—Perhaps once. When Shirley was with us?
—Who was Shirley?
—The maid. She was studying eschatology. Maiding parttime. She left us for a better post. Perfectly ordinary departure.
—Did she perhaps wear shoes of this type?
—No. Nor was she given to the cri de coeur. Except, perhaps, once. Death of her flying fish. A cry wrenched from her bosom. Rather like a winged phallus it was, she kept it in a washtub in the basement. One day it was discovered belly-up. She screamed. Then, insisted it be given the Last Rites, buried in a fish cemetery, holy water sprinkled this way and that—
—You fatigue me. Now, about the hundred-pound sack of saccharin.
—Mine. Indubitably mine. I’m forbidden to use sugar. I have a condition.
—I’m delighted to hear it. Not that you have a condition but that the sack is, without doubt, yours.
—Mine. Yes.
—I can’t tell you how pleased I am. The inquiry moves. Progress is made. Results are obtained.
—What are you writing there, in your notes?
—That the sack is, beyond a doubt, yours.
—I think it’s mine.
—What do you mean, think? You stated . . . Is it yours or isn’t it?
—I think it’s mine. It seems to be.
—Seems!
—I just remembered, I put sugar in my coffee. At breakfast.
—Are you sure it wasn’t saccharin?
—White powder of some kind . . .
—There is a difference in texture . . .
—No, I remember, it was definitely sugar. Granulated. So the sack of saccharin is definitely not mine.
—Nothing is yours.
—Some things are mine, but the sack is not mine, the shoe is not mine, the bonbon dish is not mine, and the doors are not mine.
—You admitted the doors.
—Not wholeheartedly.
—You said, I have it right here, written down, “Yes, they must be mine.”
—Sometimes we hugged. Lengthily. Heart to heart, the one trying to pull the other into the upright other . . .
—I have it right here. Written down. “Yes, they must be mine.”
—I withdraw that.
—You can’t withdraw it. I’ve written it down.
—Nevertheless I withdraw it. It’s inadmissible. It was coerced.
—You feel coerced?
—All that business about “dish” rather than “plate”—
—That was a point of fact, it was, in fact, a dish.
—You have a hectoring tone. I don’t like to be hectored. You came here with something in mind. You had made an a priori decision.
—That’s a little ridiculous when you consider that I have, personally, nothing to gain. Either way. Whichever way it goes.
—Promotion, advancement . . .
—We don’t operate that way. That has nothing to do with it. I don’t want to discuss this any further. Let’s go on to the dressing gown. Is the dressing gown yours?
—Maybe.
—Yes or no?
—My business. Leave it at “maybe.”
—I am entitled to a good, solid, answer. Is the dressing gown yours?
—Maybe.
—Please.
—Maybe maybe maybe maybe.
—You exhaust me. In this context, the word “maybe” is unacceptable.
—A perfectly possible answer. People use it every day.
—Unacceptable. What happened to her?
—She made a lot of money. Opened a Palais de Glace, or skating rink. Read R. D. Laing to the skaters over the PA system meanwhile supplementing her income by lecturing over the country as a spokesperson for the unborn.
—The gold eyebrows, still?
—The gold eyebrows and the gray-with-violet eyes. On television, very often.
—In the beginning, you don’t know.
—That’s true.
—Just one more thing: The two mattresses surrounding the single slice of salami. Are they yours?
—I get hungry. In the night.
—The struggle is admirable. Useless, but admirable. Your struggle.
—Cold, here in the garden.
—You’re too old, that’s all it is, think nothing of it. Don’t give it a thought.
—I haven’t agreed to that. Did I agree to that?
—No, I must say you resisted. Admirably, resisted.
—I did resist. Would you allow “valiantly”?
—No no no no. Come come come.
—“Wholeheartedly”?
—Yes, okay, what do I care?
—Wholeheartedly, then.
—Yes.
—Wholeheartedly.
—We still haven’t decided what color to paint the trucks.
