Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  Which is exactly what he did. He didn’t just run away; he disappeared, hiding himself so well that the estate had no choice but to declare him dead in absentia shortly after he (would have) turned eighteen, which action was forced on the trustees by my grandfather’s unexpected death at the age of forty-three. Great Grandpa Marcus had placed “a perpetual stipulation of cognatic primogeniture” in his will, which meant that after the extinction of every single male heir my mother was awarded (I would say begrudgingly, but there was no one left to begrudge it) sole control over the various Stammers family concerns—male genes, all else being equal, trumping female, but a daughter of the Stammers line being more capable, or at any rate more tolerable, than a son from any other family. Despite its name, the Magic Mountains Conservancy and Trust was a private corporation over which Marcus’s heirs had absolute authority; as the only surviving Stammers, my mother was spared the internecine feuds that rent brothers and sisters and sons and daughters through most of the twentieth century. As chairman of the Board of Trustees of Lake Academy she held not quite as much sway—Academy by-laws forbade not just female students but female faculty and administrators, including, of course, in the office of the President—but even though she had access to a quarter of a million dollars per year in discretionary funds, as well as “such Slaves as are required to maintain the proper Office and Estate of a Gentleman” (bear in mind that this stipulation was written in 1891, in Marcus’s own hand), let the record show that my mother claimed not one penny of Academy or conservancy funds or personnel for herself. “I paid the Browns,” she insisted when I prodded her. “I paid them.”

  In fact, though she claimed to disagree violently with the principles of both institutions, the one and only aspect of Marcus’s bequest she changed was the stipulation that they remain under family control. When she discovered that she was pregnant—when she made up her mind that she was going to keep me—she altered the terms of the two entities to prohibit any Stammers from having a hand in their day-to-day management—a largely nominal gesture, given that she retained ownership of both the conservancy and the Academy, and as such directed less at herself than at any male progeny to whom she might give birth. From 1981 until the end of time, her sons and grandsons would have only two options available to them: live off the interest derived from the conservancy’s endowment while watching the principal trickle steadily away, or sell the whole kit and caboodle for once and all—school, land, investment fund, even Marcuse itself, which remained a (money-losing) Stammers asset right until the very end.

  The day we moved into the Field she took me into the yard to watch the sunset stream over the Magic Mountains in mileslong bars of gold and red light. The shadow that she’d seen twenty years earlier didn’t make an appearance, but even so the view was beautiful in the way that sunsets, surprisingly, still are, and after a long pause during which I assume she was waiting for the return of her beloved deer, she sighed proudly and said, “That’s what I saved you from, Judas.”

  It seemed absurd to me that my mother insisted that people regard her pots as nothing more than cookie jars even as she projected the most wildly symbolic psychological significance onto the natural world. Of course the Magic Mountains were hardly pure manifestations of nature—were, like Mayan pyramids, mostly riprap cosmetically concealed by Stammers’s labor and circumscribed by their imagination. But manmade or not, they were still mountains, or, well, good-sized hills, and the only way my mother could have saved me from them was if they were falling and she pushed me out of the way.

