Carroll Jonathan - After Silence

VIP免费
2024-12-18 0 0 1.88MB 106 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Jonathan Carroll
After Silence
Jonathan Carroll
After Silence
FOR
KAROLINE ZACH
GABRIELE FLOSSMANN
KATHLEEN WETS
GERT AHRER
REAL GUARDIAN ANGELS
Many thanks to
MONICA SULLIVAN DAWSON, RN
who was essential
in helping to bring this book
to the finish line
“Everything in the world gives us back our own features; night
itself is never dark enough to keep us from being reflected in it.”
– E. M. CIORAN, A Short History of Decay
PART ONE. A ROSE IN THE THROAT
“With you I am the woman everyone thinks I am.”
–James Salter
How much does a life weigh? Is it the product of our positive or worthwhile acts, divided by the
bad? Or is it only the human body itself, put on a scale–a twohundredpound life?
I hold a gun to my son’s head. He weighs about one hundred and thirty pounds, the gun no more
than two. Another way of thinking about it: My son Lincoln’s life weighs only so much as this pistol in my
hand. Or the bullet that will kill him? And after the shot will there be no weight?
He is smiling. I am terrified. I’ll pull the trigger and he will die, yet he’s smiling as if this fatal metal
against his head is the finger of a loved one.
Who am I? How can I do this to my own son? Listen–
Mileage meant cloud ears. If it had been a good day, full of long fares and chatty customers, my
father often treated me to a meal at Lee’s, the Chinese restaurant across the street from our house. Two
dollars for the works, including a dish of cloud ear mushrooms on rice. Mom and Dad hated the place
and would never go because everything there tasted “like grease pudding.” But he was nice enough to
trade me the two bucks for a hug and a kiss. I got the best of both deals because I loved hugging my
father. Both of my parents were great hug givers, as opposed to many parents who accept them as either
their due or a necessary evil of living with children.
I was lucky. My father taught me generosity, how to live with a calm person when you are not, and
ventriloquism. He delighted in the art of throwing his voice, of putting words in someone else’s mouth.
My mother was just like her maiden name, Ida Dax. Short, up front, no nonsense. To her dismay,
my father nicknamed her “Daisy” on one of their first dates and refused to call her anything else. He said
both she and her name reminded him of Daisy Duck. You can imagine what he had to do to win her
offended, practical young heart after that. But he did, because in spite of her seriousness, she loved to
laugh and Stanley Fischer liked nothing more than to make her laugh. Unfortunately, my father was also a
man destined to be a mediocretorotten businessman. By the time I became fully aware of him, he had
bombed at a large number of jobs, so both he and my mother were satisfied that he’d become the town’s
only (and thereby “successful”) taxi owner. Mama, although shortertempered and less forgiving than Dad,
was luckily not one who cared very much about wealth or material things. As long as bills were paid,
there was sufficient food and clothing for the family, and a little was left over for each of our “vices” (my
eating Chinese food, their buying a television set or going to movies every weekend), then life was okay.
I cannot remember her ever badgering him for ending up where he did. In retrospect I don’t think she
was proud of him, but she loved him and considered herself wise for having chosen a man she liked
talking to, one who smiled with genuine delight on seeing her every night when he came home.
My childhood memories are rather vague, but that’s probably because I was safe and content
much of the time. I remember sitting in Lee’s Restaurant and looking out the window at our house. I
remember playing catch with a Wiffle ball with Dad. When the white ball floated through the air toward
me, he made it talk. “Outta my Way! Here comes the Wiffler!”
My father always had time to play, my mother bought only the best colored pencils and paper
when she understood how important drawing was to me. They loved me and wanted me to be whole.
What more can we ask from another human being?
When my brother Saul was born, I was already twelve years old and more on my parents’ side of
the fence than his. As a result, he grew up with two parents and an intermediary, rather than a fullfledged
brother who gave him noogies or made his life happily miserable. By the time I went to college, Saul was
only six and beginning elementary school. It was not until a decade later when he was a teenager and I
was working in New York that we developed any kind of relationship.