—Yes. How about blue?
On our street, fourteen garbage cans are now missing. The garbage cans from One Seventeen and One Nineteen disappeared last night. This is not a serious matter, but on the other hand we can’t sit up all night watching over our garbage cans. It is probably best described as an annoyance. One Twelve, One Twenty-two and One Thirty-one have bought new plastic garbage cans at Barney’s Hardware to replace those missing. We are thus down eleven garbage cans, net. Many people are using large dark plastic garbage bags. The new construction at the hospital at the end of the block has displaced a number of rats. Rats are not much bothered by plastic garbage bags. In fact, if I were ordered to imagine what might most profitably be invented by a committee of rats, it would be the plastic garbage bag. The rats run up and down our street all night long.
If I were ordered to imagine who is stealing our garbage cans, I could not. I very much doubt that my wife is doing it. Some of the garbage cans on our street are battered metal, others are heavy green plastic. Heavy green plastic or heavy black plastic predominates. Some of the garbage cans have the numbers of the houses they belong to painted on their sides or lids, with white paint. Usually by someone with only the crudest sense of the art of lettering. One Nineteen, which has among its tenants a gifted commercial artist, is an exception. No one excessively famous lives on our street, to my knowledge, therefore the morbid attention that the garbage of the famous sometimes attracts would not be a factor. The Precinct says that no other street within the precinct has reported similar problems.
If my wife is stealing the garbage cans, in the night, while I am drunk and asleep, what is she doing with them? They are not in the cellar, I’ve looked (although I don’t like going down to the cellar, even to replace a blown fuse, because of the rats). My wife has a yellow Pontiac convertible. No one has these anymore but I can imagine her lifting garbage cans into the back seat of the yellow Pontiac convertible, at two o’clock in the morning, when I am dreaming of being on stage, dreaming of having to perform a drum concerto with only one drumstick . . .
On our street, twenty-one garbage cans are now missing. New infamies have been announced by One Thirty-one through One Forty-three—seven in a row, and on the same side of the street. Also, depredations at One Sixteen and One Sixty-four. We have put out dozens of cans of D-Con but the rats ignore them. Why should they go for the D-Con when they can have the remnants of Ellen Busse’s Boeuf Rossini, for which she is known for six blocks in every direction? We eat well, on this street, there’s no denying it. Except for the nursing students at One Fifty-eight, and why should they eat well, they’re students, are they not? My wife cooks soft-shell crabs, in season, breaded, dusted with tasty cayenne, deep-fried. Barney’s Hardware has run out of garbage cans and will not get another shipment until July. Any new garbage cans will have to be purchased at Budget Hardware, far, far away on Second Street.
Petulia, at Custom Care Cleaners, asks why my wife has been acting so peculiar lately. “Peculiar?” I s
ay. “In what way do you mean?” Dr. Maugham, who lives at One Forty-four where he also has his office, has formed a committee. Mr. Wilkens, from One Nineteen, Pally Wimber, from One Twenty-nine, and my wife are on the committee. The committee meets at night, while I sleep, dreaming, my turn in the batting order has come up and I stand at the plate, batless . . .
There are sixty-two houses on our street, four-story brownstones for the most part. Fifty-two garbage cans are now missing. Rats riding upon the backs of other rats gallop up and down our street, at night. The committee is unable to decide whether to call itself the Can Committee or the Rat Committee. The City has sent an inspector who stood marveling, at midnight, at the activity on our street. He is filing a report. He urges that the remaining garbage cans be filled with large stones. My wife has appointed me a subcommittee of the larger committee with the task of finding large stones. Is there a peculiar look on her face as she makes the appointment? Dr. Maugham has bought a shotgun, a twelve-gauge over-and-under. Mr. Wilkens has bought a Chase bow and two dozen hunting arrows. I have bought a flute and an instruction book.
