City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

  We must remain fixated, for the Director—a vast and stealthy intelligence, a leviathan moving ponderous many miles beneath the surface—demands it. We receive several paid solicitations each day that ask for a description of a beloved husband, a dying dog, or a housewife who wishes to tell her husband how he neglects her all unknowing:

  He hugs her and mumbles like a sailor in love with the sea, drowning without protest as the water takes him deeper; until her lungs are awash and he has caught her in his endless dream of drowning.

  Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people’s attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

  Of course, we do not create objectively perfect sentences—sometimes our sentences are not even very good. If we could create truly perfect sentences, we would destroy the world: it would fold in on itself like a pricked hot air balloon and cease to be: poof!, undone, unmade, unlived, in the harsh glacial light of a reality more real than itself.

  But I am such a perfectionist that, in the backwater stagnation of other workers’ coffee breaks, in the tapa-tap-tap of rain trying to keep me from my work, I continue to string verbs onto pronouns, railroading those same verbs onto indirect objects, attaching modifiers like strategically placed tinsel on a Christmas tree.

  By my side I keep a three-ringed, digest-sized notebook of memories to help me live the lives of our clients, to get under their skins and know them as I know myself. Only twelve pages have been filled, most of them recounting events after I reached my fifteenth birthday. Many notes are only names, like Bobby Zender, a friend and fellow orphan at the reform school. He had a gimp foot and for a year I matched my strides to his, never once broke ahead of him or ran out onto the playground to play kickball. He died of tuberculosis. Or Sarah Galindrace, with the darkest eyes and the shortest dresses and skin like silk, like porcelain, like heaven. She moved away and became an echo in my heart.

  These memories often help me with the sentences, but today the wound on my hand bothers me, distracts me from the pristine longleaf sheets of paper on the drafting boards. The pen, a black quill that crisply scratches against the paper, menaces me. My fellow workers stare; their bushy black eyebrows and manes of blond hair and mad stallion eyes make me nervous. I sweat. I teeter uneasily on my high stool and try not to stare out the window at the geometrically pleasing telephone lines that slice the sky into a matrix of points of interest: church spires, flagpoles, neon billboards.

  A woman who has finally found true romance needs a sentence to tell her boyfriend how much she loves him. My palm flares when I take up the pen; the pen could as well be a knife or a chisel or some object with which I am equally unfamiliar. My skin feels itchy, as if I have picked at the edges of a scab. But I write the sentence anyway:

  When I see you, my heart rises like bread in an oven.

  The sentence is awful. The Director leans over and concurs with a nod, a hand on my shoulder, and the gravelly murmur, “You are trying too hard. Relax. Relax.”

  Yes. Relax. I think of Emily and the book I was going to get for her at the Borges Bookstore: The Refraction of Light in a Prison. Perhaps if I can project from my relationship with Emily I can force the sentence to work. I think of her sharp cadences, the way she bites the ends off words as if snapping celery stalks in two. Or the time she tickled me senseless in the middle of her sister’s wedding and I had to pretend I was drunk just to weather the embarrassment. Or this: the smooth, spoon-tight feel of her stomach against my lips, the miraculous tangle of her blond hair.

  So. I try again.

  When I see you, my heart rises like a flitting hummingbird to a rose.

  Now I am truly hopeless. The repetition of “rises” and “rose” knifes through all alternatives and I am convinced I should have been a plumber, a dentist, a shoeshine boy. Words that should layer themselves into patterns—strike passion in the heart—become ugly and cold. The dead weight of cliché has given me a headache.

  At dusk, I ask the Director for a day off. He gives it to me, orders me to do nothing but walk around the city, perhaps take in a ball game in the old historical section, perhaps a Voss Bender exhibit at the Teel Memorial Art Museum.

  IV

  I spend my day off contemplating my palm with my girlfriend Emily Brosewiser, she of the aforementioned blond hair, the succulent lips, the tactile smile, the moist charm. (My comparisons become so fecund I think I would rather love a fruit or vegetable.)

