Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (4 page)

The case is now under investigation, and public opinion, though not at all supportive of the student’s tactics, is nonetheless in favor of her version of events. My own sympathies, for partisan reasons, are also with the student, though I recall that the mayor canvassed our neighborhood that same day, and that I spoke to him less than two hours after the alleged encounter took place. I remember him having been perfectly composed, answering my questions clearly and with genuine interest. Whether this composure was evidence of a clean conscience or of a monstrous emotional detachment and moral corruption remains to be seen.

Silence

A friend from the city lived for some years in a basement apartment situated directly over a busy subway line. Because of the excessive noise, our friend’s rent was very low, and over the years he grew accustomed to, even enamored of, the trains’ deafening rumble as they passed during the night.

Recently the city undertook a massive subway reconstruction program, and the tunnel beneath our friend’s building was retired from regular use. Soon his landlord caught wind of the change and promptly raised the rent to a level far outside our friend’s meager budget.

However, our friend tells us that he is relieved to have been ousted. The silence in the apartment, coupled with the knowledge that an empty tunnel lay mere yards from his bed, terrified him; and when, after the reconstruction, he would hear the scrabbling of a rat, the dripping of water after a storm, or the rustlings of a vagrant, the import of the sound was absurdly magnified and seemed to represent an urgent threat. He is presently seeking a new apartment in the vicinity of some other subway line, so that he might again have, at long last, a decent night’s sleep.

The Pipeline

Our local university, faced with the problem of prohibitive summer cooling costs, announced a curious solution: water, they suggested, could be pumped from the perpetually cold bottom of our town’s famously deep lake, diverted two thousand feet through a giant pipeline to the hilltop where the university stands, and run through a series of smaller pipes in classroom ceilings, where it would cool the air before flowing back into the lake. The project would be called WACA (WAter-Cooled Air) and was slated for completion within two years.

Dozens of protests from environmentalists and recreationalists ensued, with scientists from both sides of the issue debating the possible effects of the project. But the university had deep pockets, and the project went through against all objections. Enormous trenches were dug in the hillside, disrupting traffic and marring the serenity of many local neighborhoods, and massive pipes four feet in diameter were laid and connected.

It was not long, however, before a small group of undergraduate hydrologists examined the pipelines and discovered that the campus end, which was not yet connected to the series of pumps that would bring water to the buildings, lay exposed and open behind a chain-link fence near the cafeteria; and that the lake end, which had not yet been connected to the submerged section of pipe, lay exposed and open about ten feet above the lake’s placid surface. The implications were obvious. The students rigged a fleet of wheeled pallets, donned helmets and swimsuits, and embarked upon a series of high-speed joyrides down the pitch-black pipeline that culminated in violent and exhilarating ejection into the water below.

This behavior continued undetected until the students, nine of them altogether, vanished from their summer classes. They had been missing several days when a fellow student, privy to their pipeline antics, suggested that police check the WACA sites. As it happened, WACA contractors had sealed off the bottom of the pipeline, at last connecting the submerged section to the section buried in the hillside. The students’ bodies were discovered lodged in the main pump, five hundred feet below the lake surface.

The tragedy has stopped the WACA project indefinitely, and window-mounted air conditioners are once again visible jutting from the ivy-covered walls of campus buildings.

Leaves

We live in a profusely and variously foliated area, and our trees are large and old, cultivated here by an excellent public works department, so it is not surprising that our town draws tourists from far away come fall, when the leaves change color. They drive through our residential streets with their out-of-state license plates, pointing out to one another the extraordinary colors, from the stunning reds of the red maple and black oak to the orange of the birches and radiant yellow of the gingko, a streetside specialty here. Occasionally a visitor will pull over and compliment us on the beauty of our leaves, but none of them ever thank us—for fertilizing the soil, for keeping insects at bay, for treating the wounds caused by storms, and droughts, and old age.

And then, when the tourists return to their own towns, our leaves grow drab, they fall off our trees and into our yards and gutters, and if we don’t get rid of them they sit there and turn black and wet under the snow. Nobody comes to look at them then. We walk through them in our boots on the way to our cars and try to forget what’s happened, and we endure the winter, and eventually the city comes and takes the leaves away. We do our best to put them out of our minds, to enjoy the bleak view of the valley between the bare branches of the trees.

The one saving grace of all this is the spring, when new leaves arrive. They’ve never yet failed to do so. They start out tiny and green, like mint candies, and for a short time they are ours alone, and nobody else’s. And then in summer, even when wind and rain and hail tear through them, even then they stay right on the trees and make a sound like applause, all summer long. As if they are thanking us for spending this time with them before the tourists come and take them away.

Shortcut

One night, when I was young, I fell asleep while driving down a Midwestern two-lane county highway and woke suddenly to find myself on a wide, empty interstate in a powerful thunderstorm. I pulled off the road and waited until the rain stopped, then drove to the next exit, where I found a motel and checked in for the night. I was met the next morning by bright sunlight and a feeling of disorientation, because, although the sleep had refreshed me, I had no idea where I was. A glance at the telephone book in my room reminded me that I was in Iowa. This mystery solved, I went out to the cafeteria adjoining the lobby of the hotel and sat down to eat breakfast.

Seats were scarce, so when a young woman asked if she could join me, I was happy to oblige. I engaged her in conversation and soon realized we were headed in the same direction. Since she had been stranded here by a bout of engine trouble, I offered to drive her the rest of the way. She accepted.

By the end of our trip, the young woman and I had fallen in love, and within a year we were married. Now we live together in another part of the country, our children moved out and nearing the age we were when we met. The story of our meeting in the Iowa motel is told often to guests, and occasionally we retell it to one another, for sentimental reasons.

That morning, as we climbed into the car together, I recalled the sudden change in the highway and weather the previous night. When I’d gotten settled behind the wheel, I consulted my map to see where I’d gone wrong. I was at first puzzled, then horrified, to discover that the road I’d been driving on was practically parallel to the one I’d exited after the storm, with as many as sixty miles separating the two. In order to switch from one to the other, I would have had to make several connections on unfamiliar country roads, which might have taken more than ninety minutes. I had no memory of this drive, and could not have known how to accomplish it without careful study of the map. Nonetheless, I appeared to have done so while sleeping.

When, years later, I finally told my wife, she dismissed out of hand my version of events and insisted that I must simply have found a shortcut.