Karate Chop: Stories (Lannan Translation Selection (Graywolf Paperback)) Page 4
He remembers his own as a dry rustling sound, always bent over work: a kneading board, trays of bread buns, minced pork, layer cakes, and See how he runs! And when he thinks of her it’s by the cherry tree in the front garden.
But Dagmar is in fog, a bitter cold morning in Copenhagen, and she is standing still in a black dress with puffed sleeves and laced boots. She has a parcel under her arm, wrapped in newspaper, and that’s what seeps in and out of his chest. The parcel, and the thought of the twenty-five small bodies she concealed in attics or burned in the stove, and the fact she was never able to explain why she did it. She was out of her mind on naphtha, she said. It was like being in a dream that couldn’t be described.
He knows it’s hard for normal people to understand the part that couldn’t be described. Dagmar Overbye wasn’t normal, but when he did his military service they said women could be good and efficient fighters. They could even be vicious. All they needed was to cross over a line, the sergeant said. Once they’d crossed it they had no problem with killing. Personally he has no wish to know what line that is, but something tells him that in the cases of Dagmar and Aileen there must have been some foregoing demoralization. Damage set off by comfortless upbringing, perhaps even a kind of mental illness. It would explain a lot, if that were the case. It would make things understandable. Anomaly is within the bounds. The abnormal can be accepted, it can even open doors in a person and make room for everyone to be human, he thinks. But then it might be something else altogether. Something more frightening.
He remembers a night not long ago when he stayed up after the retiree had logged off. That night he read online in the tabloid that chimpanzees were able to make spears for hunting. A team of scientists in the West African state of Senegal had observed behavioral changes in apes in an area without food. He read how they noticed the apes began to hunt with spears. That was one thing, but only the young apes and the females did so. The old males sat around and starved, the article said. They weren’t good at thinking new thoughts, a female scientist commented. She talked about how with her own eyes she had seen a female chimp spear one of the monkeys the locals called bush babies. This particular bush baby lay sleeping in its den, and the scientist described how the chimp used the spear to prod the monkey out of the den and then killed it and ate it. That same night he googled bush baby and the screen filled up with pictures. They had big, black, bulging eyes and were by nature clearly terrified, like Dagmar’s twenty-five infants or Aileen Wuornos’s biological child just after reading the first article about his mother. That’s what the bush babies looked like, paralyzed with fear, and yet the old males just sat around waiting to be possessed by something big. A savannah full of males with banjos, he thought, and females with hair under their arms. And spears.
He switches off the computer and turns on the desk lamp. He sits still with his hands on his knees until the hard drive has stopped whirring. They make up all sorts of things, he thinks to himself. Then he takes off his shoes so as not to make a noise when he goes up the stairs to her.
FLIGHT
IT’S A YEAR NOW SINCE ALLAN MOVED OUT, AND WE HAD NO CHILDREN, though both us were able. He once told me I was like the castles he used to build out of straw bales when he was a boy. Inside the castle was a den in which to eat cookies and drink fruit juice while listening to the rumble of the combine in the next field. That’s what being with me was like, Allan said. Another time he said I reminded him of a doghouse his father had. As a boy, he used to sit inside the doghouse with the German wirehaired pointer. It was cozy, and sometimes he would think of what it would be like if a girl suddenly crawled in to be with him. That was me, and he meant it nicely.
Allan worked for Vestas and traveled to wind farms abroad as a consultant and service technician. When he came home he found it hard to explain to me what he had seen and done. He spoke of great landscapes, bigger than anything a person could imagine, and I would nod, which annoyed him. For Christmas one year I bought him a digital camera so he could e-mail me photos when he was traveling. That way we could better share his experiences, so I thought. I still have pictures on my computer of Allan in front of various foreign attractions. One of the pictures I don’t know what to do with shows Allan next to a wind turbine that’s still laid out on the ground. Behind him is a vista of pine trees and rocks fading away into what looks like infinity. The picture is from Dolly Sods, West Virginia, and when he got back he was quiet.
I don’t know how long he brooded, but one evening after we had eaten he said it was okay if I kept the house, but he needed to move out. There was nothing wrong with me, he said, he just felt like he was in a vacuum. He took two suitcases and filled them with clothes. He took the dog, too, and said he would drive over to his parents’. I realized he didn’t mean for it to be a break but something final, and yet I still went outside with him and waved as he backed out of the driveway. I particularly remember the front door when I turned to go back inside. The light from the lamp shining on the wall cladding and door handle. That sort of thing.
In the days after he moved out I didn’t know what to do with myself. Whenever my mother called, I didn’t tell her he was gone and answered her questions about the things we were doing. In order not to go into what had happened, I let her do most of the talking while I looked out the window at the hedge. It won’t grow, and I’ve planted bulbs all along its length to make up for it, but there’s no joy from bulbs in November.
I spent time waiting for the reaction, only it didn’t come, and time passed best when I sat at the computer. Finding information about places like Dolly Sods is easy on the Internet, and I could see how vast and beautiful and desolate it was. In Dolly Sods, there are places where no one has even been yet. Distances and depths of that magnitude are amazing, and I imagined how Allan had stood there with his hand on the wind turbine. I didn’t cry. Not even when I finally told my mother and father. I explained to them it was for the best, and I made it sound like I’d been involved in the decision.
