Middle C

by Gass, William H

  Details filled in behind his recollections the way leaves blow into a hedge. Although Miss Moss led Joseph out of her office and returned him to his routines, he realized that he was welcome to rap at her door when down in her domain. He was also allowed to use her typewriter to compose a few letters of reference and a CV faithful to its form if faithless in everything else. She taught him a few tricks with inks. And how to steam off stamps and safely remove other sorts of seals.

  Miss Moss admonished Joseph not to speak to the Major about his visit. He was to remain particularly mum about the ID and that she had showed him how to ink, Polaroid, or steam. Have you received the green glare of Major’s eyes? Joseph hadn’t. He rather thought her eyes … green in the import of them … I mean, green the way a fire burns. While Quasimodo plies his bells, Quasimama sweeps her keep, she said, adding mystery to mystery.

  Joey’s new driver’s license already felt legitimate where it hid as it should in the wallet he had stuck in his hip pocket. Feeling it there made him calmer when he drove, if not more competent, and as the car rose over the low hills he saw endless possibilities in every barn and silo, as he had in his recent journey through his own past, since every memory was made of many elements, each of which had or could be given a diverting history. He felt front porches fill with people he could then pretend to know. Smaller roads kept crossing or leaving the highway, and he could travel over any one of them simply by turning his wheel to drive down the lane of the damaged piano or visit the day when his dad had disappeared (for public consumption, Joseph would call him “dad”), the bobbies arriving at their door as though Dad were dead or in dreadful trouble; or he could stop to admire the greeting-card view of his first Christmas in America or even revisit Debbie’s wedding in the backyard of the groom’s potato patch. For that miserable affair he could collect clichés and stereotypes like the stamps he had only today learned to lift from envelopes.

  The Skizzen family had been driven to a small severe church for a ceremony that was simple and soon over, distressing Miriam, who of course was upset to be the sole Catholic in the crowd and often taken to be Jewish in the bargain. It was also clear that her daughter was the only member of this refugee family the groom’s was inclined to adopt. Deborah wore a dress her mother had made for her and was given away by her brother, who was consequently compelled to be civil. She looked pretty in the way brides must, beaming like an ad and smooth as a counterpane. Afterward the congregation drove out into the country where, in a farmyard, the bride and groom recapitulated kisses.

  After a decent interval the dismal couple departed for their prepackaged life with only one JUST MARRIED sign on their car and no tin cans to rattle at their rears. In a few days they would return to the family property where the groom’s inheritance was being prematurely forked over like one of their hills of potatoes. Joseph determined to think of his new in-laws as small-town bovines who mooed when you pulled their tails and then blew smoke from their noses. As cartoons he could endure the folks they really were, people calm in their convictions, as secure about the direction of their life as a train about the destination of its track, and this serenity unsettled Joey, who admitted in dark moments to being envious as well as scornful of it, because the regularities of his own life had been so routinely interrupted and because it depended on an indifference to the wider world that was tended as carefully as one of their spud-filled fields.

  But, if ignorance brings bliss, as he had recently learned, it is still smart to be satisfied. When he complained to Miriam about the complacency of his about-to-be in-laws, she told him he wouldn’t have liked Austrians then, because they knew to a napkin how life should go on, what was right and what was wrong—be honest, work hard, trust God—everybody knew these things, they knew them, but they often didn’t do them because honesty meant you couldn’t steal and cheat and get ahead of others by using damnable devices. Hard work was hard, that’s why it was called hard, so few people wanted to do it, though they knew they should, they knew to trust God, too, which was the most difficult, since it meant accepting the troubles that made up much of life, accepting them and getting on, even when you were uprooted, bombed, and abandoned.

  As she had been, she was once more prepared to tell him.

