The Umbrella and the Wristwatch

The Umbrella and the Wristwatch

 

One of us said, downstairs at Clinton's, twenty-five feet from the place where Joan swallowed it two days earlier: "Don't tell me anything, because I got it. The band is going to play, and meanwhile, I'll have it coming out of me. Straight out of me, that Aretha Franklin Dao is dripping."

You don't follow. Let's call it 1989. There was this bar back then on Cross Street called Slint-Eye's. It was a big place, with stages for bands or some-such on three different floors all stacked one on top of the another. We were down there in their below-ground basement, minding our own private businesses, to see Joan read some poems in front of a small battery of pilsner drinkers.

We didn't want to kill Joan. There was a lot to talk about, like: What's the motivation? Oscar Wilde could plug motivation into the character, such was early modernity, but in late modernity, which was the place we were then, the question we all had was why. We knew there was something wrong, so we got up and stood almost easily and compassed the low cedar armchairs to the M.

It was all for the glass that I went there, and it worked. I looked like me. I was looking into my heart. Whoever it was I was simulcast with out there in the basement of Slint-Eye's, he was gone. (He'll be back soon enough.) Meanwise, somewise, trubwise: there was Joan out there wanting me to watch her read a couple poems.

There were a couple coin-op pool tables down there, so I watched a couple pool-players doing their pool-playing. The next paragraph will have to do with Joan, so you should know that Joan was twenty-three at this point here in our narrative, and that she was brilliantly chestnutty all around, and that her professedly favorite film was On the Waterfront. Bela Lugosi's dead....

Joan had eyes and I looked at them having satten down. They were a pure brown, with no variates. I have to take it on experience that she alwas looking at me too. It's very dumb to fall in love with a barmaid, isn't it? In all cases it's a no-no, but I can't say it made much of a difference to either us or me since she wasn't a barmaid after all. She was a musician, and a secretary.

It seemed it got to be time for us all to leave since we were pretty much out of money and even though we two'd consumed only half what Joan'd drank, such did we keep up with one another all fairly and squarely. We walked over to the bus stop because the bus was known to stop there and nowhere else for a good eighth of a mile or so. Don't take my word for it, though; sometimes we're bad with numbers.

She bid us goodbye by not kissing us, and it was apparent to us‑though we took it evenly, or appeared to do so‑that she had cooled considerably. Maybe it had been a mistake two days ago, and maybe should have discouraged her. Two days later, as it was two days later, nothing about it had been mentioned. She was either pretending it had never happened, or she thought we had forgotten all about it because we'd been drunk.

I started walking along the street and I started feeling uneasy, like dyspeptic or something; I think to you I can describe it as having the sense you had to find a bathroom, and moderately quickly at that. I considered returning to where we'd been, since it was close and had the required equipage, but chose instead to get to another tavern to get myself together, maybe have another beer.

In the basement, in the toilet, there was what I needed. I looked and there he was. My better half. I said: "Hi!" and he said: "Hi!" at the same moment though I could only hear myself saying: "Hi!" because the stupid glass was then in the way. Glass is a barrier, you know, and a pretty good one at that. It can be broken, of course, but you may not want to draw attention to yourselves.

Anyway, we made my plans for the rest of the night: another beer, another look, a walk home, a look at home, then sleep, during which there would be no glass separating ourselves from the other. Any mirror you can find on that side is soft and springy, sometimes cloud-like. On occasion the glass isn't there at all, or at least it seems that way; but that's on the other side.

We didn't recognize anyone in that second bar and we drank our half-price bottles in peace. Tuesday evening, Tuesday evening: so far away from the weekend! How were we to get to there? There are lots of people on the streets and in the big city, and sometimes it's hard to hang onto yourselves. Nothing is ever simple since there's two sides to everything; precisely two sides and only two sides.

We found ourselves have a pretty nice time in there that night. There was a glass at the bar and we could see right through it, into the other bar that was on the other side, and we took a great comfort in that. Sometimes in a bar, it's the little things that count. Fine service is always nice, and if the glasses are clean, the drinking ones and the other ones, well, that worked for us.

