Bowl of Cherries, page 11
“It seems unlikely, not to say impossible.”
“For the sake of argument, try to accept it, like a good little reader of Herodotus. And to further suspend disbelief, let’s say our workforce labored in shifts, twenty-four hours a day including Sundays and holidays. That’s a daily assemblage of twenty-four blocks, which in a year would yield…?” He frowned heavily. “I don’t seem to have a pencil…”
“Eighty-seven hundred and sixty,” I told him.
“Then how long would it take to complete our pyramid of two million, three hundred thousand blocks?”
I winced.
“Well?” he scolded triumphantly. “Cat got your tongue?”
“Two hundred and sixty-four years.”
“So there you have it. Unlikely,” he mimicked my voice with uncanny fidelity, “not to say impossible.”
“But the pyramid was built—it’s no illusion. How did they manage…?”
Again he said, “I know how,” and the hair on my neck woke up. His voice continued, the intonations of a pedant before a captive seminar. “Egypt in so many ways has provided the furniture of our minds…” Now the voice came as if from deep in a vault, a sepulchre. “But they also knew something we don’t know—how to harness the most incredible source of energy the world has ever witnessed. They did it,” he said, as I looked at him bleakly, “with sound and music. The sharp, clean notes of a horn, the timpani of a taut goatskin drum, the crash of cymbals, the peal of bells, the rattle of bones, the percussion of copper rods that fanned the air and set off great vibrations—and those blocks of limestone rose from the quarry like birds, like perfect arrows from perfect bows, and sped through the sky and settled, stone on stone, at Gizeh. Can’t you just see them?” he asked.
And incongruously I could, the pliant limestone shaking loose the fetters of gravity, rising with the dream-slow grace of a blimp, trotting nonchalantly over the desert, galloping above the papyrus sedge, gathering speed, soaring… I shook my head hard. Reverie crashed.
“…flow of forces through the universe,” Chatterton was saying, “sonic energy, pulsations of power, and music the propellant.”
“I don’t see how,” I said.
He flushed. “You are a willful and obstructive boy,” he roared. “Your attitude fails to captivate. You’re fired!”
“That’s okay with me,” I told him. “You can talk to Abdul yourself.”
“I’ll—no.” He tugged at his robe. Surprisingly, he added, “I apologize. Let’s not be hasty.”
I had no intention of being hasty. What I didn’t need was to get canned, now that Valerie was back.
“All I meant to suggest,” he said soothingly, “was that your criticism lies within a limited concept of logic. Certainly you realize that our orderly universe is disorderly, and riddled with incongruities.”
There was more than a pustule of truth in what he said. Even legitimate science has at times become discomfited by the forays of irrationality and made to recant its earlier, inflexible certitude. The theory of relativity by Einstein (another mop-head) violated all proper laws of logic. Was Chatterton’s seemingly absurd premise—that harmonics have a physical effect on a solid body, with no apparent exchange of force or energy between them—any more bizarre than Einstein’s?
Yes, it was—the product of crude, thalamic thinking, sloppy, quasi-scientific experiments with gongs, clappers, fipple flutes. Unless…
“How far have you gotten in your research?”
“We’re on the verge of victory. The key’s in the lock. With a little money from Abdul, we can turn it. The door will swing open, like the gates of heaven, to reveal…”
“Have Gorelik or Grady or any of you succeeded in moving physical objects by the manipulation of sound waves?”
“You first,” he said. “What have you come up with?”
I could have told him in one word: nothing. Or I could have recounted that strange isolate, that perceptible stutter-step I thought I saw when my domino moved maybe a wink before the onslaught of my solo. More likely not, so I shook my head and said nothing.
“What would you say, young man,” and he eyed me gravely, “if I told you that I have observed a metal jackstone tremble when the air around it was charged with the notes of Gorelik’s flute? That I have seen a cube of beech-wood, not large I admit but large enough to swear by, startle like a fawn to the ring of two thin cymbals?”
