Next I looked up Evelyn North. I struck it lucky there too, the kind of lucky that was starting to frighten me. Just like Audrey said, the silent movie star had been one of the casualties of the advent of talking pictures. When she quit the movies, she bought an English country house and had it shipped in numbered crates to an undisclosed location in the American Southwest, a legendary event revisited in the disguise of a weak fantasy in The Ghost Goes West, the 1936 Robert Donat film. Stars need their privacy. As it happened, there was all too much privacy there. The air-dropped groceries began to pile up. Eventually someone dared to investigate. Some weeks had passed since her fatal encounter with a drifter, a rattlesnake, a jealous lover, a hit man sent by the government to expedite the requisitioning of her land, or the noonday sun (all these theories were mooted). By then the star was dispersed. She’d been parceled out among coyotes, vultures, and all the littler scavengers. They never found her head, which had prompted speculation by the ever vigilant C. C. Metzger that the star (who was never filmed in bright light or full length, and who looked subtly different from scene to scene) had actually had two of them. The spinal column would have told, of course, but it was only recovered in part, and had gotten mixed up with the bones of an unknown, possibly a vagrant who had come along later and met a similar fate. The star’s only heir, the part-time part-Navajo housecleaner, was persuaded to sell the house and land to the government for a pittance, and nobody knew anymore where exactly the house had been. Wouldn’t it be funny if… almost as if drawn there, as close to the dollhouse as it could get—or the other way around, the dollhouse converging on the Manor—until one day, boom. Thin Air.
I looked up John Seymour Laine in an encyclopedia of architecture. “We have been unable to find any authenticated views of the house most contemporaries considered his masterpiece (the structure no longer exists). However, the residence in this unlabelled photograph found amidst a jumble of memorabilia donated to the British Museum, fits contemporary descriptions of Laine’s masterwork, and to cognoscenti, bears the unmistakeable stamp of the architect’s mature style.” The “residence” was the dollhouse. The photograph was taken from ground level in what seemed to be a vegetable garden. I suppose that out-of-focus lettuce could be taken for a tree.
By now I was barely surprised. If anatomy had allowed it, I would have thought Blanche was scampering ahead of me everywhere I went, planting tokens for me to find. Maybe the Unity Foundation was up to its tricks again, though how they could know so much about me, I couldn’t imagine. Oh, it was crazy to imagine anyone could or even would get a single copy of a book printed up and antiqued with judicious applications of a weak acid solution, and nip into a used bookshop while I napped to shelve it where I was sure to find it. But was it really more probable that in a reputable history of the American Southwest I should find a photograph credited to someone very estimable with a view camera and a donkey, a photograph that had to have been taken by our Time Camera, for there we were in the background acting as extras, dressed as a pair of squaws in questionable headgear? More and more history seemed like a catalog, not of neutral facts, but of lies, dreams, obsessions. My obsessions.
THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL
Op Ed
To the Editors of the Pennsylvania-German Folk Pottery Review
cc the New York Times, the Washington Post, the London Observer, etc. etc.
Sirs, I cannot hold my peace concerning the shocking inaccuracies in your recent feature, “Tulipware of the Pennsylvania-German Potters.” The author cites Harlan Eliphalet Husband, under whose charismatic leadership a small community of twins, conjoined twins, spouses and sympathizers formed a small “Empathis Concordance” or Lek in Pennsylvania. So “Tulipware” states and thus far we are in agreement. I confess I am amazed that no mention is made of the Togetherist Group (of which I am a member) and our indebtedness to Husband, which we acknowledge openly. (That we call one another “husband” is not, as has been poisonously alleged by people who should know better, because we are male chauvinists, but to honor the memory of this visionary leader.) But let that pass.