If I were ordered to imagine who is stealing our garbage cans, the Louis Escher family might spring to mind, not as culprits but as proximate cause. The Louis Escher family has a large income and a small apartment, in One Twenty-one. The Louis Escher family is given to acquiring things, and given the size of the Louis Escher apartment, must dispose of old things in order to accommodate new things. Sometimes the old things disposed of by the Louis Escher family are scarcely two weeks old. Therefore, the garbage at One Twenty-one is closely followed in the neighborhood, in the sense that the sales and bargains listed in the newspapers are closely followed. The committee, which feels that the garbage of the Louis Escher family may be misrepresenting the neighborhood to the criminal community, made a partial list of the items disposed of by the Louis Escher family during the week of August eighth: one mortar & pestle, majolica ware; one English cream maker (cream is made by mixing unsalted sweet butter and milk); one set green earthenware geranium leaf plates; one fruit ripener designed by scientists at the University of California, plexiglass; one nylon umbrella tent with aluminum poles; one combination fountain pen and clock with LED readout; one mini hole-puncher-and-confetti-maker; one pistol-grip spring-loaded flyswatter; one cast-iron tortilla press; one ivory bangle with elephant-hair accent; and much, much more. But while I do not doubt that the excesses of the Louis Escher family are misrepresenting the neighborhood to the criminal community, I cannot bring myself to support even a resolution of censure, since the excesses of the Louis Escher family have given us much to talk about and not a few sets of green earthenware geranium leaf plates over the years.
I reported to my wife that large stones were hard to come by in the city. “Stones,” she said. “Large stones.” I purchased two hundred pounds of Sakrete at Barney’s Hardware, to make stones with. One need only add water and stir, and you have made a stone as heavy and brutish as a stone made by God himself. I am temporarily busy, in the basement, shaping Sakrete to resemble this, that and the other, but mostly stones—a good-looking stone is not the easiest of achievements. Ritchie Beck, the little boy from One Ten who is always alone on the sidewalk during the day, smiling at strangers, helps me. I once bought him a copy of Mechanix Illustrated, which I myself read avidly as a boy. Harold, who owns Custom Care Cleaners and also owns a Cessna, has offered to fly over our street at night and drop bombs made of lethal dry-cleaning fluid on the rats. There is a channel down the Hudson he can take (so long as he stays under eleven hundred feet), a quick left turn, the bombing run, then a dash back up the Hudson. They will pull his ticket if he’s caught, he says, but at that hour of the night . . . I show my wife the new stones. “I don’t like them,” she says. “They don’t look like real stones.” She is not wrong, they look, in fact, like badly-thrown pots, as if they had been done by a potter with no thumbs. The committee, which has named itself the Special Provisional Unnecessary Rat Team (SPURT), has acquired armbands and white steel helmets and is discussing a secret grip by which its members will identify themselves to each other.
There are now no garbage cans on our street—no garbage cans left to steal. A committee of rats has joined with the Special Provisional committee in order to deal with the situation, which, the rats have made known, is attracting unwelcome rat elements from other areas of the city. Members of the two committees exchange secret grips. My wife drives groups of rats here and there in her yellow Pontiac convertible, attending important meetings. The crisis, she says, will be a long one. She has never been happier.
The Palace at Four A.M.
My father’s kingdom was and is, all authorities agree, large. To walk border to border east-west, the traveler must budget no less than seventeen days. Its name is Ho, the Confucian term for harmony. Confucianism was an interest of the first ruler (a strange taste in our part of the world), and when he’d cleared his expanse of field and forest of his enemies, two centuries ago, he indulged himself in an hommage to the great Chinese thinker, much to the merriment of some of our staider neighbors, whose domains were proper Luftlunds and Dolphinlunds. We have an economy based upon truffles, in which our forests are spectacularly rich, and electricity, which we were exporting when other countries still read by kerosene lamp. Our army is the best in the region, every man a colonel—the subtle secret of my father’s rule, if the truth be known. In this land every priest is a bishop, every ambulance-chaser a robed justice, every peasant a corporation and every street-corner shouter Kant himself. My father’s genius was to promote his subjects, male and female, across the board, ceaselessly; the people of Ho warm themselves forever in the sun of Achievement. I was the only man in the kingdom who thought himself a donkey.
