Lacking Character

by Curtis White

  “Mmm-hmmm?”

  “Did I understand you correctly? If I open the letter, you will shoot me?”

  Laughing. “Yes, obviously, but that shouldn’t worry you because you would never…sir! What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing, Rory. Go to sleep. Are you warm now?”

  30.

  Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

  Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

  And the green freedom of a cockatoo…

  —WALLACE STEVENS

  —after Flann O’Brien

  —I thought cockatoos were white.

  —They are.

  —But this one is lemon yellow.

  —And that one’s orange orange.

  She laughed obscurely.

  —Can I assume that this is not a real cockatoo but one of your made-up things?

  —Please, you’ll hurt his feelings! Actually, he’s quite a bit better than a real cockatoo because he can recite poetry. But you should be careful about what you request. If you ask for Paradise Lost, you’d better get some coffee, because you’ll get it, all night and into the next day. I regret to say that there is no stop or pause on this bird.

  If you are tempted to make a request, I would recommend sonnets. I think his temperament is just right for Petrarch. When he gets going, you’d think he really was in love. Or one of the nice little odes that Mr. Keats taught him. What a show he puts on for the sad parts, especially when he suspects that the poet is disappointed, as poor Johnny surely was. I got so tired of hearing about Fanny this and Fanny that.

  —Say, just how old are you?

  —That is not a proper question for une femme de certain age.

  —Apologies. Does your bird have a name?

  —We call him Amy….

  —Amy?

  —After Amy Lowell, the American versifier and burlesque star.

  —Good Christ! I had no idea she was a stripper!

  —Anyhow, Amy-the-parrot could see right through Johnny’s Shakespearian rhetoric to his testicular indignation, but, then, she is an animal. She gets that sort of thing. Yesterday she began crying while reciting Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock.” Now, that’s a funny poem, I think, not a sad one, unless I’m missing something. I think the word “rape” threw her off. I suspect that the eighteenth century is completely lost on her. Parrots are strangers to irony.

  —I like to cry till I laugh.

  She gave me a “What does that mean?” look, an “out of left field” look. Then:

  —How’s the coffee?

  —You know, I think it’s perfectly balanced.

  —Thank you, but you’re wrong to say it’s balanced. That would imply that there are conflicting elements within it. This particular brew is unconditioned (or “single-sourced,” as your grocer might say, wrongly, but we do not expect our grocers to be metaphysicians). It is One. It has no qualities. In this coffee you taste only coffee’s Suchness.

  —Are you suggesting that this cup in my hands contains coffee’s pure subjective infinity?

  —That’s right.

  Believe it or not, this philosophical commentary on a cup of coffee was all very matter-of-fact for Felicité, like we were just talking about the appropriate blend of light and dark beans. But I was feeling playful, so I risked a riposte.

  —To be honest, I think that your coffee is too complete. Coffee without conflict, unconditioned coffee, is dull. I prefer a synthetic resolution in my brew. Coffee with conditions is okay with me. That’s why I put the hazelnut Coffee-mate in mine.

  —Do you think I didn’t notice? Do you always carry that awful stuff in your pocket?

  —Yes, just in case. And a little Splenda. But I accept your criticism. It just shows why you are ethereal and otherworldly, and I am a mess. A wreck.

  Felicité looked at me sadly and affectionately, much as she looked at Percy when he got into trouble. You’d think I really was a wreck. Then she looked at me some more.

  —There’s something odd about you, speaking of synthetic resolutions.

  —What do you mean?

  —I’m not sure how to put this, but has anyone ever suggested to you that you have a cartoon face? Do you remember Wimpy?

  —Is that a joke?

  —A joke? Cartoons are funny, so if there is a joke it is your own.

  —My dear Queen, never mind that. Never mind cockatoos, long poems, the eighteenth century, coffee whether pure or synthetic, and, certainly, never mind my cartoon face. I have come to you for a reason. I have come to hear what you have to say about Percy. How is he? I have received questions about him. Some people want to know what he is exactly, and how you made him. Are there formulas? Could they make their own Percy at home? Or in college chemistry lab? Many of my readers are very technologically minded. They read novels as if they were reading Popular Mechanics, and I think that’s a remarkable thing.

  Others, the more naïve, perhaps, just want to know what happened to him. Has he adjusted to life back in bonny Islay? Did he find a girl? Settle down? Buy a home? Write a book? They don’t like the ambiguity of his conclusion, and I can hardly blame them. How are they supposed to understand the stuff about being inside a snow globe? They feel as if they have been manipulated emotionally and then just allowed to fall to the floor, like poor Fanni. They feel that you have taken advantage of them. There’s some resentment out there. In spite of everything, they came to care about Percy, to love him, in fact. I felt very much the same way.

  —Oh, he’s fine, the dear one. He’s out on the front lawn now grazing among the spring flowers. He seems particularly fond of the crocus. He says that they are spicy.

  —What? Percy? That doesn’t sound like him at all! Grazing? He was becoming such a philosopher!

  —Well, he is ruminating.

