"Very good. Natural-born uncoverer. And what do you remember about said incident?"
"Keithy, I was just nine years old. I swear I had nothing to do with it."
"Don't be a Hoosier." We sat and looked at the icon, knowing that another word would spell disaster. To self-conscious effect, he took out of his rucksack an acetate overlay. He handed it to me, saying, "Forgot something." I spread the overlay over the photo, and the scene was transformed. It now read, in fancy, living color, 40-point type: "DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE OTHER GUY IS UP TO?"
Keith was wired by now. A wrong guess was worse than none, so I set the composite image down and folded my hands. He explained that his outfit had been hired to free-lance this ad; it would hit the stands in three big-circulation glossies next month. His eyes gleamed. "The bastard will sell," he chuckled. "Apotheosis of vending by fear. Paranoia — our supreme erotic desire. Everyone secretly adores having his worst nightmares orchestrated."
"I thought we bought things we liked."
"Wake up, lady."
"Who's the client?" I asked. "What's the product?"
"God damn it, O'Deigh. Who in hell cares? Haven't you figured this game out yet? Nobody sells products. They sell slogans."
He was right: I thought of all the times patrons had asked me to identify forgotten commodities by dimly remembered sales pitches. The best display in adland, the ne plus ultra of mottodom, was; "The Best Motto Money Can Buy."
We stared at the reconnaissance, pretending to sip at our tepid, distracting narcotic. I could stand it no longer. "A beautiful lettering job. The layout's nice. What would you like me to say?" I had come to try to be kind, but was not prepared to find kindness so messy. I could think of nothing to say that would extricate us.
But I had misread Keith — flunked the economics of compassion. Before I knew what was happening, he was hissing at me, "You want me to quit my job? Make some difference? Go chain myself to the fence at Lawrence Livermore?" He began racing along a mental tangent angle I could not intercept. "You think I don't know what's at stake? You're the one; you don't have the slightest sense of what we're up against. You, with all the facts. You won't sum them up. Look at this." He smacked the photo with a violent backhand. " 'Twenty-one years back.' You still haven't the slightest idea what we're looking at."
I knew I was looking at a triumph of late-day, calculated despair. I knew the sort of product the photo promoted, the market distraction we have inserted between every desire and its itch: the ultimate bottled water, a salt elixir that creates more thirst than it gratifies. I'd heard him deliver the same speech when we lived together, but never so distraughtly, never with such solid supporting evidence.
The waitress's hovering maddened him. On the woman's third return he said, "You want us out of here? Why not put a taxi meter in these booths? Or I can leave a bunch of quarters on the edge of the plexi here, and you can come by every ten minutes and pick one up." He was pacing in place, poking the slots on the napkin holder, squeezing the mustard pump, spindling the straws. I took his hands and held them steady, more wrestler's pin than old flame's cradle. He turned on me, gave me the most menacing smile I've ever seen: "You still don't know the secret word here, do you? You think the issue is apocalypse? The missiles are nothing, dear heart. No-thing." He looked at the photo as if he'd forgotten what the issue was. "How you supposed to take arms against something like this?" His laugh was desperate, falsetto. "Picket?" His voice popped, like a teenager learning to drive a standard transmission. "The product is electronic mail. The advertisement is a finalist for a national award."
I knew that such things existed. But I'd never taken them seriously. "How? It hasn't even run yet."
"Novelty is all. These folks are on top of things. I have to fly to LA next month, because___" He looked at me with caustic pride.
"Because the awards are being televised."
"Who's the sponsor?" I risked. Keith cackled.
"Brought to you by the folks who left you sponsorless." He breathed, clearing an aisle down the minefield between us. "Thing is, I could use a stunning, statuesque, killer beauty in black elbow gloves to drape over my arm." He waited until I could no longer accept gracefully. "Care to help me find one?"
I took him home, where he began communing with the remote control before I was out of the room. At last I asked him what I had come to ask, a question no answer could satisfy. "Keithy, will you be all right?"
He shut the sound off and stared. "Why did you move?"
I manufactured something about room, adulthood, self-reliance, the need for perpetual experiment. I didn't try to explain that I was after the one thing I already knew would not be left me at the end: what it felt like to be alive.
Books
I went through my library this morning, searching for books I might be able to peddle secondhand A bit histrionic, perhaps. Premature. 1 still have cash left, if none coming in. Haven't yet been knocked back onto necessity. But for a minute this morning, I got obsessed with the idea of efficiency, the political economy of plants: capture the energy I need to build just those structures that will let me capture all the energy I need. I forgot for a moment how inept and archaic nature really is. Grotesque encumbrance of peacock tails, koalas' dependence on a single leaf, inexplicable energy cost of narwhal horn: efficiency belongs only to ingenious naturalists.
This morning around ten, I ran out of sentences. It became impossible to type another verb. So I attacked my library, thinking to pare it down. I didn't need both the Times Atlas and my schoolgirl Hammond; I could part with the older almanacs; my Spotter's Sailboats, acquired who knows where, had stood me in all the stead it ever would; I could ditch either Bartlett's or the Oxford Quotes.
But in choosing between these last I rediscovered just how differently two identical purposes could be met and also, indirectly, the source of the note that first persuaded me to come out and meet Todd by streetlight. Running my finger down the entry "Ears,"
hath e. to hear
high crest, short e.
I have e. in vain
in e. and eyes to match me
'Jug Jug' to dirty e.
leathern e. of stock-jobbers
I was struck by the ears that were missing. If not here, then I would need to check one of those great compendia the rearguard guerrilla actions against the scattering of world's word where he cribbed all his love notes. I found them in "Adam's Curse," by Yeats.
I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
The lines turned up in a superfluous anthology I'd ear-marked for sale. The note that had stolen the verses returned to me intact, and with the note, Todd — more real, less efficient than I've yet made him out. And with him, I had what I was after, and my sentences came back all afternoon. And I vowed not to sell so much as a single, redundant letter.
XV
The Natural Kingdom (II)
Q: How big is the biosphere? How high? How wide?
R.G., 5/12/81
Q: What is Life?
E. Schrödinger, 1944, J.B.S. Haldane, 1947