A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

  Keep walking and shadows find you. They’re the distilled essence of all harbors and bays. They taste like a wounded sherry you can drink or pour on your cuts. Shadows are graceful and do not require explanations. They know you’re more dangerous than they dare imagine. They cannot fill in your blanks. Simply surrender and they do everything.

  There are no neutral zones. They’re an illusion, a delusionary construct, like movie and real estate contracts. Satellites map each zip code and tap every telephone. Cities are enclaves between combat arenas. We are born with weapons of mass destruction. They’re within us from inception and we pass them down the generations like poisonous heirlooms. It’s ground zero now and forever. She senses the car moving behind and away from her, and she’s grateful. She hopes Clarissa loses her license and becomes destitute. She should have her hands amputated like any other thief. Then she should get a slow growing undetectable ovarian cancer that metastesizes in her stomach and brain. The Russian Mafia should gang rape her while the Iranians eat caviar and watch. In any event, she never wants to see Clarissa again.

  THE PROFESSOR’S WIFE

  It’s a brisk, wind-thrashed morning in early April and Professor Malcolm McCarty is riding his bicycle along Maple Ridge Road toward campus. His bike is winter gray and weathered, with a wire basket attached in the back and front. It’s ideal for transporting books. He purchased it from a Sorbonne classicist during his first graduate school sojourn in Europe, and despite the shipping expense, he knew he would cherish it.

  Malcolm has an intuitive sense of his emotional parameters, his range and repertoire. It’s an unwavering internal mechanism of measurement that gives the impression of confidence. Some perceive it as arrogance. It’s not. Rather, it’s a trick of the genes he was born with, a small gift, like absolute pitch and eidetic memory.

  Not that he knows himself, of course. Who can purport to possess that gift? Still, Malcolm McCarty exercises a consistent ability to articulate and prioritize the morphology of his sensibility. In a millennium of inchoate folly, even rudimentary self-awareness is considered impressive.

  There’s ice on the road from a recent snowstorm, and with characteristic lethargy, the town of Allegheny Hills has not sent out plows. If he was the sort of man who shrugged, and he isn’t, he might be tempted to do so now, to convey his indifference to the condition of Maple Ridge Road. As a man of implacable aplomb, insignificant external details do not affect his fundamental purpose.

  Professor McCarty is completely disinterested in the exchange of verbal banalities and displays of conventional gestures. That’s the sort of behavior junior faculty refer to as body language. Body language, he thinks derisively during faculty meetings, wondering if any of the new boys have read a Shakespearean sonnet. Or more accurately, any sonnet.

  He remains calm. He conceals his contempt for the assistant professors from California and eastern seaboard cities. It’s the principles of the institution he’s devoted to, not the transitory personalities. Let them come and go. Milton and Chaucer are permanent like the universal law of gravity, the force fields and the speed of light.

  Malcolm McCarty believes universities are akin to the monasteries of Europe’s Dark Age, the last repository of illumination in a barbarous era that lasted a thousand years. During particularly offensive curriculum discussions, where the canon is autopsied and body parts assigned to what is indisputably the province of women’s studies, ethnic sociology, film appreciation and abnormal psychology, Professor McCarty maintains his restraint. He has an appreciation for grace and the discipline of modulation.

  In the third decade of his academic service, Malcolm recognizes that bureaucracy eventually reduces and degrades. He’s become strategic. Junior faculty present passionate justifications for Hip Hop: The Poetry of the Present. They’re not arguments, but clearly rehearsed theater pieces. It’s a charade with syllables intended for another format entirely. Twitter? YouTube?

  Given these rules of engagement, a monosyllable is appropriate. A simple no. He has a reputation as the man of the no. He’s their anchor, their barricade, their unrelenting referee. He instinctively recognizes where the borders of civilization are and when there’s an incursion. His sense of violation is absolute. He’s been department chair for two decades.

  Invariably these boys and, increasingly girls, move away. On, they call it, as if Boston and Los Angeles automatically conferred clarity and vision. He can define them with the elegance of a simple equation. Movie theaters with ornate facades + plazas selling the paraphernalia of diversity + concoctions with curry from Cambodian villages = an unassailably better destiny.

