The Business of Naming Things (18 page)

[Tears off her cloak and throws it over him.] Lie still where you are! I will go and bring help for you.

[She goes a step or two towards the right; then she stops, returns, and carefully feels his pulse and touches his face.]

ELLA RENTHEIM
.

[Softly and firmly.] No. It is best so, John Borkman. Best for you.

[She spreads the cloak closer around him, and sinks down in the snow in front of the bench. A short silence.]

When
John Gabriel Borkman
ends, John Gabriel Borkman is curled up, dead in the snow, and Liam is pale in his seat. Died of a cold heart, or a cold in the heart, did Borkman. An ice grip. In the final tableau, the shadows of two women—his wife and his true love, his wife's twin sister—stand over him. A weird triangle that Sophocles somehow overlooked; Freud, too. A genus of disorder that went extinct, thinks Liam, as he gathers himself up. He's glad to be out of there. Borkman showed him something, and he is anxious not to drop it, which he will, he fears, if he stops or talks, so he brusquely weaves through the crowd to the street and hopes (!) his wife will keep up, but she willfully tarries and dawdles and constructs a show tent around her own particular needs and it takes time to raise this tent and time to greet her parents and to say good-bye and strike the tent, so they will argue, he knows, when she is through and good and ready and gone.

V

J
AMES
J
OYCE LEARNED
N
ORWEGIAN
in order to read Ibsen. It's tough to be in a bar in Brooklyn on a rainy night, after a row with your wife on the platform for the No. 2; after stomping off and out of the station, in protest and a certain coldness—from the She, from the surround, the ache-inducing iron and steel and the acrid tunnel breeze like death. That smell again. It's tough, but then, the night air is cold like a drink of water. You are thirsty for the water. And there's the soft orange glow
of neon over there, some script in reverse on the damp street. Go there.

What was the fight about? The usual. He's too “distant.” So there you are in a bar in Brooklyn on a rainy night; on a whim, you are reading letters written more than a century ago by two great artists. A scotch. There may be a hockey game from—Liam checks in for a minute—Montreal on the big screen, but Liam is in the archives of a defunct Irish newspaper.

            
Jeg har ogso laest—eller stavet mig igennem en anmeldelse af Mr. James Joyce i “Fortnightly Review” som er meget velvillig og som jeg vel skulde have lyst til at takke forfatteren for dersom jeg blot var sproget maegtig.

Yes, Joyce learned Norwegian—Dano-Norwegian—in order to read Ibsen, and as an eighteen-year-old he wrote a review of what was to be Ibsen's last play,
When We Dead Awaken
—the play that followed
John Gabriel Borkman
. Ibsen got wind of it, somehow—he struggled to read the young man's review. He wrote a note in his own language, care of the
Fortnightly Review
, which Joyce translated:

            
I have read or rather spelt out, a review by Mr. James Joyce in the
Fortnightly Review
which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.

And it's nice and warm in the bar. Liam Brogan is at one empty end, the glow of his BlackBerry dealing mysterious hands into his reading glasses, darting hearts and diamonds.

            
I wish to thank you for your kindness in writing to me
, wrote the young Joyce in reply, gamely in Norwegian.
I am a young Irishman, eighteen years old, and the words of Ibsen I shall keep in my heart all my life
.

Another source Liam finds quotes Richard Ellmann saying, “before receiving the note from Ibsen Joyce was an Irishman; thereafter, he was a European.”

            
Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you. Many write of such things, but they do not know. You have only opened the way—though you have gone as far as you could upon it—to the end of “John Gabriel Borkman” and its spiritual truth—for your last play stands, I take it, apart. But I am sure that higher and holier enlightenment lies—onward.

