The Teachings of Don B.

by Donald Barthelme

  “Fourier analysis. Critical-band masking. Continuous smearing grids.”

  “Um. Well, then, I suppose that’s that, isn’t it? You’re quite sure it’s the soul—the human soul?”

  “Worm-path studies don’t lie, Winnie. I ran the program four times.”

  “The human soul . . . on its way to, ah, Heaven.”

  “One assumes. It was definitely outward bound.”

  “I see. Well, then, let’s have a look at them.”

  “Right here, Winnie.”

  “God. Ugly little bugger, isn’t it?”

  “Not precisely pretty. I wouldn’t, for example, call it gorgeous.”

  “Definitely not gorgeous. Rather unattractive, actually.”

  “I remarked that myself.”

  “Looks rather like a frying pan.”

  “Yes, it does, rather.”

  “A heavily, uh, corroded frying pan. You see that handle sort of part, over to the right.”

  “Yes, I noticed that. Looks rather like a, ah, handle.”

  “A bit used-looking, the whole thing.”

  “Quite.”

  “And then there’s that, ah, knuckle sort of thing there at the top. What d’you make of that, Reggie?”

  “Haven’t the faintest, Winnie. What you might call an anomaly.”

  “Yes, definitely anomalous. I mean, one doesn’t like to think of souls, the human soul, as having . . . knuckle-shaped things sticking out the top, does one?”

  “Much prefer not, Winnie. It bothered me, too.”

  “Yes. It’s disturbing.”

  “Yes. Definitely disturbing.”

  “I always thought of the soul as being more symmetrical, don’t you know.”

  “Right. Sort of . . . beautiful. Like that stuff one puts on the Christmas tree at Christmas. What’s it called?”

  “Angel hair.”

  “Right. Sort of like angel hair. Ethereal.”

  “Ethereal, that’s the ticket. And now to see it looking very much like something someone’s been frying eggs and kidneys and God knows what all in for just ages and ages—well it sort of takes the wind out of one’s sails, as it were.”

  “Very disturbing, I agree, Winnie.”

  “I wonder what that little nipple-shaped business is, in the middle there.”

  “Yes, I was curious, too. Probably should be looked into.”

  “Why couldn’t it have been, you know, beautiful? If you follow me.”

  “Well, there is sin and all that, of course.”

  “Yes. Sin. I was afraid you were going to mention that.”

  “I don’t quite follow.”

  “Well, the thing is, Reggie, I have something to confess. Something in the sin line, actually.”

  “Something to confess?”

  “Yes, I don’t know quite how to put it, but it’s something that’s been rather on my mind, these past weeks.”

  “What ever are you talking about?”

  “Well, it’s about Dorothea.”

  “Dorothea?”

  “Yes, Dorothea. The thing is, I ran into Dorothea a few months ago. At Marks & Spencer. She was looking for some orange thread.”

  “Yes, for her tatting.”

  “Yes. She was tatting a bedspread, I believe. An orange bedspread.”

  “Yes, she’s finished it. It’s on the bed now, in the bedroom.”

  “Quite. Well, Dorothea was looking for some orange thread—a particular shade of orange—”

  “Yes. It’s called burnt orange, Winnie. A sort of burnt-looking orange.”

  “Right. Well, she, as I say, was looking for this special shade of orange thread, and I was looking for a thimble.”

  “You were looking for a thimble.”

  “Right. Margaret had asked me to stop off at Marks & Spencer and fetch her home a thimble. She’d lost her thimble.”

  “I see.”

  “I bought two, actually. In case she misplaced one, she’d have the other, you see. Sort of a backup system.”

  “Um.”

  “Well, as it happens the thimble department is quite close to the thread department, at Marks & Spencer. They’re adjacent.”

  “I should think they’d be pretty well the same department.”

  “One would think that, but as it happens they’re separate departments. Separate, but adjacent. So I sort of ran into Dorothea, that afternoon, and in the ordinary way asked her if she’d like to pop out for a drink.”

  “She accepted.”

  “Ah, yes. So we popped out and had a drink. Several, in fact.”

  “I see.”

  “And, uh, one thing sort of led to another, and the fact is that I’ve been seeing quite a bit of Dorothea in the past weeks. Illicitly.”

  “Illicitly.”

  “Yes. Behavior which is, strictly speaking, non-licit.”

