The invention of the wor.., p.19
The Invention of the World, page 19
He married, instead, an overdeveloped girl by the name of Laura Schmidt, the only daughter in a large family of drunken thieves. They lived in an old shack far up a dirt road, in a died-out orchard cluttered with car parts and broken iceboxes and bedsprings. Neither the old man nor any of the six brothers worked; they lived off the results of “trades” they were always making with people, exchanging one useless piece of machinery for another but always in such a way that they ended up with a little more than the trade-partner had intended them to have. It was what the old man called “stepping up in the world” and would eventually lead him, if he lived long enough and logic was something you could count on, to being the richest man in the district. Laura, too, was traded off to Wade, though not in any way quite so obvious as the bedsprings and car parts were traded. Without her, the old man said, there would be one less mouth to feed: that in itself was a profit. But in handing her over, he said, he expected to gain a son-in-law who would lend a helping hand now and then, when the volume of trade was too heavy for “the boys”, and who wouldn’t be above sharing some of his liquor supply when the police had been out in their yearly visit to smash up his still and break all the bottles in his stock. Wade agreed to everything, though he had no intention of doing any of it, because Laura had thrown herself at him, practically begged him to marry her, and he didn’t know how to pass up an opportunity like that. As soon as the wedding was over he moved south to build his fort and had no dealings at all with his in-laws.
“You’re a goddam fraud,” the old man said. “But you don’t need to think for a minute you’ll get away with it. Nobody outdeals Montgomery Schmidt. Nobody.”
There was hardly time for revenge. Within a month after the wedding Laura, the bride, having found her way out of that drunken family, decided to keep right on going. She disappeared with an American tourist who told her that in his California orange grove there was nothing to do but lie around all day getting a suntan and thinking of ways to spend his money. How could she refuse an offer like that, she wrote later. Surely Wade would understand why she couldn’t turn him down.
Oh, he understood all right, he wrote her. He understood only too well. But he couldn’t see why she hadn’t suggested taking him along too. Didn’t he enjoy sunshine every bit as much as she did?
But what did he really care about that? The thing that really mattered, the thing he’d waited for all his life had happened. He had The Fort. He had those tourists so eager to part with their money. He had Virginia. Things were perfect.
THREE
On the afternoon of the day after the wedding, while Virginia painted in her yellow house, he walked by himself out on the beach, on the exposed side of the spit, a hundred yards out from the shoreline, just above the bed of green slimy seaweed that lay exposed and stinking along the edge of the water. He walked on rocks big as footballs, scarred with barnacles and limpets the shape of coolie hats, and whenever gulls came flapping down to investigate his movement he threw pebbles like bits of food and then waved his arms to send them screeching away. There was a dull ache in his groin. His stomach felt as if he’d swallowed fire. It was whenever he did too much thinking that he bloated up with gas, like a cow trapped on its back in a hole.
The figure coming towards him down the beach seemed at first to be vaguely familiar, even at a distance. There was something about the loose hip-tilting walk he thought he recognized. It was a man, he saw, dressed in white pants and an orange shirt, but it was no man he had ever seen before. And when the stranger got close enough for Wade to see his face, he realized with a cold flush of shock that he was looking at an exact duplicate of himself. The man smiled, said “Hello” in a voice that sounded like Wade’s voice, and then passed right by and kept on walking down the beach. Wade was too surprised to speak, nor did he make any effort to follow. He watched the man until he disappeared around the tip of the spit, out of sight behind The Fort.
At dinner he pushed the fat sausages around on his plate and tried to eat. His mother shovelled her own food in as if she were afraid someone would steal it, talking the whole time about a family of black people who came to The Fort today all the way from Mississippi. “Drove a big old red converted school bus,” she said, “a whole pile of black faces looking out. It seemed like there was one for every window. And clean, I’ve never seen a whole family of kids all look so clean before, every one of them. Like little black dolls. I wish we had more black people in this country, they’re so different from everybody else. Your stomach acting up again?”
Yes it was, he said. And she pulled his plate across the table and began eating off it as if she were the Queen of Somewhere at a banquet. That was how dainty she could be if she wanted, nibbling with just her front teeth.
“Was there a man went through today?” he said. “Did you sell a ticket to a man in an orange shirt?”
She shrugged. “Who knows?” through a mouthful of potato. “What did he look like?”
He couldn’t tell the truth straight on. “Dark,” he said. “Lots of black hair. Tall. He had white pants on.”
“Maybe,” she said, though she looked dubious. “There was a lot of people today. Business was good.”
Business was always good. In the six years he’d been open there hadn’t been a summer yet when tourists had failed to flock through. They handed over their money with an eagerness that made him suspect the only thing important to them was parting with it, that what they saw didn’t matter to them as much as the desire to spend every cent they’d brought along on their holiday. The sight of tourists streaming off the government ferries onto the island had given him his idea for The Fort. They were just begging for him to take their money.
