Census

by Jesse Ball

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  Perhaps you wonder how it is that we managed to find a bed each night? The truth is—we often ended up sleeping in the car, and though it was winter, it was not so bad, for this car, which was made by a company called Stafford, long out of business, has a sort of built-in heater that can run when the car is off. It heats the front compartment only.

  The car was an old taxi-cab, and the idea, I guess, was that it would save gasoline if the engine wasn’t running while the taxi waited on cold nights for a fare. So, every now and then I fill the little stove with its own supply of fuel, and then during the night it goes on periodically, every fifteen minutes for a minute or two, just enough to keep us from freezing.

  The vehicle was originally called the Carriagecar (one word), but it swiftly became known as the Stafford manhandler—the police used it as a paddy wagon. I bought ours from a used car dealer for almost nothing, with the intention that we would own a car that we didn’t actually ever want to use, and that owning such a car would force us to walk or bicycle. My wife agreed about this proposition, and we never much used the automobile.

  So, this trip was a moment of vivid life for the Stafford. Probably it had never managed to have much of a good time in the yard next to the house where we lived, and now it was just gobbling road, rolling its wheels on every sort of surface, braving rain and snow, skirting the edges of flooded streets. What a life!

  When my son was young, my wife wrote a book for him in which the Stafford was a character. It became a sort of touchstone, and, as it turns out, was crucial in making him comfortable with the idea of this trip. Yes, we would be going far away to places we have never been. Yes, we might never come back. However, we will be in the Stafford Carriagecar. In that sense, everything will always continue to be just the same. Do you see that?

  F

  Two women lived in a house at the edge of F. We came on it from the outside, and so it was the first place we stopped. I wanted to pass it by, but my son insisted. Why did he insist? I think it was because there was a round window in the face of the house.

  There was a bedraggled garden in the yard, and no clear driveway. I pulled up on the grass and we walked around the garden. I noticed the wreck of a squash and signs that other things too had failed to receive harvesting. The house was one of those false log cabins. What I mean is: the outside is made to look like it is built from logs, but of course it isn’t. I have always saved a special hate for these houses.

  When we knocked on the door, it was answered by a great deal of barking. After a time someone came—a woman dressed to go out, coat and all. The dogs pushed past us, and she did too.

  What is it you want? Oh, knock again—my sister will come. And I will be back in a while.

  She went away across the yard and down the road, smaller and smaller, smaller and smaller until the leash was too thin to be seen, and soon she was too.

  We knocked again. This time a young woman came.

  You can never trust my older sister, she told us, as we sat by a fire that she made before our very eyes.

  I doubt that she will come back tonight. She hates strangers, and men, and strange men most of all. She dislikes travelers and old men, and old travelers. She doesn’t like drivers, she doesn’t like musicians, she doesn’t like gypsies. Do you have a dog? She tolerates those, if they are hers, but yours would be yours, and so she probably wouldn’t like it, not unless you gave it to her, which she would never accept, never.

  Her sister was the famous comic writer G. Salter. It was through the money earned by the books that the two sisters lived, and so, of course, the younger sister was very grateful. As she put it, I was put on this earth with no purpose in mind, and so I am very lucky that another who can earn her way was put down at my side. I suppose I would just wander the streets as a prostitute if not for my sister. She laughed and said it again. I would just be a sort of hired girl in the street. Just pin my miniskirt up!

  She looked at me suddenly, playing at being cautious. You’re a little old for such things, though, aren’t you?

  She laughed again in the midst of her faux-caution.

  I am so tired of everyone who lives in this town! If you were a young man, why, I would just take you into my room this minute. I would practically beat you to death with sex. But you are a bit old, aren’t you?

  She laughed and laughed.

  I’m frankly surprised you don’t use a cane. Should I get you one? I think we might have one here—and we have no need for it. Ha. You and me, I’ll bet we couldn’t sleep together if we tried, I mean, if we had to, absolutely had to. We would roll around in bed and nothing would happen, nothing at all. We’d be like two children at a sleepover. How pathetic! Do you know I believe the human race should end—that this should be the final generation? My sister agrees, too. I had myself spayed by a veterinarian when I was nine. She was fourteen. We just covered ourselves in animal skins and slunk into the vet’s office. It changed the way I look at everything, that day in the vet’s office. I tell you that so you know—neither one of us will ever have a child.

  She laughed some more and put some wood on the fire.

  I was at a loss to know what to say, so I said should we begin? and she agreed.

  The matter of the census was attended to, and then the marking. This was a bit of a shock to her, for, as she put it:

  I almost die whenever I am hurt even the slightest bit.

  Afterwards she asked if we would stay the night. I said we really ought to go. She said we really should just stay—it was so late.

  This stalemate was broken by the door opening.

  I see you haven’t gone, said the older sister. I have been waiting in the yard for you to leave for the last hour, but if you won’t, you won’t. Let’s get done with this business.

  She threw her coat over a chair. The dogs ran into some other room and couldn’t be seen or heard anymore.

  You are a census taker?

