Desire Provoked

Part Five

A BRIEF unexpurgated history of the world (when Toby was four years old and Adams asked him what he did today in preschool):

“We put clothes on our clothes for finger-painting and then we painted with our fingers and I ran out of paper and we took the clothes off our clothes and Mrs. Thompson she’s a girl took me to the back and helped me take my clothes off so I could wet the toilet and then it was time to rest. Then we ate bananas and looked at pictures and rested some more and Mrs. Thompson took Lisa Griffin she’s a girl too to the back and helped her take her clothes off so she could wet the toilet and then we rested some more when we were all dressed.”

Hundreds of women. Bobbies in blue. The women dragged off by the bobbies to jail. At night the women in jail. The bobbies as husbands at home, as fathers at home with their wives. No plan, not really, not really a plan to speak of. Missiles. Gleaming white silos, a chain-link fence that runs nine miles. In the daytime mud and rain, plastic hats, the husbands as bobbies at home. Fathers of a chain-link fence. Hundreds of women in the daytime, muddy and wet, weighty, resisting the bobbies, heavy yellow plastic trying to stop the deployment of missiles. I have to go there, Pamela said, where for nine miles the world is coming to an end.

“Attending one cause to the neglect of others inevitably foreshortens knowledge of the overall effect,” Adams writes in a letter to his brother. Pamela’s in London. He gave her five hundred dollars to help pay for her ticket. “The right breast is just as marvelous as the left and that, in part, explains this woman’s terrible arrogance.”

“Carter was furious this morning,” Jill tells him at dinner. “The county informed Palmer that the dam site is privately owned.”

“They’ve changed their tune, then. I thought the county claimed that land.”

“Within a week of the ground-breaking, city council dropped all legal proceedings.”

“Why would they do that?”

“It’s illegal for the government to fund projects on private property. The county obviously wanted to block construction of the dam.”

The Observer carries a full account: the dam had never been intended for flood control. It was meant, instead, to be a power source, generating hydroelectricity for homes in northern Elgin County — the lots that Carter had recently sold. The dam, privately owned by Carter and a few partners (Congressman Palmer among them, Adams figures), threatened to eat into the revenues of the Elgin Utility Company.

For several days, Carter maintains publicly that he had planned the dam to prevent high water. When meteorologists point out that there is no such danger, Carter publishes Adams’ map, with the altered isohyet. “Flash floods are an imminent possibility,” he says. “We’re fortunate there have been no disasters so far.”

Palmer flies back from Washington for a news conference. “My record and my conscience are clear,” he tells the press.

Adams fears an indictment for falsifying documents. Jill feeds him Pepto-Bismol, Nyquil, Excedrin.

Pamela has lost eight pounds. Her right elbow is cracked. She won’t say much about her ten days in England (though she does give Adams her receipts): mud and rain, a few arrests. She wasn’t among those taken to jail. “Dissent’s the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do,” she says. She seems discouraged, a bit shaken.

She’s been playing tricks on the children. She bought a smoke alarm, Toby says, and the other night around two it went off. He hustled Deidre out of bed and they ran into the hall. There was Pamela on a chair, pressing a button on the alarm, making it buzz. She smiled at the kids, walked into her bedroom, and shut the door.

“Maybe she was just testing it,” Adams says.

“In the middle of the night?”

That’s not all, Toby tells him. The day she got home she asked him to heat some roast beef for her in the microwave. He opened the oven door and was startled to see a shiny face. He dropped the roast beef on the floor. She had placed a clown mask — part of the costume she had bought months ago to tease Deidre — upright in the oven. She stood in the kitchen doorway, smiling, as Toby picked up the meat.

Near the cemetery in the least lit end of town fireflies signal their names. Again. No one dead bothers him and he doesn’t think past the overhead hum of the wires.

Night is a flat color through which he’s stared at his country. In quiet times, when he was a kid, he poked among car scraps in junkyards on the edge of town, looking for radios that would sing to him from someplace down the highway.

In the kitchen of the dance hall down the road, an all-night cook sends flour into the air beneath a ceiling fan. Adams can just make out the dance hall door from here. He delights, imagining the arcs of dough and the sugar he could chew until it hardened like tobacco in his mouth.

