Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

I fell into the affections of the cat because of the nature of my job. As fire lookouts, Jingle and I were obliged to observe incoming storms, and to record the locations of lightning strikes. My responsibility was to go to any strike within a mile or two of the tower and contain the fire until a crew could get there. Early that afternoon we saw a brief puff of smoke from a strike nearby. I packed my shovel, axe, pulaski, a couple of jugs of water, some snacks, and set off to the find the fire. I took a compass reading, noted what landmarks I could identify, and lurched out over a rockslide and boulder field across country into the forest. It was steep, rugged terrain.

The storm that threw the lightning had passed. Sky was crisp and blue, a smatter of clouds. The smell of ozone and smoke haunted the air. I got to what I’d calculated to be the position of the fire in a little over an hour. It was a rough scramble. My clothes were soaked with sweat, and the tools weighed heavily on my belt and back. I found no fire. For several hours I criss-crossed the heavily wooded mountainside, and hardly noticed that it was getting dark. I wanted to find the damned fire. At a certain point I realized that night would come before I could start back. I stopped and snacked on dried figs and nuts. It was turning cold. My drying sweat chilled me to the bone. I cut a few branches for a bed and lay down, and pulled the duff around me for warmth. Coyotes sang their excellent laments in the distance, and close by an owl whooed. The next thing I remember was the rasp of the Jaguar’s tongue that woke me up. Its breath was sweet and acrid.

I started back at dawn, feeling failure for never finding the fire, but exhilaration from the affections of the Jaguar. I’d never heard of such a thing happening to someone else. Jingle came down the tower steps and embraced me when I got back. I heard Brendan, the ranger, over the radio.

“Do you see a big fire? It should be to the Northeast.”

I looked out from the lookout and saw nothing.

“No. And I never found the strike we marked.”

“That’s okay. We’ll keep an eye on the point from the air. Are you sure you don’t see anything? It’s huge. Look past Kelly’s Thumb.”

I looked. “No. I don’t see anything.”

“Strange,” Brendan said. “Thousands of acres. Well, okay then. Brendan, over and out.”

“Ten-four.”

Once we broke contact, I saw the smoke. There had been so much of it I took it for a weather system, a bank of clouds coming in.

“Did you see it?” I asked Jingle.

“Yeah. I smelled it first.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was so glad to see you because when you didn’t show up last night, I was worried. I wanted to touch you first.”

The thrill of gratitude when someone you love tells you she has worried about you is very great. I remember that, but even more I remember the smooch of the Jaguar’s tongue. Many of us enjoy how the first kiss of the person we know we will marry lingers as a palimpsest on the lips. Or some remember what it feels like after a fight, the first time they get smashed in the face. So does the sensation of the Jaguar licking across my sleeping eyes remain embedded in my skin as if memory.

As I watched a quarter of Boston College football I wondered if their talented young linebacker, Mark Herzlich, was related to my old grade school/junior high chum, Eric Herzlich. This kid was quick, had great anticipation, and rarely missed a tackle. The pros would definitely be interested. Eric himself never seemed athletic, wasn’t a member of our New York Bullets social and athletic club. I often went to his house to hang out with him and Bert Schwarzschild. He lived on Pinehurst Avenue, north of the entrance to the George Washington Bridge. His father was a serious European. He sat in the dark apartment in an easy chair reading books in German. Nothing below Schopenauer, I imagine. He didn’t like the tumult of teenage boys, and disapproved of whatever we were doing. He frequently looked up from his book and threw scowls our way, the way football refs throw their yellow flags. My major transaction with Eric was to trade my wax 78 of Jose Iturbi playing a Chopin Polonaise for a 78 of Charlie Parker’s “Buzzy,” with “Warming Up A Riff” on the flip side. His father wouldn’t let Eric play Bird in the house, and probably wasn’t welcoming to any other jazz. He almost launched a smile in approval of the trade; of course, I knew that I’d got the best of the deal.

These memories turned up after I got an email from Bert Schwarzs-child, former Bullet, erstwhile inventor of the imperative “Be Dere!” that he put out over the phones to alert us to scheduled games. He has been a long time editor of Physics Today . He is an actor and raconteur who had memorized in German all the ranting speeches of Adolf Hitler, and could perform an impression of the fiend at will. Bert is an intrepid tracker of the lives of all our buddies in Washington Heights. In the email he mentioned that the very Mark Herzlich I’d been curious about was Eric’s grandson, and he’d been diagnosed in his brawny youth with bone cancer. “Sobering news,” Bert remarked. Indeed sobering! I felt horrible for him, so physically gifted, to feel the bite of the axe so young. My feelings were weirdly extenuated by the fact that his grandfather had once been my buddy, though I haven’t seen him since High School, and by the fact that I’d recently done my own dance with cancer. I knew something of what the kid was facing.

My response could have been more specific, I thought, since I had asked myself questions about the kid, but the feeling was generalized into the horror, and my compassion for the millions dying young on this wide planet of dread. In the same email Bert put my pet number, 137, the fine structure constant, in the context of string theory. He explained that string theory advocates, like Leonard Susskind, who has written some popular books on the subject, like to speculate that these “non-dimensional” constants, are established arbitrarily, as if at a crap-shoot, at the instant of the big bang, and that there are many big bangs, each one with an arbitrary set of non-dimensional constants and a different physics. What a deal. I think these notions color somehow my sympathies for Herzlich and his grandson, and how I fold them into this wallet of pain. The two bits of information in the one email are powerfully coordinated for me. I don’t understand how or why, except to speculate forever into futility. It’s all a crap-shoot in an alley, and we’re led into it blindfolded, and we never get to warm the dice.

Mark Herzlich, however, beat the terrible C, but didn’t play for the Giants in the playoffs because of injury; but as his grandfather said to me, “Wait till next year.” That’s exactly what I’m doing.

On humid nights the mosquito rules. Linne drew them to herself like filings to a magnet. When we slept they rarely buzzed me, but gathered massively on Linne’s pale skin. She was visiting me in Cape Breton. We slept without bug repellent or protection in a tiny crude cabin George had built the year before. He and family came up for a summer from New York. I cut trees for boards from a dying woods, and ripped them lengthwise with a chain saw, a dangerous system. I could easily have lost a leg. I told him he was building too close to the edge. After three summers, undermined by groundwater, the cabin tumbled down the embankment towards the ocean. In bed Linne covered herself as best she could with sheets and blankets but the mosquitoes found her anyway, drawn by their lust for her rich Alabama blood. I didn’t recognize her extreme discomfort, and she didn’t complain, as if she accepted mosquito torment as part of the cost of being with me. It wasn’t the first time I’d been insensitive and stupid. Linne told me later that she ran a fever on the way home, and fainted while changing planes at Logan, because of her burden of mosquito bites.