短篇小说｜The State of Nature
I slept through the burglary. I considered lying about this to the cops when I went to report it, but you don’t lie to the police. It’s like doctors: they can’t help you if you lie to them. I mean, I don’t always tell my doctor the whole truth, but that’s because my doctor happens to be an old friend—some things are just too embarrassing to tell your friends.
One cop asked if I was unemployed, since I had been taking a nap on a Thursday morning.
“I’m an ophthalmologist,” I said. “My schedule varies a lot.”
She looked at my glasses suspiciously, as if they contradicted what I’d just told her, as if an ophthalmologist were required to have perfect vision. I wear contacts when I work, because patients tend to feel the same way.
I told her everything that had been stolen. Most of my living room and a bit of the kitchen were gone: laptop and flat-screen, of course, sound system, but also the Eames chair, the four Hans Wegner Wishbone dining chairs, the two Moroccan rugs I’d brought back from Fez, the two pieces of jewelry I always put on the marble side table (gone as well) when I came home, the china. I didn’t care much for the china, and I never used it—it was a gift my parents had received on their wedding day, and the marriage had failed—but I knew it was worth something.
“And an optometrist’s case,” I said. “An antique from the thirties.”
“Does that have any kind of resale value?” the cop asked.
I said that all the trial lenses had been in mint condition, that someone might pay a thousand, twelve hundred, maybe, but that mostly it was of sentimental value, since it had been my grandfather’s. I’d never met my grandfather, but I omitted that part.
“That’s a widely varied set of items,” the cop said, reading over her list. “Either the guy knew exactly what he was going to find or he was pleasantly surprised.”
Out of curiosity, I asked if people often slept through burglaries. I hadn’t taken a pill, by the way—I’m just a heavy sleeper. People are always amazed at my ability to fall (and stay) asleep at parties, through construction in the building, at condo 30 42821 30 13060 0 0 6971 0 0:00:06 0:00:01 0:00:05 6969meetings. I’m convinced that this corresponds to some ancient tribal trait, some remnant of a time when human activity around you meant safety, that it was safe to sleep, that someone was looking out for the group. My mother says that it’s a nice thought, but that I shouldn’t trust “human activity” to mean “friendly activity,” I should be more wary, have less faith in people. I guess the burglary would prove her point—but then what? There aren’t any pills against sleeping too well.
“It happens,” the cop said. “Not often, but it happens.”
I wondered if they had come into the bedroom. How long they’d watched me sleep before deciding it was safe to carry on. The cop had used the singular, but I pictured two burglars, minimum, what with all the heavy lifting. Mostly, it was worse to imagine only one guy.
When I came home, my cat, Catapult, gave me hell and followed me around from room to room to make sure that I wouldn’t miss any of her grievances.
“You could’ve summoned some of that bitchiness earlier, when they came in to steal your bed,” I told her. The blue Moroccan rug had been her favorite napping surface. “It’s a bit late to make a federal case of it now.”
Catapult screamed louder whenever I spoke, so I didn’t argue with her any further. Also, yes, I talk to my cat. I think the weird thing is not to talk to your pet. Or to expect your pet to answer you. Or to talk to your pet when someone else can hear. I’m not insane. I know the cat matters to me and only to me, so I won’t talk about Catapult too much, only when relevant to the story. In fact, maybe I can reveal all of Catapult’s arc right now and be done with it: Catapult was not screaming because she missed her fluffy Moroccan rug. (She could sleep on anything, even atop the cast-iron radiator, when it wasn’t burning hot, her body sagging into the crenels.) She was pissed because we no longer had a TV. It took me some time to accept it, but that’s what it was. Catapult missed Netflix and Larry David, and that was the long and the short of it.
I was late to my 3 p.m. appointment, because the locksmith thought that I was interested in his life story. It was, in fact, somewhat interesting—his father murdered by his mother, lots of travelling—I just didn’t need all the details. As I walked the patient into my office, my secretary handed me his file. I’m usually able to read a patient’s file and still catch, out of the corner of my eye, what kind of state he’s in, but I got nothing from Mr. Simmons. It was like having a log wearing glasses in my peripheral vision.
