His kick felt solid. The can bounced from the back of the box. That was a relief—as if he’d passed stool.
Well, we wouldn’t hear anything, see anything, feel anything, of course, because we—who were we, now?—would have perished. As we went into the ground we’d pass former fellows, previous persons, being flung forth—the Catacombs coughing up their bones. There’d be billions of corpses and no one to count them. No one to photograph weeping mothers for the evening news. No mothers, no news, at last. Human life on automatic pilot. Reruns till every inch of film flames. No more microwaves. The air would soften, ease, grow gentle, when the human frequencies fell silent. A few birds would float above the mess and look for eyes to peck—eyes still fresh and moist from wild surmise and well-meant weeping.
Our concern that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear it will survive.
My concern … it’s my concern … alas … mine. My concern that mankind might not endure has been followed by the fear it will survive. Succeeded—succeeded—has been succeeded.
Professor Joseph Skizzen’s concern that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by his fear that it will survive.
The sentence had begun forming—as if it were going to be significant—during breakfast on a mild May morning many years ago. He could not remember the fruit or how it lay in the bowl of his spoon or how it tasted when it became mush in his mouth. As a music critic—a musicologist—as a philosopher of music—he was used to working with words; they held no special terrors for him; he thought of them simply as tools; they were not instruments like those in an orchestra, because he did not think of his books and essays as performances. His ideas, of course, needed them, but he didn’t dress up his thoughts like toffs or tarts and parade them about on the avenues. He could not remember the bread or roll either or whether they had a plate to themselves. He could not remember the nature of the day.
The sentence had simply passed through his ears and lodged in his head like a random bullet from a drive-by gang. Sorry, meant to shoot the little girl standing with her doll on the front stoop. Meant to shoot Grandma in the porch swing. Meant to shoot the geraniums through their pot. There was another sentence in the barrel. Sorry, meant to shoot you with something harmless, such as: “green oranges are picked when barely yellow and dyed orange to reassure consumers”—certainly not anything disturbing: the fear that the human race, etcet.
“Unripe oranges”? “Scarcely yellow”?
And of course, a word like “dyed” was disturbing, even in a sentence about dissembling, about misleading. Nothing was safe anymore. You could hug caution and try to prevent it from being thrown to vicious winds, but tides would overwhelm its NO SWIMMING signs nevertheless, while earth opened to let the timorous attitude fall, alive and alert as caution is, to the central fire.
During the weeks following its appearance, the sentence had struggled to free itself from the entanglements of a professorial unconscious. Every morning before work, before beginning the routine of the day, the professor was compelled to mess with it. Like a cat kicking a sock stuffed with mintnip. It remained, after every assault—the sentence, the sock—somewhat shapeless. Yet maintained—the sentence, the sock, did—its former attraction. Or perhaps it was like sucking on a sick tooth. Though sucked, the tooth stayed sore. So kicking or licking it was an exercise he did routinely the way others jogged. Its words needed to be whelped because it was a serious sentence—not about companies colorizing fruit, not about academic worries, not about his dim—to him—and dubious past—yet a sentence that had to be made right somehow, properly completed, because it was never right when he read it, though what was wrong was never clear either.
His game of kick the can had come to be a coarser instance of a sock attack. The cans failed to rattle as noisily as they might have if kicked down a concrete street, but it was the best he could do under the present circumstances, and engaged another portion of his anatomy in a way that had to be healthy.
He hadn’t seen the sentence in his mind’s eye as though MENE, MENE had been written on one of thought’s walls; he heard it, yet heard it all at once, as if at a glance, the way he would study himself in his shaving mirror: one bit of face in focus, where the razor aimed, the remainder in the realm of the vague … yet there—though vague—certainly there—a dim presence.
Since he couldn’t be sure whether the sentence was a war wound or a tapeworm, he didn’t know what to do. Maybe rewriting was the wrong tack. Maybe he needed to find a context for it instead. Maybe it had been translated from the Austrian and begged to be returned to the language it came from. “The idea that the people might not persevere” was perhaps a better beginning. Not “the people” just “people.” The idea that we might lose the human race and come in last … the idea that our might was a Maginot, potent so long as unemployed—fearsome only of physique—as showy as a circus—no more serviceable than a costume—was … was unendur … insuff … and if … if fired like a battery of Berthas—our powers and our vainglory might explode in our—the shooter’s—face—as if … if our shell had been sent through the calamitous curve of a bent barrel …
The sentence had slowly appeared, gradually shaped itself, and as it had, so had the compulsion to perfect it overcome him, filled and overflowed him as if he were a tub. Enough, he had cried, yet there the flood came, out of nowhere, rolling down stairs like a rapids.
The thought that mankind might not endure has been replaced by the fear it may survive.
