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  ABBOTT AWAITS

  YELLOW SHOE FICTION

  Michael Griffith, Series Editor

  A NOVEL

  ABBOTT AWAITS

  CHRIS BACHELDER

  Published by Louisiana State University Press

  Copyright © 2011 by Chris Bachelder

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  LSU Press Paperback Original

  FIRST PRINTING

  Designer: Mandy McDonald Scallan

  Typeface: text, Whitman; display, Helvetica Neue

  Printer: Mcnaughton & Gunn, Inc.

  Binder: Dekker Bookbinding

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bachelder, Chris.

  Abbott awaits : a novel / Chris Bachelder.

  p. cm. - (Yellow shoe fiction)

  ISBN 978-0-8071-3722-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3602.A34A65 2011

  813′.6 - dc22

  2010024227

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence

  and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for

  Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  for the wonders—

  Jennifer, Alice, Claire

  O the evening robin, at the end of a New

  England summer day! If I could ever find the

  twig he sits upon!

  —Thoreau, Walden

  CONTENTS

  June

  July

  August

  ABBOTT AWAITS

  The bulb in the desk lamp burned out eleven days ago, yet Abbott continues to twist the knob every time he sits down. It’s habit, not hope, Abbott thinks, though he pauses over the distinction. He sits in the dark, awaiting connection. Across the hallway there is no light beneath Abbott’s bedroom door, which means his wife is either asleep or not asleep. She is an insomniac, and six months pregnant. Would he wake her if New York were rubble and ash? Charlotte? But tonight the empire is more or less intact. Abbott clicks “Child tied in hot car as couple dines,” but he discovers that the article fails to answer the questions raised by the headline. For instance, Why do people do things? And just what is going on? Given the restaurant in whose parking lot the child, 9, was allegedly tied, the verb dines seems to Abbott not only inaccurate but editorially wicked. Elsewhere, a former celebrity has chosen death over middle age. A sleeping-bag prank has taken a life. A trap door has revealed a dungeon. In smaller type, the functioning and malfunctioning of military equipment has killed many, many people, all of whom, Abbott presumes, would rather have continued to exist, in spite of everything. Abbott’s yard needs mowing, he remembers. He ought to go to bed. He knows that sleep is necessary for temperament, energy, long- and short-term memory, healthy skin, brain, heart, back, and feet. There are people who die of sleeplessness. But tonight at a righteous, low-traffic site he finds a photo essay about a Chernobyl orphanage, two decades after the Mishap. There is a warning about disturbing images. He cannot very well turn away now, lest he be someone who turns away from the disturbing. But first, Abbott’s six-point safety check: (1) time (12:42 a.m.); (2) child monitor (quiet); (3) light beneath bedroom door (no light); (4) strength of dial-up Internet connection (49.6 Kbps); (5) tall stack of final exams (half-graded); (6) fluid level of cocktail glass (low). Abbott walks through the dark house to the kitchen to top off his drink, then returns to the dark office. It’s not as if there aren’t packages of light bulbs in the hall closet. He settles into his chair, turns the knob of the lamp. He knows this one is going to hurt: slow-loading photographs of deformed and radioactive children, while his own developmentally normal child sleeps down the hall in her blue-and-green pajamas. Her skin is perfect. He minimizes the running box score of the West Coast ball game, and then, already disturbed, selects a disturbing image.

