by Doon Arbus
In the absence of confederates, the would-be defector’s courage fails him, leaving him painfully conscious of his sudden self-imposed isolation from the pack, equally incapable of rejoining the others or of following through on his threatened departure. He lingers disconsolately on the island of carpet beneath his feet, stranded midway between his former comrades and his anticipated freedom, an outcast on the fringe of a lost opportunity.
The caretaker takes up the challenge anyway. “Go on, go then if you must,” he says, addressing the entire group with a dismissive wave of the hand, as if he were in the act of making them disappear. “Or stay if you prefer. It hardly matters in the end. Even as you stand there, smugly swaddled in your swaddlings, propping up your fictional personas with freshly blackened hair or reddened lips or whatever transparent masquerade helps you pass for who you think you were or hoped to be, oblivion waits, smiling. Whatever made you think you could escape? Sooner or later we all wind up a pile of empty clothes and worthless keepsakes and sad, abandoned furniture, one last revenge on former friends and relatives now burdened with mounds of stuff to defile, destroy, or auction off. That’s the ultimate legacy: whatever’s left behind of you in everything you happen to have touched along the way, everything on which you’ve inadvertently leached away bits of yourself in passing — those flecks of dead skin, the stray hairs, the oily fingerprints, the sweat, the drool, the dried up blood and other fluids. That’s what you’ll inevitably become and what you will, with any luck, remain, thanks to the impressionable objects you’ve come into contact with — stone and wood and cloth and metal — things with no agenda, no cause to plead, no interest in you other than to do what they can’t help but do: to simply hold you and to keep you and preserve you in all the ferocious tenderness of their sublime indifference.”
He speaks with the impassioned equanimity of someone who has nothing left to lose, or more precisely, someone for whom any loss would be counted a kind of victory. He can harbor no illusions about the impending repercussions. Exposure is inevitable. He has finally gone too far. Complaints against him will be lodged with the authorities. His words will be misquoted, his transgressions reported on and perniciously embellished. Once more, he will be summoned before the Board like a delinquent schoolboy and called upon to defend his actions. Reprimands will have to be endured, some suitable form of punishment meted out. Even banishment, the ultimate threat, may be in the offing. All this no doubt he can foresee, but he no longer has the power to silence himself. Besides, it’s probably too late for silence now. He presses on.
“Don’t you even begin to get it yet? This is what lies at the root of the Doctor’s reverence for the object: the unique unadulterated particles of history embedded in each one of them from the humblest paper clip or paper coffee cup to the rarest irreplaceable treasure. History’s last hope rests here, in these mute, unborn, undead enemies of time. Without them and the place to keep and care for them as they deserve, we’d all wind up orphans of some interminable present with no past solid enough to cling to, no illusion of a future up ahead.” His left eye has begun to twitch and while he speaks he rubs at it impatiently like a cranky child awakened from a sweaty summer nap.
“Where else do you think history resides? Do you really think it’s about something as ephemeral as words? Do you actually believe the stories they’ve filled our heads with, those lies and mangled truths concocted in a futile effort to impose a reassuring pattern on the random by assembling disparate events into some arbitrary chronological chain of cause and consequence. Wake up, for god’s sake! Look around you. Are you blind? Don’t you see what the man has done here? Don’t you feel the power radiating from the things inside this place — yes, partly on account of the simple fact that, despite their encroaching obsolescence, they threaten to endure and outlast all of us, these seething carcasses of what once was and is no longer — but also because of the terrible pull they exert on one another. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel how desperately the hammer craves the nail, how ardently the etching congeals itself around the contours of its frame, a magnetism so intense you could easily wind up an unintended casualty of the undertow.”
He manifests the peculiar fluency of someone who has honed his conversational skills without the benefit of anyone to talk to, substituting for the more ordinary forms of verbal intercourse extensive monologues conducted solely with himself, unimpeded by interruptions or contradictory opinions or even so much as the implicit rebuttal on the face of a skeptical listener; someone in the habit of embracing with equal fervor any side of a complex, vexing question as a kind of exercise to keep the mind alert and test its intellectual flexibility, pitting one adopted viewpoint against another in a contest which — given the perfect parity of the participants — can only achieve victory by arriving at a stalemate.
