Anything Can Happen

by Roger Rosenblatt

  On Plagiarists and Their Apologists

  Between the bubonic and the plague, how to choose?

  On Institutions

  Institutions do not care for particulars. That is why you must stay as far away from them as possible, my sweet particular.

  On God

  Montesquieu said: "If triangles had a god, it would have three sides." My kind of God.

  To One Who Asks Why I Am in Such a Rage

  The usual, friend. Injustice.

  To Hannibal Lecter

  What's eating you?

  Twenty Things One Would Like to See in Movies

  The Amish family is extremely nasty and abusive.

  The African-American cop is not the first one killed.

  No dances, no wolves.

  The central male figure is not an architect.

  No one says: "Get your butt in here (or out of here)."

  The serial killer leaves no clues, does not get in touch with the pursuing detective, and does not want to be caught.

  We enter a black inner-city neighborhood and no boom box is playing rap.

  A woman lawyer is abysmally stupid and incompetent.

  A man travels through several dimensions and is ignored in every one of them.

  A green beret commando is ordered not to go back across enemy lines to rescue his buddies. He obeys.

  "Only a flesh wound? This is killing me!"

  A major rock star plays an aspiring rock star and in his or her first performance flops big time and is booed off the stage.

  No one says: "Big time."

  A man digs deep into a crime of the past and comes up with nothing.

  A reporter is polite, sensitive, smart, and honest—and does not get the story.

  A hotel cleaning lady opens the hotel room door, discovers a murder victim, and calmly calls the police.

  A crusty old classics teacher is feared and mocked by the students in a prep school where he has taught for forty years, and he turns out to be a pederast, a plagiarist, and an embezzler.

  A policeman is not known and hated for doing things "his way." He does things everybody else's way.

  There's a scene about a Bingo game, in which the winners cry out: "I won!" Nobody in the film, especially those using computers, ever says: "Bingo!"

  The police trace a phone call from a criminal in a split second—no waiting. As soon as they pick up the phone, they yell: "We've got him!"

  Odes for a Rainy Afternoon

  On Jumping to Conclusions

  People use the phrase "jumping to conclusions" as an expression of disapproval—as if to jump to a conclusion is a silly and fruitless thing to do. Yet, when one spies a conclusion, what else is there to do but jump to it?

  To a Friend Who Never Picks Up the Check

  Every student of literature knows that Kit Marlowe was stabbed to death as he sat drinking with three companions in a tavern in Deptford, England. Did you ever wonder why?

  To True Lovers Who Lament the Fact That They Cannot Live Forever

  You already have.

  To One Who Won't Get Over It

  You seem awfully fragile for the weight of a grudge. It might be the one thing you're not able to bear.

  To My Favorite Satirist

  You are like the washroom in a church—out of place and indispensable.

  To a Young Artist Who Searches for a Brand-new Subject

  Don't.

  On the Noblesse of Women

  It goes way back. Even Adam was exonerated.

  On Bloodsuckers

  Should a vampire require a transfusion, and it is your blood type, and yours alone, that will save his life, ask yourself: How many ways should you give blood to a vampire?

  To a Critic Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

  Why? you ask. Because you cannot tell flippancy from sorrow. Simple.

  To Those Who Say That They Have Learned from Past Mistakes

  Very good. That's a good one. I like that.

  To One Who Has the Power to Cause Harm

  You call that power?

  To One Who Catches My Drift

  Thanks. It's all I've got—drift.

  The Albatross That Brought Everyone Good Luck

  I should write a fable about an albatross that brings everyone good luck, wonderful luck; or one about a sword belonging to someone named Damocles, Tom Damocles, that liberates its owner and smites evildoers; or one about a wolf in sheep's clothing who is simply a cross-dresser, quite harmless; or one about a last straw that turns to gold and turns all the other straws to gold and makes the recipient rich.

  But I will not do that, of course. One must retain one's standard metaphors, or else how will one be able to sidestep the truth?

  Bring a Wildebeest Home to Mother

  At first she will be appalled. She will ask you: "Where did you get that wildebeest?" And she will tell you: "Take it back at once!" However, you will find that if you do not take the wildebeest back at once, but rather say nothing and let the animal stay for the evening, your mother will begin to grow accustomed to the animal, which you have now named Chip. By the following morning, in spite of the chaos created (crushed chairs, smashed china), she, too, is calling it Chip.

  Next, bring home a baby tiger and see what happens. Once again, your mother will be appalled, and aghast as well, and she will say: "A wildebeest is one thing, a tiger another." But here, too, if you keep your wits about you and let things happen as they will, Lucky the tiger will soon be part of the family—though one day you may find that Chip has disappeared.

  In a little while, bring home a full-grown elephant.

  You did ask how demagogues were born?

  Jaws's Side of Things

  You try eating while people are batting you over the head with oars and splashing about and taking shots at you with a .357 Magnum. Someone even tried to blow me up with dynamite. See how you'd like it. If you ask me (of course, you won't), the trouble with the world today is that no one lets you do what you do best. There's always somebody out there ready with a new and different direction, the suggestion of a hobby, perhaps. What would I do, I'd like to know? Collect stamps?

