Abbott would like to think he’s a good guy, and yet his wife is up there sobbing, and he’s down here with the superglue.
19 Abbott’s Mind
Abbott nearly swerves into a mailbox trying to read the church’s hand-lettered advertisement for a forthcoming sermon entitled TOLERANCE IS NOT THE SAME AS LOVE. There is no need for comment or response. No need, even, for thought. Abbott knows that you are supposed to envision your mind, your consciousness, as a clean and empty room, open windows on opposite walls, the wind just passing through. The wind is the world, here and gone, or perhaps only here. Abbott likes to add white fluttering curtains to give the wind form, but he soon discovers that the room of his consciousness has a curtain rod, some hardware, a cordless drill with a battery that needs to be charged. He’ll need an electrical outlet. Is the room wired? He can’t remember what the things on the ends of curtain rods are called. They have a name. The wind swirls in his room, stirring up dust. Abbott has thoughts, he can’t help it, about the hand-lettered advertisement for the sermon. One thought is that tolerance, while admittedly not identical to love, is, on an imaginary Continuum of Regard, a good deal closer to love than enriched uranium. Another thought, buried beneath the first like an earthquake survivor, is that there is in fact not one thing the same as love, including love.
20 Malaise Is for Renters
Some stories, like this one, have more than one ending. Here is the beginning: When his family moved into the house in Western Massachusetts, Abbott found an old nine-by-twelve carpet rolled against a wall in the unfinished basement. Soon after settling in, Abbott unrolled the musty but serviceable carpet on the cement floor. He then placed the cat’s litter box atop the carpet, both to create a comfortable excretory environment for the cat and to limit the dispersal of litter. During the winter, Abbott began to suspect the cat was spraying the carpet, but the carpet is dark and the basement lighting is poor, and he did not care to investigate the matter. When spring arrived with higher temperatures and higher humidity, however, the basement began to reek. And then tonight, Abbott, dizzy with the fumes, investigates the matter and realizes with a cold shudder that the carpet is soaked with cat piss that apparently never dries. Not dealing with it is no longer an option. He must put his hands on the carpet, and now. Abbott rolls the carpet (wincing at the wet cement beneath), opens the rusted metal doors of the bulkhead, and drags the sodden, cylindrical load up six wooden stairs to the backyard, then around the house to the driveway. Now is the time for thinking. The carpet is far too big to leave by the curb for the weekly garbage pickup, and also too big to place in or on his car to take to the dump. Abbott knows what must be done, and he selects from his garage a standard carpentry saw, with which he attempts to cut a strip from the carpet along the twelve-foot side. The carpet, however, has a thick border, reinforced, Abbott will come to learn, by saw-resistant wire. Thus he returns to the garage and emerges with a large pair of hedge clippers, and with some effort he manages to slice the carpet’s border. The word Abbott cannot quite remember until much later is selvage. The sun has dipped below the tops of the big trees, but the night is still quite hot, and Abbott is sweating. The windows of his house are open, and he can hear his wife tell his daughter, “No mouth.” Once he has sliced through the carpet’s border with the hedge clippers, he is able, with considerable exertion, to cut a nine-foot strip with the saw, stopping at the bottom border to use the hedge clippers again. With this combination of tools, he makes seven long cuts, creating eight strips of filthy, urinous carpet, nine feet long and roughly eighteen inches wide. This takes quite a while. The wire inside the carpet borders cuts his fingers, which are wet with piss and slimy nuggets of cat litter. He hears his wife tell his daughter, “Time for your bath.” Neighbors walk by and watch him cut carpet with a saw. It is possible, he knows, that they can smell the ammonia from the street. He does not look up, does not indicate that he is available for chitchat. Even so, they call out, “Looks like you got your hands full there,” and, “What you need is a carpet cutter.” He grunts assent, wipes his brow with his sweaty shirt. Abbott rolls each of the eight nine-foot strips into a tight, damp bundle, and he stacks the bundles in the driveway like firewood. Cord, he thinks. He hears his wife tell his daughter, “Let’s get you to bed.” He returns the hedge clippers and saw to the garage, and he sweeps up the litter and carpet fluff from the driveway. Then he takes from the garage an empty plastic garbage can and a box of heavy-duty lawn bags. He places the