What I cannot let pass is the shockingly anachronistic use of the pronoun “he” in reference to Husband. Is this ignorance, or a willful slight to a devoted if unaffiliated toiler in the byways of Knowledge? Need I reiterate that from persistent descriptions of his “mercureal” personality, the voluminous hooded cloak he habitually wore, the stooped posture described by many chroniclers of the times, and from identifiable stylistic deviations between his “empathic” sermons [collected as Truth Comes Praising, Changing Times Press, 1974, though this edition contains startling errors, one of which—the omission of a single word, “not”—seriously misrepresents his position on free love to the lasting detriment (though it may also be said, in some quarters the advancement) of his posthumous reputation—those who missed my essay on the subject may read it in its entirety on my Web site, and I hope with this we may consider the question closed] and his political speeches (even accounting for the necessity of guarding one’s speech on the witness stand, while in the pulpit and revival tent a swashbuckling rhetoric carries the day) tabulating word-frequencies with the aid of a computer has satisfied this scholar (NB, though not, to their eternal discredit, the Yale examining board!) that “he” was in fact two persons (see Stephen L Pinster, grad thesis 1989), two powerful speakers, who divided the tasks of office very happily according to their different attainments?
Among Husband’s papers, recently discovered in the Marshall Family Memorial Manuscript Library (among a collection of misc. Pennsylvaniana—the carelessness of the staff boggles the mind of this researcher, who despite his youth expects a better reception than his helpful criticisms received. I defy thee, Marshall Family Memorial Manuscript Library, and if I borrowed certain papers, it was only to set them free from a so-called Temple of Scholarship that would be in fact its Tomb) by a researcher who shall go unnamed (not out of fear. Do thy worst, MFMML! But out of modesty) was a draft of a proposal for a new language of the Twin Nation. It is possible he had the assistance of his wife, née Persis Affable, who before marriage had achieved some notoriety as a spiritualiste for “Speaking the Language of the Incas While Under Trance” and tying intricate knots in lady’s unmentionables. A new language for the Twin Nation! I modestly propose that I, richly steeped in Husband’s work and history, am the obvious candidate to reconstruct this language. Visionary funders sought.
Empathically and Emphatically,
Stephen L Pinster
P.S. As for Vyv Hornbeck V.D.’s venereal divagations into pop psychobabble, please see my own “Venn Unveiled: Boolean Boob.” This milquetoast philosopher is, I suppose, an appropriate bellwether of a “weak, piping age of peace,” but his flimsy arguments cannot support the burden of b___ Vyv heaps on them, or even the more nuanced considerations of Handler, Gadreaux, et al. Another scholar carried away in the talons of an idée fixe.
Oh, and Josiah Venn never existed.
Views expressed are not necessarily those of The Observer.
THE ERASING GAME
For days after I saw Doom Town scoured away in seconds, I felt restless, strange. I wanted to see it again. “Let’s play Penitence,” I begged Blanche, but Blanche said no, no, we could not destroy the dollhouse—“I didn’t mean for real!”—no, not even for pretend. She would tell Max, tell Papa. I blustered, but felt an unfamiliar doubt. Blanche never said no. “All right,” I said, getting a piece of paper, “we’ll draw the dollhouse, and then we’ll erase it—”
“No.”
No! I stared at the paper. “You don’t get it. This is a different game,” I said. “This is the erasing game,” and made it up right then.
To err is human. To erase, divine.
First rule: A drawing is of something.
Second rule: It didn’t exist before you drew it.
Third rule: All drawings are bad drawings. (Especially mine, but I didn’t say that.)
Fourth r
ule: The thing is more perfect than the drawing of it.
Fifth rule: When you erase the drawing, the thing is set free.
“Where?” she said suspiciously.
“Thin air,” I said. “The wild blue yonder.”
I described Thin Air to Blanche. It was a barren place of cubes and planes, bare stairs and walled squares. Trapezoids of light slid through doorless doors and paneless windows. Days, the landscape was the blue of a white room the sun has just left, nights, the blue of suffocated blood—a blue of depletion, of faint but chronic hunger. This planet had no dust, no leaves to fall or pins to drop. Only ice plant and dry grass and the more architectonic cacti grew there. Seas were innocent of plankton, sargasso, small fry; only the streamlined sharks cut its cool crystal. Unmanned ships steamed straight from port to port, carving white lines on the blueprint. In this land equations silently proliferated and reduced themselves on cocktail napkins and blackboards. There were candles with no wicks, lightbulbs free of filaments, shoes with eyelets but no laces. Roads led nowhere, and the pages of books were innocent of ink. It was a land so pure that only the erased could live there, and it was our job to colonize it.
