There are faint distortions on the tape; then Merrill is telling his swimming story, the one about there being a tank at the bottom of the Danube. 'You can only see it in a full moon. You must block the moon with your back,' says Merrill, 'which cuts the reflection.' Then, somehow, you arch out of the water and hold your face 'approximately six inches above the surface - all the time keeping a landsight on the dock at the Gelhafts Keller.' Somehow you hold this position without stirring the water, 'and if the wind doesn't make a single ripple, the tank's barrel swings up to where you think you could almost touch it, or it's perfectly aimed to blast you. And in a straight line off the Gelhaft's dock, the tank's top hatch opens, or flutters in the water, or seems to open. But that's as long as I've ever been able to hold my face approximately six inches above the water surface ...' Then, thinking diabetically, Merrill announces that this exertion always influences his blood sugar.
Bogus Trumper flips the switch that says rewind. The hog truck is gone, but on the other side of the screen, the katydid still holds out its wings, more perfect and complicated than some Oriental silkscreen, and Trumper, squinting through this lovely mesh, sees Mr Fitch, a retired neighbor, scratching his dry and overraked lawn. Scritch-scritch goes Mr Fitch, urging the last ant out of his grass. Through a katydid's wing is the only way to make Fitch-watching bearable.
The car that now labors to the curb - the one that Mr Fitch waves his rake at - carries Trumper's wife, Biggie, his son, Colm, and three spare tires. Trumper regards the car, wonders if three spare tires are enough. His face mashed to the window screen, he startles the katydid, whose sudden wing-whir startles Trumper - who lurches off balance, his head pushing the rotting screen free of the frame. Catching himself, Bogus jars the frame loose too, and what his startled wife sees is her husband's precarious dangle - his waist, the axis for his unexplained teetering on the window sill.
'What are you doing?' Biggie screams to him.
And Bogus finds the tape recorder with his foot, dragging it toward him like an anchor. He restores his balance by kneeling on the control panel. The recorder is confused; one knee says full speed forward, the other says play. In a high voice, Merrill Overturf blurts, '... off the Gelhaft's dock the tank's top hatch opens, or flut--!'
'What?' says Biggie. 'What are you doing?'
'I'm fixing the screen,' Trumper says, and waves reassuringly to Mr Fitch, who waves his rake. Not in the least distressed at window-dangling or odd shrieks, Fitch is used to various demonstrations of imbalance from this house.
'Well,' says Biggie, with one hip cocked out, making a seat for Colm. 'Well, the diapers aren't done. Someone will have to go back to the laundromat and take them out of the dryer.'
'I'll go, Big,' Bogus says, 'just as soon as I fix this screen.'
'That won't be easy!' hollers Mr Fitch, leaning on his rake. 'War-built!' he cries. 'Damn war-built things!'
'The screens?' Bogus asks from his window.
'Your whole house!' Fitch shouts. 'All these jiffy one-stories the university put up! War-built! Cheap materials! Woman labor! Junk!' But Mr Fitch isn't really being unpleasant. Anything vaguely connected with the war effort sets him off. A bad time for Fitch; he was too old to go, even back then, so he fought the home front with the women.
At the see-through curtains of his front-porch window, Fitch's tiny wife is stirring nervously. Do you want to have your fifth stroke, Fitch?
When Trumper examines the rotten screen, he finds the accusation to be true. The wood feels like sponge; the mesh is rusted brittle.
'Bogus,' says Biggie, straddling the sidewalk, 'I'll fix the screen. You're terrible at that kind of thing.'
Trumper slides back inside, moves the tape recorder to the safety of an upper bookshelf and watches Mrs Fitch at her see-through curtain waving Mr Fitch inside.
Later, Bogus goes to get the diapers. On his way home, his right headlight falls out and he drives over it. Changing his front tire, he thinks he'd like to meet a man who thinks he's got a worse car. I would trade with him in an instant.
But what Trumper thinks he'd really like to know is whether there was anyone under the top hatch of that tank. Or if there really is a tank, at all; if Merrill Overturf really saw it; if, even, Merrill Overturf knows how to swim.
