Winkie

by Clifford Chase

  He thought a moment, then began: “Baby Winkie appears like a jewel in the longest, most beautiful sentence you’ve ever read. Baby Winkie surrounded and supported by density and beauty of language.”

  Just then he heard a rustle and, with an intake of breath, almost believed he’d conjured his love. He peered out of the blind—no, just a stupid deer. He continued writing.

  “Baby Winkie crying in such a way and at such a moment as to make you cry too. You long to comfort her. ‘Poor Baby Winkie!’ you say. The moment is couched in such circumstances—danger, entrapment—as to make Baby Winkie’s perfect cry excruciatingly piercing.” The professor sweated. He paused, biting his pencil. But pausing was unbearable. He couldn’t scribble fast enough.

  “Baby Winkie crawls somewhere. Baby Winkie separated from the bigger one called Winkie. Baby Winkie imperiled in some way. Baby Winkie makes a new friend. (Me?) She appears momentarily safe. But then something happens, Baby Winkie turns a corner and finds the danger, after all—waiting, roaring! (Me?) Does Baby Winkie survive? If so, how? a) by learning from the ordeal and outsmarting her opponent? or b) by accident, unwittingly, so that the event only affirms her innocence and purity?

  “It HAS to be b).” The professor had to restrain himself from leaping up out of the blind in excitement. His hand shook as he wrote. “She’s the wild animal of the unconscious. She’s like a little furry Buddha. She’s in all your favorite books—books you haven’t even thought about in years—Walden, Orlando, Portrait of the Artist… She has the timeless, irreducible poignancy of a 1930s cartoon character alone in the landscape: duck on a pond; rabbit in a hole; mouse on a riverboat. What will she encounter when she is no longer alone in the frame? That is, in what unexpected and hilarious way will she defeat and humiliate her hapless enemy?

  “The wolf smashed flat?

  “The cat chopped to bits?

  “The hunter blown up by his own gun?—”

  Before the hermit’s eyes, the page was beginning to quiver and break into bits. His breath stumbled. He fainted.

  This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense and imbibes delight through every pore. Baby Winkie goes and comes with a strange liberty in nature …

  The professor’s head twitched from side to side. His heart pounded, ceased, pounded again.

  The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before Baby Winkie like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together like a joint …

  The sound of trumpets died away and Baby Winkie stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing …

  I give the name Baby Winkie to a boldness lying idle and enamoured of danger. It can be seen in a look, a walk, a smile, and it is in you that it creates an eddying …

  A wild angel, Baby Winkie, had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

  The professor awoke from his swoon to a musical rustling just outside the blind. Was he in a book, a vision, or the world? He peered through the sticks and leaves. There she was—Baby Winkie—not more than a few feet away, innocently drinking from the stream. She looked different than he had remembered her—larger ears, darker fur—but no, it could only be she. The other one, the male, was nowhere in sight.

  The professor’s heart pounded. He burst through the blind and snatched up his love.

  “Heenh! Heenh! Heenh!” she cried out.

  And, echoing down the creek bed: an answering, deeper cry.

  3.

  Winkie saw the bearded crazy disappearing down the ravine, Baby Winkie yelping over his shoulder. Winkie crashed through the underbrush after them. Each of his child’s cries was like a crack in reality. Why had he let her out of his sight? He scampered madly. The brambles, the muddy ground, the abductor’s baggy ass flashing between the foliage.

  The baggy ass carried his life away. He mustn’t lose sight of that shifting patch of khaki. Winkie brayed and trumpeted. Ground, more ground, snapping limbs. Was he catching up? He brayed again. Were his baby’s screams closer? Leaves flickering past, branch tips. There, just ahead, the patch of khaki seemed to be stuck. “Damn, fuck!” cried the kidnapper, trying to catch his breath.

  The little bear tunneled through the brambles and sprang. He bit at the blob of ass. The blob held his cub, and her cries were like pinpricks in his eyes. Winkie growled and chomped. He saw spots—something was hitting him. Could a blob grow a fist? But Winkie would burst the wiggling khaki thing with his bites and it would release his child. Winkie saw more spots. He bit down into an especially soft place. He bit hard. The monster roared and staggered.