  Look. I eat. That's my name and that's my game. Or, to be more accurate, you're my game. Too bad for you. And, if I say so myself, I'm pretty good at my specialty—a virtuoso. My friends call me that.

  What did you expect, may I ask? That I would slink away, repent, or better still, reform? If only you could see yourselves—so hot and bothered on the shore, so vengeful, so warlike (I'm impressed), and oh, so sorry that I am what I am and not sitting limp in a decorative glass cup, with sauce on the side, like some dumb-ass shrimp cocktail.

  Dogstoevsky

  The dog. By Roger Rosenblatt. The dog barks. By Roger Rosenblatt. The dog barks by Roger Rosenblatt who is trying to read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is trying to read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, but the dog barks. As Raskolnikov dodges his landlady, the dog barks. As Raskolnikov curses his sister's fate, the dog barks, too. The dog always barks. By Rodya Raskolnikov. Dogs and Punishment by Rodya Rosenblatt, by Roger Raskolnikov, by Fyodog Dogstoevsky. Barkbarkbarkbarkbark.

  I am not crazy yet. The dog has not barked me to craziness quite yet. All I have sought to do for the past two days, sitting in the same chair in the same house with the same Hershey's Kisses left over from Halloween at my same left hand; all I have sought is to make some progress with Crime and Punishment, and so I have considered killing the dog, as Raskolnikov killed the two old women.

  If you kill one dog, after all, what does it matter to the balance of the world, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

  Of course, you do not hear the barking; you, swaddled in the sweet silence of your Ford Taurus or your Library of Congress, you do not hear my cairn terrier with the tommy-gun voice. Nor can you hear what my cairn terrier hears. Nor can I. But I can hear her. It is a metaphysical riddle, is it not, that she barks at what she hears, but I can only hear her
barking. Who then would hear the sound if I felled her with a tree in the forest? Bark to bark.

  What gets me is how little she cares for my peace of mind. She has not read Crime and Punishment. She knows nothing of the pleasures of sitting back with Hershey's Kisses on a dismal November afternoon—the trees shorn, the wind mixing with rain—and reading of starving young Russians tormenting themselves in the city of———, in the year———. Six long years I have owned this dog, feeding and bathing and tummy-scratching in return for puppy barking and dog barking. She is not six, I remind her. She is forty-two. Time to settle down, I remind her. Tempus fugit. Cave canem. (Barkbarkbark.) She is not the dog I had hoped for, not that dog at all.

  Not that I was hoping for Lassie, if that's what you're thinking. Or Rin Tin Tin, or Yukon King, or Fala, or Checkers, or Him, or Her, or a dog that flies or takes fingerprints or says "Ruth" in bars. I was not expecting Ms. Magic Dog of the Twenty-First Century, who could not only fetch my copy of Crime and Punishment, but who could also have translated the book from the original. Not my dog. Not the dog of my dreams.

  All I ever wanted was a good and quiet dog, like the dignified hound in Piero di Cosimo's Death of Procris, sitting so mournfully, so nobly at the feet of his fallen master. A dog like that would not bark more than once a month (once in his seven). A dog like that would know his place in the order of things and would state by the mere fact of his docile existence that there are those who rule and those who sit quietly, those who read Crime and Punishment and those who don't, and therefore do not make it impossible for those who do, just because they hear things that those who do, don't.

  Barkbarkbarkbarkbark.

  There is nothing out there. I have been stalled on [>] for an hour, and there is nothing out there. Raskolnikov has axed the two old women over and over again. He feels no remorse. He is consumed with purpose. He can do whatever he wants to do—sans guilt, sans cairns—he for whom no dog barks.

  Now she is still for a moment. The brown, blank eyes fixed with alarm. The head loaded, ready to fire. What can she hear? Is it the sound of an enemy I cannot hear yet? Or is it the sound of the enemy I can never hear, the sound of evil itself, of my own murderous impulse to kill the very dog who barks to keep me from killing the very dog who barks to keep me from killing me?

  Love Song

  If those pushy mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, years ago in Argentina, didn't go away no matter how the policia shoved them around; if they continued to walk up and down in front of the presidential Pink House carrying photographs on placards and holding snapshots between their index fingers and their thumbs; if they insisted day after day, sunshine or rain, that their children did indeed exist in spite of the fact that they had been "disappeared" by the thugs of the military government, proving by their dogged persistence that there was no such thing as a desaparecido or that nothing beloved could vanish just like that ... why would you think that I might disappear?

  Go Where You Are Loved

  Go where you are loved, and where you love. But you, being you, will, of course, make the other choice and head off for enemy quarters where you will be greeted by handshakes, chocolates, and flowers. There, people will tell you how splendid you look, how beautiful your mind is, while, out of your sight, they will plot your assassination. At night you sleep without dreams and curl a stupid smile on your stupid face.

  As for those you love and who love you, you have persuaded yourself that they can wait. The remarkable thing is that they will.

