Going For a Beer

by Robert Coover

  The money distracts them long enough for him to drag himself out of the swamp and onto higher ground, where he finds an old ramshackle clapboard house, its windows dark, door banging in the wind. He stumbles inside, slams the door shut, leans against it. He can hear them out there, scratching and belching and shedding bits and pieces of their disintegrating bodies as though appetite itself were pure abstraction, made visible in but fettered by flesh. A hand smashes through a window—he swings at it with a broom handle and it splatters apart like a clay pigeon, the wrist continuing to poke about as though in blind search of its vanished fingers. He shoves furniture up against the door and nearest windows, locates hammer and nails, rips away cupboard doors and shelves and table tops, nails them higgledy-piggledy across every opening he finds, his heart pounding. When he’s done, the woman frying up pancakes and bacon at the stove says, “I know how you feel about traveling salesman, dear, but wouldn’t it be cheaper just to buy one of their silly little back-scratchers and forget it?” He sighs. The air seems polluted somehow, as though with artifice or laughter. Is it those people outside?

  “Gee, Dad,” his son pipes up, ironically admiring his handiwork, “does that mean I don’t have to go to school today?”

  “I’m sure you can find your usual way out of the attic window and down the drainpipe, Billy, just as though it were Saturday,” replies his mother, and again there is a disturbing rattle in the air.

  “Hey, come on,” the father complains, “it’s not funny,” but he seems to be alone in this opinion. He has the terrible feeling that his marriage is collapsing, even though the bacon’s as crisp as ever. Or, if not his marriage, something . . .

  “Hey, Dad, that’s terrific!” exclaims his daughter, coming down for breakfast. “It looks like a giant tic-tac-toe board. What’s it supposed to be, some kind of tribute to hurricanes or something?”

  “That’s right,” says the mother, “it’s called ‘Three Sheets to the Wind.’ Now, why don’t you take it down, dear, and let the dog in. She’s been scratching out there for an hour.”

  “Wow, speaking of sheets, I had the weirdest dream last night,” says the daughter, ignoring the hollow static in the air. Her father shrinks into his chair, wondering whether the problem is that no one’s listening—or that everyone is. “I was in this crazy city where everything kept changing into something else all the time. A house would turn into a horse just as you walked out of it or a golf course would take off and fly or a street would become a dinner table right under your feet. You might lean against a wall and find yourself out on the edge of a cliff, or climb into a car that turned out to be the lobby of a movie theater. Some guy would walk up to you and change into a pizza or a parking meter in front of your very eyes. Billy was in it, only he was sort of like a pinball machine and to shoot a ball you had to give a jerk on his peewee.”

  “That’s stupid! Pinball machines are girls!”

  “Maybe that explains the bed-wetting,” sighs his mother.

  “You were in it, too, Mom. You were in a chorus line in a kind of scary burlesque show, in which all the dancers were collapsing into blobs and freaks. One of your breasts seemed to slip down and slide out between your legs and you kept yelling something like ‘Get a bucket! Get a bucket!’ Dad wasn’t in the dream, at least I didn’t recognize him, but somebody who was pretending to be him kept hammering on the door and saying he was ‘the loving dad’ and please let him in. But I knew it was just a werewolf who was trying desperately to change back into a human and couldn’t. See, everything kept changing except the things that were supposed to change.”

  “Speaking of your father, where is he? Wasn’t he here just a minute ago?”

  “I don’t know. He wasn’t looking very good. Sort of vague or something.”

  “Oh boy! Can I have his pancakes, Mom?”

  “Well, I hope he paid the mortgage this month.”

  “Anyway, there were these midget league baseball players who turned out to be prehistoric monsters, and all of a sudden they attacked the city, only even as they went on eating up the people, the whole thing turned into a song-and-dance act in which the leading monster did a kind of ballet with the Virgin Mary who just a minute before had been a lawn chair. The two of them got into a fight and started zapping each other with ray guns and screaming about subversion on the boundaries, but just then the ship sank and everybody fell into the sea. You could see them all floating down past these enormous buttocks that turned out to belong to a dead man in a bathtub. Don’t ask me who he was! Well, it occurred to me suddenly that if everything else was changing I must be changing, too. I looked in a mirror and saw I could flatten my nose or pull it out to a point, push my chin up to my forehead, stretch my cheeks out like wings. Still, I felt like there was something that wasn’t changing, I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but it was something down inside, something I could only call me. In fact there had to be this something, I thought, or nothing else made sense. But what was it? Who was down there? I was curious, so I asked the woman I was with to tell me what she thought of when she thought of me. I told her it couldn’t be anything physical, my scars or my cock or the shit-streaks in my underwear, it had to be something you couldn’t touch or see. And what she said was, ‘Well, I think of you as a straight shooter, Sheriff, but one who can’t stop lustin’ after the goddamn ineffable.’ ”

  “She said that, hunh?”

