Authors: Daniel Handler
“No,” the fellow said. “Another kind of strange.”
“It can’t be any kind of strange,” said the guy who delivers the organic box. “You asked for it.”
“I did not
ask for it
,” the fellow said.
“Sure you did,” the guy said. “Every week I deliver organic food right here to this house. Look, we have tomatoes, mangoes, beautiful kale, homemade salsa, wild clover honey, celery and fennel and potatoes, and a thing of organic yogurt from the dairy down the highway. Look at all the flavors here. I bring you them because you want to eat them. You signed up for it, Joe.”
“And I give you your mail every day,” the postman said, “except Sundays and holidays. Why shouldn’t I think you’re terrific, and stop by to tell you so?”
“I’m putting you in my report,” Mike said. “It’s for school.”
“That’s not the same thing,” the fellow said.
“The hell it isn’t,” Muriel said. “I love you like my own son and you don’t want me in your house?”
“Yeah, it’s my house,” the fellow said. “You all seem like nice people, but I’m going to ask you to get out of it. Get out of my house.”
“Don’t be silly,” the fellow who delivers the organic box said. “I’m making you a mango lassi.”
“You’d better make a pitcher,” the postman said, craning to look out the window. “We got someone else coming up the front steps.”
“What the—” the fellow said, but the doorbell rang and he had to go answer it. Once more, this is love: it rings and you open up unless it looks like an ax murderer.
“Maybe it’s his wife,” Muriel said. “I’d love to meet her.”
“Who wouldn’t?” the delivery guy said. “I bet I’d love her too. I’m certain of it, in fact. This is going to be delicious. They drink these in India, like at a wedding or if they’re feasting. Mangoes, yogurt, a little lime juice if I can find it. I found it!”
“My my,” said the first of the three women who walked into the room. It wasn’t his wife. None of them were. All of the women were somewhat old and they lived in the neighborhood. “What a lovely room!” she said. “I love how it flows from the kitchen to the living area, and I love you!”
“I knew he would have a fantastic room,” said one of the other women, “because he is a fantastic person.”
“Come in, come in,” the postman said. “The fellow who delivers the organic box is making us all a pitcher of Indian drinks. Stay for a moment and we’ll drink a toast—to Joe!”
“What are you adding, clover honey?” one of the women
asked, looking over at the blender. “It looks like this is going to be very unusual.”
“Well, I suppose it’s a somewhat unusual situation,” Muriel said.
“I for one am glad,” said one of the older women, and perhaps because of her age the fellow who delivers the organic box turned off the blender and everyone gave her the floor. “I had a story I was going to tell,” she said. “I was going to say that I had a rare disease of some sort and I needed comfort. Or that I was anxious for my mail and that I saw the postman go into this house and not come out and so I couldn’t wait anymore or I wanted to make sure nothing was wrong. But I’m not anxious for my mail. I’m healthy as a donkey, and no one writes me, just companies hungry for money. Dear Valued Customer, they say, but I know better. Who gets real mail nowadays?”
“It’s not donkey,” said the fellow at 1602. “It’s
horse
.”
“Joe gets real mail,” Muriel said, and lifted her letter from the table. “I wrote him a real letter.”
“Then read it to me,” the woman said. “Or make Joe read it. Tell me a story to pass my time. I find you interesting, Joe, so nearly everything you say will be interesting too. I love you. I could say I’m lonely but that’s not the only reason. So many days you passed me by, see the tears standing in my eyes. You didn’t stop to make me feel better by leaving me a card or a letter. Mister Postman, look and see if there’s a letter in your bag for me.”
“I hate that song,” said the fellow, but let’s be honest: that song is an enormous hit. It’s most certainly part of a hit parade,
and everyone loves a parade. Joe found, to his mild amazement, that he was having trouble not singing along with the love song that was now in the air. “I want you all to leave,” Joe said, but he was still adorable to the whole crowd. “This is private property and you’re in flagrant disregard.”
“Flagrant disregard, get him,” Muriel said, or clucked. “Let your mother tell you something, Joe.”
“I don’t want you to tell me anything,” Joe said. “I’m not—I’m not the terrific guy you keep telling me about. I’m not made of sugar and spice and everything nice. I’m made of rats and snails and puppy-dog tails. I lie sometimes. I have broken people’s hearts. I’m looking for love, I’ll admit that, but now that it’s here in abundance, I’m afraid of commitment and I want you, please, to leave me.”
“It’s not rats,” Mike said, and bit his lip.
