THE FISH had begun to smell by the time I read episode forty-two of Dead Air, “Playing to the House.” The odor hadn’t penetrated the hotel yet, but I knew from experience that it would the next day.
WHILE my boyhood chums Raskol, Marvin, Spike, and Matthew dug a cave to make a hideout from which I would be able to broadcast without being discovered by agents of the Federal Communications Commission, I worked on camouflage. I did my work so well that my friends couldn’t see how well I’d done it. Because the hand of man was nowhere evident, they began to suspect that the hand of man — my hand, to be specific — had never been applied to it, to suspect, in short, that I was shirking my duties.
So, I set out to make my work obvious. One evening, I left my shovel leaning against one of the spindly trees I had transplanted: a telltale sign of digging, if an interloper should ever come along to see it. I devoted about twenty minutes to getting the shovel into just the right position, choosing the right tree, dashing back and forth between the site and the spot where the five of us usually stood at the end of the day to admire our work so that I could judge the effect from my comrades’ point of view. I changed trees, changed shovels, changed the angle of the shovel against the tree — all of this to make the shovel more or less noticeable, until I got it exactly right. Then, when I thought I had made it obvious enough to be noticed but not so obvious that it looked staged, I nudged it a little in the direction of the obvious.
As the five of us were walking away from the site, we turned, as we always did, to give the day’s labor the admiring glance one gives to one’s own work, and Raskol spotted the shovel at once.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”
“What?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
“Don’t you see it?”
“No,” I lied.
“Me neither,” said Spike.
“Come on,” said Raskol. “Look harder.”
“It looks great to me,” said Marvin. “If I didn’t know there was a cave under there, I’d never know it, if you know what I mean.”
“You’re right,” said Spike. “It’s amazing. Before now, I never really noticed what a great job you’ve been doing, Peter.”
“Maybe you just never saw it in the right light before,” I said.
“Maybe not,” she said, “but now that I look at it, it’s amazing. Everything is sort of — just the way it ought to be — you know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” said Marvin. “It’s — I don’t know how to put it — ”
“I know!” said Spike. “It’s the spot you try to find for a picnic.”
“Yes!” said Matthew. “You’ve got it. It’s that spot in the woods that my mother’s always looking for. It’s got everything: that nice little mound or hummock, the fallen log, where you could sit down and enjoy the view, that rock there, where you could put your feet up if you were sitting on the log, the little clump of birches — everything.”
“It’s great!” said Marvin. “Perfect!”
“Wait a minute!” said Raskol. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see what’s wrong?”
“No,” said Marvin.
“I don’t either,” said Matthew.
“Look,” said Raskol. “Look at this.” He begin striding toward the shovel, but Matthew, Marvin, and Spike still didn’t see what he was headed for. He walked to the shovel, turned back toward us, and folded his arms. Still they didn’t see it. He picked the shovel up and waved it over his head.
“Oh,” said Matthew. “That.”
“So what?” said Spike. “He forgot a shovel. A little mistake. That doesn’t mean anything. You’ve got to look at the great job he did, not at the one little mistake.”
The others agreed with her, even Raskol. After he handed the shovel to me he said, “They’re right. It was just a tiny mistake, and other than that it’s perfect.”
I knew, of course, that for that audience of four the shovel itself had been the perfect touch, the one little mistake that had made them see the great job I’d done. However, standing there with them, looking back at the camouflage, I was disappointed with myself for not having seen before the real flaw, the flaw that I saw so clearly now.
“It needs a stump,” I said.
I was already beginning to see the scene with a stump in it. It would hide the entrance. We would tilt the stump back and crawl in under it. If the putative interloper ever came along, he would never guess that under that picturesque stump lay an underground broadcasting studio, and I was beginning to wonder what was keeping that interloper. Would he never come along and, by failing to notice it, applaud my work?
[to be continued]
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