Then again . . . what is wonderful about this life—as sordid as it might appear (and it is sordid! How I long for a loving touch! An admiring glance! A word of encouragement!)—is the way the proximate world unfolds for me: it is mine. There is not a single nook or cranny on this campus and its environs (the graveyard, athletic fields, studios, theater, laboratories, classrooms, kitchens, dorms, staff and faculty housing, etc., etc.) I have not managed at sometime or another to scrutinize. (On moonless nights I move about as swiftly, as silently as a bat.)
I have wintered in the safety of the biology lab’s hospitable cabinet, its lowest shelf as deep as a coffin and ceiling twice as high (the lab sinks are big enough to soak in!). I have wintered in the mop room of the kitchen and with discretion supped on cans stacked there with seeming boundlessness. (Who could miss two months’ worth of cans abused in such a clever way that only eight cans [each lasting a week] are consumed: pork and beans, ravioli, clam chowder, minestrone, chicken noodle, tomato bisque, green pea, chicken gumbo.) Meals augmented by calculated visits to the faculty wives’ kitchens, always abounding in cottage cheese, cheddar cheese, sliced ham. And always in the cellar pantries: French pickles, homemade jam, seasonal apples. If one is clever, things vanish in such a way as to inspire no more than a brief moment of perplexity. This said (I admit to this; I am, after all, no enigma to myself!), I live by the seat of my pants.
Last summer, when all the families on Faculty Circle had walked over to the Dean’s house to watch the fireworks, I slipped into a kitchen and feasted on what remained of a Fourth of July supper, the few ribs sweet and sticky; I was nearly overcome by the taste, the slaw swimming in the bottom of the Danish bowl, the rolls in their basket, the butter in its dish. I feasted secure in the knowledge that they, in their affluence, swept along in the bustle and comforts of family life heightened by a national holiday, would never notice a few ribs reduced to bone, the salad bowl licked clean.
I am, as are all men: mindful, artful, perceptive, creative—and an animal. Determined to survive, to sleep in safety and not go hungry. I imagine that my chosen life says something about other men, about man’s nature. And that in spite of all these digressions I am leaning toward greater things. Capable of greatness. What if my life is not only the mirror of my own thwarted destiny, or the mirror of mankind’s thwarted destiny, but the mirror of my species’ capacity to overcome the worst odds? The odds of a collapsed infancy in a world shuddering with sadness. (It is true I could be doing better than counting cans of minestrone and bathing in sinks that reek of formaldehyde. I acknowledge this freely.) But back to the moment. As I return to my current den, drawn as are the fish by starlight, my path is illumed by the stars and the moon. The night sky has a child’s color; it is the color of her hair . . . the twilight is the color of her eyes, the earth is the color of her mood, and I can hear her almost-imperceptible wheezing in the breeze; her perfume is the perfume caught among the thorns of the blackberry bushes that line the path. And I think as I approach the Night Library that she is all things to me: star, astral light, perfume of bramble, moonlight, and secrecy: life itself. Asthma.
When asked, which happens from time to time, I say I am researching Verner Vanderloon and, come to think of it, this is true. After all, his papers are here along with the books, and I am deep into all of it. (Read some Malinowski! Axel admonished me before his death. Read some Lévi-Strauss, some Boas! Read Margaret Mead! But I have a mind to finish what I have begun; such an interesting mind, Loon’s!) If asked (this has never happened) there is much I can say about him, his intimate and groundbreaking work (his obsession Axel said) with human cruelty, the connections he makes (considered by his peers ill-advised) between man’s terror and resentment of mortality, and his paradoxical impulse to take life’s side, to esteem promiscuous wives (one example) who he imagines, in one of his most charming digressions, being revered on another planet for all they do for the public good, arousing feelings of conviviality, good cheer, fraternity—not to mention inspiring the erotic fires of all the wives. (His chapter on the Temple Whores of Tantric India could not be more wistful.) Yet his detractors call him the dog who always barks up the wrong tree.
There is, admittedly, some weird stuff about the name of God and Vanderloon’s inquiries into the origins of self-awareness. My own, he writes, was awakened by the sound of my grandmother’s garter pistol going off, not by accident, and shattering my granddad’s ribs.
