by Sam Lipsyte
The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England sipped tea in his parlor somewhere in England. Pale light trickled through the parlor’s leaded windows in that trickling manner of English light as pictured by a person who would not know. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England was an old man now. He passed his days sipping tea in his parlor and staining his mustaches with smoke from his briar pipe. His legs, once strong enough to spur his horse at a Boer sniper’s nest or leap a boulder to avoid the whirling blades of a Mahdi charge, lay withered beneath the double layer of his tweed trousers and his dear dead wife’s favorite shawl.
It was difficult to believe it was 1983. How old was he? One hundred and twenty-five? He had lived to see so much, from the murder of the czar to the Austrian paperhanger to the American moon shot, not to mention those urchins with the safety pins through their eyebrows and their so-called music.
The Sex Pistols were the best of the lot.
Still and all, it would be better to die now. It seemed to him during these days of pale, pictured light that the only thing keeping him out of his coffin was an unanswered question: Why had he killed the idea of tanks in England? He had had his reasons and recalled them quite well, thank you. Tanks were clunky. Tanks were slow. Tanks looked silly compared with, for instance, a mounted detachment of the Scots Guards cresting a hill on a crisp autumn day. Yes, he had been there when Mr. Simms demonstrated his “motor-war car,” that boiler on wheels with the revolving Maxim guns. Impressive to a simpleton, perhaps, all those moving parts in the Daimler engine.
The light trickling through the leaded windows was certainly pale. This Public Image Limited business was a horrific mistake. Lydon had gotten it right the first time. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England had gotten it wrong, stood there on that muddy field, snorted in Mr. Simms’s expectant face.
“Won’t do. Won’t do at all.”
Was he supposed to be some seer, then? A Delphic oracle? How could he predict such intractability, the endless trenches, all that wire, the Boche guns shredding so many tender poets? Surely he should be forgiven for killing the idea of tanks in England. Others, after all, had revived the idea, fetched it from conceptual purgatory. A little late to save the poets, perhaps, but there were too many anyway. Besides, who is to say they would not have roasted inside those infernal kettles?
Then again, with a jump on the job, England might have had a whole fleet of armored poet-preserving machines. Maybe one would have rolled over Corporal Hitler in No Man’s Land, saved everyone a considerable inconvenience. Still, would that have been worth the price of watching Rupert Brooke die of prostate cancer?
It was the American Century, after all, or so the Americans kept proclaiming, and maybe they had a point. Though not much of a book fancier, the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England had always been keen on the Yanks. His favorite was the golden lush from Minnesota. Gatsby was tops. A secret part of him had always wished he could write such a bloody good novel. Or better yet, be the subject of a tale by such a blazing talent. But the story of the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England would probably never have occurred to Fitzgerald. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England had spent most of the so-called Jazz Age pretending he had not killed the idea of tanks in England. It was not much of a story, was it?
It could very well have been that the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England was actually one hundred and twenty-seven years old. There were no papers pertaining to his birth. A bastard, he was, born in a hedgerow to a chambermaid. His father, the fake earl, had been kind enough to pay for schooling, after which the army seemed a natural choice. Leap a Sudanese boulder, charge some Boers, you might dodge certain questions of lineage. You might rise through the ranks until you have won enough medals to be asked your opinion of the idea of tanks in England.
Be ready, by God.
Now the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England heard the sound of an engine revving out past the garden. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England peered out the parlor window. It was that damned Peasley, the groundskeeper, on his new contraption, the mechanized lawn mower. Peasley had eaten up a good deal of the grounds budget with that pretty mechanical toy, which, come to think of it, is what Lord Kitchener, the old field marshal, dubbed the Simms car.
So it was not only the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England who killed the idea of tanks in England!
The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England could remember when men cut grass with curved blades on the ends of sticks. What were they called again? What were those blades that seemed to whirl on the ends of sticks called? Now came Peasley riding high up on his little mower like a modish tank general, some arrogant Total War twit.
Confound him.
The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England let his dear dead wife’s shawl slip from his lap. He hobbled out to the garden gate. Peasley chugged by on his mower, waved.
“Won’t do!” called the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England. “Won’t do at all!”
He noticed that Peasley wore some odd plastic muffs on his ears and probably had not heard him.
“Hello there!” he called, moving past the gate and onto the lawn. Peasley rounded a tree, headed straightaway at the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England. Could Peasley be driving with his eyes shut? The idiot looked lost in reverie. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England stood motionless. His old bones, his rotted legs felt staked to the earth. What he would not give now for Hal, his old Boer War mount. Not a kingdom, though. Too late for that.
“Peasley! Peasley!”
One could not say his life flashed before his eyes. His life had been too long. The lawn mower was too slow, and clunky. He saw things, though, toys from his boyhood, tin lancers and hussars and cuirassiers, the gilt-edged pages of his beloved adventure books. He saw the nibs of examination pens, and the body of the girl who would become the woman who would become his wife, in moonlight. He saw himself and others in uniform, on parade, on maneuvers, and later on pallets, gurneys. He saw veldtgrass and Sudanese dirt and trench mud drying on his boots. He saw his mother in her maid’s kit, and his father, far off in a sun-buzzed meadow, a quail gun in the crook of his arm. He saw the garish pink-and-green sleeve of Never Mind the Bollocks, his own palsied hand pawing at the precious vinyl inside.