“Now look,” said the postman. “You’ve upset my kid.”
“Why are you here?” the fellow from 1602 said.
The postman threw the packet of the fellow’s mail on top of his other mail on the table in the guy’s house. “I’ll try to explain,” he said, and then he tried to explain the idea that’s here. It’s an idea we’re more or less stuck with. Isn’t love a sharing? Isn’t it opening your bag of sweets and passing it around, or whipping something up out of groceries you brought to someone else’s house? And if it’s a sharing, then you have to share it. Love makes the world go round, the hit songs collectively tell us, and the world is full of people you don’t know and might as well be nice to because they won’t leave. Some of the people you won’t like, but every day we wait for the postman and he hardly
ever brings something good. Let us love you, the postman was trying to say, this time let everyone love you, but this kind of talk wasn’t really his style, so he just said, “We love you, guy. It’s your eyes and your smile and your necktie and shoes. You are terrific and we love you, and you’re a sport, so be a sport. Take a mango lassi and drink with us.” For in the hubbub of things the fellow who delivers the organic box had easily found glasses for eight. They were fancy glasses, not ones the fellow used often due to their delicacy, but why not use them now, even if they break? Why not fill them while they last?
“We love you, man,” the postman said, and held out a glass like you’d hold out a bag of something made by the sea. We all want what’s in the bag. You’d have to be crazy not to take some. Have you ever had a mango lassi? Thick down the throat, crazy orange, delicious and happy if you like that sort of thing? What else can a fellow do, in the grip of mango and yogurt and fruit, spun up into a substance just like love? It
is
love. It’s a part of it.
“Come on, Joe,” Mike said, and Joe reached out and closed his hand around something sweet.
A
fter the catastrophe I moved out of the city to the California hinterlands to finish my novel, where I had an “unimpeded view,” their words. “Hinterlands” is my word. These are all my words, actually.
As you know because you’ve read my novel, things were pretty sinister for a while. Several famous buildings had been blown up by angry people from another country with varying degrees of success. Sometimes many people had been killed. Sometimes not so many, and also there were rumors of a volcano underneath us. We were maybe living on a volcano, and the big question was what’s the next thing, when will the next famous building go, what will happen next. My unimpeded view was a famous building in San Francisco which it seems particularly pointless to identify any further. That’s why it wasn’t really the hinterlands, where they let me stay, it was just across a bridge from San Francisco and you could see quite a lot of the city, unimpededly, from the empty and grassy field all scrawled out in front of the cabin, including the famous building, but when you have been born in San Francisco and that’s where you drink your Campari, that’s where you buy your Stephen Spender, that’s where you walk with friends and hear about their endless prob
lems, taking secret notes all the while for a novel, then anyplace outside of San Francisco is the hinterlands. It’s a real self-centered place, San Francisco, and that’s why I had to head out to the hinterlands for a while to get my words together and down on paper.
In the novel you will recognize them as Lucinda and George, but the people who lent me the house were Nora and George, friends of my mother’s who have always been great supporters of mine. The place was empty because Nora had decided to travel for a while, and offered me the house because George had been killed in the big fire. The memorial made me sad. So many people were killed that we had to face that George was unimportant, just an incidental and never a target. At the gathering afterwards at the house I sat in the chair where later I would sit and begin my novel of our times, and read to the quieter members of the assembled mourners a poem about George that marked my return to rhyme.
It is from that chair that I saw the unimpeded view of a man with something on a tripod, standing in silhouette at the edge of Nora and George’s field. I had just decided to call it a day on the novel and had poured myself some of Nora and George’s cabernet, which I was steadily working through, when I saw him, distant and rumpled, fiddling with a tripod and blocking my eyesight. I took the wineglass out with me and crossed to him in the field. I wasn’t scared that he was a terrorist, although I knew of course that I would be an obvious target.
A part of my novel discusses how things can get clearer if you get closer to them, a sort of allegorical thing, and that’s how
it was. Halfway across the field I could see a man a bit older than me, the thing on a tripod a video camera, and that he was rumpled in jeans and a linen shirt which he was wearing unbuttoned over nothing. He was a man with a baseball cap on his head, and also unshaven, but those seemed like things I could fix.
“Hey,” he called over. “Am I on your land, man?”
“Yes,” I called back. “What are you doing on my land?”
He scratched his chin and shielded his eyes so he could get a better look at me. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess this isn’t a good time to run around with a tripod on private property.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess not.” I stood in front of him and took a sip of my wine to show that it hadn’t occurred to me to be frightened. “But what are you doing?”
