Clutch

            For all intents and purposes—a phrase that all-too-often diminishes the mystery of ‘all’—the press conference was over, the podium emptying of its various speakers. The renowned poet J. Hiram Peacock had died sometime during the night—his body found at the base of a cliff that sunshine couldn’t reveal until mid-morning, and now it was early afternoon. The tide had almost buried him, which might have been the way he wanted it. But people cared about J. Hiram—look how many came at such short notice—and there was no way he’d just slip away, unnoticed. How he slipped—that was what this presser was all about.

            The sheriff had to front the questions, though he often pointed to the deputy coroner and the DNR representative to provide details about the body and the circumstances. “We cannot inform much more,” each said, “as the investigation is on-going.” Indeed, they had hardly transferred the corpse to the morgue when the need had become apparent—through helicopter footage and a million social media shares already—to at least give something of an explanation, even if there was little more to say than

·      he’d been walking his dog

·      the weather was, as you know, calm—and moonlit

·      the promontory above where he fell had no fence

·      the dog, still leashed, made his way back home

·      there was nobody else at home, and no evidence of foul play

·      there was no note—nothing revealing a deliberate act

·      the body, as we have said, was half-submerged when found

·      we’re not revealing who it was who found him

·      we’ll reconvene again this time tomorrow—or earlier, if fate sees fit.

            It was an odd way to end—if fate sees fit, as if the Wizard of Oz were part of the consultancy. Others who had spoken, assembled on the fly, included a neighbor more or less disconsolate, an agent of the publishing house that owned the rights to much of Peacock’s works, and a colleague at the university he sometimes graced—if also cursed.

            “Yes, of course it’s a loss,” the colleague said during Q&A, “which is immeasurable. What can one say? He’d written—well, not everything, but—so much that is now in the parlance of not only philologists, but the common reader, who could quote him at a moment’s notice…”

            “Can you give us an example?”

            “Um,” sighing in some disbelief, “sure… it’s best seen written out, but you can hear his power in the lines:

                        ‘ours were not the hours that bound us

                        but the second chances of infinity.’

That, and more concretely—”

            “You can find a complete collection of quotables from our website,” the publisher announced, disinclined to give away the gems for free.

            “Business”, the colleague lamented, “is never what a poet wants to leave as legacy.”

            “So what will be his legacy, from an academic point of view?”

            “Academic? I know him as an artist—or”, swallowing the thought, “… knew him… I’m sorry—this is all so sudden—”

            “Of course,” the questioner understood, putting up a palm to apologize.

            “But,” the colleague began again, “I can try….” The publisher and the sheriff loomed in the background, gauging when responses went too far. The colleague, for her part, decided on these lines: “art itself is legacy, and art that spurs on other art is—not to be redundant—immeasurable. I was talking to him just the other day—”

            “Where? When exactly?” another journalist pressed for details.

            “Well, just a matter of speaking—it doesn’t pertain to how he died—”

            “How would you know?”

            “Of course I can’t know. So maybe I’ll say no more.”

            “Probably the best course forward,” stepped in the publisher, “so, again, our website is—”

            “No, no—,” broke in the second journalist, “I didn’t mean to stop you. Please go on—talking to him just the other day…”

            The colleague weighed the moment, an ear on the remonstration and encouragement equally. “I asked him if poetry would survive the century, and if so, in what form…”

            The publisher shouldered toward the microphone. “That’s the credo of our company—Dr Peacock would affirm—to usher fine literature from generation to generation, as Shakespeare did for Milton, who did for Dryden, who did for—”

            “But it was curious how he answered it,” the colleague continued, gathering strength in the recall. “He brushed his hand through the notion of this century and had me imagine New Year’s Day, 2025—seven years from now. I said, ‘ok—that’s not too hard.’” She itemized through unclenched fingers: “‘different president, for sure; harsher hurricanes, probably; handsets obsolete, perhaps, traded for wearables, Dick Tracy watches—that kind of thing.’ He listened to these obvious considerations. But then he said this: ‘In seven years, everyone on earth will change significantly—usually through relations—yet everyone will essentially remain the same—usually through relations.’”

            Reporters scribbled in short-hand, as if a video review wouldn’t catch things right. One asked if the poet meant to say that twice, “about relations,” to which the colleague simply nodded. The sheriff considered that point as good as any cue to wrap this conference up—there had been no mandate on entertaining questions in the first place. Yet as he cleared his throat to repeat ‘again, this time tomorrow,’ another question from the press could not be stifled: “Did he speak beyond those seven years, like the century you initially proposed?”

