Abbott Awaits - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Chris Bachelder (JULY) #3

JULY

1 Abbott Bumps His Head on the Glass Ceiling of the Capitalist Imagination

This morning Abbott is sitting on his back deck having coffee and reading the newspaper with Ted, Margot, Oliver, Vince, and Chester, who are all imaginary people. Not friends, exactly, because Abbott does not have the time or energy to maintain the friendships. Acquaintances, let’s say. Abbott says, “OK, everyone, listen to this,” and he begins to read aloud a very interesting imaginary article about two identity thieves, ages sixteen and seventeen, who hatched and executed a bold scheme whereby they obtained the credit card information of numerous wealthy Americans and then used the cards to make generous (but not exorbitant) donations to worthy charities (children, animals), consequently putting the prosperous cardholders in the awkward position of contesting the transactions and retracting desperately needed donations to heroic nonprofit organizations. Shame as a lever. And if these fraud victims did not contest the charges, then in essence no crimes had been committed, and the kids would go unprosecuted. Abbott considers this article a kind of moral-political-spiritual Rorschach test, and he stops reading after five paragraphs to elicit comments from his acquaintances. Margot is laughing. She has her head tilted back and her mouth open with her buck teeth pointed upward as if to take a big bite out of the sky. She is gorgeous and buzzing. She pats Abbott on the forearm and says, “You just made my day.” Abbott has a gigantic crush on Margot. If he were not married to a real woman and if he didn’t have dried applesauce on his neck and if Margot were not always off backpacking through terrifying countries, he thinks he might propose to her this instant. But then Ted with that ridiculous facial hair says that he just doesn’t think that the end ever justifies the means. Abbott shares a meaningful look with Margot; he rolls his eyes, and she sticks out her big red tongue. Ted says that these two fellows — he actually says fellows—broke the law and must face the consequences. He provides a brain-numbing series of examples and hypothetical scenarios to illustrate means/ ends ethics. And while he is genuinely sympathetic to all Robin Hoods … that’s when Vince interrupts to say that these naïve hackers have an undeveloped political consciousness. Margot says, “They’re sophomores in high school, Vince.” Vince says, “So?” Margot says, “Can’t you just admit that it’s kind of cool?” Vince swats her question away with a wave of his hand. He says that injustice is systemic. You can’t just strike rich individuals, he says. You have to strike institutions and systems. These kids’ actions are meaningless in the context of the larger struggle. Ultimately, they have done nothing to alter the access to the means of production. This is Vince’s answer to everything. He is right, of course, but Abbott still wishes he would shut up. The deck furniture is imaginary and it is nice. This lazy expanse of Sunday morning is definitely imaginary. Oliver exclaims, “String those kids up and televise it!” This represents his full intellectual response to the matter. Nobody knows why Oliver is even allowed to be here. Then it’s quiet for a moment, and everyone turns toward Chester, the fatalist. Generally, Chester does not speak unless prodded. “So, Chess,” Margot says, “what do you think?” Chester looks up from Sports, the only section of the paper he says still has the capacity to surprise. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” he says fatalistically. “Sure it does,” Margot says. “Just keep reading the article,” Chester says, returning his attention to Sports. Abbott finds his place at the sixth paragraph and resumes reading out loud. As it turns out, twenty-two of the twenty-four wealthy fraud victims contested and withdrew the unlawful donations. Charity officials, quoted on condition of anonymity, found it difficult to hide their disgust. After a two-month investigation, the FBI apprehended the teenaged perpetrators at a skate park a few blocks from their high school. There was, apparently, something wrong with their plan at the level of conception. They are still being held and interrogated by the FBI, and will likely face charges of larceny and fraud. Said one law enforcement spokesman, “These little wiseguys are in a whole heap of trouble.”

2 Abbott and the Disturbing Images

The one-year-old child in the home video that Abbott shot but did not want to watch tonight is doing some adorable things that Abbott and his wife had forgotten, even though they believed when they saw those things, only a year ago, they would never forget them. For instance, she is putting a ceramic serving bowl on her head. Abbott and Abbott’s wife watch without smiling. Abbott is stunned, and he does not know what his wife is. The family room, past and present, looks post-tornadic. That child, so alive right now on the television, is missing, gone forever. That ceramic serving bowl, a wedding present, has also disappeared. Abbott does not want to pick a fight. He does not want to spoil the evening with gloom. But how else to say it — mortality permeates home video. Those tragic anti-drunk-driving television commercials from Abbott’s youth — the ones featuring home-video footage of joyous children subsequently killed by drunk drivers — those ads did not create the association. They presumed it, utilized it. Nevertheless, Abbott keeps his mouth shut. “You’re right,” Abbott’s wife says after only a few minutes of adorable footage. “You’re right. Let’s not.” A child is a Trojan horse, a thing of guile. The rout is commenced.

3 Abbott and the Terrible Persistence of Romantic Thought

Yesterday morning, compelled as if by some binding treaty or biological imperative or perhaps The Farmer’s Almanac, many of the men in Abbott’s neighborhood rose early to clean their gutters. Abbott, more vulnerable to this kind of suburban pressure than he’d care to admit, today borrows a ladder and climbs it roofward during the hottest part of the day. The rain gutter is an apt synecdoche of domestic existence: From the ground it appears practical, functional, well conceived. But when you stand on a borrowed ladder and peer into it, you realize what a gutter is. A gutter is a flimsy trough of sludge, secured by rusty hardware. Rainwater is not so much channeled and diverted as collected and absorbed. All along the front of his house Abbott is alternately repulsed and terrified. He is afraid of falling off the ladder and sustaining compound fracture or death. The warning is right there on the top step, accompanied by a picture of a tumbling man who also appears to be on fire. Abbott knows that one instant everything is OK and then the next instant everything is not. He knows that it’s always the husbands of pregnant women who get buried by sinkholes or lashed by falling power lines. But he continues scooping the muck into a black garbage bag, and by the time he reaches the gutter along the back of his house, his dread and aversion have abated, and his eye and mind begin to wander. He sees that the roof over his family room runs flat until it hits the roof over his garage, where it rises at a soft angle for three feet or so before peaking and dropping steeply down the other side. Abbott, now accustomed to the ladder and his repetitive gutter-cleaning movements thereon, knows that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who would climb onto the flat roof one lovely summer night with a blanket and a bug-repelling candle and a bottle of cheap wine in order to recline against the gentle slope of the garage roof and gaze up at the vastness with a wine-bent conception of the sublime so limited as to be soothing, and those who would not. Of the latter type, Abbott knows that there are two subtypes: those who would not, beyond adolescence, even think to climb onto the roof with a frayed backpack one lovely summer evening, and those who would envision it deeply and repetitively, but never, ever do it. Abbott belongs to this wretched latter subtype, the worst possible. All that vestigial poetic yearning, useless and malignant. Abbott’s wife, inside the house, comes to the kitchen window below the section of the gutter that Abbott is cleaning. Her face in the window is level with his thighs, and so naturally he imagines her sucking his penis and swallowing his semen. “Are they bad?” she asks. “The gutters?” “Yeah.” “They’re not that bad,” he says, lying for no reason at all. She says, “The baby is really kicking today.”

4 Abbott Celebrates the Birth of His Nation

Abbott knows what’s going on out there. Blankets on lawns, scared birds circling the dark, the smell of burnt meat, sulfur. Somewhere a minivan in neutral is gliding silently toward the pond. Abbott is unpatriotic, unwashed. He pours another drink, kills a mosquito, sedates his dog with laced cheddar. He can hear, in the distance, the Sousa and bottle rockets. He reads Billy Budd, Sailor for the first time in seventeen years. He had forgotten how sad it is, or more likely he had never quite known.

