Ill Nature

by Joy Williams

  After the deck talk a video was shown about Mt. Athos, which of course everyone crowded in to see. I was shocked to see footage of an old monk feeding cats. There must have been twenty-five cats leaping and crawling all over him.

  “What about all those cats?” I said. “There has to be a female cat in there somewhere.”

  “That was explained in the deck talk,” an Englishwoman said.

  “I missed that,” I said. I was embarrassed, but I admitted it.

  “An exception was made with the cats,” an Englishman said.

  Sharks and Suicide

  THERE’S SOMETHING OUT THERE WAITING FOR US, AND THAT’S the truth. Wasps or abandoned refrigerators. Dehydration, myxedema, and the three-hundred-year-old elm on the curve. Explosions and wrecks and electrocutions. Funny-tasting meat treats. There are cycles and moments. There are fatal hours. The chop waits in the night and the bright sunshine, and each piece of earth is good enough and greedy for our ending. Dying is the message, all right, but the messengers are bums. Petty. Common. Hasty. We’re shot or burned. Our bones start breaking. Cars make waffles of us. We keel over. Or it begins with trouble in the voiding parts. Not many of us die from love or terror these days, and there are few thoughts left that touch us with true horror. But there are some, certainly. There’s one. Earth’s nightmare is the sea.

  Swedenborg said that devils are things that after death choose hell. Who among us knows the extent of the sea’s true abyss?

  The known food of the West Coast white shark includes pieces of basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus), gray smooth hound sharks (Mustelus californicus), Pacific mackerel (Scomber japonicus), cabezon (Scorpaenichthys marmoratus), halibut (Paralichthys californicus), sea otter (Enhydra lutris), and man.

  The shark as cruising destroyer, acting, for some, as bizarre machina, attacks approximately twenty-five people a year. That’s hardly many. Nevertheless, the thought of a big fish lunching on a fated bather is known to create concern out of all proportion to the amount of injury or loss of life incurred statistically. Somewhere or other, there’s a bronze whaler or a gray nurse or a white death out to do the purely unspeakable. Rolling and trimming, balancing and pivoting, flying with baseball-size eyes through the sea, without malice or immoral intent, a percentage of sharks bite a percentage of people. The chosen can be a silver-suited diver or a black pearler or a little boy in a hemmed T-shirt or a woman bathing with her gentleman friend after lunch or a kid on a fluorescent surfboard with a singing keg.

  The pressure exerted by the jaws of a typical eight-foot shark is three metric tons a square centimeter.

  The shark is not in the tarot; it is not in the signs of heaven. Its strict reality remains beneath the waters of the world.

  A shark attacking a human being probably never strikes from mere hunger, but rather because, under varying circumstances, the victim assumes a suggestion of food, which the shark, out of the purity of its nature, is unable to resist, hungry or not.

  The shark likes blood and fish, but it often attacks man when neither of these excitants is present. It strikes in the rain and the bright sunshine, off crowded beaches and in rivers seventy miles from the sea. Neither month nor time of day nor condition of sea or sky nor depth of water nor distance from shore is applicable to the probability of attack. Neither shade of skin nor the presence of sweat or urine is applicable. Nothing is applicable.

  The sensory systems of sharks, although beautifully interrelated, nevertheless result in a decidedly limited behavioral repertoire. Once sharks have initiated a specific pattern of behavior, they are not readily distracted or inhibited. Often they continue to attack their prey despite a variety of normally distracting and noxious stimuli, including severe bodily crippling.

  Such an object! Both primitive and futuristic with its simple core of mystery, with its actions, exact, obsessed, and inexplicable. Such a deep imperviousness to life! Such silence. Such . . . invisibility. As though created instantly, when needed, out of the sea itself. Day and night, without cessation, death approaches. What can be learned from the shark but negation?

  Sharks move boneless from the sea light into the darkness of our worst imaginings. And as the impossible terminus, as the inconceivable hazard, they slip from our dreams into the sea.

