by Camille Roy
People are looking for solutions however reluctantly, because drugs are unfashionable.
BABY looks down on his large flowing blue mom. He cannot see anything of her body but a red slit and blood sliding across the blue folds.
Someone takes hold of BABY, lays him on a metal shelf, and puts a plastic bubble over his mouth. BABY begins to breathe oxygen smoke as he looks up at the blue masks of his doctors. BABY’s eyes are hazy. But it’s not a result of wanting money or drugs. Before BABY learns how to think, he has a thin grammar.
Meanwhile, conversation passes like plates among the white asses of the doctors. No one is listening to BABY, who says,
I feel I’m just the logical result of certain families breeding with each other. History has something to do with it, but not as much as you think.
BABY will never remember his first breath.
He won’t remember his body arriving, either.
All objects ARE frustration (is a theory about art). The body is plumbing and consciousness, so you feel your toast before you taste it. Pain folds a person’s cranium.
I’ll explain circumstances to all you minors.
i) The picture is big,
ii) The picture rains on us,
iii) I’m coated with picture.
Understanding requires free time, and no one’s time is free.
(Restless stratification.)
Here is a picture of BABY:
His skin is soft as butter.
His eyelashes peek like little lambs then curl up.
He is quiet as a pocket.
Mom is dripping, little puddles of white form in her nipples and the whole house smells of milk. Mom’s understanding is perfect. She knows that the nipple is the only object that ISN’T frustration, so she puts her nipple in BABY’s mouth.
Mom says, I’m so glad the BODY arrived (kiss kiss).
BABY is sucking. Then BABY lifts his head & says, “I’m the only one whose body isn’t missing.”
I was a bar dyke before all this gender-theory crap came along. I kissed and fucked like every other girl in my invisible world, and I stuck dollar bills in the G-strings of all the strippers in town. That world is still invisible, because I left my body there.
If you believe that, find the burial at the end of this sentence. Do you know whose body is waiting for you there?
No one can see anything before I get dressed. After I get dressed, I am a sex toy. This happened even before I became a lesbian, or a mother, or a girl. It is a very personal, very feminine thing: minimalism.
It’s simple. There’s less private and MORE PUBLIC in everyone’s life. How can you see yourself, when you can’t even see your information? Is it local, or does it start in Los Angeles and expand outward like an orgy?
If you think you look like yourself, look for the hole you make in air. That’s what I wanted, when I began these sentences. Now I’m afraid of poisoning.
I see BABY’s grammar brain spreading from his big blue eyes across his face. I’m waiting for tips of intelligence. Recognition begins somewhere, maybe in language, before any mass starvation. Maybe recognition is moistened by visuals.
When I talk to BABY, I’m talking to the future, with the perfect understanding only a MOTHER can have. I know, for example, that to restore theatricality to language (that modernism tried to destroy), BABY’ll write a script for a horror movie starring the little wonder slut of Hollywood, Drew Barrymore.
Which objects are the most scary? Think very delicately, then put those words into Drew Barrymore’s mouth. BABY’s tiny pink lips are the beginning of language, but when he reaches for her nipple, Drew Barrymore screams. There’s a gulf between milk squirting into BABY’s mouth and a moving picture. Why are objects frustrating? Here’s something to try in the privacy of your own home: compare the neck and lips of a Hollywood slut to the neck and lips of a mule.
BABY doesn’t know the difference between mother and monster. He doesn’t know that purses hide money. He can’t tell why.
Before my expulsion, for immature and morally reprehensible misbehaviors as well as academic failure, Dr. Wittig had never bothered to look at me. I wasn’t surprised. Very few people looked at me. It was remarkable how many people seemed to find ordinary social intercourse with me actually unpleasant. I rarely failed to observe that when I spoke to a fellow student at the Institute, his eyes would dart at my mouth and then jump hurriedly away. Apparently my mouth had become some sort of stain. So I quit speaking and crept like a wraith from one classroom to the next.
