Tag: walker rutter-bowman

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 7

The Islands

by Walker Rutter-Bowman

At parties we stood around the newest statue. The host described intent, the extraction of stone, the weather of genesis. This time it was Charles. His pants were new and stiff. When he lost his train of thought, he defaulted to saying, “Galala marble.” Those were important words, and he clung to them. The statue was almost beautiful. We tried not to look at its bent genital, its implausible balls. Or we tried to look closer. When Charles lost the train again, he spoke, with feeling, of his adopted son’s agoraphobia. It had been diagnosed by a real doctor via a videoconferencing portal. The fear came to light as a nightmare: the boy pinned against a wall as people backed up, the backs of their heads growing as large as balloons, black hairs coming into focus. The reason the boy gave for not coming downstairs was the poor health of his lizard. The vet sipped champagne and said, “The lizard is fine.” He shook his head sadly. “The lizard has never been finer.”

These people wore watches and rings. Their shirts looked like normal shirts but more assured. To them and their methods, wealth meant island. My money was new, and so were these friends. I had never been an island man. I was from an interior state shaped like a muffin. Islands have sun and sand. They crawl with things that kill. They have grooves and protrusions, inlets and sides. They sneer.

One night, while everyone was discussing island life, some people pulled out their new passports to the islands they owned. These were official-looking documents with pictures and dates. While others looked and laughed at the photos, I shook my glass with a landlocked vigor, making the ice bang together. 

Why no island? they asked me. They knew my net worth. They had read the profile of me in the lifestyle magazine. You can still find the profile online. The writer called me a transit magnate, and it’s true I’m in bridges. That’s how I made my money. Why no island? they asked. They doubted my holdings. They lacked a fiscal literacy when it came to the great bridge. But I had funds. I’d adopted a daughter despite the towering cost. I could afford an estranged wife who sometimes sent me cards, and from the handwriting, by the angle of the stamp, I could tell she came by her loathing honestly, like a farmer. Adopting a daughter had to do with a single office where you went to fill out forms. And then the fenced-in area where you met your daughter. But having a daughter won’t protect you from island pressure. She’ll love it, they said. In good weather your adopted daughter will sail around the coast, they said. As the sun sets, you’ll sit on the terrace and watch her boat go by, and she’ll look up at you and wave, and the wave will mean something to both of you. She’ll sail all around and make you a worthless map, and you’ll attach it to the refrigerator with a magnet, and every time you go in for ice cubes, you’ll tap the map with your finger, and you’ll think, Here I am.

Sometimes this is your house, your new statue, your adopted daughter. Sometimes, despite what you’ve been told, Shauna is not agoraphobic, she just likes to read. Sometimes a lizard is not the perfect pet, and it ends up being you who feeds it and rubs its crested head. I liked the lizard but not my new statue, which had a small and sneaky face. He looks like you, the people said, and they mimed kissing it. That was their notion of a joke. I described to the guests how the artist was eager to disprove traditional metrics of abundance. The statue was small and ugly because the artist aimed to desexualize, or was it sexualize?, the height of men. Smoochie smoochie, the guests responded. I left doors open so they could poke around, find proof of my money, like pictures of Shauna in various stages of the latest orthodonture. They studied the photos to see if we had skipped steps. We had. But we had also doctored photos to hide the fact that we’d prioritized certain teeth over others. Half-satisfied, they put down the pictures and studied my clocks. I turned away to signal I didn’t care if they pocketed some of my clocks.

It’s not nothing, they said, roughly handling my timepieces, tossing them back and forth like baseballs. Meaning: a clock is not an island. Two clocks is not an island. Three? 

I knew it wasn’t. A clock is much more than nothing, but even the rarest clock in the world is no island. And if, one day, there’s an island that’s also a great big clock, it won’t come cheap. I was rich but I wasn’t clock-island rich.

But I could buy the average island if I wanted one, I said. But do I want one?

Their embarrassment rose up.

They looked deep into the faces of my very own clocks to hide how stupid they thought it was, a man holding himself apart from island desire. Money can buy a lot, but it can’t buy you the sense to keep things to yourself. It can buy you a clock that looks like a coconut with a hinge hidden by soft, brown fibers. It can even buy you the service of a man who stands in front of you to block your words with his broad body, a man named Jim who was a respected member of the team. For years my words struck him and fell to the ground, and for this he was, in my view, well compensated. But he couldn’t always be there. Jim needed a day off from time to time. Jim had a family.