“Look,” he continues, “no one disputes the fact that every single object on display is first of all defiantly a thing unto itself, a gloriously purposeless, self-sufficient thing with all its own idiosyncratic physical attributes. But on the other hand, consider this: in the absence of a lock — or the concept of a lock — what is a solitary key but a sort of cripple, a strange lost incomprehensible entity yearning for a reason to exist? What can they possibly make of such a baffling artifact a thousand years from now when keys and locks have long since grown extinct? Relationships change everything. Below us in the rooms downstairs — could you have really failed to notice? — even though nothing moves and nothing speaks, a veritable riot is going on. The place is teeming with petty quarrels and competitions, with forbidden assignations, conspiracies, alliances, unlikely kinships, and attractions and repulsions. Didn’t you catch the uncut diamond in its case winking impudently at the shiny lump of coal across the way? Or the virgin candle, conceived to be devoured slowly by a flame, inclining helplessly in the direction of the nearby unlit match, its doom and destiny? Weren’t you even the slightest bit intrigued by the hourglass, the sundial, the cuckoo clock, and the rest of their kind clustered together in a corner of the second floor carrying on their interminable debate over the nature of time and how to measure it? The strategic distance between any one thing and the next — or the way they’re poised in apposition or collusion — transforms them all. Isn’t this how society itself purports to function? For better or worse, each member is made smaller, larger, darker, lighter, rounder, flatter, richer, poorer, stronger, weaker, plainer, queerer in contrast to whatever winds up in its vicinity. As, for that matter . . .” He hesitates a moment on the brink of an unexpected twist in his disquisition before delivering his conclusion, “As are you, my friends.”
The caretaker scrutinizes the small amorphous blob of humanity in front of him, which keeps shifting, contracting, reformulating itself in the manner of a single living organism. Its eight component parts, as if dissatisfied with the degree of their proximity, have been steadily closing ranks, seeking warmth or comfort or a semblance of safety, while the solitary ninth member lingers in their wake, like a drop of spume cast off by the undulating sea. At this point, the entity can shrink no further without risking inadvertent physical contact with itself. Even now, breaths commingle. A shoulder is in danger of brushing up against a powdered cheek; a finger must contort itself to avoid an unprovoked encounter with a stranger’s thigh.
From the standpoint of invidious comparisons, the nine people do not fare terribly well in the eyes of their host. One man’s distinctive nose becomes an unfortunate parody of all other noses. The sumptuousness of a woman’s dark complexion turns everyone else ghostly. Each individual set of characteristics serves as a tacit rebuke to the very nature of someone else’s, making oddities of them all. The entire spectacle strikes the caretaker as simultaneously comic and pathetic, sending him into a fit of soundless laughter, which leaves him momentarily helpless, nearly doubled over at the waist, his torso trembling in an effort to suppress the outburst. “Sorry,” he gasps, when at last he manages to regain his composu
re. “But really, you know, you’d best beware your neighbors.”
The man with the beard, who has been following the circumlocutions of the caretaker’s thesis from the start, frowning all the while under the awning of his dark brows, finally settles on what he evidently regards as a satisfying retort, one that only hints at his considerable erudition. “This is sophomoric anthropomorphism gone mad,” he fumes, obviously spoiling for an argument, much to the dismay of his companions who begin to fear this new engagement of the enemy will, at the very least, prolong indefinitely what has already proven to be a seemingly interminable stay in purgatory — prolong it, or possibly result in something even worse.
