A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith have to laugh; this name is both preposterous and inevitable.

  Reluctantly they introduce themselves to (Maynard) Smith—(Matt) Smith, (Matthew) Smith. There are no handshakes for neither (Matt) Smith nor (Matthew) Smith can bear to grasp (Maynard) Smith’s (filthy) hand.

  (Maynard) Smith appears disoriented like one who has journeyed a long distance. He tells the men that he is forty-nine years old, no family, no place to stay in San Rafael though he has a bed in a halfway house in San Francisco near the parole office.

  Parole. They will inquire about parole, though not immediately.

  (Matt) Smith asks (Maynard) Smith point-blank: is he waiting for Kizer too?

  (Maynard) Smith recoils, baring his teeth. His voice is a guttural growl: “Kizer! Why would you ask about him?”

  “Are you waiting for him? We were.”

  (Maynard) Smith looks from one man to the other. Disfigured face, sunken eyes. Broken and stained teeth. His nostrils are distended, enormous. His breath smells sepulchral. He stares at them as if there is some joke here he should grasp but can’t, quite.

  “You know that he—him—it’s his—‘death day’ today—like a birthday except it’s when you die. …”

  “‘Death day’? Kizer? Kizer is dead?” (Matthew) Smith is disbelieving.

  “‘Anniversary’ is the word. What I meant to say. Today—June 9. I saw the date on a newspaper.”

  “But—Kizer is not …”

  “… not dead. He is not.”

  (Maynard) Smith appears to be hard of hearing, or in any case does not hear the others’ protests or register their alarm. He tells them that it is his first day back in San Rafael in nineteen years; he’d been released from San Quentin just two days before. His laughter lacerates the ears, the very air, like gravel being roughly shoveled. Rubs his bloodshot eyes with his fists as if he’d like to gouge them out.

  “He provoked me—fucking Kizer. It was Kizer or me. They called it ‘second-degree murder’ but I know better—he knew better. If I hadn’t done what I did I’d be dead now. He’d be here.” (Maynard) Smith pauses, drawing a deep, tremulous breath. His small, mean eyes glance about, seeking food, drink.

  “So I’m alone now, I have no friend, no family—nothing except my life.” (Maynard) Smith enunciates life as one might enunciate worm.

  (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith glance at each other, trying to absorb what this apparition has told them.

  Kizer is dead? Today, June 9, is Kizer’s death day?

  Seeing that (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith seem to be struck dumb, (Maynard) Smith speaks harshly yet with a kind of grim satisfaction. His large, dark nostrils contract and expand as he breathes; his very being exudes an air of the grave. As he speaks, he picks up a small cucumber slice, a small swig of parsley, from (Matt) Smith’s cold salmon platter, left behind on the tabletop by the careless waiter, and shoves them into his mouth.

  “Fucking shadow over my life. Since we were boys. Everything I did has turned out wrong. Mark of Cain on my forehead. So many times I’ve explained, tried to explain. I didn’t have the strength to save myself. He had to. That was our secret. I wasn’t a strong swimmer. In fact, I was a poor swimmer. My arms had no muscle. My legs were skinny. I was panicked. I clung to the canoe, he had to pry my fingers from it. I was paralyzed. … So many times I’ve explained, and no one will believe me. I wasn’t the one who capsized the fucking canoe. He was.”

  Soldier’s Handbook

  William Lychack

  The gun we found was an M1911. This was the standard-issue sidearm for the United States military from 1911 to 1986—World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam—and, as such an integral part of a soldier’s life, it only made sense that every essential of this weapon would be laid out in great, almost loving detail in the Basic Field Manual of the United States Armed Forces.

