Wide World In Celebration and Sorrow

by Leon Rooke

  A minute later, he’s doing it. He’s doing it without even the dollar. He screws the light bulb between his lips, screws it tight, standing there at the front door looking out at the dark night and the lopsided woman’s face with her open mouth. He does it, nothing happens, then he crouches, grimaces, and gives that bulb a last extra twist. The light flickers, it goes out. “Uh-oh, pay up,” Bed and I say, because Daddy Stump hasn’t said anything about flickers. But he smiles. He gives that bulb a thump, and that light comes on. It comes on and stays on. About 40 wattage on, I’d say. It doesn’t flicker any more, even as he says “Excuse me, Sweetheart,” a rumble, but that’s what it sounds like, and he strolls past the light woman and down the steps into the yard, where he performs these several little spins, these struts, his head cocked, like he wants us to observe that he is not attached to by wires or On and Off switches of any kind, except maybe his tongue.

  Because later he tells us the tongue does it, gets the job done, but only if he’s been drinking, which he was doing that night, running back and forth from the Intensive Care chamber where Mama Stump presides in her agony, to his hooch stash behind the corn meal.

  So I am now bringing in the glass of water which he has called for and which he cannot get himself, the water that is meant for Mama Stump who is too infirmed to drink it or even to know her nurse has come with it. Daddy Stump is hoisted up by the wall where I expect him to be, near the head of Mama Stump’s bed, and she is there laid out in bed with only her dark brow and her closed eyes showing, the skin of those eyes dark as pecan shells, these peach pit eyes which are always closed, not even breathing insofar as I or Bed can tell, though Daddy Stump claims she can hear and understand every word said, or others unsaid, so watch it, he says, if you don’t want to get swatted.

  But he does not say that now. What he is saying now, which is like he’s inside a story he has been telling Mama Stump over the past minutes, is “Itu, itu.” This with a kind of smirk, or laugh, on his face, the same as was when he was doing his 40 watts with the lopsided woman’s light bulb. All around the four walls are these head-high grease spots in the past coma year he’s put there. He is hootched up against the wall, the leg cast, which is all the way up to his fanny, covered by his super twill ratty-edged trousers, only his pink toes with the long toenails showing, his head scrunched down deep into his shoulder blades or collar bone, deep into the grimy, yellowish neck brace. That one rebuilt shoulder riding up even with his turbaned ears. This lick of black shiny sideburn hair, which he wouldn’t let them shave when they were scraping his head down to the hide, poking out from the wrappings wild as a crow’s nest. A shadow folding from him to the corner and shooting on up the next wall.

  “Itu,” he’s saying. “Itu.”

  Laughing full-out now, and looking down at Mama Stump like he’s sure she’s laughing too, if only under the covers where no one will ever see it.

  I lift out Mama Stump’s hand, her arm brown as ginger, like a dead, shrivelled root you’d pull from the ground, and I wrap her cold fingers around the glass, though she’ll never know it and pretty soon the glass will plop over and wet the bed, the same as Bed will me once we are sawing the logs on that open-out couch.

  It’s the asbestos, according to Daddy Stump. The asbestos in the walls, which has brought about this strange discoloration of the loved one’s skin, and he will sue the pants off somebody, once he figures out who.

  “‘Itu, I’m going,’” he’s saying. “They’ve got this scrawl down at the bottom of the screen,” he’s telling the patient. “This white print scrawl which is a translation of what these Japanese characters are saying up in the working part. The picture’s working part, where this little fellow is working all-out, on the top of this nice-looking woman. They been going at it, you see, and when he gets there, does he say, I’m coming? The way me and you would? No, what he’s saying is ‘Itu, Itu,’ with this thrashing of breath, these grunts, with this white scrawl down at the bottom telling us what he’s really saying is ‘I’m going, I’m going!’

  “‘Itu, Itu.’”

  He even comes down from the wall, Daddy Stump does, to slap his knee, his casted leg, he’s enjoying his story that much, and now looking over at Mama Stump under her covers to see if she’s got it yet, is she laughing yet, which she isn’t and won’t.

