Turn off the soap opera. I hear you. But you know, life does actually contain soap opera moments and corny moments and why not include them? To not do so is to oversimplify life.
But still, you’d probably like a story to pin this on. Onward, Charles! Remember—to be fashionable means you can be fashioned into things. We pathetic humans never seem to forget having been fashioned. Now we are as mere ceramic playthings. Make sure you get good and glazed before you get fired.
I leave her place and walk home. The obelisk is lit. In the night haze, it takes on a bluish aura. The aura moves, like oscilloscope lines, in the rhythms of my muscae volitantes.
The fog-dampened boardwalk on the edge of the sea is nearly empty—a few persistent anglers still cast from the pier; a small family walks barefoot by the water’s edge; a dead brown pelican lies in a heap at the end of the pier, next to the garbage can. The garbage can is filled with dead pelicans.
The cemetery nearby is filled with dead anglers. Death has been busy this year. He deserves a year off. At least. Several boards on the walk need replacing. The risks of falling through and being seriously injured are great. Even so–I was taught to skip by an old sea captain Irish mountain goat.
At the end of the boardwalk is the entrance to a path into the woods that stretch for dozens of miles in any direction except binary. The true stars are they who deny the opposition total supremacy. Or so De Saussure might have said. Who’s to know? Gigi or G.G. Allen? Is it all a matter of taste? Or is that a false dichotomy?
Quick—the door! Out here! Quick!
I follow him. He slams the door.
"Oh, man. I couldn’t take one more second of that." he says.
"Me, either," I confess. He leads me into a hidden tavern underneath the boardwalk.
"If you’re headin’ into those woods, you’re gonna need some bolstering," says he.
Instead, I go into the city. I find a bar made of soap. Convenient should I pass out on my stool, slide my face across the bar and wake up ready for a shave. I could use a laser, the newest way to shave out of the East.
Yeah, smart ass, why don’t you Kanji then.
Sorry—I didn’t mean anything.
That’s just it. You never mean anything.
Oh, well that’s nice.
Hush! Do you see that?
The entrance to the woods. Do I have to?
He nods.
I’m in. The trees are weak here on the outskirts. Lots of bare limbs.
Hey, get your mind out of the gutter! He yells. I’m referring to the trees, I yell back.
I see Jim Chapman coming back the other way. "How’re the woods?" I ask.
"Freaky. I just wrote about them."
"Oh." Better find some new ground.
This time make sure it hasn’t already been taken.
Gerdes and Chapman, in a land grab for material, race neck and neck.
Actually, it’s not like that. Material shared is material urned. So, of course, I razed the forest and retreated into the city where nothing is natural.
Nothing in my life is natural.
I am an artificial man, at least on a cellular level. Reentering the city, I see the design patterns made by the lit lights of the high-rise buildings lining streets like chess pieces. In this game, though, all are pawns.
Wake up! Your country brethren aren’t going to help! The Kraken has swallowed all your lovers’ lovin’, so there ain’t none left for you.
Nor will there ever be. Love died with the computer commuter for whom sex is just another plug-in. You hear me? You! Over there on the seat riding sideways! How many cities can one heart hold? Mine holds Atlanta, Kiel, Geneva, Mulungwishi, Cape Town, Nashville, Chicago, Iowa City, Dubuque, Anchorage, and Macon, all for having lived there. Add to that list of cities I’ve slept in and you’ll see there is in my heart precious little space. Any one city is big enough to fill the space.
Unable to leave the city, I decide to find my way downtown. I buy a Bosc pear at a kiosk and a newspaper out of a machine. I find a seat on a bench in the park. The Staples Singers are playing a gospel festival.
What? In the city?
Certainly. It’s Gospelfest or something.
Is Mahalia there?
No, man, she passed a while ago.
As I weave my way towards the stage, I see my shoelace has come undone. I bend down to tie it and some bozo galumphs into me from behind. I go rolling like a bowling ball into a group of furniture sales representatives out for a Sunday stroll.
"No," says one, "I always argue that the loveseat is an essential part of any living room. That way you have seats to accommodate groups of one, two or three."