  We sit on a lichen-encrusted bench at the San Matador Park, my arm around her shoulders, and watch the mallards siphoning through the pond scum for food. The gasoline-green grass scent and the heat of the summer sun make me sleepy. The park seems cluttered with dwarfs: litter picker-uppers armed with their steely harpoons; lobotomy patients from the nearby hospital, their stares as direct as a lover’s; burly hunchbacked fellows going over the lawn with gleaming red lawnmowers. They distract me—errant punctuation scattered across a pristine page.

  Emily sees them only as clowns and myself as sick. “Sick, sick, sick.” How can I disagree? She smells so clean and her hair shines like spun gold.

  “They were always there before, Nicholas, and you never noticed them. Why should they matter now? Don’t pick at that.” She slaps my hand and my palm thrums with pain. “Why must you obsess over it so? Here we are with a day off and you cannot leave it alone.”

  Emily works for an ad agency. She designs sentences that sell perfection to the consumer public. Before I ever met Emily, I saw her work on billboards at the outskirts of town: “Buy Skuttles: We Expect No Rebuttals” and “Someday You Are Gonna Die: In the Meantime, Buy and Buy—at the Coriander Mall.” At the bottom, in small print, the billboards read: “Ads by Emily.” At the time, I was girlfriendless so I called up the billboard makers, tracked down the ad agency, and asked her out. She liked my collection of erotic sentences and my manual dexterity. I liked the gossamer line of hair that runs down her forearms, the curves of her breasts with their tiny pink nipples.

  But her sentences have become passé to me, too crude and manipulative. How can I expect more from her, given the nature of the business?

  So I say, “Yes, dear,” and sigh and examine my palm. She is always reasonable. Always right. But I am not sure she understands me. I wonder what she would think about my memory of the arc of sky above with night coming down and the sea rustling on the shore. She did not argue when I insisted on separate apartments.

  The circle on my palm has gone from pink to white and the way the wrinkle lines careen into one another, the scars like tiny fractures, fascinate me.

  Emily giggles. “Nicholas, you are so perfectly silly sitting there with that bemused look on your face. Anyone would think you’d just had a miscarriage.”

  I wonder if there is something wrong with our relationship; it seems as blank as my life as an orphan. Besides, “miscarriage” is not the appropriate logic leap to describe the look on my face. Granted, I cannot myself think of the appropriate hoop for this dog of syntax to leap through, but still . . .

  We return to our separate apartments. All I can think about are dwarfs, hunchbacks, cripples. I sleep and dream of dwarfs, deformed and malicious, with sinister slits for smiles. But when I wake, I have the most curious of thoughts. I remember the weight of the dwarf woman’s body against my side as she stuck the sliver into my palm. I remember the smell of her: sweet and sharp, like honeysuckle; the feel of her hand, the fingers lithe and slender; her body beneath the clothes, the way parts do not match and could never match, and yet have unity.

  V

  A most peculiar assignment lies on my desk the next morning, so peculiar that I forget my damaged palm. I am to write a sentence about a dwarf. The Director has left a note that I am to complete this sentence ASAP. He has also left me photographs, a series of newspaper articles, and photocopies from a diary. The lead paragraph of the top newspaper article, a sensational bit of work, reads:

  David “Midge” Jones, 27,
a 4-foot-5 dwarf, lived for attention, whether he ate fire at a carnival, walked barefoot on glass for spectators, or allowed himself to be hurled across a room for a dwarf-throwing contest. Jones yearned for the spotlight. Sunday, he died in the dark. He drank himself to death. Tests showed his blood alcohol level at .43, or four times the level at which a motorist would be charged with driving under the influence of alcohol.