“Supplanted.” How about “supplanted”? The notion that mankind might not endure was after all a happy one, optimistic, hopeful, so it could hardly be described as worrisome or a cause for concern.
But it was not really a happy thought. Skizzen was saddened that one had to hope for humanity’s demise, for the wipeout of every man woman and child. And their goddamn sidewalk shitting dogs. And their insatiable greed. And the misused intelligence—caviar on cake, invention for invention’s sake. And their mountainous indifference. Horrendous cruelty. He was sorrowful. But we had done enough damage. Enough. We had done enough harm. Enough of us. Enough of this. Nevertheless, he was constantly compelled to recast the notion, to reconsider it, to suffer its shortcomings.
Moreover—now—his wrestle with the thought would be followed by a reverie on the catastrophes that could accomplish … could complete the idea, round it off: fire, flood, earthquake, howl of wind. Fog. A foul fog. A fog that knew no lift. Miasma for a million miles. A fog of farts from a billion bodies. Rancidities. Shit streams. Stack smoke. Cigarettes. Autocide. Sour breaths. Cook pots. Sweat glands suddenly unparalyzed. Rubbish rot. Microspill. Odors previously unidentified.
Puzzled by the onset of the sentence, Joseph Skizzen examined his memory and found that his recollection of its birth changed when he changed its wording. It appeared gradually but all at once—whole—like a ship or a plane approaching. Or it arrived in servings like courses at a dinner. When he read a score, he heard the music ahead of what he read. What would be, already was. Yes, he decided. It came into his consciousness like a familiar phrase of music.
There is no single sound for C major either. Mozart’s … what? thirty-something symphony is hardly a single sound. Enter the enemy—the diminished fifth—as in Der Freischütz. “Here it is,” Don Giovanni cries, shaking the hand of the Statue. Mephistopheles, as a woodwind, invokes the furies of fire: “J’ai besoin de vous!” Caspar calls for the Black Huntsman Samiel to appear, Alberich curses the ring. L’homme. The crack in creation. Listen to that: l’homme. Diabolus in musica. The Fall. The Flaw in the fig. L’homme.
The woeful hope that mankind might not endure has been succeeded by the miserable fear it may survive.
My. My woeful hope. Wan hope. Who else so hopes? L’homme. They love their lives. L’homme. Cling to existence however ruinous like the pin oak’s leaves through winter. They try to thrive. To multiply. To make murder a method of management.
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nbsp; Miriam became convinced that her husband was dead only when his image in her head no longer intimidated her. It was, she said, his Jewish look, since he hadn’t had it when he married her, or, at least, he hadn’t taken it out of hiding then to sic on opposing opinions like a bulldog on an intruder. Yet, if only an act, what a reality! She would quiz the sky: Who was he? and Joseph, now in his wiseass teens, would reply, Who is anybody? which would mightily annoy his mother, for she felt, in her world, you knew for a lifetime, and a lifetime before that, because you could perceive in the grandparents, provided you knew them, who someone was, and how they would be when good or bad fortune came; who would shovel when it snowed or cough when it rained; who sharpened the scythe before they swung it; who, when burlap bagged the apples, drank the most cider; and who would be a column and a comfort when sickness overcame your life and lowered it into the grave. He’s a steady fellow, folks said of steady fellowy sorts, as if there was nothing higher to be attained.
His Jewish look? Smelling the world, Joseph Skizzen could not do what his father had done to save them: become a Jew. The Jew had lost his oily ways, his oily skin, his oily nose, his oily eyes, and now looked just like everybody else. Jews drank like the Irish. The Jew was a Republican. He had abandoned the book and wore a rifle. Everybody was Israeli. Everybody had an uncle in the IRA or a nephew in the PLO or had arrived as cargo or had crossed a border in the dead of night. Equality had arrived. Nobody was better. We were all illegal. Nevertheless, enemies were atmosphere. Everybody claimed to have received, in his or her inherited past, a horrible hurt. This justified their resentment, though it was the resentful that had harmed them. Opferheit. Victimhood was commoner than any common humanity. Mutual suspicion and betrayal feuded men together. Exile was birth by another name.
The garden his eighty-year-old mother had made for him beckoned. There was a bench, a small clear pool bottomed by slate, shade so soft it seemed to surround him like cerements, iris as graceful as grace gets. Enjoy, he said to his conscience, take pleasure in the garden your mother has cultivated. Was it not Béla Bartók who heard birds deep in the woods, uncannily far, and smelled a horse in the exhaust of a motorcar? He watched the gently dancing points of the forget-me-nots: five itty-bitty blue petals that chose to surround a tiny yellow symbol for the sun. They skipped about the garden, their little blue dots like scattered seed. Out of bits and pieces, Skizzen could complete his mother’s bent blue-denim form behind the irises now voluptuously blooming: deep violet, royal purple, a cool blue so pale the petals seemed made of puffs of air. Later in the year, the red wild bee balm would replace it with butterflies. A garden was a good thing, wasn’t it? This garden was a good sweet place. Though his mother was ruthless with the weak. Nothing mimsy was tolerated, nothing was permitted to be out of place, nothing diseased or otherwise sick was allowed to live. Cleansing was continuous.
