And yet, she was indispensable. When he complained about the suffering of the artist, she added more fruit to his diet, and in truth he suffered less. Alone, he used to sit in front of the cookstove and listen to the stillness beyond the flames; now there was her breathing. And who else was there to read to? He realized he had been writing so as to be able to sleep at night, but she could purge his guilt with a simple backrub, confirming his suspicion that it was nothing more than a cramp in the lumbar region. When he reasoned that perhaps he needed the writing, after all, to stay awake in the daytime, she sent the children in to play with him. He began a parody on Plato’s cave parable, in which he celebrated, not the shadows, but the generosity of the wall.
Also, it became important to delay the climax. Thus, he got involved with spirals, revolutions, verb tenses, and game theory. There were puns that could make endings almost impossible, like certain very thick prophylactic devices. He started a story about a man who was granted a wish by a good fairy and who promptly blew the circuits by packing the universe out with good fairies. He applied Zeno’s paradox to a suicide bullet, and kept it up all night. He invented a story about Noah in which the old man starts by making the door and the window, then can’t figure out how to build the ark around them. God, too, is confused by this approach, but is too proud of his storied omniscience to admit it, and so provides dogmatic solutions which turn out to be self-contradictory. Many volumes of profound arguments ensue, explicating God’s wit. Noah meanwhile builds himself a captain’s cabin, complete with yellow oilcloth and Coleman lanterns, but God, annoyed by its pretensions, turns Noah into a pillar of peanutbutter and then invites the animals in, inventing the Eucharist. Enough of these false starts, these dead fish heads, he reasoned, taking his children down to the bay for an afternoon swim, and the flood will never come.
It was beautiful, that little bay, clean and quiet, cool, with only the occasional leech like a cautionary tale. Sometimes a turtle would swim in, looking for the old days. The woman would kneel on a flat rock at the lip of the bay like Psyche, washing out diapers, as though to impress upon him the inadequacy of his revisions. On sunny days, schools of tiny fish would arrive like visitors from the city, white and nervous, and birds would come down, looking for action. His children splashed at the edges, played in the sand, scrambled about in the boat, chased toads, cried when they got ants on them, peed on the bluebells and each other, ate mud. Now and then, one would drown or get carried off by the crabs, and he’d wonder: why do we go on making them if they’re just going to quit on us? Oddly, neither the woman nor his balls ever seemed to ask that question, and he felt alienated. He contemplated a detective story, in which all the victims and suspects are murdered, as well as the detective and all those who come to investigate the murders of the detectives who came before. But he was an intransigent realist, and he knew, as he climbed up on the small pier, that he’d probably bog down in the research. He dove off, projecting out a multivolume work on the blessings of mortality to be entitled, Adventures of a Mongoloid Idiot, and struck his head on the bottom, thinking: all this from the pulling of one trigger!
The message on the bloodspattered wall was a learned discourse on the fortyseventh chromosome of mongoloid idiots, and its influence on the prime number theorem of imminent apocalypse. Was it enough to say that he’d shot himself because he’d let the coffee boil? Probably it was enough. He’d apparently run out of bread and had been eating his peanutbutter between manuscript pages. His typing ribbon was missing. First lines lay scattered like crumbs and ants were carrying them off. One of them read: In eternity, beginning is consummation.
Much of the island was unvisited, being too thickly overgrown with trees and brambles. You could sink up to your knees in pulp from the last era’s forest. His children occasionally wandered off and never returned. Perhaps there were ogres. Probably not, for they’d have heard them snorting and farting on still nights. Sometimes they took the boat around the shore of the island, gathering bleached driftwood. One of these twisted shapes led him to a story about a monster that was devouring the earth in bits and drabs as though to simplify its categories, but he threw it away, recognizing it as genteel autobiography. On one corner of the island, amid tall reeds, herons nested. Their long graceful necks seemed to give them an overview that spared them the embarrassment of opening sallies. If my head was on a neck like that, he thought, I might not have to shoot it off.
