THE BOOK OF PLANS by
Don Berry
The little Oregon coast town wasn't even on my map. I came over a massive headland about 4:30 in the afternoon and, after a two or three mile descent on Highway 101, saw a small sign that said Otter Rocks, with a white arrow pointing off toward the ocean.I turned off. The winter sun was already low in the sky, and I didn't feel like driving on into the dark. I remember the late year sunsets along this coast as spectacular, with the western horizon flooded with salmon reds and the eastern sky turning magenta, and thought I'd like to park someplace along the beach and watch nothing much happening not very fast.
My back ached. I've never been an enthusiastic tourist. When you travel alone there's not a lot of savor in that soup, and I've been alone for a couple of decades now, since the accident that took Lillian.
I didn't even recognize the name of the town, and that surprised me. Twenty years ago Lillian and I had spent a good deal of time on this coast together. This road was clearly older than that. Hell, the last repair on this road was older than that.
The village of Otter Rocks was a pleasant surprise, neater and better kept than I expected. Since the demise of logging in the Coast Range, most coast towns have decayed steadily into a ramshackle collection of peeling storefronts and boarded up windows. The trip down the coast had been depressing for that fact, because I remember better days. Maybe that's why I'm still drawn to the Oregon Coast; we've both seen better days.
I had intended this trip as a kind of sentimental journey, an attempt to recapture the enthusiasms of memory, and so far it was a dead bust. It was just making me sad, and reminding me of what I had lost.
The main street of the village ran at right angles to the beach, but there was a small road right at the beach, and I pulled the Toyota into a wide spot behind a drift log. I turned the engine off and leaned back to watch the great globe turn red out over the sea. I took some comfort in the idea that the ocean-end of day had not changed in twenty years, or probably twenty thousand.
As darkness flowed down the hills, I turned back into the village. The main street was surprisingly cheerful in the descending dusk; shop fronts sparkling with lights for the whole two blocks. A rather plain shop sign caught my eye as I drove slowly up the street. It simply said BOOKS. No owner's name, no title, and clearly not part of some gigantic mass-distribution chain. Just -- BOOKS. I liked that.
An ancient bell-on-a-wire tinkled as I pushed the door open, and I walked into the past. At the rear of the shop a grayish man of about my age sat at an old roll-top desk, his reading glasses perched well down his nose, wearing a striped work shirt and red suspenders that looked as though they'd seen a few days in the woods. The dog-eared paperback he was reading had a western scene on the cover. He nodded briefly as I came in, and returned his attention to his book.
Good. Not a big conversationalist.
The shop was perfection, at least in my mind. Bare wood floors so old the soft grain had been worn away by decades of boots, and the hard grain raised as though sandblasted. The racks stood about eight feet high, made of unpainted two-by-fours, and each of the three aisles boasted a wooden box you could stand on to see the higher shelves. As far as I could tell, there were no new books at all. No bestseller racks, no posters, no point-of-sale promotions.
Just BOOKS.
What I remember about bookstores as a child was the magical sense of unending potential. Everything worth knowing was there, somewhere. Books embodied mysteries, worlds of hidden value, universes unknown, and, above all, those evanescent ideas that could light up my twelve year old mind in sudden unexpected ways, like sparklers thrown into the air on the Fourth of July.
I haven't felt that way about books in a long time. Somewhere along the line books had ceased to tantalize me with What Might Be, and become the stolid repositories of What Was.
In that, I suppose books are simply the reflection of a life that gradually trades off What Might Be for What Was. In youth I was 90% What Might Be and 10% What Was; now, in middle age, I am 10% What Might Be and 90% What Was. I am not at all sure I am content with the trade.
My drifting thoughts were interrupted as the gray man lightly cleared his throat. "Anything in particular?" he said.
"Just looking, thanks," I said.
He nodded approvingly. "We have what you need," he said, and returned his attention to his paperback.
I smiled to myself. That was exactly it, I thought, that was how bookstores used to be for me. They had what I needed. Who, now, has what I need?