3
Old Tasks & Plumbing News
Bogus Trumper
918 Iowa Ave.
Iowa City, Iowa
Sept. 20, 1969
Mr Cuthbert Bennett
Caretaker/The Pillsbury Estate
Mad Indian Point
Georgetown, Maine
My Dear Couth:
How are you keeping the seventeen bathrooms, now that all the Pillsburys have left you with their plumbing?
And have you decided in which master bedroom, with which sea-view, you will spend your winter?
Biggie and I appreciated your convincing the Pillsburys we were safe guests for the boathouse. That was a nice revival week for us, Couth - and a break to be able to leave my genitors.
It was a curious summer we had with my genitors. Great Boar's Head is the same summer scene as ever - a convalescent home for the dying, who seem to think that three months of wheezing in the salt air will preserve their lungs for another winter. My father's business thrives in the summer. He once told me something about old people: their bladders are the first to go. A urologist's heaven on the New Hampshire shore!
But it was something for the old boy to open his basement to us for July and August. Since my disinheritance, Mother has obviously been feeling grandmotherly urges; their summer offer must have stemmed from Mum's desire to see Colm, not Biggie and me. And my father seemed to unbend his previous financial ultimatum - though the unbending was no more appealing to me than his cutting me off. Also he charged me rent on the basement.
When we left to come back here, the good doctor orated, 'Let's leave like this, Fred. You're going on four years of doing it on your own, and I must tell you: I'm impressed. Let's see you tie down that PhD, and keep your grades, and I think Mum and I might be able to help you and Biggie and little Colm toward a nest egg. That Colm is a dandy.'
And Mum kissed Biggie (when my father wasn't looking), and we all bundled back to Iowa City. Three tires and two fan belts later, we were back in our war-built one-story. The old man didn't give me so much as a dime for the tolls.
Which brings me to something important, Couth - if you could spare a little. The tolls alone ran us twenty bills, and I haven't even paid the credit card companies for the trip east in July. And in Michigan City, Indiana, we had a Holiday Inn Experience which will probably mean the early retirement of my Gulf Card.
But! There is a thin shard of sunlight in this gloom. My thesis chairman, Dr Wolfram Holster, has given me some of the Comparative Literature Kitty, as he insists on calling it. For my piece of the kitty, I run the tapes in the language lab for freshman German. My officemate, and fellow tape-runner in the lab, is a sly little pedant named Zanther, whose interpretation and 'supra-literal' translation of Borgetz is being heralded in this month's issue of The Linguist. I showed Zanther the bulk of my summer's writing on my thesis; he read it all in one afternoon and told me he didn't think anyone would publish it. I asked him what the circulation of The Linguist was; we haven't spoken since. Following my period of proctorship in the language lab - when I know Zanther is coming on duty - I artfully misfile the tapes. He left me a note about it. 'I know what you're doing,' the note said; it was stuck in what he knew to be my favorite tape. I left him a note, too. It said: 'No one knows what you're doing.' Now communication is impossible between us.
Even so, it's a small kitty and I've got a small bite of it. Biggie's back with her old job at the hospital, bed-panning the elderly between 6 a.m. and noon, five days a week. Colm, therefore, is with me. The child gets up about the time Biggie leaves. I fight him off in bed until almost seven. Then his repeated news of what's wrong with the toilet prompts me to rise and call Krotz the plumber again.
We've seen quite enough of Krotz. I sublet the house this summer, you know, to three football players taking a summer make-up course in world culture. I knew football players might be rough types, that they might break a chair or split our bed; I was even prepared to find a raped castaway girl; but I was sure they'd be clean. You know athletes - all that showering and deodoring. I was sure they couldn't live in filth.
Well, the apartment was clean, all right, and there wasn't even a raped girl. There was a pair of Biggie's panties nailed to our door, and the more literate of the three had pinned a note to the panties, saying 'Thanks.' Biggie was a bit resentful; she'd packed all our clothes very neatly, and it disturbed her to imagine football players riffling through her underwear. But I felt enormously encouraged; the house had survived and the athletes' scholarships had paid their rent. Then the plumbing problems started, and Biggie concluded that the only reason the place looked so clean was because the football players had flushed all the crud away.
