by Curtis White
“Please, stop.”
“Here’s what I’m saying. Let’s take these trees here. We know, our knowledge boys and girls know, that something called sap flows up the outside, the so-called living perimeter, of a tree. If you’ve not seen it, I can tell you that it’s right below the so-called bark. Up it flows and out through the leaves, where a fine mist of the stuff, or even heavy drops, then rain down like maple syrup on my car, ruining the paint job. Perhaps I notice that the drops form a non-pattern on the hood that I believe is called a ‘random walk’ in physics. Okay. My point is, why doesn’t that readily accessible stuff, these things-of-the-world, rise to the level of knowledge?”
“Stop.”
“Now, listen! The important point here is more than scientific. Who gets to say where the knowledge border is? Who gets to say that these things over here count as knowledge, but these other equally real things don’t? Oh, those things over there, they say, are trivial. But I say nothing is trivial! The bag we call ‘trivial’ is stuffed with ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine-nine percent of knowable things. And I say that that just won’t do.”
“I’m warning you!”
“There is also the ‘generality’ question. Why is everyone so content with knowledge as a generality, a sort of schematic for negotiating the world? So what if it’s practical, so what if the math works? I don’t respect it. For example, we have the principle of photosynthesis, and we have drawings in high school textbooks with arrows showing the sun-soaked leaves converting the sun’s rays into sugars, but what we should want to know is how this leaf, this leaf right here, steeps in warm light. I don’t want a diagram. I want to know what it’s like to be a leaf steeping in warm light and making sugar. There’s something that it’s like to be a leaf, agreed? I want to know what that is, what it’s like. In essence, I want to be the leaf soaking right there, even if for just a moment. And then the same for every leaf on every tree everywhere. Now, that is what I call knowledge. Is that too much to ask? That’s what we should want from knowledge, but that’s not what we get. No, all we get is the executive summary.”
“I was going to threaten to put you out with Percy if you didn’t stop, but, actually, that’s a good point and very well put. That ‘executive summary’ bit.”
I “beamed,” and once again language mocked itself painfully.
“And so, for the issue before us, it is shameful that we don’t know why the Portuguese brought the guinea pigs to Islay. But that is such a gross oversight that it is tantamount to indifference. Supine galactic indifference. Was there no one at that time interested in a little research trip—paid for by his or her employer or written off as a business expense—to Lisbon for a look at the archival record? And there it would be in some ledger, the neat little columns, ‘Import from the colonies: 271 guinea pigs’! And maybe there’s a letter in which some guy in marketing takes credit for the idea: free guinea pigs will increase sales, especially among the poor, besotted folk of Scotland.”
“Objection noted, but let me ask you in all candor, don’t you think you need a little rest? I mean, my goodness, this can’t go on, can it? You’ll hurt yourself.”
“A rest?”
“For your own good, sweetie. A period of rest.”
“And that’s just the beginning of it. Why don’t we want to know if it was hard for the furry creatures to breathe in the capacious pockets of the Portuguese merchants? Why? I would not only like to know that, I would like to know what the oxygen, each molecule, was like in the guinea pig’s blood. There’s something that it’s like to be a molecule of oxygen in a guinea pig’s blood. Is that completely without interest for us? And everyone wants to know about the furry softness of the creature in the rough Portuguese hands. Did the tender softness of one of God’s creatures cause in the sailor a corresponding softening of heart? Did the sailor’s tender feelings for the soft creature lead him away from his habit of molesting the lassies of Scotland? Who wouldn’t want to know this?”
“Now I think you’ve gone dangerously far. What you say is something for God alone.”
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. So, it’s up to God to sweat the small stuff? To know about the oxygen molecules and the long-ago molesting of lassies?”
“Exactly.”
“Really, that is some comfort.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“In that case, I would simply like to know if there are ever gaps in God’s data stream. Does God nod?”
“As I said, this line of thought will get you into trouble on Islay. The Portuguese also brought the auto da fé with them, and as far as I know it’s still a community resource in extreme cases. This has the feel of extremity.”
“I’m sorry. Just let me say this, then: I love guinea pigs.”
“That’s nice.”
“They’re really cute.”
“Yes, they are.”
“And soft too.”
I folded my hands in my lap, looked to the side, to the amber light of Scottish evening, each massless photon of it, flowing in the window. My lower lip trembled. There’s something that it’s like to have a lower lip tremble. I wiped at my eye, smearing the trees on the other side of the road. They fell all limp and blocked the little road down to the highway, as if they were only spaghetti trees.
Our kind Queen offered me a Kleenex from a family-sized carton printed in flowers of an indeterminate species done up in very pale pastel pinks and greens. I blew my nose and wiped my eyes, but it was too late for the trees and indeed for the road itself, which had gone all muddy, like a mountain road in a flood somewhere on a hill in Tennessee. The Kleenex carton smelled of cardboard. Cardboard is a paper product. As such, it was once a tree or even hundreds of trees. The trees need the sun and minerals and lots of water, which is abundant here for good or bad. The carton is the lumber company and its many employees and the many willing hands at the paper factory. Steam from the exhaust chimneys rises whitely against a stark blue sky. This all happens, as you well know, on Earth, third planet from the sun for the nonce.
