Indecision: A Novel Page 15

  “Right. So you acknowledge there was a serious question of whether we’d live to see twenty-five. Remember adults would ask us about what we wanted to be when we grew up? And didn’t you always feel like you were humoring them, no matter what you said? And then,” Alice went on, “how it came as a shock to discover midway through prep school, with the Wall coming down, that there really was something to prepare for after all. Yet you had no plans for adult life—none. We could never imagine growing up because the future could always be cancelled at any time. So beyond a certain narrow time frame our desires ran into a kind of horizon and had to stop. There was no such thing as the long term.”

  “Interesting . . .”

  “And now, Dwight, now your desires have to find a place in a world which you never imagined you would live to see.”

  “They knew what they were doing when they made you an adjunct professor, didn’t they? I’m impressed.”

  “So why do you sound sarcastic then?”

  “Do I really? I don’t know.” I really didn’t. And did I sound sarcastic or did she just hear it that way? Already I could feel the psychoanalytic situation sucking me into the whole mirror mirrors mirror problem, the bad infinity thing. “I love you, Al,” I said because it was so bedrock true.

  “But I want you to think about something. What institution also came to an end that, as you say, you happen to associate with mutually assured destruction?”

  “I don’t know. Destruction death grateful dead cosby show family ties summer vacation . . . Nah, not working.”

  “You doofus! Mom and dad—it’s what you said yourself. That’s what ended too, along with the Cold War. Ten years later. And you never once expected it.” Suddenly her eyes filmed with tears. “And now,” she said, voice cracking, “now . . .”

  “Alice. Hey. Hey there.” I nearly got up to hug her, before the patient-client relationship reasserted itself and I resumed my reclining position.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “They never belonged together anyway. It’s better. I’m fine. I even wish she still liked Dr. Hajar. I liked him.” She sniffled. “He was funny.” Alice was kind of abstractedly looking at nothing. Then she recovered. “Do you feel this helps at all, talking like this, Dwight?”

  I reflected. “It’s interesting. So that helps. I feel that anything that’s interesting helps a great deal. And I come back tomorrow, right? So—”

  She wore a look of misgiving as she stood up to see me out. “What would you think about coming in only twice a week? I’m sorry. Four times a week might get kind of intense.”

  “Sure, two’s a good number, good even number. I hope you’re okay, Al. About mom and dad. It doesn’t really bother me, you know. People should probably get divorced more often. Then they wouldn’t bother each other for so long. You know, more abortion, more divorce.”

  Alice had been arrested at the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia, where in addition to other First Amendment crimes she had formed part of this large group chanting “More abortion! More divorce!” at the passing conventioneers. She’d ended up spending a night in jail without access to a lawyer or a bathroom.

  “More toilet breaks!” she was saying now. “Which is a serious political problem, you know. Work in a maquila in Mexico, work in some EPZ in Vietnam, not enough toilet breaks.”

  “I’ll look into it.” I glanced at my fancy parental graduation-gift watch which ran on my own motion, so that you hardly had to wind it: “I’ve got work in five minutes.”

  “Till Wednesday,” she said standing in her doorjamb. “In the meantime I want you to think about something else. I want you to think about what it’s like for you to live in a consumer society in which tiny portions of desire are constantly being solicited from you and frittered away so that you can never save up enough passion to spend on any one thing.”

  “When am I not going to live in a consumer society?”

  “Come on some fieldwork sometime.” Before turning her attention to American garage-filling culture, Alice had lived for a while among the Akha people from Laos, where a bridegroom will be daubed with soot, mud and dung in order to give him a foretaste of married life. She much more favored the system of the Na people in China, among whom a lady is visited by whoever she likes at night and then raises her variously-sired children in a longhouse with her brother.

  As I pulled open the elevator door I chanted out, “More abortion! More divorce!”