On the bottom shelf of the aisle where I stood, a small stack of oversize books and pamphlets lay flat. Most of them paper-covered, roughly the dimensions of an atlas, but of varying thickness. I thumbed the backs of them without looking carefully, but one thin portfolio caught my eye.
It was thin, covered with heavy, buff-colored paper. The lettering on the cover enchanted me immediately. The title was THE BOOK OF PLANS, outlined in a square-serif typeface, arched like a rainbow. The background drawing showed a young man with a cap -- a kind of generic Huck Finn. The typeface somehow had the feeling of the 1930's, and instantly reminded me of the precious treasury of the pre-WWII Boy Scout manuals.
It didn't appear to have more than a dozen or so pages, but when I opened it at random, pure nostalgia welled up in my throat.
PLAN VII - A BOY'S TREEHOUSE There on the page was a neatly drawn plan for a treehouse made of orange crates and rough lumber. Basically just a six by eight-foot platform, but it had a railing, orange crate storage, a beautifully angled shed roof to keep the rain off, and a closed box marked SPECIAL THINGS, with a hasp. You could put a padlock on SPECIAL THINGS. You could lock up your SPECIAL THINGS and sit on top of them and survey your lofty realm. It was perfect. God only knew where you could find orange crates these days, but that was trivial. It was purely wonderful.
The gray man cleared his throat again. "Sorry, sir," he said softly, "But I've got to close up here pretty quick. Wife's getting off work." He tilted his head to the side apologetically.
"Sure," I said. I looked at the cover of THE BOOK OF PLANS, where $3.50 was marked in light pencil.
"Find what you need?" the gray man said.
"Think so," I said. I took THE BOOK OF PLANS to his desk.
He turned it over, looking at the front and the back carefully, and nodded. "Good book," he said.
"Three fifty?" I said.
"Fifty percent off," he said. "Buck seventy five if you don't mind."
I smiled. "Guess I was lucky," I said.
"Oh," he smiled shyly back, "Everything's fifty percent off." He waved his hand broadly, taking in the whole store. "Going out of business sale."
"That's a pity," I said, laying two dollar bills on the desktop.
"Not really," he said, pushing a quarter back to me. "Been going out of business near forty years now. Not something you want to rush."
In the natural arithmetic of God the basic equation is: Life = Death. For every eighty billion (or so) arthropods that come into existence, eighty billion (or so) arthropods go out of existence.
It often puzzles me that the human species seems exempt from this perfectly simple rule. We seem to increase without limit, swarming across this tiny planet like a demonic virus, and every time you turn around there are more of us, and more, and more again. Perhaps we truly are a kind of planetary virus, since the size of a man in relation to the earth is like the size of a virus in relation to a man. Our lives are maintained by stealing life from the world around us, where other species only borrow.
I sometimes think this faux-immortalité is the reason we find it so difficult to come to terms with death. Deep in our souls we know it doesn't really apply to us. All those others; not us.
Nonsense. I know, I know. But I cannot explain why, after more than two decades, I have utterly failed to come to terms with Lillian's death.
We were married for only six years. Both of us were just past thirty when a random patch of black ice whipped her red Karmann-Ghia over the median and into the path of the tanker truck. I never even saw her body. The last moments I had of her were a cheery "Back in about an hour, hon," and the stiffly neutral phone call from the state patrol three hours later.
At that moment I died, too, though I was not to know it for some time. The searing weight of grief was so intense I did not even notice that I myself was missing from the scene.
I remember thinking it could take years before I would wake in the morning without pain, and it did. Then came the milestone of six years -- she had been gone as long as we had been together -- and as I had ceased to feel the intensity of loss, so had I ceased to feel anything at all.
I had closed my ambitious little accounting office in Portland after a couple of years -- how trivial my ambitions seemed without Lillian to share them -- changed states, changed cities, changed everything I could change and ended by changing nothing.
Instead of coming gradually back into life, life receded slowly from me, like the inevitable ebbing of the tide. Gradually I was transformed from an up-and-coming young accountant to a semi-retired bookkeeper, at the age of forty. In my little Seattle apartment on Capitol Hill I installed a computer and an old Xerox machine, and that was it. By forty-two or so I was simply waiting as quietly as possible for the death of my body to catch up with the death of spirit. And for a dozen years, that's how it's been.