So I bought the island. I had another party. I bought another sculpture. I was in the red. The bridge business was sputtering. Shauna wouldn’t come down because her book was getting good. The vet came in the door and said he heard the lizard was ill. I said the lizard was fine, and he said, That’s a relief, and helped himself to a flute of champagne and some canapes. He shook hands with the members of the group. His daughter’s teeth were straight but not as white as Shauna’s. His daughter had a lizard, but she would never have a lizard and an island, a lizard on an island. I helped him help himself to another flute or two.

I walked the guests around the statue and pointed to the contours. You see them there, the contours? They looked, but they took them for granted.

But of course, this location is temporary, I yawned. I could see Jim scrambling towards me. Soon we’ll move the statue to the island.

You bought an island?

I didn’t mention it?

Which one? they asked. Their maps were open.

That one.

That’s the one Kurt wanted. 

They were impressed. I knew because they went quiet and still, like certain birds in the presence of larger birds. While Jim was in the cellar getting more champagne, I took advantage of his absence to quote a poet who loved to fish.

But now they wondered what was left of my holdings. Any liquid? Was I hurting? Island-rich is one thing. Island-poor is another. They said I had the stink of it on me, the smell of a man over-leveraged by his land. So I bought one more. Jim said I was only doing it to shut them up. He was grilling for us because I’d never mastered the art. From time to time he’d complain that grilling was not really his job. I said maybe he should shut up and focus on the burgers. But he burned them anyway. His mind was elsewhere. He had been playing piano at Petit Chapeau Rouge for ten nights in a row, and it was starting to take its toll. The subject was sensitive. I’d told him he could do both until one of the jobs suffered, and now they both suffered. He wasn’t blocking comments at a satisfying rate, or grilling with the precision of former days, and word from Petit Chapeau Rouge was his playing was plodding and lacked dynamism. He was overworked. Jazz piano was teaching him vindictiveness, and he was leaving me unprotected. This burger is burned, I said. It’s flame-broiled, he said, hanging his head.

If I bought the second island close to the first one, they would criticize me for making decisions based on convenience. Accuse me of intending to build bridges between the two islands. Say, Oh, he made his fortune from building little bridges, now watch him try to connect his islands with two or three little bridges. I fooled them all by buying a second island quite far from the first. No bridge in the world could connect them, and I should know. Part of working in bridges is knowing when you’re ahead and when you’re not, and another part of working in bridges is proving your point.

Jim, who was helping me with motive, said it’s all right to prove your point. He was proving one himself with his sad piano playing and his burned burgers. Now I’m in a position where I can comfortably say upon reflection that the second island didn’t measure up to the first. It was covered in ants—one kind of ant, special for its aggression and orange thorax. A man lived on the island, a scientist, who had stretched his research grant longer than anyone thought possible. He called them Hofmann ants. His name was Hofmann. Either it was a tremendous coincidence, or he had named them after himself. He was covered in bites, and when you thought of all the pieces of Hofmann the ants had bitten off, the name began to make sense. He lived in a brown, single-flap tent. His papers declared he was allowed to study the ants for two more years, but I think he had changed the dates. He held his papers up as if someone might read them. He clutched the documentation like someone might take it away. When he talked about the ants, Hofmann could really get going. His face would grow red, his newer bites would begin to glow. The bites looked like little islands themselves, volcanic chains of red craters surrounded by ashen crusts. He was very skinny. Jim and I wondered what he ate. There were no fruit trees. Very few fish in the surrounding waters. But there were ants. And his tongue, when it showed itself, was short, thick, and coated in an orange gel. Maybe it was love, maybe it was revenge, maybe it was as simple as a dependable source of protein.

Two islands impressed my new friends. They had to rethink the sources of my wealth. Little bridges, sure, but maybe little tolls, too? That’s right, that’s right, many streams. Bridges was big. The people who had once asked, Is bridges really a living, is bridges really wealth?—they were now rethinking what they knew about the revenue of the load-bearing causeway. Plus I had invented a dongle that changed people’s lives, turning one port into another. Because a dongle is a bridge, too. A dongle is a bridge, too.

