Damned If I Do Part 15

The trout fills the pa.s.senger seat. Its head presses against the armrest of the door. Its tail brushes against Alan Turing's thigh. Its eye is pointed toward the roof.

"Tell me about your wife," the trout says.

Alan Turing drives with both hands on the steering wheel, leaning slightly forward. His fingers are stiffening from the work of driving and so he reaches over to turn on the heat.

"What are you doing?" the trout asks.

"I'm turning on the heat."

"Leave it off."

Alan Turing does. "My wife is very smart," he says. He doesn't look at the fish while he speaks. "She's intense and I sometimes wonder what she sees in me." Alan Turing smiles sadly. "Lately, I've been distant and, I guess, not very responsive. I don't know why. Anyway, I became distant and she became distant and the whole thing just kind of s...o...b..lled. I've been working a lot lately. But that's not really it. I mean, it hasn't been work. I've been-how can I put it-lost, sick, stupid. I'm simply not happy with life." Alan Turing glances at the trout. The fish looks bored. "I know it sounds dumb. Midlife s.h.i.t and all that. But now I'm afraid I've pushed Barbara far enough away that she's looking for someone else."

The trout seems to struggle with a breath, flops its tail against the fabric of Alan Turing's trousers.

"We still have s.e.x, but that's all it is, I think. s.e.x. It feels so empty. It never felt like I had to search for the feeling before. I'm so scared. We don't even argue. We're just creating a gentle, uncrossable distance. And then I get mad and I want to tell her to go away." Alan Turing is crying. "It's life, too, you know. It's this day-to-day stuff. I don't know why I do anything. I do my research, but it's for s.h.i.t. I read the news and it goes in one eye and out the other. I haven't heard a good joke in years. And my wife is sleeping with someone else and still f.u.c.king me."

The fish says nothing.

Alan Turing pulls into his driveway and turns off his car's engine. He gives the trout a look and says, "Wait here." He gets out and walks across the yard, the gra.s.s of the lawn he hates so much feeling soft and moist under his feet. His hands are shaking. He enters the house and stands inside the foyer. He calls out for his wife. "Barbara!" There is an urgency in his voice that he hears, that at some other time he might seek to control, but not at this moment. "Barbara!"

Barbara comes down the stairs. She is wearing a robe, a towel wrapped around her head. "What is it?"

"Why do we do this?" Alan Turing asks.

"What's wrong?"

"Everything's wrong, Barbara. Look at us. Look at us."

Barbara clutches her robe closed.

"Yeah, close up. Heaven forbid I should see you naked in the light. It might lead to lovemaking instead of f.u.c.king."

"Alan," she complains.

Alan Turing is pacing. He stops and stares at her. "What's happened to us? To everything?" Inside his head, reality seems far away and unreachable. "Come outside with me. I want to show you something."

"I'm not dressed."

"It doesn't matter. Come on. Come on!"

Barbara flinches.

"Come on," Alan Turing says more gently.

"Alan, you're scaring me."

"I'm scared, too."

"What do you want to show me?" she asks.

"Just come with me. Please?"

Barbara nods and steps through the door he is holding open for her. She follows him across the yard. He leads her to his car in the driveway. He turns and watches her look across the street for neighbors.

At the car, he looks in and the big trout is not there. There is a very little minnow dead on the pa.s.senger seat of his car. He feels near to fainting and turns, squares his shoulders to Barbara.

"What is it?" she says.

Alan Turing looks at his wife's eyes, tries to hold them, tries to memorize them. He looks at her lips and her ears and her nose. He touches her hair.

"What is it, Alan?"

He says, "I love you."

The Devolution of Nuclear a.s.sociability.

We are all too familiar with Saussure's and likewise all too familiar with the notion that the line separating the signifier and signified is somehow sliding or shifting. And finally, we are as familiar with the instructional icon:.

Arbor.

As elementary as these concepts might now seem, I begin with them as Semiotics begins with them.

So, I ask you to imagine a character, Adam. Adam is deficient in a singular linguistic way. He is never quite able to say what he means. Adam often gets very close, but never realizes his intention. Adam might attempt to explain the Pythagorean Theorem, but can only manage to get across that the sum of the squares of two sides of a triangle equals the square of the third side, being unable to make clear that the third side is the hypotenuse. Likewise, if Adam means to draw our attention to a right angle, he can only manage triangle. So, that s.p.a.ce or gap between the signified and the signifier is never quite crossed. We get: Since nature abhors a vacuum, something must fill that s.p.a.ce. To say that it is nothing merely begs the question. For if Adam, with his peculiar problem, were to intend to mean triangle, he would only be able to convey geometric shape. We have then: Geometric shape.