Vanderloon’s research into the many forms marriage takes miraculously coincides with the ways in which the gods conspire and interfere with family life. What comes to mind is the familial traditions of the Episcopate Islands of the Eastern Rim, in which the eldest brother deflowers his sisters, who then defer to him in all things, including the vocabulary they are to use for the rest of their lives, the time of day they may speak, and the subjects of their discourse—such as the migrations of lizards, the color of edible moth pupae, the (limited) ways in which the backs of chairs may be decorated. On another island the bride is made to name the groom’s every family member and ancestor but forget her own; on yet another the bride in coitus cuts off her groom’s left ear, which she then gives to her mother-in-law as proof of her undying fealty.
Vanderloon also darkly rejoices in stories of mothers tossing mush at their infants’ faces; it must learn to swallow what it can of the mush and its pride simultaneously. “Our species is doomed to perish cursing its own boundless absurdity,” Vanderloon is said to have asserted when asked to speak at his retirement supper.
Back to Asthma. She is eight, the very age I was when Mother vanished into the box forever and Father, once so kind, began to devolve into debility and viciousness. Little Asthma! As mine was, her mother, Blackie, is a screamer. Asthma. A name that is soft on the tongue, that, like cotton candy, dissolves. My own fairy child. One day I hope to know her as well as I know Vanderloon’s books, the way I know every pop and snap the library makes in the dark after hours and the taste of canned minestrone when you have spooned it into your mouth for twenty consecutive days. (I believe I am the only person on the planet who knows just what this tastes like.) If I could, I would count every hair on Asthma’s head, and not just to know their number, mind you, but to uncover that number’s precise meaning, cabalistically if you will—in terms not of God’s name or the numbers of hairs He had on his head or chin (a childish exercise), but of how that number coincides with the scattered pieces of the world as they couple and uncouple ceaselessly: there is a pattern to all this, only it is invisible, and furthermore it takes a particular frame of mind, and it takes time (!), it takes intention (!), to see it. Asthma. I hear Blackie scream and think: Go in peace, my little bell, my little snail, my little seaside pail; Asthma the salt, the surf of my soul.
Deep in the dark days of winter, I think: How good is the summer! I can get around joyfully and tirelessly, live in comfort in the Utilities House, its windows open to the breeze, and much like a cartoon character, snag a pie from a windowsill (or a kitchen table) and in the dark of night, make off with the plump promise of a refrigerated chicken!
One of the fine things about campus life is that intellectuals (well, maybe this isn’t true of French intellectuals) are not into dogs, and if they are, it’s not a watchdog but a child-friendly dog, a sleepy dog with floppy ears and droopy jowls, a cat-friendly dog. A dog that will protect the parakeet from the cat. Parakeets are popular and as long as I don’t collide into a cage in the dark (this learned the hard way) don’t set off any alarms. For one thing, they appear to be much like chickens; as long as they are in the dark they sleep a deep and dreamless sleep. (The one time I collided into a cage it belonged to a large gray parrot who roused the house with the word: Parcheesi! [It turned out that was its name.] Like an adulterer I had to hide behind the sofa until everything settled down. Parrots, I have noticed, are popular with narcissists.)
When the faculty brats play in the forest that unfolds behind the Circle, their shouts are shuttled by th
e trees. Decomposing trunks bridge the moon. Being the children of professors, their dragons guard golden apples. They play at pharaohs, the collapse of Thebes. They know something of the great plague. Sometimes the games they play are dangerous, as when Asthma spends a long afternoon tied to a tree. Lost among the seething wars of starships deeper in the woods, the boys forget her, abandon her for the river’s rocky beaches and then, at day’s end, the comfort of the Indian Wars at home, televised in black and white.
The curious thing about Asthma is that she is not afraid. Her captivity provides an occasion to ponder a number of beauties, paradoxes, and contradictions. Overhead, several thousand geese row the air. Almost imperceptible, a fox, terrible and wonderful, slips past with a rabbit in its mouth. The two animals stain the air with a scent of appetite and fear that lingers for hours. And Asthma sees a copperhead uncoil and spill from under a fallen tree, mossy and hectic with the comings and goings of beetles the size of thumbs. What, she wonders, what on earth can they be thinking?
