Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  15

  Everyone Is Going to Paris

  Jackson couldn’t believe it: Sunny couldn’t or wouldn’t go to Paris in June. She refused to cooperate with his fantasy, refused to play the role he’d scripted for her in his little drama. She was going to the ASIH meetings in Mexico.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told you sooner. I didn’t realize there was a conflict at first.”

  It was a Saturday morning in February, three weeks into the semester. Jackson’s NHI proposal was due in one week. He and Sunny were sitting at the library table, piles of books between them. It was fiercely cold out and the wind was blowing hard, and even though it was ten o’clock it was so dark out they kept the shutters closed. The lamplight made her hair look like straw. She’d pulled it back into a ponytail. Like a high school girl.

  He didn’t know how to react. He’d been dealt a body blow. “I’ve told Suzanne we’re coming.”

  “You’ll have to cash in the tickets and tell Suzanne we’ll come some other time. You’ve got plenty of time. You’ve got three months.”

  “They’re nonrefundable. The tickets.”

  “I’m sorry, Jackson, I’ve already signed up for the meetings.”

  “You’ll still need to get your passport.”

  “Why would I need a passport to go to California?”

  “It’s in Mexico. Baja California is in Mexico.”

  “Mexico?”

  “You want me to show you on a map?” She didn’t believe him. He got out the National Geographic Road Atlas. There it was, a long ragged strip attached to the bottom of California, connected to mainland Mexico by a smaller strip that ran under Arizona.

  “How could I be so stupid?”

  “Ignorant, maybe, but not stupid.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Is Cramer going?”

  “Yes, Cramer is going.”

  “Are any other students going?”

  “I don’t know. Laura is going.”

  Jackson knew better than to get into a fight. He could tell by the way she held herself that this was a done deal.

  “I’ve already sent in my registration fee.”

  “Not taking any chances, are you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I was going to propose to you in Paris.”

  “I think we should talk about this later.”

  “I’ll propose to you right now. Will you marry me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What’s ridiculous? We’re living here like man and wife. Husband and wife.”

  “I don’t need a man to look after me.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. You think Baja California is in California? And what about ShoppingKart-dot-com?”

  “What about ShoppingKart-dot-com?”

  “It’s been hemorrhaging money. It’s down to three and a half today. If it goes any lower they’ll stop listing it on the New York Stock Exchange. If you’d listened to me …”

  “You’ve been following it, haven’t you, just so you could hold it over my head. I’m not going to talk about ShoppingKart-dot-com.”

  “I’ve been listening to NPR,” he said.

  Sunny fixed bacon and eggs for her lunch.

  Jackson ate a sandwich. They didn’t speak. They kept the radio on though the reception was terrible.

  Maya was puzzled. Jackson put on his heavy coat and took her out to play Frisbee. She’d learned to take the Frisbee first to Jackson, then to Sunny, who usually came out with Jackson. The wind tore at the Frisbee and slapped it to the ground. Maya stopped each time she picked it up and looked toward the front door, expecting Sunny. Jackson had to shout at her. They were both hoping that Sunny would come out and play, the way she usually did. But it didn’t happen.

  Jackson was the first to apologize. The silence between them was intolerable. He was afraid she’d move her things back up to the apartment over the garage. He couldn’t hold out any longer. He wanted to grab on to her, pull her back, keep her from slipping away, but what he said was, “I’m sorry, I was out of line. I should have asked you before I bought the tickets.” He was already afraid, afraid of losing her, afraid that he’d lost her already.

  Sunny apologized too. “I should have told you as soon as I realized there was a conflict, but I knew you’d be upset. I’m upset too, but this is something I have to do. It’s a good career move.”

  “It’s all right,” Jackson said. “I’ll go by myself.” And at the time that seemed like a good plan. It was the only plan he could think of.

  As an anthropologist Jackson understood jealousy as a solution to the problem of the uncertainty of paternity—an evolutionary adaptation that promoted reproductive success. Jealous males introduce more genes into the gene pool than males who are indifferent to the infidelity of their mates. It made sense, from an evolutionary point of view, for the Yap husbands of Micronesia, or the Toba-Batak husbands of Sumatra, to kill their wives and lovers if they caught them in the act of adultery. Texas husbands too. As an anthropologist he did not find it surprising that sexual jealousy is a leading cause of homicide in many parts of the world. But this was to stand outside the experience, to look at the beam of light. Now he was standing inside the experience, looking along the beam of light. He didn’t like what he saw. He told himself that his marriage proposal had been ridiculous. He told himself that he was glad Sunny had been more level-headed. He told himself that jealousy was inappropriate, that Sunny had made a professional decision, not taken a lover. But he didn’t believe it himself, and he knew, not as an anthropologist but as a man, why cuckolds are subject to ridicule and loss of social status. He felt slightly ridiculous himself, humiliated, and he was aware of the physical symptoms of jealousy—sensitive skin, edginess—as if he’d drunk too much coffee too fast. He didn’t know what to do with his fantasies: holding hands with Sunny in the Luxembourg Gardens, proposing to her in the Café Anglais. He’d assumed that she wanted what he wanted, that her desires would be molded by his own. Better to admit that he’d mistaken the intimacy they’d shared in the kitchen and in the bedroom, and in the living room too, and out in the woods, for love.

