Census

by Jesse Ball

  He would sometimes become frustrated, very frustrated, because we would set goals for him, and it would happen that we, who knew nothing about what would turn out to be possible or impossible, had helped him to set a goal that was too much. This was enormously depressing for him. On the other hand, if we set goals that were too easy, then he would lose interest, or what’s worse, struggle with those out of some expectation that this easier thing was as hard as some other hard thing we had recently shown to him. There had to be a happy balance, though, and we learned it in time. Mostly it was a matter of mood—keeping a strong mood of joyfulness and gratefulness, and trying not, in our attitudes or speech, to lay the world out in hierarchies.

  I remember the day he learned to do a particular sword move. He had a wooden sword, and he liked to swing it around out by a tree near the barn. He would go out there early in the afternoon and then it would be dusk and he would still be playing away, fighting invisible duels. In this case, he wanted to do a move that involved turning around in a circle and ending with a sort of horizontal slashing blow. You have probably seen it done once or twice. However that may be, the spinning around was very difficult for him. His legs would end up in the wrong place, and he would even become angry. So my wife practiced it with him and practiced it with him, the turning, going very slowly, again and again, very slowly, until finally, one day, he managed it. Of course, even then it wasn’t exactly the spinning blow that a swordsman would use. He still took quite a bit of time in the turning around—however it was enough. I heard him calling to me all the way from the downstairs of the house, and I heard him on the stairs, and then in the hall by my study door. A part of me is, I think, still there behind that door, full of joy, listening to his approach.

  R

  I often think of my son’s experiences, and I compare them to my own—to the life that I have been lucky enough to live.

  There was a man I knew—he used to wear a yellow suit, which is a pretty rare suit. To wear a suit like that you have to be certain of a lot of things. He frequented a twenty-four-hour chess cafe, one I went to compulsively when I was in medical school. I don’t remember what his profession had been—perhaps he never said—but he knew an awful lot about ornithology, and it was he who got me on to Mutter. We would have wild games—any opening named after an animal, he knew it. His favorite was probably the Orang-Utan, a versatile beginning in coffeehouse chess as it leaves the second player confused and intimidated, if it is at all possible to intimidate him/her. But he loved to play the Hippo, the Dragon, the Polar Bear. Once he started c4 and I ran the game into the Hedgehog, one of my own personal favorites: he greeted my moves with applause and then proceeded to dequill me. We spent a lot of time together, perhaps those hours between 1am and 4am are especially long, most particularly for old bachelors, which he certainly was. In any case, he used to say to me: read widely because almost nothing has been everywhere applied. What does this mean? I took it to mean—insights are often made locally and used locally, but that a person with a wide range of interests will find the mirror of one thing in another and voila—there you have it—suddenly, the insight from one field appears perfectly suited to another. Or perhaps there are some changes to be made, but nonetheless . . .

  I bring it up because the feel of that middle-of-the-night world is one I had not felt before, and one I have not found since. It is a thing confined in my heart to a small elliptical space, and beyond it there is nothing, no bridge to the rest. Or if there is a bridge, it is simply my shared love of the cormorant, or more precisely, of Mutter’s cormorants, of what she felt about cormorants.

  I am sad for my son that he has never gotten to go out on his own and find a world like that, a place where your small gestures of courtesy can be received with a slight but sure gravity. The kindnesses and at the same time the absolutely unforgiveable breaches made by old men playing chess: they are too many, far too many to name! They are all trivial, every last one, but together, they make a cosmos, and it was one I adored. I don’t even remember the final visit that I made to that coffee house. My life became very busy, I had little time for such things. I got to know a series of women who would not let me roam about in the night, culminating in the end in my wife, a woman who certainly would have let me roam about in the night, but, in the company of whom, I was absolutely content, and so she, as much as the others, brought my nighttime chess playing to a close.

  When the game became really intense, when it was close, and he would perhaps be defeated, this man in the yellow suit had a thing that he would say to me.

  He would pause and look over the board, and then look up at me with an extremely serious look. He would wait for me to meet his gaze and he would say, the same way everytime:

  In my city, they have a tradition—there must be a place at the table for the bride’s father. Are you the bride’s father?

  I would say, I am not the bride’s father.

  Then he would say, are you the bride?

  I would say, I am not the bride.

  What then are you doing at the table?

  At which point he would have figured a way out, and he would slam down one of his pieces in triumph and look up at me with a little smirk.

  What then are you doing at the table?

  My wife had a show that she performed once—it was a show in which only two dozen tickets were sold. These two dozen people came to the theater and sat in their seats. The show was to be an hour long. It was called, PRESENCE.

  She sat on a chair at the front of the stage, simply dressed, with a trumpet on the ground next to her, and didn’t say or do much of anything. She just watched the audience intently. The lights were on, so she could see them just as well as they could see her, and if they tried to talk, one of the ushers would quiet them down. Eventually, people left, in ones and twos until the theater was empty.

