Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  The only makeup in Reid’s house belonged to his mom. I don’t think she was into blackface as much as she was, you know, black. (For that matter, I don’t think Reid thought he was disguising me as a black person as much as he was trying to cover up my birthmark: no matter how much he enjoyed fucking me, he was still savvy enough to know that it wouldn’t do to be seen in public with Judas Stammers.) Still, the finished product seemed to amuse him no end. “All you need is some red lips and ‘Mammy’ on the squeezebox,” he said after troweling cinnamon-colored paste across my face and neck. His voice wavered on “squeezebox,” you could tell he’d just thrown it in for effect. He offered to uncover the mirror but I turned him down. This kind of masquerade only worked if you didn’t know what you looked like—if you could believe yourself not just unrecognizable but someone else. He dressed me in shiny red tear-away sweatpants and a white satin basketball jersey that hung to my knees. The word “RODMAN” was emblazoned across the back in red letters. I assumed it was a double entendre, was disappointed to learn it was merely someone’s name. At any rate Reid wore jeans and an untucked buttondown, so I should be forgiven for thinking the outfit was a joke at my expense. He dapped my fist. “Yo, homie, let’s roll.” Speaking of clichés: the ground floor of the shed was taken up by a 1968 Sedan DeVille convertible, the biggest car I’d ever seen. When Reid whipped the cover off I whistled. I called it “cherry” but, like Reid’s “squeezebox,” I was parroting the script of a movie I’d never actually seen. Reid laughed, told me the car was ersatz from wheels to windshield, no more authentic than the Ship of Theseus. The drive into Marcuse took forty-five minutes instead of the usual fifteen because we followed the interstate around the northern border of the conservancy instead of taking the Post Road straight in. (In a total failure of theory of mind I thought Reid didn’t want to drive by Potter’s Field lest my mother spot me, but he was just avoiding his dad’s filling station. “If he saw me in his Caddy he’d shoot me. If he realized it was a white boy with me—shit.”) I missed our first pass up High Street because I was blowing him, but after we looped around the upper gardens we headed back toward the Foundry, and as we drove past the Browns’ bakery I made eye contact with Mr. Brown through the open door of his shop. His stare took in me, the jersey, the car, and before he turned back to his counter he gave me what Reid called “the bona fide Negro nod.” I caught a glimpse of myself in the shiny windows of the bakery, barely recognized the suety George Hamilton schmear that smiled back. It was only then that I realized that Reid had, intentionally or no, made a minstrel out of me. Though who knows, maybe I’d always been one, and I’d just been waiting for the maquillage. “Look at me, Mammy,” I mouthed. “Don’t you know me? I’m your little baby.”

  I only heard my mother use the words “gangue” and “goaf” once each. The first, and clearly rehearsed, instance occurred in Three by Stammers, in a scene filmed at least a week before she actually sat down at her work table, when she dismissed the film, the money, and indeed everything said about her pots as gangue: something that had to be removed in order to make them visible. The second and equally self-conscious use occurred almost a year later, after she’d begun churning out pots at the rate of two or three a week from the clay she dug from the pit behind the house. A prospective buyer was starting to annoy her, and in a pique she suddenly declared that he was a fool to spend money on one of her pots. They were nothing but goaf, she said. It was the land from which they were dug that was the jewel, the commodity, “the only thing that would endure” (which line the buyer smugly repeated at trial as evidence that she knew the second series of pots was going to implode before she sold them for tens of millions of dollars). The implication was that the pots existed intact in the dirt and my mother wasn’t making them as much as revealing them. I suspect she hadn’t thought her analogy through that far—nuance was never her strong suit—but even so, there’s a symmetry to the two statements, both of which posit culture as superfluous. The grave-sized pits she left in the earth were indistinguishable from the pots themselves, gaping tears in the fabric of the world, and both pots and holes were of a piece with the destruction Marcus had inflicted on the same land a century and a half before. “Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history” Emerson wrote right around the time Marcus was buying the Tsistuyi, and if that’s true then it follows that nature is only nature in the absence, not just of human presence, but human traces. Thus the conservancy is no more a mountain range than a rood screen is a forest or a Ferrari the seam of taconite from which its iron was extracted and smelted into steel. Perhaps nothing on earth qualifies as nature any more, save for the planet’s gravitational pull and the ions that bombard it from space, and the inevitability of death. But if that’s true how did we get here, and was it where we intended to go? Or is it a case of a local civilization gone global, depleting natural resources like the Rapa Nui Polynesians and Icelandic Greenlanders, until all that’s left is gangue and goaf, and not even memory to regret whatever bad decisions brought us to this pass?