  During Joseph’s many pensive moments in the library, he had an opportunity to reflect upon his own unearned sense of superiority. He began to realize that his friends would see him as they saw a Christmas package, decorated to entice but wrapped to conceal. By giving himself youthful myths and minor mystifications, he had donned, in effect, a powdered wig and a false nose and thereby could actually remain far away in his actual unoperatic life, doing nothing they might imagine, feeling nothing they could share, still pure as plain blue sky. Unsmudged by the smoke from a single chimney.

  For as nice as Miss Moss had been to him, helpful and generous with her time, she was nevertheless a ghost with gloves and her own fake skin, wrinkled as though it had gone years without pressing, her animosities running about in her like disturbed ants. Joey now regretted changing Madame Mieux into a German. She had lost a lot in the move, and he was reconsidering the point of her presence. Good heavens, he had forgotten her new name as a Frau. Hilda something. That wouldn’t do.

  Some of his stories seemed to suit the self that Joseph was fashioning right from the beginning. He remembered the plotlines, the highlights, the deft amusing touches without any difficulty, but other features slipped away in the very moment they were being introduced. As his trees bore fruit he decided he should not let the flesh fatten too far from the core. “Swell to a green pulp,” wasn’t that Miss Moss’s expression? When he had listed his age on his new license, he had added five years, no more, which would give him a little time in Graz or Vienna, the latter a larger presence, a more resounding destination, a better birthplace. Consequently, that flight to London, like the other Joseph’s to Egypt, could be made more graphically perilous and prolonged.

  Unfortunately, he also remembered the indistinct document, now carefully hidden away in a closet, that registered his birth in London, and upon which one of his palms was printed, or—no—it was a tiny foot. A footprint. No one need know about it. That path was safely covered. On the other hand, if he wanted to follow some official format when he made out a new one and became born again (as the students at Augs used to say when they had managed to memorize a particularly salient Lutheran fact), he had better dig it out and take another look. His mother would try to monitor everything, and she would not be pleased to think he was altering the date of his birth. Well, this fresher forgery was a problem that, because of the card Miss Moss had made for him, could afford to wait for an opportune time.

  22

  The expectation that the human race might be destroyed by its disappointed Gods as a punishment for mean and murderous madness of the sort that Professor Joseph Skizzen’s Inhumanity Museum documents daily has been superseded by the horrifying possibility that the species may be rewarded for its follies instead, with citations for crime, awards for cruelty, and medals for madness.

  During the same week that Professor Joseph Skizzen was preparing his final lectures on Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron, the newspapers were carrying reports concerning a celebrated Israeli rabbi who had, at last, solved the greatest theological question presented to the faithful by the Holocaust—namely, why? and six million times why? why? why? … why?

  There will be no Judgment Day until we undertake to celebrate it. There was a why for Jews, of course: what had their people done to breach the Covenant so utterly and so reprehensively as to deserve annihilation? There was also a why to trouble Christians unless they could forget that German Catholics and German Lutherans had murdered all those German Jews; unless they could somehow reconcile God’s bloodlust with their own thirst by viewing the Almighty’s malevolence as carte blanche to give heretics and Christ killers what they surely deserved—a punishment long in coming and therefore most acceptable. There should be a similar
why put to the followers of Islam about Allah, the One and Only God, because to single out Jews to exterminate, as he obviously had, particularly Polish and German ones among countless equally deserving Spanish, Russian, or American specimens, not to mention oodles of additional infidels of all sorts, is … well … odd … Was Allah merely miming the Christian God Almighty, already an epic anti-Semite? The consequences were especially unexpected because the remnants wound up unwanted on the doorstep of the Palestinians—not, one would think, a result in Allah’s plans. No one has seemed similarly concerned that Joseph Stalin murdered many more millions than Adolf Hitler (Professor Skizzen had ample documentation stuck to flypaper in the south dormers). He had finally decided that the reason for this (apart from left-wing reluctance and unremitting Jewish propaganda) was the absence of an organized state campaign against a specific racial target. In any case, what were all these deities—G-d, Jehovah, and Allah—allegedly up to while their minions were slaying even one soul not to say massacring so many? because they were all responsible, weren’t they (those Gods, that is, that existed)? since their power and their wisdom were such decided particularities of their nature like our height and brain size; they were the culprits, surely, weren’t they? these Notables of the Sky? if not for turning on the gas directly, at least for closing their ears to the hiss, turning their backs to the passing trains, washing their hands lest they be stained, taking a snooze through repeated beatings … yes, every one of those Gods … silent bystanders to innumerable shooting parties held till the bodies of the dead lay in heaps like potatoes, and all that human consciousness, all that awareness—in each victim the very candle of the Lord, it was always said, the very Light asked for at creation—was snuffed … ah yes … snuffed … snuffed … —so that’s what the smoke was.

