As dusk advanced, Lotte tried to warm herself within a rotting log. She was timorous in that pulseless space, her skin raw against the roughness of the bark, the erratic twitch of insect legs. Drawn to the smell of nearby R., she rolled in the mud to affect a mottled garment. There had been a half-constructed house; there had been a warm, upright woman. Lotte’s memories of R. manifested as an eddy of burgundy flinders.
She found the house dramatically changed. The front porch was now enclosed and a new large room clung awkwardly to the back of the structure. Without knocking, she opened the screen door and passed from the sunroom into the living room. The furniture was new; she rubbed a striped couch in gold velvet with her fingertips and licked the high polish of a highboy constructed in a fine dark wood.
“Mother,” a young girl called from the stairs. “A stranger is in our house!”
Adeline came from the kitchen with the lid of a Dutch oven in her hand, but dropped it to the floor when she saw her lost daughter hiding behind the potted ferns.
“Daughter?” she said.
Lotte kept her eyes on the chandelier, its swaying red-glass droplets.
“I am over here, Mother,” said the girl on the stairs.
Repeating, “Oh my girl,” Adeline small-stepped toward Lotte and clasped her by her wrists. Thinking of the rosy color of the word “family,” Lotte opened her mouth and bit her mother on the stomach through a layer of beaded gray silk.
I had forgotten the fundamental direction of speech—I thought all expression was digestible. Because I experienced so little pain within the interval organ, I did not understand the meaning of my mother’s tears and screams. I did not let go of the cloth of her dress and the fold of her flesh until my teeth hurt and my half sister started pulling out handfuls of my thin, coarse hair.
REEDUCATION
Helena Coates, age thirty-two: Had I succumbed to the savagery of my situation, I would have been no better than an inessential organ within the beast. These wolves steal your youth. That is why they live so long; they absorb the passenger. May my young daughters be spared the temptation of lustful wandering.
Lorraine Thompson, age fourteen: I could not read inside the wolf. Now that I can read, I intend to read many books. I would like to see a city. I would like to ride in the subway. I sew very well and my stitches are very straight. My favorite meal is beef stew.
Beth Englander, age twenty-two: The adjustment was hard, but now I am a telephone operator. I am indeed grateful to serve my country in these trying times.
Lotte Pfeiffer, age twenty-nine: If I had grown old and died within the wolf, I would have never known my sister, Emily. One wishes to die accompanied, but this is best with one’s original family. I am learning how to be a nurse and care for wounds.
—Excerpts from IPRA handbook of 1933
ADDENDUM
How do I read this book?
Carefully, as though you are about to enter the mouth of the wolf.
For those who have forgotten, the wolf interval is a mobile dwelling. How does a nomad dwell?
Dwell. From the Old English dwellen, “lead astray, hinder, delay.” Of Germanic origin; related to Middle Dutch dwellen, “stun, perplex,” and Old Norse dvelja, “delay, tarry, stay.”
***
A TRUTH
I would like to explain why I never bought a mobile dwelling, why I decided to spend the money I had saved on a Vandercook letterpress instead. Why did I choose a dying profession? To explain myself, I wish I could reprint the last illustration of C. R. Bailey’s booklet, but in moves across the country in search of cities hospitable to the book, I have lost a number of treasured papers. Let me instead try to concentrate on the sensation of Bailey’s book, the intention of its pages. I opened the last folded illustration and saw two hands at the edge of the paper, two hands so similar to my own. The hands on the page pulled back the lips of a wolf into the shape of an inverted V, exposing her teeth and the black circle of her throat. That is why all my books have spaces like ribs, like throats. The book is an interval organ. If you are ready to fold your sheet into the initial folio, remember the pleasure of this task. Align your corners and crease your sheet, first with your thumb, then with your bone folder. Admire the spine you’ve created—the backbone of the word. But in creating a book, there is always the need to reduce. Slide your pallet knife inside the crease and tear it in half. The paper will pant if your movements are circular. The new edge won’t be perfect—it will have its teeth. This is a mark of your work, your hands. You are making a mouth for an author. You are reproducing your own mouth. The contentment of this task should feel like an expanding white mass on your tongue, lacy at the edges.
