Guide to Animal Behaviour

by Douglas Glover

  The trick is to read all individual texts as part of one vast narrative the meaning of which will become clear as we approach textual totality (TT), that is when we have arranged enough or all of the individual texts (textuals or textettes) — the jigsaw puzzle analogy is helpful here — in their proper order.

  At TT, for example, it will be possible, at last, to decide if life (L) is meant to be read as a comedy or a tragedy, as romance or thriller, or some combination of genres, styles and points of view.

  It will also be possible to arrive at some endlich theoretical conclusions as to the nature of AOAT (the Author Of All Things, God, Amenhotep, Tom Wyatt, Herr S-G or whatever name it will be proved He goes by — all clues pointing to the writer being blessed with possession of a one-eyed trouser snake [Ed. Note: Except for the blue stick ’ems!]).

  Of course, it must be admitted at the outset that TT, L and AOAT are all hypothetical constructs, moot, unproven and highly speculative. The LOAT Concordance and Preface are meant to be a sort of prolegomena, a kind of ground-clearing exercise and first attempt at TT, a preliminary structuring, if you will, of the hard data.

  I returned to Wandlitz in haste, eager to put to paper my most recent impressions. It seemed to me, all things being equal, that TT = (t)n, where t stands for any individual textette and n is Hester’s bra size the number of all existing, possible, putative, potential, virtual, spurious, forged, false and inspired textettes (or textuals [Ed. Note: It seems that the use of the technical terms “textette” and “textual” formed the basis of a heated scholarly debate among the authors represented inside the box. Half seem to follow Arturo Negril W in preferring the feminized “textette,” while the other half swear by rabbit dick who coined the designation “textual.” There is even some internal evidence to the effect that C and Ronald were living in the box at the same time as rabbit dick and that the latter was forced to leave after promulgating his heretical jargon.])

  The following equation then describes, in a form at once succinct, perspicuous and elegant — after all, scientific criteria are ultimately aesthetic — the meaning of existence: (t) n / AOAT = L.

  I was tremendously excited by this discovery and only slightly worried about thoughts of dark matter, words left unsaid, Pancho Villa’s head and the mysterious blue stick ’ems. I resolved not to spare myself in my efforts to complete the LOAT Concordance, but as I turned the corner into the alley (Wandlitz, East German Sodom, Box City) I was nearly run down by a bright-yellow city sanitation truck.

  The elderly black woman (a.k.a. Frau Schalck-Golodkowsky, the Whore of Babylon, paramour of my neighbour, dark twin star of the red-haired woman Hester — in a flash, terrible doubts assailed me; what if L = Labia, Lance, or Lovelorn? Alliteration was only a circumstantial clue, yet no scientific or scholarly mind could ignore it; only a painstaking series of experiments could settle the issue) sat weeping in the doorway of Herr S-G’s box, wiping her tears and blowing her nose in a green plastic garbage bag.

  She said, “’e was takin’ a shit in da dumpter an’ det took oom away!”

  I was struck speechless. (Ed. Note: Progressive fibrodisplasia ossificans was first diagnosed by the French physician Guy Patin in 1692. In the course of the disease, muscle turns to cartilage and then calcifies. As the tongue is a muscle, speechlessness is often the first symptom of onset. The patient generally dies after a few years by shattering, either from being dropped on the floor by clumsy attendants or by being knocked accidentally against door jambs. This is, of course, the origin of the term “brokenhearted.”)

  As you know, I had never trusted these people. I could tell they held some mean-spirited grudge against me, perhaps through nothing more than sheer envy at my superior ambition and intellect (“Snob!” he would hiss every time I stuffed a fresh BOOK REVIEW down the back of my pants). Sometimes, however, I suspected them of more facinorous motivations, suspected, yes, that they were in league with (dupes, paid informants, hit men) unseen forces (dark matter, Hester, the Toys R Us corporation) out to compass my ruin — on the whole things had been going badly for me, oh, for the last thirty or forty years.

  Still, it was a shock. We all used the dumpster as a comfort station, careless of the dangers involved. I thought of old S-G, neighbour, drinking companion, fellow cardboard troglodyte, honourable opponent, cut off and swept away in the act of defecation.

