Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“That’s one way of putting it,” Jacob replied.

“Well, I don’t know the circumstances.”

“Not that it keeps you from commenting,” Thom said.

“I’m not hurting Jacob’s feelings. Am I, Jacob? You must say, if you’d rather not talk about it.”

“I don’t mind.”

“It’s supposed to be better to talk about such things,” Annie said in her own defense.

“But it’s so ugly,” Jacob said.

His friends paused, in case he was going to say more. The kettle began to whistle, and Annie poured it.

“Are you angry?” she suggested. “That would be quite natural.”

“It doesn’t seem fair to talk about it. It’s not as if she can answer back.” Because he hadn’t put that aspect of Meredith’s silence into words before, he was suddenly aware he might cry.

“I imagine that part is natural, too,” Henry observed, in a tentative tone.

“It’s nice that you’re all here.” His emotion embarrassed himself and them, and there was another pause. It was as if they were a family, communicating by silences as well as speech. It was Thanksgiving, after all, Jacob thought, though the holiday couldn’t resonate for the others as it did for him.

“Does this look right?” Annie asked after she had washed and dried the chicken, and set it in the roasting pan.

“It looks as if it favored the left side, in life,” said Henry. “As if it might have had a limp.”

“Oh, it does, doesn’t it,” Annie agreed. “Like a tennis player, with one arm bigger than the other.”

“All the chickens are perfect in America,” Henry said.

“Are they?” She gave Jacob a worried glance.

“They’re given antibiotics,” Henry explained.

“But you don’t mind, do you, Jacob?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. Let me see.”

“ Is it the left side?” Annie asked. “Oh, I see. I was imagining it upside down.”

“I’m fairly sure the head of the bird went here, when it had one,” Henry suggested.

Now that his attention was called to it, Jacob saw that the bird’s right leg was slender, from what looked like a disease rather than an injury. It was a little sad to think of the animal alive. “They don’t seem to have decent antibiotics for humans here,” he said, “so I don’t suppose they can manage them for chickens.”

“Have you ever given thought to vegetarianism?” Kaspar asked.

“Not now , Kaspar,” Annie warned.

“It’s only a question. I’m not a vegetarian myself.”

“Perhaps I’ll pop outside for a fag while you lot confer about the lifestyle of the bird here,” said Thom.

“I’m going to lie down for a while myself,” Jacob announced. “Is that all right?”

“Of course,” Annie said. “It’s your apartment.”

* * *

He woke to the sound of his friends murmuring in the next room. He heard the oven yawn creakily as someone checked on the roasting chicken. “But I don’t under stand that,” he heard Annie’s voice say, rising above the others to protest something. Through the part in the curtains of his bedroom window, he saw a knotty mantle of clouds, darker than the gray of the cement highway barrier, bringing a premature dusk. All day he had wondered if it would rain — he had developed a shut-in’s fascination with the weather. He tensed his legs under the covers to stretch them, and then let them lie loose and indolent. It was a luxury to think of his friends assembled in the next room.

“Good morning!” Thom greeted Jacob when he at last returned to the kitchen.

“I felt like Prince Myshkin in there,” Jacob said, “lying faint and grateful on my sofa while society swirls about.”

“Were we too loud for you?” Annie asked.

“No, not at all.”

“You do not have consumption?” Kaspar asked.

“Did Myshkin have that? Or was it his friend? Anyway, no.” Jacob found the question irritating. Kaspar seemed to miss the petting he got when he was in Mel and Rafe’s keeping, and in their absence put himself forward the way a nervous child does, by hunting for an error to atone for or a tragedy to regret. “They told me I have quinsy,” Jacob continued, “another nineteenth-century disease.”

“That’s what you have, isn’t it, Kaspar,” Annie said.

“Quinsy?” Jacob asked.

“No, the other,” Annie clarified, “but that isn’t the proper name for it.”

Jacob now wished he hadn’t joked.

“It’s rather a personal matter…,” Thom cautioned.

“It is no secret,” Kaspar said, with a gesture of his hand brushing Thom’s scruples away, like crumbs from the tablecloth. “The head of the German department, too, has TB, and we were talking about it just last week.”

“Dr. ? I didn’t know,” said Annie.

“He was encouraging me to be stronger. He does not like it that I am so often away from work.”

“Hardly fair of him,” Thom noted.

“And I will tell you something, but you must promise not to say it to others. I said my case was in the bones of my legs. And then he showed me. But you must promise to tell no one.”

“We promise.”

“He removed it,” Kaspar said, tapping his own nose.

“Removed his nose?” Annie asked.

“I don’t understand,” Jacob said.

“His case was in his nose.”

“Isn’t it real, then?” Thom said.

“It was to encourage me!” Kaspar repeated. For him the department head’s motive was the best part of the story.

“You oughtn’t to have told us that,” Annie said sternly.

“You aren’t telling the truth, are you?” asked Jacob, who thought that at least one of them would have noticed the prosthesis, if there had been one. “Right there in the teacher’s lounge, he took off his nose?”

“He is an old Communist,” Kaspar explained. “No one else is competent to run the department. But he can no longer threaten, and the school does not yet have money to lure. How to get us to obey? That is his problem.”

“He could appeal to your good nature,” said Annie. When Annie and Jacob had come back from Berlin, the headmistress had scolded her for arranging a substitute on her own rather than through the office.

“But he does not know how. He tries by—,” he gestured instead of saying it again.

“So it’s once again the problem of socialism with a human face, as it were,” said Henry.

“But when there is no longer socialism, and the face is wounded. And when, as Jacob says, the antibiotics are rather mediocre.”

“So you do think capitalism will be an improvement, after all,” said Jacob.

“Oh no. Under capitalism no one will take any trouble to persuade another, only to buy him.”

“You miss socialism, then?” Henry asked.

“I missed socialism even when we had it.”

“But it was socialism that caused the damage,” Jacob said. “The poor antibiotics and so on.”

“But the idea of socialism didn’t,” Kaspar answered, humorously, so as to suggest that the quixotism of his defense wasn’t lost on him. “The powerful will find a new kind of force. The one you are accustomed to, probably. But for the moment there is this clumsiness. It is an interlude.”

“It must be awful, not to have a nose,” Annie said.

“It would be a pity if there were nothing about the coming changes you approved of,” Henry commented, “when you worked so hard against the last government.”

“But I did not work against the government,” he protested, with the innocence that Jacob imagined he put on when asking Melinda for tea while in her bathtub.

“You worked as a dissident.”