The Business of Naming Things (22 page)

He'd have to work on that; it was hardly a sound bite.

He'd have to step on it to get ice and firewood and propane in Plattsburgh.

J
OHNNY HAD ALL HIS PROBLEMS
, and more. He'd bounced from woman to woman, too; he drank. He'd also done a stint in prison—bar fight, assault. Still on probation, Liam imagined, though he didn't stay abreast of all such developments.

Loved the kid, but done him wrong. No doubt, the kid believed that. There was no rinsing it out. It was something that could, at best, be lived with, not removed like some stain. It was there, and that was one of Liam's greatest mistakes, to think such things would fade. After being surrendered by his own birthing mother a few hours after she'd housed him for nine months, all was forgotten, expunged—it was even expunged from the public record, not to mention an infant's memory. Sort of. “I guess that's what we're talking about,” Liam said to the self of him reflected back in his windshield, his glasses with dashboard rubies glinting. He swerved around some roadkill and was shocked to see his first moose standing there on the shoulder, a big rack and chest set high on the ladder of his legs. Liam pulled over, got out, and then panicked. He had a beer can open and he'd been drinking since morning, but Bullwinkle loped off across the lanes into the wooded median anyway, so Liam
got back in the Jeep and roared off, his heart pounding so that a stitch beneath his left pectoral throbbed. He was sure this is how he would die one day—infarction.

There was the necessary stop in Plattsburgh and he made it. There was no need to rush; he'd forgotten—you could get propane at the twenty-four-hour Sunoco station, and ice, and packs of “camp wood.” He picked up a couple of cold ones for the forty-five minutes more he had to go.

Liam was fearless about the drinking and driving, if he wasn't coming out of some tavern establishment. Regular citizens going to and from upstate weren't subject to being stopped unless they were weaving or racing, and there were no troopers on the back roads anyway, so he was safe, safe to relax with a can between his legs, sipping, relaxing, spacing out the ride with thoughts of elsewhere. The final leg of it all went smoothly, and when he made it to the edge of his property in the total darkness, his headlights frighting the pines around him, all he wanted to do was dive inside, find the bed, whack it a few times, light the Coleman, see what he'd been reading last time he was here, and fade away.

A movie screening in a dark, private theater, with couches. Watching with a team of filmmakers—their film—and a few of their friends. Liam doesn't personally know any of them. At first, he is seated next to the choreographer, who seems gay. They share a couch. As the film begins, Liam mentions to him that over there is Alan Good—a dancer he's seen in the Merce Cunningham troupe. Oh, gushes the choreographer, Yes, he was simply brilliant in
Showboat
. Did you see
Showboat
? No, says Liam, laughing. Just the Cunningham company. I don't think I'd go see
Showboat
. The choreographer leaves in a huff. Then a young Russian woman slides in next to Liam. He knows her name, somehow—Valdaya. She has
large head, big green eyes, and a small body. She must be a dancer, he thinks. Valdaya is very friendly, and puts her hand on his chest expressively, very familiar. Liam thinks about cheating on his wife. Someone discreetly appears to take a drink order in a whisper. Liam doesn't know what to have. He is distracted. Valdaya says, “I'll have a Guinness.” Then, Liam doesn't want to have a Guinness; it would appear to be copying her, trying to impress, ingratiate. But he genuinely loves Guinness. He says, “A Guinness.” Valdaya says to him, “‘A Guinness,'” in a low growl, imitating him, her green eyes lifted toward him over a thin grin. He wakes up.

The cabin is bright with light. There is snow in the field all around, which he'd hardly noticed when he pulled in. Perhaps it had snowed during the night. It had; there are no tracks from the car to the front porch, upon which he now stands, shivering. The sunlight reflects bright sheets off the snow and fills the windows with white light, and the two small rooms inside. He goes back in, and he can hardly see for a moment and he closes his eyes. He sees in his mind's eye the tweed coat hanging over the back of a chair, and when he opens his eyes, it is there.

In his earlier days, Liam was part of a literary community—short-lived but real. Poets, artists, dancers, spiritual adventurers. If there was an idea holding it together, it was a belief that the imagination could transform reality. This was practiced and pursued and found in many ways—the poetry of Blake and Coleridge, the writing of Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, Owen Barfield; and even the deconstructionists, who saw that reality was transformed by systems of expression, detrimentally.

To Liam, at first, it was hocus-pocus, no different from his childhood Catholicism: Your belief becomes reality. But he soon learned that the act of imagining could release to
the surface realities within, which then could be incorporated into the reality without, changing it. Drugs and drink and reading did this for him; meditation; going places in his mind and coming back with something; dreams.

His father-in-law had claimed that “fiction is an epistemology, a system of knowing.” The same thing.

Liam didn't really buy it, after a while. He put it down—his own efforts in life could not change anything or anyone, certainly not himself, or his son, or his marriages, or his career. But now he sat at the little square pine kitchen table in a chair opposite the draped tweed coat from Dublin that he'd bought for himself and given his son and seen on television the day before. Where'd that come from?

He'd wait. His son was here.

There was no need for the radio. Liam realized he already knew more than the world.

He forgot about his own little poems, his moment in the harsh limelight. This was real.

Had he conjured something out of the dark? Was he in the true realm of art and faith after all, after all his living? Was this wisdom? If his son would come, he would know. And he would wait.