  “That’s what they say over there,” he tells her. “What do you think of that?”

  But Mama Stump doesn’t care what they say over there, or over here, or anywhere else in the world. Mama Stump’s gone to where she can’t think about it.

  So I leave her fingers wrapped around that glass, and slip on out, glad for the minute that I have not had to brush her teeth or wash her limbs, coax the pudding cleanser into her hair, salve her, spray her, switch her backside over to the cooler portion of sheet – do anything other than get that water – as he slumps back to the wall and goes on with that “Itu” business, or wherever it is he goes when he goes in there to tell her what it is he goes in there to tell her.

  In the kitchen, Bed is splashing up water from the floor pool, all over herself, wetting down that mud, which she’s got slung now from one end to the other, over the dirty dishes, the curtains, the windows and door, and chunks of it up on the ceiling and on that hanging light bulb.

  “Stupendous,” is what she’s saying

  “First-rate.”

  “Incredibly yours.”

  Now it’s night. It is night, and bedtime, and Bed is getting ready for bed. Getting Bed ready for bed is what brings on my shivers, for to get Bed ready I have first to open the couch, check the wet spots, root out the pillows, see the rubber sheet is stretched flat, see she has her stuffed doll, raise the windows and fluff the sheets and spread the towels over the wet spots. I have to get her promise that tonight she won’t.

  “Oh, no, Oh Swami. Never again.”

  I have first to do with her as Mama Stump has said she once had to do with me. I have to sit her down on the potty, to seat her there and coax her, shake her, run water from the taps, from the taps and the coffin-box shower stall, and sing her ditties about little girls on leaking boats in the tranquil flow of rivers, and press and poke her kidneys, pour glasses of water down between her legs, into her crevices, and woo her, browbeat her, though in the end, whether she tinkles or doesn’t tinkle it will come to the same thing: in the night I will feel her cold puddle, I will come awake to the feel of its icy widening, her puddle spreading, arriving on under us and around us in a circle wide as your backside will ever find you, then to hear Bed murmuring, “Excellent, excellent,” as she drops back into sleep again, her hand still and soft in mine, just the way Mama Stump said mine was in hers in those days long ago, before we had a dog, or asbestos, or Bed, or a house that had, as Daddy Stump likes to say, walls we could call our own.

  Mama Stump is beside me on one side and Daddy Stump is guiding me on the other, scurrying me down the hall, both of them shouting “Hold it, hold it, one more second now,” Mama Stump with this white towel spun over her head and in her soft black slip, her red toenails, Daddy Stump with his hairy legs, and me with my little pecker poked way out, holding it, us scooting along. Until it starts whipping about like a running hose you can’t catch hold of, it snaking each which way, on their dancing feet and over their legs, splattering the walls, as they whip me and my little thing over the toilet where maybe one last little spurt will spurt down.

  Then back to the bed, though not my bed, in between them there in their big dry bed, Daddy Stump’s hips about where my feet are, me leaning into his mattress weight as Mama Stump collects my hand over her warm belly and laces both of her hands into mine, then his hand there too and Daddy Stump complaining, “He won’t never grow out of it,” while Mama Stump sighs, they both sigh, and she answers back, “This is nice, so nice. So let’s hush, let’s all of us Stumps hush and go to sleep now.”

  HEIDEGGER, FLOSS, ELFRIDE, AND THE CAT

  Lights that flickered, curtain at a certain
pitch in the summoning, the rendezvous with Frau Blochmann now concluded, Heidegger clamps his trouser legs and bicycles home.

  Floss withholds opinion on the Master’s affair with the eminent colleague, which he knows will continue another few decades. What he wonders is what Elfride will say when the philosopher king comes through the door. That Jewish bitch again? Or will she say nothing, having just dispatched her doctor friend through that very door. This love business is a bit tiring, is Floss’s thought. Get back to work, he tells Heidegger. Not that such is required. After swallowing a bit of Elfride’s tasty stew Heidegger will be at his desk. Being and Time, thinks Floss, page 355. Quote, Resoluteness, by its ontological essence, is always the resoluteness of some factical Dasein at a particular time.