  Sic transit gloria mundi, I said to myself.

  My heart went out to the sad, old woman in her hour of sorrow. I wanted to say something comforting, but words failed me. (Ed. Note: As usual. See supra.)

  I reached out a hand and touched her trembling shoulder.

  This is what life is like, I thought, loved ones disappearing for no reason, when your back was turned, going off in city sanitation trucks or with fast-talking toy entrepreneurs from New Jersey, leaving you bereft, empty and wordless. What could it all mean?

  At this moment, the red-haired woman drove up in a car with New York licence plates (I had thought, from internal evidence, that we were living in East Berlin), a dozen or so new blue stick ’ems in full view on the dash. She was wearing a plastic raincoat with the hood up.

  I started off to the mission for my monthly shower, when she screamed “Stop!”

  She went over to the elderly black woman and asked her what was wrong.

  Frau S-G repeated her obscure but heart-rending story. I really wanted a shower, having, in the red-haired woman’s presence, a strong desire to scrub my little man. But I could find no words to express my desires.

  What I had begun to notice was that I had times when my energy was up, when all things seemed possible, when I would throw myself into my work with a positive and optimistic attitude; while at other times I was confused, fearful, melancholic, assailed by doubts, uninterested in even the simplest words. (What if, I suddenly thought, L = Laminate, Lobworm or Laxative? Once the argument for alliteration was admitted, all sorts of horrific and Lunatic possibilities became thinkable.)

  I felt the latter most strongly, as I say, in the presence of the red-haired woman, who at that moment was busy trying to squeeze Mme S-G into the back seat of her car.

  I craned my neck and tried to read one of the blue stick ’ems — LOAT #92. With a growing sense of alarm, I realized she had fathomed my system, had tumbled to the LOAT Concordance and had begun fabricating false (though blue) entries to the List Of All Things en masse.

  This filled me with dread. The red-haired woman had subdued Mrs. S-G who was blubbering in the back; I found myself in the front passenger seat of a BMW sedan (proof, I thought, of the German connection) with a Blaupunkt tapedeck blaring my favourite Julio Iglesias tape. We sped off at once, leaving the Sink of Sin, Wandlitz, in pursuit of the yellow city sanitation truck.

  Though I still had nothing to say, I admired the red-haired woman for her decisiveness, her quick-witted willingness to intercede on behalf of old Schalck-Golodkowsky and his stricken lover. My own obsession with words, with the LOAT Concordance, with her breasts, subterranean plots, infidelities, ambiguities, showers, stick ’ems, concierges, etc., rendered me useless in a situation that called for action. At the same time, I really despised her for foisting her vision of reality on me, for her constant references to Tom, her persistence (the black eye had all but healed) and the truly insidious scheme to introduce spurious stick ’ems (blue) into the box at Wandlitz.

  I caught a glimpse of my face in the side mirror. On my cheek I could clearly make out the words: Several women in the chamber broke into sobs. Some men buried their faces in their hands. I carefully laid a hand over my cheek so as to preserve the message till I had a chance to transfer it to a stick ’em.

  The sanitation truck came into view just ahead of us. Old Schalck-G was in the process of climbing out the back, though his progress was impeded by the circumstance of his pants being down around his ankles and also somehow caught in the machinery.

&n
bsp; With my free hand, I rifled through the stack of blue stick ’ems on the dash. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the red-haired woman glance at me as she threaded the grid-locked traffic. (It was a strange city; sometimes it seemed to me that cars stood motionless at blocked intersections for years on end, their bodies dissolving into piles of rust, mice making homes in their engines, their drivers growing old at the wheel.)

  Horns were blaring.

  Frau S-G was screaming, “Aaaoorw! Aaaoorw!”

  Blue LOAT #1287: We all love you and pray for you but Lance is about to call the police. He says somebody tried to jimmy the back door of the store.

  Blue LOAT #37: You wrote all those stick ’ems yourself. H.

  My mind was in a state of ultra-confusion.

