Nathaniel Rich - The Mayor's Tongue

Mr. Schmitz calms down, but his guilt flares again when he returns to Ternova. He enters backside-first into the cottage, a joyful tune in his throat and overstuffed grocery bags in his arms. Rutherford is slumped over in the wheelchair in an unnaturally lithe posture, so that his bowed forehead nearly touches the top of his knees. Only the wheelchair's seatbelt prevents him from collapsing onto the floor.

With great effort, Mr. Schmitz squats under Rutherford and, pressing against his shoulders, pushes him back into a normal sitting position. Rutherford's head is red, even purple, nearly to the point of lividity. His eyes are purple too.

Mr. Schmitz slowly steps away and heads to the tavern. He takes out the groceries and places them in the refrigerator; he scrubs the cupboards and fills them with cans of food; and he makes himself a small snack of celery and peanut butter, washing it down with cold, fresh milk he drinks straight out of a glass jug. For a long time he doesn't know what to do. He sits at the bar, pressing the jug to his hot cheek, his tears mixing with the condensation on the glass.

Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit, Houston. Each week another set of North American cities pass by, making a kind of patchwork map of the country in Mr. Schmitz's mind. He begins to run out of major cities. But as his tales of Seattle, Pittsburgh, Tucson, Cleveland, and Minneapolis unfold, Mr. Schmitz gains confidence in his storytelling. His voice begins to sound unusual in his ears. Its pitch deepens, and it becomes inflected with a bouncy, musical quality that seems to recall some faraway place or bygone era. It is like the voice of a lost friend.

Portland, Des Moines, Tacoma, Santa Fe, Charlottesville. He has begun to write his memoir now, whenever he is not tending to Rutherford. He thinks how odd it is that Rutherford forgot how to speak English while living in Italy; for Mr. Schmitz, the muteness of his isolation has caused the language to surge out of him. The stories he tells Rutherford grow longer and longer, and reflect more of his own experience and his thoughts. He begins to take notes on what he says, and incorporates them into his writing. In the silence of their forsaken hamlet the rhythms and patterns of language swirl around the two men, reverberating off the walls of the house and in Mr. Schmitz's head. At night, when he lies down in the upstairs bedroom, the words rise into a chorus, growing in volume and radiance, drowning out the waking world and carrying him softly to sleep.

Baton Rouge, Norfolk, Augusta, Reno, and Tuscaloosa. The long summer is coming to an end, the nights are cooling, and he's just about run out of cities. He paces about the house, talking to himself and rubbing his chin, and he feels as if he is walking along the precipice of the Carso's tall cliffs, bracing against the seawind that wants to pull him over. One evening his nerves carry him to the red-and-yellow checkerboard piazza at the end of town. The high fog shifts the outlines of the rocks and trees until it's impossible to see beginnings and endings, heres and theres. He stands in the shadow of the monastery and feels the cragged mass of the mountains loom behind him with a menacing force. When he turns to look at them he thinks he can see, over the ridge in the distance, another isolated town — a smudged yellow square at the edge of a broad green valley. There must be plenty of sleepy towns like this in the Carso, each suffering its own battle against the monotonies and mirages of loneliness. Towns, like people, can dream, and this one down in the valley, cut off from the world by mountains on all sides, looks as though it has been in a trance for many years.

He thinks of Rutherford, lost in his own reveries. What cities must he be exploring now? What dream people populate them? Carlita, the dream girl herself? It occurs to Mr. Schmitz that he knows what he'd say to Rutherford should his friend wake up again, but he hasn't considered what Rutherford might want to tell him. Focusing on the town deep in the distance of the valley, he tries to listen for his friend's voice. Finally it comes, hoarse but firm in his inner ear. And then Mr. Schmitz's eyes go blank and a pain shakes his ribs because he realizes what he has to do.

The next morning he packs his suitcase and brings it downstairs, joining Rutherford in the living room. Several minutes pass before he's able to speak.

"There's one more city I meant to talk about with you," he says at last, unable to look directly at his friend. "We lived there for, oh, so much of our lives."

Mr. Schmitz quickly glances over. Rutherford's neck is bent. He doesn't look well.

"New York is, in many ways, the opposite of San Francisco. If San Franciscans live with the knowledge that their city may fall into ruin at any moment, New Yorkers live as if their buildings are impregnable, that the city will never fall, that it will prosper forever. No one realizes that a great disaster can occur at any time, that we are the most susceptible because of our pride.

"I learned how quickly things can change, how something can destroy life out of the blue. It happened twice, in fact. Two pillars, destroyed one right after the other. First, you left for Italy. Then Agnes fell ill and died. And I've been left alone. Meanwhile, New Yorkers go about as if nothing has happened, each of them king of the city. You know how New York is. I don't need to list its qualities. It is the city of the dead. The noise of the crowds overwhelms the introspective mind. But in its incessant destruction of the old, it is a strange paradise of renewal.

"Now I'llhave time to remember, to organize my memories, to write everything down. If I want to talk to you, you'llbe right beside me, even though you'llbe here, with Carlita, and I'llbe returning home."

Mr. Schmitz turns to look one more time at his friend. And then, as if on cue, the purple tip of Rutherford's tongue slips slowly out of his mouth.

Mr. Schmitz drives quickly through the Carso's narrow switchbacks and dirt lanes, his eyes on the road but seeing nothing. It's not until the pavement comes to an abrupt end against the trunk of a giant pine tree that Mr. Schmitz realizes he's utterly, desperately lost. As he's putting the Punto into reverse, he notices a footpath through the forest. He has no idea where the nearest town might be, so he decides to get out and see whether there is a house there.

He follows the meandering path down an incline crowded with gossamer weeds until it ends in a cul-de-sac adjacent to a turquoise pond. The water is fed by a natural tunnel that gurgles out from a bed of white rocks in the mountainside. The sound of rushing water fills the air. Mr. Schmitz finds a boulder next to the pool and uses it as a bench. In the water's reflection he sees the pale skin of his cheek, a wrinkled eye socket, a carbuncled nose, a gray spray of hair. Then he looks deeper, and the shapes become abstract — a curl of light, a swirl of pond sediment, a lily pad spinning in the current — until he can make out what lies beneath.

He hears a voice so high-pitched that he mistakes it for a scream.

"Hello, friend." The voice belongs to a small man. He sits Indian-style on a boulder at the other side of the pond, facing Mr. Schmitz. His shirt is wet around the collar; he has been drinking from the pond.

"I'm lost," says Mr. Schmitz. He wants to say something else but can't think of what. "I'm lost."

"Where are you trying to go?" says the man. Something in his throat makes a clicking sound. His bare feet dangle in the pond, twirling this way and that.

"I badly want to go home."

"Where is that? Mountains or city? I'd advise the latter. Up in the mountains, the air is too thin for a man of your age. Even your dreams might asphyxiate and you could find yourself floating away in the atmosphere like a man-balloon. Down in the city you're near water and are immersed in the sounds of people in motion. You can lay your head down on bedrock and know the substance of the earth."