Then it added unless you get up.
I got up. He was swinging wildly at me then, and it is in part due to his imprecision that I was able to make it to my feet, skating blurrily away from him through the pile of books, sliding through torn paper. He ran at me. I reached out with my long country boy’s limbs and took him by the arm and used his own momentum to swing him toward the mantel. He was so thin and light that I imagined (for it must have been my imagination, it could not have really happened) that his feet left the ground and for an instant he became a graceful thing, a thing in flight. His head came whipping round after his body and cracked against the plaster and I released him, he wobbled on his feet, he looked drunk like we had both been that night in the bar, the two of us together. We had nothing in common. We really could not be more different I thought as I took hold of the nearest object which was the half-head of Nietzsche. You’re probably seen Nietzsche before. If you haven’t, let me describe him for you. The only part of him that matters, of course, is his moustache, which in early photos looks like a standard nineteenth-century version of a moustache, cigar-thick and smoke-black and vaguely pubic. A normal person might have stopped there, tending and grooming and restricting it to within the bounds of convention, but Nietzsche was of course anything but normal, and so he continued to let the moustache go and by middle age it had begun to turn up at the ends like wings, or some kind of alien punctuation mark. Everyone claims to understand Nietzsche but few do. I have always thought that one could correlate the loosening of his mind with the growth of his moustache. A good subject for a paper, not for a philosopher perhaps but for an intellectual historian with a sense of humor. Nietzsche had a mental collapse at the age of forty-five, no one knows exactly what brought it on but legend has it that he saw a man whipping a horse and lost his mind. This story is almost certainly apocryphal. He spent the last eleven years of his life confined to an institution. In the final two years he did not speak at all. During that time the moustache—by then a fearsome thing—took over his face completely, and we may choose to regard it (unruly, impenetrable) as the most precise expression of his lattermost thoughts. It’s something to behold, Nietzsche’s moustache, and one renders it in iron as a half a mushroom cap. Halved, this half-cap becomes a quarter cap, sharp at the end, like a tomahawk. Eric said nothing when I hit him with it. There was an eggshell sound and then he fell down. I thought of him threatening Alma and threatening me and maligning me and sickening her and barging into my house and interfering with my life and making me feel scared and breaking my window and taking away my words and replacing them with his own which were stupid and foul and unintelligent; correction: I didn’t think these things but I saw them swarming before me and I swung at them to clear the air, I cleared my mind of twenty years. There was no need for words. He had long stopped making any noise at all and so had his skull, which was soft and forgiving when I struck it one more time. Y
ou could claim self-defense but look. Look at the carpet, the floor around the fireplace. Look at the books. You need not look at the thing itself, inert; at the face no longer a face; greasy hair dripping at the ends. You need not see them to know what has taken place here. The room itself tells the story. Look at what has taken place—the vivid, tribal slashes of color—the way your hands tremble: in horror, yes, but also in exultation—and you can see it as well as anyone. You had all the reason in the world to do as you did. And so ask yourself, ask: who will believe you? What became of you in those moments amazes you. You call yourself a thinker, but for a brief time you were altogether physical, your strength and fury as shocking as they were manifest. Having read widely, you know in a physiological sense what took place: the glands that contracted and the hormones that spurted and the twittering neural circuitry governing fight/flight; know, in the abstract, of analogous cultural phenomena, Norse berserkers and Bacchic revelry and Aztec orgies of violence and Pentecostal glossolalia to cite but a few examples of spiritual madness whose practitioners claim to be privy in their frenzy to flashes of godliness and superhumanity, phenomena well documented and thoroughly dissected in the annals of sociology, psychology, history, archaeology, anthropology, and the comparative study of religion, reams of serious-minded scholarly prose demonstrating when and why and how people excite themselves into such a state, and moreover drawing inferences for the broader implications of such behavior vis-à-vis human nature, nurture, culture, et al. You’ve read. You have mapped these ideas on paper but never in three dimensions; and now that you have, you are entirely present, brimming with sensation, so awake and alert and sensitive to reality that it’s excruciating just to stand there, alive. The yellow of the lamps is the yellowest imaginable. The air tangy and viscous like seawater. Your belly roars with a hunger akin to sexual ecstasy. You are present; you have acted. Who will believe you, when you do not believe it yourself? Torn open all over, you feel no pain. Gather your clothes, an old molted skin. Books are everywhere, everywhere destroyed. He has done this. You turn toward him in hatred and see again what has become of him, the gray crater staring eyeless at the fireplace, and your stomach kicks and you rush to the toilet jackknifed just in time. When it is over the silence fills up with a high-pitched whine that drives your head between your knees, and you remain there a long time, first deciding what needs to be done and then girding yourself to do it and you stand wiping thick slime from your upper lip and when the water stops running you hear it: a mournful gypsy melody, a song of love and death. She is on time, as usual, headed for the library, where she now begins her workday, on your orders, so as not to wake you up upstairs. Step into the hallway and through the open door see: the heaving bosom and the birthmark and the drab denim skirt and the permanently soiled apron and the blouse cut far too low for a woman her age. In her hair a comb, plastic colored to look like tortoiseshell. She is framed by the breaking day, a light with thickness and texture and unique refractive properties, making her appear as though set in glass, suspended like a trinket inside a paperweight, staring at the floor and the mess you’ve made, she’s never seen such a mess in her life. From her cowy mouth comes an unearthly sound, starting low and ascending smoothly until it hits a certain pitch and begins to hitch, hitch, hitch like a chuffing piston, hovering in a weird vocalic triangle between u
and o
and e,
approximating what would technically be called the open-mid central rounded vowel, a term you know because you have taken several courses in linguistics. Ueoww,
waving her fat hands in front of her fat stupid face. Ueohh ueohh ueooowww.
