The Syme Papers (68 page)

I drove on a sparkling March day towards the hill-country where Joe lived, north and west with the sun blinking off the mirror, as I chased my own shadow up the Missouri Pacific Highway. The city flew by me on either side, white clapboard neighbourhoods nesting somewhere behind the outlet malls and cineplexes looking over the road. A freight train, burned with rust, followed me slowly at one stretch, running clear against the low scrub of the flat land, towards, it seemed, the comforting illusion of the Nothing and Nowhere that lay all around us. Telephone wires dangled and glinted blackly in the sunshine. I wondered if Susie wanted me to fail.

Pioneering,
Pitt thought, carrying on an argument well rehearsed, is the only way to set up shop and family. We must begin in Nowhere, stripped of accustomed props, to see how we Get On. I have always – and this is my proper boast – freed myself from the familiar, and then set forth. (If only Susie would follow, uncomplaining.) The burden of old errors is too great for little lovers to share: the unraked harvest of the family tree, rotting, mulching its acid into the soil. (Pitt, if he knows anything, knows about the burden of old errors.) It is best to begin from scratch. Scratch away until you get to scratch. Texas is it:
scratch
itself, a dry, prickly country, big enough for any number of beginnings. In short, I had little desire to go ‘home’ to New York.

Turning off MoPac, I entered green and shadowy streets, heaped upon one another, rising, along the thrust of rock beneath the wheels. There were no shops or sidewalks here, only the broad asphalt trembling like a butterfly in the sunshine that got through the sharp, dark sycamore leaves. Much of the faculty lived roundabouts, in houses they designed themselves, to suit an outcrop of the hill and catch the view – long, high views over the Nothing and Nowhere below. Curious, Pitt thought, how similar our imaginations run when left to themselves: for most of the houses looked as like as two hands, belonging perhaps to different men
but built along the same lines. Maybe the Pitts would move round here, given time and fortune. I pulled, crackling over pebbles, into Joe’s drive.

It took me much of the afternoon just to set up the thing. Phidy, of course, had come upon the middle of the experiment, and could not help me. Joe had got together a bucket of shavings – nickel and iron ore; he worried the scraps might choke the fire, but he figured they’d melt quicker, and start to run among the coals, which is what we wanted. Joe, pushing his tongue against a corner of his cheek, and scratching the stubble of the skin, had expressed certain doubts regarding the ‘upshot’ of the experiment. ‘Seems likely to me’, he’d said, ‘Syme meant it for show, mostly. Smoke and lights, fifty cents a pop, as you say. Can’t imagine he had much hopes for it, beyond that.’

Pitt also had his doubts, especially as he came to lay the coal in the bottom of the clay globe – cut open at the half, and connected each way by a peg-and-hole system. He nested several layers of coal with a sprinkle of shavings, and hoped that the bump and grind of the spinning planet would cast together the elements. Creation, at its best, would prove to be a very messy affair: a gunge of smelted ash caking the clay sides in various configurations (
which
exactly, Pitt presumed, Syme hoped to discover). At its worst, Pitt feared, he would open a smoking globe only to find a heap of burned coal, occasionally interspersed with slightly glowing fingernail-clippings of iron and nickel. He rummaged through Joe’s junk to find some fire-lighter, and came across all sorts (including a rather remarkable collection of mustard jars), before discovering a box of the shiny white sticks. These he crumbled into the opened world.

Yes, as Pitt surveyed the ‘crazy-thing’
(Fräulein’s
word) – their careful handiwork – doubts beset him. (How clever doubts are, and far-reaching – much more insinuating, intricate and complete, in their way, than hopes. Hopes at least have ends and beginnings; whereas doubts eat everything, even the ground beneath our feet, even the space through which we fall.) Such a silly little planet, stuck with handlebars for spinning, pricked through with holes.
Those mad legs, resting quietly; the single whirling arm, flung high, clutching the globe, quite still now, time stopped. I was reminded of Phidy’s reaction to the double-compression piston (would that be next, on my spiralling career?). Phidy had said:

(The trouble was, as Syme had said, that it could not – rather, that
I
could not –
swallow
myself.)

Yet Sam himself seemed to set some store by the ‘experiment of creation’, unless it was merely the wilfulness of temper that turned him against Tom, as his associate cleared up the harmless remains of the broken world:

Perhaps the pieces held some clue to the ‘mechanical workings of a most particular imagination’; proving like dreams to be fragments and emblems of a deeper preoccupation.

It was around teatime that the
Fräulein,
knocking timidly from the inside of the house, came in, bearing tea. A pretty girl, I must say for Joe – too thin for Pitt’s taste, lightly freckled around the eyes, straight in figure under cropped sandy hair.

‘Thank you, my dear‚’ Pitt said, taking a mug, and raising it to his face to inhale the brown heat. ‘Much needed.’ And Pitt stood with his eyes shut against the comfort of steam.

‘Joe said I mustn’t show you this‚’ the
Fräulein
murmured through thin lips, lifting a crumple of paper from the back pocket of her skinny jeans. ‘But I thought – it is only fair – to know. It is always fair – to know.’

