Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  “No no,” the critic clarified, “the urns. The vases? The jars?” Sigh. “Um, the pots?”

  “What, these things?” Mr. Brown pinged one with his fingernail, and even though the pot was half an inch thick and half-filled with cookies besides, it rang with the crystalline tone you expect from wafer-thin bone china before fading to a nearly noiseless vibration whose sound on the glass counter I still remember every time I hear a muted cellphone. “Lady upstairs makes ’em. Probably has fifty more, a hundred, just like these.”

  Pingzzz.

  The sound, like everything else about Dixie Stammers’s pots, unvarying from one to the next, or varying only in relation to what struck them and how hard: fingernail, teaspoon, the hollow horn of a ram (although in my case it sounds substantially different if I turn the left side of my face toward it as opposed to the right). You know it, even if you don’t know you know it. Maybe you watched as the fifteenth Dalai Lama walked into Xizang Province, reversing the journey his predecessor took in the middle of the last century; that faint pingzzz-pingzzz-pingzzz in the background was the sound of a monk striking one of my mother’s pots 108 times (one for each of the earthly temptations that keep a soul from achieving nirvana) with a gnarled length of root from the Bodhi tree beneath which Siddhartha Gautama found enlightenment. Or maybe you’ve listened to John Cage’s “Farewell (to) Monotony,” which features his nine-year-old grandson striking one of my mother’s pots with a 128-Hz tuning fork at 2.3-second intervals (the time between each of the dying man’s heartbeats), until, at the 1,024th tap, as Cage had predicted, the vibrations in the fork and the vitrified clay reached “critical synchronicity” and the pot shattered to dust (Cage himself lingered for another day and a half, his protracted death rattle forming the symphony’s macabre second movement). And then Steve Jobs, on his third liver and second pancreas and only slightly more mobile than Stephen Hawking, forked out an “undisclosed but reportedly enormous” sum (a nondisclosure agreement prohibits me from telling you the figure, even though I never saw a penny of it) to use the sound as part of the “Same But Different” campaign introducing the PhoneBook, ultimately setting it as OSXtra’s startup alert, which means that hundreds of millions of people all over the planet hear it at least once a day.

  But again I’m getting ahead of things (forgive me, Master Renslow!): in the beginning there was just the one critic, the one article, and then, finally, the one phone call, each less ping than gong sounding the close of a childhood idyll—although the real culprit, if I’m being totally honest, was probably hormones. Well, hormones and genes: I was twelve when the critic discovered my mother. Her review came out six months later, and the following several years, as my mother became more and more famous, were roughly coincident with the ravages of puberty. Adolescence was even more traumatic for me than it is for most kids because my birthmark grew at a slightly slower rate than did the rest of my skin, causing a variety of minor but annoying, embarrassing, and/or painful problems. My left ear rang constantly, my left eyelid drooped as though I had myasthenia gravis, and if I forgot myself and yelled or sang or opened my jaw too wide the left side of my mouth tore open like the skin of a blanched beet, and I would spend the next fifteen minutes with my hand cupped over my lips, my tongue furtively licking up blood (for years afterward whenever I got nervous I spoke with the left corner of my lips pressed together—that’s right, dear reader, your narrator is adept at talking out of one side of his mouth). But heads don’t grow too quickly or too much. The biggest problem was my rib cage. In order to lift my left arm higher than my shoulder I had to massage the side of my torso with cocoa butter (or shea butter, or olive oil, or even bacon grease, the various smells of which prompted Master Whitlock to say that I could drive a reformed cannibal to relapse). Monthly visits to the dermatologist in Wye became weekly; my treatment switched from flash-pumped dye lasers (which had done little to lighten the color of my birthmark) to Nd:YAG lasers (which stands for “neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet” and was, for me, pretty much the most interesting part of the process). The treatments were meant to minimize scarring, hypertrophy, and other “disfigurements,” which word, in this context, seems as richly ironic as the gift shop at Auschwitz. If you’ve ever had a tattoo removed—or a particularly flaky sunburn you tried to scrub off with sandpaper, or just doused yourself with gasoline and set yourself on fire—you have some idea what these sessions were like. Then, at fourteen, there was the indignity of a third (and final, although unknown to me at the time) operation to widen my anus, a part of the body that no teenaged boy, not even Antinous, likes to contemplate, let alone pad like a menstruating woman. It was during this period that I came to appreciate my cap and gown, which covered not only most of my skin but, now, the cuts and sores and blood-stained bandages that pointed up its deviance all the more vividly.

