Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

“Clear thinking is overrated,” I said.

“I know, but a lot has happened.”

“That’s true. Well, give it some consideration. I’ll leave you with the CD. If you feel up to a dance club with loud music and gyrating bodies, we can go and talk more then.”

“Thank you, Pauly. You’re a dear man.”

We kissed awkwardly — I didn’t want to jostle her in bed.

I drove home thinking, Holy shit, I took out her staple. I have work to do in this world. Even if she decides not to marry me, that was a good moment. It was the best moment of the day.

ON SUNDAY BY MISTAKE I closed the door on the cord from my headphones and drove to Quaker meeting with it dragging on the road. I kept hearing little sounds coming from outside the car, but I thought it was just pebbles from my tires. But no, it was the tip of my headphone cord. The stereo plug was ground down to a sharp point, and when I plugged it into my iPhone I got only the left channel. Doesn’t matter. It’s just a pair of headphones. It gives me an excuse to go to Best Buy and have a close look at the Korg Kaossilator.

In Quaker meeting a woman was knitting something brown and red as the clock ticked. She was a very quiet knitter, but I could hear her needles click and slide against each other. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her fingers form quick loops of yarn and do things with them. Across the room, Chase stood and said that he’d read something adapted from Proverbs: “Once our eyes are opened, we can’t pretend we don’t know what to do.” He sat down. I thought of the misery hat, which is something you knit for yourself and all of a sudden you’re wearing it. I thought, I can’t, I’m sorry, Gene. I can’t keep from wearing the misery hat sometimes. I remembered Roya, the girl in Afghanistan whose father gathered parts of his wife and his sons from the trees by his house. Roya lived through something inconceivable. She survived, but barely. And my job was to think about her, right then, because we were responsible. We did this to Roya — with our missiles, our taxes, our Air Force, our targeters, our elected government. We exported a war into her young life. I thought, What can I possibly do to help Roya and her father? And the answer was: Nothing. There was nothing I could do. I considered standing in meeting and saying this, but it didn’t feel right, and I’d spoken recently. I shook hands and told Chase that I was grateful to him for his message, and I went outside and sat in my car for twenty minutes, and then I drove home and began making a song out of piano and Turkish oud and the Alchemy plug-in and percussion. The only thing I could do that had any possible meaning was to write a short, inadequate piece of music about the missile attack that destroyed Roya’s life.

And that’s what I did. I wrote a two-minute song with one word in it: Roya. I put fear in it and panic, and I sang Roya’s name several times at the end. I tried to put the imagined insanity to a beat. The song will not help her. It’s not a comforting song. It’s not a good song. But it is a way of remembering. It’s a way of paying attention to a single event by surrounding it with many notes. The notes point like arrows to the wrong.

And then I took off the misery hat and gently put it away in a box.

I RODE IN THE BACK SEAT with Nan and Chuck and we met Roz and Lucy outside Stripe’s secret striped door. Roz was still pale and moving carefully, but she’d put on makeup and she was wearing a black tank top and looked gloriously bosomy, if I may be forgiven the impertinence. I introduced Lucy and everyone said hello. Roz took my arm. “You look wonderful,” I said. “We’ll just stay for a short time. Let me know if you want to go.”

I tried to pay the cover charge, but Chuck brought out his wallet and insisted on doing it — let him spend his nuclear money, I thought — and we bought drinks. The place was not full, but there were people dancing and the music was loud. We sat at the bar: five middle-aged people in a place that wasn’t really meant for them. Raymond was up on a low platform, his headphoned head bobbing like crazy. When he saw us, he waved at us in a cool, low-handed way. Nan beamed. I didn’t recognize the music. Then I did: Raymond played “Amsterdam” by Paul Oakenfold. “I love this song!” I said. Roz was moving to the beat. She hadn’t forgotten how to dance. And Raymond queued something up and the song that he and I had done together came on and I just about shat. I heard myself over the loudspeakers singing “Take a Ride in My Boat.” And the incredible thing was, people kept dancing. They thought it was an actual song. Thank God for pitch correction software, I thought. I gave Raymond a thumbs-up sign.

It was almost too loud to talk, but Roz pointed at me with a questioning expression and I nodded. I held her shoulders and I shouted in her ear, “Your words helped!”

“Glad to hear it!” she shouted. “Raymond has really grown up!” Then Diplo’s “Express Yourself” came on, and Nan and Chuck danced. Someone asked Lucy to dance and she went out with him. She was a good dancer, in a red-haired, embarrassed, happy sort of way. Raymond played his “Promises Burn” and people liked it, and after that “Sexual Healing” came on. Roz and I shouted bits of conversation about how much Lucy and Nan and Chuck were enjoying themselves, and we drank sips of Irish whiskey. It wasn’t Tyrconnell, but it was good. And then, tentatively, we kissed. We were shy with each other, and it was a somewhat dry, sphinctery kiss — too public. I pointed to a side room where it was quieter and there was a comfortable couch with nobody on it.

“It’s so good to see you,” I said.

“It’s good to see you. I liked the song, too. I’m not sure about ‘Milk the meat,’ though.”

“I know, it’s too much. I’m just glad you’re here.”

Roz held me and put her head in my neck, and I smelled her hair just the way I used to. I felt like crying and apologizing for all the wrong things I’d ever done, but instead I cleared my throat and said, “Just so you know, I’m done with cigars for the time being. Although I have to say they were very helpful.”

“That’s a relief. I was worried about that cough.”

“I love you,” I said. And then we kissed again, and it was a whole different sort of kiss this time. Our mouths remembered what they had to say to each other, and Roz’s lips were, whoa mercy, so absolutely full and givingly soft and livingly true to her inmost infinite lovingkindness. Her kiss was like a lip life raft that was carrying us somewhere impossibly good.

“Allstate bought you a new canoe,” I said.

“How nice of them,” she said. “Do you want to take a ride in my boat?”

I said I did, and we held each other for a long time. Then I drove her home.

Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels, including The Anthologist, Vox, and The Fermata, and five works of nonfiction, including Human Smoke and Double Fold (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award). He lives in Maine with his family.