The Search, and: Nicholson Baker and I, and: In Utero and After

The Search, and: Nicholson Baker and I, and: In Utero and After Catherine Barnett (bio) The Search Left on the street in my mother's neighborhood: children's games, utensils, Ethical Theory, underlined in blue ink: "There are certain axiomatic truths…expected to disappear from the earth. " But it's not like we don't know where my father's ashes are!They're right upstairs, in his study, where my mother dresses and undresses now. And I can hear her hand on the banister, sound of wind. Soon we'll go back out, looking for my father's silver Avalon. She can't remember where she parked it. It's not in the cemetery we walk pastunder trees full of summer fruit. When I reach to pick one mulberry, it comes attached to another. My motherand I must also be looking for my father, who turns out to have been soft and erasable, like the #2 lead I use to write in my books, some of which are my mother's books, none of which were my father's. I'd recognize their hands anywhere. End Page 9 Nicholson Baker and I At dinner I was seated next to him, with whom I might have fallen in lovewere he not married and living in Maine. "What's your favorite anthology? " he asked, out of the blue. I told him I likeIn the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth, where even friends who dread poetryfind something to love, some gateway drug. Which must be how we got to addictions. "What are you addicted to? " he asked. Not wine, I thought, though our wine glasses were touching. Not crab cakes, which I moved from my plate to his, or dinner parties, though I wondered who he was, this stranger in a navy sweater. "Mornings, " I said. "Trader Joe's vegetarian meatballs, " he said, but he'd resigned himself to potatoes and spoke of their virtues. Every morninghe boils up six or sevenand eats them all day long. End Page 10 Perhaps because I wasn't wearing my glasses, I mistook a hole in his sweater for a feather, a small down feather on his shoulder, and tried to remove it, but it was only a hole, only something to be repaired, and I'd embarrassed him. He said he'd spend the rest of dinnerwith his hand over the hole, like this, and as he lifted his arm across his body I noticed other holes, in the other sleeve, and thought of all I've meant to mend. Meant to mean. I keep many drafts of failed poemson my kitchen table, beside a little sewing kit, a notebook, and this memory of Nicholson Baker, whom I walked to the subway later that evening, afraid he might get lost. "Wait a minute, " he said. We were in Times Square, I was guiding him through the canyon of lights, which were an antidote to grief, as was Nicholson Baker himself, someone I just chanced to meetand may never see again. "Don't look, " he said as we were crossing Broadway. "My pants are falling off. "So I looked instead at the fifty-five giant LEDnonstop life-affirming lights, End Page 11 which made me think of my father, sundowning 3, 000 miles away. Shouldn't we try to floodlight the dark outside the dining room where he sleeps, or doesn't sleep, in a hospital bed? Flawed solutions are sometimes prayers. "Open the second shutterso that more light may come in, "said Goethe on his deathbed. It costs 25, 000 a day to keep Times Square litbut it wouldn't cost much to light upour front steps. Failing that, we keep giving my father morphine, now that he is officially in hospiceand before we gain the hour of daylight savings, which he might not live to see. I know how addictive it is. Light. Open the second shutter now. I could have waited there indefinitely while Nicholson Baker hiked up his trousersand tried to keep his hand over the little feathery hole. But. . .