Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  That assistant was of course the Academy, whose paired mission statements—to “Perfect and Preserve Nature’s Beauty” and “Brighten the Lot of the Darker Races”—reek of tongue-in-cheek hypocrisy. Even at this late date there’s little evidence of enlightenment in Marcus’s actions, let alone altruism. In 1891, when he had the school’s articles of incorporation drawn up, he actually named it Mountebank Academy. He scratched the first word out later, scribbled “Lake” in its place, but didn’t bother to order a clean draft of the document, which seems like a pretty good measure of his investment in the project. Though his “personal dispatches” (think of them as 19th-century analogues to the tweet, which he dashed off to whatever newspaper had earned his ire or admiration that day) made much of the fact that “23 or 24” of the first “noviciates” were the orphaned sons of the victims of the 1881 explosion, he failed to mention that all 307 members of the school’s inaugural “corpus discipulus” had been his employees for years or even decades, a group of glorified field hands ranging from their teens to their fifties whose (halved) salaries were now called stipends, and whose six-day, sixty-hour work weeks had been extended by fifteen hours of “maieutic rehearsal,” in which one can only assume that the call-and-response of the work song stood in for the traditional question-and-answer of the Socratic dialogue.

  Even four years later, as the Academy’s first class was “graduating” (read: getting fired), Marcus was still referring to the school as “gangue.” A particularly charged word from a miner. He could have called it “binder,” which refers to impurities within a seam, or “rider,” a thin, often unprofitable layer of coal that runs above the primary deposit. But he chose “gangue,” which refers to the commercially worthless material in which ore is found (although sometimes he used “goaf,” which is basically gangue after the minerals have been extracted). The terms were dismissive, of course, but also conferred a kind of distinction, gave the extraneous matter a mental heft neither pickaxe nor TNT could destroy. If the gold wasn’t present, the copper, the coal, the diamonds or bauxite or aluminum or mica, we wouldn’t notice the earth and stone that surround it. But by its proximity to a desirable commodity gangue acquires, not utility, but meaning, just as goaf’s negative aura adds another layer of significance to the ores freed from its grasp, which in addition to being coal or copper or gold become also not-earth, not-stone; not-gangue, not-goaf.

  Which only now makes me wonder if, instead of the hills and creek sparking Marcus’s deathbed conversion, it might not have been the chance use of a pair of words—words that had been in his lexicon for more than three-quarters of a century, but had taken that long to impress their significance on his mind. Marcus had pulled millions of tons of coal from the earth, yet this was just a fraction of what he’d had to sift through to procure his wares. How absurd to think the rest merely incidental! He’d spent millions restoring the mountains, but had he done right in attempting to return them to their previous state? Their natural state? Had he returned them to a natural state, or had he unintentionally built a different kind of mine, one whose ore lacked the fungibility of coal, but whose potential energy was infinitely greater? And as he sat stiffly in the “wheel’d-chair” he had, at ninety-eight, finally surrendered to and contemplated his “jerry-rigg’d Megiddo” and its reflection in the stream he had (at least in his own version of things) pulled out of the earth like a thread of saffron from a crocus blossom, he found himself wondering not if this strange monument he’d made would endure after he was gone, but what it meant that it endured—after he was gone. And if we’re to believe the evidence—which consists almost entirely of his own words, recorded in his diaries or in a pair of newspaper interviews he gave in the last nine weeks of his life—it was only then that he began to wonder if he’d made a mistake. Wondered if he’d treated nature as the gangue from which he extracted the ore of his experience—of his consciousness, of his self—when the truth is nature mines us. That, far from being perfectible, nature is by definition (by nature, duh) unchangeable, while civilization—culture itself—rather than humanity’s greatest achievement, is, in nature’s absence, so much deracinated goaf. The things we do in an effort to change the world only change us. But because we are an aspect of that same world, we, too, remain unchanged and unchangeable.

