Kitchen boy were close friends and now you want to reconnect?”
“Something like that. We were never all that connected.”
“Google him!”
“I don’t have access to the Internet, Father. Don’t have it, don’t need it. I’m more comfortable with ancient technology, like this telephone. I prefer real human contact.”
“Are you making a joke, Phil?”
“No. I don’t think so. I guess I am.”
“If you want real human contact, come by the church sometime.”
“I’d love to. But I’m somewhat busy these days. Working on a book, kind of a memoir. Only I’m calling it a novel because mymemory is so fuzzy. Right now I’m writing about my dinner with Rainie van der Glick. I really should be getting back to that.”
“Well, I’m here. Anytime you want to talk. But I wouldn’t leave it too long, Phil.”
“You mean, I should attend to matters of the spirit whilst I may. Seek my salvation before it’s too late.”
“That, and the fact that I’m eighty-seven years old.”
“Got it. Nice talking to you, Bill.”
11 | WHAT HAPPENED, INEXACTLY
TRUTH-TELLING IS EASY. AT LEAST, IT CAN BE. THAT IS THE OBSERVATION I am delivering, although you should know that it is, what, two o’clock in the morning. I am hovering over the laptop. Beside me is a bottle of wine, three-quarters full. But you know what? That’s not the bottle I’m drinking from, ha ha, fooled everybody. No, in the kitchenette there is a soldier an inch away from being dead, that’s the baby I’ve been sucking on. There are also a few beer cans retired to the recycling, enabling me to forget that I ever drank them, that they ever existed.
You wonder what I’ve been doing all these hours? When Reverend Nystrom woke me up this morning, I implied that I was going to buckle down and get to work right away. And that truly was my intention, but somehow I’ve managed to fritter the day away. I had errands to run, which is how I refer to the act of walking to the liquor store and buying booze. They’ve opened a new LCBO a few blocks away, a huge one with an extensive Vintages section, which is where they really gouge you for the plonk. Still, I tend to select from the Vintages section, hoping to give the impression I’m some sort of connoisseur. Then I take my purchase to the cash desks and select the queue I will stand in. My selection is not based on length of line,rather on which clerk is working the till, and how many days it’s been since he or she has seen me. I’ve got them on a four-day rotation. Anyway, I bought some wine, then on the way home I impulsively ducked into the public library. All right, all right, I admit it, I pulled
Baxter
down from its perch in the “New and Notable” shelf, I leafed through briefly and determined that it was much like Hooper’s other books, dense and impenetrable. And then I waited for a very long time for one of the computers to free up. There were four terminals, but young Asian men occupied them all, each intent on, I don’t know, proving Fermat’s Theorem or something. They clouded the screens with symbols I couldn’t fathom, strings of numbers that seemed to stretch into infinity, squared and cubed and squared again. Finally one of them was successful at whatever he was doing and he signed off and I jumped into the wooden chair and called up the Google screen. Then I entered the name “Norman Kitchen,” and was surprised to find no fewer than forty-eight of them spread across the North American continent. Forty-eight men with elaborate hairdos and fat, blubbery lips. Forty-eight men who’d had something terrible done to them before they were able to discover that life held beauty and wonder. I lost my stomach for the search, wandered out of the library and went for a long walk, which ended when I passed through the doors of Jilly’s, a strip club. I sat there and looked at naked women and wondered if I would ever feel anything again. I wondered if I had ever felt anything. I came
“Something like that. We were never all that connected.”
“Google him!”
“I don’t have access to the Internet, Father. Don’t have it, don’t need it. I’m more comfortable with ancient technology, like this telephone. I prefer real human contact.”
“Are you making a joke, Phil?”
“No. I don’t think so. I guess I am.”
“If you want real human contact, come by the church sometime.”
“I’d love to. But I’m somewhat busy these days. Working on a book, kind of a memoir. Only I’m calling it a novel because mymemory is so fuzzy. Right now I’m writing about my dinner with Rainie van der Glick. I really should be getting back to that.”
“Well, I’m here. Anytime you want to talk. But I wouldn’t leave it too long, Phil.”
“You mean, I should attend to matters of the spirit whilst I may. Seek my salvation before it’s too late.”
“That, and the fact that I’m eighty-seven years old.”
“Got it. Nice talking to you, Bill.”
11 | WHAT HAPPENED, INEXACTLY
TRUTH-TELLING IS EASY. AT LEAST, IT CAN BE. THAT IS THE OBSERVATION I am delivering, although you should know that it is, what, two o’clock in the morning. I am hovering over the laptop. Beside me is a bottle of wine, three-quarters full. But you know what? That’s not the bottle I’m drinking from, ha ha, fooled everybody. No, in the kitchenette there is a soldier an inch away from being dead, that’s the baby I’ve been sucking on. There are also a few beer cans retired to the recycling, enabling me to forget that I ever drank them, that they ever existed.
You wonder what I’ve been doing all these hours? When Reverend Nystrom woke me up this morning, I implied that I was going to buckle down and get to work right away. And that truly was my intention, but somehow I’ve managed to fritter the day away. I had errands to run, which is how I refer to the act of walking to the liquor store and buying booze. They’ve opened a new LCBO a few blocks away, a huge one with an extensive Vintages section, which is where they really gouge you for the plonk. Still, I tend to select from the Vintages section, hoping to give the impression I’m some sort of connoisseur. Then I take my purchase to the cash desks and select the queue I will stand in. My selection is not based on length of line,rather on which clerk is working the till, and how many days it’s been since he or she has seen me. I’ve got them on a four-day rotation. Anyway, I bought some wine, then on the way home I impulsively ducked into the public library. All right, all right, I admit it, I pulled
Baxter
down from its perch in the “New and Notable” shelf, I leafed through briefly and determined that it was much like Hooper’s other books, dense and impenetrable. And then I waited for a very long time for one of the computers to free up. There were four terminals, but young Asian men occupied them all, each intent on, I don’t know, proving Fermat’s Theorem or something. They clouded the screens with symbols I couldn’t fathom, strings of numbers that seemed to stretch into infinity, squared and cubed and squared again. Finally one of them was successful at whatever he was doing and he signed off and I jumped into the wooden chair and called up the Google screen. Then I entered the name “Norman Kitchen,” and was surprised to find no fewer than forty-eight of them spread across the North American continent. Forty-eight men with elaborate hairdos and fat, blubbery lips. Forty-eight men who’d had something terrible done to them before they were able to discover that life held beauty and wonder. I lost my stomach for the search, wandered out of the library and went for a long walk, which ended when I passed through the doors of Jilly’s, a strip club. I sat there and looked at naked women and wondered if I would ever feel anything again. I wondered if I had ever felt anything. I came
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