The Annals

by Petronius Jablonski

  Enough! Cease and desist, I beg you. Stop pummeling me with questions. Obviously we made it back. Or is the Reader entertaining the possibility that I composed my annals while seated at the deserted intersection? Does he imagine I carved them on the fresh concrete while Sandy communicated with prospective publishers via smoke signals? How on earth would smoke signals have penetrated the fog? Does the Reader think my story ends there, and the remaining pages consist of acknowledgements and appendixes, or that the rest of my story is one very long chapter titled My Day-to-Day Struggles Seated at the Foggy, Deserted Intersection?

  Had such particulars been of any magnitude I would, as the humble and obedient servant of Objectivity, included them. Does the Reader doubt my judgment? Perhaps he misconstrued my advice on how to improve his digestion. How many fermented drinks has he consumed?

  So that something good may arise from something bad, the answers to the Reader’s frivolous inquiries will be the subject of an addendum to this appurtenance. Its spectacular lack of merit will serve as an enduring testament to my judgment.

  • • •

  The remainder of this appurtenance concerns an editorial point of intermediate importance. If he was not in any way dissatisfied with the prior paragraph, the Reader should proceed forthwith to the posterior section.

  • • •

  While reading the prior paragraph (not including the one immediately prior to this paragraph), the Reader may have expected some lavish reference to “a Phoenix arising from these ashes” rather than the simplistic “good may arise from something bad.” The following considerations should assuage his disappointment.

  On principle I avoid all references to Egyptian mythology. As clever as they were in covering a desert with giant triangles and gruesome half-cat half-man monstrosities, their obsession with the afterworld was preposterous. How did they expect a mummy to untangle himself once he arrived in the next kingdom? Did not the removal of his vital organs and brain bode ill for his health and vigor? What were those silly people thinking?

  As the legend has it, after the Phoenix set its nest afire and burnt itself to a crisp, it was reborn. Why can no modern hack go within a mile of a keyboard without making a reference to it? Verily, it is the true curse of the Pharaohs. That such a story persisted longer than one generation bespeaks the appalling poverty of imagination rampant in Egypt at the time. Worse, it is frighteningly evocative of the Buddhist monks who practiced self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War.

  A conscientious writer will only use a mythic allusion to bring clarity. If there exists even a remote chance of it evoking irritating questions regarding mummies or horrific images of suicides, then he must look to other means to make his point.

  Even ignoring the preceding (and utterly damning) objections, it is not clear a Phoenix reference would have been appropriate. I want something good to arise from inferior questions. There is nothing whatsoever in the Phoenix legend about a superior bird arising. It is the same tedious, self-immolating one each and every time.

  A question we shall not pursue here is how a bird can set anything on fire. Did it strike a match? Did it rub two rocks together? The Egyptians were aware that birds lack opposable thumbs, were they not? Perhaps they should have spent less time carving gibberish on their gaudy tombs and more time observing the natural world. What manner of brain-disabling deadline did the author of this puerile legend work under? Had the Pharaoh commissioned him to write a new one by the morrow? Or did he compose it after hours in the broiling sun?

  In summary: a reference to a Phoenix arising would have been inappropriate, subjected the Reader to needless trauma, quite possibly ruined my otherwise splendid appurtenance, and covered my hands in filth from the crime of perpetuating this cheap, contrived, and all-around deplorable myth.

  A Bland and Unnecessary Addendum to the Appurtenance of Part III, Provided at the Reader’s Insistence

  The puddle of vomit next to the unconscious old man made me think of giant protozoa. The beam from his spotlight now struck the interior wall of the tunnel, illuminating most of the walk for us. I put my hand above Sandy’s head to alter the appearance of her shadow.

  “Knock it off.”

  “It would have behooved us to ignore that deluded attendant,” I said. “Look at the time and energy we wasted.”

  “How behooving it would have been. It would have been the behoovingest thing we ever did,” she said, succumbing to a sudden downpour from one of the sporadic thunderclouds typifying her internal weather.