  How did you know?

  She snorted:

  Each day I slap myself in the face and wait a moment then look in the mirror. If the red of the slap has gone, then I know the day will go well. But if the red remains, I know some pathetic thing will happen to me. In this case it is you, a census taker. You are the thing that is happening to us.

  I said that it wasn’t as bad as all that. Really, it was just a sort of formality.

  It is the opposite of a formality, she said. It is a purposeful inquisition.

  I agreed that it was just that.

  She looked around and noticed that her sister had no shirt on.

  So, that’s the situation, huh? I leave you for an hour and you wrap your legs around the first men who come, never mind that they’re old and foolish? How tired I am of looking after you—if only someone would come and carry you off forever. Maybe I’ll put an advertisement in my next book, a kind of sweepstakes. Winner gets my tart of a sister for his/her own to do with as he/she will.

  She narrowed her eyes. Her sister did not make any motion to put her shirt back on, but instead flounced her hair like a girl in an old book.

  Shut up, you. You’re being unfair—it’s just the tattoo to show I’ve been counted. And you must have yours also if we must pin you down to do it. So we will both be sitting here with half our clothes hanging off us. How’s that?

  We stayed there for a few days, and actually never went into the town. It turned out that the sisters wrote their famous books together, as co-authors—and neither one was very serious about anything, not in the slightest. My son was very happy—he took the dogs on long walks, and we ate several fine meals. I told them stories about the census, and also about my wife—someone they as cultured people knew, someone they had a high regard for. But eventually it was time to go.

  As we sat in the car, as I turned the ignition and prepared to depart, the older sister poked her head through the car window and told me:

  there is a film we have, a film of your wife’s performance. It is the only
one I have seen. Do you know it?

  I said I had seen a few. Which was it she spoke of?

  This one is a stage with an enormous plate on it, a napkin, a spoon. There are giant pieces of silverware, a knife and fork, hovering overhead managed by spectacular mechanical arms. Your wife is dressed as some part of the supper, and she spends the performance eluding the cutlery as a monologue is read by a man through a bullhorn. Do you know the history of that piece?

  I shook my head. Of course, I did know, but I liked hearing it told to me. When the person you love has died, any indication that they once lived is received gratefully, or alternately, you want to pretend that nothing good has ever taken place in the world. In this case, it was the former.

  The sister continued, leaning against the car, there, almost standing in her overrun garden speaking to us so powerfully, and thinking not of that, but of a distant place and time, and probably, simultaneously, a faint overlay of the person she herself was when she first watched the film in a third time and a third place, and in that faint overlay some sense of dissonance—her understanding of the world at the time, and her present understanding now. Telling stories is a visitation of this sort—for the stamp bears the impression not just of what it was to begin with, but of its every use.

  The sister continued:

  She wrote it with another girl, and they both performed it, alternating nights. In a performance the week before the one they filmed, just a week before it, the other girl was crushed and killed by the fork: right in that same theater. No one had been coming to see the show, they were about to close, but once that happened, the audience was packed every night. This is the show that killed a clown. That’s what everyone was saying to each other. It became a famous thing. Perhaps you know the story?

  I said the film was called that, The Show That Killed A Clown.

  I can never remember, she said, what the famous monologue is about, which is strange, because, well, monologues are what I do. At the time when I am watching the film the man’s words as he shouts them through the bullhorn, they seem to me to be unobjectionable, maybe even funny. But, afterwards: nothing. I don’t even know who the man was.

  He was a drunk, I said, a thoroughly drunk person recruited from the street moments before each performance. But, as for the monologue, I don’t remember it either. I don’t know that I can even hear it. I just remember from that piece, I remember the part where . . .

  Where the fork and knife start to play with her—where you feel they know they have killed before, and they are only too happy, only too happy to kill again. It is the part where you feel she doesn’t know what she is doing on the stage—that she must have wandered there by accident.

  Yes, it is this part I like best.

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  My son wanted to be the one to administer the census in the next village, some satellite of F. I told him he could do it, but that he would have to be prepared, as I always was, for refusals, cruelty, indifference. I explained all the awful things that could happen.

  We came up with a simplified version that he would do. I was to be his assistant.

  We went to the first house. A boy came to the door. This greeter went away and came back with a larger version of himself. The two escorted us into the kitchen where we sat at the kitchen table. The man repeatedly tried to meet my eyes, but I always looked down. My son’s questions were met with some confusion. He would repeat each query many times (which is also what I often have to do), and he wrote the answers down in a large folio notebook. He is not proficient in writing, but likes to do what I think of as a sort of semblance of writing—so it was as if their answers were recorded in some inscrutable simulacrum of wavy lines. The man kept peering over to see what it was that was being written, but my son held the folio at an angle such that it could not be seen.

  I administered the census mark to the man, and he had objections to this—somehow the gravity of the endeavor was not properly clear to him. At that point, I was forced to show him my proofs. He quieted down.

