by Tito Perdue
All my life I have wanted to be the only person in the world. Moving from one residence to another, sometimes occupying hotels or mansions, sometimes a library or Thelemite church, I would have time for all the films and stamps and good books that had escaped me in active times. Sleep all day, read all night. With an apartment on the top floor of the tallest building, we could look down, the dog and me, into the burnt remains of a civilization that at one time might almost have been like Greece. That was when the bozo described above as “rotting from both ends” rose and stretched, smiled, and came over to me. We were the best of friends—he believed that.
“Hey chum; how’s it going?”
In the afternoon I managed to achieve a great deal less than my salary would have suggested. But at least my colleagues were happy. They each had a position, an income, good shoes, acquaintances, a car, a bed of one’s own. What is left to wish for? As happy as ants they were, who come together at night in tight quarters. I wanted to slay the entire bunch of them.
Night did come, albeit about six hours later than desirable. We made the rounds, the dog and me, and after securing the four corners of my forty-three-square-foot backyard, we jumped back inside and locked the door. I could now look forward to as much as full ten hours without human participation, the nearest approach to happiness allowed such people as myself. We ate quickly, relishing the waffles, and in the case of the dog, a bit of left-over sausage that caused his eyes to glow.
I am indebted to my house, and to the bricklayers and carpenters and fresco painters of eighty years ago. In their honor I allowed into my dwelling no piece of furniture younger than me, nor any typewriter that needed electricity, nor any English-language novel written past 1930. Nor was I especially fond of incandescent lamps. Kerosene gives a mellow glow.
Now was the time to take out my collection and magnifying glass and focus on some of the images provided in the classic material prior to 1945. Here one could see castles, battle scenes, portraits both of stern-looking rulers and garden variety human individuals. Those were serious times, those, masculine in character, before the West had lapsed into . . . into that huge black fly who had just then settled on a Hungarian issue that had cost me better than $200 at that time. As bloated as she was on human blood, I dasn’t swat the thing lest she do damage to one of the best views of Budapest in my collection.
Turning to Romania, I lingered over the 1941 “fortress and monastery” series of semi-postals showing stone buildings of historical importance, and never mind that the stamps themselves have no antiquarian value. You have already seen, or soon will, that I care only for aesthetics, a personality defect that angers some of my philatelic colleagues who actually strive to make money from what ought to be a spiritual project only, beneficial to the soul. Watermarks? Variants? Mistakes? Perforations? Superior people care nothing for such trivia. Both here and in life itself, art is all. I am even able to enjoy some of the commemoratives of King Carol II, one of Europe’s most contemptible men, and the murderer of Codreanu.
A minute of this, I hurried back to Hungary and dawdled over the four values issued under foreign occupation in 1916, a sample of the arrogance that ought to remind us of the gains made by Romania as a result of that conflict. All my life I have wanted to visit those countries to verify they are as awful as commonly believed. I know this, that no country can be all bad that issued the Bulgarian “sunflower” stamps of 1938 (Scott A142).
I haven’t mentioned in this context that on Monday I received a tiny glassine envelope holding a full set of early airmails that had cost more than I care to admit. Working slowly with my tweezers, I forced each stamp into the yawning space awaiting them and affixed them permanently to the page, or for at least as long as I am likely to distract myself with this rather ineffective avenue of escape from the post-modern world. Actually, books are better.
And so at two o’clock I leapt to bed, and after dithering with the sheets, my two pillows (one fat one and one thin), my matches and cigarettes, and my worn copy of Kurtagić’s large novel, I read efficiently till just past 2:03, whereupon I smothered the lamp and permitted the light to fly from the room and to where it was wanted more.
The night is cold, and the woods full of animals who will freeze tonight. Who but a sadist would have inflicted life upon such creatures, squirrels and birds who know enough about the world not to ask for mercy? There they sit, shuddering in the treetops, wondering what they had done to merit this. The Author of all Suffering I then seemed to see, a bemused man sipping wine in his robe and slippers. For him, the doings back on Earth are but as the affairs of bacilli confined to a thimble in the mansion of time and space.