Krotz has sent his Roto-Rooter down our john four times. Among other things, he's retrieved six athletic socks, three whole potatoes, a crushed lampshade and a small girl's bra - clearly not Biggie's.
I phoned the Athletic Department and bitched. At first, they were very concerned. A man said, 'Of course it doesn't do to have our boys getting a name for themselves with the local landlords.' He said he'd take care of it. Then he asked me my name, and what property it was that I owned. I had to say that I didn't own it, really - that I rented it, and had sublet to the athletes for the summer. He said, 'Oh, you're a student?' I should have seen the put-off coming, but I said, 'Right - getting my PhD in Comp. Lit.' And he said, 'Well, son, get your landlord to put the complaint in writing.'
And since my landlord told me that I was responsible for any subletting, all bills from Krotz the plumber are mine. And believe me, Couth, Roto-Rootering is costly.
I'm afraid you know what I mean ... if you've got some to spare.
I really think you've got the life, Couth. Better the caretaker than them who need to be cared for. Thanks be, though, it's the last damn year of this. My father says, 'With your PhD you'll have a profession that's dependable. But every professional man must suffer his training.'
My father - as I'm sure he's told you before - didn't marry Mum until after college, after med school, after interning and after he'd established himself in Great Boar's Head, New Hampshire. The only urologist at Rockingham-by-the-Sea Hospital. After a six-year engagement to good old Mum - two thousand one hundred and ninety nights of masturbating ago - my father saw the time was ripe to marry.
I said to him this summer, 'Well, look at Couth. He's set for life. A mansion to himself for nine months of the year, his expenses paid. And a mere three-month summer of fussing for the Pillsburys, tidying their ample grounds, caulking their boats and washing their cars; and they treat him like one of the family. Can you beat that?'
My father answered, 'Couth doesn't have a profession, though.'
Well, Biggie and I agree that you look quite professional to us.
Flush all seventeen of the johns once for me.
Love,
Bogus
4
Iowa Evening Rituals
SINCE HIS FATHER disinherited him, he had learned to hoard little injustices, wishing they might merge and leave him with one significant wound, for which he could guiltlessly martyr himself forever.
Bogus flips the record switch. 'A keeper of petty injustices,' he tells the microphone unconvincingly, 'I was exposed to self-pity at a tender age.'
'What?' says Biggie - a low, groggy voice down the hall.
'Nothing, Big,' he calls to her, and notices he's recorded this too. Erasing, he tries to think: From what did he catch his self-pity? He can hear his father saying, 'From a virus.' But Bogus is sure he invented the whole thing himself. 'I made it all myself,' he says, with surprising conviction, then notices that he's failed to record it.
'You made what all yourself?' Biggie asks, suddenly alert in the bedroom.
'Nothing, Big.' But her astonishment at the possibility of his doing something himself is painful.
Blowing hair off the control panel, he gingerly fingers his forehead; for some time he has suspected that his hairline will one day recede far enough to expose his brain. But would that be a significant humiliation?
Into the microphone he records: 'There's a danger in dwelling on small emotional things.'
But when he attempts to play this back, he discovers that he's jammed the announcement too close to one of his father's hospital reports - recorded in the good doctor's den at Great Boar's Head, with a live audience of Biggie and his mother listening to a description of an honest day's fortune. Bogus is sure he's erased this once, but apparently he missed a bit of it. Or perhaps certain parts of his father's speeches are capable of reproducing themselves. Bogus is not beyond believing this.
'There's a danger in dwelling on small emotional ... bladders which can be easily infected, though the major key is some kidney complication.'
STOP. REWIND. ERASE.
With a brief titter, Bogus records: 'I resolve to be more careful how I pee.'
It's well past midnight when Bogus sees a light go on in Fitch's house, and Mr Fitch minces down a hallway in broad-striped pajamas. His bladder, Trumper thinks. But Fitch appears on the front porch, gray-faced from the nearest street light. Fitch can't leave his lawn alone! He's worried that a leaf has crashed in the night!
But Mr Fitch just stands on his porch, his face lifted, his mind beyond his lawn. Before he goes back inside, he looks up at the lighted window, where Bogus sits frozen. Then they wave to each other, and Fitch stealthily sidles into his eerie hallway and kills the light.