  JUNE

  1 Abbott Visits the Pet Store

  One should always be wary of a pet store that is also a soft-drink outlet, but it’s a sunny morning in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts and Abbott is prepared to embrace the world. Moreover, he needs to kill another hour while his wife gets some sleep in the quiet house. On the drive from the coffee shop, he finds his sunglasses in a pouch on the passenger door, and he puts them on for the first time this season. The glasses feel strange on his nose and ears. They’re nearly ten years old. Perhaps this will be the summer he is finally able to break or lose them. “Ready?” he says to his two-year-old daughter, pulling her out of the car seat. In the parking lot the girl points up and says, “Moon!” Abbott looks up skeptically, but sure enough. Grown people walk past carrying small bags of fish or crickets. They smile at the man with the premillennial shades and the curly-headed girl. Once inside the pet store/soft-drink outlet, Abbott regrets the outing immediately. The smell, for one thing. And all that sad rustling and chirping. His daughter begins to squirm, and when he places her on the ground, she scuttles to a tall rotating rack of plastic birds whose function, Abbott is dismayed to learn, is to keep real pet birds from getting lonesome. They are called Amigos. The girl pulls a low one from the rack and runs to the guinea pigs, who are either sleeping or deceased. She zigzags down the tragic aisle, from the hidden hamsters to the nibbling rabbits to the lizards basking beneath yellow bulbs. Many of the animals, warm-blooded and cold-, have their faces pushed into back corners of cages or aquariums. At a point far down the aisle, Abbott notices, the enclosures begin to contain animals that are retail food for other animals: the flies, worms, grubs, cockroaches, ants, and crickets. “There,” the girl says. “That.” She presents her Amigo to a bored scorpion. The end of the aisle, at which stands a life-sized cardboard cutout of someone Abbott does not recognize, turns out not to be the end of the aisle. The passage continues dimly beneath a burned-out fluorescent tube. Abbott’s daughter runs past the life-sized cutout, losing a shoe and not caring. Abbott retrieves the shoe and follows. He has that feeling that the inside of this building is larger than the outside. At the very end of the aisle, across from stacked cases of root beer and cream soda, he sees a glass tank full of brightly colored party favors. His daughter sees it too, and hobbles there with a floppy sock. Approaching the tank in the low light, he observes that it is filled with plastic snails in garish colors. Coming closer still, following his daughter, he realizes that the aquarium contains hermit crabs—real ones—whose shells have been painted, whereupon Abbott suffers an elaborate reaction. He cannot help wondering, first of all, who paints these crabs. It is not difficult to imagine the makeshift assembly lines, the improper ventilation, the fingers marred by repetitive motion and claw cuts. He speculates that crab painting does not fulfill what he considers the fundamental human need to create beauty. Immobilized on the sticky floor, he is also curious about the relative evolutionary histories of the two species here associated. Fossils of hermit crabs, he will later learn on the Internet, have been traced to the Late Cretaceous period, meaning that these creatures originated 65 to 100 million years ago. Meanwhile, Homo sapiens (sapiens meaning intelligent or wise) emerged approximately two hundred thousand years ago, at which point they immediately, relatively speaking, began decorating other species. Abbott watches the purple crab with the yellow swoop approach the pink crab with the blue zigzag, and while he is not sure if hermit crabs have a central nervous system, he hopes that if they do, it is insufficiently complex to generate feelings of shame or humiliation. He is, he thinks, opposed to animal painting across the board, but at this moment he feels that the hermit crab is a particularly inappropriate knickknack. This is not, let’s face it, a festive creature, and the pastel whorls are, rather than fun or cute, unseemly and dispiriting. Naturally there is, for th
e serious fan, a Red Sox crab, blue with a red B, alone in a corner of the tank. Abbott bends to study it, and when he sees that it is scavenging chips of lime green craft paint, he feels the electric snap in his chest that can only mean his heart has tripped its circuit again. “Pretty,” Abbott’s daughter says, her palms and nose pressed against the smudged glass. “Have one?” she asks. All the parenting experts, whose advice Abbott’s wife passes on to Abbott in radically abridged form, suggest that you use the word No as infrequently as possible when speaking to your toddler. “No,” Abbott says. He picks her up, sets her off. “Let’s go,” he says. “Time for home.”