In his file I had noted, “State of nature guy.” I remembered him.
“Mr. Simmons,” I said. “Coming in to see if your eyesight’s remained stable enough the past twelve months for you to try Lasik?”
“That is correct,” he said.
“Remind me again why you want Lasik so badly?”
I didn’t need to be reminded. I just enjoyed hearing it.
“I don’t want to depend on glasses anymore,” Simmons explained. “They make you look weak, and I don’t want to look weak. I want to be ready and have perfect vision when the world collapses—or just the banking system—and we have to go back to the state of nature.”
“Right!” I said. “The state of nature.”
His eyes shone behind his glasses when I said the words. It had to have been his dream since childhood.
“Also,” he said, “I hunt. Glasses get in the way. It would be nice to be able to see my prey better.”
I prepared the phoropter with his current prescription.
“Can you read the second-to-last line for me?” I said.
“E-R-Y—”
“Don’t squint.”
“O.K.,” he said after a few seconds, and started breathing heavily. “I can’t. I can’t read it without squinting. Is that bad?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Just relax. Tell me more about returning to the state of nature, how you see it.”
I made changes to the lenses while he spoke.
“I think I’d be pretty good at the state of nature,” he said. “And it’d be best for everyone, I believe. Fairer grounds on which to judge a person’s worth.”
“You mean like sheer strength?”
His forearms and shoulders hinted at a steady regimen of lifting, pulling, possibly boxing. The rest of him didn’t scream tough guy, though. More like I.T. guy. But that was probably a balance he cultivated.
“I mean like intelligence, ability to garden,” he said. “Good sense of direction will be a plus, too.”
I pictured him opening jars for his mom, scaring men away from his sisters by rolling up his sleeves—happy to do it.
“I guess I wouldn’t last very long, then,” I said, and asked him to read from the top.
“I’m sure you have some useful skills,” Simmons said, which I thought was a little condescending. I mean, I’m a doctor, after all, so, yeah, I’d hope someone would want me on his team, if the time came to make teams. “Females have a tendency to self-deprecate,” he went on, “but we’ll all have a role to play in the new society.”
I don’t think he believed that. I think what he meant was “All who make it will have a role to play,” and was only politely pretending that I’d make it.
“And, if nothing else,” he added, “your eyesight is good.”
When I gave him his new prescription, I almost apologized.
“Maybe next year,” I said. He was so disappointed.
On his way out, he pointed at the framed poster I had hung by the door, a black-and-white version of the “Giant Steps” album cover.
“Didn’t Coltrane beat his wife?” he asked me.
“Not that I know of, no,” I said.
“He should never have spoken to me in such a partisan fashion.”
He didn’t seem to believe me. He didn’t seem to believe that beating one’s wife was too different from any other personality trait, either. He’d asked in the same tone someone else might have asked, “Wasn’t Coltrane the one who taught his cat to use the toilet?” (And, no, that was Mingus.)
At my mother’s that Sunday—we did lunch every Sunday—I talked about Catapult’s still mysterious anger and the locksmith’s tragic childhood. My mother shared her general suspicion of locksmiths. Certainly, she said, they must have a copy of every single key to every single lock they’d ever installed, or a magic key to all doors, and they entered people’s homes to steal small items whose absence wouldn’t be noticed for a while; worse, perhaps the locksmiths didn’t steal anything, just took naps on beds that weren’t theirs, drank out of people’s favorite cups, shit in their toilets. Only other locksmiths ever had a clue.
“In your case, though, it’s not a locksmith who did the deed,” my mother said. “Obviously. We’re looking at someone who knows about old optical equipment. Did you tell the police that?”
My mother was glad about the burglary, in a way. She got to use all the knowledge that she’d gleaned from reading crime novels for the past forty years.
