Sapphires, p.18
Sapphires, page 18
The Googol And The Tripwire
Alice opened the door for the paper and her nipples went stiff with the cold. She clasped her breasts with her arms, bunching herself as far as she could into a warm, propelling ball and, shivering, reached down and snatched up the paper. She had heard once that breast milk could instantly freeze from sudden exposure to these temperatures, not that this was much of a danger for her now. The snow was swirling, a thick white mist gyrating in sudden puffs across her line of vision, brushing her cheeks like the touch of cold fingers. The tightness grew in her chest and she ran back inside.
Leaning across the fiery geraniums on her windowsill, Alice watched the snow. Now the flakes blew in a sheet of white, so dense that the bushes lining the path had no more definition than the faint smudge of fingerprints on a plate. All those tiny snowflakes, each one different, millions and millions of them, not one of them the same. She dropped her heels on the solid floor of her kitchen, and stepped over softly to the toaster. She waited as the little red bars of heat extinguished themselves and four gritty slices of bread, warm and dark brown, rose slowly in unison.
‘It’s rye, Dad,’ she told her father, handing him a plate. She walked over to the window again, thinking of the story her aunt had told of the beautiful young widow who died of hunger in a blizzard. But she, Alice, had a freezer full of food, enough pizzas to keep Mitch quiet all winter; briskets and tenderloin and chickens and bags full of succotash, tucked safe behind the left-hand door of the huge Amana she had bought after eight months at the packaging plant and kept as white as the flakes that were flurrying outside.
‘We might not get out,’ she said.
Herman sat poised over the toast, his grizzled hair a surprise of wayward spikes. She had given him Randall’s bathrobe, and it hung over his shrivelled frame in ridiculously abundant folds, like a flag drooping on its pole. He took a moment to reconnoitre the table—the unfamiliar cutlery set out on the unnervingly cheery placemats; the two white plates, each with its offering of toast; the marmalade jar glowing a rich liquid orange; the squat mug of coffee steaming to the north of his bread knife; the still-folded morning edition of the Standard to the east of that.
‘Mitch!’ Alice called. ‘You’re going to be late!’
‘What’s the hurry?’ said her father. ‘The guy on the weather said it was settling in.’
The week before, when she had picked up Herman from the penitentiary, the sun was bright in a blue sky and the snow was crunchy on the ground. She had stepped inside the grey stone walls and onto the brown linoleum of the foyer. Because he was leaving she did not have to wait in line as she normally did, in the bank of mothers handing bottles of fruit juice to their toddlers and the sullen chainsmokers in their wet-look boots. She strode ahead, with not even so much as a glance at the signs warning against the smuggling in of contraband or the use of gang insignia that once, in the very brutality of their language, had transfixed her with horror. She went right up to the guard and, almost laughing, handed over her driver’s licence, took the pass permitting her to enter another hall where on any other day she would have filled out a form which was yet another step that would get her to the visiting room. There she would be locked behind iron bars, as if her stubborn association with the criminal somehow made her one, too; and there she would stand, waiting in a stew on the cold concrete floor, until they brought him in and let her speak to him over a telephone, he sitting handcuffed on the other side of a thick grimy pane of bulletproof glass. Throughout the two years she had been the helpless witness to his accelerated ageing, exacerbated by the fact that it seemed to be a wholly random matter whether or not he would be allowed to shave, or the prison barber had been by to give the men haircuts. She had seen men in striped suits in the movies of her childhood, but that had been no preparation for his grey infirmary pyjamas with the starched blue cotton tunic that went over them, or the stoop that he developed, weekly, before her eyes.
But that day she had found him waiting in a kind of foyer that she had never noticed before, off the hall where they filled in the forms; and she felt somewhat disoriented by not having passed through enough stages, by not having to work hard enough to get to him. He was smiling, rather sheepishly, she thought. They had given him back his clothes, but they had that look of mothball storage about them and no longer fitted him, and she had had to bring Randall’s old overcoat for the cold.
She felt that it was bad for him to come out in winter, when the long flat land was dead, and shrouded in snow. She couldn’t help thinking it a bad sign. If it were summer she could set him to work in the garden or get him to paint the house, or he could take Mitch to the baseball or fishing. She tried to imagine him doing these things: stretching up on a ladder to reach the eaves, clipping the privet, his elbows bent and flapping—all the things that Randall might have done, if he had been anything like a husband or a father. She felt herself getting cold with anger again. She set the tray with the Diet Coke and the pretzel sticks on the coffee table, walked over to the television and turned down the sound.
‘A Canadian show. Seeing Things,’ Herman said. ‘It’s good.’
‘I thought you were doing your homework.’
‘We are,’ Mitch said. ‘But Grandpa likes this show.’
‘Mitch, you’re up far too late.’
‘What does he have to get up for in the morning?’
‘It’s AO, isn’t it?’
‘You haven’t seen it, Alice?’
‘I’m usually in bed by now.’
Herman laughed. ‘Oh really?’
‘What’s so funny about that?’
‘You never used to be. I used to stay up waiting for you, remember that? Sit down,’ he said, patting the cushion on the modular sofa. ‘You’ll like it. I watched it every week inside.’
