Loudermilk

by Lucy Ives

  Anton Beans is clearing his throat. “You all know,” he says, “the poet Troy Loudermilk. But I’m willing to bet not a single one of you remembers this specimen.” Anton Beans indicates Harry, who is growing more bloodless by the minute and looks as if he may spontaneously shoot upward through the ceiling, propelled by his own ill ease. “The weirdest thing is that you’ve all seen him before. You had the opportunity to recognize him, but you ignored it. And the reason you ignored him is he was inconvenient to your vision. You had a hero in your midst, or so you all believed. A great poet! Why bother with this puling freak!”

  Lizzie isn’t sure what a “puling freak” is, but she’s willing to bet it’s not a very good thing to be, plus Anton Beans is currently pointing at Harry, so unfortunately it probably has something to do with him.

  People in the crowd seem to want to know what the hell is going on. Like Anton Beans has done a pretty good job of lathering them up, but now it’s time to drive the point home, because even if Anton Beans temporarily has their attention, they used to be having this pretty excellent party.

  “Loudermilk!” some incoherent person screams. It’s a girl, but Lizzie isn’t big on reinforcing gender-based behavioral stereotypes.

  A few other unfortunates put up some wails.

  Loudermilk is, after all, their king.

  Loudermilk isn’t doing anything. His goose appears, for some reason, to be momentarily cooked? Lizzie is so incredibly weirded out.

  “Lou-Der-Milk. Lou-Der-Milk. Lou-Der-Milk,” the crowd is chanting. The room begins to sway.

  “OK, OK!” comes a piercing cry from rival poet Anton Beans. “You want Loudermilk? I’ll give you Loudermilk! I challenge Loudermilk and this other bizarre person over here”—indicating Harry—“to a poetry contest. That’s right! A poetry showdown. You all know what this means. Even though we live in a scriptural society in which silent, private, so-called lyric reading is thought to be the order of the day, these two lucky individuals are going to have to recite out loud, from memory or extemporaneously, the very best poem that they can. And even though none of our training here at ye olde Harvard of poetry prepares us to do this sort of thing, we’re going to judge them on the quality of whatever it is that they manage to do. And we’re going to judge them harshly and eternally and you’re going to see what I mean about what all of you have been missing.”

  There is crazy energy coming out of Anton Beans’s face and it is visible even from across the sweat-clouded room.

  Everyone, it seems, cannot stop staring.

  “Well”—this is Anton Beans again—“what are you going to do?” Maybe at this moment he is only talking to Loudermilk. That seems possible.

  And is there a pearlescent column of light that has descended to encase Loudermilk’s body? Maybe there is. And is it this column of light that is making it so obvious that Loudermilk is at this point in time completely and utterly incapable of speech? It might be. And is this incapacity manifesting itself as a series of gurgling noises that are emerging incoherently from Loudermilk’s mouth? Yes, perhaps this is so. Loudermilk gurgles. He opens his mouth and pants. Nothing happens. Loudermilk gasps. He touches his throat as if to reassure himself of its existence.

  Loudermilk swallows. He says, “‘The CNN Blues,’” and he pauses. “‘Persona poem,’” he diligently specifies, as if this is the sixth-grade debate society. And Loudermilk proceeds to recite what is by far the worst poem that Lizzie has ever heard.

  “Interesting!” Anton Beans all but screams, once his foe’s performance, such as it has been, is complete. “I’m so curious about that poem! Now, OK,” Anton Beans is fully screaming, “NOW YOU.”

  He means Harry. Lizzie at last understands the meaning of the performance.

  Harry is, for the first time, and how can this be put into words, someone. Anton Beans has succeeded in performing a form of spiritual surgery, a psychic transplant. Instead of curling into himself or spontaneously expiring or even just falling down, Harry takes a shivering step forward and says, in clipped and semi-robotic tones, “‘Mount Weather.’”

  Lizzie realizes he means, like, as in mountain.

  Harry’s voice is not so bad when you come down to it. It’s high and low both at once and it’s functional, but beyond this it has this sort of superwavy tonal filling that makes you feel it really hard, right at the center of your body?

