Savage Theories

by Pola Oloixarac

  The argument lasted all afternoon. Every so often Evelyn came into the study with coffee and plates of scones. She heard her Manfred say furiously, “But why should we choose to become vassals of an empire so small that it barely exists? Why don’t we develop a theory that truly reaches back to the beginning of time? I didn’t catch chronic colitis on that African riverboat just to see our results torn apart at some flea circus!” This sent her scurrying back to the kitchen to check on the turkey. Fischer stared out the window in silence—the elms, the conifers. Fodder collapsed into his overstuffed chair, still enervated by his own arguments, and Fischer began to speak: “When the subjective conditions are insufficient to prove to others the necessity of a given theory, a small nucleus must undertake actions that at first glance might seem unthinkable, so as to spread their ideas and bring down the regime (e.g. the other theory) in which they are embedded.” Fischer spoke calmly without ever looking over at Fodder. “It’s just a strategy, Marvin. That’s all it is.” The two of them continued on in this vein until six o’clock in the evening, when the turkey was finally ready, as were the respective decisions of the two academics.

  After the turkey with its potatoes and currants, there was apple pie. Fischer praised Evelyn’s culinary gifts, and looked with nostalgia at his old classmate, his partner in adventure, who was silently scarfing the food down. Little Jake began to cry in the next room. Not much more was said, and Fischer left the following morning. Long afterward, Moonless Writings was published by a small university press. Fodder and Fischer exchanged a few more letters, but their divergent ideological destinies multiplied the physical distance between Ithaca and Charlottesville many times over, and they never saw one another again.

  Twenty-three years later, in January of 1949, a pilot flying his Auster J/5 monoplane along the 23rd parallel over the swamps northeast of Johannesburg saw a Caucasian man running naked through the jungle. The little white stain with arms disappeared into the foliage; in spite of the pilot’s efforts to keep the man in view, he lost all sight of him. Returning to his base, the pilot, Manners, reported what he’d seen to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Owen, who furled his brow, used the tip of his boot to pull open the drawer where he kept his fountain pens, and asked Manners to fetch him the rubber stamps on the shelf. A series of aerial patrols were sent in, confessions were extracted from the inhabitants of the “black spots” where only natives lived, and a reward was offered for any lead on the whereabouts of the lost white man—all without success. One much-discussed hypothesis was that the “white Bushman” had been kidnapped by one of the local tribes, and that Manners had seen him in the final hours of his life, cruelly hunted down in the course of some beastly ritual. Thus it was that Professor Johan van Vliet, pioneer in the area of psychological experimentation, once more dodged the opportunity to return to the world of the living, white version.

  The previous such occasion had taken place in southern Bulawayo, currently part of Zimbabwe, in the fall of 1942. The heat weighed heavily on the bush lands, trapped inside a yellow fog. The nearby swamp emitted a sweet aroma which drifted slowly through the foliage; insects buzzed and crackled in the air, a deafening din. A group of archaeologists was excavating a number of sites in the area. New World specimens, thought Van Vliet, smiling as he crouched in the scrub, his thick eyebrows arched over the eyepieces of a set of binoculars he’d bought in 1912 or thereabouts at a quayside market in Bremen. For the next few weeks he watched the scene develop with great interest, and once he’d established that they were looking for human bones, he decided to introduce himself. He hid his tattoos and other bellicose symbols beneath old linen clothes he hadn’t worn since leaving his own encampment. As a final touch, he donned a khaki pith helmet, that essential element of the Commonwealth summer uniform; the Fon, traditionally fond of saving the skulls with which war provided them, had once kept this helmet as a souvenir. He stayed hidden until sundown. Then, in full view of Dr. Tom Monroe and his assistant, Dr. Lindsay Erron, Van Vliet stepped tall and straight from among the trees, surrounded by silence.