The cabin itself sat in a small sunny clearing above the little bay, with a view out over the lake and other islands. Now and then, a boat passed distantly, put-putting along. He wondered about the people who used to tell him stories. They probably died when the bombs fell. Yes, some politician did it one morning in a fit of pique or boredom, blew the whole thing up. The earth was never revisited. In time, the sun burned out. The cooling planet shuddered out of orbit and became a meteor, disintegrating gradually in its fierce passage through eons. Nothing was ever known of man. He may as well have never existed. He liked to sit in a chair in front of the cabin in the warm sunshine, gazing out over the blue lake, contemplating the final devastation, and thinking: all right, what next? He could just imagine that politician, the last giant of his race, pushing the button and thinking: This is one day they won’t soon forget!
He sat in the chair less often when the woman was on the island, for he seemed then to attract chores and children like flies. At such times, he would go up and sit among the spiders in the outhouse, contemplating his aesthetic, which seemed to have something to do with molten flats, hyperbole, and scarecrows. He wanted to write about Job’s last years, after he’d got his wealth back, but lost his memory. He thought: the central theme should be stated in the title and then abandoned altogether. He had a story about a soldier who’d been in a foxhole for fifty years and who, having forgotten entirely who the enemy was or what his rifle was for, crawled out one day and got shot. He could call it: Beginnings. He planned to write about Columbus voyaging to the end of the world and, more or less abruptly, finding it. He imagined an Eden in which nothing grew, but always seemed about to. To keep Adam from starving, Eve turned herself into an apple, which quite willingly he ate, forgetting that without her he could never find his way out of the place. He shat and called the turd Unable, because this was his prerogative. He wiped his ass and, glancing at the paper before dropping it down the hole, saw that it read: Once upon a time they lived happily ever after. Maybe I’ve got cancer, he thought.
Though on still days the outhouse could be a little suffocating, the smell was not really unpleasant. It was said that people who grew up in the days of outhouses often longed for that smell for the rest of their lives. The same could be said for piles of dead bodies, the important thing being the chlorinated lime. And to keep the door open.
Of course, that was an open invitation to bees and wasps. One thing leads to another, he thought, and that’s how we keep moving along. The blast of the gun, the crash in his skull, were already fading, shrinking into history, wouldn’t hear them at all soon, feel them at all. Once, frantically shooing a yellowjacket out the door with a rolled-up manuscript, he hadn’t noticed the wasp that had gone down the hole, while he’d bobbed up off it. He sat down and then he noticed it. He yipped all the way down the path, through the cabin, and on down the hill to the bay, and what the woman, ever his best critic, said was: Hush, you’ll wake the baby. After that, he always took a can of bugspray with him on trips to the outhouse, learning something as he squirted about the essential anality of the apocalyptic aesthetic.
At this time, he was also a great killer of flies. He carried a flyswatter around with him, indoors and out, and when he couldn’t think how to start a story, he killed flies instead. There were a lot of first lines lying about, including a new one about an apostate priest in a sacred-fly cult who’d begun to question his faith during the ritual of Gathering at the Pig’s Ass, but there were a lot more dead flies. It’s too bad they’re not edible, said the woman. She prepared him a fr
esh pot of coffee, then took the boat to town to have another baby and get some food.
He knew that what he was doing was good, because the flies were holding the earth together. He swatted them badminton-style, caught them on the hairline edge of sills and chair arms, laid jelly-blob traps for them and outscored that holy fiend the tailor, and always with a smiling self-righteous zeal: cleanliness is next to—WHAP!—godliness! He felt like Luther, his finger on the trigger, splattering dark ages against the cabin wall like brains. It’s the beginning of something, he thought, wielding the flyswatter like a pastoral staff. A disease perhaps. The coffee was boiling over on the stove when the woman returned. I think I missed my calling, he said. It’s a boy, she replied, and opened her blouse to give it suck.
