Magnetic Field(s) Page 5

  Instead he focused his mind on the escape plan. He was walking straight toward the man, who now looked up as he climbed his own front steps. A look of puzzlement came over his face for just a moment. He stopped, looking Albert in the eye, and asked, in a voice whose sarcasm made Albert furious, “Can I help you?”

  “No,” Albert told him, continuing to move now toward the neighbor’s lawn. “You cannot help me. I was just back there.”

  The man had continued to come closer. He was not afraid. “Well, what the hell were you doing back there?” He was demanding an answer. Now would have been the time to have the gun. Now would have been the time to push the big barrel of the gun into that face whose pinkness came from all this, this house, this “property” whose boundary he was sure he was now stepping over, going onto the neighbor’s lawn. He would have pulled back the hammer of the gun, saying, “I was back there playing with your toys, with your illegal bootlegging stuff, because this is your life. How did you like it, chump?”

  As he stepped onto the other lawn, he was turning his back on the man, saying, “I was just back there talking with your neighbors.” Now he was walking across the neighbor’s lawn and in about three seconds he would be around the corner of this house in the pedestrian walkway. The fool would think he had run up that walk to the next street, and he would go inside his house. Then he would freak out and call the police. But Albert would be waiting just there, and as soon as the man went inside his house he would stroll down coolly and get into the car.

  He stood by the mailbox, listening to his heart going. He exhaled hard, and then stood silent for a long time with his head bowed before starting to inhale—slowly. He forced himself to do this four or five times, thinking that it was all those fucking locks that had slowed him down. He ought to go in there and take those locks off that sucker’s doors and shove them up his ass. He heard a woman’s voice behind him ask, “May I help you, young man?” She was standing behind the half-open front door, with just her head sticking out.

  “Everybody wants to help me,” he said to nobody in particular as he started to move toward the car. As he got within ten feet of it, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, the pink-faced man coming down his front steps—toward him. He thought of running for it, but figured he could probably beat the man to the car, and that was the best bet for getting away. He did not mind fighting the man and was pretty sure he was not heeled. As he got into the car and began to start it, he saw in the mirror the man behind him, the man responsible for all this. He thought of putting it in reverse and running him down. Suddenly the frame of the rearview was totally filled with something white. What the hell was he doing back there? The trunk lid, of course. The son of a bitch had opened the trunk and was stealing back his stuff. Albert rammed it into drive and floored it, peeling away from the man in a squeal of rubber and a blare of horns as two passing cars swerved to avoid him, the trunk lid bouncing open crazily behind him.

  2 / KINDER­TOTEN­LIEDER

  When he got home, his face felt a little hot and kind of tingly, so he looked in the rearview mirror, and sure enough, he had gotten more sun than he thought. His muscles felt all loose, pleasantly tired. A white Datsun down the street had done a terrible job of parking, its nose end poking diagonally out into traffic. He had done his eighty laps and felt as if he had finally really gotten himself back into shape. When he looked up the steps, he saw a tall young man in a shiny warm-up suit coming out from behind the hydrangea bush that screened off the alleyway leading back to the garbage cans and the gate to the backyard. This guy is obviously casing the place, he thought, but what the— “Can I help you?” he asked, almost snarling.

  “No,” the man said, “you cannot help me. I was just back there.”

  “Well, what the hell were you doing back there?” David demanded. The man was walking away from him now, across the Sanders’ lawn, toward the cut-through. He was obviously trying to get away. But what the hell can I accuse him of, David thought.

  “I was just back there talking with Jim Nabors.”

  Jim Nabors? David thought. He wanted to push past the hydrangeas, to get a look at the back gate. If that was open— But then he almost stumbled over his own typewriter and tape deck.