It was at this point that I fell off into unquiet dreams relating to a number of things.
Nine
My whole purpose has been to give here the reasons for my life and behavior.
Other reasons have to do with events that should have been described earlier, namely my origins, education, opinions, travel, and marriages. I need hardly say that my first wife was the best of the lot, an intelligent woman who disappeared immediately after our divorce and whom I’ve never been able to relocate. Yes, there was some news that she’d been seen in Colorado, in that mountainous part where it were just about impossible to find a person as short as she. I give her credit, too, for her patience, her familiarity with the Latin American postal history prior to World War II, and her physique when she was naked, which was only too seldom the case. I don’t know what happened to us. Unless it was her preference for the Classical era over the Romantic in music history. What I can tell you is that we used to take walks on moonlit nights. And that’s all I can say on that topic, lest I break down into tears just talking about it. She had an odd hat and an old-fashioned brown dress designed seemingly for ninteenth-century farmwives. And yes, that was another of my weaknesses, matching as it did my kerosene lamps, my Victorian novels, and the button-up shoes that have caused so much merriment at my place of work. But enough concerning her and her decision to leave me to deal unassisted with my personal quiddities, which are no fault of mine.
She used to bring home dogs, and even on one occasion a grounded grackle of some description. Give her back to me, and I’ll happily attend to every injured bird within a hundred miles.
My second wife followed hard upon. She was only some two inches taller than the first one, but even so wasn’t interested in using the clothes left behind by Gwen. And this was just the first in a whole series of superstitions and extravagancies on her part. Curtains, a new tablecloth. I made no comment on these matters, however, not till she began dipping into her paycheck for clothes and doodads, a Navaho pot, and just a month after our wedding, a shopping trip to a store of some sort out on Long Island.
My third wife made an excellent presentation, was neat and tidy at all times, and had a degree from a school in Missouri, as she claimed. Not till two weeks had gone by did she admit finally that the university was in fact located in Massachusetts. We continued on all the same, staying together for nearly a year before I fully understood that beneath the grooming and toiletries and her prosperous job, the woman had bitten deeply, very deeply indeed, into the feminist philosophy. In any case she had cared next to nothing for philatelic matters and when pressed, admitted she didn’t detest New York City.
Thus ended my associations with women, saving only a five-week connection with a Brooklyn woman full of lipstick and earrings and an accent that left my auditory faculties permanently damaged.
On December 19, there was a clear night, cold outside but exceedingly cozy inside the house. Going to the cabinet, I took out my Czechoslovak album and turned immediately to perhaps one of the most plangent scenes in the Europe of that day. A man of obvious genius, the engraver had managed to portray a mile or two of perspective within a .426-square inch frame that also held a peasant’s cottage in the extreme distance with smoke lifting from the chimney. One of the windows was aglow and I almost believed for a moment that I coul
d detect the householder himself playing on a violin in front of the fireplace. But no, it was just my abnormal imagination again, the one that had already destroyed three marriages and a perfectly good arrangement with a girl from Sheepshead Bay.
It must have been late fall or early winter in Czechoslovakia on that stamp, to reckon by the mown fields and leaves on the ground. Overripe pumpkins decaying forlornly on the stem, a child swinging from a limb. Pleased by everything that I could see, I lifted the stamp from the sheet and after checking both doors, transported the little artifact to the adjoining room, where my microscope and chemicals were stored. It was a Lithuanian-made product, this instrument of mine, and extorted a good deal of patience to get the focus just right. Again I scanned the stubble, the stars and smoke, the broken roof tile, and the illuminated front room wherein the imagined peasant had lately been standing. At one time the whole world had been like this.