  The dirty, bearded man fell off the sanitation truck into the path of a Yellow Cab. A Haitian cabbie jumped out and began to shout French epithets.

  I recalled LOAT #37 in the box (yes, in her haste, she had duplicated an already extant stick ’em number): Man hath an eye for eternity; his works are multifarious, austere and transcendent; his Organ. is the Rod of Justice. Woman hath a wayward eye; her purpose on Earth is obscure; she is a Temptress, and her Organ is the Swamp of Iniquity. (Ed. Note: Once again the handwriting changes in mid-text.) She says she loves me, but she just woke up one morning and knew she would die if she didn’t change her life. She says I don’t listen to her, that I make funny whistling sounds with my nose when I sleep, that I gobble my food in barbaric and gluttonous haste (watching me eat makes her want to be sick), that I bore her with my constant complaints against Fate and mediocre people (“Look who’s talking,” she says). She hates Julio Iglesias and the NEW YORK TIMES and thinks my nervous laugh is maniacal. (Ed. Note: Not exactly what one would call a ringing indictment.) Evidently, changing her life means going out with L., who once gave her a T-shirt with the motto “Life’s A Beach” printed on it. How can she take seriously a man who has made a career in Barbie dolls?

  We passed the mission, which was only three doors along from where Mr. S-G lay in the street. I tried to get out, but a Yellow Cab prevented me from opening my door.

  “Why don’t you say something?” asked the red-haired woman (pretty, eyes the colour of blue stick ’ems; only my dedication to the LOAT Concordance and a certain ratine — of or relating to the genus rat — toy drummer stood between us).

  Hester’s name her breasts, her heart, her dear heart were on the tip of my tongue, but the curse of silence was upon me. (Ed. Note: Supra.) Speech — evanescent, hasty, unconsidered, polysemous — evaded me; far more did I trust the written word which had a tendency to stay put (unlike women, viz. Stick ’em #128777: A woman’s words are as substantial as a ferret’s fart. Trust them not.) — grapheme over phoneme, those were my watchwords.

  I wanted to get back to my box, to lose myself in my work, to drug myself with the infinite and loving analysis of the notes, signs and commercial hieroglyphs which festooned the walls of my corrugated home.

  (We had, by this time, crawled through the car windows and retrieved the dirty, bearded man — a.k.a. you-know-who — much soiled by his recent proximity to the interior of the city sanitation truck. We helped him pull up what was left of his pants — all sorts of surprising and interesting reading material falling out of his clothes as we did so: several issues of the GUARDIAN, a December 12, 1989, PRAVDA, sports pages from RUDE PRAVO and the FRANKFURTER ZEITUNG, and five identical copies of the PARTISAN REVIEW dating from the spring of 1984. This sanitation truck incident had revealed new qualities to me; already I liked him better. Several of the stick ’ems, I was certain, had been written in a little known Croatian dialect. Now I felt sure the dirty, bearded man was just the person to help me decipher them.)

  Ed. Note: I had a dream last night. I dreamt that the elderly black woman wasn’t: a) elderly, or b) black. We were making love in the box next door, this Cyclopean woman and I. She was about twenty, with one eye like a green grape and the other normal. Her lustrous red hair seemed to wreath her head in flames. As time passed, I became aware that the blackness of her skin had nothing to do with her pigmentation. She was covered from head to foot with a tattoo. Upon closer inspection, the tattoo resolved itself into incredibly tiny letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters. I took out my magnifying glass — having lost interest entirely in our love-making — and began to read her body. I read and read. It seemed as though it would take a million years to read the whole book. I was only down to her left nipple (an amazing spiral nebula of a tone poem made up of concentrated miniaturized letters totalling upwards of one hundred thousand words) when I woke up. I could remember nothing of what I’d read, except that it was wonderful, better than the best sex. When I woke up, I felt as if everything was going to be all right, as if, finally, I would be happy again. I thought, She is the Mother of the World.

  2

  It did not fulfil his goal of translating the Croatian stick ’ems with Prof. Schalck-Golodkowsky’s help. Old S-G returned to Wandlitz, but he had clearly lost heart after his accidental run-in with the city sanitation truck.