A writer friend recently published an autobiographical novel that was badly reviewed. She told me,
“I’m not angry because it flopped: I’m angry because I used up my childhood on that book.”
The idea is amusing, but I find it hard to believe anyone could “use up” their childhood on anything,
no matter how old we get. Like some kind of personal Mount Olympus, our youth is where the only gods
we ever created live. It is where our imagination and belief were strongest, where we were innocent
before turning gullible, then cynical. Whether we remember in detail or only small bits, it is inexhaustible.
Luckily for my father, we lived in a town full of hills. Commuters getting off the train in the evening
would take a look at the twohundredstep staircase up to the town center and plod tiredly over to Dad’s
black fourdoor Ford. He knew many of the people by name and, leaning over the top of the car, would
greet these rumpled men with a thump on the roof and a “Come on, Frank. Last thing you need now is to
climb those stairs.”
I often rode with him and was assigned the job of jumping out when we’d arrived and opening the
back door for the customer. Sometimes they’d tip me a dime or a quarter, but more than the tip, I
enjoyed being there to hear what was said during the ride to their homes. These were successful people,
owners of big houses with river views, two cars, sometimes even a tennis court or a swimming pool. I
knew their kids from school, but generally they were a snobby, aloof bunch. In contrast, their parents,
because they were either tired and in the mood for comfortable small talk or just plain adrift in their
wellappointed lives, talked to my father about many surprising things. He was a good listener and at times
unusually perceptive. All the way across these years I think, by their remembered silences and nodding
heads, that he might have helped some of them with what he said.
Once while home on vacation from college, I was with him when he took a woman named Sally
O’Hara from the station. She had a notorious husband who slept with just about any woman in town with
a pulse. Unfortunately, Mrs. O’Hara was one of those people who would tell anyone within hearing
distance about their problems. That day was no different, but she also said something that stuck in my
mind and later shaped my success.
“Stanley, I’ve decided what I need most in life is a detective of the soul.”
My father, who was used to backseat philosophers, knew how to play the straight man.
“Tell me about it, Sally. Maybe I’ll get Max here to go into the business.”
“It’s simple. All you’ve got to do is track down the people who know the big answers, Max. Find
the man who can tell us why we’re here. There’s gotta be someone out there who can. Or the person
who can tell me why my husband would rather spend the evening with Barbara Bertrand than me.”
I was already doing cartoons for the college newspaper, often using a geometric form I’d created
named “Paper Clip” to make zingy comments and complaints about life on campus. They were mildly
successful and funny, and the editors allowed me to draw whatever I wanted. But when I returned from
that vacation, I gradually began to turn “Paper Clip” into a whole new world.
Before, it had simply been a geometric figure standing in the middle of a drawing with perhaps an
object or two nearby that related to the caption. Now that strange character continued on one side of the
frame while a new one, a man, appeared on the other. In between them was a large drawing, very
realistically rendered. It looked like they were both staring at this “photograph” and commenting on it.
The first cartoon with this new format was of the figures looking at a very large hand applying mascara to
the lashes of a giant eye. The caption read, “Why do women always open their mouths when they’re
putting on mascara?” We don’t know which one of them is saying it, and there is no response.
I refined as I went along. The photograph part of the cartoon grew more and more realistic, but
also more obscure. Sometimes it took a while for the viewer to even comprehend what was shown there.
For example, a cigarette butt stuck into a partially eaten doughnut, but I’d gone in so close that seconds
went by before you’d figured out what they were. Apparently that became part of the fun of the new
“Paper Clip”–people would first decipher the snapshot, then go on to the caption.
Sometimes the two figures would be placed on the same side of the picture, sometimes behind it
with only their heads showing, sometimes moving in or out of the frame. They dangled from strings like
grade school angels, or sat in seats with their backs to us and looked at the photograph as if it were a
movie. They rowed by the picture, jogged across the top and bottom, shot arrows at each other across
its face. But always the same format–the two dissimilar figures, the ever more realistic but mysterious
photo “between” them.
