Tuesday, December 05, 2006
(11:33 AM) | Adam R:
Ch 3
[So it's been forever, too long. I know. I'm remiss. You can read chapter one here and chapter two here. Or read below for the three-second summary. And I'd like to promise it won't be as long until chapter four unravels. And I'd like to warn you(finally) that this chapter is mostly expository, so after last chapter's nailbiter, you may have been waiting all this time for nothing.]The story until now:
Adam Robinson is intent on writing a movie, or a play, he's not sure which. But he figures the best way to get started is with a plot structure, which he has been trying to sketch out in a narrative about Adam Robison, a young man who lives in a shady Baltimore neighborhood and works for a mutual fund corporation in the city's glittery Inner Harbor. Adam Robison dreams of being a culture critic. In Chapter Two we are introduced to a mysterious character named Robby, who arrives in Baltimore on a ship. He is in an amnesiac state when he meets a sardonic bum named Bill.
Adam Robison, saddened by his lack of writing ability or stick-to-itiveness, sat in his cubicle on the 25th floor and wondered what he was supposed to do. In the last few days he had sent emails to the editors of a handful of Internet magazines where he thought some of his writing on pop culture would fit in well, but he hadn’t heard back from any of them. That was okay, he figured, because he didn’t have any writing on pop culture. He was certainly interested in becoming the white Cornel West, and wanted desperately to amass a formidable amount of work on subjects as diverse as a pop diva’s wardrobe and the affects of big-box bookstores on literary publishing - but he did not want to write these essays for nothing; he wrote much better when he had been commissioned for a piece (as he was in limited measure on topics such as Christian rock).
So, floundering, Adam dug into his bag for the book by Theodor Adorno that he had recently purchased (at full price) and thumbed through it when no one was looking. This was an ineffective way to read anything, especially such dense theory that he wouldn’t have been able to understand had he been in an oak-paneled library, or if he'd been listening to a whatsit, an etude. Still, he was inspired by the material. He had shelves full of books that he only understood peripherally - Paul Bowles, Hegel, Jackson Mac Lowe - and he kept them more for their tactile reminder to work hard than for reference. Tiffany just received copies of her new poetry chapbook in the mail. She inscribed a copy for him and he shelved it in a place that would inspire and impel him. Her prodigious output flung him for ceaseless loops. And yet - a Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary sat on the corner of the floor nearest his computer uncracked. And he had wanted an OED for over a decade, shopped for them everywhere, until he found one a few months earlier at a church tag sale. It cost him a buck. He used it once to define the words “impel” and “prodigious.”
Marxism, fetishism, popular music. Gotcha. When he sat down to write, Adam cracked his knuckles in six languages. Struggling in his career, he signed up to take some graduate courses, and one of his assignments was to spend thirty minutes a day walking around. The idea was to quiet his spirit, he guessed, which seemed a daunting task. In fact, when the assignment was delivered, Adam said to himself, “Well, I can see myself not doing that,” and decided he would simply ignore the syllabus. But he recognized the lameness in something like that, and so every day during his lunch break Adam moseyed around the shining harbor, trying busily to slow himself down.
What finally stopped him on the first day was a group of window-washing ninjas repelling from the roof of a skyscraper with buckets and squeegees. Immediately he reconsidered his career path. The men would push themselves thirty feet from the building and drop to the floor below. They timed their trajectory so that when they swung into the window they could deftly affix a plunger to the glass and halt their movement. Then, in seconds, they would have the glass scrubbed and dried and were flying again. It was marvelous to watch, but looking up made Adam’s neck sore, and he kept thinking he would fall over. He propped himself up on a parking meter and scooted into a man he had not seen.
“Excuse me,” Adam offered.
“No sweat, brother. Can you spare some change?” He was a tall bum with tired skin and gray-streaked hair. What’s more, he was a bum with a dog, an eager but extremely calm, crusty Collie. Adam remembered when he was in China. There was a toothless peasant there with a monkey. He was not a nice man but the monkey was a laugh-riot, and after playing with the animal briefly it was no problem giving the peasant a few yuan. So Adam patted the dog’s head and forked out a dollar. It is absolutely true that Adam Robison is a dog lover.
But occasions for meeting pets downtown are rare, so after a few weeks Adam gave up his walks. Instead, he stood in front of his office window for several minutes and looked out over the city while his soup heated in the microwave. He listed the things he saw. Initially, he pointed the harbor out to himself, and the buildings surrounding it. After a couple days of this he noted the water in the harbor, and that there were trees set among the buildings, and people walking around, and cars and bicycles, too. He saw an expansive bridge that let cars onto route 95, which would take them to Washington DC and points south. Then he realized there were ripples on the water in the harbor, and boats out there. He didn't invent stories for the details, didn't imagine lovers in the paddleboats. He simply looked closely and listed what he saw, and found that the lists themselves were fascinating.
The next day Adam saw that the water was primarily three different colors, and the wake behind the boats was white. He studied the whiteness and realized it was actually steel gray. Looking more closely, he could tell that the buildings were comprised of windows and steel and rocks and air conditioning units. Pedestrians were reflected off the shiny glass of a hotel. The pedestrians wore dark clothes. He paid attention to the bridges one day, and from his great distance could tell that they were made up of concrete slabs set upon girders, held up by massive concrete posts. Baltimore's business district was an intricate place.
