I kept my wits about me, though. I kept my counsel. And in my apartment, just three rooms, one is reserved for concocting spells. I also make my own valentines, Christmas cards, and those that wish ill people well and those that anoint them with a curse, as well as little stuffed figures I pretend to puncture with pins. The pleasure is not major, but it is quietly lasting. It cools the soup spite spits in. But I am speaking far too frankly, more and I shall have to prick myself—ha ha—ha ha—you see I am not serious about any of this, none of it is really true. And these days, Joey, how are you?
• • •
I sing one language Mr. Skizzen, but I speak several, depending upon the circumstances, just as I hold down several jobs in several different towns. I speak teddy bear, just to cite an instance. I can make my words as white as marshmallows. I can niggerate so thick you’d think I was from Africa last minute or a tar pit in Haarlem. As well as all seasons of speech in between depending on the climate in which I find myself. Honey, you are a baby in this world and don’t know how to howl yet.
• • •
We is a bod-ie. When we sing, we is one heart, one heart the shape of one lung, we make moves froms the movies, we sway, we shout it out, we clap the beat, we unison ourselves right into reality. We casts spells. And that’s how I sells cars.
• • •
I know all about the geography of money.
• • •
People call me Witch Hazel. I sorta like that. I rub myself all over with the stuff. What a lot of me there is. You know, you play better when you just play. My husband used to say my ears looked like my head was melting. You hold your ears in as if you had just heard something alarming. He’d say, Hazel, you can sell anything. You have a nice dark-chocolate tongue. He died of his weight and I expect to die of mine.
• • •
I can be aggravated, but if I’m aggravated, I make sure, right then, that the causes are aggravated back. Even if it’s a fender. Rusting when it shouldn’t, like this morning in the wet air, overnight it seemed, and it was there, orange as the fruit, a wide patch like you’d sew on pants. Damn bad for business. Baked bad, the paint was, on it. So I scrape off as much of the color as I can with a finger file. I swear at it, too, a long complicated swear that would have peeled its paint if it weren’t orange as orange gets already. Poop. I’m nice in front of you. You such a baby. But don’t aggravate me by bawling about life. I’ll send you to sit my teddy bear. My teddy bear, darlin, don’t care.
• • • •
You just fuss and find fault, Joey, I know you from womb to past noon, from even when your father lay upon me, if you can bear the truth. Well, I bore you and so I know you. Maybe I’m the only one who knows you because people think now you are a mal—a malcontent—a malcontent man of middle age—well, when you are really old the way I’m supposed to be really old, you know how harmless your kind of malcontentedness is.
But your seed started me off down the garden rows, remember? Your packets of alyssum and other scrounged stuff you gave me for my birthday back when you hadn’t a penny for a pinch of sugar even, well, who knew what it would lead to, me with the spoon digging in the dirt like a child, but it was the miracle of that gift that gave me the peace your father took away from us all when he—they say here—vamoosed, a likable word. You helped make that maternal me you see in the garden, caring for my little sweet things and my big shameless blooms on stalks thick as thumbs. Your father, God rot his soul, used to walk me through the city gardens when we were—when I was betrothed, and in the hillsides, too, he would say the names of the flowers as we passed, the little yellow flavorings that came up between the sharp white rocks like surprises in the spring.
My plants are fastened to the ground. I like that. There’s no running off out of my garden except by the butterflies and bees, and they come back again as soon as they get thirsty. Then when all my beds are quiet—when there’s no humming or buzzing or waving from the breeze—and the heat is even heavy as the past is—all my beds are still green.
So you should be nice to your sister, Joey, even if she’s making a profit from potatoes because she is growing good things, too, or her husband is, since he’s always in the fields with poison to protect them. He and poison do make a pair, don’t they? Handkerchief across his face like a bandit so as not to breathe the foul fumes. But I say who can complain when it is beans and potatoes he is doing? who can put that profit down? so long as he’s there to spoon his soup and comes to bed like a person prepared to sleep, because most men aren’t like you, Joey, devoted to your mother the way you are, and I love you for it, God knows, though gardener you aren’t, but a man of peace and steady as a broom near to hand. You’ve done well by yourself and by me, with an upstanding reputation at the college, yes, you’ve grown respect, and that’s a splendid proud crop, Joey, no backseat to take there, spreading music around, too, like peat. Who knows what will come of it?
