Census

by Jesse Ball

  I felt that I must continue to Z. There was nothing for it but to continue to Z. And at the same time, as my condition worsened, I felt sure that I would not make it to Z. What then? When there is nothing to do, you do what little there is—what little is left.

  M

  My wife wrote me letters when we first met. We lived in the same place—not together yet, obviously, but in the same city, and we would meet every day, or nearly every day, but still she would write me letters.

  I just feel, she would say, that there are things I would never say to you—things you need to know.

  Also, she thought the person she was in her letters was someone she herself did not know until the letter was written, and then it was like she was meeting herself.

  She said that when she was at The Shape School, she lived nearby, with a young couple who had consented to take in three student boarders. The three were my wife, another girl named Gretchen, who was about seventeen, the same age as my wife, and a younger girl. The younger girl was totally uninteresting. Do you remember one of the vases at your aunt’s house? Did you have an aunt? Did she have vases? Did you see those vases? This girl was like such a vase, impossible to notice, and instantaneously forgotten, not to be told apart from any other vase.

  My wife said the couple was young and very successful. The house was quite large, with beautiful marble countertops, rooms leading on to rooms, two or three kitchens, verandas, porches. The man was an attorney, his spouse a chemist. Because the woman was a chemist, she spent long hours in the laboratory, and when she was there, the husband would be making love with Gretchen all over the house. He was very charismatic, and somehow he managed to obtain the understanding from the girls almost instantly that the whole thing was a lark, but should absolutely not be spoken of—it was something the girls had in common with him, this was what he communicated. Meanwhile, the wife would sit the three girls down and give them advice about the world, and how to handle themselves as women. She would touch Gretchen on the wrist and say, you have to think about things from every angle. Gretchen would laugh—she had a hoarse laugh like a donkey, and she would laugh. It was so funny to her—the woman talking about angles.

  Still, my wife was just a girl then and loved going to The Shape School. She had found a place, as she put it, between wing beats. The bird sails on through the air. The teachers praised her constantly, but also pushed her, cursed her even. At The Shape School one of the instructors for the final year even used a quirt, a short whip, to bring the students to heel. He used the whip on her.

  My wife relates that one day she showed up to class wearing just pants—nudity was common at The Shape School, and the instructor whipped her so hard that the whip cut her just below the collarbone. Why did she get whipped? She got whipped for not noticing what was happening. Her shirtlessness had nothing to do with it.

  One of the rules at The Shape School was, when you enter a room you had best know immediately what is happening. Every last thing that is happening in the room, you must acquire, process and place. Acquire, process and place. Then you can know how to behave. You should even be able to shut your eyes and reconstruct the scene.

  On that day, she was late and thinking about something else, so when she rushed into the classroom, she failed to notice that a dog was giving birth on the table. In coming into the rooms so rapidly, she alarmed the dog. This led to her correct punishment at the hands of her teacher.

  I always liked her, though, she wrote to me in the letter detailing these events, I always liked her even when she whipped me. Her lessons were brutal. There was no way to leave the classroom unchanged.

  In another one of her letters she speaks about her boyfriend Willy. He was not at The Shape School; he went to school in the nearby town. But he suspected her of constantly having sexual orgies at The Shape School, a thing that, to the best of my wife’s knowledge, had never and would never happen at The Shape School. Still, the general lawlessness, physical contact, and irreverence of The Shape School led him to believe that such things went on, and he was always trying to catch her in a lie. In spite of that, he was a dear boy, so she said, and she would perhaps have married him, but for one thing. One day, we were talking and he said something to me. The thing that he said was so awful that I resolved never to speak to him. Much as I loved him, much as I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, he said this one thing and it was too much. I knew instantly that I would never speak to him or see him again. I will tell you in the next letter what that thing was.

  Well, of course I was curious as to what that thing was that Willy had said. I was also a little worried—I had only met this young woman recently, I liked her very much; I didn’t want to say the wrong thing to her and receive the same treatment Willy had. But the days went by, I saw her each day, and the next letter failed to materialize. I became a little concerned. One day as we were walking in the city gardens, she turned to me:

  You must be curious what Willy said to me.

  I told her I was. I was very curious.

  The truth is: I never knew anyone named Willy. We weren’t allowed to have relationships at The Shape School. Matter of fact, we had to sign a document saying we never would. The instructors of The Shape School believed that people are individuals and must remain so. I was never meant to know or love anyone any more than anyone else. Aren’t you glad I am failing at that?

  A long time ago I had an apartment over a bakery. The walls and floors were thin, and in the night I could hear the bakers arriving and going about their early ministrations. Rather than to say that it was a nuisance, I will here record—I dearly loved this noise, and in fact I have never slept so well as when I could wake occasionally and hear the comforting sounds of baking going on below. When the time came to get up, I would go to the window, a gigantic floor to ceiling window on one side of the, admittedly, shabby apartment, and I would throw it open and sit for a time on a little terrace there, looking down over the main street. It was an old part of the city and many of the people became familiar to me. They loved those streets, and I loved them too, and none of us liked going out of them into the city at large.

