Читать книгу Doxology - Nell Zink - Страница 9

Kill, kill, kill,” Pam breathed. Daniel thought she was referring in her delirium to Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but she was attempting a Unix shutdown of the birthing process. Sometimes you have to send the “kill” command a good number of times.

It didn’t work. She kept giving birth.

He didn’t leave the room right away. But he had his limits, and one of them was how much pain he could watch her suffer. He tried to stay and even took part in the conversation about attaching a suction cup to the baby’s head. Then he felt dizzy and left to sit down in the lobby. A nurse came out to tell him it was over.

He called his parents collect. They congratulated him sincerely. But as much as they treasured the birth of a new soul predestined for heaven or hell, they couldn’t see it as a special occasion. It was routine, in the circles in which they moved, to welcome babies. They’d been wondering where his babies were since around the time he turned twenty. Flora was their ninth grandchild. They promised to send a check for fifty dollars. They invited him to come home sometime and bring his wife and daughter.

PAM DIDN’T CALL HER PARENTS. SHE DIDN’T WANT TO HEAR HER MOTHER’S OPINION ON anything—not on Daniel, not on her decision-making skills, not on her choice of hospital.

She’d picked one with a low rate of cesarean sections, and she was regretting it. She’d gotten a touch of fever right toward the end, and her ob-gyn suggested she let them induce labor. She ended up with one giant cramp that went on for seven hours until they hauled the baby out with the VE. It looked as though its birth had involved being thrown from a passing truck, the same figurative truck that had run over her pelvis. Its head was blue from the ears up, crowned with a puffy skin yarmulke for which the technical term was “chignon.”

Looking at the baby filled her soul with the fear of death. Within a week she believed that without Daniel, it would not have lived. Without him, she’d be lying facedown drunk on the bed, headphones blasting Black Sabbath. He kept it warm, dry, and loved and brought it to her to feed.

After two weeks, to her astonishment, she bounced back. The trauma faded. She regained her appetite. She saw that the baby was cuter than she’d remembered. It looked to her less like a scrap of meat torn from her insides and more like a warm, dry, fluffy little human.

She asked Daniel to take a look at her vagina and see whether it too was recognizable as human. She was afraid to use a hand mirror, because it felt like it was in shreds. He said, “Babe, it’s literally identical. Nothing’s changed.”

She looked at it herself and found that he was right. She cherished the hope that she might one day be herself again.

SHE STAYED HOME FROM RIACD TO RECOVER. BABY FLORA KEPT GETTING CUTER AND cuter. Joe came over to inspect her and declared her the cutest baby who ever lived, explicitly praising her purple-and-green head.

She was in fact a cute baby, after the swelling went down. She had Daniel’s tan skin, quite striking with Pam’s blue eyes.

He didn’t get time off from the law firm for having fathered a child. He didn’t even get a cigar or a pat on the back, since he had nothing to gain by telling them about it. Pam had better health insurance, and he felt that he looked to outsiders like an irresponsible character and nothing more: nine months from slum-dwelling loser to slum-dwelling loser dad.

She cared for the baby at the odd times when it wanted to be cared for, slept during the strange hours it saw fit to sleep, sat patiently through the eerie work routine of the rented breast pump, and let him pick up the slack. He was happy when holding Flora and a bottle, happiest when carrying her around the neighborhood hidden in a sling tied to his chest, and seriously indispensable when it came to cleaning, laundry, and shopping.

The medium-term plan was for her to work days while he went on working nights, so that someone was always with Flora. Six weeks after giving birth, she pumped three bottles full of milk and stumbled off to RIACD. Promptly the baby-maintenance scheme collapsed, and not because Daniel wasn’t up to the task. Without napping during the day, Pam couldn’t sleep enough to work. Maybe there are jobs you can do in your sleep, but fixing manual garbage collection in an undocumented big ball of mud isn’t one of them. She went back to work on a Wednesday, and by the following Wednesday it was clear that something had to change. She didn’t want to be the consultant who passes for a profit center because he has so many billable hours, at least until his clients bail.

Thursday morning she called in sick, pumped extra, put in earplugs, and asked Daniel not to wake her until she woke up on her own.

That happened around noon. When the vision came, she opened her eyes and determined that he was next to her in bed, with Flora sprawled naked on his bare chest. She nudged him out of a doze and said, “Daniel. I found a solution.”

“Pray tell.”

