Doctor Syntax

by Michael Petracca

  “You must understand that people continue to have extremely high expectations of me.” he complained. “I am expected constantly to produce literature or literary analysis of the highest quality. Sometimes I imagine I am beset by a horde of ghostly ancestral presences, terrible Harpies who descend on me, tear at my flesh, harry me mercilessly for my verbal output.”

  “I should introduce them to my mother. They’d get along great. Do you think your ghostly ancestors play canasta?”

  While we were chatting, Sweeney put a shoulder into his task and pushed open the trapdoor. We ascended the last few stairs into a room that reminded me of the interview cell at county jail, only higher and darker. It had but one small window, high up near the ceiling and smeared with greasy dust that cast a deathly yellowish pall on everything in the room: stacks of wooden packing crates and cardboard cartons, a few wooden chairs, a half-size refrigerator with a plastic pitcher of water on top, some paper cups and paper plates, a wooden library table covered with books, and a boxy, old-fashioned dictaphone, behind which sat the real Ernst. He looked inanimate, like a wax replica of the more robust Sterne-Ernst I had known, or like those sallow, eyeless eels that marine biologists have recently discovered living at the bottom of the ocean, moving about slowly in the dark and under extreme pressure. Ernst cocked an ear attentively as we entered his remote world.

  Sterne said, “Dr. Gablonzer, I’d like to present Mr. Nails, about whom we have told you much already. Mr. Nails has graciously consented to join our happy operation.”

  “I will enjoy your company, Mr. Nails.” Ernst said quietly, in a distinctly Oxford accent with not a trace of Sterne’s silly Boris Karloff overlay, “although I regret your loss of freedom. If it’s any consolation, I empathize.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.” I said. “But I’m not staying.” To this bit of bluster Ernst responded with the wan smile of a duty nurse dispensing real solicitude to a terminal patient.

  Sterne was feeling peppy, enthusiastic. “Of course you will stay, Mr. Nails.” he effused. “I’m certain you and Dr. Gablonzer will become fast friends. Ernst is our resident scholar. Shortly after his arrival in this city I abducted him, as his presence was a reproach to me.”

  “You mean you actually felt some pangs of conscience over having Ernst blinded?”

  “Oh no, that is not what I mean at all.” he said, and rather sharply I thought, as though offended by my implication that he might actually harbor some shred of decency within his sociopath’s corrupted soul. “What reproached me was the fact that Dr. Gablonzer had literary success, while I had none. I brought him here and installed myself in his home, so that I might have a taste of the critic’s life. It has been most illuminating. I have had the best of both worlds. As Laurence Sterne, spiritual head of the Combist League, I have gained a certain reputation for myself, and I have access to eager recruits more than ready to help me with my more … sensitive enterprises.”

  “Recruits like Rick here.” I said. Rick’s face reddened, and she looked away, which gratified me. The best theme there is.

  “Precisely. But kidnaping Dr. Gablonzer has added a new dimension to my life. It has allowed me to experience the respect which the world accords the scholar. We supply him with books in braille or on audiotape, and he dictates his articles into this recording device. I re-dictate his articles in my own voice and then pass them on to Miss Sterne to transcribe. I submit the articles for publication, and not one of them has yet been rejected, even by the most prestigious journals in the field. Dr. Gablonzer has a sterling reputation, you see, and I have managed to wear the mantle of that reputation as my own. In fact, I have so thoroughly assumed the character of Ernst Gablonzer that I have had numerous lively discussions with his friend, Dr. Zacky, along with several other of his colleagues, concerning my research into the Lesbian poets.”

  “Ernst’s research.” I reminded him.