“Business was good,” his mother said, again. “It wouldn’t hurt you to hang around more. Show some interest.”
The next afternoon he went out onto the beach again at the same time in case the stranger should walk by. He knelt at the edge of the seaweed bed and listened to the crackling sound of hundreds of tiny crabs moving about beneath the rocks. He pulled in a piece of kelp, laid it out on the rocks, and stepped it off. Forty feet of stem, nine feet of leaves, and the Indians had known uses for every inch. He thought of Virginia Kerr in her house up there, painting that ridiculous picture and thinking she was doing something important. He recalled what it was like to be close to her, and to listen to her voice. When the stranger came walking towards him, Wade was so preoccupied that the man was almost past before he noticed him.
“Ah!” he said, and stood up.
Yes, it wasn’t a trick of light or imagination. The man was the exact image of himself. Even his dark eyes had the same flecks of pale green. Wade, excited, waited for him to notice it, too, and to say something.
But he didn’t seem the least bit impressed. He smiled, said “Hello again, you must like this spot,” and moved on past.
“Yes,” Wade said. “I own that place over there, that fort there.”
“Oh?” The man stopped, and showed his teeth, and rubbed the front of his shirt. He looked back at the stockade fence, at the top of the bastion showing above it, and raised one eyebrow. Then he studied Wade’s face as if looking for clues to something. “A place like that must be a big responsibility,” he said, which was not at all the kind of thing Wade might say.
“Look,” Wade said, and stuck out his hand. “The name’s Wade Powers.”
“Yes,” the man said, and held the hand in his grip for just a second, then let go. “Nice to meet you. Hope you don’t mind if I take my walk along here.”
Wade shrugged. “Nobody owns the beaches.”
“True.”
“And anyway, you’re welcome here.”
The man looked at Wade as if he had doubts about that. He looked again at The Fort. “I suppose I should have a look at the inside of your outfit there,” he said. “Some day.”
Wade watched his walk, his own walk, all the way to the point, and his knees felt weak. There was sweat running in streams down his sides. After a while he, too, walked to the point, saw the man walking far down the curve of the bay, and followed.
He followed the stranger nearly a mile down the beach, then up an access road to a campsite. The man went into a long house-trailer for a few minutes, then came out and drove away in a car paler than the sky, a silver-blue sedan that looked as if someone had tried to see how close paint could come to being invisible. Wade felt like someone who had just come through a museum where he’d admired everything there was, and then realized that he hadn’t the slightest idea what any of it meant.
“Everybody has a double,” he said, because that was something he’d heard his mother say at some time. He decided that when the man came into The Fort he would ask him why he hadn’t seemed to notice how similar they were. Maybe he never looked in a mirror.
“Who says they have to look the same?” Virginia said, when Wade told her the painting she was doing didn’t look like any beach he’d ever seen.
“It looks like somebody’s insides,” he said.
“Not yours I hope,” she said, and gave him a look.
“You spend all summer painting a picture that’s supposed to look like that beach out there and all you get is this. I could do better with a camera.”
“Boy, you’re touchy today,” she said. “And all of a sudden you’re an art critic.”
He felt lousy. His stomach churned. He couldn’t keep his mind off that damned man in the silver car. He had the suspicion that when he got around the corner the car and man both vanished into thin air, like a space ship. Not even Virginia Kerr in her red bikini could snap him out of it. “It’s a waste of your time,” he said. “I hope that’s not how you teach your pupils to paint.”
“Look,” she said. “Don’t you know anything? Can’t you see what I’m trying to do? I don’t want this painting to look like what you see when you look at that beach. You look with the eyes of a man who makes his living from cheating tourists.”
“And you of course,” he sang, “see with the eyes of an artist.” He did a dance step in the middle of the room to show his opinion of artists.
But he’d spoiled it for today and she threw her brushes down. She turned the easel so the painting was facing the wall. Then she walked across the room and pushed him backwards into the sofa. “Damn you, Wade Powers,” she said. “What do you know about anything?”
And sat on him.
“What good are you anyway?” she said.
“Well, if you get up off my lap for a minute I’ll just show you.”
She laughed and moved off and slid her hand down inside his pants. “Show me what?” she said. “Show me this? What do you think I could make of this if I painted it?”
“Painted it?” he shouted. And stood up to drop his pants.
She locked the front door and led him through to her bedroom. “Don’t notice the mess,” she said. “Don’t notice I haven’t even made the bed today.”
When he lay beside her, exhausted and exultant, he told her the reason he couldn’t stand being over in that fort all day long was that the sight of tourists disgusted him. A bunch of fools was what they were, he told her, to part with their money so easily. They came into the place looking as if there was a real treat in store for them, and went out again looking as if something had just been added to their lives. They thought they were stepping back in time, living their own ancestors’ lives for a moment, and didn’t even suspect what idiots they were. They’d take pictures and go home thinking they’d been inside a real fort that was used once to hold off a howling pack of Indians. Or more likely, he told her, they’d drive on to the next tourist trap up the highway and forget by the end of the day that they’d ever been at his place. It probably wouldn’t even bother them to be told what they’d paid for was only a rough counterfeit of the real thing.