Asthma has seen copperheads before—the woods are alive with them; the children walk with sticks, thrashing their way through everything, underbrush, bramble, high grass, sumac, and cattails. They rejoice whenever they see a snake because they thrive on risk (one will become a pilot, one a stockbroker, one a gambler, and one a suicide)—enfevered when they see a hornet nest hanging above them like a severed head or whenever they see something dead. Tied to her tree, Asthma remains composed as the afternoon submits to evening—composed because her mind is gorged with fairy tales and she knows something miraculous will happen. Which at last it does, when the boys, smelling of piss and clay, and looking frightened and hurried, brandish their pocketknives and cut her free as she glowers. She may only be eight, but she twists this way and that in a manner she knows is provocative. And when Roland—her favorite—dares look her in the eyes and stutter an apology, she coyly turns her head away in a gesture both studied and rehearsed. (Asthma has seen how Blackie does this very thing when her playmates’ fathers provoke her with their eyes.)
How strange the world is! How full of marvels! On her way home Asthma passes Professor Brunelleschi, who is on his way to the cemetery where his wife is buried. Asthma’s own room overlooks it, so she is well aware of his clockwork consistency.
Asthma likes the cemetery. For one thing, it is practically an extension of her own house. The backyard gives way to lilac bushes, boulders, and brambles, and the next thing you know, you are standing on the cemetery path in the company of songbirds, squirrels, skippers, and painted ladies. Coffins blanketed in sod.
She is careful not to disturb Professor Brunelleschi while he is speaking to his dead wife. Asthma fondly remembers Noni Brunelleschi, who had been golden as if glazed and who had smelled of her husband’s Turkish tobacco. Noni, so soft and round—except for her piano playing, which was fortissimo! and angular.
“Bellezza ed onestate,” he murmurs. “I am no longer witty. I no longer laugh.”
Asthma likes the dead. They are unobtrusive. One can dream beside them without disruption. Asthma has provided Noni with companions: dead birds, moles, mice, beetles. Sometimes, sitting among the dead in a silence animated only by the breezes and the birds, a neighbor’s voice, a curse, will sail directly overhead like a sharply beaked paper plane and Asthma will hear little Pea Pod receive a slap, followed by a howl, and then Goldie yelling, and the air around Faculty Circle will churn with trouble; trouble will grease the walls of Pea Pod’s house. All the mothers are screamers. They cannot help themselves. But when she is happy, Goldie sits down at the piano, just as Noni used to do, except Goldie doesn’t play Baconfelder or Bartók or Mussorgsky. She plays Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Once when Pea Pod refused to stop howling, Goldie played “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” so loudly she declenched a thunderclap: the entire sky flew into a rage and it rained buckets of black cats (Blackie’s words) for two whole days.
Asthma’s own mother is belleza and when Goldie plays “Luck Be a Lady” and Blackie sings, she sings con espirito. But Asthma distrusts these performances and has come to absolutely loathe the piano. Because of this loathing, Asthma had managed to break Noni’s heart. “You have the fingers,” Noni had insisted. “You have the spirit and the talent. You have the ear.” But Asthma said if she ever played anything it would be the kettledrum. She could see herself tearing into that drum like nobody’s business. “Kettledrum!” Noni had gasped, throwing her hands into the air. “Kettledrum! And why not the triangle? Spoons? Tacky crystal glassware? Why not dig wells and operate an elevator!” (Asthma did not tell her that the best time she ever had at the movies was when Harpo Marx tore that piano apart.)
When Asthma gets home, Blackie is relaxing in the tub. Her hair is turbaned, her rosy flesh buoyant and bestilled. Blackie and her Rod are going to Goldie’s for cocktails and Asthma is expected to play with Pea Pod, but play at what? Asthma and Pea Pod have had a painful history ever since the time Asthma bullied Pea Pod and was bitten on the arm. For this Pea Pod had received a searing punishment. Goldie had thrown her over a shoulder, torn off her panties, and ascended the staircase swatting Pea Pod ragefully before tossing her like a sack of cornmeal into her room—as Asthma and Blackie stood in the front hall transfixed.
