Nebraska

The doctor climbs a stepladder to peer into my hero's ears and eyes. “I'm tellin you palookas,” he says, “dis is one big guy we got here. Lookit dem arms. Lookit dem coconuts on him, wouldja?”

The doctor finds nothing wrong. He merely looks at his subject earnestly and asks, “What is dis? You pullin da wool over my eyes or what?”

It's at this juncture that my creative juices peter out.

I'm outside now, in a collapsible lawn chair. I'm wearing swimming trunks that used to fit and a painful jockstrap that's begun to unravel at the waistband. The sun is hot and the pink sweater on my glass of gin is beginning to get soggy. My wife is scolding weeds again. Mutt is recumbent on the diving board with her halter off and her two cute little cupcakes showing. And I'm reading an advertisement for a book about Vincent van Gogh that's just come in the mail. The advertisement flaps in the breeze.

There's a lot about madness and despair in the copy. There are reproductions of van Gogh's paintings. One landscape shows windblown grass and twisted cypress trees, a dark, roiling sky, a lonely path meandering off the canvas. An expert notes the anxiety that caused this painting. Another is a picture of a room. Someone indicates that everything—chairs, pillows, pictures on the wall—is paired, illustrating the solitary artist's acute need for companionship at the time of composition. “You will see,” the publishers claim, “how this tortured soul was able to create great art from squalor.”

And that brings me to this. I was an M.B.A. student in finance when I married Susannah. We rented an economy apartment and cuddled up by my hi-fi set, and if we scrimped, we could afford a movie once a week and split bargain beers with pictures of mooses and elk on the labels. Life was good, if unglamorous, and we were, as I remember it, very happy. Then I graduated and took a junior executive position in a large bank, and within a year I had three varieties of twelve-year-old Scotch in my kitchen cabinet. Susannah became pregnant, and greed instructed me to resign from the bank for a comptroller slot with a hot company that took just four months to fold. We descended into a neighborhood where the kids carried swords, Susannah did other people's ironing, I drank ale that tasted like fizzed-up tea and had a picture of a platypus on the label. But inside of two years I made a great comeback. Soon I had a metallic-gray foreign car and half a brownstone in the city, and I stocked a wine cellar with bottles that I gingerly rolled and marked every month. We were very, very happy.

It goes up and down like this.

Culprits who'd apparently missed out on the advantages that our great system has to offer stole everything in the brown-stone but some leftover platypus ale. The bistro that I owned a piece of was closed by the fussy health department because of spiders in the casserole. I failed to completely survive an income-tax audit. We were hard hit that year, but that was okay, we were young, we were vigorous, we could deal with a setback or two. I paid off my debts and losses, cut down on the Scotch, and limited ourselves to one night of amusement per week, usually topless dancers and tacos. Soon we were rolling again. I got into a high-tech company at ground level and scored big on a merger. I was tapped to join a partnership investing in treasury bills—one of those can't-lose propositions. Then one day I said, “Look, Susannah, we have all this dough stashed away and what's it earning, eight and a half percent? Why don't we make it really work for us?” Which, of course, is the same as saying, “Jeepers, everything's going so swell, why don't we screw it up?”

So we overextended our credit and bought this summer house and this shrinking housegirl, Mutt, and riding lessons for the kid, which he hates, and swimming lessons so he can swallow the pool. And the plumbing's bad here and the mosquitoes whine at your ears at night and we all have pathetic summer projects: victory gardens, chocolate suntans, science-fiction stories. Yesterday I came out here with a book, planning to sit down for a good read, but the world was so much with me that I spent all of the afternoon just staring at the hedge.

The yard gate swings. The kid drags through, rubbing his eyes, his wet swimming trunks for some reason cocked rakishly on his head. Susannah walks to him; he sprints and buries his face in her bikini. “Who did this to you?” she demands, and he blurts some preschool language. Mutt and her boyfriend are in the pool going at it. I take van Gogh with me to the house. The last thing I hear Susannah say is, “Did you tell the lifeguard you were drowning? Well, honey, how do you expect him to know these things if you never speak up? You've got to put your best foot forward!”

Upstairs I typed this about my hero: “He fixed his eyes on the Tripids’ large pink noses and black glasses as they murmured to each other in gobbledygook. After a silence he swelled his chest and made a heartfelt speech, telling his audience how terribly mixed-up Planet Dumb was.”

Just that much wore me out.