  With an authoritative elegance foreign to the century from which the others came, Van Vliet explained that he was conducting research on the far side of the river, that his name was Marvin, Marvin Fodder, and he was working with a team from Utrecht University. He looked from one surprised face to the other with a delight he was perhaps unable to disguise. Lindsay Erron was of slender build, with alert gray eyes and a soft voice that she used now to note with a smile that they hadn’t heard of any other scientific expeditions at work anywhere within the radius of their research zone. For his part, Tom Monroe—tall, dark, thirty years old or so—felt a tremor in his leg, a sensation he tended to get whenever he knew exactly which horse to back. He also felt the venom rising, afflicting his conscience; he knew that it would be worth his while to invest a few bottles of scotch in this alleged Martin Faber, and so, preempting Lindsay’s womanly courtesy, he invited the man to stay for dinner.

  Dr. Monroe drew back the mosquito net on the main tent. The floor was covered with rugs and weavings; there were maps and glass bowls, kerosene lamps, tables overlaid with white cloth to hide the bones they held. A plank balanced on a pair of sawhorses served as the main work desk. There were two microscopes of different sizes, and many other strange instruments which embedded themselves in Van Vliet’s memory as he examined his surroundings. He headed instinctively for a stack of old books bound in bluish imitation leather—in the amber lamplight they were even more beautiful than he remembered. He caressed their spines as if mistaking them for the beloved backsides of the girls of Pigalle: The Book of the Sword and Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo by Sir Richard Burton, who’d baptized the kingdom of Dahomey with the fond nickname “little black Sparta,” and The Evolution of Culture, a collection of Pitt-Rivers essays combining the history of warfare with Darwin’s Origin of Species. Tom Monroe could not help noticing the murmur that crept from the lips of his guest.

  A Zulu servant came into the tent carrying a tray of glasses; seeing Van Vliet, his face froze in horror. Monroe muttered a ngiyabonga of thanks, stretching out the vowels clumsily as Americans often do, and snapped his fingers to make the man disappear. He leaned against the precariously unstable desk in the classic pose of explorers, cowboys, and suave leading men from movies Van Vliet had never seen, and lit his pipe.

  –I am in a position, he said, to confirm that we are currently excavating a site that will make history. Yes, my friend: history. We have encountered trace evidence of the funeral rituals of an Afarensis tribe: a communal grave that holds the bones of two small hominids, as well as those of a cheetah or some other mid-sized feline. The skulls of the children show signs of puncture wounds; we believe they were taken in their sleep and slain using a weapon made of animal fangs. The site’s configuration showed no traces of religious significance, nothing staged to honor any deity. There are no gods here. In this tribe, the hunters not only warded off predators; from the very beginning of time, they were murderers as well.

  Van Vliet looked out the tent at a clearing where a pair of sturdy, bare-chested Zulus were starting a fire. Beyond them he could make out a wooden structure of some kind.

  –I hired several natives to work on the excavation while Dr. Erron and I analyze samples. Apparently we pay quite well—they’ve brought their relatives for us to hire too.

  Monroe shot a wink at the clearing and smiled. Van Vliet drew close to the covered mass on the table, and Monroe pulled the cloth back so that he could have a better look. The case of Monroe could inspire an entirely different theory, one that depended on the relationship that he sought to establish with the man he considered his precursor, and on a few empirical facts held hostage. Lindsay, her legs pressed tightly together and her hands on her knees, noticed that Van Vliet was ignoring the bones; rather, he was staring intently at her. Embarrassment rose in her cheeks, dilating the blood vessels around her nose.
Her translucent eyelids licked down across her eyeballs; when she opened her eyes, exposing them to the elements, the green around her pupils went incandescent, then settled to a quiet glow. A slight quiver of the lips; her ears pinned back against her skull, a bit pale but with a slight bluish tint down toward the lobes. Van Vliet remembered the series of questions Darwin had asked about the facial vocabulary of the Chinese. When a person becomes indignant, do they straighten their necks, square their shoulders, close their hands into fists? If they encounter a problem, do they furl their brow, wrinkling the skin beneath their lower eyelids? When one attacks another, does the attacker furl his lip, showing his canine tooth on the side facing his opponent? Can expressions indicating guilt, dishonesty or jealousy be observed? Van Vliet raised two fingers as if he could reach out and touch Lindsay’s skin.