            The colleague looked at the sheriff, who blushed and backed away. The publisher inched forward, yet knew the rostrum didn’t want him anymore. “Did he speak beyond 2025?” the colleague repeated; “he did—beyond this century. It’s fitting that we’ve had Shakespeare referenced today, as more than four centuries have transpired since Hamlet, Isabella, Othello, the Fool, Anthony and Cleopatra broke the fourth wall, basically, of theatre. What’s changed since then? Our institutions have, technology certainly, notions of an ‘undiscovered country’, Caliban to Taliban—if not our understanding of either of those names.” There were puzzled looks about whose words these were—hers, or Dr Peacock’s. She read them and clarified, “characters like these were always in our conversations, as they’ve been for centuries. Our job is to add to the cast, beyond the average Jedi—to be a Shakespeare for an audience four hundred years from now.”

            “So he felt he was the Shakespeare of our age?”

            “A Shakespeare. Virginia Woolf has much to say on this theme.”

            On that note, for some reason, the sheriff called it quits. The publisher caught the colleague’s arm for some whispered words, and then one of the journalists did the same. “You’ll be here tomorrow?” the latter asked. Against the glare of the sheriff, the colleague shrugged a ‘possibly’. “If so, could you say more about seven years turning into centuries? Just… even off the record, if…”

            “I’ll sleep on it, God granting any sleep tonight.”

            The next day offered little news, and just the sheriff took the stage to say where things were with Dr Peacock—or (he corrected) the investigation of his death. “It’s ongoing,” was his blanket statement, thereby little could be gained by Q&A, but “those who want to speak about his works or legacy”—the sheriff panned generally toward those who’d spoken yesterday—“will have that chance, if not expressly from this podium. Our update, then, is thus:

·      still no evidence of foul play

·      his shirt, however, was torn from the left underarm to the middle of his back

·      this tear could have happened during the fall, or otherwise

·      the top of the cliff shows nothing abnormal

·      the tidal basin below the cliff remains off-limits

·      the one who found him prefers not to be identified

·      that finder never touched him—the lack of footprints bear this out—and called emergency services that came within ten minutes

·      the coroner’s report will not be issued before the usual legal protocols

·      updates hereafter will not be scheduled, but posted online.

And I’ll take just a few questions.”

            “Is the dog being cared for?”

            “Yes.”

            “By whom?”
            “Confidential.”

            “What do you mean by ‘otherwise’ concerning the torn shirt?”
            “Nothing more than it’s part of the ongoing investigation.”

            “Could there be a person who tried to prevent his fall?”

            “I cannot speculate.”

            “Or someone he was fighting with?”

            “Next? I’ll allow two more.”

            “Why are you so tight-lipped?”

            “Next. One more.”

            “Are you looking at his poetry for clues?”

            The sheriff stared hard at that question. Reluctantly, knowing the ticking seconds showed a flagging unresolve, he called up Peacock’s colleague from the wings, whispering to her she had two minutes, max.

            “Poetry, of course,” she gathered her thoughts, “is generally inductive, not deductive; Hiram liked to say ‘the emporium for evidence of anything is that it might exist’. Not ‘must’, but ‘might’.”

            “So…, does that mean… his poems might hold some clues?”

            The colleague shook her head a little, pulling a folded sheet of paper from her pocket with a trembling hand. “Here’s a poem he gave me not so long ago—nothing that he’d sent for publishing, as”—the publisher coughed to try to make her stop—“not all poems are meant for that, but, revelatory or otherwise, here is what he wrote:

There are no arrant knaves out here tonight—

my dog and I protect the greater us from such—

so we’ll Quixote other lands beyond our sight—

inventing faith for those who doubt too much—

starting with ourselves, our ways and means—

this world’s a top that’s spun for all it’s worth—

from dradling, and fidgeting, to slot machines—

thought is often thrown away, like afterbirth—

and in its place are many manufactured fears—

how to pay the rent, and smile while doing so—

the question’s not so petty through the years—

I wonder, with my dog, where walks might go—

I’ll hold it up for photos if you’d like.” She clutched it tenderly from the top.

            “He typed this up for you?”

            “He gave it to me typed.”

            “Dashes at the end like that? Is that typical of his style?”

            The colleague aimed her head at the publisher and said, “you might check the website,” to muted laughs, “but Hiram wrote in various styles—‘many manufacturings’, if I may paraphrase that line.”

            “You’ve called him ‘Hiram’ several times. Was that his preferred name?”
            “He was self-conscious of all his names. The obvious line to draw is to ‘J. Alfred Prufrock’, and perhaps his parents knew they’d have to play with ‘Peacock’ somehow, so why not do so in homage to the great T.S. Eliot? The ‘J’ in that poem is never known, but Hiram’s first name, Japheth, was just something he didn’t care for.”

            “I can see why!”

            “‘Hiram’ isn’t any more conventional, but yeah—he leaned toward that, or simply as ‘Hi’.”

            “Like ‘Hi and Lois’?” someone asked.

            “Alright,” the sheriff wrapped it up with that.

