Suffice it to say, of course, as I rose in the ranks, aspects of my position became distasteful to me. It was announced to me, for one thing, that I had to leave the older lover in the dirt without ever seeing her again: she never believed that such injunction came from directly above and not from the greater above, that of mortality, or a man’s distaste for anything reeking too much of it. Paradoxically, soon after the discharge of my yanked-hair lover, it happened, as a condition of my particular role in the administration for that period, that I came to be in charge of how people disported themselves between the sheets. Of course we didn’t refer to the duty in this way. Rather, having ascended to a post in one of the more cultured ministries, a post I had coveted, I found myself tasked with nighttime behavior. You see how readily I took to how people spoke there. So many of those around me liked to say that particularly ugly phrase, that people were tasked. Be that as it may, wishing to prove worthy of the new nation we were all creating, I stood ready to be tasked and would show myself through the tasking.
And in one of my new roles, I was asked to come up with a new code of morale for the nation, something quick and slangy enough that people could recall it easily, something they could use as a dowsing rod when making a choice that might affect our national hygiene, if you will, and so of course I said: Remember Our Traditions, since one of the first logos we had as a nation back when we were first forming ourselves in the more modern way was the man in his broad hat taking the woman in the peasant dress by the waist to swing her about. This man in his elegance, our fellow of the logo, looked as if he would have voiced such a motto to his sons as they prepared to take leave, heading out to storm the world, just as the woman, the mother of our nation, appeared with the cant of her head and outflung arm to have advised her daughters in similar fashion. Remember our traditions. What those traditions were did not, in truth, need much plummy articulation: enough to invoke this glorious house of the past in which we were not peasants married to the dirt but rather gallant wielders of tradition.
And it is not just that this motto now appears on all our billboards and official correspondence, it having been taken up with a spirit I could not have foreseen, even if there is that unfortunate resultant acronym, ROT, given the gothic cast the designer gave the first of each of the letters, so that we are ROTting away on every official communication and children see this ROT in their classrooms, but rather I see now that as a father I might remind you to hold tight to our traditions.
A few years ago you began asking in a manner I can only describe as querulous about some inconvenience in the fact that we maintain no photo albums of you in your early years, in contrast to the tottering weight of those we have amassed ever since you were three.
Every child feels the indignity of what a parent does or occludes, and what can I tell you, dear one? Your mother was a great one for amassing photo albums in general, to be sure. But what comes to mind is that you never asked me about other items probably more relevant to your future, such as the unfortunate case of Michael A., a man too kind to a group of infidels in our government. What happened to poor Michael A.? He let dissidents dine at his table, his children playing with theirs, and then one day, Michael A. failed to show up at his office. A hint of poisoned chicken was bandied about, a mention of foul play by a maid, and still one could find no trace of him, not the slightest whiff. What do you say about someone like this?
He was duped into his end, a state of mind that, in our family, you have never had to fear.
As I consider it, our troubles, yours and mine, began the day recently when you looked at me strangely. Middle of an official lunch you had attended with me, you sprang the question on me like one of the feral cats you so pitied as a child, your look so biting. “What if you were not my father?” What kind of thing was this to say as I was about to ascend to my magisterial functions, soon to walk up the stairs that wiggle so inopportunely, up to the podium where I would place a ceremonial wreath around the neck of an important man, a popinjay, of course, the kind of strutting man whom it is hard for me to celebrate, whose tailfeathers have always been too hefty for the scatter of thoughts in that vain little head, while it occasionally falls upon me, in my position, to celebrate the undeserving.
The opposite of such moments of unworthy celebration—and I could string a wreath with them—was always you. Do you know that I could have had a birthday for you every day of every year we had together? Do you know all the times I have held your head to my chest and stroked your hair? That I so painstakingly learned after your mother’s death to use my brute thumbs in braiding your fine girl’s hair, no easy task for a man who, back in our darkest decade, had his hands hammered by an unscrupulous interrogator?
How can you then turn to me and ask me such a question and at such an inopportune moment?
Do you know that your question stayed in my throat, a choke, and as I aimed for equanimity, I tripped on those stairs, and as I looked over my shoulder, thought I saw you choking down, in strange symmetry, a giggle, your face a mirror of what I saw in the popinjay’s smirk.
The next day, as you know, you pressed upon me a photo of two rebels you believed were your parents. That awful friend of yours gave you the photos and the misinformation. What is more horrifying is that you chose to believe her fairy tale.
Is it a parent’s job to instruct a child in what to believe?
You came upon me in the kitchen where I was having the maid make the kind of soup you once loved, the one I made whenever you were sick. The one for which I had to go to the local butcher’s, where he knows me and owes us some favors, his house having been passed over in many recent storms, where he now bequeaths us massive bags of bones he promises come solely from grass-fed beasts of our plains, the bones with an architecture oddly large and misshapen, truth be told, now taking up all the room in the freezer another fellow in our district gave us as a small gift at your last birthday.
Is it true—you dared ask, as I was telling the maid how to stir the soup from the outside of the pot toward the center—were my parents those journalists who criticized you?