  “Yup.”

  “Shitfire, Sheriff, what’d you do?”

  “Well, I shot her.” He hacks up a gob and aims it at the spittoon. “When a woman starts askin’ me to change my ways—ptooey!—I change women.” He tosses down his drink, leans away from the bar, cocks a wary eye on the swinging doors. “But now tell me somethin’, podnuh—is that just my bowels movin’ or is this saloon goin’ somewhere?!”

  “I’m afraid nothing stands still for long. So, just buckle up and enjoy the ride, ma’am.”

  “Ma’am?!”

  “Yes, we’ll be there soon.”

  “There—?”

  THE EARLY LIFE OF THE ARTIST

  (1991)

  For Benet Rossell

  He was born in the thunderous and calamitous year of the aborted comet halfway between the letter Aleph and the seductively duplicitous alto clef (the village was otherwise nameless) under the astral sign of the Spilt Ink (in more modern times known as the Black-Hearted Hole), notorious for its disorderly influence on otherwise virtuous and economical lives.

  His father was the inventor of radical mathematical formulae and was himself the walking double of the symbol for the square root (thus: rootless roots, a key to the artist’s buoyant gravity and his tendency, not so much to float, as to bounce, lightly). His father’s propositions, in the form of kaleidoscopic satires, bestial and beautiful at the same time, once caused the earth to turn inside out, but the only creatures awake at the time were drunks, bats, ogresses, and a scattering of poets and dungbeetles, and only the bats took notice and changed their habits. Fortunately, history was spared a nasty conversion, the members of the select committee for the Nobel Prize for Mathematics being among those sleeping, though his son, a bat and yet not a bat, alas, was not. Later, he was to fix the blame for his lifetime of visual servitude upon the way his father’s terrible calculations that fateful night spun his eyes inward and made his ears pop.

  His mother, who was either an exquisitely beautiful parallelogram with tufts of feathers and insect wings at the corners or else a muddy mythological river, dark with carob pods, depending on her disposition, was, in spite of shifting appearances, the family anchor. It was she who emptied the brainpans and swept the tortured beds, prepared the daily stew of catastrophe and frolic, tolled the hours, cast the shadows, shielding them from death by illumination, washed out all their humble preshrunk anxieties, hanging them on her farflung limbs and curing them in the violent sun like mountain hams. When asked, much later, to describe his earliest memories, the artist replied: “Salty.”

&nbs
p; It was also his mother who first observed that words were stones and thus not only indigestible but also poor coin at the market, good only (like the rest of us) for landfill. This was her public observation; her private observation, made only to her family, was that everything was a stone, even air, love, and dreams. This brought great stability to her son’s life, and great despair, making it hard, among other things, to breathe (always that caustic rattle, like a shingle beach raked by storm waves), but freeing his art from the illusion of permutability.

  The village where he was born never acknowledged the family’s presence or the artist’s birth there, but this was nothing strange, for acknowledgment, like traffic lights and uncertainty, was utterly foreign to it. The village’s fame indeed rested upon its stubborn and silent insouciance, which was, except for a certain ingenuous hylomorphism expressed by orchestrated wind-breaking in the village square and the occasional burst of spontaneous sky-writing, all it knew or knows of civic and religious procedure.

  When he was young, the village was not strange. The world was strange. Now it is the village that is strange. The world, too.

  For all that the artist came to know the world, if something so opaque and ephemeral can be said to be knowable, he was never able to leave the village of his birth behind. It clung to him like rumor, like wet underwear, like a swarm of sick flies, lovingly tenacious as athlete’s foot. It hobbled his gait on city pavements, tripping him up on his way into subways and revolving doors. It caused the peas to roll off his knife in fashionable restaurants. Nor did his art escape, for the village got in his inks and paints like cowdung in honey and tracked up his canvases with ineradicable clawings and scratchings and turned his paper as fragrant and crumbly as hot country bread.

