The Tattooed Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Yet hopeful: for the tests showed nothing conclusive.

  According to the neurologist, the “minute loss” of muscle tone in Seigl’s face and neck suggested, but only suggested, the possibility of a condition called myasthenia gravis, which can be treated with medication if diagnosed early. And there was a barely discernible “trace sclerosis” of the myelin sheath, the insulating tissue that covers the nerve fibers. Seigl, listening to the neurologist’s maddeningly matter-of-fact words through a heightened pounding of his heart, seized upon “sclerosis” and asked if this meant that he might have multiple sclerosis?—or, worse yet, for he’d been hastily reading about diseases of the nerves, Lou Gehrig’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis? Again, the neurologist assured Seigl: no, this meant nothing of the kind. These were very remote possibilities. The results were, as he’d said, inconclusive. “Your symptoms, as you’ve reported them, might be the result of undetected allergies, minute disturbances of metabolism, fatigue, stress . . .”

  Seigl was on his feet smiling. He reached over to shake the neurologist’s hand.

  “Doctor, thank you. I’m grateful for this consultation.”

  He left the neurologist’s office on the crowded campus of the University of Rochester Medical School in very good spirits. He went away whistling. The battery of tests had been expensive, but illuminating. He felt a thrill of elation: like a gambler who has recklessly tossed dice, and has not lost, and has not exactly won. This was one of those situations where not-losing was infinitely more crucial than winning.

  “ ‘Stress.’ ” Seigl laughed aloud.

  He was striding to his car in a nearby parking garage. A damp wind off the river cooled his face which had become uncomfortably warm in the doctor’s office. He drew a deep delicious breath. He was certainly having no trouble walking now. His legs felt strong, muscled, reliable as they’d been when he was in his early twenties, hiking in the Bavarian Alps. The piercing ache in his back after a hard game of tennis with a friend the previous week had long since vanished. The blurry double vision with which he’d been waking some mornings had vanished.

  “Imagination! Exaggeration! I should be ashamed of myself.”

  He ran up the remaining flight of concrete steps to Level C where his car was parked.

  7

  The gods thought otherwise.

  Next morning, running in Mount Carmel Cemetery, Seigl fell.

  His legs had buckled beneath him, suddenly. He lay stunned on a gravel path. Walloping heartbeat like a fist pounding him in the solar plexus. Yet his first reaction was embarrassment, that someone might have seen Joshua Seigl take a clumsy fall.

  He tried to lift himself, and could not.

  “God damn . . .”

  Shameful to be lying in a public place, exposed to strangers’ eyes, helpless as a broken-backed snake!

  Seigl tried to think what might be wrong. (Seigl didn’t want to think what might be wrong.) A man builds his body like armor, even a brainy guy like Joshua Seigl. Strong arms, muscled shoulders and biceps, and forearms, strong wrists, for just such emergencies. A man’s disdain for the female body is: no armor, only just flesh.

  It was 7:20 A.M. No one else was in the cemetery, that Seigl could see.

  He’d fallen so suddenly, he had had no warning. One of his ankles was throbbing with pain. But he didn’t believe he was seriously hurt.

  Inconclusive the neurologist had said.

  No reason to think the worst, Joshua. You should be grateful, in your place I think I would be.

  Seigl would think: strange that he should have fallen here, in this place that had become special to him.

  Mount Carmel Hill above the river was a glacier hill, a drumlin, so steep that paths and roadways zigzagged from side to side like frantic snakes. The landscape was rock ledges, gulches, chasms and thin trickling streams that in flood time became raging creeks flowing into the Tuscarora River two hundred feet below. The old Catholic cemetery through which Seigl ran—or, in frigid weather, hiked—on an almost daily basis was a place of beauty and neglect; of wind-ravaged oaks and juniper pines amid a necropolis of grave markers, tombstones, rotted-looking crosses and shabby yet fierce-eyed angels, family vaults in neo-classic design with columns, fluted porticos, solemnly carved names, dates, exhortations from a simpler era. I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Below was the river, and beyond the river was the aging industrial city in the anemic haze of dawn, with its concentration of high-rise buildings and spires amid squat rectangular shapes and old, abandoned flour mills on the river, like a mirror-replica of the cemetery above. Except for traffic moving on the elevated expressway, and plumes of pale smoke lifting skyward, the city looked uninhabited at this distance.

