"You're just in time," he said, without glancing over. "Watch." He pressed a button on the remote; was it a new device, or the one we'd owned? The sound flooded on, cataclysmic Carmina Burana—the microphone everywhere in the orchestra at once. On the screen, a casserole apotheosis of meats, vegetables, noodles, and sauces flew through the air in an ultra-slow-motion parabola so charged and erotic that each of its subtle, glacially arcing parts seemed loaded with the symbolic curve of significance.
I watched arrested in horror as epic food rained down upon an ivory-colored antique tablecloth. Every transcendent splash was Bolshoi-choreographed. Succulent streamers of pasta twisted like living things against the sea bottom. Crosscut, pan, slow zoom: every visual stop pulled out to create a late-century masterpiece. The effect, pornographically immediate, more evocative than any Ingres or Master of Flemalle, scooped out my stomach more violently than the real event would have. Keithy killed the set just as the voice-over began to explain what the stain was selling. He leaned toward me in triumph. "No talking toilet bowls for me. When Keith Tuckwell dies, he's going to leave something behind him in the minds of millions."
"That was yours?"
"Essentially."
"Network TV? Prime time? My, Keith."
"Yes, woman. I've arrived." No trace of the old self-mockery, no suggestion of see what you lost? He sat back in his chair, at peace with his times. I don't know what I'd expected, what I'd hoped to say to him. In thirty seconds, I remembered how hard it was to say anything at all. I asked how he'd been. "Since when?" Had he been eating well? "Well, but not prettily." Gotten out any? Been dating? "A veritable salad bar, a smorgasbord of women. Cold women who dress in red and black. Women with overbites — very frail. Women who know all there is to know about structural engineering. Black women who drift down sidewalks humming de Falla. Leggy blondes in pastel who have never known unhappiness. Women who keep great secrets. Auburn-haired beauties whose neuroses periodically flame out like__"
I let him improvise, absorbing my due. But it was no punishment. He was too happy. An intercom call a minute later, playfully rhythmic, revealed the reason. He buzzed the caller in without asking identity, and opened the door on a heart-stoppingly glamorous girl who wore, with poised authority, incredibly expensive Italian-tailored rain-forest green and a rope of pearls. Keith introduced us without a ripple. I didn't catch her name, but the way she shook my hand and said how much he'd told her of me laid out everything.
She excused herself to take a powder, something I hadn't realized women still did. "Keithy." I said. "You can't marry this woman."
He looked at me, lips cracking. "Why not?"
"She'll stay for long periods in the bathroom with the door closed. She'll be two hours dressing, just to take the trash out. You'll be miserable. This is just a rebound."
He waited an arch second. "Too late. Your invitation's already in the mail." His date returned. "We're going out," he said, his suit now giving an entirely different account of his emotional state of affairs. "No need to wait up." They left, leaving me watching television in a stranger's apartment, knowing the exact, private locking-up routine on my way out.
Nights in my apartment I sat in the rocker, watching Todd's goods disappear of their own volition. I reviewed the old photo gallery. I remembered how he arranged his notebooks near the bed, so he could reach them rapidly in the dark. How he bought milk so he could stare at the photos of Missing Children on the cartons. How, when he lost his patience with food, he could survive for days on charges of whipped cream straight out of the can. How his body sometimes lurched in an electrostatic jerk of total fear before falling off to sleep.
I was at last militantly alone. I would probably have stayed in that condition, habituating to it until I no longer noticed, had not the phone rung one night, Todd on the other end, hoarsely whispering, "I've killed the man."
XXV
Disaster
Information thrives on it, a larger part of the daily paper than anything except ads. Annuals feature it, the most prominent and dependable heading. Almanacs compile numbing numbers lists— freakish accounts aligned in fatal categories, Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The calendar is just a disaster register. March 27: strongest earthquake to hit North America, Anchorage, 1964. Worst aviation disaster in history, Canary Islands, 1977. Mount St. Helens, 1980. Next morning rounds out the elements: Kwangtung ferry capsizes, last year. Bolts from the blue, tears in the fabric. The word's etymology blames bad stars. But nothing is so mundane or ensured. All information, every signal and search, will collapse into noise, lost to sudden, shocking, disastrous commonplace.
Restricting myself to the seismic/volcanic category of Information Please, summing the conservative death estimates for the last hundred years, I get an average of thirty people a day dying from the locution of speech reserved for impossibility: the earth moving underneath them. Flood, drought, famine, hurricane, tornado, tidal wave, avalanche — tea visitors, daily mail. And the constructed catastrophes: hotel catwalks leaping free, tenement fires, airplanes dropping out of the sky. Motor-vehicle deaths in this country equal a large plane crashing daily. An accidental death every six minutes, accidental injury every four seconds. Only accidental birth accounts for anyone being left.
Outside accident accounts for less than 5 percent of American deaths. The rest are tiny slippages within the system, a valve shutdown, a tube burst or blocked, an instruction misread, production idle or fatally overrun. The body, too intricate to sustain, lives in what industry calls the "mean time between failures." Expected, ubiquitous friend of the family — bad stars.
The Morse name has an elegant symmetry: three triplets arranged in simple contrast that sounds panicked even in binary. No word is faster to transmit, clearer to receive than "An event again." Words — those rearguard actions — can't frame it, the infinitely unlikely disappearing into the terminally indifferent. Everywhere, this instant, unrepeatable combinations lost. Cathedrals bombed, cantatas used to wrap fish, years of space exploration going up like a Roman candle, an absurdly kind man who would choke on his phlegm rather than spit, wiped out by a fleck of loose plaque.
Disaster is modest, quiet as termites, low-key as a library dissolving in acid paper. The five-thousand-volume epic biography, life, loves — unique configuration of cells and switches—might be reassembled by trial and error, just as Keats's unwritten work lies hidden in the ad copy of magazines, out of order. Reconstituting Keats would be child's play in comparison.
Disaster is a junior page accidentally reshelving a one-of-a-kind manuscript by the wrong call number. Someone comes looking for the work, sure that it contains the explanatory key long overlooked. But the tome is not where the catalog assigns it. The manuscript, in any number of random places, is annihilated in improbability. How lost? Say the library is big, big beyond combing. Say it contains a few thousand books for every organism ever brought into unlikelihood. Say it contains a record of every geological tick that brought into existence, from out of bare rock and trace atmosphere, this implausibly kind man. No search will ever turn up that misshelved manuscript.
The "Disasters" sheaf in the vertical files professes to have the numbers in hand. It gives the erosion calmly, in columns of sandbagging statistics, the way good breeding compels a person to say, "Never mind; it's nothing," even when everything has now gone irretrievably wrong.