The Queen of Spells reached a sober index finger toward me and touched my forehead.
33.
The poetic ideal = = God
—SCHLEGEL
When I woke up the next morning, I was stretched out on the Queen’s front lawn. How did I get there? Had I humiliated myself (again!) by going one boilermaker over the line? (I should have known better than to drink the Queen’s damned fairy bourbon.) But I didn’t feel hungover, although I did have a funny taste in my mouth.
I got up and woozily walked toward the front door, composing embarrassed apologies as I walked, but the door was locked, and no one came when I knocked. I looked back across the lawn hoping to see Percy, but he wasn’t there. (Probably off to winter pasturage.) And of course there was not a guinea pig or a baby-lookin’ rodent in sight. What a crock that one was! And I’d believed it!
After trying every door and peering through every window, I decided that if I wanted some breakfast I was going to have to go somewhere else. I had a flight home that afternoon from little Benbecula Airport, but the Queen was supposed to transport me. Transport. That was the word she used. Did she mean that she would drive me in a car? I hadn’t seen a car on her property. Did she mean some form of public transport? Did she assume I knew how or where to catch a bus? Or did she mean in some literal, black-magical way “transport”? I admit I started to panic, so I took a deep breath and walked down the steep drive toward the highway, maybe a quarter of a mile away.
When I got to the highway a vehicle was waiting. It looked like a horse-drawn coach without horses, but it didn’t appear to have a motor of any kind either, or a driver. Must have been a Google prototype. There was something both old- and newfangled about it. I opened the door, and was just about to ask a passenger if this was a shuttle service to the airport when the damn thing took off and I was forced to leap inside or be stranded behind.
“This is more of the Queen’s funny
business,” I said to myself.
There was only one other passenger, and he was sitting opposite me. He was dressed like an extra in a Charles Dickens Victorian costume drama, something BBC-y, comical and lugubrious. I could only see the top of his head because his face was buried in his hands. His long, thin, yet muscular fingers looked like roots digging into his skull. There was something monumental about him. It was like a companion sculpture to “The Thinker” called “The Sufferer,” as if thinking wasn’t suffering enough!
“Let him be,” I thought. Just as I was thinking this, an image came to me. I remembered last night! With Felicité! I remembered that I had rudely fallen asleep. This was a lot worse than snoring during a college lecture. Everyone snored at those. But I had come a long way to sit at her feet…only to nod off! Had I missed something? Had she explained the mysteries of the cosmos and I had snored right through it? I groaned. How angry she must have been at my Gomer routine. Americans! No wonder I woke up on the lawn.
The man looked up when he heard me groan. I had never before seen a face so full of such concentrated pain. I could see that he was older, mid-forties, I’d say, but he was probably handsome when his face was not a gnarled sphincter of agony.
“Did you say something?” he asked. “Did I hear you groan? Are you, too, in pain?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you. I did groan. Please forgive me. It was a private thought. Don’t be concerned.”
At this the muscles in his face relaxed just a little.
“Ah, you, too, are one of the wounded,” he said.
“That depends on whether or not I catch my flight.”
“Flight?”
He asked as if I might be a migrating waterfowl. But then again, some folks did fly on the Isle of Islay.
“In an airplane,” I assured him.
I think he suspected I was making fun of him, because the vortex of twisted muscles in the center of his face slid angrily to the side, a hideous thing to see.
“Sir, you mock me!”
“I don’t mean to mock you. Why would I?”
“Because I deserve mockery. I wish you would mock me. The world should mock me. I am a fool.”
This conversation was becoming as weird as the one I’d had with the Queen, but not so sleepy-making.
I said, “Do you mind my asking if you’re okay? Is there any way I can help?”
“That is very kind of you. Perhaps you can.”
Then he looked at me intently, as if for the first time. The twisted muscles that had moved to the side of his face relaxed back to the center, like pudding flowing.
He said, “That is a very odd sort of face you have.”
He should talk!
“I beg your pardon?”
“It makes me feel like laughing. Do you know the cartoon Winky the Wanker?”
I scowled.
“No, I don’t. And I don’t think I’d like to know.”
“No offense, sir. It’s just a cartoon popular in our pubs. The lads like it for a larf. I’m sorry. Now I’ve hurt your feelings. Forget I said anything. Because I need you, friend. I must ask you to listen to what I’ve done. We have a long journey before us. Perhaps if I could talk about what is tormenting me, I’d be in less pain. Is there a chance you could verify that the things I’ve experienced are things that other humans experience? I feel so alone with my flaws and sins. Perhaps you could even tell me if I’ve done wrong? What is my crime? What my punishment?”
“Another moron,” I thought, wondering if his private hell was like everybody else’s. I could tell him the answer to that now. There is no private hell. Just hell. Just this prison. But I tried to be tactful.
“I’m no therapist, but I’d be willing to listen.”
