The Angels of Our Better Beasts
Page 14
One by one, inevitably, the men and women, now incognito, begin drawing out countries and names from the punch bowl. The British Prime Minister draws Senegal; the President of the Czech Republic becomes President of the Philippines; the Prime Minister of Greenland becomes the President of India.
“Now, look at what you have. Look at who you are!” The distinguished man sets the punch bowl down on the table where all the pastries used to be. “Imagine what could happen when the former Irish President goes ‘home’ to Peru.”
“They won’t know what the bloody heck he’s saying,” laughs the old British Prime Minister.
“He will have to lead a country with different needs, different problems. You have an economic crisis on your hands, Mr. Peru. You have an environmental and economic war to figure out. Refreshing, isn’t it?”
“I suppose trees are easier to work with than people,” he says.
“It will put everything into perspective, I imagine, Mr. Peru.”
“And you think they’ll go for this?” asks the new Senegalese Prime Minister.
“I think they’ll embrace it. Most countries are tired of their regimes and the ways to do things. They want a fresh start. They want new blood. A new perspective, one who is not persuaded one way or the other.”
“Like having your bartender as your president,” says the United States President, now the leader of Iceland.
“Exactly!” says the distinguished man. “These men—” and he points behind him “—they never brought change. They always reset the world—with its problems intact—back to the way it started. If you want to move the world forward, you need to embrace the change, wield the creativity, share the knowledge and be willing to break a few things.”
The phone rings and the busboy answers. It is the symphony and they wonder if there is a problem, and if anyone will be joining them for a nice rendition of Mozart. The busboy hands the phone to the distinguished man, who politely tells them that they will not be attending, and they can very well send Mozart out to sea for all they care. They are tired of Mozart being the hallmark of culture.
“But he’s also the patron saint of Vienna,” someone says.
“Maybe we’ll put all of those in a punch bowl as well,” says the distinguished man.
And, while the distinguished man opens the curtains, the President of the People’s Republic of China asks the six men, who all looked and behaved alike, to be his marketing team, to work very hard marketing a gyrocopter for China. When they agree, he feels very satisfied, and yet, as the Symphony Hall explodes in the picture window, and everyone realizes that, yes, this is the dawning of a new age, he cannot sigh with relief, and his banana daiquiri sits all night on the table, untouched.
Et Tu Bruté
Brutus, our multi-million dollar signing gorilla, slumps behind glass, pining away for my ex-boyfriend, Pete. He hasn’t eaten for days. He shoves all the food we give him to the observation window—offering it back to us in exchange for Pete.
Pete’s not coming back, and I’ve gotten used to it.
Brutus draws a policeman’s badge, Pete’s symbol, in the dirt of the Outdoor Facility. I want to tell him that Pete broke up with me. I never pushed him away.
Primatologists record everything Brutus does to show us he misses Pete. When he draws a badge on the glass with his feces, they say, “Look how he loved him.”
“Shelly, maybe Pete could drop by,” Dr. Jim suggests. “Just for an afternoon. You could take the afternoon off if you wanted.”
I feel invisible. We all want to know of Brutus’ grief, as if we’re bored by the human version. How blessed to have a team of caring observers!
“If you don’t want to write the letter, I can,” Dr. Jim says.
Well, it’s unanimous then. Everyone wants Pete.
Honestly, Brutus is making us write you, I write. He won’t eat. Pete, I’m not asking for me. Just for him.
This irks me on a deep level. Like I’m begging.
I’m not begging you. One afternoon, then it’s over. Visit a gorilla—save some primatologists. If I were going to ask you back into my life, I’d be more creative than saying the gorilla made me do it.
I picture Pete’s mouth in a smile under his bushy cop moustache.
He used to wrestle with Brutus. Yes, wrestle. Brutus was gentle with him; he knew it was play, and would sometimes kiss Pete softly on the forehead after he’d worn him out. We’re pretty sure Brutus is gay. Jezebel, the female gorilla shipped over from the Primate Institute, is pretty sure he’s gay, too. She went back very disappointed.
It’ll make your gorilla happy, and everyone here needs a happy gorilla.
I picture Brutus giving me a thumbs-up, his leathery eyebrows conspiratorial.
I wish I’d had enough dignity to walk out on you first. You called me a “lab rat!” You were embarrassed to be with me in public. I can’t believe I tried to be “worthy” of your affection, I write. But I crumple up the sheet and try again.
Hello, Pete. I’m writing on behalf of Brutus, who is holding a hunger strike in our lab. He’s demanding you. Dr. Jim has asked me to write you—see if you’d drop by. It would be good to see you. I erase the last part, suddenly afraid of scaring him off. Again.
I look away to see Brutus flipping through a picture album, stopping at Pete’s pictures. He sighs heavily. Should I tell him Pete wouldn’t stay? No. I can’t even tell myself.
Pete won’t fall for this, I know.
Maybe I’ll let Brutus smear some feces on the card for emphasis, for love.
