Abbott Awaits (2 page)

After a violent thunderstorm rumbles through the Pioneer Valley, bending the maples and traumatizing the family dog, Abbott leaves his house to buy an ink cartridge for his printer. While driving, he notices the large tree branches in the yards and streets. He hears sirens in the distance. The sun is out now, and the wet asphalt steams. As Abbott approaches a busy four-way intersection, he observes that the light is inoperative, knocked out, presumably, by the storm. There is no police officer directing the traffic. With a button he locks the doors of his car. He is reminded of his insufficient life-insurance policy. Gradually, however, he perceives what is happening at the intersection ahead. The drivers, as if by prior agreement, are treating this broken traffic light as a four-way stop, and they are
taking turns
moving through. If Abbott is not mistaken, there is a coordinated counterclockwise movement to the turn-taking. Occasionally there are pauses during which no car ventures forth, but then one motorist will signal to another, who then waves and proceeds. Everyone is using appropriate signals. Abbott has witnessed this kind of egalitarian poststorm automotive subcommunity two or three other
times in his life, and each time it has nearly brought him to tears. The rip in the social order neatly mended by a group of morally imaginative and mutually supporting human drivers with a firm and instinctual sense of fairness. Here's a repudiation of Thomas Hobbes, William Golding, Abbott's father. When Abbott stops in front of the broken light, he signals a middle-aged Asian man to go ahead and make the right turn the Asian man has indicated he would like to make. (The Asian man turns right and waves.) Abbott looks at the motorist to his left. A woman who appears to be a yoga instructor waggles her fingers above her steering wheel, beckoning forth Abbott, who waves ardently as he passes straight through the intersection on the way to buy the ink cartridge for his printer. The graded streets and the storm drains are doing their work. The sun is bright and cleansing. All the college kids are gone. This should be the end of the story, but it isn't. At the end of the story, which is right now, Abbott is thinking once more about what happened to that baby in Tulsa.

Abbott's dog is a sturdy, fit, and handsome yellow Lab that just might be, pound for pound, God's most timorous creation. The dog has always been terribly afraid of thunder, fireworks, and backfiring engines, but the scope and intensity of his fear have increased as he has aged. At eleven, he now fears airplanes, garbage trucks, delivery vans, other dogs, cats, people, loud birds and bugs, scarecrows, snowmen, kites and flags, some trees, heavy rain, light rain, fog, cloudy skies, partly cloudy skies, gusts of wind, refreshing summer breezes. Also, he seems scared of what can most accurately be described as
nothing
. The symptoms of his fear include violent trembling, panting, shedding, and drooling so excessive that his front paws become shiny and slick. Abbott's wife frequently says that the animal
senses
barometric shifts, distant weather phenomena. “No, he doesn't,” Abbott says. Each night for the past week Abbott's dog has been, for no discernible reason, overthrown by fright. Abbott's wife, in her third trimester, is up frequently to urinate. Upon her return to bed, Abbott has noticed the dog shaking and attempting to get beneath things far too small to get beneath, his bad breath disseminated by panting. “There
must be a storm moving in,” Abbott's wife says, nightly. Abbott has yanked open the blinds to point out what he thinks is the Little Dipper. “Look,” he has said for a week. “There's no storm.” “It's far off,” his wife has said. “He can sense it.” Now tonight, after five or six stormless nights, Abbott, uncomfortable with mystery and irritated with the dog, strives to detect in the night some fear-inducing pulse or wave during his wife's brief trip to the bathroom down the hall. He sits up in bed, holds his breath, cocks his head receptively, and in this way he achieves a promising hypothesis: The dog seems terrified by the barely audible rumble of unrolling toilet paper. This conjecture, Abbott knows, requires a well-designed experiment and a willing assistant. He entreats his wife to remove, so very quietly, the toilet-paper roll from its wall-mounted holder the next time she urinates. Once she has removed the roll she can—Abbott's wife says she can handle it from there. When the time comes, about two hours later, she executes the test with a proficiency that compensates for her poor attitude. Meanwhile, Abbott observes the dog with rigor and dispassion. He notes that the subject, while markedly anxious about Abbott's wife's absence, does not exhibit the symptoms of a full-blown fear-based episode. The nonoccurrence of terror seems to confirm the hypothesis (though Abbott feels compelled to run a few more trials, both with and without the wall-mounted holder). This is a story Abbott would like to tell colleagues at a faculty cocktail party, should he ever attend one. It can be enjoyed as a humorous and suspenseful anecdote about a family pet, and it can also be enjoyed as a parable of the Enlightenment. Abbott imagines the clustered scholars leaning into his story, their cocktails nearly spilling onto the dean's rug. To enhance the narrative's dramatic effects—and to tease out its lofty implications about knowledge formation—Abbott finds that he must take small liberties with the truth. He embellishes, amplifies. He omits. For instance, Abbott sees no reason to tell the captivated imaginary gathering that his typical response to the dog's fear is not sympathy or even intellectual curiosity but anger and exasperation. It drives Abbott
crazy
that the dog continually becomes so distraught over so little, and that the animal cannot, when afraid, be placated by words, logic, evidence, affection, or cheese. Best not to mention any of this, Abbott knows, but it's so galling, all that hair in the closet, the drool on the floor. Here is a creature that understands from Abbott's
choice of shoes
that it's time for a walk, yet refuses to comprehend that a birthday balloon is not
a mortal threat. Now, abruptly, Abbott's story is gone, supplanted by the anger and exasperation he removed from it. He does not know—he can't be certain—why he is so angered and exasperated by the dog's stubborn fearfulness. Abbott's wife's hypothesis is, Abbott maintains, unverifiable.