Then again it rains on sodden fields. Then again the rabbits make their meals out of my asters. Black spot and beetles, worms and rots and weevils, cut my yields. It rains on wet beds, on sodden fields. There is a sudden uncalled-for freeze. The daffs are snowed on till the stems bend, weary of the feathered weight of all those flakes. Then again the blooms brown beneath the relentless sun. Day after day goes by dry. Then again there’s hail. I want to cry and you don’t carry any sympathy for me because you think everything I do is futile, my trees and bushes fruitless as rocks. The weather will always worsen, you say. Due proportion is impossible, restraint, proper measure, are never nature’s way; it’s either heavy stillness or brief tornado. It’s either rags or riches, you say, while I curse the four corners of the sky, each one a Karlkrautkopf. Ach, but then again, Joey, in every year comes May. Gott! what did I just say? In every year May comes.
30
Some of us used to wonder whether the human race would escape the consequences of its own folly, but now we worry that our species will somehow go on indefinitely regardless of how wickedly it behaves.
This world is made of three kinds of stupid. The commonest stupid is so stupid it doesn’t know it is stupid but is content to be stupid; the second sort is the stupid who denies it is stupid and claims to be wiser than whiskey; the third bunch is convinced it is stupid, too, but knows it knows that much and wisely fears the worst. Among the stupidest of stupids, not knowing any better, a few will luck out because they won’t have the wit to perish properly.
Once upon a time there was a professor of music whose best instrument was hypocrisy, and who pretended to be concerned about the fate of the human race, when, in fact, he hoped it would vanish from the face of the earth the way a fog dense enough to obscure the landscape slowly diminishes, rising like steam from a damp land, so that the earth could smile again as it must have once, in the days of simple cells, titanic trees, or even reptiles with necks grown long in order to reach the leaves.
Joseph Skizzen wanted to go into his mother’s garden and shit upon the ground, but he realized that his shit would only aid the garden’s growth. Moreover, what he wished for was impossible because he could barely think shit let alone say it let alone deposit it or even shush it before it became evidently present.
The crucial problem facing any parasite is the health of the host upon which it feeds, whose substance it steals, and whose balance it upsets, because on the day that the host becomes a husk, sucked dry as dust, the parasite must be prepared to live on small bites bitten from itself, something the tapeworm may not be prepared to do but which the human worm has practiced its entire span, gnawing on the sweet knuckles of its young, cutting into small squares many of the members of its presumptive community.
Professor Skizzen was a fretter, he just couldn’t help himself, and if he was not fretting about this, he was fretting about that, because, in his experience, when things were looking their best, the worst would infallibly happen; thus it was that when he thought that the human race would come a cropper, a result it deserved
and would be a boon for the earth, he fell to fretting that such a benevolent catastrophe might not occur, and if it did not, such a disaster would be, among dire consequences, the most dreadful injustice he could imagine.
Because Professor Skizzen, as he grew older and was more established in his work and community, found himself with increasingly large periods of time to spend as he pleased, he was now able to dream of improvising, while riffing the piano keys, a kind of music that would somnolize its listeners and render them serenely comatose until they quietly passed away from indolence and immobility, not having eaten any more of the earth’s provenance or ravaged another inch of its land or consumed, in their scurrying about, any additional portion of its minerals; but alas these lullabies were made of dream chords too immaterial even for angels to sound, and there was nothing to be done, not even in nightmare, to relieve the planet of its deadliest denizen—every man jack a ripper.