“Be that as it may — but why so bloody supercilious?” the caretaker responds, embracing the indictment with an eagerness that suggests it may be precisely the sort of reaction he had been seeking all along: to flush out at least one person in this eerily compliant crowd who would care enough to risk fighting back. “I’m pretty sure Dr. Morgan and I are not the only ones susceptible to the irrational adulation of inanimate objects,” he continues. “Just take a look around. What about the young woman on your right, for instance — the one who cannot bear to face me for some reason, can you, darling? — fiddling endlessly with those silver bangles on her wrist in the grip of some remorseless private catechism.”
The target of this observation is unable to resist the challenge. Without altering the downward angle of her head or uttering a single word, she raises her eyelids ever so slowly, as if she were painstakingly adjusting a pair of window sashes, and fixes the caretaker with a look she has no doubt perfected in the course of navigating the shoals of her relatively brief existence, a look designed to make adversaries of either sex wilt in shame or pity, or even possibly in fear. Confronted by those disconcertingly pale eyes of the luminous peeled grape variety in all their steady defiant vulnerability, the caretaker — like most of the young woman’s prior opponents — turns out to be the one who blinks first, rapidly turning his attention elsewhere.
Choosing as his next victims the man and woman who had earlier in the day — it feels now so very long ago — failed in their half-hearted surreptitious attempt to flee the place unnoticed, he persists, elaborating on his initial response. “Or the couple over there behind you,” he says, “flaunting their identical silk scarves like the flags of some rogue nation to remind us — or to remind themselves, perhaps? — that they belong together.” He singles out the man with a knowing conspiratorial look suggestive of some unspecified exclusively male bond, which succeeds in isolating him from the woman by his side and makes him the sole focus of the question. “And although they may appear to be two people,” he adds, “they are probably at this point barely even one — right?”
The female half of the alleged unit flushes under the sting of this gratuitous attack. An uncommonly tall person like her companion, she has been genetically condemned to spend the better part of her life looking down on most of those around her, and this perspective on the world, so easily mistaken for innate superiority, has wound up embedded in her psyche. The shock of finding herself dismissed as an object of derision by a patently inferior being — and a half-demented one at that — leaves her nearly gagging on outrage and, as a consequence, abnormally inarticulate. “This is the most unspeakable — what kind of a . . .” she begins in a cross between a whimper and a growl that falls woefully short of its attempt to sound defiant. “You really are beyond belief,” she manages at last before turning to her partner in an unspoken plea for rescue, to which his response proves a disappointment: in light of his failure to hazard a suitably scathing verbal riposte, the act of placing a chivalrous arm around her shoulders proves a peculiarly impotent gesture.
The other occupants of the room, their curiosity sufficiently aroused, are now scrutinizing the couple to assess for themselves the accuracy of the caretaker’s remarks. A casual glance is enough to confirm for them the superfluousness of matching scarves. Gender differences aside, the two people resemble one another in so many salient particulars — in stature, coloring, a certain coarseness of the features, even the trendy, erratic ministrations of the barber — that no one could be blamed for a momentary confusion as to which of them was which. They appear to have succumbed to the powerful attraction that felled Narcissus, drawn inexorably to the familiar upon recognizing it embodied in the other. A more scrupulous examination would of course eventually uncover the inevitable dissonances — in the shape of the eyes, for instance, or the earlobes, or in the individual character of their gestures — but these differences only serve to highlight the fundamental similarities they share.
Although no particular animosity had existed until now between the unfortunate couple and their fellow visitors — nor any real basis for animosity aside from the instinctive suspicion attendant on most encounters between strangers — the present situation, simply by pitting the seven detached observers against the helplessness of the observed, creates in and of itself an implicitly hostile confrontation. To make matters worse, without specifically intending to do so, the observers — in their eagerness to disassociate themselves from the two victims and to remain more or less invisible in the hope of escaping the sort of abrasive scrutiny the couple has just endured — wind up implicated as passive allies of the persecution. The mere act of looking — exacerbated by the refusal to submit to protocol after a decent interval and look away — becomes as bruising as an actual physical assault.
