We talk about how you want to be a bellhop one day. You believe this desire stems from your long-standing infatuation with strangely shaped hats. For example, your favorite Bob Dylan song is “Leopardskin Pillbox Hat.” For a long time, though, you thought this was your favorite Bob Dylan song because of your obsession with compound words that seem to be made up, like “pillbox” and “leopardskin.”
“Dylan just made those words up,” you say. “He can do that.”
“No he didn’t,” I say. “Those are words.”
“Well, ‘pillbox hat’ is a metaphor. For dependence on drugs.; Like suburban Prozac takers. Housewives on Valium. Stuff like that. Specifically – specifically stuff like that.”
“I don’t know.” I have a hard time believing anything. I’d have an easier time believing that “pillbox hat” was a metaphor for suburban housewives’ addictions to anti-depressants and painkillers (another compound word that you just used that I wonder if you noticed) if it was a song by Radiohead – “Fake Plastic Trees”-style – or even Bright Eyes, maybe. I’d also have an easier time believing that if “pillbox hat” or even just “pillbox” was something that Dylan actually had made up. But your mind just told you that he made those things up, and your mind can’t be trusted. (But that is just something that my mind told me, and not even about you in particular, rather, about a type of mind. My mind just told me this right now, even as I wrote it: never trust someone whose mind tells them that Bob Dylan’s lyrics mean something or another. Something specific at least. I trust you, but not your mind. Anyway, “leopardskin” and “pillbox” and “pillbox hat” are all real things and real words, and they probably represent something in the context of Dylan’s song – probably ignorant affluence or something equally abstract and equally hard to believe in as the existence of any metaphor – but not anything specific.What is specific is your desire to be a bellhop, which, as it turns out, also might have something to do with your obsession with compound words. What this word suggests, as a compound word, is that one jumps at the sound of a bell –
“Hops to it,” you say with a sort of smile – the sort you have when you see someone that you sort of like, but not like a lot. “That is cute. A bellhop is cute. Who takes care of a bellhop when it gets sick? I bet no one. I bet it probably doesn’t even have Kleenex in its apartment. I bet its apartment is a half-basement one with one window that opens onto an alley. It’s helpless. Like a squirrel with the flu.”
I tell you that once I saw a squirrel get blown out of a tree by the wind and land on a driveway. It ran around in a jagged circle for a couple of seconds and then stopped, crouching real low to the ground, which I had never seen before because even when squirrels bury something (do squirrels bury their dead? – I want to remember to bring this up later because I think it sounds interesting) they have a lively arch to their spines, such grace and fluidity, but this squirrel was flat – stunned flat – and breathing heavily but quietly.
“Did it die?” you ask, concerned.
“No,” I say. “I watched it for a long time thinking it was going to die – that it was dying slowly and would eventually close its eyes. I started to feel like Ricky Fitz from American Beauty when he was taping that plastic bag or a dead bird and oozing over the beauty of life and then I felt phony. But mostly I felt embarrassed because after I started thinking about American Beauty I couldn’t feel anything about the squirrel anymore whereas at first I was amazed and sad and hopef—”
“What happened to the squirrel?” you interrupt.
“Well, I stopped watching it for a second, turned away, and when I turned back it was gone.”
“Blown away by the wind,” you say.
“Probably not,” I say. There is a silence. I remember the thing about the squirrels burying their dead because I made an “x” on the back of my hand to remind me and I just looked at the back of my hand. “Do you think squirrels bury their dead?” I ask of the silence. It looks like you stop thinking about whatever you were thinking about and begin thinking about whether squirrels bury their dead.
“Do you think I’d make a good bellhop, or a better bellhop’s girlfriend?”
“Do squirrels bury their dead. I just asked that and you ignored it.” I feel self-righteous for a second, but then feel stupid about it and smile. Who am I to be offended, I wonder. Nobody. A bloke.; A bloke who uses words like “bloke” when they’re not even part of his dialect of English. A real chump. Then, for a second, I realize we are talking about nothing and then for a second I think that talking about nothing is the same as talking about Foucault or something. You answer in the midst of me thinking these second-long thoughts about thinking and talking.
“Sorry. I don’t know. Maybe the wind blows the squirrels away as they are dying so they won’t suffer.”
You said that already, kind of. “I mean, because what happens to all the squirrel corpses? Why don’t we ever see them? Aside from the ones that are run over by cars – guts asunder – in the street, or the ones that hawks drop on our balconies? I mean, some squirrels die of old age or sickness or are still born, right? What happens to them? Do they get buried by the living? Are there squirrel bones hanging from the highest limbs of trees, like chimes to ward off predators?” I stop. I realize, hyper-consciously, looking at myself from a position that is slightly elevated and somewhere over my right shoulder, that I am allowing myself to imagine, which is a step on the ladder to “belief.”
You say, “Maybe squirrels live forever – the ones that don’t get hit by cars. They’re just all the same ones from the beginning of time, and when one gets hit by a car or dropped by a hawk, a new one can be born. There’s always the same number of squirrels, then.” You are content, like a solved math equation. Solved math equations are content.“Squirrel stasis,” I say smiling, somewhat mathematically content as well.
“What?” you say.
“Nothing,” I say. “You should smile at that. ‘Squirrel stasis.’ That’s good.”
“What?” you say again.
“Nothing.” Silence. I don’t mind. Sometimes there’s just nothing to say. After a minute or so, sometimes there is something to say again. “I think you’d make a better bellhop’s girlfriend.”
“Thanks,” you say, turning from the window. You are really pretty.
I don’t know why you said thanks, but you’re welcome.