City Page 4

  “I am not crying.”

  “Yes, you are crying.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  It was a kind of piercing, painful amazement. I don’t know if you know, Colonel. It’s rather like looking at toy trains, especially if there’s a model landscape, in relief, with the station and the tunnels, and cows in the fields and lighted signals at the grade crossings. It happens there, too. Or in a cartoon when you see the house where the mice live, with matchboxes for beds, and a painting of the grandfather mouse on the wall, and bookshelves, and a spoon that serves as a rocking chair. You feel a kind of comfort inside, almost a revelation, that opens your soul, so to speak, but at the same time you feel a kind of pain, the sensation of an absolute, irremediable loss. A sweet catastrophe. I think it has to do with the fact that at those moments you are always outside, you are always looking in from the outside. You can’t go in and get on the train, that’s a fact; and the house for mice is something that’s on television, while you are inescapably in front, all you can do is look. That day, you could go inside the Ideal Home if you wanted, you waited in line for a while and then you could go in to see the rooms. But it wasn’t the same. There was a whole lot of interesting stuff—it was weird, you could even touch the knick-knacks— but you no longer had the same sense of wonder as when you saw it from the outside. It’s a funny thing. When you happen to see the place where you would be safe, you are always looking at it from the outside. You’re never in it. It’s your place, but you are never there. My mother kept asking me why I was sad, and I would have liked to tell her that I wasn’t sad; on the contrary, I would have had to explain to her that it had to do with something like happiness, the devastating experience of having suddenly glimpsed it, and in that idiotic house. But how. Even now I wouldn’t be able to. There’s also something a little embarrassing about it. That was a stupid Ideal Home, which had been built just to con people, it was a big stupid business of architects and builders, it was a deliberate trick, to tell you the truth. As far as I know, the architect who designed it might be a complete imbecile, one of those guys who on their lunch hour wait outside schools to rub against the girls and whisper Suck my dick and stuff like that. Besides, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but generally, if something strikes you as a revelation, you can bet that it’s bogus, I mean, that it isn’t true. Take the example of the toy train. You can look at a real station for hours and nothing happens; then just glance at a toy train and, click, all sorts of good things start up. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s the damn truth, and sometimes the more idiotic the thing that grabs you is, the more it sticks, with its wonder, as if there had to be a dose of deceit, of deliberate deceit, as if everything had to be false, at least for a while, to succeed in becoming something like a revelation. It’s the same with books, or films. Any more bogus than that and you’d die, and if you go to see who’s behind there you can bet that you will find only solemn sons of bitches, but meanwhile inside you see things that, walking around on the street, you dream of but in real life you’ll never find. Real life never speaks. It’s a game of skill, you win or you lose, they make you play it to distract you, so you won’t think. My mother used that ploy. When I didn’t stop crying, she dragged me over to a machine that was all lights and signs. It was a lovely machine—it looked like a slot machine or something. It had been set up by a company that made margarine, and had been very carefully designed. There were six cookies on a plate, some made with butter and some with margarine. You tasted them, one by one, and every time you had to say if the cookie was made with margarine or butter. In those days margarine was rather exotic, people didn’t really know what it was; they thought it was healthier than butter and basically gross. That was the problem. So the company came up with that machine, and the game was this: if you thought the cookie was made with butter you pressed the red button, and if it seemed to taste like margarine you pressed the blue one. It was fun. And I stopped crying. No doubt about it. I stopped crying. Not that something had changed in my mind: I still had stuck inside me that sensation of piercing, painful amazement, and in fact I would never again be without it, because when a child discovers there’s a place that is his place, when his home flashes before him for a second, and the meaning of a Home, and, above all, the idea that such a House exists, then it’s forever, you’ve been screwed to the very end, there’s no going back, you will always be someone who’s passing through by chance, with a piercing, painful sense of amazement, and so you’re always happier than others and always sadder, with all those things to laugh and cry about, as you wander. In this particular case, anyway, I stopped crying. It worked. I ate cookies, I pushed buttons, the lights went on, and I wasn’t crying anymore. My mother was happy, she thought it was over, she didn’t understand, but I did, I understood it all perfectly, I knew that nothing was over, that it would never be over, but, still, I wasn’t crying, and I was playing with butter and margarine. You know, there were so many times, later, when I felt that sensation inside again . . . It seems as if I’d never felt anything else since. With my mind somewhere else, I stood there pressing blue and red buttons, trying to guess. A game of skill. They make you play it to distract you. As long as it works, why not? Among other things, when the Ideal Home Exhibition was over that year, the margarine company announced that a hundred and thirty thousand people had played the game, and that only 8 percent of the contestants had guessed right about all six cookies. They announced it rather triumphantly. I think that was more or less my success rate. I mean that if I think of all the times I tried to guess, pushing the blue and red buttons of this life, I must have hit it right more or less 8 percent of the time—it seems to me a plausible percentage. I say this not at all triumphantly. But it must have gone more or less like that. As I see it.

  Shatzy turned to Gould, who had not missed a line.

  “How’s that?”

  “My father isn’t a colonel.”

  “No?”

  “General.”

  “OK, general. And the rest?”

  “If you keep going at this rate by the time you finish I won’t need a governess anymore.”

  “That’s true. Let me see . . .”

  Gould handed her the list of questions. Shatzy glanced at it, then stopped at a question on the second page.

  “This is a quick one. Read it . . .”

  “31. Can the applicant briefly state the dream of her life?”

  “I can.”

  My dream is to make a Western. I began when I was six and I intend not to die before I finish it.

  “Voilà.”