The maid, an alley cat who speaks only the indigenous language, someone with whom I communicate in a pantomime that gives me no little pleasure, averted her eyes. Even she knew something disgraceful was transpiring.
I should have asked you back a more serious question: Do you wish to defile the memory of your mother this way? Or, rather, do you know how many have been destroyed by the carrion who alight on the memory of what our nation wished to become?
The heart doesn’t kidnap you, it doesn’t hide you, it doesn’t hurt you, it doesn’t lie to you all of your life, you said, love is something else.
Brush your hair, I told you, we’re going to be late.
This is incredible, you said. All those times you threw your gun down on the table to tell us about subversives being tortured or killed?
Is there something you really need to say, I asked, my posture stiffening. I have long believed every man has something he can offer any scene of confrontation, yet it had not become clear to me what I could offer.
Argillaceous. Autochthonic. Erumpent. If I could only hear you with the sweetness you once had speaking those words again. What could I say back to you.
Popinjay?
You stole me! And then the final straw: It was good your wife died young. You kill everything!
I would not have any more of the vileness you were trying to stuff in me.
Instead, I grabbed the soup ladle from the maid, gave the broth a determined stir, and turned on you, modulating my voice: You know, dear, ever since certain friends came into your life, they have sucked out your sweetness. Is what you’re saying something they have pressed into you too?
It’s not my friends, you said, it’s you!
You flounced out of the room, leaving me with the maid already turning back to her soup, mak
ing one of those horrifying indigenous gestures that could mean benediction, protection, curse.
After you spoke, I decided I could no longer stomach the official function to which we were meant to go and instead went to my room with its comforting morocco walls and gold-studded chairs, a room in which one can pore over a secret black book, because of course there does exist one concerning you, with all supporting documents neatly folded, tabbed, placed in archival lamination. And so since one day you will find this black book, after I die, unless I were to burn it, which seems an inhumane course of action, I thought it might behoove me to write you now, to help you understand some of the issues parents have.
For one thing, as any parenting book will say, the one I intended to write at the outset of this branching narrative, parents must act as containers for the emotions, violent or otherwise, of their children. Hence it falls to me to gently entertain and then correct your version of events. Were I to abstain from this function, you would not qualify as my daughter and I not your father.
To begin with, we did not steal you: we saved you from an unfortunate situation. What in your temporary blindness you call an abuse of power was to us a righting of collective wrongs. I ask whether you would have preferred an orphanage, which would otherwise have become your upside-down tree trunk? Little life would have cleaved to such a trunk.
In your eyes flashes an anger I can recognize. Know that this document is the best way I have of letting you know some of what you wish to know. You have not spoken to me since our conversation. You believe it an admirable use of your life energies to keep on smoldering. And if you still think you should call those other two your parents, I am sorry for you. Every person will go to a heaven or hell made of their beliefs.
Why is there no birth announcement, you kept on, your eyes black holes.
The maid might as well have not been there in the room with us. As you leaned toward me, I was all that mattered to you. And if I loved you with great heat in that moment, with something I have never been able to conquer rising up, it changed nothing, especially not how you smelled then, such a clammy and dank girl, my daughter a girl so much of the grave, one could almost say argillaceous.
Memo to My Muse
Paul West
Look, sweetheart, I know we are living on borrowed time that we have been borrowing from life since 1984, when we heard from that pliable humanist of a doctor we should not expect too much longer a life. Well, as DHL said, we have come through, two golden retrievers of the mellow soul, stronger than ever because I the vehicle (you the tenor) am partly bionic, a fine howdy-do for an ex-athlete who played as a pro for years. Clearly, honey, it’s the words that have saved us, neither of us recognizing they had no limit, could be parlayed to the top of their bent, and then some further. So many old chums actually goners, among the mothballs and lilies, rescued by no navy, vouchsafed no warning (some). I can only conclude we are still being called upon, not by embossed cards on a silver tray (as in the officers’ mess of long ago), but by word savorers who must have heard that farcical conversation when my publishers told my deans, Don’t let him retire, he’ll flood everything. If I did, it was only, honest, because I was going slowly, honest: a couple of pages a night, or on a satin Bermuda beach with pink in the ink of a Luddite—just long enough to indite one of these samples of a life’s exhaust, except for ours. Hence this.