Why the Poets Were Banned from the City
He drives with his foot hard on the gas all the way to our café. I’ve imagined him a hundred times as he was before we met him, before he broke down in front of us, or pulled the gun, or shot it, because I want to understand who he was before he left us—and maybe what he discovered with us, if anything at all. So I have him driving his car out of the Republic, passing the checkpoints, keeping the gun hidden well enough to pass a scan. I don’t know how he did that. I imagine he has to fake it really well, his emotional state, and act like a tourist; say that no, he’s not planning a long stay. Yes, it’s just for research for an ad campaign. No, he doesn’t know anyone here. Just coffee, conversation, a pleasant time. Has he brought the necessary emotional inhibitors? He shows them a handful of blue pills. He’s ready, he says. They let him through. Probably the info hasn’t hit his profile on their scanners yet. It’s too fresh.
He’s coming away from the suicide of his only daughter, Samantha. Sam. He calls her Sam when he talks to us. So I need to call her Sam now. She was good at illustration and ad design, top in her fifth grade class. She played a tin whistle in her school orchestra. In the picture that he shows us, she has long dark hair and is smiling, but he doesn’t remember the smiles so much over the last few weeks.
When the man comes into our café, it’s sunny outside and the blue blinds are drawn, giving the place an underwater feel that I’ve always liked. The espresso machine drowns out his first words, but everyone can tell he is upset, and every poet deep down believes, as if communally psychic, that his story would be thrilling and poignant, if a bit over-dramatically narrated. We knew that even then. Out of breath, angry, the man stands with the door of the café half open, glancing around him. He’s up to his neck in a dark blue business suit, looped by a red tie.
At first I thought he was emotionally unstable. I wanted to see his questions to the poets, his accusations, as the result of a man pushed to the edge of rational behaviour, not someone who thought about this a lot—a crank, a policrat. He was someone who had been through a rough morning. Maybe it was he that found her drowned in the bathtub. Maybe he knocked on the door several times because he needed in. It was morning, and suicides usually happen at night, so he had no reason to believe that anything was different. Except that she didn’t answer, and
this part I’m assuming, though Charlie has written that he killed her, but I don’t think that’s the case. At least, that wasn’t in my first draft. Later, when I’d read his version, I thought that he presented the whole story as that of a man on the edge for other reasons—his job, his wife, something missing in his life. And he accidentally drowns his daughter.
But, while that’s thrilling, I don’t think of him as a murderer, at least not a practiced one. So I graded Charlie’s story pretty low when workshop time arrived. Mainly because I hadn’t really come to terms with who the character was—I mean the man—but what his character was like. We all agreed on distraught. We all agreed that he was dangerous, walking into a café like that, pulling out a black snub-nosed revolver.
But we don’t agree on backstory, motive, or anything else. And I wasn’t satisfied with even my version of the story, so I went back to him driving to the café.
He picks out our café even though we’re not the first he will pass. He passes Haloed Grounds first, and then a rapper bar on the corner, and then us, Lethe Bank. He makes a clear choice. Does the number of cars make a difference? Do the names make a difference? While most of us have written ad copy for the city, we don’t think much about advertising here. Mostly we cater to regulars, so why would we think too much about name recognition, or what those names might mean to Republicans coming out to see us? We don’t. We concentrate on our games, our stories and poems and essays we write for each other and ourselves, the secret workshops we hold inside the city, memorization groups we’ve started. We have a lot on our minds.
And he does, too, that day, but I didn’t know what it had to do with us.
This is the kind of thing they said we were responsible for, which is why no one comes when I press the secret buttons under the bar. Which is why the Republic Police do not show up in time, why we are always told that we have to handle it ourselves. This is the way it goes when imaginative literature, poetry, anything with a scrap of decency is banned from inside the city. We cause emotions without product directive, emotions without prescription. People read our writing and feel something, and they don’t know what to do with that emotion. In the city, all those pretty pieces of writing you see—most of them done by us when we absolutely have to earn money—have a directive: buy this tooth cream, explore this underground chasm, invest in this high-rolling casino. So if we make you feel sad or happy, you can find resolution in a purchase. But literature, on the other hand, doesn’t let you off the hook that easy, and that’s why there was a time when we were blamed for a lot of murders and mayhem that went on. Music caused this; fiction caused that. This man saw this movie and committed this crime. People thought about things the government didn’t want people thinking about. Now, ad campaigns are so personalized to cater to your every taste that they’ve become specific in their manipulation—which, apparently, is our skill. So, while we can’t write what we want, we write what will sell.
The man accuses a table full of poets and writers of killing his daughter, Sam. To prove it, he produces a scrap of paper taken from her hand that had on it the following phrase: Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me. And he asks who wrote it, and we could recite the whole thing by heart, but Starla tells him it is Emily Dickinson.
I can see him, back at his house, busting down the door of the bathroom when he knocks and doesn’t get an answer. The wood splinters at the lock, so it would be sharp to fall against when he finally does go through. I see her like a Waterhouse painting of Ophelia underwater, only fully dressed in her school colours, a black and tan uniform perhaps, or blue and tan, with her white face under the water and her black hair rising like a silk cushion around her head. She must have had a lot of courage and strength not to come back up to the surface of a bathtub. It would have taken only a nod, you know, to bob her head back up out of the water. She had to hold herself under. And I don’t think of her eyes as being open when I imagine the scene, not like Scott does. She’s not horrific or startling; she’s quiet and buried, like Snow White under glass.