  During their last faculty meeting, he glanced across the Formica table in the conference room. Their oak table disappeared one weekend and the replacement appears to have come from the student cafeteria. It’s leached beige plastic, no doubt assembled by teenagers in Malaysia or the Philippines who have no concept of what a conference table looks like or what its purpose might be. They don’t know much about the Imperial Examinations, either.

  Malcolm McCarty was looking for Bob Lieberman, his staunchest ally. They came to the College of Northern Pennsylvania at precisely the same time. It was spring and nearly thirty years ago in the placid era before the vulgarization of culture. There was a before, when the knowledge of literature was a necessary attribute of the intelligentsia. Books were discussed at dinner parties where wit and controversy engendered a verbal choreography similar to performance art.

  Malcolm McCarty wasn’t alone. Bob Lieberman can bear witness. They saw the delegitimizing of the experimentalists and the subsequent round-up of the stylists, the stilt dancers who parachuted for locomotion. When asked for proof of authenticity, the stylist held out his palms and smiled. There it was, stigmata on demand. Then the critical apparatus, the intellectual’s compass, collapsed.

  This was before the college was called CON PA. Or as the students say now, without irony, the Con.

  An excessively thin, completely bald man is occupying Bob Lieberman’s regular chair, the one with wheels and torn leather upholstery decorated with masking tape like bandages. The stranger is picking his nails with a Swiss army knife. Malcolm will have him removed by security. He reaches for the department phone and simultaneously realizes that it is, in fact, Bob Lieberman. It’s a maliciously vandalized rendition. The sixty-six-year-old version of his former colleague and confidante is unrecognizable. He’s progressing through his collection of miniature instruments with intense concentration. He’s a slow moving chameleon extracting a filing tool.

  Their recent conversation was disappointing. Bob Lieberman had taken to staking out his office and ambushing him. He’d suddenly spring from a nook in the corridor as Malcolm walked toward his office.

  “You can have the 49ers on Sunday. Give me eight points,” Bob proposed.

  Was this an attempt at appeasement? The official line was ten. Malcolm was suspicious.

  “Why this generous offer?” Malcolm asked. “What do you want?”

  “The spring grad seminar,” Bob admitted.

  “Have a topic?” Malcolm didn’t want to know.

  “The genius of Bob Dylan.” Bob Lieberman offered a partial smile so small, it seemed purely conceptual. He looked feral and wizened and his skin was dull gray.

  “Take it to the curriculum committee,” Malcolm said. He reached his office and pulled the key from his pocket.

  “You are the curriculum committee,” Bob pointed out, following him.

  “What did I say last time?” Malcolm was annoyed.

  “I believe you said not in this life time or any other,” Bob recalled.

  “Correct,” Malcolm replied, his key in the slot; he opened his office door. Bob Lieberman was still there. Then Malcolm shut and locked the door.

  Bob Lieberman succumbed to a student, an older student, a returnee as they currently phrase it. He was exculpated by technicality. Malcolm considers Bob’s behavior an ethical violation. His fall from grace occu
rred in broad daylight and slow motion. Bob Lieberman defiled his principles and vows. He ignored logic and loyalty and, in his defining moment, he didn’t go down with his ship.

  Bob divorced his wife, the daughter of a celebrated Israeli cellist for Christ’s sake, and married a woman with a spawn of grandchildren from various sons and daughters, half-children, stepchildren and assorted offspring from implausible liaisons with adoption complications. Some children kept returning to the screened porch at sundown like hungry dogs, and after a year they were considered found.

  Bob Lieberman stopped writing. He said he didn’t feel the urge anymore. He was making furniture with his soon to be bride. He’d bought a pick-up to transport his pine benches and square squat tables to craft shows.

  “I have no regrets. Make a novel. Make a bench.” Bob shrugged.