  She stood to attention, gave me this crisp military salute, then slouched back inside her apartment in her pajamas and faded tee shirt. What would she do in there all day? Presumably she would read for a while, then leave to teach, then come back, reading or writing until it was late at night and she took some melatonin to fall asleep.

  I walked out of Alice’s building and started hustling to work. Along with the morningtime coolness there was also something new in the air: this slight kind of back-to-school tightness. The sunlight seemed faintly to smell of sharpened pencils, a sensation that comported very nicely with the feeling of renewed education you get from being psychoanalyzed. And along with back-to-school flavor there was a definite edge of anticipation in the air as well. Because going to school year after year—it really schools you, and so at every onset of fall I’d always feel a certain seasonal imminence of big games and difficult exams, new crushes, homeroom disasters. At the beginning of every school year and now into adult life I’d walk toward class or work in the morning and think Something big is going to happen this year. At some point during these nine months that will seem longer than a year, something is definitely going to take place. The statistical near certainty, combined with the utter vagueness, sent the same chill through me that was already in the air.

  SIXTEEN

  Readers may object to too many descriptions in this book of waking up. But then they will have to acknowledge that waking up is a very common if not always fully complete experience. The point is, on the third jungle morning, day eleven since I started on the Abulinix, I could feel something good drawing me awake, and when I opened my eyes it was with this birthday-boy or Christmas Day eagerness not always experienced by the full-grown even when on vacation.

  And what I saw with opened eyes was Brigid lying inside her hammock under the veil of mosquito netting. She was lying there with her chin raised up and her hands pressed together (as you could tell from the shape) between her thighs. Either her eyelids were fluttering or else it was just the effect of light strained through mesh and wavering across her sharp pretty face with the high round cheeks and the—already, perceptibly—darkening complexion.

  I put on a favorite tee shirt soft with much washing—A NUTTIER BAR FOR NUTTIER TIMES, it claimed on behalf of Mr. Goodbar—slid out from the mosquito net, laced up my boots, and after yanking from my pack my dog-eared copy of The Uses of Freedom, its pages slightly crimped with jungle damp, I went and stood outside in the warming sauna of the jungle morning and looked again at a favorite double-underscored passage:

  When at last we have reached our position of trembling certainty as to the nature of the world-request [die Weltbitte], then immediately we become aware of what has been for us the most perilous risk so far. We stood in the forest, and listened with intent—and discovered with disappointment that no sound was yet to be discerned in the air but the restlessness of wind. How tempted we were to make out an articulate sound! Instead we endured our difficult patience; we awaited the world-request. With difficult forbearance, we did not attempt to preempt it with our own demand. And now that we have arrived at last at our late certainty, we see that it was by our patience alone that we passed through a dangerous moment, the misuse of which would have led to years of frustration and continued exile.

  What a great philosopher, saying shit like that! Thus after breakfast I just plodded patiently and optimistically behind Brigid and Edwin through the twitching jungly gloom. There was zero breeze—like the whole place held its breath. Meanwhile Edwin picked out routes along worn tr
ails as the undergrowth thinned out, and the canopy got higher and denser, and everything became less claustrophobic, but also warmer, moister, obscurely more profound.

  Edwin let me take the machete at one point and hack the trail clear. And he gave me the thumbs-up and a smile when following his directives I crushed some lemon ants between my fingers and licked the digits clean. Brigid also gamely partook, and likewise joined Edwin and me in painting the thick red nectar of an achiote plant across one another’s faces in these fierce very savage-esque streaks.

  “You look good as a savage,” I told her.

  “As you do,” she returned in a curtsying tone.

  “Of course Edwin looks best of all,” I allowed.

  I’d smeared myself with DEET, but nevertheless my legs and forearms were budding with weltlike mosquito bites erupting up through the excessive, matted hair. So in spite of all the luminous patience I was feeling on the inside I trudged along scratching at myself with one hand and with the other hand waving in lazy constant genuflections to ward off the mosquitoes. Edwin by contrast seemed unmolested by the bugs.