But it was getting late and I had to work in the morning, so I went down to the washroom again for a pee and a look through the glass down there, and then we left the place. We didn't live far from there at all so we hoofed it along apiece and apace to that basement apartment of ours. We were looking to whatever dreams we were about to have. We were expecting nice ones that night, so we settled in and thought about Joan.

I don't know when the dreaming started but started it did after not very long or so it seemed to my fuzzy-wuzzy mind. He and I were both there, kids again or something quite like it, in that classroom I'd kind of invented or at least augmented. It had probably started as a real classroom some dozen or so years ago but now it had become something much more suitable to me and he. Some papers got handed around and we could guess it was a test.

I don't recall what the questions on the test were, but they appeared to be of a mathematical nature, with more than a few graphic representations to assist in the decipherment of the texts of the questions, which seemed a little redundant to us, for we ourselves were perfectly capable of making our own graphical representations of linguistic material. I put down the answers to this question and to that question confidently. I didn't think I could err there.

We handed in our paper(s) and crossed the street to the hospital where our father lay upon his sickbed. We sat there for what seemed like hours, watching him breathe, and hearing the irregular beeps of his heart monitoring device. He didn't have long to live, this old man, and we decided it was time to go since he'd done nothing to detain us. And that was when he revived and called us by name. "Joseph. Joseph. Where are you going? Will you take me with you?"

And that's when I woke up, in the middle of the night, all alone there in my bed, a nearly black night it was with just a little light coming through my basement dormer window, sweating under too many blankets, still hearing his voice saying: "Joseph" twice. I struggled out of the blankets, falling floorways in my distress, wanting him with me, the old cheating bastard. I wanted him with me.

I didn't know where I was there. Instinct got me to my feet and to the light-switch on the wall. My view of things contained matter moving around slowly, settling into recognizable patterns of chair, desk, Matisse print, dirty clothes, end-table, pushbutton phone, dresser, window, and ceiling. My hand was still on the wall, near the switch. A car was idling outside.

I went into my little washroom. The floor was colder and the air was cold. I looked at the glass in there, and there was something strange there. We were both still a little asleep, you see, and there was a bit of gunk in our four eyes. We said: "Take me with you. Where are you going?" We touched fingertips and the glass was not more. We embraced, circled, and stopped, having reversed our positions.

Morning! Good morning! We veritably leapt out of bed and got ourselves all dressed and ready for the day! We didn't know what would transpire, not really, but we figured we'd be going to work during the daylight hours and at some point we would call up Joan to see how she was, and how her bus ride was. Would we ever know how she felt about us? How could she go on living without telling us? Now: I ask you!

We got out onto the street before too long, after a shower and so on and a couple looks in the glass, to discover it was still early September. Did we mention somewhere earlier that it was some other month or season? I don't think we did, but, if we did, we were wrong because it was Wednesday September 6 of 1989. We went to work, and we did some good working that day, yessir. But, at this point, stop.

Stop, because there's about to be a telephone call. Here it comes. It's going to be made to the room in which Joan works, but instead of Joan the answerer is going to be Joan's work-stall-mate Nance, who is going to say (if we give her the chance) that Joan not work. Then, prompted, Nance will say Joan called in sick, that was going to be all, that'll be it. And yet somehow Nance will be able to say, quote:

"Before you hang up and call her, Joseph‑do you have a minute? I want you to know that, you know, though it was clumsy and all, we had a good time all together, didn't we all? All I have to say is that all in all if you all find yourselves in need of some comfort and joy.... Now I've said too much. There's nothing more I got to say to you. But know, just know, that every single fucking word is true."

We wrote down mentally a note as we dialed Joan's number: Are there more rational or irrational numbers in creation? Can rational numbers get lined up in a symmetry with irrational numbers, in a correspondence chart? If they line up, does that mean that for all rationals there's an irrational that's over there in the other column? It was a question to which a solution was not to be proffered for quite some time, for quite some twelve years later at the least. (That's another story.)

