I, Bartleby

by Meredith Quartermain

  Surely they’re eyeing the curve of his pencil moustache arcing out across his cheek. The way he’d cut it to slink round under his jaw and, sharp as an etching, curl up over his chin, tracing two little circles below his lips. Do they know what he’s thinking? Of course they do – the way they laugh and lean over their glasses of Cabernet Franc. Which one likes him more? The blonde is a little cool, a little reserved – that’s the way with elegant people – that’s the style of elegance that doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve – that doesn’t even bother with sleeves or what it’s got simmering beneath its beautiful surface. The dark asks him how his day’s going. She keeps asking even after he’s taken their order if his day is going better, now that she and her friend are here. Oh, much better. How much? Way ahead. Did you upgrade from a one to a ten or a one to a hundred? So precise – are you in statistics? She does market surveys. No, I don’t.

  The chefs have a concert of plates steaming on the bar. The maître d’, a puff-cheeked wind about to blow an arctic gale, glares at the waiter, who sails over to the plates and ferries them out, three to an arm, to his guests. He’s jovial with the professor and his younger companion. Prudent with the skinhead and his business partner. Courtly to their French-rolled wives, after he almost delivers their bread and duck pâté to the solitary patron with a stein of beer. Mercurial, ardent, soothing, discreet, and inspirational – he’s buoyant with grins and tact. His guests, too, play their parts. They even win awards – best supporting partner, best costume design, longest monologue, most dithering over Malbec or Merlot, most desperately trying to be interested male in conversation with female. And the waiter, too, with his gladsome clairvoyance, his jaunty judiciousness and astonished alertability, must be awarded a prize – of best director.

  Shyness,

  that peculiar tangle one gets into as a hostess with a guest with whom she can’t quite find the spark of animated talk. A cloud of expectation of jovial or intense speech hanging between them, making her forget even the basics of How to Win Friends and Influence People, and fall instead into a certainty of her own complete neanderthalness – cave hostess stumbling toward signs painted on rock – guests needing more wine, martini olives too stale, fish raw or overcooked if she doesn’t pop it out of the oven again and check.

  A spore – who scattered it? – roots in the consciousness of Mme hostess and Mme guest, a fungus spreading rhizomatic filaments through the hillsides of their forests. Mme hostess senses Mme guest’s reticence and Mme guest senses Mme hostess’s sensing of this uncommunicativeness, Mme hostess in turn sensing that Mme guest senses how effortfully Mme hostess is stumbling in her cave toward Mme guest, that her talk is not natural, that word so beloved by manufacturers of highly processed food. The talk is obstinate. The talk is not spontaneous. Not sprung like combustion of oxygen and carbon, but ground like the slow rub of tectonic plates.

  A hostess should know exactly how to ignite an uplifting flow of news and ideas, and Mme guest is embarrassed for Mme hostess’s inability to raise Mme guest from her ennui and disengagement, her dulled drifting in the buzzing room, embarrassed for Mme hostess’s encumbering hesitancy, but also for her own cat-got-her-tongueness, which has created now a kind of anti-ignition of two glowing logs who instead of sparking each other into flame douse each other into nullity with suspicions that either one or the other is boring or bored, that the enthusiasm of party inquiries is provincial, that one wearing the same clothes year after year while the other always sports something new has unleashed irreparably The Fear of Not Being Loved (Mme hostess will later think of the time when we were all guests of mothers who may well have been taken aback at the brazenness of beachheads in their most intimate rooms).

  The fear that makes one not speak. Mme hostess could muster a little effort toward a silent body wrapped in its circuitry of cellular impulses, but she falls away, a burnt log, afraid to step into the darkness of that circuitry, afraid to blithely utter such a common thing as a word, only to find it yawn to a black hole where she will shrink to an infinitesimally tiny dust mote. Would you like to try some of my tapenade? she says to Mme guest, I made it myself.