My only sustaining interest during these last months at the Institute was to observe Dr. Wittig. My opportunities for these observations were limited to her lectures and her daily marches through the halls, and I was careful to station myself in the hallways at those times when she usually appeared. She was a small woman, and in order to see her I had to stand on my toes and peer into the coterie of lanky senior male physicists who always surrounded her. They advanced in a phalanx which exuded a trail of deep and furious conversation. My back against the wall, my eyes riveted, the impression was inescapable—I was staring into the bloody heart of Science.
This I did with a strange quiver of satisfaction. I felt she owed me something. I was one of a handful of female students, and she was the only female physicist. I never spoke to her, for in one respect I was like every other student: I found her terrifying. This was not due to her physical appearance, which was unexceptional. She was round as a mushroom and an untidy fringe of brown hair covered her bowl-shaped head. Her clothes were sensible. True, her cheeks had sagged down over her lips, creating a permanent scowl. But the kicker was her voice, which crisply sliced into any student’s idea and extracted just what was stupid. Then she would turn and look the questioner in the eye, as though she had just given him back his kidney on the tip of a knife. After this ritual humiliation, a soft collective groan rose from the mass of students which could be heard even in the hallway. I left her classes sweaty and drained, but relaxed.
Before I finally got the boot, before the session with the Dean in which the failures of my character and intelligence were coolly identified as though they were constellations in the night sky, I had become obsessed with the idea of having an audience with Dr. Wittig. It made studying impossible; my thoughts kept wandering from my books to that office door. I pictured myself opening that door and walking through a labyrinth of stuffed bookcases and journals piled high to a surprisingly orderly desk. I’d nod courteously and she would look up with a keen expression of interest. Laying my large Optics textbook before her, I’d show her the footnotes I’d found, and we would go over them together, side by side. At this point in the fantasy I usually managed to stop myself. I knew the scenario was inappropriate and even embarrassing, because she taught Quantum Mechanics, not Optics, but the visions recurred, especially in dreams.
The footnotes in question stimulated me highly. I turned to them over and over again, and each time they rewarded me with a peculiar sense of refreshment. They appeared in a textbook which bore this dedication:
To The Student, with the hope that this work will stimulate an interest in Optics and provide an acceptable guide to its understanding.
There were three footnotes in my textbook. The first one began,
The student who is interested in further experimentation will find that she can refine the value of Planck’s constant through the following procedure…
After I found the first footnote, I paged through the whole textbook and found the other two. Each one identified the student as SHE: “She who is interested in further experimentation…” I was stunned, and sunk in one of those moments of hyper-real recognition. This girl, adrift in the footnotes, her wandering thoughts captivated by formal descriptions of the behavior of sparkling light, was known to me. Reader, I was that ghost. This was the hypothesis I wanted to present to Dr. Wittig, and which, in dreams, I did present to her.
Expulsion quieted these fantasies. Of course, I’d se
en it coming, and I’d collected a few part-time jobs to prepare myself for my separation from the Institute. Once separated, I found I had to force myself to leave my room. My only desire was to sit all day in the glassed-in porch I rented as a bedroom and watch the sun pass over the squash plants. Our back yard, like most yards in town, was a field of squash plants. An Institute experiment gone awry had contaminated the town’s soil, with the result that only two varieties of plants thrived—squash, and a curiously misshapen pine whose trunks tended to twist like corkscrews. The trees gave the town a name, used only by students: Armpit. In any case, as it was early June, the squash plants beneath my window were eagerly growing, their firm yellow tendrils spreading over more of the yard every day. By August, they would have formed a dark green wave several feet deep, and the town would have grown enough squash to last for centuries. This prospect was the final amazement which the Institute offered me. Only with difficulty did I manage to tear myself away from it in order to perform the duties of my new jobs.
I had to give up on ever speaking to Dr. Wittig, or attracting any notice from her whatsoever. But the end of my dream left me melancholy and listless. It was weeks before I could even muster the spirit to return to the Institute to pick up the last of my things. I finally went one evening, just before the buildings were locked. It was after all the students had left for the summer. As I was rushing from the building, my notebooks and papers in a shopping bag, our paths crossed.
