Dead Languages

by David Shields

  I hadn’t tried LSD, but at the time I was still determined to embrace the physical world on its own limited terms and resented anyone who had already rejected it. Opening night, they were all terribly relaxed. I suppose they’d been through the crucible before and it no longer fazed them. Charles and his parents had come up from Los Angeles to see the performance; Beth was home on Christmas vacation from Palo Alto, where she’d pretty much turned the history department upside down with her monograph on the eschatology of the Puritan radicals during the English revolution; Mrs. Sherfey and Mr. Basketball were going to be there; and I was trembling like a boy riveted to the third rail.

  Although the show didn’t start until eight-fifteen, I arrived at the theater at quarter of six and started putting on my makeup and sailor suit, which consisted of a white hat, a blue and white shirt, white bell-bottoms, and a gold sword at the waist. No one else had arrived yet, so I marched around the dressing room, repeating my lines to the cold mirrors and empty costumes. By seven everyone was ready. At eight the director stood on the top step of a ladder and gave a more inspiring pep talk than I’d ever heard from an athletic coach. It ended with everyone gathering at the bottom of the ladder and chanting, “D is L! D is L! D is L!”

  I watched the first two scenes from the wings. Desdemona was standing next to me and kept saying, “This fucking dress is too tight.” I tried to ignore her and do nothing but say my lines over and over, softly to myself. Iago tricked Roderigo, Iago tricked Othello, then the stage was set for I.iii. The Duke, Venetian Senators and Officers, and their attendants entered stage right and sat down at a table in their council chamber, which was on a special platform to suggest, when Othello and Desdemona came panting in, the difference between law and love, and lit by torches because it was the middle of the night and the Senators wanted to talk about Turks. I wouldn’t have missed my cue for the world, but when she heard the Duke say, “The main article I do approve/In fearful sense,” Desdemona gave me a little shove and, still offstage, I yelled, “What ho! What ho! What ho!” This ejaculation went off without a hitch, very loud and seafaring; I was thrilled that I was already halfway through.

  Then I came to center stage. The only experience I can compare it to was seeing the inside of Dodger Stadium for the first time when I was four and crying with joy at how green the grass was, how silver the fences, how enormous the arena. It wasn’t exactly joy I felt upon entering the stage and I certainly didn’t cry, but I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the balcony. Although I couldn’t spot the ten people whose orchestra seats I’d reserved, I knew they were out there and I wanted to win their approval, their admiration.

  “A messenger from the galleys,” the Officer said.

  “Now,” the Duke asked, “what’s the business?”

  I stepped into the spotlight and spoke my line perfectly, until the last word. The “A” of “Angelo” suddenly stood like a capitalized mountain barring entrance to the rest of the word, so I replaced “Angelo” with “Gratiano,” a Venetian bureaucrat who appears later on. A minor alteration, and who’d notice? I wasn’t proud of myself for evading the sound, but at least I’d survived.

  “How say you by this change?” the Duke asked.

  Which was his proper line and meant to convey nothing more than his surprise that the Turks were heading for Rhodes instead of Cyprus, but, in my agitated state, I thought he was asking why I’d substituted Signior Gratiano for Signior Angelo. I was so angry at him for pointing out my error to a thousand people that I drew my sword.

  “This cannot be,/By no assay of reason,” the First Senator said, and then I was sure we were outside the drama. I pointed my sword at him, too, and told all the attendants to stand back. The lights went out. The curtain came down. Iago, who wasn’t supposed to be in this scene until three hundred lines later, ran onstage and, with all the malicious energy he was supposed to possess, disarmed me and carried me into the dressing room.

  No more than thirty seconds passed before the lights returned, the curtain rose, and the Messenger launched his windy speech that contradicted and supplanted mine. Opening night survived my little blunder. The rest of the play went smooth as silk. Everyone except Cassio—and who really cares about Cassio?—died. Afterward, Othello and Desdemona went off to swallow LSD. Mother tried to cheer me up by saying she took my scuffle with the Duke as a new and valid interpretation of the Senate scene and, anyway, it was important always to experiment with classical drama. They got the Clown to say my lines at the rest of the performances.