“It makes me sick to see how stupid people can be,” he said.
She told him the problem was he had too much time to sit around thinking. What he needed was a job. But sometimes he did get a job, he told her, sometimes he went out selling real estate just to get away. “It’s remembering those stupid tourists that makes it easy for me to talk people into paying twice too much for things they don’t even really want.”
“Ha!” She slapped his bare buttocks and sat up. “When you talk like that I don’t even want to guess what it is you really think of me.”
The stranger, in his immaculate white pants and orange shirt, walked with Wade up onto the hill of grass the next day and sat down where he could see all up and down the strait. He said the little fort on the point of land didn’t look like much beside all the rest of this natural scenery.
“It’s a good spot, though,” Wade said. “The highway follows the coast in both directions, people can see this point for ten miles coming.”
“It’s a good enough spot,” the man said. “A nice spot for a park. You couldn’t ask for a better proof.” He took it all in with his moving eyes, following the spit from the stand of high firs down across the rolling field to the rocky point with its sudden wood tower. Then his gaze lifted and sought out a sprinkle of white dots, fishing boats, clustered far out on the water. “There’s a handful of optimists,” he said. “This time of day.”
“This is the first summer I’ve seen you around here,” Wade said. “Where do you come from?”
“From?” He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, nowhere.” He dismissed the question with a brief gesture of his hand.
Wade listened to the air, to the grasshoppers. “Better proof of what?” he said.
“Proof?” the man said, and frowned to recall. “Oh, proof of things that need to be proved.”
“I’ve lived on this island all my life,” Wade said. “If somebody asked me where I come from I’d be able to point to a square inch on a map and say there.”
“People are different,” the man said. “Some are more tied.”
“Yes?”
“To earth. To things. To themselves, to their own bodies.”
Wade’s bowels grumbled. Gas swelled in his stomach. “But … haven’t you noticed anything strange?”
The man looked at him. “About what?”
“About us. About how much we look alike. We could be twins.” A muscle twitched in Wade’s eyelid.
“What?”
“Looking at you is like looking in a mirror.”
“Good heavens,” the man said. And laughed again. “What an idea. You must be joking.” And lay back on the grass to stare at the sky.
Wade was afraid for a moment that he was going mad. He wished Virginia Kerr were here to see the two of them side by side. He wished he could get this fellow down where his mother could have a look at him.
“Look,” he said. “How about coming down for a look at The Fort?”
The man shook his head. “Not today,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow. When I get back.”
“Back from where?”
“A man of God is a busy man,” he said. “I’m on the road a lot, it’s not very often I get the time to lie around like this.”
“What?”
He sat up, shaking his head. “Oh, I don’t mean preacher, not a minister. It was a silly thing to say, I suppose, but you see that’s the way I think of myself, of us all.”
“Then what do you do?” Wade said. He was beginning to think the mad one in this pair wasn’t himself after all.
But the man was not listening. He was following, evidently, some idea of his own across the blank sky. “There’s a woman,” he said, “lives a few miles north of here. Most of her house burned down a while back and she’s living in just the room that’s left. She’s expecting me.”
“You’re in insurance, then.”
“Now the question is this: Can you really say her house burned down when there’s still a room left standing? Can you even say it’s the same house?” Suddenly he sighed deeply, and stood up to go. “I’ll come down and have a look at your place there tomorrow afternoon.”
After his mother had finished eating both their dinners again he walked over to Virginia’s house and went in. But she noticed the sweat that had broken out all over his body, she commented on the way his hands were shaking, she even heard the rumblings of his guts. “You better go home to bed,” she said. “You’re in no condition for anything at all.” He took a good look at her painting again, to see if he could recognize anything in it yet. But it still looked like nothing at all to him. And anyway, she told him, she hadn’t felt like adding a thing to it today. She needed a rest from it, she said. He went back to his own house and crawled into bed.
He wasn’t sick, he knew that. Yet he felt like a man in a fever. Something terrible was struggling to be born in his brain. He grunted and farted and sat up suddenly. He tried to read, and threw the book across the room. His mother banged on the door, calling out: “Wade, are you all right? Are you sick? Wade?” But he told her to shut up and leave him alone, nothing was wrong, he was all right, go on back to bed. He suspected that she stayed out there, just outside his door, for the whole rest of the night, listening, waiting for him to call out for help. He kicked and fought his way right into sleep and slept fitfully and dreamed that the stranger, hovering above his head in the silver-blue space ship, chased him all up and down this coast, all up and down every road and in every valley of the mountains, trying to suck him up with a gigantic vacuum cleaner. When he awoke in the morning the thing in his brain had been born, he knew what it was he was going to do.