I thought of Mrs. O’Hara and her “detective of the soul” often because after drawing the new strip
some months, I realized what I was trying to do was address some of the cosmic, albeit small, questions
she’d wanted her detective to answer. Not that I had solutions, but it was clear from the reactions and
letters I was receiving that my work was on target more often than not.
That is who I am. Yes, “Paper Clip” took me right into adulthood, slight celebrity status, and a
comfortable life. As a cartoonist, you learn to cut to the bone of language. If three words say it better or
funnier than four, great, use three. It would be easy to indulge myself here and ramble on about my
various years, but there is really only one important time and that began the day I met Lily and Lincoln
Aaron. So I will stop now and fastforward the story of my life twice: Once to my thirtyeighth year then to
my fortyfifth.
Picture a man walking toward the door of the Los Angeles County Museum. He has thick black
hair cut short, wears trendy eyeglasses with blue frames, is dressed in weekend clothes–khaki pants, old
gray sweater, expensive running shoes. Comfortable and colorless, it is his uniform when he works at
home. You think you might have seen him before. You have, because there have been some magazine
articles about him. But it is his work that has made him known, not his face or personality. He thinks he
has the face of a high school science teacher or a knowledgeable stereo salesman.
It was three weeks after his, my thirtyeighth birthday. I had a great job, some money, no girlfriend
but that didn’t bother me so much. In retrospect it was a time in my life when I was calm and on top of
things. I would like to have been married and had children to take to the museum, I would like to have
had “Paper Clip” syndicated in more newspapers than it was. But it was certainly possible for both to
happen. In retrospect it was a time when the only things I desired from life were not only possible but
quite probable.
I saw the Aarons almost as soon as I entered the building. Because her back was to me, my first
impression was that the two were brother and sister. Both short, both in jeans and Tshirts. Maybe five
foot two or three, Lily was taller than the boy but not by much. Her hair was swept up in a girl’s ponytail.
They were arguing. She was louder than she knew because her voice, very feminine and adult, carried
clear across the lobby to where I was.
“No. First the museum, then lunch.”
“But I’m hungry .”
“That’s too bad. You had your chance before.”
Although she turned then and I saw she was attractive, I already had an unpleasant image of her:
one of those pretentious, superficial women who drag their kids around to “culchah” and force their
noses into it like a puppy’s into its own shit. I turned away and walked into the exhibition.
I have a nasty, sometimes gothic imagination. Perhaps those are a couple of the requirements
needed to be a cartoonist. Whatever, that imagination carried a picture of bitch mother and hungry child
around the museum with me that afternoon. I couldn’t shake the whine in the boy’s voice or the woman’s
closed eyes when she loudly told him tough luck. Why not just buy him a hot dog, let him wolf it down in
five minutes as kids invariably do, and then go to the show? I was no expert, but had had a few
girlfriends with children and I’d gotten along pretty well with them. In several cases, better than with their
mamas. In my experience, you played a kid like a fish once you have it hooked. Let it run with the line a
ways, then reel it slowly back in. You know you’ve got control; the trick is to finesse the fish into thinking
it does.
I had been looking forward to this show for a long time. The title was “Xanadu” and the subject
was visionary cities. There were works by artists, architects, designers… There were even some by
cartoonists like Dave McKean, Massimo Iosa Ghini, and me. I’d been invited to the opening a couple of
nights before, but at openings you don’t get to look at the work. People push you out into a crowd of
beaming piranhas and oglers trying to play it cool but also show off their new dresses, or cut or deal, or
sidle up to a movie star. I liked to amble, take notes, and not talk to anyone.
“Hey, Max Fischer! ‘Paper Clip,’ right?”
Blankfaced, I turned toward the voice. A young couple stood there smiling.
“Hi. How are you?”
“Fine. I don’t want to bother you, Max. Only wanted to tell you how much we love your strip.
Read every one of them. And we saw your piece here. Terrific! Right, honey?” He looked at his wife,
who nodded vigorously.
