by Jesse Ball
That was a rule we had—no one could come to the house who was not universally loved (by myself, my wife, my son—that universe). We had few guests, obviously, but those few—how wonderful!
In the office of the census, I was given a sort of audition. I was there in the hopes that it would be a simple matter becoming a census taker. I was in a hurry, I was dying; is there any hurry greater than that?
Go out of the room, the census chief (local bureau chief) told me. Go out of the room, and come back in, and when you do, administer to me the census, as though to a stranger.
I went out, came back in, performed the first portion of the census, performed the second and the third, noted that I was near appropriate completion of the fourth (which does not always occur), made my appropriate completion, offered my goodbyes, and went out again. Then I waited.
I was told to come back in.
I went back in.
You are too formal, he said, and slapped his pant leg as if to knock dust off a glove.
You are too formal, he repeated, and you are also not formal enough. You prattle on when you should listen. You ask the questions as if the meaning of the question is obvious, rather than asking it in such a way that the person is removed past himself/herself to the place in which the answer resides. Are questions so obvious? I think not. Do not let yourself make them so.
When you ask a question you are not looking for the rote answer stored in the brain. Why, you could have that yourself without asking—save everyone the trouble. Instead, you are looking for a reconsideration of that question in light of the person’s entire lived experience, something you cannot know until you are told.
Your body, your extended hand, the tautness of your face, the turn of your foot—it must all shout: I here and now give you permission to live an examined life, beginning now with this moment in which I ask you a question and you, poor soul, may examine your life in the light that it sheds. This is a part, just one small part, of the grace that the census offers.
Not, where were your parents born—but, what is the meaning of a national boundary? When your parents crossed such a thing to come here—how did it change them? Why did they do it? Who were those people who left the place that they came from—fearful, hopeful, full of a joy long since extinguished, perhaps replaced with fresh joy, perhaps not—who were they, and how, in all the wild mystery of earth and its citizens, could they have come to be the people now crushed by age, waiting fitfully in the waters of death’s first sleep?
You begin by saying to me, hello—by greeting me, and yet, the greeting you give is a mere pleasantry, rather than a precursor, a spur, to actual experience. You must jolt the life of the person you face so that the matter at hand can come to light in a lived moment.
So many things wrong, so many. He shook his head.
When you look into my eyes as I am speaking, you make me lose my train of thought. If I begin to speak and the eyes are met, then leave them, and if I begin to speak and you are looking away, then look away. You can only meet my eyes while I am speaking if I come to a rhetorical point—where I am asking in some sense if you pay attention. Otherwise this action of yours—to meet my eyes—only disturbs me by declaring (in meeting my eyes), I exist, and I am standing here. Does this profane waving of the envelope of the interaction serve any purpose? Perhaps if a person has wandered far afield in answering a question, perhaps then—but even so, perhaps not, for it is at such times that the census often comes upon what is most valuable.
Do you even know what the census is?
››
I confess to you, my audition for the census was in some ways completely humiliating. The chief reached for an illustrative example, he told me that a snide boy curling his lips into a sneer as he passed each house on his own street—that this would be of more service to the census than the pathetic performance he had witnessed. At least, he said, that would not discomfit the populace. They are used to that sort of thing already.
You must understand the basic position that you are in when you enter someone’s house. You might well be the first person to ever enter that place. The man or woman you speak to might know no one. He or she might speak a language not heard in a hundred years. You must consider yourself a sort of archaeologist, a scientist, an artist, a priest. But you must add to those professions a strong dose of that immemorial office: the vagrant fool. You must truly see that you are of no account.
Why do you inquire? Why indeed? If faced with a question you cannot answer, do not ever try to answer it. Simply be patient, amass, amass. An answer might come—or a more particular question.
The census taker does not arrive as a child to a doll’s house, all seeing, all comprehending. We do not pry off the roof to investigate. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite. It is we who have no freedom, we who are bound to a running wheel that moves on a fixed path a thousand miles to its end with nary a moment to breathe or smile.
Think rather that we are a scab on a dog’s neck. The dog in its ignorance will, we are sure, attempt to scrape at us, to claw us off, but we must cling to it if we are to do any good.
I asked him to explain this. I did not understand—in this metaphor, the census is the scab and the dog is the nation?
He laughed at me.
What is our purpose? Is it the dog we are trying to help? Perhaps in some way—but in a more general, or more precise sense, you choose, it is the house that the dog guards—that is where the good we do is bound. The dog guards the house, we guard the wound upon the dog’s neck.
He pointed to a painting on the wall, a painting of a dog in an uncomfortable posture beside a fence post. Upon close inspection, the dog could be seen to have a wound on his neck, a wound covered in scabs.
