Your Duck Is My Duck Read online

  “What were you looking for in your mother’s room?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing in particular.”

  “But, really—what were you looking for?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a letter. A letter from my father, explaining why he had left. A love letter of sorts, I suppose.”

  “And what would the letter have said?” Jake asked.

  He took my hand with such sweetness. I think I blushed, actually. Looking back, I suppose the future—its chilly plan for us—had cast a fleeting shadow over him and he was searching for what I would need him to say to me when the time came. But back then in that fragrant garden, I was aware only of the light coursing between our clasped hands and the sun’s warmth on my face, with night idling where it was, half a world away.

  Merge

  What happened is that we got Merge . . . an operation that enables you to take mental objects [or concepts of some sort], already constructed, and make bigger mental objects out of them. That’s Merge. As soon as you have that, you have an infinite variety of hierarchically structured expressions [and thoughts] available to you.

  —Noam Chomsky

  I know words. I have the best words.

  —Donald Trump

  1

  Thundering down, a cataract from a high plateau, raising billows of dust, manes, tails, whinnies rippling like banners, a glamorous species, captive yes, but not entirely subdued, they—oh, no, a fellow in that ridiculous getup pops up from behind a rock and pulls out a—bink! That’s enough, good-bye stupid old show, time for a cup of tea. Pulls out—bang bang bang. Yes, sensible Cordis decides, not a drink, time for a nice cup of tea.

  The dog, a parting so-called gift from unfortunate Mrs. Munderson, peers at the blank screen, baffled, then paws at Cordis. Moppet is not glamorous, except in the most trivial sense; Moppet is cute. What does Moppet want? A treat? A tickle? A furlough?

  Moppet wants whatever she can get. Moppet is a cornucopia of lacks, a prisoner—no, an overbred parasite, poor thing, entirely dependent on her hostess, Cordis.

  You and I are stuck with each other, Cordis comments to Moppet subverbally as she puts the teakettle on to boil. “But winning ways have taken your kind far,” she comforts aloud, “and soon they’ll take you, as an individual, to the park. Assuming that boy ever shows up.”

  Park! Moppet’s ears twitch. She sits, gazing meltingly up at Cordis. Her little tail thumps against the floor.

  * * *

  Cordis’s mailbox is jammed. Keith has to pry the stuff out, and what wasn’t already mashed and tattered is mashed and tattered now. All this paper! Cordis is singlehandedly keeping the post office alive.

  Why can’t she pay her bills online, why can’t she look at catalogues online, why can’t she get announcements online, like everyone else? He can easily teach her how. But the other day when he offered, she just waved a hand in her vague, languid, dotty way, and said, “Strange, but I prefer people.” As if Keith preferred electrons.

  All right, she’s old, she can’t be expected to understand things. But it’s not as if digital communication is some outlandish new fad that she’s going to outlast.

  And to what might she prefer people? There’s no indication that Cordis likes people at all! Nobody seems to call, she doesn’t even use e-mail let alone social media, and as far as Keith knows, the only person who has ever come by is his . . . his what? His friend? His girlfriend? His . . . ? Anyhow, Celeste. But as Celeste’s apartment is just down the hall, not a whole lot of preparation or anxiety would have been occasioned by those visits. And in any case, Celeste has been away for weeks now.

  Really, Cordis’s life would be so much better if she’d only acquire some rudimentary skills, skills that every kindergarten child is able to acquire. She’s got a perfectly good computer, a recent hand-me-down from Celeste. And at least Keith has managed to convince her to use it for something. She could read the news, he’d cajoled; she could look at things—she could see anything there on that little screen: photos, magazines, movies, old TV shows—practically any rerun she wanted, going back to the dawn of time! Push a button, power over all re-creation! The goddess Cordis!

