Usually the natural world doesn’t attract me, but I have urged myself to pay it attention. There is a meadow beyond my bedroom, the one I recently walked past, where deer occasionally gather, especially in the early morning, and other animals, chipmunks, mice too small to see at a distance, or tiny creatures who can’t be seen even close, and there are grasses, weeds, trees, bushes, boulders, stones, and pebbles, and these I can also see from my window, creating an overall impression, usually indistinguishable in my mind from other landscapes, and often I try to recall those, especially if the ocean figures in the scene, but my impression of the ocean doesn’t vary much, though the image of the Mediterranean is bluer, calmer, than the Atlantic, which is greener, choppier, than Penobscot Bay, which is imperturbable and pellucid, but these descriptions lack sufficient detail and prove what a beggar my memory is. I also easily forget what I have just seen in the distance out my window, a constant view for months, even on this morning, since it’s not imprinted the way exacting events, histories, faces, and stories often are, and the landscape around me, encircling me, the so-called outside world which I hope to understand but often can’t recall, is mostly a vague picture, as general as most terms denoting it. I look at a tree and exhort myself to remember a specific leaf whose odd shape and burnished colors appear unique, because I’ll never see that leaf again, I tell myself, but then I forget it, remembering just the admonition not to forget it.
I PLACE THE RADIO ON a white shelf close to the bathtub and find a suitable station. I will rest in the tub as long as possible, but I can rarely lie in hot, oily, even salutary water more than ten minutes, because I quickly become restless when nothing happens, and nothing happens in a bathtub, though something might crash to the floor, or I might be jarred by a scream outside the bathroom which would excite my curiosity, but inside the small white room, it’s quiet. I worry that I can’t relax, as my skin is vexatiously hot and my forehead burns. The voices on the radio are melodious, mellifluous chants, but also they drone on, irritants, their human interest stories inevitable and inevitably self-serving, since human beings invented their humanity. Some speak piously, some humbly, famous ones blather about their movie, book, music, and the voices communicate one message or another, occasionally slipping into rants, and I am rendered mute by the demand to be heard. Everyone wants to be heard, most don’t want to listen. Under the oily bathwater my body lightens and floats, defies gravity, and is only a shadowy impression of its form. I scoop up handfuls of bathwater the way I did when I was a child, while my dog sat by the side of the pink porcelain tub, ever watchful. My fingers open wide, the water cascades down my body the way it always has, and I lie there as long as I can, minutes pass, I don’t know how many, but then I can’t stand it and leap from the bathwater as if scalded, grab my towel, click off the radio, let the water run down the drain, wrap the towel around me, wash the tub, because the bath oil, which rose to the top of the hot water like fat, has left a ring of scum around the sides of the white porcelain tub, epidermis, and maybe some dermis, with its enriching collagen that dissipates daily, and, scrubbing the porcelain, feel annoyed by the tasks, things I mustn’t neglect, which are expected of me here and elsewhere, and which clutter my mind when I mean to free it, since the weight of the world is a burden. I am here to shuck it off, almost required to do it, otherwise I won’t feel well, do better, achieve a goal, and I must accomplish what I’m meant to do in life, there must be something. I carry everything back to my room, with a sigh of regret, because it was pleasant but also an ordeal, a lot of bother for fifteen minutes. Still, I’m cleaner, even if my skin is slightly greasy, but in some way I’m refreshed, my flesh is pinker, hot to the touch. I’m not soothed in my mind, though my body has been hammered by heat, not the sun’s, which can be deadly, though I prefer my pores to be opened by steam, steam baths and saunas are preferable to ordinary baths, especially after swimming in the ocean.