  “It would behoove you not to mock. The word was used felicitously.”

  “Would it behoove me felicitously, or felicitously behoove me? Why can’t you talk like a regular person? Do you think it makes you better than others?”

  “You are mistaking the effect for the cause.”

  “Because it doesn’t.”

  “All hail the common denominator, all hail,” I said, waving my hands over my head. The shadow cast on the tunnel wall looked like a giant bat. “Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner, hip-hob, breaking wind to the tune of ‘Dueling Banjos’ – it is all good. How arrogant of me to imply that anything is superior to anything else. All ye unwashed, rap-listening, reality-TV-viewing masses: fear not, bathe not. Come, join us in the parlor for a belching competition. Have you not heard? A revolution has occurred. There is no high or low culture. We are all one. My elitist scorn is naught but petty judgment, certainly not righteous indignation against Vandals ransacking the remains of a once glorious culture.”

  “It’s snootiness, that’s all.”

  “Clearly you were not home-schooled by my father. Condolences. Taking pride in the mastery of one’s native tongue, using it like a violin rather than a hand under an armpit, is not arrogance. Rather, it is the pursuit and joyous acquisition of excellence. Deciding that one word is more felicitous than another is no more arrogant than deciding that a New York strip is superior to a plate of cockroaches. Who shall help me defend civilization from the barbarians? I shall not surrender. Like the great army at Masada I would sooner die by my own sword than …”

  I continued my excellent discourse throughout our walk. This oxymoronic counter-“culture” has spread like gonorrhea at a naval port and it is high time a true philosopher armed with rhetorical penicillin cured it. My discourse soon became a soliloquy, as Sandy was wont to tune out ideas she found disagreeable. (This particular theme had, on other occasions, been condemned as “old fogeyish.”)

  My concern that we would be unable to locate the spot where we needed to surmount the hill proved to be unfounded, a child of panic. As we approached the top I took deep breaths, afraid of what mayhem would ensue if any harm had befallen my car. Though Aristotle taught that for a punishment to be just it must be proportionate to the crime, I had logistical reservations about nailing the attendant to a tree.

  Aglow beneath the votive light, it appeared unharmed. Sandy stormed into the station. “You asshole,” was all I heard before the door closed behind her. I walked to my car and inspected it. With the weight of the earth leaving my back, I enjoyed the symphony of crickets while emptying my bladder.

  Sandy slammed the station door and walked outside. She pounded on the glass and displayed a universal gesture with both hands. The attendant’s face glowed with compassion. His eyes were windows into a world of absolute stasis. He smiled.

  Contrary to my expectation, to the extent that I invested any thought at all in the matter, she chose the longer of two possible routes to arrive at the passenger’s door, thereby ensuring a walk through the fresh and far from negligible pool of urine.

  “What the hell.”

  “You will have to take your shoes off and store them in the trunk, I am afraid.”

  “Why couldn’t you go over there?”

  “Am I psychic? Do I know what path you will take? Please remove them. What did the attendant say?”

  “Petronius, this’ll kill you. He says he’s never been there but some friend he trusts told h
im all about it. What an idiot.”

  “Could you perhaps purchase a new pair? I am not sure I want them in my trunk in their present condition.”

  In a gruesome exhibition of unladylike behavior, she cussed repeatedly, misdirecting her anger toward me as unenlightened persons are wont to do. Rather than embrace all that happens as thread spun from the spool of Fate, they fulminate against fellow non-combatants. She searched her backpack and tore several pages from a magazine that consisted entirely of advertisements for cosmetics. Under my supervision she carefully wrapped each shoe. As we drove out of the station she used one of Freud’s eye-crossingly inane theories to accuse me of being inordinately concerned with my car. By means of a dialogue, I attempted to demonstrate that the quest for cleanliness and order in a world of chaos and filth has nothing to do with a man’s anus.