There was no clock ticking, but the cabin did—it ticked as it settled and adjusted in the wind blowing off the mountain, and did so with a regularity, as if calibrated.

The morning wore on and the headache burned itself out. Liam began to feel clean. He sat at the table with his palms out before him on the comforting pine boards. With his hands flat and his haunches in the chair and wool-stockinged feet grabbing the floor, he had the sensation he was strapped into a moment in time or space—both—captaining himself atop a long sinew of incident, accident, and science that extended
to the core of things, through the floor and the shallow cellar and into the anorthosite upon which this structure was built, down through miles of it to where there were only canyons of lightless magma. He shivered at the thought, but pleasantly, as if part of a universal fascia that was firing everywhere in this blessed moment fired in him.

He held this feeling, captured it with his mind like a wild raven in his hands and then set it free. It flew, but tethered to him by the very logic to which he was tethered to all. It rose above him—or he grew, elevated, through the crossbeams and latticework, the shingles and the chimney flashing and the chimney stones themselves into the network of air, the atmosphere really, past the surrounding pines, in which he could see, now below him, a raven's nest, and then on past the cliff face, gray and wet, and to the bald summit with its two scraggly pines, wind-battered to hat racks of brown needles; and he could see the valley flowing west to Upper Chateaugay like an embroidered train, and beyond, to the St. Lawrence plain and its shimmering silver vein and out there, past that, Canada. Through the forests he could see his son trekking to him, breathing heavily, wandering, lost, looking for his coat, or his father, or something to eat or drink, laboring in a nimbus of his breath, looking for his mother, somewhere, frozen in the turf, her face peaceful, at repose; for the look of love for a grieving son she'd abandoned, he was looking.

All this, but here only an empty coat. Had hours passed? There was little light left, but what there was shot through the low window over the sink and across from Liam, above the lintel, the thin light splashed and danced a line. Words threatening to form, as they had when he was young and fooled with the psychotropics and he'd read distinctly a script in the clouds that he knew and recognized but could not recall or
make plain after; here, on the lintel, a line drew out, in gold and orange, four, five, six clusters, forming and re-forming but holding a certain syntax, an orthography, six signs or words. He peered hard from many angles of view, though he remained in place. He saw this:
Fall in love
. He saw
Fall in love
—it came clear and held—
with what is
. With what is held; and that was that. A cliché to be deleted, per Sonny Rollins? Oh, it held, and he thought for a pen. He had no pen and he did not want to move, but leaned across—Johnny'd have one in the coat. Indeed he did—Liam's own Parker pen, a gift to him from—for crissakes, Christmas. Two months ago. He wrote on the deal table the phrase:
Fall in love with what is
. And then began to panic. What the fuck is this?

That is to say, what is?

And how to love it?

Liam recognized nothing about the space he was in; he realized that he could not say what day it was, only that it was winter. Surely, he could cipher it out, given a little thought, but he surrendered instead to the drift, and resisted sending his mind back to an identifiable date and then marching forward on a hunt for today and nail it. No, he stayed suspended, and the panic, which had gripped his diaphragm, released. He did recognize something, though, about his location in another kind of landscape. He had often in his work found himself right here—at the summit of something, or very near it, having made a certain journey, excitedly, pleasurably, with passion and commitment, as if he were running somewhere he would recognize when he reached it, always only to end up like here, lost, unable to go on or get back down or go home. Not for the first time had he written himself into an impasse—in this case, an empty two-room cabin. He'd done this sort of thing a hundred
times, and here he was again, but somehow with a talisman of what he had given away, draped over a chair.

Somewhere out there was his son. He'd be back any minute; he had to be. The night was coming on—the whole day had nearly passed, and it was beginning to snow and blow. The cabin had given up ticking off its seconds and what he heard now was a long, unmistakable moan. Him.

F
INISHING
U
LYSSES

Y
OU STAND IN THE MIRROR
. Cheeks smart, from the shave. Your blue eyes wander—hooded, you'd say, but that will change. These'll wake you up. You swallow two without water, then rinse your mouth. Thinning a bit, right there. And you missed a spot—the hollow beneath your lip. Look like Diz.

Take stock: Two is a world away from one. This apropos your pack of smokes. You tap your second-to-last out of the pack into your left hand and put it to your mouth. One remains. The pack rattles assuredly. You think that—you know
assuredly
is not right:
assuringly
is, but you like the
d
rattling around in the pack, that sound. Words have body. Should. “Cut the thread but leave the whole heart whole.” Lorenz Hart.
Whole heart whole
—what is that . . . diastole. Heart and soul, right there. Funny: Hart/heart. Homophone.

Back in your shirt pocket. Five is close to four, so close, hardly a difference. Four is close to three, and three to two. But two is a world away from one. Exactly. One left, eternal supply. In reserve, never without one. Good name for a tune.

You finish your smoke, surprised in the rising steam of the hot tap you left running that you see an image of yourself as a boy, your young eager face in the lower right of the glass, looking up. It's Marion there with your baby son—your new son.

—You been in here a while, Bob. You okay? I'm putting him to bed.

Looks more like her, you think.

—You look beautiful, you say. This is the thing, the real thing, doll. The home. You say brightly, My Penelope.

Marion withdraws from the bathroom, from you, with a shy smile. She trusts you are happy, that's all. On the way now to the big family, not as big as yours was—she can't do that. And she knows you don't want that—no ten kids. Soon, you'll be writing for the
News
. And this is your house. You'll pay for it.