5 In Which the Celebration Continues Deep into the Night

Poor welkin-eyed Billy, devoid of sinister dexterity. The days can be long without it, Abbott knows. He’s lying in bed beside his wife, who is almost certainly awake. These two heads on pillows, maybe three feet apart. Budd’s tragic impressment by the Royal Navy has Abbott remembering the day, nearly thirty years ago, when he learned about military conscription. His father had made some casual remark about his exemption from the draft, young Abbott had asked for a clarification of terms, and his parents, still married then, had explained. What a concept. What a blow to moral intuition. (This was roughly six months before the intuition-razing twelve-hour television miniseries Roots.) Abbott can recall the backyard patio, the dandelions, the squat tin shed flexing in the heat. He received his parents’ warm but dubious assurance that he would never be conscripted and then went upstairs and closed his door. Thirty years ago in a backyard. Abbott, lying now in bed, has an idea. He might put his forehead right against hers if she’ll turn around. The firecrackers still cracking out there, the sedated dog snoring at the foot of the bed. “Hey,” he whispers, turning on his side to face his wife’s shape.

6 The Heating and Cooling Specialist’s Tale

“I come to this guy’s house in the middle of the afternoon, and he’s home. I figure he’s probably a professor. I’m a little early, and he seems kind of startled to see me. He comes to the door holding his daughter.” “How old is she?” “I don’t know, I can’t tell anymore. Two? The guy’s arm is completely covered with butterfly stickers, and he’s wearing all this costume jewelry. Like that kind Sarah used to love. Three or four bracelets and probably ten necklaces this guy’s wearing. His daughter is just in a diaper, and she has magic-marker streaks all over her chest and legs. They’re listening to Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes. You know, I’ve been there, those long days, no big deal, but this guy looks a little sheepish, even after I tell him I have a daughter and try to make funny faces at the girl and all that.” “You scared her, didn’t you?” “She just looked at me. Then the guy shows me into the kitchen, and I see his dog, this big Lab, jammed into a tiny space between the dishwasher and the cabinet, and the dog is trembling and drooling like crazy. Just like Otis used to do when it thundered, except today it was beautiful. And I think maybe he’ll try to explain the dog, but he doesn’t say anything. So I say, ‘Your refrigerator isn’t working?’ And he tells me that it’s just not keeping the food very cold. I open it up, and I look in, and it’s filled with juice and fake meat, so now I know the guy is a professor.” “You look at people’s food?” “Hey, I don’t judge. And the first thing I always check when there’s a problem with a fridge — just in case — is the little temperature dial. You know? Like you turn it one way to make it—” “I know what the dial is.” “And sure enough, I move this huge thing of apple juice and about three gallons of milk to look at the dial, and it’s turned all the way to the warmest setting. So that’s the problem with the fridge. That’s why he called me out there.” “Oh, God.” “I know.” “I think even I would know to check that dial.” “And I know this guy is going to be humiliated about this, so I’m trying to explain the problem while still facing into the refrigerator, and I’m moving very slowly and trying to make it seem like it’s requiring some expertise to, you know, turn the dial to a higher number. And I tell him that’s the first thing he should always check when there’s a problem.” “Were you an ass about it?” “No, not at all. I was serious and professional. This could happen to anyone, and that’s what I told him. I told him I see it every day, which believe me I don’t. And when I finally close the door and turn around, the guy is kind of smiling, but he won’t make eye contact.” “That’s horrible.” “I am taking no pleasure in any of this. And he’s still holding his daughter, and she’s patting his head and saying, ‘Good boy, Dad,’ over and over. Then we just stand there in the kitchen, and it’s awkward. The only noise is the dog, who is trembling so hard in that little nook or whatever that you can hear it. And then I have to tell him it’s forty dollars for the visit. It’s supposed to be sixty — and Ray will give me shit about it — but I just can’t do it to this guy.” “You’re sweet. You are.” “And he says sure, sure, and he writes me a check while holding his daughter, and she’s sticking a dinosaur into his ear and saying, ‘Dino in Dad’s ear.’ And then he hands me the check, and things are still kind of awkward, so I point at Sarah outside in the van in the driveway and tell him I’ve got my girl with me today. And I tell him she’s sixteen and we’re on our way to go upgrade her cell phone. And we both look out the window at her — she’s got her feet up on the dash, and she’s painting her toenails.” “No, she wasn’t.” “Yes, she was too. And she had that bored-looking kind of scowl on her face.” “I know the one.” “And honey, I have no idea why I’m talking so much to this guy. I just want to leave. This is more than I usually say in a week on the job. But then for some reason I tell him what I promised myself I would never say to anyone because I got so sick of hearing it when Sarah was little, but I said it.” “I don’t believe it.” “Yes, I did. I said, ‘Man, enjoy it now because it just goes by so fast.’” “Wow.” “And now I’m mortified, too, and the situation has gotten unbearable. The dog I swear seems like his heart might explode.” “What did he say?” “He didn’t say anything. He kind of laughed, and then I laughed too. Then he shook my hand and took the girl back into the playroom before I even put away the paperwork and got my tools. When I left, he was down on the floor, throwing her way up in the air and catching her.”

7 In Which Abbott Is Linked to Fetal Research In New Zealand

Because of the weak dial-up connection tonight, the Internet video of the stranger’s sonogram loads slowly and plays haltingly. The image is grainy and blurry. Nevertheless, after viewing the clip six or seven times, Abbott can pretty clearly see that the fetus is sobbing. The narrator, a professor at the University of Auckland, explains that the unborn child, twenty-eight weeks old, is responding to a vibro-acoustic stimulus (or a loud noise, if Abbott understands correctly). The narrator, nine thousand miles from Abbott, points out the rapid phases of inspiration and expiration, the three augmented breaths, the heaving chest, the tilt of the head. When a fetus cries like this, researchers call it fetal crying. Two hundred days, roughly speaking. “Wait,” Abbott’s wife says later, “it can cry before it can breathe?” Abbott lies completely still. He has never been so vibroacoustically cautious. “Even the chin quivers,” he says.

8 Abbott Recoils from The Natural Order of Things

Abbott means no harm. His daughter is frightened of spiders, even the kind called daddy longlegs, and Abbott is attempting to relocate the spider by gently grasping one of its legs. His daughter is weeping and running in circles, and so perhaps he rushes the job. The leg comes off. These things are as thin as hairs. He is not at all surprised when the seven-legged spider makes a swift escape through the grass. He is surprised, however, when its recently severed leg also escapes, twitching nimbly across the bright yellow ledge of his daughter’s inflatable pool. One must not be rash in ascribing human attributes to a detached spider leg, but the leg does seem to move with determination, courage, and a complete lack of self-pity. And later this day, Abbott, driving home from the Big Y out on Route 9, passes a construction site where an out-and-out meadow of two-foot weeds grows on the steep slope of a mound of truck-dumped dirt. The weeds sway and bend for the sun just like real plants. This bogus hillock will no doubt be dozed anon; the grading vehicles are parked on-site, ready. Nevertheless, the weeds just keep photosynthesizing. Their seeds are dispersed carelessly, ingeniously, in the summer breeze. This is the Holy Land, apparently. They all grow another sixteenth of an inch as Abbott drives past. “Enough,” he yells at the construction-site weeds. His daughter sits in the backseat with her pronouns all mixed up. “You want some songs,” she says. “You want a peanut. You want.”

9 Abbott Glimpses, As If from a Distance

Mornings, Abbott often finds the evidence of his wife’s sleeplessness: a used tea bag in a mug, a wrinkled pillow, a novel tossed on the couch. And of course her occasional notes, written on scraps of ripped paper and left by the coffeemaker. Months ago, when they began appearing, the notes were darkly comic, apologetic, tender. They digressed into observation and affection before requesting that Abbott please allow her to sleep in the morning. Often they included the time. The ripped scraps of paper were larger then, and the entreaties frequently ran to the back side of the paper. The notes have steadily gotten shorter, the scraps smaller. Abbott’s wife has now nearly abandoned rhetorical flourish, arrangement, punctuation, penmanship, and the small rightward arrow that signifies continuation. Long night — sorry. Or, the last time, simply: 3:30 bad. Abbott has saved all these notes in a manila folder without knowing why. There are three digital clocks in the kitchen — one on the microwave, one on the stove, one on the coffeemaker. They must be awful in the night. The insomniac cannot even take comfort in their small discrepancies because Abbott synchronizes them after each electrical outage. They are unanimous, imperious. This morning he sees, as he enters the kitchen, the aggressive display of time, as well as that tiny shard of white paper by the coffeemaker. Though he is morbidly curious about the note, he does not by now need to read it to know what it means. His wife must know this too, because the note, Abbott comes to learn, does not have a word on it.