“Maybe a former optometrist,” she said, blowing her nose and folding the Kleenex neatly over the result. “Or a failed one.”
Her building had implemented a new waste-sorting policy the previous month, and we’d mostly been talking about that, so my burglary provided a welcome change of topic, at least. Just as I was thinking this, though, my mother asked which bin used tissues should go in.
“I’ve been wondering for days,” she said. “Can snot be recycled?”
“When in doubt, throw it in the gray bin,” I said.
My mother doubted a lot. The gray bin was always full.
“I can put you in touch with my friend Rita for next week,” she said.
“What’s next week?”
“Well, like, every Sunday, honey, there’s the flea market on Pinto Square.”
“And why would I go there with your friend Rita?” I’d never heard of Rita.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know about this!” my mother said. “Everyone who’s been burglarized goes to Pinto Square to see if their things resurface. People call it the Thieves’ Market. You never heard that? China, lamps, small furniture—lots of stolen property ends up there. I’m surprised the cop who filed your complaint didn’t tell you to go there first thing.”
“I guess I didn’t look desperate enough to get my stuff back,” I said.
And I wasn’t. Insurance had me covered, and I’d been thinking about getting rid of the TV for a while anyway—I just wasn’t sure how to dispose of it responsibly.
“Oh, you’re getting that case back,” my mother said. “It’s all I have left from your grandfather.”
“I thought the watch you’re wearing was his. And the desk in the library.”
She simply ignored this.
“Next Sunday,” she said. “9 a.m. sharp.” She gave me Rita’s number.
Rita, to my surprise, was young. I didn’t know where my mother made her friends these days. She’d had a bad fall a few years earlier, and since then she’d decided to limit her outings to what was strictly necessary, a category that didn’t include socializing. Rita said that she was an “apartment therapist,” which didn’t help me imagine how they might’ve met. My mother didn’t even believe in therapy for people.
Rita had told me to bring pictures of the stolen items, but I’d never taken pictures of things, never really taken pictures in general, so I’d pulled images of similar objects from the Internet and printed them at the office.
“I guess these will work,” Rita said, and she sat on the ground to cut the images out and tape them (she carried scissors and tape in her purse) into a notebook deformed by dozens of other similar pasteups. My mother had told me that Rita had started coming to the market after having been burglarized herself, years before, and that, giving up on finding her own things, she’d realized she knew how to navigate the place, and could be of help to the newly burglarized.
“How does it work?” I asked Rita. “Should I pay you for every Sunday you spend looking, or only when you find something?”
“Didn’t your mom tell you?” she said. “I do this for free.”
Free things make me suspicious.
“Now, you’re probably thinking a free service can’t possibly be worth much,” Rita said. “But I’m actually pretty selfish in doing this. I just can’t stand knowing that people are suffering while I could help them. There’s a lot of suffering here. Your mother told me you were home when they did it? I was home, too. You’re lucky you weren’t assaulted. I was. But, anyway, I can lighten the burden of others by showing them around, and that’s payment enough. There’re more than three hundred venders here—it can be overwhelming at first—but most of the stolen stuff that enters the market actually ends up on the same twenty to twenty-five tables, so we’ll start with those.”
“You know which venders are most likely to resell stolen property, and you don’t tell the police about it?”
“The police know as much as I do,” Rita said. “And it’s not like the venders are the actual burglars.”
“Still, they could lead you to them.”
“Arresting a couple of venders will not make the number of burglaries drop, I can tell you that much. The guys would just find new ways to sell their stash, like on the Internet, and good luck finding anything there. See, it has a sort of convenience, a thieves’ market. People know where to go when they’ve been robbed. It gives them hope. It keeps things local. And I don’t know if you’ve heard, but local is the future.” She closed the notebook, where she’d taped pictures of my almost-things under a dramatic “missing” headline. “Globalization can only go so far before everything goes to shit. All civilizations go through the same stages before they collapse and break up into smaller groups, you know? I read a very interesting article about it.”