If we place above this Adam's attempt to offer the Pythagorean Theorem, then we see a ladder of sorts, which we might consider bounded on either side by some a.s.sociative thread: We can well imagine how this disability of Adam's can prove frustrating. Especially when he attempts to, say, summon help to his burning house, he being capable only of directing the firefighters to a house near his or to one that looks much like his, his meaning becoming twisted in his frantic efforts, much as our meaning often twists.

Meaning is difficult enough without metaphor and metonymy. But imagine Adam undertaking to say something subtle and metaphoric. His meaning will not only fall short, but might, in fact must, be misconstrued by misdirection. His ladder of meaning breaks: And depending on the situation in which his attempt is made, his broken meaning can accept (un)intentional connotational import, which we'll call contextual clutter, and so looks like this: That new meaning cannot be denied (whether acquired randomly or designedly), but it was not, in fact, Adam's intention to make that meaning. Too heavy for his initial chain, the new meaning falls off and becomes an attempt at meaning all its own, which might in turn be defended, regretted, or repeated, and certainly twisted.

The picture is yet another familiar one. I submit that it is an accurate and even a final representation of meaning. This is the stuff of meaning. Meaning is what we are and we are meaning. Meaning is molecular.

The Last Heat of Summer.

1 September.

There was nothing outside our town to warn you of its coming. One second you weren't there and the next you were. It was more than a post office and more than a village, but it had no sprawl, it had no outskirts. The town huddled close together for protection, the desert everyone loved promising to kill any stray. There, on spring afternoons and evenings when the dropping sun washed the sky pink, my friend Errol, a Kiowa Indian, and I would go out into the countryside and follow the tracks of coyotes. We saw the animals frequently and, in the course of watching them, had discovered several dens in the hills south of town. We dreamed of finding a lion's den, but never even saw a lion. The coyotes must have known we were there, staring at them from adjacent ridges through our fathers' field gla.s.ses, but the coyotes never seemed to care, casually letting their pups out to play in the cool air.

Early one evening Errol and I were sitting behind a boulder and watching two coyotes at the waterhole. The clouds that had formed above the mountains to the east never came closer and we could see that it was raining over there. Another coyote appeared suddenly, strolled close and then attacked the male, biting at its hind legs and drawing blood immediately. The wounded animal yelped but didn't retreat, the crimson soaking through his fur. Our eyes were pressed hard against the rubber cups of our gla.s.ses' eyepieces.

"Did you see that?" I asked Errol. I could tell by the way he didn't answer that he had.

The animals launched into each other again and if not for the stream of blood from the one's leg we would have been unable to tell them apart. While they tore at each other, the third coyote remained un-involved and actually seemed to enjoy her drink from the hole. Bites yielded yelps and even though we were some seventy yards away we could hear the growling and snarling. Then one animal lay motionless, the one with the b.l.o.o.d.y hip. I could see its chest heaving with difficult breaths. The attacking coyote trotted off and soon the female followed.

"Is he dying?" Errol asked.

"I don't know."

"What should we do?"

"What can we do?" We studied for another minute or so. "Let's get closer." I looked at Errol and saw that he was unsure. "Not too close, just closer."

In order to get closer, however, we had to climb down a steep slope covered with loose pebbles and for a second the waterhole was out of our view. When we could see it again the injured animal was gone.

"I want to see the spot where he was on the ground," I said.

"Why?"

"I want to see if he left any blood."

"That's crazy." Errol stuffed his binoculars back into the case, being sure to apply the lens covers. "What's the big deal about coyote blood?"

"I just want to see it, that's all."

So we walked through the p.r.i.c.kly pears and purslane to the waterhole and there it was, on the sand by the water and some of it on a bleached piece of wood, the blood of the coyote. It was everything I hoped it would be, real.

1 September Errol and I spent most of the afternoon packing the gear for the camping trip we would be taking with our fathers into the mountains north of Taos. It was not even fall yet, but there had already been snow up in Wyoming and Colorado and so we knew that the nights could be very cold. I was eager to try out the new sleeping bag my father had bought me. I pulled the blue bag out of its teal vinyl sack and let Errol feel the thickness of the fiberfill. He said something about maybe it being too heavy and it crossed my mind that he might be jealous. "I don't know," I said, "I'm getting pretty big now. I think I can manage it." It was an unintentional comment on his size; I knew that it bothered him that I had shot up a couple of inches over the summer while he had remained the same height. I felt immediately guilty for having said it and I tried to gloss over it by saying, "You might be right though. Some of the trails are mighty steep."

"Yeah, well, I can take the cold," he said.

We cleaned off the campstove and closed it, rolled the bottles of white gas up in a couple of thick towels.

"My father says he's sure we'll see a lion this year," Errol said.

"A lion?" The idea excited me.

"He said there is much talk of a cat around Questa. He said it killed a bunch of sheep and a dog, I think."

I whistled out a breath.

"My father said if we find some sign we'll track it and then we can see it."

