Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

Tim said there isn’t a good anti-drone song. I thought of trying to write it from the presidential point of view. I’d have President Obama sing something like “Today is Tuesday and I’m the warrior in chief. My people come into the office and we go down the list. I like to know who’s going to die next. And I like the world to know that I’m a no-nonsense killer man who keeps us safe with robot planes. I like to go out afterward and have a smoke knowing I’ve decided which of my enemies I should kill. Sometimes little children are killed as well, and I’m sorry about that, but that’s what happens, and I can’t comment because it’s classified security information. Today is Tuesday and I’m the warrior in chief.”

But I know that would make for a terrible song — too on-the-nose. Too hard. Too angry. Too ungrieving. Griefs, not grievances, are what we need, said Robert Frost.

• • •

THERE’S AN INDUSTRIAL MACHINE made by the Sturtevant company called a Simpactor. I had a roommate long ago who had an internship at Sturtevant, and he talked about it in detail — interestingly, he was a big Talking Heads fan. He said there are several ways to grind things up fine: you can crush them between rollers or you can send them through an old-fashioned stone grinder, as in a flour mill, or — he lifted a finger — there’s a machine called a Simpactor with a horizontal plate that spins. The coarse chunks fall onto the middle of the plate, where they are flung out toward a set of steel pins around the edge. Some of the pins are fixed and some are attached to the plate and move, and when the pins intersect they gnash and crush the crumbs of substance until it’s just the right consistency. The Simpactor is useful for the pharmaceutical industry, my roommate said, because you need things ground very fine in order for them to be absorbed by the body. “That’s fascinating,” I said, “I had no idea.” He didn’t seem full of wonder at the Simpactor, though — he was much more interested in the Talking Heads concert that was coming up.

Tracy Chapman puts me through a moral Simpactor, breaking me into tiny pieces of uniform diameter so that I can absorb my own inadequacy. I think Tim may be wrong—“Change” may be the greatest protest song ever written. It’s good partly because it offers no specific event or action. It’s not protesting anything by name. It leaves it all up to you. It’s just a series of questions. It asks these questions and prompts you to try to answer them, just as the Quakers ask questions. They have a list of questions called the Queries. Sometimes a woman reads one at Kittery Friends Meeting. One of the queries goes something like: Are you acting with love toward others? And I have to say, No, I’m not. Often I’m not. When I say catty things about Picasso or Ezra Pound, that psychotic, hateful fraud, I’m not bathed with generous feelings. When I imagine sneery songs about Barack Obama, I’m not a loving person at all.

I was making a second deviled-ham sandwich, using what remained in the can, and thinking about the importance of the inductive method, with “Change” on auto-repeat, when I heard some odd loud popping sounds. At first I thought they were something in the song that I hadn’t noticed before, and then I realized that they were from outside the house. They seemed to be coming from the barn. I stopped the music and listened. I heard two loud explosions and then a sort of rolling thunder accompanied by an awful wooden twisting noise that didn’t bode well at all. The dog was barking furiously. I went outside in time to see a large cloud of what looked like smoke ploofing out from the undercroft of the barn, down where I stored the canoe and my father’s collection of plastic packaging.

I said some bad words. Was the barn on fire? Maybe caused by one of my Fausto cigars? No, it was a cloud of dust that was coming from underneath. I went up the ramp and pulled open the barn door, which takes almost superhuman strength because it sticks. Half of the first floor was gone, fallen down into the underbarn, and with it had tumbled about a hundred boxes of books and papers. Most of my collection of old anthologies was down there, the edges of the books visible from torn and squashed boxes — also my father’s art books and his books on the history of chairs, and my mother’s books of medieval history, and boxes of family photographs and letters — all mixed in with miscellaneous junk, a catcher’s mitt, a sun-faded life jacket with mildew stains, my bicycle that I hadn’t ridden yet this year because the chain is broken, Roz’s old bicycle with the bent basket in front, scraps of plywood and planking, a sledgehammer. I saw one of my traveling sprinklers on its side, looking rusty and pathetic, on a box of something marked FRAGILE — STORE ON TOP. I was looking down at a huge hole in the barn with a lot of my life in it. I surveyed the scene for a moment and said, “Fuckaroo banzai.” I didn’t want to go below, in case more of the barn would give way and crush me dead.

I went inside and called Jeff, the barn repairman. A few years ago he’d fixed a sill that had been eaten to a punky powder by bugs. I left a message for him. “Hi, Jeff, it’s Paul Chowder, I hope you’re well. I’ve got a little situation here. Half the first floor of the barn has just collapsed. Things seem to be stable now, but I’d like you to take a look before I start hauling up the boxes.” I left my cellphone number.

Then I went back out. I took another look at the damage and shook my head. I noticed, however, that the steps to the second floor were intact. By holding on to a wooden hook on the wall I was able to sidle sideways over to them and climb upstairs. My little music studio was fine. The microphone was pointing unperturbed at my empty white plastic chair. My keyboard was just where I’d left it. My guitar had slipped from where I’d leaned it against the table, but it was unharmed. I stood in the middle of the perfect second floor, with its neat pile of swept-together bird droppings under one of the tiny side-sliding windows that don’t slide, and I laughed with relief. It’s just boxes, I thought, it’s just stuff. Everything’s fine. Everything’s just fine.

• • •

I WENT BACK to the house and gave Smack the rest of my sandwich and sat at the kitchen table for a while. Roz didn’t answer her cellphone, so I left her a message. I called Allstate and told a nice woman with a Hispanic accent what had happened. She said, “I’m very sorry to hear about the damage to your barn. We can help you with that.” She took down some details and told me to take pictures and said that a claims adjuster would be there later that afternoon. I thanked her and sat for a while longer. I took some pictures of the damage and wrote a paragraph for the record describing what had happened. I unrolled some wire fencing across the low entryway to the underbarn so that no pets or other animals would stray in. Then I climbed back up to the second floor. What the hell. Make some music in the wreckage.

WHAT I REALLY WANT to do right now, I thought, is make a superfunkadelic dance beat. I want people to hear my music and smoke illicit substances and drink mojitos and chew Ecstasy, if that’s what they do, and dance. I want to make people dance. I began layering a seventh-chord rhythm using the Steinway Hall, with another keyboard called Late Sixties Suitcase for the offbeats, and on the fourth offbeat I jabbed in a chord from a clavichord instrument called the Dry Funky Talker — a Stevie Wonder sort of instrument. On top I snuck in a flatted sixth chord for an extra magic-ass squirt of funkosity. I brought in a low, fast double hit for the bassline, a C and a D, using the Bottom Dweller Bass, and I reinforced it with steadily humpty-dumping quarter notes from a different instrument, the Progressive Rock Bass, at a hundred and twenty beats per minute. I was in the middle of quantizing the bassline — forcing it to stick exactly to the beat — when Roz called.