  Prepared under the direction of the Department of War, The Soldier’s Handbook (as it was also known) had a singular purpose: “To give the newly enrolled member of the United States Army a convenient and compact source of basic military information and thus to aid him to perform his duties most efficiently.” There were chapters on INSIGNIA AND CLOTHING, MILITARY DISCIPLINE, THE MARCH, THE CAMP, THE BIVOUAC, THE USE OF MAPS, THE SECURITY OF SMALL GROUPS. There were photos and illustrations, checklists and forms for a young recruit, all in one pocket-sized paperback. There were spaces at the front to record a SOLDIER’S NAME, SERIAL NUMBER, RIFLE NUMBER, CHIEF BENEFICIARY (SIX MONTHS’ PAY), blank pages near the back for LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT. Scattered throughout were common-sense reminders, bits of fatherly advice—be loyal, be alert, be determined, be a member of the team—but by far the bulk of the manual was devoted to ARMS AND EQUIPMENT.

  Diagrams, instructions, warnings, all of this waiting in a strongbox in my childhood room. What I’m trying to say is, I had an old metal footlocker with my father’s papers and letters and bills under my bed growing up. I had his canceled checks, his medical records, his window-washing receipts, pocketknife, car keys, wallet. I had a packet of half-used mint-flavored toothpicks, a neatly folded certificate for marksmanship from the United States Marine Corps, and that copy of his Basic Field Manual, those gray and pulpy pages, and this figure of the gun waiting there for me all along:

  Simple, reliable, the M1911 weighed just under three pounds unloaded, its magazine holding seven rounds. CARE OF PISTOL—To prevent wear and tear on the working parts of your pistol, metal parts should be cleaned and covered with a thin, uniform coat of oil. • A dirty, dry pistol will have stoppages that may make it useless in battle. • A failure of your pistol in battle may cost you your life. • Do not assume that you or your companions are safe.

  What I mean to say is, I never really knew my father. I met him twice before he died when I was ten. I remember going to the farm with my mother. They had divorced when I was two. A cow stepped on my foot that first visit. My father—this man I barely even had as an idea—he rummaged an old Indian hatchet from some pile of junk to stop my crying.

  Somewhere along the line as a kid I’d gotten it into my head that the more you used a blade, the sharper it would become. I must have wanted this tomahawk from my father to be a razor, because I started chipping branches that had fallen from the trees in the yard. I sat on the steps of the porch and unraveled the decorative tassels. I made quick work of those long strips of leather, chopping them into neat little ant-sized pieces. Of all possible moments, this would be what I would most remember: the man appearing at the screen door, staring down to ask what have I got there, and this boy—me—I’m offering up these tiny bits of leather in the cup of my palm. Just that cringe on my father’s face as he turned away, door standing dark and empty. Just me on the porch alone with that hatchet again.

  Our second visit wouldn’t go much better. There’d be beagle puppies out in the barn. I’d accidentally let them loose to chase after the chickens, my favorite puppy of the litter slipping between the bales of hay. You could hear her yelping from deep in the crevice, and bale by bale my father had to break down nearly the entire hayloft to rescue the dog. An afternoon’s work for him, and I had to wonder if everything I touched would go bad like this. I had to feel I might be somehow cursed.

  My mother and I would never see my father again after this—pulmonary embolism, living-room couch, bowl of melted ice cream on his lap—and in the parking lot of the funeral home that summer my uncle gave me whatever things my father had with him when he died. His wallet, his keys, the papers in his room, all in a small metal locker, the size of a baby’s coffin.

  Rarely did I think about my father as I was growing up—and already that was a lie—the more difficult truth was that each drip of faucet, every light bulb going dead, always my father’s hand we could feel in these things, my mother convinced she could hear him in the rooms, his ghost lurking outside the window.

  Sometimes, on nights I couldn’t sleep, I’d lie in bed just so alert
to the dark. It had a kind of viscous quality, the night, a black plushness that got increasingly difficult to breathe. From out of this my father emerged as a creak of floor near the bed. All the shadows in their right places, everything appearing perfectly natural, yet somehow he stood there in the dark. He moved so quiet in the watery black of the room, the man inching slowly toward me.

