2 Abbott and the Somersault
On the stained carpet in the family room, Abbott gently flips his daughter over on her head in a near approximation of a somersault. “Somersault,” he says. “Dad do it?” she says. “OK,” he says. He is, after all, on his summer break. He clears away the books and animals to make room. This is fun physical play with his child; the body is a wondrous instrument. “OK, watch this,” he says, sensing her attention already shifting to a stuffed chipmunk. He prepares but then stops to wonder if what he’s envisioning is actually a somersault. He hasn’t thought about somersaults in years, maybe decades. What he is doing — or what he is preparing to do — does not seem like a somersault. It can’t be a somersault. For one thing, what he’s preparing to do — fling his body over his head to land on his back — seems extraordinarily difficult and dangerous. He extrapolates that there will be a moment, mid-“somersault,” when the only body parts touching the ground will be his fingertips and his skull. This seems like a pretty advanced gymnastic maneuver. What he knows of somersaults is that they are simple, joyous, carefree exercises, very basic tumbling, and so he knows he is getting something wrong. Kneeling, with his forehead on the carpet, Abbott is certain this is not a somersault but considers going through with it anyway, in the spirit of fun physical play. “Chipmunk!” his daughter shouts. Abbott’s wife enters and says, “Oooh, Dad’s trying a somersault. Careful, Dad.” “Dad do it,” his daughter says, suddenly reengaged. Abbott remembers the feeling of climbing up to the high dive at the county pool. You couldn’t very well climb back down the ladder. “This is a somersault?” he asks, forehead on carpet. “What do you think it is?” his wife says. “Is she watching?” he asks. “You know, sort of,” she says. So then he goes through with it, a dizzying and undisciplined tumble, concluding in mild nausea and a grunt. Less a roll than an accidental fall. His breath is ragged as he stares at the ceiling. The pain, Abbott thinks, might be his kidney. His wife and daughter clap and laugh. “You’ve got to tuck your chin, sweetheart,” his wife says. A man does not always know his ultimate acts — the last time he swims in the ocean, the last time he makes love. But at age thirty-seven, perhaps the midpoint of his one and only life, Abbott knows that he has attempted his final somersault.
3 Abbott and the Inoperative Traffic Light
After a violent thunderstorm rumbles through the Pioneer Valley, bending the maples and traumatizing the family dog, Abbott leaves his house to buy an ink cartridge for his printer. While driving, he notices the large tree branches in the yards and streets. He hears sirens in the distance. The sun is out now, and the wet asphalt steams. As Abbott approaches a busy four-way intersection, he observes that the light is inoperative, knocked out, presumably, by the storm. There is no police officer directing the traffic. With a button he locks the doors of his car. He is reminded of his insufficient life-insurance policy. Gradually, however, he perceives what is happening at the intersection ahead. The drivers, as if by prior agreement, are treating this broken traffic light as a four-way stop, and they are taking turns moving through. If Abbott is not mistaken, there is a coordinated counterclockwise movement to the turn-taking. Occasionally there are pauses during which no car ventures forth, but then one motorist will signal to another, who then waves and proceeds. Everyone is using appropriate signals. Abbott has witnessed this kind of egalitarian poststorm automotive subcommunity two or three other times in his life, and each time it has nearly brought him to tears. The rip in the social order neatly mended by a group of morally imaginative and mutually supporting human drivers with a firm and instinctual sense of fairness. Here’s a repudiation of Thomas Hobbes, William Golding, Abbott’s father. When Abbott stops in front of the broken light, he signals a middle-aged Asian man to go ahead and make the right turn the Asian man has indicated he would like to make. (The Asian man turns right and waves.) Abbott looks at the motorist to his left. A woman who appears to be a yoga instructor waggles her fingers above her steering wheel, beckoning forth Abbott, who waves ardently as he passes straight through the intersection on the way to buy the ink cartridge for his printer. The graded streets and the storm drains are doing their work. The sun is bright and cleansing. All the college kids are gone. This should be the end of the story, but it isn’t. At the end of the story, which is right now, Abbott is thinking once more about what happened to that baby in Tulsa.