  15

  COULD MY ONE bright night under the hot lights have altered the genetic structure of my sebaceous glands? I thought the first impression the benevolent and beautiful girl who had yet to discover my charms would have was that I had ugly abscesses on my face and the second impression she would have was that my tongue was tied in a knot. As we exist in appearance by our face and in reality by our voice and on both counts I was a little too conspicuously marred, there wouldn’t be a third impression. Father predicted the pustules would disappear if I stopped eating so much chocolate and worrying so much about getting good grades, and Mother tended to favor the more general plague-of-growing-up theory, whereas the origin of the problem lay, as with all real problems and all real origins, in family history.

  Mother still had pockmarks on her cheeks as evidence of a diseased childhood, with patches of pink skin on her nose acquired in more than one surgery to remove the skin cancer that was her reward for believing, as a teenager, too many doctors’ X-ray radiation cures. In a faded photograph of her brother wearing khaki in Okinawa, his face appeared to be on fire. A doctor at Stanford Hospital told Beth he was the most decorated dermatologist in the Bay Area and there wasn’t a thing he could do to improve the quality of her skin until she was at least twenty-six. Only Father’s face was beautifully clear, though whenever he cut himself shaving or the impress of his glasses left a red mark at the eyebrows Mother would claim that he, too, had a horrible background. They used to have perfectly absurd arguments over who was responsible for the cluster forming on my chin.

  It wasn’t only in the cleft of my chin that the rash erupted. It flourished on my forehead and scalp and behind my ears. It made a mockery of my cheeks and troughs of my temples. It burned my neck, appeared sporadically on my foreskin—no neonatal rite performed on this half-Jew—visited my stomach and all up and down my back and buttocks. It was like an unwilling monotonous tattoo, plus variety of type. There were whiteheads on the nose, blackheads on toes, dense purple collections that finally burst with blood, white circles that vanished in a squeeze, dilating welts that never went away, infected wounds that cut to the bone, surface scars that looked hideous, wartlike protuberances at the side of the head. In just the last year I’ve endured collagen injections, punch grafts, and chemical peels. This is what living in L.A. does to one, or such is the depth of my endless, hateful redefinition.

  Millions of times Father, exasperated, said, “Jeremy, will you please stop picking at yourself?” Sometimes he’d get impatient and slap my face—as if he were both reprimanding me for squeezing scabs at the dinner table and expressing compassion by striking the source of all the distress—but he was certainly justified in whatever frustration he felt. My hands were always crawling across my skin, always probing and plucking, then flicking away the root canker. The inflammatory disease bred a weird narcissism in which I craved the mirror but averted any accurate reflection. Isn’t that what narcissism is, vanity skewed by huge self-doubt? I retired to the boys’ bathroom at London every chance I got but I’d retreat from the mirror until my face looked fine: just a little red and slightly swollen. I’d gaze at myself in night-lit windows, brood upon the image coming up out of the coffee at breakfast. I became expert at predicting which kinds of mirrors, both in the house and in the oppressive world outside, would soften the effect, and which—it hardly seemed possible—would make things worse.

  I started washing with oval brown bars and transparent gree
n squares, soft baby soaps that sudsed, and rough soaps that burned. I applied special gels, clear white liquids, mud creams. I took tablets once, twice, thrice a day; before, after, and during meals. I went on milk diets and no-milk diets, absorbed no sun and too much sun. I believed in erythromycin, tretinoin, Cleocin, Panoxyl, Dioxyl, Benoxyl, isopropyl myristrate, polyoxyl stearate, silicate, colloidal magnesium, polyoxythylene, butylated hydroxytotuluence, hydrox-propyl-methylcellulose. I saw doctors and doctors and doctors.

  A doctor in Chinatown who had been recommended by a friend of Mother’s promised three acupuncture treatments would purify me of all imperfections but resigned himself to using more conventional methods when Mother said no, absolutely not, no acupuncture. The first time I visited him he bowed and said, “So sorry. Face is full of uglies.”

  He bowed and said, “Mrs. Mandel, a most beautiful lady! A lump on her lip: one puncture; no more lump. But on phone your Ma say no punctures for you. Therefore, I provide scientific American method. Please come in.”

