Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  Hold it. That about blind men walking the streets of unknown cities. The familiar City has been weirding out lately—flashes from a movie yet to be seen.

  “The mathematics of life and death and time,” said Charley, “make sense numerologically, the way that the I Ching and the periodic table do.”

  “What else happens in the movie?” asked Wittman, remembering when we were kids and poor. The one kid who got to go to the show—Wittman had often been that kid; so had Charley—told both double features and all of the serials to a crowd of listening friends.

  “I haven’t told the best part,” said Charley. “The young soldier lost from his regiment follows the light from a candelabra of many branches, carried by a dark princess, one of two princesses, twins. She takes him through catacombs, where he meets houris and fellaheens. The soldier makes love to one of the dark twins, then he meets her identical twin, and becomes very confused visually and morally. What is love? What is faithfulness when in love with a twin? One of these sisters comes to his room, which is inside the Moorish cave, and tells him that she will elope with a man with a beautiful beard. Such a man places a ladder up to her window. The ladder falls. The soldier rolls down the hill to the foot of a gallows. There is a pile of cannonballs and skulls. He screams and runs away, and takes refuge in the inn, where he reads, ‘Once in a distant war …’ Mozart-like music. Cannons boom. The soldier hurries to read to the end of this book about his life. But the movie doesn’t end neat there or at the gallows. A lot happens—wars, Napoleonic, Carlist—between one gallows and the next, and you are not returning to the same place or the same time.

  “I went to the movie the second time to count how many times the soldier finds himself on the hanging hill, and to note more exactly what propels him there. The ladder falls, the man with the beautiful beard does not become part of the life of the woman in the window. That ladder is a line where planes intersect. Cannons. Perhaps the young soldier dies. Perhaps he sleeps and awakes from dreams. Perhaps he is reprieved, and is cut down, not hung by the neck until he dies—one can’t die hung by the foot. No two gallows scenes are alike—the scaffold is farther away or closer, higher, lower, approached from the top of the hill, the bottom, the side. There is one hanged man or many, perhaps depending on tight shot or wide-angle. Have you seen tarot cards? One of the cards is the Hanged Man, and he hangs upside down by one foot. He looks like an upside-down 4. I think the hanged men are tricksters. During other action, they come down off their gibbets and change their costumes and rearrange their poses.”

  At this point, a girl of the group by the fireplace came over and interrupted, asking Charley very seriously, “Excuse me, but some of us have dropped L.S.D. Will you be our guide? We should have gotten a guide ahead of time. You wouldn’t mind, would you?” Those were the days when heads prepared their trips carefully, and chose a watchman who promises to remain straight. Just in case. At sea, a shore. They must have picked Charley because they overheard his articulateness in the midst of revels. If called upon, the guide tells the tour group his wisdom, such as the reality he’s seeing back in the straight world. He sometimes takes their temperatures and blood pressures, and writes down anything memorable that is said. Such as discoveries. Mostly what you give them is your composure. No mind-fucking. “You can help too, if you feel like it.” Wittman was invited too.

  “I have yet to tell the best part. Good thing,” said Charley, “that I saw The Saragossa Manuscript for the third time. The flick surprised me with logic. I love logic. I wouldn’t have gone four times if I weren’t getting intelligence. I was mapping the flow chart of the lifeplots. I counted how far inside a story inside a story inside a story inside a story we go. And suddenly I saw that everything made sense. Because that ladder falls, the levanter with the beautiful beard does not elope with the woman in the window. Between scenes and cuts and juxtapositions are strict cause-and-effect links. Nothing is missing. The main link chain, though, is spoken. You have to listen for it. There’s a man who says to the soldier that the soldier in the book is the man’s grandfather. At the end, it’s that grandfather as a young soldier who runs into the chapel/inn with the book under his arm, then runs out the door and up the hill. The first soldier is fighting in a nineteenth-century war. The grandfather is in a mid-eighteenth-century war. And he has a father, a man in a periwig, early eighteenth-century. We are connected to one another in time and by blood. Each of us is so related, we’re practically the same person living infinite versions of the great human adventure. Now I see more of my father and my grandfather.

