Nicholson Baker: Traveling Sprinkler

I went back two weeks later. Hannah broke up with Tim and moved away, and Tim got a better job at Tufts University, but I’ve been an attender at Kittery Friends Meeting on and off since. That’s what you are: you’re an attender. After you’re an attender for a while, you can become a member, but I’m happy just being an attender.

• • •

I HAVEN’T MOWED the lawn recently because I don’t want to buzz through all the dandelions. My new plan is to smoke one enormous ugly cigar per week. Just one — or two, or three, or twelve if it’s necessary. A huge nasty grotesque cigar, not from Cuba, because fifty years ago Kennedy imposed a trade embargo on cigars — first securing twelve hundred H. Upmann Petit Coronas for himself and his friends — and since then we have tortured and isolated that impoverished country, all because its inhabitants “embraced” Communism. What they embraced is a hope that things could be better. That’s all they embraced. These tags that people use: freedom fighter, terrorist, Communist, fellow traveler, dupe, stooge. I want to forgive everyone. I want to do better with my life. Maybe doing better is somehow finding a way to make people’s imaginations work better.

Imagine a drone. Can you imagine a drone? An unmanned aerial killing machine? I will try. I read that they sound like lawnmowers. Here I am in my driveway, listening, and — yes — I can hear a distant lawnmower. What if I knew that that aerial lawnmower could at any moment blow up my house? What if in trying to blow up my house it blew up Nan’s house, killing the chickens, killing both her and Raymond?

Tim told me he’s going to write a book about drones. A few years ago he went to the Hannah Arendt conference at Bard College, where a man from Atlanta gave a talk on robot warfare and how it was inevitable, and how very soon drones would have software that incorporated the rules of warfare so that onboard drone computers could decide, using either-or algorithms, whether a target was legitimate and whether a missile attack would result in an acceptably low number of civilian casualties. Then the drones would not need any human operators living in Syracuse or Nevada. No human person would ever have to push a button to fire a drone missile. Everything would be preprogrammed and hands-free and guilt-free. Tim came back from the Bard conference very upset, and he began making notes for his drone meditation. Will Tim’s book do anything at all to stop targeted killing? Possibly. Probably not. I have no faith in books to stop anything. You need something more than a book. If I wrote a poem against drones, would that help? Not a chance. You need more than words. You need shouting. You need crowds of people sitting down in the road. You need audible outrage.

I have just reread parts of the article in The New York Times that upset me so much. It’s about President Obama’s kill list. Why is a kill list a bad thing?

It’s a bad thing because — oh gosh, where to begin.

• • •

I BOUGHT SOME BUNNY-LUV CARROTS and a bottle of Pellegrino and I aired out the picnic basket in the sun so that it would smell fresh. Then I remembered my car. It was a horrendous mess — papers were in there, and paperbacks, bags of old things, empty pouches of Planter’s trail mix (“Join Mr. Peanut on a taste adventure”), sand, and now cigar ash. The ashtray was positively Pompeiian. It wasn’t up to birthday snuff. I drove to the convenience store and I threw out all the trash and put quarters in the jukebox of emptiness and vacuumed the sand out of the passenger side — and the old ends of antacid, and the very dirty pennies that were stuck together from coffee spills. I heard the coins clack up the hose and I liked the sound, and I heard the sand granulate up the hose and I liked that sound, too. But still the car wasn’t clean.

I went to the gas pump and got some paper towels and I dipped them into the squeegee water and cleaned the mud and dirt off the edges of the passenger door. That’s the first thing you see when you open the door. I got the car looking reasonably kempt, as if I wasn’t some homeless guy with a decrepit car. While I was cleaning, the smell of the windshield water got to me and I started to think, You sad fool, you’re preparing for this picnic as if it’s a date, but it’s not. You’re seeing your dear friend Roz. You’re not winning her back.

• • •

I WANT TO KNOW more about songwriters. I went to Antiquarian Books on Lafayette Road to look through the music shelves. John, the owner, who is an enthusiastic member of Mensa, says he has a quarter of a million books, plus a Babylonian tablet in storage that he wants to sell for one point five million dollars. His aisles are ten feet high and double-stacked on each side with book piles — some of the aisles are so completely booked in and narrow that you have to walk sideways. John has gotten a bit portly, and some aisles he hasn’t been able to fit into for years. He has an adults-only collection in the back — I’ve bought some racy things there to read with Roz.

This time I bought Chuck Berry’s memoirs, a biography of Kurt Cobain, and a scarce collection called Outstanding Song-Poems and Lyricists , edited by a theatrical agent, which has many hundreds of songs written by obscure men and women who, in 1941, were eagerly hoping for their words to be set to music. There were love poems and antiwar poems and pro-war poems, all waiting for singers to sing them. On page 206, I read the beginning of a song by Mrs. Percy Halbach:

The nights were new; what did you do?

You ruined my life completely; we were making love so sweetly

You big bad moon.

Not too shabby, Mrs. Halbach. John said, “My best customers are the submarine men, because they never get claustrophobia when they’re halfway down an aisle.” When I left, John was negotiating with a cheerful couple who wanted cash for their trunkful of nineties VHS porno tapes.

I parked in the Starbucks parking lot and lit a Murciélago cigar with a black bat on the label— murciélago means “bat” in Spanish — and began reading about heroin overdosages in Kurt Cobain’s biography. Suddenly there was a crunch and the car lurched forward. My head was thrown back and my new Craftsman’s Bench cigar cutter flew into my coffee. I said, “What the fuck?” and got out, expecting to see damaged metal. A young woman with hoop earrings emerged from a big white sedan, her hand on her clavicle. She’d backed right into me. “I am so, so, so sorry,” she said. We studied our bumpers — no harm done. She apologized again. I said, “I’ve done it myself, it’s all good, no worries, bye.” She got in her car and drove off. A lot of life is like that.

• • •

IT’S AMAZING TO SEE the little kids in Quaker meeting, how they learn to sit quietly. They only have to sit for fifteen minutes, and then they go downstairs to paint peace signs on stones, but at first they can’t do it and they poke each other and laugh and twist in the pews and climb on their parents’ laps and whisper and tap their feet. Or they page through picture books. You can hear the long, slow turning of their wider-than-it-is-tall books. It’s like the pages are being cut with a paper cutter, schwoooof. Then eventually the silence begins to work on them. There’s a Swiss writer who wrote a book called God Is Silence .

The dumbest thing I ever did was not having children. Absolute dumbest thing. Even worse than selling my bassoon. I see the error now. My sister’s kids are turning out great. They were shockingly spoiled when they were little, but now their true personalities have taken over and they’re just nice calm tall young people with personalities. One is at Kenyon College studying something with lasers and the other is an intern at a dollhouse museum.