NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Diddlie arrives home in her friend’s silver Prius as I walk by. She gets out, waves, and opens the hatch. She picks up a carton from the back and carries it in front of her, into the dark of an overcast afternoon. The side of the box is against her cheek, and rising above her head, so she can’t see where she is going.
“Fred, can you help?”
“Bear right Did! You’re headed into the ivy.”
“I want to put this in the carport.”
“Okay, here, let me.”
“No, no, get one out yourself. Got to do this fast!”
She keeps walking blindly in taking small steps towards the carport and shouting to me without looking around. Light rain sparkles in the car’s headlights.
“See those other cartons in back of the car?”
“Yes.”
“Great, grab one.”
The Prius’ back seat is down and there are more cartons arranged side by side from the back of the front seats to the hatch. A big dog-eared book is jammed in beside one of the boxes by the right back door. The sloping hatch has crushed their soft sides.
“They’re not heavy, but they are too tall for me.”
I catch up with her, as she veers to the left.
“Is your friend going to help, too?”
“No, this goldenrod is way too strong. They are on the phone and in a hurry to go.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
We carry the boxes in and put them on plywood set on a couple of sawhorses in front of an old six-panel door.
“Where is Mr. Liddell? Aren’t these his sawhorses?”
“He moved inside. He’s getting old.”
“Is he sick?”
“He’s pretty quiet, and over ten years old now.”
“He is a senior rabbit, alright.”
We put the wet boxes down and head back to the car.
“That is a nice new door you have in there.”
“Yeah, Lou got it for me.”
“Looks like it came out of a legal office or something. You know, paneled walls, dark leather and trophies.”
“I don’t know. He told me when he hung it, that it is a frame-and-panel door, real oak and real old.”
“Looks like French polish, too.”
“Yeah, I want to take care of that some time.”
“When did you get it?
“He brought it over back in the Spring, I think.”
“Does it open?”
“Yes, with the right, ah, let’s get the boxes in first, okay?”
“Anyway, Diddlie, where did you gather all these blossoms?”
“On my way back from seeing Dr. Bales, over on Capitol Hill.”
“I know Dr. Bales, too.”
“Oh, are you sick? I mean what is Dr. Bales treating you for, Fred?”
“Mainly misspelling, poor punctuation and occasional syntactical complaints, that sort of thing.”
“Have you been tested?”
“Not lately, had an IQ test as a child, negative result, thank goodness!”
“Intelligence is more dangerous than ever these days. Look what happened to those Russians in England.”
“What Russians?”
“He was said to be a double agent retired to the safety of Salisbury in Wiltshire, and he and his daughter were poisoned with some high-tech concoction sprayed on their door from a perfume bottle.”
“Well, that won’t happen around here.”
“No, you just get sued by one of Fibonacci Corporation’s heavies.”
“That’s what happened to Werner Plank.”
“I thought he was sued by Dordrecht’s.”
“Maybe, I know he was threatened in the H-Bar parking lot by a guy wielding heavy duty threats of legal action.”
“Right here in Fauxmont, what a shame.”
“I know it hit him hard, too, but he tried not to show it.”
“Tron, told me Werner’s problems were cleared up by the lawyer, ah …”
“Right, Sherman Shrowd. Those were hard words too.”
“Sherman knows how to smooth things out, polish them up. You know he seldom goes against the grain.”
“Yeah, Sherman is a master at crafting complex deals.”
Diddlie carries another box in from the car still walking blind.
“Did! you are headed into the ivy again. Go left!”
She drops the box and starts pulling it across the gravel driveway. I catch up with her, carrying the last box.
“So, Did, what does your Dr. Bales do?”
“He does things with words.”
“Does things? Like Sherman?”
“No, not like Sherman. He uses them to distill his thoughts and then pours them into poems and novels.”
“Where does he publish?”
“He doesn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, maybe the stuff is too strong.”
“You mean, like moonshine, right?”
“He keeps a barrel of dreams in his basement.”
“Don’t they get stale and moldy?”
“In a way. He boils them in an old pressure cooker and runs the steam through a long copper line across his kitchen where the literature condenses and drips into an iPad file.”
“How ingenious! Do you have some on your tablet?”
“Ah, no, it is mainly for his band.”
“So, he’s a musician, is he?”
“Yes, and something of a magician too.”
