The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  It’s that asshole again, the spider must think every time, surveying the damage. The guy who lives in that A-frame up there. He can’t write, so he comes down here and takes it out on my work. Jerk.

  Today I won’t destroy your web, my spider friend. Jealous though I may be of not only your industry but the perfection you achieve time and again by it, how, unlike me, you never run out of webs to weave, of yarns to spin out of the most delicate, intricate threads (while I sit at my desk in my loft tugging at the single loose thread of an empty thought) …

  I won’t ravage your latest creation; I’ll climb around the ladder, or jump into the water and clamber up the side of the dock if I have to. And I’ll console myself thus: that though I made nothing today, neither did I destroy anything.

  “This view shows the contacts operated by the rotor.” From ELECTRIC MOTOR.

  XX.

  The Ghetto

  Corvallis, Oregon, 1980

  YOU MOVE INTO THE GHETTO.

  Your thirty-dollar room smells of burned cork, peanut butter, and pot resin. The previous occupant, a guy named Gleason who is said to be insane, furnished it with shelves of scrap lumber. The cockeyed shelves are sprinkled with candle wax, marijuana seeds, assorted mineral specimens, snakeskins, bird feathers and skeletons, desiccated dragonflies, and additional sundry insects, as well as other talismanic objects.

  Like the rest of the room, the shelves are painted a range of migraine-inducing hues, from school bus yellow to popsicle blue. The bed – a mattress on the floor – has a big brown stain that reminds you of a butterfly or a Pegasus. Every pane in the window has at least one BB-hole in it. A bare George-Booth-style light-bulb hangs from the end of a frazzled electrical cord. There are no closets.

  As if to preserve the room’s dreariness or to consecrate it, an invisible layer of volcanic ash coats every surface, a legacy of the eruption that blew the lid off of Mount St. Helens a few months ago, a dust as abrasive as it is invisible to the unaided eye and that no amount of wiping, washing, vacuuming, mopping, dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, or scraping can eliminate.

  The dust gets into bed with you. It blows through your dreams like that sandstorm in Lawrence in Arabia. It gathers between your toes, in the folds of your crotch, and in the pits of your arms. It turns to crud in your nostrils, clogs your ears, turns the insides of your eyelids into fine sandpaper. It gets into the pages of your notebook, dulls the varnish on your guitar, fouls the keys of the typewriter that Winston, your landlord, loaned you. There is something hellish about it, this volcanic ash, this grit belched up from the bowels of the earth, something ominous as a B-movie monster, Attack of the Killer Ash, Zombie Grunge from Hell, Revenge of the Phantom Filth.

  It pervades everything, this residue of remorse, this deposit of despair, this sediment of sadness, this gritty precipitate of gloom. You are dust, it says, and to dust you shall return.

  You’ve started putting some order to the place when Froggy joins you with a marijuana pipe he carved himself from a deer antler. He stuffs the pipe’s bowl, lights it, and hands it to you, saying:

  Anything you make with your hands is beautiful.

  I’ve got a whole shitpile of pipes like this one to sell at the main gate to the Country Fair, he tells you.

  Done smoking, he hands you the pipe. A housewarming gift.

  Oh, almost forgot! Froggy says and goes down the hall to his room, returning with a vest of yellow-green suede that he bought at Vina Moses, the local thrift store.

  Try it on!

  You happen to be wearing a white T-shirt. You put the vest on over it. At Froggy’s insistence you go down the hall to the communal bathroom, where, as he looks on, you look at yourself.

  I look like Art Carney in The Honeymooners, you observe.

  Froggy bursts out laughing. You do, you really do! You look just like him!

  Back in your room you smoke another bowl, filling the stuffy air with sweet blue smoke. When Froggy tries to open the window, a pane falls to the floor and smashes.

  WITH FROGGY GONE you write a series of letters to the teacher. A bitter letter, a hurt letter, an admonishing letter, a condemnatory letter, a sad letter, a forgiving letter. You try different combinations: sad/hurt, forgiving/bitter, bitter/sad, sad/forgiving.… Before starting each new letter you tear up the last one. By sundown you’ve torn up a dozen letters.

