I never know how long they’ll let me stay. I’ve been working in this mall now for about six weeks. So far, so good. As long as they consider me a legitimate business, I’m fine. When they start suspecting me of shady business practices, or some unsatisfied customer complains about me, then it isn’t long before I’m packing up my motor home and looking for another place to work.
Trouble is: I don’t fit into any one’s categories. I unravel knots. I’ve been doing it year round since I retired. I discovered my gift as a youngster. My sisters brought me their necklaces, with the delicate chains snarled in hopeless knots, and I could almost always untangle them, working under a bright lamp in my favorite overstuffed chair, deftly teasing the chain out of its dilemma with long slender fingers.
It isn’t always easy. Some knots take just a minute or two; others require hours or even several days of patient, careful deciphering. There are two tricks to success, I have surmised: The first trick is to look at the tangle objectively. One must analyze it; map it out. It is, first of all, a mathematical problem. The second trick is patience. This is much harder than analysis. Some people have the vision it takes to see the way out of the knot; very, very few have the tremendous patience necessary actually to do it. I have both, and have possessed them all my life. I believe I am the only person in the world who has made detanglement a successful business enterprise.
My lifestyle is transient, but I like the mall bunny scene. The people stream by with swinging paper sacks, the latest hairdo, and clothes of all styles and colors. I enjoy watching them, wondering about them; imagining how they drive home and carry all their new stuff into their already over-stuffed houses. I don’t own a house, but I have a very comfortable recreation vehicle that I call home. I have everything I need to survive, and comfortably so. At each new location, I stash my rolling house in the parking lot of a store somewhere, and I set up my little booth inside. Occasionally, like the place I’m working now, I set up in the same mall for several weeks in a row, but only if I can get away with it. Sooner or later someone will ask me to move on. Apparently I am indefinable. Nobody knows if detanglement is a real business or not. I have no licenses of any kind. It’s fine with me though — I would rather change the scenery and meet new people. Everywhere I go, I make new friends. I don’t lack for interesting conversation; my life is exquisitely gratifying. I am astonished at how much people have at stake in their various entanglements.
I am busy all year long. Children and adults alike bring me all sorts of things: balls of ribbon, chains and strings, necklaces, wads of stuck-together Christmas lights. One woman brought a rosary once. She said times were tough in her life, and she flung it aside in a fit of temper. Ah, the tangles people get themselves into because of anger! If it weren’t for rage, my business would have fizzled long ago.
I have a cozy waist-high cubicle, painted in large blocks of primary colors, with a wide wooden counter running all around except on one side where I have affixed a red door on hinges, so I can get in and out. I require a location with electrical access, because I must have my computer and a strong light. I designed my own Tangle MappingÓ computer program. It is set up so I can use a digital camera as a data source. I take several pictures of the tangled object, and then feed the images into my Tangle Mapping program. A series of images are subsequently produced on the screen. I can choose to look at the tangle either two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally. In the flat view, I can change the angle to see under and over the tangled object. I then switch the image to the three-dimensional graphic, and this view is the one I spend the most time with because it is the most helpful. In two dimensions, I can see the shape of the mess. It is like looking at a map. In three dimensions, I can actually see which strands are behind and between which others. Finally the mapping option gives me a list of options, each with step-b-step directions and an accompanying map.
I have often wondered about a fourth dimension. Scientists say the fourth dimension is time itself. There isn’t, they say, any such thing as an absolute Now. Now is dependent on where one is. Now moves along with us, as it were, leaving a trail that we can see if we can just figure out how to access it. The previous Nows, as well as our Nows yet-to-come: They are all as real as today’s Now. I have often thought — and prayed for — a way to find them all at once; a way to connect up with the history and the destination of a knot. Then, I think perhaps I could see the path that led the knot to its particular dilemma today, and thus how to unravel each and every one exactly.
Although my program always gives me its own game plans on how to detangle, I mix and match its suggestions and I delve into the job based on a combination of my instincts, patience and the data from the computer analysis.
My unique occupation has earned me plenty of attention. Years ago, I hit upon the business name of “Dr. Knotts”. It’s easy to remember, and it sums up what I do every day. Several times a year, I am approached by a reporter who wants to do a cute little feature on me. I am comic relief for their papers, I think. I have often seen my face smiling back at me under a heading of “On the Light Side…” or some such nonsense. Few people realize how vital my job is. Just a month ago or so, a young teenage girl wandered up to my booth in a Galleria in a big city. She had brought a little necklace with her.