  I pick up the glossy color print atop the pile of documentation. It shows Jones at the carnival, the film overexposed, his eyes forming red dots against the curling half-smile of his mouth. At either side stand flashy showgirls with tinsel-adorned bikini tops crammed against his face. Jones stares into the camera lens, but the showgirls stare at Jones as though he were some carnival god. The light on the photograph breaks around his curly brown hair, but not his body, as if a spotlight had been trained on him. He stands on a wooden box, his arms around the showgirls.

  The film’s speed is not nearly fast enough to catch the ferris wheel seats spinning crazily behind him, so that light spills into the dazzle of showgirl tinsel, showgirl cleavage. Behind the ferris wheel, blurry sand dunes roll, and beyond that, in the valley between dunes, the sea, like a squinting eye.

  The photograph has a sordid quality to it. When I look closer, I see the sheen of sweat on Jones’s face, his flushed complexion. Sand clings to his gnarled arms and his forehead. The lines of his eyes, nose, and mouth seem charcoal pencil rough: a first, hurried sketch.

  I turn the photograph over. In the upper right hand corner someone has written: David Jones, September 19—. The Amazing Mango Brothers Seaside Circus and Carnival Extravaganza. He cleaned out animal cages and gave 50 cent blow jobs behind the Big Top.

  Jones is a brutish man. I want nothing to do with him. Yet I must write a sentence about him for a client I will never meet. I must capture David Jones in a single sentence.

  I read the rest of the article, piecemeal.

  In his most controversial job, Jones ignored criticism, strapped on a modified dog harness, and allowed burly men to hurl him across a room in a highly publicized dwarf-throwing contest at the King’s Head Pub.

  “I’m a welder, which can be dangerous. But welders are frequently laid off, so I also work in a circus. I eat fire, I walk on broken glass with bare feet. I climb a ladder made of swords, I lie on a bed of nails and have tall people stand on me. This job is easy compared to what I usually do.”

  I spend many hours trying to form a sentence, while sweat drips down my neck despite the slow swish of fans. I work through lunch, distracted only by a dwarf juggler (plying his trade with six knives and a baby) who has wrested the traffic circle away from a group of guildless mimes and town players.

  I begin simply.

  The dwarf’s life was tragic.

  No.

  David Jones’ life was tragic.

  No.

  David’s life was unnecessarily tragic.

  Unnecessarily tragic? Tragedy does not waste time with the extraneous. A man’s life cannot be reduced to a Latin-esque, one-line, eleven-syllable haiku. How do I identify with David? Did he ever spend time in an orphanage? Did he ever find himself on a beach, his parents dead and never coming back? How hard can it have been to be an anomaly, a misfit, a mistake?

  Then my imagination unlocks a phrase from some compartment of my brain:

  David left the flesh in tragic fashion.

  Again, my palm distracts me, but not as much. I see all the imperfections there and yet they do not seem as ugly as before. David may be ugly, but I am not ugly.

  As I drive home in the sour, exhaust-choked light of dusk, I admire the oaks that line the boulevard, whorled and wind-scored and yet stronger and more soothing to the eye than the toothpick pines, the straight spruce.

  VI

  By now the plants have conquered my apartment in the name of CO2, compost, and photosynthesis. I let them wander like rejects from ’50s B-grade vegetable movies, ensuring that Emily will never stay for long. The purple and green passionflowers, stinking of sex, love the couch with gentle tendrils. The splash-red bougainvillea cat-cradles the kitchen table, then creeps toward the refrigerator and pulls on the door, thorns making a scratchy sound. Along with this invasion come the scavengers, the albino geckos that resemble swirls of mercury or white chocolate. I have no energy to evict them.

  No, I sit in a chair, in underwear weathered pink by the whimsical permutations of the wash cycle, and read by the blue glow of the mute TV screen.