I hated playing favorites, but one island had ants and the other didn’t. One island had an unwashed and righteous scientist and the other didn’t. I built an airfield and a road going all the way around the antless island. Jim said we could call it Island I—that’s the kind of creative thinker he was. I built a house on the cliff overlooking the bay where the sun set, splashing down into the ocean in a fine display of leaking reds and oranges, like it was the first or last day on earth. I pointed to the bay to show Shauna where she could sail her boat, but she wasn’t there, she was upstairs, reading her book and picking her blisters. But nothing could kill the mood. Jim popped a bottle, and our thoughts turned to God, the color and loneliness at the start of all things. 

We must have brought an ant or two over on the plane. Shauna showed up at breakfast covered in bites. Jim set out traps that might’ve worked on your ordinary ant. Instead, they began to chew on some foundational elements of the new house.

I was hurting a bit financially. People knew I was island-rich, and, like the Hofmann ant, sensed opportunity. The vet began to call and ask when was the best time to visit. He asked, How’s the lizard? and, Are you liquid? Then Jim realized he might be undervalued. He must have got to talking to the other men and women who stood in front of their employers, operating their grills, blocking their words. I think there’s a group. Maybe his long nights of stale smoke at Petit Chapeau Rouge gave him a taste of independence. He brought me some charts showing how much money he had saved me by blocking certain words. He handed me a pamphlet about the dangers of eating uncooked meats. It was hard to believe they were accurate, but they were compelling and certainly colorful. Under each bright bar was one of the stupid things I had tried to say, or a type of raw meat, and then the bar extended upward to a point of potential fiscal damage. And then the last bar, the total, extended off the page and he had to fold out some sections of the graph to show how far it went, and like a tongue of orange flame the bar unrolled and kept going: that bar was the financial damage I would’ve incurred from eating uncooked meat and then speaking about it in an honest but fiscally ruinous manner. Jim knows better than the average man that the meat lobby is a powerful force, and bridges must work with meat to reach the state of synergy we all crave in business and the American meal.

The bars had words on them. These words had hit Jim’s chest and fallen to the ground. We were safe, thanks to Jim. But now the words had returned, printed on a color-coded graph Jim used to shake me down. The words had come back, after all. I signed some papers, and Jim was rich. He had always been good to me, but now? With his bad attitude? What if all those stupid things I said didn’t actually hit Jim and clatter to the ground, but became embedded in his skull, his soul? I’m not saying he became dumber, in body, mind, or spirit. But uglier? I’m saying he remembered the words I thought we’d agreed to forget.

“Let’s say, for the sake of conversation, some of the ants made it off Island II and onto Island I. What would you do?” I cut Hofmann’s steak for him but encouraged him to hold the fork. We were broadening and deepening his diet via imported goods.

“I would worry about the survival of the habitat, as the Hofmann ant is one of the most destructive organisms in the world.”

I knew my builders would agree. My new house was sliding down the cliff before it could even be finished. I watched the workers move about, welts covering their bodies, and I thought, Is it too late to be someone else?

When asked about indigenous self-determination, I said I was all for it, on paper. A truly rich man? the advocates said, with two islands such as yours? One of which has had people living on it for centuries? Wouldn’t the truly rich man concede that the land was more theirs than his? and that they should be allowed to govern it as they see fit? Not only do you not have the right to own the island? but you don’t really have the right to be there at all? The fake passport you wave about raises a notion of nationhood? that is not yours to raise or really even listen in on? Before responding I locked eyes with Jim, who was not going to stop me, though it would pain him to see me step forward and shoot off my mouth, which is what I did, and I quoted a poet with a passion for fishing but also for fascism, and I regretted saying those words then and then regretted them even more once I saw them punctuated in the last surviving publications of print.

Sometimes, island-rich means being able to give up Island I. Sometimes, island-rich is a feeling you once had, not a life you get to live. At least that’s how Jim put it. I saw the logic, but I didn’t like it. I agreed to meet with the indigenous, and I can’t say I liked them either. I didn’t dislike them because they were indigenous. I disliked them because they disliked me. And because they killed Jim. There was a misunderstanding with Jim and the manner in which he opened his arms in a gesture of welcome. I thought it was a nice gesture, but they shot him with a very long arrow. Jim’s wife and son said after all the shielding Jim had done for me through the years, that perhaps I, for once, could have shielded, etc. They said Jim’s threats of further litigation led to my hesitance to step in front of that arrow, but it had very little to do with that. It had much more to do with the arrow, and the fear that filled my heart when I saw it flying through the sky. Even if Jim had survived the puncture, the arrow was poisoned, and the fever brought out a burst of language I had never heard from the man who took great care with his words. With some gasping and an agitated frothing at the lips, Jim died. The last thing he said was, “Is it blue? Is the body really blue?” No one knows what he meant. But from time to time, I find it useful to ask myself the same thing.