  Mount Weather

  I preceded this deluge: the phenomenon

  of a pseudo-president; experimental

  marriages; cavernous, red, dusty-red, gilded,

  red, polysyllabic words (red, gilded, red-dusty, der).

  Otherwise, I might be doin’ something

  better, eating a paste of mashed bananas

  in an unpadded, wooden saddle;

  coddled, if chemically enhanced. A

  majority of my sainted hours are now prosthetic

  fingers, important fathers, lots of feathers,

  and strange oaths. People had a certain

  humility, a contentious style and booming voice.

  They were one Immortalization Committee,

  a collective yawn; white stars, though flabby.

  I’m slow but I passed. I preceded this deluge:

  earned media; vast aromatic plants; “stop

  loss” policies; a database of fans; the so-called boffo

  scoop. I remember the frisson I felt. Yes,

  yes; and yes. A female supplicant

  wore a creamy sheepskin mustache.

  I stared back, uncomprehending,

  as the full flowering of the middle classes

  commenced in a Napoleonic burst.

  Viewing that oppression as a central part

  of our liberation, bogged down by

  diaper bags, we were hamstrung by sullen

  bureaucracy, aka, the world’s one mono-spoof.

  We did not have enough soldiers, even if their wives

  were in the dark. The premise of our exotic exercises

  was a floating island or a layer cake; some

  mellifluous middle names; well-intentioned but

  sloppy thinking; heavily subsidized corn.

  There came a giant sucking sound. It just sat

  there, oh ye fatty cold cuts! The white-collar hustle

  and hideous furniture were a collateral benefit,

  leavened with occasional doses of nostalgia, swarms

  of finches, ruddy drakes, black-tailed gazelle.

  Any vague, platitudinous quotation could

  absorb me well. My face was rather badly singed,

  so we applied a bleaching gel. Everything

  was deliberate, meticulous, red, very red. And yes,

  yes; very yes, too. There was a lot of esprit.

  Our team stayed aloft in a plane for three

  days straight, much as crimes, in the end, are

  overwhelmed by personality. It’s a quiet,

  seething understatement to say the public

  will survive the current plague of zeros.

  I preceded this deluge: I will try to keep

  my argument strictly precolonial, with

  heavily bulleted sections: “1. Experience,”

  “2. Lessons Learned,” and “18. Action Plan.”

  Though in my haste I have been heard to say

  there is no richer subject than the 2001

  anthrax mailer (or mailers). “I know not how to

  hurt other people,” I also say. I stay low key and

  crank out patients. You are patient

  when you find beers, yes? Austere and dyspeptic,

  I just thrive there, collecting endorsements

  from the entertainment world, Clintonian

  masks. I preceded this deluge.

  I preceded this deluge. A superb antagonist,

  a high-water mark, dingy with clarity, bathed

  in top-secret fluid, I went boar-hunting

  occasionally. It was the greatest time of our
lives.

  Forty-Eight

  Est et Non

  Directly after the accident, everything was shuttered. Then, slowly, and perhaps also abruptly, it wasn’t. Or, it wasn’t, and it was. It felt to Clare like a monstrous task. All things were open. But all things were things. There was nothing in the way of anything else. But it was all only real. It didn’t make “sense.” Clare stood at the top of an enormous tower. The tower was round and tapered like the world’s tallest chimney and constructed from stone. The weather was extraordinary. The tower was located in the middle of an ocean. Wisps of cloud dangled in its environs, but most of everything everywhere was blue. There was the dense sky, so thick it was a sound. There was the water, dark navy. Clare could discern the curvature of the earth. Mostly she tried not to look down.