  The moment slowed. Winkie tasted something strange and wet trickling in his mouth. It was the monster’s inner substance leaking out. The wicked creature would deflate like a two-legged water balloon now, it would grow pliant and bland, and Baby Winkie would float gently down on the billows.

  “Heenh! Heenh!” the cub was still crying. Don’t worry, Winkie wanted to tell her, but he had to bite. The blows continued on his head. It was only what he deserved for leaving his only one alone, for letting this happen. The spots grew colorful. Then he felt his skull squeezed tight, a firm tugging. He chomped down still more, but the monster’s soft flesh gave way.

  “Shit!” the man gasped. “Little fucker!”

  Winkie was held aloft a moment. He spit fluid. He glimpsed his baby’s yawling head next to the monster’s, held tight. Winkie snarled and brayed, twisting, wriggling.

  The madman shouted: “Fuck—off!”

  Then Winkie was flying through the air, the trees spiraling past. Behind him, his one child’s piercing cries Dopplered down the scale. Winkie hit the ground with a squeak. He lifted his head once, tried to moan, but his eyes double-clicked shut.

  The professor tied Baby Winkie with twine to his desk and offered her a wide variety of foods, of which she would eat only cheese balls and chocolate-covered ants. He had had to walk a dozen miles to procure these for her, and he placed them before her each morning and afternoon in two gold-leaf bowls. But Baby Winkie’s whimpering didn’t cease.

  For many days she sat on top of the desk staring out the dirty window at the woods, murmuring, “Papa, Mama, Papa,” as she used to call Winkie when she was helpless and tiny, when he nursed her night and day with his own breast. She kept waiting for Winkie’s face—the one face like her own—to appear in the underbrush.

  Instead, the professor’s plaintive eyes and neat gray beard loomed over her night and day. “Shh. Shh,” he’d whisper. Occasionally, though she knew it was useless, she bit him.

  “Now, now,” he’d mutter, rapping her smartly on the nose. “No!”

  Baby Winkie despised these attempts to “train” her, especially since the stinging blow was a relief compared to her bereavement. Three times a day she squatted over the side of his desk and let the shit drop to the floor, and three times a day he slapped her for it, shoving her toward the litter box he’d purchased and shouting, “In the box! Go in the box!” as if she hadn’t yet understood. After maybe the hundredth time she turned to the professor and said, quite distinctly:

  “The cycle of prohibition: Thou shalt not go near, thou shalt not touch, thou shalt not consume, thou shalt not experience pleasure, thou shalt not speak, thou shalt not show thyself; ultimately thou shalt not exist, except in darkness and secrecy.”

  Unknown to her captor, when the cub wasn’t grieving for her lost parent, she was reading. She had taught herself in a day; desperation had made learning easy. She read by moonlight while the professor slept. Within a few weeks she had skimmed through all his notebooks, hoping to discover some news of Winkie, and then gone on to assimilate all the knowledge contained in the hermit’s jam-packed bookshelves.

  It wasn’t that she hoped to reason with him—she understood this was impossible�
�but that her despair, which had grown day after day, simply required utterance. Her own words being too good for him, she chose others’; playful even in misery, the child simply said the first thing that came to mind. “Foucault,” she added now, in weary parody of proper citation.

  This last touch startled her captor, but only for a moment, and then her unexpected venture into speech was swallowed by his many theories about her. These continued to fever his mind, perhaps even more so now that he possessed her. He took out a fresh notebook and sat down to observe his pet, as he did each morning. He wrote: “Cloth and stuffing—vegetable. Metal and glass—mineral. Biting and defecation—animal. Speaking and singing—human. Existence—impossible!”

  Seeing what he’d written, and his evident satisfaction with it, Baby Winkie rolled her eyes. “Do you think that anything that is not beautiful is necessarily ugly? And that anything that is not wisdom is ignorance? Don’t you know that there is a state of mind halfway between wisdom and ignorance? Socrates, as reported by Plato. Why is there more craving than there is in a mountain. Why is there. Stein.”