10 The Broken Heart It Kens

In the basement Abbott presses shirts he will not have occasion to wear for three to four months. Each one has an ink stain, the insignia of his guild. This last wrinkled shirt is gray with two black dots on the shoulder. Abbott has moved into the final stage of ironing, during which he attempts to iron out the wrinkles that he previously ironed in. The monitor hisses quietly on the ironing board, Abbott’s daughter having long ago stopped singing a Scottish folk song about a captured Jacobite Highlander who will never again see his true love on the banks of a beautiful lake, and whose soul, after his body is executed by English soldiers, will travel through the spirit world, arriving home in Scotland well before his extant rebel comrade, who will walk home alone over the Earth. The static of the monitor and the sibilant chugs of the iron, combined with the dim light of a dust-covered, low-watt bulb and the stale subterranean air and the metal shelves full of rusty cans of paint and turpentine, make Abbott feel as if he is the sole survivor of a calamitous event in some remote expeditionary outpost. His shirts are beautiful, though, like Gatsby’s. They remind him of the purpose of art. He unplugs the iron and pockets the monitor. He picks up the neat warm rectangular bundle of stained shirts, turns off the light, and begins to climb the stairs in darkness. Somewhere between the bottom of the stairs and the top, he strikes his knee against a metal bracket that connects the railing to the wall. He falls to a sitting position, grips his knee with both hands. His pressed shirts tumble down the dark stairs. The pain is immense, and it does not abate. Rather, it escalates, takes on new dimensions and nuances, opens into meaninglessness. The pain lacks value and context. If Abbott’s wife were here, she would turn on the light and say, “Oh, God, ouch. What did you do?” She would offer him the ice that he would refuse for no conceivable reason. She would say, “Here, let me see it.” She would look at the knee and, no matter what she saw, she would grimace. The pain would stand for something; it would exist in a sense for his wife, for the marriage. It would conceivably lead to some kind of physical intimacy, perhaps right here on the stairs. Abbott and his wife might explore the erotic potential of a serious knee injury. But she’s not here and he can’t call for her. Or he won’t. This pain — his shoulders are shaking, his teeth chattering, as if he has been pulled from an icy pond. Abbott cannot determine if he is nearer the top or the bottom. Ascension, though, is out the question, so he scoots painfully down, over the pile of his ironed shirts. Streetlight enters the room through the small ground-level windows at the top of the basement walls, and the pupils of Abbott’s eyes automatically dilate so that he can make out shapes and edges in the dark. He hops on his noninjured leg toward his bourgeois cache of unused furniture. He sees a plastic-wrapped crib mattress leaning against a rocking chair, and he topples it to the ground. Abbott lies down on the tiny mattress, his legs extending far off the edge. The plastic covering crinkles beneath him as he adjusts his body. The smell of mildew makes him feel as if he himself is rotting. He has seen images of spores, magnified many times. When his breathing finally slows, the basement becomes quiet and he can hear the hum of the fan in his bedroom, directly above. He can hear his wife turning in bed. For a few minutes he considers masturbation. A passing car’s headlights briefly illuminate the room, and Abbott sees an old flashlight on an old bedside table, within reach. He picks it up and turns it on. Its light is weak and yellow. First he sits up and shines the light on his knee, which is still vibrating with pain. He fears and expects to see something commensurate with the sensation — chips of bone under skin or a lurid contusion or grotesque swelling — but his fear turns to disappointment when he notices that there is not a mark on it. His knee just looks like the knee of a guy in his late thirties. Next he shines the light on the stairs. The shirts are strewn, as if they had grappled at the top and then tumbled down. Their backs look broken. A blue one has an arm outstretched, as if trying to break its fall, or to reach for something out of reach.

11 Abbott and the Clenched Jaw

At whom can Abbott be angry? “Another amazing Friday night,” he says to his wife as they clip the dog’s toenails in the foyer. Abbott’s dog lies compliantly on the tile floor, but his eyes are wild with terror and his limbs are trembling. “It’s OK,” Abbott’s wife says to the dog. “This won’t hurt. You’re doing great.” Abbott’s knee hurts. He is angry with the dog, though he understands it is unfair to blame the dog for everything. He notices for the first time that there seems to be some kind of rot in the grout between the tiles. “We should brush his teeth, too,” Abbott’s wife says. “Look at that brown stuff.” “It’s always such a relief when the weekend comes,” Abbott says. “Don’t cut them too short,” says his wife. “It’s a chance to kick back and blow off some steam,” he says. With a little pep and tonal diligence, these words might possibly convey a tenderly ironic statement of solidarity, rather than a jagged statement of anger poorly disguised as a tenderly ironic statement of solidarity. “One more foot, buddy,” Abbott’s wife says. “You’re doing great.” “This is why we work so hard,” Abbott says. “It’s all worth it when the weekend comes.” Abbott’s dog makes a halfhearted attempt at escape, and Abbott pushes him back down to the floor. “Just relax!” he shouts at the dog. “First of all?” Abbott’s wife says. “This is not Friday.” Abbott says, “Fine.” She says, “It’s not even close to Friday.” Abbott says, “The point still holds.” “What point is that?” his wife asks. Abbott is not quite sure he knows what his point is. He has a notion, but it’s too terrible to say out loud. He pets the dog, examines a paw. “Second, it’s not my fault and it’s not his fault,” Abbott’s wife says, “so don’t take it out on us.” She kneels on the tile by the dog, scratching his ear. Abbott has been trying, he realizes, to look down her shirt. “Fine,” he says. “I know.” “And third?” she says, “do you even remember how hard I had to try to get you to go out on a Friday night before we had a kid?” Abbott says, “That’s not true,” which is not true. Meanwhile, the developing fetus can hear this whole pitiful encounter, according to the Internet. You would think the amniotic fluid would muffle sound, but it actually amplifies it. For an analogy, it might be helpful to remember how well you could hear underwater in the county swimming pool of so long ago.

12 Abbott Discovers an Idiom in His Yard

Abbott’s neighbor’s woodpile, against which Abbott pushes his mower this afternoon, is a real woodpile, not a metaphor. Abbott, deep in academic reverie, doesn’t even recognize the object, doesn’t name it woodpile. It’s been reduced to its geometry — it exists only in relation to his mower. As he bumps the mower against the edge of the pile, he is startled by an interstitial slithering in the stacked logs. He sees the scales, so vivid as to seem artificial. Numerous times in his professional life, in hallways and department meetings, Abbott has heard the phrase snake in the woodpile. It’s a stock expression of the paranoid intellectual. I know about snakes in woodpiles, Abbott thinks, sprinting across his yard away from the snake in the woodpile, but what is that snake doing in that woodpile? This is what it’s like living life backwards. He can’t catch his breath. Once again he’s stunned by the real.