  His new wife draped herself in floral housedresses resembling tents. Her grandsons in the army had phrases from Corinthians tattooed to their arms. The granddaughters were in jail or missing. She had given them the names of gems and intoxicants, as if intentionally scarring them from birth. Amethyst, Jade and Crystal. DUIs, possession with intent, and burglary were considered routine events. Then the multiplicity of in-laws with tawdry soap opera lives, passing around photographs of a half-child’s grandson from three liaisons past. Hadn’t Patricia in one of her Women’s Club scholarship activities sponsored that returnee?

  Naturally, there were repercussions. Bob Lieberman began teaching Literature of Cinema. His students viewed movies based on marginal novels and were encouraged to write one book critique a semester — down from the original six. Encouraged was the operative word. Not required. They weren’t even middle school book reports. The latest crop of barely literate students was evidence of the College of Northern Pennsylvania’s extreme bottom-feeding strategies.

  Patricia assumed they would continue including Bob in their social activities — their dinner parties with the deans, barbecues for visiting scholars, the President’s Tea, and their annual excursion to the theater in Philadelphia. It was surreal to envision Bob and his new bride at a flute recital, sitting on one of the white linen sofas in the President’s living room, drinking beer directly from the bottle. The new President from Yale, no less. Not to mention his Wellesley wife.

  “Things happen,” Patty said. It was an assertion, and she didn’t cushion it.

  “Things don’t happen to a disciplined man. That’s the point. Discipline.” Malcolm stared at her.

  Was that complaint on her face, he wondered, that puffing around her mouth? His wife was losing her moral resolve as she was her skin tone. There were no gradations, only a universal softening. No one was responsible. That’s the collective mantra. Everyone was damaged and inevitably must stall, collide, derail. Relapse was the consensual norm.

  “People change. He wanted a family,” Patricia offered, carefully. She was controlling herself.

  “He has a family,” Malcolm reminded her.

  “Rachel lives in Tel Aviv. The boys are in yeshiva. Then they go in the army,” Patricia replied.

  In the monolithic void of political correctness, communication is labored and deliberately vague. Spontaneity and improvisation are no longer acceptable conversational implements. Awkward silence is preferred. Between predictable statements, there’s a pause for the constant evaluation of potential areas of offense. Fear is the variable of state. We are losing our vocabulary, and our ability to differentiate, Malcolm thinks. We’re losing our sense of obvious distinctions the way we’re losing our collagen and flexibility.

  “What should he do? Stitch a scarlet letter to his chest?” Patricia asked, her face a mask, her voice shrill.

  “He should return his pension and resign,” Malcolm replied. “He should carry bedpans in a UN refugee camp.”

  Malcolm McCarty vividly remembers Bob Lieberman in his previous incarnation. In that version, indelible as a recurring nightmare, Bob Lieberman was an impassioned artist in the midst of what would be a seven-year ordeal culminating with his second unpublished 689-page novel.

  Bob’s wife, Rachel, telephoned Patricia. She was hysterical, Patricia reported. Yes, again. Apparently Bob had moved into the barn, and no longer ate or slept. He was emaciated, naked and incoherent. Rachel was threatening to leave him. Patricia insisted he intervene.

  Malcolm rode his bicycle slowly to the Lieberman house and considered the metastasizing situation. This wasn’t his first rescue mission. Last year, he’d accompanied Bob to open mic readings in Scranton and Penn State. There was a winter blizzard on each occasion. Malcolm drove and Bob practiced reading his material out loud.

  “I only get five minutes,” Bob explained. “But all the big-shots will be there.”

  The venue proved to be a shabby basement room under a biker bar. Schedules for AA and NA support groups were tacked to the walls. LIVE AND LET LIVE and ONE DAY AT A TIME were nailed into the plaster and formed a continuous horizontal line at eye level, like a bar. The script was rendered in black block letters with curious curves suggesting South Pacific tattoos and something vaguely gothic. It was an insistent male hand and misguided, Malcolm thought, a shabby attempt to use repetition as a method to disguise a renegade nature. It was unconvincing.