  SUICIDE

  The defining moment for the punk-metal band the Plasmatics was in New York City in the fall of 1980, when Wendy Williams jumped out of a moving Cadillac just before it exploded and catapulted off Pier 82 into the Hudson River. The victim, a ’72 Coupe de Ville, had been purchased from a couple who initially had doubts about selling the car they had driven all through their high-school days to the Plasmatics. “I don’t want my car to die!” the young wife said.

  “Everything must die,” Wendy said sensibly, “but your car will be immortalized.”

  The Plasmatics spent much of the money they got from albums and performances buying the cars and television sets they would then demolish. The pyrotechnical bills were huge. Amplifiers, lighting trusses, guitars—all were subjected to explosive effect. Little could equal the sight of Wendy wailing and shouting, wearing stiletto-heel boots, otherwise accoutered only in shaving cream and a bit of tape over her nipples for modesty’s sake, pumping a shotgun loaded with blanks while a false ceiling rigged by her technically inspired crew collapsed around her.

  What were they thinking of? Well, it was all about fighting ennui and banality and the torpor of common life, and it could almost remind one of Flaubert, who, writing nostalgically of the friends with whom he shared his youth, said, “We swung between madness and suicide; some of them killed themselves, one strangled himself with his tie, several died in debauchery in order to escape boredom; it was beautiful.” Flaubert and his friends, however, were romantics. They didn’t say “Fuck You” to the world. Whereas the Plasmatics were all about Fuck You. In their day they were the ultimate in visual anarchy, in staged chaos. “Rock ’n’ roll has teeth,” Wendy said, in the long-ago ’80s. “It will scratch your face off. If you like having your brains blown out and being pushed up against the wall, the Plasmatics are for you.”

  Wendy Williams, that’s not the same one, right?

  This is in Storrs, Connecticut, a dreary state university town, green in the way only the northeast Connecticut landscape can be green, a thick stultifying clogged limp breathless green.

  Wendy Williams, that’s not the same one, right?

  This is what the townsfolk would say when they learned that the thin woman with heavy bangs and long blond braid who rode her bike all around town, going to flea markets and yard sales, buying “blankies” and stuffed toys for the injured and orphaned animals she cared for at the Quiet Corner Wildlife Center was Wendy Williams. Because Wendy Williams was the superhuman screamer with the most fabulous black and blond Mohawk ever, the original hardbody, crazy and kinky and out of control, sexy scary Dada, Wendy Orlean Williams. She had her initials tattooed on her arm! WOW!

  Not the same one, right?

  Well, she was and she wasn’t. She had inhabited her life as a rock-and-roll extremist and speed-metal priestess, and when that life was gone she was just living inside herself, which was Nowhere. The Plasmatics burned inferno bright for four years, from 1978 to 1982, after which Wendy went solo. In 1984 she was on the covers of both Kerrang! (the heavy-metal magazine) and Vegetarian Times, and in 1985 she was nominated for a Grammy for best female rock vocal. (Tina Turner won.) Then there was the thrash-metal opera Maggots: The Record (the fave of Wendy aficionados), which told the tale of a larval takeover of earth and good riddance to it, and then it was 1988 and she was thirty-eight and living in Connecticut.

  She didn’t mind Connecticut. She had always been capable of disassociative states of consciousness. That’s how she functioned so brilliantly as a Plasmatic. This state of being in Connecticut didn’t exist for her, Connecticut didn’t exist, it was utterly improbable, in no way could it function as a vivarium for Wendy O. Williams. She was used to a lot of
time between gigs, but now there was just time. It took her awhile to absorb the fact that her career was over.

  In 1993, she tried to kill herself by banging a knife into her chest with a hammer. She changed her mind when the blade lodged firmly in her sternum and she realized that she was afraid that if she pulled it out she’d bleed to death. In 1997 she tried to kill herself again, this time with an overdose of ephedrine, a synthetic version of the health-food store herb ma huang—herbal ecstasy. She rejected intervention, of either the pharmaceutical or psychiatric kind. She had never taken drugs. She was a purist in many ways. She had always been outside and against and over the edge in everything, and now, mentally, she had crossed the final threshold Cesare Pavese wrote about in The Burning Brand: “It is conceivable to kill oneself so as to count for something in one’s own life. Suicide is an act of ambition that can be committed only after one has passed beyond ambition.”