  “Here’s the best part: A man with a patch over one eye climbs up through a trapdoor. As he lifts his eyepatch, and emerges into the room, he crosses over into new and larger realms. I am like him. I came out of the Cinema, and as I walked home, passing the doorways on Shattuck Avenue, and looking up at the windows of the apartments above the stores, I understood that inside each door and window someone was leading an entire amazing life. A curtain moved, a lamp switched on—a glimpse of a life that’s not mine. A woman walked from one room to another; if I ran up the stairs, I’d meet her and be in another life. After that movie, Shattuck Avenue is a street of an unknown city. I’m going to spend the rest of my life discovering the streets of unknown cities. I can follow anybody into a strange other world. He or she will lead the way to another part of the story we’re all inside of.”

  The purpose of the population explosion is to make all the multitudinous ways of being human. We are like the water of the I Ching, fluxing and flowing, seeking and filling each crack of each stream, each ocean. Charley was beautifully keeping his charges from wigging out. He got them to be inhabiting the same movie. Here we are, miraculously on Earth at the same moment, walking in and out of one another’s lifestories, no problems of double exposure, no difficulties crossing the frame. Life is ultimately fun and doesn’t repeat and doesn’t end.

  “I wanted to go see The Saragossa Manuscript again, and appreciate it some more, but its run was over. I’ve been on the lookout for it ever since. It hasn’t come back to the Cinema, and it’s not in the film catalogs. Do me a favor, if any of you find it, call me collect no matter from where or at what time of night. I want to play my memory against its trickiness and its thickness.”

  Wittman felt showered with luck that poured from the air. He’d been given a gift; someone at a party has sought him out and told him The Saragossa Manuscript. He can’t die. He can’t die without seeing this movie. Life has more enjoyment to come. Yes, life is tricky and thick.

  For years afterwards, Wittman kept asking after The Saragossa Manuscript. He helped start a film society that held Czech and Polish festivals, but did not find it. Nor did he meet anyone else who had seen it. It will be as if he’d hallucinated that movie, a dream he’d had when he was a younger and more stoned monkey. And Charley, who saw it four times in three nights, will not see the movie again. It will become his dream too. Some of those who heard the movie told at the fireside will think they’d seen it. All of them will remember a promise of something good among cannonballs and skulls.

  Merciful guide. Heads that had sailed away were gently alighting. They had swum in and as star life, then ocean life. Then they had trogged onto land, and sensed dinosaurs, which were not bald grey as in museums; they had feathers of fiery colors. The hot wind that arose was a flock of dragons flying through the house. We had worshipped winged dragons—Mo’o the terrible lizard god, phoenixes, the Garuda, Horus. It does happen when journeying through a time of caveman wars that stoned heads will break out into fights, but everybody here was descended from tribes of benign vegetarians who had lived in gardening climates. Back in the straight world, in fact, we are citizens of a country that is militarizing us. We have to take barbiturates to keep from getting riled up. Now the wings of light were folding closed, and the heads were at word-understanding. Charley had guided them so well that the visionaries will come away talking story about this movie that they’d gone to. He set th
em to work applying their word-delight to finding a name to call a thing that the last time you saw it, it was in a hallucination or a story or on another planet or in a thought or dream but makes a crossover into the real world. “If we can name it, then we can more easily map the worlds,” he said. “Remember the antique necklace in Vertigo? It was around the neck of Carlotta Valdez in the painting. Then Kim Novak as the unearthly Madeline has it; she dies—and it shows up on Judy, just somebody taking a walk on Geary Street on her lunchbreak from Magnin’s. What would you call that necklace?”