  But Professor Skizzen had noticed that God was always excused. Any and every God. For any and every thing. A tornado might trash a trailer park and the poor wretches who survived would thank him for sparing them, as well as preserving a children’s plate and one photo of the family grinning at the Falls as if they’d pushed the water over by themselves.

  Perhaps the Gods alternated fucking off. “I won’t interfere with the destruction of the temple, if you won’t prevent the crucifixion of the Savior.” The pagans, the Christians, and the Muslims had taken turns burning the Library of Alexandria, but it was a moment of rare cooperation. Most of the time the celestial bodies were at one another’s figurative throats. The thought of burning drove Joseph to his attic where there was nothing but paper, sticky strings of clippings, rows of books, piles of magazines, stacks of newsprint, rolls of placards and posters, so he was always frightened by any word that implied ignition. The fact that burning had occurred to him was significant. Set those mountains of painful testimony ablaze, shred the evidence, erase the stories: of the young woman who was raped by her judges in punishment for the adultery of her brother, for instance. Out of what dark corner of the human mind …? or is it all dark, even in the light? or do our murderous desires lie hidden in the closet of the entry? under the runner unrolled down the hall? or disguised as that spot under the dining table where the rug is stained? By whom are we ruled if not by our nature? Remove all signs of those murderers who now make movies of themselves going through their grisly motions; and there will remain the badgering of sweet maids by their horny masters or the drowning of babies in their baths. It is impossible to conceal all the evidence. Yet how easily we forget who we really are. Because it should give us the creeps. His father’s plight had been desperate indeed, for where could one go, really, to stay clean—worse, who could one be to be tolerable?

  Many have wondered whether man would survive the catastrophes to come; one alone worried that some just might.

  Joseph Skizzen decided that given the constraints of the rabbi’s beliefs his reasoning was ingenious if not otherwise acceptable. Clearly, God had to be absolved. It was not he but Hitler who had to be horrible. Theodicy had excused many of the sufferings of the Jews by insisting that Yahweh was using the enemies of the Chosen as a rod to punish them for irresolution and waywardness. So that part of the explanation was ready-made. Then the rabbi simply borrowed a strategy devised by the wisdom of the East so he could conveniently claim that these persecuted, executed Jews had been previously alive and had died once before. They had been recalled to life by God in order that they might be punished—on account of sins committed in former times—in the hell our world would become for the occasion. It was to be, not the Last, but an Intermediate, Judgment. No doubt the ordeals of the countless slain would be cautionary and contribute to the perfection of the world, an aim of every righteous Jew.

  The rabbi was sternly urged to reconsider his suggestion, and, to Joseph Skizzen’s disappointment, he rapidly did so, though with what recalcitrance was not reported. Surely the Holocaust victims did not deserve their fate. This was an objection most effectively aimed. That the rabbi’s solution required a resurrection in the midlife of the world was not an issue for the papers and was not reported, though it might have been raised. Surely theologically prepped reporters would have said that these Jews had been transmigrated, cleverly inserted into unsuspecting wombs by many an innocent but impetuous penis. After all, rotten karma had already humiliated, maimed, impoverished, killed the populations of the world many times by the ring of the bell towers. Professor Skizzen certainly approved of the idea that birth was our first punishment, and that there would most certainly be others. Camp guards who had lost their lives to old age were even now being readied for victimization on future killing grounds.

