n a t b s

With the little trip ended, we were for a moment without words. I sat down on the big piece of driftwood. Viv closed her paperback. “Well,” I said, “alone at last”—trying to draw out the joke. But this time the response was forced, the giggle much less childlike, and the joke not nearly so silly. Viv and I were fortunate to be able to kid with each other; as with Peters, operating within the limits of humor and make-believe afforded Viv and me opportunities to laugh and make jokes, put each other at ease with pretense; and with this system we could enjoy a relationship without too much worry about commitment. But a system made secure by the protective plating of humor and pretense always runs the risk of having its protection get out of hand. A relationship based on jokes invites jokes; jokes about anything—”Yes,” Viv said, in an attempt to reinforce my attempt, “alone at long last,”—and jokes about anything are now and then bound to cut too close to the truth.

-Leland Stanford

Actually, it didn’t surprise me much what they were saying—it was about what I figured all of them’d been thinking all along anyway—but the longer I listened the less it sounded like they were even talking, let alone saying anything. The longer I listened, the weirder the sound got. Usually, when you listen to people talk, you’re where you can see what is coming out of who. Kind of hook the voices up with the faces and keep them separate that way. But when you can’t see the faces, then the voices get all mixed together, and the talk isn’t exactly talk any more, not even a mixed-up round . . . it’s just a mish-mash of noise coming at you, without any individuality, damn near without source. Just a sound, feeding on itself the way a sound will when you get a microphone picking up its own broadcast so it goes running in circles faster and faster and faster into finally just a high, tight whine.

-Hank Stamper

Willard stepped back from the laundry window to leave and was stopped by his dim reflection in the glass: hardly there at all, a ridiculous little character with a receding chin and eyes swimming nearsightedly behind glasses out of style years ago, a cartoonist’s wash-drawing of the capital-H henpecked husband, a satirist’s two-dimensional straw man designed to convey at first glance a two-dimensional personality that everyone knows everything about before it even opens its straw man’s mouth. Willard wasn’t shocked by the image; he had been aware of it for years. When he was younger he had scoffed to himself at all those people who treated him as though he really were this image he projected — “What do I care for what they see? They think they know the book by its cover, but the book knows what is is.” Now he knew better; if the book never opens up and comes out, it can be warped to fit the image others see. He remembered Jelly telling of her father . . . a shy and gentle man until a car’s windshield branded him from chin to ear with a scar that raised the hackles of any strange Negro in a bar and provoked policemen to frisk him every chance they got: once a gentle man, he was now serving twenty to life for killing an old friend with a razor. No, a book wasn’t invulnerable to the appearance of its cover, not by any means.

The younger people found ways to blame the older generation, who had borned them into this mess; the older people blamed the churches. The churches, not to be outdone, put it all at the feet of the Lord: “Oh yay-us, now! Haven’t I been saying so? Havn’t I now! again and again, warned you to stand up in His light now and live by His laws now and not chance His awful wrath? Yay-is now! Now look: the Arm of the Lord is on its way; the floodwaters chastiseth!”

Which is just another way of blaming, and perhaps the best way, because there is solace and a certain stoical peace in blaming everything on the rain, and then blaming something as uncontrollable as the rain on something as indifferent as the Arm of the Lord.

Because nothing can be done about the rain except blaming. And if nothing can be done about it, why get yourself in a sweat about it? Matter of fact, it can be convenient to have around. Got troubles with the old lady? It’s the rain. Got worries and frets about the way he old bus is falling to pieces right under you? It’s the ruttin’ rain. Got a deep, hollow ache bleeding cold down inside the secret heart of you from too many deals fallen though? too many nights in bed with the little woman without being able to get it up? too much bitter and not enough sweet? Yeah? That there, brother, is just as well blamed on the rain; falls on the just and unjust alike, falls all day long all winter ling every winter every year, and you might as well give up and admit that’s the way it’s gonna be, and go take a little snooze. Or you’ll be mouthin’ the barrel of your twelve-gauge the way Evert Peterson at Mapleton did last year, or samplin’ snail kiler the way both the Meriwold boys did over to Sweet Home. Roll with the blow, that’s the easy way out, blame it on the rain and bend with the wind, and lean back and catch yourself forty winks — you can sleep real sound when the rain is lullabying you.

I laid out the cabin today.  It’s gonna have an easterly view.  You should see the light that we get here when the sun comes from behind those mountains: it’s almost heavenly. It reminds me of you.

-William Adama re: Laura Roslin