“But under what conditions? I mean, when the wind blows around here, not only a block of wood but the whole house shakes. I can’t see…”
“Then you are the victim of your own selective blindness.” He put on the face of one who detects a skunk. “It’s as if you wear defective glasses that make all that is relevant invisible. Well,” sadly he shook his fungoid head, “I cannot change that. I cannot give you vision, any more than I can give you brains. And I cannot give you a lobotomy.”
“Let’s just say I lack the faith of St. Paul—I can’t believe in the evidence of things not seen. I can’t believe in witchcraft, or comic-strip magic.”
“The study of any science begins with a comic-strip vision of the universe. I don’t suppose you know anything about acoustics?” he said.
“I know that sound, like heat, is a vibrational phenomenon. It can strip the rust off lead pipes.”
He nodded. “It can break up the blockage of fatty tissue in arteries.”
“The boom of a cannon, bouncing off a mountain, can cause an avalanche.”
“A human voice can shatter crystal.”
“It’s a question of control, I suppose.” And even as I said it, up croaked another, inner voice, monitory and more rational, “Don’t be a schmuck. Don’t get engrenagé,”—as the French say, “caught in the gears.”
“Precisely,” intoned old Mop Head, eyes burning like banked-down coals. “A matter of intensity, frequency, pitch…”
“The size, shape, and composition of the instrument to produce…”
“The required effect. Yes,” he said, “yes. What shall it be? Copper rods, silver tuning forks, the golden trill of harmonics?”
“Separately?”
“Or combined? The way Joshua used voices and trumpets to tumble the walls of Jericho?”
“I wouldn’t go that far…”
“I tell you, son, he knew something we’ve forgotten, and we must find it again. God!” he whispered hoarsely. “Just think of it…! It’s like the second discovery of fire!” He slumped back in his chair, exhausted by the gymnastics of his mind, waiting for my reply.
“I don’t know,” I said feebly. “I just wish I knew, you know?”
“That’s the chance I’m giving you. Wouldn’t you like to be a part of our effort? Incubating a revolution to redesign human society? Save the earth while it’s still salvageable?”
“Yes, sure, but…”
“Well then…?”
“Frankly, it seems impossible.”
He stared at me. “Young man…” The embers in his eyes took fire, “We’re facing a global meltdown. People all over the world despise and envy us—an explosive combination—and we don’t seem to be the least bit aware that our arrogance and insensibility toward them might have something to do with it. Right now they’re all of ’em in hot pursuit of the bomb, and once they get it, the very chain of life will be…” He didn’t complete the thought. It wasn’t necessary.
“But it’s implausible, the idea of building a pyramid by tooting a flute.”
“Implausible, you say? More implausible than what’s being done right now? A preemptive strike against Iraq? Carving up space? The space cadets up there dividing the moon with the Russians? And what’ll they find?”
“I don’t know.”
“They’ll find a pretext to fight, if only to get the side with the best view. Boy,” he said, “I don’t claim inerrancy, but something must be done.”
Well, it would have to be done without me. It was all too goofy—contributing to the second coming of fire, indeed; reclaiming a lost stitch in the fabric of time, unraveling a riddle unsolved for five thousand years.
And yet… I was tempted. I thought of my father—I was always thinking of my father—he would have jumped at the chance; for him the pursuit of the unattainable, the unresponsiveness to reality, put him in a bracket with Don Quixote. I thought of my mother’s prophetic fancy: I do not think you will die, she had said, without making a Real Contribution. But even she on her most unworldly wavelength would have rejected old Mop Head’s sales pitch. Still…
There was Armbruster. “Talent,” he said I had, as he probed his ass with his fingers, “and an unlimited potential for… for…” He didn’t know what, but it certainly wasn’t as a facilitator in Chatterton’s cabal.
“You don’t trust me,” he said flatly. “Not that I give a damn. I don’t want your approval, I want Abdul Whatsisname’s money.”
Another long silence. “I suppose,” he went on, “he would want to see what we’ve accomplished before he puts up a dime. So, tell you what—I’ll give you and Whatsisname a demonstration as soon as he shows interest in the project.” He smiled bountifully. “Isn’t that a good idea?”
