by Joshua Cody
So I don’t think my story is about suicide. I don’t know how close I was that night. I don’t think it was very close. I really don’t think I wouldn’t have realized—realized, not remembered, because I obviously knew the fact but for some reason I hadn’t ever really felt it until then—the thing about the multiplicity of selves and thus the thing about the suffering self is merely one of these selves. So my story is not these other stories—Mr. McQueen, and Ms. Wetzsteon, and Mr. Wallace, and Ms. Kim, and Ms. Korshunova—these five people, muses and musers, who basically occupied themselves with showing us beauty (I don’t mean to be reductive; for Mr. Wallace, art existed to “disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed”; and echoing this, Mr. McQueen, whose design vocabulary extended to “showers of live moths; amputees; walking on water; a woman reclining in a vast glass box, almost swallowed up by her rolls of fat and naked apart from her elaborate breathing apparatus; the model Shalom Harlow being spray-painted by a machine in Jackson Pollock style,” once remarked, simply, “I try to protect people”24), these five people who disappeared within the span of 517 days. That’s about one every hundred days. Aren’t these precisely the people who should not disappear? Should this concern us? When I learned of Mr. Wallace’s death my first thought was very like that voiced by the literary critic Michael Silverblatt on his radio program Bookworm a few days later: “Has something further happened in the world that makes it harder for a sensitive and intelligent person to want to stay alive? . . . The death of David Foster Wallace seems to speak to the difficulty of life itself. Depressed or not, brilliant or not, are we living in a time that makes it hard for us to find the things that allow us to want to stay alive?”25 What happens when you can’t find the train set? In other words, we probably should not stop ourselves from wondering whether, as we continue to move ahead, we should move with a little caution, and make sure that we keep enough room for two mirrors: for one is evidently not enough.
Ruslana Korshunova.
* * *
* Look it up! Hint: Cantos! Not too far in! Go for it!
VIII
Gutenberg’s Folly
I am not sentimental.
—Vanessa Duriès, Le Lien
This is much later, now, of course. I’m in New Hampshire, beautiful lake country. It was an impulse decision to come up here from the Cape. I can think clearly up here; the city can be intellectually claustrophobic, what with the lowceilinged apartments, the earsplitting noise and lack of sky. It’s early morning: I’m sitting on a lake, paging through a book I still haven’t read, my father’s copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions.
So what happened?
I actually like lakes more than oceans, anyway, having grown up on a lake myself; the blue is more pungent, and they’re smooth, smooth enough to allow a small pool of petrol to spread unperturbed, amply, into a black and gold plate, shimmering like an insect’s wing, radiating, really approaching insubstantiality, like the Euclidean plane that bisects space. I remember taking a motorboat out on a lake in upstate Wisconsin with my father when I was young. The smell of petrol on a predawn lake, while environmentally harmful, is nevertheless one of the most beautiful odors in the world.
The scan was clear, and my mom and I went to see The French Connection at the Film Forum; we sat in the front row. Here’s what happened: our hero, an NYPD cop named “Popeye” Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, has clumsily stumbled onto one of the largest smuggling schemes in history. He’s set up a trap for the villain, the French smuggling mastermind Alain Charnier (beautifully played by one of Buñuel’s favorite actors, Fernando Rey). Charnier and the other buyers and sellers meet in a warehouse, and the deal is sealed, smoothly. They don’t realize they’re surrounded by Popeye and a contingent of narcotics officers until it’s too late. A tightly drawn cat-and-mouse game ensues in the warehouse, played out in silence, not unlike the end of The Third Man. I wonder if William Friedkin, the director, had this in mind. (My father’s two favorite movies were The French Connection and The Third Man. He liked thrillers. He didn’t quite come around to the notion of film as “high art,” or whatever, until quite late; and then, only sporadically.) Popeye sees Charnier and fires—but it’s not Charnier. It’s the FBI agent who’d also been working on the case, and whom Popeye despised. Popeye’s partner, “Cloudy” Russo (the superb Roy Scheider), is aghast: but Popeye is unperturbed. He walks off, as if in a trance: he disappears from (our) view; he’s in a different moral universe now. There’s the sound of a single gunshot. The film ends. We don’t know who fired the shot, nor who received it. It’s one of those intelligently underemphatic endings, not some hysterical climax. It’s realistic. Of course then again it should be—it’s based on a true story. And title cards, in silence, before the end credits begin, let us know what happened after that.