  We begin again

  to write by hand, drawing the tail of one letter into the stroke of the next. Cursively running like a stream through a valley it’s worn away for millennia. The stream’s feet carry its lazy or swirling surface – thousands of hands hold it above heads of all those jogging legs, the letters and words. Can medieval monks be said to have practised handwriting? Or was it rather a form of calligraphic printing? Letter by letter stop and go. Broad tips of their quills fattening and narrowing around the curve of an o, a, c, or b. Leaping away to pick up ink. Returning to page to strike boldly down the stem of a t. Then jutting sharply to cross the t – the cross they’d committed their lives to or perhaps were driven to by cold nights and empty stomachs.

  Australian aboriginals scripted fields of coloured dots with ropes of song to carry their world. Chinese and Egyptians wrote in pictures – a man or a sun or a house stepping out of brush strokes or gouges of stylus. Nowadays we don’t write with hands and arms, we write with fingers or thumbs. We don’t sweep around curves, jut up risers, or swoop down descenders, curling and uncurling a c or an s, looping and knitting our letters. Nowadays our neurons manage rows of on-off switches, fingers wired to three or four buttons commanded by imagined letters, the conveyancers of thought, printed in our brains. Except for lists of milk, bread, and apples. Or receipts handed out by someone taking away a rug to clean. Or the cramped script on tiny lines of dental records using the universal tooth numbering system: watch 7; replaced amalgam in 12 and 29; scaling, two units; recommended extracting 32.

  Then, too, when you are seventeen or eighteen or even nineteen and starting your first job as a clerk in a dental office and there are doors to cupboards containing cottons and gauzes and sterilizers and stainless steel instruments, trays and masks and anaesthetic, and pieces of equipment you don’t know about yet, there’s not much you can do. The others don’t have time to tell you and even if they did you can’t remember it all – it’s hard enough with names – Dr. B___? B___? B___? Brandlehand. Doctor with sideburns beginning with F or S – his door always shut. Don’t go in if there’s a patient. There’s not much you can do in the mumble of hygienists and patients, the whir of drills and tiny hydraulic jackhammers chipping tartar away from tooth enamel. Doctors breeze from chair to chair. Patients drift up to the clerk’s desk, resting their elbows on the ledge to write a cheque or discuss booking an implant. You wish you could calculate patients’ bills or send them via telephone lines to insurance companies, but you can’t.

  The day stretches into a long, straight line the ends of which, like an ever-expanding universe, are travelling faster and faster apart as time goes on. Time that oozes in molecules from coffee break to lunch, from lunch to coffee break, from break to never-never-to-be-reached end of day. You will not look again at the clock. You must be busy, you must work at your job. You must be polite and always smile and talk about your evening or your weekend even though you already told them about watching TV or reading a magazine. You want to be one whom the patients can speak to, be worthwhile as the ones at the computer, the ones the doctors talk to, the ones who understand the doctors’ orders. Oh, please, what can I do?

  The one who’s training you tells you to make a list of all names and phone numbers in a box of files. Writing by hand. Aaron Lee number, number . . . and numb-er, Theresa Sanderson number, number . . . and number, rounding the a’s and d’s and o’s, spacing the r and the e and the s. Making three-humped m’s and two-humped n’s. In grades three and four you traced them on dotted lines – round and up and down and along to the back of a k. You copied stories and poems and capital cities from the blackboard. You rested your head on your left arm down on the desktop, the tip of the pen inches from your eyes, swinging up and down, shooting off the line then zigging back and round to touch the line and shoot up the stick of a d or
sweep into the tent spire of a j diving below to loop its tail, stopping for its dot – each letter sailing away then back like a boomerang to the line. Waves and waves of letters. No longer school, no longer teachers and rows of other children, no longer rulers and principals – just you and the pen between the lines.

  Vaguely you hear the word casualty. Are you all right? Yes yes. I’ve always written with my head down, even when I was in grade four. The teacher always asked. The patient leaves and the senior clerk talks about the public space of the front desk; everything you do makes an impression. The clock says five minutes to five.