At dinner the kid decided to eat his food without utensils or fingers. He poured his milk in a bowl and lapped at it. His head burrowed into his coleslaw. He pushed his corn around with his nose. I would have preferred it otherwise. Mutt was facing me, her lips as pinched as a dime, decomposing. I imagined those hungry cells of hers jumping ship by the thousands. Since she wasn't eating, she could talk without mispronouncing a word. She said, “I used to work at this nursing home, you know? And there was this snowy-haired old lady who just sort of disintegrated one year. I'd walk past her room in the morning and hear her shout, ‘Welp, that's it for the kidneys!’ On another day she might squawk to herself, ‘So it's the feet now, is it? Good riddance!’ It seemed every week she'd lose the use of something else and herald it to herself: spleen, eyelid, pancreas, hip. The doctors could never find anything wrong, but still she declined. I visited her in the hospital and she looked dreadful. She'd kick the bucket that very night. Like a dope I asked, ‘How are you feeling now, Meg?’ And in this tired, creaky voice she said, ‘Oh. Pretty. Good.’”

The kid snarfled at his hot dogs.

Susannah said, “When I was a little girl, there was a farmer down the way with a henhouse and he'd let his chickens out to peck at the gravel on the road. Oh, golly, there must've been two dozen chickens to start with, but one by one they got creamed by automobiles. I kept appealing to the farmer, ‘Shouldn't you be more cautious with your birds?’ I'd say, ‘Couldn't you tend them somewhere else?’ He'd merely chuckle and answer, ‘Those chickens aren't as stupid as they look. Those chickens do fine out there.’ The last time I saw him he was still grinning from his front-porch rocker, overseeing his last skittish hen.”

The kid wiped his face with the tablecloth. “Are the elves Santa's children?”

I trudged up the stairs to the dark study with my typewriter in it. I hit the switch on the desk lamp and shook it until the light bulb flickered on. I changed the ribbon in the machine.

My hero tells the people of Planet Dumb that they've made a ridiculous mistake. They were probably looking for a new frontier, he says. They were probably searching for a specimen, an example, a typical human being, and inadvertently picked up the one man on Earth who was sui generis, unique. He tells them, everyone else is helpless. Most people on Earth wake up in the morning wondering what they can do to make themselves miserable. From the moment they're born, they play games where nine people try to sit on eight chairs. Hundreds of people buy chances for one puny prize. They punish themselves in amusement parks. They don't have gills but they try to swim. They have sports in which a person is supposed to carry a ball from one place to another, but instead of being careful about it, the player tosses it in the air, bounces it, negligently hands it to other people. And Earthlings are constantly at war with their bodies. Those who haven't given up eating are increasing themselves with gluttony. Or they're developing stammers and tics and sweaty palms. They're afraid of airplanes and snakes and growing old, of dogs and earthquakes and fires and guns, and of being unable to make a commitment. If there aren't any bathrooms around, that's when they have to go. Only when they've taken a forkful of food do t

hey sneeze. They have Sunday pipes and trick knees and allergies; they have cricks in their necks and butterflies in their stomachs and crazy bones near their elbows.

My hero pauses, waiting for his interpreter to catch up. The potato heads of Planet Dumb are crying their many eyes out. Very sadly my hero says, “I don't suggest you go there.”

The Tripid physician complains, “But we been spendin’ a lotta moola on da expeditions, ya know? We don't wanna waste all dat green stuff.”

My hero nods grimly. He knows how dat is. He looks out the picture window with its Halloween and Valentine and Christmas decorations. Below there's the buzzing of the bees and the cigarette trees, the sugarcoated fountains.

I have no idea what he'll say next.

I sat there and smoked a South American cigar down to the stub and no words came. I walked to the bedroom. Susannah was in the bathroom running water and splashing on foo-foo. On the bed was a newsmagazine, its pages wrinkled with tears. I noticed for the first time that there were two chairs in the room, two reading lamps and vanities, that the pictures were paired on the wall. I shut off the light and let the dark diffuse itself for a while, then wandered into the victory garden, slapped mosquitoes, and sipped brandy in the kitchen as I filled up one side of the double sink, let it empty, and watched the peach skins and coffee grounds gurgle up on the other side.

I turned off the faucet and waited for the sink's garbage to settle, then crept down to Mutt's room. The light was on. I rapped on the door. “Mutt,” I said. “It's me.”

I could hear the swish of her slippers. She asked in her emaciated voice, “What do you want?”

“I want to discuss something.” I listened to her silence. “I won't feel you up, Mutt. I promise. It's about my summer project.”

She opened the door and looked at me as if she were about to expire. I sagged against the door frame, done in by her skeleton. “I've got this story,” I said, and explained everything about it. I was stuck, I said. I had problems.

Mutt said, “Well, it's not a story really, is it? I mean, it doesn't have a plot. It's just comments, you know?”

“Yeah, that's what I'm stuck on.”