The Hair of Harold Roux (3 page)

His, indeed. He can not imagine how he has come to be a professor. Aaron Benham, professor of sweet reason? Hysterical laughter in the background. Don’t list your beliefs because they are all, essentially, lies. You are not the sweet rational person whose face they know. One click over that line and murder steams in your heart. You have always been armed. You have always swung your shoulders like a typical arrogant American, and enjoyed the ice of confrontation. Christ! If he could only have some friends, some enemies he is not constrained to understand. He is sick of reason, sick of convincing. The professor is sick to death of
explaining
.

He puts his rifle back in its niche; it seems to have given strength to his arm and at the same time to have robbed his brain. He wants to think only of the rifle’s purity of function, which cleans his mind of all the paradoxical complications of having to be a member of his race.

THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX

his notebook says to him. But that is only a title. The rest of his creation fades back across a long plain into mist and darkness. He has always thought of a novel, before it has taken on its first, tentative structure, as a scene on this dark plain, the characters standing around a small fire which warmly etches the edges of their faces. Distant mountains are turning moon-cold and blue as the last light fades as if forever. It is that small fire he must constantly re-create or these last warm lives will
cease to live, will never have lived even to fear the immensities of coldness and indifference around them. Absolute Zero is waiting, always. In Paradoxology that is perhaps the name of God.

He has a poem he wants to write, called “To an Ice Tick.” Unfinished lines haunt him.

… the synapse

Must contain in small the conception

Of the conception of warmth

Here in its always small increments

A dry and an ice age hence
.

Compared to Zero the tiny exoskeletal mite, protected from our inevitable stupidity by the mile-thick icecap of Greenland, is our warm ancestor, our only hope for a recreation of humor, grace and love. When one cannot look back and find even one incident in the sad history of the race in which vanity was not more important, even, than survival, one tends to search desperately for a friend. Perhaps he will presume to instruct the ice tick in the possibilities of selective evolution toward a consciousness of its own mortality—that dark knowledge from which all gaiety and humor arises.

But then again he might not. He thinks of stabbing his pencil straight down into his notebook to see how many pages the graphite point will pierce, when the telephone rings.

No. He will not answer it. He will not answer it, he silently declares as his various traitorous appendages move him away from his desk toward the front hall where the mad thing squats and screams.

“Aaron?” Another worried voice not far from tears, but this time it is Helga Buck, his friend, the wife of his friend. “Aaron, I know you’re working …” Her voice is deep, breathy as the voice of a singer of the fifties whose name he can’t recall.

“What’s the matter, Helga?”

“It’s George,” she says.

She seems to have lost her breath, and he compulsively offers his. “What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s out in the garden. He’s got the blues something awful, Aaron. I was just wondering if maybe you couldn’t just drop by or something. I mean I know you’re working and I think it’s a dumb thing to ask. I mean maybe beg. Christ, I don’t know …”

“Sure, Helga.”

“I mean at breakfast I just mentioned something or other—maybe it was the Corps of Engineers—and he went into the bathroom and I think he vomited.”

“Okay, I’ll try to cheer him up,” Aaron says. “You know me. I’m just a bundle of joy.”

He gets her to laugh a little, anyway. “Aaron, don’t tell him I called you, huh?”

“Okay, Helga, sure. Of course not.”

“And thanks, Aaron. Thank you.” She is grateful, almost cheerful as she hangs up, which makes him feel noble, or something. He isn’t able to think of a word for his feelings because for one thing he is exasperated by George Buck. George won’t finish his Ph.D. dissertation. He’s been given a deadline by the dean and the department; he has to have it passed by his adviser at Brown by the end of August or next year will be his last. If he doesn’t get the thing finished he will have to take his wife and his bright seven-year old son Edward and go somewhere else to teach, and jobs at decent places are almost impossible to find. Aaron finds this procrastination hard to understand. A little, yes; maybe even a lot. He is no stranger to sloth himself—but not at the certain, documented expense of his job and his home. In the Bucks’ case their home, their beloved old house, has become important far beyond material considerations. George and Helga have taken a sill-rotted, almost hopelessly warped and sunken eighteenth-century farmhouse and by their own sweat and patience made it square and sound. From the sodden, foundering hulk that it had been they have erased time and made it light and crisp upon its green lawns again, as true as its
loving builders crafted and squared it in A.D.1749. Aaron knows that the house is deeply—scarily, in fact—part of George’s continuing life. George uses it the way some people use drugs or alcohol; sometimes in the middle of a conversation Aaron can see George’s eyes as he looks for calmness and satisfaction, measuring his ancient hand-hewn beams, counting whatever blessings are left in the midst of so much cold knowledge.