It had been too bloody long, this life, everything hinging on one decision made when he was just a youngish fool with too many ribbons, too much fringe.
“Won’t do,” said the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England, and fell to his ruined knees. Peasley, eyes shut, recollecting a childhood fishing trip he had taken with his maternal grandfather, a German who had helped develop mustard gas for the kaiser, drove down upon the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England, the blades beneath the mower’s carriage whirling like, that’s it, scythes.
NATE’S PAIN IS NOW
Nobody wanted my woe. Nobody craved my disease. The smack, the crack, the punch-outs and lockdowns, all those gun-to-my-temple whimpers about my dead mother and scabby cat—nobody cared anymore. The world had worthier victims. Slavers pimped out war orphans in hovels hung with rat-chewed velveteen. Babies starved on the desert floor.
Once, my gigs at the big-box bookshops teemed with the angry and ex-decadent, the loading-bay anarchists and hackers on parole, the meth mules, psych majors.
Goth girls, coke ghosted, rehabbed at twelve and stripping sober, begged for my sagas of degradation, epiphany. They pressed in with their inks, their dyes, their labial metals and scarified montes, cheered their favorite passages, the famous ones, where I ate some sadistic dealer’s turd on a Portuguese sweet roll for the promise of a bindle, or broke into a funeral parlor and slit a corpse open for the formaldehyde. My fans would stomp and holler for my sorrows, my sins, sway in stony reverence as I mapped my steps back to sanity (the stint on a garbage truck, the first clean screw), or whatever semblance of sanity was possible in a world gone berserk with mi
sery, plague, affinity marketing.
I had what some guy at a New Paltz book café called arc. You can’t teach arc, he told me. Nobody’s born with it, either. I stood for something. My finger lingered on the somehow still-flickering pulse.
I had a good run. Bang the Dope Slowly and its follow-up, I Shoot Horse, Don’t I?, sold big. I bought a loft, married Diana, the lovely Diana, who’d stood by in the darkness, my “research” years. My old man, the feckless prick, even he broke down and vowed his love. But as a lady at a coffee bar in Phoenix put it, what goes up can’t stay up indefinitely because what’s under it, supporting it, anyway?
There are wise women in Arizona.
* * *
It was here in New York City that I first noticed signs of my decline. Standing at the lectern under those harsh chain store kliegs, regaling the crowd with the particulars of a scam I used to run on Alzheimer’s patients from a clinic near my squat, I heard a voice spear down from the balcony.
“Enough already!”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I said enough,” said the man. He leaned past the rail, a fattish fellow with lovely corn-blond hair. “So you almost died and hurt a lot of people along the way. You got your medal. Go home.”
It was true about the medal. I’d recently won an award for creative nonfiction from a major credit card company.
“Maybe some others here want me to finish,” I said, hearing my voice strain now against some sissified collapse.
“Freaking sheep,” said the man.
“Leave him be!” called a voice. It sounded like Nate, my protégé. He’d been a homeless gay punk. Now he was my homeless gay punk protégé. Other voices rose to join him. My minions were protecting me. How humiliating. I felt like that bullied boy I’d described in Spoon for the Misbegotten, the one who ran home to weep and quaff his mother’s cooking sherry—not that my mother ever cooked, let alone with sherry.
“Yeah, back off. He’s been through a lot.”
“He’s fragile!”
“He’s a fraud!” called the man, who I saw now wore heavy coveralls splotched darkly in places with what could have been berry juice, or blood.
“He’s our friend!” somebody said.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can take care of myself.”
There were murmurs now, mutters, maybe.
“We’ve got your back!”
“We’re here for you, and we…” somebody trailed off.
“Don’t you get it?” said the man in coveralls. “This guy betrayed his friends and family, he’s contributed untold thousands to the drug economy, which has probably helped get others hooked, and now he blabs about it for cash. And don’t start in about his philosophy. It’s half-baked nonsense. He teaches us nothing. You really need this guy to tell you capitalism poisons our bodies and corrupts our souls? Are you that dim you can’t figure it out for yourselves?”
Nobody spoke. I was sensing a strange mood in the crowd tonight, a balkiness I had never encountered. They were maybe beginning to be done with me.
“I think you’re the dim one,” I said.
“Weak meat,” boomed my butcher.
* * *
It was a slow, luxuriant slide, like a dollop of half-fried mayonnaise slinking down the lean, freckled back of a teen. The teen’s name was Freida, she’d designed one of my websites, but those ecstasies were over. Diana had departed. Nate had disappeared. Only my father’s faxes sustained me:
Dear Disappointment,
Not dead yet? Keep at it, kid. You had all those sad suckers fooled, but not me. How long did you think it would last? The money, the women, the talks at the Y? The Y is for some vigorous cardio and steaming your nuts free of deadly nut toxins, not for listening to some junkie freak moan about his generation. Don’t you know there’s real suffering in the world? Slavers pimp out war orphans in hovels hung with rat-chewed velveteen. I saw it on the news! Didn’t you learn anything when I was promoted to vice president of sales in district seven and then got fired with everyone else the next day? When life knocks you down, don’t bother getting up. Because life will punish you for getting up. Life will bite your eyes out.
