Census

by Jesse Ball

  My son did not ask me what the song meant. The reason for this is: he doesn’t ask that kind of question. The idea that someone could tell you the meaning of something that is before you—let us assume a thing is before you in its entirety and you do not know its meaning, and so you expect someone to give it to you—this is foreign to him. If there is something completely hidden, of which there is a small part—yes, he might ask. But, looking at a hare or a geode, he would not ask what it means. As well ask what a kaleidoscope means. What does it mean?

  Nonetheless, I wanted to tell him about the meaning of the song, so I did. I said that there was much to know about it—and little. Someone translated the phrases as: I live contented because I can see the day when I want to get out of this island. But this is problematic for many reasons, most particularly that the translation was conceivably affected by knowledge of the woman’s plight. It seems she had sung the song to an otter hunter, and that he in turn had sung it to a good friend of his, many a time, so that he too memorized it, held it in his heart, and it was that man who in turn decades later recited it for another man, with the marvelous name of Talawiyashwit, who brought us the above translation. A voice singing the words can be heard on a wax cylinder from 1913, which, incidentally, is the year on record with the largest number of deaths from lightning.

  A different understanding of the whole matter can be had by adopting the view that whatever song she sang while on the island had two simultaneous meanings supported in the words. The first would be the ordinary content of the words, and the second, I live contented because one day I will leave this island.

  Alternately, one could say that it is expressly because she was comfortable on the island that she did not die. In essence, she didn’t need to leave the island.

  Boxes have been found there, in the cave where she lived, more than a hundred years later, beautiful redwood boxes containing hundreds of artifacts, fishhooks, seashell dishes, ochre, soapstone ornaments. The house that she built out of whalebones was also found, still standing upon a rise over the sea.

  It takes little effort to picture her some morning in 1841 watching such beasts as cormorants pass back and forth along, over, in the waves. She would have been about thirty, in the fullness of her life. If she did turn over those words in her mouth, Toki Toki yahamimena, and if they did mean something having to do with the day that she would leave, I wonder, as the years went by, if she began to conflate the time when she would leave the island with the time of her death, if in fact, the song could be, at the same time, a deep statement of life, and a plea for exit from that life. What could she have known of what would come if she did leave the island?

  In fact, when she reached the mainland, she lived only seven weeks and was buried in an unmarked grave, and during that time she found it impossible to be understood by anyone, for there was no one left there who spoke her language. All she could do was to continue to sing and sing her song. I am curious how loud she sung it, whether under her breath, or with a ringing voice.

  The human reaction to the epic is most manageable when it is elsewhere. Those mythic things that stand before us, shining, in dresses of cormorant—what do we have, what can we possibly offer in exchange?

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  Mutter knew of the woman of San Nicolas Island, I am sure of it. She mentions her somewhere, but for the life of me, I cannot find the instance. My memory of it is this: Mutter does her best to sever the link between the woman and the cormorants. She finds nothing germane in the dress of cormorant feathers. This utilitarian use of the bird’s plumage might have been resourceful, but it demonstrates no comprehension of what it means to be a cormorant, so Mutter.

  For her, the woman of San Nicolas Island is beside the point.

  It could be said, however, that, if the woman dove in the dress, that the cormorant feathers, which resist water, could have been a fundamentally useful aspect of the garment. I imagine myself bringing up this point to Mutter defiantly, though I am quite sure that a conversation with another human being about cormorants was not something she would ever have tolerated.

  The greatest disdain that Mutter could possibly heap, and she heaped a great deal, was saved for cormorant fishermen. The cormorant fisherman, extremely resourceful in a brutal way, loops a binding tie about the neck of a cormorant, one that he has taught to trust him. The tie is tight enough that a small fish may pass the cormorant’s throat, but not a large fish. The fisherman then sits in a boat and waits while the cormorant dives and swims and does cormorant things. Eventually, the cormorant, in encountering all the various objects of cormorant life, encounters a fish that is a fine feast. He tries to swallow this fish, but finds that, strangely, he cannot. He is under the water, a fish in his mouth, and he is choking on the fish. So, he goes to get help for himself, and the person that he goes to is the fisherman. To the fisherman’s eye, he sits in his boat and his pet cormorant leaps out of the water, fish in throat. The fisherman pulls the fish out of the throat, saving the cormorant. The cormorant goes back to what it was doing, leading it implacably towards another fish too large to swallow.

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  I do not keep much track of the days of the week, but I know that it was a Tuesday when we happened by accident upon a birthday party.

  I know that mainly because the man’s name whose birthday it was, his name was Tuesday. It was some prank his parents had played. He was named Tuesday, his brother Wednesday, his sister Thursday.

  Tuesday came to the front door wearing some horrid birthday bib. He would have nothing else but that we join him and his family for the birthday dinner, which was a remarkably delicious meal. His own son, his daughter, his wife, his mother, all were present. There was much singing, but no presents. Tuesday apparently had everything he wanted. The present I ask for he said is that no one burdens me with presents.