  Suddenly he was very excited, almost possessed with haste. He ran to his front door but he could not sort out the keys in his pocket. When he did find the right key, he could not get it into the lock. He had put these damn locks on the doors and now he couldn’t get into his own house. He was frenzied with the idea of getting inside to the phone, to call the police, but his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t get the key into the lock, and meanwhile this guy was probably halfway down the next block. He looked over toward the Sanders’ lawn, in the direction the man had gone, and was startled to actually see the man again, walking down the steps of the cut-through, back toward the sidewalk, toward the white Datsun he had earlier thought so terribly parked. David went out onto the porch to see the license plate, but for some reason he could not read it, even though he was looking directly at it.

  Now he became obsessed with getting that license number. He walked briskly down his steps, watching the other man also walking toward the car. When David got to the rear bumper, he saw why he had not been able to read the number: the man had draped a washcloth over the plate. A corner of the cloth was still poking in under the trunk lid, as if it had somehow been accidentally pulled out of the trunk, and had somehow fallen into this position. He had to admire the man’s imagination and attention to detail even as he yanked away the cloth, only then realizing that the trunk lid had not in fact been latched. It stood ajar now, and through the opening he could see part of his stereo. He yelled out, “What!” and pulled open the lid. He reached in and got his turntable, all the time reminding himself to keep his cool, to stay cool enough to remember the number, and repeating it aloud to himself over and over. Just then the car pulled away down the street, the trunk lid bouncing up and down violently. And as the car receded he stood there on the sidewalk holding his turntable out in front of himself, wanting to say something to the man, hearing himself yell out, “Z-N-two-four-three-seven!”

  Later he would tell this story, and he would laugh at himself at this point. “I don’t know what the hell I meant,” he would say. “Maybe I wanted to tell him, ‘I’ve got your number!’ But I didn’t want to take any chance of forgetting it. Actually, I ended up really liking that repetition: I used it in this new piece Anselm and I are supposed to have finished.”

  “Is that the Champs Magnétiques?”

  “Right.”

  “When are we going to hear that, anyway?”

  “Well, you don’t just hear it. You’ve got to get inside it. It’s an environment. You’ve got to get inside it and walk around.”

  “Well, when are we going to get to walk around inside it?”

  “Oh, you know—”

  The worst part about getting robbed this time was—“Well,” he would say, “eventually every part seems like the worst part. The cost is really nothing, because of the insurance. But what if Danny had been there? Or Jane? What if the guy had been armed? The feeling of being violated, of having your privacy invaded, that’s pretty bad.”

  “I came in,” Jane would add, “and found my underwear strewn all around the bedroom. He had been into everything. And then when the cops came they walked through, and here are all my bras and panties lying out in the open. It was like being violated twice. You feel you have no secrets left.”

  “And then we had to tell the summer tenants, the people who were going to take our place for the summer. The guy hit us a week before we were scheduled to go back East, and these total strangers now have to be told they’re going to be spending the summer in some sort of high-crime area. But it worked out: we didn’t tell them about the first burglary—which I think was done by the same guy. He came in through the same window, he went for the same stuff. But anyway, that’s why we ended up installing the burglar alarm.”
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  The house Anselm had gotten them for the summer had also worked out—a big rambling old two-story brick house painted white, with what seemed like a whole collection of roofs, all of them metal, all seeming to slope at different angles. The only problem with it was the bees. The house stood by itself at the very edge of the woods, at the end of a gravel road, and somehow the bees would get into the kitchen, and then they’d beat their brains out against the windowpane trying to get out. Every morning somebody had to sweep up a couple of dozen dead bees.

