by Curtis White
Her Spellness looked into the heart of a coneflower, with its bright yellow-brown seeds spiking out in stellar order, just as it was in the beginning.
“Percy, I can’t tell you how worried I’ve been. But it’s all right now, I’ve come to take you home.”
Percy squirmed.
“Mother, if that’s what you are to me…”
“You’ve always called me mother!” She was genuinely surprised and a little hurt by the way Percy put it.
“…a few short days ago, or so it seems, nothing could have made me happier than to leave this strange place and return to our enchanted home. But now this is my home. I belong here. I know that will sound strange to you, but here I am not just some ill-wrought extension of yourself, a dirty growth on your thigh, a suspicious lump that a doctor would look at and say, ‘Hmmm. That doesn’t look good.’ Here I am quite real, maybe even realer than real.” He laughed. “I’m too real for my own good, I know that!”
The Queen’s eyes were at the same time confused and moist with sadness.
“Oh, Percy! I don’t understand what you’re saying!”
“What I’m saying is that I have a purpose here. I do things that contribute to the spiritual health of the commonwealth. People come here ardent, as if committed to an ancient religious duty. I never sought any of this. I was just looking for a place to sleep. But now I cannot abandon it lightly.”
The Queen peered at him skeptically.
“Percy, that sounds like piffle to me. Can you give me an example of what you are talking about?”
“Easily. A short walk from here lives a young man named Little Prison Face.”
“That’s not a nice name!”
“It was on the order of a nickname that stuck because he burned down his daddy’s house with his real name, with his daddy in it. I don’t know what the fuss was about. After all, his daddy was already dead. Friedrich, or Baby Fred, they called him then, before the Little Prison Face moniker. Baby Fred was his daddy-killing/house-burning name.”
“Oh!”
“Later he was called Irrational Number because while Little Prison Face was doing time, he took the trouble to interrogate time’s paradoxes as he discovered them through a book, Great Ideas for Lifers, he had found in the prison library. In this book he was introduced to Zeno, through whom he learned that the paradoxes of time could only be expressed by irrational numbers. Such numbers were depressing for him because the math seemed to suggest that his release time would never arrive. Since he had nothing but time on his hands, along with his father’s blood, he began a project that could never be finished, namely: an encyclopedic account of all possible versions of Zeno’s paradox. Needless to say, he soon saw that his project itself was a paradox because there is no end of the variations on Zeno’s paradox.”
Percy continued, “For Little Prison Face, paradox was not a solution. He was in prison. So he steeled himself to the task at hand: restore time’s arrow to its rightful place, putting one thing before the other until Beginnings and Ends were fully restored and he could get out of prison. So he speculated that the two paradoxes—Zeno’s and his own—cancelled each other. Unfortunately, he only succeeded in proving that the study of the paradox of Zeno’s paradox was itself paradoxical. In other words, and this is what drove him to me, the study of infinity is itself infinite. And, it goes without saying, the infinity of the study of infinity was also infinite. And so on into the smoggy distance.”
“Thus the criminal mind!”
“Believe it or not, this course of study had a strong influence on the parole board. They called it evidence of his ‘ideational maturation.’ And they let him out.”
“This can’t be right. Even in these awful United States, this can’t be right.”
“Anyway, there was a reason that Little Prison Face was in prison. He shot his father—a right-wing cult leader with a loyal and vibrant following in Decatur—in the temple—the temple of his head—with a thirty-eight, as he slept on the family couch after a long night of Jew-baiting, singing the old songs about niggers and love for the Führer, and Monday Night football.”
“How awful!”
“He hadn’t intended to shoot his ‘daddums’ that day, but everything just fell into place and so he said, ‘Hmmm, I guess I can do this now.’”
“Percy, is this story necessary?”
“Later, he explained it all quite simply, in a straightforward manner, in all honesty, speaking in all candor…”
“Percy!”
“…he explained to the police that, ‘This father-son thing had to come to an end.’”
“Okay. This is all very interesting, but what has it to do with you?”
“Well, Baby Fred, a.k.a. Little Prison Face, a.k.a. Irrational Number, is one of my clients. He has become dependent on my therapy. He has made a solemn promise not to wrap a lamp cord around anyone’s neck, not to shoot anyone while they’re sleeping, not to burn down any buildings, not to ‘fug it,’ a general catch-all term he uses for other forms of malevolence, and to stop his research into infinity and related mayhem so long as we are working together and making progress. And you know what? He has stuck to that commitment and is well on his way to a well-adjusted and responsible life. I even dare to call him a simple ‘Fred’ now and then. And now he’s getting a certificate in massage and aromatherapy!
“The point is that the service I provide is clearly a health-giving benefit for the community. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a mental-health professional, but the effect is similar. And that is the point I am making. Making for you. It is why I cannot and must not go back to careless Innisfree.”
Obviously, this all perplexed our Queen.
“I think I should know, and better than you, what it is that you are. You are my child, or, if you insist, my creature. It doesn’t matter one way or the other, I care for you in either case. But if you possess certain talents it is because I, not the people of this quaint little vinyl gulag, gave them to you, and, frankly, none of what you have been describing sounds familiar. So what is it, exactly, that you do for these people, murderers aside? Of what does your therapy consist?”