The villain, Charnier, was never caught. He somehow escaped to France.
Carmilla never did chemo, nor radiation, much to the distress of her oncologists; her tumor disappeared; she moved to Minneapolis for a while, then came back to the city, where she is now, still partying, still healthy, still radiant.
Charnier’s shady lawyer, Weinstock, was arrested, tried, and released without spending even a day in prison.
Caroline successfully completed rehab and moved back home to start a new life—a life in which stripping and dancing and whipping and all sorts of other activities are performed at her behest, not at the wills of others.
Charnier’s mobster partner, Sal Boca, was arrested, tried, and released with the lightest of penalties.
Sophie’s alive and well and living in New Jersey.
The NYPD transferred both Popeye and Cloudy out of narcotics.
Nothereal fled in despair to Greece. Funny how in times of crisis we Europeans still try to get back to Greece. She sent me a very sad letter. She was hoping against hope that one day I would forgive her, but she knew I could never forgive her. She was from Serbia: I had squeezed her hand on a hill of domes, overlooking a winter cityscape, in a dream: my hospital room, like my apartment with its carpeting of shards of wood and glass, was a kind of laboratory, with much apparatus: like Klee in his analysis of various perversities, she brought the medical and the experimental to the fore. On February 24, 2009, the New York Times ingratiatingly reported “the Association of American Colleges and Universities recently issued a report arguing the humanities should abandon the ‘old Ivory Tower view of liberal education’ and instead emphasize its practical and economic value.” There is science: for example, the complex medical science of pain management, which is employed by a doctor to help a patient; but what if the doctor is also unknowingly a patient, without a doctor? Then the vehicle might veer off the highway, and orange cones will have to be brought out; then harm can occur, not necessarily intended or unintended but maybe as the result of an experiment or accident. Experiments and accidents showed us that mustard gas could both kill tumors and flay the skin off soldiers’ backs like when, in Ancient Greece, Apollo peeled Marsyas’s skin off his body and nailed it to a tree; experiments and accidents showed us that uranium, that most silvery of elements, could be used to both ionize atoms of the DNA of a harmful cell, leaving healthy cells behind and vaporize entire human bodies, leaving behind shadows of carbon on concrete.
Chicago-born William Friedkin’s movie The French Connection won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Picture, and he went on to direct The Exorcist, which is a story about God and vomiting.
In a way, I went on to write a story about God and vomiting.
•
I miss my father; he died, as I mentioned, in 2001, and that sad event was swiftly followed by terrifying suicide attacks—one morning a pair of hijacked commercial airplanes split two skyscrapers that stood six blocks away from my apartment nearly in half, and later that day they collapsed into dust. (I remember those buildings so well, from my first trip to New York; I remember them with tactile memory: I’d placed my hands against one of them and looked straight up agai
nst the absolutely sheer, fourteen-hundred-foot-tall façade that really approached a Euclidean plane in air.) And this catastrophe was succeeded by the emotional collapse of my mom, a frightening diagnosis, medical treatment that failed, a considerably dimmer outlook on survival, a second (and highly debilitating) treatment that carried its own mortality rate, medical bills approaching a million dollars, the death of a friend, a nervous breakdown, the death of another friend.
Master of Osservanza, Burial of Saint Monica and Saint Augustine Departing from Africa, c. 1430.