The objects of this unwanted attention hold their ground, but not without betraying, by a stiffening of the posture and of the muscles around the jaw, a suppressed inclination to do otherwise. The man tightens his protective grip around the woman’s shoulders. “What the hell do you think you’re all gaping at!” he demands in a belated attempt to make amends to his companion for his previous reticence. She joins in. “What’s wrong with all of you? Has everyone gone nuts? Why are we letting this — this contemptible — this pathetic creature do this to us?” These essentially rhetorical questions go unanswered and the caretaker, having succeeded in stirring things up a bit, has lost interest and moved on, returning to his original interlocutor, the imperious man with the beard who might be presumed to have started it all and who must not be permitted to escape unscathed.
“And what about you, yourself, sir?” he inquires mildly. “Hiding there behind your carefully cultivated underbrush, stroking it for reassurance every now and then so you can keep pretending it successfully conceals the sneering mouth or weakness of the chin or whichever shameful defect you fear might give your game away. Whereas all it really does is show us there’s something you need covered up.” In the wake of the arid silence greeting this remark, he casts an appraising eye over his remaining prospects, contemplating the possibilities like a hungry carnivore savoring the unsuspecting creature that will soon be his next meal. No one is safe now. Each is destined for his own dreaded moment in the sun.
“Go on, clutch that monogrammed alligator handbag with its treasure trove of dirty little secrets to your breast for comfort,” he says with renewed vigor, zeroing in on the woman with the long purple fingernails before tackling her nearest neighbor, the fashionably undernourished creature to her left who gazes back at him, presumably — or so he fancies — from behind a pair of impenetrable red-framed owlish sunglasses: “Is this pure style, or do you really fancy you’ve successfully deceived us about where you’re looking and exactly what you’re looking at?” Deliberately, one by one, he dispatches the rest: the failed escapee in the safari jacket and scuffed up cowboy boots (“I guess it’s worth the inconvenience of pinched toes to gain yourself the illusion of a couple of extra inches”) who still hovers near but not quite at the door; an earnest, well-scrubbed woman with a single braid (“that greying, shrinking remnant of your good old Hippie days”) beaming vaguely in his direction with the immaculate certainty of the true believer; and, finally, a scrupulously bald, ruddy-cheeked young fellow in a business
suit sporting a golden stud in his right ear (“to proclaim your status as a renegade, perhaps, and absolve you of the need to act the part”). His words, aimed each time at some sacred personal talisman, draw everyone else’s attention to it and, in doing so, annihilate its power with the ruthlessness of a blowtorch, leaving each of his reluctant guests unprotected and, one by one, bereft of cover. Their fragile alliance, unable to survive the onslaught, now lies in tatters, and they shrink from one another, shriveled, shamed, stripped of their illusions as irrevocably as the inhabitants of Eden after that fatal taste of the forbidden fruit.
These acts of verbal devastation are followed by what might briefly pass for an apology of sorts: “But who am I, you might well ask,” he volunteers ruefully. “Who am I to begrudge you your material comforts, regardless of the form they take? Or your deceits for that matter, your harmless petty affectations. We’re all entitled to whatever we can get away with, whatever we choose to cling to or hide behind or caress while we face the terrors of the everyday before the ax falls, which — in case you have momentarily forgotten — it inevitably will, whether it’s decades from now, or years, or months, or — who knows? — it could be only minutes. There’s really no excuse for some rude upstart like me to come along and rumble your disguises as if they were no more impenetrable than flimsy bits of gauze a blind man could see through. Doesn’t a civilized society rest on the presumption that each of us will quietly pretend to buy whatever it is the rest of us are selling, that so long as I agree not to notice what you’re up to, you’ll probably do the same for me? Well, the covenant is broken now. Of course you take it personally. It is personal. For some of us, it’s about as personal as it gets.”
He has the flushed, sweaty look of someone suffering from the heat, although given the actual temperature inside — even up here in what they call the “living quarters,” where objects and their needs still take precedence over humans — that heat must be internal, something exclusively his own, self-generating, like a fever. Everyone else in the room remains, if anything, a little cold.