  As satori goes, Great Grandpa Marcus’s was unheralded and as such (from the historian’s point of view anyway, the biographer’s, the novelist’s), unsatisfying. Indeed, unbelievable, save for the fact that the evidence is recorded in a page-and-a-half diary entry dated “March 32, 1896” (April 1 obviously, as several outside sources confirmed, although no one knows if Marcus’s error was intentional or accidental), in preternaturally lucid handwriting that looks like Marcus’s, but like a perfected version of it. I mention this only because in recent years the majority of his diary entries had become unreadable, by which I mean not just not legible but not writing, the unconscious squorls and whirlihoops of a man whose opiated mind dances with word pictures that have no more connection to language than the helium in a balloon has to the child’s finger around which the balloon’s string is tied. We know from his valet’s ledger that Marcus awoke that morning in a rave; that he took three times his usual dose of laudanum and chased it with two fingers of (Scotch, not American) whiskey; that he swept his glass from his lap table, bid pen, ink, and paper set in its place, then commanded his servant to “Fetch the Pyramid Builders,” as he referred to the Academy’s faculty. Except that morning he didn’t call them “Builders.” He called them “the Priesthood,” and by the time they arrived he’d finished his epistle. Who knows, maybe someone transcribed Marcus’s dictation as Zayd transcribed Mohammed’s; maybe all Marcus did was repeat a revelation conveyed to him by his own Jibril. But whatever the source, whoever the scribe, the words that made it onto paper are undeniably his. The grammar and cadences are of a piece with fifty years of previous entries, not to mention the esoteric spelling (apostrophe-d instead of “-ed,” “shun” for “tion,” &c., &c.), and even if the sense of the sentences is utterly at odds with everything he ever said, the sentience behind them remains pure Marcus. A working-class dithyramb peppered with tautologies and sesquipedalia verba and the bloviated self-confidence that what he’s saying is true because he’s the one saying it. So inexorable was the connection between Marcus’s desire and its appearance in the world that he’d come to regard his thoughts as tantamount to physical phenomena, which makes his final recursion that much more paradoxical. Because even as his last words repudiated everything he’d ever done, they were uttered with the pharaonic conviction that they would be enacted with the same slavish (sorry, but there’s no other word for it) obedience that had rolled the Magic Mountains across the land like pastry dough, then puffed them back up like a clutch of dinner rolls.

  The entry begins banally enough: “The only Constant is Change, yet Change is but Illusion.” It’s a measure of the (lack of) profundity of Marcus’s thought that he seemed to have no idea he was riffing on someone else’s idea, let alone whose. It closes, notoriously:

  from — nothing

  take — nothing

  make — nothing

  Marcus’s valet records the hoarse rasp of the master chanting these words in his bedroom, alone at first, then gradually joined by his Ansar “til the chamber door fairly shook with the Quire” (which, as siccable statements go, is kind of brilliant). A century later 444 voices were still chanting those words every day at matins and complines—in Latin, natch, so they didn’t sound quite so creepy. What they do sound like is Parmenides’s “nihil fit ex nihilo,” and while it’s possible Marcus knew the phrase (he pulled “maieutic” out of his ass, after all, though he also got “noviciate” wrong), it’s hard to imagine it was any more significant to him than those quaint Shakespearean idioms (“what the dickens?” “dead as a doornail,” “in a pickle”) that most people think originated with their country aunt or funny uncle. But how Marcus
had arrived at these particular words and what he meant by them were never revealed. After his faculty left he passed the rest of the day “in speechless reverie, chuckling at unheard trifles, [and] plucking invisible moths from the air.” On the morning of the 29th his valet was unable to awaken him, and after lying unmoving for four days, his face “as serene as St. Sebastian’s,” he sighed once, “like Heracles at the conclusion of his Twelfth Labor” (the observations are those of his eldest grandson, Hugh, who hadn’t been invited to the “Unveiling,” although he had been granted the title of second president of Lake Academy), and then, as all men do, even great ones, even devils, he died.