“I’ll draw a princess,” said Blanche, convinced.
Yes, do.
Thin Air became my comfort. In school, when I went hot with shame, its blue cooled me. I bent my head over my notebook and drew, only to erase, erase, erase. Broke-necked birds took wing. Smiles acquired cheeks and eyes. The gone goat chewed a phantom can, his bent leg made straight, and extra heads grew bodies of their own and stood with empty hands on ground as white as baby powder, Ivory soap, or a blank piece of paper.
Thin Air grew like crystals in solution. I was no longer sure it was my invention. One wall implied another, was answered by a floor, a window, and a door. A sea secured a shore. One day Blanche swore she saw it, hanging over the restricted area. “A mirage,” said Papa, but I knew Blanche was still mine.
R & R
I passed three days like gallstones. I held telephones. Call Louche call Audrey call home. I dialed not, neither with my left nor with my right hand. Rain rapped the glass door. Or rubber-gloved knuckles: “Would Misses be done soon?” Right hand less active but nimbler now, practicing fine motor skills on pens and pills and political buttons pinned on raincoat lapels—“Hey! Are you off your head? Fockin’ mushy!” We are all twofers, indeed. Why, Blanche, could that be a sense of humor?
Then Dr. Decapitate appeared in the news once more. They had found her tracks—yes, her: Dr. Ozka was a woman. Bombshell! Lady Killer Thumbs Her Nose At UK!
She had shaken off her pursuers some time ago, but it was thought that she was still in England, though other rumors placed her in Tijuana, in Hong Kong, in Reykjavik, Amsterdam, Berlin. Someone claimed to have seen her ride into the Chunnel balancing on the backs of a team of feral dogs, screaming “Olé!” and “One bliss, One way, One head!” Dr. Ozka herself, it was rumored, had once had two heads, and had performed her first surgery close to home with a local anaesthetic, a cheese wire, and a crewel hook. Police were asking citizens to report sightings of anyone, male or female, with usually wide shoulders and an off-center neck. (“Oh please,” I could hear Trey say, “any decent tailor could correct that with shoulder pads.”) Some said she had left a prominent stump, perhaps resembling a small peach. (Trey again: “Throw on a pashmina, and who’s gonna know?”) Witnesses said she was stylish, if a bit vulpine, with the long sharp canines her upper lip got caught up on now and then, the narrow jaw, but her coarse hair shone and so did her yellow eyes. (Yellow?) She had a benefactor who had given her clinic a home in the north. The authorities were being unaccountably slow to find it and shut it down. The Togetherists had announced on national television that if the police didn’t act soon, they’d shut it down themselves. I caught their second television interview in a pub. Four sheepish singletons: Link, Hitch, Bond, and Fuse. “We’ve formed a coalition with a conservative Christian group,” said Link, a Yank, and Fuse, a Brit. They spoke with excruciating slowness, because they were following the ceremonial Togetherist practice of sharing words equally, not without occasional disagreements about portion size (Link: “coalish—” Fuse, glaring: “—alition!”). “Not our bag exactly, but they have lots of dough and strategically, that’s good for us. When they try to dictate, like, policy, we have to say, like, hey! This is a mariachi of convenience, we’re not going to Bedlam with your Assyrians!”
Whispered conference.
Fuse, solo: “My mistake. We are not going to bed with your arses. I mean asses.”
