Pamela has a new barbecue pit and paper Chinese lanterns, a No-Pest Strip and wind chimes made of shells. Her lawn is neatly clipped, azaleas beginning to bloom.
Adams, alone with the kids, shuts the sliding glass door against the evening heat. He feels as though he’s visiting the home of a distant aunt. The furniture is familiar, but the house itself is strange to him, bright, open, feminine: light colors, cotton doilies, perfumed air.
Pamela, visiting a sick friend, had asked Adams to stop by after work to stay with the kids for a couple of hours. “There’s some hamburger in the fridge if you want to barbecue for them,” she said.
Now the kids are rolling on the floor, holding their stomachs. The meat seemed fresh, the pickles and lettuce brand-new. Adams himself feels fine. He feeds them aspirin. Deidre can’t keep it down. He cups her hot forehead as she leans over the toilet.
“I think that’s all.”
“Okay, I’ll get you a towel.”
“No, wait.” Another minute, swaying over the bowl.
“Feel better?” “I think so.”
He helps her unbutton her dress. She turns away from him modestly, pulls the dress over her head, and with her back still to him runs to her bed and hides herself under the covers. Adams hangs the dress in the closet full of blocks and books. The puffy sleeves settle, sighing, over the Grinch and the Slippery-Boo. He rubs her stomach through the covers and turns out the light. “Try to sleep,” he says.
Toby, meanwhile, has put himself to bed.
“How do you feel?”
“Stopped up.”
“Lungs, or just your nose?”
“Just my nose, I guess. And my ears. My throat’s sore.”
Adams places his hand under Toby’s jaw. A slight swelling. He goes into the kitchen and stirs salt into a glass of warm water. “Here, gargle this and spit. Don’t swallow.”
Neither child can sleep, and by the time Pamela gets home Adams himself feels a little dizzy.
“The hamburger must’ve been bad,” he says.
“Fastway’s meat is usually fresh.”
The following morning he feels better, but the kids remain in bed for another two days.
He draws a map of no place in particular, circular, many levels like smoke rings. The bottom ring he fills with leaves. Mixed among the leaves, utilizing their stems as definition, twelve brown hawks, wings folded, talons cramped and curled. On the next level the leaves give way to a grid, open squares within which larger hawks are just beginning to unfold their wings and open their eyes. The grid has become so wide on the next level that it can barely be perceived, and the hawks soar beyond the established border, the uneven edges of their feathers defining a new, amorphous territory. Ground to sky, intimacy to infinite space.
Three families own a total of eighteen hundred acres north of Deerbridge Road. Ownership of the remaining five hundred acres is being contested in court. The area looks fertile, grassy, slightly hilly. Streams wind through limestone gullies.
Carter is delighted. “A detailed map, hmm? Analyze movement from the point of view of convenience and cost. Say, within the week. Use the computer.”
In Adams’ office, a sleek plastic terminal. Keyboard. Blank screen. When he sits in front of the machine his own pale face stares back.
He has two problems: (1) the county line will not be firmly established until the courts act, and (2) he has no starting point.
With a space of uncertain dimensions, where does he begin? In a room, with a piece of furniture — the hutch or the wrought-iron plant stand. But in an undistinguished landscape (i.e., no meteor craters or industrial explosion sites) he is forced to choose at random. If the dimensions of the designated area are in question, the center is arbitrary.
Adams calls the center Point of View. Once this is established, he can arrange all of the territory in sight.
Outside Carter’s office, a young secretary crossing and uncrossing her legs. Her desk is aluminum, her typewriter IBM. When Carter is out of the office she pulls a Sony Walkman out of her desk drawer and types to Men at Work or Eddie Money. Partitions made of soundproof tiles separate her from other young secretaries crossing and uncrossing their legs. The partitions stop short of the ceiling; the secretaries do not enjoy complete privacy. Separated just enough so they can’t talk to one another.
Carter’s secretary smiles at Adams whenever he waits for an appointment. When he speaks to her, he has noticed, she takes her left shoe off underneath the desk. She does not remove this shoe for everyone.
The face of a candidate peeling off a billboard in the rain. Wings of paper whirl to the street, hauling eyebrows, corners of the mouth, the kindly I’ll-care-for-you look. A gentle father falling to earth on the backs of furry animals. They come to roost finally in a dark and fertile sewer where the father feels at home. His best tricks are underground tricks: withholding praise from the children, riddling them with anxiety in order to keep them sharp; tempering the wife with a weekly allowance, not mentioning the actual amount in the checking account. He must guard against free-floating pleasure, the anima, the id. He parcels out, in moderation, Dirty Harry movies to the kids, carefully counts the number of Bonwit-Teller boxes his wife brings home. He wallows in the brackish water, pleased with himself.
Overhead, thick copper cables — naked, uninsulated — break through chinks in the stone. Water drips on chalky bricks, splattering the copper. My God, he thinks, examining the wires, the whole city could blow, am I the only one who knows? Fleck fleck, like the ticking of a bomb. He reaches through the tun-neis for his kids, no use, he can’t find them in time. Sparks burst through manholes, the metal lids go flying, then —
When Deidre was little he held her in his lap and sang
She laughed and laughed and laughed. Then, one night when she had laughed herself red in the face, she paused, squinched up her nose, and thought about the song. Finally she said, “Daddy, what’s the funny of it?”
The children are sick again. Vomiting. Swollen glands. This time, Pamela says, it isn’t food poisoning. “We’ve been eating fresh vegetables.”
The doctor finds no traces of infection in either Toby or Deidre. “These look like allergic reactions,” he tells Adams, pointing out mild rashes on their arms. “Get some calamine lotion and see if that doesn’t clear it up.” Pamela takes them to a specialist, but by now the kids are fine, the swelling in their necks has disappeared. The allergy doctor places them each on a table, face down, and with a needle lightly scratches their backs. Next she pours various colored powders on each of the scratches. “These things contain active agents from pollens, spores, cat and dog hair, and so on.”
The tests come up negative.
“You’ve got two healthy kids,” the doctor says.
But a week later both are vomiting so hard their stomachs ache. They’re crying, awake all night. Pamela is having dizzy spells, too. Adams is convinced they’re being poisoned.
“Are you near a toxic waste dump?” He marches in the high grass of the fields around the house in all directions. Old tin cans, shoe soles, carburetor parts.
“I don’t think so,” Pamela says.
“Then it’s in the house. Something in the house is rotten.”
The gas stove doesn’t leak, the tap water tests fresh. There are no cracks in the foundation, nothing in the attic. “Who lived here before you? A doctor? Were there any old medicine bottles in the trash?”