by WD Clarke
—This is the key, this is the fulcrum here. Think Archimedes. The linchpin. The Kid doesn’t know, doesn’t care to know, doesn’t care if we care to know, anything about his motivation. He’s no method actor, he’s not acting, he’s action. He’s not a subject, he’s a verb.
—Wow.
—Shut up. You know that old saw, the maxim ‘Know Thyself’? Well, the Kid knows that that kind of shit just leads to an exhausting series of vigour-sapping, confidence-draining doubts and questions, forming all manner of negative feedback loops, the superposition principle of which would only turn him into a caricature of who he really is: a man, nothing less, nothing more. The Kid eschews that egghead kind of thing, all that ‘rational enquiry’ business. Cos the Kid knows what he wants, and action dictates that he enquire no further. The Kid is self-defining. Piss in a river? Hell yeah—it’s not ‘why?’ but ‘why not?’ The Kid as pioneer, as explorer, as Everest-scaler, as flag-planter.
—Uh.
—What do you think?
—Huh.
—Really? ‘Huh’? That’s it? Really?
—Sounds good Vic.
—Shut up.
—No, as theories go, it sounds good. Seriously.
—Haha.
—Seriously. One question though.
—Uh-huh?
—You buy it yourself, this theory of yours?
—Not really. Does sound good though.
—He’s just a weirdo.
—A bit of a wacko, like I said.
—Like you said. Anyway, how’re the sons and heirs apparent?
—Mine? Great.
—And Brenda?
—What did you use to call her? Back in high school?
—Back when you used to throw darts at me from the garage roof?
—Way back when.
—Back when we were just kids, Vic.
—Back when kid spelled backwards was—anyway: tell me. What did you use to call her?
—Aww. C’mon. You know.
—No, I don’t know. Remind me. Please.
—G’won.
—No. What did you use to call her?
—I forget. Numerous variations on a theme.
—Forget? Bullshit! That’s impossible. Say it.
—Fuck it. Ok. ‘Splenda’.
—No, the whole nine yards thing. The complete name. Say it like you used to say it. So I can remind you of what a great guy you are.
—It’s ancient history. We were kids.
—Say it.
—Make me.
—Say it or else.
—Else what, Vicky?
—Else I’ll pummel you, dickhead.
—‘Blenda.’ ‘Blenda Blenda Blenda.’ ‘Blenda Splenda Rearenda.’ There, satisfied?
—What a guy.
—Hey.
—Jesus, what an absolute g—.
—Hey, we were kids, how was I s’posed to know you were gonna up and marry her?
—What a.
—How was I s’posed to know? Huh? How wuzz I?
—What a great, great, fucking great guy. Peckerhead.
—Howwuzz … hey, what the fuck, fuck it Victor Victoria: what can I say?
Monk's Foods. They are seated at the bar, half-facing one another, his knee perilously close to hers, almost touching. Zoot Simms is playing on the stereo.
Owner/Chef/Jazzman and lover of all things Native American Hatamura-san is scowling at them this time too. What made her take the Kid back here? What was she thinking about? Hold on, wait a minute, it’s just an innocent lunch date, right? Right. So… ? So what?
Hatamura-san wordlessly brings the food Amē had ordered for them both: two bowls of Genmai Oyako Donburi (a kind of pilaf composed of brown rice, chicken, eggs, onions and peas in a fairly sweet shoyu or soya-based sauce). Her childhood favourite, but she decides not to tell him this.
—Wow, that’s, um, some story, Roger.
—Don’t get all middle-class on me now!
—Middle-class what? All I said was….
—‘That was some story.’ But we both know what you meant. But I know you don’t think the less of me for it. Or you do think the less of me, but that’s actually why you like me, isn’t it?
—You’re fairly entertaining, it’s true.
—You like to be a little shocked. Just a little. Kind of a catharsis, eh?
—You know, the Japanese have something a lot like our ‘eh’. They say ‘nē?’ or ‘desu-nē?’
—Don’t change the subject.