Call Me,
Your Progenitor
P.S. Dinner?
I’d pace my loft, smoke Egyptian cigarettes, drink vodka cocktails, snort any pill I could crush. Such binges once primed me for another recovery, another memoir, but I couldn’t feel the magic anymore, that rush of becoming. All was murk and a sort of moister, muddier murk. Out my window was traffic, suffering, euphoria, pretzel carts. Inside was the petty spiral. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fat dude, his wonderful hair.
I picked up my father’s latest fax. Maybe a few hours in the vicinity of his rot could put me back on track. Also, I could teach him about the Internet. I caught a bus across the river.
* * *
My father was semiretired, a freelance consultant. He drove around begging alms from men and women he’d once commanded. He got by, as many widowers do, on peanut butter and hate.
“Any booze around here?” I said.
“Why don’t you drink a pint of lye and get it over with?” my father said. “Why don’t you have yourself a nice little lye-and-hantavirus smoothie? That’ll fix you up good, you piece of shit.”
My father flung himself across the table, flapped his hand in my face. It’s true he never hit me. A father need not hit. His coughs, his smirks, are blows. Even a father’s embrace confers a kind of violence. Or so I once pronounced on public radio.
“This meat loaf is terrible,” I said now. “Worse than Mom used to make.”
“It’s supposed to be terrible,” said my father. “This isn’t meant to be a pleasant experience. This is an intervention.”
“An intervention? Where is everybody?”
“Who everybody? It’s just me. Nobody else cares whether you live or die. And I’m on the fence.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Intervene.”
“I just did.”
“You did?”
“Just then.”
“Oh.”
“So, what’s the plan, Bigtime? I figure you’re almost out of money. Welcome back. Maybe you could land some menial job, night janitor, say, but who’s going to hire you, especially with your background as a self-aggrandizing scumrag.”
“Bag?”
“Rag. Is how we said it.”
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Thanks for the intervention.”
“Anytime.”
* * *
I rode back to the city, spotted this damaged-looking beauty a few seats away. The damage wasn’t just the tortoiseshell tattooed over the entirety of her shaved skull, or the stern tortoise head glaring out from between her eyes. The damage, in fact, was everything not the tortoise, not the tattoo.
“I know who you are,” she said.
“That makes one of us,” I said.
“You mattered to me once.”
“What happened?”
“You mattered to me less and less. Can you introduce me to Nate?”
“Forget Nate,” I said. “You’ve had struggles, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Lay them on me, sister.”
The tortoise woman told me her story. She’d been a ward of the state, a runaway, a medievalist, a personal anal sex trainer, a robot rock chanteuse, a junior Olympic sprinter, the estranged wife of an ex–French legionnaire. Her story had heart havoc and threat, but no self-annihilation. She’d been stymied but always summoned the nerve to perdure. She was the opposite of me. I resented her and wanted to serve her. I wanted the world to pledge itself to her example.
“My God,” I said.
“You have one?”
“Please,” I said. “Let me write your story.”
I pictured us together in my loft, me with spiral-bound pads and designer pencils worn to their nubs by her inspirational tale. Critics would applaud my decision to invest my talent in this inked slut’s plight. My fans w
ould swoon at the way I’d reached out to another wounded human. I’d get off drugs and drink for good, raise chickens upstate, produce some independent cinema.
“No way,” she said. “You’re a slimy, evil sellout hack.”
“Sure, but will you consider it?”
The bus pulled into Port Authority. The tortoise woman slipped away.
* * *
Diana lived in a building near the river. Somebody buzzed me up. A man stood in the doorway, shirtless, bleeding, words freshly carved into his chest. PEEPS PLEEZER, the gashes read.
“Nate.”
“Diana’s not here,” said Nate. “Do you want to come in? You look like hell.”
“Hell is where I’m crashing these days, Nate. But what about you? You’re the mutilated interlocutor here.”
“I’m purging my defects via ritual.”
“Is that why you’re poking my wife?”
“I don’t poke her. We’ve got something more evolved than that. Besides, you know I’m gay.”
“You used to be homeless, too. Written any more bad versions of my books?”
“I no longer cite you as an influence.”
“I can live with that.”
“I’m having a hard time believing you can live with anything.”
“Nate abandoned and betrayed me,” I said.
“I’m right here,” said Nate.
“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to God. God is my witness. Tell Diana I forgive her.”
“Tell her yourself,” said Nate. “I’m reading downtown tonight.”
“Where?”
“It’s listed in most free weeklies. Diana will be there.”
“Are you inviting me?”
“I’m sharing public information. Free weekly information.”
* * *
I walked along the river for a while, wove through the queer skaters, the club kids, the breeding units with their remote-controlled strollers. I hated them, the gays, the straights. The races. The genders and ages. None of them loved me. I was feeling that forlorn hum. Maybe another memoir was burbling up.