"Is one a group?"
"Well...you know—I do have schizoid friends." "Ah..."
"And people who are satisfied by themselves."
"Oh!"
"And a mosquito bite on the back of my knee that’s driving me insane. Please excuse me." He takes off and goes into the can.
Another takes his place. "He’s a crackpot," says she. "Any couple in a loveseat would rather be in the bedroom," says she. "That much is obvious."
The city talks thus. The country is subtler.
Driving home, I hear the debate. I try to make it home, but I fall asleep and crash on the way—
"I can’t wait."
The grid engulfs me. My fingers and toes become enmeshed in it. Then the ground gives way. The city spires jut up at me, spearing me in the side. The churches have no idea what they’ve done, spearing the heavens.
The city is a confidence artist. No, not artist. The city hates the artist. The city is an assembly-line worker. What’s being manufactured are the citizens. I believe I am my social security number, my driver’s license number, my phone number.
This is no mere village.
Some things add just a fine eloquence.
Something’s adjusting vanilla quince.
Don’t you?
My nails are pulled from my fingers and toes. They are replaced by hatred, with hate, from the hateful.
And the north seems to beckon. Leave the city: go to the inhospitable zone, it suggests. But I see through that trick. If I crawl off to die in the woods, the city won’t have to deal with me. Well, me they’re going to find skewered on their main spire. Unless I succeed in shutting it down, which I don’t want to do. A shut down city is the scariest thing in the world.
I’ve seen fifteen cities shut down in the last thirty years—rioting, looting, excessive force, casualties—these are the results.
Waving back and forth in the breeze, the rhythm is ambient reggae. I’d say it was romantic, but I’ve been told I have no idea what romance is, so it must be something different. Ask my wives—they know how romantic I am. Ask the second especially. The first didn’t really like me much. Oh, that’s not true. She just tired of me quickly. It’s not easy living with me. For one thing, I do not like filling out forms.
Remember: you only have the right to assembly if you fill out the proper forms. You only have the right to free speech if you fill out the proper forms.
I remember one man, Lubjec, I think his name was, who couldn’t fill out forms either. He was a neighbor of mine in an apartment building in Old Town. He told me he so agonized over filling out forms, he’d gotten sick, so his job fired him. After that he just stayed home and filled out every form he could find. I do not want to become him.
Of course, he didn’t have a car like mine: a charcoal 2000 Toyota Camry. What a car—the best sled I ever had —or does "sled" only refer to motorcycles? I forget.
Nor did he have my wife. Well, she’s not really my wife, legally, but in every other sense she is. Know what I mean? And—I don’t mind bragging—she is amazing.
The President on TV asks, "Are you willing to make sacrifices for your country?" I imagine huge Viking pyres consuming domestic artists, but I guess he meant on a personal level, and, no—I will not sacrifice my wife for anything or anyone. I then notice the President
is wearing a dark green suit. Excellent. The last one wouldn’t wear green. The Mayor had condemned him for it, which was awkward during the convention because the Mayor, of course, was a delegate in his home city, which hosted the convention. Lubjec of all people, ended up kidnapping the Mayor. Of course, the police, once they found him, shot him in self-defense while he slept. The Mayor, having been rescued, had ordered the shooting. And then all of Lubjec’s neighbors had to be questioned, of course. Wonderful. The Mayor’s secret police didn’t take long to find where I was, and I only barely escaped—my downstairs neighbor tipped me off when they came to her door. She called me and left the phone off the hook so I could hear everything. I was gone before the second sentence. No way was I going back to jail.
I moved to another city where, as I said, I became a church organist in a rock band.
No wonder a small place like Grand Rapids had had some appeal to me, though I knew I couldn’t be there long in the land of the thumped. I’d like to say we got there without a hitch, but my wife got very sick—I think from the morphine inhalant tubes we’d been drinking. I had to get her off the bus long before we made it to the city. I can’t remember where exactly it was—we were pretty high— but it was a big city. I remember seeing a bar open from seven am to seven pm.
