Guide to Animal Behaviour

by Douglas Glover

  A fragmentary thought crossed my mind — Depleted by passion …

  Then I realized the words were a phrase on Stick ’em LOAT #153, sw quadrant, ceiling collection (I noted with satisfaction how easy it was to use the new system) which read: Depleted by passion, the successful lover withdraws into himself after coitus in order to recuperate the energies discharged into the amourous and unassuageable female. The cycle repeats itself, though each time he becomes weaker. His very success creates in her the desire, the lack, the absence, into which he, driven by instinct, throws himself again and again until released from this onerous duty by Death. The female is apparently able to have multiple organisms without any ill effect whatsoever.

  There were several LOAT cross-references, this being a key text, alarming in its implications, including a reference to LOAT #1107, a little etymological essay which I had written myself on that troubling word “organisms.”

  I felt better after reading this and spent the remainder of the day supine on my NEW YORK TIMES mattress, staring at the stick ’ems above my face. After a time, the penlight on my hat went out and I was in the dark. It was better thus. In the dark, I could brush my fingers ever so lightly across the stick ’ems as if they were a woman’s nape hairs I happened to be caressing.

  In the morning, when I awoke, I discovered that several ceiling stick ’ems had fallen on me in the night, dry and quiet as autumn leaves. I urinated in an old milk carton and spent a happy hour with my glue pot re-sticking the stick ’ems in their proper places.

  Ed. Note: Here follow several unnumbered stick ’ems to be cross-referenced using the key word “morning.”

  Mornings, now that it is cold, the dirty, bearded man and I rise late and sit at the doors of our respective dwellings, stuffing old newspapers under our clothes for added insulation. Wordlessly, we pass individual sections back and forth. He is a shallow fellow, dressing himself in the POST or the sports and business sections of better papers, to the exclusion of all else. I myself love the feel of the TIMES BOOK REVIEW and the Tuesday SCIENCE TIMES next to my skin.

  The ink rubs off, leaving snippets of articles and headlines on my chest, back and thighs. When I go to the mission for my monthly shower, I often enjoy reviewing past events in the mirror, before getting under the water. The chance juxtapositions and inter-cuttings make a kind of found poetry that is often delightfully witty.

  Of course, there were other men at the mission who use newspapers for underwear. The dressing room is the next best thing to a library reading room. Certain lower class types sport huge headline smears from the tabloids. Others bear smudged, yet incisive, economic analyses from the WALL STREET JOURNAL.

  I am the only real reader in the group. Sometimes this has led to misunderstandings and embarrassments.

  The woman who claimed to be my wife has red hair. She returned this morning and spoke briefly with my neighbour, an act which filled me with foreboding.

  I was unable to continue my work and had to go out.

  In the street, I encountered several well-meaning individuals who pressed money on me (though I make a good living carrying a sandwich board around Times Square three evenings a week; I am a human sign which reads: GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS! LIVE SEX ACTS! HE-SHES! GREEK AND FRENCH TRANSLATIONS! NO COVER! FREE HOTDOGS AT MIDNIGHT!).

  I went to the mission for my monthly shower though it had only been four days since my last. The concierge remarked upon this, a liberty and invasion of privacy to which I could not respond because of the angry feelings which welled up inside me. He told me to stop reading other people in the shower as this annoyed them.

  In spite of the concierge’s injunction, I read parts of several informative TIMES pieces while I soaked under a thin stream of lukewarm water. One article dealt with the mysterious disappearance of Pancho Villa’s head, another discoursed on the End of History, an event, apparently, which occurred only a few short weeks ago.

  When I returned to my box, the dirty, bearded man was pacing up and down before my door in an agitated manner. As soon as he sighted me, he came running over, shouting, “There was a woman here to see you. She talked to me. I think she wanted sex. I’ve always had an effect on women. That’s how I ended up here. My health cracked.”

  I didn’t know what to say. He seemed so excited, so very pleased with himself her breasts and red hair, giving me his whole history and health record like that. I couldn’t just turn away from him.