  Lindsay let her eyes fall half-closed; something about Faber seemed familiar, but she couldn’t say what it was or where the feeling had come from. Monroe stared through the smoke of his pipe at Van Vliet, and lifted one authoritative finger. He ran to the far side of the tent, set some sort of machine to work, and the strains of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” began to sound.

  –Professor, do you like Glenn Miller?

  Van Vliet’s attention to all else suddenly collapsed. He lifted his hands to his face, and began to weep. Lindsay went to him, not knowing what to say. She held out her hand, and led him to a neighboring tent where he could spend the night. They never saw him again.

  Part Three

  1

  In a little refrigerator, beneath a red tungsten gleam, a brain-versus-heart poster floated above the fliers and chewy candy. The caption read: The Thing inspires respect, and perspiration—the Thing is Queen. The Thing—that which shall heretofore be known as the Thing—is the Sublime Attractor of Pure Sensibilities. (The email invitation had chanted Zarpe Diem. Cumbia Loonática vs. Chancho Malo and Organitos back-2-back. ArteRadix, Q’lo negro, Choris Cósmicos Kalenchus. Special Guests: Tumitumi + Gadortxa Full.) The illustration was of a geronto-masculine profile whose curly beard formed a political map of South America. Andy confirmed that the proceedings in question would not include a poetry reading. (The laissez faire, laissez passer attitude of contemporary Buenos Aires obliged one to tread warily; there was always the chance that young women would venture onto the stage to share free-verse intimacies, pornographic outbursts, scattered rhymes in the local dialect.) And Kamtchowsky wanted to dance. She had always thought highly of the solvent rhythms and corpuscular-undulatory character of cumbia music; in the end, the eye of progress (its acritical, Phoenician voracity) drew near for a sybaritic feast, as if the phenomenon of spontaneous regeneration had suddenly sprung into existence, its very spontaneity consisting of a chic degeneration of the inadmissible.

  Zarpe Diem took place in a synagogue that was clearly in the process of collapsing. Strings of tiny Felliniesque lights and colorful streamers dangled down from a ceiling pocked with mildew and grime. The walls were covered with florescent arrows pointing at the cracks that ran in all directions. A green-and-red sign warned that there were no emergency exits—it was of course completely natural for a synagogue to advise against diaspora. Another sign annotated the scene with the order to “Eat your partner.”

  An insidious, rhythmic bass line peppered with cosmic sound effects could be heard—the rhythm was explosive and disconcerting. A kid wearing only underpants and a soaking wet bowler hat was pounding away at a little toy piano; nearby were several laptops and metal boxes covered with phosphorescent decals. On stage, a kid with a tie around his neck and a feather headdress was acting out the role of a native—olive-colored skin, highland facial features, the feathers themselves. On the screen behind him, images appeared of this same kid, his hair slicked back with gel, using a garden hose to water the animal innards that filled the engine compartment of a car. A girl was squeezing a tube of red tempera all over the viscera and the open hood, a theatrically robotic expression on her face. Behind the stage, a young Carmen Miranda (with the requisite headpiece of bananas and cucumbers, the dark hair and exuberantly crimson mouth) crouched down to check the cables.

  Otto and Pebeteen donned motorcycle helmets and walked up on stage. Each had a keytar strung across his chest—a common cumbia instrument. Pebeteen wore a zarzuela-style polka dot dress; he was short, thin, white-skinned. Otto on the other hand was tall, well-proportioned, shirtless in black sweatpants. Together they lip-synched the Satanist version of a Kraftwerk song. After a while, Otto smashed his keytar across Pebeteen’s helmet; Pebeteen, not the least bit intimidated, raised his own instrument and hammered Otto’s thought-dome in turn. They went back and forth like this for some time.

