Census

by Jesse Ball

  Mutter writes of this when she writes, the impression of dusk that a cormorant feels is nothing like our human dusk. We who are masters of nothing—who must change things in order to dominate them, cannot understand what it is like to be naturally, a master—to obtain a sovereignty that does not grasp, but extends in somehow palpable lines from the edges of every feather, from the point of the beak, the globes of the eyes. For us, we must diminish those beasts, those cows, those goats, that we would lead, we must break the brain of the horse that we would ride, so that we can crow that he lets us ride him. But anything changed becomes artifice, becomes less than it was, when it is made to suit the human hand. Our human victories by their nature have no glory.

  There is a set distance, my superior at the census office told me, that you will be able to travel. Do you know what it is determined by?

  I did not answer.

  Well, you could say on the one hand that it is determined by the total addition of all variables—your speed, the topography, human impediments, disease, etcetera. But, what I am speaking of is something else entirely.

  Having been a doctor most of my life I had not had a superior in a long time, and it was very interesting to me to watch the way in which this man behaved, and to feel what it was to be something in relation to that. I felt that he knew things about census taking that I did not, precious things that I must know, and that I would in a very real way fail if I left the office that day without knowing them. I say this in order to explain the quality of attention with which I stood before him in his dim office. I may even have shifted back and forth, not out of uneasiness, but merely to display how much I was anticipating each new thing he would say.

  He continued: the set distance that you can travel, whether you are young or old—you are old—is determined by the place of your death. You are traveling towards it even now. When I examined you and hired you for this work, not an hour ago, I did so not because I felt that you could become a census taker, but because I know that you already are, already were a census taker. You have always been a census taker. But now your efforts are joined to the community of work. He pointed to a wooden board. In serifed letters: The Community of Work Goes Beyond the State it Serves.

  Do you know that the census bureau is older than the nation? he asked me. I said I did not know it. Do you know, do you believe that the census bureau will outlive you—will continue when you have gone? I said I hoped so.

  He brought me to a huge cabinet full of leather-bound volumes, hundreds and hundreds. It went the length of the hallway. He knelt and began to take one out of its slipcase, but hesitated. It was too much for him even to come near the effort of so many lives.

  This work. This work, he said. There were tears in his eyes. It is the real work, he told me.

  I loved him then. But his hands were covered in the rings of different societies and I could not look at them. He raised his hands to make a point, and I shut my eyes.

  I have always despised people who join societies. In general, I feel that groups of any kind are for the weak. The need for consensus is the most disgusting and pathetic aspect of our human world. Is there none who can simply wander alone beneath a sort of cloth tent painted with dreams?

  The plan that we had, my wife and I, it was to live somewhere the three of us until, as she put it, the tree dies. Until the tree wears its leaves into winter. She spoiled the plan one morning when she took a nap. I was reading in a chair not three feet away. She must have been dead for at least an hour. I stood up, asked her what she wanted from the kitchen. She didn’t say anything. I went to the kitchen, I came back—and that’s when I saw.

  The plan was that we would depart in the same breath, as on some joined raft.

  This idea, which was such a great comfort, was proven entirely worthless when the life went on the one hand out of her and on the other it stayed in me. Perhaps that is why I chose to take this charge, the census, and travel, finally, with sure steps, towards something, even if I did not know what it was.

  Telling my son what had happened to his mother was not at all what I thought it would be. I said it out several times, in several ways. Saying it to him I said it to myself for the first time. What he knows about it—about her being dead, isn’t what I know, because what he knew about her being alive was different than what I knew.

  He used to play a game where he would be a soldier. He would be out in the yard, roaming around in the bushes. There would be a battle and he would be shot to death, and he would slump there to the ground, against a tree, or next to a telephone pole. At that point he would be dead, he would have died in the military action, and he would know it—he would feel it, what it was, being there, taking part in that role. So, he wouldn’t be in any hurry. Then, sometimes we’d get a knock on our door.

  Do you know there is someone lying in your yard?

  Oh, yes, we’d say—it’s fine. He’s just dead. He’s playing dead.

  When I looked at her body there in the chair, I thought: is she playing dead? Can she be tricking me?

  The next place was surrounded with a high fence. It was a sad dwelling. I suppose you could call it that in fairness. There was a gate, and you couldn’t get through it. There was no knocker, no bell. But when we stood there a while, someone came to the gate, and that’s who let us through, a boy. Meanwhile someone else was watching from the house. I saw a face in the box of the window and felt—not in me—something hostile.

  We got up to the house, we got into the house, to a room full of beds with a stove in the corner, and at that point we were asked to explain ourselves. So we explained ourselves, and in explaining ourselves, it became clear to the family, a family of six, that we were the enemy, or, if not the enemy, then the messengers of the enemy, the enemy that they had heard about for so long. This is my guess regarding what these people must have thought. It is my opinion that everyone who was not one of them was to them draped in poison. We appeared out of the south wearing green clothes of poison.

