“Not miles but days?”
“Not miles but days.”
“Is it that kind of car?”
“That’s how it’s built.”
“You’re an inventor then?”
“A reader who happens to invent.”
“If the car works, that’s some car you got there.”
“At your service,” I said.
“And when you get where you’re going,” said the old man, putting his hand on the door and leaning and then, seeing what he had done, taking his hand away and standing taller to speak to me, “where will you be?”
“January 10, 1954.”
“That’s quite a date,” he said.
“It is, it was. It can be more of a date.”
Without moving, his eyes took another step out into fuller light.
“And where will you be on that day?”
“Africa,” I said.
He was silent. His mouth did not work. His eyes did not shift.
“Not far from Nairobi,” I said.
He nodded, once, slowly.
“Africa, not far from Nairobi.”
I waited.
“And when we get there, if we go?” he said.
“I leave you there.”
“And then?”
“You stay there.”
“And then?”
“That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Forever,” I said.
The old man breathed out and in, and ran his hand over the edge of the doorsill.
“This car,” he said, “somewhere along the way does it turn into a plane?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Somewhere along the way do you turn into my pilot?”
“It could be. I’ve never done this before.”
“But you’re willing to try?”
I nodded.
“Why?” he said, and leaned in and stared me directly in the face with a terrible, quietly wild intensity. “Why?”
Old man, I thought, I can’t tell you why. Don’t ask me.
He withdrew, sensing he had gone too far.
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
“You didn’t say it,” I said.
“And when you bring the plane in for a forced landing,” he said, “will you land a little differently this time?”
“Different, yes.”
“A little harder?”
“I’ll see what can be done.”
“And will I be thrown out but the rest of you okay?”
“The odds are in favor.”
He looked up at the hill where there was no grave. I looked at the same hill. And maybe he guessed the digging of it there.
He gazed back down the road at the mountains and the sea that could not be seen beyond the mountains and a continent beyond the sea. “That’s a good day you’re talking about.”
“The best.”
“And a good hour and a good second.”
“Really, nothing better.”
“Worth thinking about.”
His hand lay on the doorsill, not leaning, but testing, feeling, touching, tremulous, undecided. But his eyes came full into the light of African noon.
“Yes.”
“Yes?” I said.
“I think,” he said, “I’ll grab a lift with you.”
I waited one heartbeat, then reached over and opened the door.
Silently he got in the front seat and sat there and quietly shut the door without slamming it. He sat there, very old and very tired. I waited. “Start her up,” he said.
I started the engine and gentled it.
“Turn her around,” he said.
I turned the car so it was going back on the road.
“Is this really,” he said, “that kind of car?”
“Really, that kind of car.”
He looked out at the land and the mountains and the distant house.
I waited, idling the motor.
“When we get there,” he said, “will you remember something . . .?”
“I’ll try.”
“There’s a mountain,” he said, and stopped and sat there, his mouth quiet, and he didn’t go on.
But I went on for him. There is a mountain in Africa named Kilimanjaro, I thought. And on the western slope of that mountain was once found the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has ever explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
We will put you up on that same slope, I thought, on Kilimanjaro, near the leopard, and write your name and under it say nobody knew what he was doing here so high, but here he is. And write the date born and died, and go away down toward the hot summer grass and let mainly dark warriors and white hunters and swift okapis know the grave.
The old man shaded his eyes, looking at the road winding away over the hills. He nodded.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Yes, Papa,” I said.
And we motored away, myself at the wheel, going slow, and the old man beside me, and as we went down the first hill and topped the next, the sun came out full and the wind smelled of fire. We ran like a lion in the long grass. Rivers and streams flashed by. I wished we might stop for one hour and wade and fish and lie by the stream frying the fish and talking or not talking. But if we stopped we might never go on again. I gunned the engine. It made a great fierce wondrous animal’s roar. The old man grinned.
“It’s going to be a great day!” he shouted.
“A great day.”
Back on the road, I thought, How must it be now, and now, us disappearing? And now, us gone? And now, the road empty. Sun Valley quiet in the sun. What must it be, having us gone?
I had the car up to ninety.
We both yelled like boys.
After that I didn’t know anything.
“By God,” said the old man, toward the end. “You know? I think we’re . . .flying?”
The Man in the Rorschach Shirt
Brokaw.
What a name!
Listen to it bark, growl, yip, hear the bold proclamation of:
Immanuel Brokaw!