“Well, thank you very much. That’s kind of you.”
“It’s nothing. Thanks for all you’ve given us !” Both gave shy waves and walked off.
How nice. I stood there watching them disappear into the crowd. “Paper Clip” came so easily that
part of me was always vaguely ashamed at my good fortune. Other people worked so hard at what they
did but received so little in return. Not to mention those born damned, afflicted, handicapped. Why had
my bread fallen butter side up so many years?
Thinking about this when I should’ve been smiling over the compliment, I came out of my haze on
hearing a child’s voice say, “You know what really scares me, Mom? Thin statues.”
I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote “thin statues” on the palm of my hand, knowing I’d have
to use the phrase somewhere in the strip in the future. What would his mom reply to it?
“I know exactly what you mean.”
That was enough to make me turn around. Bitch mother and her hungry boy. She saw I was
looking at them and directed her next sentence at me.
“Thin statues and thin people. Never trust a thin person. They’re either vain or on the run.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
She scratched her head. “Because this isn’t a thin society . We put such a premium on it because
we’ve been told to, but then we turn around and enjoy our fat: fat homes, fat meals, fat wardrobes. What
kind of car do you buy when you’re rich? RollsRoyce. A small house? Nope. No matter how little
money you have, the point is to buy as big as you can afford. Why’s that? Because deep in our hearts,
we love fat. People come into the restaurant where I work and pretend to like nouvelle cuisine, but they
don’t. You can see when they look at the bill that they feel cheated having to pay so much for such small
servings. That’s all nouvelle cuisine is anyway–a clever new way of cheating a customer out of their
money’s worth. Give ‘em a couple of spears of asparagus, artistically arranged, and you can charge more
than if you gave them five. Jesus Christ, I talk too much.
“I’m Lily Aaron, and this is my son Lincoln.”
“Max Fischer.”
As we were shaking hands, the man who’d complimented me a few minutes before returned,
holding a catalogue of the show.
“I’m sorry to bother you again, but would you mind signing this? I should’ve asked before, but I
felt kind of funny invading your privacy. Is it okay?” Assuming Lily Aaron was with me, he looked from
one to the other, as if asking both of us for permission.
Now, bitch mother or not, there is nothing nicer than being publicly recognized right in front of a
pretty woman.
“Sure it’s okay. What’s your name?”
“Newell Kujbishev.”
Listen to our silence after he said that.
“Excuse me?”
“Newell Kujbishev.”
I looked helplessly at Lily. She smiled and grew a look on her face that said, “Get out of this one
gracefully, big boy.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to spell that, Newell.”
He did while I slowly took his dictation. Then we shook hands and he walked away. “There goes
a man who should be required to wear a name tag at all times.”
“Your work is in this show?”
“Yes. I draw the comic strip Paper Clip.’”
“I don’t know it.”
“That’s okay.”
“Have you heard of the restaurant Crowds and Power on Fairfax?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She nodded. “Then we’re even. That’s where I work.”
“Oh.”
“Mom, are we going in or what?”
“Yes, sweetie, right now. But would you show us your piece, Max? I’d like to start that way.
Okay, Lincoln? You don’t mind, do you?”
The boy shrugged but then, as we moved from the spot, tore off and disappeared around a corner.
This didn’t seem to faze his mother. He reemerged a couple of minutes later to announce he had found
my picture and would lead us there. It was an endearing gesture, pure jealous child. He didn’t know what
to make of me or his mother’s interest, so he’d steal my thunder by finding my work and, in announcing
its place in the museum, make it his own. We followed him, chatting as we went.
“Lincoln loves to draw, but mostly battles. Catapults flinging boiling oil, warriors. Every picture has
hundreds of arrows flying about. I only wish they weren’t always so aggressive. That’s why we came
today: I’m hoping he’ll be inspired by this and start drawing Xanadus, instead of soldiers with cannonball
holes in their stomachs.”