  As I did my mistaken explaining, as I explained to them that we were there for the noble purpose of taking the census, I saw what was happening, but I had given my speech about the census so often, that it was not easy to simply stop.

  There was a long silence punctuated by the sound of something metal slamming against something somewhere to the back of the house.

  You’re going to write down that we live here, and how many we are, are you?

  I said that I was going to do that.

  Through one of the windows, I could see the car away beyond the gate, which was still open. It sat there in the road, a few hundred feet away. I returned my attention to the room.

  There were three children, two quite young, one possibly of school age. They approached my son and had the sort of encounter that children do. Even when there is no circling, there is a bit of circling in it, and often the matter concludes with all going off in the same direction. That’s what happened. They all went off to another room.

  We don’t want to hear your questions, and we won’t give you any answers. What’s more—you don’t put anything about us down, not for any purpose.

  The other man, not the husband, leaned against the wall. He had a brutal face full of insult. He hadn’t said anything yet. He had the hands we doctors recognize—hands made to hold weapons, hands never glad if they are not serving some deformed purpose. He was the one at the window. He spoke up,

  maybe they don’t leave without a real promise.

  No one said anything to that, so he kept going.

  You got your needle, old man? You going to put your needle in me? I’m not as stupid as you think. I’ve been to the south—I know what you do.

  He came over and stuck his face an inch from mine: You’re not putting your ink in me, not in me, old man.

  I didn’t move an inch, just watched him. People like this are small; it is almost always possible to escape them in those first moments, but once you consent then what is real for them becomes real for
you and it is hard to find a way out.

  He stalked back to the wall and slammed his hand against it, cursed softly to himself.

  I thought very hard and thought of nothing.

  I felt very clear at that moment in my stubbornness. The fact of it—of the implacability of my stubbornness, that I would not refuse it, my stubbornness—was obvious to me. Why it was that I was helpless in this case, well, I don’t know why. Ordinarily I might have said anything and left. Maybe it was because I was just as happy passing on down the road and avoiding them entirely. But now that I was standing there, now that I had seen things, I couldn’t unsee them. More than anything, I think it was because of the metal clanging against the house. I think such a simple thing as that—it rendered my brain completely useless. If you had asked me to play a game of chess I might not have been able to move the pieces. I would not know a knight from a rook.

  I was standing under this low roof, almost partially crouched, looking at this man, and the others were waiting for me to respond. I think only a second or two had passed, we were living in the aftermath of his blow on the wall.

  I said, you brought me in as a guest. So, what I see now, I won’t speak of. But what I saw from the fence, what I saw before I was your guest—that is my own affair, and since it is my own affair I will speak of it to whom I like and where I like and when I like.

  The wife’s face turned white. The husband shook his head.

  It was a kind of problem. The census was a kind of problem for them. We all looked at it and the metal clattering came again and again and again.

  The wife said quietly:

  Why do you take your son around with you? What’s the purpose in it?

  We stick together.

  The woman started to say something about God cursing certain people, but the husband cut her off.

  I was trying to figure out whether she meant that my son was cursed because of my job as a census taker, or on the other hand, whether, but the husband demanded my attention.

  He had something to say, he wanted me to know. He proceeded to tell a story about how the sheriff had come up there once, that he tried to get something from them. The man asked me if I thought that the sheriff had gotten it. He asked the other man, too, did he think the sheriff got what he wanted.

  The other man said that he got something. If it was what he wanted, who knew.

  Seems to me, the woman started to say,

  but the man cut her off again, his voice like a wet whip:

  what does it mean to just come up to someone’s house? Why do you think you can do that?

  He shook his head each time he spoke. It was his preferred gesture.

  I felt it was like when you are going down a hill and have begun to fall from a bicycle. It is hard to make plans about what to do.

  Then there was laughter, just laughing from the next room, we all turned to look, and the children came back in, the older girl holding my son’s hand happily. They stood there looking at us. There was a whirring sound and the clattering noise stopped. The children were so happy. Their faces reflected sunlight we couldn’t see.

  Their voices came, one then the other then the other.

  How long are you staying for? How long are you staying for? How long? You must stay here forever, at least a week!

  ››

  Down the road, actually around the very first bend, was a little cottage. A man of sixty lived there, with a face like a horn button. The three of us sat at his kitchen table and he offered us rum, which we drank. I told him what had happened at the compound.