  Oh, what a guide that Charley is, leading these wide-open feminine minds right past the Bates Motel with its shower and the desiccated mother in the rocking chair spinning aboutface. Unafraid, they were getting off on more examples of things that cross over.

  “Yeah, you mean that thing that you see after you think the nightmare is ended. An extra chill goes up you because it proves that it had happened. A flower or a ring or a coin that’s so small, it fell through a crack in the Twilight Zone.”

  “You think you’re home safe, but sitting on the mantelpiece or falling out of your pocket is a souvenir from the nightmare.”

  “Yeah, what do you call that?”

  “That’s what you would call the torn slippers of the twelve dancing princesses who disappeared every night.”

  “And Cinderella’s glass slipper.”

  “And the rose in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Blood and Roses, the sign of the vampiress, Carmilla, played by Annette Vadim. On the airplane out of the Black Forest, the rose on Elsa Martinelli’s traveling suit withers—she’s the next vampiress.”

  What happens if you were to cross over? You were a Saragossa or a Slipper or an Ishi, last of his tribe.

  A head opened his mouth wide at Wittman, as if he were his reliable Chinese-American dentist, and asked, “Hey, objectively, do my teeth look longer to you?”

  Wittman got out of the way of any biting. He nodded, smiling, not to bum the man out. “Yeah, I guess your teeth may be somewhat longer, but I’m not certain because I didn’t examine them earlier for comparison.” It’s morally wrong to throw a hand grenade into a mind helpless on L.S.D.

  “You want to look in my mirrors?” said a helpful girl. “Right now you hardly have any pores. I mean your pores are very fine. You must be going through your baby stage. You want a look?” She stood up and circled in her India Imports mirror-cloth dress, and the acid heads peered at themselves in the many many mirrors. Whatever they saw did not freak them out—not fly’s eyes, or pieces of ego, or bout of the uglies, or predator’s teeth. The color of their coalescent aura was salmon-coral.

  “There is no physical organ for guilt,” said the cathedral head. “I am so glad. I have no physical organ for guilt. But I have a question. I want to know—I do feel clearly that I have a soul. There is such a thing as a soul. I feel it. I started to send it out of my body, but got scared and pulled it back. I may have thrown my soul out of kilter. How do you reconcile unity and identity?”

  “Oh, you dear brave man,” said a perfectly beautiful girl, who laughed a wonderful laugh. Wittman wished that he too were spiritually far enough along to ask such an advanced question. How do you reconcile unity and identity? “You and the universe,” said the girl, glad for each. “The universe and you.”

  Me and the universe. The universe and me.

  At last, this party was getting somewhere, fluxing and flowing okay—when Wittman got bushwhacked. A chick who had been studying his face said, “Hey, I can see both his eyes. I’m looking at him from the side, and I can see either eye.” What she say? I look like a flounder fish? Unless the right retort comes to him fast, this is going to hurt for years. Everybody was checking out his profile. Admiringly, right? “Thanks a lot,” he said. Some retort. “Turn that way,” said the rude girl. “See? Both eyes.”

  He turned full face to her. “I don’t have much of a bridge,” he said. What was he doing, justifying his nose. Here’s her chance to say she meant a compliment. His eyes opened and shut from self-consciousness.

  She said, “Can you see out of there? How can you see out of there?” She was squinting her own Caucasoid eyes to peer into his, allegedly, slitty eyes. And, god help him—instead of saying, “What is this Nazi shit?”—he explained the advantages of our kind of eyes. “They’re evolved for use in desert and in snow. We don’t need sunglasses.” Which isn’t true. We wear shades, we cool. “Finns have this kind of eyes too. Finnish people from Finland, whose language is related to Japanese.” Oh, shut up, Wittman. The girl moved to his other side. “Come look,” she said.