“Like Prestidigitation?”
“Well, for instance, he hid the names of his wife’s cats in long words.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know, but it annoyed her, and she called me up about it.”
“You mean the cats couldn’t find them, or she couldn’t?”
“Cats seldom know the names we give them. Nobody could find them.”
“Did you visit them both, then?
“No, she was busy looking for the names.”
“Were you drinking his hooch?”
“Yes, we had a tipple with a smoky lapsang shouchong chaser.”
Diddlie goes back out to the car while I admire the door which has no handle. She returns carrying the book and puts it down by the boxes.
She opens the oak door and goes in while I am looking in the cartons of flowers.
“Bring the book, please.”
I carry the book down some concrete steps past unpainted concrete walls and through a second metal door. Mr. Liddell is asleep on the couch with a feather on his ears while the Red Queen preens on top of the standard lamp above him. The walls are lined with pigeon holes filled with goldenrod.
“How did you get it open? There’s no handle.”
“I know, pretty sneaky huh!”
“Why all the secrecy?”
“Fred, would you put the book on that table please?”
She closes the metal door without further explanation.
“Quiet in here, isn’t it?”
“Yes, you can’t hear the rain or crickets, or the crows.”
There’s no TV on, no sound but the air in our ears, until the Red Queen asks,
“What is the difference between a poet and parakeet?”
The Red Queen flutters but doesn’t take off and starts pecking the ragged top of the lampshade.
“This isn’t your living room, is it Did?”
“Well, I do live here, and it is where I keep the collection.”
“I don’t remember it this way.”
“No, you have never been in here. My husband built it as a bomb shelter in the early sixties. Lou helped me change it into my storeroom.”
“It is pretty big…. Why do you collect all these flowers?”
“For the truth in their beauty.”
The Red Queen flies around the room and lands on Diddlie’s shoulder.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.
“So, said the poet, contemplating an old Greek urn.”
“You have it from the bird’s beak, Fred!”
Diddlie steps into the middle of the room to explain the layout.
“See, over here in these cubbies, are absolute truth, then hard truth, difficult truth, here, and embarrassing truth behind that curtain.”
She points to a section on the right, covered by a yellow brocade curtain.
“Horrible and horrifying truth is locked in the file cabinets behind the couch, along with dangerous truth in the ones with combination locks.
“See, those brown jars?”
Rows of brown mason jars are arranged atop the file cabinets.
“They contain unpleasant truth.”
“Now you see those baskets hanging in the nook?”
“Ah, yes, hanging baskets.”
“They allow the relative truths to move around truth-wise, until you see them from the right angle, then that’s it!”
“A matter of POV!”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“I wish I could say, ‘I see’, but I don’t.”
The Red Queen takes off from Diddlie’s shoulder and flies back to her lampshade as Diddlie grabs my arm and whispers.
“You will honey.”
Then resuming her orientation,
“Most precious of all are my self-evident truths. I hold them real close.”
She lifts up her tea shirt and reveals them.
“Okay, I see.”
“I told you, you would get it!”
“Not what I was talking about!”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Right, right, I know Did. I know! You don’t have to show me now, though.”
“Remember those lines, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….?”
“Yes, were they ever more obscured than they are now?”
“Truth in politics is like an endangered species, Fred!”
“Or you might say it is like a polar bear hunting in a blizzard?”
“It will bite us alright if we don’t see it!”
“Diddlie, you seem to think that truth lies in goldenrod.”
“Lies! Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way Fred!”
“What do you mean?”
“For one thing, it isn’t lying down, it is active.”
“Analytic?”
“Can be, and catalytic too. You get it?”
“Yes, you have done a Dr. Bales and hidden something there!”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“Aren’t you a little concerned about hiding all this truth in here?”
“No, I am not hiding it.”
“Seems like protective custody or something.”
“Well I am the custodian!”
“Self-appointed though, don’t you think….
“Think of this as a seed bank.”
She picks up the big leather-bound volume I had left face down on the table, showing me the spine.
It reads, “Aporia,” in faded gold.
“So, what is it? an old novel?
“She turns it over to show me the front cover, which says in more faded gold, “Austin’s Performative Categories and Catastrophes.”
“They were in the car the whole time!”
“A gift from Dr. Bales.”
“We are in the ivy, now.”