Justice was never served, so why shouldn’t the race of men get away with their crimes, since individuals did, more often than not, and the idea that ultimately each one of us paid the piper (by burning in hell if not through some type of anticipatory suffering) was no more than a comforting fiction promulgated by the same criminals who gave us God and the Holy Ghost and who offer us a few paintings of their Christ on the cross or one or two smug-faced Madonnas as proof that men are on balance better than weevils and have their hearts in the right place (see the Sistine Ceiling or Chartres in the moonlight) (contemplate the advance of science or our voyages to the stars); or, conversely, those who tell us that HIV is a man-made epidemic designed by puritans ashamed of our fleshly sins to get rid of us, ironically through the very copulations by which we come to be; and that this effort, when you view it from the right perspective, proves humans to be humane after all, and that they are trying their best to cleanse the world of their company before they do it irrevocable harm; but their best will not be good enough because hermits, honest priests, and ugly virgins shall survive; fat Adams, thin Eves, shall take up nakedness as nature’s way, and, although they will look round then and see the world gloriously alive and lush and orderly, warning erections will not prevent the opportunity, and the formerly chaste will fall to fornicating with a glee the world before has never entertained.
The Inhumanity Museum made Professor Skizzen think of death a great deal—no, rather, of the dead, of the dead in heaps, of the dead in holes, in the forks of trees, of bones in Catacombs, of a body left like the remains of a blown tire in the road, and how the body goes back to being a mere heap of stuff that might have some nutritional value to fungi. It made him think of bodies less alive than plant stems, less alive than leaves, or even streams, oak smoke, a breeze, except when the cavities are filled with little nibblefish, maggots, or a greedy eel, or when the body simply ascends as stench or turns into its underclothes; and he would now and then stand naked in front of the mirror in his bedroom door to wonder why he was standing there, why anything—his wardrobe, his bed—was there, why he was so thin and why he had let a beard appear—oh vanity! because he wanted to be thought idiosyncratic by his students—and why his hair was unkempt—oh vanity! because he wanted to be seen as quite a character on the campus; but so naked now he couldn’t look at everything that was shamelessly mirrored there disgracing any self he might have chosen as his public image; though in better moments he would argue that his reflection, apparently stripped of all subterfuge, was really a misleading appearance and not his real self, which was five foot eight and one hundred forty-two, muscular though not by much, absent his mirror’s identifying marks—for instance, the rough patch on his knee where he so often picked off scabs, and that small mole like a dot of dye on his chest—really bare of body hair and so utterly ordinary no attentions would be drawn to it even if it stood nude as a statue, loincloth unattached, in a public square.
The evidence initially pointed in the direction of human extinction, but biologists suggested that, although no one would admire what they had become, a few, the most adaptable to execrable conditions (with their claws, fangs, and double stomachs), would survive.
A virus is the best bet. However, there are billions of people. A few of them are bound to be, by sheer chance, immune.
CON. No true human will survive—if any of us do—by being reduced to a species, by becoming a scarcely remaining member of a class the way there are some salmon left; because out of our species has emerged the individual like a flower from a dung heap, the self blooming as a unique person should, valued for her singularity, the quality of her consciousness, the gifts of her genius. This is our extraordinary, our miraculous achievement; it is the legacy of the great Athenians. When a genuine individual dies, he or she is not replaced. Every day, the individual has to be achieved anew. Appeals to the collective would return us to the evolutionary fold. It is true that the individual cannot survive alone; but what he or she needs is the help of other individuals not more loud-mouthed members of mankind; rather the community of those who are fully aware of the world. What a dream it was to imagine the universal kingdom of ends. That, Professor Skizzen would whisper to himself, is the moral imperative. It is totally impossible to realize. So Man may survive, after all, but only as a flock, a pack, a horde.
PRO. But every snowflake is unique, it is alleged; every salmon, petal, pinch of dirt, is as different as Mondays in Montana, Tuesdays in Tucson, Wednesdays in Waco. Fingerprints, retinas, DNA: they distinguish us. Besides, we can find the world in a grain of sand.