"Do you know that he wept about it? He wept for days and days. How was it possible? There was no answer to be had, but still he wept. Before the weeping, though, many days before, we called Joan's house, but Joan didn't answer her telephone. THAT MOMENT we went to the nearest glass to see, then we left work to go see Joan." I am going to say something like that in the future.

We knew the house relatively well. It was a rented house, shared with some five or so others. The place was dark when we knocked until finally the one named Patrick we could see coming down the interior stairs in a bathrobe. He opened the door, said hello, and replied, when prompted, that he didn't know anything. He'd been at work all night. Trying to get some sleep. Can't help you, pal.

I didn't know quite what to say to him except to say: "Can I use your washroom before I heard back down to work?" That was all right with Patrick so I went into the washroom for a little while and then we came out and many of our anxieties had gone from us. Everything was going to work out fine in the end, we knew. It wasn't anything to get especially alarmed about. She'd gone off somewhere. That was all.

The day passed as any random day of entry-level job can pass, which is to say slowly and boringly. We really wanted to get out of there to find out what had happened to Joan. Surely her roomies, and possibly herself, would be there at her house, and if not quite waiting for us, at least in a receptive mood. We moved papers from one place to another, entered data into a spreadsheet, and generally did things in an entirely alienated way.

Until it was finally time to go, so I went to the washroom for a look in the glass (knowing it might be some time before I/we would have the next chance to do so) and we passed back and forth and side to side looking for the right arrangement, and once we'd found the right arrangement we got out of the building and made for the second time the journey to Joan's house where everything would get explained in plain language etc.

We heard the music from the sidewalk. Bottom to top: drums rolling trims, bass shaking windows, and guitar squalling feedback. We had to bang on the door for some time before someone came, and the one who came was roommate Mike, who told us that Joan hadn't been seen all day or night‑they'd assumed she was with us all that time‑so no there was nothing for it. But she'd show up. She always shows up.

We went away in a wondrous mood. Did this mean we were the last to see her, and all of some nineteen hours before? That didn't make any sense, since she got onto a bus, and the bus had a driver, and he may have glanced in her direction‑or maybe he didn't. In fact, we didn't have any proof of anything. All we knew was that she had vanished from our sight, and I had no idea where she'd gotten to.

I walked back to my apartment. I bought two local newspapers along the way, and somehow managed to glean from them all I could of accidents and hospitalizations and so forth of the overnight, discovering precisely nothing worthwhile. However, this didn't mean anything, you can't prove a negative, after all, or at least that's pretty much everything I got out of my time in a philosophy class once upon a time.

At home, in my basement apartment, I didn't know quite what to do. I thought it was premature to try to track down Joan's relatives, who were people I had never spoken to, and whom I could be unduly alarming. Perhaps there was a simple explanation. Joan had other friends, of course, and chance operates in such-and-such a way that perhaps she ran into someone. Things like that happen to people.

Still, I wanted to know what had happened, if anything had happened at all. So I footed it back down to the tavern basement we'd been in the night before, as if to retrace our steps, as if I was her. (I wondered what kind of a job I could do at it. I wasn't sure if I could figure out how to walk like her! Ha! Ha! Ha!) At the tavern I sat down where we'd been sitting, once I'd procured myself two pilsners. I sat there for some time, trying to remember the order of things we'd not accomplished.

She'd read a couple poems there, I remembered. (Hadn't she?) It had been some kind of a talent night, with an emphasis on poetry. Now there was no-one, not a single performer, and the place was much emptier than it had been. I couldn't remember, though, a single word spoken. What had she read? Why hadn't I paid any attention? There must have been at least a word or two getting through my thick skull, but I couldn't remember any. She'd come back later, and seated down herself. I told her I'd enjoyed it, even.

But this evening was different for more than just the obvious reasons. I got up to go to the washroom and while I was there it (finally!) struck me. I looked into the mirror that was in the washroom. I saw my face in the mirror, and I knew there was something missing. I was alone. Hadn't I been, like, two people not too long before? Or rather: hadn't I engagedly imagined I'd been two people, and now I wasn't imagining anything of the sort any more? What had happened to the two people I'd believed I'd been?