In the hot summers, where I grew up, near the ocean, though I couldn’t hear its roar unless my father or someone else drove me close to it, on some of those sultry, long nights, even at some distance, I believed I smelled its green, roiling, salty odor. The sun and heat were fierce, the humidity terrible, and when I wasn’t in camp, settled in the mountains’ coolness, when I was instead at home, my skin erupted into prickly rashes on the insides of my thighs and on my chest. Also I was bitten and eaten by mosquitoes that, after I’d killed them, if I was able to kill them, would leave blotches of my own warm, salty blood on my arm, neck, or thigh, but my own blood sickened me, though sometimes I licked the blood off my fingers, the way I drink tomato juice, to taste it. I wish they wouldn’t serve so much tomato juice and soup, because warm tomato juice especially tastes like blood. During the summers, our family cat, who was later given away and killed, because my brother and I were too attached to her, my mother explained, though it was no explanation, and she never said it again, because by then I couldn’t discuss the miserable fates of our cat and my dog, would have her litters of kittens, usually three and sometimes four. The first dead thing I ever saw was one of her kittens, the fourth, whom she couldn’t feed, or which didn’t get fed because of its innate failure to thrive, its incapacity for life, an idea that has stayed with me ever since. The dead kitten was wrapped in a piece of plain black woolen cloth, my father’s fabric, and lay near its mother’s body, the mother who didn’t want to or couldn’t feed it. It was a black kitten, so tiny it could have fit into my six-year-old’s palm, whose dead body I didn’t pick up and hold, but instead from which I recoiled, frightened of the inert black bulge near the mother and her living kittens. They nursed at her succulent, sustaining nipples, unaware of or indifferent to their dead sister or brother, and the mother cat was also indifferent or unaware, but in nature such cruelty goes on every day, because the will to live governs, and survival depends on certain cruelties, which most consider necessary for the various species, although animals sometimes act, like human beings, against mere survival, to protect their young. A mother elephant and her one-year-old daughter stayed with an infant son and brother, who, after its birth, couldn’t stand, while the pack strode away, and even though an elephant’s survival depends upon staying with the pack, the two wouldn’t leave the infant, who struggled to get up. Born prematurely, the baby couldn’t stand because the skin on its legs didn’t stretch as much as was required for it to stand up, and when finally it could, the baby rose on its legs and took its first unsteady steps, and the three elephants marched off to join the pack. The dead kitten has stayed with me, its perfect or imperfect mother by its side, because imperfection and failure are intriguing and devastating, and often I recall entering the garage where I had hoped to raise a Shetland pony and where the mother cat and her newborn kittens lay, protected from the outside world, which might hurt them, especially dogs and tomcats, and I was thrilled by the kittens, soft as balls of angora yarn, and by new life. They were blind, the mother sleeping, and then I noticed a piece of black cloth wrapped around a bulge lying in the corner of the box. Black is for mourning, white can be, also, though that may not have been why the cloth was chosen, my father may simply have had some black fabric nearby, a remnant stored in the garage, and while life progressed and vibrated alongside the dead kitten, its mother wholly absorbed in the three healthy kittens who suckled her, I stayed in the garage, entranced by the horror of death, with its egregious untimeliness that soon came again to shock, when I was very young, but which I never accept, no matter how often it strikes.
The transvestite’s badly scarred face, her naugahyde-like skin pulled over lumpy bones, when I have seen it in passing, entranced me. She is not a female, I sometimes think, but a male in out-of-fashion women’s clothes and makeup, a contemporary antique, who has many friends in the neighborhood. Sometimes I think she’s not male but female, a girl who may have been burned in a fire at an early age, whose entire existence has been rendered strange by disfigurement. An ordinary sunburn is a first-degree burn. Both first- and s
econd-degree burns will have complete recoveries, without scars forming or other blemishes. But if the heat is extreme, underlying skin tissue can be destroyed, which happens with third- and fourth-degree burns, when in the third there is an actual loss of tissue of the full thickness of the skin and even some of the subcutaneous tissues. The skin appendages are also destroyed so that there is no epithelium available for regeneration of the skin. An ulcerating wound—skin ulcers are rounded or irregularly shaped excavations that result from a lack of substance due to gradual necrosis—is produced and in healing leaves a scar. A fourth-degree burn is the destruction of the entire skin with all of the subcutaneous fat and the underlying tendons, and this may have happened to the transvestite, she or he. The pain would have been unimaginable. Both third- and fourth-degree burns require grafting for closure and are followed by constitutional symptoms of varied gravity, their severity depending upon the size of the surface, the depth of the burn, and, particularly, its location. The more vascular the involved area, the more blood vessels affected, the worse it is, and the greater the symptoms: shock, toxemia caused by the absorption of destroyed tissue on the surface of the wound, and symptoms from wound infection. The prognosis is poor for any patient, my dermatologist told me, as I reported to him on the so-called transvestite, while he listened thoughtfully, perhaps wondering at my interest, checking my bare back for irregularly shaped nevi or moles, and especially poor, he went on, if the majority of the body surface is involved. But I haven’t seen her naked and don’t know if just her face was subject to extreme heat, though I figure more was, that she ran from an engulfing fire, her hair ablaze, the skin on her face, her limbs, and her clothes on fire. I expect she’d been asleep and was in flannel pajamas. I nurture this fantasy each time I see her, and it is how I fit her or him into my categories of experience, which is what I have and that are also historical, specific to my time and place and its antecedents. I can’t fail to notice her skin deformities and surface imperfections and not just them, but also how she marches past people as if they were not there, head high, bun toppling and falling forward, to spare herself the embarrassment of others’ brazenly curious gazes. People who glance or stare at her or him never believe they’re being noticed, a contradictory condition for self-conscious beings; it may in some way be necessary, this blindness or sightlessness, but I know I do stare, I catch myself, vigilant, but I can’t stop myself.
