by Curtis White
When he said things like that, in what she took to be a knowing and superior way, she would say, “There is nothing so dull as innocence.”
Touché!
Once during the Christmas season Jake and Fanni were eating at the legendary Stockyard Trough down in Decatur. She started in her pell-mell way with a dilled Blanquette de Veau. The chef had prepared six portions for the evening and she ate them all. She followed that with dozens of pizza hot-pockets off the children’s menu. (Yes, some of the little darlings cried when they were told that there were no more pizza hot-pockets, but she insisted that some people would have to sacrifice for the greater good, and she volunteered the children.)
The headwaiter scrambled with a sponge to erase the featured dishes as they fell from the little chalkboard out front, inexorably, one after another. At neighboring tables, the waiters sensed the drift of things and started encouraging guests to order quickly while there was still something more than bread and butter to eat.
“What!!??” one obese old-timer complained, a Cargill seed cap cockeyed on his head, bloody stains from rib-eyes past on his overalls. “No beef? None at all? Not even an old piece of flank? Not even a burger? How is that possible? This is the Stockyard Trough, isn’t it? Do you know what a stockyard is? What’s that you say? Her? That little girl over there with the Marquis’s boy? Are you saying she’s eaten the entire cow? I’ll be damned!”
Having decimated the main courses, she retreated to the soups and polished off one pot each of borscht, split pea, and soup du jour, potato/leek. (“André! Scratch the soups!”) At this point she observed that her napkin was soiled and asked for another. Pitiless, she ate the herbed caviar roulade, the crepes with caviar filling, potatoes with caviar, caviar éclairs, oysters and caviar, and—a coup de main, de resistance, de théâtre, d’état, de grâce, and de foudre—a cobbler with knuckle truffles (the low, obsequious sort common to the Aberdeens), creamed clotters, and crushed sweet-rind. (If you’re looking for the recipe, it’s in Mark Bittman’s Cobblers and Gobblers: Cooking with Cottage Clusters and Custard Clotters.)
And why did she eat these things? She ate these things because that’s just the kind of gal she was.
6.
“But you know, no matter where we are
We’re always touching by underground wires.”
—OF MONTREAL
But what brought Fanni and Jake and their marriage to a dangerous point was sex. At first, living in the country, consumed with the imperatives of shopping and eating, she hardly knew that sex existed. But one day she discovered (while strolling through the Web seeking to find things that she could buy all of) that she could perhaps also consume other human beings. Seriously, she sat upright, stared straight ahead, and had a little epiphany. Consuming people! Of course. Why had she not thought of this before?
So she joined a Web group called “Sex Gorging with Friends.” There were people out there, aware of the needs of the gorgers, who essentially offered themselves, on the site, for ready consumption. Basically, they said, as you might expect, “Eat me,” but they also said more complicated things like “I’m lonely” or “Let’s party” or “Want to date?”
There’s something weirdly sweet about these little expressions one finds on porn sites. It’s as if they were the childish nothings that are written on those tiny, heart-shaped Valentine’s Day candies that kids pass out at school. “Kiss me!” “Bite me!” “Fist me!” “Ass Maul™ me.” It was then that she had a vision, an apotheosis, if you will, that she must take everything, all the boys, as well as the girls, inside. Like some louche Rabelaisian conceit, she would crouch beneath the sex tree, heavy with fruit, spread wide her thighs, and shake them all down into her cavernous interior.
Soon Fanni had the triple burden of bringing home U-Hauls loaded with the day’s purchases, eating all of the chocolate decadence cookies in the world, all the spit-roasted chickens at every convenience store, and balling as many boys and girls as possible in motels all across central Illinois. A carnival it was, both comical and obscene.
When Jake complained to his grandfather about his wife, the Marquis replied wisely, “She is the wife of the grandson of the Marquis de N—. Her life should be given over to the frantic spending of extravagant wealth, to no purpose at all, sure only that she lives on the labor of others. She must sacrifice and empty all being, but not by swallowing it, for God’s sake. She is being too literal. It must be entirely wasted to be worthy of our lineage. Thrown out on the ground, if you will. Over time, even the slaves come to understand the wisdom of this arrangement. For what we throw on the ground becomes their livelihood. I don’t call that complicated.
“You could be better at this yourself. Honestly, I think there’s something of the mystic mendicant in you. What do you do with the money I throw at you? Give it to that woman so that she can pursue mere things? The point is the infinite emptying out of the thing-in-itself in the spectacle of barren consumption. Is that so hard to understand? No one should actually want the crappy shit! Let alone want to take it inside them! We are not a digestive system! We are aristocrats! The landed gentry! Where did you find this ragamuffin child, in some Aurora condo?”
“Actually, yes, that’s where she grew up, as I told you.”
“Oh, I knew I’d gotten the idea from somewhere. I assumed that you had the good sense to be lying about it.”