  You’re just about to start on a sad/condemning letter when there’s a knock on the door. Winston, your landlord, stands there in his slate blue postal uniform, laden with blankets, an Indian chief with a peace offering.

  Thought maybe you could use these.

  The blankets reek of mothballs. You thank him and put them on your bed.

  Heck, Winston says. I got so many blankets I don’t know what to do with them all. People come here from all over and they leave me their stuff. I got hot plates. I got pots and pans. I got shoes and boots and lamps and umbrellas and harmonicas and musical instruments of all kinds. And typewriters, of course. I got a whole bunch of typewriters. My poets, they leave me things to remember them by. Know how cats like to leave dead mice and stuff on your doorstep? That’s how it is with my tenants. He smiles. His teeth are worn to nubs. His sad blue-gray eyes perfectly match his faded postal uniform. Anyway, he says, before you go buy anything ask me first. Odds are I’ve got it.

  A while later Froggy knocks on your door. He asks if you’re hungry.

  I’m expecting a Danish delivery within the next half hour, he says.

  This time you accept. While waiting in Froggy’s room for the Danish, you and he smoke another bowl. Abetted by strong marijuana you review your circumstances, cast like Adam from the Garden, sent like Cain into the dark part of the world after slaying Abel. Forced into exile. Like Ovid. Like Galileo. Like Casanova. Like Napoleon. Your sense of righteous indignation knows no limits as you hold in the smoke and smile.

  When the Danish comes you take it down to the communal kitchen, where there’s a big old-fashioned cooking stove and a long table. While Froggy warms the Danish in an iron skillet, you set the table. With half a Danish ring on each of your plates, you eat with forks and knives as though savoring a Porterhouse steak.

  YOU DIVIDE WHAT you see as your banishment between the Beanery and your room in the Ghetto, where you practice your guitar and type the first blustery chapters of a never-to-be-published Künstlerroman on Winston’s typewriter (Olympia, portable, lichen-green w/chromium trim).

  On hot days you swim in the Willamette, whose swift current nearly sweeps you away the first time you try it. Aimlessly you walk the town’s streets, with their presidential names and hanging baskets of purple flowers, telling yourself in so doing that such periods of aimlessness are a requisite part of an artist’s education, that sooner or later your insubstantial existence is bound to congeal into something solid.

  Occasionally you play the Glass Plate Game, seated Indian style with your legs crossed under you on the gritty floor of your schizoid chamber, the small white cards with their esoteric images and titles spread out on the floor around you. You are especially drawn to the card that shows a snake swallowing its own tail, the ouroborus. It reminds you of the first day in the teacher’s special class when he astonished you all with the Möbius strip, how you walked into the classroom to find the words EVERYTHING YOU’VE LEARNED IS WRONG written across the black board, and under them The statement on the handout is true, and later, on the mimeograph sheet: The statement on the blackboard is false. Or had it been the other way around?

  You resent the teacher for betraying you. He did betray you, after all. He held out the promise of a future together as friends, and more than that, a place in his vision of that future, a utopia, one you’d help create and in which you were to play a substantial role. Now that future had gone up in smoke – like those fields set on fire by their farmers, a controlled burn. That’s how you experienced your exile: a controlled smoldering burn, sealed off yet raging within.

  On the other han
d you blame yourself for having become a man with no direction or purpose, for having no idea who you are, let alone what you’re doing. Much as you resent the teacher for his treatment of you, ultimately you blame yourself for your failure to live up not only to his expectations but to your own, for failing to become the person that you were meant – destined – to become.

  The court of self-reproach finds you unworthy of the Castalian order.

  A LETTER ARRIVES from your father:

  Dear Peter,

  I got your letter. I’ve been putting off answering it, waiting for something to happen so I’d have something to write about. Nothing really has happened, but I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t have to be a great event.

