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СКАЧАТЬ left hand don’t know what the right one is doing,’ he muttered again. Frank had already observed that they always said the same things; but didn’t everybody? He finished his slice and crouched down to tend their smoky fire. ‘Hey someone’s got potatoes burning in here.’

      ‘Oh yeah, pull those out! You can have one if you want.’

      ‘Don’t you know you can’t cook no potato on no fire?’

      ‘Sure you can! How you do think?’

      Frank shook his head; the potato skins were charred at one end, green at the other. Back in the paleolithic there must have been guys hanging out somewhere beyond the cave, guys who had offended the alpha male or killed somebody by accident or otherwise fucked up – or just not been able to understand the rules – or failed to find a mate (like Frank) – and they must have hunkered around some outlier fire, eating lukewarm pizza and making crude chitchat that was always the same, laughing at their old jokes.

      ‘I saw an antelope up in the old fort,’ he offered.

      ‘I saw a tapir,’ the Post reader said promptly.

      ‘Come on Fedpage, how you know it was a tapir.’

      ‘I saw that fucking jaguar, I swear.’

      Frank sighed. ‘If you report it to the zoo, they’ll put you in their volunteer group. They’ll give you a pass to be in the park.’

      ‘You think we need a pass?’

      ‘We be the ones giving them a pass!’

      ‘They’ll give you a cell phone too.’ That surprised them.

      Chessman slipped in, glancing at Frank, and Frank nodded unenthusiastically; he had been about to leave. And it was his turn to play black. Chessman set out the board between them and moved out his king’s pawn.

      Suddenly Zeno and Andy were arguing over ownership of the potatoes. It was a group that liked to argue. Zeno was among the worst of these; he would switch from friendly to belligerent within a sentence, and then back again. Abrupt climate change. The others were more consistent. Andy was consistently abrasive with his unfunny humor, but friendly. Fedpage was always shaking his head in disgust at something he was reading. The silent guy with the silky dark red beard was always subdued, but when he spoke always complained, often about the police. Another regular was older, with faded blond-gray hair, pockmarked face, not many teeth. Then there was Jory, an olive-skinned skinny man with greasy black hair and a voice that sounded so much like Zeno’s that Frank at first confused them when listening to their chat. He was if anything even more volatile than Zeno, but had no friendly mode, being consistently obnoxious and edgy. He would not look at Frank except in sidelong glances that radiated hostility.

      Lastly among the regulars was Cutter, a cheery, bulky black guy, who usually arrived with a cut of meat to cook on the fire, always providing a pedigree for it in the form of a story of petty theft or salvage. Adventures in food acquisition. He often had a couple of buddies with him, knew Chessman, and appeared to have a job with the city park service, judging by his shirts and his stories. He more than the others reminded Frank of his window-washing days, also the climbing crowd – a certain rowdy quality – life considered as one outdoor sport after the next. It seemed as if Cutter had somewhere else as his base; and he had also given Frank the idea of bringing by food.

      Chessman suddenly blew in on the left flank and Frank resigned, shaking his head as he paid up. ‘Next time,’ he promised. The fire guttered out, and the food and beer were gone. The potatoes smoldered on a table top. The guys slowed down in their talk. Redbeard slipped off into the night, and that made it okay for Frank to do so as well. Some of them made their departures into a big production, with explanations of where they were going and why, and when they would likely return again; others just walked off, as if to pee, and did not come back. Frank said, ‘Catch you guys,’ in order not to appear unfriendly, but only as he was leaving, so that it was not an opening to any inquiries.

      

      Off north to his tree. Ladder called down, the motor humming like the sound of his brain in action.

      The thing is, he thought as he waited, nobody knows you. No one can. Even if you spent almost the entirety of every day with someone, and there were people like that – even then, no. Everyone lived alone in the end, not just in their heads but even in their physical routines. Human contacts were parcellated, to use a term from brain science or systems theory; parcelled out. There were:

      1) the people you lived with, if you did; that was about a hundred hours a week, half of them asleep;

      2) the people you worked with, that was forty hours a week, give or take;

      3) the people you played with, that would be some portion of the thirty or so hours left in a week.

      4) Then there were the strangers you spent time with in transport, or eating out or so on. This would be added to an already full calendar according to Frank’s calculations so far, suggesting they were all living more hours a week than actually existed, which felt right. In any case, a normal life was split out into different groups that never met; and so no one knew you in your entirety, except you yourself.

      One could, therefore:

      1) pursue a project in paleolithic living,

      2) change the weather,

      3) attempt to restructure your profession, and

      4) be happy,

      all at once, although not simultaneously, but moving from one thing to another, among differing populations; behaving as if a different person in each situation. It could be done, because there were no witnesses. No one saw enough to witness your life and put it all together.

      Through the lowest leaves of his tree appeared the aluminum-runged nylon rope ladder. One of his climbing friends had called this kind of ice-climbing ladder a ‘Miss Piggy’, perhaps because the rungs resembled pig iron, perhaps because Miss Piggy had stood on just such a ladder for one of her arias in ‘The Muppets’ Treasure Island.’ Frank grabbed one of the rungs, tugged to make sure all was secure above, and started to climb, still pursuing his train of thought. The parcellated life. Fully optimodal. No reason not to enjoy it; and suddenly he realized that he was enjoying it. It was like being a versatile actor in a repertory theater, shifting constantly from role to role, and all together they made up his life, and part of the life of his time.

      Cheered by the thought, he ascended the upper portion of his Miss Piggy, swaying as little as possible among the branches. Then through the gap, up and onto his plywood floor.

      He hand-turned the crank on the ladder’s spindle to bring the ladder up after him without wasting battery power. Once it was secured, and the lubber’s hole filled with a fitted piece of plywood, he could relax. He was home.

      Against the trunk was his big duffel bag under the tarp, all held in place by bungee cords. From the duffel he pulled the rolled-up foam mattress, as thick and long as a bed. Then pillows, mosquito net, sleeping bag, sheet. On these warm nights he slept under the sheet and mosquito net, and only used his down bag as a blanket near dawn.

      Lie down, stretch out, feel the weariness of the day bathe him. Slight sway of the tree: yes, he was up in a treehouse.

      The idea made him happy. His childhood fantasy had been the result of visits to the СКАЧАТЬ