  Anthropologists speculate that the earliest notion of an aesthetic sense seems to have been tied to the idea of mimicry. Excavation of Homo erectus sites finds a proliferation of tools and containers each of which shows a high degree of consistency in its execution. The sameness doesn’t appear to be dependent upon the shape of the materials from which they were crafted: a fuzz-barked larch branch and a smooth ovoid flint were both transformed into the same trapezoidal wedge, sharp on one side, softly rounded at the other. It may be that the minds of Homo erectus were so simple that having seen a palm-sized wedge work as an implement for flaying skin from flesh and flesh from bone, they believed the tool’s power was dependent not just on its edge but on every aspect of its shape, and sought to reproduce it as closely as possible. Given the immense periods of time over which the same shapes continually appear, however, this suggests a remarkably steep learning curve, and my mother sided with those interpreters of proto-human remains who argued that the tools’ makers produced the same shapes over and over for the simple reason that they liked them—liked the shape itself, and also, and more importantly to my mother, liked the fact that the individual objects resembled each other. Contemporary aesthetic sensibility focuses on distinction, on individuality and the aura of uniqueness. To my mother it was a case of forest for the trees. “Take a step back, let your eyes go soft, forget about what’s written on the placards,” she says in a section of Three by Stammers that follows her on a walk through the Met’s painting halls, Old Masters to Abstract Expressionism in three minutes flat. “I mean, it’s all just canvas and pigment, canvas and pigment. Do you think a Bushman sees the difference between Turner and Rothko? For that matter, can you tell the difference between Ibo war drumming and a Navajo prayer for rain?”

  Sometimes I try to imagine it. The origin of consciousness. The evolution of language. Modern man existed for a hundred thousand years before he began to perform mental functions that people like you and me would recognize as thinking. For a hundred thousand years—a period twenty times longer than that between the building of the Pyramids and the fall of the Twin Towers—men and women did little more than pull fruit and berries from trees and pick bugs from the ground, gnaw shreds of meat and marrow from abandoned carcasses killed by animals that were faster or stronger than they were. One hundred thousand years. It beggars the imagination to contemplate such a vast span of time, yet it’s irresistible not to. To shrink millennia down to ticks of the second hand like a wire model of the solar system collecting dust on a high shelf. By which I mean that I know I’m telling a story, but isn’t that what consciousness is? The substitution of sensory data for a mental picture? Isn’t that how language works? Through symbol and metaphor? To not tell the story would be to not be human. But to mistake the story for the world is, somehow, to not be alive.

  So. A troupe of naked, tiny humans curled up in a hollow, sister-wives and uncle-fathers, bodies sooted over, matted ha
ir bunched in uneven clumps around faces and groins, only the fingers clean, from licking the juice of whatever they’d eaten, fruit, greens, the rare piece of meat from some animal they’d killed or whose carcass they’d found. When did they start crawling away from where they slept to relieve themselves? When did they teach their children to do the same? When did they realize that fire could do more than burn? Could warm too, if you didn’t get too close, and keep predators at bay. Flickering light glimmers on intertwined legs and arms, torsos pressed up against each other for warmth, strips of stiffened animal skin knotted over shoulders and stomachs, all surrounded by a darkness as solid as the land, and indistinguishable from it. There’s here, the amorphous dome of orange light, and not-here, the vast blackness that’s everywhere and everything else. Was this the first distinction we learned to make, more profound even than the distinction between self and other, friend and foe? On some sleepless night when a storm or an animal’s roars vibrated through the dark did we feel that it was safer to be here rather than there? In the light. With the pack. When a child crawled fearlessly out of the circle did we make some kind of warning grunt or wave our arms instead of just dragging it back? And these grunts—and yips and clicks and moans and sighs. When did we begin to string them together like abaci, quipu? Juxtaposition as conjunction, as grammar. Big—fear—pain. Eat—lots—full. Come—hold—mmmm. Comparisons would have come before names, I think, this better that before berries better leaves, names of things before names of people. Antelope. Lion. Cave. Water.