I remembered how I used to behave. It seemed‑strange though it seems‑that I, until seriously recently, had felt it important to find a mirror (which I had interpreted to be a translucent glass, as if onto another world), look into it, and ... become two people? I remembered myself thinking like this, though I didn't think that way anymore. As if there was a me in the past, and a different me in the present....

....And that me in the past had a belief, and a ritual, that made him honestly and truly believe in something that appeared to the present me to be ridiculously unreal, and practically the stuff of stories and novels. (All in all, this kind of stuff really makes you think that maybe those eggheads at MIT and joints like that are onto something when they say time doesn't really exist. Or that they aren't.)

I knew this problem needed further thought, but at the time I was more interested frankly in figuring out the mystery of where Joan got to the night before. I went back out into the action of downstairs at Slint-Eye's and looked around, thinking some clue or another was about to jump out at me from some corner's cobwebs. But of course no clue moved out into the middle of the room to shout: "'Twas I!" Rather, the place was as dead as before.

I looked at the handy clock on the wall, which told me that I was almost exactly twenty-four hours past when I (with Joan) was leaving the night before. Taking that as a good sign, I decided to walk to the bus stop. I noticed I was re-tracing our steps, one step at a time, thinking not about what I might find at the end of the journey. No pictures or ideas penetrated that skull. Walking was everything; all that mattered were the steps. The journeying led on, of its own volition.

To the bus stop it seemed to be two or three blocks, counting foot by foot. Looking up, I saw from my position the moon in her position, slightly diminished after our previous meeting. The bus stop got closer until it looked a mile high. A sidewalk square was being cracked apart by something down below, on the underside of its surface. Sound and light came suddenly to the experiential foreground as a bus arrived, possibly a routed bus, and possibly her bus.

There was naught to do but to get onto the bus, drop some coins into the collector canister, and look down the coach. Expecting what? Expecting to see her, Joan, dressed as she'd been dressed, straight ahead, and heading to near the back. Expecting to see the matter incarnated. Expecting a symbol to jump out from the dirt under the seats. Stranger things have happened before. There's got to be some place from which symbols can spring. So many symbols have jumped out from dirt that it's in fact impossible to know in which year to start enumerating them.

There's a prime position in any bus, and that is of course directly behind the back exit. From there one has a commanding and unobstructed view of two-thirds of the coach, and also something of the road ahead. I put my head over and craned it, and there she was again, up there in the sky, my moon-of-the-month. Since, once, Joan and I had sat in just such a place, I figured she'd have been sitting there the day before. It was all I had to go on.

That was me, thinking, looking at the moon, knowing at the same time that when I returned my gaze to the strict horizontal, I would become less than myself. Joan had something to do with it. I wasn't sure how, but I knew she had something to do with it, and I also knew I had to find her as soon as possible. I started my examination of the outside. Houses passed by in the night, like ports within which were the lights suitable to ports, like restaurants, like the rail depot café in Brief Encounter.

Someone sat down alongside. After sighing some pretty deep sighs, he said: "You know what happened. You know exactly what happened. You know why you know what happened, and you know how you came to know what happened." "I'm sorry, what are you talking about?" "You know what, and who, I am talking about. Must I break it down alphabetically? About alphabetically am and break down I I it know must talking what who you."

Taken aback. "How am I supposed to know what happened to her? Did I have anything to do with it? I went here, and she went there. I saw her get onto this bus, this very same bus I think, maybe not the same driver but still. Didn't I see that, or something like that? What did I do? What are you accusing me of? I'm mad now, but I won't be mad forever; soon enough I'll snap out of this. But now, tonight, here, presently, situationally, tell me what you mean."

The stranger said: "First: look out the window, up at the sky." Turning, out the window and up at the sky I looked, saying: "That's the sky, all right. The night sky." I turned back to the stranger, but the stranger was gone. I looked up the bus and down the bus but he was nowhere to be seen, and we hadn't made a stop during the time I'd been looking at the sky. I was initially puzzled by this, but then the facts in my case came back to me and I shrugged it off.