Though appalling, the noise serves a clear purpose, awakening you to what is happening now, in this instant, here, in this place. You say her name. She looks at you, and her face seems to push into itself. Hers is a consummate disgust. This is America. She thought you was nice man. She say you boss. But what are you now except a filthy streaked savage with a good vocabulary? And she won’t stop making that noise. You say her name again and take a step toward her, and now she lets out an honest-to-goodness scream, an extended twelve-tone aria of pure terror. Before this you’ve never really understood what’s meant by “bloodcurdling.” Because the sound she makes really does cause you to feel your insides congealing, and for a third time you say her name but she is not to be reasoned with, screaming as she comes jousting at you with the hook end of the poker. Back you go, tangling with her abandoned vacuum and landing hard on your tailbone, grabbing at her ankle as she rumbles past. It’s eighteen long and short feet down the hall and all you need is for her to stop screaming long enough for you to explain, you chase her into the living room saying her name. The poker swings at you and you catch it with reflexes you didn’t know you had and yank hard and she is near and your arm catches her around the waist spinning waltz-like and down you both go rolling around together on the living-room floor, along the way kneecapping one of two brass lamps. She smells like detergent and chamomile. What must this look like, you wonder. In a way, it must be quite funny.
If only she’d be quiet. That’s all you really need. What will the neighbors think? You can explain exactly what happened and why, but first she has to shut up.
You pry the poker out of her hands and fling it away, trying to hold her shoulders so that you can look her in the eye and order her to calm down, but she isn’t listening to you anymore, nosir, she’s got her own agenda now and she won’t quiet down long enough for you to get your point across, and when you put your hand over her mouth not to hurt her but to briefly stopper the noise driving you mad with fear, she bites your hand eyewateringly hard, blunt nails scratching your face; for God’s sake she’s trying to claw out your eyes. What is wrong with her. This doesn’t involve her, none of it does, and you don’t need her to get involved, you just need her to stop screaming right now, it is a need larger than the sun. Grab her arms and pin them down and hang on to her like she is a steer. Her advantage is viciousness, she’ll try anything, every dirty crafty trick in the book. Your advantage is size. This is something you have always had: mass. One knee on her chest and then the other and she is subdued, thrashing weakly, her heels kicking back against the floor. Listen to me. You are trying to explain, trying to win her over with words, listen to me, listen. Listen. But look at her now. She makes a face. Some part of you recognizes that you must be hurting her. Is it a decision or something that happens? Is it something you do or something that is done? Who is the agent; what is the verb? Because you aren’t moving at all, you’re staying right where you are, and her eyes grow large and you understand what is happening to her—or did you understand already, when you chose to remain there, in place, your knees bearing down, twin anvils on her fifty-year-old heart. She makes a noise like an iron releasing steam and her stare is all white and her head falls back, exposing her throat, and you stay there until you stand up and face the silence anew, an additional problem on your hands. This, now? It is absurd. It cannot be real. But here is a hand. And here is another. Whatever excuses you might have had before are gone now. The choice is binary. Go on. Or stop. You are so afraid. Look back and the past telescopes to this very moment; look forward and the future is clear. You are not ready to ask yourself questions. You will need to lay out context, to provide a theoretical framework; and that will have to wait, as the abstract now yields to the very concrete. THE STRAIN OF DRAGGING her back to the library causes your back to seize up, and it is through sheer force of will that you manage to get her the rest of the way. You set her down on the carpet next to him, shaking out your limbs to loosen up. Gather what you need. She has left the rest of her supplies in the entry hall. Bottle of ammonia, can of solvent. In the kitchen hang a sloshing bucket in the crook of your elbow. Tuck a mop under your arm. Peel off trash bags. Take sponges. Aside from the books, the carpet has caught the worst of it. The stains have dried rapidly, forming lots of hard little specks and a few puck-sized patches, black fibers gummed together as though cauterized. Paper towels dissolve, useless. What you need is a good old-fashioned rag. You take off your robe. It stinks of exertion and fear and you dip its hem into the bucket, by now warm and scummy, afloat with all manner of unidentifiable black bits. The urge to vomit comes and goes. Your throat hurts from retching. Your solar plexus aches. Your eyes want to go to the faceless face, and to prevent this you look down, only down. Squeeze the excess out of the robe and back to work, scrubbing. It isn’t really working, is it. You can’t tell. Your vision is blurry, blink that away. It occurs to you that the stains may have gone all the way through to the floor. With trepidation you lift the corner and run your hand over the herringbone. Clean. Dry. Remember that this is a nice carpet, really nice, fine quality, the pile thick enough to absorb your sins. Lay the corner down and put your back into it. Oh but the books. Many cannot be saved. You try to wipe them clean but of course that doesn’t work; it has soaked through the old paper, passing deep into the text. Blotches on the frontispiece echo through the third chapter. To see this twists your heart up like a wire. Some