Census

by Jesse Ball

  My wife would sometimes use the photographs to illustrate points that she was making, as she knew he knew them so well. She would say, and now we are going to work on this the way we worked on walking, do you remember how we worked on walking? And she would show him the picture in which she stands behind him holding his arms, as he steps forward on uncertain feet. Then they would return to the exercise, whatever it was, working on words, or letters, or singing, whatever.

  Two photographs that were among the very first put on the wall, but that disappeared for months only to be put up at the last, the very last two, but set right in the middle of the proceedings, they were a pair of photographs of a raincoat, with him in it. There is a raincoat and a bannister and a boy in the coat, and I am in the shadows behind. In the next the hood of the raincoat is up and it has begun to appear to be the costume of a clown. I think this is why he liked the photograph. When my wife and he first saw it, she said, oh look, here you are a clown, like me. Here you are like me. Then something threw it out of favor and it disappeared into the pile only to be brought back again at the last, as a tie between mother and son. In truth, I think the photograph gives the impression of a clown not because of anything that is funny or comedic, but because there is a formality and gravity to the costume that has no bearing. It is this powerful expression of some specific place in a hierarchy that does not exist that is the wonder of a clownish costume—the regular elements of garments distorted, missized, deformed. Yet there is a freedom granted by that—and the freedom is, one cannot misuse the garment of a clown. Whatever one does is right.

  On the back of the door, my wife put a photograph of our laundry line. She told him that the photographs he was choosing were like the laundry on the line and that he could place them however he liked, just as the laundry was placed, and that they could be fetched and returned and moved about in all the same ways, and even worn, pinned to a shirt, if he wanted.

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  The young doctor inquired: when did he learn about the camera—when did he know what it did? Did he learn to operate it himself?

  I said he did not want to use the camera, who knows why. But he liked very much to carry it, and often did, and when it would come time to use it he would give it to my wife or to me, and the photographs would be taken. Though by that time, I think we took far fewer photographs, perhaps more out of a sense of obligation than anything else, though obligation to whom, I can’t say.

  My wife loved to take photographs of trees, and even more than trees, of the woods, of that grouping—no single tree, but conglomerations of branches. There was a photograph there on my son’s wall where he stands with me and he grips my arm with his hand, and behind us there is a kind of wilderness of branches. It is my feeling that the photographer looked past us as she took the photograph, and that we are in it in some sense, only by chance. Still it was my favorite of the photographs that I was in, perhaps because of the position of the hat I was wearing, which is lowered over my eyes. This was my favorite hat for many years, and I lost it climbing. My wife and son would laugh at me when I spoke about any new hat that I owned but disliked, and there was a kind of joke my son would make where he would without breaking into a smile tell me that he knew very well where my hat was, it was upstairs, and I would play along and say, yes, if it is upstairs, why don’t we go and get it, and he would say all right, and then up we would go, up the stairs, and I would say, well, you have me upstairs, where now, and he would lead me to his room, and I would say, is my old hat in your room, my old hat that I lost while climbing?, and he would nod, and lead me in, and then I would make a great display and demand that my hat be returned to me, and he would point with glee to the photograph and tell me if I wanted it, I could have it.

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  There is another boy who is in three of the pictures. He lived across the way, and his parents were not friendly to us. I believe the father hated us, there was some misunderstanding. But when the boy was young he would come often to play with my son. This went on for a year or more, and then one day, no more. They continued to live across the street, but would have nothing to do with us.

  My son liked this boy very much, and so three pictures on the wall are photographs of him. I must say, in all honesty, this was a very bad boy. He would never listen and would always break things. Anything given to him was as good as broken. But we did not mind that, not very much, and treated him well until it came time for him to disappear into his own life.

  They had a large dog, too, named Robber and when the boys were young, they would hold on to Robber’s neck and be pulled about the yard.

  I think the boy came most one year when the weather was very hot, because the impression I have from those photographs, and in general, in thinking of him, is one of intense heat. We made a lemonade stand for them, but no one came. It was a rather lonely road. I had to pretend to be a customer myself, but the boys were not deceived, and I know that they felt in their hearts it was not valid, although they gave me lemonade and charged me the agreed price.

  Sometimes he would ask me, my son would ask why it was so dark in the photographs. I believe it is true that many of the photographs that we took were taken inside, and it is also true that the lens of the camera we owned was a rather poor one, and so the light was not good enough for excellent photography. Yet, two of the pictures that he liked the most, two that he did in fact refer to as being photographs of himself, were very dark pictures. In these two he is by a window, and wearing a striped shirt. His mischief is in his face, beneath the surface in the first, and fully apparent, covering his face, in the second, in which he has left the window, and is in motion towards us.