VI

            
DAD,

            
I drank a fifth of vodka last night. A little unusual as I usually drink half that to get me to that comfortable sleeping point. The night started off as a celebration. I had tested out of a comprihensive final exam. Although just a small insignificant community college class. I had done so well that the proffesor decided that I had done enough to be excused from the final two weeks and skip the final. A proud moment for me to say the least. As I sat at the computer trying to tell my tale to an assortment of disinterested people, I began throwing back
the shots. Burning as it goes down. The simple act of holding the vile fluid in your mouth will induce vomit. I quickly chase it away with the soothing sweetness of cool green bubbly mountain dew. A flush of warmth grips my face. My mind begins to slip away from thoughts of bills and grdes and kids. I begin to aprediate myself. I start to feel great. To feel important and purposfull. I drink more taking it in easier and easier. To the point where the drink loses its toxicity, and takes on a life giving force. As if I am swimming in a different kind of water. Not the cooll awakening kind that most of us jump into. But a warm velvet like skin covering ever inch of my person. My movements become smooth and methodical. Making each gusture, each statement deep and meaningfull. I become insightfull, reflective. The next shot brings me to a point of thankfullness and regret about the things I should have done. The things I should have done. The things I should have done. The things I SHOULD HAVE DONE! A weight begins to pull on neck. My eyes noticeable become wet. Still high floating, near weightless I drink. My mother. Would she be proud? would she still love me? She Froze to death on a bender when I was ten. Fighting with one of her abusive boyfriends she tried to walk almost thirty miles drunk in a freezing rain. One more. She took her fucking clothes off! Why the fuck would she do that? In the snow and the ice she decided to get naked. The doctors said It was a natural reaction to hypothermia. Maybe she was just saying fuck it. Its cold I am drunk I cant stop drinking
and whoever is in charg of this bullshit fuck you. The next one slides down my throat with no resistance. No need to chase it away. My body is ready. Receiving the poiso actively. My focus shifts to the consumption. I become clumsy now. Oops spilled my drink no. no. I caught it. Fuck! I spilled ths ash tray. I am smoking now. Nearly one for one with the drinks. I don't remember starting. I don't really want to but it goes on. Choking down the acrid smoke gulping down the burning clear fluid. Again. Again. Now two drinks in a row. I hate this fucking life. Fuck you. The house is a fucking mess dinner sucks. You are supposed to love me. Love me god damnit you fucking bitch you don't apreciate anything I do! fuck you! Get away from me! I hate you! All you want to do is take the kids away from me! The door slams as she storms out. What is her fucking problem? Another. I can feel my head slumped on my shoulder. My eyes are darting around. I am still sitting at the computer. I start to feel the urge to play sad songs. Songs that will make me feel. Songs that will make me cry. I want to cry. Secret tears. Tears no one knows about. Tears that are mine and mine alone. They need to come out this is their only release. A flood of emotions, a damn broken on a river of sorrow that builds for a lifetime. finally a chance to flow. I am crying now. Openly weeping. Why am I sad? why am I crying? why am I alone? One more. Its gone now. I smoke my last cigerette, wipe my face, and pass out.

            
Morning. Every one is mad at me. I am alone on the couch trying to dodge the resentfull glares of
people. People who know me and love me. People passing by, trying to start their day. My mouth Feels filled with sand my head with cotton. I realize as I get up to piss. I had taken all my clothes off.

            
And somehow I'm here. In the Motel Six business center. Im gonna hit send. You won't believe how cold it is.

VII

“S
OMEBODY SHOT
O
BAMA
.” The statement was heard, but apparently only by Liam. Then he heard it again. The bar was crowded now; it was midnight. All the young Brooklyn writers were there, as couples. They had nice clothes on, the women in flouncy dresses and fancy shoes, heels, straps across their long, bony insteps; the men in expensive sport coats over chambray shirts and flannel; they all wear stylish eyeglasses. Liam had been staring at them a long time. He places his hand across the forearm of a woman in a long dress and bandana who's been sitting next to him while he plunged through his BlackBerry. He's noticed her now. She seems like, well, a neighbor. She smells like that perfume that smells like pot and that Liam can never remember the name of. Howdy, neighbor. She turns to him, and she's the image of a woman on the cover of Brautigan's
Trout Fishing in America
. Arguably. Granny glasses. Gap-toothed. Loose. “Somebody shot Obama?” he asks her. “Really?” she says. “I'll tell my husband.” Liam notes to himself: She said
rilly
.

