Wilson

by David Mamet

  “Whoever talks first loses,” Greind thought. And then he thought of a young girl, who, at the time, seemed to him as a quite nice young girl, but who, at this remove, he realized must have been a stunning vision of nubility.

  “Or, to put it differently,” he thought, “must now be seen to be, to one at this age – to myself, in fact – or, to put it better, to have been some stunning piece of ass. (Although, at that age, she was, to me, just ‘some girl’)”

  The other spoke. “You know,” he said, “I was telling you about my dog …”

  “Wait wait wait,” Greind thought. “Have you never heard of ‘a companionable silence’?”

  “… as if he knew, before I spoke,” the man said.

  “Well, tell me how he would of known more afterwards,” Greind thought. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, he was a dog.”

  “… to get the paper, or …”

  “And I especially remember,” Greind thought, “(oh, how I’d like to see that now) that space, that truncated triangle, if you will, at the top of her thighs, and below the pubis. You could see light there!”

  “… or, when I was sad, he’d be sad,” the man went on.

  Greind looked at him with a contempt unmixed with pity.

  The above is, of course, a mediocre example of the genre. That it is fiction need not, I feel, be decried. There exist various examples of the genre worthy of consideration, if not as literature, then, at least, as reasonable specimens of entertainment. That it treats of an historical figure, again, need not in any way disqualify it from a (granted, unsubstantiated) claim upon our respect and attention. Greind (Bennigsen), for good or ill, “belongs to us all.”2

  But I must object, as, I am sure, must any fair-minded reader, to the arbitrary inclusion, and the disrespect which impartial analysis fails to find absent, in the inclusion, I say, of the character of the dog – the dog, dragged in by the heels* in what we can only consider a (feeble) attempt to enliven an otherwise barren, mechanical, and pointless interchange.

  I do not mean to endorse the jingoistic “if it was in the Capsule it was good enough for me” and have long vociferously opposed that school of – we cannot call it “thought”, for we must call it “politics.” But I find myself driven into their arms by productions of this ilk. I swear to God I do.

  Slowly I Turned

  or: Thoughts on the Spit, by St. Athanasios1

  How do these new discoveries2 affect our view of the world – for it must be the merest craven who’d deny it. Fire, the repudiation of a geocentric cosmos, TV, life on Mars, each, in its way, each in its day, changed, formed the life of Man.

  What are we, anyway, we lying, evil worms – infecting this green sphere first with our thoughts, then with our words, and lastly with our deeds?

  What are we but a disastrous failed experiment? Nothing, really; or, at the most, not very much at all.

  How infinitely preferable the monastic life – a round of contemplation, and occasional oral or anal sex.3

  How, if not noble, if not blameless, then we will say, more worthy of emulation, to move over the world not like the sea, no, pulling, filling, ebbing, forcing, no, but like the wind, or wind-over-the-sand, or gentle wind-over-the-sand (for the sirocco or harsh desert wind does have the power to affect, to alter, to engender, passions, if, for nothing else, for shelter, for, while it does blow unceasingly, week after week, one wishes, one comes to wish that one were dead – or, at least, in a less sandy place).

  And what has altered, since the Capsule returned?

  Is it the fact of life on Mars which alters all?

  No. No more than would a like announcement concerning Zabia, Kansas, or somewhere else.

  No. It is the revelation, as it must be, of that life’s quality which must, which doth, which shall inform all human thought and action for the next foreseeable while.

  Muuguu

  From Tales of the Fantasist

  This, do you see, this is the Essence of Muuguu. Not “to do,” not “to be,” but, rather, to neither “do,” nor “be.”

  This is not “of the essence.” This is the essence. This is it. A lot of jagoffs are running around, spewing out this or that absurd nonsense; no doubt, some of ’em are (or think they are) in earnest. Big Deal.

  That is not our look-out.

  All you can do: stick “close to the Thing,” and Keep your Head Down. Go with God.

  You’d have to go in any case.