  The last photograph, lowest on the wall, was of the garage outside our house. He is standing on the cracked pavement, and wearing a sport coat. I believe it was a first day of school, some first day of school, and he had gotten his clothing together in an official sense. He had prepared himself, and he wanted the moment commemorated. I think this because there is a set to his shoulders in the photograph that implies some kind of patience, or some bowing before the inevitable. Not that he was very resigned—as a child he was not one to be resigned to things. If anything he was a mule.

  He does not seem so stubborn to me now, said the doctor. Why he is very courteous.

  We looked over at my son, who was asleep, curled on a couch.

  Look he has even removed his shoes before putting his feet up on the sofa.

  Oh he is thoughtful, I said. But the thoughtful ones are often the most stubborn, don’t you think, when they have a sense of justice, of injustice?

  The doctor collected old books and he showed us many beautiful medical atlases, many tomes of curiosities. He seemed to enjoy showing them to us, and his voice became very warm as he spoke.

  The naming of things has never been systematic, he said—this was his chief complaint. It makes the body an impossible morass, but it need not be so. He proposed an entire new scheme of naming—the renaming not just of every part of the body, but also of all illnesses, so that the entire matter of the human form and its sicknesses could be easily understood.

  I said there was one difficulty—that we could at this moment only come up with a scheme of naming as perfect as our present understanding of the body. That, in effect, a dozen or two dozen years from now, the state of medical knowledge would have moved forward, and that it would become necessary to, in essence, do the very same thing once more, renaming everything in order to fit a new and more profound consensus.

  Of course, of course, he agreed. His feeling was that this should happen once every fifty years.

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  I went about with him in the last days of my recovery and found him to be an excellent practitioner. He would introduce me as a senior colleague, despite my dress, and would solicit my opinions as he dealt with matters of all kinds. Only once did he truly need it, as I recognized the presence of a special sort of cyst that he had never seen, but that I had often dealt with. We
talked the procedure over thoroughly the night before my son and I left.

  Won’t you stay? Perform the operation, or even just assist?

  It is within you to do it. Certainly it is.

  He had an immense fear of seeing his own blood, strange in a doctor, and he would not for anything be marked by the census needle. He had the mark of the previous census, though. How? I asked.

  I was holding a friend’s hand and I fainted dead away, he said with a laugh. The room disappeared before my eyes, and it has been replaced with this.

  He gestured to his books, statues, leather-clad desk, his carpeted study.

  I feel so old, right now, he laughed. Don’t you always find you are the age of the person you are talking to? I feel, I feel speaking to you that we have lived together your life of surgery—so many years of life. And, I suppose you feel, speaking to me, that you are a young man, just beginning his practice. You can feel what I feel in that regard. But the years will pass quickly. Soon, I, like you, will be near the door.

  The body gets used up, but the mind continues, like a darting bird, I said quietly.

  A darting bird, wingless in the open air.

  We laughed together. My son laughed too.

  It was time to leave. It could be delayed no further. The doctor came out with us to the car and stood waving as we went, as we approached the distance, at which point he vanished completely, he and the town of G.

  Mostly as we drove, my son and I talked about things we had spoken of many times before, things that we both knew about, and liked to talk about. It wasn’t necessary to talk about new things very often, or I should say, only if they really merited it.

  One of the old things that came up again and again was The Shape School. It is the school where my wife went to live when she was ten. Such a place! The Shape School was an experimental school. The idea was that it would serve the ordinary purpose of education for ordinary students, but in an extraordinary way. In fact, what it did was turn out clowns.

  There is a shape to everything, so it was said by the teacher at The Shape School, herself a famous mime. If you can enter into and assume the shape of something, then you can demonstrate it to someone else. You must become a library of shapes.

  I believe there were two teachers and perhaps forty students during the decade in which The Shape School was in operation. Like clowns, the teachers could not keep their hand on the tiller for longer than that. They wandered off to other pursuits.

  The Shape School was housed in a military barracks that had been disused for a decade before coming on the market. I suppose that’s when the clowns found it and thought—how funny would it be to have a clown school in an army barracks. Though, of course, they didn’t think of it as a clown school. In fact, as I said, it was quite the contrary: they had genuine pedagogical aspirations to perform only the most basic work of education.

  But, for the time that it existed—I think no one would have wished to be anywhere else. I suppose that isn’t entirely true, as of the total population through the years of forty students, they ended up with only six graduates. But a school of that sort must be hard—if only to challenge its finest pupils, who in this case, were those that no one else would ever have raised up or lionized. The finest pupils of The Shape School would have been degenerates and laughingstocks in any other school.

  My son liked for me to tell the story of the boating lesson. It was announced one morning to the students, to the first class, some fifteen pupils, that they would learn to go boating. Everyone was instructed to wear a bathing suit and to bring nothing of value. Children are always squirreling away precious things in their pants, socks, sleeves—and so this was a wise precaution.