Circumstantial Evidence
Lynne Tillman
A SUNNY TIME
ALL OF A SUDDEN I liked birds, their shapes and colors, downy coats, and fluffy, rounded chests. I had, as a child, liked parakeets, had one or two, always ice blue, but it turned into childish love. Maybe now it had returned in a grown-up form. I don’t know when birds on the street or flying around outside or in parks, or nesting in branches of trees began to call to me, attract my attention, attract in the sense that I was unable not to watch them as they bathed in dirt or sang to each other, but they did.
It might have been around the time I was walking on Lafayette Street, walking home from the Time Café on Lafayette, where I spent many hours at lunch or dinner for about ten years. The Time Café had high ceilings and an open space, and during the day, a lot of sun came through its windows. It was a sunny place to sit, and there was also an outdoor patio for drinks or brunch. In the evening, in the cellar or basement, there was a lounge and below that a nightclub called Fez, which I went to often, to give a reading, hear one, hear music, watch performance.
I was walking along Lafayette, going uptown, going home, when I saw a man and a little girl, maybe eight, standing on the sidewalk, looking intently at a fire escape. The man, probably her father, held a shoe box. This excited my curiosity—a man, girl, shoe box, the two looking up, concentrating—and I looked too. They were watching a small, brightly colored bird, one usually seen, in Manhattan, in pet stores. The bird sat on the rail of the fire escape. I watched also for a while, then walked on, past the Colonnades, the beautiful apartments built in the eighteenth century, where Edmund White once lived, and where I visited him seconds before the AIDS epidemic, so, in retrospect, everything seemed good and sunny then.
As I walked on, I saw a doorman standing at the entrance to a building. The bird had alighted on his broad left shoulder, just sitting there. I called out to the man, Grab that bird on your shoulder, and in an instant he scooped it up. I don’t think he knew it was there, it was so little and light. I asked him for the bird, for the father and daughter I’d seen trying to catch it up the road, and he handed it to me, without a word. I would call the moment dreamlike, but it wasn’t, it was something else, and I carried the colorful bird in the palm of my hand back down Lafayette to the girl and her father, still standing at that spot.
I strode up to them, and said, Here’s the bird. I handed it to them. They took it, astonishment almost on their faces, but not really that, and they said nothing. They just looked at me, and I walked away. When I think about this absurd incident, I wonder at the silence of it, even the silence of the bird in my hand.
BASIE’S DISAPPOINTMENT
He was seven weeks old and just two pounds, when David and I rescued him from the New York City kill shelter. The woman taking care of the kittens warned us against him, because he was wild. He’s crazy, she said. They called him José.
(Later I tried calling him José. But the name didn’t work, because my first association to “José” was José Feliciano and his cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire.”)
The woman brought in “José” for me to hold, and he squirmed. But then, when I held him more firmly, he looked into my eyes. We gazed at each other long enough, and he kept still long enough, that we really looked into each oth
er’s eyes.
We’ll take him, I told the doubting woman.
We called him Basie, after the Count, and because the recently dead cat that Basie followed, Louis, had been named after Louis Armstrong. Louis was only eight when he died of a heart attack. He supposedly had lymphoma when he was five, but he probably hadn’t. He was born with a very bad heart.
Louis looked like an Egyptian blue, with a sleek blue-gray coat and a long, narrow face and nose. He was very elegant. Basie was a tuxedo gray kitten, with a white belly. I had wanted another gray cat.
Basie came home the next day, after he was fixed, and we needed to introduce him to Chester, our ten-year-old cat. David had said we could adopt a kitten only if we did it quickly, before Chester became used to living alone. Chester probably would have liked to live alone. He was a long-suffering cat. First he had to put up with Louis, whom he mothered from when Louis was an eight-week-old kitten. Then Louis grew up and dominated Chester, he bullied him, even terrorized him. He would scare Chester off the spot on our bed where he liked to nap.