  This was a tortured landscape, glacier-gouged many millions of years ago, and always there was something strange and haunting about it that stirred Seigl’s imagination. Intellectually, it gave him nothing. He knew that. The history of the region—explorers, original settlers, battles and treaties with the Iroquois, Huron, Seneca Indians, the precarious establishment of a British-empowered civilization that threw off its links to England in a paroxysm of revolutionary fervor in 1776—meant little to him. He was European by temperament, not American. And, though he’d been a novelist once, and believed he would be again, by nature Seigl was a philosopher: philosophers hate history.

  For to be a philosopher is to wish to believe that the human mind transcends the contingencies of time. To be a philosopher is to believe that the human mind is not yoked to time; philosophy is of the timeless spirit, while history is solidly of the earth.

  Philosophy frees, history enslaves.

  I am not my ancestors Seigl thought desperately. I am not my father, I am scarcely myself.

  His eyes shone with tears. Everywhere he looked he saw eerily beautiful shimmering double images. A marbled sky above the river at dawn and, only a few yards above his head, patches of oak and sumac brilliant as neon.

  You look as if you’ve had a good day, Joshua?

  It was fine, Sondra. But now is better.

  The evening before, he’d taken a friend to dinner. Like a fool he’d rushed to celebrate. The word inconclusive ringing in his ears like a deranged recess bell.

  Seigl would order one of the most expensive wines on the menu. He would leave a twenty percent tip. He would laugh delightedly, a big bewhiskered untidy man drawing the attention of other patrons.

  Is that Joshua Seigl? And who is with him?

  Seigl’s friend was Sondra Blumenthal, professor of Religious Studies at the university. An attractive woman of about Seigl’s age with a fine chiseled face, intelligent eyes. Seigl had known her for years. Their friendship had begun when Seigl, in the first flush of literary success, asked to review a slew of theological-philosophical books for the prestigious New York Review, had passed judgment scathingly on all but Blumenthal’s From Genesis to Revelation: Ways of Re-Visioning the Bible, though he’d been critical in his praise. They’d met soon afterward. Seigl was grateful for Sondra’s company, often at short notice. She had been married briefly, a long time ago; of that disastrous marriage, Sondra had never spoken, and Seigl had not inquired. He cherished the woman’s good common sense, particularly when he endured periods of working intensely without feeling he accomplished anything of merit, or when he was in a despondent mood, which came to the same thing.

  These weaknesses of character of which Seigl could never bring himself to speak to another person. Shame!

  Seigl confided to Sondra, it was a day of gratitude.

  Sondra asked why: had he hired his assistant?

  No. He’d changed his mind.

  But why? Sondra asked. It had sounded like a good idea.

  Seigl sat silent, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. He didn’t recall telling this friend that he was looking for an assistant. He was certain he hadn’t.

  He told her he didn’t need an assi
stant really. He could hire a typist as he’d done last time, to type his manuscript drafts onto hard disks. The prospect of having another person in the house, a stranger, at close quarters . . . Seigl shrugged, indicating distaste.

  Sondra asked Why, then? Why gratitude?

  Seigl said enigmatically Why not? Maybe because I didn’t hire an assistant.

  He wasn’t going to tell Sondra about the neurologist, the tests. The inconclusive results.

  Nor about his reasons for having taken the tests.

  Sondra offered to read Seigl’s manuscript when it was in a state to be read, and Seigl thanked her. Often the two exchanged works-in-progress for mutual criticism. In recent years, Seigl hadn’t had much to give to Sondra; he disliked most of what he wrote, though at the outset he was usually absurdly optimistic.

  Sondra asked, was it his translation of The Aeneid he’d been working on, and Seigl said yes. He’d made a start a few years ago, re-examining the poem from the perspective of the contemporary world of divisiveness, nationalism, blood-consciousness and blood-feuds. He’d never been a great admirer of Virgil; he’d much preferred Homer. But there was something now in The Aeneid, the shaping of an individual’s destiny by historical, not personal forces, that excited him. The founding of a city, and of a civilization; the subordination of individual desire; the Trojan hero, so very unlike the Greek brute Achilles, carrying his elderly father on his back . . .