The sky’s insistent clouds; the cemetery trees, top heavy, wrapped with iron to keep them from splitting; the clasp of his own ribs. He’s happy about the snow that won’t fall again tonight. On calm nights it’s possible even to be happy about the earth, though it’s packed with victims and hides its face in an accident of rock.

His children will take care of their mother. He will take care of himself. Rosa’s screen door scrapes open in wind, a sound that reminds him of home.

“Sometimes, in the middle of a séance, the dead start talking all at once,” Rosa says. “I can’t tell one voice from another.”

I used to powder my face in the morning light through serrated curtains the green and gold sheen of the mirror hush twenty bucks I says to him for the gun in that case Smith and Wesson was a pisser wasn’t it I’d say so yes train tickets grilled ham and cheese colanders seed packets a copy of The Masses a toy rickshaw with a paper umbrella for God’s sakes hush that man could drink I haven’t been thirsty in what was it like being thirsty like making love to yourself and stopping before you were through I regret to inform you opening day Ebbets Field my heart soared like a pigeon purple martins came we built a house for them hush now hush up but the sparrows made a nest in your friends and neighbors have nominated you for tomatoes the Columbia Encyclopedia Robert’s Rules of Order black olives matchbook covers most sincerely crossword puzzles yellow paper I was sixty years old in what was it like being sixty years old not enough get me some more a shaken Mrs. Wilson informed her children good-bye honey I love you will you please be quiet keep frozen broke out in hives too soon can’t rush fifty amperes warmest regards insert part A into part B then shhhh three dollars and fifty vaya con Dios did you twice at least no what was it like I don’t remember hush.

Elgin County’s legal staff is no match for Mai-low and Vox, not to mention Palmer’s Washington pals. Not only is the dam approved, it receives additional funding from the Bureau of Reclamation. All objections from the Elgin Utility Company are swept away, as are the protests of the individuals who had originally opposed the county.”

“Everything in its place, hmm?” Carter says, signing a document that effectively terminates one-third of On-Line’s employees. “With our operations streamlined, we’ll show an even greater profit margin next year.”

Under new policy, Jordan’s position in the Records Office is absorbed by the clerical staff. Ever since the accounting department reported to Carter, rumors have been thick that Jordan was caught trying to embezzle two to three thousand dollars from the political action fund. Adams asks Carter about him.

“Unstable. Mayer warned me. I should’ve fired him long ago.” If he suspects Jordan of stealing the money, he doesn’t show it.

Adams stops by Jordan’s office to say good-bye. “You’re going to have to find another boogeyman now, Sam. I’ll be three thousand miles away.” Adams wishes him luck.

At five o’clock he stands at his office window. Jordan, carrying a small box containing articles from his desk drawer, steps onto a bus. The doors close behind him and he’s gone.

Each friend is a light and you stare at your friends. The dark moves in. It never leaves. He sits here thinking of his debts.

The worst dreams come back like a series of bad decisions. Each has a face he can recognize: his father reading in a square of light, his mother smelling of milk, the rude and perfect taste of girls who circled his house in the dark: I’ll help you don’t worry just think how long you’ve waited.

Think of the friends who’ve looked to you, how often your help didn’t matter. They fuck themselves up, you don’t see them again. It’s what you do all day.

Jill has let herself in with a copy of Adams’ house key. Adams comes home carrying two sacks of groceries.

“Stay out of the kitchen,” he tells her. “Le Grand Diner coming up.”

He boils rice, bakes chicken, steams clams, mussels, peppers, tosses salad, mixes a spicy oil and vinegar dressing, butters a baguette. He sets the table with cloth napkins, lights two red candles, pours champagne. “I’ve been given an international assignment,” he tells her.

Jill nods. “I knew it was a matter of time.” She helps him carry the plates to the table. “Where?”

“Svalbard. Near Greenland.” Adams passes her the salad.

“What are you doing there?”

“Carter made a deal with Comtex for exploratory mapping. They think there are undiscovered oil deposits on the island.”

“How long?”

“Six months.”

“Whew.” She lowers her glass. “Can I visit?”

Adams smiles. “Four weeks after I get there, the sea becomes too icy for ships to navigate, and there are no commercial flights.”

“Well, you know, your papers will have to pass my desk,” Jill says.

Adams pours them each a glass of Amaretto. They retire to the bedroom, undress each other slowly in the reflected light from the window, and sit together on the bed.