  He did the only thing he knew how to do: He retreated into his work, his NHI proposal, which was due on March 1: “Managed Ecstasy: An Ethnography of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following.”

  Marxists and Freudians offered alternate explanations, as they did for everything. According to the Marxists the Pentecostal movement should be understood as a response to hard economic times. Industrialization had transformed rural Appalachian society. Railroads made mining and logging possible on a grand scale. Capitalist owners of coal and timber companies had bought up huge tracts of land from unsuspecting farmers, who were reduced from independent yeoman to laborers. Missionaries from the traditional denominations—Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist —legitimated the exploitation. The holiness churches grew up as a kind of resistance movement, developing practices that set them apart from the secular world as a way of preserving their identity.

  In the Freudian version of the story repressed sexuality was evident at every turn, tension between a pleasure-prohibiting religious culture—an overdeveloped superego—and the demands of the id, projected onto the eroticized Serpent. The preachers tended to be psychopathic personalities who enjoyed baiting authority figures—the police, the law, God himself; risk takers who believed themselves to be exempt from the iron laws of nature—from the heat of the fire, from the toxic effects of strychnine and rattlesnake venom.

  As an anthropologist, Jackson found these explanations too reductionist. He proposed linking the practice of snake handling to the snake cults of Africa and the ancient Near East, and to the snake dance of the Hopi. In all the Old World stories, the snake comes to bring a message of immortality, but the message is, through some mischance, perverted and immortality is lost. There’s even good reason to believe that in the earliest versions of the stories the se
rpent is none other than the original creator God.

  He also placed the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following squarely in the tradition of ecstatic religion going back to the worship of Dionysus, of the mother goddess Demeter at Eleusis. To tarantism, and Mardi Gras, and rock festivals. To early Christianity, which was experiential rather than dogmatic, which depended on certain experiences, such as glossolalia. What Plutarch had said about the initiation at Eleusis held for early Christianity. The pilgrims were transformed not by something they learned but by something they experienced. Something that had disappeared almost entirely from mainstream religion.

  Jackson’s NHI proposal was completed in plenty of time. The deadline was Wednesday, March 1. He’d had it ready to go on the previous Friday, but instead of spending a couple of hours at the Xerox machine, cranking out copies, he had to file his proposal electronically. All NHI proposals, starting in year 2000, had to be filed electronically to comply with the new Federal Financial Assistance Management Improvement Act of 1999, also known as Public Law 106–107.

  Jackson called the NHI help desk. He begged them to let him submit a paper proposal—or submit his proposal as an attachment—but he got nowhere.

  It wasn’t possible simply to submit the proposal as a document attached to an e-mail. You had to use special software, which had to be downloaded electronically, and then, if you used a Macintosh computer, you had to download special software in order to use the special software that you’d already downloaded. And you had to be registered. The TF grants officer was tearing his hair. TF had in fact registered. The registration had been confirmed more than once by the business office. There were a lot of complicated passwords that the grants officer had printed out for anyone submitting a proposal, but on Tuesday Jackson’s user name and password were repeatedly refused. By whom? It wasn’t clear.

  It turned out that Jackson’s proposal had not been properly authorized by the university comptroller, despite the fact that TF had registered with the NHI months earlier.

  On Monday the comptroller tried to register Jackson but couldn’t do it without a special PIN number. She called the NHI help desk. The person didn’t know how to locate the PIN number, but did know that it would take ten days to get a new one.

  The comptroller spent the afternoon on the phone, with Jackson at her elbow, looking through file folders and listening at the same time. She eventually came up with the elusive PIN number and was able to register Jackson as a user.

  On Tuesday it turned out that Jackson didn’t have the right version of Adobe Acrobat on his computer. He could fill out certain necessary forms on his office computer, but he couldn’t save them, so he had to transfer all his files into an updated version of Adobe on a computer in the grants office.

  At four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon he pushed the “send” button on the computer in the grants office and received a “submission successful” message, which was cause for celebration, but by five o’clock various error messages had arrived via e-mail: His proposal failed to include the credentials for the Senior/Key Person Profile component. He would have to start all over, using a different NHI Web site for Corrected Proposals. He would also need a Common User ID.

  The NHI help desk in Washington was closed, and he got nothing but automated responses to his e-mails telling him not to respond to this response.