The following morning a freak ice storm had split a majestic cherry tree in two—a tree that had been the pride of Faculty Circle, planted smack in its middle. Asthma shudders recalling this, recalling her own terrific guilt, her wish that Pea Pod had done her greater damage—broken her arm or ruptured a vein. She has feared Pea Pod ever since. She imagines her in her room alone, drinking black milk, eating black food, and picking at a scab. “I’m not playing with Pea Pod,” she says decisively. “I’m tired and hungry and I’m going to eat a peanut-butter-marshmallow sandwich.”
“Sure, baby . . .,” Blackie yawns and closes her eyes. Asthma sees her mother’s pecan-colored pubic hair fizzing in the perfumed bath salts.
He is unlike other people. And the girl, too, unlike other people. Sometimes when he is crouching alone in the lilacs waiting for the moment to quicken, for the world to start over, it does. Suspended in the shadows, he sees her windows come to life and when this happens it is as if the first stars have caught fire and he is vividly alive, he embodies expectation, flush with longing for a look at the One Child, the One Girl: Asthma. Whose parents, Blackie and her Rod, have just left the house and in cocktail attire walk to Goldie’s front door and ring. In a moment they vanish as into a black hole. They will drink and drink. Propelled into a very great distance, time will stand still.
Asthma carries her supper to her room and considers her holdings: 110 animals (he has counted them) made of plastic, glass, wood—and one ivory elephant. They are provided with a restaurant that serves blue-plate specials, an amusement park constructed of shoe boxes, a castle with a moat, a movie theater (Italian. Made of printed cardboard and a gift from Noni). A mirror pond. An opera house, the Eiffel Tower, the Tower of Pisa (made of plaster), a locomotive.
The first time he saw Asthma she was in a tree. He had already seen Blackie, a hot machine made of rivets and spinning gears, like a pressure cooker and a robot combined. She was much like his own mother, always heating up and letting off steam. Asthma was better off in the tree than in the house.
Asthma’s father, a history professor, collects stamped postcards from Jamaica going back to the 1850s. His prizes include the King of Wings Penitentiary featuring a pink Cunard Line stamp, and the Jehovah God Bible School with three Jamaica Boy Scout stamps: pink, blue, and green.
Stub has never taken food from Asthma’s house.
It is unclear if he crouches among the lilacs to watch over Asthma or simply to watch her. If he could, he would join in her play. It is possible that he wishes to be her, wading deep into the fullness of the game. Upstairs framed in light, Asthma leans over her realm, moving things around. She is Ptah, brooding over the Egg of the World; she is Trimurti, her arms whe
eling from within the lotus flower; she is Marduk, constructing a reed mat on the face of the waters, scattering dust, inventing gods and men—except that she plays with little glass horses, a plastic camel. He thinks Vanderloon would also appreciate this play of hers.
He burns as he watches her from below, the flickering, the firefly child, now you see her, now you don’t—careening like the smallest particle of matter, as restless as a thing can be, as a puppy, an angel dancing on a pin, as a dust mote swimming in the ocean of the eye: rabbit, fairy, human child: Asthma! Sprite, little daemon, his own talisman burning from his neck, burning within the iris of his eye.
It is hard to see her without entering into a certain . . . delirium. But he has always been vulnerable. He navigates his loneliness as if on a raft with a tattered sail.
His pockets rattle with wire scraps he uses to pick locks. In a storm he needs every muscle of his slender frame to hold his bucking world together. Sometimes the raft breaks beneath him and he comes close to a thing so terrifying that it has no name.
All around him people are living their lives. All those lives! Mammals barely evolved in houses with clean windows and solid oak doors. Their refrigerators stocked with boxed butter and beef, mustard and beer. Often the smell of baking wafts from a kitchen window. The lawns speak of tranquility and community. He knows the best kitchens. On a balmy evening he naps on a well-tended lawn listening to music from a phonograph, munching a fresh cookie, the music reedy and strange, or lovely, as it is tonight, something from a distant place and time beyond his knowledge or comprehension. The divine voices of the choir—angels or archons—tumbling through the air. The music nourishes him. It sweetens him with something like joy.
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