Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

The cabin was weird but maybe it was just right. He’d done a neat job with the paper towels and typing paper, on the windows. When she looked around she thought of shoji screens and kabuki.

She was always doing something, Nina. Somewhere in the cabin she had found a tiny rabbit-eared black-and-white TV set. Earlier, she had tried to get a news program on it, without success. Now she was sitting naked, crosslegged, on the bed, holding the thing out at arm’s length, squinting at it.

She said, “It only works on this one channel and only in certain places in here, certain elevations, so to speak.”

The reception was on the dappled side, but he was able to make out that she was watching an ice skating exhibition. A girl was doing a prolonged spin, head flung back.

Nina said, “I can do that for twenty minutes.”

“You don’t do it that often, I notice.”

“Do you want to know why I don’t?”

“Naturally.”

“Because it makes me dizzy.”

“Right.”

He reminded her that she needed to get ready. He went outside again.

Hume was somewhere. So be it, Ned thought.

A little way down from the cottage a mossy granite hump about the size of a compact car stuck up out of the lawn. Ned was leaning against it. He had completed the last of the top nine calls required by Convergence business. The marches were going to be immense .

Moss had a distinct odor. I did not know that, he thought. The odor was like the smell of urine. He pushed himself away from the rock and bent to examine the lower surfaces of the monolith more closely. Someone may have peed on it, he thought, or an animal like a stag marking its territory.

He was keeping an eye on the cottage. Nina must be almost dressed. She knew where he was waiting and that the paper-covered windows would let her put on a shadow play for him. She was doing it. They could doubtless get some actual curtains from the manse, if it mattered.

He stretched. It was still misty. He wanted Joris to sign the petition, and the others, too, but especially Joris. He shouldn’t be assuming he knew where his friends stood politically, based on the past. If only his personal dark sense of what it was going to be like this time could be instilled in other minds by some kind of contagion, that would help. But he didn’t have that gift. Douglas had once had it. He himself could help once the ball got rolling. He could help with the arrangements and he was always willing to be on the cleanup committee. He felt his pilot light was back on. The standard munitions the U.S. Army used were made from recycled radioactive metal. He hadn’t mentioned that to Joris, the new the hideous permanent consequences of just blowing things up. The only bad news he’d gotten during his calls was that some absolute idiot had approached ISKCON about joining the East Bay march and ISKCON had seemed interested. He was not going to have the Hare Krishnas involved if he could help it.

He walked up to the bedroom window, tapped on it, and then stepped back. Nina posed, making a cruciform shadow, which meant, he guessed, that she was ready for her debut.

He wanted to delay everything. He wanted to get up on a big rock and hold his arms out like Nina, like the Gandhi of the Catskills or the Jesus overlooking Rio de Janeiro.

Three of the nine people he’d talked to on the phone had asked him if he was all right. He’d explained about Douglas’s death to everyone, but still what they wanted was some more evident elation out of him when he got the repeated majestic estimates for participation in the Convergence. He was elated, but apparently not enough. Rise, he said to himself. A day of streets like rivers of fists was from a poem.

After Nina’s ablutions, Ned had gotten the shower to work better by unscrewing the head and clearing it of a clot of matted leaf shreds. He should have done it before she’d used the thing. It had been a simple task. Nina was always nice about showing gratitude for small tasks, and it wasn’t flattery. Ned knew he was benefitting by comparison with her all-talk ex-boyfriend Bob.

They were both cleaned up and ready, or thereabouts. In fact she was still busy on her hands and knees behind the bed.

“You know what I hate?” she said.

“I already do.”

“Okay what?”

“Puncture wounds.”

“ No . What I hate is when you lose your shoes and have to look all over the place and when you find them it’s just your shoes.”

The deodorant she had brought smelled like pine. She apologized for its not being their customary scentless type. Ned said, “That’s okay. In fact I like to use this kind once in a while. It makes me feel regular.”

“Like the masses?”

“Right.”

“Where are the masses when you need them?” she said.

“You’ll see. Just wait.”

They were both wearing jeans and black sweaters, which made no difference at all to her. Claire would have complained that they looked like twins. Hume was on his mind, still. Douglas’s original plan had been to name his son Godwin, after William Godwin the cosmocreator of anarchism, ignoring the static the abbreviation of Godwin would have brought down on the child. Now Gruen was saying that in fact Douglas had been claiming in the last couple of years that his son hadn’t been named for David Hume, as they all knew he had, but in honor of Hume Cronyn, the actor. What was the point of that? It was annoying.

It was time to go. There was something he wanted to tell Nina first, an item he was carrying around from his adolescence. Sometimes certain memories just emerged from his consciousness and if she was around, he could vent and be done. She had gotten used to it.

There was a secret he was going to keep from her, though. Before he had gotten into the shower they had tried again and to get hard he had resorted to an image of Iva, naked except for her apron, bending over and presenting a rear view to him.

Nina was finalizing the placement of barrettes in her hair. It was pulled straight back. She was looking at herself in the mirror. She said, “I need beauty treatments of some sort.”

He approved everything about her appearance. He said, “Something I want to tell you. It doesn’t exactly relate to Hume.” Bringing this up from nowhere might soften the light on Hume, it occurred to him.

She sat down on the bed.

“Okay, I would shoplift paperback books from display racks in drugstores, mostly. Mostly science fiction. The racks were usually near the door and you could slip out quickly. Once I was getting set to take Slan , I think, but I got flustered and stole the wrong book, which turned out to be a thick little compendium of the plots and librettos of the great operas, something I had zero interest in. So but when I got home I was seized with the feeling I had to read the damned thing to justify taking it. I took science fiction for the pleasure of reading, so since I had this opera book in my possession some Catholic notion said I had to read it.”

Nina said, “Aaah, so that’s where you get all the minutiae about operas that you use when the subject comes up. You impressed me, you know!”

“Well then my crime was providential. Composer biographies were in there, too. A lot stuck. Is there anything you want to know about Donizetti?”

“Not right now. Are you saying this in defense of Hume, by the way?”

“I don’t know.” She would want to know more about his criminal past later. She identified him with a sort of unfailing law-abidingness.

“Was that the last one? Did you stop then?”

“No, I stole one more. From Holmes Bookstore in downtown Oakland. A big hardcover book, a history of stage magic by Ottokar Fischer, with big gorgeous plates. It was the maximum size I could fit down my pants. I wanted it and I put it down the front of my pants and pulled my stomach in and zipped my jacket over it and walked out of the place almost fainting. And that was the last, forever. I stopped before I was ever caught.”