  But it was great for Danny, who had the whole woods to explore, the whole world of nature right outside the door, all the way to the bank of the Hudson itself, only two miles away. And in the other direction, about half an hour by foot, was the campus of the college, with six newly resurfaced tennis courts and a student union where Danny immediately figured out how to beat the two old pinball machines, so that, even though they were no challenge at all he was able to show the other kids—mostly summer kids his age in for the music camp—how to beat them, and so made some friends, with whom he wandered around the woods setting off firecrackers. Sometimes he would bring some of the kids home and jam with them if they played the right instruments and were into rock, but most of them were super-casual friends who changed every two weeks, with the sessions of the music camp, and most of them were pretty straight classical types. On any given day you would run into two or three of them practicing in the woods—not just flutes and clarinets but trumpets and trombones, and one day David ran across a skinny girl with frizzy hair playing her cello right in the middle of the path. She had carried her little folding canvas chair and her music stand, and was sitting there serenading the beeches with something largo from the Brahms First. At least she was playing it largo. It would have been wonderfully romantic if she had been any good. But still it was pleasant. Danny made a great show of being scornful of these kids, saying, “If we had a long enough extension cord I would bring my axe out here and blow these turkeys away.” But the next day as David was walking down the gravel road—just to clear his head—he heard the sound of a blues harp coming out of the woods, and when he got to the clearing there was Danny, sitting with his back against a tree, practicing a three-bar figure over and over again. “Hey, Dad,” he said, standing up and putting the Hohner in his back pocket, “want to play some basketball?”

  François was the only local boy Danny’s age. His father was a Canadian who had come down from the Maritimes years ago to teach physics at the college. They knew Anselm, but only casually. They lived in an amazing rabbit warren of a house right on the bank of the large creek (the Sawkill) that flowed into the Hudson. The father was endlessly in the process of building it, using only the logs and stones of the area, but cut and joined and finished with a remarkable craftsmanship. All the exposed wood and stone and all the indoor plants made being in the house barely distinguishable from being outside it.

  Jane said, “It’s a lovely house to visit, but I don’t think I could live there. I need a little more of a feeling of civilization, I think.”

  “Amen,” David said.

  “And the sound of the waterfall twenty-four hours a day would drive me bananas.”

  “Does François play an instrument?” David asked Danny.

  “Yeah. Tennis racket.”

  “Is he any good?”

  “He’s not bad. He’s going to teach me how to hit an overhead.”

  François also had a good collection of comic books. The only time Danny really felt lonely was in August, when François and his family went back up to Nova Scotia for two weeks to visit relatives. That was when Jane saw the archery set at a garage sale, and figured it would be good for Danny, and for them too. It was something they could do together because it was new to all of them and they would all be starting to learn it at the same level, she said.

  It was François who solved the mystery of the secret room for them, but that was much later, just before they went back to California. David had noticed one day as he drove up to the house that from the outside it was bigger than all the rooms accounted for. There was some kind of superstructure tucked away at the back of the building, with its own metal roof that sloped at yet another angle from the others, but that structure somehow disappeared when you were inside the house. It was the kind of thing he told himself he would look into one of these days, but never got around to, telling himself perfunctorily that it was an attic or a storage room of some kind, and letting it go at that, except for those times when he noticed the odd superstructure as he drove up to the house or when he came back to the house by the path that went past the refuse dump in the woods on the way to the river. Then he would tell himself that he wanted to check it out. But almost always, as soon as he got inside the house, he forgot about it. He was much too preoccupied with the piece he was working on with Anselm.

  About every three or four days, he would drive over to Anselm’s studio, or Anselm would come over, and they would have what David called “show-and-tell.” If he went over there, Anselm would start out turning everything on at once until David could calm him down to one projector or one set of monitors at a time. “This sequence,” Anselm was saying, “doesn’t work unless you’ve got six monitors. I want to force the viewer to make those comparisons: ‘Are they in phase?’ ‘Did that sequence repeat this one down here precisely?’ See what I mean?”

  “Yeah. I like it. I like it. I think.”

  On one screen a field of wheat grew, in a matter of a minute or so, from single fine spears of vulnerable green seedlings like chives to a sea of green waving tufted plants, and then ripened to amber, still waving and rippling as the wind moved over it. Then the sequence started over.

  “See, right there,” Anselm said, pointing at the screen as the wheat began to change color and ripen, “right there I want to dissolve in a sequence of actual waves or sea surface, right? This viewer is going to have to work his ass off. No rest for the wicked. And while that’s happening, see, this one over here is tracking on the cemetery—see how those rows of tombstones flow over that hill?”