As it turns out, a well-known actress's tears in a well-known movie are not real tears. They are a special effect, added after shooting. The director, called out by some heroic entertainment watchdog organization, defends the actress in an interview, saying she could have cried real tears had she been asked to. She was not asked to. She's a fine actress, deserving of an Academy Award. It was only when the director was editing that he decided her crying would improve the scene in question. So, yes, he digitally inserted some tears. He does not understand the controversy. After all, the car chase in the movie is not real, nor is the triple homicide. On the Internet there is a still from the movie of the crying actress, and Abbott notices that the tears really do look fake—big, round, firm Hollywood orbs, dewdrops on a morning leaf. They look like they could stream upward, climb the actress's face. The director says in the interview that let's not forget art is an illusion. He says that even had the actress's tears been real, they would have been fake. He says just think about it. Abbott understands why Plato kicked these guys out of his city. “What they should do,” Abbott says at the dinner table, ostensibly to his wife, the only other
adult present, “is put tears on everyone's faces in every movie. Comedy, action, drama. Everyone. Every character in every movie, weeping from the opening credits to the end. What scene would not be improved? That's what I'd like to see. That's what they should do.” Most evenings they sit down together as a family for dinner, usually about 4:45. “It's difficult,” Abbott's wife says to Abbott after a while, “to have a relationship with the entire world.” Their daughter says, “More cucumber?” His wife says, “Do you know what I mean?” Abbott thinks he does know what she means. What she means, he thinks, is it's impossible. What she means is, Please knock it off. Don't just leave the table as soon as you finish your dinner. Live with us, here, now, in this house.

Abbott has two hours and fifteen minutes of child care before his wife takes over. He and his daughter take a hot morning walk around the neighborhood at a gruelingly slow pace, returning home with quite a few acorns and a flat gray rock. Abbott prepares himself before checking the clock in the kitchen. He estimates the time by subtracting fifteen minutes from his most conservative estimate of the time, but then discovers that he is still ten minutes fast. The morning yawns before him. He reads a book to her six times in a row, wanting very much to set the author's house on fire. The girl spills juice on the carpet, and Abbott blots it with his shirt. They look at a neighbor's cat in the yard. They ruin a yoyo. They spin a propeller. They eat animal crackers. They play with a long-necked toy dinosaur whose wonderful scientific name, Abbott will learn later, has secretly been changed to a name not nearly so good. Abbott looks at the clock and calls out in pain. His four-and-a-half cups of coffee have been, according to the calibration on the pot, eleven cups of coffee. They make Remote Control dance. They find a ladybug, some brown pine needles that must have fallen from the Christmas tree. They sort beads by color,
by size. They roll the beads down inclined surfaces. “Dad sit right here,” Abbott's daughter says, and Abbott sits right there. “Hold this,” she says, and he holds it. “Do this,” she says, and he does it. “Not like that,” she says. What did Abbott used to do with his summer mornings? He cannot even remember, cannot contemplate the freedom, the terrible enormity of Self. Abbott's wife walks into the family room and kisses his warm head and his daughter's warm head. Then she sits on the floor in a playing position. Abbott gulps the rest of his tepid coffee and goes to bed. He can hear his wife and his daughter talking at the dining-room table. “What do you think we should name the baby?” Abbott's wife asks. There is a pause before the girl says, “Cheetah.” Abbott approaches sleep with an ineffable sense of relief that he did not know, before having a child, what it was like to have a child—did not
really
know what it was
really
like—because if he had known before having a child how profoundly strenuous and self-obliterating it is to have a child, he never would have had a child, and then, or now, he would not have this remarkable child. Abbott's wife, were she here, might say that it doesn't quite make sense. Abbott might rub her hip lightly with the back of his hand. “That's the thing,” he might say.