She leaves a small stack of Kennedy half-dollars on the bar as a tip. The bartender—a narrow blade of a dude with an earring and a crew cut and a tight T-shirt—sweeps them away. “Mr. Clean,” Liam surprises himself by saying. The
bartender looks back and winks and shouts “Okay,” over the din. “Quiet!”

Pointing a remote into the air in a
Sieg Heil
salute, the bartender turns one after another of the five TVs overhead from what was the traffic feed—Liam realizes the bar's called Traffic and the music just now being slowly turned down is “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys,” the Steve Winwood piano running down toward silence—it's a high-concept bar, like out of a Jonathan Lethem novel.
He's
here, too, with wife #3. Why does Liam know this? It's like a dream, or some dreams, where you are character and narrator both. On television is the cock-jawed Brian Williams in a tux, looking grim. Everyone is watching.

I
N THE BACKGROUND
, in a bar that's emptied, a muted, off-key Chris Wood saxophone solo sounds. “Around this time, springtime, early April, on a Saturday morning there was nothing going on,” says Liam. “Parents weren't around in those days to entertain you, take you to things. Dad had showed me how to fish; how to dig for worms and bait a hook and be careful. So some April days there'd be a smell in the air that made me want to fish; the smell sort of said,
Fish now
. And I would feel that it was good to fish; it was industrious; it was natural. The fish or the stream wanted me to fish.” Liam dabs at a puddle on the bar. She stops him.

“The worms were there at the corner of my grandfather's garden, near the burn barrel, wanting me to dig them, bring them to some other wilder reality. And so I would go and get the round-pointed shovel out of the garage and bring the green bait can if I could find it or use one of the slender Prince Albert cans my grandfather'd discarded, a small tin flask with
a snap top, and I'd head down the hill to the garden. I'd turn over six or eight shovelfuls of dirt thick as fudge and wait to see the purplish worm slowly squirming, sometimes only its tip visible, nosing around blindly in the fresh cut of air. I'd pry them out with my fingers and into the can they would go, with a little tuft of grass and the black dirt.

“The bait can would go in the creel; I'd check out the pole, see that it had a hook on it, Eagle no. 9; take a few extra hooks and a jackknife; there was a can of bug spray in the creel, old and rusty—Off.

“I'd walk up the hill past Ryan's Feed Store and up the old abandoned broken-up pavement along the brook. In the trees it was dark and the only sound was the rushing of the brook, always high in the spring with snowmelt. I'd get in deep enough and look for those pools Dad had told me held the promise of trout, as if they were lingering there, holding themselves steady and unseen beneath the surface, waiting for feed to wash through. Kneeling on the bank, I would begin the difficult process of baiting a hook, which began first with trying to extract a worm from the can; they all seemed to know how to burrow in and disappear; but one would soon be captured, and though it writhed in my hand, the barb of the hook sounded him into mindless pain and then surrender as his body, against its will and by degrees, became the meat sleeve of the barbed metal shaft.

“
Plink
, into the water the hook would go, the dark curl of meat tightening into a ball for a moment before unlacing and flailing there in the current. I'd wait in the loud watery din for a tug.

“When one came, it was like some stranger suddenly touching you intimately or somewhere where you did not control the reflex—a swab stick on your tonsil, the hammer
tap below your patella. It got your attention right to your spine. The idea of a trout is pure muscle, the idea of twitch, muscle twitch defined against the press of the water, redefined at the end of the pole in your hand when the trout flips into the free, wary air, snapping back and forth like a wound up something, and you start marching in a controlled panic, your sneakers splashing to land the snapping catch into the brush, where you don't care if the reel gets wet behind you or if the line tangles as long as you get that trout, furiously snapping its green silvery red-speckled body, hung up on a branch.