  “You are correct. And therein lies my problem … to which you, Mr. Nails, are my solution. The scholar’s life has been everything I have dreamed. But I must continually play the role of Ernst Gablonzer, in order to cover my impersonation of him and to keep myself out of the federal correctional system. Playing the role of the eminent Dr. Gablonzer has been but an appetizer, a piquant antipasto to the main course, in which I have brilliant work published in my name, so that people will bestow upon me the respect my heritage demands. Dr. Gablonzer simply does not have time to create masterpieces for me as well as do his own work. I have tried any number of means—some of them painful—to persuade him to increase his output, but … as you can see for yourself, prolonged confinement has depleted his energies somewhat. You will change all that. With the addition of the brilliant Harmon Nails to our authorial stable—with Dr. Gablonzer covering the classics and you, Mr. Nails, writing criticism in my name—we will make the name of Laurence Sterne once again shine like a bright jewel with works of great importance. You will bring me enduring fame as a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century letters.”

  “People can’t get off on fame that comes from someone else’s work.” I argued naively.

  Sterne reinvented the classroom in order to correct me. “People cannot? The phenomenon you describe is common practice.” he lectured, “and I know for a fact that many professors do just that, without suffering any qualms of conscience. For his last article on Renaissance pagan symbolism, for instance, Dr. Zacky instructed each of his graduate assistants to research and compose a section, which the eminent professor then revised in his own words. He merely compiled the sections and thus added yet another title to his list of publications. This is considered perfectly acceptable practice in academic circles, and what I propose to do with you is no different. Besides, a very wise man once said, ‘The world beats us down, and all we want to do is get what is coming to us.’ Worldwide recognition is no less than my due.”

  Desperately I countered, “The police know where I am. My mother will hire people to find me. My cousin is a world-famous investigator. I have people who love me very much. They won’t give up until they find me …”

  “Oh, I have no doubt that your so-called loved ones will nose about my Westwood headquarters for a time, but my legitimate business owns several warehouses, and this one I own under an assumed name. We obscure our tracks carefully and visit this location rarely, primarily to replenish Dr. Gablonzer’s supply of nourishment, to drop off or pick up a load of literary antiquities we have acquired by less than legitimate means, and to pick up Dr. Gablonzer’s latest dictation. No one knows of the existence of this warehouse, except for my closest circle of associates and I.”

  Abjectly frustrated by my own inability to reason Sterne out of his demented plan, and recently made aware that Sterne’s failings as a writer constituted his area of greatest vulnerability, I hit him below the belt, at sentence level: I criticized his grammar. “‘My closest associates and me,’ not ‘I.’” I said. “Object of the preposition ‘for.’ Any bonehead freshman knows that.”

  Sterne was not wounded, at least not outwardly. “Ah, a fine critical mind and a sound sense of mechanics as well.” he said. “You will suit our purposes perfectly, Mr. Nails. Your loved ones will search weeks, perhaps months, and then they will resume their lives, no doubt greatly saddened by the loss of someone so engaging as yourself. Your mother will mourn you, and you will miss her terribly, I’m certain. But be consoled: All the while you’ll be doing valuable research for me, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Death is one thing. I could perhaps deal with the prospect of infinite nothingness, but not forty years of research and then infinite nothingness. Criticism: An hour in the fifth floor stacks of the humanities library almost drives me insane. I feel as though I’m drowning in a whirlpool of periphrastic abstractions, I’m fluttering like a bat without sonar through a haze of cirrate diction, being crushed to toothpaste under the awful G-forces of bibliographies and footnotes. There was no wa
y in hell I could last a day as a critical slave for Sterne. I lost control, began screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs, and in a paroxysm of horrified loathing, I charged Sterne.

  Sweeney stepped nonchalantly in to block my headlong flap, and I pummeled his chest with my tiny fists, not a pretty sight. Sterne said, “This will not do, Mr. Nails. A display of this ilk is not seemly in an employee. It is bad for worker morale. I’m going to have to request that Mr. Sweeney relax you.”

  “Relax as in how Ford relaxed Nixon by letting him off the hook, or relax as in how Sweeney relaxes you by giving you blowjobs under the table at Combist League meetings?”