  But we were moving forward after the disruptions of the past year and a half, and I was determined to meet her halfway. And so I turned and gazed dutifully across the stream-bisected bog. There are prettier mountain ranges, more dramatic or bucolic, but none that possesses the Magic Mountains’ eerie uniformity, as if nature had made them for the sole purpose of gracing Kodachrome postcards captioned “Wish You Were Here!” in rainbow bubble font. But nature didn’t make them: Marcus Stammers did. In 1882 he preemptively shut down the mine and had the entire mountain range placed under the auspices of the newly formed Magic Mountains Conservancy, whose ostensible goal was the “rehabilitation” of the land the mine had destroyed but whose actual purpose was preventing the fortune it had made the Stammerses from “dribbling into the Purses & Pockets” of the families of the 239 victims of the 1881 explosion, not to mention the “Accurs’d Attorneys” who represented them. The seven original peaks, which had stood between 1800 and 2200 feet, had by then been razed to a single mound of debris, coal-black and barren, ten miles long, three miles wide, 900 feet high. I doubt that the muckrakers and carpetbaggers who went after Marcus expected him to do anything more than cover this mass of broken boulders with a layer of dirt (if even that) and let Zephyrus blow in what seeds he would. But Marcus took to his new status as the land’s steward with the same zeal with which he’d raped it, electing not simply to rehabilitate the mountains but to restore them to an idealized condition. The crews of miners who’d torn them down—the ones who were still alive anyway—built them back up into seven identically perfect inselbergs, each as smoothly domed as a bell jar and possessing a similar air of imminence, as if a hand might at any moment reach down from heaven and pluck them away, revealing whatever pickled corpses sheltered beneath. There are those who say that the Magic Mountains Convervancy was the work of someone who saw nature as man’s canvas, and to decorate it was not just his right but his duty. But I don’t think Marcus had a concept of nature, or, at any rate, a concept of nature that separated it from the things of men. It’s not that man was a natural entity. To the contrary: there was no such thing as nature. The world was a mere extension of man’s psyche. Hence the mansion, the gardens, the town of Marcuse; hence the Magic Mountains, which in Marcus’s vision had nothing to do with the Tsistuyi that had stood there before save that they occupied the same coordinates of longitude and latitude. The Tsistuyi were Cherokee hills; the Magic Mountains were Marcus’s, and would stand until someone with an even stronger will came along, and replaced them with whatever he saw fit.

  Or maybe the explanation’s simpler than all that. Marcus had millions of dollars at his disposal, after all, and in the wake of his settlement this money could be spent on nothing but the conservancy, and, what’s more, had to be spent, or would disappear in fines, levies, taxes, damages. Marcus’s horror vacui had manifested itself long before he was forced to close his mines, as had his beavery mania: if he didn’t chew on something his teeth would grow through his skull, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s really what my mother thought she was saving me from. Not the Stammers hubrus but the Stammers compulsion: for sameness, for repetition, the illusion of mastery over the world. Seven identical mountains, 174 identical pots, generation after generation of black-robed acolytes chorusing their “From nothing, take nothing, make nothing” mantra. But all I saw were seven round hills covered in second-growth pine, and all I said was:

  “How’m I supposed to get to classes?”

  My mother cocked her head like a crow catching the sound of a mole digging a few inches below the surface. She waved a hand at the creek. “You want a boat? A jetski? An inner tube or basket of reeds?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Hey, these are the same reeds that carried Moses down the Nile. If they were good enough for the savior of the Jews—”

  “Bulrushes.”

  “Hum?”

  “Moses’s basket was made of bulrushes.” My voice grated in the bucolic setting. I liked the way it sounded, and made it even more harsh. “How am I going to get to school?”

  My mother didn’t acknowledge me immediately. Sighing—I know it’s uncharitable of me, but I’m pretty sure her sigh was for the deer who refused to appear rather than her increasingly truculent son—she turned away from the hills.

  “You know, we’re on the Wye bus route. If you wanted, you could start high school there. What
would you be, a freshman, sophomore?”

  “What I’d be is better educated than most of the teachers.”

  My mother shrugged. Her eyes strayed back toward the hills. “I just thought you might want to see the world from another perspective.”

  There was a question in her voice, as if she wasn’t saying what she wanted but was trying to find out what I did, and I waved my hands like a drowning sailor.

  “Hello? Look at me, Mom. I’ve always seen the world from ‘another perspective.’”

  My mother grimaced. “Good,” she said, and after a moment, “Good” again. She turned her whole body now, not so much toward me as away from the sunset, away from memory, from expectation and disappointment, only to be confronted anew with the failure of her child’s face. Still, she nodded as though we’d negotiated some important settlement. “I’d prefer it if you continued at the Academy through high school,” she said, even though this clearly contradicted her earlier suggestion.

  My mother knew very well that the Academy didn’t have high school, it had fifth and sixth forms, but all I said was, “Um, because . . . ?”

  Another wince, followed by a smile that I think she meant to be tender but came off as condescending. “Because you can’t reject something until you understand it.”