There was not even a moment’s solace for him when the Marquis suggested that, if all else failed, she might be stoned at the city periphery, under the freeway overpass near the new Home Depot. That’s where that sort of thing usually took place. After all, unlike spending money, ruthless sexual roistering was exclusively the prerogative of the oligarch boys, as far as the Marquis was concerned, and he knew his stuff regarding the ancient protocols. The girls, and especially the wives, he said, could just “sit on their tuffets.” But after a moment’s fantastic conjuring of this stoning, Jake remembered that his grandfather was from an older and very conservative generation. Attractive as it was, stoning was probably out of the question in the world as presently construed.
Contrary to what Jake may have thought, Fanni got nothing out of all this—not prestige, not wealth, not the love of her community—and she certainly did not get anything like what we would understand as pleasure. She did it all out of a sense of duty. She did it because she was obedient. She followed the instructions delivered by the inner voice of the world. In fact, she was so pure that she put to shame the world itself. Seen in the right light, she was beatific. She fulfilled prophecy. In the sad end, when Jake asked her to explain herself, she said, severely, “I am.” Like those of the Sphinx, her victims festooned the rocks below while she gazed innocently at the horizon.
7.
“It is madness to suppose one owes something to one’s mother…
She casts us into a world beset with dangers, and once in it, ’tis for us to manage as best we can.”
—THE MARQUIS DE SADE
I don’t want to make it seem as if the sexual troubles experienced by Jake and Fanni were in any way out of the ordinary. They were simply part—a very vivid part, agreed—of the Way of the World, as the following news item attests.
THE CHILDREN MUST LEAVE
(AP) In a legal decision that will be debated and reinterpreted for decades, the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of several recent state and municipal laws seeking to use civil confinement against potential sex criminals, especially potential pedophiles but also rapists, sexual cannibals, and those who perform “unnatural acts with the beasts of the field” (Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas). What is extraordinary is that the Court let stand several federal appeals court decisions affirming the constitutionality of laws in Vermont, Oregon, and other states allowing mass preventive detention of people who only might commit sex crimes against children. Some of the people who brought suit are presently in detention even though they have not committed a crime. Of course, it is impossible in most cases to know
their true intentions, and so they have been called “malefactors in sexual thought crimes against children.”
Most of those presently in detention are there solely on the testimony of friends and relatives, although there is a surprisingly large number who have self-identified as sex criminals in potentia and turned themselves in, many with elaborate written accounts, duly notarized, of the pedophilic acts they haven’t committed.
Asked to explain the thinking behind Oregon’s version of this law, the state attorney general, Lisa Mulhern, said, “Our law requires little explanation. These are our children we are talking about. They deserve our protection.”
Critics of the laws claim that they violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment since the laws identify particular classes of people vulnerable to the laws, especially priests (reasonably), but also wicked uncles, and “old men who live alone” (West Virginia), as well as novel categories like “sexual cannibals.” Critics also complain of the vagueness of the laws since uncles are also, in other connections, fathers and husbands and brothers. Finally, critics worry that the laws will be convenient vehicles for retribution for other insults or imagined injuries that may be entirely the invention of the accuser.
In an eleventh-hour amicus briefing, the ACLU—an organization composed almost entirely of adults, the Court noted—argued that it was the children who should be confined. Again, the Court did not find this persuasive.
Although analysis of this historic decision has just begun, legal scholars seem to agree that in theory everyone is now subject to civil confinement as a potential child sex predator, rapist, or sexual cannibal. When Ms. Greta Kosar, a spokesperson for the Court, was asked if this meant that everyone should now consider him- and herself to be in theoretical civil confinement, she smiled and commented, “That is a plausible outcome of the Court’s logic, yes.”
“Does that include members of the Court itself?”
“I can only say that the Court does not mean to needlessly alarm the public. These laws will not be enforced capriciously but only where appropriate and on a case-by-case basis. The Court has had this assurance from the states, and we trust them to be responsible.”
Finally, in Vermont, the tiny Roman Catholic hamlet of Further Enrichment concluded that the only way to be certain to avoid the implications of the Court’s rulings was to drive the town’s residents beneath the age of sixteen to the county line and warn them not to return until they are of age. While a few parents complained about this preemptive action, most others seemed relieved. One neighbor commented, “It was a necessary thing to do. You can’t live with that sort of uncertainty. They were a provocation with lunchboxes. For a close-knit community like ours, that’s just not acceptable. Nevertheless, they are our kids and we wish them all the best.” The village priest observed that the expulsion was appropriate under the Church’s “proximity to sin” doctrine. (A papal encyclical titled “At Arm’s Length” will be posted to the Vatican’s website on Thursday.)
At the time of this report, none of the children of Further Enrichment have retained legal representation. Given today’s Supreme Court decision, it seems unlikely that many—if any—lawyers will want to take on the professional and personal risks.
One Burlington public defender commented, “It’s really a puzzle to me how these kids could ever obtain legal representation. After all, wouldn’t lawyer-client confidentiality, with its faintly scabrous suggestion of private meetings behind closed doors, make the attorney vulnerable to the new confinement laws? In fact, since the laws specify preventive confinement, it would be prudent of state bar associations if they announced publicly that none of their members will represent anyone sixteen and younger in the current legal climate. Even that is no guarantee, given the expansiveness of the ruling.”