  “Um. And you’ve been feeling a bit uneasy about it?”

  “Yes. Horrid, in fact.”

  “Well, I can understand that, Winnie. It is a bit sticky, given the fact that we’ve been friends and colleagues all these years. Since the fifties, really.”

  “The late fifties, yes. I came here in 1956.”

  “But I don’t quite see, Winnie, what this has to do with these photographs. Of the human soul on its way to Heaven. The first ever. I would say that the immediate problem is not your little flutter with my wife, Dorothea, but the photographs. I mean, business before pleasure, Winnie.”

  “Right, Reggie. I couldn’t agree more. You always were one for getting on with it.”

  “The question is, in my view, what are we to do with the bloody things?”

  “Burn them.”

  “Burn them? But they are of some scientific interest, wouldn’t you say? I mean, if the soul exists, and we have the snaps to prove it, it would have quite a lot of relevance, wouldn’t it? To everything?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose it would have some relevance. Give the theologians a hell of a fright, for one thing. Maybe be worth publishing, just for that reason.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Of course, on the other hand, a great many people—decent, serious people—are probably very interested in this sort of thing. The existence of the human soul. I mean, it’s not like the tooth fairy, right?”

  “Much more relevance, I’d say, Winnie. To things in general.”

  “Well, Reggie, it’s what you might call a nice question. There’s our responsibility to science and truth and all that. But aren’t we sort of in the position of those chaps who made the atom bomb and then were sorry afterward?”

  “Yes, I’d say we were, actually. Rather.”

  “It seems to me to boil down to this: are we better off with souls, or just possibly without them?”

  “Yes, I see what you mean. You prefer the uncertainty.”

  “Exactly. It’s more creative. Take for example my, ah, arrangement with your wife, Dorothea. Stippled with uncertainty. At moments, we are absolutely quaking with nonspecific anxiety. I enjoy it. Dorothea enjoys it. The humdrum is defeated. Momentarily, of course.”

  “Yes, I can understand that. Gives the thing a bit of zest.”

  “Yes. You’d be taking away people’s zest. They’d all have to go around being good and all that. You’d get the Nobel Prize, and no one, repeat no one, would ever speak to you again. People do like their zest, Reggie.”

  “But still—”

  “There’s just one more item, Reggie. One more item to be considered. I am absolutely persuaded that you have succeeded in capturing the first hard evidence for the existence of the human soul. But it’s flawed.”

  “The thing is a bit on the homely side.”

  “Downright ugly, to be perfectly frank.”

  “God knows what a life it must have led.”

  “Yes, but don’t you see, Reggie, that these snaps, if they are published, will come to stand for, in the public mind, all souls?”

  “I suppose there’s something in that.”<
br />
  “Some things it’s better not to know about. That’s what I’m suggesting.”

  “Your affair with Dorothea would be an example.”

  “An excellent example, Reggie.”

  “Of course there is some fallout from all this. The affair, I mean.”

  “What is that, Reggie?”

  “I don’t like you anymore, Winnie.”

  WE DROPPED IN AT THE STANHOPE. . .

  We dropped in at the Stanhope the other day for a conversation with HRH Tutankhamun, last pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, just as his much-mitted extravaganza “Treasures” was about to open at the Met, a sellout before the first customer hit the noble steps. We found the boy king in the pale-pink sitting room of his suite, wearing a Turnbull & Asser djellabah and sipping Perrier, the delicate sadness on his face transformed for the moment by something like opening-night fever.

  “We did very well out of town,” he said. “A million three in Seattle. A million four, give or take, in Chicago. Total U.S. attendance may break seven mil. I’m nervous, of course—New York is the experience. But they’ve booked us into a class place. I stand outside the Met and think, Zowie! Look on my works, ye Mighty! I mean, they’ve got one of our temples under glass, man. It’s amazing.”

  We asked the slight, dark monarch if his spectacle had a theme.

  “Yes. It’s about gold, man. Heavy metal. I mean, I’m quite comfortable with gold. I was into gold very early. I was into gold when there was none of this two-hundred-and-thirty-dollars-an-ounce nonsense. Gold doesn’t unnerve me. But I’m not most people. Most people, they see a little gold—I mean, a little gold that’s not in a wristwatch or something—they begin shedding skin, man. Γ&&r jλλ AAk ψψ”

  We said we hadn’t quite got his last remark.

