A-N-D-Y
, to prevent them from becoming anxious or excited at inconvenient times. Eventually the children grew older and learned to spell, but my colleague continued her spelling habit, now employing it as an educational tool. She subjected the children to impromptu quizzes, asking them to point to the
H-O-U-S-E
or the
S-T-O-P-S-I-G-N
, and soon much of her speech around the children consisted of spelling.

Unfortunately, this habit spread to her speech at the office as well, and persisted long after her children had grown up and moved away. For some years she avoided any speech at all during the workday, or spoke slowly and carefully to prevent lapses. But the habit proved too strong for her, and today she spells with great frequency, presenting a new
P-R-O-P-O-S-A-L
or buying lunch for a
C-L-I-E-N-T
. The habit intensifies when she is under stress, and at these times she will occasionally grab a pen and paper and write out what she wishes to say. This compromise does seem to satisfy her urge to spell, and is easier for the listener to comprehend.

It is not unusual for her business associates to spell back at her, or even, after a long workday, to spell a word or two at home to their spouses, regardless of whether or not they have, or have ever had, children of their own.

The Mad Folder

I used to live in a large apartment building, where I had many friends, all of whom lived on the same floor as I did, and whom I’d met coming out of the elevator.

The building had twenty-two floors, but only eleven laundry rooms. This meant that those on an even floor, like me, had to share their laundry room with the people below them. But there were ample machines for everyone, and this posed no problem.

One night a neighbor of mine stopped me in the hall to tell me something. He said that about an hour before, he had moved his wet laundry to a dryer, then went out to get a bite to eat. When he came back, his dry laundry had been neatly folded and placed in his laundry basket. He was holding the basket when he told me this, and it was filled with the clean, folded laundry.

After this, many of us had a similar experience. A launderer would leave the building, or simply return to her room to watch TV, or, in one case, just pop next door to the video game room, and return to find her laundry carefully folded and stacked. This experience became a kind of joke around the floor, and we began to speak of a “mad folder.” A few of the more listless among us would actually leave their laundry in the dryers on purpose, in the hope that the Mad Folder would get to it some time soon. But the Folder was unpredictable, and as often as not this labor-saving strategy was a failure. Our feeling was that the Mad Folder was a kind of random benevolence, and it was wrong to try to lure the Folder with neglected laundry. We began to think of the Folder as belonging to us, like a kind of patron saint, and we would do silly things like offer toasts or say prayers at our many cocktail parties.

One night I went into the laundry room with some dirty clothes and fell into a conversation with a woman from the floor below. While we talked, she removed some clothes from a washer and put them into a dryer. We continued talking, and at some point a distant dryer finished its cycle, and without missing a word of our discussion she crossed the room, removed the laundry and began to fold it.