I should not give the impression I was totally alone. I had company from time to time. But the company of acquaintances is not the company of friends.
"Not a bad wine, William," Marianne said to me after a simple meal of pasta in my apartment. Marianne is a widow a little older than I, who lives on the ground floor.
"Glad you like it," I said. "It was on sale."
Marianne shook her head. "Everything is so pricey these days, I just don't know how everything can keep going up and up. I suppose it's just getting old and all, but I can hardly keep track any more. The Social Security just doesn't go very far."
"I have a theory that what feels like the Right Price is what things cost when you were twenty-five," I said.
Marianne laughed. "I think you're right," she said. "Bread should be a quarter a loaf, you ought to be able to get a Cadillac for four thousand dollars. Lord, William, I remember the first time I saw a Pontiac for four thousand dollars and I thought it was a joke."
We were sitting on my couch with our after-dinner wine. Marianne pushed aside a small stack of the perpetual pile of magazines and put her wine glass on the coffee table.
"Oh, William," she said, "I meant to ask you if I could copy one of those embroidery patterns in your book."
"Embroidery patterns?" I said. "What embroidery patterns?" While I subscribe to a fair number of magazines, embroidery was not one of my little eccentricities.
"That Book of Plans," Marianne said. "I saw it last time I was here. It was on the table here. I'd like to do that sunburst pattern, it's like quilts I remember my grandmother making."
I'd returned from Otter Rocks with my nostalgic BOOK OF PLANS treasure and put it on my coffee table, where it had quickly begun to sink beneath the piles of incoming magazines. I'd only looked at it once or twice. It had given me a rather delightful sense of a past time, but I certainly didn't recall any embroidery patterns.
"I'm sure it's here," Marianne said, thumbing through the magazines. "Yes, here it is."
She extracted the thin folio from the pile with two fingers. Oddly, the cover looked different from my memory. It seemed to have changed from the light buff tan I recalled to a pinkish magenta, perhaps because of the electric light. The lettering, too, was slightly different, still an outline, but not quite so blocky, a little more graceful, a bit more feminine.
Marianne began turning pages, and on each page was something I had never seen before. Rather than the austere line drawing of A BOY'S TREEHOUSE, PLAN VII was divided into tiny squares like graph paper, with an embroidery design carefully marked out with colors. Marianne turned the pages rather rapidly, and no matter how many she turned, she did not come to the end. I had always assumed the BOOK OF PLANS had about a dozen or so pages, but Marianne must have turned thirty or forty before she came to the one she wanted.
The astonishing thing was that she never came to the boy's carpentry projects. Every page was like PLAN VII; a graphed embroidery design.
"This is it," she said, folding the cover back to show me the pattern of a sunburst. "Could you Xerox this for me, William?" She handed me the BOOK OF PLANS and smiled.
"Ah - ah, yes -- of course," I said. I took the book gingerly over to the Xerox , and copied PLAN XXXVII -- DAWN RADIANCE for her. I flipped through the pages quickly, and confirmed my first impression. The BOOK OF PLANS contained nothing whatever but embroidery designs.
I scarcely remember Marianne leaving. I was dazed by what had just happened. I don't know how long I sat staring at the cover, until, simply by the intensity of my gaze, it blurred, and I was uncertain exactly what I was seeing. I was suddenly rather fearful, wondering if I was becoming unstable, and the terrible thought of Alzheimer's disease crossed my mind. Could well-balanced people in their mid-fifties suddenly begin to hallucinate? Was this the beginning of something so devastating I could not even imagine it?
Tentatively, I picked up the BOOK OF PLANS, and thumbed it open...
PLAN VII - A BOY'S TREEHOUSE.