My mother was disappointed, though she found it commendable that I’d taken it so well. It was true. My colleagues said so too, they praised me for dealing with it so well. Allan was also impressed, and we soon found a friendly tone, especially when he phoned. We could even laugh, and I could hear his voice relax at the other end. About three months after he moved out, he called one evening and said he was being sent to Turkey. He was going to install new turbines on a plateau there. How exciting, I said. And he said: Yes, I’m looking forward to it. There was a silence, and then he said he was very happy and grateful to me for taking it all so well.
Afterward, I sat in the kitchen. I looked at the bulletin board and the magnets on the refrigerator. I brewed coffee and watched the water as it ran through. I sat down at the counter again. When I drank the coffee, I felt something go wrong inside me. It was as if it tasted too big, and the same with the soda, the licorice, the maple syrup, and the Greek yogurt I ate later on. I was agitated, restless, and the only thing that helped was to chew on something. But it was never sufficient. Every time I ate something I would have to put something else in my mouth. I couldn’t stop, and the night didn’t help. I walked through the house thinking of grapes, and I’ve never been the kind of person who could eat whatever I wanted. At two in the morning I thought fresh air might do the trick. I stood out back and looked out over the landscape. I could see the stream winding through the meadow. There was frost in the grass, and then I began to cry.
It came from way down, from a place I didn’t think I had, and it hurt, too. To make it keep on hurting, I imagined I ate up all the grass, all the cows, all the birds. I pictured myself stuffing the meadow, the stream, its banks, and soil into my mouth. I forced all kinds of things into my stomach: church steeples, castles made of straw bales, silos. The grove on the other side of the stream, and the military training area behind the barracks. Eventually, all that was left was me and the tuft of grass on which I balanced. That, and a great NM72C wind turbine I
refused to devour. And since you can’t eat yourself, I went home.
The next morning was Sunday and I drove over to my parents’. I had bread rolls and pastries with me, and the carrier bag full of magazines I’d borrowed from my mother. She could tell by looking at me that I hadn’t slept well, but she didn’t delve. We talked about my sister’s husband and their kids instead. We talked about my brother’s wife, because no one gets on with her. And we talked about Allan, too, because he wasn’t like that at all. They liked Allan, and it all would have turned out differently if we’d ever had kids. I said he was going to Turkey to work for a while. My mother said she didn’t understand why he always had to be on the move. I nodded, and my father found an ad in the paper he wanted me to see.
When I was sixteen, I told my mother I wasn’t sure I wanted to have children when I was old enough. There were other things in life than kids, I said. My mother ought to know, because my aunt once said Mom cried when she found out she was going to have me. But she has a habit of forgetting things that don’t suit her, and she was pleased when I came home and said I’d met Allan. It’s always been hard to find gifts for my mother, but when someone gives her something she never has the heart to throw it away again. The attic is full of old newspapers, worn-out clothes in trash bags, furniture, cheap novels, souvenirs, knitting, and potted plants put away for the winter. When I was a child, I was certain that if there was ever any danger I would hide in the attic. Nothing could get to me there. I would take the rugs down from the beams to make a den. I would have freezer bags full of soft cookies. Fruit juice in water bottles with screw caps that smelled of mold. From below would be the sound of the transistor radio that kept losing its frequency and had to be retuned all the time, and I would see myself running bare-legged through the paddock, not caring about stepping in the cowpats, not caring about touching the wire at the end and getting an electric shock, but running all the way down to the stream and leaping across, and I could feel it still as we sat there and drank our coffee: the feeling of taking flight.
“There are other men,” Mom said all of a sudden, and smiled at me over her pastry.
“I suppose,” I said, and then Dad handed me the coffee pot.
My head was empty as I drove home and I felt like crying again. I tried to set myself off by thinking of various things, but couldn’t. I even thought of Dolly Sods in West Virginia, and the wind turbine that was yet to be erected. It didn’t help, and Dolly Sods simply made me put my foot down even harder on the gas pedal. Dolly Sods is mostly a wilderness from which vast amounts of water run into the Mississippi River that flows through the middle of the United States and divides it in two. That’s what I thought to myself as I drove through the hills. Dolly Sods is huge, and not many years ago no one lived there at all. The people who lived on its edge were scared. For them, it was an ominous place, full of wild animals and deep abysses. There were stories of hunters venturing too far into Dolly Sods and never being seen again. When I got home I sat in the car outside. I thought about going away. I could still do what I wanted. I didn’t need to ask permission of anyone. I could go to the United States and rent a car as simple as that. I could drive straight to Dolly Sods and park the car on its perimeter. I could put my camera on the hood and photograph myself there, in walking boots, a white T-shirt, and sunglasses, looking just like other people in photos.
I pulled the key from the ignition and leaned back against the headrest. I told myself I would do just that. I sat there and looked in the side mirror, and promised myself I’d think about it.
