With great energy, and with a confident smile, he sent two cans into the cardboard. Such skill, he thought, was seldom seen.
Mostly, though, from every place not already tacked or pasted, clippings were loosely pinned or taped so that they would have fluttered had there ever been a draft, as they did wave a little when Skizzen passed or delivered one of his kicks, dangling for quite a ways down the wall in overlapping layers sometimes, even stuck to flypaper Skizzen had cannily suspended from the ceiling; the whole crowd requiring him to duck if he didn’t want his head and neck tickled; and giving to the room a cavey cachelike feeling, as if some creature, fond of collecting, lived there and only sallied forth like the jackdaw to find and fetch back bright things; or, in this case, cuttings from the tree of evil, for which purpose paper shears had been put in every room of the large house, every room including entry, bath, and laundry, because you never knew when you might come upon something, and Skizzen had learned not to put off the opportunity, or delay the acquisition, since he had, early on and before this present remedy, forgotten where he had seen a particular picture or news item and was sadly unable to locate it again. He vividly remembered, too, how he had lost an image on a handout by postponing its extraction when he should have scissored it out while he was still standing on the front stoop holding in his shocked hand a leaflet bearing a grotesque beard and a text attacking the Amish because they were receiving special privileges, which allowed them their own schools; when children, whose God-loving parents were faithful members of the Church of Christ’s Angelic Messengers, were called truants when kept from class and made to study—by a sick and godforsaken society—demonically inspired views of the development of life.
Next door, though the room was doorless and open to all those who found their way there, was the library, three of its walls lined by crude plank-and-brick cases crammed with books bearing witness to the inhumanity of man; especially a complete set of the lives of the saints, the Newgate Calendars, several on the history of the church, the many-volumed International Military Trials in an ugly library binding (for sale at a very reasonable price by the Superintendent of Documents of the U.S. Government Printing Office), and several on the practice of slavery through the centuries translated from Arabic, lives of the Caesars, careers of the Medici, biographies of feminists, the fate of the gypsies, Armenians, or the American Indians, and, of course, tome after tome on holocausts and pogroms, exterminations and racial cleansings from then to now, where on one page he could feed on names like Major Dr. Huhnemoerder, Oberst von Reurmont, Gruppenfuehrer Nebe, OKW Chef Kgf, and General Grosch; however, the library did not merely hold works on barbaric rites and cruel customs or on spying, strikebreaking, lynching, pillaging, raping, but on counterfeiting, colluding, cheating, exploiting, blackmailing and extorting, absconding, suborning, skimming, embezzling, and other white-collar crimes as well: proof through news reports, through ideas, images, and action, of the wholly fallen and utterly depraved condition of our race—Slavs killing Slavs, Kurds killing Kurds—testimony that Joseph Skizzen augmented, on the few ritual occasions he allowed himself to observe, by his reciting aloud, while standing at what he deemed was the center of his collection, alternatively from a random page of some volume chosen similarly, or from a news bulletin pulled down blindly from whatever stalactite came to hand; although he did occasionally cheat in favor of The Newgate Calendar, from which he would read with relish accounts of crimes like that of Catherine Hayes, who contrived, by egging on several of her many paramours, to have her husband’s head cut off, in the punishment by which the righteous were seen to be even more wicked than the criminal.
When the wretched woman had finished her devotions, an iron chain was put round her body, with which she was fixed to a stake near the gallows. On these occasions, when women were burnt for petty treason, it was customary to strangle them, by means of a rope passed round the neck, and pulled by the executioner, so that they were dead before the flames reached the body. But this woman was literally burnt alive; for the executioner letting go the rope sooner than usual, in consequence of the flames reaching his hands, the fire burnt fiercely round her, and the spectators beheld her pushing the faggots from her, while she rent the air with her cries and lamentations. Other faggots were instantly thrown on her; but she survived amidst the flames for a considerable time, and her body was not perfectly reduced to ashes in less than three hours.
Joseph Skizzen put his whole heart into his voice, happy no one would hear him, satisfied that no one would ever see his collection either; for he was no Jonathan Edwards, although his tones were dark, round, ripe, and juicy as olives, because he had no interest in the redemption of the masses whose moral improvement was quite fruitless in any case. He did privately admit, and thus absolve himself of it, that Joseph Skizzen was a man who enjoyed the repeated proofs that his views were right.