  Constipation was perhaps his main problem.

  His wife, growing less and less articulate, began to beat him mercilessly with old shoeboxes.

  Eventually, he abandoned his surface home altogether, went to live in the subway and was heard from no more. He had tears in his eyes and stopped to give It a fond little wave of farewell as he staggered out of the alley the last time.

  The elderly black woman pined for him (this is one of the mysteries of human existence: how a woman can hate a man, beat him mercilessly with shoeboxes and then dwindle as though she had a tapeworm when he is gone). She and It had a brief, frenzied and melancholy affair, a relationship they both regretted later.

  It probably summed it up best when he wrote in LOAT #2073: We were both lonely, sad creatures. We had both suffered grievously in life, had both felt love and been abandoned. It was natural that, without thinking much, we should lurch toward one another in the hour of our need. But she was not a reader, and we both soon realized there could be no lasting attachment.

  Eventually, the elderly black woman left Wandlitz, too, heading, she said, for El Cajon, a San Diego suburb where she believed she might have family.

  The neighbouring box fell into decay, and It had to take special measures to ensure the structural integrity of the common wall.

  But Wandlitz had lost its Weimar Republic charm for him. The fruitful period, when moral decadence strode hand-in-hand with intense intellectual activity (like Nero fiddling while Paramus burned), had given way to an era of stagnation, cultural anomie and mounting anti-Semitism.

  In this atmosphere of malaise, It quit his job as a human sign and began to take money from the red-haired woman and her toy mogul boyfriend on the condition that he make twice-weekly visits to Dr. Elkho Reinhardt, a prominent Upper West Side analyst. For a month that spring, It sank so low as to impersonate Tom Wyatt, the red-haired woman’s former husband, in order to encourage the doctor and extort additional funds from the guilty (if deranged) couple.

  This time of drift came abruptly to an end one afternoon when It (who never lost his native fastidiousness) adjourned to the mission for his monthly shower. There, for all to see, wrapped around the broad buttocks of a fellow mission client in sixty-point type, was a NEW YORK POST headline: PARAMUS TOY STORE FIRE BOMBED/MANAGER DESCRIBES BARBIE DOLL “HOLOCAUST.”

  He knew at once this was the proverbial writing on the wall, though how he knew he could not tell. Only, the sudden and mysterious linkage of the words “Paramus,” “toy store,” “fire” and “manager” — words which had hitherto appeared exclusively within the confines of his box struck him as evidence of a disturbing synchronicity, a gathering of her breasts forces (Lance, dark matter) bent on his destruction.

  Alarmed, yet lucid, realizing he must somehow save himself, h
e went underground within hours — first sealing his box with duct tape and mailing it to himself under an assumed named (Leffingwell), c/o General Delivery, El Paso, Texas.

  Such practical action on It’s part may surprise the casual reader. But he had always possessed a special affinity for the phrase “parcel post,” and the sight of a Federal Express truck parked in the street beyond the alley never failed to inspire in him the frisson of adventurous anticipation other people feel at airports and train stations.

  (Also, he had eaten a Mexican orange that morning, which he regarded as a sign. From his investigation into the disappearance of Pancho Villa’s head, he knew El Paso was on the way to Mexico.)

  It took two weeks to make his way across the country, travelling at night on Greyhound buses, using money he had saved from his therapy job for food and tickets.

  In El Paso, he collected his box, then slipped across the border in the back of a crowded cattle truck.

  Changing his name yet again (A. Negril), he journeyed south to the village of Ococingo near the Guatemalan border, where he now resides in a small, rented room above a brothel that goes by the name of a large American battery manufacturer. He earns his living as a letter-writer among the credulous and illiterate Chiapan peasants, while continuing his boxological research.

  It is neither happy nor sad.

  The passions of his youth are spent. He has to wear eyeglasses to read and make notes.

  The brothel denizens regard him as a harmless and amusing eccentric and delight in spending a restful hour or two sitting in his box (it just fits inside the rented room, with space to spare for a hotplate and icebox), listening to Julio Iglesias tapes and sipping iced tea while the old man scribbles on his little yellow pads.