13 Abbott Thinks, Yet Again, the Unthinkable

Abbott’s daughter has been napping for two hours and fifty minutes. Abbott, a frequent complainer about her short naps, thinks this one has been going on entirely too long. The monitor is quiet, which means either that she is alive and sleeping or that she is no longer alive. He wishes he had been more patient with her, more attentive. He wishes he had been more focused and engaged during all those hours they spent with the beads and the buttons in the family room. He wonders about the last thing he said to her. He thinks it was, “Have a good one.” When he has wrestled and played with her in the family room, he has put his head on her chest and heard her small heart beating. He has wondered what keeps it going and going. Nobody seems willing to admit that the very premise is outlandish. Abbott’s daughter’s nap is Abbott’s time to get things done around the house or run errands or rest or read, but for the past forty-five minutes he has just been sitting at the dining-room table, waiting for her to wake up. There is no good reason to go in to check on her. If her heart is not beating, then it has already stopped beating. Going in does not change that. Why enter her room only to confirm a dark suspicion? While there exists the possibility that she is alive and napping, Abbott should remain outside her room. If the nap lasts five hours, a week, a month, he should sit right here at the dining-room table with the slim hope that she’s just very tired. Why not live as much of his life as possible with this hope? Why rush to begin the sorrowful remainder of his days? If she is no longer alive, every second he does not know for certain that she is no longer alive is another second he does not have to live with it. He knows it is best to stay out of her room. When he enters her room, she immediately stirs. She is, and has been, alive. His relief is immediately succeeded by regret and self-rebuke. He does not want her to wake up. He could be reading right now, or taking his own nap. He could be working with wood. He tries to sneak from the room, but his daughter sits up and calls out. “Dad,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “Dad. I’m awake.”

14 Abbott’s Imaginary Burst into Subdisciplinary Prominence

“Historically speaking,” Abbott begins before a rapt imaginary audience at the imaginary Royal Institute of Harbinger, Omen, and Portent in Helsinki, “we occupy the epoch after Juvenal and before Armageddon.” He pauses for robust laughter, as his notes instruct. His imaginary paper is called “On the Feasibility of American Burlesque.” Its real thesis is that it’s increasingly unfeasible. The ornate, high-ceilinged lecture hall is stiflingly hot or quite drafty and cold. The atmosphere is electric, charged, and crackling. His artful Power Point presentation culminates with a photograph of the four deceased dolphins that recently washed up in San Diego. “A necropsy confirmed that they had been shot,” Abbott says. “With a gun.” The applause lasts one minute and thirty-five seconds. Flash photographers flout the strict prohibition against flash photography. Abbott’s handkerchief is soaked. He looks up from the lectern, sees members of the audience scanning the conference program for his short and humble bio. It hasn’t been easy to be away from his real wife and daughter for these six imaginary days, but the benefit to his career is inestimable. His absence makes him miss and appreciate his family even more. This trip in all likelihood has strengthened the domestic bonds. Also, he has never been to Sweden, and he has enjoyed discovering a new place on his own. Finland, he means. He has never been to Finland, and he has enjoyed discovering a new place on his own.

15 On the Very Possibility of Kindness

The bananas in the kitchen are overripe, and Abbott’s wife wants to make banana bread. So far the premise is simple and so is the motivation. But there is a complication. Abbott’s wife is tired and busy, and she is having trouble finding the time to make the bread. Right now she has to leave the house to get some milk and swimming diapers. After Abbott puts his daughter to bed for her nap, he walks into the kitchen and sees on the counter the perfectly overripe bananas, the large mixing bowl, and the recipe. What happens next is that he begins to make the banana bread, despite the fact that he has never baked anything. One can’t presume to know another’s thoughts, but Abbott feels certain that his wife did not leave the bananas, bowl, and recipe on the counter so that he might make the bread. He knows it would never occur to her that he would make the bread. Abbott is not even considering this possibility — it’s just that when he sees these items on the counter he feels no twinge of guilt or responsibility, no subtle marital pressure, no implicit request or demand. He knows — to the extent this knowledge is possible — that his wife began to make the bread, but then ran out of time or energy. He knows she is not now at the Big Y wondering if her husband fell into the trap she set in the kitchen. He has already begun assembling ingredients when he notices that his wife has made notes on the recipe card, adjusting the amounts of ingredients to make a two-banana loaf rather than a three-banana loaf. He thinks with fondness of his wife, who keeps these adjusted recipe cards somewhere in their home. He doesn’t really think; he just feels fondness. Fondness and a kind of jolt. He follows the adjusted recipe. His motivations for baking are unclear, even to himself. He’s just baking, and at some point in the process he realizes he is enjoying himself, a realization that leads to an overawareness of baking and the enjoyment of baking, which threatens to spoil the experience but does not. He puts the loaf in the oven and waits. As the kitchen begins to smell good, he becomes eager for his wife’s return. He is anxious to witness her surprise. He is anxious, he supposes, to be regarded as a surprising husband. Abbott is beginning to understand that he baked only because he believed his wife had absolutely no expectation that he would bake. Consequently, in making banana bread he could also make himself, at least temporarily, into a remarkable spouse. He may have thought he was helping his life partner, but he was not. Not in an authentic way. He was never baking for her. Now he has gone and spoiled the experience, and when she comes home he is gloomy with the certainty that he has never been and will never be genuinely nice, a quality he admires. He wishes he had not baked the bread. That would have been the nice thing to do. He walks out into the rain to help bring in the groceries, but not in a nice way. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks, to which he just shakes his head. When she enters the house and smells the bread baking, she seems legitimately confused. It’s as if — Abbott is just guessing here — it’s as if she can’t remember whether or not she made this bread. She can’t remember making it, and yet the bread is obviously baking, so she searches her mind for other possibilities, finally arriving at her husband. “Did you make the banana bread?” she asks. “Yes,” he says, unpacking groceries. “Are you serious?” she says. She opens the oven door and peeks in at the loaf, which is rising beautifully. Then, concerned, she says, “Did you follow the recipe for two bananas?” “Yes,” he says. “Did you find the baking soda?” “Yes,” he blurts, as if offended. She clearly cannot believe he found the baking soda. He himself had been stunned to find it earlier in the door of the refrigerator. “Well,” Abbott’s wife says, “thank you. That was nice.” Together they put away the groceries in silence. Eventually he says, “I thought you might be surprised.” “I am,” she says. “I am surprised. And I’m grateful. I honestly can’t believe you found the baking soda.” This is not going well; the quality and quantity of her surprise are wrong. The afternoon has arrived at a shameful crisis: Even though Abbott knows that baking bread in order to exhibit his limitless depth is solipsistic and spiritually deficient — the very opposite of generous, in fact, and the cause of his current despondency — yes, even though he knows it, he still wants his wife to notice his limitless depth. “I was just trying to help you out,” he says, casting a wide net across the True/False Continuum. “Listen,” Abbott’s wife says, squeezing the back of Abbott’s neck, “the bread is a surprise, but you are not.” And so it is that Abbott is surprised.

16 Abbott and the Mail

Fucking Thoreau — he could, for his part, happily do without the post-office. Leave it to the childless to be complacent about the mail. You put a toddler in Walden and you’d get new philosophy. For his part, Abbott takes great comfort in the reliable work of the postal service, a representative of which comes to his neighborhood in the mid- to late afternoon six days a week, every week. The mail is an undeniably significant part of his day. It not only signals the blessed arrival of the mid- to late afternoon, it also offers the promise of surprise and wonder. Today there is nothing surprising or wonderful, and in fact there never is. But there is the promise. Today it’s a bill and three more baby catalogues. Abbott and his wife used to feel irked and mildly infringed upon by the fact that these companies somehow knew they were going to have a baby. But then they started flipping through the catalogues, and they found a lot of interesting stuff. Abbott sees four neighbors from four houses on his side of the street, all walking to or from their mailboxes. The mail truck is still moving down the street, and it continues to draw more neighbors from their houses. The scene feels a bit like a nature documentary. Everyone greets one another in a mechanical fashion, waving first to their eastern neighbors and then to their western neighbors. It’s like they’re all riding in a parade. Abbott does not even focus his eyes on a person or people — he just transmits vague signals of salutation to his counterparts. This is, to the best of Abbott’s knowledge, a weekday. Don’t his neighbors have jobs? And what could they all be expecting every day that is so important? Why this desperate rush? The awkward trip to the mailbox is enough to make Abbott want to wait a few minutes each day after delivery before checking his mail. On the other hand, he knows there are limits to what a man can ask of himself.