“How many stages are there?” I asked.
“Nine,” she said. “We’re on the eighth.”
We started looking. Rita introduced me to a dozen venders. She gave them only my first name, because they didn’t need to know my story—anyone who was there with Rita had the same story. She stopped on occasion to compare a picture in her notebook with something on a table. No match for me, or for anyone else.
I asked about her job, what it was that an apartment therapist did.
“It’s just interior decoration,” Rita explained. “Basically. Except not for people who just moved in and are all happy about it and have a vision, but for people who’ve come to hate their place, who feel trapped, who’ve lost all connection to it. I try to make them like it again, to find the right color for their walls, objects they can truly bond with.”
“Would you say you’re a good apartment therapist?”
She thought about it.
“Clients are usually satisfied,” she said. “But some of them relapse after a while. Start accumulating shit and hating everything again. They can’t help it. It’s the eighth stage I was just telling you about. After abundance and apathy: dependency and bondage.”
We weaved through the tables, talked about humanity’s impending doom some more, and were offered coffee by a Malian national who sold mostly authentic West African masks and textiles. Akkram was his name. Akkram noticed I had cat hair on my sweater and asked many questions regarding Catapult. “How is she taking the burglary?” he asked, and I said that she complained a lot. “Poor baby,” Akkram said. “It must be hard, not being able to speak, in moments like these.”
Rita looked through her purse for a stevia packet for her coffee, and while doing so extracted a plastic whistle. She handed it to me.
When I asked what it was for, Rita said that it was a rape whistle.
“It’s just a whistle,” I said.
“Sometimes the simplest things,” Rita said, and didn’t finish her sentence, or didn’t believe sentences needed verbs.
We didn’t find my things, and no one raped us. Rita said not to worry, that it was rare for objects to resurface in the first couple of weeks after a robbery. I was a little annoyed at not having been told this before, having got up early on a Sunday only to face such low odds.
When I entered my mother’s apartment, she was in motion—a rare phenomenon. When not at work, she usually moved only from reading in bed to reading on the couch.
“Photographic paper,” she said. “Can it be recycled as regular paper?” She held a large manila envelope bursting at the seams.
“I wouldn’t think so,” I said. “Isn’t it full of chemicals?”
“Your father used to take so many landscape photos,” she said, laying the envelope on top of the overflowing gray bin. “I don’t get it. Some are nice and all, but it gets pretty repetitive pretty fast. I’m only keeping the pictures with people in them. And then I’ll keep the best ones of you in a special envelope.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I just want to know where they are. If there’s a catastrophe and I have to flee. People never think to pack pictures in a catastrophe. I mean, except in the movies, of course, and even there they have to waste crucial time finding them. They’re just not part of the go-bag essentials.”
“What’s with everyone planning for a major catastrophe these days?”
“Don’t you watch the news?”
“Of course I don’t watch the news,” I said.
“Well, that’s smart,” my mother conceded.
I asked what kind of catastrophe she was preparing for.
“I don’t imagine anything in particular,” she said. “Nuclear attack, epidemic, riots . . .”
“Where would you go?”
“Or it could just be that I have to go to the hospital in an emergency.”
“Are you ill?”
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
I tried to think of what I would put in a go-bag, but I blanked. All I could think of was underwear, pens, eye drops. A very sad list.
“The thing is,” I said, “you should probably take your go-bag everywhere with you. Catastrophe might strike while you’re out shopping. There might not be time for you to come home to pick up your stuff—there might not even be a home for you to come back to.”
“I know that,” she said. “Don’t you think I know that? That’s why my fanny pack is a reduced version of my go-bag. Essence of the essential. Come to think, I’m going to have to pick a single picture of you and slide it in there.”