—It’s a way of filling up the spaces, between moments, between people.
—Yup, is all he says.
She says nothing more, begins to force herself to eat. She has no appetite, feels kind of nauseous. He is right, of course, he always is, always has been, ever since they met as undergrads at McGill, she from Victoria, he from Shawinigan, but both living on St. Viatur and both double-majoring in Poli-Sci and English: she does in fact like him because she doesn’t really like him. There’s a kind of dangerous power about him, a magnetism that’s certainly not based on his looks, such as they are. And just look at him: he appears even dumpier, even more dishevelled and acne-scarred when viewed in juxtaposition to the exceedingly neat and trim and beautiful Japanese. She has never seen a really ugly Japanese person, but you could almost call Roger ugly—almost, and the June humidity is causing him to sweat profligately, even in this air-conditioned restaurant. But still, there is something about him; there is indeed a ‘there’ there.
—I gots another story for ya, toots, he says.
—Well?
Hatamura-san comes back out from the kitchen, one more bowl in hand. But they hadn’t ordered anything else. Of course, the slippery mountain potato. Of course. Suspicious, superstitious, Amē knows what their host—and what Life, really—is trying to say to her.
—Here we are! Our compliments, Hatamura-san says, in accent-free English, making a slight honorific bow.
She has always known it, of course, but it only crystallizes at this moment, with the arrival of this complimentary dish: foreigners have a really hard time with the mountain potato.
—Foreigners have a really hard time with the mountain potato, she says. It’s too slippery to pick up with chopsticks.
—Yeah, but not this wrangler, Amēkins.
—It’s a test, a friendly test, look, Hatamura is smiling at you, Roger, look.
It’s a test that both Amē and Tim had passed with flying colours, of course, last year. He’d been teaching at Sophia University for five years, and she’d lived here as a ‘Base Brat’ as a pre-teen, for four years while her father was on exchange at the U.S. Navy base. Amē and Tim had this in common: their attachment to each other was buoyed by a mutually high level of Gaijin [foreigner] proficiency. The alienation that they felt here, their separateness from a culture that they loved—but one that could never, would never fully accept them—was much different than that of the run-of-the-mill expat, replete with far more subtleties and nuances than someone like Roger, for example, could ever appreciate. It had been the mainspring of their togetherness, this shared estrangement, this fluent otherness.
Without it, where would they be?
Now, unbidden, a traitorous little thought appears out of the ether and makes its way through her head: if sweaty, crude Roger can eat the mountain potato properly, she’ll go along with whatever it is he’s here to propose—whatever it is, and regardless of her bloody scruples (which she wished, sometimes, would all just hit the road, Jack, and pack their things and go). If he can’t, she won’t. It’s completely ridiculous, of course, but it’s also a safe bet, 99.99% guaranteed to leave things as they now stand, but there you have it. She’s thought it. She can’t take it back, or won’t. Why not? Isn’t this just a tad perverse?
She shakes her head a little as if to wonder at herself as she watches Roger look at the bowl. She knows him too well, has analysed her way around all of the contours and fault lines of their ‘friendship’, to
have any doubts as to why he’s really visiting her.
He prods one of the potatoes in the bowl, moves it around.
—If you can eat the slippery potato with your chopsticks, they like the hell out of you, I know, he says. They pulled it on us down in Kyoto, last time I was—er, we—were there. Amusing. In a stupid kind of way. Like the tv game shows they have, based on the humiliation of the contestant.
—And the degradation of the viewer, as a byproduct.
—Hey, no one has to watch. Tvs do have an off button, you know. Anyhow, people seem to like them, to watch them anyway, these shows. They work.
—They sell.
—Same thing. Hey, don’t be so hoity-toity, missy. Don’t affect that anti-capitalist little rich girl pose. Not this late in the day. Or at least not with me, not with your very own Father Confessor.
—Forgive me.