  The eight or nine attendees were talkative college students dressed entirely in black who looked like professional mourners. Their long fingernails were lacquered and resembled the backs of certain beetles. They chatted into gadgets and rarely glanced at the podium. Bob trembled as he read. He was inaudible.

  An egg timer was set at the five-minute mark. Bob was startled and confused when it rang. He’d only read two pages, badly and much too fast. He glared at the bell like it was a guillotine.

  There was punch in plastic cups and a paper plate of stale crackers. The bigshot, an undergrad in a black hoody who’d published an underground journal called Scranton Scribes, said, “Terrific words, man.”

  Bob executed an abstract bow and hunched further into himself. He leaned close to Malcolm and whispered, “I need my eyeglasses next time.”

  On the way back, the highway was almost impassable. There was only the black of the ice covering the road and the deeper black of the dark.

  “Writing is a criminal act. Artists employ the methods of professional criminals. We have the same repertoire.” Bob began. He was earnest and attempting to be reasonable. “We trespass, break and enter, burglarize and rob. We assume aliases and engage in fraud. We lie, omit and impersonate. We collect family history for the purpose of unmasking them. The only reason we talk to anyone is to practice dialogue. Tell me that’s not true,” he looked at Malcolm.

  “Autobiography is traditional,” Malcolm observed.

  “We call these entities composite characters. Bull shit. We’re arsonists and assassins. We lure and trap. We’re mercenaries. We violate and desecrate. We autopsy the living, and exhume the dead for interrogation. Then we deny everything,” Bob concluded.

  “Original and well-stated,” Malcolm managed. This was not the first time Bob Lieberman had articulated his theory of the artist as outlaw. Malcolm was gripping the steering wheel and he couldn’t see the painted lanes on the highway.

  “Artists invented home invasions,” Bob posited. “We’ve been doing it for millennia. Some confections demand intrigue and a clarity possible only by obsession. To master the page is to know origami. We are the shifting tectonic plates. We are the calamitous disruption that causes seismic ruptures.”

  Bob Lieberman tended to speak sporadically. When he broke the surface, like a diseased whale about to beach himself, his words came in a rush, energetic, wind-charged and inflamed. He favored improvisational epiphanies and driving loosened him up. It was unfortunate. Bob’s literary theories were painful. But his rhapsodic descriptions of the creative process were tortuous.

  “A poem is like a one-night stand, unexpected and exotic. It happens in Katmandu or Vienna, or on a train or ship. Objects and gestures are heightened and indeli
ble as they happen. Exaggerations demand and receive permanence. Are you following me?” Bob asked.

  “Absolutely.” Malcolm was enthusiastic.

  “A poem is neurosurgery. It’s a blood sacrifice. You amputate your limbs with a dull penknife and no anesthetic. That may bring you a single stanza. Maybe.” Bob paused, presumably to allow Malcolm to fully comprehend his concept.

  Malcolm couldn’t distinguish a separation between the ground and sky. The pavement was glistening, glazed and scaly like crocodile hide.

  “Anyone can write a poem,” Bob unexpectedly said, contradicting and negating himself. “I prefer the short story. It’s like a love affair that distills and sanctifies.”

  Malcolm steeled himself as Bob described the russet fluttering of October dusk. Maples were citadels of light and nothing was peripheral.

  “On the other hand, a novel is a marriage.” Bob hesitated. “It can consume and gut a lifetime.”

  Malcolm McCarty agreed.

  “No one is born a novelist. The deformations of the personality necessary to achieve the artist’s altitudes are not intuitive. The sacrifice and solitude. You must make yourself a fertile wilderness before you can be a breeding ground,” Bob clarified. His tone suggested confession.

  “I see,” Malcolm tried.

  Bob Lieberman laughed. He was on the edge of hysteria. “You can’t possibly understand,” he immediately replied. “You’re just an academic.”

  “Right you are,” Malcolm agreed. Then he skidded off the road into a long shallow ditch, barely missing a frozen maple tree. Snow was up to his thighs as he examined the damage. The fender was bent nearly in half. It would have to be replaced.

  Malcolm took two shovels from the trunk. He handed one to Bob and began digging.