The ordinary is vastly more powerful than the miraculous. I wonder why we have such high regard for miracles, when they are so quickly overwhelmed by the ordinary. The miraculous, the mysterious, the inexplicable, can flash across your life, and before the image fades from your retina the ordinary has begun to reshape the world into bland, mundane earthiness. Today's "I saw a miracle" becomes tomorrow's "I thought I saw a miracle" and next week's "I remember when I thought I saw a miracle."
My first reaction to the miraculous transformation of the BOOK OF PLANS was heart-thumping astonishment. But within a day or so it was only the memory of astonishment, and that pig won't fly. The experience slipped easily into that vast compartment of my brain labeled "Things I don't understand and probably never will." Because every time I picked up the BOOK OF PLANS, it was the same book I had found in Otter Rocks; no more, no less.
The next -- episode -- came a few days later. I was wakened on a Saturday morning by a phone call from a client of mine, George Mackey.
George was a young man with a vigorous little plumbing supply business, and I did his books once a month. He was worried about a discrepancy in his accounts payable, and was desperate to get it resolved. I invited him over and took his hard copy to my work room to compare with the computer records. It turned out that one of his suppliers had inadvertently double-billed for a shipment, and there was no real problem.
When I went back in the living room George was pacing back and forth with the BOOK OF PLANS open in his hand.
"Bill," he said. "This is incredible! This is exactly what I need! Look at this!"
He spread the book open on the coffee table. The page heading said FULLY BATTENED LUG RIG. There was a row of about six squarish diagrams criss-crossed with lines that meant nothing to me. The caption under the diagrams said "Alternative methods of reeving the hauling parrels."
"Looks sort of like the sail of a Chinese junk," I said.
George is one of the innumerable boat crazies in Seattle, and spends his every spare moment thinking about wind and water.
"That's exactly what it is! But nobody knows exactly how they did this. And the next page is a dozen different forms of euphroe, and I've never even see half of them!"
"George, I don't understand a single word of this," I laughed.
"Bill, I've got to have this. I'll get it back by Monday."
"I'll Xerox whatever you want," I said. "But I think I'll keep the book here. It's kind of rare."
When he left with his copies of half a dozen incomprehensible pages, he folded them as though they were printed on gold leaf. His eyes were slightly glazed, and his passionate delight was enough to make a rock smile. He'd forgotten completely about his accounts payable. No accounting for tastes, as they say, or perhaps no taste for accounting. Little bookkeeper's joke, there.
After the episode with George, I cleared the stacks of magazines off the coffee table, leaving only the BOOK OF PLANS. I had no idea how the word spread, but I began to have three or four unexpected visitors a week. Often they appeared slightly dazed, as though they didn't know how they had come to my apartment, or why they were there. I quickly learned that all I had to do was go out of the room on some pretext or other, leaving my "guests" alone with the BOOK OF PLANS.
A pizza delivery boy found the plan for some kind of gadget to attach to an electric guitar.
Another client, an archeologist at the University, found plans for Ur of the Chaldees, Chichen Itza, Troy, Knossos, and every other major city of archeological importance.
A thin, dark man with a foreign accent found a plan whose text was in some variety of Arabic. When I asked him what it was, he simply raised one long, bony finger in the air and smiled. "Thank you, sir, thank you, thank you. You are a true Happiness Giver."
That phrase struck me, and returned to my mind often in the days and weeks that followed. A Happiness Giver. Not too bad a role, that.
With one apparent exception, everyone who consulted the BOOK OF PLANS found what they needed, though it often appeared to surprise them.
The exception, if indeed it was an exception, was a wild-eyed young man with orange and purple hair whose seance with the book produced twelve pages of diagrams captioned in an alphabet that was clearly not of this earth. I could not even focus on the lines of print. The text seemed to swim before my eyes, as though layer after layer of writing were floating to the surface beneath every line.
"Can you read this?" I asked him.
The young man shook his head. "Not right now," he said. "I think it's Arcturan. Maybe Vegan."
"What is it?"
He looked around the room as though wary of spies, and in a hushed voice he confided, "I'm working on a Time Machine."
"Ah," I said. "Well -- good luck, I guess."
"Thanks," he said.