"That would be something," I said, even though his talking was sounding like bragging, but I was more interested in the cat. I genuinely hoped his father could track the thing.

"Kiowa are great trackers," Errol said.

"I know."

1 September After Errol went home that night I sat in the den where my mother and father were playing gin. They sat on the sofa and used the coffee table for the cards and I sat on the floor in front of the televsion and watched some kind of spy movie. My mother was wearing a yellow dress with red flowers on it and her hair was pulled back to show her round face and its delicate features, her full lips painted red against her brown skin. Looking at her made me happy and I felt warm, being full of the roast beef dinner we'd just had. My mother laughed a lot and it sounded as if she was winning and my father pretended to be bothered by it all, but I could tell he wasn't. In the movie a man was chasing his double, a man who looked just like him except that he had a scar on his chest. They were on a train and the bad guy kept making everyone think he was the good guy and doing and saying rotten stuff so that they all came to hate the good guy. My mother told my father that she was going to miss us while we were up in the mountains and said she wanted us to be careful. My father and I told her we would be and when I turned back to the television, the train had wrecked and I didn't know which spy was the good one.

1 September My mother was a stalwart believer that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and especially today, as we were setting out for the wilderness, she fed us well. We had oatmeal and eggs and pancakes with fresh berries. My father read the newspaper and whistled out a breath, said something about the government that neither I nor my mother heard and then put down the paper.

"So, we should be back early on Thursday," he said and then shoveled in a spoonful of oatmeal.

My mother looked at me. "You be sure to change your underwear. I know how you boys get out there. And brush your teeth."

"Yes, ma'am."

The sun was pouring in through the window over the sink and the zinnias my mother had cut and brought in from the garden were glowing. My father was wearing his favorite flannel shirt and I had on one very much like it. We tried to eat everything to please my mother.

We finished breakfast and loaded our gear into the Jeep Wagoneer, making sure to leave plenty of room for Errol and his father's stuff. I petted the head of La.s.sie, our collie, and then we waved good-bye to my mother as we backed off the driveway and rolled away down our lane, past the gardens and picket fences and past the car-chasing terrier that lived on the corner and often slept in the middle of the street.

1 September The drive north and up into the mountains was beautiful. Errol and I were sitting in the backseat while our fathers talked in the front. Errol's father, whose name was Andy, called my father by his shortened nickname, Oz.

"So, what do you think, Oz?" the Kiowa man said. "Do you think this stuff down in Cuba is a real problem?"

My father shrugged. "I just wish the white people could blow each other up without taking the rest of us with them."

The two men laughed, but Errol and I just looked at each other.

"But life is good for us out here, isn't it, Andy?" my father asked.

"Yes, it is."

We drove up away from the squatty junipers and past the firs into a series of meadows and stands of aspen. We decided to stop at the top of a hill that overlooked a clear, twisting creek that had a beaver dam. The two fathers agreed that the fishing would be good there and so we set up camp. It seemed we all sang as we collected wood for the fire, set up tents, and prepared the night's dinner of hot dogs and baked beans from a can. I don't remember what songs we sang, only that we sang.

1 September We sat around the fire after our meal and Errol's father told us how his people used to come down and raid the Taos Indians, how some of the warriors remained to take Taos wives, how they set up a camp in Bear Canyon and lived there in the summers and in the winters moved down to stay in the pueblo, even though they were Kiowa, even though the Kiowa made periodic raids on their village.

The moon was full that night and was bright corn-bread yellow. A few coyotes called out to it and Errol and I watched it, our heads sticking out of the tent we were sharing. Our fathers were still up and talking just yards away.

"I wish I was Indian like you," I said to Errol.

"Why?"

"I don't know, really," I said. "I guess I like the way your father talks about this place. Like it's a part of him."

"My grandfather told me I'm a cat dreamer. And it's true, I have these dreams where a cat moves right through me. I can feel it."

I stared at his profile, his eyes still pointed at the sky. I wondered whether I believed him. I wanted to believe him and was jealous at the thought that it was true. "What kind of cat?" I asked.

"A big one, a lion."

I closed my eyes and looked for my own cat.

1 September Fog hung in patches over the pond and meadow. Errol fished the slow-moving creek below the beaver dam and I worked the expanse of flat, still water above it. It was early, the air still frigid. There was no fish-feeding activity on the surface, so I was casting terrestrials, cinnamon ants, hoppers, and elk-hair caddis flies up current to an undercut bank. I was casting into the weeds and dragging the flies into the water with a splash, the way my father had taught me. "Ground insects always splash into the water," my father told me. "You don't have to cast far. It's all presentation. Everything is presentation."

A big brown took my hopper and then darted for cover around a stump in the pond. I sloshed through the knee-deep water to keep my line clear. It was a big fish, at least twenty inches. My heart was pounding. My breath was short. I could feel Errol watching me. I began to strip in line.