  “Neither.” he said coldly. “I mean relax, as in relax your musculature by beating you senseless, Mr. Nails.” Sweeney all but salivated—or perhaps he really did salivate, since, now that I think back on it, I do recall some dime-sized puddles appearing on the concrete floor just before Sweeney stepped forward and delivered a short jab to the soft area just below the base of my sternum. Unlike the blow to my groin by Sweeney’s deceased colleague, Dill—that blow was chastening but beyond pain—this shot hurt bad and incapacitated my diaphragm temporarily, so that I had the panicky impression that I had suffered massive respiratory arrest and would suffocate within seconds. I curled up involuntarily in a tight ball like an armadillo under duress, so tight that Sweeney had to use his beefy arms to pry me open in order to deliver the next blow, at the impact of which I curled up again. Sterne said, “It is either unendurable agony or literary criticism, Mr. Nails. Make your choice.”

  “They’re both the same.” I gasped. “Why do you think they call it the Anguish Department?”

  “An assertion born of ignorance. You have no idea how unendurable anguish can be.” Sweeney punched me in the kidney, which made me go rigid. I was getting the idea. “Give in to the inevitable, Mr. Nails. Be my ghost-critic, and your agony will end.”

  “I won’t.” I grunted. Sweeney kicked. “Fuck you.” I exploded. Sweeney punched, this time to the cheekbone. I swung wildly at him, a haymaker and a big mistake, because he landed a surgical counterpunch flush on my nose. Blood started running freely, down my upper lip and into my mouth. I could taste it, warm and sweet as an In-Out Burger, rare, hold the onions. I was reeling away from Sweeney, who caught me down low with a rabbit punch that brought me to my knees. He was circling me, cocking his leg for a soccer-style kick to the groin, when I heard a voice say, “Stop.”

  Through my pain it sounded thin, hollow, distant, as though it came from inside a garbage can somewhere across the street. In fact, it had come from just a few feet away. Rick had swung the shotgun in Sweeney’s direction, and she was pointing it at him. She was trembling wildly, and the gun was inscribing quick little arcs in the space between Rick and Sweeney. Sterne said, “Ah, our newest recruit appears to be squeamish at the sight of blood. This will not do in a colleague.” Sweeney left off playing with me and approached Rick, who said unconvincingly, “Don’t. I’ll use this.”

  Sweeney was smiling now, which distorted his features horribly, unnaturally; unused to smiling as it was, his face buckled at odd stress points, so that he resembled a prize-winning cabbage with teeth and eyebrows. Sweeney hefted a huge packing crate over his head and moved menacingly at Rick, who backed up. Sweeney kept on coming, gaining momentum as he approached. Rick kept retreating until she bumped up against the concrete wall. Sweeney was charging fast now, chin out, no longer smiling, and Rick fired twice. Fragments like turkey meat burst forth … not from Sweeney’s body, which Rick had missed altogether, but from the wooden crate beside him.

  The force of the first blast hitting the crate sent a shock wave of debris into Sweeney, which jarred him from his headlong course, and the similar effect of a second shot set him to reeling unsteadily as he tried to establish a center of support under the bulk of the crate. He veered left, then right, and collided finally into a tall stack of wooden boxes, nearly ceiling high, which bent like a palm tree in high wind, then toppled. Sweeney bellowed as the wall of wooden crates collapsed on him. He went down hard to the floor, crates continuing to impact his body like a shower of meteors on a muscle-bound moonscape. The topmost crate broke open on impact with his collarbone, spilling contraband books over the now-inert Sweeney. I crawled over and picked one of the books out of the pile. The great beast Sweeney had been felled by Alexander Pope. You live by tedious, moralizing eighteenth-century poetry, you die by it.

  Sweeney wasn’t dead, just dazed. He poked his head out of the pile of books and looked around stupidly, like a bear coming out of hibernation. In a high-pitched quaver Sterne admonished Rick, “There is no possible excuse for your traitorous cowardice, Mr. Masters. I am terribly disappointed in you, for the moment. It is not, however, too late for you to redeem yourself in my eyes. If Mr. Nails is unwilling to work for me, he must be excused. His reticence has already seriously damaged Dr. Gablonzer’s morale. Therefore you have another chance to prove your allegiance to me, Mr. Masters. You have the firearm. Take care of Harmon Nails.”