“You get a day job, and we hire a babysitter.”

He sat upright, clutching Flora close, and said, “No, no, no.”

“Why not?”

“I am not letting some migrant worker take it out on my daughter how much she misses her kids. We don’t have anyplace to put a Dutch au pair, as much as I’d enjoy hosting one, and we can’t afford a qualified babysitter. We’d have to put her in day care, and there’s no way on God’s earth. Forget it.”

“I meant Joe.”

“Joe,” Daniel said. “Isn’t he, I don’t know, not the most literate—”

“I know she’s your daughter and everything, but she’s also a newborn. She can communicate on his level until she’s at least six.”

“What makes you think he’d do it?”

“He has some okay shifts, but he averages, like, five dollars an hour. We offer him seven, and bingo.”

“No way,” Daniel said. “He trusts everybody. If somebody came up to him on the street and asked if they could hold her, he’d just hand her over.”

“People will think he’s the dad. If I were going to fence a baby, or even liberate it for my own use, would I go after the dad? Anyway, you just invented that crime, because I’ve never heard of it—playground-based baby trafficking. Come on. People around here keep an eye out for each other. You know what they say. It takes a village to raise a child.”

“It takes a parent to raise a child. It takes a village to raise a stray cat. Joe is too trusting to be responsible for anybody.”

“Look who’s talking, the man who wants to hire a stranger! At least he’s a known quantity. And he’ll say yes, because he worships her.”

In the evening they went to see him, bearing Chinese takeout. He didn’t hesitate. Chief among the people he trusted was himself. If someone had offered him a job running the trading desk at Goldman Sachs, he would have taken that too.

He got so excited about his new opportunity that they had to remind him of the existence of the coffee shop. He said he was sure no one there would mind if he missed some shifts, and whenever he was done babysitting, he could pick up where he left off. For all they knew, he was right.

He did have a short attention span, but as Pam said, that might be an advantage. Babies have ways of getting themselves noticed. Joe’s attention span might equip him with unusual patience, by keeping him from noticing that it was the same shriek over and over.

SHE CALLED IN SICK AGAIN ON FRIDAY, AND HE CAME OVER FOR A TRIAL RUN, ARRIVING at nine in the morning. She grabbed a bottle of breast milk from the fridge and warmed it up in the microwave. After she had arranged him feeding Flora, she lay down on the couch for a nap. She didn’t want to disturb Daniel, who was asleep on the bed, having gotten home from work at seven.

Four hours later, she woke up. Joe was holding Flora and a fresh bottle, still sitting at the kitchen table. He said, “I changed her diaper.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot to show you how.”

“No problem. It’s easy, compared to regular underpants. There’s no front and back!”

Nodding affirmatively, she rushed to the bathroom, because she was having this phase where the desire to pee and peeing were sort of the same thing. Through the door, she could hear him singing a blues song to Flora:

Drink another bottle, it’s almost two o’clock

I said drink another bottle, baby, it’s almost two o’clock

You been drinking all this morning and I’ll never let you stop

On the kitchen table, squirming on her back

I said baby’s on the kitchen table, squirming on her back

I’m going to take her little pants off and show her where it’s at

Daniel turned over in bed and said, “Your song is deeply disturbing.”

“The last line needs work,” Joe said. “In blues songs ‘back’ always rhymes with ‘heart attack.’ Maybe ‘wipe her dirty crack.’”

“I think with regard to our professional relationship there should be an ironclad rule,” Daniel said. “No songs about my daughter.”

THEIR ONE CONCESSION TO JOE’S ECCENTRICITIES WAS THE PURCHASE OF A BABY carrier. Pam called strollers “traffic testers,” because of the way caregivers in New York shoved them into the street to stop the cars. They had been transporting Flora in a ten-foot-long carrying cloth that circled the torso multiple times, with an X in back and another X in front, finishing with a knot you had to tie behind your own back. Joe’s attempt to put it on might have worked as a vaudeville routine. For him they invested in a BabyBjörn. They didn’t say it aloud, but they were both ever so slightly concerned that he might forget Flora somewhere if she weren’t firmly attached to his body.

Daniel quit his night job, transitioned to Pam’s health insurance, and signed on with a temp agency in the financial district. The hours would be unpredictable, but the pay was higher than for full-time work—eighteen dollars an hour. Within a week, he had an assignment that would last a year, sitting in for an administrative assistant on maternity leave at an employee benefits consulting firm way downtown, in windy maritime Manhattan, close to Battery Park.