  Floss, in his cramped library carrel, has no argument with that. Well and good. Floss and resoluteness and Heidegger, Floss believes, are one and the same.

  They are together, he and the Freiburg sage, working the deep trench.

  Heidegger now writes, quote, The essence of Dasein as an entity is its existence.

  Without entity, no essence: well and good, remarks Floss to himself. Particles afloat in space, what purpose they?

  Quote, The existential indefiniteness of resoluteness never makes itself definite except in a resolution. Page 346.

  Here Floss wants to say Hold the phone. Floss wants to put his foot down.

  Floss’s mind is rapidly scribbling notes to himself. These notes are scratching like a dog inside Floss’s brain. Hold the phone is but one of the dog’s bones.

  Floss’s index finger is rapidly scanning the lines, speed-reading Heidegger as the master composes. Are not he and Heidegger that close? Are they not twinned with respect to Being and Time? Are they not brothers?

  Floss can quote aloud, at any time, Floss can, any one of Heidegger’s current or future thoughts. The text is spread open on the desk for company only.

  Photographic. That’s what Floss’s mind is.

  Never mind that he has scribbled into his notebook the erroneous page reference. His hand did. Floss’s mind knows the difference.

  Not 346. 355. Floss has jumped ahead. He always knows where Heidegger is going; often he arrives at the destination while the King of Thought is still clearing his throat.

  Quote, Only by authentically Being-their-Selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another.

  Ah! Floss thinks. Let’s not get too, you know, personal. Like.

  In Floss’s view this statement is another Hold the phone. This is Heidegger fighting a headwind.

  That someone has just this moment walked into Heidegger’s study is radiantly clear to Floss. Being with one another is an untypical Heidegger sentiment. The Master has been thwarted in his goals. Ergo, the line’s impurity.

  Who is the culprit this time?

  Excited, Floss thumps his knees.

  Elfride, of course.

  This is Heidegger being influenced by Elfride. This is the wife calling the tune. It is Elfride saying, If you are going to be with me, then be… with me.

  Floss can see Elfride hovering over the great man’s shoulders. He can see her whisking dandruff from the great man’s shoulders with a tough whisk broom.

  —Don’t mind me, Elfride is saying.

  Heidegger doesn’t like any of this. Naturally, he doesn’t. Her very presence fills him with distaste. She has destroyed his flow of pure thought. Be with one another? How has that monstrous phrasing got onto his page?

  Four a.m. Heidegger never sleeps, that explains him. But must Elfride do her dusting at this hour?

  Floss thinks not. Floss thinks Elfride must have something up her sleeve.

  —Dearest soul, the great man says – can’t you go away? Can’t you leave the room and quietly close the door?

  —You know what happens if I don’t dust, don’t you? Elfride says.

  Heidegger doesn’t know what happens if Elfride doesn’t dust. He is pretty certain Elfride means to tell him.

  —Can’t you make a guess? Oh, go ahead. Go out on a limb.

  Heidegger is thinking he has always been out on that limb. He was out there first on the limb with the Jesuits when he was a boy, then with Husserl, the so-called father of phenomenology; he was out on the limb with Elfride, then with Hannah, then with Elfride and Hannah jointly. And don’t forget colleague Blochmann. Occasionally the Stray Other. Now he is back on the limb with Elfride. Elfride is dusting the limb.

  —I do not intend to engage in your theatrics, dearest soul, he says. I intend to sit here and work on this passage on page 355 until I get it right.

  —It’s right, dear one, Elfride says. I’m here to tell you it is already right. You get it any righter, then I won’t know what to do with myself.

  Floss, hearing this exchange, leans back in his tight carrel chair. He crosses his arms over his chest. He closes his eyes.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” Floss says.

  Heidegger spins his head. Elfride ignores Floss. Floss is a pest; he pops in at inconvenient times; otherwise, he is nothing to Elfride.

  —Keep out of this, Floss, she says.