It can happen at any time, in any room of the house. Abbott is never safe, and neither, consequently, is his wife. This afternoon, as Abbott kneels in the kitchen, pouring kibble from a forty-pound bag into a plastic bin from which the dog is fed, a folded coupon falls to the tile floor, frightening the dog. The coupon is covered in a fine coating of kibble dust. Unconcerned, Abbott picks it up and hands it to his wife, who is in charge of coupons. “Here,” he says, unaware that it is a smuggled and coded message. She unfolds the coupon to determine its value and its restrictions. She snorts. “This expires in
2017
,” she says. Abbott looks up from his task, spilling some kibble across the floor. He feels an unpleasant tingle at the back of his neck. Will there be dog food in 2017? Or grocery stores? Or legal tender? “Ever notice,” Abbott says to his wife's back, “that when you say a future year out loud, it sounds kind of ominous?” The dog eats the hearty nuggets one by one from the floor. Abbott says, “Not when you see them written, but when you say them out loud. 2023. 2048. The plan is to cut carbon emissions in half by 2051. Congratulations to the class of 2040.” His wife says, “Let me try. Wait. OK. The treaty expires in 2074.” Abbott nods. “
See
?” he says.

The Internet, Abbott reads tonight on the Internet, is now believed by experts to be one percent pornography. Somewhere, no doubt, confetti settles onto tumid organs. When Abbott browses the Internet, he imagines all that porn lurking inside the monitor, directly behind the screen he is browsing. It's
in
there, it's in his computer. Just a flimsy scrim of tragic news headlines dropped between his torpid gaze and all that nudity and unorthodox penetration. He imagines that one small transposition of letters in a Web address will produce a beaver, an anus, someone peeing on someone else. This thought, like so much of American life, renders him titillated and despondent. Abbott is not a prude about porn. Or, to put it another way, he is a prude about porn. He just wonders if the consumption of pornography can legitimately be considered a component of human flourishing. All that loneliness and credit-card debt. The thesis of Stephen Jay Gould's
Wonderful Life
is that humans are an entity, not a tendency. “We are a thing, an item of history,” Gould writes, “not an embodiment of general principles.” After a thorough analysis of the 530-million-year-old fossil record in a limestone quarry called the Burgess
Shale—and of the mass extinctions of species that occurred after the quarry was formed—Gould concludes that the evolution of human life was spectacularly unlikely, a lottery win. “Replay the tape a million times from a Burgess beginning,” Gould argues, “and I doubt that anything like
Homo sapiens
would ever evolve again.” With great mental exertion and a decent night's sleep and no ambient noise, Abbott can hold this concept precariously in his mind, like an acrobat balancing a chair holding a sequined assistant. But when he tries, in his mind, to add the proliferation of Internet pornography to Gould's thesis on historical contingency, the strain becomes too much and he nearly blacks out in titillation and despondency. What an awful miracle. Abbott knows from Keats that the fancy thing to do is to reside in Paradox
without any irritable reaching
. But he also knows that he is, above all else, an irritable reacher, and about as capable of reform as a trembling dog. (There is rain on the roof, song on the monitor. He could just type in
wild sluts
, get it over with.)