The day we moved in I learned from the magisterial, patient super the kind of thing I had almost forgotten I wished to know. My encounter with him — first in our new apartment, with Ev busy and half-listening (and Emma saying, “Ong Zeus”), then in the hall outside our front door, then in the west elevator whose ID button the super pushed to illustrate a point, then in the dim basement and its corridors where we pretended to look for a vacant storage locket — led to two conclusions, his and mine, distinct yet seemingly congruent in the one rounded shadow we combined to cast in the light of two dusty bulbs, one of them behind him one behind me. Ma’am the answer to that is there’s no space in the basement. Yes sir you sure have got a lot of books, I see you have a book on Islam, very interesting, I don’t know it; have you read all those? It’s going to be a splendid apartment in my opinion we get them bathrooms finished. Sure the fireplace works, long’s the City don’t crack down. Plastering (plastering-plastering) well yes and no, the house painter will do plastering if you ask real nice, he’s very busy. Over the shower? In the window? He’s very busy, I got him on a pretty extensive operation all this week but next week who knows—who knows? Basement (basementbasement) oh we going to look; but like I told you there is no space; hopefully we can allocate a spot for the trunks, yes sure we could take this one now. The east elevator down the hall there’s under inspection. Leggo I got it. This button? The I D! Funny I never thought of that. No it means “One Down,” but it don’t work, push it all you want the only way to go one down from eight is press seven. No I got what you meant, oh the id, sure; no, it’s one floor down, that’s the meaning not the id. Don’t you strain yourself, what the missus leave inside, cinder blocks? O.K. watch out, I got her. We can leave it up against these newspapers. Sure, sure, we can look, but those lockers belong to people been here twenty thirty years. Oh yes he’s got one all right; oh you know him; his first name? Funny, I don’t know either, but he’s a pal of mine, two night owls at the all-night deli, even give me an autographed book he wrote. But he’s got trouble, y’see. See? there’s no lockers for you. Hopefully one could become vacant and then I might arrange for you people to get it but people live here till they die, big apartments for the rent, we don’t have the wherewithal to provide the services we once could before I come here. B’I think we might make a special space back there where we left your trunk, move some of those stacks of papers, I could give you a spot all to yourself, you couldn’t store a bedroom set there but hopefully some of your luggage kind of thing y’see. The trouble? What you expect? the man’s controversial, the mailman needs an extra box for him is what he needs he gets so much mail. Made these speeches all over the country — see, what happened he asked for an unlisted number he was getting some crazy calls after he went around the country and said all that about the Religious Leaders — oh you know? — somebody let it out he was in for an unlisted number, and Christ if the papers didn’t get hold of the number before he did. Yes I know him personally, he’s a real gentleman, and a brilliant man in my opinion; a little extremist but you got to respect him. Thank you sir that wasn’t necessary, thanks (thanks-thanks), we clear them stacks off this week so you got your own space. The space you save may be your own. No he’s not presently in the city. Got some land down in the Islands — Exuma? Well, I couldn’t say, but he got land on two of them down there — no taxes — went there for a long weekend, he’s got pirates from — Haiti I think coming over there they say; it’s undeveloped, just one hotel, he’ll be back Monday Tuesday; mail’s piling up, stacks of it, I think he better get a secretary, had one a few years back then he fired her and she got married all of a sudden and very next month lost her baby, some of his mail just laying around in the mailroom, he never comes down till noon. He’s after me to buy down there.
Still, the super through the next two weeks maintained a kind of equidistance between our apartment and the course of my movements. When I said, Dom, that I had space to explain, did I mean among others the superintendent’s space I have just for this inflated moment occupied? I dislodge myself, Dom, from the super’s space of hopeful vacancies, Haitian pirates, a derelict plaque in the basement emblazoned “OUR CODE,” stacks of papers and (on the main floor) mail, and confess it’s been some years since I presumed either by parabolic passage or creative congruence to lose myself in other lives. In short, I tipped the super an opening five for his idioms and the eerie equivalence each item of his talk seemed to have with each other item, and before the week was out ascertained the mailman’s schedule and acted on it.
Saturday you never know; but eight-fifteen Monday through Friday he’s at the boxes with the two canvas sacks of house mail slumped on the floor. In ranked banks of twenty per official lock the eighty boxes are tilted out like bins and top-loaded. Now, that early in the day tenants don’t bother unlocking the front of the box but reach in the top while the mailman’s at work. My box, though remote from yours by floor, is right under yours, for one thing because we’ve the same letter apartments (though judging from the scale of this room not exactly the same apartments — did I say scale?). With a sigh and a matutinally murmured pardon I bumped the mailman and reached. Reached, removed — then perhaps turned with gracious surprise to greet the man who has half a Bermuda onion first thing before he walks his obese Corgi. My own mailbox I could unlock later, if Ev didn’t.
Now a public man not only rates more junk mail than a man like me but may oftener feel obliged to answer it. And it isn’t only junk mail that costs pointless intersections. Your recent wife was of the opinion your attack on Religious Leaders might lose you that new conservative interest you’d elicited from the vast para-urban constituencies even if you and I (in our separate but like-lettered apartments here in this old benighted building) knew that these constituencies merely used you as entertainment. It was clear to me your wife wanted you to sense that even going around in circles you were still the man she once took you for, and that if you took each other back, you two might now finesse an open-ended truce in this great apartment I’ve as yet not had time to case. Three of her letters misconstrued your work so subtly I almost resealed them and sneaked them back into your box. But I trusted my hand and deposited them in our floor’s incinerator chute whose little room at ten a.m. can fill so with back-up fumes due to the landlord’s failure to replace a defective baffle that the bulb above the porter’s deep slop-sink can be seen through the smoke only in sulphuric blur. My censoring in any case lessened the pressure on you. Perhaps not enough. Tonight something happened. I will need more than time to explain it to myself. I don’t have to raise the extensible rod and pull up your projection screen out of its case and hook it to know it’s a silver-gray lenticular. The DA-LITE label tells me.
What’s my line? Maybe you. But be warned, my course is partly coördinated by certain points and lines it never touches, it runs between them in a way and misses them but is derived from their distances. Take my paternal uncle Coolidge along the Potomac and my step-grandfather John stuck in Flatbush.
Yes, Dom, maybe you. But I’ve neither striven nor wished to be someone else. My complaining step-son Ted will read of your death and never guess my connection. A generation of complainers seek now from all those over thirty sweet peace as right rather than privilege — as a fringe benefit on the magic map of cost-to-cost plenty. But better off complaining than borne on mild old grass to some poly-deceleration of the head. Ted, thanks to the rhythms that be, isn’t interested in smoking (period) much less in syncopating his charismosomes. Oh for God’s sake, C.C., he says to me, pausing head down at the front door one evening he knows I wish he’d stay home, for God’s sake the way you talk—be spontaneous. Then back home at the crack of dawn he’s staring out the kitchen window pretending he didn’t hear me get up and no doubt hoping I’m still sunk in dense sleep, which shows you how much he knows about this desomniac dad of his (right?). I didn’t have to follow you to the other side of the country, Dom, to know what I know. But just the same, I went.