inspo/dialogue

It was late and dark and smoky at Rudy’s. The booth had broken into several conversations, Ronnie next to Saul Oppler, who had fully forgiven him for killing his rabbits. Ronnie was looking at Saul’s hands. “Saul,” he said, “you have no fingerprints.” Saul looked at his own hands, old and giant and strong, hands that looked like they could pulverize rocks. He examined his smooth fingerpads and shrugged. He said he used his hands. To make paintings. Just worked the prints right off, he said.

Ronnie said he never knew it could be that easy.

“What do you mean, easy?” Saul said. “I’ve been in the studio for forty-eight years. You call that easy?”

“I meant getting rid of your—”

“I didn’t get my first solo show until I was thirty-seven years old! Easy. To hell with it,” Saul said.

DAYS PASS, wet and icy, each more miserable than the last. The sitters that were to relieve Watchman and Maidenhair never show. The standoff enters week two, and the ring of workers at the foot of Mimas turns angry.

“You’re out in the middle of nowhere. Four miles from the nearest person. Things could happen. Nobody would know.”

Maidenhair beams down on them, beatific. “You guys are too decent. You can’t even make a credible threat!”

“You’re killing our livelihood.”

“Your bosses are doing that.”

“Bullshit!”

“One-third of forest jobs lost to machines in the last fifteen years. More trees cut, fewer people working.”

Stumped, the loggers wander into other tactics. “For Christ’s sake. It’s a crop. It grows back! Have you seen the forests south of here?”

“It’s a onetime jackpot,” Watchman shouts down. “A thousand years before the systems are back in place.”

“What’s the matter with you two? Why do you hate people?”

“What are you talking about? We’re doing this for people!”

“These trees are going to die and fall over. They should be harvested while they’re ripe, not wasted.”

“Great. Let’s grind up your grandfather for dinner, while he still has some meat on him.”

“You’re insane. Why are we even talking to you?”

“We have to learn to love this place. We need to become natives.”

One of the loggers revs up his chain saw and whacks the branches of one of Mimas’s largest basal sprouts. He steps back and looks up, brandishing a limb like a sailboat mast. “We feed people. What do you do?”

They shout at Maidenhair, tag team. “We know these forests. We respect these trees. These trees have killed our friends.”

Maidenhair holds still. The idea of a tree killing a person is too much for her to think about.

The men below press their advantage. “You can’t stop growth! People need wood.”

Watchman has seen the numbers. Hundreds of board feet of timber, half a ton of paper and cardboard per person per year. “We need to get smarter about what we need.”

“I need to feed my kids. How about you?”

Watchman sets to shout some things he knows he’ll regret. Maidenhair’s hand on his arm stops him. She’s gazing downward, trying to hear these men, attacked for doing what they’ve been asked to do. For doing something dangerous and vital that they’ve learned to do so well.

“We’re not saying don’t cut anything.” She dangles her arm, reaching out to the men from two hundred feet away. “We’re saying, cut like it’s a gift, not like you’ve earned it. Nobody likes to take more gift than they need. And this tree? This tree would be a gift so big, it would be like Jesus coming down and . . .”

She trickles off on a thought that Watchman has at the same moment. Been there. Felled that, too.

12.7 I visited Petr in hospital again. The worst thing about dying, he told me as I sat between his bed and the smudged windows, is that there’s no one to tell about it. What do you mean? I asked. Well, he said, throughout my life I’ve always lived significant events in terms of how I’ll tell people about them. What I mean is that even during these events I would be formulating, in my head, the way that I’d describe them later. Ah, I tried to tell him: that’s a buffering probl … but Petr wasn’t listening. The dying want to impart, not imbibe. When I was eighteen and I found myself in Berlin the day the Wall fell, he went on, as I watched the people streaming over, clambering up on it, hacking it down, I was rehearsing how to recount it all to friends after I got back home. I watched the people sitting on the wall, chipping at it with their chisels, and the guards standing around not knowing what to do … That’s what I was thinking, he said, what was running through my head, right in the moment that I watched them chiseling and chipping. Same as when I saw the shootout in Amsterdam. What shootout? I said. Didn’t I ever tell you about that? he asked. No, I answered. I found myself caught in the middle of a shootout between Russian gangsters as I came out of a restaurant, he explained. They were all firing from behind lamp-posts, dustbins, cars and so on, and I ducked into an alleyway and one of them was right there with me, holding this huge pistol, a gold one, which he balanced on the back of one hand as he shot it with the other. Wow, I said. Yes, Petr nodded—but the point is, that even as I cowered behind this gangster in this alleyway, I was practicing relating the episode when it was over. He had a huge pistol—a gold one, no less! And he balanced it like this … and it recoiled like that … Or: I was just ten feet away from him … I thought that he might turn his gun on me, but he ignored me … Trying out different ways of telling it, you see? Well, now, I’m about to undergo the mother, the big motherfucker, of all episodes—and I won’t be able to dine out on it! Even if there turns out to be a Heaven or whatever, which there won’t—but even if there does, I still won’t be able to, since everyone else there will have lived through the same episode, i.e., dying, and they’ll all go: So what? That’s boring. We know all that shit. So it’s lose-lose. Do you see my quandary? Yes, I said; I see that could be a problem.