And only then did it occur to me: What was I so exercised about? I was no more than a courier delivering the pouch to Abdul. Let him get incensed, let him expose the old man as a buffoon, let him get banished from the violet eyes of our darling. But definitely not me.
FIFTEEN
THE INCENDIARY
“No,” Abdul said, clipping the syllable rather emphatically. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s difficult to visualize,” I told him, “it’s like, well, like a butterfly—you can see the wings but not the engine. Wouldn’t you care to see Chatterton’s engine?”
“No,” he repeated. “First, it could be a trick, an illusion. Second, I don’t have the money, so it’s all kind of academic. And third,” he added forthrightly, “he’s crazy.”
“A little eccentric, perhaps, but crazy…?”
“They’re all crazy. All you’ve got to do is look in their eyes and there’s nobody home.”
“Not all of them. Grady’s sane.”
“I don’t like Grady. He’s always sniffing around. He spies on me.”
Jesus, here he goes again. Abdul al Sadr, prince of paranoids. “Well…” Yet I knew what he was trying to say. I had the feeling, when his nose was in his newspaper, that Grady was listening, his nobody-home eyes tracking us.
“Why do you think he’d do that?” I asked.
“I don’t know why,” he said impatiently. “But whenever I’m alone around here, when Val and Derek are off together or something, he pops up out of nowhere. Once he popped up in Washington on Connecticut Avenue—suddenly appeared as if by accident, and asked me to have a drink.”
“Did you?”
“No. Not that I’m that much of a Muslim. It’s just I don’t drink with people I don’t like.”
“You might have found out what he wanted. If anything.”
“I don’t want to know what he wanted. I want him to let me the hell alone.”
“Maybe he’s just friendly. He tried to be friendly with me, when I first got here. I didn’t know anyone, and…”
“Maybe he wants something from you.”
“What could he want from me? Will you think it over—Chatterton’s proposal?”
“What for?” A shadow of annoyance crept across his narrowed eyes.
“There are certain precedents, you know. Joshua at the battle of Jericho—”
“He also made the sun stand still,” he said. “If you believe that you’d believe anything.”
“But what about… what about…?”
“There are no precedents in defiance of gravity.”
“If sufficient thrust were generated…”
“Sure,” he mocked, “with a fipple flute.”
I decided, for the moment, to press him no further. Why, you might be wondering, did I press him at all? Here’s why:
Valerie had returned, to be sure, but for all I saw of her lately she might still have been in Florida. Not precisely true: I glimpsed her once, floating like a wraith down the hall, chewing abstractedly on a pencil. I called to her but my vocal chords fogged up; what emerged was a kind of fluttery bleat. She disappeared inside her room with a great, resounding slam of the door before I caught up with her. It occurred to me that because of my dustup with Derek, perhaps he was determined to keep her away from me. If so, he had gained her total cooperation.
She never appeared for meals in the commons refectory. I didn’t know when she ate (or what; roses, perhaps). Presumably she dined with Daddy Mop Head, and I could imagine, if that were the case, the bleak atmosphere they shared. I never saw him either.
Patience, I told myself, have patience. But patience is a lonely virtue; a depressive emptiness consumed me after the sweet fire of seeing her so briefly.
And then the unkind, uncaring, and ceaselessly vigilant stars that wrote my destiny veered off course. Suddenly I looked up, Grady looked up from his newspaper, and there she was. She walked into that room of mismatched furniture and everything went aglow. She clutched a notebook against her breasts; it didn’t know how lucky it was. She came right to the point.
“Something’s wrong,” she said to Grady. Reluctantly, he put down his paper. “I’m writing the story of my life,” she went on, “for school. What you call an autobiography.” She opened the notebook and frowned at it. “I’m up to ‘once I went to camp when I was a little kid’ and I dunno, something’s wrong.”
“Valerie,” Grady said, “if I understand the academic process, your teacher meant for you, not me, to figure it out. That,” he went on, uncharitably and unmoved, “is the way to learn.” And he stuck his nose back into the kettle of print.