  —This is terrible! None of my readers is going to like this if it’s true! As I said, they really came to care about him, just as if he were a family member. He reminds some people of their own children. But now he’s more like a distant uncle doing twenty to life out on the old chain gang.

  —Which is why I’ve always said that readers are idiots. You are the one who has played them a dirty trick, I think. You’ve led them on and now you expect me to pick up the pieces for you. All I have to say is this: Percy is nothing special. He’s just Percy, and he’s my business.

  —Come on! That’s not fair! He was bright with intelligence and now you describe him as if he were a migrant doing lawn care…or a goat!

  —When we returned from N—, I decided to give him a period of rest. He was getting into too much trouble, and many of his thoughts were…incorrect. You could see that yourself. All that malarkey about living with dogs! The weird orgy fantasies with teenaged girls and platinum-blond suburbanites and ex-cons! I mean, one can only hope he was making it up. And I sure didn’t want him to come home all alienated and introspective and morbid like a ceramic Hamlet. I’d been through enough with him. He needed to have his faith in the simple things of the world restored. Yes, things like grass. Flowers. Dirt. He had become so abstract. I also felt he needed to have his trust in hierarchy and authority restored. As for your readers…do you actually have any? I mean, have you ever seen even one? Or is that just something you throw around to impress people?

  —You know a Queen of Spells could just as easily be a Prince of Potions.

  She gave me a terrible look.

  —And a novelist can munch on grass!

  —Touché! Actually, this is my first novel.

  —Is it?

  —I’m better known as a librettist.

  —Are you?

  —I met Philip Glass in 1970 on the steps outside Holly Solomon’s gallery in SoHo. He was smoking a cigarette with David Bowie and a young Nicolas Africano. That was when I pitched my idea for an opera to him.

  —Opera?

  —That’s what he said! You could see that the idea intrigued him. He asked what I had in mind. I said that the libretto I was working on was
called “Autophagy: A Tragedy.” Very stern, masculine, and Greekish. I said his austere music was perfect for it. Here was a story told at a cellular level. Cells break down their own components in response to nutrient deprivation and in order to keep the lights on eat themselves. I mean, if that isn’t modern operatic material, I don’t know what is. Think about the costumes! Naturally, as they eat, the cells become more and more minimal, just like his music. The whole thing, I said, was a metaphor for the slow self-consumption of Western culture. He really liked the idea, but he thought it should have three acts. But where do you go from there? I was stymied. I worked on it for months and then along came Einstein on the Beach, the sneaky bastard, and that stole my thunder. He got caught up in the hype, and now he might as well be composing radio jingles.

  —Mm-hmmm. You know, I think you could use a period of rest.

  —How’s that?

  —Never mind. Well, I don’t have anything to say about your opera that it doesn’t already say about itself, so, to return to Percy, if you’re worried about him just look out the window. He’s down there now cropping the lawn. This is Tuesday so he’s probably doing some edging.

  I did as she suggested, and there he was, like old Nebuchadnezzar, munching the growing green. The Queen had always seemed so nice. But this? I will admit, it made me anxious for my own safety.

  —Well? Does he look like he’s suffering?

  —No, but he doesn’t seem much like Percy either.

  —Oh, Percy! I sometimes think you’re as clueless as your stupid readers. What is a Percy, after all? A character? Frankly, for any human purpose, he lacks character. He, like you, is more on the order of a cartoon, or a puppet, or luggage.

  —That’s exactly what I came here to find out—what Percy is.

  She sat back in her chair, put her fingers to her chin, as you see people do when they want to look like: “I’m thinking.” And she really was thinking. She was wondering about the capacity of the vessel—me—before her. And who could blame her for that?

  31.

  “[Animals] do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and in complete certainty of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat them up.”

  —HEGEL

  “And what are those little creatures grazing beside Percy?”

  The Queen came to the window and looked down on the lawn.

  “Oh, those are guinea pigs.”

  “Guinea pigs? They look like babies. Human babies.”

  “Yes. They do, don’t they.”

  “So are these just more of your little creations?”

  “No. They are Nature’s creation.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m a little confused. How can guinea pigs look like human babies on all fours?”

  “It is interesting. As I understand it from newspaper articles I’ve read, guinea pigs were introduced into Scotland as pets in the late eighteenth century by Portuguese coffee merchants, with an eye toward product diversification, I suppose. In most places, they’re just guinea pigs early and late, but here on Islay something happened. Some of the pets naturalized and spread rapidly. Then, especially in residential areas of the island, people began to notice little herds of what looked like infants calmly sitting together and munching on front lawns. Obviously, people were horrified at first and ran to pick the babies up and take them inside. But to their amazement, the little creatures scampered off into the forest.”

  I looked at her, my mouth open so wide that my perplexed mind felt like it was dripping from my tongue. All I could manage to say was:

  “This is impossible.”

  “No, this is Islay. We’re isolated, just like the Galapagos. Things have an odd way of evolving here.”

  “My God!”