  We sat out on the lawn in chairs until it was well dark. My son was asleep. Tuesday offered we could stay there. I thanked him, but the feeling in me, overwhelmingly, was to push on. I wanted to get as far north as possible. Somehow this birthday of his made me feel that although I would not have another birthday of my own, I should push towards it, actually force myself through time towards the turning of the year. In this case that meant helping my son to the car, covering him in a blanket, and driving on in the night on a road that I could scarcely see. When the light from the occasional lamp illuminated the pavement it seemed too foreign to me, frighteningly abstract, both closer and farther than I could ever expect.

  When you are a young surgeon, it often happens that you are put into situations that you did not imagine were possible. The set of things that could be wrong from the get go—before you are put into such situations, you would never assume that it could be true: that you would be in such a situation, and that you would be called upon to fix anything. You would think that it is totally obvious there is nothing to be done. And yet, by hook or by crook—or just plain chance, it comes to pass again and again that the very worst events come to pass, and it is on your watch. The nurses are looking at you. The other doctors are looking at you. Sometimes the patient, awake, is looking at you. Everyone is wondering—what will he do? How will he fix it?—never mind that sometimes no one even knows what “it” is to begin with.

  The result of this is that one develops a sort of facility—I won’t say one is prepared for the worst, because there is no such thing as actually preparing for the worst. However, one becomes used to the absurd idea that the worst things are being visited on you as by some supernormal agency, and that the best you can do is to try to weather the storm. Thus, if someone’s leg has been crushed by a garbage truck, and you are looking down at this spectacle on the operating table, this spectacle of an operating room, this spectacle of you, scalpel in hand, considering what must be done (you are looking down on yourself as if from above) then it is not just a matter of feeling—how can this go right, what can I do to make this right, but there is also this other thing—that you think, life
is truly absurd, and there really is no meaning, only objects of various size colliding in space, if they are so lucky as to be near each other.

  The propensity for effective action coupled with abstract philosophical assessment was somehow strong in me—and only grew stronger with age, such that, in the years before I gave up my practice, the nurses and doctors with whom I worked had become very used to listening to peculiar monologues that I would give while operating. It became a sort of running joke—and was especially funny because the insight that I could obtain at such times was really much greater than at any other. If I were, for instance, at this moment to simply try to speak, I am sure what would come out would be nonsense, just pure drivel. However, at those times, while operating, I was inspired.

  I remember the day that I was given my doctor’s bag—a black leather bag with instruments in it. This was a very long time ago, I don’t think anyone even possesses such a device any longer. But, for me at the time it was a very big deal, and I remember looking at it in horror, thinking of all the situations that I was now supposedly qualified to fix, having only this absolutely insignificant tool set. The miracle of medicine is that anyone ever recovers at all, from any injury, however small, and much of that is simply chance and the body’s natural powers. In a way, we doctors are done a disservice by the faith that people put in us, for when things go well we are ignored, and when things go ill, we are blamed. But actually, we do not always have that much to do with it.

  I remember the case of an old man who came in. He was complaining of pain in his arm. I examined him—this was in a small provincial hospital—and I noticed that his right shoulder was dislocated. I fixed it, and he was ushered out of the hospital. Two hours later he had returned, and why? Because his left arm was broken. The right shoulder, as he put it, had been that way for years. I had fixed the wrong thing.

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  When I signed the paper joining myself and my will to the mission of the census, I was told a curious fact. Those who travel on behalf of the census—not only do they have no special rights or protection, as do many other sorts of workers, but in fact, they sign away their basic rights of protection. Anyone may injure, attack, kill, harm a census taker and there is no legal recourse.

  Why is it this way? Because the census takers must be seen to be completely harmless, even in so much as their presence itself might be harmful by dint of the responsibility one might bear for their presence. To wit—a census taker would never be admitted to a home if it were possible that he could sue for injuries sustained within.

  This absolute lack of protection has at times led to the deaths of census takers in various places under circumstances which, had the census takers been ordinary citizens, would clearly be judged murder. What is the attitude of the census bureau to this appalling situation? If I had to put my finger on it, I would say, the basic idea that we are alive each one of us and acting to fulfill his/her own aims—it is an idea much disputed in the offices of the census. Rather they would say, the census is a large instrument made up of living cells—and each cell is a census taker. None of them is worth anything alone—but in total, well, you understand.

  As for the difficulties that were immediately created, great difficulties you would imagine, of recruitment, it turns out that the mythos of the census taker was, if anything, enlarged, by the idea that census takers are utterly vulnerable. People are always looking for the new class of martyrs. In the census taker the modern martyr was found.

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  I kept some of the rules of the census on a little placard in the glove box. I don’t know what the purpose of the placard was, or where it was intended to sit. In very neat print, the placard read:

  If you are invited in to a house, you must go.

