by T E. D Klein
The poem's seventh section, "A Celebration," threw in the towel, philosophically speaking, declaring, in effect, You can't fight this new god, or at least you can't defeat him. The narrator instead preferred to celebrate him by building a creature in his image-"A thing to walk among us, and carry on His work":
I'll set it free to murder and maraud, To serve the dictates of this nameless god.
The eighth section was the so-called "Chant of the Fabricant," the part the rock critic had likened to "a recipe," in which the narrator, in the tones of an occult Julia Child, exhorted the reader to
"Gather garbage, offal, and pollution
From the waste places of the world . . .
From the dumps, the cities' sewers, and dry deserts,
From the refuse of the shore."
(Perhaps, mused Nadelman, this was why the song had so excited Huntoon out in Long Beach.)
The result was to be mixed together, with a boulder for the head, and shaped into "a semblance of the monster in ourselves."
At last it was time to give the creature life, to release the thing to wander the world and teach humanity the truth. The ninth sec-tion had therefore been titled "Prolegomenon to the Creature." Seated m his li ving room, Nadelman scowled as he must have scowled twenty years before to notice that the section contained another unfortunate typo, perhaps even a malicious one: "a message from beyond the veil of night" had become "a massage." He wondered if anyone else had noticed.
The section also contained the Invocation that the old kraut actor had narrated.
The hunger of the worms that feast
On sacrificial goat.
The yammers of the pious priest
That echo till my song has ceased
Till he's devoured by a beast
Who tears away his throat!
The god was invited to please breathe life into "my humble creature builded in Your image." Begged the narrator: "Make him truly Your son."
In the final section, "The Creation," the creature rose. It was described: it had its parent's "lidless eyes and lipless mouth," "and poison in its glance, and in its touch"; it was a thing "that fastens with its hands and won't let go."
With a single mad gesture the narrator commanded it-"Rise, thou, and do thy Father's bidding. Teach us to fear."
Here the poem ended. As if to prevent any reader from lingering too long under the spell of its gloomy last lines, it was followed, on the same page, by a breezy drawing of a group of Union students sunning themselves on the lawn beside the college chapel.
If Nadelman thought for a moment that he was out of the woods-and for brief periods at the office on Thursday, he did- he was quickly set straight, for on Friday he returned shampooed and showered from his lunchtime workout at the gym to find a phone message from Hun-i oon waiting for him: Went upstairs this morning & the only thing I found was its gloves.
"He said you'd know what he meant," the secretary said, with a tiny lift of her tweezed eyebrows to signal commiseration.
Nadelman nodded. "Yeah, I do. It's good news, in fact." Even as he said it, he wasn't sure, but he forced himself to smile as he rounded her desk and continued into his office, telling himself that it was good news. Maybe the thing had been eaten by the birds. Didn't seagulls live on garbage?
That night he stayed out past twelve, ostensibly from having bar-hopped with two old Union alums just in from the Coast, but in fact from having spent a celebratory evening with Cele in her rent-controlled apartment on Ninth Street. Waiting for him on the kit-chen table, alongside a tuition bill from Michael's school and an L.L. Bean catalog, was another postcard from Huntoon, this one a black-and-white view of the Long Beach boardwalk at midseason-a view that stirred memories of his childhood, even as he read the postmark and realized that the card had obviously been mailed several days before, in response to Nadelman's include-me-out letter. He studied the picture for almost a minute in an effort to put off reading Huntoon's message, searching the boardwalk and beach for a small, skinny boy in the photo that could have been himself.
Giving up, he swallowed and read the card.
"I don't see how you can deny the God. He says He knows you. He did breathe life into His servant just like in the song & He's everything you said He was. Well you did get one thing wrong, He does have a name. He's called The Hungerer."
Rhoda had, touchingly, been waiting up for him, lying propped up in bed immersed in last month's Commentary-something he would never have found Cele doing-or at least pretending to be immersed in it so as to make a pretty picture when he came into the room. Maybe half-consciously she suspected what was going on, harmless though Nadelman swore to himself it was. Either way, he felt guilty.
Or maybe it was Huntoon's little kiss-off that bothered him, that bit about "The Hungerer." Nadelman sensed a wolfish smirk in it, like a tiny twisted vein of poison. It gnawed at him, that phrase. And he knew why, too.
"This sounds absolutely crazy," he told Rhoda, as he sat on the bed after recounting-in just enough detail, he hoped-his evening's adventures at a trio of Yorkville bars. "The guy's really got me spooked. It's like he's reading my mind. I'm sure I've seen that phrase somewhere before."
"In the rock song?" There was impatience in her voice. He knew she wanted him under the sheets with her.
"No, that's just it. It doesn't appear in the song, I'm sure of that. And it's not in the Unicorn, either. But somehow I still associate it with the goddamn poem."
She looked blank, unwilling to be drawn into the game. "So?" she said at last. "Where's it from?"
He shrugged. "I just don't know. It could be in my original typescript."
"But you would have handed that in to the magazine."
"Yes, but I may still have the carbon."