Of the town’s affected children, only three-year-old Tommy Rogers of rural Further Enrichment was willing to take questions from reporters. When asked what he thought of the Court’s decision, he replied boldly, “What are why here? Ha! Here come meeee!”
Residents last reported seeing Tommy, his hand held by his older sister Tammy Rogers, age 8, walking south on State Highway 10 toward the Massachusetts border where there was rumored to be an aid station set up by the Department of Homeland Security.
8.
Faust: “This damned Here!”
—GOETHE
Fanni grew up in a brick apartment on a cracked concrete slab in suburban Chicago (it was, in fact, Aurora). There was a Casey’s and a Dollar Store down the block. Her mother’s only possession, other than her clothes, was a 1967 Dodge Dart with bald tires and a leaky radiator. Fanni has a photograph of her mother sitting in the driver’s seat of the Dodge, its window down, her arm cocked on the ledge as if she were a person in control. In control of the vehicle, in control of her life. She is smiling.
Unfortunately, it is not true that she was in control of anything. To show this, let us take this photo, open it up, and spread its contents out on a table in order to get a better understanding of just what is in this photograph. Once it is opened up in this detailed way, we notice that her blouse is not fresh. We notice that she appears to have gum disease. In the pupils of her eyes, one can clearly see that the person she is smiling at is her drug dealer. (His elongated convex image is also present in the rear passenger’s window.) We could further deduce that she is “going out” and leaving her daughter with the drug dealer, who will be asked to serve as babysitter. (His name was Alphonse and he was actually very nice to the daughter when he was conscious. He protected her from the next-door neighbor, about whom more in a moment.) The only thing that is really clear is that she is entirely lacking in self-knowledge while being vain and self-absorbed, a very taxing combination of traits.
And yet if you saw her today you would swear she is pretty, and indeed she is!
Her father is a high school teacher in Naperville. He teaches science. He filed for divorce when Mom took Ecstasy and brought home a “friend from the motorcycle club” named Filthy. Filthy was a very civic-minded man and helped administer the club’s (invitation only) “Cocaine is Commerce” convention and charity fundraiser. The club thought this convention was funny, but local addicts enjoyed the free samples whether the convention was a joke or not. For her father, there did not seem to be a question of who should stay and who should go, so he left. As for Filthy, they finally got rid of him when Alphonse declared that he was a bad influence on Fanni, but the truth is that he was only willing to leave when he was given a cigar box full of Alphonse’s best cannabis.
Nothing about teaching high school biology prepared Fanni’s father for this sort of behavior in a wife. When he left, he looked as if he were a small furry mammal kept in a shoebox on which a brick has been dropped. The court awarded custody to Mom, and Dad got visitation rights that seemed to have something to do with leap years. As far as the court was concerned, a very prudent principle had been maintained: a young child needs its mother.
It was a fine piece of work all the way around. And I haven’t even come to what lived next door in the dismal little duplex in which she was now doomed to grow up. Her neighbor, a person that she shared a wall with, a very thin wall, was a man in jeans with a crotch so filthy that it looked as if it had been used to strain clotted cream.
“Hi, honey,” he would say to her, “Watcha got there? A dolly?”
This is where Alphonse would say, “Chingate, cabrón. No to bother her, pendejo.” Sometimes he took out a knife to make his point more vivid, but, as I mentioned, at other times he was “away.”
This was the karmic condition into which she was born, like it or not. It all came to maturity twenty years down the road when Fanni married Jake and invited him to watch as a craigslist “handyman” plowed her hindwise with a virile member whose permanent readiness for such chores defies the studious attention of the contemplative mind.
But if you think that I am suggesting that Fanni was a monster, a slut, fallen, cruel,
deranged, or even just a little carried away, that is a mistake. For, in a sense, Fanni was just one of the many. Hurtful as she was for young Jake, she was just doing what everybody was suddenly doing as if they too were, like the little men on horses, just copies of something. She was just an expression of something beyond herself. God? Fate? Genes? Neurons? Who knows? What is important is not to blame her for the usual things, her tragic flaws or her sins, because she lacked nothing, she was not acquisitive, she was not a “shopper,” she was not a gourmand, and she was not a sexual predator. She just was what many were. I wouldn’t want to call it a belle époque, but it was an epoch. She was simply of her moment. I would go so far as to say that if there was someone having trouble fitting in, it was innocent Jake. Many of Fanni’s new friends even commented that he wasn’t a “people person.”
I believe, to put it metaphysically, and that’s really the way it should be put, that Fanni was part of a spiritual warp in space that had caused the cosmic monkey soul to go digitally viral. (But who can blame her for that? No one intends with malice aforethought to be the catalyst for a new version of cosmic monkey soul. Agreed?) Almost everyone in the community, but all the women for sure, found themselves caught in a strange compulsion, a wretchedness, in which they were not at all unlike the black-clad messengers on horseback with whom we began this tale. No one “wanted” to do any of this. They had no idea what they were doing or why they were doing it. They found themselves carried before a gale, as if a strong hand were pressing at the smalls of their backs. They drifted as if they were caught in the solar winds that move about in the empty regions of space, ionized bits purling in warm currents made by coronal emissions.