The Full Catastrophe Read online

  A thought struck him—hard. The Pillow bastards’ mysterious absence might not have been so mysterious. Maybe they saw the F. F. Sweet article and decided to scrap the interview. Who wanted to interview a loser? He imagined a gang of them hurrying away from the office, sneaking out of the building to avoid him, maybe even passing him on the sidewalk and wondering to each other if that was the preposterous job candidate and giggling as they ducked into a bar.

  With this image snuffing the last ember of his self-esteem, Cook took the airport exit, crossed the highway, and drove to the Centurion Inn.

  The first thing to catch his eye in the lobby was a tall, thin, sad-faced man standing near the windows that looked out to the swimming pool. He had whirled around when Cook entered, and now advanced toward him, his eyebrows raised so high they sent wrinkles up his bald head to its very crown.

  “Jeremy Cook?” he asked. “Jeremy Cook?”

  “Yes?” Cook watched him approach. He wore a gray suit of overwhelming dullness. As if to make up for it, a gaily colored beach towel was wedged under one arm.

  “Oh! Thank goodness!” the man said. “I’m Roy Pillow.” He thrust out his hand.

  With profoundly mixed feelings, Cook took his hand. “I missed you at your office.”

  Pillow frowned. This erased the wrinkles in the top half of his head and concentrated them just above his eyes. “My office?”

  “I’ve just come from there. I left a note for you.”

  “Why?”

  “So that you would know I’d been there,” Cook said with a little laugh of impatience.

  “Why didn’t you assume you would simply tell me, as you have just done?”

  “Because I didn’t know I would see you.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “What?” Cook said, a little too loudly. He glanced to the front desk, where the clerk was watching them with undisguised interest.

  “I arranged a meeting here,” said Pillow, casting his eyes around the lobby.

  “If you did, you didn’t arrange it with me, and I’m the one who counts.”

  Pillow smiled quizzically. “But I did. In my letter.”

  Cook immediately produced the letter from his pocket. Pillow took it and read it, gently rocking back and forth from the waist up, as if pleasantly smitten by his own prose. He handed it back to Cook and said, “It’s there in black and white.”

  “Are you kidding?” Cook was getting loud again, and he had to throttle down. “Listen. I’ll read it. ‘Dear Dr. Cook: Thank you for sending your dossier. I shall be delighted to meet you at four-thirty on Friday, June first. Please advise if this time is problematical. Sincerely, Roy Pillow, Director. P.S.: I have booked a room for you at the Centurion Inn on Williams Road, directly across from the airport.’” He looked up at Pillow, who of all things was beaming. “There is absolutely no basis for your interpretation of this letter,” Cook said sharply.

  Pillow flinched and his smile disappeared. “Oh come now,” he said. “You’re not going to maintain—”

  “If you wanted me to meet you here at four-thirty, you should have said so.”

  Pillow shook his head. He seemed genuinely puzzled. “Why do you insist on pursuing this?”

  “Because you’re wrong, that’s why. And you won’t admit it.”

  “Would it help if I admitted it?” Before Cook could answer, Pillow looked at his watch and said, “Actually, I’m afraid we’ll have to table the subject. Is that all right with you?”

  Pillow sounded so conciliatory that Cook felt all alone with his anger. “Sure,” he said. “Hell, I’m willing to drop it.”

  “No, no. That wouldn’t be right. It’s just that I have a plane to catch”—Pillow paused, then quickly went on—“which is obviously why I booked you a room here in the first place, so far away from the office. Don’t you see?”

  “That doesn’t prove a thing,” said Cook, suspicious again.

  “I didn’t mean it to prove anything. I was just telling you that I have a plane to catch.”

  “No you weren’t. You were sneaking in a final bit of support for what you think your letter says, even though it doesn’t support it at all and even though we agreed to drop the subject.”

  Pillow put his hands out before him in the air, palms down. He looked like Jesus calming the waters. Cook focused his irritation on Pillow’s stupid beach towel, still firmly wedged under his arm.

  “Let’s get you settled,” said Pillow.