I smiled at her. “Well, well, well. This looks too small to be yours…”
“It is. Or, it was. I was just a baby when I was given that necklace.”
“Looks like it’s been shoved in the back of a drawer for some time.”
“Yes. It has.”
“Have you thought of just buying a whole new chain for it? Pretty little heart, nothing wrong with the pendant –“
“Oh no! I — I want the original chain. I know it’s not the greatest…but….my father gave me this necklace. It’s the only thing he ever gave me, and I want it —all of it — just the way it is.“
I smiled and nodded. I hear this sort of thing all the time. “I understand completely. I’ll see what I can do here. Probably will take a little while –“
“Do you mind if I just sit here and watch you work?”
Not the first time I’ve heard that either. “No! Not at all! You make yourself comfy, and I’ll just pop this necklace over on my graph table here…”
She sat down on a tall stool that I always place on the customer side of my booth, just for this purpose. She leaned on my wide counter and propped up her pretty rosy face with her hand, elbow on the counter. She was dressed for winter in a soft white angora sweater and brown suede slacks. Her honey-colored hair was teased into hundreds of bouncy shoulder-length curls, and her large brown eyes glowed with youth and the wonder of a whole lifetime ahead of her. She smelled warm and sweet: Vanilla perfume, I think.
I held the slender camera up to my face, and bent my knees a bit until my eyes were level with the necklace on my graph table. It was small, and very simple. A gold heart, real gold from the look and the feel of it, about an inch in diameter, hung from a small clasp on the fine gold chain. The gold chain was pulled here and there from someone trying to unravel the huge hopeless-looking knot that consumed nearly its entire length.
I snapped a few shots of it from different angles: directly above, each side; I turned the snarled filament over and repeated the shots. I sat down and plugged the camera wire into the computer so I could process the photos for my Tangle Mapping program.
“My mom and dad got divorced when I was only two. I haven’t seen him for a while. My parents never did get to the place — you know, how some divorced couples are friends after a while? Not my parents. They can’t get within a mile of each other, they start fighting! So I guess my dad just decided to stay away for good, or something.”
“Pretty complicated mess. How long has it been like this?”
“Since I was just a baby. I’m an only child. When you’re the kid, it’s so hard. You feel — guilty. Helpless. Like life is running you instead of you running your life.”
“You tried to get this unraveled, yourself, ever?”
“Uh huh. But I gave up trying. There’s nothing I can do. I didn’t start it; I was just born into it.”
The map screen was on now. “Ah. Look. See how the strands are enmeshed? We’ll just follow the lines, starting with the smaller clasp end — that end’s easier to pull through the knotted parts — until we get all the way through it.”
“How do you do that?” She leaned the top half of her body down on the counter, flattening out her crossed arms on the wooden surface, and stretched her neck forward. She had not a trace of self consciousness. She was filled with genuine curiosity.
“It just takes observation, patience and determination.”
“Like, you have to be committed to finding the solution.” Her bright eyes flashed at me. Smart girl.
“That’s it. Commitment.”
“There’s some things you just can’t undo yourself though. And I know, because I’ve tried and tried.”
I had my detangling instruments flying in and out of the knot now. I had to design my own tools, when I first started this stuff, years ago. I have a pair of long nosed pliers with a beak no bigger than a pair of sewing needles, a couple of awl-like wands that are just slightly thicker than the pliers, and a set of magnifying lenses of varying strengths, similar to the lenses a jeweler uses for appraising gems. Now I was pulling, very gently, on the middle of the knotted mess with the needle-like pliers, my gaze leaping back and forth between the necklace filament in my hand and the computer screen. The clump loosened and began to give.
“Wow! It’s coming apart!”
“Mmm hmmm.” I was concentrating so hard, my forehead felt hot and damp. Suddenly I found the central knot — every tangle has one — and the chain came loose. It was wound around itself many times. I lifted the whole thing up by the clasp and let it twist around and around in the air. The young girl’s eyes shone as she watched, entranced.
“I can’t believe it!”
“Believe it! Good as new. There you go.” I placed it gently in her outstretched hand.
“Thank you! How much do I owe you?”
I smiled at her. “No particular charge. You just give whatever it’s worth to you.”
She hopped down off the stool and I watched as she glanced up and down on my little booth. “You — you don’t have any prices listed anywhere?”