carpet rolls in two bags, four to a bag, and he heaves the bags into the garbage can. He tries to push the lid on, but it will not fit. That one vivid star must be Venus. Garbage pickup, Abbott remembers, is not tomorrow but the following day. He would rather the stuffed and lidless can not sit incriminatingly at the street for thirty-six hours, so he decides to drag it back into the garage. This kind of dragging will eventually wear a hole in the bottom of the can, but Abbott does not know that yet, and he is untroubled. He presses an illuminated doorbell button mounted on a two-by-four, and the garage door drops slowly like a final curtain. And this is where the story furcates like lightning, strikes ground in four places. The first ending is about Ernest Hemingway and masculinity: catching speckled trout in a cold stream, knocking them dead on a flat rock, furling them in leaves, and placing them in a shady spot until dinner. The second ending is cold and familiar, another variation of the look-behind-the-refrigerator horror of domesticity and the soul-diminishing obligations of middle-class citizenship. The third ending is a virulent eco-sci-fi scenario, involving planetary visitors in the year 2820 who find massive underground deposits of nondegraded carpet. The fourth ending is the riskiest and the most interesting. This ending makes a sincere attempt at Franklinian homily, and it goes more or less like this: Almost any task, no matter how initially abhorrent, can, if conceived with Ingenuity and executed with Industry, create feelings of Satisfaction and Pleasure.
21 Abbott and the Longest Day of the Year
Amidst the toys in the family room is a battery-operated light-sensitive jungle-animal-sounds puzzle, given to Abbott’s daughter either by a childless friend of Abbott or a friend of Abbott who hates Abbott. Tonight, like all the nights, Abbott and his wife clean the family room after putting their daughter to bed. Tonight, like all the nights, when they turn off the light after cleaning they activate a loud light-sensitive jungle-animal sound — an unspecifically savage squawk from the bottom of the puzzle crate. A monkey, perhaps, or parrot. Tonight, like all the nights, the jungle-animal sound is an agonizing surprise, an ambush. Abbott and his wife laugh and say curse words. Shit and fuck, for instance. The imprecations, because they are directed at a puzzle for children ages two to four, seem more vulgar and thus more satisfying. Tonight, like all the nights, Abbott says he will just take the batteries out of that motherfucker. Outside, the sun is setting, and the sky has turned that color that is both lovely and frightening. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Abbott’s wife, vanishing down the dark hallway. This day, like all the days, endless and gone.
22 The Abbott Hubcap Index (AHI)
As Abbott drives homeward through the Pioneer Valley, his spirits are lifted by the sight of a shining hubcap propped against a maple tree, and then another against a weathered wooden fence. They look like gleaming medals bestowed upon the human race. The probability of a driver ever locating a missing hubcap is remote, of course, which is precisely what makes hubcap-propping such a poignant act. These anonymous pedestrians have propped hubcaps because they know if they ever lost a hubcap, they would want someone else to prop it. It’s the foundation of all moral philosophy. Then, as Abbott nears his house, he notices his neighbor has returned home from a weeklong trip in his new car. He notices, furthermore, that the wheels on the driver’s side are missing their hubcaps. The car, so sleek just days ago, now looks dilapidated. Considering the possibility of a design flaw, Abbott drives around the block in order to examine the car’s passenger side, and he observes then that those hubcaps are also missing. Whatever he might wish to believe, Abbott knows it is statistically unlikely that all four hubcaps fell off this new car. He stops just past his neighbor’s driveway, stares back into the black nothingness at the center of the tires. He feels that he is within a drama of contending moral forces, as we find in Hawthorne. Is it unreasonable, Abbott wonders, to want to live and raise children in a land where the number of propped hubcaps (PH) exceeds the number of stolen hubcaps (SH)? He imagines a list of industrialized nations, ranked according to a hubcap index — the ratio PH: SH, expressed as the average number of propped hubcaps per one stolen hubcap. An index of 2 would be righteous indeed. Really, anything above 1 would be an index of virtue, as it would indicate that the citizens’ noblest instincts were prevailing, by however slight a margin. The USA, Abbott speculates, certainly has an index no greater than the 0.5 he has recorded this afternoon. Sweden’s ratio is probably the best. Sweden’s or Norway’s.