  No one had spoken to Clare for a very long time, if ever. Clare was, nevertheless, aware it was imperative that she descend. She seemed able to recall having been told that the tower was of such a height that it would take her around six hours to go down it, a full day’s work if she kept constantly in motion and took a leisurely lunch. Among the difficulties inherent to this venture were the facts that 1. There was no place anywhere on the tower, once one began to descend, at which it was possible to rest; 2. Clare was afraid of heights; and 3. The stairs that ran in a spiral around the exterior had stone treads that were at most five inches at their widest, by a meager ten inches across, meaning that to walk down, one had to dispense entirely with the idea of leaning against the side of the tower with one’s right shoulder, staring down at the steps, moving forward in one’s descent, and instead one had to face outward, pressing one’s back against the tower and taking the stairs one by one, placing one’s feet in an awkward sideways shuffle, progressing haltingly while staring into the cerulean void. So maybe it would take eight hours. Or twelve. Clare knew this was all rather specific, given she was hallucinating. The tower seemed to have no interior at all. Clare stood looking at a pile of crushed glass and rubbish tips at the tower’s mossy circular top. There was nothing to sustain her.

  So Clare had begun. But beginning had not been enough.

  After the eighth or ninth day of sideways walking, Clare had come to the conclusion that she had either misunderstood the messages about the time required or that these messages were incorrect to begin with. It continued. It continues. It reminds her sometimes of the time she went to hear her father read at the Poetry Project when she was fourteen and he was in town and was reading with the famous poet John Ashbery, and John Ashbery read a long poem in sentences and the sentences were such that Clare is unsure if later anyone remembered the poems her father read. And after, Clare had sat in a bar on 8th Street and it was balmy spring and she hadn’t said anything to anyone until she had gone home. And years later when she had mentioned this to her mother, her mother had said, “But you never went to his reading, don’t you remember? That was the night Alain was here and I made you stay in. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

  However, today it is April, and Clare is older and walking toward Building 109 so that she can collect the last packet of the semester. The air is like bathwater. It gives an amniotic feel. Time is buoyant. It rocks. It vibrates eerily backward every once in a while.

  Everyone else, Clare thinks, is hungover. They have feted Loudermilk’s demise. They are presently sorting through their own recent ethanol-soaked pasts and will arrive at provisional conclusions before they exit their dwellings to drag themselves toward the site of acquiescence to packet protocol. They are heavy with the previous night’s disclosures. Next week they are likely to demand administrative justice. Clare keeps thinking that there must be a story in this, but she can’t quite make it out. She recalls again what a beautiful voice the real poet had, his line about Clintonian masks. It’s been a while, too, since she thought so directly about her tower. She looks down at her feet, but it’s just the Cretan sidewalk. Troy Loudermilk, Loudermilk’s full name is—as Anton Beans had said. Troy, whom Clare has briefly met. God, the trip is taking a while.

  She is expecting Building 109 to be deserted. However, when she opens the door there is chatter and a lot of it. Everyone is standing in the front room, pressed together, as if they’re witnessing a new contest. Clare has just made the decision to attempt to sneak by, when what is/are the actual object(s) of fascination catch(es) Clare’s eye, which is, it must be said, the verb-related understatement of the year, since Clare is well-nigh frozen.

  Someone has xeroxed her vagina.

  Not Clare’s vagina, but someone’s. Actually, maybe Clare means “vulva”? Someone has presumably clambered atop one of the trusty Seminars machines, dropped trou, pressed lips to plate.

  This person—enterprising and biologically female, not to mention well versed in the intricacies of desktop printing—has subsequently taken the step of scanning said genital copy and converting it to a PDF of sizable dimensions, such that she has been able to print it out on some nine—Clare is not at the moment one for counting—eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets of paper, taking advantage of the office’s impressive laser printer. The original Xerox has been reconstituted, rectangle by eight-and-a-half-by-eleven rectangle, on the wall of the Seminars HQ front parlor in a prominent location, one normally occupied by an oil portrait of dopey old Rainer Dodds, kindly patriarch, shaking hands with Henry Ford as out the window behind them horticulture and industry glowingly coexist, invisible music sailing over the land.

  The original portrait lies facedown on the rug. It appears, somehow, to be sleeping.

  It’s a nice vulva, too. It appears friendly.

  It is also, Clare realizes, a materialization of the title of her recent story.

  Clare has not gone unperceived.

  The origin of the world, Clare is thinking.