  While all this was happening I was beset by the usual adolescent indignities—the acne, the strange growths of hair and uncontrollable vocal tics, the sudden desire to run, to kill, to rut, to cry—and, of course, by my mother, the budding superstar. Against everyone’s advice she refused to place her pots with a dealer in Dallas or Atlanta or New York. If people wanted to buy her wares they would have to come to Marcuse and carry them away themselves. And come they did. The first went for a thousand, the second for two, the third for five, the fourth for ten. The price continued to jump by leaps and bounds until it stabilized at $150,000 around number 40, but then Three by Stammers came out and number 64 went for $325,000, and 66 (65 was missing and presumed broken) went for $600,000. But again, I’m skipping ahead. The only changes I noticed at first were my own: the little peanut that had been my testicles suddenly losing its firmness, its shape, until it bounced between my thighs like a mold-spotted leather pouch stuffed with two—unequal, alas—mounds of coin; the daily horror of shitting through an asshole ringed with scabs that split open when my sphincter dilated or were torn away wholesale by the outward flow of feces no amount of Metamucil and mineral oil could soften sufficiently; and of course the residue that I found in the fly of my pajamas most mornings, sometimes creamy as glaze made from mother-of-pearl, other times crusty as the slip that saturated my mother’s smocks, and often as not tinged with the same colorful swirls as the organ from which it spurted.

  On top of all that, there was the constant flood of people into and out of our apartment, who kept me busy straightening the piles they mussed, sweeping up their ashes, scrubbing their lipstick from wine glasses and coffee cups. (“What?” my mother gasped more times than I could count. “This piece of crap? Pottery Barn, $11.95—ha ha!”) What these interlopers were doing didn’t seem nearly as important as what my mother did, and often kept her from doing it besides—and, more to the point, kept me from what I wanted to do in my curtained-off sleeping nook, since my mother’s callers often stayed from just after lunch until the wee hours of the following morning. My petty vengeance was to follow after them, running a rag over everything they touched or mopping their footprints away one step at a time or spraying Lysol directly into the clouds of smoke that spewed from their mouths. “Oh, don’t mind Judas,” my mother would say to her clients, laughing, as I glowered at some wattle-necked Swiss or big-hatted Texan, “He can’t stand a mess. Yes, Mr. Beaumont, I said Judas.” Then, too, not a few of the men, on realizing my mother was single, were wont to play the suitor. She was “still young,” as they said—as she herself said—although that still added a note of urgency, of years and beauty steadily eroded by the soaps and scrubs of her hourslong baths. But even though my mother did nothing to rebuff them—laughed at their jokes, accepted their gifts, welcomed them to her bed—they soon drifted away, because it was clear that even when she wasn’t working with clay, when she was wearing a silk dress instead of a cotton smock, an open blouse that showed off the birthmark on her breast or a wrap skirt that revealed the taut line of her thigh, she was still thinking always and only about her pots, such that, minutes after lickin
g the last creamy morsel of chocolate pudding from her spoon, she could flag down the maître d’ and ask him if he had a bag of shells for her, which pungent bundle (tarragon, lemon, day-old mollusk) she would thrust into the hand of her startled date when he reached to help her from her chair. Wine and water were equally “refreshing,” filet mignon and Hamburger Helper equally “delicious,” suitors and buyers, men and women, strangers and, finally, her own son, equally “interesting”:

  “Mr. Hauser is quite an interesting man, Judas. You should get to know him.”

  “Ceci n’est pas une pipe told me something really interesting when—no, Cecil. Saint Pepin. Did you wash my smock today—or your ears for that matter?”

  “Bobby says you wrote an interesting letter in response to that piece in the Times-Picayune. You should leave it out for me, I’d love to read it, it sounds very interesting.”

  The newspaper, folded open to the letter in question, had been sitting on my mother’s bedside table for nearly three weeks when she made this remark. Every evening when I cleaned her room—or every evening when I could get in there anyway—I found that it had migrated to the bottom of a stack of cosmetic dermatological magazines and auction-house catalogs, and I moved it back to the top of the pile, only to find it buried again the next day, until finally she used it as part of the packing for number 62 when she sold it to a buyer representing some branch or other—oh, the irony!—of the Japanese royal family. That’s what I blamed the critic for—not for making my mother so busy that she didn’t pay attention to me, but for making me realize she’d never paid attention. For thirteen years we’d been so perfectly alone together that it never occurred to me our quarantine might not have been established for my benefit. Simply having my mother there, working her clay, her mortar and pestle, her brushes and glazes and kilns with metronomic regularity was all I needed. On the days I didn’t have class or a doctor’s appointment I waited in my sleeping alcove until she finished working—used cotton swabs to daub polish into the ornate crannies of the Stammers silver (the interlocked M/S that, in hindsight, I realize could’ve read S/M just as easily) or refolded the clothes Mrs. Brown had washed so they fit more neatly into overstuffed drawers or tore the pages from magazines and ripped the pages into pieces and sorted the pieces by color in preparation for a collage that I had no intention of making (although I had given it the rather grand title of “The Apparition of the Apotheosis in the Wine Stains Left on the Table After the Last Supper”), waiting always for the click of the bathroom door and the opening of the tub’s faucets, the first sawing strings of Bach or Scarlatti or Purcell signaling that it was time for me to restore our world to order, to uncrack the egg, as it were, from which our life daily hatched. All of that was gone now. The routine that had defined our lives since I’d given up painting had been obliterated. In its place was an endless parade of visitors who tossed money around like confetti and renewed in me the sense of myself as a freak to be gawked at like a carnival sideshow or ignored like a carcass on the side of the road. Nocturnal emission might have alleviated adolescence’s liquid accumulation but it did nothing to lessen the anxiety and anger building up in me like an air pocket in firing clay, excited molecules ricocheting against their cell walls until at last the bisque explodes, destroying itself and everything else in the kiln. I don’t know what might have happened if, one day in early 1995, the phone hadn’t rung.