I shrugged it off because I had more important things to think about. I had to figure out what I'd done with Joan. How had I managed to catch up with her? Maybe the bus story wasn't true after all. Maybe she hadn't been on the bus, having not seen her get on the bus. Back at Slint-Eye's. Go back to Slint-Eye's. Go on that assumption. Back there, there was something there. Something easily missed. It was the place to gather the clues. What had been done to her?

The intersection looked in many directions. Across the street stood another bus stop, this one heading back down, down to Slint-Eye's and environs. The ride was uneventful. Everything looked how it had some twenty minutes earlier‑though this was an illusion, of course. A great deal had changed, though none of it was visible to the naked and obvious eye. The building looked the same. The door looked the same. The basement tavern looked the same.

Now it was just a matter of waiting for the clues to become apparent. Times being what they were, all would be revealed before the night became undone. Looking with all eyes was not completely necessary, since the solution would be plain and dandy. The lights were on, though dim, and the wall, though dark, reflected some amount of light. Suffice it to say: the place was illuminated. Not even a mouse would be capable of hiding, let alone clues to a mysterious disappearance.

Maybe there was information to be found in the washroom. There in the glass I saw myself, or rather I saw someone who looked like my self. "Hi," I said. "You've been wondering where I've been." "Some momentous things have taken place, but on the other side of the glass it must be like nothing has happened at all." "No, I can't tell you which is which." "The priority, though, is to find out what we can about Joan." "Is she missing?" "She may be missing."

And so out we went, back into the tavern, thinking both together that two heads are better than one. (It only stands to reason.) We looked from stem to stern, wondering if the place was real after all. "Slint-Eye's?" What does that mean, where's the wit in it? Can there really be a place that goes by that name? Where's the verisimilitude? No place called that could every really exist.... But there we were, in a place called that, looking for some girl we weren't quite sure existed in the first place. (We were sure of ourselves, though; of that, we were sure.)

We didn't know how many glasses of pilsner to order. We were at the bar, feeling in our pants for money, bills and coins, and the bartender of course caught us up short in that shocking way they have of suddenly shoving their glances into your faces to say: "Yeah?" and we just as suddenly said: "Three pilsner draft, please," which was, we're pretty sure, a most regular order in a place like that, seeing as the glasses were real pilsner glasses and thus rather on the small side.

We figured there that we had to start from some serious first principles there in that basement tavern. The first principle we had to contend with was: Is there an external world, or are we rather just a couple brains in a couple vats? We quickly concluded that ethically it didn't matter, since either way we were responsible for our actions, vats or no vats. Everything was real enough to place our actions in an ethical framework. Clear thought can proceed from there, no problem.

We had to know where we were. We looked around; we listened to the song that was playing on the stereo system. It was certainly a tape of local favorites. Ah! There! I know it! We're in the last half of Bela Lugosi's Dead. I don't know why they're playing that. Joan's always all dressed in black, and she's got black hair, so maybe that's the meaning of the song. I can't see how it all fits together, yet I can see ... last night (?) they were playing that song about now too.

We think it's a recollection. We're almost certain we heard it twenty-four hours earlier. We dismiss the obvious alternative and look at the table with its pilsner glasses on it. We're sitting where I think I was sitting yesterday, maybe in the same position, yes, yes, yes, yes in the same position. The people around, the people at the bar, look awfully familiar. Can't it be that these people are regulars? Is that all there is to it? That this place has regulars?

How much time is this going to take? How much longer must we wait?

Something is about to take place. Something I've been looking forward to.

Can this be happening? Who is that touching my hair?

I turn my head to see that it's Jane there, with her hand near my eyes.

Is she really saying: "I'm so nervous to be reading in public?"

Is that my voice saying: "Don't worry. Think we're all naked."?

She's in her satchel now, looking for the pages she'd written.

Does this happen every time someone gets up on a stage?

I'm pretty sure there's some other way to do this. Some other way.