  2 Abbott and the Somersault

  On the stained carpet in the family room, Abbott gently flips his daughter over on her head in a near approximation of a somersault. “Somersault,” he says. “Dad do it?” she says. “OK,” he says. He is, after all, on his summer break. He clears away the books and animals to make room. This is fun physical play with his child; the body is a wondrous instrument. “OK, watch this,” he says, sensing her attention already shifting to a stuffed chipmunk. He prepares but then stops to wonder if what he’s envisioning is actually a somersault. He hasn’t thought about somersaults in years, maybe decades. What he is doing—or what he is preparing to do—does not seem like a somersault. It can’t be a somersault. For one thing, what he’s preparing to do—fling his body over his head to land on his back—seems extraordinarily difficult and dangerous. He extrapolates that there will be a moment, mid-“somersault,” when the only body parts touching the ground will be his fingertips and his skull. This seems like a pretty advanced gymnastic maneuver. What he knows of somersaults is that they are simple, joyous, carefree exercises, very basic tumbling, and so he knows he is getting something wrong. Kneeling, with his forehead on the carpet, Abbott is certain this is not a somersault but considers going through with it anyway, in the spirit of fun physical play. “Chipmunk!” his daughter shouts. Abbott’s wife enters and says, “Oooh, Dad’s trying a somersault. Careful, Dad.” “Dad do it,” his daughter says, suddenly reengaged. Abbott remembers the feeling of climbing up to the high dive at the county pool. You couldn’t very well climb back down the ladder. “This is a somersault?” he asks, forehead on carpet. “What do you think it is?” his wife says. “Is she watching?” he asks. “You know, sort of,” she says. So then he goes through with it, a dizzying and undisciplined tumble, concluding in mild nausea and a grunt. Less a roll than an accidental fall. His breath is ragged as he stares at the ceiling. The pain, Abbott thinks, might be his kidney. His wife and daughter clap and laugh. “You’ve got to tuck your chin, sweetheart,” his wife says. A man does not always know his ultimate acts—the last time he swims in the ocean, the last time he makes love. But at age thirty-seven, perhaps the midpoint of his one and only life, Abbott knows that he has attempted his final somersault.

  3 Abbott and the Inoperative Traffic Light

  After a violent thunderstorm rumbles through the Pioneer Valley, bending the maples and traumatizing the family dog, Abbott leaves his house to buy an ink cartridge for his printer. While driving, he notices the large tree branches in the yards and streets. He hears sirens in the distance. The sun is out now, and the wet asphalt steams. As Abbott approaches a busy four-way intersection, he observes that the light is inoperative, knocked out, presumably, by the storm. There is no police officer directing the traffic. With a button he locks the doors of his car. He is reminded of his insufficient life-insurance policy. Gradually, however, he perceives what is happening at the intersection ahead. The drivers, as if by prior agreement, are treating this broken traffic light as a four-way stop, and they are taking turns moving through. If Abbott is not mistaken, there is a coordinated counterclockwise movement to the turn-taking. Occasionally there are pauses during which no car ventures forth, but then one motorist will signal to another, who then waves and proceeds. Everyone is using appropriate signals. Abbott has witnessed this kind of egalitarian poststorm automotive subcommunity two or three other times in his life, and each time it has nearly brought him to tears. The rip in the social order neatly mended by a group of morally imaginative and mutually supporting human drivers with a firm and instinctual sense of fairness. Here’s a repudiation of Thomas Hobbes, William Golding, Abbott’s father. When Abbott stops in front of the broken light, he signals a middle-aged Asian man to go ahead and make the right turn the Asian man has indicated he would like to make. (The Asian man turns right and waves.) Abbott looks at the motorist to his left. A woman who appears to be a yoga instructor waggles her fingers above her steering wheel, beckoning forth Abbott, who waves ardently as he passes straight through the intersection on the way to buy the ink cartridge for his printer. The graded streets and the storm drains are doing their work. The sun is bright and cleansing. All the college kids are gone. This should be the end of the story, but it isn’t. At the end of the story, which is right now, Abbott is thinking once more about what happened to that baby in Tulsa.