Mitch added, ‘It’s about a reporter, he solves these crimes with ESP.’
‘I don’t know how either one of you can distinguish one program from another. It’s been on non-stop since this morning.’
‘We’ve had our eye on the news, Alice. Wouldn’t you like to know when this storm is going to end?’
Alice had a job at the container conglomerate that had swallowed up the wholesale glass company her grandfather started and had been kept going by the men in the family ever since. Kozminsky and Sons was now just a division of Krista and her cousin Abe was the only one left in it except herself. She was secretary to the new head of the accounts section, a man from Lincoln who had been friends in his youth with Starkweather, the boy who dressed like Jimmy Dean and shot dead nine people in the town. Mr Earnshaw. A wiry man only a few years older than she was, with a conspicuous nut of an Adam’s apple and face turned a mottled red from lunchtime exercise. He would often talk about the massacre. There were hard times then just as there were now, people with nothing to do but cause trouble, but some rose above it, he would say. It crossed her mind that Earnshaw was hinting at something here though she could have been reading too much into what he said. But his quiet ruthlessness made her uneasy: she sensed he enjoyed his brush with savagery, was secretly proud that whatever had turned his friend into a monster had also made him what he was.
She had been desperate when she went to her cousin to see if there was an opening for her. Operations in the packaging plant were being rationalised—that is what they called it—but what it meant was they had installed computers in the office and two-thirds of the bookkeeping staff lost their jobs. She had a good typing speed and shorthand as well but with the new machines these skills were no longer at a premium, so she took her redundancy pay and went back to business school to learn how to operate the Wangs. The redundancy package wasn’t much and Randall was always hopeless with the alimony. Whenever she saw him he said that he had left her the house and everything in it and wasn’t that enough? Her mother had always said that she would realise one day how important family was—she said it first, now that she recalled, when she had married Randall. The crunch came when her father was convicted. She swallowed her pride and went to see Abe at Krista. She knew he would help although his own position there was none too secure. But Krista was a growing company, a medium-sized multinational with branches opening in Canada and Mexico. They had room for good stenographers and the pay was even better than she’d hoped.
But thinking about it, in the warmth of her house, with her father and her son by her side, she discovered a twinge of hope inside her that the snow would keep falling and that she might never go back. Maybe this, too, was a bad sign. She took her tumbler of Coke from the tray, sat back on the modular sofa and tried to find her way in the story about the clairvoyant reporter finding his way around the back streets of Toronto.
‘Don’t ask me,’ Alice said early the next day. ‘I never understood it. I went to a liberal arts college and learned about history and literature, not that it did me much good. Your grandfather’s the one to help you.’
‘If I ask any more he’ll think I’m dumb,’ Mitch whispered.
‘He likes it, Mitch. He really does. He wants to feel useful.’
She leaned against the architrave in the hall and watched her son hesitate, then stride into the living room, an exaggerated bounce in his step. Her father was lying on the sofa with the newspaper over his face but when Mitch called he sat up. A lurid glow from the television danced in the lenses of Herman’s cockeyed reading glasses, and cast yellowish shadows on the window. Behind, the snow kept whirling, drifting, tumbling, descending.
‘Five hundred and ninety-five, say, by seven hundred and thirty-six … How much have you got?’
‘It doesn’t fit on the calculator.’
‘Let me see.’
Herman took the calculator and started punching out the figures. ‘What was it, five hundred and ninety five …’
‘By seven hundred and thirty-six.’
Herman put the calculator aside. ‘Your mother should get you a better one. Tell you what, I’ll get you one myself—for Christmas. A Casio, the best. But for now, let’s see you do it in your head. You know, your great-grandfather could do it in his—he counted those bottles, one, two, three, up into the hundreds, as they came off the truck. He didn’t need a calculator. Come to think of it, I’m surprised they let you use these things in school.’
‘They say we should concentrate on the principles.’
Herman laughed and ruffled Mitch’s hair. ‘You got me there. But let’s see you do it anyway. I bet you can’t.’
Mitch scrunched up his brow and concentrated.
‘Five hundred ninety-five by …’
‘Shush, Grandpa.’
Herman nodded, and to quiet himself looked up at the soundless television, and saw a woman acting in a daytime soap. Her facial expression was anxious, her hands were pushed on her hips. It was an inept parody of emotion, but caught by it unawares, its crude stylisation made him wistful and Herman tried to calculate how long it had been since a woman had looked at him like that.
‘I don’t know. Four hundred thirty seven thousand something. Four-hundred-thirty-seven-nine-hundred-twenty … I forgot the last number.’
‘That should be the easiest. Six times five, it’s got to be a zero.’
Mitch was annoyed with himself and slapped his forehead. ‘Okay, what did I say, four-hundred-thirty …’
‘Seven, nine hundred twenty.’
‘Twenty!’
‘Four hundred thirty seven nine hundred and twenty. Good. Now multiply that by three thousand seven hundred and sixty.’
Mitch squealed and threw himself back on the sofa. ‘Go suck yourself, Grandpa! In my head?’
