NACH.COM

The heater hose shower worked well enough, but the computer screen shook, had tremors, and the air conditioner hummed incessantly and louder than the passing motorcycles. The hot hot humid Kansas air reminded Jack of Florida, and the drip drip drip in the kitchen sink reminded him of a rain forest, reminded him of Oregon, of the Olympic Peninsula. Where was she? When would she get there?

The editor said, “Make it simple, see, simple like Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich. Don’t fuck with your generation, and the list goes on, like John Gardner says, simple. I got 22-year-olds coming out of my ears, so don’t fuck with your generation. Harsh words, hey boy?”

The editors and the agents never got it. Jack was a correspondent, but nobody got it. He was posted then to Kansas and he reported daily what he saw, what he heard, what he felt, what he knew. He reported it all. Every day he reported it all from Kansas, from the corn fields and the prairies, from the book shops, from the Paradise Cafés and the bike shops and the clothing stores and the bakeries and from the groovy organic supermarkets. One of the shops was in a perpetual state of panic because the government had threatened to regulate the sale of wonder potions. Jack reported it all, and more. He was a solo correspondent, and she would be there soon enough to fill in the blanks. Nobody else got it. Nobody else got what was going on. Just she and Jack.

William S. walked down the street like the grandfather of derelict poets, all frowning and pissed because he didn’t like cameras ‹ he clearly did not like cameras or photographers or smiling, or maybe he just didn’t like anything, maybe he didn’t think anything was worth liking. Jack’s editor at the newspaper blinked twice, snorted, puckered his lips as if they were clutching a cigarette, and he demanded a story about the new university students learning about the goodness of sex from a horny old university quack who called himself a sexologist. “Fuck that old worthless writer,” the editor shouted, then spat a thick mass of bloody gel onto Jack’s left shoe. “Get me that god damn sex man. Same as last year, right.”  Jack told the editor to talk to William S. about sex, about soap and assholes, that would make a good story for the newspaper. A how-to, with diagrams and photo re-enactments. Jack told the editor that he was a son-of-a-bitch fool, a pathetic, tired, ignorant, brainless fool. Jack thought, hoped, prayed in that micro moment a lifetime’s worth of prayer that this back-talk of truth would get him fired, get him unemployment, get him the hell out of that untruthful newspaper office, but the editor just cracked a smile and spit another bloody gob onto Jack’s other shoe.

In his car Jack heard his latest dispatch on the radio news. “Flash! This just in from the Kansas correspondent: he’s got eyes on the front of his face and ears on the side of his head, and man they are humming. Reportedly dead, the correspondent’s sensory organs resurfaced on the correspondent’s face this morning in the bathroom, where he had gone to shave. Somebody thought the extremities were dead, officials said. Locked up in an air-conditioned house, hitching a ride on that big black head, somebody had once said that they were dead, and so it had been reported. But the Kansas correspondent reported today that his entire being was alive. Alive! The obituaries were false, premature.”

Even closed and shut up and dead-like Jack could see his wife riding a bicycle. Funny that, riding that blue bike she was on when she was shot and Jack was two thousand miles away and she called and said, “I’ve been shot in the head.”

Jack could see her on that bike in Oregon, happy, unassailed by life, and then in the gutter feeling her ear, losing sense of time and place as some government-owned pickup stopped to help and call for an ambulance, and Jack watched her see it all in black and white, she walked in slow motion and smiled, she said, “I’m all right, really, I’m all right.” But of course the blood was gushing out the side of her head.

The guy who helped her was one of those big, friendly older working guys in overalls who are always helpful and kind and never get a damn thing for it. He was good with his hands, he could fix things like lawn mowers and cars and kitchen sinks, and he could build things, like buildings and showers and furniture and window boxes for flowers. He was an artist, but nobody got it. He was just a stupid maintenance man who once called an ambulance for Jack’s wife.

The cops showed up, took some notes, and the city guy in the pickup was gone. She lay on a stretcher while the black and white cops took notes and looked for evidence. Her head was a blood read beacon of random hurt. She wanted to go home.

The sounds echoed loudly because the apartment was so empty. It contained Jack and his clothes and his computer and his futon and a bunch of shit he had dropped on the polished oak floors, and every noise he made reverberated. Every noise the downstairs neighbors made reverberated louder. At three in the morning their telephone woke him, almost nightly. Who was it calling? A lover, a friend,a relative? Was the lover calling to say warm things, to find out if she got home safely? Was the friend an insomniac? Or a paranoid parent checking up on a reckless daughter?