And when a bloom closed in upon itself, brown and wrinkled, its petals now like a body bag, his mother pinched it from its stem. She deadheaded it … listen to that … L’homme. Fearful word, now fearful phrase: dead head. Dead head. Dead head.
In the center of the garden a vine, glossy and vibrant and leafed like the sea, clung to the trunk of a great beech with such intimacy it seemed a skirt, meanwhile other tendrils streamed so prolifically out along the tops of the beech’s upper branches—running every twig as though they were channels, doubling the greenery, putting a leaf inside a leaf—that the birds forsook the tree to nest inside the thick entwinement. Was this rampant plant a garland or a garrote? Surely the beech would die. And afterward, its lover would be—wedded to a corpse. What was the diff? It could climb brick.
After the Fixels arrived in New York, they were handed over to New Jersey until they could be relocated in a small town in Ohio. Miriam, at first more discombobulated than she had ever been, was reassured by the fact that nearby their college community there were Amish living a modest rural life. She began to work in a plastics plant with the word “rubber” in its misleading household name. The serene streets slowly brought her serenity again. And the people of the town were kind. Americans love to feel sorry for others and are happy to have someone worthy of their concern. Routines took over like overlooked weeds. Yussel and Dvorah were sent to school as Joseph and Deborah, a change that officials welcomed as a sign of good adjustment. In no time, they were no more Jewish than they had ever been. The boy, Joseph, began to imagine he was as Austrian as his father and, of course, his mother was as Austrian as anybody. Joseph had his father’s apish gifts and an ear for accents. Soon his English was perfect, yet with a charming, reassuringly distant, Germanic shadow.
Gone, his father had seemed distressingly present, but after a time, during which Middle America distracted Joseph from his history and its wounds, Rudi Skizzen receded into harmless anecdote, and Joseph and his sister could grow apart as good kids should. Deborah disappeared into majorettehood, dating the better automobiles, and dancing through gyms in her socks. Her grades were ladylike Bs while his were gentlemanly Cs, averages adorned with pluses, most often as afterthoughts. Joseph was careful not to draw attention to himself, he made no effort to hold on to his German, and it, too, waned, leaving behind a few words to be treasured like curious shells. In what proved to be due course Deb married a nice-looking boy, nearly Catholic, who would almost enter Yale. The ceremony meant she would move a mile or two away, though it was still far enough never to be she who was seen again, even if, occasionally in town, a missighting would be made.
So Deborah made her escape by fashioning herself like someone on a magazine cover—American health, curls, and cleanliness—just as her father would have wished her to do. Joseph was sadly certain that she would feed her husband wieners and bear babies, but in the USA way. Her house would wear tricycles, aluminum awnings, and a big glass grin. Of her past there would be not a trace, but she had longed to be ordinary, and it looked like her husband would help her to achieve negligibility.
Joseph’s aloof, slightly exotic air could have given him girls if he had not feared he might have to present a certain self to their inclinations, a self some of them might fancy, and tend not only to expect but to desire. He abbreviated his time in life, solely as a youth, to a boy he called Joey, a kid who hated sports but could ride a bicycle. Days, for him, went by like the windows of a jerky train. For how many months of his short life had he been poorly dressed, hungry, and generally uncomfortable, sometimes seriously sick, full of fear for the future, scrunched in a crowded railroad car, staring out of smudged windows at dim meadows, distant cows, poles in regimented lines like those on rulers; or how many hours had he passed standing in the aisles of buses under the elbows of adults or spent being borne about in a blanket, eyes on an unrecognized sky, helpless and in ignorance of every outcome?
Not to mention the heaving sea, the spray that affronted his face, and the creaking speech of the bunks and walls and covered pipes, which he recalled with the vividness of nightmare, although these memories were more continuous and complete than those he retained of London under the Blitz or of Britain during the bland baconless days of victory and reclamation. The only positive spaces were the spaces of the church where Miriam brought them for mass after Rudi ran off, memorable because they felt made of the music that filled them. Mostly, when he recalled parental faces, he saw anguished eyes and swollen cheeks, voices tired beyond terror—flat, dry, hoarse—bodies that could scarcely bear their clothes: these were the companions of his every moment, and their figures became faintly superimposed upon the interested eager jolly features of his teachers whose feigned enthusiasms were no more encouraging to him than the false hopes his mother had—over and over—held out to him, even when she wished he’d cry and carry on the way his sister did instead of sitting silently, as if his wish to be elsewhere, in his small case, were a success, and he was.
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