Jill tells him of her plans: she believes she will leave On-Line within the next few months. A better offer has come her way from the physics department of Murray State College. The university’s personnel director seems to have taken a romantic interest in her.

“Do you like him,” Adams asks. “I don’t know.” She traces a line on Adams’ thigh. “Maybe.”

“Then I think you should go out with him.”

“I might,” she says. She sips her Amaretto. A sweetened kiss.

He must renew his passport, contact the utilities, visit his parents, make arrangements for a replacement with the band. (Zig has written a song about him called Sanitized Terminal Man, “about this real straight dude who likes to get down at night.”) He’d forgotten what it meant to say good-bye.

Rosa puts him in touch with his paternal grandfather, who if living would’ve been a hundred and thirty-two years old.

“What’s it like being dead,” Adams asks.

“It’s like not being able to read.” The voice is cold. “Imagine a grown man with no education trying to figure out his income tax or a newspaper headline or the warning label on a can of pesticide. That’s death.”

Adams says, “What can’t you do?”

“It’s not so bad, not so bad. We have our share of erotic moments, though don’t ask me how. I think, somehow, we’re more purely erotic without our bodies, as if the soul or energy that animated our arms and legs were not spirit or chemical reaction or electricity, but desire. But I don’t know. You’d have to ask one of the others. Some of these guys seem to know what’s going on here. I don’t. You know what I miss? Eyes. I never realized how important eyes are.”

Rosa opens her eyes and his grandfather is gone. Adams gazes out the door. Tombstones, lighted houses. Children making food with the mud beneath a tree.

His mother airs a bedroom for him. She is stooped and dark. A searing headache. “Hand me my pills,” she says, folding a wet cloth on her forehead.

“How’s Dad?”

“You’ll see the old coot tomorrow. I invited him over for supper.”

“Good. Can I get you anything else?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Good night, son.”

Adams sets his glass of water on a nightstand by the bed. The moon is full. He is reminded of a night long ago. In the afternoon his mother had taken him shopping. On the way home he saw in the window of an antique store a set of toy musketeers hand-carved by a London cobbler in 1836: a toothpick army dressed in red tunics, black caps, and white belts, with brown ammunition bags on their backs. Some stood, aiming rifles. Others knelt. Still others manned tiny wooden cannons. Adams’ mother let him stand in front of the window while she ran to the jewelry store down the block.

Adams pressed his fingers to the glass, pretending to thump the wounded soldiers. Then he noticed, next to the little brigade, a display of nautical equipment: a brass telescope, a pocket watch made of gold, a silver gyroscope, and an old-fashioned rod wound tight with string. Lying open next to the rod was a captain’s log bound in leather. The ink had faded to the color of a sparrow’s wing. Adams couldn’t read the words but he made out the date, 1798, in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Next to the log, another wonder: the captain’s survey kit. Inside, encased in blue velvet folds, a wooden straight-backed compass, a ruling pin, and a divider. The instruments gleamed, their edges precise. Adams knelt closer to the glass.

Just then the shopkeeper appeared. He wore a gray suit and a tie as red as the wooden soldier’s coats. He placed his right hand on a gold-leaf globe the size of a small freezer on the floor next to him, and his left hand on a Louis Quatorze chair. He scowled at Adams — he’d smudged the window. Adams turned and ran. He received a scolding from his mother, who’d searched for him for half an hour, but it didn’t matter. That night, curling up in his sheets, he felt himself wrapped in velvet, the moon gleaming between the folds.

His father heats bread and thick potatoes. His face above the boiling water’s light stands out, stung by the hot Nebraska air. Without words he tells Adams, “You descend from a man without foresight and are handicapped by the need to go on.”

The bales behind his house are cut and carelessly stacked. Throughout the morning, combines graze on the fields; they are willful, with solid arms. Adams thinks, “This is my father’s home, a scraped rock. People cry in the middle of the day and I don’t know what to do with them.”

Last night dust poured through the air vents like salt. A jug of fresh water waited to dry on the kitchen table. Adams cleaned the things he’d kept and went to see the river fish stirring up mud.

Okra, creamed corn, cauliflower, fried chicken, and rice. Tumblers of iced tea. Adams’ father is quiet. His mother chatters about her church friends, passes biscuits and salad, asks about his upcoming trip.

After supper, Adams’ father says to him, “Let’s go for a spin.”