Jack reported on the loneliness of waiting.

It was so damn hot and Jack might as well have killed himself to cool off. He drove up and down 23rd Street looking for a medical clinic he had to write about for the newspaper. He got there drenched in sweat, so bad they thought he needed treatment, thought he needed a stress test, as if the stress of driving in an un-airconditioned car weren’t enough.

They had this thing called a heat index. It was like the wind-chill factor, adding up the combined effects of heat and humidity, and the day he went to the medical clinic the heat index was somewhere over 110 and Jack had to wear a tie all day. He hoped he smelled bad, especially at the end of the day when he sat in the editor’s office talking in the second person about the orifice surrounding the sphincter muscle.

That afternoon Jack had driven home for lunch to use the phone, to beg for another job, because being the Kansas correspondent didn’t pay much, and his job at the newspaper didn’t pay much more and let’s face it, he hated it. It was a pleasure to edit his own dispatches as the Kansas correspondent, to send his reports off into the world somewhat like he once did for the wire service. He didn’t know who received his dispatches, but he knew they were out there, because he sent them every day without fail.

Jack sent one dispatch from his car while he was looking for the medical clinic.

It was around 1 p.m. and he was in his car and the sun was blistering his skin. His bare arms glistened with sweat and Jack could see the patches of moisture growing beneath his arm pits and beneath the shoulder belt. The wetness was spreading and converging and it was obvious that soon his entire shirt would be soaked.

He drove up and down 23rd Street looking for The Yellow Sub. He had been to the sandwich shop once before but he couldn’t find it. The road was terrible. There was a traffic light at nearly every intersection and the lights all turned red as he approached. This happened in both directions. This was clearly not a random case of bad luck but some intended speed torture to insure that Jack would remain as hot as possible in his car.

Jack barked at the world when one light turned to yellow and then to red, stopped him there once again to boil. He barked at the world, at every other car on the road that had caused his misery. He barked at the editor, at the doctor and the nurse who ran the health clinic that he could not find.

When he finally found that insufferable clinic he paused beneath the shade of a tree before entering, and looking at himself he nearly turned around and went home. He was wet as if he had entered a shower with his clothes. It was as if he had fallen into a swimming pool.

He filed the following report:

“KANSAS ‹ The heat of summer is enough to drive a man mad, but a solitary man is just mad enough to stay sane. One man here evaporated into thin air. His lover boiled herself in grief and followed his vapor trail all the way to Buffalo, Wyoming, where they condensed together, kissing, and then they made plans to camp in the Bighorn Mountains.”

Jack should have turned back and quit the job on the spot, but he lacked nerve. He went into the health clinic and drank purified water.

California was the name of one of Jack’s downstairs neighbors and she should have invited Jack down to watch TV. Or Jack could have watched her do a sultry striptease with her sultry roommate Christ The Savior. It was too hot to do anything other than watch.

Jack could not take a woman named Christ The Savior seriously. It was like naming a boy Jewman or Buddah. What was the point? To be nearer to the holy one? To be reminded, day in and day out, of one’s spiritual obligations?

Jack could not take this particular Christ The Savior seriously because Jack very much doubted she took her biblical obligations seriously. She was out late every night and Jack thought she was a fucking machine. At any rate, it was a pleasant thing to think, her hips twirling and twirling and twirling all night long without a moment’s rest.

One morning was so hot that Jack went into the newspaper office at 7 a.m. and the first thing he did was tell the editor that the mere sight of his sorry face made him ill, that each footstep toward the newspaper office sank him deeper and deeper into a state of self-loathing, and that he was a cheap, ugly man for whom Jack wished only the worst.

To Jack’s great delight, he was fired on the spot. The editor tossed Jack’s belongings out the one window in the news room and shouted, so that everyone could hear, “Don’t come back, you ungrateful prick. It’s over, you hear! You’ll never work in this town again.”

Jack left his pencils and notebooks on the street where they landed, loosened his tie, and he could not help but laugh at the joyousness of the occasion. His arm pits were quickly darkened by sweat, but Jack didn’t care. For once something had gone his way. He felt as if he had won the lottery, and in fact he might as well have, for in that very instant of release from the penance of the news room his life turned around, immeasurably for the better. The editor still did not understand that Jack was the Kansas correspondent.

Jack quickly reported this bulletin:

“KANSAS ‹ The Kansas correspondent is on his way.”