  David grew up in Dalsohme, a bustling but inconsequential port town on the Gulf side of the Moth River Delta. His parents, Jemina and Simon Pultin, made their living by guiding tourists through the bayous in flatbottom boats. Simon talked about installing a glass bottom to improve business, but Jemina argued that no one would want to see the murky waters of a swamp under a microscope, so to speak. Instead, they supplemented their income by netting catfish and prawns. David was good at catching catfish, but Jemina and Simon preferred to have him work the pole on the boat because the tourists often gawked at him as much as at the scenery. It was Jemina’s way of improving business without giving in to Simon’s glass-bottom boat idea. Some of the documents the Director gave me suggested that Simon had adopted David precisely for the purpose of manning the boat. There is no record of what David thought of all of this, but at age fifteen he “ran away from home and joined a circus.” He did whatever he had to on the carnival circuit in order to survive, including male prostitution, but apparently never saved enough money to quit, though his schemes became grander and more complex.

  “Most little people think the world owes them something because they’re little. Most little people got this idea they should be treated special. Well, the world doesn’t owe us anything. God gave us a rough way to go, that’s all.”

  Soon the words blur on the page. Under the flat, aqua glow, the wound in my palm seems smaller but denser, etched like a biological Rosetta Stone. The itch, though, grows daily. It grows like the plants grow. It spreads into the marrow of my bones and I can feel it infiltrating whatever part of me functions as a soul.

  That night I dream that we are all “pure energy,” like on those old future-imperfect cardboard-and-glue space journey episodes where the budget demanded pure energy as a substitute for makeup and genuine costumes. Just golden spheres of light communing together, mind to mind, soul to soul. A world without prejudice because we have, none of us, a body that can lie to the world about our identity.

  VII

  The day my parents left me for the sea, the winter sky gleamed bone-white against the gray-blue water. The cold chaffed my fingers and dried them out. My father took off one of his calfskin gloves so my hand could touch his, still sweaty from the glove. His weight, solid and warm, anchored me against the wind as we walked down to the pier and the ship. Above the ship’s masts, frigate birds with throbbing red throats let the wind buffet them until they no longer seemed to fly, but to sit, stationary, in the air.

  My mother walked beside me as well, holding her hat tightly to her head. The hem of her sheepskin coat swished against my jacket. A curiously fresh, clean smell, like mint or vanilla, followed her and when I breathed it in, the cold retreated for a little while.

  “It won’t be for long,” my father said, his voice descending to me through layers of cold and wind.

  I shivered, but squeezed his hand. “I know.”

  “Good. Be brave.”

  “I will.”

  Then my mother said, “We love you. We love you and wish you could come with us. But it’s a long journey and a hard one and no place for a little boy.”

  My mother leaned down and kissed me, a flare of cold against my cheek. My father knelt, held both my hands, and looked me up and down with his flinty gray eyes. He hugged me against him so I was lost in his windbreaker and his chest. I could feel him trembling just as I was trembling.

  “I’m scared,” I said.

  “Don’t be. We’ll be back soon. We’ll come back f
or you. I promise.”

  They never did. I watched them board the ship, a smile frozen to my face. It seems as though I waited so long on the pier, watching the huge sails catch the wind as the ship slid off into the wavery horizon, that snowflakes gathered on my eyes and my clothes, the cold air biting into my shoulder blades.

  I do not remember who took me from that place, nor how long I really stood there, nor even if this represents a true memory, but I hold onto it with all my strength.

  Later, when I found out my parents had died at sea, when I understood what that meant, I sought out the farthest place from the sea and I settled here.

  VIII

  At the office, I have so much work to do that I am able to forget my palm. I stare for long minutes at the sentence I have written on my notepad:

  David was leaving the flesh.

  What does it mean?

  I throw away the sentence, but it lingers in my mind and distracts me from my other work. Finally, I break through with a sentence describing a woman’s grief that her boyfriend has left her and she is growing old:

  She sobs like the endless rain of late winter, without passion or the hope of relief, just a slow drone of tears.

  As I write it, I begin to cry: wrenching sobs that make my throat ache and my eyes sting. My fellow workers glance at me, shrug, and continue at their work. But I am not crying because the sentence is too perfect. I am crying because I have encapsulated something that should not be encapsulated in a sentence. How can my client want me to write this?