  Beside him came Yoshi Ogasawara, a Nisei girl of Okinawan ancestry, whom he’d never asked out because his sexual hang-up was that he was afraid of smart pretty women. She had carried a double major of pre-med and ballet, and was now at the U.C. Med Center. Yoshi grabbed Wittman by the wrist, and announced to the world: “He’s got an epicanthic fold, the same as I do. See?” He fell in hate with her. What’s she taking him for? An anthro specimen. Homo epicanthus. Pushing her face forward to show her eyes, weighted down with false eyelashes, she was entertaining the party with our eyes. She batted two black brushes that were glued on with strips of electrician’s tape, black eyeliner tailing out to here, blue-green mascara lids, and the lower lids rimmed with silver paste. Her eyelids were the puffy type, and the tight tape pressed into them at mid-puff; skin sort of lapped over the top edge of the tape, and made a crease per lid. She turned from side to side, giving everybody a look-see. With an index finger, she was pointing out her epicanthus, which is at the inner corner of the eye, when this (white) guy reached over and caught her finger, held it, and said, “You have beautiful eyes.” It was Wittman ought to have done that. Why wasn’t he the one to have leapt up, and taken her in his arms, and spoken up, “You are beautiful”? Because he can’t stand her; her eyelids are like a pair of skinks.

  “No. Oh, no, they’re not,” she giggled. “I’m going to have them operated on for double lids. I have single lids. These are single lids.”

  “What?” “You’re what?” What? You people want two eyelids for each eye? Like an owl or a cat, one coming down, one across? Like an iguana? A shark? You don’t mean you’ve only got one eye that’s lidded. One of your eyes doesn’t have a lid? They were white people, and didn’t know what she was talking about. They do not have those phrases, “double lid” and “single lid,” Yoshi. Those are our words. No, not ours, they are Japanese-American idioms, and just because they’re English words, you think white people can understand them. A.J.A. words. Chinese are not that subtle to have a thing about a fold in the eyelid. But, yes, eyelashes are important—they are a primary sex characteristic. Minnie and Daisy would look exactly like Mickey and Donald if not for eyelashes.

  She did not know when to stop. “The upper lid—see?—is prolonged. See? The top lid dips over the inner corner of their eyes.” Their. “I can ski all day long without getting snow blindness.”

  Oh, for the right existential Zen act that would re-define everything. Change the world. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Why were these people listening to this stupid girl, as if she were leading them in sane discussion? She was opening her eyes wide, parting her fake eyelashes top row from bottom row.

  “But we came from the Tropic of Cancer,” he said. What a weak thing—a fact—to say. And his vow to always identify us as born here—broken. “Eskimos wear goggles,” he said. “They have to cup their eyes with these goggles made out of wood that look like egg-carton cups with a slit across them.” What’s he talking about Eskimo goggles? He’d made a move when he should be upsetting the chessboard.

  “What is this Nazi anthropology?” he said.

  She didn’t get it.

  “You’re getting surgery on your eyelids?” asked a pitying white girl, the one who pointed out his flounder-fish eyes to the multitudes. “Are you having trouble seeing?”

  The soon-to-be Doctor Ogasawara laughed. “No, I’m not having trouble seeing. I’m going t
o have my single lids cut, and a line sewn in. The plastic surgeon—Dr. Flowers of Honolulu, the best eye man—will remove some of the fatty tissue, and the lid will fold better. Double up.”

  Somebody asked why, and as she tried to answer—they were not understanding—disconcertedness overran her. How did she come to be using this as party conversation? “Because they—they don’t like eyes like ours. We don’t find my kind of eyes attractive. We like eyes that …” She was prating. “We like eyes like his.” She pointed her finger at Wittman’s face. “He’s got double lids. I’ve got single lids.” She brazened on. “You’ve got good eyelids, Wittman. He’s got a fold. It’s a common operation. It’s one of the more simple cosmetic surgical procedures.” She was looking to Wittman. Help. “You know,” she said, appealing to him, Be my ally. “Oh, you know. You know what I mean.”