[...] Buddy’s mother, during one of Zane’s visits, had said something about how wonderful it was that Zane was helping preserve the balance of nature, and Zane had made a face and said the balance of nature was a dead dodo.

“Nothing is really balanced. Try to think of it as an ongoing poker game, say five-card draw, but everything constantly changes—the money, the card suits, the players, even the table, and every ante is affected by the weather, and you’re playing in a room where the house around you is being demolished.”

Buddy and his father, in sympathy for once, exchanged glances.

“Truth is,” said Zane, “most of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. Just tinkering, is one view, another view—”

“Quit while you’re ahead,” said Buddy’s father and silence fell on the table.

At today’s meeting the safety man is smooth, calm, but even so, he speaks of horrors. He says to the crowd, “How many of you want to go home today with the disfigured face of a monster? Raise your hand.”

Nobody raises their hand.

“How many of you want to go home today with shattered bones in your chest and waking up for the rest of your life coughing blood and wheezing in the dark dark night?”

No hands raised for that either.

“Okay now how many of you want to go home today missing a finger? Okay two fingers. Wait, how many want to go home today missing both your hands, so you just have two stumps hanging there at the end of your wrists? Raise your hands if you want that to be you.”

“Jesus Christ,” someone says over by the drill press.

He’d moved down to the corner of the table to talk to Patrick, who was the lead singer of a rock band that had just received a devastating negative review on a popular website. Derek was existentially unnerved by the unfairness of it. Patrick was sweet and funny, and everyone who heard his music loved it, and yet now some asshole had endangered his possible career because his album didn’t meet some nonsensical standard of originality, as defined by a critic whose sense of history didn’t extend any further back than David Bowie’s third album. As if originality even existed. Derek realized this was a rich position to take, as someone who edited (assisted in the editing of) reviews of various degrees of negativity, and he had already written a couple of less-than-positive ones himself, though they were for obscure-enough venues that he was confident he hadn’t derailed anyone’s ambitions. It was wrong, he knew, that the reason he was opposed to this particular bad review was that it was Patrick, a person who was already so sufficiently self-effacing that he didn’t need a website to tell him he should dislike his own work. The solution, Patrick was telling him now, was not to take things personally. One needed, he had discovered, to let one’s work be as the seagull over the ocean, drifting on currents and squawking horribly, unencumbered by the dull perspectives of the beach­goers on the distant shore.

“Huh,” Derek said.

“Yeah, I guess I’ve been thinking about it too much,” Patrick said.

I met Bon on the other side of passport control. We had at last stepped foot on la Gaule, as my father had taught me to call France in his parish school. It was fitting, then, that the airport was named after Charles de Gaulle, the greatest of great Frenchmen in recent memory. The hero who had liberated France from the Nazis while continuing to enslave us Vietnamese. Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity! No one was spared, not even the Americans or the Vietnamese, who bathed daily, or the French, who bathed less than daily. No matter our nationality, we all become accustomed to the aroma of our own contradictions.

What’s wrong? he said. Are you crying again?

I’m not crying, I sobbed. I’m just so overcome to be home at last.

Now she’s saying that he’d never have suggested such a thing when they were first dating, when he was deeply in love with her.

“It’s a bad sign,” she says.

He replies drily, “You’re out of your mind, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You’re always going your own way these days. I don’t see how we can resolve this.”

After making this statement, she starts to cry. But he keeps walking slightly ahead of her. At the next intersection he stops and she catches up to him.

“Why were you so opposed to walking and enjoying this sunny day?”

“I’m wearing a new pair of shoes that I haven’t broken in yet.”

“Well, you could have told me that.”

“You could have asked.”

At that point I stop following them, having already heard too much.

The Belsons are coming to our house for a barbecue, and I’m making a pie with Peggy, our stepmother since last year. Outside the kitchen window Bradley pushes my stepsisters, Sheila and Meg, on the tire swing. Peggy keeps looking out there like she’s nervous. Dad’s beside her, chopping onions for burgers.

“He’s pushing them awfully hard,” Peggy says.

Dad looks out and so do I. Sheila and Meg are six and seven years old, Peggy’s daughters from her first marriage. Dad smiles. “Brad’s good with kids,” he says, kneading the chopped meat.

“That’s not what I said.”

Dad is quiet. I stare at my blob of crust. “What do you want me to do?” he says.

Peggy laughs. “Nothing, I guess.” She dumps her flour and sugar mix over a pile of apple slices. “If I have to tell you, then nothing.”