  Rick swung the shotgun at me. I cringed, expecting the sudden white-hot flash to explode inside my head and that was all I ever felt, but it didn’t come. Instead, Rick said, “Take this, would you, Harmon? Guns make me nervous.”

  I looked up. She was proffering the gun to me. I took it and pointed it at Sweeney, who settled back down into his pile of literary rubble.

  “Can I take this to mean you’re not working for Sterne anymore?” I asked Rick doubtfully.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I never was. I’m a journalism student at UCLA, undercover like you. I had a term paper to write, and I came up with the bright idea of infiltrating a cult and doing an expose on it for the Daily Bruin. Sterne’s ad in the Free Journal looked like a natural. But I never thought I’d end up using a gun, or rescuing a kidnaped scholar. I’m a pacifist.

  “Not a bad shot for a pacifist … and a girl.” I said, my entire face throbbing from the indelicate makeover Sweeney had recently performed on it. Normal breath was returning, and, while it was clear that I would walk with a pronounced stoop for several days, my physique seemed otherwise to be in working order.

  “You know!” she cried in surprise.

  “All along.” I said, throwing truth to the winds. “I figured you were a spy for Sterne.”

  “What gave me away?”

  “Something in the way you walk, perhaps, or how you cross your legs. Real men like me have a way of sensing these things. That’s why Sterne never figured it out. Right, Sternie?”

  He growled.

  “Don’t feel bad, dude. Look on the bright side, think of all the time you’ll have to produce your own brilliant scholarship. Forty or fifty years at least.”

  “Grrr.” he said.

  “No, really, I’m sure the library at San Quentin is well stocked with minor eighteenth-century poets for you to read. Maybe you can even start a prison chapter of the Combe society. Get the cons to appreciate culchah, when they’re not taking turns probing the profundity of your rectum.”

  Sterne started baying, emitting a low, mournful feral wail, the kind young beagles make when their masters are away at work. “Aoh Aoh Aoh Aoh.” he said, choking off each syllable with abrupt glottal stops, in a rhythm very much like the deadly disco music to which he was so partial.

  “Groovy beat.” I commented, dabbing at my nose with a wad of old packing material. Good news: no fresh blood. “Sternie got soul, don’t you think, Rick?”

  “The name is Marianne.”

  “Masters?”

  “No, I made that up, too. It’s Evans. Marianne Evans.”

  “Hey. That’s George Eliot’s real name.”

  “She spelled Marianne differently. Two words. And you can stop calling me Rick now.”

  “It could be the hair and the beard.”

  She rolled her eyes upward. “0h. I forgot.” She took off her cap, and the hairpiece came along with it. Her own hair was wound
tightly and pinned flat against her skull. She removed the pins one by one and then bent over and shook her head from side to side. Her plaits uncoiled gracefully in gentle undulations, chestnut brown with spicy amber highlights at their crests.

  “Hey now.” I said.

  Marianne Evans turned her head to one side and peeled off the false whiskers. Rubbery glue clung to her face, first stretching out in the same way that mozzarella clings to lasagna noodles, and then snapping back in a way that melted cheese never does. She rubbed her face with her fingertips, and most of the rubber cement pilled up and rolled off. Despite the few remaining pillules of glue left on her cheeks, Marianne was lovely, with fine chiselings of jawline, cheeks made rosy by rubbing, and all defined more sharply by contrast with the shabby men’s clothes she was wearing, to the effect that her face appeared a cameo against them, ivory-clear and rare. I was awed by the transformation and recalled greedily the body I had espied in the darkened upstairs bedroom. “I knew you weren’t a guy, but I had no idea.” I said with a certain constriction of vocal cord.

  “Now you’ll stop calling me Rick?”

  “I’m used to it.”