The fanny pack my mother was referring to was a purple tartan monstrosity that my parents had given me to take on some science-class trip in middle school. It had rained the whole time and I’d never worn it. She’d found the fanny pack when sorting through my stuff, during the couple of weeks she’d spent bored at home with her broken leg, right after her fall. Such a great invention, she’d said on the phone that day. Do they still make them or was it just a nineties thing? I told her that the only two people I’d seen rocking fanny packs in the past ten years had been jazz musicians. Well, they know what’s up, I guess. It’s perfect for a night about town. Could carry cigarettes, Mace . . . even a short novel, maybe? For the subway ride? I told her she could keep the fanny pack, because that seemed to be the reason she’d brought the whole matter up, and she’d been wearing it ever since. She didn’t walk around conspicuously sporting the fanny pack (That’s how you get mugged, she said) but concealed it under her sweaters. After her fall, she started wearing ample sweaters, not the lousy kind you see on depressive people but sweaters of well-shaped ampleness, made of pretty wools. The way they draped over her waist and hips, you would never suspect there was a purple fanny pack under them at all times.
“Is Dad O.K. with you tossing all the pictures he took?”
“Of course. He said he trusted me to do the sorting, and to scan all the ones I deemed essential and send them to him, so he can have them for his own go-bag.”
I assumed my father had merely been polite. I couldn’t imagine him packing a go-bag. He already lived in the middle of nowhere, the exact sort of place that refugees would flood to in case of a major catastrophe. I guess maybe that’s the one scenario, though, in which he’d feel the need to flee. He didn’t like people much anymore.
My parents divorced the year I went away to college. Not out of love for anybody else. Neither of them remarried or even dated afterward—not that I know of. They’d just had enough of living with each other, though not with each other so much as with anyone, I think. They’re a pair of loners who became attached just long enough to raise a third one. I know people, grown men and women, whose parents worry that they still haven’t found “the one,” or even just “one.” My parents never broach the topic. They know it’s not for everybody.
“Can I take a look?” I asked, but I’d already retrieved the manila envelope from the gray bin.
After lunch, my mother went back to the novel she was reading, and I went through the photographs at the kitchen table. Lots of trees, indeed; lots of closeups of flowers. The West, the Midwest, Mexico. I noticed that the room had got dark at some point, and I thought time had flown, the sun had set, but it was just clouds, nearly black clouds that wouldn’t go away anytime soon. I turned the lights on, and the rain started. The light made me think of my father, how sad he’d made me on weekend nights, always working at that same table. He was a lawyer, but often he did all sorts of things for his clients that had nothing to do with the law, like their taxes, their correspondence. He helped out his friends and their friends, too, wrote recommendation letters for them, dealt with their D.U.I.s, things like that. When I was a teen-ager, he made a big deal of setting up the attic with a state-of-the-art stereo system and a nice leather chair. He said that he needed a place to relax after work, but, because he was never done with work, he never went up there. There was always something extra he could do for someone. Maybe it was during one of those evenings, as he was solving a stranger’s problems under the pasty kitchen lights, listening to his music on a Discman, that he first devised his plan to become a hermit. I don’t blame him. He had to do it. He was too nice to people. They would have eaten him alive if he’d stayed in a well-populated area. The stereo, the records, and the club chair were the only things he took in the divorce. It all seemed right to me now: him alone, finally listening to his records; my mother alone, reading; me alone, sorting through landscape photographs of trips I hadn’t taken.
I selected two photos and threw the rest away again. In one, you can see my parents’ shadows ending right at the edge of some orange canyon; in the other, there’s that sequoia tree in the Giant Forest which has a hole in it the size of a house.
Rita would’ve kept looking for my things with or without me, but it felt wrong knowing that she was at the market alone, so I always went with her. Every week, we met at Akkram’s table for coffee. Akkram always inquired about Catapult. He’s the one who said that what she missed was TV.
“I fully sympathize with your cat here,” he told me. “I don’t know what I would do without my shows. And, mind you, I see actual people every day, lots of them, and I still need the fake stories. Your Catapult is home alone most of the time. The people on TV were a big part of her social life.”
“But I leave the radio on for her when I go to work,” I said.
