FIFTY-FIVE
Opening the book of Wordsworth’s poems, the one with the green feather that tumbled from the shelf his first night back, Ran’s eye lit on a verse:
The old man still stood talking by my side;
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the man did seem
“Like one whom I had met with in a dream…” The words rose up in him from some deep place, and Ran spoke them aloud, eyes closed, and checked the text, and they were right, and he felt gooseflesh on his arms.
How hard is that to guess, though, Nemo pointed out, that “seem” would lead to “dream”?
“True,” Ran said, deflating.
The button, though, was real.
When he opened the top drawer, however, the object in the pencil-well, though round and nickel-sized, didn’t say OshKosh. It wasn’t even made of tin, but mother-of-pearl, like the bridge dots on his old guitar.
Poor boy, you wanted so badly to believe, didn’t you? You wanted magic to attend. All a dream, Ran, all a dream. Nothing exists but empty space and you….
Too demoralized to contest the point, Ran took the reading-glasses case without the reading glasses from the drawer. As he rolled the joint, a chimp, beaned by a falling coconut, let out a screech on the computer screen and thudded, hard, to earth.
“You and me, my brother,” Ran said through clenched teeth as he held his toke. Throwing up the window, he listened to the sash weights rocket down their beaten grooves, and blew his smoke into the night.
In the distance, a whippoorwill cried out, and, farther off, a freight.
Only minimally anesthetized by the first hit, he turned on the TV, restlessly surfing till he came to a rerun of Saturday Night Live. After a few skits, Eddie Murphy came on in a preposterous Uncle Remus beard, the old routine about white liberals attending summer camp down south, where they pay to pick cotton and receive lashes from Negro overseers. Stoned now, finally, Ran began to laugh a bit, and then it built and built, till he was pealing great guffaws, swiping spilled ashes from his thighs.
At this juncture, Marcel appeared from the guest room down the hall.
“Am I keeping you awake?”
“No, I was just looking for—”
“Claire? Sorry, no, it’s only me.”
“Some towels,” Cell said, “actually.”
Ran made an exaggerated comic shrug. “Don’t have any on me. Come sit down, though. Smoke this chub with me.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
“Come on, Cell, you’re always passing,” Ran coaxed, inhaling, speaking through clenched teeth. “Don’t decline my hospitality. You can sit down and smoke a joint with me, can’t you? For old times’ sake?” When he released the hit, his smile, if anything, had brightened, but menace flashed through the hilarity, running none too deep.
Marcel seemed unwilling to decline. “I’ll sit for a couple of minutes, but on the joint, no thanks.”
“Fair enough,” said Ran. “Pour yourself a drink. There’s some of Clive’s sipping whiskey on the cart. Do you know this one?”
“I remember it,” Cell said, glancing at the screen.
“Funny as hell, isn’t it?”
Cell shrugged and took a sip.
“Come on,” Ran said. “If Murphy can laugh at it, why can’t you?”
“I guess, after all, we don’t all think alike.”
Ran’s expression sobered now. “So, what, I’m having another cracker flashback? This is racist, too?”
“I don’t know that it’s racist,” Marcel replied. “I just don’t find it funny.”
“Why not?”
“There’s too much pain in it.”
“But comedy comes out of pain, Cell—isn’t that what they say?”
“Maybe so. But if your mother gets murdered, you don’t laugh at murdering-your-mother jokes. If your child gets abducted by a pedophile, dead-baby jokes may not make you roll.”
“But your mother wasn’t murdered,” Ran rejoined. “Your baby wasn’t killed. You didn’t sweat on a plantation picking cotton. Neither did your parents or your grandparents or theirs or, probably, even theirs. What’s the statute of limitations on this, Cell? Where’s all this pain coming from in you?”
“That’s two questions, Ran. On the first, I guess it’s as long—at least as long—as white Southerners regretting the loss of the Civil War. That was a four-year episode in their history they’re still carrying remorse about. Slavery went on for two hundred and fifty. I don’t see the statute expiring anytime soon. And on the pain question, it’s not about me specifically.”
“Why not?” Ran asked, sitting straighter in his seat. “When does it get specific, Cell? See, this is where I fall down every time. I don’t know how to play the role you want to cast me in, the Abstract Oppressive White Man. I don’t know how to treat you as the Abstract Black Man Oppressed. I think political correctness makes people scared and too self-conscious to act naturally, to just behave like human beings to each other. To