  The group went down to the lake, where there were two rowboats. The instructors took one, and rowed out a ways.

  With a bullhorn they yelled out—and their voices were clear over the plane of water, come on now, come on. Let us see which two can have the best accident.

  So all day they were at it, the students going two by two out onto the lake, and failing at boating in one way or another, ending up spluttering and coughing, dragged by the neck or shirt or arm out of the cold lakewater.

  There is a proper way, the older instructor said, to have a boating accident. We will demonstrate.

  The instructors then set out to boat, and were overcome by a complete catastrophe that saw the rowboat overturned, an oar broken, and one of the two instructors not found for a good twenty minutes, at which time she emerged from the bushes on the far side of the lake.

  That is how to have a boating accident.

  For, as they said, it is not just about the truth of the thing, but that there is some common essence to the accidental, and that you must not simply have your accident pervaded with the essence of itself, but that essence must, in some sense, be magnified. Its essential nature as accident must be signal, must be obvious to the onlooker in a direct way—it must call to the person within the onlooker, she who has fallen from a boat, perhaps ten years ago, skipping over all the days and things that have come to pass since, and leaving her in an abject state of empathy, of total understanding. At that point it is even possible to remove the boat accident itself. For instance . . .

  At this point, the instructor performed a boat accident, but not in the lake. She performed it there on dry ground with only her hands and feet to help her, and astonishment was general through the crowd. For, just as on the water, a calamity had come, and it was clear, as clear as day, that it had not come from within the mime, but from without.

  Where then does it come from?

  My son always wanted to know where the instructor went when no one knew where she was—when the boat had overturned and the oar had broken. He, my wife and I, we would try to analyze it: did she swim underwater the whole way? Was she ever in the boat? These were the questions. My wife, who, of course, had been the one to first tell the story to us, she said the instructor was in the boat and that she had swum the distance holding her breath. But then there was a reservation about this. For it to seem a proper accident, wouldn’t it be impossible to get a deep breath while the boat overturned? Wouldn’t that ruin the idea of the accident (if you were overseen)? Everyone agreed that it must have been a very stealthy breath. Because it isn’t like a magician’s trick—you can’t know where the audience will be looking when you have a boat accident. They may well be looking straight at your face, and if so, then you had better not be taking a deep breath just before it happens.

  The alternate theory—that only one instructor was in the boat, is conceivable. One instructor rows out, has the boat accident, and then asks where the other is, and states that she was in the boat, too. The human mind will supply a second instructor in the boat. Sadly, it is the case that we are this fallible and credulous.

  To this idea, my son said, she would want to be in the boat. They want to be in the boat together.

  Although, there are many objections to this statement, there is something essentially right about it. The lens is set at the right distance, and that is: the instructors are just people like anyone else. Given the opportunity to be in an overturning boat, they will take it, regardless of this frame of teaching. We have all had an experience of this kind, when we are hiding and watching a group of people who begin to do something that we would like to join in. Yet, we must keep to our contract, we must continue to hide, and it tears us almost in half—our desire to join in the delight of whatever pastime it is, whatever treat is being shared, and our firm intention to remain hidden.

  One can take this as a sort of principle, so my wife told me—that we must be positioned within our deceptions in such a way that we can be afforded the maximum continued delight. It is useless to be Atlas.

  H

  As we drove on, a feeling grew in me. It has always been my opinion that if you are performing an operation of any sort, not a medical operation, I don’t mean that, although certainly, that too is an operation, and what I say now applies al
so there, but I mean, more generally, any sort of operation whatsoever—if you are engaged upon a pursuit that you will assay again and again, then you should change up the manner in which you do it, you should experiment in small ways in order to be assured that you are in fact performing it in the best way possible. Too often people permit tradition to stand in for misunderstanding, or vice versa, and then the mistakes that were made in comprehension are compounded, mistakes that are, in many cases, correctable with logic alone. Think then of what the careful pursuit of excellence can do, giving no heed to anything but what functions—it was this way with me regarding the census.

  I felt suddenly that the census taking we had done already was of a particular kind, and that we needed no longer to do it in that way. I was sure: I could use what I knew now about census taking to begin a new method of performing the work, a method that would adhere in a fundamental way to the spirit of the census, but that would permit my human fallacy less rein in its ruinous deceits.

  NEW METHOD OF THE CENSUS

  The new method of the census was an objection to the formal aspects of the previous method. Where before it was seen to be necessary to ask specific questions, and thus to privilege the gathering of certain information over other information, now it became clear that we could decide what information to look for. To have the luxury of subordinating oneself to one’s superiors, certainly it is a delight. In an immediate sense, one is never other than a lectured child at such times, and one finds what one is asked to find, if one finds anything at all. However, out in the world I have come to see that he who looks too hard for any particular thing, though he may find it, will certainly miss the most wondrous and strange things he passes, though they stare him in the face.