Without even stopping at home to call his wife and talk it over or to reconsider or even to change his clothes Jack stopped at a travel agent’s office and to purchase an open-ended ticket to Nairobi. He charged the $1,235 ticket to one of his numerous credit cards. The flight left that night from Kansas City, so Jack had only a few hours to pack and prepare for his journey. As it turned out, he forgot to call his wife and had no time to do so until the day after he arrived at his hotel in Nairobi.

It was a three-legged flight, with stops in New York, Paris and then finally, 23 hours later, in Nairobi. It was close to midnight when the Boeing 737-400 landed, but the airport was crammed with arrivals and departures wearing the most colorful clothing. It occurred to Jack only then that one of the things he most missed about Africa was the colors, and it was somewhat ironic since most of the colors in the clothes were created by western chemical dyes.

As he remembered from his last visit most of the westerners wore khaki safari clothes, as if somehow the old movies had convinced them that this was the only acceptable uniform for the whites, the wazungus.

He was still in the clothes that he had worn to the office the morning before, when he was fired. Somewhere along the way he had removed his blue and burgundy regimental tie and had stuffed it into his pants pocket. But he still wore the white cotton dress shirt, grey flannel slacks, black leather dress shoes and his blue blazer. Why in God’s name had he worn a blazer to work on such a hot day? Jack couldn’t understand what he had been thinking.

The air was cool and fragrant outside Jomo Kenyatta airport, which did not really have any walls. Jack could smell Africa.

He had only one bag, a large day-and-a-half backpack stuffed with a few changes of underwear, some rain gear, a pair of long cotton pants, a pair of shorts, several t-shirts and hiking shoes.

His lightweight goose-down sleeping bag was strapped along with his tent to the outside of the pack. He bought some shillings at the money changer and took a matatu to the Hotel Pigali, and then he slept for 13 hours dreaming of hyenas and zebras and giraffes in the Serengeti. The next day he bought lunch at the bakery around the corner from the Queen Victoria Hotel and then he walked to the post office to use the international telephones. His wife wasn’t home so Jack left a message on her answering machine. He told her he would be back to Kansas in time to meet her there. She wouldn’t be able to join him there for another five weeks. Jack promised to call in a week unless there was no phone available. He would write.”Yes, don’t worry, I’ll write. Sleep tight.”

Jack spent the rest of the day preparing for his trip to the Mara. That night he fought the bed bugs before falling asleep in the Hotel Pigali. He dreamed of an old cape buffalo massacred by 21 lions.

Jack awoke in his Kansas apartment. He jumped out of his futon and pinched himself, closed his eyes and counted to three, and then slowly he figured out what had happened: after he fell asleep in Nairobi someone had drugged him, kidnapped him and returned him to Kansas. It was a cruel, two-day joke. Jack awoke dazed, drugged, perplexed, slightly sick to his stomach.

Out in the country Jack saw four great blue herons feeding in a flooded corn field, and the following Monday, after lifting weights at the community center, he took a bicycle ride, east somewhere among the corn fields, and he saw one more great blue heron. They were enormously beautiful, magnificent birds. They could have  stopped his heart and killed him with their beauty if they had wanted.

The heat wavered. It was always there, but sometimes it was less oppressive. In another day it would blaze again. Jack had to drive to Kansas City to the damn university medical center.

Rice and beans and salad for dinner, and then Brahms’ Fourth on the radio, and he knew he must have seemed like a pathetic excuse for a 26-year-old in 1993, when his walls should have been shaking with the vomiting crack of some unintelligible grunge that passed for a punk revival. It was excellent noise, but not music, and Jack, a most pathetic blob of a life, must have seemed somehow sad getting such enjoyment out of such stodgy 100-year-old drivel, “I mean what’s it say, man, it don’t say shit to this generation, you know? Fuck if I know what that shit says. It don’t say nothing to me, it’s just all sweet and old-like.” Jack heard that from everyone he met, even the old digesting editor.

The Chinese shop thugs on 14th Street kick-boxed a junky, pummeled his face and kidneys repeatedly, and the only one who had the nerve to tell them to stop was a middle-aged black woman who shouted “stop them, stop them, they’re killing him,” but who was going to stop them? Who was going to step forward and tell the judo experts to lay off the junkie, who could barely stand before they launched into him? Who was going to stop them? Not Jack.