A fine name for the greatest psychiatrist who ever tread the waters of existence without capsizing.
Toss a pepper-ground Freud casebook in the air and all students sneezed:
Brokaw!
What ever happened to him?
One day, like a high-class vaudeville act, he vanished.
With the spotlight out, his miracles seemed in danger of reversal. Psychotic rabbits threatened to leap back into hats. Smokes were sucked back into loud-powder gun muzzles. We all waited.
Silence for ten years. And more silence.
Brokaw was lost, as if he had thrown himself with shouts of laughter into mid-Atlantic. For what? To plumb for Moby-Dick? To psychoanalyze that colorless fiend and see what he really had against Mad Ahab?
Who knows?
I last saw him running for a twilight plane, his wife and six Pomeranian dogs yapping far behind him on the dusky field.
“Good-bye forever!”
His happy cry seemed a joke. But I found men flaking his gold-leaf name from his office door next day, as his great fat-women couches were hustled out into the raw weather toward some Third Avenue auction.
So the giant who had been Gandhi-Moses-Christ-Buddha-Freud all layered in one incredible Armenian dessert had dropped through a hole in the clouds. To die? To live in secret?
Ten years later I rode on a California bus along the lovely shores of Newport.
The bus stopped. A man in his seventies bounced on, jingling silver into the coin box like manna. I glanced up from the rear of the bus and gasped.
“Brokaw! By the saints!”
And with or without sanctification, there he stood. Reared up like God manifest, bearded, benevolent, pontifical, erudite, merry, accepting, forgiving, messianic, tutorial, forever and eternal . . .
Immanuel Brokaw.
But not in a dark suit, no.
Instead, as if they were vestments of some proud new church, he wore:
Bermuda shorts. Black leather Mexican sandals. A Los Angeles Dodgers’ baseball cap. French sunglasses. And . . .
The shirt! Ah God! The shirt!
A wild thing, all lush creeper and live flytrap undergrowth, all Pop-Op dilation and contraction, full flowered and crammed at every interstice and crosshatch with mythological beasts and symbols!
Open at the neck, this vast shirt hung wind-whipped like a thousand flags from a parade of united but neurotic nations.
But now, Dr. Brokaw tilted his baseball cap, lifted his French sunglasses to survey the empty bus seats. Striding slowly down the aisle, he wheeled, he paused, he lingered, now here, now there. He whispered, he murmured, now to this man, this woman, that child.
I was about to cry out when I heard him say:
“Well, what do you make of it?”
A small boy, stunned by the circus-poster effect of the old man’s attire, blinked, in need of nudging. The old man nudged:
“My shirt, boy! What do you see!?”
“Horses!” the child blurted, at last. “Dancing horses!”
“Bravo!” The doctor beamed, patted him, and strode on. “And you, sir?”
A young man, quite taken with the forthrightness of this invader from some summer world, said:
“Why . . . clouds, of course.”
“Cumulus or nimbus?”
“Er . . . not storm clouds, no, no. Fleecy, sheep clouds.”
“Well done!”
The psychiatrist plunged on.
“Mademoiselle?”
“Surfers!” A teen-age girl stared. “They’re the waves, big ones. Surfboards. Super!”
And so it went, on down the length of the bus and as the great man progressed a few scraps and titters of laughter sprang up, then, grown infectious, turned to roars of hilarity. By now, a dozen passengers had heard the first responses and so fell in with the game. This woman saw skyscrapers! The doctor scowled at her suspiciously. The doctor winked. That man saw crossword puzzles. The doctor shook his hand.
This child found zebras all optical illusion on an African wild. The doctor slapped the animals and made them jump! This old woman saw vague Adams and misty Eves being driven from half-seen Gardens. The doctor scooched in on the seat with her awhile; they talked in fierce whispered elations, then up he jumped and forged on. Had the old woman seen an eviction? This young one saw the couple invited back in!
Dogs, lightnings, cats, cars, mushroom clouds, man-eating tiger lilies!
Each person, each response, brought greater outcries. We found ourselves all laughing together. This fine old man was a happening of nature, a caprice, God’s rambunctious Will, sewing all our separateness up in one.
Elephants! Elevators! Alarums! Dooms!
When first he had bounded aboard we had wanted naught of each other. But now like an immense snowfall which we must gossip on or an electrical failure that blacked out two million homes and so