I took it from her freckled hand, which hung idly, its duty done, by the
Fräulein’s
hip, too still for comfort. Then she clasped the fingers in her other hand, and held them both against her belly; released them, conscious of her fidgeting, and stood painfully quiet – a wrinkle trying to smooth herself away. But she did not go. She waited for Pitt to read.

‘Joe said I shouldn’t show you‚’ the
Fräulein
repeated, when I was through. ‘But I thought it’s only fair.
Es tut mir leid‚’
she said, turning to the gentleness of her mother tongue for comfort. ‘I’m very sorry.’

Pitt, curious as ever and quite particular, asked only, ‘Had Joe seen – this’, clutching the memo, “before we made – this?’ waving his arm at the Headless Bicycle, Joe’s nickname for that ‘fantastical device’ proliferated from the collective imaginations of Syme and self.

‘We both had‚’ the
Fräulein
answered, resting her hand on the seat.

‘You are – very kind‚’ Pitt said, sweating, flushed perfectly crimson from chin to pate. ‘Very kind‚’ he insisted, as he walked into the bright shadows of the street and left her there – in the open garage, staring after him.

The pebbles ground and scattered as he backed into the road, swung outwards, and then – breathing stertorous calm – drove
slowly off. Pitt fled the rich hills and green-canopied streets. The sun came out over the highway again, as he turned south and home. Towards Susie and failure. He recalled another sunny occasion, many years before, on which his father had taken young Pitt ‘on the job’ one summer morning over the school holidays. The boy did not know what to expect, he had heard so much of his father’s innovations. ‘Did Dad make this?’ he asked, fingering a jointed gasket. ‘Or this?’

‘Your dad?’ the man said, a barrel-chested figure with hanging arms, stooped against a board to tie his boots. ‘Which one is he?’

Pitt pointed below.

‘Him? I don’t really know what he does. Orders parts, I think. I never see him up here.’

How my face burned at that, grew hot to touch! Fitting, I think: for shame runs in the blood, as deep as love, and just as old. Pitts, I believe, have always been laughed at.

‘Have you heard?’ Susie said, as Pitt strode in the door.

‘What? Heard what? What’s there to hear?’

‘I don’t know. I was asking.’

‘Don’t ask. How should I know? They’ve only just started.’

She lay upon the couch in sweet collapse, under a feather-bed, watching TV – the boys hidden about her person, only their heads appearing. Spring break must have begun, Pitt thought, on the quiet. ‘I brought the bed in here‚’ she said. ‘Three little slobs. Shameful.’

‘You should be – out and about. We should all be out and about. This is crazy. Sun shining. Everything.’

‘Heard what?’ Ben said – quick child, attentive to all elision, stubborn in ignorance.

‘We’re cold‚’ Aaron added. ‘And I’m trying to watch.’

‘Do you want us to burn things?’ Ben said. ‘For science?’

Pitt turned off the TV. ‘Come on‚’ Pitt declared, making a fist of the cover, and beginning to pull. ‘Come on. Come on.’

‘Leave it, Doug. Everyone’s snug and happy. Why do you want to spoil it?’

Pitt thought of reasons; then picked one. ‘I’m going to bed‚’ he said. ‘I need the duvet. Come on.’

‘You should treasure such a sight‚’ Susie said, wrinkling her nose, resisting. ‘Wife and babes, in arms.’

How sweet and clear is anger! A bell ringing, summoning old strength. He pulled the feather-bed free, and wrapped himself round – like a bear in snow. ‘Good night!’ he said. ‘Good night!’ (My mind had not been so … lucid … in months. Utterly empty, spick and span, picked clean. Then filled with light. A perfect treat – pristine. Pure and simple as a glass of water.)

‘Why do you spoil everything?’ Susie cried, sitting up, and – from some compulsion – beginning to tie on her tennis shoes. ‘Just when we’re happy? You hate it when anyone’s happy except for you.’

‘Good night‚’ Pitt said, and closed the bedroom door.

Then another door banged shut; and the screen followed lightly behind it.

Pitt awoke from a deep sleep at dusk.
Courage, he said, and pointed
towards the shore,
lines drifted at the edge of his thoughts like loose wood on a slack tide. Outside his window, the yard lay brown, becoming black. The neighbour’s kitchen glowed in the soft air; someone stooped below the counter. Disappeared. Pitt had turned away before she rose again; a hand, perhaps, against her aproned back. Sleep like cotton filled his head: a muffling. He stood quite naked, to his surprise – he did not remember undressing. Then he stepped into the bathroom on cool feet and peed. A bright stream; the sweet stink of it rose into his breath. Afterwards, he dipped behind the shower-curtain, wetting his bare shoulders, and switched on the tap; waited quietly till the hot began to spit and sing against the tiles, then slid in.
‘Du mußt dein Leben ändern‚’
he muttered into the thresh of water. I feel a new man, he thought; only worse.

When he walked into the living room, Susie had a cup in her hand, and poured it trickling into the potted tree beneath the window. ‘The boys are getting changed for the dance‚’ she said. ‘Joe called, with a heavy cold, poor man. The committee have decided. I told him you were asleep.’