Inner Tube: A Novel Read Free

reaching into unimaginable distances, and sometimes I’d be scared of them in silent night, just for an instant, till I could say don’t be a baby. Obsolete qualms, so far have we moved in so short a time, incurious now, blending into our machines and tapping the power. The third-grader here, solemn in his programmable sensory helmet, plays 3-D Nova Wars with an invisible opponent, little-boy blips hopping from relay station to relay station, droplets in the data stream. And back there, thoughts of secrecy. Obsolete gestures from the past, as I once interpreted old film shot at twenty-eight frames per second and played back at standard twenty-four, custard pies flying, everyone hurried, a worried-stiff style of movement abandoned in our age of comfort. Obsolete even as memory itself, the mass attention span shortened into near-disappearance, here and gone, a blip.
    Carla would have been ten that fall. She was tense for her age, grim, an assemblage of bone rods threatening to snap. Dark things appealed to her, and she never wanted to watch what I wanted to. After a documentary on the Great Depression, she took to wearing a stained jumper and a sweater gone out at the elbows. She picked at her dinners, preferring white bread and soda pop, and afterward sat in the driveway gazing up into the sky. Arriving at school barefoot, she told a teacher her family was too poor to buy shoes.
    Mother restrained Gordo in favor of reason. She said it wasn’t at all fair to those who suffered through the Depression to make a game of it. And what about all the families who’d seen it all through? Carla’s grandfather hadn’t stopped treating patients just because they paid with popovers and baskets of eggs. Mother had new dresses whenever she needed them and went right on with her flute lessons. Out came the brown family photographs, but Carla slapped them away.
    “Liar,” she yelled. “I know what I saw.”
    But did we know what we saw, in the sense of recognizing a thing previously met? Were we innocent as farm animals and in danger of being misherded? Was there any use in lecturing Carla about “facts”?
    For children arrived since Hiroshima, the lines have been fine. Nothing but clarity would do, while contradictions dropped all around like leaflets urging surrender. Nostalgia was forced on us. We learned not to learn by example.
    Dictum: In our world, nothing would ever be simple. The very best methods were required, each of us a little project separated one from another by fine lines. Everything in the technique.
    “When you wish upon a star…” And they said for us all to sing together.
    We learned from the evidence: It was all a job. We had to imagine furiously, find room inside those lines. Even that was a job, to be somewhere else. And scary sometimes, like you might not come back around. But the clarity was there. We knew what we saw.

5
    S OMETIMES, WITHOUT RECOGNITION OF how or when, I will find that a tiny cactus spine has worked its way into my hand. I clench my teeth and feel sand grinding on my molars. I live in the desert now, but it is in no way novel. Here is the same quiet geometry of the suburb I come from; only the scale is different. Climate, topography—these things are interchangeable as wallpaper. I recognize the stunned atmosphere of this place, its heavy padding of silence, its isolation.
    Lake Success. The name itself suggests a real-estate swindle, some collection of placards and surveyor’s stakes at the edge of an alkali pit. In truth, we were only minutes from the city limits. Airline pilots lived there, and pharmaceutical researchers, and even a member of the state legislature. The streets were bright, lined with cars, and humid winds blew in from Little Neck Bay. But just the same, Lake Success was a ghost town waiting to happen. And waiting still.
    I choose a typical Friday evening of twenty-five years ago: My sister and I are supine before the television in our flannel pj’s, a bowl of