A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

Bob Lieberman leaned against his shovel and directed his words to the dark. “I know the moth kiss of the page that both denounces and saves. I’ve had a spiritual intercession. It’s remarkable, incalculable. I know what resides in the vast aubergine corridors of fall. That’s where our bridges and mirrors are, our biographies, diaries and footnotes. That’s where our real selves are, in the aubergine corridors where streetlights suffocate the night.”

  Bob described his transformation while Malcolm dug the car out of the ditch. Artists cast shadows that have nothing to do with their bodies. Bob admitted he was merely an apprentice. When he’s an adept, levitation and spontaneous combustion will be unremarkable frequent occurrences. Artists are clairvoyant and instinctively know procedures for invisibility and seduction. One must avoid the debris of the ordinary to be purified by solitude. Bob’s neurons twisted as lines and paragraphs deposited themselves on the page like shells sea-swells swept onto sand. Channels beneath his flesh ignited. He was beginning to cast spells and translate languages he didn’t know. He was aware of the risks, the toxins and ancient fevers and plagues he exposed himself to. Artists accommodate lethal agents and come to crave them.

  “We are the absolution we see,” Bob concluded. He handed Malcolm the shovel, sat back in the car, and let Malcolm drive him home.

  Later, Malcolm drove Bob to an open mic night at Penn State. Bob claimed he was having an anxiety attack. He took two tranquilizers and changed his outfit several times in front of a mirror. He finally selected his stylish Barney’s black gabardine funeral suit, a black shirt and black tie.

  It took five hours and the highway was closed, roads barricaded and wind brutal. They climbed stairs and walked the corridors of two buildings before finally locating the basement room. SNOWED OUT was taped to the door and the door was locked. Bob turned the handle anyway and threw his shoulder against it. Then he cursed for an hour.

  Malcolm was forced to stop in Maple Corner’s. Two trucks had collided, several cars were involved, and the vehicles were surrounded by police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances with flashing red lights. It was an updated version of the protective circle wagon trains used. Paramedics passed with stretchers and gurneys.

  Malcolm managed to maneuver to the shoulder and navigate into the parking lot of a closed coffee shop. They’d probably be there all night.

  Bob was sullen and agitated. Malcolm wanted to turn on the radio but feared Bob would call it polluting noise and cause an argument. Then he noticed Bob was leaning against the car door, sleeping, his inaudible pages between his fingers.

  The landscape reminded him of a black-on-black Rothko painting from the mid-60s. But it lacked the nuances and sense of luminous immanent tragedy. It didn’t even have the promise of suicide. Malcolm fell asleep, rehearsing his speech for in court when he sued Bob Lieberman for the twisted fender.

  Malcolm slowly pedaled to the Lieberman house, leaned his bicycle against a side gate, and walked directly to the barn. He was resolved. He pounded his fist against the raw wood. Then he knocked again.

  Bob Lieberman opened the door half an inch. A khaki wool blanket was draped across his shoulders, but he was, in fact, naked.

  “Did I wake you?” Malcolm inquired, casually.

  Bob Lieberman squinted in the sunlight, glanced behind Malcolm as if he expected more and worse, and edged back into the barn. He was furtive and already retreating. He resembled a small mammal — a harp seal or otter — sensing capture.

  “I don’t sleep.” Bob was offended. Clearly, sleep was too trivial a state for an artist.

  He motioned Malcolm into the barn with two stiff fingers. It was a reluctant invitation. Malcolm glanced at his living quarters. Bob had painted the barn wood black. The room was Spartan. Malcolm noticed a desk with a small lamp, his Smith Corona typewriter, and a metal folding chair. A sleeping bag was on the ground. Papers in the shape of fists and plates of decayed food were scattered randomly across the ground.

  “I can’t talk now,” Bob said. “I’m working. Obviously, this novel should be written in Africa.”

  “Making progress on the void?” he ventured, cheerfully. Bob’s novel was set in the void of a century that could be the past or future.

  “There is no void. That’s the point of my novel. The void is festooned with orphans, runaways, and skeletons of drowned babies.” Bob was angry.

  There was no obvious place to sit. Malcolm leaned against the barn wall and realized the barn wasn’t entirely empty. Photographs of goats, elephants and zebras were tacked to the wood walls. Bob had constructed a sort of altar with crates and burlap, and random objects were placed on the top — two oranges, glossy opera programs and a red hawk feather. Perhaps they were offerings.