I remember jeeps rolling though the streets. It was a city under martial law, I think. How we escaped the city I don’t recall. My wife might know. But probably not. We woke up two days later back in our city and we weren’t sure if we’d actually gone on a trip until I found the gas receipts. I’m not sure who signed for half of them—the handwriting’s neither mine nor hers, but it resembles Lubjec’s, strangely. But that couldn’t be. He was dead. Or so the police had told us. Who knows if they are telling the truth, though. Frequently they don’t.
The President has formed a commission to look into reported abuses by big city cops. I’m sure the commission will never be heard of again–it was a salve announcement.
It’s a Salve New World, Little People. Do as you’re told and you won’t get hurt. I think that’s the gist of his message.
Of course, we freaked out when we came to. I mean, there we were, hunted for questioning, and we returned to our lair. We got out of there fast, amazed that the police hadn’t staked our place out, or had they? Had our return been at their hands? Were we being watched? We weren’t sure. How could we be? When I caught her looking at me suspiciously, I knew we had to move again. That would keep her distracted. We moved six times in four months, until she trusted me again. By then, we’d picked up six species of cockroach in our boxes. We finally decided to fumigate. We set off our bombs and went to a motel. When we got back the next day, our apartment had been ransacked. They had found us again.
You can imagine this wasn’t easy on my wife’s nerves. She Who Has Thus Far Been Unnamed needs a name. She’s not Beckett’s—she’s mine. Her name is Suzette.
Ah! So you say that she and Beckett were both French? No! Beckett was as Irish as James Joyce. Ireland always pushes her young away from her bosom. In this, she and America are sisters. America only lets multi-national oil conglomerates suck on her tits. Blessed are the French, who accept us from peasant stock!
A French woman, out of some incredible generosity, took us in. We stayed in her house and were given a room with southern exposure. Suzette loved it, and brought dozens of plants: green, white, red, gold, blue.
How we met her is interesting. I was carrying a book by Raymond Federman, Aunt Rachel’s Fur, around, and this woman at this restaurant came over and told us she’s read it—in French, of course—and that she thought it the funniest, most ribald writing since Rabelais. We hit it off. Suzette seemed a little jealous, but when Suzette–yes, they had the same name—invited us to coffee, my Suzette immediately accepted, which allayed my fears. I love my Suzette. I would never betray her. The Suzettes became good friends, actually. They played tennis together at least three times a week.
I kept myself busy by reading avant-garde fiction—you really should read it if you haven’t. Oh, you have been?
And now, five am, after a night of writing, my demons confront me. Not with any ferocity. See? City is at the heart of many things.
For two months I had no idea that the other Suzette had known Lubjec. Lubjec had, apparently, survived and had gone underground. Literally. Supposedly he’d built himself an underground city, a project he’d been working on for twenty years. As the underground city grew, it dug deeper, because it knew the surface would crash down eventually.
Each underground city was built under a big city. When the top worlds collapsed, the lower worlds would dominate. Like icebergs, big cities showed only ten percent of their mass above surface. Then they collapsed. The lower worlders were already too deep to be affected. The upper worlders died. Most of them. A few of us made it. And we formed a resistance.
I’m their unwilling scribe, Jacobus.
Excuse me—the President’s back on. The power outages in the city are no cause for concern, he says. The city police, as always, have everything completely under control.
Control.
What a word. Buck Henry and Mel Brooks, in Get Smart, seem to have thought the word positive: Control were the good guys, CHAOS the bad. Others might posit "freedom" as positive, "control" as negative. What do you make of that?
Staying at Suzette’s (Suzette H., not my wife, Suzette M.) was a delightful respite from the world’s woes. That’s what I’m supposed to say. The truth is, that it was hell. My wife’s jealousy got worse. She began to imagine I was referring to the other Suzette when I called out her name in bed. It was crazy. I only think about my Suzette. Her face. Her smile. Her freckles. Her dimples. The curve of her mouth. The expression in her eyebrow. Her deep brown, almost black, eyes that are the abyss that can engulf a man forever. Now do you see how much I love her? My Suzette, I mean.
I must pause here.