He understood there was nothing banal about giving birth, even to mongoloid idiots, and through the first half dozen or so, he suffered nearly as much as she did, or so he told himself, writing odes to navelstrings and the beauty of ripe watermelons to keep his mind off the unpleasant tearing sensation in his testicles. He began a story about a man who brings his wife to the hospital to have a child. They’re both excited and very happy. The wife is led away by the doctor and the man enjoys a sympathetic and goodnatured exchange with the staff. The delivery seems to take longer than it ought, however, and he begins to worry. When he asks the staff about it, he gets odd evasive answers. Finally, in a panic, he goes in search of the doctor, finds him at a party, roaring drunk and smeared to the ears in blood. He realizes that in fact he’s in some kind of nightclub, not a hospital at all. The doctor is a stand-up comedian, delivering a dirtymouth routine on the facts of life and using his wife’s corpse as a prop. The worst part is that he can’t help laughing. Ah, what shall we do with all these dead? he wondered. The island was becoming a goddamn necropolis.
He’d even managed to kill the snake and the frog, though the woman had spared them. It was as though they couldn’t escape their natural instincts toward snakes, his panic, her affection. The frog was just one of those innocent bystanders who come along to thicken the plot, like himself or Jesus Christ. The woman was bathing in the bay, standing in the shallow water, haloed about with suds, just kissing the surface with her vulva, and he was on his way down the path with shampoo and towel to join her. There was a snake across the path and he stopped short, his heart racing. Its mouth was stretched around the bottom half of a frog. He could see the frog’s heart pounding, in fact he could hardly see the frog for its thumping panic. He ran to the woodpile and grabbed up an axe. The woman, who had seen his heart pounding in his ears and eyes, came up to see what had frightened him. Her bottom half was dripping wet, and there was soapscum in her pubes. He was trembling as he crept up on the snake with the axe: he thought that the frog might be a decoy, a secret ally, that he was the one the snake was after. It’s some kind of identity crisis, he realized. The frog’s eyes blinked in the snake’s maw. The woman kicked the snake gently. It disgorged the frog, feinted as though to strike, then suddenly was gone. Stupefied still, he hopped a few feet into the underbrush and began a story about the old serpent, left behind in Eden after the action had moved elsewhere, who comes on a frog, green as the New Testament, first one he’s seen in years, swallows it, and dies of indigestion. She nudged him in the ass with her toe, but he only cowered there, his heart thumping in his ears. She saw that he was in trouble and went down to secure the boat against the coming storm.
It’s always like this, he thought. You just get started and then the storm comes. He knew that if he wrote a story about the heath, after Lear, the Fool, Poor Tom and all the rest were dead and gone, just the heath, the storm raging on, phrases lying about like stones, metaphors growing like stunted bushes, it would be the most important story of his age, but he also knew the age would be over before he could ever begin. He no longer believed there would be any message on the cabin wall: let’s have no illusions, he thought, about blood and brains. Outside, the wind was howling, the boat was bumping against the pier, and pine branches swept the cabin roof restlessly. They sat inside and played strip poker, starting naked so as not to delude themselves. He drew a pair of Queens and a King, but the woman beat him with a heart flush. Off with his head! she screamed. What have I got to lose? he said. The wind blew in and swept the cards away. In bed, their sheets flapped like sails.
He awoke the next morning, tangled in first lines like wrinkled sheets. The windows were smashed and birds lay about with broken necks. The woman was down at the bay, rinsing diapers, the children huddled about her like the sting of conscience. He went out to pee and saw that the boat had sunk. First lines lay all about like fallen trees, shattered and twisted. Columbus, his hips bucking, was voyaging to the end of the world, crying: This is working! I’m getting on! Jesus was raising mongoloid idiots from the grave like filleted fish, pretending to be the Good Provider. He half hoped that, as he peed, the boat would bob to the surface, but it just lay there on the bottom in a gray sullen stupor, only its gunwales showing like a line drawing for a suppository or a cathedral window. He felt as if he’d opened one too many holes in his body, and the wind had blown in and filled him with dead bees. It’s time to leave the island, he told the woman. I’ve already packed, she said. We’ll make a fresh start, he shouted, but she couldn’t hear him because the children were crying. She was bailing the boat out with the diaper bucket. A fresh start!