  He said, ten years ago, I was here when they came. It was just the two of them then, the brothers. Then came the woman. Do you know a funny thing? Anytime you see them—sometimes they go down to the town, sometimes they come around here to check up on me, like good Christians, anytime you see them, it seems like one of them, one brother or the other brother, like one of them is in charge, but it isn’t so. That woman does whatever she wants, and she owns them body and soul. They are her mouthpieces, and whatever they say, they say it because she said it first. She grew up a dozen miles from here, and the list of things that woman has done . . .

  He spat on the ground. It was his own house; he spat on the ground. He poured us some more rum.

  It’s for the road, he said. Rum for the road.

  He laughed hoarsely, really not a laugh at all. Do you know this laugh?

  The man brought out some pictures. This is a picture of my wife and daughter.

  Aren’t they beautiful?

  Yes, very beautiful.

  They were beautiful, they certainly were. Can’t say they weren’t.

  Did they die?

  No, they live somewhere else. You see, I can’t be gotten along with. I am just a bastard some days.

  E

  And now the boy was trying to understand; he was being generous with me.

  But you, what made you do it? Why would you stop being a doctor?

  Some days had passed; we had traveled quite far, and seen several things, some notable, some already forgotten; now we were sitting on the porch of a large Victorian house. Beside it were many other houses, all old, beautiful, many built of wood and some of stone. We had emerged from the hills into a sort of basin, I suppose it was the beginning of E, and in the midst of the basin there was a rise of land and on it an old settlement.

  There was a huge bank building across the way, and several churches. It had been a prosperous town for something like thirty years, so they said, a hundred and fifty years ago. Such brief blooms of wealth leave their impressions most in architecture—these outward signs of might. But like might, wealth is just a kind of pressure. Something hollow is left when it fails.

  I sat on a rocking chair. My son sat on the steps. A small boy sat next to me in another rocking chair.

  What made you do it? he said again. Don’t you like helping people?

  I did like it, but I wanted to do something else.

  He understood that. He said that he thought about fossils a lot when he was eight, but now that he was nine, everything was different.

  Somehow, he said, being nine, you can look back at being eight and see how clearly you had misunderstood things. He related to me how he would memorize fossils—their names and shapes, and write out the names in a book. He would get it for me if I wanted. He even owned one, a trilobite, as well as several plant fossils. He was not of the opinion that animal fossils are superior to plant fossils. His best friend, who still does fossils by the way, even though he is nine now, too, prefers animals. This is misguided because the animal fossils don’t move. They aren’t, the boy explained, about to move like a real animal. Did I know what a fossil was?

  I said that I did.

  Right, right.

  His voice implied that he couldn’t just believe me, not just like that.

  His father came out and brought the papers he wanted to show me. They had moved to the town from somewhere else. This is the kind of thing the census likes to know. Actually, it is of very little interest to me, but when a person goes to another room to get papers, I just wait. I am learning about waiting for things to happen, really for almost anything to happen.

  What do you think? the man asked. Is it enough?

  Oh, yes, I said. This is very good.

  ››

  As we drove that night, I told my son about the loneliness that sometimes afflicts people who are alone. Meanwhile, I explained, some other people are just as alone, but never become lonely. How can that be?

  We thought about it for a while.

  I told him that I was thinking about cormorants almost all the time because of my study of Mutter. All the books in the car were written by Mutter.

  Bringing together the thought of cormorants, a thought that, even now, is still poised somehow in the air above me, with this notion of loneliness and its haphazard effect—it is almost as though some are drawn to loneliness, as to an art—we come to the woman of San Nicolas Island, a pers
on who, it seems, did not so much suffer the horror of loneliness. Over the rumble of the car, I related the story of this woman with great delight, telling my son that she had been on the island for eighteen years when she was discovered in 1853. That, coming to shore with her rescuer, she wore a green dress of cormorant feathers, such a dress as had never before been seen. The dress, which had become her integument—like some sort of hermit crab shell, this cormorant dress had, seemingly improbably, formed around her, sewn together with binding of whale sinew—this feathered dress was the outward emblem of her plight, and in some ways constituted the main part of her available for judgment, as in other ways, she was somewhat ordinary—apart from her miraculous ability to survive.

  He wanted to know where the dress was.

  I told him the dress was in the Vatican, that because it was miraculous, because, in and of itself, it held the essence of what is unknowable, and what is therefore more valuable than value, what is invaluable, it was sent to the Vatican, a place known to be a repository for all that cannot be understood, but must be preserved. I said this was a kind of joke also because the dress is presumed lost somewhere in the Vatican. He did not laugh but looked at me steadily, waiting.

  The road ahead of us was down and down and down. It was in a cleft, so that what we were going down towards—that could not be seen very well. Of course it was also the nighttime. I continued:

  She had a song that she would sing to her rescuer and to others, Toki Toki yahamimena / Toki Toki yahamimena / Toki Toki yahamimena/weleshkima nishuyahamimena / weleshkima nishuyahamimena / Toki Toki yahamimena . . .