Russell Hoban: The Bat Tattoo

Next morning I took his notebook off the work-bench, and when Mom asked me if I’d seen it I said no. I could read most of the words but I couldn’t understand very much and there were numbers and symbols I couldn’t make head or tail of. I hid the notebook in a cigar box in my sock drawer for when I got older.

Right after Dad’s death my mother was on the phone a lot. A big man in a dark-blue suit came to the house, his aftershave was like a kick in the head; his eyes looked as if they’d been shot in with a rivet gun; you could tell from his smile that he enjoyed his work. He looked around at the furniture and the carpet and the wallpaper. He had a briefcase and he took some papers out of it, then Mom sent me out of the room while she talked to him. I listened at the door but they were too quiet for me to hear anything; I looked through the keyhole and saw Mom signing the papers.

After he left she just stood there looking out of the window. I asked her if that man was going to take away the furniture and she said no. Then I asked if he was the undertaker and she said no, there wasn’t going to be a funeral. She told me that some people left their brains to science and Dad was doing that with his whole body. ‘His brain too?’ I said. I was thinking of all the ideas he had in his head, like perpetual motion; I was thinking of the words he hadn’t said.

‘Well, yes,’ she answered, ‘they’re taking all of him.’

‘What are they going to do with him?’ I wanted to know. I wondered what kind of experiments they had in mind. I could see him high up on a platform in a thunderstorm where lightning would strike him.

‘They’ll do whatever scientists do,’ she said, ‘and he’s bringing home more money this way than he did when he was alive, so be proud of your father. He finally achieved perpetual motion.’

‘Is he in Heaven now?’

‘I don’t know where he is but it’s just you and me from now on. He’ll be missed at the liquor store but they’ll have to stagger on without him.’

‘I’ll miss him too, won’t you?’

‘Oh yes, but, like they say, there is a Balm in Gilead.’

‘Where’s Gilead?’

‘I’ll let you know when I find it.’

The first I heard of what was really happening was that afternoon. I was out on our front walk killing ants with a hammer and Herbie Johnson came by. ‘Are they going to let you watch when they crash-test your dad?’ he asked me.

‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

‘Don’t you know? They’re going to strap him into the driver’s seat of a car and crash the car into a wall — they must figure he’s got the experience for the job.’

‘Don’t come around here with that crazy kind of talk,’ I said. ‘I’ll crash you into a wall.’

‘My father works at Novatek,’ said Herbie, ‘and he’s the one who told your mother they pay good money for dead bodies and they use them for dummies to test how safe a car is.’

That’s when I punched him in the face and he went home. And then I was left with Dad in my head singing ‘From This Moment On’ and smiling at me. Years later I bought a Frank Sinatra tape with that song on it but I always fast-forwarded past it. Psalm 137, though, that my mother used to sing to her own tune — I’ve got that on a CD with Boney M: ‘Rivers of Babylon’. ‘By the reevers of Bobby-lahn …’ they sing, and they don’t sound as if they’re sitting down by the water — they’re on a long dusty road and they’re moving right along, going somewhere. I’ve got recordings of Psalm 137 by the choirs of King’s College and Trinity College, Cambridge, Westminster Abbey, and Wells Cathedral, and they all sound like choirs in a church.

It was the summer of the last year of his life when Dad took me out to Cranbrook to see the Orpheus fountain by Carl Milles. We drove out there one afternoon, just the two of us. The heat waves were shimmering over Woodward Avenue and the smell of the upholstery in the car almost made me sick; when we got on to Lone Pine it was cooler because of the trees. We parked the car, walked through gates and an archway, went past a sculpture that I don’t remember, then down some steps, along a promenade, up some steps and through some columns, and there it was: eight naked bronze figures, male and female, all in a circle around the spray that was coming up in the centre. The figures were realistic but smoother and simpler than real people and very athletic-looking. Some of them had their arms uplifted and some didn’t; all of them seemed to be listening for something, listening so hard that their bodies stretched out and their arms and legs grew longer. All of them had one foot touching some foliage but that was only a support for the bronze; the figures were suspended in mid-air, suspended by their listening. One of the men was holding a bird in his right hand and with his left he motioned it to be quiet. The girl to his right had turned her face away and raised her hands, almost touching either side of her head as if she was saying, ‘No, it’s too much!’ The listening seemed to go all the way up above the green of the trees to the blue sky and white clouds over us. There were mallard ducklings swimming in the fountain. The bronze looked cool; the water sparkled in the sun and a breeze was blowing the spray towards us. There was a smell of fresh-cut grass and flowers, purple ones that I didn’t know the name of and yellow daisies. I heard birds in the trees. ‘Remember,’ said their voices, ‘remember the listening of the bronze people.’

‘What are they listening for?’ I said to Dad.

‘The music of Orpheus. He made such wonderful music that he almost brought his wife back from the dead.’

‘Are these people dead?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Where’s Orpheus?’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is one of the women his wife?’

‘I don’t think so. All that’s here is his music and these people listening.’

I listened hard but all I heard was the whisper of the spray and the splashing of the water falling back into the fountain basin. ‘I don’t hear any music,’ I said.

‘The music is in the silence,’ said Dad.

But I thought it must be very faint and far away from those eight in the fountain; they seemed to be trying hard to hear it, yearning for it to come to them. One of the men seemed to be saying, ‘Louder!’ with his arms up, both fists almost clenched as if he was trying to pull the music out of the air.

‘I don’t think they can hear it either,’ I said to Dad. There was a sadness welling up in me that was almost choking me. ‘They’re trying but they can’t hear it. Can you?’

‘No.’

‘But you said the music was in the silence.’

‘It is but it’s not music you can hear. You keep trying but you can’t hear it. Maybe that’s all there is.’

‘All there is to what, Dad?’

‘All there is to what I can tell you.’ He rubbed the top of my head and gave me a hug. We had our cooler with us and we went and sat down on the lawn to eat our ham-and-cheese sandwiches and drink our drinks. Dad had his regular beer, Stroh’s; I had a soft drink called Vernor’s. I can almost remember the taste of it: sweet and gingery and the first swallow made you sneeze. While we ate and drank we watched the fountain people and the ducklings and the other visitors. That was the only time I ever saw the Orpheus fountain. Even after I was old enough to drive there myself I didn’t; I was afraid I might not feel what I felt that time with Dad. It was something that I saved inside me.

After Dad died and then got smashed up again as a crash-test dummy I didn’t do very well in school and I didn’t feel much like talking to anybody. Mr Falco, the art teacher, gave me some clay and modelling tools. ‘Maybe your fingers feel like talking,’ he said. I tried to make a figure like the ones in the fountain but it wouldn’t stand up; the legs gave way and the arms fell off. Mr Falco showed me how to make an armature, and then I did a figure of a man reaching for the music he couldn’t hear. It wasn’t very good but Mr Falco said it wasn’t bad for a first time with clay.