  Predictably, she just stood there, an unsturdy tower, hands clasped tensely and eyebrows slightly raised, as if waiting for a child to conclude a tantrum, while he’d demonstrated, grinning and waving his arms like a used-car salesman. But obviously she’d taken something in, because since then he’s caught her hunched over all kinds of weird stuff—clips of ancient comedy shows, cowboy movies of all things, nature documentaries . . . Just yesterday when he came up with the mail there were elephants behind her on Celeste’s old screen, playfully squirting water at one another while some fool prattled on about them like a proud dad.

  The damn catalogue he’s lugging in must weigh five pounds. For this, a tree was torn limb from limb. Not that he, personally, much cares, but Cordis ought to. On the occasions Cordis deigns to speak to him, it’s usually to air some peevish apocalyptic pronouncement—trees, habitats, resources, hurricanes, guns, polar bears, pollinators, this, that . . .

  Get Cordis off these mailing lists, teach her how to find her catalogues and bills online—tasks of pleasing clarity to add to this ostensible job, a job as ridiculous as it is unremunerative and ill defined. For what does Cordis need a personal assistant? My assistant will take care of it; I’ll get my personal assistant right on that. To whom would Cordis say such things?

  During the weeks that Keith has been working for Cordis, he has brought in the mail, sorted her few bills, made some appointments with an acupuncturist, ferried her identical white shirts and black trousers to and from the laundry, and tried to organize a box of old photos—or rather, he started to try, but almost as soon as he lifted the lid she gently and wordlessly disengaged a snapshot from his hands, returned it to the box, replaced the lid, lifted the box back onto a high shelf, and went into the other room.

  He’s also walked the dog, picked up bottles of vodka and vast quantities of dog food, replaced a lost corkscrew, run out to the supermarket for a lemon and some teabags, to the pharmacy for ibuprofen . . . Four years at Princeton!

  Humiliating, but for the moment it will have to do. And at least he can take satisfaction in doing Good. Yes, at least he can assist Cordis with navigating the vast seas of cultural ignorance where the elderly are cast adrift, each solitary on a decomposing life raft.

  Celeste will see, when she gets back—which she is slated to do any time now—and returns to her pro bono tending of Cordis, how unselfish he’s been, how responsible and thoughtful.

  For a moment he basks in the halo of warmth throbbing out from his heart. Yes, Celeste will be delighted by the irreproachable way he’s conducted himself. And by then he’s sure to have snagged a real job, and his father will no doubt have dropped all the fuss about that borrowed money, too.

  And anyhow, Celeste has promised to take him back in if he still hasn’t found an apartment. In short, soon everything will be okay, all the wayward elements of his life will have snapped into place, making a seamless map for him to peruse and follow into his future.

  In the elevator up to 6, Keith shuffles through the armload of mail: the giant catalogue, other junk to go immediately into the trash, bills . . . and hey, look, an envelope, a real envelope, addressed by hand! Who could be writing to Cordis? But—

  Wait! The envelope is addressed to him—to him care of Cordis . . .

  He slips it into his Italian calfskin messenger bag, muffling its faint black drumroll, just as Cordis opens the door of her apartment and he breaks into a sweat.

  “Oh, good,” she says, looking at him myopically over her glasses and reaching for the catalogue. “Moppet was becoming concerned.”

  What? He’s not late! He checks his watch. “Oh, hey, sorry,” he says.

  “It’s all the same to me,” she says, leafing through the catalogue. “Speak to Moppet.”

  Five fucking minutes, big
fucking deal, he could reasonably point out, plus given the condition of the subways, it’s a miracle he made it at all. But—a template of genial maturity, mutinous impulses in check—he manages to effect a chuckle and says, “So, how are we all today, good?”

  “Better would be impossible,” Cordis says, without looking up from the catalogue. “And how are we?”

  Keith suspects that Cordis is not entirely the loon she staunchly affects to be. Maybe, it occurs to him, her outlandish persona—like the large, strange, theatrical pieces of jewelry made apparently of rock and bone that she sometimes wears and that lie in artful heaps around her apartment—is designed to snare the attention so that she herself can be left in peace to wander through her realms of mental weirdness.