“Not the same,” Akkram said. “Can’t see the faces. For all your cat knows, the voices are in her head, and she thinks she’s going crazy.”
After three months of going there every Sunday, I was starting to know all the venders. I noticed, also, the freshly burglarized, carrying pictures of their missing property. Some came to Rita, some preferred to look on their own. Since I’d met her, Rita had found nine stolen items, negotiated their prices, and delivered them back to their original owners. They reimbursed her, of course, but also often offered extra compensation and invited her in for coffee (sometimes champagne), which she systematically refused. She didn’t do this for a reward—or, rather, her reward was to have found the item. There was a flap at the back of her notebook where she kept a stack of white stickers that said “Found!” in red letters. Her favorite thing was to peel off a sticker and paste it above the picture of the object in question, obliterating the “missing.” It was hard to tell when Rita was happiest, looking or finding. It was obvious that she would still be doing this in forty years (assuming the world didn’t end first), rummaging through piles of objects that didn’t yet exist, that hadn’t yet been invented.
One morning, I saw a vase that my father had brought home from a trip to Mexico. A woman was holding it up in the sunlight for inspection. Her T-shirt said “Best Mom Ever.” I wondered how other mothers felt when they saw such a T-shirt. I could’ve asked Rita (she had a daughter) but didn’t. I pointed at the vase instead.
“That vase was my father’s,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Rita said. “I didn’t know your dad had been burglarized.”
“He wasn’t. We just gave all his stuff to charity after he left. About twenty years ago.”
“I’m so sorry. Your mother never mentioned it.”
“Oh, he hasn’t vanished or anything,” I said. “He has a phone and all, somewhere in the woods. My mother and him still talk.”
I knew by then that my mother and Rita had met at the hospital—my mother’s fall having occurred the same day Rita had been assaulted by her burglars. They didn’t see much of each other, but they spoke on the phone often, according to my mother, and I found it strange that she had never mentioned my father.
“My dad’s not big on owning stuff anymore,” I told Rita. “So it’s weird to see something of his.”
I saw Simmons then, my state-of-nature patient, looking at a display of knives, two tables up. I was wearing my glasses and didn’t want the secret of my bad eyesight revealed, but the moment I thought this our eyes met. Of course. I can’t tell for sure what happened then—I’m not the best at reading people, and it all went too fast for deep analysis anyway—but I think he panicked. He broke eye contact right away and disappeared into the crowd.
“Do you want to get it?” Rita asked me, her thoughts still on my father’s vase.
I said I didn’t, and Rita bought it herself.
“Just in case you change your mind,” she said. “You’ll know where to find it.”
The woman in the “Best Mom Ever” T-shirt, who’d previously coveted the vase, was now wondering if she’d made a mistake in discarding it.
“Why doesn’t your daughter ever come here?” I asked Rita.
“She’s better at home with her dad,” Rita said. “This place is too depressing. You can’t bring a kid here.”
It felt rude to note that there were tons of families walking around.
“And I don’t want her to see me as this loser,” she added.
“What loser? You’re not a loser.”
“Honey, of course I’m a loser. You’re a loser, too, by the way. We’re all here looking to pay a second time for stuff we already owned. I mean, we can’t let go of things—things!—that it took a stranger a minute to take away from us and profit from. They’re the winners. The market was nicknamed for them, not us. If someone was writing an essay on the Thieves’ Market, they would be the thrill. We’d be interviewed, maybe, for color, for laughs. But we’re the losers here. Losers A to Z.”
“What I don’t get is how one minute we’re a symbol of new life and the next minute we’re a sandwich.”
She was smiling while saying this, but her eyes still teared up.
“I thought you’d given up on finding your things,” I said. “I thought you weren’t really looking anymore.”
“Well, I’m not,” she said. “Not really. But it’s always somewhere in the back of my head. You never know when things will resurface.”
I thought about buying my father’s vase back from her immediately, so she could at least feel, in that moment, that we shared the burden of loserdom, but then I didn’t. I didn’t even want my own things back.