  Much light might be thrown on this symbiosis of village and artist had the artist’s earliest works, scratchings with a stick in the dust of his village streets completed at the age of three, been preserved for posterity, but in the village posterity had been over for some time, gone the way of the wooden whistle, immaculate conceptions, and the comforting orthodoxy of the garrote. His father had a mathematical formula about it, his mother a sobering aphorism. As for the artworks themselves, the village livestock had a more explicit comment, one artist speaking, so to speak, to another. “What you might call the natural reaction of invisible forces at work in the theater of the brain,” one villager put it bluntly in his rude tongue, twitching his long ears, “and other bodily parts . . .”

  The artist, too, precursor to both the action-painting ecstatics and the disposable art fundamentalists of a later age, could accept the obscuring of elemental vision by the anarchical graffiti of even more elemental sheep turds and mule tracks—who was he to insist on orderly alphabets when there were none?—yet it might be said that everything he has ever drawn, written, painted, fractured, composed, filmed, fondled, or sculpted since has been nothing more than an attempt to recover those first scratchings in the village dust all those years ago.

  Thus, on the one hand, the village created the artist, providing him with implements and canvas and a palette enriched with the primary pigments of alienation and suffering (there was nettle-rash and hogbite, for example) and festive despair, together with song and murder and the spatialization of time with its saffron yellows and olive greens and mauves and ochers and cerulean blues, and, on the other hand, it made his art impossible, all art in fact, not just his, art being excluded from the village’s available categories. Only when the village moved away one day and left him, alone as a crack in the sidewalk in the world’s urban maze, did his life as an artist suddenly begin.

  It began with little animated stitchings as though to suture a wound, or open one. Then color emerged and flowed from unseen sources, pushing the margins out until now the artist’s drawings and paintings are as large as the village itself, which was probably not so large as the artist remembers it. What is he trying to do? Reinvent the lost village? Paper the void? Use up the world’s forests in case the village might be hidden there? The artist will not say. He will only remark enigmatically to his circle of disbelieving admirers, while turning over and over in his paint-stained hands the luminous stones of his loves and dreams, that “there was no early life, only this mockery of a prolonged and bitter afterlife . . .”

  THE NEW THING

  (1994)