After Jim, I stopped responding to others. I went a bit mute. If I had to say anything, I wrote it on a scrap of paper and kept it in my pocket until I could gather more information on what kind of thing it was. It slowed me down. Sometimes I dropped a scrap of paper, a thought, and it blew away, and after a few moments I didn’t miss it. 

Shauna says it’s interesting that islands are places of exile and objects of desire. Shauna says it’s interesting what wealth does to men of a certain susceptibility. Shauna says it’s interesting how expensive her school is, though not even she knows the real figure. She wants to want to help others, but she wants other things too.

We listen to old recordings of Jim from Petit Chapeau Rouge. I can detect things I said to him that influenced his playing, as though the words found their way into his fingers. The playing is plodding, it lacks dynamism—and that’s exactly how I want it. Sometimes the last thing you want is dynamism. His grave is on the island. The island has a bird with a very recognizable call. Somehow Hofmann never noticed it. The bird drowns out what I’m about to say. I want Jim to be that bird. Jim didn’t believe in bridges, and neither do birds. Shauna puts flowers on his grave, and I sprinkle it with scraps of paper. She questions if the scraps of paper are a good way to honor Jim. I believe he would’ve valued it for its human comedy: the scraps of paper carried away by the wind, the way I chase after them and trip over my own two feet, the way Shauna sighs, the way they blow into the water and drift into the distance, the way I wade into the shallows without even rolling my pantlegs. The papers soak up the sea, the ink bleeds into the water. Hofmann makes an orange stew. I open my mouth to speak, but the Jim of a bird screams again. A bird is a bridge, but to what? To more birds?

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.

Categories
Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

THE FIREMAN

By Walker Rutter-Bowman

My wife has become a more suspicious person. I tell her we can trust the babysitter. Her references check out, she’s first-aid certified. She’s a nice young woman, but my wife thinks she’s in it for the wrong reasons. It’s all right to have an agenda, which is hard for my wife to accept. My wife’s success as a painter didn’t come from plotting and scheming, only because she’s not good at those things. The thing she’s good at is painting. The thing she leans on is her talent. I point out that she admires some artists of known agendas. When my wife and I wed under the dying elm next to the reservoir, her brother said we had to reason with each other, and we agreed. But she won’t let me be the devil’s advocate, let alone the babysitter’s. The babysitter’s not in it for the baby, though she likes the baby well enough. She’s in it for the money, because that’s our transactional society, simple economics. She stands at the door, slipping her feet into her shoes, arms into coat, and we hand her cash. Cash, the king. The baby sleeps. My wife says the babysitter is an art student looking for a recommendation, which is true. My wife hasn’t uncovered some great secret. My wife found her in one of the studio classes she teaches. The babysitter’s been honest with us since the beginning. She represents the frankness of a generation. My wife is eating dozens of daily grams of protein but her blood sugar seems low, her energy has cratered, she looks in the freezer for frozen meatballs and reasons to distrust her fellow woman and man. I make sure to be present when she interacts with the babysitter. My wife says I always take the side of the less fortunate. “The babysitter comes from wealth,” I say. “Where?” she asks. Wealth, I say, like it’s a place I know.

My wife wants an old woman to babysit. She thinks the lack of old women in our lives is a failure of character. And the old women we do have in our lives are not the right kind of old women. They say the wrong things. They make me carry their carts. When the baby was just born, they said it looked unwell. The baby’s eyes were different sizes, and she hadn’t grown into her skin. When I hurt my knee, one of the old women said, I guess your running days are over. We don’t believe in hitting old women, though sometimes a neighbor shakes our faith. When my wife married me under the dying elm by the reservoir, my brother said I would take care of her when she was old because I loved my elders. Maybe I did, once, but it’s hard to remember. When I help the old women in our building, a mutual feeling of animus lingers. Our eyes lock and narrow. When we wed under the dying elm on the shore of the recreational reservoir, we agreed to celebrate one another’s known associations, but perhaps we didn’t use those exact terms. My wife doesn’t approve of several old men in my life. She says I want to be like them, the old and lonely men, a sour smell clinging to my clothes and neck. She says they are the kind of old men who don’t listen to women, as if there are many kinds. But I keep my neck clean. When I hold the baby, she puts her face right into my neck, and she enjoys it. She loves my neck. She puts her mouth on it. I don’t want to be lonely, but there’s nothing wrong with a little time alone. No one wants an old man to babysit. Only an old woman. I’m not sure why, but this is how it’s done. We won’t be making any changes. Everyone’s a pioneer before the baby comes along, then they remember that convention has its merits.

