Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

Norman didn’t believe in the Kinsey Report and the decided swapping out of a politics of economics for a politics of sex. This was part of the great distraction of late modernity. As for his sexuality, well, he would watch out that he didn’t end up strangling kittens, or whatever was said that went on in the minds of the sexually repressed or the sexually confused.

He told Joanne about the kittens, just to be on her guard. She shook his hand, like a deal had been struck. He could trek across the border anytime he felt the need. She had been through enough. She understood that warranties and marriages weren’t worth a damn, not in the way they used to be, and honesty was as rare a commodity as gold.

*

They took a long, meandering journey south to Florida and Disney World, planned by Joanne, for what she called a greater inspiration and view of the world, and, of course, for Grace. They did it on a strict budget. Norman agreed to it and gave Joanne control of the purse strings. In so doing, he bestowed on her a sense of permanence in this new existence.

In the latter stages of the house negotiations, Norman had given Joanne Power of Attorney, after she had insisted she could do better, which she did eventually. She came out almost $6,000 ahead of the initial offer, bargaining hard and holding fast when Norman would have caved in. The great secret to negotiating was not to analyze your own worries, but to assess what the other side gained or lost in walking away from the table.

Joanne, it turned out, had deep insight into how certain aspects of life worked. Norman discharged the debt he had paid off on her credit card. He called it her commission.

*

Joanne was asleep, her mouth half-open in the sunshine. They were across the Kentucky border. Norman tuned the radio to an a.m. station. He came upon the last of the spring baseball games played out in the Arizona Cactus League. He had his hands on the wheel in the earnest way of someone who had mastered a new skill.

It stalked him, that old life, the absence of it made greater suddenly. He recalled a lazy afternoon long ago, Walter drinking cold beer after mowing the lawn, catching the tail end of a game on a small transistor radio. What Walter had loved about the game were the stats and the cluster of the teams with their old-fashioned stripes, knickers and stockings, the antiquated side of it, when, even into the seventies, heroes like Babe Ruth were still revered, despite how in vintage footage Babe looked like a big-diapered baby and was no athlete, or not in the way they were now, but Babe had delivered on what was asked back then. He had swung at dreams, led the way toward manhood with a trot around the bases, his cap tipped, reverent and appreciative of the applause, and the other greats of the game, known ultimately for the gravitas of their courage. Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech at Yankee stadium, declaring that he was the luckiest man alive, and dead two years later, an account his father could not tell without crying.

It was there again. Walter calling the Cubs ‘bums’, the pennant race lost early, his relationship with them contentious, and yet he stuck with them out of loyalty. Walter attentive to the line drives, the walks, the loaded bases and the sacrifice fly — a play that had always smacked of an invention dreamt up by shakedown mobsters, or tied to political gerrymandering, when there was a deep humanity underpinning it. The assumption, that, under certain circumstances, you might be asked to make sacrifices for the team, and that a quirk in the scorecard, in the very game itself, might protect you and allow you to keep the sheet clean. This national pastime, at its essence, it tended toward the appointed time when each man in the wind-up and strike stood alone at-bat.

That was it, when it came down to it. A game that could be communicated in words alone, in the voice of commentary, so it was no great loss if you weren’t there. In fact, it was a game better heard than seen, and decidedly set up that way in the ungodly number of games that constituted a season — the double-headers and clusters of mid-week games — so, in the end, it was TV that diminished the game, exposing the paucity of attendances and the slowness of any real action, an accommodation cameras could never quite invest with an essence of mystery, and even less so with the advent of color, when the texture of reality took from what was and would always be a game of nostalgia and ghosts.

Hours passed.

*

Norman drove deep into the Kentucky Mountains, before descending into an overgrown valley where a shadowy town stood by a carving, meandering river.

Joanne roused, her finger on a map like a field marshal. She denied that she had slept. There were quirks between them, but Norman could see the look on her face, the miraculous sense that you just close your eyes and wake into another world.

They stayed at a schoolhouse turned historic hotel in the heart of coal mining country. The brick façade glowed in a brown dinge of light behind laced curtains.

It rained in sheets in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Through a series of tall picture windows in a classroom turned spacious bedroom, they played cards and Scrabble made of real wooden blocks, aged and played with by schoolchildren over a matter of decades.

Joanne made a meal in a small alcove, Norman standing alongside her, helping, aware of the solid wood chairs, the rounded tables and bone china, the bite of a breadknife with a worn handle and the teeth of a saw, all of it of a vintage of great permanence.

Joanne had on a wedding ring. Norman noticed it, this unannounced union decided upon by her alone. It somehow did not involve Norman, or it involved him, but in a way that acknowledged how love was always one-sided and kept alive more so by one partner than the other. He felt the advantage and disadvantage of what she quietly offered.

He looked askance at her, her hair flat against her head in an unadorned plainness of domestic life. She was in a shirt with the sleeves rolled above her elbows. It was something that would be decided, her faithfulness, over days, weeks, months and years, this decision of hers, and better configured in looking back on what had been decided and not voiced.

*

They were in a valley cut from a river, encased in an earthen mass of dead foliage, the layers of past life dating back millennia, predating the rise of humans, the V of the valley blocking sunlight so the day was more shadows, greyness and fog.

It took the reach of the sun across the cosmos to find them, the void of distance, a faint light eventually finding them on occasional days of blue skies, so it was not such a great burden to go into the mines against the characteristic slate grey of a webbed fog. You limited the possibilities, cut yourself off from alternatives.

Beneath the earth it was simply all darkness. You came up to the possibility of rain or sleet or maybe sun. It was a veneer, this world of light, when the greater reality of the universe was darkness. He heard a church bell toll that might have been for him alone, if he believed in miracles.

It was the two of them, and Grace, the compact of a life and the reach of Florida in the offing, but for now they were arrested here in the quiet of a schoolhouse, this weigh station between the past and the present. He liked this about Joanne, how she had found the schoolhouse in some informational flyer and sought it out, because places like this argued for simple choices or no choices at all.

Choice, or how it was now envisioned and experienced, was a new phenomenon, and what people decried when it was denied them was, in fact, the opposite of the truer essence of life and how it had been lived for the greater part of human awakening.

He was mindful of this against the scroll of fog and the diaphanous leech of true color, so Joanne was a shadow beside him. He watched her out of the corner of his eye. She cracked a series of eggs in a deft one-handed way, so it was a magic trick, the sudden glob of yellow like a contained sun run into a ceramic bowl. This was a late afternoon lunch materializing before his eyes — scrambled eggs and bacon, a pot of coffee on the stove over the blue whisper of a crowned gas ring.