  “It didn’t stop you. And what makes you think I’m going to reject it? Not that I could actually accept it if I wanted to. Not since you”—I waved an arm at the horizon, which a century and a half of history said should have belonged to me, no matter what color my skin was—“saved me from it.”

  “Because you’re not just a Stammerer,” my mother said immediately, as if she’d known what I was going to say—as if, almost, she’d wanted me to say it. “You’re also my son. As your misplaced hostility makes all too clear.”

  I’d like to claim I didn’t understand what she meant, or that she wasn’t right. I’d like to tell you that I really was mad at her and not at something else. But I did understand her and she was right, and if I was pretending to be mad at her it was only because the thing I was actually mad at needed, like the thousand apparitions of Vishnu, a material form to make it comprehensible to human senses.

  “Whatever,” I said, and started for the building that, whatever it had been, was now our house. “I want a Triumph,” I tossed over my shoulder.

  “A triumph?” my mother called. “Like, elephants and acrobats and, um, sacrifices?”

  “Don’t forget the captured slaves and tribute from conquered kings.” And then: “A motorcycle,” I added quickly, because part of me was afraid she might respond credulously to my demand—to her perception of my demand—and when I slammed the door behind me three of her unbroken panes jumped from their mullions and shattered on the stoop. Oh yeah, I remember thinking as the clatter filled my ears. Point to Judas.

  The house had three floors, as I’ve said, and without any discussion the first became my mother’s and the third mine, the second being reserved for everything that had been in the apartment above the Browns’ bakery (everything that didn’t belong to the Browns, that is, which turned out to be more than I would have guessed—the shrunken heads, for example, a relic of Mr. Brown’s service in the Pacific in the Second World War, along with the diving helmets, and Mrs. Brown laid claim to a bentwood rocker that materialized from beneath what had been nothing more than a shapeless mound of quilts for as long as I could remember). We should “start fresh,” my mother said, and offered me “free rein” to pick out whatever I wanted in the way of “paint and doorknobs and switchplates.” I will admit to having had very little in common with most teenaged boys, but I was never so far gone that I gave a shit about switchplates. All I did was order the most basic objects from IKEA, which choices my mother, not surprisingly, vetoed out of hand, by which I mean that when they arrived she didn’t let me take them out of the boxes or even return them, but piled everything in the yard, doused it with gasoline (we kept a can at the house for my Vespa, which is what she gave me instead of a Triumph), and set it alight.

  Then she disappeared.

  She was gone the better part of three months, from sometime in February, when we moved into the Field, to early May. Only gradually did I realize she was combing every antiques store in a parallelogram roughly bound by Galveston, Louisville, Richmond, and Savannah (which coordinates I base on the return addresses on the packages that began arriving a week or so after she left and continued to show up for months after she was back). She didn’t tell me she was going, just left me with two treasure-chest ice boxes filled with TV dinners and frozen pizzas, as well as a standing order with the IGA for perishables and a strongbox containing $23,362 in “pin money.” She came home every eight or nine or ten days, less to check on me than to deliver something small and inordinately expensive or fragile. Just before she set out for the third time I asked her how she knew I’d be there when she got back. My mother knew her son well enough to understand that this was less threat than declaration of loneliness, though not maternal enough to try to make me feel better. “Oh, good God, Judas, run. You’re not exactly the hardest person in the world to find.”