“Camille,” Dr. Wittig said, “What are you going to do now?”
I blushed hastily when I felt her hand on my arm. “I’m not sure.”
“Have you got a job yet?”
“No,” I lied.
“I need someone to help me file and sort my experimental data. I’ll pay you. Thursday afternoons, from one to four.” She spoke briskly as she wrote her address on a slip of paper and dropped it into my bag.
The effect of this meeting on my spiritual state was nearly indescribable. Suffice to say, desolation was shattered and my fantasy life began to bubble and churn anew. This time, I decided, I would conduct myself differently. I would pledge myself to Dr. Wittig’s task in the spirit of obedience, and attempt to follow the rules, whatever they might be.
When I stepped through her door the following Thursday, I entered one of those states of clarity that belong to another life and spirit, one which has been dedicated to a higher pursuit. My peculiar overheated personality simply drained away before her stern and superior gaze. She looked me over, and then her smile, with teeth, was gleeful. I followed her into the cool darkness of her house. The drapes were closed and, in the dim light, the furnishings seemed swollen and furry. Everything was upholstered in something soft. A Bach violin concerto, played with passionate rigor, seemed to emanate from the very walls. Dr. Wittig tossed her head lightly from side to side. “David and Igor Oistrakh,” she said worshipfully. “The Russian violinists are the best.”
She ushered me into the study and bid me to sit in a small clearing among the papers on the floor. It was a sight I thought I’d left behind forever—wave functions beyond number, in heaps, all mockingly inscrutable. Suddenly I was filled with dread and exhaustion too deep to allow for even a polite expression of interest, and I sank to my knees in the appointed spot.
She looked at the mess of papers with amusement. “Somewhere in this pile, Camille, you will find an exhaustive description of all possible interactions of strange quarks with tops and bottoms. I find it rather interesting, when I’m not utterly bored by it. But what about you? Are you stupid, or do you just not like physics?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She smiled dryly. “I doubt you’re stupid, but I’ll tell you what to do.” She then described her various catalog systems and gave a list of their inconsistencies. It was a long list, and as she recited it, she seemed to be observing me. In the pause that followed, I realized she’d given me a difficult task, not a filing job. But I tumbled into the problem humbly, each breath beginning a new train of thought.
In part, this was because the problem was difficult, but Dr. Wittig also distracted me, as she persisted in strolling restlessly about the room. She poked journals with a finger, picked up objects and set them down carelessly. Finally, she settled at her desk.
“My father was a butcher,” she said, at length. “That’s not what you expected, is it?”
I turned to reply but she was really talking to herself. “Butcher and Bitter, I called them. My parental influences. Physics got me out, and for that, for a long while, I loved it passionately. It took me to Vienna, where I studied before the war. One step ahead of the Nazis, I followed my professor from Vienna to Princeton. Through it all, physics had for me a steely glamour. It was a winner. War couldn’t change that. Nothing could.” She looked at me. “What is it like,” she asked, “to not be any good at it?”
“Oh,” I said miserably. How could I explain? When I received official notice from the dean, failure poured like honey from my throat. As the letter fluttered to the floor, my head fell onto the table and I closed my eyes to let the prospect of expulsion take on the shivering gleam of the newly real. I expected to feel broken, and I did. What I didn’t anticipate was the sickening warmth gliding through every fiber of my body. Failure can be a kind of massage. Everything stops, and then all that forward momentum is replaced by a series of tiny choices… I decided to try honesty with Dr. Wittig. “I think I’m a lesbian,” I said. “So I’m going to work on that. I need more experiences.”
She didn’t seem to have heard me. “Girls,” she said, “never last at physics. Somehow girls are ruined for physics, even the ones who have a Talent.”
“What about you?”
She sighed. “Yes. What about me? I can only say, some vices are so private their very existence is questionable…”
She then opened a desk drawer and took out a rectangular silver case, from which she extracted a cigar. “Do you mind?” she said. Surprised, I rocked back on my heels and then found myself locked into her steady gaze. Her irises had green rims with a yellow core, and they watered. I was reminded me of ponds, the shallow kind, a little scummy.