They get in his pickup, an old black Ford, and drive to the miniature golf course. A Monday night, it’s closed. Adams’ father unlocks the gate and they stroll the carpeted greens. Windmills, castles, and moats flank the fairways under sodium vapor lights. As they walk, Adams’ father knocks a blue ball ahead of them with a putter.

On all sides of the course, cornstalks scrape one another. Diesels moan on the highway.

“So you let your wife get away from you?” Adams’ father says.

“Looks that way.”

“Man ought not to let his wife get away from him.”

“Not if it’s not for the best,” Adams says. “What’s that mean?” The old man sends the ball past a Plexiglas squirrel.

“What about you two,” Adams asks. “That’s a different situation.” “How?”

“We’da killed each other.”

A large metal buffalo blocks their path. They step around it.

“How you gonna get her back?”

“I’m not,” Adams answers. “She filed for divorce. I agreed to it.”

“Hell, boy.” Adams’ father swipes at a weed growing through a crack in the carpet. “That’s bad business.”

Adams watches the weed sail over the head of a mermaid curled alluringly on the edge of the thirteenth green.

“It ain’t an easy path, Lord knows, but a man ought to be able to hang on to his women.”

The blue ball swings around the mermaid’s fin and into the cup.

“You’re right,” Adams says.

He phones Kenny, then Otto.

“You’re going to freeze your ass off, boy.”

“Probably. Listen, do me a favor and check on Pam and the kids while I’m gone, all right? Just give them a call.”

“If Pammy’ll talk to me. She’s a good girl, but she listens to her father.”

“Make her talk to you. Don’t let her treat you that way.”

“Pammy does what she wants. You know that by now. But I’ll try.” “Thanks, Otto.”

“Keep a hot potato in your pants. You’ll need it.”

On the computer Adams simulates world climate, concentrating specifically on the northern hemisphere. He types in a climate model developed by North, Short, and Mengel of the Goddard Space Flight Center, calls a world map to the screen, and averages temperatures for the month of July over a period of a hundred and fifteen thousand years. A hundred and fifty thousand years ago glaciation covered North America and most of Eurasia. If the temperature at high northern latitudes remains below zero degrees Celsius in the summer months, ice builds slowly over decades. Presently, July temperatures fall below freezing only in Greenland and Antarctica.

Otto is right about his ass.

In the company’s small library next to the coffee room he reads about a man named Milankovitch, a Yugoslav astronomer who insisted, early in the twentieth century, that the glaciation of eighteen thousand years ago (earth’s most recent ice age) was caused by a small variation along the earth’s axis and in the shape of the earth’s orbit around the sun.

Using Milankovitch’s figures as well as more recent data, Adams predicts that continental ice sheets have an oscillation period, based on earth’s orbit, of roughly a hundred thousand years. He projects on the screen a simulation of continental drift and discovers that Antarctica iced over about thirty thousand years ago, after it had separated from South America and was isolated from warm equatorial waters.

Presently there is less ice on the earth’s surface than there has been at any time in the past hundred and twenty thousand years. Though he knows it makes no difference in his travels, Adams is somewhat comforted by the fact.

The kids want to go for a walk in the park that Pamela takes them to, where the zoo is, and the public golf course. Adams anticipates a dreadful day, explaining what little he knows about lions, as he did when the kids were small, but the zoo is not on their list. They just want to walk.

It is a cool spring afternoon. The park is fresh, wet pines snapping under a whitecap of mist. On still days deer sometimes skip across the fairways — briefly, always a surprise — and disappear into the pines. Beyond the trees, wheat and corn sway dryly in tight little rows.

“Will you bring us something, Daddy?” Deidre says. “From that place you’re going to?”

“Of course I will.”

Toby, predictably, is quiet.

A V of grackles swings from the sky. Adams pulls his sweater tight around his chest. The black birds work their beaks into a collective sound like air leaking from a hose, and settle on the golf course several yards ahead. A field of black poppies, wings lifting like petals before growing still. Adams can feel his children’s bodies — first Toby’s, then Deidre’s — break from his hands as the children rush toward the birds, flapping their arms. The grackles rise at once, gyre toward the trees, circle up, then right, descending again toward the kids, then wheel over Adams’ head and are gone. Strings of mist break from the trees where the birds have made a hole, the children, meanwhile, laughing.