  “Fine,” said Cook. He turned to the clerk, who managed to greet them with formulaic friendliness, despite the fact that he must have considered both of them chuckleheads. Cook gave him his name. As the clerk typed it into the computer, Cook suddenly wondered about Pillow. Was he acting this way because he had seen that bit of nastiness by F. F. Sweet, or was he just permanently weird?

  “I show no reservation under ‘Cook,’” the clerk said.

  Pillow said, “Oh come now.”

  “I’ll check again.” The clerk cleared the screen, retyped Cook’s name, and shook his head slowly.

  “Try ‘Pillow’ then. Mrs. Pillow made the reservation, and she may have used our name.”

  The clerk tried it. “No sir. Nothing under that name.”

  “Oh come now,” said Pillow. “There must be some mistake.”

  This was true, thought Cook. “Do you have any vacancies?” he asked the clerk.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Fine.” Cook turned to Pillow. “No problem.”

  Pillow was frowning. “I don’t understand what can have happened.” He continued to brood and mutter while Cook registered. Cook got his room key, picked up his suitcase, and asked Pillow where he was going.

  “Why, to your room. I intend to interview you.”

  “I meant your flight,” Cook said. “You mentioned an airplane flight.”

  “Oh. That. Seattle.” Pillow’s delivery was sharp. It was as if he were flying to Seattle to face charges of some kind. The subject was closed.

  The two men went out into the central courtyard and began to circle around to Cook’s room, which was on the far side. Cook saw Pillow cast his eyes longingly at the pool. In light of Pillow’s beach towel, Cook suddenly felt obliged, as host in this context, to offer Pillow a swim, and he did.

  “No time now,” Pillow said curtly.

  Cook decided that the only way they would have a normal conversation would be if he acted as if he were interested in the job, though he no longer was.

  “I once heard a paper given by someone at the Pillow Agency,” Cook said. “It was on language death. It was—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Pillow.

  “Is he still with you? It was quite an interesting paper.”

  “No,” said Pillow. “He pursued his subject to its logical end.”

  “Oh.”

  Evidently fearing that Cook hadn’t understood, Pillow said, rather loudly, “He’s dead.”

  “Yes, I see,” Cook said quickly. “I’m sorry to hear that.” He stopped at the door of his room and took the key from his pocket. “Here we are.”

  “He was a troublemaker,” said Pillow. “I made a mistake when I hired him. Since then I have had to be ve-ry, ve-ry careful.”

  Cook nodded as he opened the door. His thought: “This guy is a nut for power.” Then he revised it: “This guy is a nut.”

  Pillow walked in after Cook and sat down at the tiny table in front of the heavily draped window. “I don’t mean to rush you,” he said, rushing him.

  “It’s all right,” said Cook, taking the other chair. “Let’s get started.”

  Pillow folded his hands on the table and seemed to study them. Then he spoke: “In the life of the mind, criticism plays a vital role; feedback, be it positive or negative, should be encouraged, not discouraged.”

  This threadbare truism, delivered in a form befitting it (one subjunctive, one passive, one tediously stress-marked antithesis), had an instant sedative effect on Cook, and he felt himself s
lipping fluidly out of his chair like a narcoleptic.

  “How does a man climb a mountain?” Pillow asked, rousing Cook to semiconsciousness. Pillow kept his eyes on his hands. He made them rise, still folded, a few inches above the table. “He ascends and establishes a camp and stays the night. From there he ascends to another camp. Then to another. And another.” Pillow signified these ascents with equidistant elevations of his folded hands. They had reached eye level now, and Cook had to sit up in his chair to see Pillow’s face over them. “He is doing fine, our climber,” Pillow continued. “He is making good progress up the mountain. And then? A wise old mountain dweller comes to him and says, ‘You cannot climb the mountain this way. It is too dangerous. You must go a different way.’”

  Cook found himself sadly disappointed by this news. He had gotten behind that mountain climber and was tickled by his progress.

  “At first the climber disbelieves the old man.”

  Yeah, thought Cook. Press on.