  You don’t have to go home, but you Can’t Stay Here.

  This is the Essence of Muuguu.1

  Lola Montez and the Moving Picture Boys

  Lola Montez

  (Often conflated with J. of T., her effigy still exhibited on “Capsule Day,” Papua, New Guinea)1

  It was said that Lola Montez died in agony, after drinking an over-the-counter preparation warranted to stave off sexual debility. The deeper question: did Lola Montez ever live; and, the ancillary query: if so, what was that dog on her lap in the linecut (London Illustrated Times, vol. 81 no. 6)?

  Granted it has been identified as a King Charles Spaniel, but it must take an act of either faith or intellectual dishonesty to overlook the extensive delineatory gifts of the engraver in re: face and form, textile and décor, and to suggest his muse failed him only in the matter of the dog.

  Why?

  No, we must aver that the drawing is an accurate rendition of something. Of what?

  To answer the question, we must look to the skies.2

  Jane of Trent

  Jane of Trent

  But who was Jane of Trent?

  Can it be established that she/it ever existed?

  “Sant’Graal/Sang Real” was the cry of an earlier age.

  Imagine those adventure-loving stalwarts of that time – mounting their horses or mules and trotting off “around the world” – their mission: to discover that object whose very existence was in doubt, and whose identity, to compound the difficulty, unknown.1

  Some said it was a cup (grandalis), and some a grating (gratilis).

  Some, looking for new fish to fry, elaborated the first into Chalice, Basin, Bowl, et cetera; the second to Casket, Box …

  (Is it not interesting that the one stress the circular, spherical, or demi-spherical; the other the square or cubic?

  It has been noted that the world’s religious symbols each portray the play of opposites: the vertical-and-horizontal of the cross, the opposed triangles of the shield of David, two wacky half-circles of the Yin and Yang, the pierced planet of the Crypto-Janissaries, etc., etc. – and might we not deduce, infer or extrapolate a greater, say, an ur-bipolarity in the voyages and efforts of the Crusaders after the Grail? Might we not say they strove not to (or primarily to) possess an object, but to codify a symbol? Or, to put it differently, to ally their name to such codification – for, had they obtained that Grail (whatever the deuce it may have been) they surely would have been forced (a) to surrender it to ecclesiastic authority, and (b) at some point, to die.

  What would remain? Some measure of fame.2 So what?

  Similarly the quest to identify, to isolate, to establish the existence of Jane of Trent smacks of the neurotic’s (hero’s) task: to unify opposites, to discover the Hid, to discard the false, and, so, still anomie.)

  Who, what, was Jane of Trent?

  Let us proceed analytically.

  (1) What was Trent?

  I will now take the reader through what is, I hope, more than an approximation of my mental processes; or, if you will, of my use in approaching similar conundrums.

  I cannot say, and I will not call it a “technique” – it may or may not be – I think I may apply the more non-value-laden term, “procedure.”

  It has long been my use to sequester myself when facing a (seemingly) difficult problem, thus to allow my unconscious to work.

  Having no discipline, I find that the least distraction is seized upon and exploited past any rational forecast of its inherent interest or utility. I would, for
example, pick up an old ticket stub and study it, in the absence of anything else.

  I would read the manufacturer’s warning upon the venetian blinds, the upholstery tag which says DO NOT REMOVE THIS TAG, film reviews, South American literature, anything, in short, in preference to the hard (but so oft rewarding) work of the Imagination.

  There I sit, then, in that which I’ve come to think of as “seclusion” – in my old, cracked, brown and comfortable wing chair, my feet in the carpet slippers, my shoulders draped in the old, moth-holed cardigan (what is there so comforting about old clothes?) – the pipe and its appurtenances on the smoking stand, the case bottle of sherry on the sideboard, shades half-drawn, the window cracked, my old ink-spattered writing board across my lap. In the appointed depression on its top the SchaefferTM snorkel pen, filled and wiped. Upon the board, flush to its left-hand margin, several (more than ten but rarely more than twenty) sheets of laid, ivory, A4 (or “foolscap”) paper.