But during the four years they’ve labored to restore the old house George has put off his dissertation—a time bomb he must have known would destroy all their work.

But does George really know this, or not? The rationalizations of the highly intelligent can grow subtle beyond human understanding.

“God
damn
it!” Aaron yells as he goes back to his desk to write a note to his wife. In his unhinged state he finds himself writing something flippant.

Dear Agnes,

SOS from Helga, so out to comfort George. Yippee! I don’t have to write! Also, I am definitely insane, but not to worry: Heaven protects a fool.

Mossy buckets
of concupiscence,

A.

From the hall closet he takes a nylon windbreaker and his white crash helmet, goes to the garage and straddles his black and silver Honda. As he pulls the crash helmet down over his ears its warm, foamy cushioning reminds him of the interior of a Greyhound bus—too plushy and humid. State law says he has to wear the thing, so he must thank the state for protecting him from himself.

The machine changes him in ways he finds interesting and somewhat frightening—frightening in retrospect, at least. It is similar to the effect his rifle has on him, in that they
both tend to purify and somehow heighten him as an animal. He cannot ride this gleaming power slowly or hesitantly.

Now he chokes the machine, opens the fuel-cutoff valve, finds the green dash light signifying neutral and kicks down the starter. It has its own authoritative cold life, and he lets the engine warm itself—low, businesslike revolving beats smoothing toward power. It is not a big machine but it is meant for racing, and the short throws of gearshift, clutch and throttle are for quickness and precision. It will take him into the wind, where he will lean through the curves.

He rides out through his graveled driveway, feeling a hardly perceptible, yet precisely perceptible, sliding out of the rear wheel. Every motion of this machine
means
, under pain of instant violence to his body. On the asphalt he finds a steadier traction and increases his speed. Soon he is going sixty miles an hour, his tender bones inches from the road, and he asks himself what he is doing here. Isn’t this stupid? some part of his brain insists upon quietly asking. If his chain breaks, or if any one of a number of little possibilities occur, he will instantly become a basket case. The answer is that when this ride is over, he will be safe; nothing exists to force him to ride so dangerously again. And after the next ride, he will be perfectly safe.

Five miles later, with a few bugs splashed against his glasses, a few more in his teeth (a peculiar, acidy taste, something like fresh tomato), with memories, as if he’s been drunk, of trees leaning, fields tilting, cars about to do threateningly irresponsible things, he turns into the Bucks’ driveway and stops next to their barn. He finds neutral and with a sigh of transition turns off his engine. When he pulls off the thick helmet, his head feels light, giddy. He walks on tingling delicate feet to the kitchen door, where Helga meets him. She has been described to him as homely, something he will never be able to understand; she is a small, intense girl, a little skinny, with unfortunate hair the color of tarnished copper, but her smallness is not cute, her intensity is not demanding or aggressive, and when Aaron talks to her he sometimes finds
himself abstracted by daydreams of Helga’s vivid little body naked beside his. Learned hesitancies or not, this vision sometimes intrudes, but there is no guilt attached; if he took the time to feel guilty about all the things he thinks of doing, rather than what he actually does, he wouldn’t function very well in this world. But here he goes again, her slim thighs flickering in the muted, strobic light of his fantasies. To him she is always, for some reason, green—a delicate mint green that reminds him of those perfectly formed people in Flash Gordon, from the planet Mongo.