            The colleague stayed an hour, though, to share more lines from memory. The journalist who had asked the day before how seven years turn into centuries rekindled the question, not so satisfied that today’s quatrains sufficed. “Among the poems he shared with me, the one I read out seemed pertinent to how he might have died, walking Barney—”

            “His dog, yes?”
            “Yes—and thinking, maybe absent-mindedly, about errant knights against the arrant knaves of this world. Admittedly, that doesn’t vault our present circumstances much—”

            “And rather implies a look backwards in time,” the publisher interrupted. “I think you should be careful about platforming his work without expressed permission.”

            “Whose? His? Certainly not yours, in this instance.”

            “In this instance, the guardian of his estate. I know that isn’t you.”

            “No one can reclaim what another person freely gave. And we’re talking about ideas, anyway.”

            “Ideas have copyright.”

            “And thoughts, and questions, and arguments, and conversations, and memories?—”

            Some journalists walked away from this, but the one hell-bent on Peacock’s long-view of humanity pressed on: “I can’t shake yesterday from the notion of a Shakespearean leap into the future. What would Hiram say about.., well, life in the 25^th century?”

            The colleague shot the publisher a glance that underscored free speculation. “He knew there’d have to be enormous differences. World population could be ten-fold or one-tenth that of today, depending on prosperity or pestilence. Space will have opened up, so some of us would be out there—where we used to say the heavens were. Biology will coincide with electromagnetic regulators, blurring some sense of what is human and who is robot. But—as I represented yesterday—Hiram was convinced about ‘relations’ as the common denominator of any era. We will always need ourselves.”

            “The reason Major Tom is calling Ground Control?”

            “And his wife—‘I love her very much’—”

            “—‘she knows’,” the journalist couldn’t help but croon.

            “Sounds rather utopian,” another journalist wanted to determine.

            The colleague scrunched her lips on that word. Looking toward the publisher, she decided to conclude, “if not utopian, also not its opposite. Go to the website and browse that spectrum more.”

            J. Hiram Peacock lived alone for the latter half of his life, though always with a dog or two, parakeets and smaller pets. A maid would come in once a week, friends would visit on occasion, but few remembered how recently. His relatives respected him, including his privacy, and, living on the other coast, their tighter budgets had to wait for him to fly to them. He wasn’t active on social media but participated on some professional blogs, none of his own making. His publisher and agents—several over the years—met him at the university or in their offices. Neighbors—like that one disconsolate—saw him often in his yard and walking along the promontory. They liked him or, more likely, the idea of having a poet in their midst.

            Nothing of the investigation held anything upon another cause than a ‘self-fall’, accidental or otherwise. Results of blood toxicity showed nothing unusual; he had eaten reasonably that evening. Searchers explored every crack of the cliffside to try to procure that swath of shirt—the size and shape of a paper airplane—and finally determined it must have gone out with the tide. The dog, it was thought, could have ingested it, but the vet ruled that out in due time.

            After a few days, it was arranged that the dog would go to live with the colleague. The latter was of two minds about it—never having owned a dog herself, yet well aware that Barney, 14 human years old, could largely take care of himself. The need for walks, though, gave her pause.… The last line of the poem she shared would guilt her into the commitment.

            One of the detectives joined the veterinarian to settle Barney in. The colleague’s apartment was modest—a connection of rooms that all looked like a professor’s study, books and papers spread about like plants at a floral shop. She’d made a special area in the hallway for the dog, yet led him all around to get the lay of the land. Then she asked her visitors into the dining room for coffee. The afternoon was in its homestretch—perhaps there’d be more work to do for all of their offices, if times like this bridged work with greater cause.

            “We’ve done a thorough search of everything he owned—there may be items that you’d be interested in, according to the guardian of the estate,” the detective said.

            “Who is that guardian?”

            “It’s legally undisclosed, but we have been granted rights to say, well, what I just did.”

            “Are you talking about his papers, letters?”

            “Among other things, yes. We’ve looked through things according to investigation protocol, but have no interest in detaining them for those who’d value what they hold more personally.”

            “The guardian agreed that you’d be ideal for the dog,” the vet seemed happy to add.

            “How would this guardian know?”

            The vet and detective shrugged, discretely. “The fact is,” the former admitted, “no one else gave any indication of care for his well-being. I mean, in the abstract, maybe, but…”

            “From what we understand,” the detective continued, “the dog is the only witness to Peacock’s fall. Even ‘witness’ is not so accurate, as the leash and his being outside the property is only circumstantial. Neighbors mostly didn’t know Barney’s name—you did; no one outside the investigation called the veterinarian’s office—you did every day.

            “In the brief time we’ve been here, Barney’s wagged his tail more than I knew was in him,” the vet joined in. “He’s obviously comfortable with the conditions here.”