Come 3:07, I left the desk and initiated the five steps that took me to the window. They were diligent enough certainly, the pullulating brown immigrants working night after night on the wall. A parabolic structure, the thing had originally been intended to sequester a certain ten-block set-aside that the police nowadays demurred to enter. Fetching my telescope, I made what probably would be my last inspection of that dread district that lapped my own neighborhood and came to within a few rods of an outdoor marketplace where Caucasian foods were still on offer. Further I could see some dozen or more mile-high towers flashing urgent messages out to ships at sea. Upon these, too, I trained my telescope, especially a lilac-colored lamp of great wattage that just then ceased to function, the filament having no doubt exhausted itself.
I am not insane. It happens merely that I love my leisure, my coffee, my dog, books, and particularly my seventeen-volume stamp collection spilling over with art and history while offering a pathway to better times. I would long ago have surrendered to a lifetime of solitary confinement, provided I had a blanket, a pee pot, and could keep my collection with me.
It was just past four in the morning when I abandoned my bed and returned to the table. I had left the stamp in its position, but the microscope had again to be adjusted in order to account, I suppose, for the rotation of the Earth and sunspot activity over the interval. Obviously there was no “peasant with a violin” to be seen, although the outlying fields remained as perfectly mown and moonlit as before. That was when I shifted to the northwest corner of the scene, and after making a final adjustment, almost fell to the floor, aghast to find an infinitesimal boy standing up to his waist in the stubble while waving back in friendly fashion from about a hundred years ago.
Ten
I have come upon these pages, and must consider whether to continue with them or not.
Eleven
I have chosen to continue with these pages, if only that I may be seen doing something in the eyes of my superiors [sic]. But I should remark that my desk, formerly near the front of the second row, has been moved to the back of the room, a promotion in my mind but a demotion in theirs. Certainly they dare not dismiss me, not with my popularity among these thirty-one standard-issue colleagues who admire my virtues and character, my self-presentation, my courtesies to women, my tolerant approach to things, and the infectious good humor I contribute to our little group. Truth is, I need just seventeen months and a few days till I can claim my pension at eighty-two percent of the full rate. Let them try to fire me at this date, and the whole city would rise up in hot indignation and forward-looking self-interest.
My contempt was growing and my reanimated camera obscura (computer) could now do all sorts of things it oughtn’t. On Tuesday I invested a good, or rather a bad, five minutes looking by remote sensing into a randomly-chosen home in Jersey, a place with three television sets, and on the bedside table a bottle of sleeping pills, a glass with something in it, and a novel such as might give pleasure to the New York Times. Of the beds, one was unmade but the other wasn’t. The kitchen, I admit, was neat and tidy, but had two sentimental landscapes on the wall and a hagiographic rendering of JFK on the refrigerator door. Next, I pulled up the hologram of a large building in Pakistan with people coming in and out. As for my own residence, the lawn needed work, and through the window I could see the back of my own poor head bending over my collection. Thankfully, there was nothing else in that room (apart from a hand-colored print of last century’s pre-eminent philatelist) to excite even the most belligerent agents of the State’s Housing, Rehabilitation, and Gratification Department. Indeed, the day was drawing on, and thus far I had succeeded in doing nothing that could contribute to the present system.
By 11:24, I had fallen into a hypnagogic state in which I imagined myself sailing a gilded ocean made of glass. My memory reverted then to a certain Salvadorian commemorative of 1949 that pictured the sea exactly as I featured it. That was when I became aware of the organization’s lead proctor standing just at my side, a tall woman, well dressed, urging me with quickly declining patience to take the day’s mandated medications.
I did as required and then yawned and stretched so as to appear unaware of the newly-hired bozo smiling in my direction. The noon hour was drawing near, and now this new ignoramus probably wished, like so many others, to contract a discussion with the company’s premier intellect. For him, that would represent a promotion, for me a wasted hour. After so many years on the job, I was tired, tired unto the absolute death of having to pretend that I wasn’t even more exceptional than they knew, an indigo bunting amongst jays and wrens.
