| Eleven, The Spelunker (cont. from page 1)
Fiction by Diane Greco you. Steel yourself, for here is the plain truth: He was a fake! A con artist! A joker! While it is true that, now and then, one may hear his name uttered respectfully, if somewhat sotto voce, in connection with his papers (the one we co-wrote was very well received and continues to be taught in university classrooms around the world), the name, as you know, has only the most precarious relation to the thing, and this relation, like everything else that holds us together, only weakens with age. Res et verba—or is it verbum? No matter. As if in reaction to my present confinement, my imagination has expanded to such capacity that I can hold in my mind up to a dozen contradictory, half-baked, or simply wrong ideas at once, sometimes in several languages, with no internal discord or fatigue. At any rate, the spelunker’s good, if undeserved, reputation persists, but this shouldn’t surprise you, for you know all too well his ability to charm. Oh well, we all make mistakes, especially in our youth, and yours was glorious: your endless legs; the relentless way you drank with him at the graduate bar every night and then how the two of you would withdraw, hand in hand, making everyone else so melancholy; and not least, your flying hair! And how much of it you had! So thick, so curly—and me with my poor head in a scarf. Well, enough of that. Let me return to my story which, in the right hands—and yours, do I even need to say it, are almost certainly the right ones—might even be parlayed into an award like the Nobel Prize. Or a Pushcart, at least. You see, despite being a dried-up geology professor, I do know about such things. So, let me, at last, begin:
I bought a condominium here in Cambridge in, let me see, 1992 or thereabouts. It was one of those periods, not unknown on our campus, of technological lull, just after the massive investment in machine intelligence disappeared and just before all the previously empty office space began to fill, and then overfill, with rumpled men and women in polo shirts and khaki pants yakking frantically into their cell phones about positioning, experience economies, and the eternally misterioso thing known as market cap, which, despite appearances, is not something anyone could wear, although I am sure you will find a way to wrap this terrible pun around my head in your next novel. (In fact I hope you will—even a woman in an ugly hat is so much better than one who is bald. But in the meantime, please forgive me: I know these details are by the by.) As I was saying, I had just bought my condo, and I was troubled to find, upon moving in, that several things were wrong with it. First, the plumbing. During my inaugural shower, I was interrupted by banging on my front door. Throwing my robe about me, I ran to answer the summons. My panic was only increased by the fact that I had not completed the paperwork on my fire insurance and, for that reason, I guiltily supposed the building was on fire. I flung open my door to find, however, that the ruckus was due only to my diminutive female neighbor, who was hollering, “TURN THE WATER OFF. TURN IT OFF. TURN THE GODDAMNED WATER << Return to TSAR Volume 8, Number 2 |
