Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

After fifteen minutes Donna the clerk said, “We want to thank the children for worshipping with us. Can they shake hands around the room?” The children pushed themselves off their pews with serious faces and shook hands with the people who sat in the first rows of pews that faced the center of the room. There was a shockingly beautiful girl of about six with a barrette that was not doing a good job of holding her hair. She nodded politely as she shook the knobby hand of the oldest of the elders, a thin, tenderly smiling woman who wore hearing-aid headphones. Then the children left and I listened to them thumping down the stairs to the basement. Muffledly I heard the teacher call, “Don’t touch the stuff on the table yet!”

Then again the clock and the silence. I looked down for a long time and bent over, leaning my elbows on my knees, still holding my car key, and then I remembered the helpful tip about posture and I imagined the hooks in my rib cage and sat up. I opened my eyes and I saw that nobody was smiling now and many people had their eyes closed. Time seemed to be going even faster, as if it were a train picking up speed. Many minutes went by. I wondered who would speak. Nobody did. I looked at the clock. It said ten after eleven. I wanted someone to speak. Surely someone would offer testimony about something. But I noticed that the woman who sometimes talked about her birdbath wasn’t there. She was often the first to speak, and once she spoke others did. Silence was all very well, but in order to feel the silence you need a few words.

I didn’t think that I should say anything, because I’d said something about chickens the last time I went. On the other hand, someone should speak. I checked the clock. There were only ten minutes of meeting left. A woman got up and I thought she was going to say something, but she just left to arrange the after-meeting food in the other room. Please someone say something!

• • •

I WANTED TO TELL the Quakers about Debussy’s sunken cathedral. I kept formulating an opening in my head. “A little more than a hundred years ago, a composer named Claude Debussy wrote a piece for piano called ‘The Sunken Cathedral.’ He was a man with a big forehead who loved the sea. His most famous piece of music is called La Mer , the sea. And in one of his early songs he set to music a poem by Verlaine with the words ‘The sea is more beautiful than cathedrals.’ But when he wrote his tenth piano prelude, ‘The Sunken Cathedral,’ ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie,’ he was no longer young and he was harassed by money worries and he had symptoms of the cancer that would kill him and he was thinking that life hadn’t turned out quite the way he had expected.” I wanted to tell them all this, but I couldn’t because it was late, and it was really too much to say in meeting. I always felt a little like a godless impostor among these genuinely worshipful folk.

There were only four minutes of meeting left. I hoped that the woman with the big white hair would say something — she often spoke at the very end of meeting. She was sitting with a slight almost smile and her eyes were closed. Everyone seemed content with the silence. I’ve been reading a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I thought maybe I should say something about Hopkins’s articles on sunsets for Nature magazine. After the Krakatoa explosion, Hopkins wrote three articles for Nature describing the unusual colors of the sunset that he’d meticulously recorded in his notebooks. But there was no time to say that, and it was too raw, really, to be a message anyway. Then again, at 11:29 a.m., I thought I absolutely must stand and tell them about the sunken cathedral. I wanted to say that Debussy played enormous still chords and out of them you can see the smoky blue water and the decayed pillars of the ruined church and the long blue fishes steering themselves down the nave and poking their snouts at the lettucey seaweeds. I wanted to say that in 1910 Debussy felt a great disappointment. That he wrote a friend that sometimes he wished he was a sponge at the bottom of the sea— éponge , a usefully squeezable word in French. But then he came up with this piece of music, the tenth prelude, and in it he created a great shadowy still place underwater, this place of peacefulness where when you listen to the music you can go and watch the medieval fishes swim. I wanted to say that he’d always wanted to noyer le ton, to drown the tonality, and he did it by closing the lid of the piano and holding down the sustain pedal and letting the elements of the chords pile up. I wanted to say, “He was sick, he couldn’t play the piano as virtuosically then as he had in music school, when he could noodle for hours and amaze his fellow students with harmonies they’d never heard before, but out of his sense of disappointment and out of his money worries and out of his new sense of his own mortality he built an ancient crumbling lost ruin that nobody had known about, and we can hear it and see it hanging there or standing there on the seafloor in the silence.” I didn’t say it.

Then it was one minute after eleven-thirty and Donna turned to shake hands with the man next to her, and she smiled, and everyone smiled and shook hands with the people around them. Donna thanked us for choosing to worship there and a visitor introduced herself. She was from Eliot, Maine. A woman announced that the soup kitchen needed volunteers. Another woman reminded us that a man was giving a talk on solar power on Wednesday evening. Then two members grasped the handles on the large wooden panel that closed off meeting from the room where the potluck food was, and pulled it up, not without effort because it was more than two hundred years old and stuck in its frame, and when they’d pushed it up above six feet, another person propped it into place with a long pole. I nodded hello to the old man and to several others and walked out into the marvelous morning sunlight. The woman from Eliot was behind me. “You’re a visitor,” I said.

“Yes.”

I shook her hand. Something made me say, “Most of the time there are messages. Usually people say a few things during meeting. It’s not always totally silent.”

“Oh,” she said. “Do people generally park on the street?”

I said that generally they did, yes.

“Because I didn’t know and I parked up there.” She pointed to her car in one of the spaces in the small lot behind the meetinghouse. “After I did I wasn’t sure if that was all right.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly fine,” I said. I waved my keys at her. “Have a nice Sunday.”

“You, too.” She waved her keys at me.

I walked to my car and lit up the stub of my Opus X cigar and smoked it until the label began to burn. It’s made in the Dominican Republic and wrapped with leaves grown from Cuban seeds.

THIS IS PAUL CHOWDER, sitting in a plastic chair. I want — I want — I want to tell you something new. I feel that I have a new thing.

What is it when you have an urge to produce something, to make something, and it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s good or not? When I was a little kid, in first grade, there was a project that we had to do in class. We were supposed to make a holiday wreath. It was to be made from a bent coat hanger, tied with the plastic wrap that came from the shrouds that went over your clothes when you picked them up from the dry cleaners.

The strange thing was that the dry cleaners that my father went to used blue-tinted plastic. On the appointed day I brought the blue plastic sheet to school. But I noticed that everybody else’s dry cleaner plastic was clean and clear. Mine was blue, and theirs was clear. I was horrified by the idea that I’d brought in the wrong raw material. The teacher gave me some extra clear plastic, but there wasn’t enough for a whole wreath. “You can take pieces of clear plastic and do part of the wreath,” she said gently, “and then alternate with the blue plastic.” I shook my head. Everybody else’s wreath was knotted with thick luscious densely packed bow-ties of clear plastic. I didn’t want to finish the blue-striped wreath, but I did. It was a shaming disappointment. My mother wanted to hang it on the door but I said no. And yet why was I raising a fuss? It doesn’t make any sense. What were we doing making plastic Christmas wreaths, anyway?