Yikes! said the newscaster jovially. There was heavy rain in South Africa. Flooding, which had already killed six people, was about to destroy a c————— farm at the border with Botswana. This odious farmer saved the hotbed of shoes and handbags and murder by letting all fifteen thousand of them into the Limpopo River.
31 MARCH 1983
It was rare for a four-year-old boy to feel his heart was being boiled in acid when he saw the word a———— but so it had been. Neal’s pop-up animal alphabet book had, on the first page, a monster with gaping jaws and huge teeth and gleaming jelly tongue. Rough with sores, it roared its name: A————! He always skipped that page.4
One day after school his mother was not home. At night on the telephone she said they gave her a little boy. His name was Rabindranath. Rabi for short.
Like Neal, his father had some afternoons off from school. They went to visit the next day, but Neal was not allowed to see Rabi. You’re too dirty, his father explained on the way home, because Neal had not washed his hands.
That night in the hospital he took a moving staircase and saw them basking on the beams in fluorescent slime, mouths propped agape by natural levers. They lay on their sides revealing tiled bellies of celadon and their jaws hung open sideways like the lifts. They told Neal that if he took the lift he would turn to poured concrete.
At home, when he was about to go to sleep, Neal pressed against hard armor because they were about to eat him! He woke screaming next to a heap of books in his bed. Nina hit the shared bedroom wall and told him to shut up.
The a————s were everywhere. At school Sister Mary gave lessons about tooth brushing with Nessie, a squishy, high-voiced a———— puppet who lived on her hand during the day and in the loch at night. There were wooden splinter-scaled a————s called dinosaurs on the ledges and in the toy box. In the afternoon he used up all the green paint (there was no more blue, the favorite) and had to use gray, and everything he did—cars, flowers, Rabi—looked like a————s. On the way home he saw their swampy homes in moss; their backs, buried in mud, in tire marks in the ground.5
While his mother was in the hospital, dinner was, alternately, Weetabix, take-out curry and pizza (that night). He sat with his father and Nina in front of the television and watched John Humphrys on the BBC: Rebel crickets were back from matches.
Daddy, asked Neal, what do a————s think about?
Eating, he said. Nina snickered.6
The next day at school there was still no blue paint, so he read all the animal books. The United States had the highest population of a————s: They were in the bathtubs and washbasins and in swimming pools and the streets and Americans kept baby ones and when they grew up they ate you unless you put them on the subway by flushing them. In New York there was a friendly c————— on East Eighty-Eighth Street called Lyle. Babar sometimes fought c—————s but also valued their advice in running the country. Otherwise they would eat him. Napoleon brought them to France from Egypt. There was an awful, cackling family of a————s, dapper in fur-lined wool, squabbling, plowing through crowds, breaking balloons. A————s all around.
8 FEBRUARY 1993
In the weeks between sentencing and his mother’s fourteen-year incarceration, there was cold, black howling.
His mother built a shrine for Rabi in the coat closet and would close the door, several times a day, to wail. At first the neighbors would call the police. But she was already going to prison.
When the day came, he didn’t see her. The front door clicked behind him and he heard the howling again. Neal turned back. Then he ran to the subway. The 1, 2, 3, and 9 lines spilled south like ribbons of blood, and the A, C, and E tangled like veins downtown, and when he considered the corporeal possibility of other lines’ other colors his eyes fluttered open.
He was almost late. Sister Agatha pulled him into her office, which, with wainscoted walls and myrrhish funk, looked and smelled like The Sound of Music.
Sister Catherine told me your mother left today. Are you all right?
Yes.
And your family? How are they?
Neal knew the answer but said: I want to become a nun.
Excuse me?
I’ve—
Are you even Catholic?
No. I asked my dad once if I could convert and he said no. Besides, roles for men in the Catholic Church are so limited.
If he had said such a thing before the incident, she would have laughed, but her face darkened, and her breath caught fire like a dragon’s.