17 Abbott Adds a Key to the Ring

Abbott does not consider the broken doorknob on the seldom-used front door a high-priority repair, or even a problem. “So we can’t get out,” he says to his wife. “People can’t get in. It’s kind of a nice feature.” “But what if there was a fire?” his wife says. She is a very skilled wife. This afternoon, during the child’s nap, Abbott drives to the hardware store to purchase a doorknob. He stands in the doorknob aisle for fifteen minutes. Faced with a choice between many seemingly identical doorknobs, Abbott purchases the second most expensive one and takes it home in a bag. The installation is supposed to be easy, but it is not. The doorknob and the screwdriver become slippery in the moist air. The dropped screws clatter and vanish. Eventually, Abbott replaces the doorknob, then makes small noises and gestures of completion until his wife says, “Looks good. Nice job.” Since Abbott did not replace the deadbolt, which was not broken, he now has two different keys for a door he does not use. He puts the new key on his ring, which has become heavy and crowded. What is that blue one for? It was only seven years ago — no, six — that Abbott left Texas in a small moving truck, after completing his lease and donating his Plymouth Reliant to an organization that teaches troubled teens to fix transmissions. At that point he had no keys. Not one. A putative adult with an empty key ring. He had forsaken the air-conditioning on his drive out of Texas. He had opened the windows and let the hot wind blow freely through the cab. The last time he told this story to his wife, she laughed and said, “Why don’t you just tell me about a woman you enjoyed having sex with?” Stepping onto his porch with his screwdriver and jangling keys, he recalls the story of the empty key ring with a powerful sense of boredom. He closes the front door and tests the new doorknob and the lock. He turns and pushes, turns and pulls. He listens for the click, and he hears it.

18 Abbott on the Couch

Tonight Abbott is a generality, a tendency, a convention. He is an indistinct and featureless lump beneath a thin blanket. Tonight he is Husband on Couch. The battered cushions sag beneath the weight of his unoriginality. He is complicit, he knows. Nobody can make you be Husband on Couch. Wife in Big Bed can’t. You always have choices. Abbott could hop a freight train, ride the rails, build fires in trash cans. Or he could be Husband on Air Mattress, just for the principle. The fight was painfully stupid. Abbott, lying in bed, asked his wife if her novel is any good. She said, “Oh, you know.” Then he asked what her novel is about. He didn’t even care; he was just making bedtime conversation. She said, “Oh, you know.” He studied the title, the cover. He tried to peek at the author photograph. He said, “I do know. It’s about marriage and secrets and faith. Am I right? And the strange settling sounds an old house makes at night? And that angle of light in the winter?” Abbott’s wife did not say anything. Abbott said, “Loss of youth. Estrangement. A nice meal ruined by the truth. A long walk during which it becomes shockingly evident that the natural world is violent and ruthless.” Abbott’s wife said, “Are you done?” Abbott said, “Passion. Memory. Forgiveness. Seething things beneath a placid surface. A tree cleft by lightning.” Abbott’s wife closed her book and said, “Is there something you’d like to talk about?” Abbott realized that he was spoiling any chance of a good night’s sleep for his wife, but he knew if he stopped now it would appear that he knew he was acting poorly, and that was not an admission he was prepared to make. He was operating by a strongly felt but dimly understood sense of correctness. “The smell of the cut grass, the feel of the cut grass on bare feet, the memories of walking on cut grass with bare feet in simpler times.” Abbott’s wife said, “Stop yelling.” Abbott said, “I’m not.” Abbott’s wife said, “If there’s something you’d like to say to me, then say it.” Abbott said, “She lives in upstate New York with her husband, her two children, and her two horses.” Abbott’s wife said she didn’t care about the novel but he was being an ass. And of course she rolled over to face away from him. It had taken Abbott, without premeditation, something like two minutes to wreck the night. Then, apropos of nothing beyond his own insensitivity, he said, “I know about the water in the basement.” He found a tone to make it cruel. He got out of bed and stood up. Abbott’s wife held her book with her index finger marking her place. She did not move and did not speak. Beside her, on her nightstand, that small porcelain dish filled with earplugs. He left the room and arrived unimaginatively on the horrible family-room couch, a stained and cat-tattered mound of soft dough. The dog came with him, but then returned to the bedroom after a few minutes. Abbott does not anticipate falling asleep anytime soon, but the next thing he knows his wife is shaking his leg. He opens his eyes to see her holding her novel and a steaming mug. The lamplight makes him squint. He rubs his eyes, pats the listless cushions for her to lie down with him. “This is my spot,” she says. Abbott extracts himself from the couch and limps down the hallway, dragging his thin blanket like a vagabond. That’s way too fast, he thinks, hearing a car drive past his house.

19 Abbott and the Sticky Shit All Over the Fucking Steering Wheel Again

Gone are the daydreams of academic notoriety and glistening vulvas and whatever else. All Abbott wants right now — the only thing — is to be knocked unconscious by the long wooden handle of a lawn tool.

20 Abbott and the Utopian Community

With his helpmeet Abbott establishes one early-summer evening a small utopian community in a seventh-floor room of a Boston-area La Quinta. After checking into the hotel, Abbott and his wife and daughter ride the elevator to the seventh floor, stopping at the second, fifth, and sixth floors because Abbott let his daughter push the buttons. Inside the room, Abbott says, “This is OK,” and his wife says, “Yeah, it’s fine.” While Abbott holds the child on the window ledge overlooking heavy highway traffic (“Truck! Bus!”), his wife spreads out a picnic dinner on the comforter of the king-sized bed. There are peanut butter and honey sandwiches, sliced carrots and cucumbers, a sandwich bag of Fig Newtons, one ripe banana, and a large bottle of a sports energy drink that they all pass around and dribble onto the comforter. After dinner, Abbott puts a rusty barrette in his daughter’s hair and the family rides down the elevator, walks out of the lobby, and discovers a tiny plot of grass by the parking lot. Nearly all of this utopian grass has been killed, either by dog urine or grubs. A high chain-link fence separates the play area from the busy highway. Abbott runs wildly in small circles, and his daughter chases him, stopping occasionally to put Styrofoam cups and blades of dead grass on a fire hydrant. Abbott’s wife is too pregnant to run, but she watches and cheers and exclaims. Then they all return to the elevator and ride back up to the seventh-floor room. Abbott and his wife work together to put their daughter in pajamas, to brush her miniature teeth and wash her face. They turn out the lights, close the curtains to block the glow of the setting sun, and place the girl, along with her stuffed pony, in a playpen/crib in the corner. “Goodnight, sweetie,” they say, moving a large utopian chair in front of the playpen/crib. “Have good dreams.” But the child gets teary and is obviously not going to sleep, so Abbott moves the large chair and lies down on the floor next to the playpen/crib, the vinyl mesh siding of which allows him to speak to his daughter and to see her in the dim light. She rolls to the edge of the playpen/crib with her stuffed pony and says, “Dad’s down.” She says, “Dad’s on the floor. There’s Dad. See Dad through the hole. Hi, Dad. Dad has two knees. Airplane far away.” Abbott says, “It’s time to go to sleep.” His daughter says, “Dad through the hole. Sunblock tastes bad. Toast is food. This is Popo. Show Popo to Dad? Hi, Popo. Mama’s driving. This is a different blue one. We saw lions!” She begins singing the alphabet song, veers into “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” then returns triumphantly to her version of the alphabet. “Good night,” Abbott says, rising to his knees after fifteen or twenty minutes. His daughter says, “Dad? Dad, lie down! OK? That’s fine. Dad through the hole!” So Abbott lies back down on the floor and talks to his daughter through the vinyl mesh of the playpen/crib. He feels as if he is either giving or receiving confession. His daughter says, “Dad’s tired. Dad’s rough. OK!” Once more he tries to get up and once more he is ordered to stay. The despot behind the mesh weighs less than a bag of dog food. Seventy minutes after being placed down, Abbott’s daughter falls asleep, and Abbott creeps away from her, silently replacing the large chair in front of the playpen/crib. He finds his wife sitting cross-legged on the floor in the closet-and-sink niche outside the bathroom. The light from the bathroom is just enough for her to read a celebrity and fashion magazine. Abbott sits beside her, and they share a Hershey bar and look at dresses and purses and DWI mug shots. They’re both too tired to be sardonic. Later, in the king-sized bed, Abbott wants to attempt late-term utopian intercourse, but his wife does not, so they compromise on a hand job. This is just fine with Abbott. He understands that compromise is a vital component of marriage, as is, though to a lesser extent, the hand job. In fact, as he approaches orgasm — or more likely, much later — he realizes that the hand-job-within-marriage, while no substitute for vow-renewing egalitarian coitus (from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs), nevertheless does have a legitimate place in the utopian scheme. He rubs his wife’s swollen belly as she does it. Afterward, she brings him a washcloth. They kiss goodnight, then roll to distant regions of the enormous bed. The next day is a disaster. The amazing furniture clearance is not amazing. There are too many other people and too many other people’s children. Abbott’s wife sits on every couch and makes the same look, as if she’s offended or as if the couch has lied to her. “Well, it sort of has,” she says. “You have to imagine you’re not pregnant,” Abbott keeps telling her. “I wish you knew what a ridiculous thing that is to say,” she says. Abbott and his wife bicker all day and are constantly reminded of each other’s most regrettable qualities. There are no good couches, but they pretend the real issue is their spouse’s poor taste or unreasonable requirements. “Comfort is not an unreasonable requirement,” Abbott’s wife says, causing Abbott to wonder aloud whether they are wealthy enough for comfort. Abbott’s daughter behaves like a two-year-old in a furniture store. She spills apple juice in a deluxe modern showroom, narrowly missing a divan. The child’s stuffed pony is lost, discovered by a virtuous sales associate, then lost again. Abbott’s wife’s ankles hurt. She sits on couches and does not want to stand back up. The utopian community disintegrates, almost upon sunrise. All told, it lasted roughly thirteen hours, six of which Abbott spent sleeping. Like all other utopian settlements, including Robert Owen’s New Harmony Community on the banks of the Wabash River in 1825, this La Quinta venture dissolves into chaos and fails. Still, Abbott considers while hiding from his family amidst the leather sectionals, all the nonutopian communities have dissolved into chaos and failed, too. So big deal. So try again.

