Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

When I got home I opened a letter from the IRS and read it. They were losing patience with me. I thought, This is dumb. I need fifteen hundred dollars right now. I called up a man I know at one of the boatyards in Kittery and asked him if they needed help shrink-wrapping boats. I knew they would, and they did. I’ve done it before during times of economic hardship. It’s satisfying work, better than painting houses because the ladders are shorter. You haul a sheet of white plastic off a large roller and drape it over a big boat called, for instance, Cookie’s Dream , whose owner can’t afford to keep it afloat, and then you pass a flaming wand over the plastic, not too close, so that it shrinks to the hull’s curve and the form of the frame that you’ve built over the deck, and in the end you have made an enormous white lumpy anonymous shape that sits outside in a boat parking lot with many other white anonymous shapes. The boatyard plays an oldies station on the radio, and they pay in cash. There are a lot of boats in the tall weeds out back, even in high summer, because so many people are out of money. Occasionally the owners return and cut away some of the plastic and have picnics on their stored boats, or play poker.

I CALLED ROZ’S NUMBER and she answered. I asked if she was hungry.

“Yes!” she said.

“Because I have a fresh tank of hummus and some pita chips. Chickpeas are supposed to be good for you. They have lots of iron.”

“I’d love some hummus.”

“When should I come over?”

“Now is good.”

There was traffic on the highway and I was late getting there. Lucy let me in and greeted Smack, who wagged his tail wildly. Roz was in her bedroom, propped slightly on pillows. The room, which was white, with blue trim around the windows, had the quiet, almost sacred feeling of convalescence.

“It’s good to see you,” Roz said. “Pardon my state of dishevelment. Thank you for the Mary Oliver, and the music.”

I opened the bag and gave her a chip. She dipped it into the hummus.

“Wow, this is so delicious,” she said. “Wow, wow, wow.” She adjusted herself in the bed and winced. “I’m hugely bloated. My insides have expanded to fill the void.”

I said I figured they had some adjusting to do.

“They certainly do,” she said. “But everything seems to have worked out. Modern medicine, you know? When it’s good, it’s good.”

She asked me what I was doing, and I told her I’d put in some afternoons of shrink-wrapping at the boatyard and that my arms were sore. And that I’d written a dance song using some of the three-word phrases she’d sent. And that I’d spent the afternoon in the parking lot while she had her operation.

“That’s good of you. You’re a good man.”

“A good man needs a good woman. How is Dr. Harris? Is he the man?”

She patted my hand to silence me. “I’ve been thinking about a lot of things,” she said. “Ellen, my gynecologist, believes in Reiki massage.”

“Oh, heavens.”

“No, no, it was good. Before the operation, they put me in an enormous hospital bathrobe and took me into a very dim room and I sat in a comfortable chair, and a woman came in with a portable kind of boom box that was playing, I guess, Reiki massage music. The woman was all in black, except for some turquoise jewelry, and she held her hands for a long time on my shoulders, then on my hips, then on my stomach, then on my feet. It was so soothing. She said, ‘Think of me as a cord that goes from the music to you.’ She said the music was from Tibet, and that it was two thousand years old. She said we had places in our bodies where the energy can get stuck, and that she was going to release the energy so that it could flow freely. It sounds very New Agey, but I just sat there with my eyes closed feeling peaceful, and my mind suddenly filled with happy memories of walking with you and the dear dog at Fort McClary. They were such good memories.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

“And then she went away and Ellen came back and touched my arm and said, ‘How are you, any questions?’ I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t have any questions — this is so peaceful I find that I’m crying.’ And I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my bathrobe and felt grateful. And then I had the operation, and I spent the night in a room with a very loud grouchy woman who moaned and farted all night long, and I’ve been in sort of a fog since. I’ve been listening to the music you gave me. Tell me about that Brazilian piece in which the woman sings.”

“Bachianas Brasileiras,” I said. “She’s singing about the moon. My dad used to play it for me, and I thought you’d like it.” Then the doorbell buzzed. Smack barked furiously. He’s vigilant about doorbells. I looked at Roz.

“Oops, that may be him,” she whispered.

“I better go,” I said.

“I’ll talk to you soon.”

Harris had arrived bearing a ceramic pot of flowers wrapped in plastic. We shook hands coolly.

“I’m just on my way out,” I said, waving. “Bye-bye.”

• • •

TODAY’S SECRET WORD is “garbanzo.” A very warm and nauseatingly friendly hello to you all on this tender summer day. You may be interested in “the poet’s day,” aka my day.

I opened my eyes this morning and I saw that the sky was blue, with two clouds shaped like ZiL limousines waiting for passengers near the horizon, and I saw that there were some cable TV lines outside the window. The cable lines were no surprise, because they’ve been there for many years now. All the cable companies string their wires along the same upright wooden bar lines, as if they’re trying to write a song.

I lay in bed blinking and thinking. The dream I’d just had was about finding an old bicycle horn on a shadowy set of subway stairs somewhere near Columbia. The blue rubber bulb was faded and cracked but the horn still croaked. The stairs were covered in old, slippery magazines and trash — the footing was dangerous. I put the bicycle horn in my pocket and made my way carefully down to the noise and heat of the station. In the back of my copy of Tony Hoagland’s What Narcissism Means to Me I wrote a note about my dream, and I read one of Hoagland’s poems, “How It Adds Up.” He says that he listened once through a door as someone, “obviously not me,” made love to his girlfriend.

I went downstairs and pushed the button on the coffee machine, and I opened the door so that the morning air could come in through the screen, and I fed the dog and let him out. He found his place under the car, where he’s dug a low, cool spot for himself in the driveway sand. He sits there for hours sometimes. He’s getting older.

I put a waffle in the toaster and ate it, with some local maple syrup from an unbeautiful beige plastic jug, and thought — not for the first time — that what I should really do with my life is be a designer of syrup jugs for all the maple syrup boiler-downers who live around here. Surely there’s a better color of plastic jug than beige. There’s a maple farm in Alfred, Maine, that makes an exceptional dark amber syrup that’s enough to make you throw your arms out and thank the fates for this concoction, which is better than laudanum and better than morphine. Better than Yukon Jack, almost. It’s similar in a way to Yukon Jack in that it’s sweet and viscous.

I rinsed off the plate and put it in the dishwasher and thought that tonight I might run the dishwasher. I run a load every three or four days, so it’s a big deal for me. Then I wrote a fast loop with a massive kick drum from the Deep House Kit and a Round Reggae Organ doing karate chops up on top. First I tried singing, “I’ve figured out — what I’m going to do.” I scrapped that and sang, “He’s no good for you, he’s no good for you.” That worked better. The man across the street began chainsawing a tree, which interfered with my recording, so I closed all the windows, imagining what people would say if I ever had a dance club hit: “And he recorded it all at his kitchen table!” The refrigerator hum bothered me while I was singing, so I used a quarter to turn its thermostat off, and when I did I remembered how much Roz had liked the hummus.