  You understand that the phone had rung before—had rung almost incessantly in the nine months since the Art in America review came out—but my mother never picked it up, just let the machine get it, and had me return the call, or not, as the mood struck her. But on this day she did answer. She’d just said to a prospective buyer, “He says it itches sometimes, and it’s sensitive to temperature, and I think it’s fucking up his hearing, but as far as I know it doesn’t actually hurt,” when the phone rang and she sighed almost gratefully and said, “Please excuse me a moment,” and picked it up.

  “This is she.”

  “Yes, I know who h-he is.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear about that.”

  “Goodness, that was—please don’t touch that, Mr. Ling—very generous.”

  “Just a moment, let me get a pen.”

  “Of course I’ll relay the news. Thank you for calling.”

  In the time it took me to roll on my side—painfully, a three-inch blister along the outer left edge of my rib cage bursting like popped bubble wrap—the conversation was over. My mother held the corded handset a few inches from her ear as though it were the head of a poisonous snake, and the quizzical yet slightly wondrous smile on her lips filled me with a premonition in a way that none of the events of the previous fifteen months had that our lives were not just about to change, but to end. It wasn’t the telephone that filled me with such dread. It was the fact that my mother was holding it. I myself used the phone regularly. But my mother never did. There was no explicit reason for her refusal. She never said, “I don’t like telephones,” or “Telephones are unclean,” or anything like that. Rather, there was always a specific excuse not to answer when it rang (“Judas! My hands are covered in clay!” or “You get it, Jude, you’re closer”) or not to pick it up when she needed something (“It’s such a beautiful day, let’s walk down to the Lake to see if the strawberries are ready. We’ll stop at the post office on the way back”). Certainly she wasn’t a Luddite like the masters. She worked the halogen lamps that lit her table like Shiva’s second set of arms, thought the sonic toothbrush one of the wonders of the modern world, replaced every one of her scratchy old Alton Ellis and Slim Smith 78s with CDs as soon as they were available and would’ve thought Spotify a latter-day Library of Alexandria. Nor was she particularly antisocial: at the age of thirty-one she’d taken up the old ladies’ habit of folding a quilt over her bedroom windowsill and leaning out of an evening to chat with the novices making their way down High Street toward the Foundry, gowns open if the weather was warm or poking from overcoats like mourning crinolines if it was cold, and at least once a week—well, exactly once a week, every Thursday afternoon at 3, when Mrs. Brown retreated into the basement with the laundry and a portable television she “hid” in her sewing basket—she installed herself at one of the tables in the bakery and chatted with Mr. B. about obscure pastry facts (apparently the best water for parboiling bagels was drawn from the Dnieper River, but only upstream from the factories of Kiev, and only before the Communist Revolution in 1917), the latest piercing trends among the students at the public school in Wye (eyebrows giving way to lips, lips to nipples, nipples to navels, navels to “Oh, Miz Stammers, don’t say it, I don’t even wanna think about it”), whether the ice would crack on the Lake before or after the first daffodils bloomed on its north-facing banks (after being unusual, but for the same reason a harbinger of a cold spring that would translate to a late planting of the soybean crop and a bad yield come August), or if anyone could ever love someone with a face like a baboon’s ass (“Kids is putting metal and tattoos and just about any old thing in, on, and around they faces now, so who knows—and no one likes a eavesdropper, young man, so whyn’t you grab yourself a cookie and run on upstairs?”). But there she was, the phone hovering near her ear for one more moment, and then, starting, she returned it to its cradle. “Mr. Ling, please,” she said, “sit down and don’t touch anything,” and then she walked toward my room. She paused on the threshold, her gaze aimed obliquely from the bed, as if I might be up to something, or as if someone had, for the first time since I was three or four, made her self-conscious about her son’s appearance.

  “Judas,” she said, addressing the far wall. “I have some news to report. Your great-uncle has died.”

  I’d been looking at my mother expectantly, but now I too turned—turned the right side of my face toward her, the left side away—as if I’d been caught out, or caught a glimpse of some hideous stranger on the street and realized it was my own reflection.

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