  • • •

  The remainder of this bland and unnecessary addendum to the appurtenance concerns an editorial point of minor importance. If he was not in any way dissatisfied with the reference to the army at Masada, the Reader should proceed forthwith to the next section.

  • • •

  The Reader, if he read the bland and unnecessary addendum to the appurtenance in a doctrinaire cast of mind, may have objected to my comparing myself to both the Romans fighting against the barbarians and the Jewish army fighting against the Romans. There are two main schools of thought concerning mixed metaphors. Classicists, such as myself, consider a mixed metaphor to be as venomous and bulky as a poorly mixed drink. On the other hand, English-sacking Huns (or pragmatists) believe the evolution of language leaves us with only one criterion when judging mixed-metaphor cocktails: the proof is in the pudding.

  “But how can you possibly reconcile your laudable stance with your egregious metaphor?” the incredulous Reader demands.

  The Reader has to remember that we classicists are not unrelenting tyrants. Indulgences are granted when circumstances warrant them. My reference to Masada did not occur in the ambrosial peace of my study with a snifter of cognac in hand and Zeus curled up next to my oak desk. It occurred in a dark tunnel next to Sandy in the throes of one of her spells. Under the circumstances, I believe my discourse was more than satisfactory. Its ardency more than compensated for what it lacked in consistency. Would the Reader have behaved differently, perhaps composing and whistling a rondo? I thought not.

  The identification and critique of mixed metaphors is a worthy pursuit. (And I hereby challenge the Reader to find another in my annals.) But it must be tempered with an examination of the conditions under which they arose. If the conditions were severe, clemency must be granted.

  A Supplement to the Bland and Unnecessary Addendum to the Appurtenance to Part III

  Does the Reader feel edified? Is his life now complete? Has the knowledge that Part III ultimately ended with Sandy walking through a puddle of pee and accusing me of being “anal-retentive” transformed him? I insist that he place a separate bookmark in the previous section. As often as he questions my judgment he may turn to it and remind himself that initially I chose not to include those inconsequential factoids.

  And did the rigors of my Socratic dialogue disabuse Sandy of her psychological theory? (I assume the ever-consistent Reader insists on “closure” here. No doubt an inquiry concerning her shoes is next.) In the topsy-turvy world she inhabits, the rational extirpation of fatuous theories is becoming impossible. If only Freud were the worst of her mentors. The trend of late is the denigration of History and Reason, with wariness fertilized by the manure of multiculturalism. How on earth does the merit of an idea, practice, or work of art have anything to do with its origin? Culture should be defined as the greatest things that man has created and done and thought and dreamed. Those obsessed with subdivisions missed their calling in set theory or classifying beetles. (Do they pine for the days of “German science,” I wonder.)

  “But scholar,” the Reader pleads, “doesn’t the scant contribution from Greece, Rome, Europe, and North America warrant the unbounded attention lavished on the other major players?”

  Dear, sheltered Reader, multiculturalism erroneously assumes — nay, demands at gunpoint — the ludicrous notion of equality between groups. (In the absence of cloning, no two humans are equal. How could groups be?) Before any group may bask in the illustrious torch of History, it must contribute something of value to humanity. Contrary to contemporary “historians,” most merit little more than a footnote for being plundered. Victims are not heroes, and history is not a sanctuary for ne’er-do-wells. Multiculturalism is analogous to the Special Olympics where prizes are bestowed upon all.

  We once took a vapid class to satisfy the benighted diversity requirement — as though exposure to “the greatest things that man has created and done and thought and dreamed” would not, of its own dynamism, erase all parochialisms. Surrounded by students deprived of Homer and Horace in favor of cryptic gobbledygook, I succumbed to labor pains of exasperation and birthed the following revision: when Dorothy, the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and Cowardly Lion discovered that the much-ballyhooed Wizard was a fraud, they should have castrated him with the Woodsman’s axe. That is how I would have ended the novel, sending an unequivocal warning to all charlatans seeking power. Then the Lion, crazed from the scent of blood, would tear the Wizard to shreds. Dorothy would grab his head, walk outside the castle and hold it high, proclaiming, “Sic semper charlatans.” This delightful vision was my only solace during the gloomy nights when I endured the grandiose, multicultural babbling of Professor Oz.