  Then, within the next month, she showed up inside of all their houses, blowing this tremendously loud horn, and frightening many of them in the night.

  She would hand them a letter and the letter said, It is your life, your presence is required. You can’t say where a thing will happen.

  Some people said at the time that she was lucky not to have been shot. The truth was a little different than that, however.

  To my mind, if she had been shot, if she had been killed while performing this elaborate piece of buffoonery, well, I am certain she would have seen it as complete, as one of the ways of the matter ending.

  ››

  In my office, which was in a little modern building—actually modern, not the farce that stands in for modern buildings these days—the patients waited beside a large glass window that looked onto a half acre of pines. The secretaries sat opposite, and through a door there was an entry to the rooms where I and my partner would meet our patients, who usually had been sent to us via physicians.

  The building was polished concrete on the outside, with long vertical slits in it to let in the light. When it rained, you would find the falling of the rain in unusual places, and that was because the windows of the building, and the skylights were in unusual places. Alternately, at midday when the sky was clear, there were other effects: The bathroom that the doctors and secretaries used had a chisel shaped skylight that in the middle of the day brought a beam of light down, a beam of light that reminded me of pictures, photographs of light falling in cells in the panopticon. The light was supposed, as I recall, to be redemptive. I found this very funny, and pointed it to out to the secretaries, to all the various secretaries through the years. Some found it funny, some did not.

  It happened occasionally that when I went to the office I would bring my son, and he always got along very well with the secretaries, and the nurses, especially when he was still a child. They would neglect their duties in order to play with him, and of course I always looked the other way. I remember standing in one of the narrow hallways looking out through a slit no more than six inches across, and seeing outside, where the pine trees con
gregated, one of the nurses in a crisp uniform, the fabric bent like a coat of feathers, kneeling on the pine needles, her childish face flushed and joyed with my son leaping and leaping in front of her, he too flushed and joyed, and the sensation in my body of all the years we would have together, and all the people he would get to meet and be.

  My wife and I always spoke of making a trip together to show our son the country, but it never came. For one reason or another, it never came, and so I felt when my wife passed, when the idea rose in me about the census, I felt finally it was the time to take out the Stafford, to drive the roads north. In her death, I felt a sure beginning of my own end—I felt I could certainly not last much longer, and so, as life is vested in variety, so we, my son, myself, we had to prolong what life we had by seeing every last thing we could put our eyes upon.

  Never mind the dangers, never mind the worries, or the troubles of the road. I felt sure all problems would solve themselves.

  ››

  I stopped the car at the sign for the road leading up into S. I had decided to explain to my son what was happening.

  I told him that I was having symptoms that pointed to a serious problem with my heart. Did he remember what the heart does?

  We talked about what the heart does. I said that I needed mine if I was going to live, but that it looked like the heart was not going to work anymore.

  I explained that we were very far from home, and from anyone that we knew, but that in Z there was a train and that he could perhaps take that train back to the place where we lived, and I could write ahead and there would be someone to meet him.

  He said that sounded good to him, that he would enjoy it if we wouldn’t drive in the car anymore. The two of us could go on the train. He wouldn’t mind that.

  I said that the thing was, it wouldn’t be me going on the train with him, it would be just him. He would be on the train by himself.

  But where would I be?

  I said that I would not be anymore—it would have been the end for me. I pointed out that we had talked about death before, and how it is very natural, it is not something to be afraid of.

  He thought that was fine, but he would prefer if we went on the train together. He could look forward to that.

  I said that the plan had changed and now we were going to drive straight through to Z.

  He liked that idea. He asked if we would have to stop at any more houses. I said we would not stop at any more. We were finished with that.

  I went to the back of the car and started packing his things up, so they could fit together into a single bag. When he saw me doing this, he started packing my things into one of the other bags. I told him it was no use. I could not go on the train.

  I continued putting his things in his rucksack, and he tried to stop me, he grabbed my arm, and when I wouldn’t let him, he began to cry. I told him to sit in the front and wait. Instead he sat on the ground, right there, with his back to me.

  When we got into S, I stopped at the post office and mailed a letter and we continued, and all through S and T he wouldn’t speak to me at all.

  In U, I had another episode and I lay flat on the ground until somebody came to help me and we were stuck there overnight. I got some pills at a pharmacy, and I was okay, or as well as was possible.

  When the sun rose, and we began the drive, I saw that the factories had ended, the great procession of factories had ended, we had reached the cessation of the industrial corridor, that perhaps from here on in we would be driving through forest.

  I felt giddy, uplifted.

  I began to sing a song about a tree and my son joined in, we sang that song and other songs, and the road fell away beneath us. Now and then we would pause to get something to drink, or something to eat, but we kept on and kept on, and though I felt faint, there was a dogged strength in me, that last strength that people sometimes speak of. It is enormous—it is a boundless furious energy like shivering. I felt as I drove that I could not be halted, not by anything.