She turned abruptly toward the door. “Maybe I can help…?” I heard my voice saying.
She hesitated and, with a lovely, what-have-I-got-to-lose shrug, settled beside me on the floor. I shot a fleeting glance at Grady. Immersed in his paper, he didn’t give a damn that our respective philosophies of education were at variance.
Valerie pointed a slim finger to the smudged and questionable page. I leaned toward it, her, my God our shoulders were touching. Still I managed to get my eyes back in focus.
That’s when I met two new girlfriends
[I read]. One of them was Cindy. She
was weird and Nancy. We climbed a
mountain. Some of the girls climbed
down. I was one of the some.
I showed her how to fix it. “Thanks,” she said. She pulled up a leg of her jeans and licked an adorable scab on her knee.
“Could I do that for you?”
“What? Usually I’m pretty good with words,” she confided. “When I look up a word in the dictionary the same day I never have to look it up again. But,” she went on, “I’m not as good as you are.” It wasn’t a compliment, the way she said it, but a realistic evaluation of the evidence at hand. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I let it pass—the intimation that despite my syntactic skills I was still a child. “I don’t know,” I said airily. “Maybe I’ll star in a porno flick. What do you want to be?”
“Me? Nothing.”
I furrowed my brow critically. The response was not totally lost on her.
“Hell,” she said, “there’s a lot of nice people who don’t work.” Her wayward loyalty to the pariahs of the Hebraic-Protestant ethic was, I thought, admirable. “What I like,” she went on, “is to just let things happen. Just let ’em fall into place, you know? Instead of trying to like direct them.”
It had been my experience that things, given half a chance, fell chaotically out of place. However, “I agree with you totally,” I said. From behind the wall of his paper, Grady tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress something between a snort and a snicker, and sank deeper into his chair.
Valerie stared gravely at the curtain shielding Grady from us a few feet away. Calmly, leisurely, she took from a pocket a book of matches. She stretched full out on the floor, struck the match, touched the flare to the spine of the paper. I watched the cremation in a catatonic frenzy, gawking at the burst of orange flame, at Grady flying upward among the sparks, then stomping the conflagration to embers. The whole room reeked; by the time the dead flakes curled blackly across the floor, he was gasping and she was gone.
Jesus. I spent the rest of the evening, of course, thinking about my little incendiary. About her fractured, inspired syntax. She was weird and Nancy… Her slither across the rug to firebomb Grady. I wondered what next, how I’d manage to see her again. And when, the following afternoon, I ventured to the window of my cell—Glory be to God there she was, swinging through the woods with long coltish strides, wrapped in a low-lying mist, wading through blood-red leaves, kicking at pinecones. She picked up a rock and threw it: a flutter, a flash, and a rabbit, swift as a wind-up toy, bolted through the bosk and disappeared like an illusion. With the speed of the rabbit I plunged down the stairs.
“Hello!” I yelled above the wind.
No answer, not from her, but she paused. I sped to her side. We walked in silence, which was trumped by a torrent of sound, a cascade entangling the rude orchestration of winter. The clinging cold wind wailed around us like the disembodied voice from the moors that cried Heathcliff. The disorderly leaves cackled as we plowed through them. Beneath us the earth smelled of sour apples and the antique rot of vegetation, while over us hung a cloud as large as a continent.
The thorn bushes whistled at her and that wind like a wild river pressed her jeans to her thighs. The peppergrass and the gnarled old chestnuts bowed like devoted retainers along her path. I too was enchanted, managing to brush against her as we walked, feigning awkwardness.
And then she said softly, speaking as much to the trees as to me, “I don’t like to be laughed at.”
“Grady?” I asked. “I think he was laughing at me.”
“Then why didn’t you do something about it?”
“Because, because, because I, I…” My tongue went bankrupt.
Her lips curled. “Men!” she said scornfully, kicking at a moldering acorn. It shattered explosively. “That fucking Derek,” she muttered.