While I watched, my right hand was in my pocket, investigating a folded brochure, its edges gone soft as felt. What was it? You remember, Mr. Nickel, the stumpy man, the gimpy man, with the prosthetic leg and the prosthetic daughter. I could not withhold a little shudder at the thought of his giggle and gush. I pulled out the brochure with the intention of throwing it away, but something prompted me to have another look at it first. It was just a brochure for the Hunterian Museum. But look, a second brochure has slid or been slid under the skin of the first, like a wolf in cow’s clothing, no, I mean, like—
After I opened it I closed it again and thought, I should go back to America. I pictured the telephone, I heard the automated flight information line pick up, I felt myself authoritatively pressing the star key, or was it the pound key, pressing and pressing, until I got through to a bored angel who would change my ticket and my destiny. But even as I imagined these things I was poring over the page.
From the minute our heavy doors seal behind you and the peace of the place cools your heart, you know. There is no place on earth quite like the Unity Centre. And when the great circular door of the shrine swings open and our founder steps through to welcome you, you know there is nobody quite like Madame O. No figure, secular or spiritual, inspires such devotion. We omit nothing…
Somebody’s heart paused as if to listen, and then went on, like the man in the movie who thinks he is being tailed. Somebody else’s heart matched it beat for beat. There was a pulse of darkness like a soft blow in the back of my brain, and I thought, I don’t know why, I’m going to die! But then I rallied. I had a destination! It was bracing, after all my fuddling through books. I felt the tug of a plot line, and it felt like coming back to life.
As I was on my way to the train station, I thought I saw Louche standing at a bus stop, holding a Transitional Object on her hip like a baby. She had cut her hair. I ducked into a doorway.
“Excuse me!” a plump woman said in reproof, stepping around me.
“You’re excused,” I said.
A minute later, I stepped out and walked quickly toward Louche. I was breathing hard. I could still turn back, after all. Seeing someone I know, I thought, even if it is Louche, will keep me from—I tapped her shoulder. She turned. She was not Louche. She was not even a she. And the Transitional Object was a disassembled office chair.
So I bought a ticket.
The train strove north. Sheep with black faces, sheep with blue daubs on their backs, yobs in cold stations gaping through breath clouds. The lowering sky menaced the few trees. Isolated sunrays angled in like cop lights searching a vacant lot where something vile had been found—a bleeding brick, an entire fingernail, hair with a bit of scalp attached.
The ticket collector arrived with a chuckle and an air of faint threat. My left hand had begun crawling up the wall in the direction of the emergency pull cord. I brought it back down.
A steel tank. The reflective scars of wet furrows. An empty chip bag under a bush. These things must be imagined gliding by and turning away as they are left behind. It started to rain: countless short dirty striations on the windows.
Then the sun broke through, straight into my eyes, so the car was rubied, and fringed with eyelash-rainbows. My nose was a shining boomerang hanging over the aisle, Blanche a big blond blur, and the train was pulling into the station.
I was the only passenger to disembark, and the station was deserted
. Outside, the sunlight that had seemed so welcoming proved thin and streaky, as if still filtered through dirty glass. I could not see my shadow. I thought of vampires and mirrors and my hearts seemed to strike together in my chest, like weights in a clock disturbed by movers.
A bulbous taxi was at the curb, its driver leaning on the hood, smoking. I got in and we pulled out into traffic. “I don’t have the exact address,” I said after a moment, “but it’s near the crossing of ——— Street and ——— Street.” I had planned this small deception. I was going to point at another building near the clinic and wait until he drove away before walking the rest of the way.
“Say no more,” said the taxi driver in a tone that could have been sardonic. I examined his long bony face in the mirror. His lips were chapped, and he licked them often with a neat, unconsciously greedy pass of the tongue. Except for this quick movement, his face was impassive.
The photograph on the brochure had showed, behind the convalescents, a slice of out-of-focus white wall that I had extrapolated into something between a modern art museum (bone-white concrete fins) and a château. When I tried to picture it more clearly it shrank, for how could something so grand go unnoticed? Still, I wasn’t prepared to see a small, stained, stucco house—barely more than a cottage—on top of that peculiarly steep, almost conical hill. Poking up from among flat, densely cobbled streets and boxed gardens, the hill looked extravagant and unhealthy, like a bubo. It was closely carpeted with grass clipped to the cuticles, an almost white lawn of follicles and roots. A fence ringed the base of the hill.
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