Nicholson Baker: Traveling Sprinkler

I got in the car and plucked a note with my thumb on the biggest, fattest string. An almost incomprehensibly gorgeous sound gushed out of the big hole, from inside the guitar’s wooden velodrome. It made something vibrate in my pituitary gland. “Ooh, that’s so nice,” I said.

I drove home and worked through the first few guitar lessons in GarageBand. I practiced chords until the tips of my fingers hurt terribly. You have no idea how sharp guitar strings are. I looked at my fingers and saw deep red grooves. Fortunately the string just missed the numb skin graft on my index finger, where I once cut it slicing bread.

I wanted to play minor chords immediately, but the cheerful, well-groomed instructor from GarageBand was sitting on his stool telling me how to play major chords. They always start you off with major keys even though minor is where you generally end up.

• • •

LONG YEARS AGO I wrote a poem called “Misery Hat.” It was about a magical hat that the narrator, a woman, knits out of yarn from a mysterious yarn store, and when she puts it on she can sense any misery within a five-mile radius. She senses human misery and animal misery and sometimes even plant misery — the misery, for instance, of a neglected banana turning black in a bowl. She’s dissatisfied with the hat and she knits a bigger one, with yellow and brown and green and black stripes, that can sense any misery anywhere in the world. She sits miserably doing nothing, wearing her long floppy hat. I sent the poem to Peter Davison, the poetry editor at The Atlantic . He sent it back. Later, after he’d published another poem of mine, “Knowing What to Ignore,” he took me to lunch at the St. Botolph Club. I had a delicious bowl of leek soup and suddenly he leaned forward and whispered to me that Walter Cronkite was at a table across the room. I looked and, wow, there was Walter Cronkite, looking a little older than when he cried on the news after Kennedy was shot, but not that much older.

I sent Peter Davison the manuscript of my first book of poems. He’d recently published Stanley Kunitz’s The Poems of Stanley Kunitz —a book I loved and carried around with me — and he’d bought me leek soup at the St. Botolph Club in Walter Cronkite’s presence, and he’d said encouraging things, and he’d published “Knowing What to Ignore.” I’d left out “Misery Hat” because I knew he didn’t like it. I thought it was a good bet that he would publish my book. In the end, though, he rejected it.

But he was a genial, intelligent man — a bit of a name-dropper, perhaps, as are we all, but a nice man and a sharp-eyed editor. Oddly, the main thing I remember about him was that he wore a beautiful tie and pronounced his first name “Meter.”

• • •

I LIKE WRITING in the car. I can drive somewhere, park, put my notebooks and my papers on the dashboard, clamp on my headphones, and think hard in all directions. Sometimes I put the white plastic chair in the back seat, so that I can sit beside the car when it gets too hot. The air-conditioning doesn’t work anymore, and I’m always on the lookout for a place to park with dappled shade. I live for dappled shade. There’s a corner of a parking lot near Planet Fitness that is particularly dappled. I thought I saw Gerard Manley Hopkins there once, in his car, muttering over a dictionary of Anglo-Saxon.

One of the small great moments in Crazy Heart , the movie with Jeff Bridges, comes early on, when he arrives somewhere after a long drive and the first thing he does is open his car door slightly and pour the urine from his travels onto the parking lot. It’s not hard to do once you get the hang of it.

My power steering has a leak — the fluid dribbles out uncontrollably. I had it fixed once and I’m not going to fix it again until I get things settled with the IRS. So I have no power steering, and I have to struggle to maneuver into a parking space or turn a tight corner. And the brakes are getting worrisomely soft again. But it’s my car, my Kia Rio, and I love it. I really love this car. No car has ever been this good to me. I will be faithful to this car forever. I will nurse it along. If, when I’m a wobbly old man wearing young man’s blue jeans, the University of Texas asks me to sell them my correspondence, which they probably won’t, I’ll say to them, Forget the letters, forget the manuscripts, what you want is my green Kia Rio. And maybe my traveling sprinkler, too.

I’M OUT IN THE GARDEN, Maud, and very fine clouds have, without my noticing, moved across the moon and collected around it like the soft gray dust in the dryer. I want to scoop the gray clouds away and see the moon naked like a white hole in the sky again, but it isn’t going to happen.

About an hour ago I had a little scare. I was listening to Midnight Star playing “Freak-A-Zoid” on my headphones, that eighties standby, and I was remembering a time in music camp when a green-eyed cellist and I wrote “1976” in the sand. And then, through the music, I heard a very weird short barking sound.

What in the holy Choctaw Nation was that? I tore off my headphones. It was not a normal dog bark. Maybe a coyote bark? Not like that. Coyotes go ooo-ooo-ooo from miles away, mournfully. I said, “Hey there.” It was quite close — it came from behind me, in the overgrown area. Did porcupines bark? No. Once at twilight I walked up to a baby porcupine near my compost bin. It screamed like a petulant child, and its mother hustled over and turned her back on me, showing her fade haircut. It sounded nothing like this. This was a definite bark. Probably the wild animal, whatever it was, had seen the glow of my computer and been frightened by it. I turned the screen to reflect its eyes, but I couldn’t see any eyes.

I looked up at the moon and the squinting stars and the black masses of the trees. There was no sound except the distant chirring of crickets. I didn’t want to go inside, because it was very cool outside and there were no mosquitoes and it was a perfect night for thinking, except for the unseen animal that was disconcerted by my being out here in the yard when he or she thought the world was his, or hers. I didn’t want to let my dog out, because he’d smell whatever it was and go crazy barking — he’s a very full-throated barker when he feels it’s necessary — and wake the neighbors. Do raccoons bark? I don’t think so. Somebody said they’d seen a bear near Dead Duck Beach. Do bears bark?

I heard it again, closer, still behind me. Three short loud rattling barks. Was it dying? Did it hate me? Did it care about me at all?

I was spooked. I went inside. I looked up “bark bear” on the Internet. Very little. Also “bark wolf” and “bark moose” and “bark deer.” There were lots of hits for barking deer. I watched a murky YouTube video called “Barking Female Deer.” The sound was exactly what I’d heard. Then YouTube wanted me to watch — and I did watch, twice — a video blooper compilation with ninety-seven million views in which a news anchorwoman mistakenly said, “Georgia is the top penis-producing state.” The fallibility of newscasters was comforting. I decided to go back outside because I wasn’t sleepy yet.

• • •

BACK OUTSIDE, I looked around and noticed that Nan’s kitchen light was on. Then I saw her. She was in her bathrobe, walking slowly back from the chicken hut. Her hair was undone. She usually wore it up.

I went over. “Nan?” I called.

“Hi,” she said.

“Did you hear that?”

“The barking deer?”

I nodded. “It totally freaked me out. It was right behind me.”

“Yeah, I heard it about a month ago, too.”

I sensed something in her voice and asked her what was wrong. I figured it might be trouble with Chuck.