“There’s been a threat,” he said, pointing out across the bay to the building. “That’s the latest threat. That’s what they think is next, and there’s an opportunity here.”
I took another sip and looked him over again. I had been at Nora and George’s for just a bit more than an empty week. Crossing the field to see him, sipping wine as I went, made me a gentleman farmer, discovering another gentleman on my property. “I see,” I said. “I think. You’re making a movie—?”
The guy grinned at me. “Footage,” he said. “
Footage
. Don’t you watch TV? That’s where it said the threat would be. I’m surprised there’s not more people out here for pictures, but if I’m the only guy there’s all the more for me, right? If they say the building’s going to blow, people are going to want to know what it looks like. That’s footage. Every station in the world will want it. All the big networks, everything.
Everybody
.”
“You’re here to tape it?” I asked. “If the building blows?”
The guy shrugged, took off his hat, put it on, pointed at where the building was standing unharmed. “The way I see it is, like, the first time, what did people say to you? Turn on the TV, right? Something’s happened, turn on the TV. Somebody’s got to take the pictures of the things that are happening. It might sound greedy or something, but if I could stop it of course I would. If I could. But what I can do is, if it happens, I will have the pictures and so people can see and unite, or whatever. Be upset. Know what’s going on, because I sold the footage.”
“Sold?”
“Well, yeah.” He grinned again, and moved one arm so his shirt opened a little more. “I mean, I’m standing out here all day, right? That’s worth money. I can’t do it for nothing.”
“You’re going to stand out here all day?” I said.
“If you’re mad about the land,” the guy said, “I can rent it or whatever. You can have a piece of it. You can have some of the money. You can’t be some billionaire, living way out here in an old house like that. I saw when I drove up. Right? Right? You’ll take money. Money, money, money, money, money—there’s nothing wrong with it.”
I took another gentleman sip and looked out at the city I had left, all the characters in my book, so busy and oblivious that they had never done anything for me, not a thing. “How much money?” I said.
“They say thousands,” he said. “That’s worth it to me, to sit in a field. It’s a nice day, even if nothing happens. Right? Look, it’s okay, to be on your land, right? Hang out for a bit, if some
thing happens you’ll see it, plus some money on the back end, right?”
“I guess so,” I said. “I was going to blow off work anyway.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said, and then began to fiddle with his camera again. I sat down on the grass and felt it scraggly around my shorts.
“Do you want some wine?” I said.
He squinted out at the horizon and then made a little frame with his fingers like movie people do in the movies. “It’s a little early for me,” he said, with the building in his sights. “What, eleven
A
.
M
.? No thanks. So what’s your name?”
I looked out at the unimpeded city. From the edge of the field I could see places I had been a hundred times, distant and shiny like the setting of something. All ready to go. He and I regarded the city like a lover asleep when you’re not, him filming and me taking mental notes for work that was going to blow everybody away. “My name is Mike,” I said. “I’m a writer. I primarily write fiction.”
The guy was looking through the camera but he nodded, making one last adjustment. “Well, Mike,” he said, “have you ever had sex with a man?”
I thought I did a pretty good job of it. We walked back across the field and I didn’t do anything like take his hand, and when we reached Nora and George’s bedroom I stood in the doorway and bit my lip sort of, like I was nervous and didn’t know what I was getting myself into which I’ve found generally works to my advantage. Adam smiled at me and sat on the edge of the bed and took off my shirt very gently as I stood in front of him, things
like that. It makes the sex better. This is the thing when love starts, both people pretending something that will make it happen, the lies all luscious and wet with lonely hope. Afterward he held me which if you have not shaven I do not like and which is easy to get out of if you have set it up previously that you’ve never had sex with a man so now you’re freaking out a little bit and don’t want to be held. “Sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said. Outside it was still plenty sunny and I had to shield my eyes as I scurried out of bed and put my shorts back on, looking at him and leaning against Nora and George’s bookshelves. Thick nonfiction poked me in the back, big demanding books on George’s area of specialty, astrophysics, which I guess is vital and important but always seems without flair to me, like waiting tables in a restaurant or crawling back to ex-boyfriends on the nights when it hurts you too much to be alone. Adam looked at me like he thought I was cute, which I thought was cute, and I wished again I was a smoker so I could slowly, slowly exhale a nice shimmering cloud at someone as I wrinkled my brow in thought and sketched all my lovers into place.