  He went over the error messages with the grants officer. It turned out that he needed to type his own name in all capital letters on the cover sheet for the proposal.

  On Wednesday morning he called NHI and learned that the Senior/Key Person was his department chair, Baker Kimbrough. He added Baker Kimbrough’s vital statistics and re-entered his proposal (sixteen separate files) on the Web site for Corrected Proposals—with his name typed in all capital letters. He and the grants officer had made more than sixty calls to the NHI help desk and had received as many e-mails.

  At three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon he pushed “send” again on the computer in the grants office and received a “submission successful” message. He waited until four. No more error messages. He thanked the grants officer and went back to Davis Hall and sat down in the Common Room. He wasn’t ready to go home. He and Sunny continued to live together as before, continued to cook dinner together and work together in the living room after dinner, but they didn’t talk about Paris.

  The only other person in the Common Room was a colleague in Philosophy whom Jackson had dubbed “the philosopher king,” or, eventually, the “PK.”

  “You still going to Paris?” the PK asked, looking up from the book he was reading.

  Jackson nodded.

  “You and Sunny?”

  “Going alone,” Jackson said. “She’s off to a herpetology conference in Mexico.”

  “Hunh.”

  There was no need to explain further.

  “Everyone is going to Paris,” the PK said. “Wittgenstein. Imagine a world where everyone was trying to get to Paris. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing right now. Their goal is to get to Paris.”

  “I want to get to Paris,” Jackson said. “But most people have other things on their minds.”

  “Excuse me,” the PK said. “I had it wrong. What Wittgenstein really said was, ‘Everyone is really going to Paris.’ It’s a heuristic, you see. It doesn’t matter whether or not they are consciously aware that what they’re really doing is preparing to go to Paris. The point is, it makes you look at the world in a totally different way.”

  Various people entered the Common Room: Angela Shepherd, the chair of Philosophy; Paul Molson from the dean’s office popped in, looking for someone who wasn’t there, and then popped out again; more philosophers appeared; a couple of anthropologists. At every entrance the PK gave Jackson a meaningful look and mouthed Paris. The TF grants officer who had helped Jackson came in looking for Jackson. Jackson imagined all of them bound for Paris.

  Paris, Jackson thought. But he held up his hand to ward off bad news from the grants officer: “Don’t tell me …”

  “No,” the grants officer said. “It’s all right. I just got a confirmation e-mail from NHI. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Thanks,” Jackson. “I don’t think I’m up for another battle.”

  Everyone was interested in Jackson’s experience with the NHI, which Jackson turned into a humorous adventure, though he was still somewhat shaken.

  The coffee and the stories ran out at the same time, five o’clock. It was time to go home, and everyone left except Jackson, who was remembering how Warren used to show up at five o’clock and plop himself down in one of the comfortable chairs with a story about the winter of ’71, when the snow drifted up over the windows on the first floor and the power had been out for three days, or with a question about the greenhouse effect or the situation in the Middle East. And you’d soon find out that he knew more about whatever it was than you did.

  It was dark when he got home. And bitter cold. Snow from the empty fields had drifted across the drive and he thought for a minute he wasn’t going to make it. He opened the window so he could tell if Sunny’d built a fire. He could smell the wood smoke before he could see the house.

  Outwardly things were the same. There were no more quarrels. They were making love regularly. But inwardly he could feel her pulling away from him. Maybe not pulling. But drifting away from the shore, letting the current carry her. There was open water between them. He thought she could still hear him calling. But he couldn’t hear her calling back.

  16

  Translocation

  Jackson was angry at first, when I told him that I couldn’t go to Paris. I didn’t blame him—I’d have been pissed too—but there was no way I was going to change my mind. But then he apologized. He thought it was a good idea, that going to a conference would be good for my academic career. I was relieved. I knew how disappointed he was and I’d been prepared for a scene, or a bigger scene. I was disappointed too. I wanted to go to Paris, but I also wanted
Jackson to put up more of a fight, to storm around a little more. It was Claire who really laid into me. I’d never seen Claire so mad, not even when Maya got into her New York chocolate cheesecake at the millennium party. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You fucking whore. How could you do this to Jackson after all he’s done for you? You’re like one of those female rattlesnakes you told us about that won’t breed unless you’ve got two males in the cage with you, with two penises each.”

  “Not two penises,” I said. “Hemipene. The male reproductive organ is bilobed …”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “What next?”

  And so on. No one had ever talked to me like this, not even Earl. I didn’t try to defend myself. I just sat there, at a table in Seymour Union, and took it. The funny thing was, Claire wasn’t shouting, she was talking in a low husky voice so she wouldn’t make a scene. But it wasn’t funny. I felt bad. Was I really like a female snake that needed two males in a cage with her, each with two hemipene?