Also, Chester’s beginnings were brutal. He was rescued from a Bronx vacant lot. When we adopted him at four months old, he had a sore foot wrapped in bandages. The shelter people said he would recover fully. But Chester still often holds that hurt paw up in the air, just above the floor, because he learned, or was conditioned, not to put it down when he was a kitten.
Chester was a classic tabby kitten, and beautiful. But he seemed to have less and less energy every day. It wasn’t normal for a kitten not to play. He was soon diagnosed with distemper, which kills many cats. Chester was shot full of antibiotics by a determined vet. It was over a long, sad weekend in the vet’s office, the same weekend John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane was lost, but Chester survived. I believe his lonely hospitalization increased his fear of humans. But Chester is another story.
When we brought Basie home, Chester sniffed him in his carrier, and when we let him out of his carrier, Basie instantly, fearlessly, ran over to Chester. Chester was startled, and hurried away.
Two days later, Chester accepted Basie, as he had Louis, and started licking and mothering him, the “good-enough mother.” Then, like Louis, Basie grew up to dominate Chester, though Basie still wants Chester to love him, lick him, and even shares some wet food with him at night. Louis didn’t care.
Basie had looked into my eyes that first time I held him, and when we brought him home, and he sat by me on the bed, a tiny little kitten, he continued to look into my eyes, and I looked into his. For many moments, he and I would stare at each other. One day, to my surprise, little Basie reached out, with a tiny paw, but tentatively, to touch my eye. No other cat I’ve encountered had ever wanted to touch my eye. I stopped him, gently. But Basie was very curious about the eyes he was looking into. He wanted to know what they were. So it happened again and again, for two months at least. He’d reach out and try to touch my eye. To pat it. Nothing aggressive.
During this time, I felt Basie wanted to communicate with me. I spoke to him, and he appeared to listen. I talked. He didn’t understand but he tried. It was in his eyes. He was so young. He’d cock his head to one side and listen.
When he was around six months old, Basie changed. He stopped trying to talk to me. Or he realized he couldn’t understand. That was when he stopped trying to touch my eye. Basie still likes to stare and look into people’s eyes. He will look in whatever direction David and I point. When we talk about some mischief Basie’s gotten into, he will go right to the area where he misbehaved. But it’s different. He’s different. I once thought he was disappointed at the limits between us, between him and people, but if he was, I think he’s forgotten.
Conversion Testimony
Rick Moody
IT WAS A ROUTINE DAY, the day of my conversion. I was at an artists’ retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the MacDowell Colony. I was lucky to be there, and in an ambitious moment in my career, working on finishing my novel Purple America, falling in love with someone on the premises, taking in spring in New Hampshire, hiking Mount Monadnock, meeting and greeting, full of dreams. It was seven years since my last drink. I would call my approach to what I put in my body—excepting the injunction against drugs and alcohol—unenlightened. I ate what I wanted to eat, and while I took seriously the suggestion (among my community of sober friends) that I have a spiritual life, I wasn’t yet preoccupied with the resolution of that question. I took the spiritual stuff in stride. I’d read a book on Zen and then toss it aside and read a book on the Quakers. It was the semi-examined life. As regards the evening in question: I always hated the moments before dinners at the artists’ colonies, those awkward quarter hours where you had to talk about what you had done that day. And so: There was no reason to suspect that this particular quarter hour would usher in a complete change in my life. And the chef who cooked dinner that night had no reason to suspect she would change my life. But she did. She changed my life when she decided that that night’s dinner was going to consist of meat loaf.
I have always kind of hated meat loaf. The presence of the word loaf in the phrase meat loaf seems to be part of the problem. That phrase meat loaf has always been repellent to me, even when I was a child, and even though I ate meat (flesh, as vegetarians sometimes call it), I always thought there was something highly suspect about meat loaf. I have the same feeling about pot roast. Somehow these words weren’t meant to go together: pot and roast, meat and loaf, and the idea of meat being packaged like a bread product is inappropriate to me. Then as now. In my thirties, I made my peace with the phrase, and had been known to eat meat loaf on occasion, especially in my penniless twenties, because I didn’t have the money to make sure the next meal would be as good as the one in front of me. Nevertheless, when the cart of meat loaf was wheeled out of the kitchen at MacDowell, I felt some dark stirrings. This was not entirely unusual. Though I was not a finicky eater (I would eat, for example, almost any kind of hamburger, no matter how dingy the precinct in which it was assembled), I had, as well, a tendency to find mac and cheese totally nauseating, and had heaved it up once as a child, never to eat it willingly again. It was not, at first, disturbing to me to find the meat loaf at MacDowell was nauseating. What was novel was why it was nauseating. I remember the platter of meat loaf having a crimson hue, almost like it was a red velvet cake. My further recollection is of a kind of gray/tan base material over which some ketchup had been drizzled, nouvelle cuisine style, to create a lively and animated plate of gore. I had a thought about the meat loaf I will never forget. I thought: car crash.