He wants to see Emily Dickinson. And I know the group shouldn’t have laughed, but it’s the irony of everything that comes back and kicks you in the ass. Would he have been this angry if he knew that Dickinson was dead, that she wasn’t a living villain, out to hurt his daughter or other young girls in the Republic? Would he have sought her in the OutSkirts, among us, if he’d remembered that, oh, she died in 1886? No, she won’t be out there. And this galls us, that the poetry that is the most moving, that causes the strongest emotions, isn’t even ours. And the other poets have no idea that the man is looking to kill someone, only that their poetry is hardly as effective and that this man is ignorant of literature. The kind of irony we chat about daily in the café. Some of us slip real poetic lines into advertisements all the time. For wine, Keats: “Oh for a draught of vintage!” And then they show the bottle and the man dying of thirst. Eliot for selling pickups to men: “And there will be a time to wonder, Do I dare? And, Do I dare?” Blake for oven mitts: “What hand dare seize the fire?” We sneak them in where we can. But these are in-jokes, for us, because it doesn’t matter.
And now, after a long time, maybe years, of no “literature-connected incident,” this man comes in doing exactly what people supposedly did when reading literature, though this rarely happens to us and we are exposed to the deadly emotion-producing stuff all the time. The media call us immune—we see through fiction and poetry and we can handle the emotions because we bend them, and are, therefore, ourselves unstable. So there are thousands of us who have the power to manipulate people—we’ve drunk enough of the poison to be immune—and we have to pay for any unstable words of Dickinson that cause a young girl to drown herself. Powerful and responsible, but exiled and needed at the same time. For the people of the Republic then, literature moved them, really moved them, and that’s the biggest potential audience for a bestseller—only there aren’t any; just full length action-oriented infomercials and novel-length ads, But this man, this Dylan Hailey, was affected by a death. Not a poem. The girl was affected by her own life going in some bizarre way. This explanation is unacceptable to Mr. Hailey. Because when you see your daughter underwater in that blue way, her hand holding onto something, she is telling you that the piece of paper is key. And you will go anywhere to find the answer to that key, and you will not believe anyone connected to that key is innocent. And you will point your gun at a mystery writer, an environmental essayist, and two poets looking for the answer to that key, and maybe the key to Emily Dickinson’s apartment.
I think Starla’s chapbook, The Bend of Light Through Water, an excellent collection of poems she wrote following Mr. Hailey’s visit, returns to the central problem I’ve been trying to understand. Light is distorted in water—not only the light that enters it, as if seen from below, but also light as seen from above. When he looked down at her face through the water, he didn’t see truth. I don’t think Hailey ever saw the truth, even at the end. I think he came close, but he had no references, no way of understanding context. Is context what I want to say? It’s close. Maybe narrative is better. Or practice, as Barry said in his essay. Hailey did not have practice with contextualizing his experience.
He sits down at the table, still holding the gun, and asks for a glass of water. I bring it to him, setting it down as he leans back to let me move in front of him. I think about being a hero—I write adventure fiction and ads for Boy’s Life—but it’s one thing to think about being the hero and another thing to actually be one. Those punches are easy to write—“he fit a right cross under his chin”—but have you tried one? So I don’t. I bring him his water—I offer to fix him a coffee, and what am I thinking? He doesn’t need the caffeine. He asks me to sit, so there are six of us at the table; Joan, the mystery writer who eventually filled in some of the blanks, stays at the table in the back, moving to the blue couch under Van Gogh’s Starry Night only when he asks her to.
Joan takes the biggest risk. “She’s dead,” she says.
And he looks at her, moves the gun in her direction.
“All the people she loved died. She died of grief.” She says this in a matter of fact way, so that he will know the truth and not want to hurt anyone. In the way that Charlie tells this moment, he grossly overplays the man’s grief. But, even if it’s badly written, the man does break down. Big sobs. He covers his mouth, as if he is trying to hold them back, but they keep bursting through his fingers, out of his eyes. He still holds the gun, but it wavers at all of us in a casual way—an afterthought of malice, though still dangerous. Charlie makes this the reason the man fired the gun in the end. He says the turning point was right here, when he makes the connection between himself and Emily Dickinson—and I think it’s important—but I see the connection as also being between his daughter, Sam, and Emily. Because what the others don’t write down, not even Barry, was what Joan said after that. She says, “Emily wrote about dying a lot when she was trying to understand the death of her friends.” That’s what I think has to be the moment when we started helping him contextualize and grieve. And maybe I’m oversimplifying it, but I’m trying to find where the narrative line is inside his head. What leads to what leads to the gun going off?
I think if Emily had been alive, she would have died that day. He needs to do some action—just like he’s been taught by all those commercials. He has an emotion. He has to take some action. And this is what makes it difficult for everyone at that table, I think. Everyone knows that he is going to have to do something—at least fire the gun. That’s one of the first rules of mystery writing: if you have a gun in a story, it must go off.