  Cordis has slammed the catalogue shut and is staring at him severely, as if detecting his thoughts. Look neutral, he instructs himself, you have nothing to hide, but his heart is now racing in all directions, like the cockroaches last night when he got back to the apartment he’s renting and turned on the light.

  “It seems that feral horses revert to the behaviors of their wild ancestors, just as if they had never been domesticated,” she says.

  “Huh.” His heart relaxes—those were not his thoughts at all! “Interesting.”

  “Well, that’s what they’re saying, anyhow. But tell me, you’ve just gotten out of college—”

  “Okay . . . ,” he concedes warily.

  “So presumably you’re familiar with what we believe these days. Do we consider ourselves to be domesticated? And if that’s the case, do we think our brains have gotten smaller again?”

  What is she talking about? “See, that’s what your computer is for,” he tells her. “You can look that up!”

  “Because they say that domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild progenitors.”

  “Yeah?” Keith says. “That’s insane.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s insane,” she says, holding the catalogue in front of him accusingly, as if it were irrefutable proof of his turpitude. “The whole thing.” She heaves the immense shiny waste of wood pulp into the lovely basket she uses for trash. “Here you go,” she says, and hands him Moppet’s leash.

  * * *

  What could be less dignified than following this springy white puffball down the street like a courtier and placing its turds in a plastic bag? When Keith attempted to suggest to Cordis that the plastic bag part was beyond the scope of his office, she hardly bothered to respond. “Oh, please,” she’d said. “When something that size shits, it’s practically abstract.”

  “Chill for a minute, you,” Keith instructs Moppet as he leans against some plutocrat’s fancy, forbidding wrought iron gate to balance dog and self well enough to fish out the envelope that’s been gestating there in the dark confines of his messenger bag. Very awkward—does this genteel block with its row of lovingly tended brownstones not place at intervals a bench to welcome the weary flaneur?

  A bench! Ha! When has Keith last seen a bench in this town? Do people younger than he is even know what a bench is?

  The senseless thought pellets ricochet off his brain as he struggles to open the envelope without either ripping its contents or strangling the dog: a bench! Some homeless person might misunderstand—some homeless person might feel entitled to sit down.

  Keith loops the leash around his wrist, causing Moppet to leap, choking, in protest. But better an affronted dog than the wad of fur and gore he’d have to present to Cordis after a critical moment of inattention, and the envelope seems to spring open, leaving a vicious little cut on his finger—an incriminating streak of blood, a tiny crime scene marking a mortal struggle with a piece of paper.

  The handwritten address on the envelope, now smeared and dripping, is shocking. The letters, formed in black ink, are as personal as fingerprints—more intimate than any previous contact he’s had with Celeste, though one might have thought that there could hardly be anything more intimate than their previous contact. Unnerving, he reflects, to be so familiar with someone’s body and yet never to have seen her handwriting.

  And yet, how would you come to see a person’s handwriting? Nobody has written anything by hand for, like, hundreds of years. Except maybe a check. But a letter? He might as well be clutching an illuminated manuscript! Hm, it’s not a letter, it’s a postcard . . .

  And in the same ink, the same curves and lines, precise and delicate as the tracing of a heartbeat or a brainwave, meaning unfurls:

  Hm. So much for meaning. What is the matter with these two, Cordis and Celeste! Could it be the water in the building? Well, sure—not for nothing does he always bring his own.

  But what does she mean, she’s moved on? That project of hers is finished, she says; it’s time for her to come back . . .

  This seems to be some kind of cryptic rebuke, does it not? What is it this girl is trying to get across to him, and why doesn’t she just say it! He knew—even before he opened the envelope he knew it would contain a rebuke.

  Though actually it’s her own fault that she’s so disappointed in him. He never lied to her, he never tried to pass himself off as some kind of saint. But it’s impossible for her to think that there might be anybody alive who wouldn’t share her overheated notions (evidence to the contrary) about—about absolutely everything, so she’s shocked when that supposition turns out to be erroneous. She made certain assumptions about him and his attitudes, which he failed to correct promptly. But how could he have corrected those mistaken assumptions of hers promptly? How is that his fault? He didn’t even realize she was making them!