  (… how I miss Monica – the finest bitch that ever was.

  And yet, how privileged I was to’ve known her.

  What God, what deranged Deity would doom these creatures, their lives so short, so cruelly short, in any case, to displasia.

  Were I a billionaire I would devote all of my resources to eradication of this scourge.

  I know that in this I am not alone. I praise the work of Mrs. Truesdale and of the Society – their work is beyond praise.

  But even their support must leave a gap between the memory of that Bright Friendship, of those morning walks, of the exchange of glances that, yes, can only be called “private jokes,” of the sighs which could only be “confidences,” and the reality of this dreary, empty, interminable loneliness.

  “Woof woof” – how to convey the tone, the tones, more to the point, which indicated Here I am; I’m hungry; What is that?; I’m glad to see you; Something is amiss, and all degrees beyond and between, of speech, of perception, reason, intuition, of a grasp of the world so far beyond mine …

  How can I exorcize the spectre of her limping, in pain, eyes full not of that “mute questioning,” which the unperceptive or (frankly) exploitative would foist upon us in the name of sentiment, no, but, to the contrary, of a full perception – full knowledge, full realization of her impending doom. “They are better off, for they do not know their end,” spout the uneducated.

  What a load of crap.

  I wish they would have been there when I put her down.

  I wish they could have … but I digress.)

  Now I am “set”: my artefacts, my tools, my “friends” (or, say, so as not to fall into sententiousness, “comforters”) are all about me – the door is locked, the telephone is “off the hook,” I can begin …

  If only Monica were here …

  [End.]

  The paper was graded B, the grade scrawled across the title sheet in red. Under it, the assessment, “Too sad.”

  On the second page, again in red, at the top, “Margins …???”

  From Self Help and Purity for Girls

  For, of course the Universe was, at its largest, discovered to be not only congruent, but identical to the smallest previously unsuspected particle of matter, this being the beloved circularity which was the last refuge of the frustrated physicist attempting to describe the infinity of Space.

  And all the science-fiction writers had been right. How jolly. And all he could think was of the unfortunate, the pathetic impossibility of a man on the largest and a woman on the smallest world having a sexual encounter.

  “Which goes to show you,” his wife said.

  But it was not for nothing he was Chief of the Institute. Not for nothing at all.

  How well, in fact, he had improved the hours of “leisure,” the supposed “lunch” hours during his long years of employment there.

  How he had benefited from their trust, or, say, their lack of systematic inventory oversight.

  For, now, it stood before him: THE MACHINE … assembled in lieu of – how many? – chicken-salad sandwiches. THE MACHINE.

  Who would not have said that its construction was a pipe dream?

  Nay, a symptom of obsession so deep as to deserve its own cognomen – its own specie of awe or revulsion?

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t tell anybody!” he thought, as he looked upon it.

  “What adventure awaits me!” he thought.

  He shed his shoes and stepped upon the platform.

  He threw the preliminary switches in their long-ago pre-ordained order. What was that, however?

  Someone rattling the maintenance supply area door …

  He looked back. He heard their voices.

  Why, at this one time, he wondered – why this, of all times …?

  Any residual scruple, and, yes, any fear was discarded.

  This was his one chance. He depressed the final buttons in the precise-numbered sequence. The board began to glow, the platform to vibrate, awaiting the final activation.

  He grasped the lever. They were breaking down the door. But they were too late! The lever was on its way down. He smiled. He looked down at his feet upon the platform – those feet which would carry him on an adventure the like of which was never known before. And he saw, on the platform, sharing the platform with him, a carpenter ant. A carpenter ant, crawling, now, upon his naked foot, as the force field enveloped him, and all went bright, then dark, then bright for the longest time, after which there was nothing.

  “Where am I?” he thought upon awakening. Et cetera.