  Plato said that under certain circumstances, suicide can be justified. These included extraordinary sorrow, unavoidable misfortune, intolerable disgrace. To the Greeks it could be a principled act. But the Christians got hold of it, mixed it up with martyrdom and shortcuts to heaven, and overdid it. By the fifth century, St. Augustine deemed it monstrous, and by the beginning of the fourteenth century, Dante was relegating suicides to the seventh circle of Hell, a mere compartment away from those who had murdered others: There, the souls of suicides are transformed into stunted and twisted trees in a dark and pathless wood. The birds that make their nests there are hideous harpies who tear at the branches and make them cry out and bleed. When Judgment Day comes, these souls will not be reunited with their bodies. The bodies will simply hang from the trees’ branches—separate, useless. This grotesque image remains one of the most fearful in all literature. It still moves us, even in our century when few of us believe in Judgment Day and scarcely believe in the soul. We believe in the now and the self. We believe that any anguish we might feel is caused by chemical imbalance, which can be corrected. We believe in the promise of a future through prophylactic drugs. We believe we always have the chance to reinvent ourselves.

  Wendy couldn’t reinvent herself. She tried to live meekly. She volunteered at the wildlife center. The goal there is to release the injured and orphaned animals back into the wild. You don’t look into their eyes; you don’t make pets of them. She thought pets were prisoners. She didn’t work with dramatic creatures, like raptors. She involved herself almost exclusively with squirrels, which some people regard as decorative rodents. Wendy appeared shy, gentle, soft-spoken, withdrawn. She worked at the Parkade Health Shoppe between Storrs and Hartford. All the employees wore white lab coats like chemists or aides in some sanitorium. Everyone was helpful and cheerful and smiling. It was a normal, utterly preposterous place. Wendy wore the white lab coat and was cheerful and smiling. But there was something spooky about her, too. Her body was in excellent shape, but her mind wasn’t—her mind was darting around in dark places, pathless woods. She didn’t believe in redemption, but she did believe in deliverance. She was miserable and full of rage, and when she was fired from Parkade and they tried to deny her unemployment benefits, she was deeply pissed. Wendy O. Williams concerned about benefits? It was pathetic. But the benefits weren’t the point. It was the whole horrible working in a shopping center, getting your driver’s license renewed, getting out of bed in the morning.

  So the situation was this: She was living with a tattooist and his cats and suing for unemployment benefits from an employer who didn’t want her to have them. Wendy hated cats. She was still taking care of the occasional baby squirrel that had to be nursed with a bottle. She didn’t want them to be raised around cats because when they were released they would think cats were their friends, which would make it easy for a cat to mosey up and snap off their heads and disembowel them before they had a chance to say hello. She was working out a couple of hours a week and getting tattooed, and that was all she was doing. The tattoo was too complicated and was making her upset. It was a water and fire design that was not making sense for her. What was it supposed to mean? Innocence and purification? Change in the midst of eternity? Soul mind? What? She had always been physical, an appearance person, and now she hated her body. She had wanted leopard spots, but the boyfriend tattooist couldn’t figure out how to do them.

  In 1998, April 6 was a Monday. Statistically, April is the most popular month for suicides. Christmas time can’t hold a candle to it. And Monday is the favorite day. Wendy took the .38 handgun the tattooist kept beside his bed. What was she thinking? Maybe she was thinking of a happy time, of her birthday, years before, when the Plasmatics gave her a surprise. They were in Phoenix and found out that the city was going to demolish a house to make way for a road. They arranged for a bulldozer, got the proper permits, put her up on that big machine— Happy Birthday, Wendy!—and she aimed it and smashed that house to bits.

  Of the notes she left, one of them said in part, “I believe strongly that the right to take one’s own life is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have.” This was the responsibly iconoclastic Wendy, moving from the right to be smutty to the right to die violently by her own hand. One of them said, “My feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.” This was the dyslexic, philosophic Wendy referring to a place she wanted to be, a place where she wasn’t.

  Then she went into the woods, fed some squirrels, put a bag over her head so she wouldn’t utterly freak out the person who found her, shot herself, and died.