  Orientalisme

  If I prefer not,

  he stands on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of his building, which is not the place he owns but rather the place he has come to. A room. A hot plate. A toilet down the hall. He brings the cigarette to his lips and draws smoke into himself, feeling it swirl in his head, into that manliness – that sureness of himself – that always came with a cigarette. Like he was on the job. When he had a job. With Nick and Derrick and Zoltan. He clamped down logs, shot them into bark-ripping teeth, squared them into cants, ratcheted them through blades, flipping clean, white boards to conveyor belts. Have to know computer language if you want that job now.

  Market music sings in his ears from the open stalls of Chinese dried shrimp, red and green beans, curly black stuff on bark he used to saw. Old man rolls his cart to his everyday spot on the corner. Must have a family, a son’s business around here, sending him out with his fold-out seat and steaming bundled leaves, keeping him busy when he’s no longer really needed. What do they taste like? White van drives right through the red light, turns left on red! – woman driver, go figure. Another woman – looking at him – stands beside leaf-bundle man, waiting to cross. Stare back. Why should she look at him? With her city-clean jeans and buckley boots. It’s his street more than hers. He lives here. She’s only walking through from the rich houses past the tower blocks and the school. Some of them dumps, but they’re still houses, with separate walls from other houses. Houses with kitchens and bathrooms and no one banging and cussing at night. No one punching. No one puking in the hall. The light’s changed. She’s looking at the green, not at him. She’s crossing between the lines.

  She’s writing about him. She’s glimpsed him on a street corner. Snapslotted him into neural fibre, transported him through synapses in her arm to her wrist and knuckles to wiggle him out on paper through a tiny metal rod. Her snake trail bumps, dots, and loops along between lines running out from small holes around a coil of wire, reminding her of lie-detector styluses or the scratching of machines that measure earth tremors and heartbeats. Is she then part of a machine or perhaps an organism that measures slight quakes and shunts of tectonic plates? Part of a pulse-taking circuitry picking up radio waves and translating them to a line of camels walking nose to tail across the desert of her page. Their hoofprints disappearing in shifting sand as though she’d washed the ink under a running tap till it faded to hazy stains.

  What lies was her stylus detecting? She refused to write about him from the outside. Refused to place him in the world of her thoughtless glances and no doubt classist assumptions about men of sixty or so who lived in the brick blocks of single rooms above Chinatown merchants selling sacks of dried shrimp, raw peanuts, cloud ear fungus, sea urchins, and black-eyed beans. Attended by foraging pigeons waiting for the guard to turn her back. No – this descriptive impulse must be checked. Unless she slipped into his thoughts. His sightlines back to the man with the cart selling steamed packets wrapped in leaves. Her I no longer present in the writing – her I disappearing into his I – an impertinent impersonation. An I which she gives to you like a cloak of invisibility.

  Cloth Music

  Whatever it was the Chinese calligrapher said with her brush strokes, it was not something she said quickly. This stroke horizontal. Cut that into two arms with a dash upward of the same length blown forward by a strong wind. From the belly of the dash, stroke down a short leg plunging ahead into the wind. Branch a bold shelf off the leg, elbowing downward to end in a hook. Finally slash upward ramming an iron spike between leg and hook. No good rushing, thinking of what the brush strokes mean or thinking of lunch or the next character. Each stroke must signify its own speed and weight, as it carves, in the eagle’s view, buffalo pounds of white space. No use being ridiculously careful, mincing and stinting the ink, trying to keep brush strokes alive, trying to make sure it all stands for something, make sure it carries her away on its magic carpets from the meaninglessness of doing nothing, of standing for nothing, promising nothing, of promising no ticket to goodness and rightness.

  As though we are to life as words to meaning, a matter of reference, we signifiers and life a distant signified, rather than fractals of intercellular space returning like molecular jungle gyms in the marks of sense and frames of mind that captivate us. As though making our mark takes place on a white page in a vast notebook and diary that began with the big bang – each footprint of each member of each species recorded infinitely for each to read of each of all of the others.

