The Fish's Eye by Ian Frazier

Author:Ian Frazier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

(1997)

IN THE BRAIN

On one of the long motoring vacations my family used to take—five kids on a mattress in the back of the station wagon, our parents in front sharing the driving, heading down a highway in the Yukon Territories or on the Canadian prairies or some other far-flung place of the sort my father preferred—I saw my brother Dave writhing and wincing in pain. Of the siblings, I am the oldest and Dave the second oldest. In those days, I found certain of his sufferings to be of scientific interest: on occasion, I even did what I could to increase them just for my own information. In this case, I observed him screwing up his features, muttering to himself, and once in a while shaking his head like a horse in a cloud of flies. Finally I asked him what was wrong. “I can’t stop thinking about the words ‘inclined plane’!” he said. “No matter what I do they keep running through my head: inclined plane inclined plane inclined plane!” Our mother turned around and tried to comfort him, suggesting that he just think of something else, but Dave replied that trying to think of something else only caused him to think of inclined plane more. He sat there, beset and wretched, the golden inclined plains of Canada (or wherever) rolling past our station-wagon windows.

The day eventuated, as travel days do. We stopped at a point of interest, ate at a little restaurant in a little town, checked into a motel. After the bouncing on the beds, the putting on of pajamas, the listening to of stories read by our father, Dave and I got into one twin bed and the three younger kids into the other. As the lights went out, and our eyes adjusted to the single beam falling through the opening in the door between our parents’ room and ours, a wicked realization crossed my mind. “Dave,” I whispered, “inclined plane.” I was rewarded with a moan like the moan of the damned.

The old saying about history occurring first as tragedy and the second time as farce seems to work in reverse order for me. Jokes I make, often at someone else’s expense, have a way of turning up later as real and strangely less funny problems in my own life. My brother’s affliction proved to be contagious: getting a name or a phrase or a few bars of music stuck in my head has become one of the minor banes of existence for me. At certain moments I have practically prayed for a distraction to dislodge whatever happens to be stuck, much as hiccup sufferers hope for an unexpected and curative fright. For years I lived in New York City and had distractions to spare; in New York no idea survives in the mind for any length of time. But then I moved to a rural place where the distractions amounted to (1) the smell of pine needles and (2) time to put gas in the car.

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