The census chief covered his mouth as if telling a secret:
An old manner of looking at it is to say that each census taker is a scab and each person is the dog, that the house is the nation, etcetera. In this sense, we are in the realm of synecdoche, for each scab is all scabs, each person is all people—humankind and scabkind respectively. This was thought for a time to be the right way of looking at things.
Now, on the other hand we go about it a different way. The census itself, at the moment given, is the scab, the wound is what isn’t known about the populace—it is therefore not just in what manner the dog has been injured, but rather, in what manner the action of the defending of the house has been altered by the wound. Does the dog shy away? Does he whimper? Does he hide beside a fence post because he cannot do his duty? The census, in learning his capability, somehow ameliorates the situation by taking into account the dog’s excellences, what is left to it to do, and understanding its deficiencies—which of its tasks it can no longer perform. The idea of the house as the nation is also a known fallacy. The census is a matter for humankind in general—past nations, which, after all, bloom here and there like flowers, each one to its own paltry epoch. That which we can know, and continue to know—it is not bound to the nation. Once that knowledge exists, it exists.
He patted me on the shoulder, go you unlucky scab. Do what good you can.
G
I used to do exercises to keep my strength, but I have abandoned them for the duration of this trip. The reason is not that I know I will die soon, because I feel people should keep on with the routines they love, whatever the case. The reason: I feel that driving the Stafford is itself exercise. The car has almost no suspension to speak of, and bounces every which way. Driving the Stafford over rough and rocky roads is in effect the experience of being yourself dragged over those same roads—and at a fast clip! This was the experience of being a tinker, I suppose, long ago—traveling from town to town with clattering wares. Our wares (the census and its documents) have no sound, though—just the inchoate shape of lives, and so they cannot clatter.
My son would like very much to drive, but I do not let him. One day, though, as we went our way, we came upon a broad cleared space—the site of a fair to be
, or a fair that was. So, I let him drive about there. He just handled the wheel, but it was quite thrilling for him. And, in watching, I once again felt the strangeness of driving—of piloting such an absolutely large object around with nothing whatsoever to stop me!
There were some metal uprights here and there that needed to be avoided, and it was never clear that he would avoid them—though he did. We drove quite slowly, just fifteen miles an hour or so, but it felt very fast, and as we went we sang at the top of our lungs. He would swing the wheel back and forth wildly, nearly tipping the car at times—it is not meant for such things. Two large birds were resting in the distance, on a fence and I could see their puzzlement, even though their faces weren’t clear. Don’t you ever feel you can look into an animal’s face just as you would a person’s?
When we had gone around again, I looked for them, but they were nowhere to be found.
My son said to me about the driving of the car, he said this after driving the car: now I am a driver. I said, yes, but don’t drive the car without me. He said you don’t drive the car without me.
››
It is fine to talk about exercises—but those are a matter for someone looking through the trees to the open air. I deceive myself when I pretend to that state of affairs.
For me, things were worse. I had felt it for a time, just as I had at home, a trouble, a tightening in my chest, and it had come more and more. Of course, I did not worry for myself, as I would have in many ways liked to be already dead, but for my son. His life is such that he is assured of nothing that continues. He needs a champion.
In G, I woke up and I was lying on the floor of someone’s living room. My son was crying and holding my foot. A doctor was looking down at me, his face and five or six others. The faces were very close to me. People always come closer to an injured person than they usually would, as if the injured person takes up less space. That or they shun you.
What could I remember? I know I entered the house, I know I had begun to speak to them of the census, and then—I don’t know.
The doctor got me to my feet after a while.
We spoke; he found he could extend a great courtesy: he took us back to his own home. He allowed us to stay there several days. He himself ministered to me daily. Why he would be so kind is hard to say. There are expressions, some people are like that or it was the right thing to do. I think it is more often simply luck. I must have reminded him of someone.
In any case, on the fourth day my condition passed, but I was very weak. I felt I should sit for another day or two, and he concurred.
I will give you a description of this man.
The man was about thirty, and eager to speak with me about all things medical. He would describe professional troubles, problems of this sort or that, and I would speak to them with my long experience. In the evenings, we played chess. He liked to think over his moves for a long time, both the obvious ones and the difficult.
I came here, he said, by a process of elimination. I didn’t want to go to any of the places that I knew, I didn’t want to practice there where I had been, anywhere I had been. So I went to a place that I did not know, thinking it might be different. But it is much the same. It is much the same, don’t you think?
He said he had been there six years, and would probably never leave. The people who lived in G were easy to deal with, on the whole kind and well meaning. They liked him well enough, and respected him. There was a certain distance, a certain reserve displayed by almost everyone on account of his being an outsider, but he understood that. He was working on a medical dictionary, and constantly corresponding with other doctors all over the country. But it was good, he said, to be face to face with another like him, if I didn’t mind him saying that.