Eschewing the elevator, I managed to climb to the thirty-fourth floor, where one of the better and less visited restrooms proved uninhabited at this time. With my own toilet out of commission, I needs take full advantage when I can. And then, too, someone had left behind—don’t expect me to describe it—a pornographic watercolor of the highest quality. The custodian here, a friend of mine and the only person I know destined for paradise, had declined to erase the thing.
I read, briefly, a few pages in Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft while taking a few swills betimes of sweetened brandy wine. Entered then one of the thirty-fourth-floor people who began very briskly washing his hands. He was whistling a tune, a poor one, and I could see his shoes under the partition. The feet were small and yet his rubber soles so compressed that I figured him for a fat person. Worse, he seemed to have a living insect of some nature peeping over the edge of his nearer cuff. We looked at each other.
The streets were bleak and cold and the rest of that. High winds bending great buildings to the breaking point. Amazingly, I hadn’t gone a full block before I descried that same pair of shoes marching side by side with me. He was, the owner of that footwear, quite as heavy as I had foreseen, and yet his profile (elongated by action of the low winter Sun) was not as loathsome as it so well might have been. The champion in that category was a uniformed Pinkerton standing on the corner with a beet-red face.
I have read where old Leland Pefley once escaped into a Christian Science Reading Room when in similar circumstances. Bad for me, all that I could see was a congeries of public benches in that two-acre park that abuts upon 19th Street. Each bench bore an inch of urban snow, a granular material that hadn’t stopped an inebriated and shirtless New Yorker from seating himself there while reading out in a loud voice the stock quotations from a discarded sheet of newspaper that proved, as I drew near, to be about two weeks old.
I still had twenty-one minutes left to me, a concession to my seniority with the Department. The day was sixty-two percent finished while my career was advancing even faster than that. With that in mind, I came to my forty-story bank building, sustained by my after-tax deposits of $3,600 monthly, more or less. (More or less? If my deposits were sometimes more, it stands to reason they must sometimes be less, for Christ’s sakes.) Twenty feet above me, I spied a gargoyle dressed in a wig of pigeon manure. But in all truth, it really was a friendly locale for doing business, where the automation was loaded with pleasant voic
es always ready to apologize.
There was a reverential atmosphere in that building, all of it presided over by an enormous Pinkerton blocking the exit. As a person who could do many things at once, his left hand kept opening and closing around the handle of his government-supplied baton. The West might rise, the West might fall, a destiny that fluctuated with the transactions taking place here among a computer array.
Not that I despised my own poor share of wealth. I used to withdraw a few bills and carry them into one of the private booths where I could sniff at the stuff in peace. Each hundred dollars represented four hours of future freedom. It’s an ugly sort of specie, of course, bearing the portraits of men that never certainly would have been chosen by me. Poe, where was he? Lee Harvey Oswald? Tito Perdue? John Wilkes Booth?
I don’t always know the sum of my own holdings, an elusive quotient that oscillates with market conditions. Today all things were looking good—housing starts were up and Moldova was back in the market for American debt. I lifted a twenty-dollar bill from the safe box in front of me, and after fitting on my glasses, proofed the famous prose—“Buy low, sell high”—that bears the endorsement of the nation’s Treasurer, a haunted man, as his calligraphy seems to suggest. I thought of tying a thread to that bill and trailing it along behind me as I walked. Would my third wife come chasing after and ask to have me back?
At present I have just $220,000 in bonds at maturity value, and rather less than that in equities and cash money, a decent sum in my father’s day but scarcely enough today for groceries, stamps, utilities, and dog feed. I realized then that I had been talking to myself, reckoning by all the people watching from across the floor. At that point I decided to return my money and my half-dozen most pricy stamps to the metal box, a grey thing eight times longer than wide, return it to the “cave” in the wall that continued on for an unfathomable distance before coming out presumably at the other end.