“But kids like violence. It comes with their territory, don’t you think? Isn’t it better if he works it
out by drawing, rather than if he were to conk someone?”
She shook her head. “Nonsense. That’s only the easy way out. Reality is, my kid likes to draw
pictures of people getting shot. All the rest is psychofluff.”
Stung, I averted my eyes. It took a split second to realize she had stopped. “Listen, don’t have thin
skin. Life’s too short and interesting. Don’t think what I said was an insult. It wasn’t. I’ll tell you when
I’m insulting you. I’m also wrong a lot and you’re allowed to tell me that. A fair trade. I guess that’s your
picture?”
Before I could catch all these balls she was throwing at me, we came across her son, arms crossed
and sternfaced, standing in front of my drawing. His back was to it.
“What do you think, Lincoln?”
“Pretty good. You’re sure you did it, you’re telling the truth? Swear to God?”
He wore a crisp white Tshirt. Without asking permission from either him or his mother, I took out a
black marking pen, pulled him to me, and began drawing on the front of his shirt. He gave a small peep of
protest, which I ignored, and I kept going. His mother remained silent.
“What’s your favorite part of my picture?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see it from here!” He twisted and fidgeted but not too much. It was plain he
loved what was going on. Under my hands he felt like a puppy getting its tummy scratched.
“Doesn’t matter. Use your memory. Can’t you remember things?” I kept drawing. The pungent
smell of felttip ink was everywhere.
“Yes, I can remember! Better than you, probably! I like the part where those big buildings are
shaking hands.”
“Okay, I’m putting that in right now.” I stopped a moment and turned to Lily. “Are you angry?”
“Not a bit.”
So I let fly. Dancing clocks, birds in top hats, buildings shaking hands. It took a few minutes to
complete but both of us had such fun (Lincoln squirming and giggling, me drawing fast) that it seemed no
time at all. Sure I was showing off, but come on, it’s allowed when you’re making a child laugh.
When I was finished, Lincoln pulled the shirt off and held it up in front to see what I’d done. His
smile was as wide as a plate. “You’re crazy!”
“Think so?”
“Ma, did you see this?”
“It’s great. Now you’ve got to take good care of it because Max is famous. You’ve probably got
the only shirt like that in the world.”
He looked up at me with big eyes. “Is that true? The only one?”
“I’ve never decorated a shirt before, so yeah, it’s true.”
“Cool!”
There were features on both their faces that gave away the fact they were related: thin wellformed
noses, long mouths that went straight across with no lift or curl at either corner. When they weren’t
smiling, although both smiled often, you couldn’t read what they were thinking by their expressions.
Lincoln was nine but small for his age and it bothered him. “Were you small when you were my
nine, Max?”
“I don’t remember, but I’ll tell you this–the toughest guy in my town was short and nobody messed
with him. Nobody . Bobby Hanley.”
“What would he do if you did?”
“Pull your ear off.” I turned to Lily. “That’s true. I once saw Bobby Hanley, who really was the
toughest kid in town, almost pull someone’s ear off at a basketball game.”
“He sounds like a peach.”
Lily wore a man’s white dress shirt and a long blue linen skirt that came to the top of her ankles.
Intricate, beautifully woven leather sandals and toenails that were painted red.
“How come you do your toes but not your fingers?”
“Toenails are funny; painted fingernails are sexy. I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea.”
She was full of opinions, and she was glad to tell them to you at the drop of a hat. At first I thought
she was pompous and/or a tad screwy because some of her beliefs were unrepentantly black and white,
others absurd. All television was bad. Travel was confusing rather than broadening. Gorbachev was a
sneak. She believed one should spray house plants with water whenever it rained because they “knew” it
was raining outside and longed to be there. She was reading a famous composer’s biography but, as with
all biographies, preferred reading it last volume to first because it gave her a better picture of the artist.
“It’s like that in life–first you meet a person as they are now, then only after you’re interested in
them do you want to know more about their past or their childhood. True?”
