Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

“Are you all right, baby?” she said.

I told her I was fine, that the barn was still standing, and that the insurance guy was coming.

“What about all the boxes? Your dad’s books?”

“Not good. And the canoe is underneath them.”

“Oh no, the canoe! What can I do? Can I come over?”

I knew she was very busy. “You’re probably finishing a show.”

“Well, it’s kind of a madhouse here today. Nortin Hadler’s scheduled for an interview. This is the first time he’s been willing to talk to us. I could come later tonight.”

“I’d love that,” I said. “But it’ll be late, and really I’m perfectly fine right now. You want to come this weekend? By then I’ll know the damage.”

She said she’d come on Saturday morning.

I said that would be great. I coughed.

“Are you still smoking cigars?” she asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“Because that sounds like a dry cough. Is it a cigar cough?”

“No, I just swallowed some saliva.” I coughed again.

“That’s definitely a cigar cough,” she said.

“Maybe it is. Mark Twain smoked twenty cigars a day. When he stopped, he wrote nothing. The man at the guitar store — I mean the cigar store — the man at the cigar store says that a cigar takes the serrated edge of life and makes it into a straight blade.”

Roz said, “They’ll be cutting a tumor out of your neck with a straight blade if you’re not careful.”

“Jesus, honey. Let’s put that aside. It’s just a temporary crutch. The music is the thing, and it’s going forward at a hundred and twenty BPM. I’m hot, I’m smoking, I’m on a roll. In fact, I’m up on the second floor of the barn at this very minute writing a dance song.”

“What? Come down from there. That’s not safe. The floor just collapsed.”

“You’ve got to take some risks in life.”

“Please, baby, come down from the barn. Will you at least promise me you’ll come down from the barn?”

“I promise. It’s nice of you to worry.”

She said good-bye. She’s so thoughtful. It took three trips to move my equipment to the kitchen table. I clamped on my headphones and listened to what I had so far. It needed more. I went to work with the Trance Kit of sounds, which has a good kick drum and a nice synthesized clap with a hint of rimshot in it for the second and fourth beats. Then I had an idea: I played the plink of the egg slicer on top with some echo synced to the eighth notes. Tasty. I brought another chord rhythm on the Funky Talker. It sounded pretty good, frankly. I laughed and pursed my lips and windmilled my arms. It was pure retro Stevie Wonder, but with a dance beat.

Now I needed some vocals. I hooked up the pre-amp and adjusted the microphone so that it was right at my mouth, and I sang random things. “Egg slicer, ooh, ooh! Slice that egg, ooh, ooh!” Then: “Guan — tan — a — moe-hoh!” I ran my voice through Logic’s phone filter so that it sounded not like me. I sang, “Why can’t you close — Guantanamo?” Then: “Make no mistake — you betrayed our faith.” I’m so tired of hearing Obama say “Make no mistake.” “Make no mistake,” he said in his Nobel Peace Prize speech, “evil does exist in the world.” Which is why he has to ship arms to Libyan rebels and fly drones around everywhere and spread violence and kill people. It’s sickening. Make no mistake? His whole foreign policy is one long string of mistakes. And we’re supposed to get excited about health care. More tests, more drugs, more colonoscopies, more needless invasive procedures. Fuck it!

Then I thought of a stanza in a Charles Causley poem. I hit the space bar to begin my egg slicer loop and I sang

O war is a casual mistress

And the world is her double bed.

She has a few charms in her mechanised arms

But you wake up and find yourself dead.

That was much better than any lyric I could write. Causley’s father died of injuries suffered in World War I. Could I make a hot bumping antiwar dance song out of Causley’s stanza? Probably not, but even if I could, they wouldn’t be my words. I’d have to get permission from his executor, and it would be a whole wrangle. I had to supply my own lyrics.

• • •

I WAS OUT by the half-dead apple tree dancing to Phatso Brown’s remix of “Apes from Space” when the man from Allstate arrived with his clipboard. I showed him the scene of the accident. He made some measurements and took a lot of photographs. He was an enthusiast of post-and-beam construction with a beard, and he seemed to know what he was looking at. He asked about the heap of boxes. “They’re mostly just old papers and books and probably they’re fine,” I said. “As long as it doesn’t rain.” The underbarn has a sand floor and it floods when there’s a heavy rain. There was a canoe down there, too, I added — only a bit of it was visible. He asked about its value.

“What can I say?” I said. “Green fiberglass canoe, Old Town, some happy hours on the river. It probably cost a thousand dollars. Maybe more. It was a birthday present from my ex-girlfriend.” He nodded and made a note. I left him to perform further calculations and sat in the white plastic chair making an intensive auditory study of the dance songs in my iTunes library. There are so many great dance songs — and yet there’s room for more. Or so I thought. I wanted to start a dance song with a woman saying, “And I’ll see you later.” Maybe I could convince Roz to say it. I listened to “Safe from Harm” by Andrew Bennett, and “Save the Last Trance for Me” by Paul Oakenfold, and “Healing of the Nation” by Sherman, and “La Luna” by Blank & Jones, and “Striptease in Istanbul” by Nublu Sound, and parts of four songs by Underworld.

Underworld is good. I discovered them by chance on a long plane flight. I was poking at the touch screen, looking for something to listen to after watching a very good documentary on Picasso and Matisse — Matisse comes off well, and after his operation he uses a pair of large shears to cut colored pieces of paper — and I saw a song on a list called “Bigmouth.” It was a dance number with an insanely honking harmonica and no words, and it was by Underworld, a band who had also created something called “Mmm… Skyscraper I Love You.” Back in the eighties they were doing things I would like to have done — chopping up found voice clips ahead of the game — although they were too tolerant perhaps in their early days of zappy saw-toothed sounds, as everyone was. The song I liked best by them was a more recent one called “Bird 1.” “Bird 1” is about something — I don’t know what — something about a white stick and a shaft of sunlight and a fly and a chainsaw of tiny firecrackers. I’m always a sucker for a shaft of sunlight. It’s stoned, I guess. It’s “poetry.” The chorus is splendid. “There is one bird in my house,” sings the main Underworld man, Karl Hyde. Not “a bird,” but “one bird.” There’s basically only one chord for most of the song, as well as one bird. There are a great many words in the song, however. Most of them don’t rhyme, and as in many great songs, the words aren’t terribly important. I would like to write something like this.

Where is my lighter? I’m simply unable to light a cigar stub outdoors with just a match. I haven’t mastered the technique.

The Allstate man said he had everything he needed. He said it looked like about five thousand dollars’ worth of structural damage, plus eighteen hundred for the books and the canoe — assuming the canoe was a total loss — and he’d be able to get me a check this week. We shook hands and he drove away. He had a sticker on his window that read “Proud Parent of an Honor Student.” I liked him.