NAT NEWSOM
IF I WERE TO SINGLE OUT ONE PERSON IN PARTICULAR FROM MY extensive studies of human behavior it would have to be Nat Newsom, whom I knew ten years ago, or rather ran into outside the McDonald’s I passed each day on my way to work at Columbia University. Nat Newsom opened the door for the customers of McDonald’s while rattling a plastic cup he for want of a better solution had taped to his wrist. The reason Nat more than anyone else stands out for me as special is not simply that he was able to keep his spirits up despite lacking health care and the deposit his former landlord had vanished into thin air with. That was part of it, but more specifically it was because of the paradox of Nat, genetically predisposed to naïveté as he was, lacking the very quality that characterizes the condition.
A person is born with the ability to reach out for things in the world. Thus, an infant will clutch at any finger that is extended toward it, for the child wants to live, and in order to live it must get its hands dirty. It is the retention of this basic reaching out into the world that characterizes genetic predisposition to naïveté in the adult human. It’s bred into us. The monkey’s young reach immediately for the mother’s fur and use its tufts as handles during transport on their perilous way through the jungle, and on another level we must not forget that the reflex moreover is cosmic, since humans reach out in more or less the same way to God and all else unknown. But let’s return to Nat Newsom.
Nat Newsom stood outside McDonald’s every day trying to make it look like he was helping people by opening and closing the door. The reality of the matter was that his handicap prevented him from truly making a difference, but at least he showed himself to be willing. Doing so allowed him to save up so that at the end of the day he could go through the door himself and purchase a Happy Meal. Having observed Nat Newsom for some time I decided one morning to ask if he would be interested in taking part in my study of existential behavior at Columbia’s philosophy department, where I am known as Professor Jack Soya. Nat agreed, and we arranged to meet over a beer in a bar that same evening. Nat showed up on time.
He told me he was born to an alcoholic mother who had also experimented with amphetamines during the pregnancy, a cocktail that resulted in Nat entering the world as smooth as soap, unable to grasp hold of anything at all. Where his fingers were supposed to be he had only stumps, so Nat drank his beer through a straw. I studied his hands as he did so: both were equipped with a minuscule thumb that more than anything else resembled a baby kangaroo when, tiny and covered in slime, it slips out of the female kangaroo’s birth canal to slowly (and, in accordance with its genetic predisposition, naively) crawl upward through its mother’s fur and into her pouch, there to latch onto the nipple with its entire body, which mostly consists of a mouth. A journey, incidentally, that may be compared to the (likewise innately naive) wandering made by the newly hatched young of the sea turtle amid a rain of dive-bombing seagulls from their warm hollow in the sand to the infinitely large and embracing ocean.
Nat Newsom grew up without the ability to think strategically, yet with an abundance of enterprise and a close relationship to his mother’s sister, who quickly took her place. My aunt could not be brought down, Nat told me, and I dwelled on his comment. People like Nat Newsom appear to be equipped with their own center of gravity insofar as they seem able to maintain an open outlook on the world almost regardless of whatever it may allot them. This is not to say that this naïveté cannot take up temporary residence in the prison of the mind if, during an attempt to reach out, it happens to burn its fingers. But inside, such people are toddlers. They look at their burns and bruises, their emptied bank accounts and broken dreams, as though it were an eternal source of astonishment to them that malice actually exists.
I would like to stress this propensity to wonder, this willingness to believe, by relating one key scene in Nat Newsom’s life. One day in front of the New York Public Library, Nat and a friend are accosted by a man wearing a cheap suit. The man in question is white, a matter of no real consequence, but on the lapel of his jacket is affixed an ID badge with a black man’s photograph on it. The badge says the man’s name is Charlie, and yet this white man introduces himself as Kevin Miller. Charlie or Kevin addresses Nat Newsom’s buddy, not Nat himself, who is visibly handicapped. The man stands right up close to Nat’s buddy and says he can see he pumps iron. And then he produces a questionnaire and a ballpoint pen from a pocket of his suit.
Two things are happening here. One is that Nat’s buddy is disarmed by charm. The hustler, which of course is what the man is, caresses the buddy’s ego, which according to Nat Newsom was an easy target for flattery. The fact that Nat’s friend gets taken for a ride is due to this flaw in his personality and not with him being genetically predisposed to naïveté. And we should believe Nat, for whom lying was so difficult, when he claims that his buddy was not in the slightest bit naive. But Nat, who was predisposed in that way, catches on to the nature of the transaction. What happens with Nat is that one part of him thinks: What a nice guy, and it’s such a good thing there are people willing to help drug addicts, while another part thinks: This guy is a swindler, cheating unsuspecting people out of their money. Nat Newsom is of two minds. He can see that the questionnaire doesn’t even mention drug addicts. He can see that the black man is white. Nothing adds up, but despite this double insight Nat neglects to warn his buddy. Moreover, he does nothing to stop him handing over ten dollars for the rehab program in Harlem. And not only that: Nat Newsom turns his backside to the swindler and asks him to take ten dollars out of his back pocket. I can’t do it myself, says Nat, waving his little thumbs and stumps in front of the guy, who gladly helps him out with his problem.