Taken literally, any stethoscope’s an instrument for listening to sounds produced within the body, but your average Boy applies it to the TV, the radio, water pipes, woodwork, even a roach trapped in a typewriter-ribbon box. Dum-di, dum-di. I listen, lick my lips at, the sounds of the red jellies churning and wobbling within chest cavities. Given opportunity, I would listen to Lenin’s tomb, the Pyramids, the Rock of Gibraltar. I’ve heard trees growing, limestone creaking, roadways humming, cigarettes crackling, even the stereo (when the machinery adds its whir to the sound of a symphony, like technicians getting in the way during one scene of a movie shoot and, thanks to some astute director, being left in, not as a novelty but as a specimen of the truth-behind-the-truth). With some foreboding, I’ve listened to silent things—the air, a pound of fresh-ground coffee, the phosphorus head of a match—and have thereby developed a dismal sense of what ignores me. Take this thought even further: If you slash your wrists, the blood doesn’t look at you, doesn’t heed you at all, but goes about its business according to known laws. I sometimes lose sleep when I get to thinking about how much of each person is merely stuff, without which he wouldn’t be alive, but which has nothing of his personality stamped on it. Put Napoleon’s heart alongside Stalin’s, on a clean, white tray, and you don’t know which; or Byron’s penis alongside Casanova’s, Helen of Troy’s twat alongside Sappho’s, Abraham Lincoln’s bladder alongside John Brown’s. You never know whose from whose. And that’s partly why I’d like, although from what surgical-supply store I know not, a stethoscope for listening to identity, something regular and measurable as a heart’s beat, something that persists, can always be eavesdropped upon. But then what would you hear? A heart makes a succession of beats; an identity, according to David Hume, is only a succession of perceptions, so to speak, and the mind is a theater that is its own play. So why bother? All you would hear is a series. You’d be none the wiser than the Chinese Chuang Tzu, who dreamed he was a butterfly and, on waking, wasn’t sure if he was a man who’d dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamed he was a man. The other night—was it night? I’m unsure, but it was a black time—I dreamed I was myself, and now I don’t know if I was An Other dreaming or if now I am another. I can’t sustain this for much longer: The mind’s fidgeting, forever in fact in recoil from this or that, it won’t obey, it never did. Worst of all, even at my most vehement instigation, it won’t dismiss the conceit that I have been taken over by the Tesseract Fund in ways other than financial, so much so that my dizziest imaginings have come to be just as “real” to me as, say, the hives I’ve been plagued by, or my spondylitic neck, or migraine or dyspepsia or postnasal drip.
For example, in one of my books I am the planet Mars, I no longer laugh at such a fatuous swap. I’m accustomed to my body temperature’s varying from 80 degrees Fahrenheit to –300, which is mighty upsetting to those reactionaries of etiquette who still insist on shaking hands. A friendlier frostbite they never had. I no longer mind my diameter’s being only half that of Earth or my mass’s being only one-tenth of same; after all, my pressure is only 1 percent, I’ve no oxygen at all, just carbon dioxide, argon, and water vapor, oh it’s a serviceable mixture, it cuts down on my smoking and those violent keep-fit runs across space I used to fancy myself doing, and it tends to keep visitors away, they so much dislike wearing suits, it makes the whole affair so damned formal. By now, I’ve grown accustomed to those space paparazzi who zoom past with cameras at the ready, hoping to catch me scratching at my scrotum or leering at Venus. Nobody sees much of me, that’s a fact; a flyby’s only a fleabite, I conveniently blush for them and it’s over and done with. Once, before I evolved a philosophy, the slanders used to bother me: being linked up with (and made responsible for, in some cases) war and agriculture, which was like attributing peace to that mountain of exaggerated presence, Everest, and razed-ground activities to Mount Etna. Most intolerable of all, though, has been the comparatively recent downgrading of my intelligence: Mars, once thought capable of intelligent being, they have now decided has nothing but rocks in his head, in the cracks of which there may, here and there, be a plant or two. It’s true that 30 percent of my complexion is discolored—a bruised blue green, as if I’ve been swatted in the face by micrometeorites—and this they used to interpret as arable land, or something just as gross. Little do they know that these are camouflage areas known locally as Anoxybiotic Biblianths, in which, instead of men’s writing books, there are books busily writing men, the rationale for this activity being as follows: gaping at my blue-green regions, but virtually writing off w
hat of me happens to be ocher red, such men as Schiaparelli, Lowell, Archenius, Kuiper, Tikhov, Dollfus (unfortunate name!), and Oepik planted labels on what they thought significant—quotable—features of the Martian style. Thus I find myself saddled with (to name only a few) a Scandia, an Ortygia, a Mare Boreum, a Tempe, an Ascuris, a Cydonia, an Eridiana, all of them names having an unmistakable leftover flavor. I don’t mind this too much, you can give a dog a bad name and it sticks, but not a planet, certainly not while the so-called experts in Martian Environmental Medicine are still fooling around with such stray concepts as anaerobic bacteria, glycerol, waves of darkening, perma-warm spots, and subsurface water tables. What truly got my Martian goat was the imposition upon my surface (no doubt by astronomers with such names as Bill Posting) of the following quasi-literary allusions: Amazonis, Nix Olympica, Dis, Elysium, Electris, Hellas, Ausonia, and Atlantis. In retaliation, which I myself regard more in the nature of a red-shift pastiche, the Martian mind is returning these concepts to their owners marked Sentimental, Trite, and Neoclassical. There are, however, a few other names inflicted upon me, which have necessarily been given other treatment, to wit the following, with Anoxybiotic-Biblianthic rendering as described:
Arabia: The Seven-Pillars-of-Wisdom is about halfway through writing his novella entitled Gordon Lawrence, publication dates 1833, 1885, 1888, 1935.
Eden: East-of-Eden, who seems to suffer continually from razor nicks, is doing one thousand words a day on John Steinbeck’s Pelvis, the legs and spine already having been written. No date.
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