Nobody knew what went through the man’s mind before he jumped off the ferry. It was the Andrew J. Barberi, one of the new boats then, and the seas were rough, white-caps, but the deck hands launched a life boat to try to save him, and he swam away from the life boat. They tossed a life preserver, but he didn’t grab it. He swam away from them, he bobbed in the water, he went down, he came back up, he went down, he came back up, he went down, and then he didn’t come back up. The life boat returned to the ferry. Nobody knew why the man had jumped. Nobody knew what had gone through his mind. The ferry was late getting to Staten Island, and some of the passengers were annoyed with the delay. None of them knew what went through the man’s mind. None of them asked.  None of them cared.

An article for Dine and Wine: What eating or drinking establishments are best to wretch in? It is a matter of criteria. Some establishments, such as the Hideaway, beg to have vomit deposited on their floors. Some, like the place that first put mayonnaise on a reuben, deserve the honor.

The Hideaway was a place in Kansas owned and operated by people who thought that a dismal semi-finished basement with a sound system and pool tables was the ideal setting for social gatherings. It was actually an ideal setting for regurgitation.

One day Jack killed a stranger. He bought an AK-47 at a pawn shop that specialized in guns, and then he walked a block to a park, and he shot the first person he saw. It was a middle-aged man in a blue cotton sweater and blue jeans, wire-rimmed glasses, a smile on his face, walking quickly, carrying a single red rose. Jack shot him once in the head and he died instantly, the smile still visible beneath the blood that drizzled over his lips.

The thing about being alone all the time is that you grow used to silence, but then you don’t, it drives you mad so that you think about all sorts of terrible things that should stay hidden in dreams you don’t remember.

Jack went back to the newspaper as if nothing had happened and he was grudgingly taken back with a warning: no more charmed life, buddy boy, no more prime assignments. Work kicked the shit out of him that first day back. Jack wanted to leave. He wanted to die. He hated it, but he toughed it out.

At the hospital in Kansas City he saw an elderly black couple from behind. The old woman, a bit heavy, was hurting bad, walking slow. Her husband held out his hand and their fingers just touched. It was so beautiful. Jack was forced to write a story about a girl with cerebral palsy who liked horses and who was doing better than doctors expected, and Jack really wouldn’t have cared if the girl had been killed and the story canceled. Back then that’s the sort of thing that newspaper editors trained in journalism schools liked. Jack couldn’t take it so he set fire to the publisher’s office in protest and the publisher, a short fat ignorant man who inherited the business, burned alive before Jack’s eyes. Jack stood and watched the man’s skin turn black and their eyes met but the publisher’s were dead and then they boiled and oozed out of their sockets. Jack offered no help, but it didn’t matter, the editor came into the office and saw the mess and all he said was that Jack still had to do the story about the little girl.

Jack never knew where his dispatches went. He just wrote about what he knew. He tried to write with the deep unspeakable passion that the bastard editors and agents in New York said they wanted, but he always came up with something different and no good.

The little girl was delightfully cute in her tan riding breeches, black riding shoes and English riding helmet. A lovely young girl who chased the kittens at the barn. She posed for the cameras, adored the attention. Her little imperfect legs and muscles carried her admirably on the horse, on the ground. It was before eight but already hot. Jack mostly watched her while the photographer took his pictures. What exactly was cerebral palsy and how was it that she had it? She was smarter than some of the people Jack worked with.

Jack got out of the newspaper office early and went back to his silent apartment. He tried to write an article for a children’s magazine about urban ecology. He nearly wretched when a BBC report on the Holocaust came on the radio. It was about how the BBC and the  British government suppressed information about the death camps. Jack thought fleetingly about the moral paralysis over doing anything about Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, everybody killing everybody, torture, starvation, rape — a fucking mess and the world seemed to care so little. It was what Jack wrote a year earlier, and things were only worse. It was pathetic. Jack was pathetic. He didn’t know what to do. He was afraid to ask. He was afraid to try. He felt weak, at fault. He felt the responsibility to act and the unwillingness to do so. What could he do?

For two nights Jack was near insanity, running mad through the streets in search of his soul, which escaped somewhere along Interstate 29 when he drove to Kansas from South Dakota. Jack thought his soul was either still in South Dakota with his wife or in St. Joseph, Mo., where he stopped at a Denny’s for lunch. The place had been packed full of church folks having the big Sunday supper, and Jack figured his soul couldn’t take it and escaped and maybe hitched a ride with a  truck, and now it didn’t want to rejoin Jack, so he was without a soul, going mad in his impossible search. The liquor burned right through Jack’s soulless heart, he laughed at the unlaughable, thought the unthinkable. He spit on a needy woman, gave to the greedy, to himself. He watched himself watch the world spin speedily, and meanwhile everyone else listened intently for the lost Martian satellite. They said it probably exploded, or that a transistor failed. What was the difference? It failed.