  For many at that hour, their destination was the bakery, so in a sense, I would sit on the terrace and watch as the people of that quarter came to me and went away, where I sat on a sort of mast extruded from the forehead of the beast that was the bakery. I was so happy then, and I was happy because in that year an amazing thing happened: I became certain that I would find someone I could love. Before that, I had an equal certainty, an equal and opposite certainty, motivated by experience and rational thought, and this equal certainty told me, you who have never found anyone of real worth, you shall never find anyone of real worth, and the reason is this: people are islands and all communication is impossible. There is only fakery, mummery, and a dulling of the senses.

  Yet one day I had a dream. It was the night before my surgical examinations, and I had a dream in which I was garbed in a silver fabric from head to toe. I was standing in a meadow and the sun and moon were close above my head, and as I said, I was garbed in a silvery fabric, and this fabric allowed me to feel for once an absolute happiness in my limbs and my features. I called out—but without need, just a cry, just a golden cry, and someone came to me out of the darkness. There were trees all about the meadow and in the trees, I could feel that there were thousands of people waiting, staring, holding their arms to themselves. From that group in thrall there came one—a girl—and her face was turned away so I could not see it, but she came closer and closer, and I called again and she came closer. I woke there in my room, and the noise of the baking was below, the sound of the bakers’ talk. I crossed the room, my feet almost glowing against the warm floorboards, and when I threw open the window, I felt a thousand other windows, other doors opening. Somehow I knew I had stumbled upon some key, and that it would not be long before I met a person I could love.

  I did not have long to wait. Perhaps a month, perhaps two months—the
n, I was standing on a corner, consulting some directions I had written on the back of my hand, and a girl bumped into me. I’m sorry, she said, I’m sorry to tell you this, but that guy over there, the one crossing the street. I think I saw him take your wallet.

  I reached into my pocket. It was as she said: the wallet was gone. My eyes went to where the man had been a moment before, but he was no longer there. Then, I saw him, turning the corner, slightly further on. I began to chase him, but the girl ran after me, saying, wait, wait, wait, and wait again.

  You have probably already guessed it, but she had taken the wallet. She gave it back to me and asked me where I was going so absent mindedly. I said sarcastically that I was about to speak to a congregation on the subject of kindness to strangers, and the general lack of it. Would she like to come along as an example?

  She did not laugh.

  But really, where were you going?

  To a party—someone is giving a party. I don’t know anyone there.

  She smiled and twined her arm with mine.

  In that case, she said, let us go together you and I. We’ll pretend we are sister and brother, but also lovers. What do you think? We will be holding back our affection because we are in public, but there will be something there—something obvious to everyone. What do you think?

  Now, at that time, I should mention, my wife to be was already a tremendous success. It happened that I did not know her, and, of course, she liked that. It was probably even necessary for me to not know her.

  In any case, she lived in a very beautiful house outside of the city, and had a large barn there where her performances were planned. She was not going to move out of it on my account, so the only thing to do was for me to move out of my place. However, there was one problem with that. She had, by that time, grown to enjoy going to visit me there, and she liked especially looking up from the street and seeing my silhouette in the window of the little studio (there was almost nowhere you could go in the room where you could not be seen from outside).

  This is an example of the way that she thought. Her solution to the problem—the problem being that I would no longer be in that apartment because I would be living elsewhere with her—was that she bought the apartment outright. She bought it, and then we would only rent it to people who resembled what I looked like at that time. A string of men all resembling me in height and silhouette.

  So it was possible then, for many years, even down to the time of her death, to walk there in the old quarter and behold in the window my old self doing this or that, such things as I did when I lived there.

  She was very thin, my wife, always very thin, and her face looked a little like a ferret. You would never trust her with anything, to look at her. She was on the small side, and wore loose clothing, although when she wanted to, she could certainly appear to be rather large, or even smaller. This was part of her art.

  She had long fingers and a mole under her left eye that looked like a tear. Her irises were flat gray, like a sheet of rain, and she would often look through you when you talked. People would always be turning around to see what she was looking at.

  She wasn’t very strong, but she had done tremendous physical training for her work, and she was very fast—shockingly fast. I remember, she and my son were on a train, he was very young, maybe five, and somewhat frail, and a man started making fun of my son, so she didn’t hesitate; she hit the man in the face and broke his nose. The police came, and there was going to be trouble, but the other people in the car wouldn’t testify that anything had happened.

  She found out the man’s address, though, and we sent him a box of specially fabricated chocolates—a half dozen noses. This was her sense of humor. When we explained it to the chocolatier he didn’t even charge us.

  ››

  From the moment I met her, I immediately ceased to feel alone. I became, if anything, more secretive with others, because whatever I thought of to say, I could say it better, and have it heard better, saying it to her, than to anyone else.

  Sometimes she would try to convince me to be playful in my work, to leave a clamp or a forceps inside one of my patients with a note on it for the person who would eventually get it out—things like that. Of course, I never did any such thing.

