Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  THOUGHT

  Amelia is skeptical, I thought.

  LIST OF RESEARCH

  MATERIALS CONSULTED

  My plan for self-transplants was not formulated without the benefit of some amount of research. I turned over the literature, which is immense, the following volumes sticking in the mind as having been particularly valuable: The Self: An Introduction by Meyers, Self-Abuse by Samuels, The Armed Self by Crawlie, Burt’s The Concept of Self, Self-Congratulation by McFee, Fingarette’s Self-Deception, Self-Defense for Women and Young Girls by Birch, Winterman’s Self-Doubt, The Effaced Self by Lilly, Self-Hatred in Vermin by Skinner, LeBett’s Selfishness, Gordon’s Self-Love, The Many-Colored Self by Winsor and Newton, Paramananda’s Self-Mastery, The Misplaced Self by Richards, Nastiness by Bertini, The Self Prepares by Teller, Flaxman’s The Self as Pretext, Hickel’s Self-Propelled Vehicles, Sørensen’s Self-Slaughter, Self and Society in Ming Thought by DeBary, The Sordid Self by Clute, and Techniques of Self-Validation by Wright. These works underscored what I already knew, that the self is a dirty great villain, an interrupter of sleep, a deviler of awakeness, an intersubjective atrocity, a mouth, a maw. Transplantation of neutral or partially inert materials into the cavity was in my view the one correct solution.

  NEUTRAL OR PARTIALLY

  INERT MATERIALS

  CROSS A RIVER

  A girl appeared holding a canteen.

  “Is there any wine s’il vous plaît?”

  “More demands,” said Mr. Hawkins. “They accumulate.”

  “Some people do not know they are a member of a herd,” said Mr. Bellows.

  The girl turned to Daumier.

  “Is it your intention to place all of us in this dirty water?” she asked, pointing to the river. “Together with our clothes and personal belongings as well?”

  “There is a ford,” said Daumier. “The water is only knee-high.”

  “And on the other bank, shooters? Oh, that’s very fine. Très intelligent.”

  “What’s your name, Miss?”

  “Celeste,” said the girl. “Possibly there are vipers in the water? Poisonmouths?”

  “Possibly,” said Daumier. “But they won’t hurt you. If you see one, just go around him.”

  “Myself, I will stay here, thank you. The other girls, they stay here too, I think.”

  “Celeste, you wouldn’t be telling them about poisonmouths in the water, would you?”

  “It is not necessary. They can look for their own selves.” She paused. “Possibly you have a very intelligent plan for avoiding the shooters?”

  She is not pretty, Daumier thought. But a good figure.

  “My papa is a lawyer,” she said. “An avocat.”

  “So?”

  “There was no word in the agreement about marching through great floods filled with vipers and catfishes.”

  “The problem is not the water but the Jesuits on the other side,” said Daumier.

  “The noble Loyola. Our resuscitator.”

  “You want to spend the next year in a convent? Wearing a long dress down to your feet and reading The Lives of the Saints and not a chilidog to your name?”

  “He will take us to the convent?”

  “Yes.”

  “What a thing. I did not know.”

  “Daumier,” said Mr. Hawkins. “What is your très intelligent plan?”

  “What if we send some of the girls in to bathe?”

  “What for?”

  “And while the enemy is struck blind by the dazzling beauty of our girls bathing, we cross the rest of them down yonder at the other ford.”

  “Ah, you mean bathing, uh—”

  “Right.”

  “Could you get them to do it?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned to Celeste. “What about it?”

  “There is nothing in the agreement about making Crazy Horse shows in the water. But on the other hand, the cloister . . .”

  “Yes,” said Daumier.

  Soon seven girls wearing towels were approaching the water.

  “You and Mr. Bellows cross the herd down there. I’ll watch out for these,” Daumier said to Mr. Hawkins.

  “Oh, you will,” said Mr. Hawkins. “That’s nice. That’s very nice indeed. That is what I call nice, that is.”

  “Mr. Hawkins,” said Daumier.

  Then Daumier looked at Celeste and saw that the legs on her were as long and slim as his hope of Heaven and the thighs on her were as strong and sweet-shaped as ampersands and the buttocks on her were as pretty as two pictures and the waist on her was as neat and incurved as the waist of a fiddle and the shoulders on her were as tempting as sex crimes and the hair on her was as long and black as Lent and the movement of the whole was honey, and he sank into a swoon.

  When he awoke, he found Mr. Hawkins lifting him by his belt and lowering him to the ground again, repeatedly.

  “A swoon most likely,” said Mr. Hawkins. “He was always given to swoonin’.”

  The girls were gathered about him, fully dressed and combing their damp hair.

  “He looks extremely charming when he is swooned,” said Celeste. “I don’t like the eagle gaze so much.”

  “And his father and grandfather before him,” said Mr. Hawkins, “they were given to swoonin’. The grandfather particularly. Physical beauty it was that sent the grandfather to the deck. There are those who have seen him fall at the mere flash of a kneecap.”

  “Is the herd across?” asked Daumier.