Seeing an exhibit with a new person is like doing your homework and listening to the radio at the
same time. You want to look, but you also want to make an impression. And remember the child who
likes you but is suspicious at the same time. The only work Lincoln liked was a loony 3D city street by
Red Grooms. The rest of the time the boy kept wandering away for long stretches, or asking his mother if
they could leave now.
Contrary to the first impression, I liked the way Lily Aaron handled her son. She paid real attention
to the boy, listened carefully to what he said, spoke to him with no condescension in her voice. If one
were to hear only that voice, it would sound like she was talking with a friend, someone she cared for but
in no way felt superior to.
She was great, but was she married? Committed? I hinted left, right, and center. I prompted
unsubtly but none of it got me the answer I sought: Yes, I am married. No, I’m alone now.
“And what does your husband do?” We were sitting in front of a bank of video screens watching
Lincoln walk back and forth from one to the other, checking the different action on each. The same film
ran on all the screens, only at different speeds: construction workers putting up a skyscraper.
Lily turned and served me a look that had a lot of topspin on it. “You asked that question like
you’re committing a crime. You’re allowed to ask. I’m not married anymore. Lincoln’s father hasn’t been
around for a long time. Rick. Rick Aaron. Rick the Prick.” Having said that, she smiled cheerfully. “When
it comes to that man, I have no dignity. Only old words apply to him–‘rake’ or ‘scoundrel.’ ‘Shithead’
does very nicely too.”
I laughed. She did too.
“I think we have to leave soon, Max. I can tell when Lincoln is getting grouchy.”
“Would you like to have lunch together?”
“That’s a thought. Wait a minute.” She got up and went over to the boy. Squatting next to him, she
spoke in a low whispery voice. He stood still, looking straight ahead at the television monitors.
Sometimes life narrows to one laserthin word: yes or no. I watched closely. What if he said no? She was
so pretty–
“Okay. But only if we go to Crowds!”
She looked over her shoulder at me and raised an eyebrow. “That’s where I work. He loves to eat
there because everyone is his friend. Do you mind?”
Outside I walked with them to their car, an old but beautifully kept Volkswagen Bug. I’d just
noticed the black leather seats when inside rose a figure that took up the entire back seat.
“Is that a dog or a Bulgarian?”
“That’s Cobb. He’s a greyhound.”
Lily unlocked the door and the giant dog slowly leaned his thin head out. His face was graying and
he had the calm faded brown eyes of an old boy. He looked at me philosophically and then stuck his long
tongue out for no apparent reason.
“He likes you. That’s his way of blowing you a kiss.”
“Really? Can I pet him?”
“No. He doesn’t like to be touched. Only Lincoln gets away with it. But if he likes you he blows
you kisses, like that last one.”
“Oh.” Can you be interested in a woman while thinking she’s nuts at the same time? I guess so.
The dog yawned and his tongue came out even further. It looked like a thick pink belt unraveling.
“How old is he?”
“About ten. He used to be a champion racer, but when greyhounds get too old to run it’s not
uncommon for their owners to put them down because they’re too expensive to care for. That’s how we
got Cobb. They were going to kill him. Kill him or use him for blood.”
“Excuse me?”
“Greyhounds have the richest, best blood of any dog. Veterinarians prefer to use it for transfusions
into other dogs, so some people breed them just to take their blood out.”
“Is that true?” I looked at the old giant and felt instant pity.
Lily leaned forward and, puckering her lips a few inches from Cobb’s black nose, kissed the air
between them. The dog looked solemnly at her. “That is the sad truth. You know now how to get to the
restaurant?”
“Yes. I’ll meet you there.” I patted the roof of her car as she slid in. Behind me there was a loud
squeal of brakes, then the brute metal crunch of a car accident. I’d barely turned to see where it was
when Lily banged the door back open into my side.
“Look out! Where is it?”
“There. Nobody’s hurt. Just looks like it’s a fender bender.”
“You don’t know. Lincoln, stay here. Do not move!” She leapt out of the VW and raced across
the parking lot.
“But nothing happened.” I said out loud to myself.