“So what do you do, Mike?” he asked me. “What are you doing out here in a place like this, a kid like you?”
“I graduated from college almost two years ago,” I corrected him. “I’m a writer, I told you. I’m finishing up a new novel.”
“A
novel
, huh? How many
novels
have you written?” he asked.
“One,” I said.
“One including the one you’re working on, I bet,” he said.
“How many thousands of dollars have you made selling footage to the big networks?” I asked.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said. “I was just teasing you, Mike. I’m a kidder sometimes.” He rolled out of bed and stood in front of me, tiptoeing up for a second and shaking his arms out like a dog getting out of the water. “I’m gonna go check the camera,” he said, leaning down to put on his sneakers. “I’m gonna take a piss, and I’m gonna check my camera. I left it running but I can rewind and tape over it. Just in case something happened, which I don’t think it did because I think we would have heard something.”
“You’re going to walk out there just in sneakers?” I said. “You look like a dirty movie.”
He strode out to the bathroom. “No one will see me,” he called, splashing away. “It’s warm like California is supposed to be, and we’re in the middle of nowhere, kid. This house is in the middle of a field and the neighbors are probably working a stupid job in San Fran.”
“I hate when people call it San Fran,” I said.
“San Fran is what everyone calls it,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“When you get back maybe,” I said, “we could have lunch or some wine. I could—”
“When I get back,” he said, “I’m going to teach you how to suck my cock.”
I covered my smile with my hand and he chuckled out of Nora and George’s house. The tall grass in the field made shadows on the wall that I knew I could describe in sentences which would have no equal, but I didn’t think it was relevant for me to do so. That was the trick, I was seeing, knowing what was symbolic and what wasn’t. If the afternoon sun made playful, slip
pery shadows on the walls
like a group of small and carefree children playing childish and innocent games of childhood
, then you can’t include them if you’re moving beyond childhood to someone who might figure prominently in at least two chapters of the most important book of my generation. Love is keeping that symbolic focus, each kiss crucial, each step a landmark. I could have read down a list of every important landmark in America and told you what they all stood for symbolically, what it meant if they were to be destroyed. I knew what everything meant and soon everyone else would know too. I just needed to finish it up. I needed to give Adam a name, and nudge all the details into place.
I stood up and got him in my sights as he walked to check his camera and impede my view, and I couldn’t decide. David? Steven? Something European like Tomas, but more wistful? I walked out of the bedroom to my desk and paged through my manuscript as I looked at him through another window. More than sixteen pages were finished, but I could still see where I thought he might go just when the phone rang as fucking usual.
“Mommy,” I said, before I could help myself, “I said I’d call
you
. Didn’t I say that? I’m working and the phone interrupts me.
I’ll
call when I’m
not
working, which is hard because I’m working
very
long hours,
very
hard, because I’m a writer, primarily of fiction, and that goes with the territory, but I
will call
so
don’t call me
.”
“I’m just worried about you, Tomas,” she said. “I worry about you. I mean, you just shocked
everybody
on Sunday.
Every
body
said to me is he all right, they said is he
all right
out there at Nora and George’s. You just shocked
everybody
.”
“Fiction changes every generation,” I said. “It evolves, and some people are going to be shocked.”
“But Tomas,” she said. “Tomas. I don’t understand what that has to do with your shaving your head.”
“I told you that heroes always go through
changes
, that that’s the very essence of a story, that you must capture the moment when something
changes
because that is what people want to read, and that a shaved head is a
symbol
, that
symbolically
the hero shaving his head is being re
born
, that he is as bald as the day he was born because he is coming to a new
understanding
.”
“But you had plenty of hair when you were born,” my mother whined.
“You’ll understand better when the novel is published!” I shouted. “Then you can read the parts over and over until you
get it
!”
I hung up and found Adam grinning at me. “Sheesh,” he said. “I could hear you yelling halfway across the field. Woman troubles, huh?”
I looked at him and he was naked as the day he was born except for the shoes. “Yeah,” I said.
“Happens all the time,” he said, staring out the window. “All over the world, I bet. Women complaining, taking the money, no wonder some guys want to blow up buildings.”
“I don’t want to blow up buildings,” I said, reaching for him. “I think it’s stupid to blow up buildings.” This time I let him hold me, although in the novel, no. But you know that of course,
because there isn’t any Adam or Tomas or anything. There’s no wise and sad description of the sun setting and darkening the room in my novel so that by the time we were finished he had to feel around on the floor for everything he wanted to be wearing.