  He wore a Mao cap, a gray waistcoat, and slippers. The waiting room had bamboo mats on the floor and black-and-white photographs of Peking, circa 1947, on the wall, but his office was thoroughly modern. He had me lie down on a steel table and immediately started squirting liquid nitrogen into my open wounds. “Freezes face until handsome,” he said with one of the deepest and most reassuring laughs I’d heard in my life. I loved the feeling of dry ice on my skin, the sensation of being only cold. Then he locked me in a closet that had a glass window, placed black goggles over my eyes, and shot ultraviolet rays at my head.

  “Your Ma much afraid of radiation. She say not to use. She have bad experience with quack Americans. They not know how to moderate. I have know-how,” he explained.

  He dipped my face in a solution of hot water and curious chemicals, pressed a pimple popper to what he called “the spot troubles,” and wiped away the blood with rubbing alcohol. While I was leaving, he handed me an immense plastic bag of sample panaceas and said, “Try all of these. Come back next week and please to tell me which works. Also, go to beach a lot to get sun on face and chase tan girls.”

  All winter of my sophomore year I went to Dr. Huang to absorb his liquid nitrogen and radiation and hear his words of encouragement. He said I was showing remarkable progress, but I didn’t see any improvement. He said my advance would be more dramatic if, as he had instructed, I rubbed salt water into my skin and received the reflection of the sun off the ocean. He probably hadn’t been to the beach in ten years; the bay was always overcast and the ocean was replete not so much with restorative salt water as repulsive kelp.

  May fourteenth—Mother’s Day, 1972—broke clear without early morning fog. Since Beth was still immersed in reading period in Palo Alto, Father was competing in a Class C tennis tournament for men sixty years old and over at the Pool and Racquet Club, and I’d forgotten to get her a gift, I offered Mother the pleasure of my company during a day on the coast. I gathered all my unguents into one bag like a vacationing egoist committed to the perfect tan, the difference being that the sun god is bent on elaborating beauty until it becomes bronze, whereas I wanted only to look acceptable, to appear normal. Two years later I airbrushed my yearbook picture into virtual unrecognizability, and four years after that my second idea for this project—a family album with photographs—dissolved in my inability to use any pictures that didn’t flatter myself and my subsequent realization that the flattering pictures ended shortly after catastrophic consciousness began—say, when I was twelve. Mother suggested we make a real excursion of it and drive to San Gregorio, the beach where, via a rough voice on the radio, I received the first intimation that San Francisco was going to be a sympathetic paradise no more than Los Angeles had been. For some strange reason I’ve always rather enjoyed returning to places of crisis, so we went. It was the weekend and warm: the freeway leading out of the city was as clogged as I’d ever seen it, but when Mother was in a good mood the world disappeared and all was well.

  She opened the sun roof. She kept rewinding and whistling to an extremely happy tape of Prokofiev which, although she found the Russian composers in general a trifle florid, was her favorite piece of symphonic music. In the back seat she had a picnic basket and a binder containing the rough draft of a book on mental illness she was ghostwriting for an illiterate Beverly Hills psychiatrist. Mother couldn’t wait to bury her toes in the sand and start getting all scientific about the dark night of the soul.

  San Gregorio was even worse than I’d remembered. It was difficult to get from the cliffs to the beach; I had to carry the picnic basket, the rough draft on mental illness, and my bag of lotions, then catch Mother when she slid down on her butt. And once you got there you didn’t necessarily want to be there. Sand dunes stood at one end of the shore like extremely obvious emblems of human destiny and despair and, beyond them, caught on the rocks, loomed a blank lighthouse. Packs of seagulls pounced upon every scrap of food, every minuscule fish that dared to surface. The sea, the sand, the sky, everything was gray.

  Four men banged plastic golf balls against the crags and another dug dirt with a metal detector. A woman sold wilting roses and postcards of the Pacific Ocean. Babies in cribs, boxes of Kentucky Fried Chicken on woolen blankets, adolescent lovers searching for each other in the surf, the smells of beer and pop and pot—Mother and I walked through and away from all this to the empty end of the beach, where the tide came up a little higher and the shore was somewhat rockier, but we had our own cove and that was what we wanted.