  Essays. I, Too, Dislike Them

  The essay consists of one part poetry, two parts history, three parts philosophy, and no parts sex.

  My point of entry is a young woman standing before you reading a book, waiting for a train. She wears a round straw hat girded by a thick blue band. Her sandals are open-toed. Her dress is white with a pattern of small yellow flowers. Her skirt stops at her knees. Her expression skitters between the quizzical and the serene. She never lifts her gaze from the pages of the book, and she shows no concern for the time, the station, the train, her eventual destination, or for you.

  What do you think? Is she a vision from a painting by Degas? Is she Galatea? Is she the intersection of thought and space? A problem? A symbol? A doop doop de doop?

  Is that bulge in your pants a thousand words long?

  If in My Sleep

  If, in my sleep, I shout unintelligible names or indicate anguish in a garbled tongue, or call out in horror or surprise, or utter a lament in Spanish, though I do not know Spanish, or laugh—laugh wildly—you may be sure that I am dreaming of a black glass wall with tall, cracked ladders leaning against it, and I am clambering up the side, only to find that I am crawling on the ceiling of a tunnel, and below me are red horses in stampede—dreaming, that is, of my life as an impossible puzzle.

  So please do not push or nudge or tap or make any effort to get me up, for I fear that I may wake into sleep and understand everything.

  Instructions to the Housekeeper

  Please wash the sheets and polish the silver. Please dust the piano, do the shopping, and cook dinner. Please fix the lamp in the hall and the sprinkler system. Please rebuild car engine (the Lexus). Please point up the bricks on the west wall of the house and relay the foundation (steel beams to replace locust posts). Please stop teenagers from getting tattoos. Please explain to said teens that rifts always occur between parents and children and that everything will be all right. Please make life more pleasant for me at work and give Brooks an injury that forces him to stay home for several months. Please add a little spice to my marriage—sex, culture, etc. I'm concerned about the market—please improve. Cure cancer, end world hunger, terrorism, and so forth. Racism, ditto. Thank you.

  P.S. Please do the shirts right this time. No starch.

  "Neglect"

  Naturally, you called it "neglect," and it was neglect—the absence of attention, the omission of attention—as when a town in which an industry once thrived (a steel mill or a shoe factory) is fallen from neglect, and the eaves of the roofs sag soaked with rain, the door of the bank vault lies open to houseflies, the grocer's shelves are thick with dust, the druggist's shelves the same. And nothing remains of the school yard except a jungle gym in a heap of pipes and a chain-link fence that has been yanked from its stanchions. Still, you were right. Technically, it was neglect. Don't give it a second thought.

  With Narcissus in the Aquarium

  "I can't see my reflection for the fish," he said. He was wearing a white silk shirt from Paris, a Zegna tie, and a suit custom made in heaven.

  "That's the point," I told him. "Look at these beauties."

  I showed him the larvaceans weaving their mucous nets, and the comb jellies and the barrel-shaped salps. I showed him a thirty-foot siphonophore and noted how these creatures did not have advanced nervous systems, or brains, or eyes, and were nonetheless able to defend themselves and hunt. I showed him the chambered nautilus and the octopus, and the cuttlefish that disappear in smoke of their own making.

  "Look there," I said. And I showed him the shovelnose guitarfish and a grouper rowing by using its pectorals as oars. I tried to engage his interest in the synchronized swimming of the silver sardines and the schools of mackerel gleaming in the light. But I could see that he didn't care, didn't care for any of it.

  Then suddenly he stopped. He stared at one of the glass cases. He lay down his briefcase containing his schedule of lectures and his schedule of TV appearances and a list of the phone calls he had to return from important people in Washington and New York.

  What enthralled him was the Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid from hell, with its salmon-colored body that can hide in the cloak of itself, its salmon-colored head, and its blue eye—that blue eye of the Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which is no ordinary blue, but the blue of the first blue ever, the blue that defines the color, the blue open eye of the sea itself.

  "You know," he said at last. "That eye. That eye."

  "What
about it?" I asked.

  "It's looking at me."

  Kilroy Was Here

  Every place in World War II, every foxhole, every tank, every available surface displayed the mystifying graffiti KILROY WAS HERE. A riddle. A joke. For decades, people asked, "Who's Kilroy?"—as if that were the question.

  Tell me a story. Tell me a story about Kilroy and why he was here. Tell me about you being here and about me being here. Oh, yes. And about Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor-in-chief of the French edition of Elle, who suffered so massive a stroke that the only part of his body he could move was his left eyelid. So, with that left eyelid he signaled the alphabet—a, b, c—to others, and thus was able to write a whole book, a bestseller. He used his eyelid to write a book: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. He, too, was here. Ici.

  Along with the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto who, in their final days, after they had watched their mothers and cousins shoved off to the extermination camps in the dead of winter and were themselves at the edge of death from diphtheria and malnutrition, still they took little pieces of paper and rolled them up in scrolls and wrote things on them—poems, fragments of autobiography, political tracts—and slipped the scrolls into the crevices of the ghetto walls.