  From the time she was six, Shatzy Shell had been working on a Western. It was the only thing she truly cared about, in life. She thought about it constantly. When good ideas came to her, she turned on her portable tape recorder and spoke them into it. She had recorded hundreds of tapes. She said it was a wonderful Western.

  4

  They killed off Mami Jane in the January issue, in a story entitled “Killer Rails.” That’s the way things go.

  5

  That business about the Western, among other things, was true. Shatzy had been working on it for years. In the beginning she had collected ideas, then she had started writing things down, filling notebooks. Now she used a tape recorder. Every so often she turned it on and spoke into it. She didn’t have a definite method, but she went on, without stopping. And the Western grew. It started with a cloud of sand at sunset.

  The usual cloud of sand at sunset, every evening wafted by the wind over the earth and into the sky, while Melissa Dolphin sweeps the road in front of her house; whipped by the river of circling air she sweeps, with unreasoning care, and futile. But carrying her sixty-three years calmly and gratefully. Twin sister of Julie Dolphin, who, swinging on the verandah, sheltered from the worst of the wind, watches her now: watching her, through the dust, she alone understands her.

  To the right, laid out along the main street, runs the town. To the left, nothing. There is no frontier be
yond their fence, only a land that has been decreed useless, and has been abolished from thought. Rocks and nothing. When someone dies in these parts, people say: the Dolphin sisters saw him pass by. No house is farther out here than their house. Nor elsewhere, they say.

  So it is with astonishment that Melissa Dolphin raises her gaze to that nothingness and sees the figure of a man slowly approaching, blurry in the cloud of sand and sunset. Although she has occasionally seen something disappear in that direction—thornbushes, animals, an old man, useless glances—something appear, never. Someone.

  Julie, she says softly, and turns towards her sister.

  Julie Dolphin is standing, on the verandah, and in her right hand she’s holding a Winchester model 1873, octagonal barrel, .44-.40 caliber. She looks at the man—he walks slowly, with his hat lowered over his eyes, duster down to the ground, leading something, a horse, something, a horse and something, a bandanna protects his face from the dust. Julie Dolphin raises the rifle, slides the wooden butt against her right shoulder, bends her head to align eye, sight, man.

  Yes, Melissa, she says softly.

  She aims at the middle of his chest, and fires.

  The man stops.

  He looks up.

  He lowers the bandanna that hides his face.

  Julie Dolphin looks at him. She reloads. Then she bends her head to align eye, sight, man.

  She aims at his face, and fires.

  The echo of the shot is swallowed up in the dust. Julie Dolphin knocks the cartridge out of the bolt: Morgan red, .44-.40 caliber. She remains standing, watching.

  It takes the man a few minutes to get to Melissa Dolphin, motionless in the middle of the road. He takes off his hat.

  Closingtown?

  It depends, Melissa Dolphin answers.

  Shatzy Shell’s Western began exactly like that.

  6

  “I’m going with you.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see this damn school,” Shatzy said.

  So they went out, the two of them; there was a bus or you could walk. Let’s walk part of the way, then maybe take the bus. OK, but cover up.

  “What did you say?”

  “I don’t know, Gould, what did I say?”

  “Cover up.”

  “No way.”

  “I swear.”

  “You dreamed it.”

  “You said cover up, as if you were my mother.”

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  “You said it.”

  “Stop this.”

  “I swear.”

  “And cover up.”

  The street sloped slightly downhill, and the ground was littered with leaves that had fallen from the trees, so Gould shuffled his feet as he walked, as if he had moles instead of shoes, moles that were tunneling through the leaves, making a noise like a cigar being lighted, but multiplied a thousand times. A red and yellow noise.

  “My father smokes cigars.”

  “Really?”

  “He’d like you.”

  “He does like me, Gould.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can tell, from his voice.”

  “Really?”

  “You can tell a lot of things, from a person’s voice.”

  “For example?”

  “For example, let’s say you hear someone with a beautiful voice, really beautiful, a man with a beautiful voice, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Then you can bet on it, he’s ugly.”

  “Ugly.”

  “Worse than ugly, really ugly, a greaseball, you know, he’s too tall, or he has fat hands that are always sweaty, always sort of moist, you get the picture?”

  “So.”

  “What do you mean, so?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t like to shake hands. In fact I don’t have much experience of hands.”

  “You don’t like to shake hands.”

  “No. It’s stupid.”

  “Oh?”

  “Grown-ups’ hands are always too big. It’s pointless for them to shake hands with me, just thinking about it is stupid, and in the end it’s always embarrassing.”

  “Once, on TV, I saw the Nobel Prizes being given out. Well, one person went up there, in a fancy outfit, and then all he did was shake hands, from start to finish.”

  “That’s another story.”

  “It’s a story I’m interested in. Tell it to me, Gould.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Nobel Prize.”

  “What about it?”

  “How did they decide to have you win it?”

  “They didn’t decide to have me win it.”

  “You mean you just won it?”

  “They don’t give the Nobel Prize to children.”

  “They could make an exception.”

  “Stop it.”

  “OK.”

  “. . .”

  “. . .”

  “. . .”

  “All right, then how did it happen, Gould?”

  “Nothing, it’s nonsense, you know—a way of talking, I think.”

  “Odd way of talking.”

  “So you don’t like it?”

  “It’s not that I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t like it.”

  “I find it odd, that’s all. How can you think of telling a child that he’s going to win the Nobel Prize? He may be intelligent, and what have you, but you can’t know—maybe he’s not that intelligent, maybe he doesn’t want to win the Nobel, and anyway, even if he does, why tell him? Isn’t it better to leave him alone, let him do what he has to do, and then one morning he’ll wake up and they’ll say have you heard the news? You’ve won the Nobel Prize. The end.”