  Heidegger sighs. These sighs are magnificent. They express his full contempt of those who would make the philosopher’s already impossible task that much more difficult.

  Elfride, normally the most anchored of women, is subject to flights of fancy. Now she’s whisking her broom at vacant air. She has even given that vacancy a name: Time Being. There was a time, Floss recalls, when Elfride was more besotted with Heidegger than some now assert is the case. It is all that Hannah’s work. Months before Elfride and her future husband met Elfride had carried in her pockets notes destined for the magician of Freiburg. Don’t deny it. Yesterday I saw you looking at me. Or: Last week I blocked the doorway and without a word you swept by me. Or: I beseech you. Love me. She still retains these undelivered disintegrating missives under lock and key in a wooden chest buried beneath the floor. They prove her love. They prove her love existed prior to his. This makes her proud. Not even the great can be first in every regard. These notes will be published after her death. The instructions are contained in a sealed envelope affixed with her granddaughter’s name. Not in this envelope or in the locked chest is the narrative describing the gypsy fortune teller’s role in their haunted lives. Well, are not all lives haunted, Floss, who has never loved, reminds himself. The gypsy said to Elfride, On the first rainy afternoon, following your economics class, stand beneath the first blooming tree your steps venture upon. The lover meant for you will appear. Cold rain dripped, afterwards she caught a cold that endured through many weeks, and periodically through each wheeling year, this existing as nothing because love’s astonishing light penetrated the drooping boughs and stormed her heart. Heidegger, under a black umbrella, indeed appeared. Through wet lashes he imagined he saw a dying tree where nothing had stood days before.

  —You. What is your name?

  —Elfride Petri.

  —Why are you standing in the rain?

  —Waiting for you. I am your fate.

  Heidegger believed in fate as he did in Plato, with suspicion, particularly with regard to the monumentally salient question What is truth, but he was impressed. She was also pretty, though with rain pouring over her face he would reserve opinion on that. Yet when this schoolgirl fitted her body against his, his heart which was three quarters stone fragmented and certain sounds issued from his mouth never until that moment heard by himself or by any other. Fortunately only children on a dilapidated school bus, there to witness ancient Marburg splendours, were present, and they were too distracted to absorb any image of the historic coupling. This was because rain had become sleet, sleet had become snow, which in minutes had blanketed the lovers, flakes ascending and descending a second and third time, and then repeatedly, in abstract harmony with their movement. Floss, who was there and could have sought the better view had he been that kind of person, was mostly concerned with Heidegger’s black
umbrella which the gusting wind ripped into sundry pieces, the cloth flitting hither and yon like unruly crows, if crows were ever to attempt flight in such weather.

  Heidegger has put down his writing pen. He is leaning back in his chair. He is crossing his arms over his chest. He fits his tongue beneath the upper lip; he can see clearly his thick Führer’s moustache. The sighting gives him strength, although he distinctly prefers his own. He is reminded that theirs is a nation-building task. The moustache renews him in the impossible goal.

  He sighs anew, leaning farther back. He closes his eyes.

  His sighs now, however, are obviously feigned. They exist merely as an admonishment to his wife. Feigned, they express his resignation. His disappointment with married – the assailed – life. The sighs are meant to convey to Elfride that he has given up. How can he work with a loudmouth duster in the room, chattering nonstop?

  Gone from his head is that trail he was tracking re resoluteness.

  But that quickly does his mind seize again upon the trail. His shoe soles hit the floor. His burden has lifted. The pen flies into his hand. Once more he is at work. He is already scribbling again.

  He is scribbling, Floss thinks, quote, The resolution is precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time.

  Hold the phone, Floss is thinking. The projection is termed disclosive only because the thought has just this second revealed itself to the sage. Ditto, factically.

  But Heidegger is breaking his pen’s point underlining this significant line. It is imperative that the line be printed in the italic. If the line is not set in the italic then readers fifty years from now, speedreaders like that dunderhead Floss, will fly right by it. They will be blind to its pertinence, as he himself is blind to the dust, the dandruff – as he would wish to be blind to Elfride’s galling presence.