Alfred’s hands were rotating on his wrists like the twin heads of an eggbeater. As well as he could, he advanced his fingers along the string, squeezing and twisting the wires as he went — and the dark stretch reignited! The string was complete!
What had he done?
He smoothed out the string on the Ping-Pong table. Almost immediately, the faulty segment went dark again. He tried to revive it by squeezing it and patting it, but this time he had no luck.
(You fitted the barrel of the shotgun into your mouth and you reached for the switch.)
He reexamined the braid of olive-drab wires. Even now, even at this extremity of his affliction, he believed he could sit down with pencil and paper and reinvent the principles of basic circuitry. He was certain, for the moment, of his ability to do this; but the task of puzzling out a parallel circuit was far more daunting than the task, say, of driving to a discount store and waiting in line. The mental task required an inductive rediscovery of basic precepts; it required a rewiring of his own cerebral circuitry. It was truly marvelous that such a thing was even thinkable — that a forgetful old man alone in his basement with his shotgun and his sugar cookie and his big blue chair could spontaneously regenerate organic circuitry complex enough to understand electricity — but the energy that this reversal of entropy would cost him vastly exceeded the energy available to him in the form of his sugar cookie. Maybe if he ate a whole box of sugar cookies all at once, he could relearn parallel circuitry and make sense of the peculiar three-wire braiding of these infernal lights. But oh, my God, a person got so tired.
He shook the string and the dead lights came on again. He shook it and shook it and they didn’t go out. By the time he’d coiled the string back onto the makeshift spool, however, the deep interior was dark again. Two hundred bulbs were burning bright, and modernity insisted that he junk the whole thing.
He suspected that somewhere, somehow, this new technology was stupid or lazy. Some young engineer had taken a shortcut and failed to anticipate the consequences that he was suffering now. But because he didn’t understand the technology, he had no way to know the nature of the failure or to take steps to correct it.
And so the goddamned lights made a victim of him, and there wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do except go out and spend.
You were outfitted as a boy with a will to fix things by yourself and with a respect for individual physical objects, but eventually some of your internal hardware (including such mental hardware as this will and this respect) became obsolete, and so, even though many other parts of you still functioned well, an argument could be made for junking the whole human machine.
Which was another way of saying he was tired.
He fitted the cookie into his mouth. Chewed carefully and swallowed. It was hell to get old.
Fortunately, there were thousands of other lights in the Maker’s Mark box. Alfred methodically plugged in each bunch. He found three shorter strings in good working order, but all the rest were either inexplicably dead or were so old that the light was faint and yellow; and three shorter strings wouldn’t cover the whole tree.
At the bottom of the box he found packages of replacement bulbs, carefully labeled. He found strings that he’d spliced back together after excising faulty segments. He found old serial strings whose broken sockets he’d hot-wired with drops of solder. He was amazed, in retrospect, that he’d had time to do all this repair work amid so many other responsibilities.
Oh, the myths, the childish optimism, of the fix! The hope that an object might never have to wear out. The dumb faith that there would always be a future in which he, Alfred, would not only be alive but have enough energy to make repairs. The quiet conviction that all his thrift and all his conservator’s passion would have a point, later on: that someday he would wake up transformed into a wholly different person with infinite energy and infinite time to attend to all the objects that he’d saved, to keep it all working, to keep it all together.
“I ought to pitch the whole damn lot of it,” he said aloud.
His hands wagged. They always wagged.
He took the shotgun into his workshop and leaned it against the laboratory bench.
The problem was insoluble. There he’d been, in extremely cold salty water, his lungs half-full and his heavy legs cramping and his shoulder useless in its socket, and all he would have had to do was nothing. Let go and drown. But he kicked, it was a reflex. He didn’t like the depths and so he kicked, and then down from above had rained orange flotation devices. He’d stuck his working arm through a hole in one of them just as a really serious combination of wave and undertow — the Gunnar Myrdal’s wake — sent him into a gargantuan wash-and-spin. All he would have had to do then was let go. And yet it was clear, even as he was nearly drowning there in the North Atlantic, that in the other place there would be no objects whatsoever: that this miserable orange flotation device through which he’d stuck his arm, this fundamentally inscrutable and ungiving fabric-clad hunk of foam, would be a GOD in the objectless world of death toward which he was headed, would be the SUPREME I-AM-WHAT-I-AM in that universe of unbeing. For a few minutes, the orange flotation device was the only object he had. It was his last object and so, instinctively, he loved it and pulled it close.
Then they hauled him out of the water and dried him off and wrapped him up. They treated him like a child, and he reconsidered the wisdom of surviving. There was nothing wrong with him except his one-eyed blindness and his non-working shoulder and a few other small things, but they spoke to him as if he were an idiot, a lad, a demented person. In their phony solicitude, their thinly veiled contempt, he saw the future that he’d chosen in the water. It was a nursing-home future and it made him weep. He should have just drowned.
He shut and locked the door of the laboratory, because it all came down to privacy, didn’t it? Without privacy there was no point in being an individual. And they would give him no privacy in a nursing home. They would be like the people on the helicopter and not leave him be.
He undid his pants, took out the rag that he kept folded in his underwear, and peed into a Yuban can.
He’d bought the gun a year before his retirement. He’d imagined that retirement would bring that radical transformation. He’d imagined himself hunting and fishing, imagined himself back in Kansas and Nebraska on a little boat at dawn, imagined a ridiculous and improbable life of recreation for himself.
The gun had a velvety, inviting action, but soon after he bought it, a starling had broken its neck on the kitchen window while he was eating lunch. He hadn’t been able to finish eating, and he’d never fired the gun.
The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.