The drug trade and all it entailed, including bribery and money laundering, bored him—Joseph Skizzen had to confess to that partiality and to the fact that the relative absence of this and similarly vulgar forms of criminal business, as well as many of the brutalities of ordinary life that rarely reached the papers, was a serious flaw in his collection and, presumably, in his character as well. But who would know or care? That was a comfort. His work had been protected from its critics.
None more severe than he, when he missed his target and the can rattled through its vulgar leap toward the dormer ceiling.
Movies that would pan a camera about a serial killer’s poster-lined room (or a delinquent adolescent’s sometimes), after the police had invaded it, in order to astonish the audience’s eyes as police eyes presumably were, would cause Skizzen an unpleasant twinge on account of the situation’s distant similarity, especially when the lens would dwell on newspaper clippings, lists with circled names, or photographs of Charles Manson, but he bore such surprises well and avoided them altogether when that was possible.
There were images that had nowhere to hang but in his head, images he remembered from books but of which he had no other copy; particularly one, from a strangely beautiful illuminated manuscript called The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, that depicted the martyrdom of Saint Erasmus. The presumptive saint lies on a raised plank, naked except for a loincloth. His abdomen has been opened and his intestines attached to a windlass erected above him. Thereupon, like a length of sausage or a length of rope, his innards are being wound by two figures, one male, one possibly female, each working hard to turn the spokes, their faces, however, averted from the scene. The saint does not appear to have wrists or hands. Eight turns have already been taken. The sky is empty except for a few clouds; the earth is empty except for two hills and some small yellow flowers. Around this painting, framed like a picture, is a delicate thin line made of curlicues and a field of tiny petals stalked by imaginary butterflies. At the bottom a small boy wearing a collar of thin sticks is riding a hobbyhorse.
His curiosity aroused by this calamitous vision, Skizzen sought more bio concerning Saint Erasmus. One source simply said that “although he existed, almost nothing is known about him.” This sentence stayed with Skizzen as stubbornly as the piteous illumination. What a blessed condition Erasmus must have enjoyed! Although he existed, almost nothing was known of him. Although nothing was known of him, as a saint, he existed. He existed, yet he had lived such a saintly life there was nothing of him to be known. Still another authority was not as sanguine. It claimed that the cult of Erasmus spread with such success that twelve hundred years later the martyr was invoked as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, whoever they were, and had become patron saint of sailors as well as kids who had colic. What was known, during those hundreds of years, was not known of the saint but of some figure he had thrown about himself as you would a ghostly garment or a costume for the dance. Proudly, Professor Skizzen pasted Erasmus in his memory book. A.d. 300. He was sprayed with tar and set alight. He was jailed, rescued by an angel, disemboweled. On a day in a.d. He died for me.
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So as time and life passed, Professor Joseph Skizzen took care of Miriam, with whom he still lived; he played his piano, once a nice one; he prepared his classes and dealt with his students, studied Liszt, obsessively rewrote his sentence—now in its seven hundredth version—or clipped affronts to reason, evidences of evil action or ill feeling, from books, papers, periodicals, and elsewhere, most of them to paste in albums organized in terms of Flaws, Crimes, and Consequences, though many of the more lurid were strung up like victims on lengths of flypaper, nothing but reports of riots on one, high treasons on another, political corruption, poaching, strip mining, or deforestation on still others, and in order not to play favorites, he decorated a specially selected string with unspeakable deeds done by Jews, among them—in honor of his would-be forgotten father—the abandonment of the family.
Professor Joseph Skizzen’s concern that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by his fear that it will quite comfortably continue.