“No. I tell everyone to pay as they think best.”
She fished in her blue denim shoulder bag. She brought out two rumpled dollar bills. She frowned. “It’s all I have,” she said. “I’m sorry. This is all I have.”
“It’s enough,” I said. I placed the tiny necklace in her clean little pink hand. She gazed at it, and then smiled at me without words. Her eyes glistened. She turned and walked very, very slowly down the mall: A dreamer whose dream has been released into life, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.
Another time a young boy — eight or nine I guess — came by with a brightly colored kite in his arms. Round splashes of red, blue and yellow covered it. Behind the kite, in his hand, was a mass of kite string, tangled tightly. His eyes were wide and bright.
“This was my big brother’s,” he said. “If he knows I took it, he’ll kill me.” His face was a study in guilt and remorse. “If you could just get the string back like it was, then — maybe I could sneak it back into his room, and –he’ll never know I took it, even.”
I must have looked at him a little too sternly, for his eyes filled with fear as he looked into mine. I tried to counteract the austerity with a smile and an outstretched hand. “Let’s have a look, then.”
“I brought my allowance for two whole months with me.”
“Well, let’s just wait and see what I can do first, shall we? Give it here.”
I took the whole limp mess from his dirt-smudged hands, kite and all. Again, as so many do, the boy sat and watched from the stool on the other side of my workspace. I placed the kite on the counter beside the computer and placed the huge ball of string on my graph table. It was one of the tightest, and largest, knots I’ve worked with.
“Why’d you take your brother’s kite?” I picked up my digital camera and pushed the power buttons.
“I don’t know.”
“You must know something.” I began snapping pictures.
“He has everything! He gets all the good stuff. I’ve wanted a kite for years, but Christmas comes along and who gets a brand new kite? David does!”
I sat down, waiting for the photos to process through. I looked at the young boy. “Life isn’t fair, is it?”
“No.”
“Did you fly it?”
He looked up, more hope in his eyes now. “You bet! It’s the coolest. The wind is just perfect for flying today, too. Have you been out today?”
“Not yet. But I know a good wind for flying when I feel one.”
“The more I flew it, the madder I got.”
It figured!
The boy sighed. “I wonder why they give David more than me.”
“What was it like, flying that kite?”
“Like I was flying, my own self.”
“Ah.”
“It’s a great kite. But now — now I’ve gone and got myself in a big mess. I never should have touched it. “
“It wasn’t quite worth the thrill of the sky, eh?”
“No.” His eyes grew deep, and he fell silent.
The computer screen wavered a bit, then flashed on.
The three dimensional view showed a way out, but it was going to be a long and complicated struggle with my detangling tools.
“This is going to take quite some time,” I admitted.
The boy rested his chin in his hands with an air of resignation.
“How long? Longer than an hour? Because my brother gets home in an hour.”
“Longer than an hour, I’m afraid.”
“Oooooh,” he groaned, and dropped his head into folded arms like a school child taking a nap on his desk.
“You know, there is an option here.”
He popped his face up just enough to rest his chin on his arms and look at me. “What?”
“You could just tell your brother the truth. If I were your brother, and you stole my kite and flew it, because you don’t have one of your own, though you have wanted one for so long, and if you told me honestly that you felt terrible when it crashed, and that you spent two months allowance getting the string untangled — when any common dishonest child might have simply bought new string and hoped I wouldn’t notice — well. I’d forgive you, that’s what.”
He looked at me blankly. Then the sourness returned to his face. “Sir, you don’t know my brother. He’s going to kill me.“
“Well– what choice do you have now? I can’t get this done until it’s too late anyway! Seems to me the best hope you have is to tell him the truth, and prepare for the consequences.”
“Tell him then run like heck!”
“If that’s what it comes to, then, yes.”
He hid his face again, and I worked until the sweat ran freely and I felt terribly thirsty. I sent him after a Coke for me, and he brought back one for each of us. After a while I worked the tangles loose enough to pull free, and I sent him down the mall several hundred feet with the kite, while I rolled the string into an orderly ball, walking toward him with the growing sphere. The look on his face was different now. He watched as it got fatter and fatter, and smiled as I finally reached him and handed him the string.
“Wow! You did it! I thought maybe it was too much of a mess to fix, but you did it!”
“Now don’t give into temptation and fly it on the way home!”