“Well, it changes from time to time. In fact, so far no two sessions have been the same. So I can only give you instances, or what Fanni likes to call ‘iterations.’ She’s a real philosopher, you know.”
“But what is it that you do?”
“For instance, Theodore, or Ted as he likes to be called, and his wife Trudy, or Tru, came over—she’s quite beautiful, I think, especially her jugs, as Ted calls them. Anyway, Trudy got things started by asking Ted to vent his wrath on his heritage. You can tell who wears the pants in that family, when they’re wearing pants. Then they crisscrossed the white ground of my fertile vector with nonfatal mammalian blood. Then she instructed Ted to put on the bony backtowards, which he did, and then laid it on thick.”
“Laid what on? Laid it on what?”
“The bony backtowards, of course, and on me, of course.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Hang on. Then Ted said that the strength of the burden-bearer, that would also be me, was failing. I was, a little bit, failing. Then he observed that there was much rubbish. He proposed to clear the rubbish by laying his jeweled pederect on Trudy’s scuppered vellum. She seemed to like that and I was fine with it. I was encouraged to watch clinically, to take notes, but also to be ready when ‘your time has come,’ as Trudy always puts it.
“For sure they wanted to transition to something more dimensional and temporizing, specifically, the singing comforts of the man who is made of glass, and then the final ascendance of the Fury of the Oppressed. Unfortunately, it was near the top of the hour and I needed to clean up for my next appointment, and we needed to make sure the digital recorders were re-synced and the archives given proper serial numbers. I mean, it’s bookkeeping, yes, but we do it at the end of every hour. But did they understand? No. Finally, Fanni came to the door, caught my eye,
and pointed meaningfully to her watch.
“Trudy was still not happy about it and blamed Ted for taking so long with the bony backtowards I told you about. She complained that she hadn’t gotten what she needed out of the session. She said, and I quote, ‘My needs have not been met.’ I said that there would be more sessions, but she said, ‘I’ll be back!’ It sounded a little threatening, to be honest with you.”
“My God, Percy, these people are deranged.”
“You really think so? Why?”
“And you say all of your sessions are like this?”
“No. I said that they were like this in different ways. There are tricks of the trade to create this sense of difference when there’s really not much. This usually involves hedging, dodging, and scheming, as well as the plentiful use of temporal caesura.”
“How could you stand it, never knowing what personal violation the next hour might bring?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘violation.’ I have never felt violated. In fact, I haven’t even felt like a person. I’m not even sure that I know what these words could mean for a creature like me. You have made me so permeable that there’s really not much to violate. Unless I’ve missed something along the way.”
The Queen frowned and acknowledged, “Yes, that’s true. Permeability was part of my design work. But that does not give them leave to treat my art as if it were a hydraulic sex doll!”
“And as for ritual abasement, that, I must say, has always felt very natural to me, very proper to my being. And, to be honest, there was a handsome something in it for me. I mean, just look how I thrive here!” He swept his hands grandly about the cramped room with its sterile IKEA furniture.
“But, you know,” Percy said, his eyes moist with emotion, “none of these stories that shock you so much really captures the heart of the matter. In the end, what it is that they love in me—love, I say, Mother—is that I am like a nerve over which creep the otherwise unfelt cruelties of the world.”
21.
“We touch heaven when we lay our hands on a human body.”
—NOVALIS
“How many of these sessions do you have in a day?” asked Felicité, decorous and attentive once again.
“Oh, my schedule is full. As we speak, Fanni is negotiating a new time for the Andersons. They’ll be upset, of course. The next available time is in a month, barring cancellations. It’s like trying to get in to see your psychiatrist. But I hope they’ll understand. After all, how often does my mother come to visit?”
“Indeed.”
“Anyway, we can only talk for a few more minutes. Fanni stresses customer service.”
“How much do you charge these disturbing people?”
“Oh, there is no charge. But we do encourage tithing, and folks are generally quite happy with that arrangement, especially since they’ll want another appointment. Fanni’s calendar makes contracts unnecessary. Fanni says that we get about five percent of our client’s after-tax annual income.”
“Do you get any of this money?”
“What would I do with money? I already have a bed to sleep in.”
“Buy a plane ticket home?”
“Mother, please.”
“Oh, I’m very unhappy. I’m not used to seeing my creations treated like this. I’m on the verge of invoking a mother’s wrath.”
“Whatever you’ve got, Fanni’s up for it. Just remember, I’m the closest thing to compassion most of these folks have ever known.”
“This is vexing.”
“As your pal the Marquis said to me, ‘You look at things in the way people do.’ I think he meant that that was a problem, and I believe him now, I see his point. You are looking at things in the way people do. But it’s so simple: all of the things people say are simply the things that they say. There’s no good or bad in any of it. They mean well, I think, in some general sense, but that doesn’t matter. Am I making any sense?”
The Queen of Spells was spellbound.