  She addressed the packages to herself or to me depending on which floor they were intended for, and it was because of both of these things—because she was gone, and because they were addressed to me—that I ended up with my father’s books. Before we moved in my mother had Potter’s Field gutted to its bricks and beams, leaving only the floorboards intact. Each story was thirty-two feet wide by forty-seven feet long, narrow staircase tucked into one corner, stingy bathroom in the opposite. I pushed the furniture (Paul McCobb, Heywood-Wakefield, an array of bent, blond plywood by Aalto, Saarinen, the Eameses) against the south wall, separating out only those items that came in boxes, which, rather than unpack, I stacked into a low-walled room-within-a-room where, for the first time in my life, I masturbated with utter abandon. I’d masturbated before, of course, despite the lack of privacy in the apartment—had occasionally managed to squeeze one out in the tub while the faucet was running, and sometimes I raised my hand in class (my left hand, of course, so that the sleeve of my gown fell down and exposed my purple arm) and asked to be allowed to go to the bathroom, where I beat my meat with a tight grip so that my hand didn’t slide up and down the shaft of my penis but rather moved the skin back and forth over the engorged corpora cavernosa, which was hardly the most pleasurable way to take care of business (more than once I ended up with blisters) but was the quietest. No doubt most adolescents learn to pleasure themselves in some measure of silence and secrecy—yes, and shame too—and no doubt there are horny teenagers who can’t wait till they get home to get off, who hide in toilet stalls with their feet on the doorframe thinking no one knows they’re there, unaware that behind the sound of the blood pumping in their ears the stall is rattling in time with their suppressed—compressed—orgasm. But they at least have the option of waiting until they’re behind the locked door of their bedroom, parents and siblings safely asleep, uncloistered imaginations free to roam the contours of their phantasmal partners instead of listening for the sound of approaching footsteps, an opening door, a maternal giggle: “Don’t worry, Judas sleeps like a cock. Yes, Dick, I said ‘Judas.’” I had none of that—not until we moved into the Field and my mother went off on her shopping spree, leaving me alone in an empty house, the nearest neighbor a mile away. I jerked off on every floor, in every position, at every hour of the day or night, but after a certain number of boxes addressed to me (by which I mean seventy-nine) had arrived, and after my mother came home unexpectedly one night and nearly caught me on her bed, and then again on her potting table, I more or less confined myself to the cardboard-walled stall I built for myself on the third floor. I played out a host of captive fantasies on its bonded brown surface: bricked up in a crypt like Fortunato or locked in a garret like Ugolino and his sons and grandsons (I was always one of the latter, my climax invariably coming when I f
elt my grandfather’s toothless mouth start to gnaw at my penis) and once I was Rapunzel in her tower, my hair purple rather than gold and, rather than the instrument of my liberation, the method of my restraint, its long coils binding me at wrists and ankles while a shadowy figure, half witch, half prince, daubed my body with viole(n)t enchantments that left me sealed within a seamless, sexless integument, no penis or vagina, no anus or mouth, no eyes, ears, or any other opening, no fingers and toes and eventually no arms or legs: just a cocoon of pure purple flesh inside which my desire writhed like an unborn emperor butterfly or undead mummy.

  The fact that my sexual imagination was so steeped in twice-told tales made it that much more shameful to me. Not only were my fantasies grotesque deviations from what was normal, they weren’t even mine. They weren’t even me. I was a stranger to myself, a character in someone else’s story; my life, by which I mean not just my appearance but my name, last and first, my position in the Academy as laird among tenants, so patently denied me any status as an object of sexual desire that I could only be aroused either by replacing my body with an unmarked—unmarred—substitute, or else by amplifying my defect and imbuing it with totemic power, which power was invariably used to imprison me. The Academy had separated the sexual act from reproduction for a hundred years. Far from condemning homosexuality, the masters viewed it as a socially enlightened form of sexual activity, since it was guaranteed not to produce offspring (this, along with the robes and prohibition against “making,” led to repeated charges that the school was a pederastic cult, despite the fact that sexual relationships between novices and masters were only permitted if initiated by the novice and he was, in accordance with the local age of consent, at least sixteen years old). But as in all else, the Academy taught that sex was an encounter between material beings. To cloak these beings’ flesh in fantasy, in narrative—in, God forbid, history—was a denigration of the individuals involved. Don’t misunderstand me. The Academy didn’t teach that all beings are perfect as they are—one-legged, cross-eyed, fat as a boar. Perfection implied imperfection, and the Academy rejected both categories. Rather, it taught that all things merely are what they are. Regardless of what they had been or might become, nothing can negate or supersede their form at any given moment—and if the thing in question is a person, then the key to right living (happiness and sadness being two more states the Academy regards as illusions) is to acknowledge what you are—not your psychological nature, but your material being. I was a freak. I should accept that, and get on with life.