  Coral Castle

  ED LEEDSKALIN WAS TINY, LATVIAN, AND ODD. LEGEND HAS it he was jilted by his bride-to-be on his wedding day, or maybe the day before, back in 1913, and he came to America, where he wandered forlornly for thirteen years before settling in Florida City. Here he became interested, one might say obsessed, with coral rock, the ancient dead reef that makes up the foundation of Florida’s Upper Keys. The rock had been quarried extensively for bridge and causeway fill for Henry Flagler’s railway to Key West, and there was a lot of it lying around, very heavy of course, weighing many tons. Using chains, pulleys, and old car parts, Ed moved chosen pieces of rock—which is really beautiful in its polyp-and-gorgonian-riddled way—and began fashioning it into tables and chairs and planets and even a moon, a large crescent moon weighing twenty-three tons. Then he moved, taking all his rock with him. He bought some land in Homestead, ten miles away, and transported everything in a borrowed truck, alone, in the dead of night, legend has it.

  In Homestead he really went to work. For twenty years! He cut and carved coral to make ponds and settees, steps going up to nothing and steps going down into the ground, towers and telescopes, a sundial. He made tons of chairs, a heart-shaped “Feast of Love” table, a rock sun-couch, and a bedroom full of slabby beds, large and small, also a rocking cradle. He thought it would be nice to have children, and he looked forward to disciplining them in the “Repentance Corner.” If they were naughty, he would make them put their little heads in holes he cut in the rock. Their heads would be held in place with a wedge of wood, and he would lecture those little heads.

  When he was more or less finished with his work, he built a wall around it all, a lovely eight-foot-tall wall of perfectly fitted coral blocks and the pièce de résistance, a nine-ton gate so perfectly balanced it swung open with the touch of a finger. He lived alone behind the wall in a tiny room, on a bed made of boards wrapped in burlap and hung from the ceiling. He never had a girl. He wrote in his journal, “I ALWAYS WANTED A GIRL BUT I NEVER HAD ONE,” not even the girl who jilted him at the altar, the sixteen-year-old by the name, legend has it, of Agnes Scuffs. Agnes Scuffs of Latvia.

  It’s just as well Agnes didn’t marry her suitor. Her life would have been so hard. She would have eaten only green vegetables and wild rabbits. She would have been up all night fiddling with that coral rock. Leedskalin’s idea of fun was closing his eyelids and giving a side-p
ush to the eyeball to see tiny bolts of lightning dancing about. Maybe Agnes wouldn’t have thought it was that much fun. She might have wearied of his endless theorizing and philosophizing. Then there were the magnets. She would have had to live with those adored magnets. Magnets were everything to him. “SURPLUS MAGNETS ARE THE REAL LIFE,” he wrote. Magnets were “THE COSMIC FORCE. THEY HOLD TOGETHER THIS EARTH AND EVERYTHING ON IT AND THEY HOLD TOGETHER THE MOON TOO.” The only thing keeping the moon up was magnets. To bring the moon down you’d just give it a half turn so it was no longer aligned with its magnets. If Agnes disagreed, he would have said, as he did to everyone, “YOU SAY I’M WRONG, I SAY YOU ARE WRONG YOURSELF.” He believed the body got its magnets from food; digestive acids dissolved the food and liberated magnets to be used for other purposes (in his case, moving thousands of tons of rock all by himself ). Maybe it’s best the little fellow’s love remained unrequited. Everyone knows unrequited love is the strongest magnetic force of all.

  One of the nicest things to happen to Coral Castle was in 1963, when the fabulously unclassifiable movie director Doris Wishman shot one of her early nudie films there, Nude on the Moon. Watching Nude on the Moon is a fine way to visit the castle. In Doris’s film, spacemen land on the moon and discover that nudists are that planet’s sole inhabitants. The naked actors frolicked amidst the rocks, quite at home among the throne and obelisks and the eighteen-ton models of Mars and Saturn. The nudists conferred at a coral table shaped like Florida, while communicating telepathically through little quivery antennae on their heads. This method enabled Doris to dub all the sound in afterwards, the nudists not being terrifically competent actors.