Neal, she said, you cannot be a nun. You might find a way to be one, and won’t like what happens.
By day’s end, the nuns began to resemble c—————s: Their habits were very dark blue, which could as easily be very dark green, and hid their necks—c—————s had no necks—and most in advanced age had the tendency to walk with their shoulders leading, which lent the appearance of hind legs.7
25 JANUARY 2013
Neal rented studio space in an ex–bus garage in Bushwick. He was freezing in four layers and winter jacket. The flat, taupe space had comforting, creaky floors, and glimmering white8 noise from the machinery. There was free coffee. He filled the paper cup with only a couple of ounces so the acrid, dark potato water wouldn’t get cold, and got up for refills.
People trained to look were watching him, again. Despite Neal’s cinereous costumes of moth holes, his beauty offered some protection. In France a drunk Bavarian told him he was the bastard son of Helen of Troy and Vitruvian Man, which lent Neal the comforting notion that his grandfathers were Zeus in swan form and the Doric column. Nevertheless he received mostly the disadvantages of optimal geometry. Strangers poked him like a piece of public art or missing pound of flesh. He was a silent muse, never listened to—yes and no were similar words, he thought, black and white in their affect—and had a muscular memory so underdeveloped that, on mornings after, he couldn’t tell whether there had been a man or woman and had to look for clues.9
Neal secured vellum with rulers to his drawing board, inhaled, and uncapped a marker.
He tried to caricature the a————. Whimsical fun! He could change the rest of the illustration, which was much easier than drawing a single c————— in the style of the current piece. Then he added one scale too many, and the whole thing fell apart.
Neal tried to make a wash of green, soft and laurel. He eyedropped water as if the whole thing weren’t unsalvageable.
Then he tried parts. One tooth. One eye. The blank space between the tail and hind legs. Each shocked him off the page.
He threw away everything and almost regretted not asking whether the client preferred a————s or c—————s but they would have asked him for pictures of both.
Despite the morning’s promise, Neal took out the painting in question and couldn’t decide whether to scrape out a Phthalo-black road. He was running out of paint, except for a birthday gift of handmade Italian and French earths, still unopened. He sliced his knife across the canvas like a Roman barber.
3 DECEMBER 1998
In college Neal was failing cognitive psychology. The professor, a Zen Buddhist, gave him a meditation guide and a one-year-old a————, eighteen inches long, sweet and grassy and delightful as a watercolor jungle.
He took the wriggling baby a———— back to the dormitory and set it on the sofa. It began tearing and gnawing the sofa, tossing about its foam flesh, ripping the spines from books, soiling his bed scarlet with the sofa’s body. (It had been alive?)
Neal used a calling card to reach his mother in prison. It’s ruining everything.
Send it here, she said.
Neal took the a———— on the bus downtown. He heard whispering and grumbling and soon the bus was empty. Even the driver left. He walked the rest of the way.
In the rush to send away the a———— he forgot to put on shoes. They found a shoe store, which glowed boiled-yolk sulfur from skele
tal shelves and was, like everything else downtown, going out of business. Neal shoved his feet into a pair of Pyongyang metro-gray Velcro sneakers without unfastening anything and shouted to the salesman that they were too small, but the a———— was tearing up what remained of the shop. Neal sighed and picked up the a————.
He tiptoed in geisha-bound feet to the post office, a———— under his arm.
Hi, Neal told the postal worker. I would like to mail this a———— to the women’s prison in Plattsburgh, New York. How much will it cost?
You can’t mail a————s, sir. No animals are allowed in the postal mail, said the postal worker.
Could I please buy a box? Neal asked. The medium-large one. Priority Mail.10
The postal worker groaned and brought him the box. Neal wrestled the a———— into the carton, flapped it shut, and stood over it with crossed elbows so that it couldn’t escape. It was scratching open the cardboard, growling, poking out mother-of-pearl claws.