  His desk was cluttered with assorted items — a bud vase with a bouquet of calligraphy pens and sharpened pencils, a magnifying glass, sequins in a glass bottle and a crystal candy dish with fragments of debris that might be gravel or seashells. A cocktail glass was filled with erasers and paper clips and surrounded by dozens of thumb-sized bottles of white correction fluid and extra typewriter ribbons.

  Reams of blank paper and a box of black and white magazine photographs were under the desk — children alongside railroads who looked abandoned, high-rise apartment buildings with balconies where sheets and T-shirts hung drying on ropes strung across an alley in a favela, and city plazas with cathedrals and pigeons on smooth gray stones seemed familiar.

  The wall beside his sleeping bag was decorated with photographs of elephants and savannah sunsets. Bob had apparently attached squat candles to a pine branch and hammered it into the wall. A rusty iron cowbell, two marimbas, gourds and a tambourine were near his sleeping bag. Bob was still inhabiting his poet as shaman persona.

  “Are you engaged in voodoo?” Malcolm decided to ask. “What are these objects?”

  “Talismans. I’m a method writer. I told you, this book should be written in Tanzania. I’m compromising and it’s dangerous,” Bob said.

  “Sure,” Malcolm replied. “It’s a slippery slope.”

  Maybe the barn was an attempt to represent the pre-verbal Paleolithic cul-de-sac of Bob’s void. His faux escapement was designed to evoke a primitive era. Fire was a recent invention, and cave painting, glyphs, prayer and barter didn’t yet exist. There were no permanent myths, but only transitory seasonal entities with inconsistent affections and powers.

  Bob’s protagonist was two-foot-high and clawed. Zubo, Master of Meteors, invented flight and wildfires. He carried an acetylene blowtorch, and rode on four-humped camels and the backs of disabled satellites and deserted space stations. His hobby was scorching cities. His consort, Zima, ruled rivers and inland seas, and derived pleasure from drowning children. She lured them and wrapped them in strands of red kelp. Strangled children washed up on shore, drained and weightless. At nightfall, the tribe gathered their dead daughters and sons and praised their generous gods.

  “They’re hundreds of mutations and thousands of generations from triangular arrowheads. They don’t even have fishing nets and drums,” Bob had clarified.

  His novel’s scientific premises were fallacious. Bob was a technical illiterate and absolutely ignorant of the principles of basic physics and anthropology. His fundamental concepts were irredeemably offensive, ridiculous and unpublishable.

  “Do you believe words clarify and redeem? Treaties and vows? Alliances? The Geneva Convention? Covenants and promises,” Bob abruptly asked.

  “Yes, Bob. I certainly do,” Malcolm replied.

  “Words are tadpoles and microscopic worms. They’re eons from vocal chords, grammar and vocabularies. The growls of hyenas are superior. Hyenas come in after the jackals and before the kites. Autumn brings wolves in packs of forty. They’re hungry.” Bob shuddered. His eyes were unfocussed and mottled with a filmy residue like storm clouds. He should definitely be checked for glaucoma.

  Bob Lieberman took off his eyeglasses. When he was intensely passionate, he often removed his glasses.
When he assumed the guise of an artist, and fueled from within, the external world was a foul and unnecessary distraction. On several occasions, Malcolm had seen Bob pull off his glasses with a wild, awkward flourish, toss them to the floor and step on them.

  “I’m not sure anymore. Syllables are ashy pebbles escaping from some hole in your face. They’re transient and insubstantial, peripheral and irrelevant.” Bob paused and evaluated the elephant pictures. “They’re how to fill rooms with ghosts.”

  Bob was his closest colleague and, as department chair, he was responsible. Malcolm leaned against the barn wood and sorted through his options.

  “Do you know what’s at the end of the universe?” Bob asked.

  “No,” Malcolm said. “I do not.”

  Bob Lieberman told him the universe was immensely vast but ultimately finite. There’s a river at the end, sliding slow and dense with chunks of gray agate behind the obscure insult of smoke. The last bend of the river unexpectedly ends and there’s a final colossal but graceful trestle, above ridges of sweet William, Geraniums and ferns. Spring is bold and unrepentant and scented with terror.