4 Abbott’s Dog
Abbott’s dog is a sturdy, fit, and handsome yellow Lab that just might be, pound for pound, God’s most timorous creation. The dog has always been terribly afraid of thunder, fireworks, and backfiring engines, but the scope and intensity of his fear have increased as he has aged. At eleven, he now fears airplanes, garbage trucks, delivery vans, other dogs, cats, people, loud birds and bugs, scarecrows, snowmen, kites and flags, some trees, heavy rain, light rain, fog, cloudy skies, partly cloudy skies, gusts of wind, refreshing summer breezes. Also, he seems scared of what can most accurately be described as nothing. The symptoms of his fear include violent trembling, panting, shedding, and drooling so excessive that his front paws become shiny and slick. Abbott’s wife frequently says that the animal senses barometric shifts, distant weather phenomena. “No, he doesn’t,” Abbott says. Each night for the past week Abbott’s dog has been, for no discernible reason, overthrown by fright. Abbott’s wife, in her third trimester, is up frequently to urinate. Upon her return to bed, Abbott has noticed the dog shaking and attempting to get beneath things far too small to get beneath, his bad breath disseminated by panting. “There must be a storm moving in,” Abbott’s wife says, nightly. Abbott has yanked open the blinds to point out what he thinks is the Little Dipper. “Look,” he has said for a week. “There’s no storm.” “It’s far off,” his wife has said. “He can sense it.” Now tonight, after five or six stormless nights, Abbott, uncomfortable with mystery and irritated with the dog, strives to detect in the night some fear-inducing pulse or wave during his wife’s brief trip to the bathroom down the hall. He sits up in bed, holds his breath, cocks his head receptively, and in this way he achieves a promising hypothesis: The dog seems terrified by the barely audible rumble of unrolling toilet paper. This conjecture, Abbott knows, requires a well-designed experiment and a willing assistant. He entreats his wife to remove, so very quietly, the toilet-paper roll from its wall-mounted holder the next time she urinates. Once she has removed the roll she can — Abbott’s wife says she can handle it from there. When the time comes, about two hours later, she executes the test with a proficiency that compensates for her poor attitude. Meanwhile, Abbott observes the dog with rigor and dispassion. He notes that the subject, while markedly anxious about Abbott’s wife’s absence, does not exhibit the symptoms of a full-blown fear-based episode. The nonoccurrence of terror seems to confirm the hypothesis (though Abbott feels compelled to run a few more trials, both with and without the wall-mounted holder). This is a story Abbott would like to tell colleagues at a faculty cocktail party, should he ever attend one. It can be enjoyed as a humorous and suspenseful anecdote about a family pet, and it can also be enjoyed as a parable of the Enlightenment. Abbott imagines the clustered scholars leaning into his story, their cocktails nearly spilling onto the dean’s rug. To enhance the narrative’s dramatic effects — and to tease out its lofty implications about knowledge formation — Abbott finds that he must take small liberties with the truth. He embellishes, amplifies. He omits. For instance, Abbott sees no reason to tell the captivated imaginary gathering that his typical response to the dog’s fear is not sympathy or even intellectual curiosity but anger and exasperation. It drives Abbott crazy that the dog continually becomes so distraught over so little, and that the animal cannot, when afraid, be placated by words, logic, evidence, affection, or cheese. Best not to mention any of this, Abbott knows, but it’s so galling, all that hair in the closet, the drool on the floor. Here is a creature that understands from Abbott’s choice of shoes that it’s time for a walk, yet refuses to comprehend that a birthday balloon is not a mortal threat. Now, abruptly, Abbott’s story is gone, supplanted by the anger and exasperation he removed from it. He does not know — he can’t be certain — why he is so angered and exasperated by the dog’s stubborn fearfulness. Abbott’s wife’s hypothesis is, Abbott maintains, unverifiable.