you have read; others you have pledged to read. Still others you have never considered opening, and it is only now, when you must let them go, that you appreciate their worth. Bravely you reinsert pages, restore torn corners, fill the body bags. The green silk looks unscathed, which is a good thing, because you doubt anything would ever come out of that; and damage to a few square inches would have necessitated removal of an entire panel, of which there are three, two on either side of the fireplace running from floor to ceiling and one covering the area above the mantel. You might have had to throw it all out and repaint. The lamp that might or might not be a Tiffany is intact. The bluejays cry stop stop thief thief thief You spend several minutes scrutinizing the easy chairs. The upholstery is dark enough that you might be able to get away with leaving them be. Better safe than sorry. You bend to pull up the cushions, catching, as you do, a glimpse of the face, not a face. And again, on your knees, over the bucket. Some time later the feeling passes and you stand, exhausted and at the edge of yourself. Without looking at him, you drape a trash bag over his upper half. You vacuum. You carry everything to the service porch, empty the bucket into the large plastic basin sink, strip down, putting your ruined clothes in a trash bag. Upstairs, you stand beneath the hot water. The runoff is pink. You rub yourself raw with a washcloth, turn the temperature up until the gashes in your flesh are bleached clean. Then you cut the water and stand in a column of steam, tingling with purpose, making plans. Dry, anoint, and dress. Aside from the cuts to your body, which sting but are of no real concern, she has left her mark on your face, three jagged trenches dug deep into the flesh below your right eye. You reach for a box of bandages, then reconsider. Which is less conspicuous: the injury or the dressing? You wish you had some makeup. But whatever she kept in the vanity you have long thrown away. It’s your vanity, isn’t it, and what use does a grown man have for makeup? You never need anything until you need it. Isn’t that the truth. You put the bandages on and go downstairs. The situation calls for tea, which you make with two teabags and heaping spoonfuls of sugar plus the juice of an entire lemon. You make a list, check it several times. Today, you are setting out on a journey—you have already lost sight of the shore—and the fear of having not taken into account some undoing detail dogs you. Go on. Go. Her keys are in the pocket of her apron. To your surprise, the station wagon starts beautifully. You ease down the driveway. It has been a long time since you’ve been behind the wheel, any wheel, and Boston drivers are notoriously aggressive. A college friend who grew up around here told you once that he learned to parallel park by backing up until he hit the bumper of the car behind him. He called it “kissing.” To him this was perfectly normal. You think about this now as you cruise the neighborhood in a widening spiral, looking for a parking spot that isn’t metered, insanely tight, or restricted by permit. Maybe you ought to put the car in a pay lot. But that’s no good: they’ll have a record of you coming in and out. You can’t have that. Keep looking until a mile away, you find a space that suits your needs. You read the signs and go, praying to a God you haven’t believed in in years. Your first stop is the ATM. There you withdraw several hundred dollars in cash. You don’t feel too good about this; it is one of the many potential flaws in your plan, which is, of necessity, ad hoc. You try to avoid looking at the camera set behind the tiny one-way mirror, wondering then if avoiding the camera actually appears more suspicious than gazing directly at it or, better yet, trying to seem as though you haven’t given any consideration at all to being caught on camera. To appear relaxed, you whistle. Do ATM cameras capture sound? The machine is taking forever, making an exasperated noise, as though it has to print the money from scratch, and suddenly you become aware of the bandages on your face. You can feel the glue holding them there. This should be impossible, because the bandages are static, and the only way you ought to be able to feel anything is if they were moving against your skin; but their weight is there, it’s like a giant leech. You want to rip them off but of course you can’t and it’s hell, keeping still. Tak
e your cash and your receipt and go, peeling off the bandages and casting them into the gutter, sickened by your own foolishness. Next a hardware store. You buy a shovel. It costs twenty-four dollars and ninety-seven cents plus tax. You are tempted to buy other items as well but you have decided that the thing to do is spread your activity over a wide area. The cashier, a pretty girl named GRETA, says it looks like snow. You smile and nod but say nothing because you don’t want to lodge in her memory. Then you worry that by not answering you will look like a creepy mute, thus lodging in her memory, so you say something to the effect of what a surprise. And though you did not intend to be funny she laughs in a distinctly flirtatious way. You follow her eyes with your eyes but she never glances in the direction of the gashes on your face and you feel better. Maybe you look more normal than you think. It might be that they are not as prominent as you think; perhaps you are suffering from a distortion in self-perception, the kind that causes anorexics to see themselves as fat or teenagers to believe that the zit on their chin, no bigger than a period, has swallowed their entire head. Or maybe, though, she’s simply being polite; after all, it’s rude to stare. Maybe her eyes went straight there (seeking out imperfection, as eyes tend to do) before moving away as her social training kicked in; although if such a thing had occurred, and she did
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