7
Rudi had not left his family in the lurch, Miriam told the children at first, frightened of the effect the truth would have upon them. It was Raymond Scofield who had done that. Rudi had, she insisted, gone to America, where he would find work and, in due course, a pleasant place to bring them. After the second year, this lie could no longer be lengthened. Who knew what foul thing had befallen him in that faraway barbaric country of cowboys? And when they sailed for the States, that was the story in charge: their dear father had been killed by wild beasts, outlaws, or Indians in New York or Canada. He had doubtless been buried on the lone prairie, because neither the immigration authorities nor any of the refugee organizations had any record of a Rudi Skizzen or a Yankel Fixel or a Raymond Scofield. But, by the children, this was no more believed than Santa Claus, though the pretense was for a while maintained. We should have gone to Halifax, Miriam said, that’s where your father is. But Miriam and her children were now in the hands of the system, so they went to a tiny two-bus town in Ohio, where they lived in a very small house at the edge of whatever civilization there was; Miriam got a routine job making rubber dishpans; the kids rode hand-me-down bikes to a very small school; Miriam caught one of the buses to work where she made friends readily; and life in Woodbine, Ohio, was safe, calm, regular, and quiet. About her occupation, Miriam always said it was better than the laundry. She still smelled of something, but it was no longer soap. Debbie loved her school where she soon had plenty of chums and took up cheering the boys at their American sports. When Debbie jumped up and down her breasts bobbed beguilingly beneath her sweater, and that was the real reason for the acrobatics, Joey felt. He liked Debbie better younger when she was without them and their gentle wobble. Imagine being popular for such a reason or made happy because you stuck out.
Joey was not so pleased with himself or his place. He was uneasy with everybody but Mr. Hirk, who had also made him uncomfortable at first. Perhaps it was because Joey fancied himself an Austrian of aristocratic lineage. Or because he began a grade behind and never got over the shame, though the normalcy of it all was explained to him countless times—wartime risks, irregularity of life, uprootedness of family, loss of father, poverty, the rest of it. The fact remained that he had been put back and was regarded as a stupe on that account. What he didn’t like was standing out, being noticed, for whatever reason. He felt endangered by attention. During the rest of his schoolboy days he settled for Cs and gradually found a spot in the back row.
From the back row he never asked a question or answered one, if he could help it. He never took chances, shuffled his feet, whispered or passed notes, or surreptitiously read an illicit book while it hid inside the assigned one. He dressed as plainly as possible, stayed awake in study hall, didn’t join, date, suck up, or hang around. He was resolutely friendly but had no chums. He owned nothing so valuable he felt responsible for it.
With Mr. Hirk out of the picture, Joey had no piano to play and no place to practice; however, he remembered that there was an old upright in his former grade school gym, so he went there after classes had let out, walked boldly in—such was the laxity of that peaceful place and those peaceful times—and played honky-tonks with its sticky keys. The tunes echoed from the vast expanse of wooden floor as though it were a sounding board. He found he could reproduce the little marches his fifth grade had been made to parade to, so he began with those, and no one still left in the building minded; perhaps the janitor thought Joey was working on a project or preparing for a pageant … as, it would turn out, he was.
Joey would find that, in America, at least, if you turned out a tune when you played the piano, then you played the piano; the skill was given you as easily as a second cup; appearances were better than reality; and the sight of someone slightly inept was immensely reassuring to those woefully without ability. As had to happen, teachers remaining after hours for a meeting heard the racket and a few came to the gym door to investigate. Joey was playing the “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” something they recognized, so they went away again without a question. However, the teacher, into whose hands and hoarse voice the children’s instruction in music had fallen, sought Joey out and asked him to play a few times after school for ceremonies and such things. Joey said he would be happy to, on one occasion playing his own variations on “Three Blind Mice” to childish laughter and parental applause.
In this way Joey learned that music is an enemy of isolation. People gather for it as if it could not be heard without help; it certainly could not be enjoyed without all those whom it employed: the place, the performer, the piano, the passive rows of people in chairs, devoted to their own silence, all ears.
The music teacher—who often rented instruments for this or that child in her charge from a sheet-music and record store in town that had such a sideline—recommended Joey when she learned that a clerk-of-all-work was needed there, and so, after relatives and friends of the owners were found to be uninterested or unavailable, Joey was approached. Through such a turn of fortune, Joey found himself with a real piano to play on and in his mother’s grateful good graces at the same time. He began working after school and on weekends, but when he graduated he was taken on full-time at the High Note, so named because it was on High Street, a street so named because it lay across the edge of a ridge and looked down on Main, though only by a little. Through two small bleary windows at the rear of the shop Joey could look out over a small valley toward the low hills on which Whittlebauer College was perched, since every college in Ohio, maybe every college ever built, had to have a hill and be said to be “on the hill” and therefore come to be called, not the college, but the Hill. In short, he could see from High to Hill, although he could not know then that it would be his life’s ironic trajectory.
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