Adam tried to subject the neighborhood around 1818 to the same scrutiny, but everywhere he looked he could only see trash. He stood by his front door and looked down the street to see rows of rowhouses and potato chip bags whirling in the air. Even their brand name sounded grimy: Utz. He noted that the houses were charmingly distinctive in their appearance, painted varying shades of red or crumbling with a false brick veneer. He liked that. But as hard as he looked he could only see knotty trees, trash, and rat offal. Perhaps I could appreciate this better from higher up, he thought, and then he remembered that he could climb on his roof. He had, in fact, spent long hours on his roof in the past several weeks, trying to keep water from leaking through it. So he retrieved his ladder and set it up against the building.
Tiffany had placed a strict ban on going up the ladder without anyone to hold it, as there was a four foot gap between the ladder's tip and the the bottom edge of the roof. But Adam knew he was skillful at climbing. He was an adept climber. When he was six he fell from a jungle gym and broke his arm. At eight he fell out of a tree and broke his other arm so completely that the bone pierced the skin and fell out into the grass. While biking in the Northwoods of Wisconsin in his middle twenties he announced to his friends that he had a plan. "I'm going to climb that pine tree," he said, "hold on to the tip, and ride the tree as it bends to the ground."
"Like an elevator?" Homer asked.
"I hope so," Adam said from the top of the tree. It bent slightly, but it was an old pine, thirty feet tall and regrettably brittle. It bent only slightly, then cracked. Disappointed, Adam fell through the branches to the ground below, landing with his head only inches from a gnarled stump. "Oof," he asserted. Then the top of the tree landed on him.
"Oof," Homer said this time. It could be that Adam said it once more as well, before slipping out of consciousness.
While he was under, Adam dreamt he was in a crowded, noisy bar, trying to capture the bartender's attention. He wasn't trying to get the bartender's attention for a drink, he was literally trying to capture her attention. He wanted to use it to babysit his dog, Lightning, while he went away for a few days. He thought this would be possible by staring and inhaling slowly, but someone tapped him on the shoulder. In Adam's half-wakefulness, he knew it was the Holy Ghost, and that one of them was drunk. He said, "I dreamed I saw the Holy Ghost, standing drunk at the bar," as Homer laughingly shook him back into the present reality, which was not that bad.
So Tiffany's ban was more of a suggestion, he thought, and started up the rungs. When he lived with his grandparents he was given the task of straightening the antenna on the roof. "Have grandpa hold the ladder for you," his Aunt said, "but under no circumstances should you let him climb it." And no sooner did they have the ladder leaning in place than was the old man scampering across the roof like Anne of Green Gables. And then Adam was on his own roof in Baltimore, scanning the neighborhood for his story.
Eugie came by while he was up there. "Hey," he called up, "sport me a dollar." Adam pretended to ignore him, but it was easier to pay attention to another human then the streets of his neighborhood, so when Eugie called up again, he said okay and started to the ladder. Climbing down was always the hardest part. He had to close the gap between the roof and the tip of the ladder with boldness and blind strength of character. "So Schopenhauer," he said as threw his leg off the roof, his belly resting against the tar. "Will and idea." His foot found the top rung too hard, though, and the ladder slid across the side of his house and slowly, slowly fell to the ground.
Now Adam was holding to the roof's edge with just his arms, his face red with exertion and (it's not too much to admit) fear. He hoped Eugie would be sensitive to his predicament, but Eugie was already around the corner, talking to James. Their language was objectionable, and Adam thought the conversation was not entirely worthwhile. He focused his attention on his own situation, instead. Now was not the time to solve inner-city education problems. But when was the time? If the city continued to deprioritize preventative solutions, how could they expect real, lasting change? Adam accepted his own point, there was no reason to delay working toward a good cause. As he hung from the roof of his house, thirty feet high, he thought about praying.
"Dear Jesus," he said aloud, "please lay your guiding hand on the inner city of Baltimore, so that my neighbors can go to college and not get shot in the leg. And, Lord, if --" his arm slipped a bit off the roof. "If you can use your other hand to sort of scoop me back onto solid ground, that'd be great too. Lead me into the perfect center of your will, Adam." He chuckled. It had been a long time since he last prayed. "I mean, Amen."
It was a nice day. Birds were chirping in the litter. One bird, Adam noticed, had its wing stuck open, and he could only walk around in circles. That is, he could only pivot around his wing; he wasn't actually making circles. This was especially evident when the bird meandered over to a round drain cover that Adam hadn't seen before. "That's interesting," he thought. And suddenly the ladder was touching his feet again. It pushed up against his legs, forcing his knees up to his chest. Adam pushed back with his weight and was happy, really truly happy, that the ladder supported him. He let go of the roof and started his descent.
"Schopenhauer," he said at each rung. And when he was on the ground he saw the face of God, and God was Eugie, and Eugie had moved from the ladder to the wounded bird, and was chasing it in circles. | Main Page