21 In Which Abbott Drives through the Center of a Diamond

Driving home, Abbott notices the sudden quiet in the backseat. The noticing perhaps more sudden than the quiet. By adjusting the rearview mirror he is able to see his two-year-old daughter and his substantially pregnant wife, both asleep, mouths parted, heads inclined toward each other. They are both a little sweaty and beautiful. By tilting the rearview even farther down — and by dropping his right shoulder nearly to discomfort — he is able to see his wife’s breasts, enlarged by pregnancy and bisected intriguingly by her seatbelt. If seatbelts became standard in American cars in 1964, why, Abbott wonders — later, not now — is our contemporary national art not filled with breasts bisected by nylon straps? Where are the songs and poems, the sculpture, the oils on canvas? For a stretch of fifty or so highway miles, Abbott periodically readjusts his rearview mirror to look first at his sweet, sleeping family, then at his wife’s splendid breasts. There is something here, inaccessible by blade, no matter how sharp. Although he is not generally a happy man — or perhaps because he is not generally a happy man — Abbott recognizes happiness when he feels it.

22 Abbott’s Cave

Having not checked the Internet in nearly thirty hours, Abbott dials up with a premonition, though he also had a premonition the sun would rise this morning. Another full rotation of the planet — the odds of mayhem are pretty good. And sure enough: the steamboat has exploded; the gunman has walked in and opened fire; the gorillas in the zoo have stopped eating; and now these missing girls. Here’s what we know: drunk babysitter, open screen door, tiny footprints in the mud. Authorities are amassing, combing, projecting. They are not answering that question at this time. They are utilizing all available resources. The parents are bargaining with God. “You shouldn’t read that stuff,” Abbott’s wife has said, more or less concurring with Henry David Thoreau, who believed that anyone who cares to know that a man had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River is living in a cave, and not just any cave but a dark un-fathomed mammoth one. Right now she’s calling for Abbott from a remote region of the house. He understands her tone, if not her explicit message. When Abbott attempts to conclude his dial-up Internet session, he has, as always, a choice: STAY CONNECTED or DISCONNECT NOW.

23 Abbott’s Folk Remedy

Abbott just stumbled accidentally upon this treatment, but now he swears by it. It’s a little of the hair of the dog that bit you. The first thing you’ll need to do is have a child. The best kind for this remedy is a child who has some manual dexterity, who can safely and neatly chew solid foods, and who can ride placidly in a car seat. A two-year-old child usually works well. Next you’ll want to buckle the child into its car seat with some soothing words or perhaps a folk song about the sinking of a great ship. You don’t want a fussy child. Start the car and begin driving around. It does not matter where you drive, but Abbott recommends, for safety’s sake, that you avoid heavy traffic and/or winding roads. Also: a clear, dry day is best. Now, once you have helped create this child and buckled it happily into a moving car, you’ll need to open a plastic bag full of snack items. Dry cereal is fine, as are raisins, pieces of dried fruit, or small nuts. Use something that the child likes. While steering with your left hand, use your right to offer a small snack item back to the child in the car seat. Show appropriate caution, obviously. Hold the snack item securely but gingerly. Do not turn around, and do not use the rearview mirror to look at the child. Looking back is not only dangerous, it also ruins the treatment. Keep your right hand extended backwards, despite the growing discomfort. If it helps, talk to the child about what is happening. (“Here’s a pretzel for you.”) Now wait. Keep your eyes on the road, your left hand on the wheel. Keep your snack arm extended toward the backseat. You may feel a burning sensation in your shoulder, and that’s fine. Wait. Stop talking. The waiting is crucial. Your sense that the child does not want the snack item or can’t reach it or in fact is not a real and separate person — crucial. Do not turn around. Do not talk. Just pose a question with your right arm, extend it into the mystery of the backseat. Now: Feel the child’s tiny warm hand graze your scarred and callused fingers. This is important. Feel the child achieve a grip on the snack. Don’t look! If you see it, you won’t feel it. Feel the tug as the child, of its own startling volition, takes the food from your light grasp and, one presumes, eats it. Your snack hand should be and feel empty. The emptiness is crucial. Repeat as desired.