I was stuck in this cab alone with a madman. What was I supposed to say? Maybe I could mug him for authentic human details that I could use in my novel.
“Oh, thank you. Thank you.”
“One thing before you begin: There aren’t any guinea pigs in your story, are there? Stories with guinea pigs put me to sleep.”
34.
“The will acts in proportion to its fancied power, to its superiority over immediate obstacles. The being baulked of this throws the mind off its balance, or puts it into what is called a passion; and as nothing but an act of voluntary power still seems necessary to get rid of every impediment, we indulge our violence more and more, and heighten our impatience by degrees into a sort of frenzy.”
—HAZLITT
I felt a little guilty taking his thanks because, you know me, I had every intention of stealing his story if it was good, assuming that he didn’t ruin it by telling me too much.
He began circumspectly.
“Do you know about computers?”
I thought he was kidding.
“I mean those computers that are called personal?”
“Yes, I know about them.”
“Here in Islay, not only men but also women are allowed to own and use them.”
“That is the same for us in the United States.”
“Really? Even there, in that enlightened place?” He seemed both surprised and intimidated by the idea. “But there are so many women there.”
“Roughly fifty-fifty, I’d guess.”
He seemed to do some quick calculations, peering into some appalling potentiality, his hands once again on his head, pulling at his hair this time. “How awful!” he concluded.
I had to laugh just a little, which didn’t help his mood.
“Here in Islay the personal computer, especially its use by women, is new. I wish to God that it had never come to pass, but our legislature in a moment of mistaken liberality forgot what has made our island great. But I admit that I am conservative by nature. Even in my youth I objected when women were allowed to go about without gunny bags over their heads. Frankly, even though I was only ten at the time, I argued that men and women should both have to wear the bags. I went so far as to parade around town wearing one myself, just to make the point. Of course, I was laughed at, but we have seen what we have seen, haven’t we?”
Whatever that meant.
“At first when we brought the computers into our homes we put them, as is our custom with other things dangerous to women and children—car keys, guns, newspapers—in locked rooms. Unfortunately, you could see the soft glow of the computers through outside windows. The women were mesmerized by it. Both women and children began to gather outside, looking longingly at the penumbra. You’d have thought it was a shrine for the virgin and miracles were expected.” He looked down angrily. “That’s when I put the ‘Women are requested not to linger in this area’ sign up, for which I suffered the most unfair abuse.”
He looked into some very dark and very personal inner space lit only by the luminous eyes of demons.
I said, “Don’t take this wrong, because I understand where you’re coming from, but have you never heard of equal rights?”
He looked at me, mouth wide, a look of confusion and something like despair in his eyes.
“That’s all right,” I consoled, “I never thought much of them—the equal rights—myself.”
Finally, he gathered himself.
“Sir, I have never beaten a woman!”
“That’s helpful to know.”
His liquid emotions were more somber now, you know, introspective stuff, like he was running over the events of his life just to be sure about his claim regarding beating women.
“I’ve never beaten one, although they readily provide just cause for beatings. As for the computers, I should have known that we couldn’t keep them out of their hands forever.”
“But,” I objected, “some of your most powerful people are women. I have a particular friend here, Felicité, Queen of Spells, and she is truly a force to be reckoned with.”
“You know the Queen of Spells?”
“Yes, I do.”
He looked lost in an infinite confusion and said, “That is another matter entirely, I
assure you.”
Then he began to tell his story. I’ll spare you the lengthy version of his particular moral destruction, the slow dissolve of his life. It was the usual story of the May/December marriage, technically updated. Once women were granted access to personal computers, his young wife, some twenty years his junior, did what was inevitable. She began posting thrilling photographs of herself on various websites. Repairmen were attracted to the sites. His young wife finally ran off with the “odd-job fella,” as she called him.
Oh, you should’ve heard him go on about it all. It was ridiculous. You’d think it was something out of the ordinary, and maybe in backward Islay it was. Still, I thought, his story really did offer a promising subject for a novel, done in the right way. It immediately started shaping itself in my mind: set in rural Illinois. A young wife brings the handyman home for the husband’s pizza, and together the three of them embark on an exciting and profitable amateur porn site. She floats a stock option in the second year, and a majority of the shares are purchased by Russian venture capitalists. Romanian mafia and Shabab terrorists begin hanging out in the TV room, looking out for their investments. Things get dicey when the husband fails to maintain an erection and is threatened by a Somali extremist with a scimitar, the scimitar being, of course, the reason for his flaccid member.
Promising, but back to present things.
Strangely, my companion’s missing wife wasn’t at all the reason for his present condition. In the last few weeks they’d negotiated—via Skype—a compromise. She could watch “Ooooh!” and other cute kitten sites, and he would no longer threaten to have her stoned by his family. In fact, she’d already apologized for her behavior and was at that very moment traveling home to be with him once again.
“Well, if that’s the case, what in the world are you doing here? Why aren’t you home waiting for her? Making a quiet little dinner. Chilling a pleasant little bottle of Galway blush.”
Once again he resorted to the head-in-the-hands routine, the fingers digging down into his skull like fusiform tubers.
