Sometimes when I think about this, I can’t help but laugh. I want to laugh at the situation and at what I said, which was stupid, and the ridiculous and horrible nature of the thing we were betting on itself, and then at the fact that out of everyone, I won, but it’s not really something to laugh about, is it?
I didn’t think I’d win, of course. Nobody thought I’d win.
It’s a silly thing to think sometimes, but there are times, there are a lot of times when I think about that bet, when I think about the bet and about how Africa sank, how quickly Africa sank after I made that bet. There are times, late at night or if I wake up early in the morning, if a trash truck or my neighbors, the ones above me, who often fight and scream late into the night, if something wakes me up and I find myself lying alone in my bed in the dark, I will remember that bet I made, and I will blame myself for what happened, blame that quarter bet for the way Africa sank right into the sea, and though I know it’s a foolish way to think and to act, I will look back on that bet with great and shuddering regret.
V.
There were screams at first, but only from those few men and women closest to the action, the people, in other words, who had gathered around the now empty pool to see what Harold Cornish was doing to it. Otherwise, the rest of the party seemed oblivious to what was going on by the pool. If you knew him or if you’d heard him speak, you could maybe pick out the brittle, nasal sound of Harold Cornish among those first voices, but maybe not. Apparently, the guys — three of them, all drunk on stolen champagne and holding, as if they were firemen, an average-sized water hose — didn’t know that Cornish was inside the pool working on fixing the hydraulics, and when he lifted his head up to see what the hell was going on, he received a faceful of water. This struck the gentlemen with the hose as extremely funny. One or all of them then doubled over in laughter, sending, for a brief moment, a spray of water up and out over the crowd, so that soon those who had had no idea that anything was happening were quite focused on the pool and the men and the hose.
I turned to Karen to see what, if anything, might be playing across her face as this all transpired, but she had left my side, and after quickly scanning the courtyard, I spotted her kneeling down and leaning into a row of shrubs planted against one of the far walls. She had hiked her black, sparkling dress up over her knees, and her left hand dug into the bushes in search of the water spigot, which she found, and, after briefly turning the nozzle hard to the left and jetting more water into the crowd, she managed to shut the hose down. By the time I turned back to look at the men with the hose, security had confiscated the water hose, and the three drunks — who later turned out to be interns with the bright idea of speeding along the process of sinking the model of the African continent — were being escorted into the museum proper.
Then Karen was at my side again and she said, shaking her head, “You’re taking me out for a drink after all of this.” I looked at her, not a little surprised, and she said, “I deserve a drink after all of this, and so someone’s taking me out for one, and it might as well be you.”
Before I could say anything to this, the speakers let out a high-pitched whine that hurt our ears, and everyone in the courtyard turned to the stage, where Owen Mitchell was now standing, his finger tapping against the microphone. At the time, I thought that someone had made a mistake and told him it was now time for him to speak, that he had quietly protested, the commotion only just ending, that an overeager employee of Karen Long’s or someone from the board, nervous about the way this party had begun spiraling out of control, had practically shoved him onto that stage to give his speech, whether we were ready to hear it or not. Later, I found out this was not the case. Mitchell stepped up to the microphone of his own accord, he told me. “Things had gotten out of hand,” he said, smiling. “No one seemed to remember why we were there.”
He cleared his throat. The whining stopped. He tapped the microphone again and cleared his throat again. The crowd, those of us still left in the courtyard, fell silent. I turned to look at Karen again, and she was looking up at the stage. Mitchell looked out at us and he shaded his eyes, and then he looked down at the notes in his hand, and he folded them and stuffed them inside his jacket pocket, and we waited for him to begin his speech.
It was a short speech, shorter, maybe, than even he had planned. It was not the speech we knew. Mitchell had managed somehow to boil it down to its essence, or maybe he made it into something entirely new. I can’t remember it now, not its specifics, not past those first few words, and Mitchell hadn’t written it down, had abandoned, at the last moment, his own notes, and cannot remember it himself. It spoke of tragedy, I think. I think, too, that it spoke to the enormous loss of life, to the sense that this world had been pushed to the brink, but in truth, the speech might not have been about any of that. It was not the speech we knew, yet by the end of the speech, I felt as if I weren’t listening to Mitchell as he spoke in front of us, as if the words weren’t coming from him, but had been borne inside my own head, had always been part of my own thoughts, that Mitchell was simply reminding me of something I already knew and had somehow forgotten. Judging by the soft sighs escaping Karen’s lips as she stood to my right, the way her lips moved as if she were reciting the speech along with Mitchell, I was not alone in this.
“They told us the center will not hold,” he began, and there seemed to be no other sound but the sound of his voice. “If we lose this, they said, the center will not hold and we will not survive, yet here we are.” He smiled. “Here we are.”
Juan Manuel Gonzales: A Meritorious Life
GONZALES, JUAN MANUEL (1804–1848). Innkeeper, forger. Place of birth: Delicias, Mexico. Don Rafael, who owned land in what is now the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, had a son, Hernando. As the story goes, Hernando was in love, but his love, for Gabriela, the daughter of his wet nurse, was forbidden by his father. When Don Rafael discovered that Hernando and Gabriela were still meeting, in secret, and that their affections had only grown stronger despite his wishes, he sent Gabriela to Mexico City, where he enrolled her in a school for nurses, and in exchange for her agreement to end her foolish affair with his son, Don Rafael agreed to pay for her schooling as well as a room he acquired for her at an all-girls’ boardinghouse. In addition to this, Don Rafael provided Gabriela with a stipend equal to fifty dollars a week.
Hernando, struck dumb by how quickly Gabriela acquiesced, refused to leave his father’s house for two weeks after Gabriela went away. He canceled all appointments with his friends and instructed the house staff not to allow anyone, but for the unlikely Gabriela, entrance onto the large estate.
Then, one hot summer afternoon, Hernando, who had that day moved no farther a distance than that between his bed and the chaise lounge set beneath his bedroom window, was surprised to see in that bedroom window the face of a faithful servant and friend. At first startled and then quickly angered (for had he not given specific instructions?), Hernando at once decided to shove the intruder, push him out of the window and off the wall, so that he would fall and perhaps break his legs. As he grabbed the man’s shirt, ready to give him a strong shove, the servant pulled from his person a carefully folded letter and shook it in Hernando’s face, saying, “Please, Don Hernando, please, I have instructions from Gabriela.” Quickly, then, Hernando pulled the young man inside, grabbed the letter, and read it and read it again and read it for a third time before once looking up at the servant who had delivered it, at which point he said, “You may leave.”