  For example, to-day was such a perfect day. I put on my brand new sneakers and went to Huntington Park for an hour. Unfortunately it rained the night before and the trails were full of mud and now my new sneakers are no longer new. Even so, it made me feel good to be out and exercising.

  I’ve sent you the typewriter ribbon that you asked for and a check for $100 ($20 – mommy’s contribution), first class. You must have got it by now. Nothing much is happening here. I’m working on a new machine, one commissioned by Procter & Gamble for measuring the color, texture, and consistency of one of their products, namely Jif peanut butter – loathsome substance; only Americans would eat such crud! The thing has to fit into their assembly line. Already it’s so heavy I can’t lift it. I hope you’re around when I have to put it in the car.

  Last Sunday I made a great effort to wash part of the Building floor. I used a mop at first but wound up sitting with a rag and pail, dragging myself around, doing more cleaning with my ass than with the rag. It was tiring and dirty and infinitely unpleasant, but it did me good.

  This morning, in contrast, I feel plain lazy. Got up late and dragged myself around, hating myself. I doubt I’ll get down to work till after lunch.

  I’m looking over your letter. “Maybe I’ll just stroll down to the Beanery expecting, in the back of my summer-fevered mind, to find some girl willing to keep me company…” Do you know, old as I am, I still get those feelings?

  My favorite part of your letter was the part about your having nothing to be afraid of. It’s so important to plunge into each new phase of life with confidence. I wish I’d had that sort of confidence when I was your age.

  As for security, I’ll tell you what security is. It goes with the idea that there is a spot for you somewhere, that once you find it you’ll hang on to it because if you lose it it’s too bad, you may never find another as good. I was victimized by this kind of imagery, but I know you and your brother won’t be. In a sense you’ll never have “security,” but then you won’t need it, either.

  I keep thinking of you standing on the ramp of the interstate where I let you off, waiting for the car that would take you West. I had turned and headed back into town for lunch when on a hunch I drove back to the ramp hoping to have a last look at you but you were already gone.

  I took that as a good omen.

  The typewriter tells me I should shut up while I’m ahead.

  Love,

  Papa

  You heard from your brother, too. By then he’d earned his bachelor’s degree and was poised to begin his doctoral program. It was hard for you not to compare your life unfavorably with his. Stretched out on your stained mattress in your boarding room you remembered the game you and George played with each other, the one in which you’d take turns elaborating the millionaire/pauper/raging snowstorm scenario, with one of you the millionaire, and the other the pauper. Back when you played it you found the game hysterical. Now it didn’t seem quite so funny.

  IN YOUR LONESOME exile you do odd things. One day, you follow a strange woman in the street. She has long dark hair and is walking slowly, as if with nowhere in particular to go. You shadow her for a block and eventually catch up with and say hi to her. She returns your greeting and keeps walking. You remark (keeping pace) that she looks familiar and wonder if maybe you’ve seen her somewhere before. At the Beanery, maybe? (As I recall this for you, dear Past Self, it embarrasses me deeply: not just your having harassed this woman, but the transparent lameness of your approach.) The woman says, Could be, and keeps walking. You keep following her, pursuing this line of inquiry, insisting that both of you were at the Beanery together one evening, watching a heavyset lady sing and play the guitar. Remember? This folk singer singing a song about whales, about saving whales, or maybe she sang like a whale.

  I’m sure you were there, you say, insist. I’m sure I saw you, I know I did!

  By her quickening pace it is or should be clear that this woman wants nothing to do with you, that she’s pegged you for a creep. Still you don’t relent. You follow her to the entrance of a supermarket, where, turning to you, smiling, she says, I’m going shopping now. I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t follow me in here. Once inside the supermarket she heads straight for the security guard, who glares at you through the plate glass.