  Well. Most people think of childhood as a continual present, unfettered by complex memories, unconcerned with a nonexistent future, when it’s more accurate to say that kids live in a continual past. I mean the immediate past, of course, not the “weight of heritage” or whatever you want to call the things I’ve been writing about here, but in my case the two were indistinguishable. From my first word to my first poo to my first day at school, every milestone occurred in an atmosphere steeped in Marcus’s legacy and shadowed by my mother’s genius, so that learning how to be a person was, for all intents and purposes, learning how to be a Stammers. But children don’t learn like adults. They absorb information in a fugue state in which knowledge isn’t so much memorized as embodied in words and actions repeated over and over. It would be a mistake, however, to think of these repetitions as recreations of the instantiating experience. They are instead the same experience, time dragged forward with no regard for clocks or calendars. And unlike adults, whose more developed memories resignify even the most routine activity (usually by getting bored), children suffer no diminution of return. The thousandth game of fort-da is as pleasurable as the first, but only if the re-enactment is perfect. A single deviation provokes a temper tantrum; too many and the game loses its appeal. Certainly cleaning worked that way for me. I behaved as if I were following a script I’d written, but the truth is the script wrote me, guided me like the rails carrying a roller coaster, which, however thrilling the ride, is always the same ride. Which is why, when new elements were introduced—the flood of visitors who invaded our home, and the pots carried out like arks to a hidden altar—the apartment no longer felt, not clean, but cleanable.

  No doubt if it hadn’t been my mother’s career it would’ve been something else. Puberty probably, or some more random event: a car accident or tornado, a tender word from one of the other novices or pornographic configuration that called into question everything I thought I’d figured out about human connection, physical or otherwise. Which is to say: at a certain point history exhausts itself and you find yourself in the present. You find yourself in the world, and have to start living your life. You find yourself—a Stammers, a boy, a freak, abandoned—and have to make a life out of what you’ve got. What you are. Though I made a few desultory attempts to keep house after my mother returned from her shopping spree, I knew I was playing a waiting game—in part because I didn’t know what else to do, but mostly because it’s what I thought she was doing. But however rigidly precise Dixie Stammers’s potting technique was, it wasn’t, like cleaning was for me, a ritual. It wasn’t magic. The pots had to be unvarying, but the process of making them did not. If the initial method lost its charm, its challenge, she had only to find a new way to work. And this she surely did. But two years after we moved to Potter’s Field I could no longer pretend that the change it represented had ever been anything other than wishful thinking on my part, or cynical manipulation on my mother’s. Yes, she was making pots as she had during my early childhood, and yes, the number of visitors to our home slowed as their price skyrocketed. But her process was if anything more insular and time-consuming than it had been before, her clients infinitely more demanding. They showed up only once every month or two, but they came with retinues now, of assistants, lovers, art buyers, gawkers, expected dinner or at least drinks, and often spent the night (or several nights), often on the second floor, in a row of rusted wrought-iron beds that stretched down one wall like a noir vision of a syphilis ward, but just as often on the first, which is to say, in my mother’s bed (which, unlike her bedroom on High Street, was cordoned off from the rest of the house by neither door nor wall nor curtain). But it was only when she sat for Three by Stammers and dredged up her new pots like a Scheherazadean goldpanner that I understood: she could keep this up forever, and I would never be anything more than spectator. I would have to find something besides cleaning to while away the time. Something, dare I say, dirty.

