1005: The last . . .
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 42 begins
Chapter 42
October 21
Playing to the House
The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion. . . . No sign of this insidious labor showed on the surface.
Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual
THE LAST GROUP of potential buyers for the hotel arrived early in the morning. (I call them the last group of potential buyers because two days later I persuaded Lou to buy the place.) Their arrival was preceded by the sudden death of a great number of fish. Albertine and I went down to the dock to await the arrival of the launch and found the surface of the water covered with fish, belly up, gill to gill as far as the eye could see. This happens sometimes. It has been blamed on red tide, on lightning, and on ecological imbalance. Babbingtonians have always blamed it on despair.
The launch parted the fish bodies and chugged to the dock. The group began to disembark. They were a motley crew, men and women from many walks of life, various levels of society, at least three races, and half a dozen creeds, but they were all Babbingtonians, and I have no doubt that each of them, if asked about the dead fish on the surface of Bolotomy Bay, would have said, “Sometimes they just get disenchanted with the life of a fish and they up and die.”
“Albertine,” they said, and then, “Peter,” one by one, with a handshake for each of us, by way of greeting.
“Ralph,” we said (or Denise or Nathan and so forth), by way of acknowledgment.
“Heard the place was for sale,” said Ralph, who seemed to have been elected spokesBabbingtonian.
“That it is,” I said.
“Well, we’d like to take a look at it, if we wouldn’t be in the way.”
“Not at all,” I said. “Not at all.”
“What do you have in mind for it?” asked Albertine.
“Well,” said Ralph, and he turned toward the group as if to see whether they would approve of his telling us what they had in their collective mind. They looked at their shoes, which gesture in Babbington often means “Don’t matter all that much to me, I guess.”
“Things are changing,” said Ralph. “Over in town.” He looked back across the bay toward Babbington so that I would know which town he meant. “It’s not the place we grew up in.”
“Things do change,” I said.
“But do they have to? Muss ess sein? That’s what we asked ourselves, one night, just a few of us. And we said, ‘No!’ This was after some discussion, you understand. We came to the conclusion that all it takes is a determined bunch of like-minded people who are willing to invest some sweat and money, and by golly we can arrest our headlong rush to chaos and turn back the hands of time.”
“Which bar were you in when you came to this conclusion?” asked Albertine.
“Let’s see — I think it was — ”
“Never mind,” I said. “I think I see what you have in mind. Olde Babbington. A quiet place, a place where life moves slowly, where people take the time to stop and talk to one another, where the elm trees arch over Main Street, where — ”
“Where you can’t go right on a red light,” said Ralph, pounding his fist in his hand emphatically.
“Yeah!” chorused the other olde Babbingtonians.
“Folks,” I said, “you’re welcome to look the place over, but take some advice from somebody who has been obsessed with the past almost from birth: you can remember, but you can’t return.”
I should have left it there. It was all that had to be said, but of the two prevailing tendencies of every author — either not to say things that should be said or to say many things that do not need to be said — mine is the latter, so I added, “On the level of existence at which we live our lives, time is a one-way street.”
“We won’t have any of those, either,” muttered Ralph.
They roamed the island, but the spirit was out of them, and they left after a while, chugged back to Babbington with the dead fish bobbing in their wake.
[to be continued]
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