  “We’re always crossing bridges, losing our wallets and waiting for planes. We pretend we know where we’re going. We attend to our watches, springing forward and falling back. We’re aching for lamplight, a pier, an alley or mooring we recognize. We all need a cot for the night.” Bob’s voice was soft.

  They considered the end of the universe in silence.

  “Your wife stole Rachel’s gold compact and tennis bracelet,” Bob told him. “She takes things whenever she visits.”

  “I’ll look into that,” Malcolm offered.

  “Rachel said she’s a kleptomaniac,” Bob Lieberman revealed.

  Malcolm nodded his head.

  “Something’s stirring in the electronic soup. An emerging patois that isn’t codified. We don’t know its morphology or sensibility,” Bob observed. “Or what it wants. Don’t assume progress is benign. I’ll tell you this. It’s birthing itself and it’s savage.”

  “I’m following you,” Malcolm said.

  Bob Lieberman suddenly leapt from one foot to the other. “When I merge with my persona, I’ll birth royal lepers,” he announced.

  Malcolm looked at his watch. “Time to get dressed,” he decided. “There’s a new open mic on campus. Got your car keys? OK, let’s take a short drive.”

  Bob Lieberman immediately acquiesced. He clapped his hands and spun around several times in a circle. Professor Malcolm McCarty found a towel on the floor and wrapped it around his waist. Then he drove Bob Lieberman, barefoot and hallucinating, to the Briar State Hospital. They held him in a locked ward for 30 days.

  It was never right between them again.

  After tea and before dinner, Malcolm McCarty typically spends forty-five minutes on his stair stepper. He listens to the NPR feed from Pittsburgh when the wind is right. He used to find All Things Considered entertaining. Then he realized all things were not considered. Or perhaps all things were considered in all the same ways. He suspects topics are selected alphabetically. Farming in Finland and France. Faulkner. Fire fighters. Freud. Futurism.

  “Isn’t there personal evolution?” Patty demanded. She had followed him to his study. She’s still talking about Bob Lieberman. “Do you accept that possibility?”

  “I accept entropy and the effort to battle it,” Malcolm answered, no longer engaged.

  “Let’s not even go there,” Patricia said to his back. She slammed the door shut.

  This is a slogan she repeats with regularity. Let’s not even go there. His students also say this. It’s a global idiom. Verbal contagions suddenly appear. A TV celebrity utters a colloquialism and it becomes the coin of the realm.

  Certain moments loiter in the dusk and do not dissipate. That awkward conjunction when he failed to recognize Bob Lieberman is one of a series of misidentifications. He had a similar experience at a conference in China three or four years ago.

  Malcolm McCarty was in the hotel restaurant, weighing the nuances of the menu, the possibilities of twice-rinsed bird nest soup, sea moss and eel with river fish, snake and infant pigeon. A woman sat next to him. Her tangy metallic perfume was an unexpected intrusion and he recoiled. The scent permeated her skin. He thought of rancid cooking oil rising from woks in hundreds of millions of muddy alleys. Her overly painted mouth was the red of a degraded calligraphy rendered in that so-called Shanghai coast prosperity. The encrusted lips parted and he was startled to hear Patty’s voice.

  Patricia’s hair had been darkened in the hotel salon and festooned with pearls. They protruded from her skull on shiny black sticks. She wore an inordinately red silk dragon scarf around her neck. An odd whitish powder was lacquered into the crow’s feet around her eyes. It reminded him of lime in gullies and trenches and uncountable pots of spoiled broccoli and spinach. He considered the pollution of the Yangtze and Yellow River under a moon the Han have charted for six thousand years. He managed to say, “Good evening, dear. Come to me, my dragon lady.” He bowed and kissed her hand.

  They had just returned from a two-day journey on the Perfume River. A fiercely painted red and yellow barge in the shape of a dragon had taken them to a village in the mountains. It was puerile and redundant but they remained moderately festive. In the town square, vendors with crutches offered counterfeit cashmere shawls and enormous pear-shaped melons with dagger-like spikes were sold from a 70-year-old flatbed army truck. The neon was graceful; pinks lingered on the water like lotus blossoms. Translation was possible, he decided, but it’s drained, anemic and ghosted. The difficult was discarded and the ambiguous omitted. Simplification was the global standard. We can cross the great fluid expanses but there’s a price.