  “Oh come! It’s not unlike domesticated dogs, is it? You know how they can give those sad-eyed looks that appeal to something parental in us? Something that says to us, ‘Give me food’? Give it another can of Chef Michael’s Canine Cuisine Veal Marsala even if it is twenty pounds overweight and can barely waddle out to ‘go potty.’ The guinea pigs have just taken the next step. They’re domesticated. These babies are actually a kind of emotional parasite. We offer them food and protection because it’s impossible for us not to think that they really are babies. I’m quite serious. If you trap one—carefully!—it will sit in your lap and gurgle and coo. They parasitize our tender feelings and then get plenty to eat. People have offered bottles of formula to them, but they always throw them down and head for the cat kibble.”

  “How do you know they are even guinea pigs?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Some kids trapped young pigs and put them in a cage. When they were about six months old, the children came out to feed them and there they were. Babies. Crying babies, too, because they expand at ‘birth,’ the moment when, like butterfly larvae, they metamorphose into baby form. They were jammed painfully against the cage’s wire mesh and had to be cut out.”

  “Do they just continue to grow? Do they go to school? College?”

  “Oh no. No, no. They have a very short lifespan. The metamorphosis is quite traumatic for the creatures. They live, usually, to be about two, two-and-a-half years old. Then, you know, they’re rodents. They roll over, stick their legs in the air, and die.”

  “I’m feeling a little ill.”

  “Oh, you’re just like the others around here. Some women, especially childless women, are never able to achieve emotional distance. Sure, you can say, ‘They’re only guinea pigs,’ but they just don’t understand. I understand the science of what has happened here, evolution, the logic of parasitism, genetic mutation and all that. But some folks just can’t process it. The ocular evidence is just too strong.”

  “I can see why.”

  “The really tough times are when we experience population explosions and, inevitably, population busts. Like other rodents, they can outbreed their food sources. I suppose we could just start dumping bags of dog food out on lawns that they’ve chewed to the root, but that just increases the magnitude of the problem, doesn’t it? Eventually, Islay would be coast-to-sorry-coast guinea-pig babies. And think of the consequences for the local ecosystem. It would be a puling desert. A baby monoculture. I don’t even know that there would be room for us regular humans. So, we just have to let Nature take its course.”

  “I need to sit down.”

  “When these population crashes get really bad, some people can’t even leave the house for fear of what they’ll see. But even in times of stable growth there is always road kill. That’s hard to take even for me.”

  “That image is not going to leave my brain for a very long time.”

  “I’m sorry, you sensitive thing you. Let me just conclude with two observations, one good, one very bad. First, no one has had to mow a lawn in years. Lawn-care people aren’t happy about it, but homeowners sure are. Second, on the bad side (and I believe that this will shortly lead to legislation calling for the extermination of all guinea pigs on the island), there have been reported cases of infanticide in which the murdered child’s body has been stripped and thrown out in an area with a large guinea pig population. Evil, but very difficult to detect without DNA lab work. You can imagine how the police feel when sifting through all the little corpses. And the labs hate doing autopsies on rodents. That’s not what they signed on for.”

  “Please, stop.”

  “These murders, I believe, will spell the end of this little evolutionary experiment. I think they’re doomed to be one of Nature’s dead ends. Between the lawn-maintenance lobby and the concerns of law enforcement, you may be seeing the last of them now. So you might want to take a selfie with the creatures in the background. That will light up social media, won’t it? Not to mention the bump in tourism that follows. I mean, people will want to see these things before they’re all gone.

  “But I do worry about Percy. I think he’s become quite fond of them. I t
hink he finds them comforting. I won’t say I think he’s right in this, but I think he feels that he has a lot in common with them. I know he’ll be sad when they’re gone.”

  Then the Queen looked at me and made a funny sort of face, and said, “Much sadder than I’ll be when you’re gone.”

  32.

  “The medulla oblongata is a very serious and lovely object.”

  —FREUD

  The medulla oblongata is a serious thing…if you’ve got one! When the Queen made that “funny sort of face,” wrinkling her nose, there was a moment in which I wondered if she were taking mine. Staying awake, or just breathing, became a challenge. But I continued gamely.

  “Do you know why the Portuguese coffee traders brought guinea pigs with them?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Did they carry them in their capacious Portuguese pockets, so popular in the day?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Were the guinea pigs part of the trade? Or just companion pets during the long voyage?”

  “Again, I don’t know.”

  “Were they what you call a sales incentive? Buy this much coffee and get a free guinea pig?”

  “That is not an unreasonable guess. Silly, but not unreasonable. But, once more and for the last time, I don’t know.”

  “Or were they what are called ‘loss leaders?’”

  “I don’t know!!”

  “But I’d like to know.”

  “That, I’m afraid, cannot be in these circumstances.”

  “Have you ever thought about how many things are not known? I think that if someone made an honest, good-faith survey of the field of things known and unknown, the results would be distressing. I’ve come to believe that our proud knowledge accounts only for the smallest, most pathetic percentage of things that can be known. And if you throw in the things that are inaccessible to our proud perception, the percentage drops to the point where, statistically, you’d be tempted to say that we don’t know anything at all.”