—Come off it, admit it, there’s a part of you that likes it too, what I do, what everyone who wants to get along in the world has to do. It’s just that there’s another you that doesn’t like that you like it. Or approve, rather. But hey, I like’em both, both the you that desires and aspires, and the you that’s ashamed of all those oh, not-so-nice things that keep this ol’ world spinning round.
—The world.
—The real world, baby.
—Eat your potato, big daddy.
—I shall, no, let me re-phrase that: I will. But first I’m desirous of keeping our nattily beatnik host in a little suspense, if it’s ok with you. And I’m gonna let you in on another story, cos I know you likes em, Sam-I-Am.
—Your last one was rather special, it’s true.
—This one’s not about me. Remember that guy I told you about, the one I was sitting next to on the plane over?
—The one who seemed so shocked about your story?
—Correct. Vic was his name. Vic the Oxford button down Sperry Topsider guy.
—Hey you wear those, too!
—But they don’t define me, I just wear’em to grease the wheels. He wears’em to escape the trailer trash tag that’s dogged him since he was a kid.
—How do you know that?
—Bits and pieces. Interpolations, extrapolations, a few hunches and a couple of blind guesses.
—The usual.
—The usual. It’s the late ’70s. He is an outsider, not a lot of friends. The friends he does have don’t have a lot of friends. Comes into his own at college, later, but we’re not concerned with that period in his life.
—No, of course not.
—What fascinates us is his youth, late elementary school—what do they call it there?—middle school, yes, yes, middle school to early high school.
—The interregnum.
—The brief, revolutionary pause. Hormonally, intellectually, physically. The world turned upside down. Roundheads and blackheads.
—And blockheads.
—This is my story, sweetie. Anyway, guys is guys.
—Forgive me.
—Perhaps, but. Nevertheless, there will be penance. Later. Well then, his name is Victor. He’s what? Thirteen or fourteen. He lives in a small town, a bedroom community for Boston, on the south shore, where the blood runs as blue and cold as the ocean currents.
—Miles Standish proud, she says, suddenly wistful.
—Correct. Roger looks at her now-otherworldly eyes, decides not to enquire, but she then offers, enigmatically:
—I knew a boy once… , she begins, trailing off into contemplation of a possible, parallel universe.
Two boys. Once upon a time, there were two boys, brothers. One, catalytic Mercury, the other, Polaris, true north, the guide star….
He allows her this moment of transport, watches the rise and fall of her breath. As if unaware of herself, she sighs. A shallow in-breath followed by a deep, collapsing exhalation. He could watch her breathe all day, he thinks, but then the cross-indexing Rolodex of his mind autonomically looks for, locates, and retrieves the corresponding, intergraded recipe cards. Breath. Respiration, inspiration. Inspirare, Inspiratio. Prajna: ‘Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, doing deep prajna paramita, clearly saw the emptiness of all the five conditions….’ The Heart Sutra. He knows of it, has read about it, has done a little research for that interminable Minister of Whatever, to bone the boneheaded huckster up on the local, ah, culture. Avalokitesvara is a bodhisattva, a would-be, could-be Buddha, who chooses to remain in creation until all sentient beings are guided to enlightenment, past or through the cycle of desire and suffering. Saved. Interesting, in a way. But. But expiration, your soul leaving as you exhale your last breath. Your expiry date, but.
—But Victor, he says. His family does not belong to the yacht club.
—Hence his present-day getup. Compensating.
—Affirmative. He is one of the great unwashed.
—The hoi polloi.
—Very quick, grasshopper, you see deeply into the empty mirror. But tell me this: what, what do you think, do you imagine, his nickname—among the elect, among his betters, the Haves, what his nick-name might, no, must be?
—That’s a toughie. Uh, um.
—Open wide, your mind: into the void you ride, the black diamond trail, ‘like an escaped ski’, until to rest you will come, at the mountain’s base, where….
—What in the… ?
—Where you are not what you are, where motionless you are—but electric. You allow the truth, which is but temporary, which is always arriving, in process, to come and then go. Like the rising and falling of your….
He thinks she thinks he is staring at her breasts, but he isn’t, at least not this time.