  * * *

  IN CONNECTICUT SHORTLY BEFORE YOU LEFT FOR CORVALLIS you’d befriended a guy named Jeff Ajax. You met him at the state university, where, at your mother’s behest, you had gone to complete your undergraduate degree, and where you came upon him playing guitar for a small group on the campus quad. Jeff Ajax had a Rasputin beard and sang in a nasal baritone that, though twangy and out-of-tune, held you and the others who had gathered to listen to him enthralled. Afterward, when you asked him whose song he’d been playing, he told you it was one that he’d written himself. It was further disclosed that he had been playing the guitar for less than two months.

  No kidding? you said. You mean it’s that easy?

  Nothing to it, Ajax replied. If you like I can teach you. You just need a guitar.

  That was two weeks before you learned that the teacher was living in Corvallis and decided to go there. By then you had obtained a cheap guitar and learned the chords to a few songs, you’d even written several songs yourself. When you informed Ajax of your plan to hitchhike to Corvallis his face lit up with enthusiasm.

  Corvallis? No shit, I used to live there! he said.

  You did?

  It’s a great town, a magical place, said Ajax. It rains a lot the rest of the time, but the Indian Summers are long and beautiful. The people are open-minded. They’ve got rainbow festivals and renaissance fairs and a Bavarian style beer hall. It’s a great town for music. If things get rough you can get by on food stamps. I plan to head back there myself soon as I get up the gas money.

  Why don’t we hitchhike together?

  Ajax shook his beard. With two of us we’d never get anywhere. Besides, I never want to hitchhike again. Why don’t you ride out in my car with me? We can split the gas money. Which reminds me: can you loan me ten bucks?

  You didn’t want to wait. In the end, you and Jeffrey Ajax had agreed to meet up in Corvallis. Twice a week since your arrival you’d been checking with the cashiers at the Beanery for a message from him.

  Now you were sure he wasn’t coming, that he’d stood you up and made off with your ten bucks. This augmented your sense of disillusionment.

  * * *

  NOT SO LONG AGO (YOU SAY TO YOURSELF LYING ON YOUR back on your mattress in your room with your hands tucked under your head) you occupied an enviable status in the world. You had talent, good looks, charm, healthy friendships with remarkable people, and all the potential in the world. Women found you – if not irresistible – certainly not creepy by any means. Compared to most people you had no financial woes or material wants. You stood at the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid, within a hair’s breath of that brightest of stars known as Self-Actualization, a first-class passenger aboard the Happy Train.

  Now? You were obscure, a failure. You had trouble sleeping. You had only two or three real friends, misfits all. Your legs were too short, your nose was too big, your hair was ludicrously frizzy, your hands – and by extension your dick – were too small. You wer
e arrogant, vain, and profligate. You depended upon your parents for material support while living a marginal, peripatetic existence. This so-called life of yours – which you didn’t deserve to live – sucked. No wonder you sought out unfamiliar members of the opposite sex, not so much for lust or companionship as for the remote chance to behold, in their shiny fresh eyes, a more flattering version of yourself.

  It would take years of therapy for you to ascribe these and other symptoms to the pursuit of gratification by vanity known as narcissistic disorder and to trace its origins back to the day you wheedled a kiss from your kindergarten teacher in exchange for a crayon drawing of the Empire State Building (or was it the Queen Mary?), a fateful transaction that over time evolved into a mode of survival.

  Among your legion of therapists, one would point you toward a strain of narcissist known as the peur aeternus, the eternal child-god forced to live forever provisionally in a state of perpetual adolescence by his fear of being trapped in circumstances wherein intolerable limits might be imposed on his yearning for “freedom,” i.e., the sorts of responsibilities and conditions that define average – mediocre – lives. Though he made his first mythological appearance in Ovid, the puer aeternus is best known through his incarnation as the flying, mischievous, never-aging Peter Pan. Those who suffer from “Puer Aeternus Complex” or “Peter Pan Syndrome” refuse to or can’t grow up.

  All this is not yet news to you as you lie there in your miserable bed in your miserable room looking up at your miserable ceiling, wondering where you went wrong, alternately blaming yourself and the teacher.