“I won’t. Thanks, Dr. Knotts. Here.” He handed me a pocketful of green bills and change. I took it, bowed to him with a smile and watched as he skipped down the mall. I have often wondered what happened to that nameless boy when he encountered his brother that afternoon. One thing I feel sure of, however: I feel certain that his brother let him live.
I can’t help everyone. Last spring, a man brought me a fishing line. He and his wife had a terrible fight, he said, so he went fishing to “cool down”. Right off the bat his fishing line snapped into pieces, so he marched over to a bait and tackle shop and bought a “…brand spanking new line!” Almost the instant he resituated himself in the boat, “…she tangles up all around the damn pole! I never seen such a freaking mess in all my life. Brand spanking new! I’ll be damned to hell if I’m gonna buy more line. Can you fix it, Doc?”
I tried. It was the oddest thing. I took pictures, but the Tangle Mapping program simply would not engage.
“Damn that stupid woman. This is her fault. She never did know when to quit — just on, and on, and on — shut her up permanently, one of these days…”
I jiggled switches. I even defragged the computer. I uninstalled and reinstalled the program. The tangle refused to be visualized on my screen. Finally I handed the whole mess back to the man, who was dancing back and forth from one foot to the other with growing rage.
“You’re a fake! I knew it! Thief! You put all these crazy signs up all over town — ‘Knots? Not!’” He swore profusely. You’re the “Not”, that’s what I think!”
After jutting his square, nubbly chin right in my face, he stomped off. Before the day was over, I was heading east in my motor home. The fisherman had turned me in. The mall’s office staff gave me the usual spiel — they can’t research the background of every single entrepreneur every single time; that I had signed some paper somewhere verifying the legal status of my business; that false advertising was a breach of contract and so on and so forth. Yadda, yadda. After listening to that sort of thing for a while, I offered to pack up and leave. They agreed that it was a good idea for me to find a new spot.
I’ve been here, at River Haven Mall, for many weeks now. I’m starting to feel almost at home. It’s noon, but I’m not hungry. I’m sitting here, have been, all morning, watching the people walk by. I love to watch people. A young woman pushing a baby stroller paddles past, a few pounds on her that I bet weren’t there a year ago. Her face is smooth, warm and seamless, and her whole being casts about her an air of peace. She walks slowly, drinking in the sights and smells and sounds. A little pink-wrapped bundle lies in the stroller. Two teenage boys behind her are flapping along on feet too big for the rest of their bodies, their oversized blue jeans slopped over their sneakers, chewing great lumps of gum, giggling and jostling each other. Behind them is a middle aged woman with a middle aged body — sagging here and there, including the expression on her face. She looks here and there, then straight at me. Here we go again? Yes, she’s walking toward me. She has a box in her hands. Her simple red dress is woolen knit fabric, falling in soft, draped folds, nearly to her ankles. The softness of her dress is echoed by shoulder-length waves of mist-colored hair. She is tastefully made up, but the sweet gentle colors of her face can’t hide everything. Something’s not right.
Trying to hide my intuition about her, I smile brightly. “Help you today, ma’am?”
She plunks the little box down on my wooden counter. She sighs. Inside there is a considerable length of very fine chain, metal, bronze colored, muddled into a messy jumble.
“I never dreamed this would be so hard to get free!”
I lower my head and peer, bewildered, into the box. “What do you have here?” I ask her.
“Oh, it’s actually two chains. They go to my grandfather clock. It’s been in my family for generations. I never, never dreamed they could get tied all up like this — have you ever seen anything like this?” She laughs, but there is a fragile dryness in her voice, as if she might cry in a minute.
“How –“
“My cats got in there — I don’t know, maybe they were after a mouse or something. They must have detached both chains from the top of the casing, then played with them like they were alive or something!” She sits down on the customer stool and sniffs a little. She pushes her pearly cloud of hair back over her shoulder on one side.
I draw the chains, gently, out of the box. “This won’t be any trouble to get undone.”
“Oh, do you mean it? I hate to be so — so sentimental about a clock, but — it’s the only clock in our house. It’s mine. My husband didn’t want any clocks at all in the house. He can’t stand to hear them ticking, he says. I begged and begged, and finally he let me bring this one home, from my father’s house, after my parents passed away. I have to keep it in the basement, though, so he can’t hear it ticking away the time. That’s how come the cats got into it. Probably mice too. Probably it’ll be ruined before…”
“Can’t stand to hear the clocks ticking?” I must know why. “What’s that all about?”