—FROM THE Autobiography
I AM writing to you, Hannahbella, from a distant country. I daresay you remember it well. The King encloses the opening pages of his autobiography. He is most curious as to what your response to them will be. He has labored mightily over their composition, working without food, without sleep, for many days and nights.
The King has not been, in these months, in the best of spirits. He has read your article and declares himself to be very much impressed by it. He begs you, prior to publication in this country, to do him the great favor of changing the phrase “two disinterested and impartial arbiters” on page thirty-one to “malign elements under the ideological sway of still more malign elements.” Otherwise, he is delighted. He asks me to tell you that your touch is as adroit as ever.
Early in the autobiography (as you see) we encounter the words: “My mother the Queen made a mirror pie, a splendid thing the size of a poker table . . .” The King wishes to know if poker tables are in use in faraway lands, and whether the reader in such places would comprehend the dimensions of the pie. He continues: “. . . in which reflections from the kitchen chandelier exploded when the crew rolled it from the oven. We were kneeling side-by-side, peering into the depths of a new-made mirror pie, when my mother said to me, or rather her celestial image said to my dark, heavy-haired one, ‘Get out. I cannot bear to look upon your donkey face again.’”
The King wishes to know, Hannahbella, whether this passage seems to you tainted by self-pity, or is, rather, suitably dispassionate.
He walks up and down the small room next to his bedchamber, singing your praises. The decree having to do with your banishment will be rescinded, he says, the moment you agree to change the phrase “two disinterested and impartial arbiters” to “malign elements,” etc. This I urge you to do with all speed.
The King has not been at his best. Peace, he says, is an unnatural condition. The country is prosperous, yes, and he understands that the people value peace, that they prefer to spin out their destinies in placid, undisturbed fashion. But his destiny, he says, is to alter the map of the world. He is considering several new wars, small ones, he says, small but interesting, complex, dicey, even. He would ver
y much like to consult with you about them. He asks you to change, on page forty-four of your article, the phrase “egregious usurpations” to “symbols of benign transformation.” Please initial the change on the proofs, so that historians will not accuse us of bowdlerization.
Your attention is called to the passage in the pages I send which runs as follows: “I walked out of the castle at dusk, not even the joy of a new sunrise to console me, my shaving kit with its dozen razors (although I shaved a dozen times a day, the head was still a donkey’s) banging against the Walther .22 in my rucksack. After a time I was suddenly quite tired. I lay down under a hedge by the side of the road. One of the bushes above me had a shred of black cloth tied to it, a sign, in our country, that the place was haunted (but my head’s enough to frighten any ghost).” Do you remember that shred of black cloth, Hannahbella? “I ate a slice of my mother’s spinach pie and considered my situation. My princeliness would win me an evening, perhaps a fortnight, at this or that noble’s castle in the vicinity, but my experience of visiting had taught me that neither royal blood nor novelty of aspect prevailed for long against a host’s natural preference for folk with heads much like his own. Should I en-zoo myself? Volunteer for a traveling circus? Attempt the stage? The question was most vexing.
“I had not wiped the last crumbs of the spinach pie from my whiskers when something lay down beside me, under the hedge.
“‘What’s this?’ I said.
“‘Soft,’ said the new arrival, ‘don’t be afraid, I am a bogle, let me abide here for the night, your back is warm and that’s a mercy.’
“‘What’s a bogle?’ I asked, immediately fetched, for the creature was small, not at all frightening to look upon and clad in female flesh, something I do not hold in low esteem.
“‘A bogle,’ said the tiny one, with precision, ‘is not a black dog.’
“Well, I thought, now I know.
“‘A bogle,’ she continued, ‘is not a boggart.’
Donald Barthelme Page 84