  She attempted, he urging her on, the new thing. The old thing had served them well, but they were tired of it, more than tired. Had the old thing ever been new? Perhaps, but not in their experience of it. For them, it was always the old thing, sometimes the good old thing, other times just the old thing, there like air or stones, part (so to speak) of the furniture of the world into which they had moved and from which, sooner or later, they would move out. It was not at first obvious to them that this world had room for a new thing, it being the nature of old things to display themselves or to be displayed in timeless immutable patterns. Later, they would ask themselves why this was so, the question not occurring to them until she had attempted the new thing, but for now the only question that they asked (he asked it, actually), when she suggested it, was: Why not? A fateful choice, though not so lightly taken as his reply may make it seem, for both had come to view the old thing as not merely old or even dead but as a kind of, alive or dead, ancestral curse, inhibitory and perverse and ripe for challenge, impossible or even unimaginable though the new thing seemed until she tried it. And then, when with such success she did, her novelty responding to his appetite for it, the new thing displaced the old thing overnight. Not literally, of course, the old thing remained, but cast now into shadow, as the furniture of the world, shifting without shifting, lost its familiar arrangements. The old thing was still the old thing, the world was still the world, its furniture its furniture, yet nothing was the same, nor would it ever be, they knew, again. It felt—though as in a dream, so transformed was everything—like waking up. This was exhilarating (his word), liberating (hers), and greatly enhanced their delight—she whooped, he giggled, this was fun!—in the new thing, which they both enjoyed as much and as often as they could. Indeed, for a time, it filled their lives, deliciously altering perception, dissolving habit, bringing them ever closer together, illuminating what was once obscure, while making what before was ordinary now seem dark and alien. This was the power of the new thing, and also (they knew this from the outset) its inherent peril. The new thing, being truly new, not merely a rearrangement of the old, removed the ground upon which even the new thing itself might stand. The old things’ preclusive patterns were like those frail stilts that floodplains housing was erected on; the new thing joined forces with the cleansing flood. As did they in their unbound joy, having anticipated all this from the start, though perhaps not guessing then how close together delight and terror lay, nor back then considering, as she, he urging, made the new thing happen, how indifferent to their new creation would be both world and thing. Indifferent, but not untouched. All shook and they, the shakers, were not themselves unshaken. This, too, even trembling, they ardently embraced, though perhaps they whooped and giggled less. Scary! she laughed, reaching for him, and he, clinging to her and thinking as he fell that some principle must be at stake, something to do with time, cause, and motion perhaps: So much the better! Thus, even if somewhat apprehensively in such an altered yet indifferent world, they found pleasure in what might in others inspire dread, their own apprehension mitigated by their shared delight in this new thing, their delight dampened less by antique fears of being swept away in metaphoric floods than by their awareness that the new thing did not, could not know them, nor would or could the world in which they had brought it into being. The new thing, which was theirs, was, alas, not really theirs at all, nor could it ever be. Moreover (her logic, this), they had chosen the new thing, chose it still, but with the old thing lost from view, what choice was theirs in truth? Were they not in fact the chosen? And his reply: Let’s go back to the old thing, just for fun, and see. And did they, could they? Of c
ourse! The old thing was waiting there for them as though neither they nor it had ever gone away, like an old shirt left in the closet, a lost friend discovered in a crowd, and they found new pleasure in returning to it, or at least comfort, and something like reconciliation with the entrenched and patterned ways of the world. The old thing reminds me of my childhood, he acknowledged gratefully, and she: Why this appetite for novelty anyway, when we are here so briefly we don’t even have time enough to exhaust the old? Thus, they enjoyed the old thing anew and in ways they had not done before, chiefly by way of ceasing all resistance, and they told themselves that they were pleased. Of course, they had to admit, after knowing the new thing, it was not quite the same, the old thing. Sort of like dried fruit, she said, sweet and chewy now but not so juicy as before. He agreed: More like body than person, you might say, more carcass than body. They experimented, giving the old thing a new wrinkle or two, but could not sustain their revived interest in it: it was still the old thing and it still oppressed them. Back to the new thing. Which was still there and was delightful and exhilarating, as before. They were pleased and did not have to tell themselves they were. What fun! Truly! But the new thing, like the old thing, no matter how at first they denied this to each other, was also not the same as it had been before, he the first to admit it when regret, batlike, flickered briefly across her brow. No, she objected, falsely brightening, it is not it but we who have changed. By going back. To the old thing. Yes, you were right in the first place, he said, we were not free to choose. But we cannot go back to the new thing either. No, she agreed, we must try a new new thing. And so they did, and again, beginning to get the hang of this new thing thing, they found joy and satisfaction and close accord with one another. Out with old things and old new things, too! they laughed, falling about in their world-shaking pleasure. But was this delight in the new new thing as intense as that they’d felt when they’d first tried the old new thing? No (they couldn’t fool themselves), far from it. So when the new new thing bumped up provocatively against the old new thing they were filled with doubt and confusion and no longer knew which of the two they most desired or should desire, if either. Out of their uncertainties came another new thing (his handiwork this time), momentarily delightful and distracting, but soon enough this too was replaced by yet another (now hers), itself as soon displaced (both now were separately busy at what had become more task than pleasure), the devising of new things now mostly what they did. By now, even the new thing’s newness was in question. I am lost, she gasped, falling to her knees. He called out from across the room: I felt oppressed by the old thing, now I feel oppressed by the new. This is probably, she said, speaking to him by telephone, just the way of the insensate world. We were fooled yet again. No, no, I can’t accept that, he replied by mail, else no new thing is a new thing at all. His letter crossed with hers: My unquenchable appetite for novelty is matched only by my unquenchable appetite for understanding. What a clown! I am deeply sorry. Adding: I have now become a collector of old things. There is not much fun in them, but there is satisfaction. But wait, he wrote in his diary. Does not the invention of one new thing insist by definition upon a second? And a third, a fourth, and indeed is this not in fact, this sequential generation of new things, the real new thing that we have made? And is that not delightful? He thought, if he tore this diary entry out and sent it to her, he might well see her again and they could have fun in their old new things way, but the time for all that was itself an old thing now and, anyway, he no longer knew, now after the flood, where in the world she was.