  Not a friendly visit. Not there to comfort anyone. He never arrived to give solace or relief. My father more just that empty volume waiting for me, and then that hand on the back of my neck. Not hard, not heavy, but not exactly lifting either, just this strange and steady pressure that I knew to be him, the hair on my arms going electric. I’d get myself nice and riled up like this. I’d stare my eyes raw with the traffic light outside my window. That steady throb of red on the street. And soon I would lose patience with myself. Always the reading light to turn on—room snapping back to shape—and me listening for my mother sleeping, that rolling into shore of her breathing. Nights like this I got up and checked my collections, my shells, my acorns, my interesting pebbles and bottle caps and old antique nails and pull tabs. I took books from the shelves or baseball cards from their piles, the piles sorted by team, the teams sorted by player position. I dawdled over some little project halfway built on the desk—an airplane model, a cardboard gas station—and then that strongbox under the bed would occur to me, as if I had completely forgotten it existed.

  I’d slide it out into the light. I’d open the latch—that stale tang of metal—and that would be my father for me, a thick taste of tin and old papers, my fingers leafing through the letters. I had that hunger I didn’t know I had until I reached the bottom of the box. There’d be my father in the bills, the checks, numbers added on the back of an envelope, a scribbled street address, doctor’s appointment, smudge of fingerprints—all the debris of his life I picked over like specks of meat from a bone—the loose buttons and coins at the bottom, the wooden matches, the car keys and dog tags, and then always those black-and-white photos: my mother and father at the farm (late afternoon light, front porch); my father as a young man sitting with his parents (young prowl of man in his service uniform, cap pushed back off his face, his mother holding him down with her elbow); this man asleep in a chair with a baby on his chest (me staring out wide-awake); and so on.

  I never meant to become my mother about such things, but it would be hard not to want to find meaning in these objects. I must have learned from her how to select omens, like they were tiny seeds to encourage, all the accidents turning out to have been on purpose.

  The Basic Field Manual of the United States Armed Forces would be waiting for us when we found the gun. It would be lying under my bed long after it could have done anyone any good. I’d find it years too late, yet still I must have wanted it to be my father who placed it there as a message for me. Every time I opened that old metal box of leftover junk, it’d seem something new would appear to me, some fresh detail I had never noticed before, as though he was trying to arrange things for me to see, leaving papers and relics, little hints or anachronisms, a new postmark, a fresh pack of chewing gum, a dollar bill in his wallet from two years beyond his death.

  I knew this wasn’t possible. Not for a single moment would I have believed, if someone just told me anything like this, but then that cold brush of fear in my room at night to explain. The way I simply knew his presence by the door. No one could have convinced me it wasn’t my father standing there. No one could have lifted that away from me.

  Later, when I was older, my mother would tell me that she and my father would make love while I was outside playing at the farm. The creaking porch, the blackness of the windows, the cows in the fields, and my mother and father leaving me alone like that for what seemed such a long time. What was a person supposed to do with that sort of knowledge, my mother and father in the house together? Or the fact that my father (him with that sweepstakes smile) would die, of all days, on my mother’s birthday? Or that he’d have my school photos in his wallet when he died? How were all these details supposed to lie still? How was all of this supposed to fit together?

  How could I not want to find meaning in a neatly folded certificate for marksmanship from the United States Marine Corps? A Mercury dime, a window-cleaning receipt—didn’t their mere survival make them somehow significant? Was there any way to just open that Basic Field Manual and ignore that sense of my father directing me? How would I not hear the man’s voice in that, my father trying to tell me something through the pages of the handbook, if only I could listen somehow harder?

  Do not leave a loaded weapon where someone else may unknowingly pick it up. • Keep the safety lock on at all times, particularly when advancing, as you may catch your trigger in brush and kill yourself or your comrade. • Never point a weapon at anyone unless you intend to kill him.