Herman stared at his grandson, feeling the blood tingle in his cheeks, as if he were a sixteen-year-old virgin. As if there were such a thing as a sixteen-year-old virgin anymore. ‘You know, Mitch,’ he said, conscious of a deepening roughness in his voice, ‘no one ever spoke to me that way, not even in prison.’
‘I’m sorry, Grandpa.’
‘Did you learn that in school? Along with those principles?’
‘I’m sorry, Grandpa.’
‘All right, son.’ Herman lifted a bit of fluff off the sleeve of Randall’s sweater. ‘It slipped out, we’ll say. What we need is a calculator, a pocket one I mean, that’ll go as high as a googol, ten to the hundredth power, or a googolplex—you know what that is?’
Mitch shook his head.
‘A one, followed by a googol!’
‘Almost infinity!’
‘Why almost?’ Herman grinned. ‘A calculator for infinity. Why not?’
Mitch looked up at his grandfather. They both fell back laughing and Herman gave Mitch a gentle punch on the arm.
For dinner on the second day of the storm Alice served individual frozen chicken pies and succotash.
‘Can’t we have pizza?’
‘We’ve had too much pizza,’ Alice said. ‘It’s not good for you. Or me. Or Grandpa.’
‘You could have thawed out some pizza when you thawed the pies. I really hate succotash.’
Alice pressed her brow against the heel of her hand. ‘Please, Mitch. Just eat your pie.’
She sighed, and glanced at her father.
Herman gave Mitch a sly grin. ‘I’m not too crazy about corn and beans myself. But I eat them.’ He made a great show of piling the vegetables onto his fork and sliding them into his mouth, raising and lowering his eyebrows, like Groucho Marx.
Mitch smiled and bent his head towards the meal.
‘Mitch needs a new calculator, Alice. A good one. He deserves it, he’s been working hard and has a good deal of talent. A Casio, I was thinking.’
‘Dad, he’s only ten.’
‘Maybe you could bring one back for him from the office.’
‘I don’t know, Dad.’
‘Tell you what, I’ll call Abe.’
Abe Lavan had distinguished himself by inventing the rectangular milk bottle. It had revolutionised the dairy industry. Just by straightening the traditional milk bottle’s curves, the volume of milk that could be stored, transported and distributed to homes and supermarkets around the country trebled. Alice often wondered how the cows had felt. She wrote to her sister Janet, soon after she got the job at Krista: ‘Did each cow have to produce more or did they have to increase the number of cows? Is there a limit to what one cow can produce or, theoretically, can she go on squirting out milk ad infinitum, day after day, as long as she is properly stimulated?’ Janet never bothered to address these questions in her reply. Alice thought it would have made an interesting item on Janet’s radio show but Janet didn’t pick it up, which may have gone part of the way towards explaining why Janet had made something of her life and why she, Alice, for all her triumphs at Oberon, was working as a secretary at Krista through the good graces of her cousin Abe. And she felt so cringing and thankful for it that she made a point of not associating too closely with him at work, which was relatively easy because Abe, in his sixties, was held on as a salesman and was often away.
She thought about Abe while pulling clothes and linen out of the dryer. She warmed her fingers on their heat, folding and sorting them into piles. She could not help noticing that the smallest one was her father’s. When the snow stopped she would drive him into town and they would get him something decent to wear. She was pulled up short trying to imagine what to buy. She stood motionless with her hands spread out on a towel. Snowstorms and travel aside, Abe was at work at eight every morning, blue shirt, Abercrombie Fitch three-piece in place—the works, down to the Gucci cufflinks and the Dior aftershave. Would that be the right attire for Herman, a man as they said ‘between jobs’? She would have to inquire discreetly about headhunters, which of them would jump at the chance to take on a client whose last employment was kitchen hand in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. Before that? Well, yes sir, a top notch sales executive in his field, promoted to chair of the company. A smallish company, sir, but expanding, though computer software, as you’d know, is competitive, extremely competitive. And one of the creditors, you see, they took him to court …
What did Alice dream about? She was ashamed to admit, even to herself, that she dreamed about Randall. She was even ashamed to be ashamed, for who else but herself would she dare to confide in about her dreams? In them Randall was always coming back. He would telephone, or write a letter, and she would prepare for him: she would clean the kitchen, paint the house, paint herself. But then, ineluctably, something invariably would go wrong. Earnshaw would keep her back, so she would miss him; there was no way of telling him that she would be late, and when she arrived home he would have come and gone. She would hear the hiss of an approaching tornado and in seconds the house would be ripped from its foundations and be sent whirling into the air, only to land miraculously upright in some faraway, uncharted country where he could never find her. And this night she did hear a sound, not a hiss or even the knock of wood against the wind, although she woke recollecting a sound somewhat similar, a sound like a door closing against its jamb; and the sound of this repeated itself in her memory, like a counterpoint to the crunching sound muffled by the unrelenting drifting of the snow, in the endless blizzard which was keeping Randall away. For all of it, she realised with some embarrassment, was yet another extension of her dream. One more stage, one more hopeless enactment of its theme, like the endless halls and foyers and anterooms she had travelled through inside the dank stone walls of the Nebraska state prison.