I said I didn’t mind at all. But, he should know that I was no longer a surgeon.
The profession is the profession, he said. You can’t give it up, even if you want to.
I said there was one way to give it up for good.
He was very concerned about my heart, and gave me several medications. There are things that could be done, he said, certain drastic things. But he could see I wouldn’t pursue those, and if so, if I wouldn’t pursue those, well, then I knew already, most likely I knew, I must already know what he knew, which was that, if I was not at the end, I was at least very near it.
What will you do with your son? What will he do when you die?
There is someone he can go to—someone we know. I will send him back on the train.
That will be hard. Do you think he can travel alone?
He can do it. There is always someone who has it in themselves to help him. It is not a fact I have ever seen fit to rely on before, but it has always been true.
Do you ever wonder, the young doctor asked me, who he thinks he is? Who does your son think he is? I have a sense of myself and I’m sure you have a sense of yourself, and in some ways we attempt to obtain from others a recognition of it. I attempt in meeting you to ensure that you see who I think I am when you look at me. You do the same. But he does not appear to try very hard to do that. And so I wonder—who does he think he is?
I said that this is something my wife talked about, something she would bring up from time to time. One day, there was a box of photographs from our lives together, and she brought them all out. She and he went into his room with the photographs and he chose several to put on the wall of his room beside the door. He puzzled over them for hours, taking one down, putting another up. This became a kind of activity that would happen that summer, and I believe by the time the fall came, he had finished. The wall had reached a kind of solvency. From then on it did not change.
The fact that he chose the images for the wall, and that he liked to look at them did not really imply that he thought the person in the photographs was himself. And, in fact, I think we as people make a kind of mistake in believing this to be true in general about photographs of ourselves. Is that really you in the photograph? Or is it someone you have a connection with? Someone you once knew, but who now is foreign to you? A person whose concerns you share in part—but who is lost and gone away?
Because of this we did not insist with him that the photographs were him, although we often implied it. For some this may be an overly subtle point, but if you are not interested in such subtleties, then you will unwittingly forfeit many of the finest things that life gives to you to feel.
››
The photographs were attached to the wall with small black nails. My wife had a ball-peen hammer and she enjoyed using it for tasks that often deserved a real hammer. I am not even sure what a ball-peen hammer is for, or why she came to own one, but I imagine it was simply the innate oddness of the ball-peen hammer that drew her to it.
I heard the nails going in, one by one that first day. Then on days that followed all through the summer, my wife would be called up to the room to rearrange them, or to take one photograph down and replace it with another. We came to be very familiar with those photographs.
The first series, that ran highest on the wall, at his head height, were of a snow scene. I don’t remember what year it was, though I think the year was written on the back of one or two of them. We had bundled him up in his winter clothes, and taken him sledding. Someone had given us an old fashioned sled—one that didn’t work very well—and we had gone out to the yard to drag him around in it. This was his first real experience with snow—and he thought it marvelous. He climbed out of the sled and rolled back and forth in it, getting snow all over his face and nose. Then he began to cry and then he stopped, for he was happy. He ate some of the snow. He called out to us, some syllable—I guess it was a word for snow. He had a parka on, one with a big hood, and my wife and I took photographs holding him to commemorate the moment. First, one in which she hid behind him, holding him up. This was often her posture, to pretend to be doing something useful, while, in fact, concealing herself.
His expression as I hold him is rootless—he does n
ot know that he is being photographed, and thinks that his mother is standing to have a look at him. But why?
She calls to him; in the next picture he breaks into a smile. I am beaming. What can she have said?
On the wall these two are separated with another where she and he look for something on the sled. From the shadows I think it must be late afternoon—and this leads me to wonder, what did we do all morning as the snow was falling? It is something I have forgotten. A thing was given to me—a marvelous morning with snow falling, a lovely wife and child, an afternoon to come out in the landscape—and I allowed it to pass in such a way that I can no longer feel it. What things did my wife say to me? What observations did I make that I hoped to think on again? All lost—but pointed at like an arrow by the late afternoon shadow cast by the sled in this photograph I no longer possess.
››
The next picture was of my son in a sink. He is of that size that he can bathe in a sink, and so, of course, we bathed him there. I understand that there are people who bathe small children in baths, but as far as we were concerned, the essential ridiculousness and joy of bathing a small human in a sink was not to be avoided or lost. This photograph recommends itself to my memory because of one thing—my son asked where the boy in the photograph was. Where is he? I asked him: when did he mean? In the picture the boy is in our house, the house we lived in, this house, this very one that we live in still, so I told him. And that is still where the boy is, but now the house is much smaller, much more familiar.