  And so we word-bodies walk our word-legs in a language we can’t speak. We stand for our brush strokes. We kick at tyrants. Our ink stains resist like wax in batik. We bear scars of our spelling mistakes. We set out each day with helmet, shield, and sword – the girls we love. We can’t stop. Can’t put down our pens. We’ll always love how they twist away from us fantastic windmills. We can’t imagine a time when we will no longer set out, no longer resist, no longer love to follow their rhizomatic cartwheels, to mark our time in the arms of such siren readers.

  Mén

  Mén talking. One, jaw dropped to ground. The other, listening. Implacable. Sometimes they hug and smile beside a suitcase on wheels and a waiting car. Sometimes they compare books or condos or iPads or revolutionary philosophies. They face each other at parties, searching for talk whether it’s hockey or stocks or their firms that could be getting more work but are doing all right. Faces facing. Antennae to matter, drinks in hand, bellies sometimes bigger than heads but heads are where they live – large heads on sticks, one stick with bigger feet than the other. On terra firma. Firmament. Chain of being. Their heads like windows – double-sashed panes squaring eyes, squaring mouth, squaring suits in square buildings squared in streets. But they are not men with an accent – they are a door – their paned faces the swinging louvres you push through to whisky, studs, and holsters. A frame of men. Between them, a door. You could be photographed there or you could photograph your shadow going through. Mén and door. You brush along silent man’s back, stroke the sides of his upper pane, slide along the lower pane to his spine, then jut round front and bottom of talking man’s glass, trace the crossbar of his sash, sweep across the tip of his head and down his spine to flick out his feet, and you find one man has more window, another more stick.

  Bàba

  Swashbucklers clash on sash window laid sideways shimmering back whiteness of sky, white as teeth over jawbone. Howdy, says jaw, curving a path to the teeth door under a roof of crossed swords – god-hefted hilts – blades striding scissor legs over windows of sky. Father sword legs – what’s he say for himself – this striding gesture whose memory, said Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, made the very soil of Chinese life – whose silhouette waved bloodstained flags on silk roads where intellect can only grope? Let my character speak, he insists, let me stroke my noble legibility, brushing my father and my father’s father and my father’s father’s father and his father and his father’s father – men of swords, men of staked ground. Men who said, My women. My children and only my children. My house is my castle, and I, the most generous of I’s, am the king of the tallest house, the one who makes black black and white white white. Here you will find the right house, the scientific house, the fit house, the real house, the perfect house, the clean house, the just house. No dithering, no gropes, no failures, no singing drunks, no brambles, no bastards, no anima
ls without jobs, no houses without architects, no eyes without heads, no heads without homes, no trees without fences, no words without logic. Who would not want the city of fathers?

  Māma

  Interlocking wishbones saunter up a wall, a junk with crossbars for sails. Four oars propel her bow: four children, four splashes of milk, four portholes to her hold. The crossbars paint a lacquered screen with six small squares of Reason, behind which her wishbones tangle lovers. Her six-slotted weir catches splashing trout, her wishbones build a chaise longue or a loom for weaving tents. Her night arms hug the moon, tossing seeds to a well near the four labours of birthing. Her village has six seats of council in three walls: Reason, Rectitude, Justice. On the Wall of Reason, Queen Thamiris fights King Cyrus. On the Wall of Rectitude, Judith beheads Holofernes. On the Wall of Justice, Euphrosyna writes.

  Her father, the wealthy Paphnutius, tried to marry her off but she, dressed as a man, fled to a monastery and amazed the abbot with her/his prayers and devotion. Day after day, rain or shine, the barefoot Brother Smaragdus sat on folding stool in the cloister, knife in one hand, pen in the other, copying texts from book to parchment folded over a wooden tent. Knife hand trimmed the quill, then pinned parchment to the steep slope. Pen hand picked up ink, rested on knife hand, and painted beautiful shapes of words. With the other monks, Brother Smaragdus practised how to read aloud the strapped and brass-knuckled tomes. So devout was Smaragdus that at night he/she would continue by candlelight, alone in his cell, tracing the lines of minims and interpuncts and bathing his thoughts in science.