Lincoln spoke from inside the car. “I know. She always does this. Whenever someone’s hurt or
there’s an accident, she goes and helps. You can’t stop her. She always does it.”
“Okay, then I guess I’d better go see if I can help too. You stay here, Lincoln. We’ll be right
back.”“Don’t worry. I’ve done this a million times. She’s always helping somebody out.” He put his
small arm around the dog, who, at that moment, looked like a Supreme Court justice.
Across the parking lot a small group of people had gathered around a black Jaguar XKE
convertible and a small pickup truck that were bashed together. The driver of the XKE, a thirtyish
pregnant woman, was glaring daggers at the truck driver, a young Oriental man in a straw hat. The back
of his pickup was filled with gardening tools. From her frown and his “I’m sorry” smile, it was clear the
accident had been his fault. Lily stood next to the woman and looked at her worriedly.
“Are you sure you’re okay? Sure you don’t want me to call an ambulance?”
“No, thank you. Maybe a cop, though. Look at my car, will you? Damnit! That’s going to be at
least five thousand dollars to fix. I don’t even know if it’ll drive now.”
The Oriental man said something in his own language, and to our surprise, Lily answered him back
in it. The pregnant woman and I looked at each other while the man spoke again, in obvious relief, to
Lily. “He says he’s fully insured, or at least I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s saying. He keeps repeating
you shouldn’t worry.”
“What language is he speaking?”
“Vietnamese.”
“Wow, you can speak that?”
“The rudiments. The basics, but I can make out his gist.”
Lily took over the whole scene. She got both causer and effected to calm down and go through the
necessary steps so that when the police did arrive, there would be nothing for them to do. Both the
woman and the Vietnamese fellow were so grateful for her help that they couldn’t stop thanking her. She
had nicely and efficiently taken the venom out of their situation and helped when she had no stake in the
matter. How often does someone like that happen along?
“Well, Max, now I’m really hungry. How about you?”
“That was very nice to do for them.”
“You know, it was. But I’m angry at myself for knowing it. I’d love to reach a point in life where I
do things like that for others but don’t even know I’m doing them, much less know it’s a nice gesture.
That’s progress. Wouldn’t it be great?
“Do you read mystery novels?”
“Mysteries? I don’t know, sometimes.” I was beginning to learn her abrupt topic shifts weren’t so
abrupt–they invariably arced back on themselves but you had to get used to the strange angles at which
they turned.
She went on. “I don’t. Too misleading. People buy them for the twists and turns and whodunits,
but not me. Life is complicated enough–figure it out. You don’t need mystery novels or crossword
puzzles to keep you busy. Also, those stories imply people are confused because there’s no Good or
Bad. Nonsense–we can recognize the difference. Most of the time we know damn well what’s good and
bad, right and wrong. We just choose not to act on it. What I did back there was right–but only what
anyone should do in that sort of situation. That’s why I deserve no credit.”
“Okay, but it was kind.”
She shook her head. “I don’t like living in a world where ‘correct’ is so rare that it becomes
‘kind.’ ”
There is a terrific story in my family that needs telling here. My grandmother was a dangerously
bad driver. Particularly because she drove so slowly, no one wanted to ride in an automobile with her
when she was at the wheel. Once my grandfather was in the hospital for a minor operation. On the day of
his release, his wife went to get him in their car. Still wearing pajamas and bathrobe, he was helped into
the back seat. Grandma set off for home at her customary crawl. Usually so vocal about her driving,
Grandpa lay in back absolutely silent. She thought it was because he was still suffering from the
operation. But his silence was disconcerting. Once in a while, without looking in the rearview, she would
ask him if he was all right. “Yes, but speed it up a little, willya?” “All right, dear.” Then she continued at
her fifteen miles an hour. Halfway home she stopped at a red light. It changed and a few minutes later she
again asked if he was okay. No answer. She asked again. No answer. Concerned, she looked in the
mirror. No Grandpa. Horrified he’d fallen out, she stopped the car in the middle of the street to look for
him. No Grandpa. Since she was close to home, she drove there to call the cops to find her poor ill
husband. Guess who was sitting on the porch at home waiting for her. Guess who’d gotten out at that red
light, hailed a cab in his pajamas…
Lily had a great sense of humor but I don’t think she ever really got the funny in that story because
she drove like my grandmother.