On Mondays that winter, I had been taking shifts at the E.R., for ocular emergencies. After my shift, I’d got in the habit of heading to the Cave, a jazz club a few blocks from the hospital. The music wasn’t great there (they rarely saved the best lineups for Mondays), but the pours were generous. Simmons was at the bar when I came in that Monday, and at first I thought it was a weird coincidence—two chance encounters in just two days—but he’d been waiting for me, he said. I couldn’t remember mentioning working at the E.R. to him, or going to the jazz club afterward, but maybe stalking was part of the training he’d devised to insure his survival. Or maybe he’d called my office. Maybe my secretary had given him my schedule.
“I owe you an explanation,” he said. “About what happened yesterday. I shouldn’t have run away like that. That was cowardly. Let me buy you a drink.”
What had caused Simmons to run away from me at the market hadn’t been my wearing glasses but his not wearing his. He thought that I’d noticed, even though, in the course of examining patients, I end up seeing them without their glasses more often than with.
“I went to see another ophthalmologist,” Simmons explained, “and he said it was O.K. to get Lasik, even though my vision hadn’t been stable for twelve months, and you know that’s what I always wanted to hear, so I went for it. I felt wrong proceeding against your advice, and I’m sorry. But, well, not that sorry, because it worked! I have perfect vision now. I mean, near-perfect.”
“Congratulations,” I said. I didn’t tell him to enjoy it while it lasted.
“You’re not mad that I didn’t follow your medical opinion?” Simmons said. “I felt really guilty—”
“I’m happy for you,” I said. “Now you can just relax and wait for the world to collapse.”
“Thank you,” he said. “In the meantime, though—and don’t tell my girlfriend this—I feel like getting the surgery is the best decision I’ve ever made. I shot six ducks in a day last week. Personal best.”
He’d confessed to having got Lasik and to having a girlfriend before I’d even ordered a drink. I didn’t really see a reason for us to hang out anymore, but I still pounded my Scotch, and ordered a second one.
We talked about the different ways he was preparing for the state of nature (he knew how to build a fire with just sticks, and not only how to shoot but also how to make his own bow and arrows), and over the third drink I mentioned my father, and his self-sufficient life in the woods. Simmons asked me for his e-mail. I asked him if his girlfriend, whom he’d referred to as K., was looking forward to the state of nature as much as he was.
“She says she has to get laser hair removal before it happens, and then she’ll be all set,” he said.
“She doesn’t think pants will still be easy to come by?”
“I think it’s for her own comfort.”
“What’s her name again?”
“K.,” Simmons said.
“I mean her whole name.”
“Katie.”
“What’s Katie short for?”
“Probably Katherine, don’t you think? Or Kaitlin?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“I guess her mother is Russian, though. Could be Katia.”
“Or Ekaterina,” I said.
“Wow! You think?”
He had to pee, and while he was in the bathroom I thought about how K. would probably not become his wife—not until death did them part, at least—and about how no one ever stayed together forever and how unsad that was.
The jazz trio that had been playing since we’d come in wrapped up its first set. The bass player grabbed a mike and said, “Guys, we’ll take five, be back in fifteen,” which was a joke you got the feeling he’d made every night of his performing life. It still got a couple of laughs. The drummer got up from behind his toms, and, sure enough, he was wearing a fanny pack. I was drunk enough that I flirted with him when he stood by me at the bar. One thing I know about jazz musicians is that they can never believe it when someone who’s not a jazz musician talks to them.
“Where do you buy a fanny pack these days?” I asked the drummer.
“Well, this one has a very special history,” he said.
Before he could launch into it, I told him that I wasn’t too interested in the history of things, in general. He said something about how objects ended up saying a lot about our souls, actually, how our relationship to them was also part of our humanity, etc. The sentimentality of his speech might not have disturbed me so much if he’d been less earnest, if he’d just assumed that cheap psychology was how one picked up women at bars, but he seemed to believe every word he spoke.
