OCR Text |
Show 11 micro-cassett tape recorder which he surely cannot afford. He starts over. With the ten-second self-timer on the new camera, he can now get himself into the picture. New photographs of the lab include himself in white jacket. In sport coat and tie, he stands-a young professional-before the University buildings. With packages under his arms he poses with a parking meter in front of Wigdahl's Hardware Store downtown. And on tape now there are sounds to go with the pictures: lab noises and lab talk, students gossiping in the student union, the horns and screeching tires of traffic on the street, rock music, cash registers registering, people laughing, clowning, coughing. But the sounds are so random and disconnected that Garrett can make little sense of them; and when Ahmed's voice comes on, as though to explain a scene, it is in garbled, unintelligible Turkish. Garrett begins to lose interest. "I suppose," says Ahmed, "that I will have to edit them. Even for my sister." One morning Garrett discovers that it has stopped raining, and after work that evening he begins to plant his garden. The ground is really still too damp, but it is already June, absurdly late in the season, and it is now or never. He plants peas which should have gone into the ground a month ago, cheats by putting in tomato and pepper plants which are already eight inches high, lays down a row of carrots out of a sense of tradition rather than taste. He hates carrots. When it gets dark he showers with satisfaction. It feels good to have gotten so dirty, done something with a future. |