  How did you like it? I asked my son after the fifth house, a particularly difficult visit. The people in the fifth house pretended not to understand my son at all. I was forced to interpret. To begin with, these were not gentle people. They were not nice to each other, they were not nice to us. Luckily, he did not feel he had done anything wrong. It was clear to him that giving the census was not easy.

  Five visits in that town—and he felt it was enough. He asked me what it was we were trying to do. I said that this was a difficulty for me also. It is hard, I said, convincing someone else to do something the value of which you do not understand.

  But, do I, I asked myself as we drove on, doubt the census itself? No, a thousand times, no. It is only my particular application of it, an application mired in confusion, the confusion of my life and circumstance. I imagine in my head, late at night, what a real census taker would be like, the manner of his arrival at a house, the greeting he would receive, what questions he would ask, caparisoned, as it were in garments of silver, moonlight perhaps?

  That something beyond you longs to know your humble circumstances, longs to know every last detail of your feeble and utterly failed life: what does it mean?

  I put the papers my son had written along with all the other papers and when we reached the next post office, mailed them together. There may be someone at the bureau who can see what I cannot—for whom something certain resides in places where my eye can only quiver and fail.

  I think I first came upon the cormorant not in the open air but in the pages of a book—as a boy reading Paradise Lost. Satan costumes himself that way—and it is understandable, I think, for him to do it. We don’t just pick costumes for their efficacy, but also because we delight in them, and like how we look. It is funny to me to think of Satan and the woman of San Nicolas Island wearing a similar garb, though I suppose Satan also had a beak and webbed feet, light bones, etcetera. The question of whether Satan inhabiting a form has in actuality the form itself, or just the appearance of that form is one that has never been argued to any sort of conclusion by theologians, though they have tried. A possible answer is that he does not in any way resemble a cormorant when he is in a cormorant disguise; however, looking at him, you feel you are looking at a cormorant. This line of thinking would make us to feel that the woman of San Nicolas Island, despite not having the beak and wings of Satan’s cormorant, in some sense comes closer to true cormoranthood than does he.

  The truth is—at the time I did not even know what a cormorant looked like, so knowing that Satan was disguised as a cormorant was to me knowing nothing. I had an idea that a cormorant was a kind of crow. Later I learned from Mutter that I was not alone in this belief—an entirely false one. The cormorant is no corvid cousin.

  There is a theory about Milton, that he made Satan use a cormorant shape because that wondrous water bird is unskilled at flying. The cormorant’s wings are too short to fly well. It can be argued that it almost—that it almost doesn’t fly. In fact, the cormorant does fly, but it is tiring for it to do so. Of course the reason is—it must swim well, and graceful wings made for the air are no help in swimming. To me it makes sense that Milton might have wanted Satan to be a bit uneasy in the sky, as a kind of precautionary measure, a tinge of color, however, this is not entirely consonant with the fable of evil as we know it, for don’t witches flee into the air at the slightest provocation? Wasn’t Satan himself an angel?

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  Years ago a woman came to me with a puzzling condition. She was a friend of my wife’s.

  Can we have this conversation in confidence?

  Yes, of course.

  I am beginning to have trouble recognizing my husband.

  What do you mean?

  I mean—I can’t recognize him anymore, if we are in a large group. If I have to meet him in public it is hopeless. I just stand there and wait for him to approach me and declare himself. It’s all I can do.

  If someone else were t
o do it, were to approach me as I stood there in the crowd—well, I would just go off with that person instead. I simply can’t tell who he is.

  The woman was about forty-five, a stage actress. She wore her hair in elaborate beehives and such, and always dressed in the finest clothing. My wife made endless of fun of her about it.

  Her husband was an economist. The trouble was, as they grew in wealth, the two of them become more and more like everyone else, to the point that, as she said, she could no longer tell him apart from anyone. Presumably, the man himself was in the same difficulty—but he was too proud to seek help. Either that, or his philandering ways made it that he didn’t care.

  No, I am just joking about that. The mind weaves things this way and that. Actually, the sad truth was this: the woman, long a reluctant patient of mine, her husband had died earlier that year, and she refused to accept it. She would rather believe that she could no longer recognize him, that he had been lost that way, than to come to terms with his death.

  I told her that the best thing for it was to find someone else, to find a person that she could both notice and identify, and to bind herself to him (or he to her). The disintegration of your marriage, I told her, is completed in anonymity, the anonymity in which no one can be told from any other. You must find someone remarkable.

  This was very bad advice, and was prompted partly by the fact that I disliked the woman very much. I think it could be said that, if I believed she would take my advice, then the giving of that advice might be seen to be wrong. However, this woman had always despised me, and thought my opinions of no account. Therefore, the opinions that I gave her began to be of no account. Isn’t that the spirit, the essence of fairness? Perhaps that is why some have said: there is no fairness in medicine.

  In general, I have always avoided that realm of doctoring that touches upon the mind. I had a friend in medical school who was embarked that way. He became a great success, his speech a kind of cure-all, and I always felt that it was his ability to persuade people against their will, that made him successful. My wife hated him and wouldn’t have him in the house.