  4 Abbott’s Dog

  Abbott’s dog is a sturdy, fit, and handsome yellow Lab that just might be, pound for pound, God’s most timorous creation. The dog has always been terribly afraid of thunder, fireworks, and backfiring engines, but the scope and intensity of his fear have increased as he has aged. At eleven, he now fears airplanes, garbage trucks, delivery vans, other dogs, cats, people, loud birds and bugs, scarecrows, snowmen, kites and flags, some trees, heavy rain, light rain, fog, cloudy skies, partly cloudy skies, gusts of wind, refreshing summer breezes. Also, he seems scared of what can most accurately be described as nothing. The symptoms of his fear include violent trembling, panting, shedding, and drooling so excessive that his front paws become shiny and slick. Abbott’s wife frequently says that the animal senses barometric shifts, distant weather phenomena. “No, he doesn’t,” Abbott says. Each night for the past week Abbott’s dog has been, for no discernible reason, overthrown by fright. Abbott’s wife, in her third trimester, is up frequently to urinate. Upon her return to bed, Abbott has noticed the dog shaking and attempting to get beneath things far too small to get beneath, his bad breath disseminated by panting. “There must be a storm moving in,” Abbott’s wife says, nightly. Abbott has yanked open the blinds to point out what he thinks is the Little Dipper. “Look,” he has said for a week. “There’s no storm.” “It’s far off,” his wife has said. “He can sense it.” Now tonight, after five or six stormless nights, Abbott, uncomfortable with mystery and irritated with the dog, strives to detect in the night some fear-inducing pulse or wave during his wife’s brief trip to the bathroom down the hall. He sits up in bed, holds his breath, cocks his head receptively, and in this way he achieves a promising hypothesis: The dog seems terrified by the barely audible rumble of unrolling toilet paper. This conjecture, Abbott knows, requires a well-designed experiment and a willing assistant. He entreats his wife to remove, so very quietly, the toilet-paper roll from its wall-mounted holder the next time she urinates. Once she has removed the roll she can—Abbott’s wife says she can handle it from there. When the time comes, about two hours later, she executes the test with a proficiency that compensates for her poor attitude. Meanwhile, Abbott observes the dog with rigor and dispassion. He notes that the subject, while markedly anxious about Abbott’s wife’s absence, does not exhibit the symptoms of a full-blown fear-based episode. The nonoccurrence of terror seems to confirm the hypothesis (though Abbott feels compelled to run a few more trials, both with and without the wall-mounted holder). This is a story Abbott would like to tell colleagues at a faculty cocktail party, should he ever attend one. It can be enjoyed as a humorous and suspenseful anecdote about a family pet, and it can also be enjoyed as a parable of the Enlightenment. Abbott imagines the clustered scholars leaning into his story, their cocktails nearly spilling onto the dean’s rug. To enhance the narrative’s dramatic effects—and to tease out its lofty implications about knowledge formation—Abbott finds that he must take small liberties with the truth. He embelli
shes, amplifies. He omits. For instance, Abbott sees no reason to tell the captivated imaginary gathering that his typical response to the dog’s fear is not sympathy or even intellectual curiosity but anger and exasperation. It drives Abbott crazy that the dog continually becomes so distraught over so little, and that the animal cannot, when afraid, be placated by words, logic, evidence, affection, or cheese. Best not to mention any of this, Abbott knows, but it’s so galling, all that hair in the closet, the drool on the floor. Here is a creature that understands from Abbott’s choice of shoes that it’s time for a walk, yet refuses to comprehend that a birthday balloon is not a mortal threat. Now, abruptly, Abbott’s story is gone, supplanted by the anger and exasperation he removed from it. He does not know—he can’t be certain—why he is so angered and exasperated by the dog’s stubborn fearfulness. Abbott’s wife’s hypothesis is, Abbott maintains, unverifiable.

  5 In Which Abbott is Surprised by Artifice

  As it turns out, a well-known actress’s tears in a well-known movie are not real tears. They are a special effect, added after shooting. The director, called out by some heroic entertainment watchdog organization, defends the actress in an interview, saying she could have cried real tears had she been asked to. She was not asked to. She’s a fine actress, deserving of an Academy Award. It was only when the director was editing that he decided her crying would improve the scene in question. So, yes, he digitally inserted some tears. He does not understand the controversy. After all, the car chase in the movie is not real, nor is the triple homicide. On the Internet there is a still from the movie of the crying actress, and Abbott notices that the tears really do look fake—big, round, firm Hollywood orbs, dewdrops on a morning leaf. They look like they could stream upward, climb the actress’s face. The director says in the interview that let’s not forget art is an illusion. He says that even had the actress’s tears been real, they would have been fake. He says just think about it. Abbott understands why Plato kicked these guys out of his city. “What they should do,” Abbott says at the dinner table, ostensibly to his wife, the only other adult present, “is put tears on everyone’s faces in every movie. Comedy, action, drama. Everyone. Every character in every movie, weeping from the opening credits to the end. What scene would not be improved? That’s what I’d like to see. That’s what they should do.” Most evenings they sit down together as a family for dinner, usually about 4:45. “It’s difficult,” Abbott’s wife says to Abbott after a while, “to have a relationship with the entire world.” Their daughter says, “More cucumber?” His wife says, “Do you know what I mean?” Abbott thinks he does know what she means. What she means, he thinks, is it’s impossible. What she means is, Please knock it off. Don’t just leave the table as soon as you finish your dinner. Live with us, here, now, in this house.