  Seigl spoke with his usual enthusiasm. His friend seemed so very engrossed with his words. She’d read an uncompleted essay Seigl had written on The Aeneid a few years ago, and other, related work of his he had yet to shape into a coherent whole.

  Remember, Joshua? I encouraged you not to quit.

  Sondra’s eyes brimmed with feeling. Seigl wanted to reach out impulsively to take her hand; Sondra Blumenthal’s ringless hand, that rested uncertainly on the tabletop. But he hesitated. He knew that Sondra would misinterpret such a gesture, as other women had done. Seigl was often filled with feeling, a kind of generalized love, or excitement; a kind of Eros; yet not love as Sondra would wish to interpret it, nor even erotic desire which is impersonal, swift, and pitiless in its rapacity. Seigl fumbled to express himself. Fumbled somehow with the wine menu and there went the candlestick holder, the burning candle toppling onto the tabletop.

  I’ve got it, Mr. Seigl. No problem!

  A dark-clad waiter materialized to set things right.

  And may I tell you our specials for this evening, sir? Madam?

  It was the slim-hipped slick-haired young waiter who reminded Seigl of one of the minor gods. Mercury, maybe. Now you see him, now you don’t.

  Exotically named: Dmitri?

  By all means, Dmitri. Do tell us.

  A recitation. Appetizers, first courses, entrées. How, better yet why, could a waiter remember so many items of virtually no significance, night after night; how could a man so humble himself in the role of waiter, servant; the role of serving others, with a smile? Carrying in trays of food, hauling away dirtied plates and garbage. Seigl shuddered imagining himself in such a demeaning role.

  Yes you’d do it. And worse. To live. If required.

  Dachau. Bergen-Belsen. Buchenwald. Theresienstadt. Maybe you wouldn’t have lived, but you would have tried.

  Choucroute garnie . . . braised beef shanks with pine nuts and sultanas . . . risotto with smoked salmon. And for dessert . . .

  Seigl made a show of listening with enthusiasm to the waiter but he never remembered such recitations. Invariably he ordered a meal he’d ordered many times before. Sondra was the one to incline her head to listen, even to ask questions. Taking the occasion seriously. And why not, occasions like these are to be taken seriously.

  Seigl’s gaze was drawn to the rear of the restaurant. The booth, now empty, beside the swinging doors to the kitchen.

  Why?

  IT WAS 7:20 A.M. Though ten or more minutes had passed. Seigl, perspiring inside his clothes, didn’t want to think, yes time has stopped.

  His watch, a thin gold disk of a face, grainy leather band, he’d had since 1986, in commemoration of an honorary doctorate of humane letters he’d received at a New England liberal arts college, was badly cracked across its front and obviously damaged within. In his fury and self-disgust Seigl wanted to rip it from his wrist and throw it down.

  “God damn rotten luck. Fucking luck.”

  For it seemed to him luck, merely: losing his footing in the loose gravel, falling. Falling hard.

  He was half-crawling, half-dragging himself to a grave marker about fifteen feet away. The marker was older and weatherworn and low enough so that he could hoist himself up onto it, stretch and massage his legs. The left leg was gradually regaining sensation: a bizarre feeling as of tiny roiling stinging ants. The right leg, which worried him more, was still strangely numb. This leg dragged at him like a false leg prankishly attached to his body.

  At least he hadn’t broken anything. Leg, arm. Hadn’t sprained an ankle, dislocated a shoulder. Twenty years ago hiking in Arizona he’d broken his collarbone in a fall. Sixty miles from the nearest medical clinic in Flagstaff and a medic to give him a shot of painkiller.

  Might’ve cracked his head. And then?

  “Fuck this. Come on.”

  There was something ridiculous about a fallen man. A middle-aged ex-prodigy. Like one of those rotted stone angels blown from its haughty perch atop a family vault.

  Seigl’s great-grandfather had reputedly married into the Munich-Catholic haute bourgeoisie with the understanding that this act would make of him and his progeny non-Jews in perpetuity. Appropriate then that the great-grandson who could believe in no religion, who in fact disdained the very concept of religion as one of the evils of mankind, should be struck down in this place.