  I wondered and wondered what would happen to my son when he grew old, if he grew old. I wondered if he would wear an unkempt beard, go about in pajamas. I wondered if he would feel some intensification of all he had known as the years passed, or whether things disparate would become more disparate still. I thought of rooms, quiet, dark rooms, with him sitting in them, facing sometimes towards the window, sometimes away, a window through which no light came. I thought of him walking on the scoured cement of shopping centers with plastic bags blowing past his knees, and his face dirty, his eyes tired. I thought of the place where he would die, perhaps a mattress, perhaps a stairwell. I thought of what he would feel at that moment, and to whom. In my mind it is my wife he calls to then, whether out loud or not, whether with some contortion of his trunk or not, whether crying with some wounded face, or staring blankly, a mind pushing on what is after all simply more nothing.

  ››

  Outside of V, I woke in the night and my son was shouting. He was hitting the side of the car and shouting. I asked him what was wrong and he told me in his dream he was outside the upstairs bathroom in our house. He was standing on the carpet there, banging on the door. My wife was inside and he wanted to see her. She had been in there for too long, and she wouldn’t come out. He had to see her.

  I asked him when he had seen her last. When had that been?

  He said he didn’t know.

  He started to say a time, but he stopped midway, and his hand fussed with the window crank. He pushed his face against the side of the door and closed his eyes.

  S, T, U, V, W, X, Y & Z

  We came down a long slope all day through changing vegetation. Pine forest settled into the empty boughs of deciduous woods interpenetrated with bushes, some bright with leaves, with the red berries of holly. On the left away through the woods rose variegated emblems of stone—an abandoned cemetery. The road was a sort of rut and the car shook violently. My son held my hand.

  We came onto a flatness and the road sprawled into a dismal little town, a flyspeck. There were three buildings and one of them, one of them was the railstation.

  This was Z. As I said, there was a train here, one that shoots west any distance, any distance you like until it comes to the circuit—the roundway that reaches back down to the center. The man at the railstation who sold us my son’s ticket, he said, three o’clock. Once per day the train comes through. Even-numbered days it goes west, odd-days east. You lucked out. Today it goes west.

  Today the train goes west, I told my son. I gave him his ticket and he held it in his hand. At the car, we put his last things into his rucksack. He held that too, with his coat buttoned up to the chin and his hat pulled down. His eyes wandered my face helplessly. Living things are so remote. Our hearts leap and our bodies wait helplessly in space.

  I thought to myself, I can be of no use to him. I thought once, I dreamed we would go together, as on some joined raft. My wife, my son, I. But this I, it must go first. My son must go to someone else, some good beginning, a place where a person can stay. Is there no such place?

  I thought to myself, then, it is possible, the good is possible. It must be.

  ››

  The train has left. It must be five or six, for the sky is darkening. The train has gone and with it my son.

  I am weary and it is easy to sit down and so I do. Beside me is a ditch.

  My son is gone. The train is gone, and with it my son.

  My good death can’t be more than a few minutes away. I feel a change in my eyes, something I can’t describe, something unfamiliar. I know I should get down into the hole, and not make someone else do it for me. But, I don’t want to go down there, not yet. I who have stood over so many bodies, so many dead bodies, so many old ailing bodies, soon to be dead, just dead, long dead, I in this body am confused in my consent.

  My son stood on the metal step of the train and his whole self was open, was reaching to me. I who had buttoned all the buttons of his coat. I who had tucke
d his hair back. I moved my hand and it was some kind of waving that happened, a thing with no meaning. How could anything have meaning then? He looked at me and I know he knew what I had said—that I was going in a hole, that I would be no more. That he could never look for me. But what he knew about that—what it was to him to hear those things or say them again to himself: I do not even glimpse.

  I smell the wet black dirt and remember days in the garden, when it would have been possible to stand and run to my wife or stand and run to my son. But I did not do so. I concerned myself with parsley or yams or pulling weeds. I had so much and all at once. There is too much light in those thoughts. Light everywhere. It obliterates me. I recoil.

  My grave and my grave and my grave.

  I am afraid, for I know there is no one there to speak to, no one to see. There is no one in the hole. All those things I thought might happen—they cannot happen there. No one is waiting for me down in that hole.

  Once I came to get my son from school and when I arrived he was at the corner of the asphalt playground, and a few boys were there with him. They were leaning towards him in an awful way, and he was leaning into the fence. Perhaps his eyes even were closed—I was too far away to tell. One of the boys was saying things to him, and the other boys were shaking, I guess they were laughing. I came to the edge of the playground and called his name, I called to him, and the boys broke away. They walked off, past me, and they were so happy, with a kind of pure happiness of youth—a happiness that isn’t good, that isn’t evil, that exceeds all—and as I came towards my son he stayed there, leaning against the fence, his hand clutching a piece of old vine that was curled in the metal links. I called to him again, and again, and when I said his name right next to him he came.