  “That’s glyph for ‘Mein Gott im Himmel,’ ” he said. “I like to zetz in a little glyph now and then. It glyphs people out. Anyhow, gold is the main thing but not the whole thing. This stuff is old, man. Time abolished. Or, from another perspective, time encapsulated. People just stand there and feel time. And then, of course, there’s the mummy thing, and the curse thing. We’ve got quite a lot going for us, really.”

  We inquired if the curse, said to have caused a number of mysterious deaths among people associated with the opening of the tomb, was still operative.

  “Well, when I walk down the street, I don’t step on any cracks myself,” he replied, smiling. “The old let-the-hand-raised-against-my-form-be-withered. You understand, I placed no curse. You always have a passel of priests around wanting to slam a curse on this, slam a curse on that. I guess it keeps them off the streets.”

  We asked if the proliferation of Tut-related sales objects annoyed him in any way.

  “They say that there’s a Tut madness, a Tut mania, that the show has been overcommercialized. Sure, we’re peddling a few little items. But they’re class knockoffs, man—beautifully reproduced, for the most part. I mean, if Rocky can do it, why shouldn’t we? The Frisbees, the T-shirts, the Tut beer mugs—I just regard those as kind of light, kind of kicky. I think of the show as sort of an ambassadorial sort of thing, don’t you know. Sort of a goodwill sort of thing. Did you see what Tom Hoving said in the Times?”

  He picked up a clipping and began to read aloud. “‘People by the millions see the exhibition and they think, Well, Egypt really has some sort of incredible and great culture.’” The king paused. “And that’s absolutely the story. Egypt really has some sort of incredible and great culture, and we want folks to know that.”

  We took our leave then, and he showed us to the door, pressing a ten-inch polyester-resin canopic jar into our hands as a parting gift. “A λittλ& som&Γhing Γo r&m&mb&r m& 6y,” he said.

  WELL WE ALL HAD OUR WILLIE & WADE RECORDS. . .

  Well we all had our Willie & Wade records ’cept this one guy who was called Spare Some Change? ’cause that’s all he ever said and you don’t have no Willie & Wade records if the best you can do is Spare Some Change?

  So we all took our Willie & Wade records down to the Willie & Wade Park and played all the great and sad Willie & Wade songs on portable players for the beasts of the city, the jumpy black squirrels and burnt-looking dogs and filthy, sick pigeons.

  And I thought probably one day Willie or Wade would show up in person at the Willie & Wade Park to check things out, see who was there and what record this person was playing and what record that person was playing.

  And probably Willie (or Wade) would just case around checking things out, saying “Howdy” to this one and that one, and he’d see the crazy black guy in Army clothes who stands in the Willie & Wade Park and every ten minutes screams like a chicken, and Willie (or Wade) would just say to that guy, “How ya doin’ good buddy?” and smile, ’cause strange things don’t bother Willie, or Wade, one bit.

  And I thought I’d probably go up to Willie then, if it was Willie, and tell him ’bout my friend that died, and how I felt about it at the time, and how I feel about it now. And Willie would say, “I know.”

  And I would maybe ask him did he remember Galveston, and did he ever when he was a kid play in the old concrete forts along the seawall with the giant cannon in them that the government didn’t want anymore, and he’d say, “Sure I did.” And I’d say, “You ever work the Blue Jay in San Antone?” and he’d say, “Sure I have.”

  And I’d say, “Willie, don’t them microphones scare you, the ones with the little fuzzy sweaters on them?” And he’d say to me, “They scare me bad, potner, but I don’t let on.”

  And then he (one or the other, Willie or Wade) would say, “Take care, good buddy,” and leave the Willie & Wade Park in his black limousine that the driver of had been waiting patiently in all this time, and I would never see him again, but continue to treasure, my life long, his great contributions.

  DOWN THE LINE WITH THE ANNUAL

  The Consumer Bulletin is much used in courses in consumer problems, consumer education, economics, home economics, business, civics, marketing, sociology, life science, physics, and other business and science education subjects. Its findings provide valuable material to be used in teaching young consumers in high school and college how to become intelligent and informed buyers of goods and services, and to learn to look for sound qualities in the products they buy.