I group these unfortunate events together into an eight- or nine-year chapter. Saint Augustine (whom Pound, shamefully, called the “drunken African”26) writes of “nearly nine years” that “passed in which I wallowed in the slime of that deep pit and the darkness of falsehood.” I’m reading my father’s copy that he bought in 1941, and at this phrase, in the margin, he’d written, “mine is 8 so far.” I don’t know when he wrote that.
I’m sitting at the side of this lake, paging through this book. On page 345, we have Saint Augustine looking forward to “that pre-eminent rest, when our soul shall have passed through the waters which have no substance.” Next to this my father scrawled
! ?
Elsewhere, Saint Augustine is talking about his son. “There is a book of ours,” he writes, “which is entitled The Master. It is a dialogue between him and me.” My father had scrawled an alarmingly tall exclamation point next to this passage, and written in way of explanation, “This is shocking! My book is a dialogue between my son & me! Augustine did it too!” I wonder what book this is. It’s somewhere, within the tens of thousands of typewritten pages and handwritten manuscripts that, after his death, were, oddly enough, still there. So my brother and I gathered them together, in Wisconsin, near a lake; divided them in two, and split them up between New York and Los Angeles, at two oceans.
This is a great book, the Confessions. I never did read enough, can’t even go into that, I wasted my time learning about music, although it might not have been as indulgent a waste as I’d feared. But listen to this: Chapter XII of Book Twelfth of the Confessions is entitled:
Of the intellectual heaven and formless earth, out of which on another day the firmament was formed.27
Next to this, my father writes, “magical.” I wonder what he thought was magical here.
I suspect it was the phrase “on another day.” In fact, I’d bet on it.
True story: Saint Augustine and his mother, Monica, had intended to sail from Rome to Africa, but she died before they could make the trip. Days before she died, they were standing at a window that looked down upon a courtyard. The courtyard enclosed a garden. They both experienced a sudden glimpse of eternity, which suddenly vanished.
Saint Augustine was born in Algeria. I googled “Saint Augustine” and two websites caught my attention. In one, a Muslim writes, “St. Augustine was before Islam and here utters words that speak well to us as Muslims.”28 In the other, an American writes, “More disgusting behavior from Islamic thugs.”29 But enough about poor Saint Augustine—we’re running out of time, and pages, and I want to talk about my father a bit before we finish up. He was a gifted writer but he never published. Kafka admitted somewhere that anything he wrote was “perfect,” by which he meant, he explained, that there was “style” already imbued in whatever came out of his pen. My father once said a similar thing about his own writing. I can’t recall exactly how he put it, but it was startling to hear, because he was a modest man. “You certainly don’t have to pursue the arts,” he said once, “but you certainly can.” Maybe that’s why I wrote music instead of words—writing music isn’t really writing, it’s designing. And another startling admission he made was when he said that, while Kafka was his favorite writer, he couldn’t stand the fiction, it was only the journals that mattered to him. Which really, now that I mention it, helps us round out the curve here—the motif of journals and memoirs.
When I was in high school and fell in love with a girl for the first time, and fell out of love with science and fell in love with literature and all that artsy stuff I had hated before, my father had something between a nervous breakdown and a midlife crisis. That might have been a coincidence, but as I discovered literature, he rediscovered literature through his son, and that’s why I’d like to have a child someday. (I say that now! And all my friends warn me—rethink. It’s a lot of work. But still. Plus they’re so cute. That’s what you think. But they are. And in the end we agree.) I took a trip to New York with this high school girl—in those days, and from Milwaukee, New York was a big deal, a big city, you were on an airplane and you were flying into this huge city, and the plane dipped and you could see the Empire State Building like a little model, casting a shadow from the orange setting sun: and back then New York actually was a big city, because you could go to the Gotham Book Mart on Forty-Sixth Street: you could walk in, it was really there. I mean you could literally get on an airplane in Milwaukee and fly through the air and wait and then see Manhattan below you, and you could try to see, as you were landing, and as the plane tipped, if you could identify Forty-Sixth Street; and you could grab your girlfriend’s hand and you could be in love and be flying into Manhattan.* Readers my age and slightly older than me will know what I’m talking about, and readers younger (sadly, legion) might not, but let me put it this way: the Gotham Book Mart was where wise men fished, if there wasn’t a freshwater lake around, predawn, smooth. And it was there that I bought my father a copy of the facsimile of Eliot’s original draft, with Pound’s annotations, of The Waste Land—I love facsimiles, as you by now know—and even though it had been published in 1971, he didn’t have it. So we flew back to Milwaukee and I gave it to him, thinking he already had it—I couldn’t believe he didn’t have it, but he didn’t have it. So this gave rise to a bunch of interesting conversations that I’m pretty much still having with him.