“Like,” he said, his ponytail brushing against his cheek as he leaned forward, “it’s no accident that the first thing you wanted to talk to me about was my fanny pack. Fanny packs must mean something special to you. Mine made you think we might have a connection.”
“My mother wears one,” I said, and I understood something then, all at once. Why my mother wore a fanny pack. The real reason she’d become friends with Rita, what had brought them close, at the hospital. There had been clues—her shutting herself up in her apartment, the can of Mace, the silent quotation marks she seemed, more and more, to place around the word “fall,” when she mentioned her “fall.”
The drummer kept talking while I tried to write a message to my mother, apologizing for having only now come to understand what had happened to her. Letting her know that we could talk about it, if she wanted, or that we could also never talk about it, but that, in a way, her sending me to Rita might’ve meant that, deep down, she was ready to talk about it now, with me, or so it seemed. It couldn’t be that she just wanted a stranger to give me a rape whistle, could it? Well, actually . . . maybe it could? Maybe I was overstepping? Probably, I thought. Probably overstepping. If my mother had wanted me to know she’d been assaulted she would’ve said something, she would’ve been direct. I couldn’t just send her a text about this in the middle of the night. Actually, I could, but I shouldn’t. Or maybe I should? And, in fact, no, I couldn’t, either. There wasn’t any cell reception in the club. I’d tried to send the message, but the delivery had failed. If that wasn’t a sign that I shouldn’t send it, it was at least a guarantee that I wouldn’t send it until later.
“That guy’s creepy,” Simmons said. He’d got rid of the drummer while I’d been typing. “Did he bother you? Are you all right?”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
We went to the CVS across the street to buy some Alka-Seltzer, in anticipation of our separate hangovers, and because we were drunk we looked at every item in the store that was more than three different colors at once. Simmons tried some juggling balls and I compared two different fanny packs. He told me just to go with my gut. I chose the one that had the most pockets, and he offered to buy it for me. “Could come in handy one day,” he said.
At the register, I picked up a DVD of the third season of “The Walking Dead” to watch on my computer with Catapult. We hadn’t seen the first two seasons, but I didn’t think she’d care. Simmons said that it wasn’t the most realistic, as far as survivalist works of fiction went, that it was still too bathed in American puritanism, too shy in coming to terms with the speed at which morality would disappear in the event of a zombie apocalypse, but that there was still some useful information to pick up from the show.
“If anything, it teaches you to do exactly the opposite of what the characters do.”
On the sidewalk, we divided the contents of the Alka-Seltzer box and I put my twenty-four packets in my new fanny pack.
Simmons hailed a cab for me, but I said I preferred to walk.
“You’re not walking home drunk in the middle of the night,” he said. “Not on my watch.”
I told him that I’d done it before, that I was a responsible adult, that I had a whistle.
“Nonetheless,” he said, “you should be more careful.”
“I am careful,” I said.
“Well, you should be more afraid, then.”
I accepted the cab, and before he closed the door on me Simmons said he would see me next year, for his checkup, if I still wanted him as a patient. I didn’t tell him that his eyesight would likely start deteriorating again before then.
I was so dizzy in the car that I told the driver to drop me off a couple of blocks before my building. I needed to walk the rest of the way, no matter what Simmons thought. It was freezing out, and it hurt to breathe, but everything stopped spinning, at least, and I had more balance now, and being aware of my balance made me aware of the stillness all around me, and the silence. I don’t love silence much. It’s too easy to break. It’s one of the reasons I don’t visit my father in the woods too often. I can’t fall asleep there.
I can’t tell you why I blew the whistle. Nothing was threatening, only the possibility that the silence might be broken, and I guess that I may have had this idea that if I was the one to break it it would be all right, or not as bad. What would be all right, though? What would be not as bad? I don’t know. I didn’t blow the whistle to get attention, or at least I don’t think I did. I didn’t really think about it. All I know is that I blew it, and nothing changed. No one came.
来源：纽约客（2018.04.09）
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