24 On Turbulence

It’s nearly midnight when Abbott’s wife walks into the basement to find Abbott with his head against a heating duct. She’s holding a magazine, wearing underwear and a tank top that doesn’t quite cover her stomach. Abbott can see a crescent of taut white skin beneath the hem. “What are you doing?” he says. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she says. “We should probably whisper,” Abbott says, pointing upward. They are standing directly below their daughter’s bedroom, and sound does carry in the house. Still, Abbott’s wife rolls her eyes at him. “What are you doing?” she says. “Sorry you’re still up,” he says, putting his head against another section of duct. “This floor is gross,” she says, and they both look down at her bare feet, one on top of the other, toes curled. Abbott’s wife has to lean forward to see them. “I’m looking for a noise,” he says. “What kind of noise?” “I don’t know,” he says. “Kind of a rustle. Tell me if you hear it.” His wife switches feet. “I brought you something,” she says. She opens the magazine and begins reading an article on airplane safety. She knows he is scared to fly, and she knows, further, that he reaches irritably after fact and reason. The chance of a plane crashing is one in 11 million. The wings on a jet are built to flap up and down. It’s called flexing. “I knew that one,” Abbott says, tapping the edge of square silver duct with his fingernail. “And if the wings didn’t flex, the ride would be terrible,” his wife says. “I know,” he says. His wife keeps reading. Only one plane has ever crashed because of turbulence. “Ever?” asks Abbott. “Ever,” she says. “And probably only because it was flying too close to a mountain.” Abbott’s wife reads a passage about how people who are afraid of flying are advised to think about the plane being suspended in a big bubble of gelatin. Abbott has no idea what that means or how it might help. “And listen, turbulence,” she says. “Turbulence, because of the speed of the aircraft, turbulence feels much worse than it actually is.” Abbott stands up straight. The only light is from an exposed sixty-watt bulb on the ceiling. The basement darkens at the corners. His wife looks like some kind of ghost or dream, talking about aircraft. Abbott has cobwebs in his hair and on the back of his neck. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “How can turbulence be not as bad as it feels? Turbulence is what turbulence feels like. That’s exactly what it is. You can’t distinguish turbulence from its effects.” “No,” his wife says. “There’s the air currents or whatever outside the plane. Think of the gelatin. Then there’s the bumping and falling sensation that the passengers experience.” “We should whisper,” Abbott says. “I might have just heard the rustle,” she says. “That wasn’t it,” he says. “If you hit a tiny rock in a car going thirty miles per hour, it doesn’t feel that bad, but if you hit the same kind of bump in a jet going”—she checks the magazine—“eight hundred feet per second, then it feels more severe.” Abbott is almost entirely certain that an airplane would not hit a tiny rock in the air, though he wishes his wife had clarified that point. She says, “Not that planes hit rocks. They hit air currents.” “Of course,” Abbott says. He had never considered that turbulence exists independently of our perception of it, though the point is suddenly evident. “The main thing is if you can picture the aircraft in a big pocket of gelatin,” she says. “I still don’t get that,” Abbott says. He would like to get it. “A jet is only moving about one inch up or down,” she says. She has closed the magazine, and she is palpating herself below the ribs. “Are you OK?” Abbott says. His wife says, “The baby keeps jabbing me up here.” He says, “Are you worried about it?” She says, “No. The main point with the turbulence is that things aren’t really as bad as they seem. Or feel.” Neither Abbott nor his wife says anything for a minute or so. There is no need for Abbott’s wife to say that turbulence is in this respect just like so many things in life, and there’s no need for Abbott to say that turbulence is in this respect quite exceptional. At some point you do not need to talk to have a conversation. The conversation exists whether you have it or not. It continues silently in a parallel dimension of the marriage. They both pause to let it run its course toward another stalemate. When it’s over, Abbott whispers, “Eight hundred feet per second?”

25 The Obstetrician’s Tale

“It’s a true story. During my first pregnancy, I really did stay up late at night reading my old embryology textbook — those million tiny things that all have to happen perfectly. And I really did come in to work early every day to give myself an ultrasound. I’m only trying to commiserate, but I should know by now that there are some people — and it’s usually the men — who I just shouldn’t say those things to.” “But still …” “Still what? It’s nice that they come?” “Well, it is nice.” “You know, I used to think that too. But now I’m sick of all these heroes.”

26 Abbott and the Oversized Load

Abbott empties the dirty water from his daughter’s inflatable pool by stepping on the edge. When all the water has drained into the yard, he uses his hose and hose attachment to spray out the dead bugs and blades of grass from the bottom and sides. Today it is above ninety degrees. He drags the pool ten feet away so he won’t kill the grass beneath it. It might be too late for that, he speculates. After he locates the two valves and blows in more air, he removes the hose attachment and places the running hose in the pool. The water from the hose is too cold for his daughter, though, so Abbott boils water in a teakettle on the stove, then takes the kettle outside with an oven mitt and pours it into the pool. He pours in four kettles of boiling water. Abbott’s daughter will be excited. Abbott moves a deck chair to the edge of the pool, where he might sit this afternoon with his feet in the water. When the girl awakes from her nap, she does not want to play in the pool. She wants to walk. She and Abbott walk through the neighborhood to a busy street called Pleasant. Abbott picks her up, and they watch the traffic pass. The girl is quiet, lethargic. Abbott puts his palm on her forehead — of course she feels hot. He puts his palm on his own hot forehead and determines nothing. They see delivery trucks, a motorcycle, a town bus. Then Abbott points and says, “Look at that. Right there, coming this way.” The girl turns her head toward the flatbed tractor-trailer carrying a small white house. In front of the truck there’s an escort car with a yellow flashing light on its roof. The house on the truck passes slowly by. “Pretty amazing,” Abbott says to her, before noticing that she’s crying. She’s not making a sound. Tears are filling her eyes and running down her cheeks and neck. “It’s OK,” Abbott tells her. “Let’s go get a snack.” He carries her back down the street toward their house. She smells like sunblock. “Listen,” he says, “it’s just fine.” Tonight he’ll tell his wife about it. One of them will say it’s troubling. The other will say it’s nothing to worry about. Abbott doesn’t know yet which one he’ll be.

27 In Which Abbott Sits in a Parked Car for Quite a While

Were he to marry, twenty-eight-year-old Charles Darwin scribbled in pencil on the backs of envelopes, he would never see America; he would never learn French; he would never go up in a hot air balloon; he would never take a solitary trip in Wales; he would be obliged to go walking every day with his wife; he would be forced to visit and receive relatives; he would be forced to bend in every trifle; he could not read in the evenings; he would be fat and idle, anxious and responsible; he would never have enough money for books; he would be banished from London; he would be trapped in London; he would have the expense and worry of children; he would feel a duty to work for money, especially if he had many children; he would be forced to host visitors and be a part of Society; he would listen to female chit-chat; he would have no time in the country, no tours; he would have no large zoological collection; he would not have enough books; he would have no freedom to go where he liked; he would not have the conversation of clever men at clubs; he would suffer, above all else, a terrible loss of time. Darwin was married within the year. He and his wife, Emma Wedgwood Darwin, produced ten children, three of whom died young. Late in life, he wrote of Emma: “She has been my greatest blessing, and I can declare that in my whole life I have never heard her utter one word which I had rather have been unsaid. … I marvel at my good fortune that she, so infinitely my superior in every single moral quality, consented to be my wife. She has been my wise adviser and cheerful comforter throughout life.” And to his children Darwin wrote: “I have indeed been most happy in my family, and I must say to you children that not one of you has ever given me one minute’s anxiety, except on the score of health. … When you were very young it was my delight to play with you all, and I think with a sigh that such days can never return.”

28 Abbott and the Vexing Claims of Purity

Furthermore, Abbott’s daughter will not drink her organic cow’s milk. Just will not, no matter how many times her father takes a sip of it and then licks his lips and rubs his belly. Then this morning Abbott’s wife has what she considers a breakthrough when she adds maple syrup to the milk and the child drinks it eagerly. “Maple milk!” his wife says, making lip-smacking noises at the child. Abbott is not impressed. He feels his belly-rubbing program has not been given enough time to succeed. “And all those additives and chemicals,” he says to his wife. “No,” she says, “it’s pure maple syrup.” “Right, pure,” Abbott says, troubled by the stupidity of his sarcasm. He gets up from his chair and walks to the kitchen to scrutinize the syrup bottle, which does indeed disingenuously announce its 100 percent purity. What he will do, he decides, is read the ingredients out loud like the Declaration of Independence, but he finds upon inspection that the ingredients are not listed on the bottle, so his scheme collapses. “I thought they were required to put the ingredients on here,” he says. “What?” his wife says. “It’s pure maple syrup. Sap, that’s the ingredient. Look at her go.” There’s no denying it, the child is crazy about maple milk. Abbott is still perplexed by the absent list of ingredients. “Syrup is not sap,” he says with a derisiveness born of uncertainty. “It can’t just be sap.” His voice nearly cracks, and his wife turns in her chair to face him. “Well, what do you think it is?” she says, laughing now. “Processed sugar,” he says. “And aspartame. Lead paint. Fluorocarbons. Agent Orange. Parablendeum. How does it get so delicious?” “More?” Abbott’s daughter says, holding up her empty cup. “They do something to it,” his wife says, “but they don’t add anything. I’m not saying it’s health food, but I know it’s natural. Pure Vermont maple syrup — what did you think that meant?” Abbott disappears into his office, where, after establishing a particularly strong dial-up Internet connection, he learns, at age thirty-seven, that real maple syrup is, after all, just maple sap — from a tree — boiled down. (Native Americans taught the early settlers how to make it. For a sugar maple tree, you’ll need about thirty-two gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. It’s a good idea to strain the finished syrup through cheesecloth to remove any debris or crystallized minerals.) Here he is, suspicious of trees. He hunches over the laptop in his darkened office, chastened and contrite. Outside, someone is mowing in the rain. Abbott knows you can’t just believe. He knows you can’t just not believe.