After about a month of "guests", I began to hear of consequences. In retrospect, I think I had been dreading this. I have never been a religious man, but, like everyone else in this culture, I am steeped in a profound suspicion of mysterious gifts. All too often stories of those who seek mysteries take a diabolical turn. Some hidden retribution usually accompanies the granting of wishes, and THE BOOK OF PLANS was clearly in the wish-granting business.
Marianne's embroidery of DAWN RADIANCE was shown in a rather exclusive art gallery and sold immediately for $750. In addition, the gallery offered her a contract for as many embroideries as she could produce, and the Seattle Weekly ran an effusive profile of this elderly woman who had turned folk art into "true" art.
George took me for an exquisite sail to the San Juan islands, and told me he was quitting the plumbing business. On the basis of his "unique knowledge of the craft", he was being financed by a Hong Kong consortium of investors to create a line of finely crafted yachts based on the ancient Chinese junk.
The pizza delivery boy gave me tickets to a concert his rock band was giving. It seemed their "new sound" had made them the rage of the Seattle music scene, and resulted in a record contract with a major firm.
The archeologist from the University was being credited with the "most important discoveries of the past hundred years," when his plans of ancient cities guided the diggers to unanticipated treasures and unhoped for pleasures.
I did not hear directly of the orange-and-purple haired boy and his Time Machine. I chose to believe he was now with his Arcturan colleagues, somewhen else. I wished him well.
Everyone who consulted the BOOK OF PLANS came away with something they needed. The operative word was "needed," because I came to realize there was a distinction between what each of them wanted, and what they needed. Sometimes they were the same, and sometimes not. But in every case, the readers were in a position to use what they found.
In every case, that is, but one; myself.
At first I had been swept along by the miraculous, the wonderful, the unexpected. But as I have noted, even the miraculous grows mundane in time. As the miracle of the BOOK OF PLANS became commonplace in my life, a dissatisfaction began to tickle at the back of my mind, and as time passed it became more frequent and more nagging.
What about me? What's in it for me?
I am not proud of this. But I cannot deny it was there: what's in it for me?
Why should I, the owner of the gift, be the only one who could not profit from it? As I watched life after life being transformed and amplified and illuminated by the BOOK OF PLANS, I became increasingly resentful that I was excluded from this world of seemingly infinite possibility.
This resentment was like a dark cloud that began to gather over my days, and in time, my nights. I even began to resent the gratitude I saw in the eyes of my "guests" as they left my apartment with their treasures; I alternated between feeling ill-treated and being appalled at my own greed. It was a side of myself I had not known existed.
I finally resolved that if the BOOK OF PLANS would not give to me freely, I would find a way to force it.
The only thing I could find in my mind that I truly wanted was -- Lillian. I wanted the life that had been taken from me two decades ago by that sudden explosive intrusion of chaos into my world of order. For twenty years the quality of my life had been shaped by the aching void at its center -- the absence of Lillian. And every time my mind brushed against that void, I recoiled, unable to face the loss that pierced my heart like a scorpion's sting.
Now, I began consciously and intentionally to fill that void. I began to focus my attention on the images of memory; Lillian coming, Lillian going, Lillian laughing, Lillian crying, Lillian in sex, Lillian in melancholy. I deliberately conjured up those images I had avoided for so long, like a meditation, until my waking hours were filled with remembered images of Lillian, and my dreams as well. This went on over weeks.
Then, one Tuesday morning while I was making breakfast, I glanced at the coffee table where the BOOK OF PLANS rested quietly. It was there, the familiar buff rectangle of paper, but there seemed to be a kind of shimmering light around it. I found I was holding my breath, and let it out, slowly, controlling the emotion that suddenly leaped up in my throat.
As calmly as I could manage I moved the frying pan off the burner, and turned the stove off, leaving two eggs only partially cooked. I walked over to the coffee table and sat down before the BOOK OF PLANS. The shimmering light was not really a visible phenomenon, but rather an impression, the kind of flickering impression sunlight leaves on water.