  “But what I really want you to see,” he went on, leaving David standing in front of the panel of monitors, “is this little beauty. This mother took me three weeks just to do the wiring—”

  “I don’t like the cemetery,” David said, without turning around.

  “This circuit random-cuts between six different cameras, and of course you can set it up for six monitors or six optical printers or six projectors—any way you want to go. So like—here,” switching on another video monitor, “you get six different takes on the same image. Which of course makes it six different images, right?”

  On the screen an amazingly beautiful young woman’s face was looking directly at him, first saying, “Kiss,” and then pursing her mouth in a kiss. The cameras had been arranged all around her head and as she spoke and kissed, David saw her from a random selection of the six camera angles. “Kiss.” The screen was filled with the blonde back of her head. “Kiss.” A three-quarter angle from the left. “Kiss.”

  “Who the hell is that?” David asked.

  “Why don’t you like the cemetery?”

  He loved the mornings, those heavy wet summer mornings of the Hudson Valley. Often he would wake up very early, in the blue-gray light of dawn, lying for a long moment on his side, gazing out the bedroom windows that looked back up the long straight white gravel road flanked by the woods on one side, conscious of Jane beside him, her body heavy with sleep. He would lie there listening to the birds and, under that layer of sound, the occasional groan or creak of the house, his wife’s breathing, an insect humming. He would get up then, quietly, and take his clothes downstairs. The house was so delicious then, when everyone was asleep, leaving it to him, and he loved being able to leave it, to go out onto the porch naked and put on his clothes out there, feeling the soft airs of summer on the skin of his body. Then he would walk, either through the woods to the river or up the gravel road toward the coll
ege. The world then was being given him, in the creak of the branches as he walked past them, the soughing of the leaves, the crunch of the gravel under his Keds. He walked all the way to the college, realizing as he drew nearer that he actually was hearing angelic voices. It was the kids from the music camp. They were in the chapel practicing Fauré’s Requiem. He wanted to get closer, to hear it better, but they were so far away, the voices so faint, that every step he took on the gravel crunched out the music. He ended up walking a few paces and then standing still to listen. He wished he had thought to bring the tape machine. He would bring it tomorrow. He would track in on the music, finding the exact place on the road where he would first be able to hear it, the precise threshold, and then track in, getting closer but leaving the volume steady, so that the listener would feel himself moving toward the source. It would be hot tomorrow; the shoulder strap of the Uher would cut into his shoulder, but it would feel good to be getting to work this early, while the rest of the world was still asleep.

  When he brought the tape machine the next morning, it bothered him at first that the microphone wasn’t directional enough, and was picking up the crunch of his feet on the gravel as well as the music. He could have fixed that with a shield or baffle of some sort, if he had thought about it. But that was part of the world he was recording. He had so often to remind himself that the incidental noises, the background or ambient noise level that we ordinarily tuned out as well as we could—that was part of the experience of hearing anything. Like Cage hearing the random traffic noises as part of the string quartet he was listening to.

  He walked steadily forward, holding the mike out in front of him, his head, adorned with earphones, bowed to watch the VU meters, thinking also that he must look quite weird, like a witch doctor or something, walking down the road at this hour, holding this strange forked wand out in front of him. He knew also that when he heard the playback of this tape he would be able to see this whole morning: the white road, the soft light, the moving wall of trees on his left, the open field on the other side of the road, the blue sky of a summer morning. But what would the listener see? That was Anselm’s job, to give the listener something to look at. As the voices swelled a little, he thought maybe a squeeze shot of some leaves, the camera pushed up to them so tight that the screen was filled only with a green geometry of veins and edges of leaves, then pulling back to reveal, eventually, the whole of the woods. “The forest and the trees,” he thought. As the viewer’s eyes were telling him he was getting out of the woods, getting a more and more encompassing, more commanding prospect, his ears would be taking him deeper and deeper into the field of the music, the domain of the music, the beautiful voices singing about death. But that was not really his concern. Anselm would take care of that.