  “He challenges the old man.”

  Yeah. That’s the ticket. Throw the old fart off the mountain.

  “He even sets out the next morning in defiance of the old man’s warning.”

  Cook wondered what happened to the old man. Did he spend the night? Was there room in the tent for him? Was there enough tea and chocolate bars and stuff like that for him?

  “But soon the climber sees that the old man spoke the truth. The route is fraught with … with danger.”

  Cook sensed an illusion-threatening lack of actual mountaineering experience on the part of the narrator.

  “Back he must go.” Pillow’s folded hands dropped a notch.

  Maybe the old guy was waiting back at camp for him. Maybe he cooked the climber a nice hot lunch, just to show there were no hard feelings. Cook hoped so.

  “Back. Back. Back.” Pillow’s folded hands descended until they lay at rest on the table. “But was the journey a waste?”

  You tell me, sport.

  “I say no. For the climb had to be attempted at that very spot. No other ascent could have been tried first. The climber had to fail.”

  Pillow smiled wanly and turned to Cook’s window, even though the drapes were drawn tight. Cook wondered if the interview was over now.

  “Let’s say that our dramatis personae are scholars,” said Pillow, turning back to Cook and looking him in the eye. “The young climber was brave, but he was wrong. The old man had to point this out. In this particular area—on this turf, you might say—the old man was the expert, and the climber was in need of correction.”

  Cook felt his stomach and intestines switch places. He imagined himself, young and impetuous, standing at his final mountain camp, gazing upward and contemplating his final assault. But look there! Look there! It’s F. F. Sweet, bustling toward him across the frozen waste, his rucksack stuffed with Kickapoo counterexamples and a shit-eating grin on his face.

  “Why don’t you just come right out and say it?” Cook snapped.

  “Very well,” said Pillow. “If you wish.” He took his beach towel from the bed, where he had set it, and began to unroll it on the table. He did it rather neatly, beginning a new roll at the end where he clutched the towel. Cook watched, fascinated, and waited for Pillow’s swimming suit and jockstrap to plop out before him—props in some new allegory, perhaps. There came the swimming suit and—no jockstrap? Didn’t he wear one? From inside the swimming suit Pillow took some printed sheets of flimsy onionskin. Pillow looked up at Cook. “How is your Icelandic?” he asked.

  Cook had looked at the language maybe once in his life. “Rusty,” he said, wondering deeply what was going on.

  “Here. Try this.”

  Pillow held out the sheets. Cook took them and searched for his own name in the impenetrable text, under the assumption that his Kickapoo adverb theory was being denounced from all corners of the globe.

  “Strong language, eh?” said Pillow.

  “I’m having some trouble,” Cook said, and at that moment he spied the name “Pillow.”

  “Oh? It must be the dialect. But you get the essence.”

  “Not really,” Cook said. “You’ll have to help me.”

  Pillow smiled. “I know you’re just being modest, but I’ll play along. You’re quite a character. What we have here is a rebuttal of the very paper you mentioned earlier, the one on language death delivered by my former employee. He had it published shortly after he delivered it. Among the languages he listed as dead was the Icelandic dialect of Schnorrfark. This article takes issue with that claim, and rather convincingly—it is written in Schnorrfark by a living, viable speaker of it. There’s a whole townful of them, and I assure you that the Pillow Agency is not welcome there.”

  Cook laughed heartily. Pillow seemed surprised at this, but then he joined in, his face and bald head instantly reddening.

  “Now you know the worst about us,” Pillow said, still laughing. Then he became serious. It was a sudden plunge. “To tell you the truth, my feeling is that to be challenged in print is actually a distinction. Even if one is shown to be wrong, at least one has said something worth addressing.”

  “Exactly,” said Cook. Evidently Pillow didn’t have a clue about Cook’s own recent experience in that line. “As a matter of fact—”

  “Now that I’ve done my duty, so to speak, let me say that I was delighted to receive your application.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ve followed your work closely over the years, Jeremy. I must confess I barely knew the field of linguistics existed until I read The Woof of Words. Your book led me to others, but I’m still a newcomer. I just coordinate things for my people out in the field. I’m rather a linguistic ignoramus, to tell the truth. Please don’t expect me to know anything. Please don’t.”

