On the contrary.
Knowing what you know now, knowing what you think you know, it stands to reason the fleshy arm roughly bifurcating the photograph belongs to Trudy, Jared’s wife.
Twenty-one months before you and Andi thumbed through your U.S. atlas and Encyclopedia Britannica in New Jersey, the small mole that you can detect just above and to the left of Trudy’s right elbow commenced changing form and texture.
By the time Jared noticed and pointed this out, the melanoma had spread to the skin on the back of Trudy’s neck.
By the time Nadie was two, Jared was a single parent.
This is how you will always recall him:
Pushing Nadine, ensconced in the upper basket of a shopping cart, through Safeway, rounding the same corner at the same instant you and Andi did.
His facial muscles derelict, his gaze unfocused as the photograph of his daughter on your refrigerator door.
Your shopping carts clanking.
Nadie beginning to cry, Jared to apologize.
Fifteen minutes, and you were sitting across from each other in a café specializing in unusual varieties of bagel, Nadie rocking in Andi’s arms, listening to how Jared was a professor of music theory at the university.
A professor of music theory who composed electronic scores and possessed a mind like an outboard motor.
Remixed ticks that are really bouncing ping-pong balls.
A chain-saw quartet.
Which is why he is visiting you tonight, ostensibly, Jared almost finished with a new piece and in need of an audience.
He shows up at your front door at six-thirty on the dot with Nadie perched on his right arm and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé and cassette of his latest enterprise extended in his left, ready with a funny opener about geeks bearing gifts.
You make small talk about his drive out as the four of you move through the house, stopping in the kitchen long enough to sort out drinks — Johnnie Walker for you and Andi, water for Jared, a nod no from Nadie who will not utter a peep — and onto the deck overlooking the gully.
Bear Creek whooshing like leaves rustling in heavy wind.
It is already almost dark.
Billions of pinpoint water particles suspended in air.
You light the grill, reciting narratives about the progress of the virtual performance museum on which you lead him to believe you are still working.
You tell Jared about the man in San Francisco who invented his own language, wrote its dictionary and grammar and pronunciation guide, and now puts on plays in it that are incomprehensible-if-mellifluous gibberish to everybody but himself and one eccentric linguist from Los Angeles who studies him.
You tell Jared about how the Vatican created a patron saint of the internet, Isidore of Seville, a sixth-century monk who composed an early database in the form of a twenty-volume encyclopedia.
Everyone laughs, including Nadie.
The damp atmosphere sweet with pine sap and humus.
You do not know why you begin lying to him. You did not think about it beforehand. Only there you are all of a sudden, lying.
Soon Andi and Jared fall into their own conversation about the state of her photography and you slip into the kitchen for hamburger patties.
You prospect in the refrigerator for the ground beef, rip the plastic wrap off the Styrofoam bed, take an earthenware plate out of the cabinet above the counter, tear off a fistful of brownish-pink meat, and start molding it into the perfect fast-food puck you associate with childhood felicity.
Sculpting, you move to the window, angling so as to avoid detection, and peek through the slats in the venetian blinds.
You imagine, sculpting, that you raise a camera and squint through the viewfinder.
The shot is either there or it is not.
It is either there or you lower your camera and keep walking.
It is that simple, really.
You have it or you do not.
If you had been paying more attention, you would have discerned it in Nadie’s features that day in Safeway: the lazy mouth muscles, the continuously puzzled eyes, the ears barely too conspicuous on her head of thin tangled black hair.
She will not say anything because she cannot say anything.
It will take her years and years to grow into a three-year-old’s consciousness, and even then she will fall short in many ways.
How in a foreign country you always exist in a haze of language you do not understand.
Hoping no one is talking to you.
Hoping no one is paying you any attention.
This is Nadie.
Jared offers her a sip from his glass of water and she shrinks back into his chest as if she’s being threatened by a baseball bat. Jared takes this in stride and sips from the glass himself. He runs his free hand up and down her arm as if trying to warm her.
Sculpting, you wonder what it means when someone opens his or her wallet, produces a photo, and announces: This is my wife.
I don’t know what it is, Jared says to Andi. She’s been like this all week.
Maybe she just needs a change of scene, says Andi. Here, holding out her arms. Let me try.
Jared passes his daughter over. You are genuinely impressed by the gesture. Nadie stiffens in midlift, ready to bay, then goes malleable as a sleepy cat when Andi gives her a little squeeze, settles her into her lap, kisses the top of her head.
Andi runs the tip of her finger around Nadie’s mouth and Nadie smiles impishly.
Tell me about your symphony, says Andi.
You should run a day care center, Jared says. Look at you. You’re a natural. The symphony? The symphony is a symphony. Except there aren’t any musical notes in it. Everything’s done with a speech program.
You type in what you want the computer to say?
I collect childhood jingles and slogans. When I’m a hundred and twenty and can’t remember my own social security number, I’ll still be able to recall what Quaker Oats wants me to buy.
A hundred and twenty?
The number of years I need to live to ensure I’ll be able to look after Nadie for the long natural life she deserves.
He tilts his head back, closes his eyes, intones:
I’d like to teach the world to sing…
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, Andi responds empathetically.
Two, you add from the screen door, voice filled with sadness. Two. Two mints in one.
These are the verbal constructs that shaped our psychic evolution, Jared says, opening his eyes and smiling at you. The ones that make us who we are, connect us to who we were.
You lay the six meat pucks on the grill and close the lid and tell him about how Saint Clare is the patron of sore eyes and television.
You consult your watch, raising it close to your face to compensate for the encroaching night, and balance your scotch on the railing.
… a whole bunch of them, Jared is explaining when you refocus on the conversation again, typed them into my computer, and recorded the resulting multivocal recitation. I took that into the studio and started twidgling. A little reverb here. A little track overlay there.
I can’t wait to hear it, Andi says, clapping together Nadie’s small palms.
Nadie lets out a joyous screak.
You glance at Andi, surprised at the pleasure she is taking in this activity.
A day care center, Jared says. It’s totally obvious.
One burger or two? you ask.
Two, says Jared. Nadie will probably just have a couple of bites of mine. Anyway, so. If it’s not too personal or anything, have you guys ever thought about having kids? You’d be such great parents. Creative. Intelligent. Loving…
One for me, says Andi, then to Nadie: Can you make a steeple with your fingers?