His new colleagues expected almost nothing from him. They seemed thrilled that he knew how to alphabetize. They came to him for help printing spreadsheets.

After work he usually took the handoff, since Pam worked later. In the morning, he headed downtown while she waited for Joe.

The familial stress level declined to near zero. Flora continued to set new benchmarks for infant cuteness. By the time she was six months old, Pam, Daniel, and Joe were in agreement that for her to get any cuter would violate natural law. Her hair had come in wavy and almost black. Her eyes were dark blue. Her face was chubby as a peach.

LIKE DANIEL, JOE TOOK HER ON LONG WALKS STRAPPED TO HIS CHEST. HE HIT ALL THE record stores at least once a week. His former coworkers at the coffee shop fawned like grandparents.

One afternoon he came home and put her on the changing table just as his beeper went off in the pocket of his coat. He left her to go to the coatrack. He was feeling around for the pager’s hard surface in a tangle of candy wrappers when he heard a thump. She was lying on the floor on her side, making a high-pitched groaning noise.

He ran downstairs to call Pam, who had called his beeper. He said, “While I was getting the beeper, Flora fell on the floor! I think she hurt herself!”

“Where are you?”

“Downstairs.”

“Go back up and get her. Hail a cab to the emergency room at New York Downtown right away. I’ll meet you there. Okay?”

“Her arm looked weird.”

“Push her sideways into a box so you don’t have to change her position. Pad it with blankets. I’ll see you at Downtown Hospital. Okay?”

She didn’t call Daniel because she had a bad feeling about what he might say. He confirmed her fears that evening when he arrived home to see Flora’s elbow wrapped in blue bandaging. It was sprained. Joe had thought it was broken because he didn’t really do shapes. Daniel said they couldn’t go on letting a retard care for their child. He stopped himself and added, “He’s not retarded. Of course not. I just mean—”

“What did he do differently from anybody else?” Pam demanded to know. “Do you really think there’s any babysitter in the world that wouldn’t have happened to? She rolled over. There’s a first time for everything. And he was flawless. He charmed his way into pediatric orthopedic surgery before I could even get down there. She was fixed before I even caught up with them. She’s fine!”

“She has a monster bandage,” Daniel said. “What if she’d been bleeding?”

“What do we have to do, hire a registered nurse? I know Joe couldn’t splint a broken arm to save his life, and the box he put her in was way too big. But he knew something was wrong, and he got her to the hospital. That’s one of the reasons to live in Manhattan. It’s never far to the best medical care in the world.”

“He put her in a box?”

“I told him to. I don’t know. When an animal’s hurt, the most important thing is to get them to the vet without moving their spine, so you slide them onto something stiff like cardboard.”

“Oh, my God,” Daniel said. “She could have had a spinal injury, and you told him to pick her up and put her in a box!”

“Well, he couldn’t just leave her there and call an ambulance. That would take forever.”

“She might have been—I can’t even say it—”

“What?” Pam protested. She knew what he was getting at. Her throat seized up. “I didn’t think of that,” she said. “I can’t even think about it if I try.” It was true. No amount of effort could make her imagine Flora with a broken neck or back. It seemed like a sin, and tempting a lifetime’s bad luck, to think about it, much less say it.

“We’re getting rid of that table,” Daniel said. “We don’t need her airborne. There are no changing tables in nature.” She whimpered in her crib, and he picked her up. “Baby Flora, the floor baby. Born to be in contact with the earth.”

HE RESERVED THE HOBOKEN STUDIO AGAIN, THIS TIME FOR A FULL DAY, INCLUDING grudging supervision from a grouchy engineer, and recorded two Joe Harris tracks: an original entitled “Hold the Key” and a cover of “American Woman” by the Guess Who.

“Hold the Key” was taken straight from life. “Hold the key, kill the light, lock the door, lock it twice, and go down …” It had originated as a mnemonic device for leaving his own apartment, but in Daniel’s opinion it could become a stoner anthem. He imagined crowds at festivals singing it, swaying, holding hands.

Joe said “American Woman” was easy to play and fun to sing, and he wasn’t wrong. No one, hearing that recording, could have denied that he could warble like Mariah Carey and wail like Bono. Only the oddness of his ambitions marked him as an indie eccentric rather than a mainstream poseur.