That is, the meat loaf did not look like food, but rather like somebody’s femur and quadriceps at a car crash or at a crime scene or in one of those preposterously violent war scenes that you might see in a film, when the film is attempting to be realistic. The meat loaf was disgusting to me, utterly abject, and just as abject was the proposition that I was meant to eat this gore that had been shoveled up from a soft shoulder. That I should eat it and engage in conversation with the other colonists, that I should pretend nothing was wrong: These obstacles were, suddenly, insurmountable. I can remember no more of the night, except that I didn’t eat the meat loaf, and probably ate five extra pieces of bread and an extra helping of salad, and I didn’t give the experience of abjection a second thought, really, because I had in no way prepared for abjection that night; it had overcome me, which I suppose is how conversions take place. Not because of persuasion (I have known a great number of vegetarians in my life), but because of an alignment of circumstances. I did not consider the possibility of renouncing meat that night. I imagined, simply, that I would never again eat meat loaf.
However, the feeling of abjection quickly extended itself to all beef products. As I say: I had no thought initially about the cow, the animal, who provided the meat in the meat loaf. As with most philosophical regeneration in my life, I could not make the journey until the old way of thinking was completely emptied of relevance. And so it seemed to me in this tran
sitional period that beef was a constituent element in meat loaf, and probably, therefore, I should avoid beef. This was not, as I recall it, a difficult thing to give up, and there was no real cost to doing so. Every right-thinking person recognizes that there are reasonable health-related criteria for avoiding beef. Hamburgers are petri dishes for listeria and salmonella, all manner of bacteria, and high cholesterol is a likely outcome after a lifetime of red meat, and I have heart disease in my family. Even worse, there is bovine growth hormone to contend with, excessive use of antibiotics in the food chain, etc. People approaching middle age, these days, often come to rethink red meat, unless they are ranchers or reactionaries who feel that there is some kind of pride inherent in red meat. I gave it up easily, and I don’t remember regretting it.
There things stood for a while. I came to think I’d had an inexplicable reaction to the meat loaf, a bodily one, like Franny Glass passing out while saying the Jesus Prayer. A conversion experience. I did not care to look deeply into my own motives. Abjection is powerfully physical. One does not want to drink blood, one does not want to touch the excremental wastes of the human body, one avoids maggoty strongholds. Such was my experience of beef. I didn’t want to think of a steak as the thigh of any animal, but I could not, it seemed, avoid doing so. As it happens, for eight or nine years in the nineties I taught at a summer program at Bennington College, and Bennington College, for reasons that are not hard to fathom (alternative culture! students! environmental consciousness!), had vegetarian fare in abundance in the cafeteria. One summer while I was teaching there (1998, I think) I decided to see if I could go a week without eating any meat.
Those Bennington vegetarians sure were lucky. Not a meal went by during my week of vegetarian experiment in which there was not some rather delicious mushroom item next pan over to the sinews of animal body that were laid out in charming fillets for those who were still that way inclined. I chose the vegetarian fare, and I also became an adept at odd configurations of salad at the salad bar (just beets and chickpeas! only things that are yellow! extra helpings of hot pepper!), and quickly the week was at an end, and it was a welcome surprise. I decided to go for another week. This was not a hard decision to make, then, because I was just biting off a little bit at a time. There were two qualifications, though. I was not ready to renounce bacon, though I had not eaten any recently, and I was not ready to renounce fish.
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