  Never harm anyone with word or deed, even in defense of your own life.

  Wear neat presentable garb.

  No complaints. No sabotaging of the reputation of the census.

  Never expect help from anyone. There is no help for you.

  Once each month send completed documents to the center from which you came.

  Something I had meant to mention, but forgot to:

  The father of the fossil-hunting child, a man with pale red hair, told me in confidence that he had moved from another district far away because of testimony he had been forced to give, testimony in a criminal case. He had observed, in the street outside his house, a murder. He had not been alone in observing it. In fact, dozens of people had seen it happen. The trouble was, the murderer was a very influential man and no one would testify.

  I had my wife and son to think of, he said. I didn’t want to do it, but then I found myself agreeing. I found myself testifying.

  Did you have to go to court?

  I took the witness stand, and on the basis of my testimony he was convicted and then hanged.

  But why did you change your mind—why did you testify when you had decided against it?

  At this point his wife had come into the room. She was a small woman with pale eyes and lustrous, beautiful, almost obsidian skin. A rectangular hat sat atop her head and I was captivated. But she was watching him.

  She watched to see what he would say to my question, and when he said nothing she laughed.

  Why don’t you tell him why you testified, why don’t you tell the man?

  She looked at me. It is a kind of riddle, don’t you see?

  She laughed and laughed. I like it so much, she said, the horror of our life—that brought us here. Let’s say this, do you see that tree?

  I looked where she was pointing, out the side window to a tall tree in a sloping park by the bank building.

  I see it.

  If the man were hanged in that tree this minute, and you could see him, you would know everything.

  I thought about it a moment. Oh.

  Yes, she said, still laughing. They were brothers, twin brothers.

  She took his arm and the two of them stood together. He hadn’t laughed at all, but he said,

  I’m glad that we can laugh about it. Will you laugh about it with us?

  I wasn’t sure what they were asking. I nodded.

  He took a picture down from the mantel, two boys standing by a fence. A peacock was in the background.

  Which one is me? he asked.

  My son has gotten lost on many occasions. Anytime we have gone somewhere crowded, he loves to do something and that thing that he loves to do is to wander off. When he has done so, it becomes impossible to find him again, for he is so overwhelmed with simply perceiving what can be seen in a crowd like that, at a fair like that, at a zoo like that, at such a circus, promenade, boardwalk, metropolitan train station, that he plays no part in being found. When he is again found it is clear that he was, if anything, working adamantly to not be found, but in an entirely passive way. By that I mean, he joins the scenery of the place, delighted to learn the things that he can learn there, making no effort to call attention to himself, and in this he is very practiced. Many a time, my wife and I could be seen scouring some place, with the aid of sometimes dozens of people, desperate to find him. Where then is he found? He is sitting in a shop window eating an ice cream cone with an old woman. Or he is riding in a flamingo boat with a family of Asian tourists. Or he is sitting on the ground, looking at the heaving sea of legs.

  It is certainly true that at all times the world is fascinating. At all times all parts of the world are eternally fascinating. There is no legitimate rubric that could be used to choose the doing of one thing over the doing of any other. So when he chooses to simply observe this or that, and, I presume, leap out of his heart into some empathy with the thing observed, whether it is a Ferris wheel or a tortoise, I have never been capable of objecting, and certainly, I have never sought to change what is essentially to my eyes, a basic resourcefulness that finds at any moment something profound. My wife was of the same opinion, but surely we did suffer for it. The long apologies we would have to give to the legions of helpers. B
ut strangely, no one was ever angry about it. People become fond of him very quickly, and that has always helped.

  That we must mark the people who have been subjected to the census is clear. How that mark should look—so to speak, what it, in essence, is, is set down by a mandate made in the place of the census bureau. It is emblazoned in the eye of every census taker. Yet, the manner in which the mark is given is absolutely unclear.

  Yes, it is a tattoo. But, how to create it? A census taker showed me a sort of ink-gun, like a stapler, which is laid upon the rib, and in one fell swoop stamps the tattoo in its entirety upon flesh. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I find this device hideous, and would never use such a thing.

  It could be that my background as a surgeon prepared me for the work of tattooing. In fact, I do not mind it at all, although I have never in truth done any tattoo apart from the census mark.

  For this work, I use a mechanical tattoo needle, and fresh black ink, the method for the making of which I have become acquainted with, in case it should ever happen that I run out. The danger of blood contamination is gotten over by using fresh needles. I foresee difficulties in the future with this, as I cannot forever know that I will have access to fresh needles. Therefore, I have read a manual about older methods of tattooing, if it should come to pass that I must set my mechanical needle aside. To be completely honest, in some ways I long for the simplification that would therefore take place, as I have watched several films of the old Japanese and Polynesian methods, and I find them very attractive, although I understand in my heart that they are painful, and would cause me no end of trouble.