  After wars and cholera, plagues and harvests and string quartets, we arrive at our penultimate destination. In between, we manage to recognize our wives. We smile, take their hands, noting that their fingernails are painted like a butcher’s. We tell them they look like a warlord’s concubine. We remember we are returned from the sea. We have cheated death again.

  In mid-morning few vehicles are on the approach to campus and there are no pedestrians or bicycles. Professor McCarty has the reputation of being both the first and last man on the road. It’s said you can use him as a calendar. His daily bike rides begin in March and continue until Thanksgiving regardless of storms and wind chill. Weather is an insignificant external phenomenon like fashion, like the long hair, strident turquoise jewelry and buckskin-fringed jackets of his graduate years.

  Now the exaggerated baggy pants and body piercings of his current students. They dye blue and magenta streaks in their hair that accentuates their absurdly white skin. Apparently the take-home message of the millennium is to avoid the sun. This they can do, hoops sprouting through their noses and eyebrows. They take buses to Erie to have bolts driven into their tongues. Their faces often swell and require antibiotics. They crucify their mouths as if intuiting they have nothing to say. They veer toward silence and shade and concentrate on the gadgets in their palms. They’re albino zeroes.

  Recognizing the universe mathematically is an ability Malcolm was born with. It’s precisely these instincts one must nourish and protect. It’s a curious paradox. In the service of authenticity one is labeled recalcitrant and eccentric.

  Professor McCarty earned his undergraduate degree in physics. Then he realized the divisions of most unusual derivation came not from numbers but syllables. They were orders of magnitude more unpredictable and dangerous. The ferocious recklessness of a pen and mouth deserved the astonishment awarded delinquent asteroids. No celestial body compared to the delirious, high-wire, no-net orbits of a poet. By then, he’d discovered Keats, Byron and Shelly.

  In the Allegheny Mountains of northwest Pennsylvania, April is still winter and ice smells of a permanent absence without the impulse of invention or revision. The air is odorless and bleached. It’s what a terminal man dreams when all sensation is removed. There
are no lavender Crocuses pushing up from snow, no Tulip necks or frail Hyacinths. No daughter arranges snow flowers in a basket. There are no flowers or daughters or baskets. There’s only the cut of cold. In the end as in the beginning, the knife. And the curriculum committee thought the Elizabethan Period was irrelevant.

  Patricia McCarty watches Malcolm ride confidentially down Maple Ridge Road. The day is Attica gray with a texture suggesting metal, bad food, child abuse and felonies.

  In the Allegheny foothills where Pennsylvania becomes New York State, they call the border Penntucky. Here the erasure of possibility has the sheen of aluminum shedding, losing its edges and purpose, elegance and nerve. Surfaces are like ditch-water in night rain where you can’t see your face. Corroded swingsets tilt above punctured tires, cars rust in backyards and the daughters don’t return. The boys come back between tours in Iraq and prison. They’re bums with palms outstretched for money.

  There’s an ashy arithmetic to explain this geography and how it creates its own self-perpetuating stain. Thirty-five-year-old women have emphysema, can’t comprehend email, and spend $500 a month on satellite TV. They leave their babies in the same diapers for weeks.

  “Why do they do that?” Malcolm wondered.

  “They like to hear them cry,” Patricia replied.

  “And the TV bills?” he asked.

  “What should they be doing?” Patricia demanded, angry and defensive. “Prepping for their MCATS? Their bar exam?”

  Malcolm thinks character is constructed from consistent decisions. And the women of the hollows and trailer parks deliberately make malevolent choices. He is completely wrong. Volition is not a component. Their circumstances are an inevitability within the system itself. Is there a hierarchy of ignorance? Is the inability to evolve aesthetics criminal? Is it a sin or a felony? What is their punishment? Imprisonment? The stake?

  Malcolm is accustomed to pronouncing judgment from his elevated perch. Of course everything he touched responded. He planted their garden, along with the garden each successive college president’s wife held the Spring Tea in, along with the Trustee Luncheon, and the barbecue for the rare stray Pulitzer novelist. Malcolm tracked the sunlight effortlessly, laying out the first plots, digging holes for Lilac trees and Ornamental Plums. Malcolm made vegetables appear. With a roll of twine and two consecutive Sundays, he planted seeds for tomatoes, peppers, corn, carrots, and pumpkins. He supplied some off-hand, barely conceived weekend formula and solved the problem. Abracadabra.