  Once the names were in place and synced up with that first distinction between here and not-here we would have been able to describe things not visible to the listener. Over hill. Many hunters. We would have been able to make suggestions. Attack! Sshh! And then, and then . . . ! And then, somehow, we started talking about things we’d never seen. Of course we’d have learned to conjecture thousands of years earlier: tracks and spoor and bones mean that this or that animal had passed by. But when did this gave way to invention? To the idea of forces animating this or that event, spirits, gods? And when, finally, did it give way to art?

  Because this was the miracle of humanity: that we could make something and, liking what we’d created, make it again, not like a bird fashioning the same nest every year by dint of genetic programming, but out of study, selection, conscious manipulation—above all, desire. What had my mother done but take this behavior to its logical end: identicality. The absolute imposition of consciousness on nature. If life is change, then the perfect indistinguishable sameness of my mother’s pots stood as simultaneous embodiment and refutation of death itself. But it wasn’t miraculous—not to her. It was just a question of paying attention to what her fingers and eyes told her. Anyone could do what she did, she said, which is why she didn’t call herself an artist. An artist needed to be in possession of a singular ability coupled with a singular sensibility, and my mother claimed she had neither: the shape of her pots wasn’t simple because of some minimalist or essentialist aesthetic: it was simple because simple was what was called for. Her techniques were even more derivative and duplicable. Women had made pots in the same manner as she did for thousands of years; had used them to carry water and food and other mundane items of daily life, and no one made a fuss over them, let alone handed over kings’ ransoms to claim them. If her contemporaries didn’t duplicate her pots, it’s not because they couldn’t but because they didn’t want to. Something else was more important to them, and they chose to pay attention to that instead. It was just a choice, possibly even a smart one. The world didn’t need my mother’s pots, after all, and she was only able to make them because she had enough money that she didn’t need to take a job more useful to society. That people paid her for them was just another layer of irony. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t take their money, but she’d have never presumed to ask for it.

  But these are reflections colored (to use a loaded word) by hindsight. At the time all I thought was that my life was gangue and goaf to my mother’s, a feeling that’s reemerged often as I attempt to write this account, in which I no longer know if my story is trying to reveal itself in the context of hers, or if in fact she is struggling to be seen through the tint of my birthmark. “Gangue,” we call it, as if it had no other name until it came into proximity with something precious, something someone wanted, when of course it had had its own name all along: graywacke, silica; not a son but a boy. And “goaf,” as though its continued existence were defined by absence. But would I still have been me, had I not been Dixie and Gaius Stammers’s son?

  The makeup was still in situ on day three, peach and purple sandbars peeking through the muddy smear after a night spent biting pillow, but all Reid did was add lipstick and blush and mascara and screw one of his mother’s blonde wigs over my head like a swim cap. Her lingerie was waaaaay too big for me, but I knotted the garter belt in back (after I figured out what it was) and it held up the wrinkly pantyhose well enough. The bra just looked stupid though, and I ditched it before stepping into a sleeveless velvet minidress as though it were a pair of coveralls. “You know how to tuck?” Reid asked. Before I could ask him what he meant he spun me around so my back faced him, reached between my legs, pulled my penis and testicles toward him, smushed them into the crack of my ass. While he was back there he used clothespins to cinch the dress to my figure and, from the front at least, in the mirror, I looked liked the bride of Frankenstein, brown(ish) head on white body, one purple arm thrown in for good measure. He came in for a kiss but I jumped back. “You bastard!” I said in a voice less draggy than faggy. “Trying to kiss me with that hussy’s perfume on your clothes!” “Um . . . ?” Reid leaned in again. I tried to slap him but he batted my hand away. “Bitch, please.” “Can’t you at least pretend to hate me?” I pleaded. “Tell you what,” Reid said. “You can pretend I hate you while I pretend your ass is a vagina.” I told him to call me Dixie but he didn’t get it until I called him Gaius. “Fuck me like you’re my long-lost brother!” He hung off me like a mountain climber dangling from a piton. “That’s like your uncle, isn’t it?” “I’m not sure,” I said. “Is he still your uncle when he’s also your—” “Dude,” Reid cut me off. “You are full of shit.” I thought he meant my words but he was showing his Academy training: he meant my ass. Seventeen-year-old physiology being what it is, he went ahead and finished (and give the boy his due: he made sure I did too) but then he walked me to the shower and, after washing himself, went at me with a loofah that left the right side of my body as florid as the left, and made me think of long-ago days when I had lovingly, hatefully, scrubbed the clay from my mother’s smock in a sinkful of lye. “You just figure it out?” he said as he threw his mother’s soiled clothes in a garbage bag, “when I told you about the books?” “Do I seem like the kind of boy who’s always known his dad was his mother’s brother?” Reid shrugged. “It would explain a lot of things.” He gathered up my clothes, handed them to me. “But, you know, if I fuck you again I’m pretty sure I’m gonna go Jeffrey Dahmer on that face.” I gave him a full left profile. “Would that be so bad?” From the corner of my eye I saw Reid’s nose wrinkle like he could still smell me. “Yeah, dude, it’s been real.” “Yeah, well,” I said. “I was gonna have to go home sometime.”