  When Joseph Skizzen’s scissors had saved these hypotheses for his museum, they almost immediately encountered other, less theoretical, more painfully real catastrophes: in the Union of South Africa, Sri Lanka, Serbia, and the Sudan, in Afghanistan, Algeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Palestine, in Rwanda, Colombia, and the Congo, the criminal consequence of tribal animosities of every kind and degree of virulence, in India, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, in Bosnia, Croatia, Turkey, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Timor, in whatever they were presently calling Burma or Siam, in Somalia, Fiji, Chechnya, Ireland, Algeria, and Zaire … which, Joseph knew, was only to begin strife’s roll call, and without the solace of an ending.

  With all our ironies under lock and key, Joseph thought, might we not find a way to praise this rabbinical folly; indeed, we could return to Erasmus himself and read how “man’s mind is much more taken with appearances than with reality. This can be easily and surely tested by going to church.” But Erasmus does not let the philosophers off either.

  They “are reverenced for their beards and the fur on their gowns. They announce that they alone are wise, and that the rest of men are only passing shadows. Their folly is a pleasant one. They frame countless worlds, and measure the sun, moon, stars, and spheres as with thumb and line. They unhesitatingly explain the causes of lightning, winds, eclipses, and other inexplicable things. One would think that they had access to the secrets of nature, who is the maker of all things, or that they had just come from a council of the gods. Actually, nature laughs uproariously at them all the time.” Yet it is not easy to find a funny bone in a charnel house. In the country of the mind there are calamities, not of the same kind, but equally worthy of our distress. The slaughter of reason is as regular as that of cows at an abattoir. This extraordinary human gift—the ability to think—is rarely used to recommend a calm and caring life, or even to find a just harmony among the needs of men. It appeared to Professor Skizzen, now, that reason was no more than an instrument of human appetites, the way our teeth and tummies are, precisely as some philosophers had suggested (though he had at first resisted them). The intellect was not the Columbus of ideal ends, the designer of legitimate aims, or the motivator of moral action. Instead, when it was not busy making money or in the inventive service of military might, or creating calcifying conveniences and debilitating amusements, it was being begged to justify envy’s slanders, spite’s pettiness, resentment’
s cruelty, power’s enjoyment, and greed’s greed, or asked to excuse lying, ineptitude, or brazenly manipulative ideologies, and sent to the aid of gross indifference or fashioned as a shield against pity, and support for a mercilessness exceeding any our boiling pots have for their lobsters or our guns for their game.

  Each one of us shall perish. That is the good news. Our race, however, may survive. That is the bad news. Those who have perished will be beyond suffering and will not mind. That is the good news. Those who live later will care quite a lot about living and pay a great price for their desire. That is the bad news. The race shall survive for there are greater calamities to come. To die like flies is not how the flies will put it.

  The first movement of Webern’s symphony is followed by a second that is a candrizans of the first. Maybe that is how it will be. From Adam to Armageddon and back again. At the end of the world two humans will be left—so to say, standing—evE (whose palidromic name is perfect for the part), and madA, whose spelling is not so felicitous), and they shall live in a valley between mountains of slag and hills of reeking corpses, at first fully uniformed with passion aplenty to rape one another turn and turn about, and, only at the last orgasmic gasp, buck naked, sated, and ignorant as worms.

  It occurred to Professor Skizzen that the problem with his sentence was: it wasn’t a full twelve-tone row. What really obsessed him was the perpetual variation of a single idea that so perfectly suited music based on twelve tones.

  First I felt mankind must perish; then I feared it might not.

  Not quite. The right number of words, but he had repeated “I.” How predictable. But he admired the m’s and f’s. Terse. To the point. Direct. Like a blow. Modest if it weren’t for the pronoun. Semicolon though?