  So we sat a while with our backs to the alley wall, watching the elderly black woman rummage in a dumpster. This was a profound moment of communion, let me tell you, though it ended abruptly when I tried to share my thoughts on the LOAT Concordance with him. The dirty, bearded man said something rude, and we ended up wrestling and spitting in one another’s face.

  The elderly black woman screamed at us, “Aaaooorrw! Aaaooorrw!” She seemed to derive some evil pleasure from our conflict.

  (Aged stick ’em, shoebox collection: The most common human experience is betrayal. All our relations are contaminated with sadness and terror. [Ed. Note: A depressing thought.])

  3) Then there is the infinity problem.

  I am composing the LOAT Concordance and its explanatory preface on fresh unnumbered stick ’ems (there is a large supply in another corner of my box, origin unknown) which I glue to the ceiling in orderly rows easily readable from a recumbent position (sometimes jokingly referred to as “the missionary position”) with the aid of penlight.

  I intend to begin numbering the ceiling stick ’ems sequentially as soon as I finish numbering all the previously numbered and unnumbered stick ’ems and the NEW YORK TIMES, also the trademarks, logos, company slogans and shipping instructions on the cardboard walls of my box (some of the box panels face inward, some outward, thus creating horrendous cataloguing problems).

  Each numbered stick ’em generates at least two concordance stick ’ems and an abstract to which I append some brief, preliminary conclusions, a tally of possible connections (semantic, spatial or mathematical) with other texts, and assorted stray thoughts. To achieve my goal of total list integration (LOAT), I shall have to include the new concordance stick ’ems as a special subset of all stick ’ems. This means that the set of all stick ’ems grows at the same rate as my system list, making the job of including all stick ’ems within the list impossible to complete.

  A task which I once undertook with a light heart, thinking perhaps to while away a few idle hours putting in order the thoughts, observations, quotations, theories, apophthegms, limericks, hypotheses, phone numbers and laundry lists earlier tenants had affixed to my cardboard walls, has turned into a pointless burden.

  I worked on reconstructing the water-damaged notes on the s wall. When the red-haired woman knocked at my door, I had finished eighteen LOAT references, a good morning’s work.

  “Tom?’’ she inquired, softly and wearily.

  She had a black eye, a stunning instance of the convergence of text and reality.

  “Tom?’’

  She was clearly deranged. I was not Tom, though I felt myself beginning to acquire a veneer of Tom-ness through repetition and association. (Ed. Note: See LOAT #437, Arturo Negril Q, s wall, ur quadrant: The lover attempts to reflect the image of himself which he sees in her eyes. He steps outside of himself and becomes an other, a stranger. This stranger then has an affair with the poor fellow’s girlfriend. Ha! See under Lovers, Paranoid Schizophrenia, Betrayal, L-words, Doubles, Out-of-Body Experiences and Impossible Things.)

  Who was Tom? Who was the red-haired woman, for that matter? And the ineffable Lance? (Ed. Note: See under Love Triangles, Real and Imaginary.) I found myself adrift in a phantasmagoria of things which did not exist: missing NEW YORK TIMES articles, Pancho Villa’s head (stolen from his grave in 1926), Tom, words left unsaid, not to mention the numbered stick ’ems which I had failed to locate.

  I started to weep, abruptly awar
e of the futility and hubris compassed by my life in a box.

  The red-haired woman seemed to understand. She placed a gloved hand on my ankle and pressed it. Her hair was heavily lacquered. She was wearing trousers and a short jacket made from animal skins. The odour of her perfume — Mankiller — was everywhere.

  She was clearly ablaze inside, whether I was Tom or not. I tried to resist, but she was too strong for me, and soon we were involved in an embrace.

  To the casual observer, there was little difference between our embrace and the wrestling match I had recently had with the dirty, bearded man.

  We knocked over the urine carton.

  I caught sight of Stick ’em LOAT #57: His life was haunted by a sexual sadness. This made no sense to me whatever.

  “Stop it! Stop it, Tommy,” she said. “I’m with Lance now. You have to stop living in the past. It’s not right what you’re doing, making a public spectacle of yourself, hurting your Mom and Pop, harassing Lance and me. Dr. Reinhardt wants you to come back.”