  The choris cósmicos were for sale at a stand in back, watched over by a friendly local fat guy and his brood. Little Kamtchowsky wolfed down her grilled sausage to the catchy rhythm of “La bomba” as sung by Carmen Miranda, who tapped her foot but was otherwise motionless. Then all the lights went out except for a few flickering yellow beams accompanied by a low frequency pedal effect, amorphous. The stage filled with mysterious figures dressed in black, wearing black helmets, brandishing machine guns that fired brilliant red beams of light.

  ON THE FLOOR! EVERYBODY ON THE FLOOR! HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD!

  Everyone obeyed, hiding their heads in their hands. The commandos walked amongst the prostrate bodies. They repeated the orders, shouted them over and over, swinging their weapons expressively left and right. Some of the people on the floor covered their plastic cups with their hands to keep from spilling. The noise grew deafening. ON THE FUCKING FLOOR! And now a police siren. Contagious laughter revealed that with this simulation of a simulation of a massacre, the show had come to its climax. The bodies of the dead crawled over one another, their arms and legs tangling, a mass of trembling tentacles. The shouted order changed to “Hands in the air!” just as the Pibes Chorros song of the same name started to play, and at the back wall a ritual took place—a poster was set on fire, some guy with a Leibnizian wig.

  Llegamos los pibes chorros

  queremos las manos de todos arriba

  porque al primero que se haga el ortiba

  por pancho y careta le vamos a dar.xi

  After a while Kamtchowsky had had enough of being alternately astonished and bored, and went to look for a bathroom. Such trips were intimately connected to the core of her personality, linked as they were to general notions of female camaraderie and volubility. Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, whenever Kamtchowsky and her friends had announced that they were going to the bathroom, they were in fact about to “take a walk around,” a tactical euphemism for getting a sense of the lay of the land, discovering who had come and where they could be found. Nothing memorable ever occurred, but the ritual kept them alert to possible interactions with the opposite sex.

  In the course of this current expedition, she rubbed more or less lasciviously against twenty people or so; the spatial rhetoric of the hallway encouraged such flirting. The tightly packed bodies slowed her forward motion, and the low light turned everything red—not just her thoughts. At the end of the hallway she saw a half-open door and an old sink; once inside she noticed two boys smiling at her. One had curly red hair, was twenty-two or so, and quite cute; the other wore a checkered beanie and was extremely pale, infantile, disfigured, as if a very weak acid produced by some morbid form of maternal love had subtly corroded his features.

  Kamtchowsky smiled back at them, and realized that she was mimicking Mara’s seductive little gestures. The boys stood there, wordless. They look like imbeciles, she thought. She saw that on the toilet seat cover there was a swastika drawn in white powder; it made her feel dangerous. She gave a little hop, went to her knees, hunched forward and inhaled through her lucky dollar bill. Under the sweet gaze of her new friends, Kamtchowsky’s bodily organism took in about two grams of ketamine, a general anesthetic often used on animals. T
he drug selectively diminishes the power of association in the cortex and thalamus, producing a dissociative phenomenon similar to an “out of body” experience. Kamtchowsky gasped for air—the chemical had gone in like a punch. The kid in the beanie drew near. He opened her left eye with his fingers and observed the behavior of her pupil. Kamtchowsky opened her mouth to speak; three seconds passed, and now she’d lost all control of her body. This discovery occurred just as she was formulating a desire: she wanted to make her way back to that packed hallway where acceptance came freely, but her legs would not respond.

  Montaigne theorized that handicapped people make the best sexual partners, because the nutrients that would have served a given extremity are rerouted to the genitalia. Kamtchowsky had never heard of this, but mysteriously enough, she was in a position to provide corroboration of a sort. His name was Miguel; professionally speaking, he was the first differently-abled young man ever to be chosen Employee of the Month.

  One afternoon back in April, at a McDonald’s in the Belgrano district, she had ordered a McFiesta, and noticed that Miguel wanted to look her in the eyes as he handled her order, but couldn’t quite manage it. Someone less romantic than Kamtchowsky would have admitted to herself that this was just because he was totally cross-eyed. Miguel, with all the aplomb that the scene required, invited her to join the McTour that was just beginning. Kamtchowsky, french fries and small soft drink in hand, couldn’t bring herself to say no.