When my brother and I were children, he’d write us these marvelous stories. Here’s part of one of them.
The Adventures of Little Dee (d) & Kinto
Chapter 22:
Little Dee (d) Misplaces His Tuba
Little Dee (d) has misplaced his tuba, and thus cannot play in the marching band in the football game.
Kinto plays the finger cymbals and has not lost those, so he can play.
However, a marching band without a tuba is no band at all, or not much of one, and so it is essential that Little Dee (d) find his tuba. He has looked everywhere for it and cannot seem to find it. Kinto wonders how Little Dee (d) can lose his tuba. A tuba is a mighty big thing to lose; you’d think if you looked around for it you’d see it somewhere. If you saw it, you’d notice it immediately.
“I don’t know,” Little Dee (d) said fretfully, irritated at Kinto for chiding him, and also at himself, for losing it, and also at the tuba, for getting lost. “I’ve looked everywhere for it.”
“Are you sure you’ve looked everywhere?” Kinto said, emphasizing the word everywhere.
“Well, I haven’t looked in my underwear,” Little Dee (d) said irascibly. “Have you looked in Siam?” Kinto said, thinking of all the places it might be where Little Dee (d) possibly—indeed, most likely—hadn’t looked. Kinto looked thoughtful again.
“I knew you were going to say something as foolish as that,” Little Dee (d) said. “I knew you were going to say something as far out as that. That is really far out.”
“Siam is far out,” Kinto responded, agreeably. “That’s why I suggested it. That’s why I thought of it. I was trying to think of far off places where you hadn’t looked. I thought you would already have looked around here.”
“I did look around a little,” Little Dee (d) said. “I haven’t looked in Siam.”
“Well, why don’t you look in Siam?” Kinto said.
It would be easy for Little Dee (d) to look in Siam. Little Dee (d) could whee.
Wheeing is the ability to go someplace very fast. It is not to be confused with wheezing, whi
ch is what you do when you get an asthma attack, or what you might do after running very hard—say, in a race. Wheezing is the sound of air rushing through the bronchial tubes, when they are constricted. Wheeing does sound a bit like wheezing, though. Anyway, Little Dee (d) can whee, so he could get to Siam and back in time. It wouldn’t be any trouble.
“Why don’t you whee to Siam and see if your tuba is there?” Kinto said, suggesting Little Dee (d) go to Siam by whee.
“How could my tuba be there if I never took it there?” Little Dee (d) said. “I’ve never been in Siam.”
“I thought you told me you’ve been everywhere,” Kinto said, amazed.
Little Dee (d) was exasperated with the whole thing—the conversation he was having with Kinto, and with Kinto in particular—so he ended it and that was the end of the Siam adventure.
A note to the reader
Chapter 22 is fairly late in the story, so you have some catching up to do.
First of all, who is Little Dee (d), and why is there always this (d) behind his name? And who is Kinto?
Little Dee (d) and Kinto have already been introduced in the story, and yet they haven’t been properly introduced. This seems to violate certain canons, of storytelling, for children. First you should introduce your characters.