Following her to the restaurant that first day, I got the feeling something was seriously wrong with
her car. Like the hand brake was full on, or the engine had fallen out and she was pushing with her feet.
Little things like that. She called it cautious driving, I called it coronary driving. It had to be against the
law to drive as slowly as this woman did. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t pulling my leg. But she
wasn’t–this was her, and from that day on there was no way I could convince her to speed it up. When I
drove the car, she was perfectly content at whatever speed I chose. But when Lady Lily herself was at
the wheel, you went back to the days of the bullock cart. Only she held a gearshift knob instead of reins.
On the ride over, Cobb stared out their rear window at me. He resembled one of those giant stone
heads on Easter Island. Once in a while Lincoln turned and gave a small wave, but until we reached the
place it was mostly the old dog and me eyeballing each other through crosstown L.A. traffic.
I didn’t know them, but I liked both very much already. Lily was smart and talked too much. I
imagined waking with her, the greyhound taking up half the bed. Lincoln would come in sleepily and sit
on a corner warmed by sun falling across blue blankets. What did she look like in the morning? What did
they think of me? Would I see them again after today, or would something happen to spoil it and make it
go away? I was a romantic and believed in instant recognition, instant affinity. Why couldn’t this
happen? I’d had luck before and therefore faith that it wasn’t a onetime thing.
From the outside, Crowds and Power was so lowkey and cool that I first mistook it for a
warehouse. Then a parking attendant hurried over to Lily’s car and I knew this must be the place. A
warehouse manned by parking attendants. It was bluegray cinder block, and only when you looked
closely did you see the small salmoncolored neon sign saying the name of the restaurant. I have nothing
against subtle or cool, but in L.A. they try so hard to cool you right into oblivion that it is often both
noisome and silly at the same time.
“Here we are, Max. What do you think?”
“It’s hard to tell it’s a restaurant. No big, uh, fanfare or anything.”
“Well, you should have seen it last month! No face is better than what we had. Wait’ll you meet
Ibrahim. Come on.”
The parking attendant jogged back to us and I saw he was Oriental. Lily said something in what
sounded like the same language she’d used earlier at the museum. The two of them smiled.
“Max, this is Ky.”
“Hi, Ky.”
“Hello, Paper Clip. Hello, Max Fishah.”
“You know me?”
“Ky knows everyone famous in L.A. That’s his way of studying to be an American. Right, Ky?”
“This is right. I do not understand your cartoon but you are famous, so it must be very good.
Congratulations.” He bowed deeply and took my car without another word.
“What’s with him?” We walked toward the restaurant.
“Just what I said. Ky’s Vietnamese and wants the green card here. He thinks America will like him
more if he memorizes its famous people.”
“That’s the oddest thing I’ve heard today.”
“Not so odd. What’s more important in America than being famous? Famous is best, notorious is
second best. Come on.”
The moment she opened the door, the voice spat out like a zap of static electricity, sharp and
crackling with speed and random inflections.
“You think you’re a skyscraper, Ibrahim. You think you got a World Trade Center imagination.
摘要：

JonathanCarrollAfterSilenceJonathanCarrollAfterSilenceFORKAROLINEZACHGABRIELEFLOSSMANNKATHLEENWETSGERTAHRERREALGUARDIANANGELSManythankstoMONICASULLIVANDAWSON,RNwhowasessentialinhelpingtobringthisbooktothefinishline“Everythingintheworldgivesusbackourownfeatures;nightitselfisneverdarkenoughtokeepusfro...

展开>> 收起<<
Carroll Jonathan - After Silence.pdf

共106页,预览22页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：106 页 大小：1.88MB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-18

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 106
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注