MY FATHER, HIS BROTHER, WHO was his partner, or Junior, the stockboy, would unroll a bolt of their cloth on a long table, the fabric’s unfurling like an exhalation of breath, accompanied by a whooshing sound, and then one of them would search for minute imperfections, bumps or lumps in the weave, discolorations, since so much could be wrong. Briskly, my father would have taken out his magnifying glass, a golden instrument, shiny and compact, and carefully scrolled it down the length and width of the cloth, the fabric of his and his brother’s design, to ascertain the cloth’s status, its condition for selling. Watching him read the cloth, I saw that his face was calm, in repose, when mostly he wasn’t, but his concentration assured me of its possibility, and one day I wanted to be absorbed, too. I have a bolt of his fabric, and, in small boxes and cartons here, swatches of fabric and some yards of cloth I’ve saved and that I won’t sew into clothes or curtains, because I don’t know how. I possess them because I like the material and the touch of them reminds me of places and times I can’t visit. My mother sewed, as well as knitted, but after several procedures on her brain, she forgot how, but then was retrained by the patient ministrations of an instructor, though now she’s forgetting again, her brain is tired, but having the swatches and cloth remind me of the bolts in my father’s stockroom, the intimacy and care with which he looked at material, as well as the stockboy, Junior, his forthright helpfulness to my father, who fired him later because business was bad, so usually I don’t want to remember Junior or consider his fate.
Textiles didn’t seem to matter to the Polish woman, though while I spoke of them and my father’s work, when I searched for topics she might like and that we could discuss, she managed a decorous smile, and a look of interest flittered on her attractive, broad face, which was also distinguished by its vacancy, but whether that was because she worked at a job she disliked, endured daily annoyance and boredom, which cemented her face in a placid mask, her serving face, or because she was dull, I don’t know. When she urged me to have a massage from her, after two years of my having facials, though she wasn’t especially expert in its practice, she expressed the determination that I relax, she didn’t talk about my sensitive skin, she kneaded my skin like dough, and she might have noticed the cherry on the back of my upper thigh, but about it she has never remarked.
THE INVENTOR LOVED HIS DOG, who was always with him, except at mealtimes when he entered the big house, where his disregard of the community’s pet prohibition would be noticed by the authorities, and where he also met and fell in love with a woman who seemed to appreciate him, but then she stopped, or she never did like him; his friend, another resident, told me she was too classy for the inventor. He confided his suspicion after the inventor had dropped his jeans and exposed his rosy ass from the dark wood balcony, so I wondered if the woman had been disillusioned by an act of cheap bravado and considered him vulgar. She left before I could ascertain if she was a classy character; anyway, class is meant to be shunned, and here anonymity fosters and superintends the myth of American classlessness, an aspect of American Exceptionalism that also claims the nation as an entirely new world, unlike its parent Europe, especially England, so it can’t have an empire and doesn’t have a hierarchical social order. Still, I’d be surprised if she had lost interest in him for that, because while it might be considered an outrageous act in our motley, possibly disreputable community, his well-turned ass was beautiful. I was surprised that it affected me, that I perceived his skin as a riotous invitation, tempting, and often I wish I were a dermatologist. Mine advised me to stay out of the sun years before others acknowledged the terrible damage it can do to skin, but people still lie under a blazing sun, without sunblock, and imagine they are soaking up its beneficial, natural rays, when, in fact, they are harming their skin, aging it, and making themselves sick. People with sunburns look clown-like under their coat of sick skin, though when I was a child I was often tan and hoped to get as dark as I could, though when I was two or three, I saw a dark brown or black infant, dressed in blue, in its carriage on the street and loudly asked my mother why the mother didn’t wash him. At this time our family had a maid who was black who came to the house three times a week, and she had a son, whose name I don’t remember, with whom I played. We roller-skated, there’s a photograph of us with our roller skates on, I’m looking at him, he’s smiling at the camera, I usually didn’t look at the camera. It was an awkward moment on the wide sidewalk, the two embarrassed or humiliated mothers, who were strangers, with their innocuous children, one older than the other and talking, and my white mother, who’s not sensitive, must have been stunned by her child’s impertinent, revelatory question, because she apologized, and the black mother graciously or uneasily accepted her apology. Then my mother apologized again, grabbed my hand, and yanked me away. It is my earliest memory of skin, though it’s possible that when my father first remarked on the cherry on my upper thigh, I was the same age, and that could have been the first reference to skin I heard. When my friend and I walked around Vienna, and it snowed, he joked about how it was telling us something. My friend explained he was at greater risk than I, because he was a young black man prey to other men’s aggressive impulses, if he read on the subway, he might be challenged to a fight, and generally men die before women, and I do have more dead male friends than female, they must take more risks, be less concerned with their health, less observant of danger, or in some sense court death more. He lost his life on a mountain, where it was snatched from him, so he will never return. The cherry may still be there, fading on the back of my upper right thigh.
American Genius Page 24