Jack spent the night fondling a delicious red head from the grocery store. She wept, she moaned, and so did Jack. He told her don’t come back, I don’t want this, but she threatened to come back. and he lived in fear that she would come back, fear and desire and the pitiable knowledge that she would not. Jack considered a return to Nairobi. But he was maxed out on his credit cards.

What do you do when you don’t want to do anything? Jack wanted to hold his breath and wait for his wife to arrive, when they could do things together, look together, explore together, see all the new things together. He wanted to share that wonder with her, not before her. He didn’t want to know things so that he must show her, teach her. He wanted to learn with her. It was the act of discovery, and timing counted.

He got a flat, so he walked for miles, for days. It was slow, but it was okay.

All of Jack’s shoes were scattered on the floor. Every day he would drop them on the floor and figure out where they were later. The slippers, the work shoes, the dress shoes, the sneakers, the sandals. The leather slippers were near the guitar and the dumb bells.

The dopes at the wire service weren’t interested in taking back the Kansas correspondent. That was the indication. The bureau chief hadn’t yet actually interviewed Jack, so if he was interviewing candidates it appeared that Jack was not even on the short list. Unless the bureau chief considered that he’d already interviewed Jack. The humiliation of holding out hope was worse than not getting the job. Jack couldn’t think, he couldn’t act. He was in paralysis. He had lock-jaw. His heart had frozen, his eyes were pasted in mid-blink. Time had ceased. Jack inhaled. The exhale was imminent, imminent, but still in the realm of anticipation. Wait for it. It will arrive. The river will flow again. The heat will subside. The heat drove Jack mad. He could not think in the heat. He could not move. He could not go anywhere, not even to K-Mart to buy himself a new bicycle tube or a pump. The tire went flat. The patch failed. The gas escaped. What if the patch holding Jack failed? What exactly would escape? His guts, or something invisible?

Jack was not a radical and he could live with that. His thoughts were angry, but not new, not unusual, and his answers were quiet, unremarkable, maybe delicate. He would have liked to have been loud, brash. He would have liked the attention, but he knew that whatever he was, it was not that. If he shouted, he was false. He had been false so much of his life. His truest moments were quiet, personal, like the best of his stories, like Lila. Lila was him. It was not a blockbuster. It didn’t win any awards. It never took anyone’s breath away. It was too simple, too wishful, too pure. Jack’s deepest yearnings were simple and pure and hopeless. The touch of a hand — it gives life. An abstract expressionist painting, a drug-induced diatribe, a bitter dive into New York ‹ always New York, or L.A., or that one time Pittsburgh with homosexual memories of that reputedly most livable place — it was always a place of glitz, camera lights and an overabundance of the falseness that Jack foolishly reached for. He was at peace with a  touch, or even alone in his Kansas apartment, a correspondent reporting to himself. That was his life. That was all. It was inadequate, but it sufficed. It was admirably adequate in its inadequacies. If Jack could remember that then he knew he would always be happy.

The red-head and Jack had coffee together, and then Jack convinced her to come home with him. They made love all afternoon and just after Jack came his wife arrived. Jack had completely forgotten that she was due in Kansas that afternoon.

He heard the door open downstairs and then her voice.

“Hello!” she said. “Hello? Anybody home?”

She walked up the stairs and saw the red-head and Jack, entwined, naked, the voluptuous, full-breasted girl’s legs spread wide and clasping Jack tightly within her.

“Oh, you are home,” his wife said, wiping the sweat from her brow. “What a drive.”

Jack, speechless, waited for her expression of shock, dismay, disgust. He had failed her. She approached, and Jack stood, now in shorts but no shirt, and they hugged.

“I missed you,” she said after they kissed. Their hands touched. Her hands were so soft, better than Jack remembered.

“I missed you,” he said. He glanced down at the mattress where the redhead and he had spent the afternoon. She was gone. Jack and his wife were together, alone, at last. He showed his wife the apartment they would finally share. He showed her where he had placed the computer, his clothes, the telephone, a few books, and he showed her the shower that he had built out of automobile heater hose and hose clamps.

“It works well enough,” he told her, proud of his frugal ingenuity.

She touched the side of his head. It was a soft, familiar touch.