Hi, Neal told the postal worker from the same place in his throat. I would like to mail this box to the women’s prison in Plattsburgh, New York.
I said you can’t mail a————s!
He watched the a———— run round and round, forming a tire of kudzu.
25 JANUARY 2013
Neal was congratulated for securing representation from a wellknown commercial gallery, but had been avoiding it: Despite his advancing age, painting was to Neal a childish way of understanding why humans had so many ear bones. Dealers plied him with boxed Prosecco and asked about his ceramics, of which he had none.
He squinted at the newly painted walls, which had the glacial quality of octogenarian hair. Sarah, an old friend, was a gingery ex-modern dancer from Cornwall. When the gallery hired her, she was allowed to bring two artists, one of whom was Neal. He recognized the directors from a previous boxed-wine incident but agreed anyway.
We’re so excited! Sarah said, embracing him.
Yes, said Neal. But it’s not quite … I was hoping for your advice.
All right. Neal followed Sarah to her office, which seemed to function, for now, as storage. He cleared a table of boxes. She perfunctorily offered tea. He slid open the portfolio. She winced. He, generous with paint, suspected smudging.
Sarah put on her reading glasses and knotted her delicate brow. I wanted to ensure you were, you know, seen.
We’re not selling it for parts, right.
We liked your … what was it, Hippocrates series.
That stuff was a bit naive, said Neal. It’s from grad school.
We discussed this in November.
It’s not unrelated to the humorism series, said Neal.
I didn’t expect something so literal, Sarah sighed. This is naive.
Perhaps that’s the humor of humors, I just …
She stepped back and put her hands together. All right. So it’s a river of bile and phlegm with c—————s and a————s and snakes and things. In the style of Courbet.11
Neal gasped. Oh my God.
18 MAY 2003
Neal’s French was immaculate, a talent he attributed to being denied Bengali by his naturalized Scottish father: We don’t wants you to sounds likes them wogs and Pakis, innit laddie. He rented a chambre de bonne from a Vietnamese doctor, found a job at a garage and soon had a robust knowledge of argot that led many to think he was a thug, work in group shows, and a healthy addiction to walks in the Bois de Boulogne. Still, after three years, he was beginning to feel uneasy. His friend Zoë referred him to Jean-Louis Katz.
The sprightly, bespectacled Katz, a Lacanian psychoanalyst from southern Ontario, enjoyed rocking back and forth in brightly colored sneakers. Today they were the chemical orange of gas fires, the sun, hazardous waste, apocalypse, raw carrots. Incongruously, Katz smoked cigarillos, but not around Neal, who was sensitive to smoke. Still he absorbed the vanillic odor, soothing and fetid.
So at the dep, when you were ringing up the groceries, a man’s presence reminded you of a c—————.
It’s a garage. Actually his car reminded me of an iguana.
Thus the car reminded you of a c—————.
Neal said, Most reptiles are too primitive to experience any kind of affection. They only express fear and anger. But iguanas can develop qualities of trust and calm in order to get along with others.
Like your mother.
My mother is not a reptile. It’s my amygdala.12
Oh-ho, I don’t think so. How about your brother?
I’ve always had the a———— phobia.
You mentioned that your brother had force brute and a skin condition. And your phobia began around the time of his birth.
I don’t think of him anymore, said Neal. You speak as if I killed him.
Katz paused. That’s interesting. Let’s stop there.
The session had been eighteen minutes long. Katz charged Neal forty-two euros a week for three sessions, a steep discount for which he received a subsidy. Neal muttered, Thanks when he handed Katz fifty, to which Katz said, OK.
When told OK in response to thank you Neal felt rejected, another thing from his father, who thought OK, you’re welcome, it’s nothing, no worries, or anything other than no, thank YOU were all extremely rude.
Hey, you got a toonie? asked Katz. Neal shook his head.