  It was the fault of the sauvignon blanc of the previous night. Seigl had had too much of a good thing. Sondra had said several times she hadn’t seen Joshua so lighthearted in some time and he’d allowed his dear friend to think that, yes she’d had much to do with his mood.

  Thinking of Sondra. A pang of regret. Guilt. They’d said goodnight at the restaurant, kissed cheeks and departed to their separate cars. Seigl had made a blunder in their conversation, seeming not to recall the name of Sondra’s eleven-year-old son or even, in his vague affable way, that this son existed.

  If he’d had a workable cell phone (which he didn’t: the damned thing was always failing to function) and if he’d brought it with him (of course, he had not: why would he want to carry a cell phone while jogging?) he might have called Sondra Blumenthal and explained his predicament and Sondra would have come to get him, help him. She lived several miles away, on the other side of the river. Though possibly she was at the university. Immediately Sondra would have come to him, ascending the long hill to Mount Carmel, making her way into Mount Carmel Cemetery and along the winding, zigzagging roadway. She would discover him sitting on the grave marker abashed and annoyed as hell . . .

  The vision faded. Seigl would never have called Sondra, even if he’d had the damned cell phone. He could not. Simply could not.

  Essler. The young man, a kinsman he’d seemed, whom Seigl should have hired as his assistant, but had not. He might have called Essler.

  We see the shadows of things, not the things themselves . . . We are forced to imagine what the writer doesn’t reveal.

  Essler had spoken in praise, and warmly. Speaking as the reader of The Shadows. He had not intended criticism of course. Yet the words seemed to Seigl stinging, ironic. In the flush of youthful ambition Seigl had dared to appropriate, by way of his father’s obsessive memories, the tragedy of his grandparents’ lives and deaths, though he’d known nothing firsthand, and the details of the deaths were unclear. His very ignorance, he’d obscured in a gossamer-like prose. Of course, The Shadows was “fiction”—“a work of the imagination.” It was not a family memoir, not the work of a Holocaust survivor and had not been presented as such. And yet: Seigl was wracked wit
h an undefined shame when he thought of it. When he was introduced as the author of. His success of twelve years before seemed to him now a kind of card trick: somehow, he’d impressed his influential elders. The Shadows had been the lead review-essay in the most distinguished of American literary publications, and the identical thing happened in England, with a launching in the Times Literary Supplement comparing the young novelist to Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld . . . He’d been the twenty-six-year-old “find” of the season. A very deft card trick, the kind you can execute only once.

  And he’d been naive, then. In his young-man’s arrogance. Seeing the world in fairy-tale terms. There is good, there is evil. Evil preys upon good. The tragedy of history.

  His parents had been immensely proud of him. And yet.

  His mother had wanted him so badly to marry, to marry. Marry!

  In the last months of her life, fretting. You never found the woman you liked, did you try? Did you try hard enough? And now it’s too late.

  Mom, no. It isn’t too late.

  It is! Too late for me to have a grandchild.

  In The Shadows he’d evoked elliptically the confused impressions of his Seigl and Schiff relatives transported to the Nazi death camp a quarter-century before he was born. Not invention but imagination. The stories haltingly told to him by his father who, aged seven, in 1939, had been sent to live with relatives on Eighty-ninth Street at Fifth Avenue in New York. And so Karl Seigl had had an American self: yet always, as he would one day confide to his son, he was a “posthumous” being, and moved like a ghost among living human beings, a wraith out of Hades. What was strange and magical to Seigl during the months of composing The Shadows was the fact that Karl Seigl himself hadn’t been a firsthand witness to most of his family’s experiences; he, too, had been told fragments of history, by the few relatives who’d survived and contacted him in the 1950s. Family history as a sort of immense spiderweb spanning part of two continents. If you know spiderwebs, you know that they are spun with infinite precision and patience; according to the spider’s genus, they conform to a design; yet individual spiders spin variants of this design. If broken in one area, the web is constructed to hold in other areas. Nine-tenths of a cobweb might be broken yet the one-tenth would remain, holding fast, distinctive. Seigl had thought of himself as re-weaving a spiderweb, re-constructing and re-strengthening. A shimmer of fading impressions had been woven into a work of apparently durable prose, secreted by Joshua Seigl, born 1964.