  Mother was starting to get a feel for the errata of the rough draft, every so often waving her blue pencil in the air and shouting, “The syntax! This guy’s syntax is all wrong!” and I was applying coat after stinging coat of creams to my face when a band of naked colonists descended the trail and appeared before us. No clothes, no towels, only tubes of fat around their waists and, in their hands, AM/FM radios, bags of potato chips, cans of Schlitz. Six men and six women, most of whom seemed to be exactly thirty-eight years old—nearly middle-aged and yearning for youth—standing in front of me and Mother like precursors of a new race.

  One of them, a woman with heavy hips and a red bandana across her brow, said, “This section of San Gregorio is nudist. You’ll either have to strip or, like, depart.”

  I took her to be sort of the governor of the colony—maybe the bandana was like an official badge—and her warning drew a number of rude observations from the rest of the crowd.

  “The old lady’s got a good bod for an old lady,” said a bald man who was at most five years younger than Mother.

  “The kid isn’t bad, either,” said a woman with tiny breasts. “Good legs. Real good legs. The face, though: ’tis a pity, the pimples.”

  “Kinky couple, don’t you think?” said someone I couldn’t see because he was standing in back. “What would you say? Fifteen and forty?”

  This last insult made their fat bounce with laughter, and yet it wasn’t far from wrong. I was fifteen, Mother was forty-seven, and the trend of married women taking teenage lovers was accelerating at such an alarming rate in San Francisco that I couldn’t tell whether the colonists were kidding or whether they actually thought Mother and I were a close-knit couple. Mother was wearing the only swimsuit she ever owned, a one-piece black monstrosity, and I was wearing the red trunks, with blue anchor at the crotch, which I’d bought for Audrey’s birthday party. Mother had seen me naked until I was nine but, except for one purely accidental glimpse of her running from the shower to the bedroom the early evening of February 11, 1964, I’d never seen her. I really didn’t want to because I’d heard severe psychological maladjustments were the inevitable result and I really don’t think she wanted me to, either, because she was a good guardian and a moral woman. There seemed only two alternatives, though—returning three miles to the crowded beach or undressing at the command of our captors like victims in a vulgar film—and neither plan struck me as wholly desirable.

  Mother ask
ed them questions: why do you want us to disrobe? Do you ask everyone you meet on this side of the beach to disrobe? How long have you been living here? Do you find the term “beach bum” pejorative? Would you define yourselves as beach bums? As nudists? Does a bare body have, for you, any political significance? Do you have little huts along the coast?

  At first I thought Mother was just trying to stall them by posing diversionary issues, but then I realized she was perfectly sincere and genuinely interested in their replies. She was working now as a feature reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and, if this wasn’t the lead story in next week’s Sunday supplement, thirty years’ experience had taught her nothing. She only regretted she hadn’t thrown a camera into the trunk of the Fiat so she could shoot carefully shaded pictures of the subjects in their birthday suits. Mother had a talent tantamount to genius for transforming whatever absurdity she saw around her into just more stuff of her own fame: taking away its terror or ennui by exploiting it.

  They seemed to have heard of her when she told them who she was. When she told them why she was asking so many questions, they gathered at her feet. She sat with her back to a boulder and recorded, in shorthand on the reverse side of the rough draft on mental illness, their inane answers. No one was paying any attention to me any more, not to my real good legs, not even to my pitiful pimples, so I slipped away with a blanket and my bag of gels. I settled on a spot in the middle distance between Mother’s colonists and baggy men playing plastic golf.

  Every half hour I sprinted to the shoreline and rubbed saltwater into my welts. Other than that I did nothing more strenuous than apply patented cures to my face. I spent the entire day asleep on the sand, with my hair combed back so the sun wouldn’t forget my forehead, that most flawed of all facial areas. The sun, creams, and saltwater seemed to be working together very nicely to reduce the blisters. My skin felt softer and smoother than it had in years. The bumps burned away. Even my forehead felt fine. There was a public cabana standing, in all its indignity, on the edge of the hill that dropped down to the beach, and I felt compelled to confirm—through study of the image in the mirror—my inkling that I had at last found salvation, in Mother Nature herself.