Until uttering those words, he hadn't decided on what he would do. But now he realized that he couldn't go to bed without assuring himself that Huntoon was mistaken. Guiltily he stood, promising his wife he'd be back in a few minutes, but knowing she would probably be asleep by the time he returned. It was just as well; he doubted he could summon up much passion for her tonight anyway.
"Close the door when you go out," she said tonelessly. Before he had shut it behind him, she had already snapped off the light.
He had no trouble finding the carbon of the poem; right below the stack of old Unicorns he saw it, a sheaf of onionskins fastened with a rusty staple. One seldom came across such things anymore in these days of the Xerox machine. He recognized, in the smeared black ink, the slightly uneven letters of his old second-hand Royal portable.
He scanned the poem quickly, though carefully enough to see that it was the same as the published version. There was nothing in it, not a single line, about the Rival God's having a name. The discovery came as a relief: Huntoon stood revealed as just another madman, not even in touch with reality, much less with a god.
He was about to put away the suitcase once again, but the thought of rejoining his wife, of tiptoeing back to that darkened room and sliding sheepishly into the bed where she lay angry and unfulfilled, made him pause; or perhaps it was simply that he knew he'd blame himself if he gave up the hunt so soon. He would have to go all the way back to his original draft; it was worth the extra effort to make absolutely sure Huntoon was wrong.
Below the carbon typescript-bless his retentive nature!-was yellow legal-sized pad containing the handwritten draft of the original manuscript. He could see, even at the top, that he'd tried out several different titles: "Return of the Master." "Advent of the Master." "The Post-Modern Prometheus." "The Eighth Day of Creation." How solemn he had been in those days!
The long yellow sheets were a rat's nest of scribblings and cross-outs. Why, he wondered, had he bothered to save such stuff, this evidence of an inconstant purpose, of a disordered mind? Probably out of the same sense of self importance that had led him to write the poem in the first place. He'd believed-hoped, at least-that some-day someone would want to retrace step by step, phrase by phrase, hi
s proudest act of creation.
But he'd never expected that the someone would be him, and with so insane a purpose.
How obsessively he had fussed with things. Almost every line in the poem had undergone minor variations and alterations. "The idol of the abattoir" had started out life sans alliteration as "the idol of the slaughterhouse." The "god who stinks of carrion" had debuted more crudely as " a god who reeks of rotting meat"; no doubt he'd found "carrion" more poetic and hadn't been able to come up with a suitable midline rhyme for "reeks."(Listed in the margin beside it, shamelessly, were beaks, cheeks, leaks, peaks, speaks, shrieks, each one neatly crossed out.)
Funny, the things that had concerned him as a young man. There'd been lots of shuffling between "a god that" and "a god who," as if that were a matter of great moment. Curiously, one of the linei describing the creature-"That fastens with its hands and won't let go"-had originally been "that fastens with its hands and can't let go." The latter image was curiously disturbing; he wondered how he'd ever come up with it.
He was about to put the yellow sheets away when he came across a discarded line from the bottom of the seventh section. Above the couplet that, in the final draft, he'd settled on -
I'll set it free to murder and maraud,
To serve the dictates of the nameless god
-he saw an alternate line that he'd rejected, perhaps for want of a proper rhyme. There it was, right beside the newer version, carefully crossed out with three blue lines through it-his original thought:
To serve the dictates of The Hungerer.
For a moment, his eyes refused to focus in it; the pages seemed heavy in his hand. He remembered something Nicky had once told him back in college, about how you could disprove thousands upon thousands of phony haunted-house stories, reports of apparitions, UFO sightings, claims made by psychics and charlatans-but if even a single ghost or spell or saucer could truly be proved to exist, that one example would change everything forever. Grant the reality of
a single spirit and you found yourself faced with an entire cosmos of them. And it dawned on him, suddenly, that this was what had happened-that, in an instant, everything had changed: those two small words that stared at him from the page, eleven scribbled letters barely an inch long, had punched a single tiny hole in his universe, like the hole at the bottom of a bucket. He sat there, staring dumbly, as all his certainties leaked out.
Just as quickly he reached for explanations. These pages he'd been studying-might Huntoon, somehow, have seen them too? But where? Not even the editors of the Unicorn had seen this early draft. Nadelman himself had forgotten what was in it, much less that he'd ever penned that phrase.
The Hungerer . . .
What was it Huntoon had said?
"He knows you."
Impossible, he told himself. Impossible! He just plain wasn't going to admit it into his world. He felt a sudden affection for the yokel in the old joke, the one who, visiting the zoo, gazes wide-eyed at the giraffe towering above him, higher and stranger than anything in crea-tion has a right to be, and declares, "There ain't no such animal."
From outside came a low metallic scraping, followed by a clatter. It sounded as if it had come from just beyond his window, but he knew how sound carried in the city; three floors up was just like being on the sidewalk. He stood and peered down from the hall window. A trash can was lying on its side in the street, its lid beside it„Jike a mugged man whose hat had been knocked off. Vandalism, and for no reason except that the kids knew they got away with it these days; last week they'd painted swastikas on the old grey temple two blocks to the west and had smashed one of its rosy stained-glass windows. Well, he'd felt like smashing windows himself once. Above the street the narrow strip of sky was overcast, with no light but a cloudy yellow smudge that might have been the moon.