            “I’ll probably inundate you with questions when he’ll have the sniffles…”

            “Sure,” the detective answered for the vet, “and give us a call whenever you need.”

            “You’re very kind. I think, if Barney agrees, this will all work out. Barn? what’ya say? Barney?”
            The dog wandered in naturally at her call. His tail was wagging—consistent to his age and penchant. In his mouth was something he had found—securing ownership of his new environs, it seemed.

            “What’s that, Barn?” the colleague asked, then cupped her mouth in recognition.

            The detective, noticing, also beckoned. “Barney, come here, boy,” and he complied—not giving him the item, but letting the detective scritch his neck.

            The vet looked at the colleague, as if she were suddenly his client. “Have you seen this before?”

            Of course, she had. Her eyes looked from it into Barney’s, reading his mind to discover her own. The detective said nothing, letting the vet’s question linger. The colleague also said nothing—the cloth speaking somewhat for itself. Barney lay down, keeping his find close to his snout.

            “You were there that evening,” led the detective, still looking at the dog.

            Barney, as if in response, sighed the way dogs do.

            “I was,” the colleague softly confessed. She put out her hands, J-shaped, left atop right, flinching. “From that afternoon, onward. I’m surprised you hadn’t found his phone call to me—”

            “We didn’t find the call record unusual; it was typical that he’d call you or some other colleague around that time of day—we don’t investigate routine things to an intrusive degree.

            “He said he didn’t want to live anymore—you would have heard him imply that on the phone—”

            “—again, we—”

            “—and he didn’t want to think four hundred years from now when,.. when—”

            She stopped—not to cry, as was in the making, but to kneel down to share in Barney’s find. The vet gestured to the detective to give them space, then reminded her of the question: “when?”

            Her sigh resembled Barney’s. Then, “when eternity consumes the need to be present, as it has.”

            “You ate dinner with him?” the detective measured.

            “We talked a lot. I brought over the poem about Quixote—that was mine, the only lie I told to the press. I wanted him to enjoy ‘our ways and means’, among other things.”

            “Were you romantic with him?”

            She kept her eyes on the dog. “Does that matter, really?”

            The detective wasn’t sure. “No,” he decided for the moment. “Can you describe how he fell?”

            Now she stretched to make her elbow a tripod to support her head for the memory. “He gave me the leash—we’d been walking a half hour, not arguing but also not enjoying the moonlight, which I kept on pointing to—it was a favorite motif of his, the changing faces of the single side we see, the towboat of tides…. Barney was tired, whining to get home. Hiram asked me to do that for him—and I said I wouldn’t, not without him, too.”

            The vet gently slid the triangle of cloth from Barney’s paws and regarded it himself before handing it to the detective, who asked, “how did this tear happen? When exactly?”

            The colleague studied the crooked fingers of her left hand. “He turned toward the cliff and paced like I hadn’t seen before—not quite a run, but… a resolve. I begged him to stop as I ran—Barney right beside—and he wouldn’t. So… I… clutched what I could, and Barney seemed to understand, too, because he threw his weight toward the safe side—aiming home—otherwise I would have tumbled over the cliff, too. I thought his weight and my clutch could be enough.., but… the fabric ripped and… he was gone.”

            “Why didn’t you report this right away?”

            Good question, her face showed. “I saw by moonlight the moment he crashed into the tidal basin and I yelled and yelled for—I don’t know—minutes more than I knew a rescue was possible. No one heard me? Really? None of the neighbors?”

            “None,” the detective straight-lined. “Or, like you, they didn’t come out to bear witness.”

            “He was dead. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted the ocean to wash him away.”

            “Why did you leave Barney out all night?” the vet implored.

            “I let him go—he ran the rim of the promontory and out of sight. I looked for him ’til the moon went down and gave up. I came here and collapsed.”

            “And put yourself together for the press conference?”

            “What else could I do?”
            “You could have said all this then! You could have told the truth!”

            “You could have helped with Barney then,” the vet poured on.

            She sank fuller to the floor. “I could have let the facts define the man.”

            “Yes,” insisted the detective, “you made all this an unnecessary drama!”

            The room assumed the atmosphere of Prospero’s cell—or the ramparts outside it: “a turn or two I need to still my beating mind,” the colleague said, “that is what Hiram needed. I’m not sure I bought him time, but… the rest of us got that chance.”

            The vet and the detective regarded each other, wordlessly, and, in turn, stood up to figure how the meeting might end. The detective went into the hallway to make a call, muffled but overt enough in purpose. The vet returned to sit again. “Will you be able to take responsibility of this dog?” he asked. “Or yourself, for that matter?”

            The colleague sat back up and asked Barney, “are you ready for a walk?”

            Barney stood and wagged his tail, a welcome return to some routine and the shared need for here and now.

             

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2017)