  The professor experienced slight discomfort at this last utterance, but shook it off. He noticed only that her eyes looked sad and ancient. “Old, yet young,” he noted. “Compelling, yet scary. Cute, yet grotesque …”

  “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness,” said his obsession coldly. “What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time? Shakespeare, The Tempest.”

  Now the hermit frowned. “Disturbing,” he wrote. “Sometimes B. W. seems to mimic with an intention—as if she meant what she said, choosing enigma. It’s as if she’s joking with me, at my expense.”

  Baby Winkie went to her dish and disdainfully ate an ant. “He made a collection of butterflies and asked his mother for arsenic in order to kill them,” she said. “On one occasion a moth flew around the room for a long time with a pin through its body.” She sat down glumly. “Freud. The dream is made witty because the straight and nearest way to express its thoughts is barred to it. Ibid. Song of the bleeding throat! Whitman.”

  The professor had expected the little creature to be a pure voice of innocence in his life, yet she spoke in his own language, that of books, which echoed back to him across a vast sadness. He continued uneasily: “Her choice of food, for instance: a genuine preference, contempt—or both?”

  For a moment Baby Winkie tried to empathize with the hermit’s complete inability to empathize. Peering into his soul, she saw a wall, behind which things seethed. It made her head hurt. “For free association really is a labor,” she whispered, “so much so that some have gone so far as to say that it requires an apprenticeship. Lacan.”

  Deciding he’d simply discovered his captive’s potential, the hermit set out to tutor her in the arts and sciences, explaining to her that it would be like the end of Wuthering Heights, when the refined girl is seen teaching the uneducated boy to read—the professor had forgotten the two characters’ names, which was unimportant—and the student-teacher relationship makes the boy and girl both more suitable for each other, by equalizing their level of education, and brings them closer together, for they are described as leaning their heads intimately over the same book—

  Baby Winkie thought bitterly that she would have laughed if she weren’t also unspeakably bereft. She thought of all the times she had once called her parent’s name and he had answered—but no more. What had the world come to? Staring up into the hermit’s gray nose hairs, she said, “Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite risible, with glitter in his hair—”

  The professor gave her a rap on the nose and began the day’s lesson.

  It was around this time, the thirteenth week of her captivity, that Baby Winkie decided to disappear. The idea came to her in the middle of the night, with sudden and almost peaceful certainty, along with the understanding that disappearing was a skill she’d always possessed. It had always been there, at her disposal.

  Her normal expression must have altered profoundly, for the next morning the madman suddenly interrupted his lesson and blurted out: “You’ve given up on that other, bigger bear. You’ve let go, haven’t you?” He knew he was speaking too eagerly, but he couldn’t help himself. “You have! I can see it in your eyes.”

  He meant she would be willing to be his pet now, but that wasn’t it at all. Beginning to whimper as she hadn’t in weeks, Baby Winkie said, more to herself than to him, “I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world. Wilde.” She sighed, turning away to the dingy window and to the scene of the empty, Winkieless forest she had beheld for so long now like a yellowed, heavily varnished painting. She hid her face. “And yet what purple hours one can snatch from that gray slow moving thing we call Time.”

  This was her last regret. She calculated that her disappearance would take a few days at most. This would allow her to pass through the necessary layers of acceptance, though not to turn back. She began to glow slightly. The sweet ants and sour cheese began to collect in her two bowls. She peered out the window as longingly as before, hoping to see her parent not in the forest but in the next world, whatever that world was, past or present, and in whatever forms the two of them might take.

  Sometimes she was already there, either remembering or anticipating, she wasn’t sure. The not-here and not-now presented itself to her in thousands of intricate episodes and eras, story after story, and it wasn’t simply that each was possible, but that each already existed in all its fullness.