The day before the opening the babysitter calls to cancel. She ate a bad salad. No one is thoroughly washing their vegetables and greens. My wife, for instance. It could have been you, I do not say. You could have killed the babysitter by accidentally feeding her the feces of livestock. Wash your stuff, I do not say. Restraint in such situations is even more valuable and punishing. I hold myself back with an outmoded form of tolerance. This infuriates my wife, who has read much about the lives of saints but has the wrong temperament to follow in their footsteps. She knew what the silence said. It drives her to wash a carrot with such uncommon vigor that it slips from her grasp and shoots out of her hands and into her eye, the orange point striking the white ball. “Are you happy now?” she screams. When we wed under the dying elm on the shore of the polluted reservoir, her aunt had told us to laugh at one another, and we agreed, so I am laughing. But of course I’m not happy, not even glad.

We get her squared away with a nice eyepatch. She lets me put it on for her, kiss her hair. It looks good on her because that’s the kind of person she is. Turning her head slightly to let me know she is being regal in her pain and humility, and that the kissing, if it continues, will not be on the lips. She is still trying to be a saint. I kiss her hair again. She doesn’t need an apology, just my sadness. Like a sexy saint she walks through the house, floating, touching things gently, with only her fingertips. She’s at her best in the aftermath of conflict. I knew my wife would secretly enjoy wearing the eyepatch. We decide to bring the baby to the opening. It’ll be easy. She is a good baby and well liked. She has never attended an opening, and maybe it’s about time we bring her along as a part of the family. My wife believes in one integrated life, not an artistic practice siloed from the rest of it, and I agree, I guess. The baby is a part of our lives.

When my wife was awarded a prestigious and lucrative prize that made us temporarily rich, we lost our minds a little. We got into wine. We did some research and bought a wine fridge. Anyone can win a prize just as anyone can have a baby. It was a lot of remunerative validation, but not enough. It went away quickly, and as it did, she asked herself, Why me?, which seemed like a natural question after the windfall of validation. Why me and not the others? But she asked it with such regularity, such force, that it began to drive me insane. Why me, why me, why me? I started hearing it in the squeal of breaks, the tinkle of a windchime, the creak of a rusted gate. Why me? Why me? When we wed under the dying orange elm we agreed to be as one, the reservoir was crowded with birds and the civic dreams of park architects and the promises we made to one another. My father told us to be grateful, and we tried. When we wed by a dead tree, we did so to condone one another’s worth through words of repetition, though perhaps not in those exact terms, and I’d like the option to veto a few repeated phrases. Why me, why me, why me? When we wed a tree was falling and a manmade lake was rotting and her mother told me she had never really considered her daughter the artistic type. When we wed, the wind ruffled the water on the reservoir, blowing the stagnant both toward and away, representing the chafing of nature against man, or vice versa. The wind is bad, the wind is good. At no point did the wind sound like Why me, why me, why me? There are questions I don’t ask myself, and in this way I hope to be a model for those I have agreed to share a life with.

I believe in my wife’s paintings. I believe in the baby. And yet, one of my goals in fatherhood has been to avoid comparing our daughter to my wife’s paintings. I have failed at many things but at this I have mainly succeeded. 