  In keeping with family tradition, I tried the creek first. I dug a machete from one of the boxes on the second floor (because of course Dixie Stammers owned a machete, owned—of course—four), hacked my way through the reeds to the creek’s central channel, tottered over the water on one of the fallen pines, fell into the water and nearly cut my ear off (no, really: there was blood), crawled out of the water on the far side, and hacked my way to the mountain beyond. Up close the Capitoline’s brown-needled carpet was all dimples and bubbles, with ferns clotting the hollows and blue-green moss clinging to the sides of exposed rock. From across the flood plain the pine trees seemed to crowd each other like a concert audience, but in fact they stood at arm’s length one from the next, and here and there the rock had fallen away as the fill settled, leaving tangled networks of roots crookedly tented over jagged voids. (Think those walking trees in Tolkien, or Louise Bourgeois’s spiders, though what they reminded me of was Great Grandpa Marcus: of his staves and swayback and Thomas Nast’s caricature of him; of his hubris and folly.) No doubt ten- or eleven-year-old me would’ve been enraptured by the mangafied surreality of the environment, but fifteen-year-old me knew that whatever I was looking for, it wasn’t there. I devoted approximately sixty seconds to contemplating the crowning achievement of my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s life, whizzed on a longleaf (I dunno, maybe it was a Sonderegger), then turned around and made my way back to the Field, then hopped on my Vespa and took off. I mean, we lived on a highway, for Pete’s sake. An abandoned highway maybe—the Post Road, which floods out at least once a decade, was superseded in the late seventies by the interstate on the north side of the conservancy—but as it turned out the dearth of traffic was advantage rather than impediment. Sex rarely seeks out bright lights, after all, except maybe in porn.

  State Comfort Station NE-28 had been built in the 1910s, when “motoring” was still considered more of an edifying novelty than a means of practical transportation. Its six acres had been as landscaped as a city park, including a pond fed by a canal off the White Woman and a lawn big enough for badminton and croquet. The lawn had long since been overrun by hackberry and sumac and the pond had silted up, though you could still tell where it had been by the stand of silver-barked poplars that grew amid the elms; while up front the rose of Sharon hedge that shielded the rest stop from (now largely nonexistent) traffic had turned into a kudzu-draped wall that completely blocked any view of the facilities from the road. The original building, with its service station and convenience store and cafe, had been torn down in the early ’60s. Its more modest replacement housed nothing besides a pair of restrooms fronted by a narrow vestibule, but the structure itself was one of those happy marriages of vernacular architecture and midcentury forms. Its end walls were built of local graywacke fashioned into a pair of dry-stone buttresses, between which hung a steeply angled roof whose front pitch soared nearly twenty feet over a forward-leaning glass checkerboard that offered up a picture-perfect view of Marcuse and Inverna and the shining black roof of Stammers Hall at its apex—or would have, if half the panels hadn’t been replaced by plywood at some point in the distant past (one sported a Perot-Stockdale sticker). What glass remained was streaked with spraypaint and countless t.p. bombs splatted and dried into fist-sized meringues. The vandalism reminded me of my mother’s comment about the unbroken windows at Potter’s Field, which is to say that someho
w I knew the damage hadn’t been done by locals—that the people who came here came from somewhere else, for something they couldn’t get where they lived. But what really drew me in was the smell: a stockyard bouquet of ammonia and sulfur made all the more palpable by a perpetual fog of Lysol. My mother’s cleaning fetish didn’t extend to her environs, but she hated bad odors—said they got into the clay, rendering vitrification unstable—and the first time I set foot in that rank cave my eyes watered and my penis twitched, because I knew I’d found a place that excluded her as surely as Potter’s Field excluded me.

  Swallows darted in and out of a gap between a rotting panel and the frame into which it had been wedged. Dozens of mud nests clung to the exposed beams of the canted roof, splattered shit and feathers and the occasional corpse dotted the floor. Grimy swirls on the cracked terrazzo testified that someone was assigned the task of maintaining the facility (a Tuesday-Friday detail, I learned later) but it was clear that no one checked the cleaner’s work. Even so, there were links to the outside world: a condom dispenser in the men’s room, a tampon dispenser in the women’s, both offering a variety of brands promising safety, comfort, and, ironically given the context, hygiene. A vending machine offered soda and water, both locally bottled. A pair of rickety wire racks displayed pamphlets advertising nearby attractions: my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s mines, my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s school, an otherwise nondescript house that had been a stop on the Underground Railroad and three more that had housed this or that Confederate “hero.” Despite all this it was clear the rest stop had slipped from local consciousness. The heavy air breathed of the forgotten, the abandoned, and, inevitably, the illicit. Later I would learn that what I’d thought was Lysol was really stale poppers, but at the time all I knew was that the twitch in my stiffening penis was back, and more insistent this time.