25 JUNE 2009
Nebraska was not on the way to anywhere. One summer Neal received a grant to attend a residency outside Omaha. The most exciting images were from the map: He was impressed by how many right angles there were. He saw bluffs and windmills and sunflowers and soft, blond straw. Flat land, flat green, flat sun, flat sky.13
A sculptor dropped him off on the way to see her daughter in Kansas. He expected 1970s cop-show staircases, but the building was a former secondary school. Three-F, his mother had said. The interior had the same coffee-bleach stench he remembered from grade school and the same faux-terrazzo linoleum in brown and green.
Neal rang the doorbell and heard the metal shuffle of four locks. His mother, in aging, had become her inverse. Everything about her that had been lush was dry, everything black was white, everything plump was thin, everything soft was hard. And vice versa. She had been Lakshmi round, creamy, cow-buttered peonies, but now her beauty was taut and sphinx-like, all armor and needles, and alien, like a temple carving.
Her accent had been evolving in prison and was broadening to suit the plains. She offered tea and microwaved a Tetley bag with a sugary shower and milk of chalk.
She asked what he was doing in Nebraska. He said he was at an artists’ residency. Michael Jackson was dead, of anesthesia and displaced longing. His mother used to love Michael Jackson. She said she was going to go out for a while, and if he wanted food she could take him to the diner across the highway. He declined. The apartment had two bedrooms, but the spare was full of large boxes.
He fell asleep on the sofa and had a horrible dream. Neal worked at a hockey rink in Guelph, Ontario, and was instructed to prepare the arena for the evening match. A team of a————s had challenged a team of sharks to a hockey game. The blood match of the century, his colleagues enthused.
The a————s had many requests. They presented detailed instructions in ghoulish maroon a———— calligraphy, which Neal guessed wasn’t really ink.
1. Please keep players frozen at –3,000 degrees Celsius until match time.
2. Dead pucks/models/human beings will be discarded at the side of the rink.
When he woke at 6:00 a.m. his face was wet. Neal inhaled sharply. His mother had still not returned home. He smoothed the sofa cushion and walked out, locking the door to the best of his abilities without a key. He ran through the corridors and walked north, hoping to hitchhike to the nearest bus station.
25 JANUARY 2013
Cosmos and his wife, Laura—pronounced the Petrarchan way, Lahoora—last year bought a house. They had only moved in a month ago: Laura, from a small town in the Spanish P
yrenees, found brownstones to be of poor quality. She decided to demolish and rebuild the interior. When Neal asked why she bought the house in the first place, Cosmos offered, We have problems with our architect.
Neal saw a bell but decided it wouldn’t ring. He opened the door and saw tarpaulins and drop cloths suspended from what once were floors and ceilings. It was large enough to be livable anyway.
Hey, said Cosmos. Would you knock down the dining room and kitchen walls?
Right now?
No, dummy. I want to liberate the space.
What do you want to do with it? Neal asked.
Cosmos chortled. Just kidding. How’s things?
Emma, Cosmos’s four-year-old daughter, bounded into the room. Initially Neal didn’t understand her, but now that she was older they had things in common, like a fear of wild animals. We got the pictures!
Neal was queasy. Laura had commissioned twenty-six animal alphabet cards in watercolor from a renowned commercial children’s painter. Emma began to take out the cards, protected from them-selves by an exotic polymer he didn’t recognize.
Look at the letter A!
Leave him alone, darling, said Laura, walking in with crossed arms. He’s hungry.
She took off Fridays not because she was underemployed, but because she was partner in an international branding consultancy (Neal still didn’t know what that was) and did as she wished. Six months earlier, Laura and Cosmos had had a son named Xavier. Neal had met the baby twice and found him boring: Xavier lacked a reasonable command of French and was insufficiently excited about having a name that began with the letter X.
Laura clicked against the soon-to-be-excavated parquet floor on low-heeled ankle boots to kiss Neal on both cheeks. Hello, she said, dropping him in a device used to purify nappies.
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