“Go ahead,” I said. I resumed my work.
When she spoke again, it was in a deeper voice, somewhat husky, as if she were finally going to set something straight. “Let me tell you a story about a girl who actually did become a physicist. It was a mistake, of course. She should never have come here. Everyone was terribly distracted, and I not the least. She was my student. It was the late forties, and the Institute was filled with young Marxists studying mathematics. All the political arguing gave the Institute an atmosphere of openness which was, in the end, illusory. Socially, it is physics which is the dismal science. But Marjorie seemed to think she could belong here. She floated in like a pink lollipop.”
Dr. Wittig scowled at me. “You are odd, but she was a terrific spectacle, Marjorie. That lovely name belonged to a girl who walked into the Institute at the tender age of fifteen, wearing capris and a sweater set. She attended the open house with her father and shook everyone’s hand, peering up into each stern face with a polite smile. Her hair was astonishing. It was so shiny it looked wet, but it was thick and soft, a sort of auburn cloud. It exactly suited her personality, which was soft and drifting…
She was quite brilliant, that was the most surprising thing. Marjorie was quick as an eel at any depth. She didn’t seem to understand how peculiar this was for us. She had the expectation that we would simply be pleased, and she wasn’t sensitive to the ambivalence she aroused. It was with considerable relief that we granted her a Ph.D. in physics when she was nineteen. Everyone thought she’d go away. Instead she got married, and that seemed, well, equivalent. She married one of our most promising mathematicians and quickly had a son, named Jonathan. She became a housewife. It all seemed normal. Those of us who didn’t do that, the women who were serious scientists, were really just freaks. I don’t mind saying so. It’s had its rewards.
>
“Anyhow, poor Marjorie was left alone with her young son. Her husband committed suicide, a few years after he got a job teaching at the Institute.
Dr. Wittig paused for a long time. “At that point, we should have given Marjorie a job. I’m sure she needed it. I wasn’t the one who argued against it. But then she got married again, to another mathematician, and we were saved from having to make such a decision.
“She accompanied her new husband to Pakistan, which was where he was from. That was when I started to get her letters. I still have them. They’re in a box in this very desk. I intended to give them to Jonathan, once he was grown, but now he refuses to speak to me. There’s a lot in those letters about his first steps and words and the little games he used to play with his mother.
“Ahh, this story,” she said sadly. “Once back in Pakistan, her husband came under the influence of his family, and when Marjorie seemed to have trouble getting pregnant, he took a second wife. She was simply expected to live with the new arrangement. I didn’t hear from her for months, and then a terrible letter arrived, filled with despair. She told me the whole situation. The new wife wouldn’t look at her, and far worse, neither would her husband. ‘I’ve disappeared,’ she wrote. ‘I’m a stranger in my own life. It’s all I can do to speak even to Jonathan. He has no one else here, believe me…’
“I didn’t answer her letter for a good while. I’m unfamiliar with this sort of problem, and I wasn’t sure what to do or say. Finally, I sent her money. No strings attached. I simply expressed the hope that she would leave Pakistan. She wrote me back immediately. ‘Your help means more than I can say. Jonathan and I are leaving for Paris in a week and this terrible episode will be over.’ I will never understand what happened in Paris. I visited them two years later, over the weekend after a high energy physics conference to which I had been invited.
“Jonathan was very well-mannered. Children seem to be like that in Europe, they’re so polite I find it somewhat eerie. In this respect Jonathan had become European. He wore a sailor suit and had tea with me in the kitchen. ‘Dr. Wittig,’ he told me, ‘My interests lie mainly in painting and music.’ He was about seven at that point. Their apartment, in a poor section of Paris, was sparsely furnished. Marjorie kept Jonathan’s clothes in a cardboard box. I inquired delicately into her employment situation, and her replies were vague. Perhaps she was the kind of person who simply needed to be given something to do. As I said before, her character was oddly cloud-like, soft all the way through. A lovely person. I gave her more money.