  “I promise I won’t,” Cook said in a voice so friendly he wished he heard himself use it more often.

  “As I said, your book led me to others, and in a sense it led to the Pillow Agency. You aren’t exactly a Founding Father, but I think of you as the John Locke behind the Founding Fathers.”

  “My, my.”

  “You can imagine my delight when you wrote to us. Now, whatever you were paid at the Wabash Institute, I’m willing to better it by twenty-five thousand.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  Cook was pleased, even though he had no idea what this would total. He had always had a problem remembering his salary, what with the way it changed every year.

  “Well?” said Pillow. “I’m eager to get this settled.”

  A sudden cautionary impulse made Cook say, “May I sleep on it?”

  A wave of disappointment crossed Pillow’s face. He was flustered, but he fought it and rallied. “Of course. Sleep. Sleep three nights, right here.” Pillow patted the bed like a jolly innkeeper. “I’ll pick up the tab for the room. If your answer is yes, come to work Monday morning. I don’t have to tell you where the office is.” Pillow chuckled somewhat normally. “If the answer is no, stay away. I will construe your absence as a polite decline of the offer, and no hard feelings. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds fine. I don’t really know much about your agency. Do you have any sort of—”

  “I’ll have something sent here for you to read.” Pillow looked at his watch and stood up. “I really must run now.”

  “You know,” Cook said, rising with him, “in the spirit of confession, I should tell you about an article that just appeared about my work.”

  “Oh?” Pillow said. “How nice.”

  “Well … If what you said is true, yes, maybe it is nice.” Cook told all, surprised at how much relief he got from it. Almost all, anyway. He didn’t mention what he had done with Pillow’s copy of the journal.

  “Linguistic Inquiry, you say?” Pillow asked. He was a little less amused than Cook had hoped.

  “Yes! That’s what’s such a killer about it—one of the top journals in the field.”

  “Mmm,” said Pil
low.

  “Your Icelandic thing is peanuts compared to where I got blasted. Hell, you got off easy. Who cares what comes out of a culture that has only four or five surnames to pass around, right?” Cook laughed raucously.

  “Yes, yes,” Pillow said. He seemed distracted as he slowly headed for the door. “A long article, you say?”

  “Oh! Endless!”

  “Mmm.” Pillow opened the door, then half turned toward Cook. Without looking at him, he said, “I’ve already offered you the job. I can’t very well withdraw the offer. Good Lord—Linguistic Inquiry. It’s a nightmare.” He pressed his lips together and inhaled sharply through his nose. “I’m stuck. That’s all there is to it—stuck.”

  Pillow didn’t shake Cook’s hand. He simply turned away and left. He crossed the courtyard, muttering and shaking his head.

  Cook stood in the doorway, frozen, holding himself in check, deliberately pausing at the threshold of remorse and despair. Then he plunged headlong into the abyss.

  Three

  At the bottom of the deep end of the Centurion Inn swimming pool, Jeremy Cook hated his life. It was Sunday afternoon. He had resisted this feeling for two days, but it finally defeated him at an unexpected moment—after a deep dive out of the hot Missouri sunshine into the shock of cool water, performed with a run and a bounce and a splash that trumpeted joie de vivre. The sudden silence, the pressing weight of water, the hostility of the enveloping medium—these combined to cave him in, depressing him so much that it seemed unlikely that his body could rise to the surface. But it did, and he dragged himself sadly out of the pool.

  Motels are venues of negative feelings. Thus it had been a mistake the night before for him to pause and reflect on how lonely he was after just one day away from his old milieu, and what this meant for his alternative career plan of splendid isolation in northern Wisconsin. It had also been a mistake that morning to check—again—in the motel office for the package of promised literature from the Pillow Agency (“Nothing yet, sir”), and to ask if anyone had indicated they would be paying for his room (“We were rather hoping you would do that, sir”).