My hand was trembling as I turned the cover. The first page was captioned
PLAN 0 -- LILLIAN Beneath the caption was a graphic image I recognized immediately;the double helix of DNA. It was`similar to many images of its kind I had seen, but seemed to -- move -- internally. In slow and elegant motion, the spiral turned before my eyes, revealing the ladder-like connections between the two helices. If I concentrated on a particular connection, the vision expanded in detail until I could see structures that were invisible before, tiny relationships that had been too small to perceive, but now were revealed clearly.
I turned the page, and another image of the same kind filled the next, a great double helix turning slowly like a galaxy in endless space. Another page, another helical galaxy. And another. And another. And another.
No matter how many pages I turned, the same images revolved slowly, imprinting my mind with their light over and over and over again, without end; the genetic Plan, the abstract code of existence, the ground of being.
I had no question whatever that this was the true genetic description of that person I knew as Lillian, accurate and exact in every respect.
But as certainly as I perceived that fact, I knew that Lillian was absent from that genetic code as she was absent from my life. No matter how perfect the physical description, there was no Being. Where then, was Lillian?
As I focussed my attention on the swirling spirals an upwelling sense of urgency filled my chest. Rising from beneath the diagrams, I almost thought I could see her face, like a submerged dream floating to the surface of my mind after years in darkness and loneliness.
. . . then, suddenly, I remembered. . .
"Damn," I said. "Damn, damn, damn. I did it again."
I closed the BOOK OF PLANS.
The two lane blacktop down into the village of Otter Rocks was punctuated by a long-faded centerline and cross-hatched with unrepaired cracks.
The main street of the village ran at right angles to the beach, but there was a small road right at the beach, and I pulled the Toyota into a wide spot behind a drift log. I turned the engine off and leaned back to watch the great globe turn red out over the sea. I took some comfort in the idea that the ocean-end of day had not changed in twenty years, or probably twenty thousand.
As darkness flowed down the hills, I turned back to the village. The main street was surprisingly cheerful in the descending dusk; shop fronts sparkling with lights for the whole two blocks. A rather plain shop sign caught my eye as I drove slowly up the street. It simply said BOOKS. No owner's name, no title, and clearly not part of some gigantic mass-distribution chain. Just -- BOOKS. I liked that.
An ancient bell-on-a-wire tinkled as I pushed the door open, and I walked into the past. At the rear of the shop Teacher sat at an old roll-top desk, his reading glasses perched well down his nose, wearing a striped work shirt and red suspenders that looked as though they'd seen a few days in the woods. The dog-eared paperback he was reading had a western scene on the cover. I pretended not to recognize him.
"Do you buy used books?" I asked.
He looked sharply up at me, peering over the top of his reading glasses.
"Sometimes," he said. "What do you have?"
"Just my little joke," I said. "It's me. Messenger."
"Very funny," Teacher said. "Did you deliver the Gifts?"
"Of course. But I have to say I couldn't make head nor tail of them. I didn't even get a glimmer of the Design this time."
Teacher shrugged. "Messenger doesn't have to understand. Just deliver."
"Oh, I know. But sometimes I get at least an idea of the Design. Couldn't you - couldn't you give me a clue, just once?"
Teacher smiled. He turned to the next page of his cowboy novel and said, "Don't know myself. Those Gifts don't even start linking for thirty of their years, and the Design doesn't appear for another sixty."
"Thanks for nothing," I said.
"My pleasure," Teacher said, grinning. "And how about you? Game over?"
"No. I blew it. Again. I bought into the whole illusion. I always get hooked into believing I am the character I play. It's the whole Ego thing -- it's so damn convincing. I just can't seem to see through it while I'm playing the Game."
Teacher laughed. He rubbed his stubbly chin. "Let's see. Since you came to me you've gotten attached to sensual delight, right?"
"Right."
"And then wealth. And poverty one time. And ambition. What was it this time?
"Grief," I said. "I got so hooked on my own grief there was absolutely no way I could let go of the illusion. Sometimes I think I'll never get through this phase."
"Many never do," Teacher said philosophically. "But we all play the Game, nevertheless. Ah, well. Live and learn, Messenger. Live and learn."
end
The Book of Plans
©1995 Don Berry