Daniel didn’t waste money on a printed sleeve for the seven-inch, knowing it was the glued-on label that mattered. He used xeroxed clip art and a free vector graphics program (CorelDraw) to make the Lion’s Den logo. It showed a stylized lioness holding a large flower, something like a zinnia, in its crossed forelegs, with “Lion’s Den” in sixties-style art nouveau script. He put the preponderance of his investment into sound quality, paying double for heavy vinyl mastered at forty-five revolutions per minute to be shipped from England. He ordered one thousand of the singles, an insanely optimistic number, but Joe had committed to playing as many shows as it took to unload them, even if it took him the rest of his life. Daniel estimated twenty years.

JOE WAS IN THE LOFT ON CHRYSTIE STREET WITH FLORA WHEN THE UPS MAN ARRIVED with the fourteen stunningly heavy boxes. Victor helped him carry them up the stairs. Joe put one on the stereo, cranked it, and danced. It was immediately clear to him what he needed to do. He fed and changed Flora, strapped her to his chest, tucked twenty-five singles into his messenger bag, and marched off to the Abyssinian Coffee Shop.

He bestowed singles on all those who currently had shifts and stacked five more by the register for the remaining employees to pick up. With one exception, a pothead prep cook whose shift was ending, the staff added their gifts to the stack, from which two customers removed six singles before a homeless hoarder absconded with the rest.

His next stop was Tower Records. He asked to speak to a manager and explained that he was Joe Harris, seeking distribution for his new single, out now on Lion’s Den. He introduced Flora, turning and lifting a corner of her blanket to show the manager her sleeping face. He talked too much and too loudly. He continued talking after the manager turned away. He was allowed to leave two singles. He left the store against traffic, through the entrance, turning around to wave goodbye.

He headed westward toward NYU’s radio station. Failing to get past the security guard, he was told to try the U.S. Mail. At select bars and nightclubs, he pressed the single on whoever answered the door—in one case, a custodian holding a mop.

SHORTLY AFTER HE LEFT TOWER RECORDS, A JUNIOR EMPLOYEE WHO HAD WITNESSED the proceedings asked the manager if she could please, please have the singles before he threw them away. He said of course not; he would never throw them away, much less give them to her. They were the property of Tower Records, to be listened to in due time by the staff member responsible for selecting indie records for distribution.

She knew how many supplicants he had—dozens every day. She said, “At least let me listen to it. You have to!” She clasped her hands and bounced to indicate pleading.

“Fine,” he said, holding out both seven-inches. “Take them.”

“I don’t want to keep them,” she said. “I want us to distribute it, if it’s any good. I want to hear it!”

“Why?”

“Because that guy was so cute, like an angel. Did you see his eyes? They were like stars!”

“Take them,” the manager said, disgusted.

She put one in her messenger bag and brought one to the frat boy working the customer service desk.

Forty-five minutes later, after his ironic Anita Baker compilation tape was done playing, the store filled with a fresh and compelling sound. Joe had recorded all the A side’s instrumental tracks on bass. Open strings played the part of Neil Young and Crazy Horse bass. High fretting was Phil Lesh meets the Congos bass. Fuzzy bass, courtesy of Pam’s distortion pedal, stepped in after the bridge to play a solo. All the tracks were doubled, because he liked playing them so much. The sound was low fidelity, but the tune rocked like a cradle rocking, like someone casually pitching a melody from hand to hand, and he sang in a tormented voice about something it was hard not to take for loneliness. The chorus was a three-part harmonic cadence on the repeated word “down,” careful and precise as a madrigal.

Annoyed by the challenge to his preconceptions, the customer service frat boy flipped it to hear the B side. Massive riffage blasted from the store’s speakers while the same voice cried out, “American woman!” The vocals were lower in the mix than on “Hold the Key” and conveyed a note of pain definitely lacking in the original. It sounded as if the American woman really had the singer cornered this time. It was less a succession of throwaway insults than a cry for help. The bass recalled live Yes or King Crimson, with the kind of distortion that peels paint off distant walls.

“I’m in love,” the stock girl said. “Do you think that was his baby?”

“It definitely wasn’t his single,” the frat boy replied. “That guy was a retard. That’s who the breeders are. Not smart people. That’s why we’re devolving.”