“Oh! I don’t know. He’s not a bad man. He’s just so — so — funny about things. He never has worn a watch. He’s late to everything.”
“How unusual, to hate clocks.”
“Hm?”
“What I mean is: Most people love clocks. Most people I meet, they are addicted to time-keeping. Everywhere you go, everyone’s marking off the minutes, the hours, the days. As if we could control it! You know what time is, of course: Humans measuring the movement of the earth, in the context of its location in the universe.” As she gazes at me, her eyes intense and her chin withdrawn into the upper portion of her neck, I am already poised in front of my screen, examining three-dimensional images of her tangled clock chains.
She looks down at the counter. She traces the grain of wood with a finger. “You know, I’ve never thought of that before. That is all time is, isn’t it! Time isn’t scary at all, is it!”
“Oh, I didn’t say that. Time is terrifying! I would rather imagine, from the sound of it, that the thought of the earth turning around and around, or the stars moving from point A to point B, or the simple ticking of the minutes on a clock — time dying one second at a time — all of that terrifies your husband. And, really, it’s not the natural state of time at all! I believe some people are more tuned into that fact than others. The natural state of time is none at all — time stopped, frozen — eternity. Your husband knows that — at some level — maybe not consciously. He knows that the clock is measuring his life away, and that some day time must stop altogether.”
Perhaps I have said too much. The woman looks at me with suspicion. She looks nervous. “Sounds like you know my husband or something.”
There are times when I speak the whole truth without thinking things through first, and I don’t even know why. I just do. “He never makes love to you anymore, I would guess…”
She jumps up as if she has just received an electrical shock. I’m so blunt sometimes. I might have known this would happen. “Why, you — how dare you! Give me that chain. Right now!”
Failure! I’ve said too much, too soon. I hand over the chain, still tangled into hundreds of crimped bronze corners, and she snatches it from my fingers so quickly, it stings the skin on my palms. Off she trots, her red dress dancing, her cloud of hair floating on her round shoulders.
I let my face fall into my hands. If only she had given me just one more minute, I would have told her — told her that being afraid of time is similar to being afraid of sex. Clocks and the sex drive: Both announce our mortality to us in ways that shake us to the center. Clocks proclaim: Time-Is-Short! Our bodies scream at us: You must be replaced! What I wanted to tell her was: If he can make peace with the clock, soon enough he will be interested in you again.
I hate when people leave too soon.
I begin packing up my things. No doubt I’ll get thrown out before evening, just as soon as that woman tells the mall staff I’ve propositioned her. Carefully I fold the mirrors into a neat stack, and begin to unplug the computer.
I look up. A thin young boy is sitting on the stool. Trust and innocence swim in his bright blue eyes. He has a dark brown coat on, a tattered-looking hand me down. He wears a simple gray wool cap over his dark curls, rolled at the brim, rough-textured.
“Hello again, Dr. Knotts. Remember me?”
I squeeze my eyebrows together and feign memory loss. I widen my eyes and smile brightly. “Ah! I remember now. Last year I was here, in this very mall, about April or May.”
“That’s right! That’s right!”
“–and a boy brought me a ball of yarn that his sister had made –carded the wool herself, spun it on a real spinning wheel –“
A cloud passes over the sunshine of his face. “Yes. You remember.” He looks down at the wood counter for a long moment. “She died in August.” He slips off his hat with slender, trembling fingers. He gazes at it. “She made this for me, with that yarn you unraveled for us. And — you didn’t even charge us!”
A growing weight is suspended from my vocal cords, on the inside. “I’m so very sorry you lost your sister.”
“When I saw you, I just had to stop by a minute. I want to tell you something.” He leans up into my face and cups his rough warm hand over my ear. I can feel his hot breath as he whispers.
“I believe in you.”
He hops down from the stool and squints, reaching into his pocket. Out come two shiny new quarters. “I didn’t have anything to give you last time — so here.” He grabs my hand and turns it palm up and places the fifty cents into my hand. “It’s not enough, but –“
“It’s enough.”
He smiles. He is so beautiful. He walks away, looking back at me two or three times. As he fades into the crowd of people, I can see the gray wool of the hat bobbing up here, and there, getting smaller and smaller.
A blue-suited officer is walking toward me briskly. I sigh and continue to pull the wires out of my set-up.