I must panic here. The philosophy of the city: "I’m no longer myself. I’m exactly who you want."
I have been assigned to find Lubjec. I de-atomize tonight.
The process is simple. Each of my atoms will be programmed to find him. When one locates him, the rest receive the message and reassemble before him.
That should freak him out. Hopefully that alone will be enough to make him surrender.
My atoms speed into the entryway to the underground, then they disperse. They zoom down corridors.
"Halt! You can’t go in there," led to I did. A few air conditioning vents later, I found him. I was behind him, so I started toward him.
He was wearing a baseball uniform. His name was sewn onto the back. I saw a team name, the Hawkinsville Homers, so I dispersed and rethought my strategy before he saw me.
I wondered what he was doing in the city. On a hunch, I bought a paper. Sure enough, the Homers were in town to play the city’s minor league team. Lubjec was listed as P.J. Ribl, but I read anagrams. I recognized him.
Why take him so fast? I wondered. I could jinx his game, have some fun.
Great Googlymoogly! There. That ought to fix him. Now to take a seat in the stands. "Ladies and Gentlemen! Welcome to William Weaver Field!"
Oh, good. The starting line-ups. Excellent! Ribl was starting at second. That was a little odd, because he was normally the shortstop. But the regular second baseman, Legron, was nowhere to be seen, and the game had to be played on time. One thing for sure, Skipper Leo "Minnie" Dumocher wouldn’t have gone easy on Legron even if he had been killed in a car accident.
Oh, look at that. On a hit-and-run fly to left, on an attempt to double-up the base runner, who was already past second, Ribl had tried to back up first base. However, the pitcher had the same idea. Ribl and the pitcher collided on the other side of the first baseman, and Ribl’s staying down. The pitcher seems to be okay. He’d hit his head into Ribl’s temple. Ribl’s out. Man, a concussion at least. I hope he’s okay. Oh—better get up and go to the concession stand now. There’ll be a long wa
it in a few minutes. Plus there’ll be too many people in the men’s room for me to get into a stall, and I hate competition urination. Oh, that’s right. The stalls here don’t even have doors. I hate public defecation, also. I see little to be gained by humiliating the fans, but then that’s me. Others seem to get off on it.
However, there are those who try to get off on humiliating me. One favorite play is to insult me. Another is to insult my children. Any insult leveled at my children is leveled at me. My advice is not to go there.
Of course, no one listens to me. A favorite sport of those whom I know is to pretend they care about me, but when the crunch is on, to deny any knowledge of me. Before my cock crows twice, they’ve condemned me. Of course.
Not my cock of course. Mine crows a hundred thirty or forty times at least before I’m condemned. There’s no rule, naturally, that says women should hate their men. There are very few rules, actually.
I’ve made it too easy to hate me, haven’t I? I’d better go read some Arno Schmidt again. It’s all about the sentences we’re given.
Life. Eternity with someone who hates you. Sartre’s No Exit. That’s all right. If it’s a test, I’ll pass. Even when hated, I am faithful. It is the one quality consistent in me. I never betray my mate.
She, of course, despises me for it, wishing I were unfaithful so her hatred would be justified.
Her hatred of me is eye-opening! I’ve been used. Ah, well, my ship is back for me soon.
On board will be provisions for my feelings as well as my hunger and thirst. Stowaways might tell me I’m a good captain—my first mate apparently finds doing so demeaning. However, I still trust my first mate and will not find in the stowaways a replacement. As I said, I am loyal, even if no one else is. I’ll stay here and work crosswords. I’m safe in my cabin.
A knock.
I ignore it.
Another.
I ignore it, too. I have work to do. I’m not looking for love again. It becomes hate. I don’t understand the rules of trinkets, phone calls, ex-husbands, or whatever is in that jewelry box. I can announce a tornado by accident— I savvy the weather. I know when to duck. It’s duck season. I have my waders on. I crouch. Low-flying projectiles are heading at me. I’m being told again that I’m the sorriest human who has ever lived. It’s okay—I’ve been hated before. I don’t think it’s permanent.
The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan Page 3