“He’s out in the garden,” Helga says in her deep voice, a voice that always reveals the breath that is so vital to life. He notices that the fingers holding her constant cigarette are stained browner than usual, and that her large eyes are a little smudgy, the gray irises bleached.

“You do look a little sad, Helga,” he says.

She tries to smile, but it turns into a little self-deprecating quirk of the lips. “Well, you know I’m worried,” she says.

He puts his hand around her arm above the elbow, feeling the bone surrounded by its delicate warmth of flesh. “Where’s the patient?” he asks.

“In the garden. Come on.”

Together they walk around the corner of the old gray barn and stop to observe George, who sits among the pepper plants playing listless mumbledypeg with a garden trowel. He wears dungarees and an old gray sweatshirt so full of holes it looks as though it has been sprayed with acid. In faded blue letters, BOWDOIN can still be made out across his slumped back.

“George?” Helga calls. “Look who’s here!”

George turns his head, smiles and jumps up. He immediately goes down again, then gets up smiling ruefully and massaging his left calf. “Leg went to sleep!” he says, limping toward them. “God, it feels like a bag of nails!”

“How’s it going?” Aaron asks, thinking not only of the general but of the specific, meaning George’s dissertation, which concerns the verse of one Henry Troy, 1548-1610, brewer, wool factor and occasional, lousy, poet.

“Pretty good. Pretty good,” George says. “Not bad. Can’t complain.” His wide honest blue eyes seem never to indicate that they reflect any previous knowledge or opinion, but that whatever they gaze upon is new and fascinating, even quite wonderful. George is thirty-one, Helga twenty-nine. She turns away, looking at the dark earth of the garden.

“Hmm,” Aaron says.

George is looking at him; is there a gleam of resentment somewhere in that innocent blue? George decides to smile. “Well,” he says. “Well. I’m a liar, yes. Things aren’t really too good.” He suffers a spasm of the lips, turns away, turns back shrugging apologetically.

A cloud passes across the sun, making them look up. More are coming; dark anvils grow in the west above the wooded hills. A gust of wind turns the field hay dull silver in swathes.

“I’d better put my motorcycle in the barn for the moment,” Aaron says. George hurries ahead to open the barn door. When the machine is safe inside the barn they go back to the house and join Helga in the low, beamed living room George loves so much. Little light comes through the narrow old windows, less as the dark cumuli move over the house. Helga turns on two warm table lamps and it might be night.

“How about a beer?” Helga says. “Aaron?” She looks to him, a little gleam of conspiracy in her eyes, and he answers correctly. She brings them beer and glasses on a black stenciled tray, and they ceremonially, silently, pour.

“It’s going to
storm
,” Helga says.

“I guess I’m letting things get me down,” George says.

“Who can blame you?” Aaron says.

“I mean, what we’re doing to the world. I can’t believe it, Aaron. Sometimes I forget it for a few minutes and when it all comes back it’s worse. It’s like remembering at four in the morning that you’re going to die, only it’s worse than just you dying. Christ, it’s everybody, everything!”

“I have the same hallucinations.”

“But you still get your work done!” George says, meaning that it must not bother you
enough
.

It is two-thirty, and now the storm surrounds them. The electricity goes off with none of the fading, brightening, fading that predicts only a temporary failure. It goes off as though God’s hand has pulled all the wires like hair, in snarled handfuls. They sit in the white flashes, the narrow old windows printing their framed lights intact upon the optic nerves. Aaron wonders if George welcomes these moments of blackout as he himself does—these moments free of guilt about his work. Right now he cannot work, and though he enjoys this feeling of lightness it also shows him how constant and heavy is the burden of his work.

“I love storms,” Helga says. “I love anything powerful that isn’t caused by man.”

Hmm, Aaron thinks.

As yet there has been only distant thunder, but now it comes rolling across the hills toward them, sharp breaking sounds within softer rumbles. The only metaphor Aaron can think of has to do with some game or other of man’s. Barrage, etc.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to be scared of thunder again!” Helga says.