There is wine at the opening, the paintings hang on the walls. The wine comes out of glass bottles and goes into plastic cups, it comes out of the cups and goes into mouths, onto tongues and lips, onto shirts and the concrete floor, onto pants and shoes. The beautiful people are wearing beautiful clothes, except for those who are trying something else. The people move in a circle around the room and then clump in the middle, their hands touch and then peel apart. I can tell my wife is disappointed, doing her fake smile. She pulls back her upper lip to show her pink gums. She is doing everything right, and she will have to keep doing it. We have not been temporarily rich for a long time. She wants to scream but the longer you go without screaming, the harder it becomes. Our friends have a wine fridge I find very sleek and unassuming. I am trying to drink less, sleep better, dream more. I can tell from her one eye that she’s tired. She’s not used to the eyepatch, and she keeps peeling it up and wedging her fingers under it to rub her socket with a back-and-forth squeak like a cloth or squeegee on a pane. Her paintings are excellent, and it’s unclear if they mean anything to anyone. It’s likely her eye is infected or getting there. The baby is being shy with her head on my shoulder, and then the baby stops being shy and wants to walk. The baby starts to cry, and my wife comes over to comfort her. The baby is not really a baby. Please understand that when I say baby I mean philosophically. She knows the difference between her mother coming over to comfort her and her mother coming over to shut her up. She can say a few words like hop and bob and money. I go outside to get some air. A fire truck crawls down the next street over and sirens drown out the sound of the baby screaming at the paintings. Someone is burning tonight. I hate to think of babies stuck in buildings, but I love the thought of firefighters carrying babies in their arms. They deserve a lot of credit for being so gentle in their huge fireproof suits, and I think the babies like to look into those firm faces under black and yellow helmets. From where I’m standing, I can see the baby facing the canvases and opening her mouth as wide as she can, as if to devour each work of art. I had the same instinct when I saw my wife’s paintings for the first time—the urge to engulf them, wrap them up, take them inside myself. Something about them makes you want to open yourself up, which not a single critic has noted. The baby is screaming, and people are looking at her with sympathy, but also moving away from her, putting some distance between them. From a young man I acquire a cigarette, which I begin to smoke. The baby screams with all her might and I use my whole chest to tug in every bit of smoke from this cigarette, a scream in reverse, as if I can flip it inside out with the force of my inhalations. 

“What do you think?” says the man who gave me the cigarette. “She’s too young for an opening,” I say. “I mean the paintings,” he says. I mention that not a single critic has noted the thing about opening yourself up to a work of art. He writes it down on a little notepad.

The sirens keep pealing. The lights from the fire truck dance across the buildings, smudge across the windows. A few improbable stars poke out, and a plane rises or falls across the purple-black sky. The sky is like a reservoir. I am like a dying elm. My wife picks up the baby, and the baby kicks her as hard as she can in the stomach. But then she decides the violence must end. She gets snuggly. She securely clutches a clump of my wife’s hair, which means peace. My wife sees me and waves and tells the baby to look outside, pointing, and the baby doesn’t see me, but she waves all the same. She will be lucky if she grows up to have hair as beautiful and strong as her mother’s, able to withstand all this tugging. The baby is muscular, in her way. She wears tunics. She lifts objects above her head like boulders and then releases them. The paintings are mostly of trees that look terrified to be so well-lit and stuck, as the artist has stuck them, in the middle of grim fields. My wife likes the work of a group of French artists who called themselves prophets. They painted bright but soft interiors and trees that look terrified. One of them died in a river, one of them died of disease, and one of them—I don’t know, I don’t know. They were artists of a known agenda, and they said so. Usually in my wife’s paintings there are two trees but sometimes there are three. The trees don’t look like people, despite what some critics have said. Some critics have said that the trees are people, or the absence of people, the hatred of people. They have not said that the trees are trees, or the absence of trees, the hatred of trees. My wife believes her critics are trying to work their way into her. They bite her, they chew a hole, they burrow in, and from that vantage hope to see and say something of worth. The baby did the opposite: she was too close to the paintings. She had no perspective. She had to get out of there, look around, get her footing. She is my wife’s greatest critic because she gave up the privilege of proximity. She exited the body of the artist and, with a few exceptions, never looked back. My wife is like anyone else, hating people, loving trees, and vice versa. When we wed under the approximation of wood and by the facsimile of water we held hands and said we would share it all, but it turns out we could have been more specific. 