  “Hey Bridge,” I said over a lunch of more patecones. “Would you ask Edwin what he uses to keep los mosquitos away?”

  “Dwight quiere saber something something los mosquitos.”

  To which Edwin replied, “Te mostraré something cuando something something, bien?”

  Yet post-lunch we just continued hiking in our prima facie directionless way, wading on through the watery light and thick air—until, somewhere deep in the afternoon, Edwin turned to me and pointed out with his machete the thick cinnamon-colored roots of an unknown-type tree that did indeed somehow stand out a little from the rest. “Mira, aquí something something necesitas.”

  The tree stood about twice our height, and beneath its dome of heart-shaped waxy leaves were these strong-looking roots buckling up like octopus tentacles through the overgrown jungle floor. “Sí?” Edwin asked.

  “Sí!” But to Brigid I was like, “Cómo?”

  “He is telling you that this is the bobohuariza. It counteracts the mosquitoes—but it will make your hair fall off from wherever you use it.”

  Suddenly I went light-headed and dizzy. And when I tried to blink the feeling off, instead there came into my mind this rare unprecedented image in which I saw myself being handled by strange fingers reaching out of the dark. In my mind’s eye the two sides of some dress shirt I was wearing popped open to reveal a hairless chest; loose pants were then pulled from my legs; and there my legs were, undisguised by hair and palely shining in some ambience-filled imaginary room. Was this the Abulinix making me see this—this—? This must be the Abulinix!

  “Tell him I want as much as possible! Como quisiera,” I said, “quisiera macho! Or I mean mucho!”

  Omnicompetent Edwin took out of his rucksack a hand drill and this small plastic tap. I watched as the reservoir beneath the plastic tap started filling up with opaque yellow liquid.

  Before long I’d stripped to my boxers and was basting myself all over with the coolish soothing stuff. Bridge offered to apply the unguent junk in the hairy center of my back, where I could never reach to. The touch of her warm intelligent hands made me squirm with romanticism even in the heat. And Edwin too was apparently having fun—laughing, calling me loco. The word was like a license, and I reached inside my boxers and began loco-ish-ly patting the goo all over my hairy but possibly not-even-all-that-uncallipygian buttocks.

  “Edwin has never seen anyone so hairy as you!”

  “Maybe no one ever will again,” I said, sparing my pubes, scalp, and itchy face but otherwise covering myself completely. “Voilà!” I said at last, glistening. “Or mira!” I threw open my arms. But looking at smiling Brigid I feared I would spring an erection—until then I’d forgotten all about Abulinix’s satyriasis side effect—and immediately I looked away.

  Fortunately my dick remained well behaved as Edwin egged me on further. He encouraged me to fill my two water bottles with this incredible elixir of hairlessness, and then to machete off the other four roots of this incredible, in fact incredibly beautiful tree that I was—hmn, come to think of it—that probably I was in the process of killing.

  “But Dwight really do you hate so much to be hairy?”

  “Well it’s just a question of what I’d more prefer. Others might prefer it too, huh?” I winked at her and resumed laboring in the dank heat, hacking away like some utter berserker as the Nalgene bottles filled with sap. Yet with knowledgeable, moral Brigid looking on I couldn’t help thinking how unpleasant it would be to do this work for subsistence pay, as some casualized agricultural laborer, for eight or more hours every day.

  “Edwin thinks you are interesting. He is saying that most of the English treat the Oriente like a museum. Maybe true,” she allowed with a certain reluctant admiration that I was in such a good mood as to feel I might deserve, hacking away until I was finished, and sweaty, and tired. Then I stood up and began putting on my clothes, receiving a smattering of applause from my jungle companions. And using the tamshi vines which Edwin had handed me for twine, I bundled up the thick roots and then carried them off lashed to my pack as we proceeded through the rest of this remarkable day.