  Ha, I thought. I knew I was living in a box and that the TIMES had reported the End of History several weeks before. But her beauty gave me pause. I felt sorry for Tom, clearly a man like any other, like myself perhaps, a scholar equally obsessed by his work and this red-haired Siren, a tragic figure.

  Her black eye, partially concealed with cream and powder (the smell of which reminded me of my mother), was exceedingly attractive.

  I wanted to speak, though when I opened my mouth, I had nothing to say. I felt the need to come to an understanding, for some sort of communication to take place, but the words to express this failed me.

  From the first onslaught of passion, I had felt my desire begin to wane. I had begun to think of the stick ’ems, ponder the meaning of the relationships, so far undiscovered, between the various authors. The truth was I felt my body dissolve as soon as she touched me. It became evanescent and airy, a thing of dentals and labials; I became nothing but words, ambiguous, ironic, fleeting and slippery.

  The moment she touched me I was gone.

  She knew this. I could see it by the tears in her eyes.

  A new stick ’em has appeared. Blue. A different colour from all the rest. Provenance unknown. I should resolve to stay in my box continuously, but nature drives me out, not to mention the constant hacking and snuffling of the dirty, bearded man next door, his amourous sighs — my mind boggles at what is going on in the next box.

  Blue Stick ’em LOAT #492 (it was such an event, finding a new stick ’em, that I registered it immediately in the List Of All Things): Dr. Elkho Reinhardt, 3:30 p.m., Thursday. H.

  I think the dirty, bearded man and the elderly black woman have formed a liaison, a cabal, a plot, against me. Alternatively, it has occurred to me that the dirty, bearded man and I are identical (he bears the marks and scars of Itness), or that he is the author of at least some of the stick ’em entries, the ones exhibiting a peculiar sexual obsessiveness, for example LOAT #12: She hath an organ that smells like a wet horse blanket; by the size of it, I warrant she hath been entertaining large herbivores; she pisseth continuously, noisily and in huge volume. The house is awash! (Ed. Note: See under LOAT #92.)

  I took off my clothes to examine myself. On my shrunken member, I found the words: Several women in the chamber broke into sobs. Some men buried their faces in their hands. Under my left nipple, I read: Wandlitz, the name of the elite compound outside East Berlin, soon became a synonym for corruption. And using a hand mirror, I discovered, imprinted on my buttocks, the words: The most serious allegations for now are those against Mr. Schalck-Golodkowsky, but his dealings could not compete for public indignation with the revelations of the lifestyle of the elite.

  I made appropriate notes and stuck them to the common wall.

  I was extremely pleased. Clues were beginning to point to this man Schalck-Golodkowsky as the agent of all my distress. I barely thought of the red-haired woman her breasts until I perceived that she was walking up and down outside my box, slapping her hands against her sides to keep warm, her breath going up like smoke.

  How long had she been there?

  I felt a sudden thrill of fear. Having decided at the outset to eliminate the time element from the LOAT Concordance and Preface on sound philosophical grounds (the number and contents of the original stick ’ems being fixed, time references were assumed superfluous), I now found myself with no objective scale for determining the sequence of events referred to on the walls of my box.

  How many times had she visited? The words “morning” and “Thursday” suddenly appeared less fixed and precise than hitherto assumed. The morning of what day? I thought, Hester I am all alone and you with your toy man. Or were they all the same morning? The urine carton was full again, so one could deduce that time had passed since it was overturned. But how much time? How long had I been there? Where did I come from?

  The red-haired woman had cast me out of the Eden of my certainties and flung me into the Hell of relativity. (LOAT #87: Her nether hair hangeth even to her knees.)

  When I poked my head out of my box, she said, “It’s Thursday. You’re late. You were out at the store yesterday, bothering Lance’s customers. I’ve come to take you.”

  I threw the milk carton full of urine over her and walked to the door of the box occupied by the dirty, bearded man. In the murky darkness of his dwelling, I could see him and the elderly black woman with their ears pressed against the common wall.

  I have you now, Mr. Schalck-Golodkowsky, I thought in triumph.

  Clicking my heels with aristocratic disdain, I gave them a curt nod and said, “Guten abend.”