  IV:

  I Find Myself in a Tavern, Fail to Initiate Two Sprites, Dream My Second Dream, and Suffer a Ghastly Dizzy-Spell

  My sobriety had abandoned me. I sat with my back to the bar looking at an empty lot beyond a quiet street. Normally I deemed a big window in a tavern to be analogous to a horseshoe mounted on a wall with its prongs pointing down: it lets all the magic seep out. But this view filled me with thoughts, as though they had been waiting and would not have found me elsewhere.

  After a delightfully digressive telephone conversation with my mother wherein I became au courant with the latest adventures of Zeus, I studied the field from my stool while the sun slid down the sky. My ghost joined me at twilight, staring back from the window, more vivid than the vacant lot but not as interesting. The barkeep’s ghost joined him and together they watched us.

  “Someday all the grass will look like this,” the barkeep said. “When there’s no one round to cut it, it’ll just grow and grow, all long and messy.”

  “Please do not feel that you are in any way obliged to regale me with quaint colloquialisms or synopses of your Farmer’s Almanac,” I said. Earlier, the brash and dour lout interrupted my telephone conversation during a particularly enchanting anecdote to remind me that I had been using his phone for over an hour.

  “All long and messy,” he said. “No one to cut it. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  To what galaxy must a man travel to enjoy his own company? I turned around and braced my elbows on the bar and my feet on the rail. “Very well, would you prefer a discourse pertaining to sports or the weather?”

  “You like a stool with a view.”

  “Not generally.”

  “Don’t let me disturb you,” he said and took a sip of red slush that reeked of strawberries. His eyes, white lights in dark craters, bounced between the window and me. The tributaries surrounding them suggested that he perceived the world with reckless humor. Short black hair stood straight up in places and lay matted in others, as though Lilliputian and misguided aliens had inscribed a crop circle on his head. The red ring around his mouth conspired with his raccoon eyes to give him the lineaments of a macabre clown.

  Visions of Zeus emigrated to accommodate expansive but enigmatic thoughts conducted by the empty field in the key of the Petronius Sensation: reflections slipping through the stubby fingers of language despite the itching allure of their existence. Though strongly tempted to deny and ignore th
e indescribable, I could not turn them away.

  “It is too dark in any event. The view is ruined,” I said, slurring my thoughts, each bleeding into others like the colors on a slick of oil, few remaining distinct long enough to name. One notable exception was the concern of suffering from a dizzy-spell. A marathon bout of abstinence had wreaked havoc on my health, my legendary tolerance in particular. The possibility that my thoughts might soon be lost forever, buried in a landfill of cocktail napkins and swizzle sticks, instilled a most peculiar trepidation.

  “If the sun never again rises on these reflections, they might as well not be here now,” Reason blurted. “What is the difference?”

  My preemptive summation involved the necessity of seizing the moment. After all, a dizzy-spell is a paltry debt when measured against the immeasurable boons of so wondrous an elixir.

  The barkeep watched me think about the precarious nature of thinking. “From around here?” he said, leaning on the bar with his beefy arms. His breath emblazoned a strawberry on the oil slick. Oleaginous eddies annexed its borders and morphed it into hundreds of dark eyes peering from a red cloud.

  “Passing through,” I said.

  “You and your better half?”

  I nodded. Sandy’s face, contorted in a furious scowl, flashed atop the puddle. Her flesh became red from the barkeep’s breath, then dark green as she transmuted into a dragon before dissipating into a field of grass. I prayed she would be sound asleep when I returned to our motel room.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  An orange rectangle and a blue rectangle appeared against a dark background. They collided and bounced away undiminished, each striking invisible boundaries and caroming again and again with trajectories predictable in principle but not in actuality.