  It was a while before the hermit noticed her glowing, because it didn’t at first outshine the slight halo of light that had always surrounded his pet from the first moment he saw her. He continued tutoring her, and he assumed that her less frequent replies were a sign of acquiescence to the new way of life he had provided. He even looked forward to the day when he could untether her.

  But one evening as he set out a bowl of fresh ants, having emptied out the previous, mostly uneaten bowl, he was startled by a golden-sunset effulgence upon the many tiny dull brown chocolate shapes. He looked to the illumination’s source and saw only his little bear-love. Even though her glass eyes remained sad and downcast, revealing nothing of her plan, he understood—with the terrible, almost prophetic insight of hopeless longing—that she was leaving, she was as good as gone.

  In all the world she was the only one as rare and strange as he was. He had hoped they could come together as fellow anomalies but this was not to be. She couldn’t survive in captivity. She was wilting like a wildflower and her wilting was a glowing. Far from making the cuddly cloth creature his own, he had simply presided over a wilting flower.

  Or was he the one wilting away? His heart thumped up and down a crooked scale. Indeed, it had been ready to quit for sometime; this was just one more thing he had scarcely noticed. Lost, enraptured—the professor dropped to his knees. “I beg you—” he entreated.

  The miracle child said: “It is in the analysis of such a case that one sees clearly that the realization of perfect love is a fruit not of nature but of grace.”

  The hermit fell over dead.

  Either she, or her very glowing, had begun to emit a hum that carried through the forest, seeming to radiate from every twig. Soon this fundamental music reached the sleeping Winkie.

  His eyes clicked open with a start. He had been lying there for months and vines had begun to grow around him. He had nearly returned to toy.

  But even in that immovable blackness, as he lay there in the thick woods unable to either know or act, Winkie could hear his precious child’s cries. Now it was as if they had reached a crescendo that woke him, but, upon his waking, all that was left was a persistent ringing, like the organ’s echo in a cathedral.

  With difficulty he rose and began staggering through the leaves, the broken branches, the ferns, the old tires, the mud, the plastic six-pack holders, the wildflowers, the heaps of dirt, the ashes of spent campfires, the brambles—oblivious to his cuts and bruises, drawn to the sound of his dying
child. The whistling-ringing-hum grew louder and he burst into a clearing.

  There, in the cabin’s dirty window, he saw Baby Winkie, bright furry gold as a flame and burning still brighter—an exquisite explosion that was almost all light.

  His only child turned, and seeing that her parent had at last come for her, she realized that, all along, her disappearance was no solitary act but a wild performance for the source of her to behold. It was like doing the most ridiculous dance she could think of. Within her glowing, she half shrugged, as if to say, wryly, “Look. Another miracle.”

  Did Winkie understand her? Gazing at his child aflame, he knew only that it was a question of what could be taken away and what could not. As it turned out, he had given birth to a saint. Her small martyrdom couldn’t redeem anything or anyone, though it was emblematic, as all suffering was, of all suffering, and therefore of all absurdity. Tears in his eyes, Winkie cocked his head quizzically. As he watched, like a firefly she suddenly went out, glowed once more, and was gone.

  * * *

  Before her disappearance, Baby Winkie had begun writing her memoirs, by moonlight, on a legal pad she had discovered in the drawer of the desk to which she had been tied. Winkie came upon it sometime later, hidden behind the desk. Though her short life had been so cruelly impeded, the child apparently had found much to remember. The pad was filled both back and front with hundreds of notes and fragments—people, places, incidents. And though Winkie knew nothing of these people or places or incidents, somehow he also understood perfectly. The pages concluded:

  Upon our arrival that day we received news of Oscar Wilde’s death. My one companion, Gabrielle, was even more devastated than me. We wandered the port city in a broken daze. And yet as we made our way up from the sea, along the narrow, winding streets, we noted all the changes taking place there—the new bars and cafés never before seen in that neighborhood, the fanciful holiday bistros including a miniature white castle with four faux turrets—all of which seemed to mark a new spirit that was to come. The sun was beaming brightly. We went into one of these new eating establishments and sat down overlooking a small patio.