DANIEL BOUGHT FACTSHEET FIVE, THE FANZINE THAT CATALOGED FANZINES, AND PAGED through it, noting down the names and addresses of likely sounding targets. First he sent promo singles to riot grrrly magazines such as Bust and Chickfactor. (Post-punk women had exchanged duct tape on their nipples for heels and cocktail dresses without compromising their ironic focus on objectification by the male gaze and the appropriation of epithets intended to belittle and demean them.) Likewise he mailed promos to painfully masculine publications such as Thicker and the Probe. He tried for attention from mass-market monthlies with nationwide distribution (Spin, Alternative Press) and tabloid weeklies (Village Voice, City Paper), which got five singles each, instead of one, on account of their big staffs.

He truly didn’t expect any competent reviewers to approve the single by this means, but it was all he had. Music being a matter of taste, and the urge to help a struggling artist rare, he counted on wasting hundreds of dollars in postage alone in return, if he got lucky, for three or four inattentive reviews.

After about two months, he had his first responses: amiable paragraphs in modest publications—five-by-eight xeroxed, stapled, folded fanzines with circulations in the hundreds—all of which said that the single was “gorgeous.” That was the adjective du jour. In the age of grunge, anything that didn’t sound like a riding lawnmower was gorgeous. Several of the reviews arrived with demo cassettes from the reviewers’ bands. The one he liked best sounded like lawnmowers ridden by nymphets playing banjos, but he didn’t have the money to put out another single. Every time a review arrived, he cut it out with scissors and pasted it to the letter-sized sheet of paper he called the “press kit.”

JOE LACKED THE ROCK STAR’S STANDARD NEUROSES. HE FELT NO BASELESS CONVICTION that he was a genius. He had never needed illusions to feel good about himself, and his illusions had never been exposed. Unencumbered by the guilty suspicion that he was secretly a no-talent impostor, he had zero inhibitions about telling the world. Soon hundreds of people with no interest in music and less inclination to buy seven-inch singles were quite pointlessly aware that he had one out. The mail carriers knew it, as did the transvestite from Essex Street with the Yorkies, the girl who made the egg creams on First Avenue, the schizophrenic who sat on the discarded end table next to the BMT entrance on Houston, et cetera.

He liked magazines and he liked helping Daniel, so whenever he came near it, he stopped into See Hear, a large alternative newsstand in the East Village that specialized in music fanzines. He leafed through every magazine—dozens of new issues each week—checking each one under H and J to make sure they didn’t miss a review of his work. So it was he who found the notice in Forced Exposure.

Joe Harris. “Hold the Key” b/w “American Woman” 7" (Lion’s Den). Ruins meets Badfinger in a jar of Gerber’s. Mark my words: You don’t need to hear this, and whoever mic’d the drums on it should die facedown in a pile of dog shit with an AIDS-infected needle up his ass.

It was the first time he had seen a review before Daniel did. He wasn’t sure what to think. It was troubling enough that he didn’t even point to it and say, “Look! Forced Exposure reviewed my record!” to the cashier when he paid for it. He paid and left, walking with studied briskness toward Chrystie Street, repeating key phrases such as “facedown in a pile of dog shit” to himself with his first-ever inklings of self-doubt.

Daniel didn’t mind being awakened from a Saturday afternoon nap (Pam was out clothes shopping) to read it. A review in Forced Exposure was exciting to him.

“Admittedly hard to parse,” he said, “but definitely positive. Ruins is good.” Ruins was a Japanese improvising bass and percussion duo widely regarded in avant-garde circles as ultimate rock gods. “Badfinger means British invasion without the invasion. They’re saying it’s not bluesy.”

“And Gerber’s?” Joe protested. “That’s baby food!”

“They’re saying you can’t play guitar.”

“But I don’t play guitar, or drums either!”

“They’re making a funny about the drums.” Daniel turned to the front of the magazine and glanced through the features. “Oh, look. Here’s a sex scene between you and Thurston Moore.”

“A what?”

Daniel was too busy laughing to answer right away. “It’s a fake Sonic Youth tour diary. He loses his virginity to you in the ladies’ room at Wetlands. Definitely do not read this. They’re not trying to pluck you from obscurity, like they do with crappy Swedish speed metal. It’s like they think you’re already famous.”

Joe perused the tour diary entry. “‘The probing, darting fist of it-boy Joe Harris,’” he read aloud. “I’m the ‘it-boy’!”

“You’re the it-boy,” Daniel said. “High five.”

He clipped the one-paragraph review and added it to the press kit, unobtrusively, at the bottom, with his official media relations glue stick.