But back in the cabin, the coffee was boiling over on the stove and he saw there was no bread for the peanutbutter. Everything seemed to be receding. They were back in the boat, and as they pulled away, the island suddenly sank into the lake and disappeared. Hey, look! he cried. You did that on purpose, the woman said. You always have to try to end it all! He had his reasons, but they didn’t justify such devastation. Who was he to be the last giant of his race? Who was he to christen turds? So much for fresh starts. He might as well not have pulled the trigger in the first place. But it was done and that was an end to it. Or so it said on the cabin wall.
THE DEAD QUEEN
(1973)
The old Queen had a grin on her face when we buried her in the mountain, and I knew then that it was she who had composed this scene, as all before, she who had led us, revelers and initiates, to this cold and windy grave site, hers the design, ours the enactment, and I felt like the first man, destined to rise and fall, rise and fall, to the end of time. My father saw this, perhaps I was trembling, and as though to comfort me, said: No, it was a mere grimace, the contortions of pain, she had suffered greatly after all, torture often exposes the diabolic in the face of man, she was an ordinary woman, beautiful it is true, and shrewd, but she had risen above her merits, and falling, had lost her reason to rancor. We can learn even from the wretched, my son; her poor death and poorer life teach us to temper ambition with humility, and to ignore reflections as one ignores mortality. But I did not believe him, I could see for myself, did not even entirely trust him, this man who thought power a localized convention, magic a popular word for concealment, for though it made him a successful King, decisive and respected, the old Queen’s grin mocked such simple faith and I was not consoled.
My young bride, her cheeks made rosy by the mountain air, smiled benignly through the last rites, just as she had laughed with open glee at her stepmother’s terrible entertainment at our wedding feast the night before, her cheeks flushed then with wine. I tried to read her outrageous cheerfulness, tried to understand the merriment that such an awesome execution had provoked. At times, she seemed utterly heartless, this child, become the very evil she’d been saved from. Had all our watchfulness been in vain, had that good and simple soul been envenomed after all, was it she who’d invited her old tormentor to the ball, commissioned the iron slippers, drawn her vindictively into that ghastly dance? Or did she simply laugh as the righteous must to see the wicked fall? Perhaps her own release from death had quickened her heart, such that mere continuance now made her a little giddy. Or had she, absent, learned something of hell? How could
I know? I could vouch for her hymen from this side, but worried that it had been probed from within. How she’d squealed to see the old Queen’s flailing limbs, how she’d applauded the ringing of those flaming iron clogs against the marble floors! Yet, it was almost as though she were ignorant of the pain, of any cause or malice, ignorant of consequences—like a happy child at the circus, unaware of any skills or risks. Once, the poor woman had stumbled and sprawled, her skirts heaped up around her ears, and this had sprung a jubilant roar of laughter from the banqueters, but Snow White had only smiled expectantly, then clapped gaily as the guards set the dying Queen on her burning feet again. Now, as I stood there on the mountainside, watching my bride’s black locks flow in the wintry wind and her young breasts fill with the rare air, she suddenly turned toward me, and seeing me stare so intensely, smiled happily and squeezed my hand. No, I thought, she’s suffered no losses, in fact that’s just the trouble, that hymen can never be broken, not even by me, not in a thousand nights, this is her gift and essence, and because of it, she can see neither fore nor aft, doesn’t know there is a mirror on the wall. Perhaps it was this that had made the old Queen hate her so.
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