29 Abbott and the Infestation

Every Sunday morning Abbott retrieves from the end of the driveway a newspaper in a blue plastic bag. Every Sunday morning he pulls the plastic bag off the newspaper and drops it into a low kitchen drawer containing nothing but blue plastic bags. This morning he opens the drawer with his foot and tosses the balled-up bag into the drawer, which is, Abbott now sees, filled completely with blue plastic bags. This morning’s blue bag falls slowly onto the pile, then slides and tumbles out of the drawer and onto the kitchen floor. It stretches out nearly to full length. A draft of air nudges it across the tile. Abbott’s dog jumps back and yelps, in all likelihood waking the child. Abbott looks down into the heaping drawer of weeks. This is how you know that you have Time in your house; you discover its shed skins. He places the thick newspaper on the counter, where it will remain until it is recycled. He gets down on his knees by the drawer. Who else is going to do it? He opens a blue plastic bag and begins to shove the other blue bags into it. The opening is small, so the work is painstaking. When he’s finished, he ties the top of the bulging bag in a knot and tosses the whole year into the garage. Today he’ll deal with shit, snot, piss, blood, vomit, rust, and rot, but they won’t be bad in quite the same way that this is bad.

30 On Conservation

All day long Abbott and his wife have been arguing. By evening there is a fragile truce. The daughter has been put to bed, though her singing and babbling are audible on the staticky monitor. “I forgot to even ask you about the butterflies,” Abbott’s wife says, conciliatory in word if not tone. They are together in the family room, a designation they actually use. They are sitting as far apart as possible on the devastated couch, purchased at a furniture warehouse years ago, when Abbott was in graduate school, and now draped like a corpse by a mail-order cover. Besides Abbott’s cocktail, the couch is the only adult item in the family room, which this and every evening looks as though robbers have ransacked it in an urgent search for a small and valuable item. Books, toys, coins, buttons, beads, and costume jewelry lie strewn across the stained carpeting. It’s almost impossible not to fight with your life partner in this room. Abbott’s wife has asked, sort of, about Abbott’s trip to the butterfly conservatory, an outing he took this morning with their daughter but did not discuss afterward with his wife because she was too busy reminding him of things about which he did not need to be reminded. Today was Abbott’s first trip to the butterfly conservatory. His wife has been twice before with their daughter, and she has reported that the conservatory is “neat” and “kind of peaceful,” that it’s “an interesting place in the middle of nowhere.” One response to his wife’s inquiry is that the butterfly conservatory is a hideous travesty, a transparent example of everything that is wrong with everything. The twelve-dollar admission, accepted joylessly by a woman talking on the telephone to someone she clearly does not want in her life anymore; the cruel trap of the overstocked gift shop, selling stuffed butterflies, real butterflies, butterfly magnets and puzzles, butterfly nightlights and kites, along with entire aisles of bright toys thematically irrelevant but wildly attractive to children; the children; the lucrative imprisonment of thousands of butterflies, not to mention finches, turtles, lizards, fish, and a parrot, ostensibly in the name of appreciation and education; the heat, as one might find in a small bathroom after a long hot shower; the horrific music — hyperactive, flute-driven renditions of “Edelweiss” and “On Broadway,” engineered to overpower visitors and create in them a stupor that might be mistaken for relaxation; the weird smell; the cafeteria with its dumb food names; the fellow adult patrons, all behaving as though they have never before encountered a flying insect; the pervasive sense of animal dirtiness; the chipper, ecologically ignorant staff members, who are in all seriousness referred to as flight attendants, and who spend their days trying to get children to pet a sleepy lizard — Abbott ponders this truce-obliterating response. It would no doubt feel good to take a big swing. But the truth is, he had a pretty good time at the conservatory. There were so many butterflies. Some landed on people’s hands or shoulders. The large proboscises were easy to see. Butterflies are astonishing when you look at them, and when else would you ever look at them? The flight attendants had helpfully led Abbott and his daughter to a mounted board of cocoons, where they saw butterflies emerging, drying their wings, then flying off into the world, or at least into the hot dome. Abbott had never seen his daughter so engaged, so stimulated. He knows that the conservatory is, in addition to a hideous travesty, something like a spiritual center, operated by a dedicated team of citizen-workers. Who else cares about butterflies? Who else would attempt to mend their broken wings with a special wing glue? The pop of the ice in Abbott’s glass reminds him — and probably his wife — that he has not, as a courtesy, desisted or at least curtailed his drinking during her pregnancy. This is a courtesy extended by quite a few Pioneer Valley men to their pregnant soul mates. Abbott has still not said a word in response to his wife’s question, which, come to think of it, was not so much a question as a statement about forgetting to ask a question. His eyes are on a section of subtoy carpet in the shape of a rhombus. Either a rhombus or a parallelogram. He knows that any criticism of the butterfly conservatory would be a deliberate attempt to rankle his wife and renew the fight. This is what a married person can do, slander a sanctuary to provoke his beloved. But Abbott does not disparage the conservatory or its workers. His decision not to strikes him as exceedingly mature, though he knows that congratulating oneself on one’s maturity is probably immature. Also, it comes as a tremendous disappointment to Abbott that his wife cannot know his restraint. If she could know, she would be touched. But he can’t very well tell her how mature and restrained he’s acting, for the maturity and restraint would evaporate upon utterance. Abbott and his wife can hear their daughter, through the monitor, singing an Australian folk song about a swagman who drowns himself in the billabong. She’s waiting for an answer, his wife is. She’s been waiting this whole time. Abbott clenches his jaw, stares at the dirty rhombus. When it comes down to it, he cannot bring himself to say that the butterfly conservatory was amazing, or even that it was neat, even though it would be at least partially true and would help salvage the evening. This is another small failure of spirit, and he knows it. The knowing of it might make things better, but probably makes things much, much worse. “It was fine,” he says of his outing with their daughter. And then he repeats it: “It was fine.” This is either an act of aggression or diplomacy, he’s not sure which at this point. His wife is a separate person, large on the inside, capable of a very broad range of responses. She folds her thin fingers across her belly and gets ready to say something.

31 The Brave Simplicity of Truth

Death is the muse of Stupid Thoughts. Here’s one: “Maybe we’ll see some good names for the baby,” Abbott had told his wife as they parked the car by the old New England cemetery. Here’s another: Perhaps the high infant mortality rate in early America made parents more temperate in their love of children. The grass is already beginning to fade and wilt. Grasshoppers shoot from the lawn like fireworks. There, at the end of the row, is the infant son of Cotton and Euphrenia—8d must mean eight days. Out on the street, the cars move swiftly past. Meanwhile, Abbott’s daughter has found a heart-shaped headstone, and she’s racing back and forth from it to Abbott’s wife. The headstone is chipped and mossy, like a heart should be. “Touch the heart!” she yells. “Touch the heart!” Her hair is wet and curly in the heat. She has two Band-Aids on her knee. Abbott’s wife bends to read stones. She’s pregnant in a graveyard, for God’s sake. Abbott considers a satirical remark, but he keeps his mouth shut for reasons unknown to him but not unknown to James Russell Lowell, also dead. “Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire,” wrote Lowell, while alive. “There is so brave a simplicity in her, that she can no more be made ridiculous than oak or pine.” The graves stretch for acres beneath the sun. Somewhere nearby, someone must be burning brush. Abbott bounces on the balls of his feet, twists his trunk until his vertebrae crack. He regards the narrow stretch of freshly mown grass before him. Stupidity, morbidity, irony … that leaves only gymnastics. “Honey!” he shouts at his daughter. “Honey, check out Dad.”