“Let me try another way.”
Suddenly he grew agitated, as if things were not entirely lovely for him in this place in spite of all claims to the contrary.
“The only problem that I have is that I can’t wake up. People say that life is a dream, and I’d really like to be here with you, even if it is in a dream. You know? People here used to say I was a gift, but not a gift in good taste. But, again, that’s just one of those things that people say, and what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to cure them of their sayings. That’s what we do here. Cure people of the things they say. In theory, once we have cured them, both sincerity and irony will have dissolved just as a bank of fog rolls in the embrace of a lake. That will be the end of the things we say, and good riddance, for then we will only have what is.”
“Percy, you’re getting a little carried away.”
“Listen, Mother, we seek something so simple, and we seek it by ridding, by ripping out, the Law of What is Said from their hearts! Only then can my people, in all their unhappiness, say something that is not a tyrannous platitude. And in that moment of freedom from ‘How It Must Be Done,’ they are for a moment, a sliver of time, Aware. It takes a long time to get to that moment, but when they do they are quite happy to die.”
Then he began to weep his pretty puppet tears.
Felicité gave a very negative shake of the head. “But, dear one, it’s all so indecent, so degrading, even for one of my Things.”
He looked up in consternation, “Oh, Mother, I hope you don’t think any of this is about sex. Sex is trivial, even when you don’t know anything about it, and I assure you that I don’t.”
“My son, I know this much: you are not who you were. But who you are is not something that can be tolerated.”
She looked almost menacing.
Percy saw his mother on the verge of a decision, a real decision with a very particular consequence for him. She was not just “saying.” But wasn’t this what he’d been waiting for? The end of saying things? The transcendent beginning of the Age of Acts? Irreconcilable Acts. He could do without the sex, but he really wasn’t into the whole accepting-death thing, even though he was only technically alive. Still, there were a few more things that he needed to say.
She pulled the Sword of Finality out from her handbag.
“Forbearance, Mother, for just a moment. Let me tell you a story. Perhaps through it I can make myself understood. Then you can do what you like, reduce me to smutty cack, whatever, because there’s nothing special about not existing, is there?”
22.
Jacques: When I cry, I often find I am stupid.
Master: And when you laugh?
Jacques: I find I am still stupid.
—DIDEROT, JACQUES THE FATALIST
—after Scheherazade
Oh, reader. She who has the last lack lacks best.
As you will recall, when we left the Queen of Spells and her prodigal golem, she had suspended the Sword of Finality over poor Percy’s head. He was as insouciant as a puppet can be, and offered to tell a story before the fall of said sword. She must have agreed because here is the story.
“As you’ve surely surmised, dear Mother, there have been rough times for me since I left you, lo, these many months ago. I have been treated inhospitably by mothers, crudely by bleached-blond women in the morning, and cruelly by the constabulary. I have been sent into exile, and made to sleep in the grass with a dog family. All this before at last being given my own room in this house, and having my true calling given to me by tender Fanni.
“But my very lowest moment was while I was living with the dogs. That probably doesn’t surprise you, but it sure surprised me. On the whole, the dogs were wonderful. Warm. Sympathetic. Helpful. Just a little smelly. I enjoyed my time with them, and I miss them now. Or, I miss most of them. There were a few ‘head cases,’ as they called it in that colorful—and really loud—language of theirs. These cases tended to be males with a sort of in-between status. They were not pups, who
were nearly as clueless as I, and they were sure not the alpha, Alpha Benji, who set the rules for how this dog’s life was to go. Nor were they among the small group of counselors called the Enforcers. No, it was the dogs that, if I were going to categorize them, I would call the Disappointed. The not-alphas and the not-Enforcers. They were the ones, as the scars on their brows testified, who had often been the object of enforcement. So, they were most often referred to by the dogs themselves as the Corrected.
“Let’s face it, none of them liked being one of the Corrected, the one upon whom Alpha’s wrath most often fell. Sure, inevitably, one day it would be from among the Corrected that the next alpha would come—it sure wouldn’t come from the politically gelded Enforcers—but in the meantime this substantial group simmered in their resentment and their disappointment and their muscular sense of powerlessness. So, it’s not surprising that now and then they ‘let ’er rip,’ as they said.
“And once, they let ’er rip on me. And why not? Who was I? A non-human human, a non-dog dog. That description was just too complicated, I was too complicated, Alpha’s tolerance and kindness were too complicated. They liked simple things. A bouncing ball. A doggie Yum-Yum. A good firm bite to the hindquarters. These were the solid, substantial things of dog family life.
“Well, one morning I rose from among a heap of my furry companions, the chill morning rising in lazy plumes of steam off their warm bodies, and I headed across our little patch of trampled grass toward the place where a morning beverage was being prepared.
“Suddenly—for no reason at all, I’d made the short walk dozens of times before—one of the Corrected leaped from sleep and with a really angry bark sank his jaws into my calf. My leg went numb from the force of the bite, and I swung at him with my left hand. He let go of my leg in order to snatch at my hand that, fortunately, he was only able to graze.