  Around sunset we reached a scenic oversight perched on some cliff’s edge. There it was—the same river we’d first paddled down, unraveling uphill like the past. And also on view was the Oriente spreading all around, and off in the distance the famous Andes, just like the mints, but with a sideways drift of smoke trailing from one volcano. Edwin went off to make dinner, and I very nearly sashed one arm around Brigid’s neat, tight waist.

  “No question about the bobohuariza,” I said instead. “It definitely works.” Fallen-out hair already lined the insides of my pants and shirt like some shedding short-haired dog shared them with me. And the change worked by this special sap had also functioned as a symbol of more interior change, because the main event of the past few hours was that I could feel the mild sure sensation of the Abulinix colonizing my system and lightly mastering it. The choice, made in a flash, to be rid of all the hair south of my neck, was seeming to have been the drug’s first annunciatory effect—and that was also how it had seemed at the time! I reveled in the sensation of feeling the same way about something both later on and while it occurred. . . .

  Brigid seemed like the sort of person who needs larger questions resolved before submitting to be kissed, therefore I proceeded to lay out the big idea that had popped into my brain: “Okay so I’m unemployed and you’re having issues about your studies.”

  “I have no more studies!”

  “Still, what I propose is we keep some of the bobohuariza, we take it to a lab in the States, we have it analyzed, then we patent a synthetic version. We have some giant cosmetics firm market it as the incredible depilatory it truly is, and we make our fortune.”

  She shook her head at my ingeniousness.

  “Then,” I said, “if you find new work that’s meaningful, great—and if not, don’t work. Didn’t you say you admire the Haponi capacity to be lazy? And meanwhile I can enjoy access to the stuff just by going to the drugstore.”

  “I wasn’t warned you are so vain.”

  “But all my other motives are so, so good. We’ll split the money two ways. Maybe with your share you could create some Belgian foundation to, you know, counteract and undermine the sort of—what?—neoliberalism?—anyway the sort of capitalism that you don’t like so much.”

  “And you like it so much?”

  “I don’t know, my knowledge is in the process of arising. And as long as I don’t have to have a job I can just learn things all day long. But so what do you think? I mean, bikini lines—gone.”

  “You become more strange by the hour.”

  “But this is so not about me. You may have noticed there’s a war against hairiness going on among the hirsute peoples of the more western or northern world—who also happen to be the big spenders. And we’ve found the silver
bullet! I mean it’s obvious to me that in the future all the women are bald and the men have flowing hair—but only on the head! Brigid, I feel very lucky about this.”

  “But really this is your idea? To market the n’importe quoi, the bobohuariza? I have to confess what I think—”

  “Think what you want. Really. You may have noticed that I’m something of a cipher who could probably be halfway molded to your wishes.”

  “But what has affected you this way? You are behaving so bizarrely.”

  “I know I’m acting a little differently. True. But we can never really schedule the important things that happen to us, do you think? Let me admit something to you, Bridge. Lately I have been suffering from this chronic indecision or—”

  “Ah, you too.”

  “—or abulia. But today, for whatever reason”—Abulinix made me decide not to mention Abulinix—“today has felt like a total breakthrough day. Today it has occurred to me that if all of a sudden I chose to be rid of my body hair; and if the certainty has also emerged in me that tech support is the wrong way to go, and a right way is going to be found, very possibly through selling the bobohuariza; and if now I know that even to have mistakenly gone after Natasha was absolutely necessary, since how would I arrive where I needed to be except through a detour? and if furthermore I’ve detected that many of my thoughts and feelings have become swift and super-sure and that’s a big part of what happiness is . . .” I felt like the Abulinix was making my consciousness so acute that life would just describe itself to me as it took place, and merely to open my mouth would render me the tribune of articulate events.

  “Yes?”

  But here it was hard to go on. “Well, then,” I said, thinking that it was a wonder drug after all, and presuming that if prolonged use didn’t cause nervous disorders, or a dangerously accelerated heart rate, or some other health consequence, then my life might be saved (while it lasted).