  I went to the mission for my monthly shower. The concierge mentioned quite rudely that I had only been there the day before. I went into the common shower and immediately noticed, on a fellow bather’s shoulder-blade, the words I had so recently (?) recorded: Several women in the chamber broke into sobs. Some men buried their faces in their hands.

  The concierge ushered me into the street once more, begging me never to return. Apparently, I had been following the words with my fingertip, my devil’s finger.

  I felt the same painful embarrassment a boy feels when caught touching his member by his Mom. I want my Hester, I thought, in a bleak and fleeting sort of way. What was a Hester?

  I thought of going to the library to check on this, but went by the alley which I now believed was called Wandlitz, a place of vice and corruption. Old Schalck-Golodkowsky invited me to share a bottle of Thunderbird with him and the elderly black woman. They had the sign of venery over their door, but I could not refuse their kind offer. I wiped the mouth of the bottle with a dirty sock before taking a sip.

  “Yer missus were har win you wuz out,” said Frau Schalck-Golodkowsky. For the first time, I noticed she had only one eye. She was very old, upwards of one hundred and fifty, I should have guessed, looking into that morbid orb. Her words struck me as having a persecutory ring.

  She broke wind alarmingly. Old Schalck-Golodkowsky giggled.

  What did it all mean? I asked myself — the red-haired woman and the sudden unreliability of words; Tom and his evil twin, Lance; their collusion with the dirty, bearded man and the elderly black woman, now unmasked as the nefarious Schalck-Golodkowskys; the fresh note of asperity in the voice of the mission concierge; and the messages on the walls of my box, which had once seemed so open and eloquent, so ready to give up their meaning, offer advice, make predictions about past events, which, until so recently (?), had seemed about to body forth for me their laws, structures and universal explanations in simple lists, diagrams and equations?

  I had wanted to thank the old couple for the wine, but words failed me.

  In fact, I began to suspect I was suffering from some sort of speech impediment — fibrodisplasia ossificans progressiva of the vocal line-out. I had become the words on my walls, but had lost my voice. It was a s
trange condition, let me tell you (though I won’t, or I wouldn’t, except for the large number of fresh stick ’ems which allow me to make notes on the progress of my disease her heart beneath her breasts, Hester and leave them here upon the wall — LOAT #401 et passim — for later scholars of boxology, psychoarchaeologists and linguists of all persuasions; make no mistake, I am on the cutting edge of a nervous breakdown research into the limits of dis(inter)course, the pathology of s(ex)peech acts, the drag net of language, which floats through the sea of life killing everything that comes to it).

  The wine had made me paranoid.

  After an immense effort, I found a library.

  I was able to trace one of the missing NEW YORK TIMES articles, a report on new developments in cosmology. Indications are that the universe would not have turned out the way it has unless there existed huge amounts of matter as yet unnoticed and unaccounted for. This missing stuff, the source of mysterious and powerful gravitational forces which shape our destinies, is called dark matter.

  I knew at once that the red-haired woman and her minions, the synecdochic Lance and the S-Gs, were at the bottom of this. It wouldn’t have surprised me to discover that the S-Gs had been secreting vast amounts of dark matter in that box next door to mine (suspicious coughs, amorous noises, cries of joy).

  I left the library vindicated and went over to the mission for a shower, but was not allowed inside.

  Stick ’em, unnumbered, shoebox collection: The messages from the past rustle on the walls of my little home when the wind blows or when the dirty, bearded man brushes against the wall. I feel a kinship with the mysterious, lost writers, the ancient ones who penned their thoughts and stuck them inside the box — strange cardboard bottle floating on the concrete sea-pavements of the city. (Ed. Note: The concluding sentences are in red ink and written by a different hand.) The ancient anatomists were wiser than they knew when they chose to call the exterior female organ “labia” — lips as in mouth and as in the phonetic designation labial — thus etymologically linking the power of speech with a woman’s nether parts (which, I have heard it said, are capable of generating sound and rudimentary speech acts by the sucking in and sudden expulsion of air). The noble male member, by contrast, is mute, stoic and incapable of falseness. It is the source of univocal meaning. When a woman speaketh, so says the Sumerian prophet Raz-el-dorab, it is prudent to stand up-wind.