  Infidels

  Joanna Scott

  It was a damp November afternoon in Paris in 1887 when the man who would be identified in the book only as “C” suffered the first symptoms of the affliction that would make him noteworthy. He had risen from his nap and settled comfortably into his armchair by the window overlooking the Place des Vosges. Droplets from the thick fog ran like tears down the exterior of the glass. A wood fire crackled and filled the room with its soothing fragrance.1

  Long married but with no heirs, recently retired from a position as director of a champagne export business, C did not lack for friends. He and his wife dined out most evenings, and he was an active member of the Société de Géographie. But C also guarded his solitude and spent most of his afternoons alone in his library. He was well educated and fluent in several languages. He longed to author something of his own but didn’t know how to begin. He was secretly critical of contemporary men of letters and blamed novelists, especially, for pandering to the public and emptying their work of useful information. The worst of them, in his opinion, was Victor Hugo, who used to live in an apartment across the square. C had read a couple of novels and a book of verse by his former neighbor. He wasn’t inclined to read more. He wasn’t at all curious. What was there to be curious about if there was nothing to learn? He had read enough to reach the verdict that the whole of Hugo’s oeuvre was overrated.

  In general, he preferred reading biographies and military histories. On this particular day in 1887, we find him reading a volume he’d purchased for a few francs from a bookseller near the Pont Marie. It was an English edition about the Crusades, and C was reading with interest about the disorder in the ranks of the early Christian pilgrims.2

  “… The vulgar, both the great and small, were taught to believe every wonder, of lands flowing with milk and honey,” he read.

  “… Their ignorance of the country, or war, and discipline, exposed them to every snare,” he read.

  “… A pyramid of bones informed their companions of the place of their defeat,” he read, and he continued to read the sentence stating that “three hundred thousand perished before a single city was rescued from the”—

  And then he stopped, or was stopped, as if he had run with his eyes closed into a brick wall. His eyes were wide-open, but he couldn’t read the word that followed in the sentence. The word was infidels. It should have been a familiar word to C even if he hadn’t been entirely fluent in English, since it was nearly identical in French: infidèles. He knew the word in English just as he knew it in French. He knew it in Latin and Spanish. Really, it should have been easy enough for C to comprehend. Yet, to his dismay, the word was utterly unintelligible. His eyes processed the letters in their correct order. His brain received the information in the usual fashion. He inhaled, and his oxygenated blood flowed briskly. All organs were seemingly in working order, and C was very much awake, utterly sober and self-aware, but the eight letters of that English word were as devoid of meaning as if he had never learned to read.

  It’s true that many of us have experienced the odd momentary sensation when a simple word is suddenly unrecognizable. Scientists call t
his phenomenon “semantic satiation” and explain it as a result of overuse of a specific neural pattern. They hypothesize that intense repetition of a specific word creates a reactive inhibition, slowing the neural activity associated with the meaning of that word. We can read the word want, for instance, without difficulty. But reading it over and over interferes with comprehension: want want want want want want want want want want want want want want want want.3

  This, however, was not what C experienced that day in 1887. He didn’t perceive the word as a familiar one that he’d once known. The letters were so unrecognizable that infidel wasn’t even a word to him. It was a solid blankness, a splotch of spilled ink, an absolute nothing.

  He removed his spectacles, rubbed them with his handkerchief, and returned them to his face. The one printed word he didn’t recognize became two, and two seeped into a sentence. He squinted and shifted in his chair. He opened the window shade. He tried to reread the preceding paragraph. With relief, he experienced some recognition: he knew what pyramid signified, and bones, and defeat. Yes, he knew what each of those words meant, thank God. Pyramid, bones, defeat.

  Awareness was painfully brief. Py … ra …, bo … n …, defe … a … It was as if the light within each letter went out one by one, until each word was dark.

  With rising concern, he turned to words in his native language. He tried and failed to read the front page of the newspaper that lay open on his desk. The titles of the books on his shelves were unintelligible. He couldn’t even read the name printed on his own stationery.

  Naturally, he would go on to consult his doctor. His doctor would refer him to a specialist, who would study him with interest and publish his case history. That C retained his speaking fluency gave the scientific community much to ponder. If you had conversed with him, you wouldn’t have seen signs of his impairment, which affected only his perception of printed words. In other ways, he lived a normal life.