Nicholson Baker
Traveling Sprinkler
To M.
One
ROZ CALLED TO ASK ME what I wanted for my fifty-fifth birthday. One of her many good qualities is that she remembers people’s birthdays. I thought for a second. I knew what I wanted: I wanted a cheap acoustic guitar. You can get them for about seventy dollars at Best Buy. They come in an exciting cardboard box. I saw two boxes, leaning against a wall, waiting, last time I was there. I almost said that’s what I wanted — I came dangerously close to saying it — but then I didn’t, because you really can’t ask your former girlfriend for a guitar, even a cheap guitar. It’s too momentous a present. It presupposes too much. It puts her in an awkward position. And of course you can’t say, “What I really want is I want you back,” either.
So instead I said, “I think what I really want is an egg salad sandwich.” Roz has a particular way with egg salad — she adds in a rare kind of paprika or tarragon or some elusive spice I don’t understand. “We could meet at Fort McClary,” I said. “I’ll bring the picnic basket and the sliced carrots if you bring the egg salad sandwiches.”
Fort McClary is a place we used to go sometimes to smell the seaweed and look at the boats. I think it’s where the Revolutionary War began, but I’m not sure. There are huge hewn Stonehengeian stones tumbled about in the grass that were going to be part of a defensive wall that never got built. I think Paul Revere rode his poor snorting horse all the way to Fort McClary to warn that the British were coming, which was the beginning of a pointless trade war that didn’t need to happen.
Roz was silent for a moment.
“Or,” I said, “if a picnic is too heavy-duty we could just have lunch at the Friendly Toast.”
“No, no, I can definitely make you an egg salad sandwich,” she said. I could hear her smiling the indulgent smile of someone who once loved somebody a long time ago.
We agreed to meet at Fort McClary and have a birthday picnic.
• • •
EARLY THIS MORNING I had a literary dream. Roz was still living with me and I was supposed to review a book of military recipes called Mess: Great Food from Army Kitchens. Roz and I were testing one of the recipes, which was for octopus-walnut muffins. Roz pulled the tray of muffins out of the oven and I bit into one. “How does it taste?” she asked.
“Not too good,” I said.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. We shook our heads and tried to think of a way I could say something nice about the cookbook.
“Maybe you could praise the walnuts?” Roz said.
I woke up.
• • •
I’M PARKED ON INIGO ROAD, which is my favorite road anywhere. I wish I could write about the phrase “happy phrase,” but there’s no time. Very soon I’m going to be Fifty Fucking Five. The three Fs. The last time I hit three Fs was ten years ago, and this time is definitely worse. Unless you’re Yeats or Merwin you are done as a poet at fifty-five. Dylan Thomas was in the ground for sixteen years at fifty-five. Keats was dead at, what, twenty-six? Riding on horseback with his sad lungs coughing blood. And as for Wilfred Owen.
The first time I read Keats’s sonnet “When I Have Fears,” I was eating a tuna sub. I was an applied music major, with a concentration in bassoon. I’d found the poem in The Norton Anthology of Poetry—the shorter black edition with the Blake watercolor of a griffin on the cover. I propped the Norton open with my brown plastic food tray and I started reading and eating the tuna sub and drinking V8 juice occasionally from a little can.
Keats says: “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” He doesn’t say, “When I have fears that I may,” you know, “drop dead,” or “breathe my last”—no, it’s “cease to be.” I stopped chewing. I was caught by the emptiness and ungraspability in that phrase. And then came the next line, and I made a little hum of amazement: “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” Keats says, “Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.”
I don’t want to pretend that the cafeteria spun around. It stayed still. I heard the grinding sound of the cash register printing. But I was thinking very hard. I was thinking about a large tortoiseshell that somebody had given me when I was small. There was a sort of fused backbone on the inside of it that ran down the middle. This bony ridge smelled terrible when you sniffed it close-up, although it had no odor from a normal distance. I imagined the tortoiseshell as the top dome of a human skull, and I imagined Keats’s pen gleaning bits of thought flesh from it.
The pen is really the only tool sharp enough to do the job of brain-gleaning properly. Keats knew that. He had medical training. He was supposed to be a doctor. He didn’t like medical school much, but he assisted at surgeries. The idea of the inside of the head as an object that had crevices and hiding places — that it was gleanable — was something that he knew firsthand. And he also knew, because he was a sick man, that his fears were justified. His mother died of consumption. He was a fourteen-year-old boy when he stayed up watching her die. He knew what it meant for a complicated gentle person to simply cease to be. And his brain was teeming with the unwrittenness of what he had to say. He had to hurry. He knew all that.
The rest of the poem isn’t nearly so good, but it ends with a bang: “Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.”
• • •
I DIDN’T BRING the list of things I wanted to write about today. Sometimes I note things I want to write about on a folded piece of paper, but I left my piece of paper in my bed. It’s an empty bed. This may be one of the empty-bed birthdays. I’ve had a few.
But a summer birthday is a good thing. On the branch near my car, on every twig that isn’t dead, there has been a lot of activity. The sap is up in these trees, and the leaves have had no choice but to move outward. Billions of buds in each tree, the leaves tremblingly uncurving, squirming outward. It’s a forced migration. The sap is pressurized and the leaves have to flee outward from the very ends of the twigs. What it creates is a fog of green over all of Inigo Road.
I’ve just been waiting for summer, waiting and wanting, and now it’s here. Yesterday was actually hot, and today I’ve put a Post-it note on the corner of my computer screen: NO YUKON JACK TILL YOU FINISH. I need a new drug. Huey Lewis sang that song and then foolishly sued Ray Parker, Jr., claiming that Parker had pinched the bassline for the Ghostbusters theme.
I’m debating whether to buy a can of Skoal smokeless tobacco.
• • •
THREE QUICK FAREWELL SHOTS of Yukon Jack. Oh my flipping God. Deep breath now. Hello, my strangely shaped figments, I’m Paul Chowder. I’m here and so are you. We are in the same Minkowski space, shaped like a saddle. You’re in the saddle and I’m in the saddle and we’re not going to fall off Revere’s horse because it doesn’t exist.
My knees are laughing. Is that allowed?
Here’s my tip of the night. Nod. It’s worth nodding at things sometimes. Just give a big nod. That’s the way they are? Okay, nod, yes. Practice nodding.
Thirty-five years ago, when I was twenty, I sold my Heckel bassoon. And that was that. Now I’m supposed to be writing a new book of poetry, which I’m calling Misery Hat. I don’t want to work on it. Today, to get inspired, I dipped into an extremely long poem by Samuel Rogers called Human Life, because I liked the title. It didn’t do much for me, but I remembered that Samuel Rogers was friends with Tennyson and Coleridge, and that made me haul out my old edition of Tennyson and look at his extremely long poem Maud, narrated by an insane person who rambles. Tennyson was very ill if not clinically insane when he wrote parts of Maud, and a lot of it is unreadable. But there is one very nice soaring patch that everyone remembers. It begins, “Come into the garden, Maud, / For the black bat, night, has flown.” There Tennyson has us. Night itself is a black bat. How thrilling and un-Victorian is that? In the same passage there’s a mention of an unusual chamber group that’s apparently been serenading the roses all night long — a flute, a violin, and a bassoon. It’s a bassoon not because Tennyson knew anything about the bassoon, but because he needed an evocative word to rhyme with “tune” and “moon.” And also because he may have been remembering another poetical bassoon passage, from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: