Lacking Character

by Curtis White

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Rory, please shut up!”

  “I assure you,” said the artist, “she’s just a country girl. A plump midwestern thing.”

  “That’s impossible. That woman grew up in a condo in Aurora where drug dealers and pedophiles marched through her living room daily. There’s nothing wholesome about her. She is damage itself.”

  The artist studied his own painting, just to reassure himself.

  “I’m sorry, but unless you want me to say that my life has been one long hallucination, I can’t agree with you. Besides, at this point she’s just a cartoon. I haven’t given her features, not even a nose. There’s nothing to make you think she’s anybody, let alone your ex-wife.”

  Jake turned to face the artist. It looked like he was going to knock his finely braided hat off. Bloody his nose. Challenge him to a duel. Who knows what? He was falling apart.

  The artist was a little unnerved. “Look,” he said, “would you like to meet her?”

  39.

  “When a man seeks his love, he’ll take even a monster by the hand.”

  —GOETHE, FAUST

  Then out from behind one of the monumental boulders came a young woman. She emerged as if she had been waiting just offstage, in the curtains, for her cue. She was a plain woman, a little heavy-set, with a length of brown hair falling loosely around a pleasantly plump peasant’s face made attractive by two deep dimples at the corners of her mouth. She also had lively, inquisitive, and playful eyes. She wore a loose pale-blue dress, belted at the waist, with buttons down the front.

  She said to the artist, “Do you need me?”

  It was as if she were at his beck and call, as if she had nothing better to do than loiter behind that boulder until called to the dull duties of a model.

  Then she said, “Oh, I didn’t know you had guests.”

  “’Zanne, these are travelers.”

  Her name was Suzanne, but her friends, and the artist was a friend, a real caregiver, called her “’Zanne.”

  “Welcome, then.” She smiled beautifully!

  Rory bounced up as if he were a Mouseketeer.

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Rory.”

  Jake was more reserved. I’m afraid he said nothing but only studied her. She felt his examination, and her face reddened and fell just a little.

  Rory tried to help.

  “Master Jake, your manners! I’m so sorry, miss, but he’s been under a lot of stress. He is Jake, grandson to the Marquis of N—.”

  She said, “A mark key?”

  Jake said, “Don’t listen to him. I am nothing. Until just now, perhaps.”

  “What’s that?” Rory exclaimed.

  Jake looked to the artist and stated—it was almost a challenge—“This is not the woman in your painting. Thank God.”

  The artist was dumbstruck. When he began to explain, Jake cut him short.

  “I don’t want to hear your explanation. I am not stupid. I have been naïve, but I am not stupid. But I may be dangerously angry. First, you show me a painting with my ex-wife in it, a gratuitous insult to my still-raw feelings. Then, expecting to see Fanni come out from behind this boulder, I see this lovely girl…with whom I am quickly falling in love, even as I speak.”

  “No, my young friend, none of this is true. I think you may be in need of a period of rest,” replied the artist, his face both wary and worried.

  “He certainly is!” cried Rory.

  40.

  “If we are able to penetrate the exterior of things, we would see that the true stuff of life and existence is the horrible.”

  —SCHELLING

  Before ’Zanne begins her story, I need to tell you something about the way that she told it. When she first emerged and joined the illuminated circle of our little group, she seemed all innocence. She was chastely dressed in a long cotton dress, with modest buttons in the front, and a spotless apron, a real working apron, as if we had interrupted her while she kneaded dough or milked a cow. I think you might want to call her a maiden. She was like a girl who had come forth in all simplicity, blameless and pure, from a sentimental engraving of the sort that decorated the modest homes of the candid German bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. In that engraving, a girl crosses a stream flowing over pebbles, the mighty Black Forest behind, its darkness restrained by her chastity. A dog, a Saint Bernard, perhaps, stands faithfully by her side, his paws in the little creek. She glances back gracefully, as if the artist had caught her in the middle of a dance step. A faint, pure smile is on her lips, and she holds the hand of her baby brother, who staggers at her side barefoot on the slippery polished stones, but utterly trusting in his dear sister’s care. She is impeccable, without sin.

  This is how Jake first saw her, and once he’d seen her in this way nothing would ever persuade him to see her otherwise.

  Of course, there is a problem with that sort of vision, however heartfelt it might be. Frankly, and I can give her full credit for frankness, she was no sentimentalist, and there was nothing about the way she told her story that should have encouraged Jake’s way of seeing her. Unfortunately, this complexity of character was lost on Jake, but I heard it and noted it well.

  I know that it must seem as if my characters live not in the world but midway in some interior distance, suspended between a mute God and the babble of the world. In short, my characters are curiously lacking in character. They are self-negating. This may sound abstruse, but I like the lack of clarity in this bracketed space between the ineffable and the incorrigible. It suits me.

  But I recognize that not everyone feels this way. That oddball anachronism that we call the “Reading Public” would prefer that the bracket, where the Work says its piece, be in among the particulars of a familiar world. In other words, their little world. It should remind them of family, of real places, of, God forgive them, real people. I can hear them now, those weary voices who would simply like to say that the author ought to try to help out now and then. A time and a place, they say. Give us that. For instance, they suggest, Delhi, in 1943, the dying days of the British Raj. The viceroy’s insomnia. The confusion and suffering among the sepoys of the Pankot rifles. The rich sentimentality for the old days when the colonialists were mother and father to a world of dark children.

  Then, completely out of bounds, the Reading Public shouts, “Or at least can we have some trees?”*

  I’m sorry, but much as I would like to oblige, to cooperate, to satisfy and comfort, I don’t know anything about colonial India. In all honesty, I can’t even say I know much about trees except to say that they seem to be all over the place. But the Reading Public should admit that I have committed myself to a few things. Minnesota, for example. That’s a place. It’s even a state. Also, a lake with a name: Lake Mandubracius (ridiculous, I admit, but I’m new to this). And there are boulders (about which I’ve already said too much). So, since it makes you happy, I will say something more about the trees. Writers often do. Only painters seem to enjoy them more, use them, profit from them in all sorts of ways. Musicians I think couldn’t care less about trees. In fact, I suspect that most musicians are afraid of trees. Something about them. If only all of my readers were musicians, I’d be free of this obsession of the Reading Public!

  I hope now that we can return to the wide-open spaces of the American interior, and I promise you solemnly, there will be trees, lots of trees.

  * If you’re wondering how I know what the Reading Public thinks: I have my literary agent to thank for that. She insisted that I “crowdsource” my creation before sending it to an editor. She explained that “if you test your book online, you can really tailor it to what people want to read.” I couldn’t argue with that.

  41.

  (IN WHICH READERS GET THE TREES THEY DESERVE)

  “Science slanders matter.”

  —SCHELLING

  —after Cormac McCarthy

  From their camp at the crest of La Cordillera de los Arboles, they looked south toward Mexico
, the vast Sonora, which was unbroken except for the dwarfish mesquite and chaparral that give the desert floor a fuzzy appearance, a world without qualities. About two miles out, a pickup truck sped west, like something in torment, a long spiral of dust growing broad and indefinite, a trailing thought too grim to finish.

  Mexico was a past that had lost all promise, not least because the pickup was carrying four drug-gang foot soldiers with AKs and a grenade launcher that they were always eager to use, and, worse yet, they were trailing Jake and his little party. For the moment, thank God, they were off the track.

  To the north, La Cordillera de los Arboles swooshed elegantly to the left, an enormous, rhythmic, comma-shaped line of pin oak and dry-green loblolly pine. They could just see where the comma’s trail ended, a swale softly settling to a hard-green river bottom of bald cypress, soaking in a patch of wetland fed by a shallow river running over brightly-polished stones. They would need to get to the sanctuary of the cypress grove by the early afternoon if they wanted to avoid the drogistas and the worst of the heat. Once they got to the trees and the wetland, Rory could make a moss poultice for the nasty gash in Jake’s shoulder, which was still oozing beneath the bandanna the girl had wrapped around it.

  The girl was another kind of problem. She would slow them, but it couldn’t be helped. After all, it was she they’d come for. Their boss had given them each a ten-dollar gold piece and nailed two more to a post, promising the money to them if they brought her home. He was called the Artist because of his imaginative knife-based talent for conflict resolution. What made this task difficult was that the girl loved those gangsters and their drugs, and she was none too happy about leaving them, especially since it meant returning to the Artist and his knife tricks. When she imagined him, he was pushing back his hat of fine-woven fibers, a black patch over his right eye, balancing a V-42 stiletto point on his index finger until a little drop of incarnadine blood puddled beneath it. The Mexicans were nurturers in comparison to the Artist.

  As Jake saw it, if the horses held up, they’d make it to the trees. They could get water, then, in one of the clear ponds, full of darters and snails, up close to the river. The horses could eat the river grasses, and there’d be plenty of silver or rosy-eyed perch for dinner.

  So, tired but dogged, they saddled the horses and cut the girl loose from her stake. She rubbed at the raw welts on her wrist but climbed quickly onto her horse without complaint. She was in withdrawal from one or more opioids, and so was starting to think that the best thing for her was to arrive somewhere, anywhere. She was a hard girl after the long months in the criminal camp on the desert floor, and she’d seen her share of addicts piled on the ground, their bones clattering like castanets. She was a girl who paid attention and learned, Jake gave her that, but he also knew he’d have to treat her without pity. Pity was something he didn’t have time for. So what if she had some bloody welts from the leather cords. Let her keep still, then.

  They kept to the deer and boar path through the pines. It smelled wonderful, like rarest oxygen and dirt, dry and purged of every impurity. It was just simply World and it was so pleasant that it was distracting from their perilous task. At one point even Rory looked over at Jake and, well, he didn’t smile, but he seemed to think about smiling, which was a lot for a man whose face looked more like a carved mask of some island god, the slits of his eyes hard against the sunset.

  The grove of ancient cypress that awaited them was thriving side-by-side with the dwarf palmetto and a fairy world of dreamlike Spanish moss. The bark of the cypress is red-brown with shallow vertical fissures. Unlike most other species in the family cupressaceae, it is deciduous, hence the name “bald.” The “knees” they send up above the water line add to their elderly charm. But for Rory and Jake, it was just shelter, a place to hide before the long, open, and dangerous ride toward the Palo Duro and then the little tobacco shop in Amarillo, where the Artist waited, whittling and whistling “Danny Boy.”

  The cypress swamps are home to marsh wren, bittern, and red crossbill, and, high in the trees themselves, barred owl and pileated woodpecker. Also, the ruddy ghost rail, a bird of legend. I linger on this point in order to determine more exactly the real character of trees and the nature of the comfort and aid they offer birds as well as, on that one day, our friends.

  Looking up, Jake could see not only the birds but also small gray squirrels (upon which the cypress depends to spread its seeds). Both birds and squirrels were in numerous small wooden boxes obviously derivative of the boxed assemblages of found objects created by the American surrealist Joseph Cornell. The boxes were firmly and safely wedged into the “crotches” of the tree limbs. Jake couldn’t help but marvel at them, never mind that his situation was so dire that he might not live to see the end of the day. Moreover, the full aesthetic impact of the boxes was lost on Jake, a man for whom everything was already surreal. It was the real that shocked him. And I think it was the real that he marveled at in those boxes full of bottle caps, a yellowed ping-pong ball, a lexicon for upholstery buttons printed on torn newsprint, things that jays might have brought and stored if Mr. Cornell hadn’t taken care of it first. Come to think of it, the jays might have resented the intrusion into their job description. It is, after all, their job to steal buttons and such and hide them in little cubbyholes in trees. That is well established in both high school textbooks and peasant lore.

  One of the little boxes was low enough that Jake could reach in and pull out the contents. He froze in horror. In his hand he held a bullet from a Sharps rifle Model 1851. That was the one with the knife-edge breechblock and self-cocking device for the box-lock. It was also the prized possession of one Alvaro “Chingé” Alvarez, he who the Chispés cartel depended on when death at a distance was called for. Model 1851 or no, Chingé never missed, and he was notorious for leaving one of his bullets, unmistakable, as an invitation to a death that was foretold and not far off. Jake did a quick pan of the surrounding hills. He palmed the spent cartridge when Rory came over to see what he’d found, although the stoic Rory would not have deigned to show alarm had he seen the shell.

  For a moment, Jake thought that maybe they should spend the night there, but, on the other hand, whether they stayed or went, Jake feared that it was all one to Chingé. Wherever they went, he was already waiting.

  For their part, the squirrels were no happier than the jays about Jake’s meddling with their boxes. He had pulled a miscellany of seeds and nuts out with the bullet. The squirrels eat the many small green cones the bald cypress produces, and drop many of the scales with undamaged seeds to the ground. Germination is epigeal. Once on the ground, the seed takes its place with years of dry, frondlike leaves shed each winter by the deciduous cypress. This provides an ideal environment for germination.

  While few people would think to do so, if one looks just beneath this cypress debris (easily swept aside), they will find a vast network of drips of liquid color, mostly alkyd enamels, spreading to the forest boundary in a sort of natural “all-over” style strikingly reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s No. Five, 1948, with its black base rising through brown and yellow to a white surface. A flute motif is provided by tubular, elongated, and thread-like filaments called hyphae of the basidiomycete fungi. (Of course, the filaments are a recent innovation by Nature, not by Mr. Pollock, and are part of a product line dating back to the Mesozoic, although those beneath Jake’s boots were probably fungal apps released and then abandoned by Natquest.com in the late ’90s—a very early example of digital pollution.)

  Just beneath the colorful abstract expressionist surface—a very thin and sere layer of liquid colors—is the forest’s mechanics, its ductwork, which provides for heating, ventilation, and cooling of the forest floor, and in a manner that both the business community and local environmentalists agree is sustainable. In places where forests have been cleared away, archaeologists have been able to dig carefully through the “Pollock” superstratum and expose Nature at her most ingenious. The fo
rest itself may cause a warm feeling of distant admiration in a viewer, but to look upon what makes the forest work, a phenolic system of flexible fabric ducting (also known as “air socks”), is to see something truly rare. It is no wonder that Nature is so often called a wonder of engineering. To see this is to understand fully the presence of God in the world. It was God that made the fabric duct available in standard and custom colors.

  Finally, beneath the forest mechanics, sinking to profound depths known to German philosophers as das ur-grund, are three broad layers of “stuff” alternating purple/white/red with lovely, elegant, fleeting tracers, as if the “stuff” wanted to escape as well as “found.” (This is the world’s foundation.) Except for the tracers, these layers, seen in a cross-section, are plainly in imitation of Mark Rothko’s 1953 “Untitled: Purple, White, and Red.”*

  These final layers stretch from the forest to the horizon and beyond at a depth of, oh, let’s round it off at 300 feet. From that point on, the earth is hollow. (If you bang on the “Rothko crust,” as it is called, with a frying pan (ideally) or any metal object, really, it’s not important (although a cast-iron sautéing pan is deeply satisfying), you will hear a hollow clanging echo from immense depths up to the length of an American football field where lies the center of the Earth, approximately. (Contrary to legend, no, the center of the Earth is not molten but merely very warm, like air circulating from an enormous handheld hair dryer.) The Rothko crust is not part of the forest per se, nonetheless the forest is dependent on it. Neither is it part of the soi-disant “drifting” of any continental “plate.” Rather, it is like a droning chord in the bases, the lied von der Erde, so to speak, on which the forest floats languidly, as does the flute in Debussy’s L’Apres-midi d’un faune.

  Following his brief meditation on the miracles of the natural world, Jake looked back at his companions and found that the girl had placed Rory in a sleeper hold, or in Judo a Shimewaza , a grappling hold that critically reduces or prevents either air or blood (stateside, this is called “strangling”) from passing through the neck to the lungs and, in sequence, the brain.