Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

“You had a really good voice,” Drummond said.

At twenty-minute intervals, the sidewalk filled and then emptied, the shopwindow blooming with successive crops of black umbrellas as buses came and went. The hour for the appointment with the social worker approached, and Drummond found that he could no longer concentrate. He rolled two sheets of paper into the novelist’s Olivetti, typing the date and a salutation to his wife, then sat with his elbows on the workbench, staring. He wondered if he should drop “Dear” and go simply with “Theresa,” keeping things businesslike, a touch cold. Whenever Drummond opened a machine, he saw a life in the amphitheater of seated type bars, just as a dentist, peering into a mouth for the first time, probably understood something about the person, his age and habits and vices. Letters were gnawed and ground down like teeth, gunked up with ink and the plaque of gum erasers, stained with everything from coffee to nicotine and lipstick, but none of his knowledge helped him now. Drummond wanted to type a letter and update his wife, but the mechanic in him felt as though the soul of what he had to say just wasn’t in the machine. He looked at the greeting again and noticed that the capital “T” in his wife’s name was faintly blurred. That sometimes happened when the type bar struck the guide and slipped sideways on impact, indicating a slight misalignment.

Drummond had been expecting a rendition of his wife, but the woman who walked in the door shortly after noon was nothing like Theresa. She couldn’t have been much older than Pete, and she wore faded jeans and a soft, sloppy V-necked sweater with the sleeves casually bunched up at her elbows. Her hair was long and her eyes were gray and her nose, though small, was bulbous. Drummond offered her a stool at the back of the shop and brought her a cup of coffee.

“So, Peter, I’m from Keystone,” she said. “A halfway house in Fremont.”

Pete squirmed in his recliner, rubbing his hands over the thighs of his soiled khakis.

“Nothing’s been decided,” Drummond assured the boy.

“Do you have many friends?” the social worker asked.

“No,” Pete said.

“No one you see on a regular basis?”

The boy reached for the crumpled pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and then picked up his rosary beads instead. The long chain trembled in his trembling hands, and his mouth made smacking noises, as though he were slopping down soup.

“When I talked to your father, he said you were in a day program several years ago. Did you enjoy that?”

“It was okay.”

“Why did you stop going?”

“I think I’ll go outside.”

“No,” Drummond said. “Stay here and talk to the lady. She only has a few questions, and then we’re done.”

The copper cowbell above the shop door clattered and the sheets of paper in the typewriters waved and rustled, giving off the slight dry whisper of skittering leaves. Drummond half listened to the tapping keys and the ringing bells and the ratchet of the returning carriage until the cowbell clanged dully a second time as the customer left. In the ensuing quiet, the sound of his boy working the polished rosary beads between his rough scaly fingers distracted Drummond from the social worker’s questions. The cowbell clapped a third time. A young mother was trying to ease a tandem carriage across the threshold without waking her twin babies. Drummond excused himself and went to help lift the front axle over the bump.

“My husband would love that,” the woman said. Mindful of her babies, she spoke in a soft voice. “What is it?”

“That’s a Remington Streamliner,” Drummond said.

“Do you mind if I give it a try?”

“No, go right ahead.”

He set the machine on a desk and held a chair for the woman. Perhaps the new world of computers had taught people timidity, schooling them in the possibility or threat of losing a thing irrevocably with the slightest touch. This woman’s hand pressed the “H” so tentatively that the type bar fell back with an exhausted plop before it reached the paper.

“Go ahead,” Drummond said. “Give it a good, clean stroke. You won’t hurt it. With a manual typewriter you want a little bounce. You can put your shoulders into it.”

“Now is the time for all good men now is the time,” the woman typed on the black-lacquered machine, and when the bell rang out, happily ratifying what she’d written, she squealed and clapped her hands.

“This is the most beautiful typewriter I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It’s so — so noir! It’s got Hollywood written all over it.”

“It’s prewar,” Drummond said. “WWII, I mean. What’s your husband do?”

“He’s a lawyer,” the woman said. “But he’s got that midlife thing going on and wants to try his hand at screenplays. He’s got lots of stories from his days as a public defender. His birthday’s coming up, and I just know he’s going to be depressed.”

“Hold on,” Drummond said, walking back to his workbench. He pulled a photo off the wall.

“If your mind’s too great for you,” Pete was saying, “you should just let God take it. That’s what Christ did. He was brain-dead. He never thought on his own.”

“I’ve never heard that before,” the social worker said.

Drummond took the photograph and, somewhat chagrined at the wacky course the interview was taking, returned to the showroom. “That’s Raymond Chandler,” he said. Chandler wore large owlish glasses and sat with a pipe clenched between his teeth, in a bungalow on the Paramount lot. A sleek gleaming Streamliner rested on his desk.

The woman ran a slender hand lovingly over the polished casing, as though it were the hood of a car. Drummond told her the price, expecting her to balk, but instead she gave the machine a pat, ticking her wedding band against the metal, and then brought out a checkbook, paying for the machine and purchasing, in addition, extra ribbons, a bottle of Wite-Out, and a foam pad. “It’s just too perfect,” she said. The typewriter was added like a third sleeping baby to the carriage. Drummond helped the woman over the threshold again and watched her go. All the young mothers these days were so lovely in a casual, offhand way. Drummond still dressed like his father, who had always worn a shirt and tie under his smock, as though his job were on a par, in dignity and importance, with the work of a doctor.

Drummond returned to his son and the social worker.

“If I let God take my brain, I’d be laughing. I’d know where I was going.”

The woman wrote something on a clipboard, which was beginning to crawl with tiny, antlike words.

“Where would you be going?” she asked.

“I’d be going down.”

“Down?”

“I’m trying to figure my brain. What it wants me to do. I think to go down, but I can’t figure out what it’s good for. It’s too much for me.”

Pete’s lips smacked grotesquely, and he stood up.

“I think I just want to be a son,” he said. “Not a god.” His elbow jerked involuntarily. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

The boy vanished into the back of the shop. Drummond turned to the social worker, whose long straight hair framed a lovely, plain face.

“Is that typical?” she asked. “That kind of talk?”

Drummond sat on his stool. “Yeah,” he said.

“And the dyskinesia?”

Drummond nodded — tardive dyskinesia. Half the words he needed to describe his son he couldn’t spell, and all of them sounded as fantastic and as far away as the Mesozoic monsters he had loved so much as a child. He remembered paging through The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs as if it were yesterday. The illustrations were lurid and the narrative encompassed the soupy advent and sad passing of an entire world. Now his boy was the incredible creature, and Drummond’s vocabulary had become lumbering and dinosauric, plodding with polysyllables.