Continental Drift

Envoi

And so ends the story of Robert Raymond Dubois, a decent man, but in all the important ways an ordinary man. One could say a common man. Even so, his bright particularity, having been delivered over to the obscurity of death, meant something larger than itself, if only to him and to those who loved him. Normally, to the rest of us, the death of a man like Bob Dubois signifies little more than the shift of a number from one column to another, from the lists of the living to the lists of the dead: one of those who make their livings with their hands becomes one of those who die at the hands of others; one of those who have lived to the age of thirty-one becomes one of those who have died by thirty-one; one of those who perpetrate crimes becomes one of those who are the victims of crimes. The larger world goes on as before, quite as if Bob Dubois never existed. In the vast generality, a statistic is merely a statistic, regardless of the column it’s in, and once an ordinary man is dead, all possibilities of his ever becoming historical, of his becoming a hero, are gone. No one will model himself on Bob Dubois; no one will reinvent him and remember the man in order to invent and make memorable himself. Even Bob’s children will forget him and the shape of his brief life. Elaine Dubois, his widow, will return to Catamount, New Hampshire, where she will devote herself to raising her three children; from here on out, it will be the whole point of her life, until long after the children have become adults. And she will never ask them to emulate their father, nor will she herself deliberately emulate him. He will be to her as Bob’s father, brother and best friend eventually became to him, an example to avoid. And the degree to which he avoided patterning his life on theirs is the degree to which his wife Elaine and his three children will avoid patterning their lives on his. Elaine will work on the line at the cannery until she retires at sixty-five, the first signs of emphysema starting to close in on her. Ruthie will not graduate from high school; she will marry at seventeen a boy of nineteen who works for the telephone company, and in six months she will give birth to the first of her five children, a boy she will name Sam, after her new husband’s father. Emma, after a six-week course in cosmetology, will become a beautician, and she will move into her own apartment in Catamount, buy a new red Japanese fastback coupe with number plates that say EMMA, and she will spend her winter vacations in places like Jamaica and Barbados, smoking lots of marijuana and sleeping with the local hustlers for two wild weeks before returning to Catamount and work at the beauty parlor and long nights at the bars. By the time she’s thirty, she’ll be an alcoholic, gaining weight fast, looking worriedly for a husband. The baby, Robbie, will enlist in the navy after graduation, and when he completes his basic training in San Diego, he’ll be assigned to an aircraft carrier, after which he’ll return to Catamount and become a plumber. Everything that happens in their lives after Bob Dubois’s death in Miami will seem to have happened as if he never existed. Yet surely, if he had not existed and if his life had not taken the shape he gave it, then the particulars of the lives of his wife and children would have been different. Just as Bob’s own life, without his father’s drab life behind it, would have been different. It’s those particulars that give meaning to the life of an ordinary man, a decent man, a common man. And the lengthy, detailed history of such a man must celebrate or grieve, depending on whether he lives or dies, even though nothing seems to happen as a result of his life or death — even though the Haitians keep on coming, and many of them are drowned, brutalized, cheated and exploited, and where they come from remains worse than where they are going to; and even though the men in three-piece suits behind the desks in the banks grow fatter and more secure and skillful in their work; and even though young American men and women without money, with trades instead of professions, go on breaking their lives trying to bend them around the wheel of commerce, dreaming that when the wheel turns, they will come rising up from the ground like televised gods making a brief special appearance here on earth, nothing like it before or since, such utter transcendence that any awful sacrifice is justified. The world as it is goes on being itself. Books get written — novels, stories and poems stuffed with particulars that try to tell us what the world is, as if our knowledge of people like Bob Dubois and Vanise and Claude Dorsinville will set people like them free. It will not. Knowledge of the facts of Bob’s life and death changes nothing in the world. Our celebrating his life and grieving over his death, however, will. Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives — no, especially wholly invented lives — deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book’s objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.