  Calm down, he urges himself. Why is he so agitated? It’s as if every little thing these days activates some new, anxiety-producing source he’s tapped into!

  He turns the postcard over, but there’s no explanatory text, no view from any window—no colorful depiction of a carousel or even of anything that looks like a rutabaga. In fact, there’s no image at all—it’s just a generic blank postcard of the sort you can get at any post office. Where could she have sent it from? He peers at the envelope—the postmark is indistinct, and the stamp is inscrutable.

  The card is unsigned, of course—a trite move to alarm or intimidate or assert domination, though Keith understood, as he was obviously meant to understand, the instant he saw the envelope in the stack of innocent bills and flyers that it was from Celeste. Who else would know to address something to him at Cordis’s?

  Except for the National Security Agency, come to think of it, though the NSA has other things on its mind. Or at least it ought to. And except for maybe a couple of his father’s underlings, or his father’s accountant, Sam. And possibly except for some regional law enforcement units, too. Theoretically, anybody can find anybody these days, even if you toss your phone into the sea, which Keith did, and follow the reams of advice you can find about disappearing from the grid. They know you’ve looked for that advice. They know that you’ve looked for it, they know how you’ve looked for it, from where and exactly when. These days a person cannot simply disappear.

  Moppet is jumping up and down on all fours, looking like an automated cleaning implement gone awry, and glaring at Keith. Why this glare? Why this bark?

  Sure, sure, everything is his fault. He glances at the postcard again and then stuffs it back into his messenger bag.

  He relinquishes his comfortable leaning position against the gate, gives Moppet’s leash some more play, and ambles on, whistling carelessly, a suave movie star from days of yore. There were probably security cameras beaming down on the fence anyhow, squadrons of armed goons poised to burst out of the air and gun him down. Self-defense, they’d claim later over his bullet-riddled body; the dog was going for the throat.

  Keith crumples the envelope with its darkening bloodstain and lobs it into a pile of trash; Moppet flings herself indiscriminately at every curiosity. A water bug will do. She’s managed to find one just about her size. She barks happily, but it doesn’t want to play with a dog any
more than Keith does, and scoots away. Oh, well, resilient temperament or short attention span, she’s on to the next thing. Oops, it’s a pit bull—Keith scoops her up before she is swallowed, and now everyone’s glaring at him—Moppet, the pit bull, the pit bull’s owner, whose giant arms are enrobed with pulsing prison tattoos. “Heh, excuse,” Keith says, making a getaway with his handful of yipping fluff and a bright smile.

  2

  He can hardly remember his life before Celeste. Actually it was only a few months ago that he met her, but since then, things have taken some pretty surprising turns.

  And to be honest, he does owe Moppet, because he never would have looked twice at the, what, rather soft-looking girl with the abstracted expression and the badly cut hair falling over her big, round glasses if the tiny dog she was walking had not lunged at a Great Dane, entangling Keith in her leash.

  “Okay, hold still,” the girl had said.

  “No worries,” he said. The dog quivered while she held it, unwinding. “But while you’ve got me here, do you happen to know of any, like, real estate place in the neighborhood that deals with rentals? I mean, cheap, relatively?”

  She did, in fact, but the directions were involved. “Say again?” he asked.

  “So, use your phone,” she said.

  “No phone,” he said. “No phone, no laptop—I was staying at my dad’s while I look for an apartment, but he’s a pretty horrible guy, actually, and I couldn’t deal with him anymore.”

  “Logic?” she said.

  “Oh, sure. What it is, is I left kind of hurriedly and he’s pretty furious, so all my—”

  “Whatever you say,” she said. “None of my business.”

  She wasn’t his type at all. Of course he wasn’t such an idiot as to have a type, he reminded himself, but she certainly wasn’t the type of any guys he knew. And detaining her had been far from his mind—he really was looking for an apartment in the area, though there were probably none available, she assured him as they walked.