  “Every last one of um,” said Mr. Hawkins. “Mr. Bellows is probably handing out the TV dinners right now.”

  “We made a good exhibition, I think,” said Celeste. “Did you see?”

  “A little,” said Daumier. “Let’s push across and join the others.”

  They crossed the river and climbed a ridge and went through some amount of brush and past a broke-down abandoned farmhouse with no roof and through a pea patch that nobody had tended for so many years that the peas in their pods were as big as Adam’s apples. On the other side of the pea patch they found Mr. Bellows tied to a tree by means of a great many heavy ropes around his legs, stomach, and neck and his mouth stuffed full of pages torn from a breviary. The herd was nowhere to be seen.

  TWO WHISKEYS

  WITH A FRIEND

  “The trouble with you,” said Gibbon, “is that you are a failure.”

  “I am engaged upon a psychological thimblerig which may have sound commercial applications,” I said. “Vistas are opening.”

  “Faugh,” he said.

  “Faugh?”

  “The trouble with you is that you are an idiot,” Gibbon said. “You lack a sense of personal worthlessness. A sense of personal worthlessness is the motor that drives the overachiever to his splendid overachievements that we all honor and revere.”

  “I have it!” I said. “A deep and abiding sense of personal worthlessness. One of the best.”

  “It was your parents I expect,” said Gibbon. “They were possibly too kind. The family of orientation is charged above all with developing the sense of personal worthlessness. Some are sloppy about it. Some let this responsibility slide and the result is a child with no strong sense of personal worthlessness, thus no drive to prove that the view he holds of himself is not correct, the same being provable only by conspicuous and distinguished achievement above and beyond the call of reasonableness.”

  I thought: His tosh is better than my tosh.

  “I myself,” said Gibbon, “am slightly underdone in the personal worthlessness line. It was Papa’s fault. He used no irony. The communications mix offered by the parent to the child is as you know twelve percent do this, eighty-two percent don’t do that, and six percent huggles and endearments. That is standard. Now, to avoid boring himself or herself to death during this monition
the parent enlivens the discourse with wit, usually irony of the cheaper sort. The irony ambigufies the message, but more importantly establishes in the child the sense of personal lack-of-worth. Because the child understands that one who is talked to in this way is not much of a something. Ten years of it goes a long way. Fifteen is better. That is where Pap fell down. He eschewed irony. Did you bring any money?”

  “Sufficient.”

  “Then I’ll have another. What class of nonsense is this that you are up to with the surrogate?”

  “I have made up a someone who is taking the place of myself. I think about him rather than about me.”

  “The trouble with you is that you are simpleminded. No wonder you were sacked from your job in the think tank.”

  “I was thinking but I was thinking about the wrong things.”

  “Does it work? This transplant business?”

  “I have not had a thought about myself in seven days.”

  “Personally,” said Gibbon, “I am of the opinion that the answer is Krishna Socialism.”

  MR. BELLOWS

  IS SPRUNG;

  ARRIVAL OF

  A FIGURE;

  POPCORN AVAILABLE

  IN THE LOWER LOBBY

  “Our herd is rustled,” said Mr. Hawkins.

  Mr. Bellows was having pages of the Word removed from his mouth.

  “Fifteen hundred head,” said Daumier. “My mother will never forgive me.”

  “How many men did he have with him?” asked Mr. Hawkins.

  “Well I only saw about four. Coulda been more. They jumped me just as we come outa the tree line. Two of ’em come at me from the left and two of ’em come at me from the right, and they damn near pulled me apart between ’em. And himself sittin’ there on his great black horse with the five black hats on him and laughin’ and gigglin’ to beat all bloody hell. Then they yanked me off my horse and throwed me to the ground terrible hard and two of ’em sat on me while himself made a speech to the herd.”

  “What type of speech would that be?”

  “It begun, ‘Dearly beloved.’ The gist of it was that Holy Mother the Church had arranged to rescue all the girls from the evil and vicious and low and reprehensible toils of the Traffic—meaning us—and the hardships and humiliations and degradations of au-pair life through the God-smiled-upon intervention of these hard-riding pure-of-heart Jesuits.”

  “How did the herd take it?”

  “Then he said confessions would be between two and four in the afternoon, and that evening services would be at eight sharp. Then there was a great lot of groanin’. That was from the herd. Then the girls commenced to ask the padres about the hamburger ration and the grass ration and which way was the john and all that, and the boys in black got a little bit flustered. They realized they had fifteen hundred head of ravenous au-pair girls on their hands.”

  “He seems a good thinker,” said Celeste. “To understand your maneuver beforehand, and to defeat it with his own very much superior maneuver—”

  At that moment a figure of some interest approached the group. The figure was wearing on the upper of his two lips a pair of black fine-curled mustachios and on the top of his head a hat with a feather or plume of a certain swash and on his shoulders a cape of dark-blue material of a certain swagger and on his trunk a handsome leather doublet with pot-metal clasps and on the bottom of him a pair of big blooming breeches of a peach velvet known to interior decorators for its appositeness in the upholstering of loveseats and around his waist a sling holding a long resplendent rapier and on his two hands great gauntlets of pink pigskin and on his fine-chiseled features an expression of high-class arrogance. The figure was in addition mounted upon the top of a tall-standing well-curried fast-trotting sheep.