  The room is full and no one is really saying anything. They all mill around gazing up at this veil-free desktop rendition of Courbet’s much more modestly sized masterpiece. It’s like they’re standing in the studio of some artist, but they don’t know who. The only sound arises from someone who, seated on a sofa, scrubs away at a scratch-off ticket, oblivious to artistic value.

  The others begin to notice Clare, and their pointed looks suggest they are waiting for her to tell them something. From underneath their carefully crafted hangovers, they wordlessly implore her. Is this her message? They do not want to return to their rented places of dwelling without a word. They want to know what this thing is, why it appears, if the author is at last coming to take full command.

  And the author is born again.

  Clare remembers the tower, its final steps, which she takes in a single bound, landing with ease.

  She will figure out what it means later.

  “I guess it’s spring,” she says to no one.

  Forty-Nine

  The Author

  There is a prone body facedown at the edge of her lawn. Meanwhile, Lizzie Hillary is not alarmed. Birds warble, and Lizzie is wearing cutoffs and a T-shirt that fit her best when she was eleven. The T-shirt was acquired outside the francophone world and yet for some reason it reads MAÎTRE-CHIEN. Lizzie throws herself across the lawn. She nearly barks and howls. Her parents have joined a delegation of concerned academics protesting President George W. Bush’s speaking engagement at a local community college, and good for them, and particularly good for them in that they are not here with her and the birds. No one can prevent what is now very much about to go down.

  Lizzie is moving with a mixture of terror and joy, and she can imagine it is fascinating to see. Too bad no one is watching. Too bad so few recognize the greatness of her artistry. Too bad she can’t take credit where credit is due.

  Lizzie comes to a standstill, squats.

  “Troy, Troy, Troy,” Lizzie says. “Loudermilk, Loudermilk, Loudermilk.” She pats the back of his head, her poor destroyed man. She knew he was going to figure out how much he needed her one day, and here he is, sultry from sun and slightly foul. Li
zzie pats harder. She flicks Loudermilk’s left ear.

  There is a moan.

  Lizzie, a true artist, turns and sits and maneuvers Loudermilk’s heavy, hot cranium onto her bare thigh.

  “MPHHphlfg,” Loudermilk is saying.

  “I know,” says Lizzie. “So true! Are you ready to wake up now?”

  “Beans,” mutters Loudermilk.

  “What? I don’t have any beans, OK? Loudermilk, I think maybe it’s time for you to wake up. My parents’ lawn is probably not so super comfortable. Um, Loudermilk?”

  Loudermilk wriggles. He rolls his head back and forth on Lizzie’s thigh. He is mashing his face against her. He gets his hands under him, opens one eye.

  “Hi there,” Lizzie tells him. “Rough night?”

  “Shit,” Loudermilk says. He rolls over onto his back. “The fuck?”

  “Um, well, I think you were sleeping on my lawn for, like, a while. And you smell really bad? So that’s what. It’s kind of rude, Loudermilk.”

  Loudermilk closes his eyes. “Yes,” he says, frowning.

  “But anyway I’m not really mad.” Lizzie touches Loudermilk’s face. “See?” she says, leaning over to kiss him on the mouth. “See how not really mad I am, the poet Troy Loudermilk?”

  “Uhngg,” Loudermilk says.

  Lizzie kisses Loudermilk again. Lizzie removes her thigh from underneath Loudermilk’s shoulder where it has become trapped and gets on top of Loudermilk’s abdomen from which vantage she continues to kiss him. This is something she’s seen in movies.

  “Uhngghmm,” says Loudermilk. His legs stir and his arms encircle Lizzie’s back. “You taste like toothpaste.”

  “You taste like dead butthole.”

  “Thank you.”

  Lizzie sits up. “Is it always going to be like this, Loudermilk?”

  “Like what?” Loudermilk wants to know.

  Lizzie is looking across her parents’ lawn. She is staring at the fence there. She feels like she could just keep looking at this fence forever. She doesn’t know how to progress from this moment, how to make something else happen, what she should say next to make it be how she really wants it to be in her life, and this is how she knows that she is young. Lizzie says, “I’m not really so stupid, you know.”