There's Something I Want You to Do

He looked at it. “You never see the moon,” he said, “until you sit all night watching it and you see how blindly stupid and oafish it is. I used to talk to it. My whole autobiography. Looked like the same moon I saw in Africa, but it wasn’t. Never said a damn word in return once I was here. Over there, it wouldn’t shut up.”

“Well, it doesn’t have anything to say to Americans,” I remarked, my mouth full. “We’re beyond that. Anything on TV?”

“Yeah,” he said, “junkie TV, where people are about to die from their failings. Then they’re rescued by Dr. Phil and put on the boat to that enchanted island they have.” He waited. I got the feeling that he didn’t believe in his own recovery. Or in the American project. Maybe we weren’t really out of the woods.

“Okay, here’s what I want you to do,” he said. “I want you to call up this Benjamin Takemitsu person and tell him that I owe him some money.” He laughed at the joke. Even his eyes lit up at the prankster aspect of making amends and its bourgeois comforts. “Tell him I’ll pay him eventually. I’ll pay him ten cents on the dollar.”

“That’s a good one.”

“Hey, even Plato was disappointed by the material world. Me too.”

“Gotcha.”

“Pour me a drink,” he commanded. I thought I knew what he was going to do, so I gave him what he wanted, some Scotch with ice, despite my misgivings.

“Here’s how you do it,” he said, when he had the Scotch in his hand. “Remember what they did in Ethiopia, that ceremonial thing?” He slowly upended the drink and emptied it out on my floor, where it puddled on the dining room tile. “In memory of those who are gone. In memory of those down below us.”

It felt like a toast to our former selves. You’re supposed to do it outside, on the ground, not in a building, but I followed along, inverting my beer bottle. The beer gurgled out onto the dining room floor, and I smiled as if something true and actual had happened, this imported ritual, imagining that he would probably be all right after all. Quinn smiled back, triumphant.

Forbearance

Whenever Amelia gazed at the olive trees outside, she could momentarily distract herself from the murderous poetry on the page in front of her.

Esto lavá çaso, metlichose çantolet íbsefelt sed syrt

Int çantolet ya élosete stnyt en, alardóowet arenti myrt.

Getting these lines into English was like trying to paint the sun blue. In several years as a translator, she’d never found another text so unmanageable. The poem was titled “Impossibility,” and that’s what it was. Each time she looked at the words, she felt as if she were having a stroke; she could feel her face getting numb and sagging on one side. Meanwhile, the ironic ticking of the wall clock marked the unproductive seconds as they shuffled past. The clock loved its job, even though the time it told was wildly inaccurate. The owner of this villa, a charming old Italian woman, had informed Amelia that the clock was senile and delusional like everyone else in the village and must never be adjusted. Adjusting it would hurt its feelings.

“That clock thinks it’s on Mars,” the old woman had told Amelia in a conspiratorial whisper. “It tells you what time it is there. And you, an American, want to argue with it?”

The poem in front of Amelia on the desk had been written near the beginning of the nineteenth century, in an obscure Botho-Ugaric dialect combining the language of courtly love with warfare, with an additional admixture of liebestod, called mordmutt in this dialect. The idioms of love and war should have blended together but didn’t. In some not-so-subtle manner, the poet seemed to be threatening his beloved with mayhem if she refused to knuckle under to him. The language of these threats (Int çantolet ya élosete, for example: “I could murder you with longing,” or, more accurately, “My longing longs to murder”), inflated with metaphors and similes of baroque complication, was as gorgeous as an operatic aria sung by a charming baritone addressing a woman who was being flung around onstage and who wasn’t allowed to open her mouth. And it was all untranslatable! You couldn’t heat up soggy English verbs and nouns to a boil the way you could in this dialect, which actually had a word for love bites, muttzemp.

Amelia put down her pen and tapped her fingers. The decorative clock, painted green, was amused by her troubles. There’s a second of your life you’ll never get back! And there: there’s another one! Too bad you’re not on Mars like me. There’s lots of time on Mars. We’ve got nothing but time here! Today is like yesterday! Always was!