  I often wonder, though, what drew her to me in the first place. She said it was because my emotions are all slightly garbled. She saw me in the street and watched me—it was something she used to do all the time as training for her performances, to follow people and try to feel what they are thinking, try to copy what they are doing. She found that I was very hard to copy, not because I was bluff, but for some other reason, a reason I don’t know.

  N

  I drove sometimes for hours, and in such cases, I would stop only because my son would pull and pull at my arm. At other times, I would sit in the car, staring at the glass, almost incapable of making any forward motion. At such times, my son would wait patiently—his patience was a thing of legend—and he would sing, and soon the clouds would pass and we would continue. Many times I could actually not breathe and I felt that it was the end, but then a moment would come and go and a moment, and then I would be breathing.

  There was a porch I remember we pulled up to, it was either in M or N, there was no yard, just cars parked all over the place, and we pulled up right next to the porch and went in.

  A couple guys, mechanics, were lounging on the front steps. We spoke to them for a while, and then I marked them, and then we went on in. It was a men’s boarding house, many single rooms with shared hall bathrooms. The place was run by a positively Rabelaisian fat man who stomped about with an almost ornamental broom, cursing everyone.

  He sat us down in his own personal apartment, which, it turned out, was exactly the same as everyone else’s. That meant we, my son and I, sat on the single pallet, and he sat on the single chair across from us, and I wrote down what he said, everything he said, as best I could.

  He said, I was a soldier, of course, and a good one. I joined as a private, but ended a captain. That doesn’t happen very often. As they say, only in wartime. These guys are always asking me how many people I’ve killed. How many people have you killed, how many people have you killed, he said, imitating the voices of his young charges. I always tell them—a hundred, two hundred, take your pick. A machine gunner never counts. Why?

  He laughed, a great bellowing laugh.

  Because he’s too busy, he’s too busy. First I was a machine gunner, then I was in charge of a whole bunch of trucks and tanks. I ran them the same way I run this lot. The same way.

  He showed us a tattoo of a lion that he had on his arm. The tail wrapped around the bicep and went up almost to the neck where it was a fire hose being used by silhouettes of firemen to put out a fire that was raging actually on his neck. There was a house that was the house that we were in, and it was on his neck, and it was being put out by a fire hose which was in reality the tail of a lion. That’s what he showed us when he showed us his tattoo. My son did not like it at all. He doesn’t like tattoos. But I thought it was wondrous.

  How did you come to live here? I asked him.

  I’ve always lived here. This was my childhood home. My parents ran the boarding house, same as I do, although we lived in the basement then.

  He showed us a picture of his father and mother, who essentially looked alike. They both looked exactly like him.

  How much do you charge for a room? I asked him.

  I take one-sixth of their pay—so that the boys can always afford it. That includes meals, by the way, so it’s real fair. It’s real fair.

  Do you know how I find them? How I find this lot?

  I said I didn’t know.

  He said they come to him. He’s never had to go looking for a single tenant. Everytime they come to him, all the time, the rooms are full.

  Do you want to see a list? He took out a list that was in a box on the table. You probably can’t count it, just looking, but there are more than a hundre
d names there. That’s the waiting list. Streng’s Boarding House for Men Only. It’s not a winning proposition—I don’t make very much off it, but I feel, it’s a kind of community, and I like to have them around.

  There isn’t time to show it to you, but if you went down to the cafeteria you’d see, more than sixty pictures on the wall, one per year, going back to my parents’ time, all the boarders lined up, proprietor in the middle, that’s my right.

  He showed us a couple more things before we left, a carved horn he had brought back from abroad, a board with his medals on it.

  I won’t see you out, he said, I have to get back to this.

  As I shut the door, I looked back through it and saw he was sitting on the bed where we had been sitting, and now, with a needle and thread, was mending something, maybe a shirt. Our eyes met and the door closed.

  ››

  We went into the very next street where there was a little cottage between two five-story apartment buildings. I knocked on the door. A woman in a bright blue housecoat let us in. I can’t hear anymore so you will have to write down what you want to ask, she said. I wrote down on a piece of paper, I AM A CENSUS TAKER DOING THE CENSUS. Oh, the census, she said. I like that.

  I waited to see if she would say anything else, but she went into the other room and came back with more paper and a tray with a pot of coffee and some cheap cookies, they must have been several years old. Here you go, she said. I am ready.

  She said that she had lived there her entire life. She used to live in the house next door, her parents had owned both, but that was demolished sixty years before. Ever since then she had lived in the house in which we sat. She had been a teacher—geography. Did we know our geography? I said that I was a bit unsteady with mine. She thought that was a shame and said all people should know geography because it is a good investment of time. It is information that will as she put it stand you in good stead. Learning about other things is often useless because these other things they change so fast. You might learn about them, sure you can, but then the next week no one cares. The information is reduced to as she said trivially small proportion. Whereas with geography it is a different time scale. You learn something and it will be good for most of if not all your life.