  I’d only been gone three days, but I half expected the house to be gone too—collapsed from age like the gardener’s shed, or maybe just disappeared, like the phantasm of our imagination it had always been. But the bricks had endured my absence just as they’d endured Marcus’s presence, their walls as straight as they were when he’d walked between them. They’d been baked until the moisture had been driven from them, then baked some more, so that they would never admit the White Woman’s floodwaters again. They’d been cut from the earth, leaving a muddy hollow scar behind, and stacked and cornered and roofed around an even bigger emptiness, and the emptiness had filled up with people and their things but above all with their ideas, and the scar had filled with shit.
>
  I didn’t find her immediately. I didn’t find her for several hours in fact. I didn’t go looking for her because I didn’t realize she was missing. She’d left before, after all, just like the White Woman, but unlike the White Woman she’d made it clear she’d always return, and after I waded through the puddled grass of our front yard to the house and found the first floor empty, and the second, I retreated to the third, where I went through book after book after book looking for a single word in my father’s hand, but the only thing I found was an underlined passage in Electra.

  Electra: And where is his poor body’s resting place?

  Orestes: Nowhere. Seek not the living with the dead.

  Let’s say I heard the splashing outside just as I finished reading the passage, or maybe after I’d thrown the book across the room, or after I’d ripped the offending page out and used it to wipe my ass. Let’s say I had a premonition that I knew what I’d see when I looked down. None of that’s true but it makes for a better story. Some version of it anyway. Maybe not one I can come up with, but mine wasn’t the kind of life conducive to imagination. I don’t mean the Academy indoctrination to which I was subjected for twelve years. I mean my face. My mother, my town, the view from my window. Though she claimed to despise her family, my mother had nevertheless followed in their footsteps in one regard: she thought of objects as totems. This isn’t the same thing as saying she thought of them as metaphors, yet to an outside observer the effect was identical. Everything in our lives was so steeped in over-ripe associations that it became, if not invisible, then normalized. Even I, who sometimes thought I hated my mother, was blind to it 99 percent of the time, and it was only every once in a while, when something knocked me out of my orbit, that I saw just how over the top it was. Over the top, but not unbelievable in the way that word is often misused, because what was so fantastic about our house, about the Academy and Marcuse and the Magic Mountains, was how believable it all was, when you traced its evolution step by step, from the hundreds of thousands of years of erosion that formed the Tennessee Valley and the peoples who migrated across land and sea to settle there, right down to the founding of the Academy and the misstep that took my mother’s life. My history, my world, by which I mean the movement of trillions and trillions of atoms over the course of thousands and thousands of years, was a series of mistakes and misapprehensions, each of which made subsequent events that much more inevitable, no matter what the Academy teaches about the potential of chance. By which I mean that the world as I knew it was weird enough already, and nothing I could invent could top the sight of my mother submerged in a pool of soupy mud, only her head visible, and only just, her hair plastered to her scalp, her face smeared, even her teeth stained brown, as if she had drunk the stuff that drowned her.