CON. Phooey to that hooey. Those distinctions disappear whenever we vote. Each of us becomes a number. The belief that we are special—you and I and he and she—is revealed as an illusion. Two thousand six hundred twenty-nine died in the April storm. Mud slides buried thirty-five. Shot while sitting on the porch swing, seventeen this summer. That’s the norm, the average age of, the median for … Six miners were found alive. When the ferry capsized twenty-one Chevys drowned. Twenty-nine million cans of tuna were returned to have their engines tuned. Last year at this time he was batting .334. When Charlie died three people noticed and one cried. Most men have no more than six different sexual relationships during their erectile lives. The tornado caused 18 million dollars’ damage. Christmas sales are up. The lottery pays 60 mil to anyone holding ticket number 8210759364. That’s my phone number at work.
PRO. Everyone I know is an unusual individual. Aunt Minnie does jigsaws for a living. She enters the most difficult contests under the stiffest rules: you cannot look at the completed picture or even learn its title; the edge must be completed first, not omitting the last, lost, little one; the fitting of forms must rise like flooding water from bottom to top, puddling is prohibited, etc.
CON. Harriet Hoff’s time of fourteen minutes fifty-nine seconds, during the 1995 finals, was better than Minnie’s by two minutes thirteen seconds. Women have won for the sixth straight year. Among the men, Frank Link had the best time but he still finished eighth.
THE WORLD comes in 1,500 pieces. Of this puzzle we have 1,250 in stock. A few of the boxes have nothing missing. At cost: $2.73. At retail: $9.99.
31
There were three sharp knocks, and Marjorie slipped in. She seemed zipped into a towel, her wild hair terrible to behold, and sat upon the bed with the familiarity of one who has made it. Joseph followed each movement, transfixed. White hands darted out of her sleeve like laboratory mice and just as swiftly were withdrawn. After a moment during which Marjorie inspected him for flaws, she rose and moved in his direction. Joey put down his milk. Good boy, she said. You deserve a nice surprise. To Joey no surprise was nice. The Major bent over, her palms shot forth and closed upon his cheeks. The holes in the sleeves were great dark ovals now. Unhand me, Madame, you forget yourself, Joey said, frightened from the world into a novel; and Marjorie recoiled as though struck by the book from which he had unconsciously taken the phrase. Un hand me, she shouted. Un hand me, she repeated, with renewed emphasis. Next she screamed in his face at the point of hi
s nose. As if blown by the noise, Joey backed his chair away, causing a plate of cookies to slide across the tiny table, overturning the glass of milk, and knocking a heavy history of music to the floor near which the equally startled stream of milk had commenced its spill. Her scream was as sharp and high as a child’s cry but lasted longer than the length of any blade and undulated as if made for a scary movie or the stage. Out of the room, whose door now stood open, Marjorie paused for breath before emitting a shriek that rivaled her first. Thoroughly frightened and utterly bewildered, Joey held one ear shut while trying to save his history. Finally he simply kicked the book to safety with a foot and released his ear, since the scream had wound down like the siren does for all clear. In the reverberating silence that followed, a few pellets of snow ticked the windows. He actually thought, Sleet; even: Oh dear. Finally Joey’s heart could be heard rising to the occasion.
After a pause to prepare his body for its next move, Joseph found a towel to mop up the milk, although one edge of the rag rug had done a good job. A door bang brought him to his row of windows. Marjorie, in her white scuffs and terry-cloth robe, was kneeling by the back bumper of the Bumbler. She removed the blocks from behind the wheels of his car, brushing the bricks away with a sweep of her hand. Then, after a pause and a faint squeak, the emergency brake failed, and the Bumbler accelerated awkwardly down the steep drive, careening over the curb and into the street, where it narrowly missed a parked car but struck a utility pole with such force the pole acquired a lean and the car a dent in its trunk that looked intended. Standing at her door now, Marjorie yelled, Good-bye, you ungrateful piece of waste, and disappeared into the house. The door shut with a slam that sung in his windows. At the foot of the drive, blocking half the street, the Bumbler sat in a pool of shade or a pool of grease; it was hard to tell because of the way the light had to fall now to reach the road.
Middle C Page 35