  “What is it?” asked Mr. Bellows.

  “Beats me,” said Mr. Hawkins. “I think it is an actor.”

  “I know what it is,” said Daumier. “It is a musketeer.”

  FURTHER BOILING

  OF THE PLOT

  IN SUMMARY FORM

  The musketeer carries a letter from the queen which informs Daumier that Jeanne de Valois, a bad person attached to the court, has obtained the necklace, which is worth 1,600,000 francs, by persuading the Cardinal de Rohan, an admirer of the queen, to sign a personal note for the amount, he thinking he is making a present to the queen, she thinking that the necklace has been returned to the jewelers, Jeanne de Valois having popped the diamonds into an unknown hiding place. The king is very likely going to find out about the whole affair and become very angry, in several directions. Daumier is begged to come to the capital and straighten things out. He does so.

  HISTORY OF THE

  SOCIETY OF JESUS

  Driven from England, 1579

  Driven from France, 1594

  Driven from Venice, 1606

  Driven from Spain, 1767

  Driven from Naples, 1768

  Suppressed entirely by Clement XIV, 1773

  Revived, 1814

  SOMETHING

  IS HAPPENING

  I then noticed that I had become rather fond—fond to a fault—of a person in the life of my surrogate. It was of course the girl Celeste. My surrogate obviously found her attractive and no less did I; this was a worry. I began to wonder how I could get her out of his life and into my own.

  AMELIA OBJECTS

  “What about me?”

  QUOTATION FROM

  LA FONTAINE

  “I must have the new, though there be none left in the world.”

  THE PARRY

  “You are insatiable,” she said.

  “I am in principle fifty percent sated,” I said. “Had I two surrogates I would be one hundred percent sated. Two are necessary so that no individual surrogate gets the big head. My identification with that Daumier who is even now cleaning up all sorts of imbroglios in the queen’s service is wonderful but there must be another. I see him as a quiet, thoughtful chap who leads a contemplative-type life. Maybe in the second person.”

  THE NEW SURROGATE

  GIVEN A TRIAL RUN

  This is not the worst time for doing what you are doing, and you are therefore pleased with yourself—not wildly, but a little. There are several pitfalls you have avoided. Other people have fallen into them. Standing at the rim of the pit, looking down at the sharpened stakes, you congratulate yourself on your good luck (because you know good sense cannot be credited) and move on. The conditions governing your life have been codified and set down in a little book, but no one has ever given you a copy, and when you have sought it in libraries, you are told that someone else has it on extended loan. Still, you are free to seek love, to the best of your ability, or to wash your clothes in the machines that stand with their round doors temptingly open, or to buy something in one of the many shops in this area—a puppy perhaps. Pausing before a show window full of puppies, brown and black and mixtures, you notice that they are very appealing. If only you could have one that would stay a puppy, and not grow into a full-sized dog. Your attachments are measured. Not that you are indifferent by nature—you want nothing so much as a deep-going, fundamental involvement—but this does not seem to happen. Your attachments are measured; each seems to last exactly two years. Why is that? On the last lap of a particular liaison, you feel that it is time to go, as if you were a guest at a dinner party and the host’s offer of another brandy had a peculiar falseness to it. Full of good will, you attempt to pretend that you do not feel this way, you attempt to keep the level of cheerfulness and hope approximately where it has always been, to keep alive a sense of “future.” But no one is fooled. Optimistic plans are made, but within each plan is another plan, allowing for the possible absence of one of the planners. You eye the bed, the record-player, the pictures, already making lists of who will take what. What does this say about you—that you move from per
son to person, a tourist of the emotions? Is this the meaning of failure? Perhaps it is too soon to decide. It has occurred to you that you, Daumier, may yet do something great. A real solid durable something, perhaps in the field of popular music, or light entertainment in general. These fields are not to be despised, although you are aware that many people look down on them. But perhaps a better-conceived attack might contain a shade less study. It is easy to be satisfied if you get out of things what inheres in them, but you must look closely, take nothing for granted, let nothing become routine. You must fight against the cocoon of habituation which covers everything, if you let it. There are always openings, if you can find them. There is always something to do.

  A SAMPLING OF

  CRITICAL OPINION

  “He can maunder.”

  “Can’t he maunder!”

  “I have not heard maundering of this quality since—”

  “He is a maundering fool.”

  CELESTE MOTORS

  FROM ONE SPHERE

  TO ANOTHER SPHERE

  “She has run away,” said Mr. Hawkins.

  “Clean as a whistle,” said Mr. Bellows.

  “Herd-consciousness is a hard thing to learn,” said Mr. Hawkins. “Some never learn it.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Bellows, “there’s the difficulty, the iddyo-logical. You can get quite properly banjaxed there, with the iddyological.”

  FOOD