The Conductor

Finding a wave in the ocean that suits his purpose, he raises his baton and has it dip a little lower. Next to him a towel is held down by books he won’t be reading. One is a biography of FDR. He loves politicians, but he has trouble believing things about them. Had he been born a woman, he would have been a terrific Mayor’s Wife. Or even a First Lady. Instead, he’s a Conductor. He raises the baton and the wave gains height. A surfer moves into its harmony.

Back in town, he’s treated to dinner by one of the nine distinguished women that travel with him everywhere and pay for his vacations. Judy is a retired cardiologist whose husband died during the pandemic, but not of Covid. He was crossing the street, and an ambulance hit him. It didn’t have its sirens on. No one was on the road, and so why wake anyone up? Judy’s husband had his headphones in, and he heard nothing. He was struck and killed instantly. While Judy and the Conductor are eating lobster rolls and clamcakes, he feels under the table for his baton and waves it back and forth for a few seconds. Judy coughs, and then feels a slight dizziness come over her. She excuses herself, leaving enough cash on the table to cover the bill, and makes her way back to the hotel. When she enters her room, there is her husband laying on the bed, reading a book about Napoleon. He asks her if she had a nice time at dinner with the Conductor, and she says she did. She gives him a kiss on the cheek, and then goes to take a bath. The water in the tub feels like papier-mâché and the heat coming off it feels like a bonfire’s comfort. She closes her eyes and tries to recalibrate. Her husband in bed feels a strange pain in his right knee.

At a bar on Thames Street, the Conductor meets a man who is escaping some bad news. He offers to buy him a drink, but the man says he doesn’t drink. They talk about music, and then they talk about making love, and then they go back to the man’s house on Spring Street and become acquainted with each other’s tattoos. The Conductor only has one, and it’s a quote in Latin that nobody can read, including him. The man has several tattoos, but the best one is of a frog in a top hat doing a soft shoe. The Conductor laughs, and then realizes that he left his baton back at the bar. He apologizes as he dresses, and when the man asks if they can exchange numbers, the Conductor says that wouldn’t be a good idea. He sees the disappointment on the man’s face, but there isn’t enough time to explain why a Conductor should never make love to the same person more than once, let alone begin to develop feelings for them. Anyway, he’s from out of town, and Omaha is a long, long way from the sea. He kisses the man as hard as he can, and then runs out the door.

The baton is right where he left it on top of the urinal. How careless of him. These vacations always lull him into a false sense of security. They have him believing that the world is mostly kind and considerate. That was how he wound up assaulted in Ascoli Piceno. Three thieves who took his money, but left his instrument. As they were walking away, he let his anger get the best of him, and he tapped his baton against the cobblestone three times. One for each of them. When the police found them the next day, they could only assume that they’d been attacked by wild animals. The thieves were known in town to be troublesome, from bad families, and perhaps destined for early graves. Still, it was gruesome. One had swallowed his own eyeballs. “What kind of an animal could make him do that,” one of the officers asked another, but nobody wanted to bother investigating. The Conductor was already on a train to Palermo by then. He was fingering the money he’d retrieved from the bodies of the thieves. It wasn’t in his nature to hurt anyone, but when you ask a baton for justice, you have no idea what that justice will look like. The Conductor guides the way. He does not play the music.

For no reason he can articulate, he gets out of bed sometime around two or two thirty in the morning and walks back to the man’s house. The doorbell is brass, and he’s hesitant to press it. Then, he hears a sound in the backyard, and walks around the side past a rake overgrown by grass and a rather expensive bike. In the backyard, the man he had met earlier is wearing a blue bathing suit and a pair of goggles. He’s standing over a large bucket of water pouring what appears to be salt into it in small increments. He approaches the man who looks up, but without any real surprise despite the hour and despite the Conductor’s refusal to exchange information earlier. He removes his goggles, and puts the salt down on the ground next to the bucket.

“May I,” the Conductor asks, and the man nods cautiously.

When the baton first enters the water, it isn’t sure what the objective is. Fresh water directly from the tap with salt added in? There’s no magic in that. There’s barely any science. Still, it goes off the Conductor, and the Conductor would like something important to happen. So, the baton is swirled around a few times, and suddenly, the bucket of water has grown five times larger, then ten, then twenty. The man grabs the Conductor, but the Conductor places a soft hand on his arm to let him know that what’s coming next will in no way endanger them. A boat appears in the bucket. Then fish. Then waves. An octopus. Several paddleboards. On the rim of the bucket, a lighthouse is constructed. The town falls away. The bucket replaces it.

All the while, there is no music except for the kind the Conductor summons in his mind. When the baton is finished, the Conductor looks at the man with generosity.

“Shall we,” he asks, and the man nods again, with less caution this time.

They climb up onto the edge of the bucket. A seagull squawks. A shark circles. A woman on a sailboat tells herself that she should have been a painter.

Two men jump into the water.

And one forgets his baton.