These night encounters. Bogus remembers Colm, sprouting a new tooth at Great Boar's Head. Colm was always a miserable teether; he kept Biggie and Bogus's mother up half the night. Once, when Bogus relieved them, he slipped off for a walk on to the beach, passing each dark cottage until he smelled the pot in front of Elsbeth Malkas's porch. Elsbeth is turning her parents on! A childhood friend, he had grown up with her (once, in her hammock). Now she is a lady college instructor, referred to as 'the poetess' at Bennington, where she returned to teach, three years after graduating.
'It's incestuous, really,' she once told Biggie.
And Biggie had said, 'I wouldn't know anything about it, really.'
The mark of a child's acceptance these days, Trumper thought, is to be so successful that you can turn your parents on. He tried to imagine his own luck with that. In doctoral robes, he delivers the commencement address, then forces a joint on his father!
Bogus crept up to see this generational wonder, but the Malkases' house was dark and Elsbeth, spotting Trumper's crouching silhouette against the lighter background of the sea, sat up in her porch hammock. Elsbeth Malkas had a chunky, oily body, nude and damp in her hammock gasping grass.
From the safe distance of a ledge beyond the porch, Bogus discussed Colm's habit of breaking new teeth in the night. There was a moment, later, when he could have discreetly left - when she went into the house to get her diaphragm. But the old-fashioned charm of this device touched him; he imagined the diaphragm crammed with erasers, pencils and postage stamps - tools of this poetess, who needed a deskful of receptacles - and he was too fascinated to leave.
He wondered, vaguely, if he would catch from Elsbeth what he'd caught from her long ago. But in the hammock he only expressed his disappointment that the diaphragm had been inserted while Elsbeth was inside her house. 'Why did you want to see it?' she asked.
He couldn't very well mention the erasers, pencils and postage stamps, or even perhaps a torn, tiny scrap of an unfinished poem. After all, with a poetess, one might make fertile her very words.
But he had never liked Elsbeth's poetry, and afterward he walked almost a mile along the beach before he plunged in the ocean, to make sure she wouldn't hear his splash and feel insulted.
Bogus i
nforms the tape recorder: 'I resolve to go a fair bit out of my way to be polite.'
Some dawn light falls on Fitch's manicured lawn, and Bogus sees the old man pad restlessly out on his porch again, just looking. What future is there for me, Trumper thinks, if Fitch, at his age, is still an insomniac?
5
A Dream to Me Now
I AM NOT an insomniac any more. Tulpen has seen to that. She knows better than to leave me to my own devices. We go to bed at a reasonable hour, we make love, we sleep. If she catches me awake, we make love again. Despite lots of water, I sleep very well. It's in the daytime that I look for things to do.
I used to be very busy. Yes, I was a graduate student, getting my PhD in comparative literature. My thesis chairman and my father were in agreement about specialization. Once, when Colm was sick, my father wouldn't write him a prescription. 'Is a urologist a pediatrician?' Well, who could argue? 'See a pediatrician. You're in graduate school, aren't you? Surely you know the importance of specialization.'
Indeed I knew it. My thesis chairman, Dr Wolfram Holster, admitted that he'd never been exposed to such specialization as mine.
I had a rare thesis topic, I confess. My thesis was going to be an original translation to Akthelt and Gunnel, a ballad in Old Low Norse; in fact, it was going to be the only translation. Old Low Norse is not well known. It's referred to, scornfully, in some satirical poems in Old East Norse and Old West Norse. Old East Norse is a dead language, North Germanic, which grew into Icelandic and Faroese. Old West Norse is also dead, and also North Germanic. It grew into Swedish and Danish. Norwegian evolved out of something between Old East Norse and Old West Norse. But the deadest of them all, old Old Low Norse, came to nothing. In fact, it's such a crude dialect that only one thing ever was actually written in it: Akthelt and Gunnel.
I was going to include in my translation a sort of etymological dictionary of Old Low Norse. That means a dictionary of the origins of Old Low Norse. Dr Holster was very interested in such a dictionary; he felt it would be of some etymological use. That was why he approved the thesis topic; he actually thought Akthelt and Gunnel was junk, though he was hard pressed to prove it. Dr Holster didn't know any Old Low Norse at all.