  —Consumer Bulletin Annual

  Will Candace come away with me—find integrity, wholeness on the Australian archipelago? Too early to say. Meanwhile, the affair of the Swedish tennis balls continues to plague us. I ventured into the basement, found Candace there on her knees before the washing machine, which was filled with Swedish tennis balls. Candace in tears. I took her hand. “What?” I said. “Oh, Charles,” she said, “is everything galley-west? Everything?” I gave it some thought. Then: “You’ve been reading the Annual.” She looked away. “It said these Swedish tennis balls could be washed in an automatic washer and dried in an automatic dryer without deleterious effects. I had to try, didn’t I?” Washing machine has ineffective lint filter, which I discovered last week when it strangled on new rug, 50 percent Dacron and 50 percent iron pyrites, purchased by Candace without first looking it up in the imposing, authoritative, annual Annual Candace, however, is blameless, racked as she is by irritation of the lungs from overuse of aerosol hair sprays (page 15), unpleasant drying and crusting of the lips from overuse of indelible lipsticks (page 17). “I do not blame you, Candace,” I said. “I blame your inadequate education at that expensive eastern girls’ school.” Iron pyrites particles pulsing in her golden hair. “Everything is galley-west,” she whispered. “Had I not yoyoed away my time in school reading Herodotus, Saint-Simon, Rilke, and Owen Wister, seeking answers to the mystery of personality and the riddle of history, I would not have failed to become an intelligent and informed buyer of goods and services. It’s as simple as that.” And in her eyes there was a misty light, produced by defective contact lenses (page 50).

  Whirled my darling away to an ice-cre
am parlor, where we consumed quantities of elephant’s-foot ice (crammed though it was with pernicious food additives). But the problem remains. We are adrift in a tense and joyless world that is falling apart at an accelerated rate. No way to arrest the disintegration that menaces from every side. Consider the case of the bedside clock. “Check for loudness of tick,” the Annual said. I checked. It ticked. Tick seemed decorous. Once installed in home, it boomed like a B-58. Candace watching it nervously, neighbors complaining, calls from the police. And on page 143 the electric can opener that sows tiny bits of metal inside can being opened; on page 178 the sewing machine whose upper thread tension is not indexed, whose cams do not produce the pictured patterns. Yes, they are mine. “There is no reason to believe that the eyes are permanently harmed by watching TV,” the Annual says. (But what of insult to the brain?) “A good toaster should give successive slices of uniformly browned toast for many years.” But my toaster brought to our union nothing but a significant shock hazard. And it is true that I purchased the nylon sheets that slide off the bed (page 211), the low-quality ink that dries too slowly (page 57)—my letters bleed through their envelopes like the hands of a medieval saint.

  “It is estimated that some 5 million girls exist mainly on snacks of soft drinks, ‘French fries,’ pizzas, candy, hamburgers, and waffles.” Who are these girls? What are their names? What do they look like? How does one get in touch with them? And how do they behave, fueled as they are with “foods of attractive appearance but dubious quality”? Candace wishes to send them lean beef in a plain brown wrapper. The freezer is full of it. (But then, the freezer itself is not trustworthy; it is given to broiling the meat in fits of temperature.) Let me confess it, I am tense, for this America is not the one I knew. I am going away, to the Australian archipelago, for although my pipe tobacco is of the type judged lowest in lead and arsenic in 1968 by the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, there is cyanide in my silver cleaner, and my oranges have been rouged with coal-tar dyes. My steam iron spurts hot water from the fill hole, my food-waste disposer doesn’t chew cornhusks properly, my phonograph is giddy with wow, flutter, rumble, and hum. Acid water slowly eats away the glossy finish on my sinks, lavatories, tubs, and what it does to the owner himself no man can say. My double-glazed windows are subject to between-pane condensation, and moths and carpet beetles are at work inside the hammers of my piano. My 3-hp rotary snowthrower is a bust. “Snow was ejected as a powdery mist, which blew back on the operator,” the Annual says, and this proved to be the case; when I returned from the trial run, I resembled a Lapp. Unthrown snow drifts now about my automobile, my apple trees, and Candace, who has gone out to collect the mail. But let her go, for I am writing letters, wrothy letters, to the manufacturer, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Better Business Bureau, and the Attorney General of the state of New York, as the Annual advises me to do. The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, staling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance, and there is mildew to think about, and ruptures and fractures of internal organs from lap belts, and substandard brake fluids, and plastic pipes alluring to rats, and transistor radios whose estimated battery life, like the life of man, is a feeble, flickering thing.