Warily he turned back to his problem, as if to an opponent who, while he'd lingered at the windowsill, had been standing behind him, waiting patiently. The possibility that Huntoon was right-that there was a being out there, that it had spoken to him, that all the words of Jizzmo's song were true-was just too preposterous to consider. After all, dammit, hadn't he himself made the whole thing up? He even remembered the circumstances of the writing: his dorm room, his desk shoved up against the wall at one end and his roommate's at the other, each with its own depressing little gooseneck lamp; the dreary winter afternoons, coming back from the library with an armload of poetry anthologies to inspire him, and which he'd be bring-ing back the following day; the snow against the window as he typed
the final draft, painstakingly whiting out his mistakes, as if the snow were covering his tracks. He'd been touched by no divine inspira-tion; the poem had been a thing of lowly choices, word after word. The influences on it were easy enough to trace; he could point to the origin of virtually every line.
The reference to the Fabricant's "living up an alley / in a house with poisoned glass" had been based on a boyhood superstition in his town, something about an old abandoned house near the ocean reputed to have "poison windows" it was dangerous to break. (The tale had probably been started by some real estate agent.) The creature with "its arms stuck from its head" had been a family joke-a bedraggled old stuffed seal that Nadelman had owned as a child, and which had been repaired this way after most of its stuffing had been lost. The monster's "lidless eyes and lipless mouth" had been inspired by the Black Lagoon movies they'd shown at Union on Friday nights. The line about "The god of Mars, of battles lost and won, I Who gives us stars but takes away the sun"- that had been lifted from Swinburne. He was certain of this because next to it he'd written "Swinburne, p.59."
The page number, he knew, referred to the old leather-bound notebook, his aunt's bar mitzvah gift. He retrieved it from the pile. Originally it had come equipped with one of those slim silver Mark Cross pens that were so uncomfortable to hold, but now the loop was empty. So were half the pages of the notebook; years ago he had turned to other projects and never gone back to it. On page 59 appeared the lines
The lord of love and loathing and of strife Who gives a star and takes a sun away
from Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon."
Idly he flipped through the earlier sections of the book, marveling at how little his handwriting had changed over the years. He was still the same boy who'd written, "Wonder if the high school year-book is the only thing I'll ever get to autograph," and "If God's so great, how come Rabbi Rosen smells like old potatoes?" There were dozens of fantasies about girls-"Linda J., all the more naked because of her freckles," "Margie D., nipples like a baby's thumbs"-and quotations from whatever he'd been reading, from Kidnapped to The Catcher in the Rye.
He had gone through the notebook while composing his poem, ran-sacking it for images and ideas, much as Coleridge had done before he fell asleep and dreamed up "Kubla Khan." And obviously the book had proved a treasure trove. Here, on page 46, was the story about the brain's resemblance to a Portuguese man-o'-war, which he'd used in the Chant of the Fabricant. Earlier, on page 40, was the note about man-eating plants "that slide up travellers' nostrils whilst they sleep"; it had appeared in his Hymn to Corruption. The references to "the Insect God" in the same section of the poem had come from an anecdote on page 33, which he'd written on a mosquito-plagued camping trip in Maine.
On the page just before it was a Mencken quotation that had obviously influenced him-it spoke of "a Creator whose love for His creatures takes the form of torturing them"-and beneath it lay the lines from Melmoth the Wanderer that had given him the "Who goes there?" passage in Part III:
Who is among us?-who?-I cannot utter a blessing while he is here. I cannot feel one. Where he treads, the earth is parched'.-where he breathes, the air is firel-where he feeds, the food is poisonl-where he turns, his glance is lightningf-'Who is among us?-Who?
From the street came a squeal of brakes and, with it, the blare of a horn. He got to the window in time to see a car's retreating taillights as it sped toward Second Avenue. Th
e early-morning clouds had parted, and a chilly moon a few days short of full hung just above the tenements at the poorer end of the block. The street in both direc-tions was deserted, save for movement directly below him as a lone figure hurried past his building, so close to its base that Nadelman could barely see more than a flash of green coat and a gleaming pink bald skull. Something shiny in the figure's hand caught the light as he rounded the corner of the building, heading toward the line of stores, parked cars, and pay phones on the avenue.
Frowning, Nadelman returned to the notebook, wondering about that large pink skull. Surely Halloween was over.
Studiously keeping the night's unanswerable questions sealed off from the rest of his thoughts, as if in a tiny water-tight bag, he plunged back into his literary excavations, moving further into the past. On page 27, in the midst of some passages of nature description, he was struck by a pair of lines whose diction seemed to foreshadow that of the poem.
With enemies who tremble at His glance, And followers who shamble at His feet.
He hadn't realized that his ideas had been germinating for so long;
he couldn't have beer, more than sixteen when he'd written that entry. Three pages before it, he found the same thought in a slightly dif-ferent form:
"He cometh. The ground doth shake. His enemies fly before Him. His followers shamble in His wake."
A similar reference, expressed somewhat more primitively, appeared on page 22:
He "wakens. Come He zvu'i: A rival god who means i;.c ill