The baby runs at the paintings and, whereas I would’ve stopped the baby before she reached them, something holds my wife back. The baby reaches the paintings and clutches at them with her small, strong hands. In some spots she pulls off the paint. If she puts it in her mouth there might be an issue. My wife holds her by the wrist to prevent it. The baby trembles with effort, and so does my wife. I think of a movie where a man tries to stab another man with a knife. One lies on top of the other, they tremble with effort, and the knife descends. The knife goes into one man’s heart, but the paint doesn’t go into the baby’s mouth. A clump falls to the floor, smacking softly. The good thing about paintings as creations is that they never destroy each other. They can glare at each other from across a room for years without ever rising to violence. Of course, the baby’s actions ultimately unlocked a new phase of my wife’s artistic career. She would never display paintings so wet and fresh again. In this way one creation can improve another. But I decided I couldn’t watch the epiphany happen. Or wonder how my wife would balance the discovery of a new direction with the need to discipline the baby. We don’t touch paintings. We don’t hurt art. So I walked around the block because, as a father, there’s nothing like it for the mind and spirit.

Before we ever had a child, we wondered what we would do when it misbehaved. Our first thought was to improve upon the past. We believed we’d turned out well, but was it because or in spite of the methods of our mothers and fathers? For a number of reasons, we didn’t want to strike the child. For one, we could still recall feeling so small and helpless before the power of our parents, who struggled in their positions of authority. My wife’s father was an alcoholic whose work significantly contributed to the microchip industry. He spanked her only once, under orders from her mother, and when his daughter started crying, so did he, and she was so shocked to see him crying she stopped, wiped her eyes. But he went on sobbing because self-pity was how he expressed himself. It came over him like a storm. They could speak to each other if they were watching a game. Televised grass made them feel calm. When I misbehaved, my mother, a classicist who won some acclaim from her book on plumbing in the ancient world, shook me by the shoulders and said, Why, why? and my father walked out to the backyard to check on his birdfeeders. He won very little acclaim for checking on his birdfeeders, despite his great passion and skill for it. Our goal was to be better, more logical. We wanted consequence for all parties involved, especially the child. It should make sense. Now we had to wonder what to do when a child unlocks a new phase of an artistic career by breaking the rules. And good art is all about breaking rules. It’s tricky. I buy and eat a hot dog. With caution the vendor watches me eat it as if expecting some complaint. No complaints. It’s a delicious hot dog.

Back at the gallery the lights are stronger and more colorful. The blues and reds and their whirling strobe belong to a firetruck. The sidewalk is full of the people who were once inside and are now confused. They had not planned to be huddled together on a sidewalk. They had not dressed for this. They are impressed by the truck but don’t want to show it. Now I hear the gallery alarm, a bell hitting itself like a penitent. I search the crowd outside for my wife and the baby until two figures catch my eye: my wife and the baby, alone in the gallery. Not alone for long, though, as the firemen march in. My wife speaks with one of them, and I can read confusion in her gestures as she struggles to process what the baby has unlocked in her artistic practice. We know there is no real danger of fire. I think we’re all feeling sheepish about our involvement in the art world when there are firemen about—even though firemen can be artists, and artists firemen. It’s easiest to be neither, and I recommend it. Some people are looking at me, wondering if I’ll run in, wondering if I’ll just stand there. I just stand there, and that earns some approval. It allows them to judge me, and once that is complete—it only takes a moment—to extend their tendrils of sympathy. I can tell the fireman is being kind to my wife. I can tell my wife is thinking about him in an intimate sense. I can tell my wife would like to take one painting off the wall and bring it outside with her. She hands the baby to the fireman. The fireman has never been in this situation. We see him through the windows of the gallery. The baby nestles into his arms. She is too old to be held like that, but the fireman is so big. He could hold anyone like that. He looks down at her. She will never remember this, the lights splashing across the buildings and streets and faces, her mother carefully unhanging from the huge wall a painting with a fresh divot. We will hold the memory for her, forever. The fireman cradling her with a gentleness he won not by training or study. He is special. The baby reaches up and touches his helmet. Her hand unlocked a new phase of a major painter’s career, and who knows what it could do for him. Her hand tells him, You’re doing good work, you bring something natural to all of this. The fireman touches her cheek with his large and gloved hand. That hand saves lives. It’s a moment I’ll never forget. She won’t remember it, but we’ll remind her for the rest of her life, the rest of our lives. Was I in danger? she’ll ask, trying to understand, and we’ll have to answer, No, not really. It wasn’t about that. It will be tricky for the fireman too. So you saved the baby, his family says, from fire, from death? No, he says, not exactly. It wasn’t about that. But for a moment, we were two people who understood one another. She unlocked a new phase of my firefighting career. But everyone has left the room. They miss his stories of melting metal, of noise and smoke. They don’t care what he found in the face of a child. So the fireman sits alone with his thoughts.

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.