—Jesus, Roger!
—You’re close. Riff on that rhyme!
—Jesus?
—Roger.
—Roger? Lodger, Codger, Dodger.
—Roger Dodger!
—He’s called the dodger? Victor?
—Over-and-out. Just like his….
—What does he dodge?
—Not him, the pater familias, the.
—Dad, what does he?
—And/or did he.
—Dodge? Viet Nam?
—Famously. But more, more that is privy solely to the close relations. Yet, we can imagine, everything, in a word, pretty much.
—Dead-beat dad.
—In the spirit, if not quite the letter of the law, yes, although the son.
—Let’s see, looks up to him?
—Worships this false idol, yes. The truth is, well, what it is: Victor, just turned fourteen, still thinks pa-pahhh is a scient-ist, white robed, of the priestly class, which the Jews denote ‘Cohen’. Thinks, and therefore is: a horticulturist. From the Latin hortus, garden, and cultura, to….
—And dad really does what?
— Grow is such an inadequate word here. More of a paying attention to, a, nurturing.
—I know, but….
—But there’s more to it, my little impatiens, my little jewelweed, my ‘touch-me-not’….
—Get on with it!
—Because cultura, and cultus are intimately bound up, intertwined, deriving themselves as they do from coelere….
—Yesyesyes.
—No, little one, you need to understand, this needs to be ruthlessly underscored, brutally italicized, emphasized with, with….
—Manly emphasis.
—Naturellement, a, er, seminal interpretation, ladybug, well parried.
—Murky Buckets.
—Of mercy, but no. No, my thanks, yes, but listen: the point being, the connection here, the copula, the equals sign: that there is bound up as one and (of course) the same, the concept-ions of growing, tilling and devoutly worshipping (in-habiting) the land, as intimate with the earth as with the very clothes on our backs….
—And your own habit, of rivers and streams….
—Moi? Well, bien sûr, I, ‘riverrun, past Eve’s and Adam’s’.
—‘All the rivers run into the sea, and yet it is not full.’
&nbs
p; —‘The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.’
There is a pause in the conversation here, and Roger searches out Amē’s gaze, to see if she has, to see if she, to see if….
But she looks out the window, at the delivery trucks and motor scooters crawling by on the narrow pavement, at the bustling crowd marching past on the even narrower sidewalk. She glances at her watch.
—Roger, sorry to interrupt, but I’ll … have to be getting back to work soon-ish.
—Yes, of course, I shall condense. Where was I? Yes, in this period of the interregnum, somewheres in the late 70s or thereabouts, and all that late 70s crap is going on….
—We survived it, no need to go into it here.
—No, well said, keep to the point, etc., etc., and we shall. Besides, what we have with this tale is something rather more archetypal, if that is not too pretentious a term to employ in mixed company.
—It is, but go on.
She is smiling now, despite herself, despite her schedule, despite her wariness and incredulity. His banter has translated her, only partly against her will, back to McGill and those heady classes in Joyce, when she and he would … when Gerald … and then Isaac….
—Now, Victor has all the usual teenage male obsessions, but one of them stands out ever so slightly … and sets him, to this extent only, mind you, momentarily apart from the homogeneous mass of maledom. Apart and yet or therefore, the epitome of.
—Epitomic.
—Yahh.
Roger goes on, and as he does so Amē watches him play with the mountain potato in his bowl, much as a cat will continue to play with a trapped mouse long after it has died, delighting in flinging it about, willfully causing sudden, explosive ‘escapes’ and subsequent, quite skillful ‘recaptures’. A mind-game, in which the imagination gains control of inert matter, gratifies itself by investing the dead object with a life-force, with a kinetic energy, energy that it can never really possess.
She is reminded of her already-forgotten vow of only minutes before, and tells herself not to be an asshole. Of course she won’t go to bed with him. Or anywhere else with him, for that matter. She is far too sensible. For that. But why did she think it? What was its meaning? Where is her brain at, these days? she wonders.
—You’ve lost interest. In my story.