  Sensing, one might say, were one to go that way

  From Trentiana – Elders of the Order, “Sleigh Bells” issue, December 2320.

  Sensing, one might say, were one to go that way, feeling the scend (or “send”) of the time-to-come, or, say, the “future” (as which of us, time-to-time, has not; though we may well deny it. But what does it profit us, to turn our back upon that knowledge, like the Comstock People, striving to block access to sexual information. Or, as if … but I digress.)

  Sensing, the scend of the future, then, like a salt mariner, astride the deck of his life, if I may, sensing, finally, or call it perception, if you will, for who can know, to call it premonition or delusion? Only that person for whom it had come true.

  [Here occurs, and is omitted, a diversion occasioned by a troop of motorcycle paparazzi. The couple in question had stolen out of a restaurant for a love tryst, and thought themselves well away. But had discovered their pursuers close behind, and bidding fair to follow come “hell” or “high water.”

  The two celebrated lovers sped off in their car, increasing their speed as if such would increase their chance of privacy. The driver–bodyguard looked back to assess his progress and plowed the car into a stone abutment.

  And many have thought of Actaeon, turned into a stag, pursued by his own hounds. But none mentioned the little mother and her child, upon which the limousine bore down at the beginning of the chase. How different, then, that morrow’s news, and how, it would have been seen that ignominy was their fell, unavoidable fate, how one would have discerned its lineaments then, in the couple’s very act.

  That dénouement of the play for which they had been born, and that appalling lesson the apotheosis of the entertainment that their lives has been. For which of us is better than those bow-tied astrologers, the economists, who teach us every morning why the stock or bond market has done this or that, but are and remain impotent to prognosticate it?]

  “No, what is cause and what effect?” the Old Man said; “and, more to the point, how is it that we are continually gulled by these post-facto pseudo-prognosticators, these false sages, past-posting us and calling it prescience?” Here he paused, and sighed, “Or ‘common sense’? I hate them all,” he said, “and wish they were all boiled in oil. Or locked in a walk-in freezer with nothing to read.

  “However,” he continued, “be it a clairvoyant vision, or be it that fantasy of greatness grown from our own egoism – whichever, in the end
, Lincoln possessed, or possessed him – how can we say, and how is one to parse that which may have been delusion but which was borne out by subsequent events?”

  This was the phenomenologic question: Can that demonstrated to have been foretold be dismissed, after the foretold event, as coincidence? This was the question which occupied Wilson sufficiently to have included it eleven counted times in diaries dating from his adolescence through the White House years – the next-to-last in that pathetic scrawl, the last in the feminine hand proved to’ve been his wife’s – supposedly dictated, generally assumed to’ve been her own invention; but how, finally, is one to say, for are not the semanticist, the philologic detective, the graphologist, merely the modern rendition of the paid co-respondent? I think so.

  “Lincoln walked five miles to school.”

  How that must have impressed itself upon the adolescent mind, for which of us, in that age, does not long, yearn for, insist upon a model? What engines of self-sacrifice and idealism are the young! How struck by the commonplace, co-opted by the false, and blind to the oh-so-slightly hidden, workings of the world – how manipulable, how sad, how dear …

  [The manuscript here is spattered with what was thought for a time to be tears, but which color reproduction seemed to reveal as blood, and which was proved by a spectrographic analysis to be beet and potato soup, the base being, interestingly, neither chicken nor beef, but goose!!!]

  … that Lincoln walked (he continued) five miles to school each day, that it was taken as a prescience on his part, for why would he have troubled, absent his (quite correct) valuation of its worth in advertising, in light of the fact that the school was right across the street? To quote from his diaries:*

  … rose every day at dawn to circle his own house for that hour-and-a-half thought sufficient to have walked five miles. And then regained his house, consumed the breakfast his “ma” had set out, picked up his books and stepped across the street. Ding dong, the bell must have went. And we may share his dilemma, those mornings when he’d risen late: “What to do …? What to do …?”