Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

“Boy, they start early at hospitals.”

Roz went off to get a pillow and a blanket. When she handed them to me, she said, shyly, “Do you still want to feel my fibroid?”

“Yes, if you want me to.”

She sat back down next to me. “I think I do. Anyway, this is your last chance. It won’t be there tomorrow.” She took my hand and placed it on her stomach.

“Hm,” I said. “I definitely feel something hard and knotted, but I think it’s your bathrobe. You know, the sash.”

“Oh, it’s lower down than that.” She undid her bathrobe. Her pajamas had narrow light blue stripes.

I touched her warm, soft, private pajamas and now I could definitely feel it. I held my hand there for a moment. “I feel it,” I said. I felt a sadness and took my hand away. “So that’s it.”

“That’s what’s causing all the trouble,” she said. “What a word, ‘fibroid.’”

“Sounds like a new kind of cellphone.”

“The Verizon Fibroid,” she said. “With an unlimited monthly data plan.”

I laughed. “I sure wish this didn’t have to happen to you.”

“But it does,” Roz said. “It’s bleeding me white. It’s got to go. Thanks for the molasses, by the way — it helped.”

“I’d like to be at the hospital tomorrow,” I said.

“No, please, it’s just too complicated. Lucy will be with me. I’ll be very out of it, anyway. We’ll talk afterward. Thank you for coming over. It was very nice of you.”

“I’m going to buy you a canoe,” I said. “I really am.” I cleared my throat. “Can I, uh, ask a rude question? What does your doctor say about marital relations afterward — is it all, you know, Tyrconnell and pussy licking and hand jobs?”

“My doctor assures me that everything will work fine afterward. In fact, she claims that sex will be better. My cervix will still be in place.”

I threw my hands up. “Ah, your cervix will be in place!”

“You wicked man.” Roz smiled at me. “Good night, sweetie.”

Smack trotted behind Roz into her bedroom and I slept on the couch. I left at five-thirty the next morning — Roz was nervous and hungry and seemed to want to avoid having to explain my presence to Lucy, which I understood. I drove home and sprinkled some cracked corn for Nan’s chickens.

I SANG MYSELF HOARSE THIS MORNING, working for two hours on the harmonies in “Marry Me.” I had that strange mental clarity you get sometimes when you haven’t had a shower and you haven’t had enough sleep. Right now it’s noon and very hot and I’m parked in a bit of shade at the edge of the hospital parking lot. Roz is probably in surgery at this moment. This is awful. The only thing I can compare this to is scenes in old movies where men are waiting to hear that their wife has had a baby. But we’re not having a baby. That’s just the way it is.

You hear a lot about the poet’s voice. Swinburne’s voice as opposed to Wallace Stevens’s voice, as opposed to Hopkins’s voice, as opposed to, say, Tony Hoagland’s voice. There’s an anthology called The Voice of the Sea , filled with sea poems. But what does it mean to say you have a voice when you’re a poet? When you have deliberately melted away your voice, and you’re left with nothing but the wire armature? All the wax, all the bones and muscle of the sound, are gone. There’s a moment in The Fly , David Cronenberg’s movie, toward the end, where the big humanoid fly squirts some acid on a man’s arm. It burns away the man’s arm down to the bone.

That’s what happens when you write down a sentence, or a stanza. When you think of it, you imagine it in all its fleshed-out, full-voiced spoken plenitude. It’s a fat, healthy living thing that comes out of a throat, made up of movements of tongue and mouth and jaw. And tiny meetings of flesh. The little vagina in the throat clenches, and air comes pushing up through it, and oooh! There it goes, up into the mouth, where it’s manipulated by the lips and tongue, the way a balloon is twisted into funny shapes by a clown at a children’s birthday party.

So it comes into being as an audible phrase, as a living heavy healthy plump fleshy thing. For instance, Yeats: “Oh cruel death, give three things back / Sang a bone upon the shore.” And then a strange thing happens that the poet does, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing. The poet says, No, thanks, I don’t want the flesh, I want the bones. I want only the words. Because there’s this nifty notation system that we’ve developed, and it’s quite sophisticated. It uses twenty-six symbols, and those symbols are able to record each word that I’m speaking, and even to record, in a crude way, with the help of commas and semicolons and periods, some of the nuances of the pauses between my words. So I’m going to roll it all out as bones. I’m going to take this living thing and I’m going to render it, boil it down. Once there was sound, and now there are words on a page.

So then you publish your poem, all boiled down, all white bones. And readers come along years later and say that the interesting thing about so-and-so’s “voice” is X. Even though they may never have heard the poet’s voice. What they’ve done is they have extrapolated. They’ve supplied their own guesses about how a person like this poet would speak, and they have managed to reclothe, or reincarnate, that printed skeleton in flesh. And of course I’m fine with that. It has to happen, and there are good things about it because the eye is a bullet train and can read quickly. It’s easier to read with the eye than to listen to somebody speak. But there are also losses, because your reconstruction of the poet’s voice may be all wrong.

An anthropologist will take a few surviving pieces of a Neanderthal’s skull — a cheekbone and a bit of jawbone — and he’ll build out a whole skull from that, and he’ll use modeling clay to flesh out the extrapolated skull with sinews and muscles and cheeks, and when he’s done he thinks he is looking at the face of a Neanderthal. He doesn’t know if he’s right. He thinks he is. We want to believe him. But he’s never seen a Neanderthal.

He could be completely wrong. If you go to Planet Fitness and study the differences in the way flesh hangs off people’s bodies, you know that he is almost certainly somewhat wrong. Was it a fat Neanderthal? Or “Neandertal,” with a hard t ? There’s no way to know. Presumably there were a few overweight Neanderthals. All it takes is some dead mammoths at the foot of a cliff and an interest in eating.

So there are losses incurred when you go from the spoken universe of sound envelopes that start and stop and die away, that can be looked at on an oscilloscope, to this whole other universe, which is hooks and eyes of code on some sort of page or screen. The page or screen is white, and the shapes on it are black — or vice versa, if you invert the colors for night reading, as I do. We learned to read the code sometime around the age of six, and we’re pretty good at it, and eventually we stop moving our lips. We think of the denatured words as the distillation of everything essential. We embrace the denaturing, and we develop prose styles that are so conventionalized, so depersonalized, that they fit well with the fact that all the sound flesh has been melted off.

Take the journalistic style of The New York Times , on its front page. It uses stock phrases like “said yesterday,” and you really can’t tell one writer from another. If you talked to each of the reporters who wrote articles for the front page, you’d realize immediately that they are very different, intelligent people. Some of them you’d like quite a lot, and some of them you might like less. You would know a great deal about them, if you talked to each of them for a minute, or if you heard them explaining what they were writing about in their articles. All that voicedness is gone — each of their “today”s is exactly the same. Everyone says “today” or “yesterday” the same on the page, because it is the same number of letters, the same typestyle. And yet each of those reporters says “yesterday,” and understands yesterday, differently. There are a thousand different ways to say “hello,” but there’s only one way to say it in print. That’s what we’re losing.