If you have had, in recent weeks, a feverless illness of the nose and throat; 

If, in recent weeks, you have been sick, but not quite so sick you could prove it to anybody; 

If you have looked at a duck and a Canadian goose, sharing the same piece of driftwood, and thought of what they might say to one another; 

If, in the quieter parts of a song, you have seen a performer stop to pull a mewling gray kitten from the bushes;

If you have laid in bed at night, all the windows open and a box fan drying the sweat on your face, and felt the precise point where your calf muscle knits to your bone; 

If you have been preoccupied by thoughts of storybook mice, who start out only mice but soon become sailors or archers or princes; 

If, in the middle of your working day, you have stood at the top of a sunken lawn and looked down at the ocean, whether or not there was an ocean to see; 

Then the best thing, truly the only thing I have to offer you, is Bel Canto. 

*  *  * 

Bel Canto is a novel by Ann Patchett. It was published in 2001. It was very popular and it won many awards. I recommend the book to you not because I think you haven’t heard of it, but because it’s the best I have. I could offer you something else: a decongestant or a better job. But they wouldn’t be what you would really need. 

I got my copy of Bel Canto from one of three places, and I couldn’t tell you which: a roadside free-book hutch, just one street up from the shore; the one-dollar sale table at the public library; or a used-book and record store surrounded on all sides by gas stations. It hardly matters. 

What does matter is that I had a tedious summer job as a sound engineer at a puppet theatre, that I seemed to have a perpetual head cold, and that I had started collecting books wherever they were cheap and available, storing them in tall and wobbly stacks in my borrowed dorm room at a nearby college. There were far more books in that room than I could have read in an entire summer. 

Bel Canto is a story about a group of diplomats, politicians, businessmen, translators, and opera singers who become trapped in the house of the Vice President of a South American country when the house is taken over by terrorists. A classic action movie setup. 

But if none of your guests are action movie heroes, and are, instead, opera enthusiasts and pianists and priests, being a hostage is about staying still, and staying still requires you to notice what surrounds you. Bel Canto is about being stuck someplace, and so it is mostly a story about minutiae. 

I disliked the work, but I liked the puppeteers, who came for a single week at a time. They attended workshops, put on shows, rehearsed in every room and hallway and patch of grass available to them. They ran showcases and open mics, created characters upon characters: a mask in the shape of a house, so that their shadow would be a house shaped like a person; a faceless cowboy, made of crumpled paper; marionettes who hobbled up and down short staircases, then sat on the stoop, tapping their feet impatiently and glaring up at their puppeteer. 

To be a puppeteer is to animate something that cannot move, to make — from a jacket or a trash bag or a pile of zip ties or your own shadow — something with its own life. To be a puppeteer is to trust an audience to look only at your movements and never at your hands, and to watch a puppeteer is to believe in a puppeteer without looking at them.

One man glued pom-pom eyes to an entire box of trash bags he’d taken from the custodial closet and handed them out at an open mic, with some sort of half-formed thesis about how anything could be a puppet. Obediently, everyone there, through small motions of the hands and the arms, brought to life a small crowd of creatures, all looking around themselves in astonishment. 

By the end of the first week, everything had become a puppet to me. While attaching speakers to an outdoor stage in the hot sun, I turned two cordless drills towards one another and let them whir back and forth in conversation.  

I don’t think it will surprise you to learn that the puppeteers were emotional people. On their better days, this meant they were intensely empathetic and gentle. Under the intense pressure of having such a limited time to impress one another, to make their marks, to be both exceptional students and promising artists, by the end of each week, the puppeteers were exhausted and snippy. 

I watched them. Occasionally I moved equipment or played music or ate lunch or stood at the top of the lawn staring at the sea. But mostly I watched the puppeteers. 

In Bel Canto, everything is still, and everything is contained, and therefore everything is important, and watching it is just as important.  The opera singer doesn’t fall to the floor, she sinks to it, “the pale green chiffon of her dress billowing out like a canopy of new spring leaves caught in an April wind.” It is a book intimately concerned with small motions, a book in which small motions are of an importance as vast, perhaps more vast, than large ones: the rustle of fabric as loud as the gunfire. 

I worked twelve-hour shifts, sometimes longer, so each morning or evening, sometimes both, despite my persistent illnesses, I would go running. The college kids I lived with thought this was absurd, as it seemed to them to be work on top of work. But that was fine. I ran up past the hospital, over the railway bridges, and past the Indian grocery store. It wasn’t work to me; or at least, it was less work than sitting still. 

I was not a fast runner. I ran only slightly faster than I walked. Yet, at a walking pace, I could never have gone where I did when I ran: down around the smooth curve of the coast, where the river emptied out into the sound; loops through cemeteries and elementary school playgrounds; all the way from the theatre to my borrowed housing. Not because, walking, I couldn’t have covered the distance, but because I never would have. 

That summer, I lived in my head. I did not speak much. I sat very still and quiet in dark corners for long periods of time, or else I worked slowly in the hot sun.

But I ran past beaches reserved for rich people, past mansions and payday lenders, factories and fortresses. I ran because it was the only part of my day when I accomplished anything, the only time I could be alone, and the only way I felt that the world was worth looking at. I ran because it was the only time I moved, small as each step might have been. 

Along the college’s walls, small, white jasmine flowers draped themselves, and as I ran, I noticed for the first time that there were flowers to be noticed. When a puppeteer crooked his arm within an empty child’s jacket, I followed the movement of a child’s shoulder, not a man’s wrist. 

At the start of their captivity, the hostages are made to take off their shoes and lay on the floor. They are searched for weapons. Catching the smell of her perfume, the young terrorists marvel at the fact that the opera singer “had somehow replicated the scent of the tiny white flowers they had passed in the garden on their way to the air ducts. Even on this night, with the possibilities of their own deaths and the possibilities of liberation weighing heavily on their minds, they had noticed the smell of such a tiny, bell shaped flower that grew near the high stucco wall.” 

It is worth mentioning that Bel Canto, for all its beautiful language, its romance, its lines about flowers and chiffon, is not a happy book. It is a book in which terrible fates befall people, despite how much beauty there is to be noticed. It is a book with death and terror and destruction in it. 

In July, the puppet theatre was overtaken by wildfire smoke. Nearby, the New York City sky turned bright orange. The puppeteers had to rehearse only in the hallways, not out on the grass. I could not see the sea from the top of the lawn, though I tried. 

My point, I suppose, is that the smoke, so thick it obscured the ocean only a lawn away, was real. But so too was the scent of jasmine, following me down the broad avenue behind the college, early on a bright summer morning. When I think of that summer at the puppet theatre, I think of jasmine and zip ties and ocean waves just as much as anything else.