Doctor Syntax

by Michael Petracca

“Remember, I saved your life.”

  “Right, and I really appreciate how you let Sweeney kick the shit out of me before you decided to move.”

  “I was scared, all right?”

  “Not me.” I bragged. Marianne looked at me penetratingly, suggestively, with eyes the chalk blue of wild ceanothus, whose kinky blooms smell on first sniff like spurts of semen. Really, they do; check it out if you’re skeptical. “Well.” I admitted, “perhaps I can admit to a slight timorousness. However, may I add …”

  “That’s what I like about you, Harmon: Honesty is rarely your first response, but you know what a bad liar you are, so truth is never far behind.”

  “Terrific. Real journalistic savvy. Can we leave now?”

  “After you.”

  Our party, looking weird to a one, like a convocation of Fellini extras, made ready to quit the warehouse. Sterne and Sweeney, after having been trussed securely by Marianne with baling wire from the dashed Pope crates, lead the way, followed by me, still in my Lippo uniform and the shotgun over my shoulder, bootcamp-style. Marianne helped the blind Ernst down the stairs. His step was springy. He breathed liberation in through the nostrils, savored its sweet liquor, and expelled the dread and hatred of the past weeks forcefully through the mouth, his shoulders and ribcage relaxing visibly with each exhalation. Once reunited with Lissa, his abduction publicized widely, he would no doubt be a celebrity for a while; this he would probably endure as stoically as he endured Sterne, and then he would resume his quiet pursuit of truth and beauty. Ernst was a survivor.

  We descended the stairs. On the third floor I saw my lost Syntax books lying on the table where Sterne had left them. The original object of this whole ordeal, they now seemed unimportant, an afterthought. Still, I was curious. I picked up the one with the note to myself in it. Marianne stopped me. “Don’t touch that.” she said sharply. “We have to leave everything just as it is, for evidence.”

  “I’ll leave my books, but I need this.” I slipped the folded scrap of newsprint out of the inside cover of Doctor Syntax. “I wrote this while in the transport of an intellectual ecstasy. This note will change my life.”

  “Really? How?”

  “It contains my perception of the crucial unifying thread that runs through all George Eliot’s novels, an original thematic assertion that will bring my dissertation together and propel me to scholarly superstardom, to a luminous reputation that even Sternie here never dreamed of, and a cushy teaching position in some prestigious eastern school.”

  “All of that’s in there?” she asked doubtfully, indicating the raggy shred of paper.

  “That, and probably more.” I said in a tone plump with promise.

  Now everyone was curious. Sterne even stopped his whimpering long enough to hear the dramatic revelation. Sweeney dropped his mouth open, as though he might catch subtle concepts in the same way that frogs catch flies. Ernst said, “Please read, Harmon. You are torturing us with suspense.” Marianne nodded enthusiastically.

  I unfolded the paper and read, or tried to. Words, a scrawl that looked like a first grader’s penmanship homework, snaked around the margins of a story about the upcoming NBA draft. I read my notes once to myself, shook my head, read them again.

  “Well …?” said Marianne.

  “I’m not sure …” I said.

  “Just read.” she said.

  “OK, but … OK, here it is: ‘G.B. says—Love, too much. get Out. Poptarts dingdongs Tpaste windx toi. tis.’”

  I crumpled the paper into a wad. Sterne was delighted. “lasting fame indeed.” he said spitefully. “You should have remained in my charge. Hao hao hao hao.” he roared.

  “What does it mean, Harmon?” said Marianne.

  My mind raced with the possible implications of the cryptic note and with the questions it raised, paramount of which was this: Had I been so wasted that I merely imagined producing some of the world’s most penetrating critical insights during my quasi-psychedelic raptus? Certainly it was possible, and there was historical precedent as proof. One time Thrasher had a class in Asian history, and he hadn’t cracked the book all quarter. Time came, as it inevitably does, for the final exam, and he had an endless procession of dynasties to memorize and only one night in which to do it. He swallowed tab after tab of white criss-cross methedrine, stayed up all night, and took a massive dose of crank the next morning, before the test. When he got home, I asked him how he’d done, and he exulted, “Great, the essay question was a fucking joke. I aced it for sure.” and collapsed on our beanbag cushion, where he lay inert for a day and a half. However, when he brought the test home at the beginning of the following quarter, it had an enormous red “F” on the front of the bluebook. While Thrasher had written brilliantly and without pause, his writing—all three hours’ worth—was concentrated in an inky blob approximately an inch round, a tiny black hole whose gravity had sucked up twelve centuries of Chinese history and rendered it unintelligible, illegible. But that was Thrasher, notorious for his pharmaceutical excesses and for the high prices he routinely paid for them. Could a couple of hits on a Droddy spliff have produced the same effect in me, or was there more subtextual meaning in those few words than appeared on the surface? More to the point, what had excessive love or junk food or toilet tissue to do with George Eliot, my Ph.D. thesis, and my future?

  Thus swept up in a tornadic fugue state of confusion, I once again envisioned George Eliot as I had on that night many weeks ago, only now even more vividly—her dark eyes deepened by loss of faith and family, her mouth perpetually pursed as though mocking the sphincteral constriction of polite Victorian society, her head cocked to one side in that cute way she had, so that her dark hair, parted in the middle and brushed down around her ears and behind her neck, perturbed the starchy formal whiteness of her lace collar—and all at once the scales fell from my eyes, as I believe is the expression. George hadn’t visited me that day to speak of herself, nothing so uncharacteristically immodest as that. Rather, she’d come to deliver the Truth about an awful ambiguity whose resolution would shatter the delicate crystalline orderings of my own self-awareness as absolutely as I had shattered Sterne’s crystal goblet. “It’s not about criticism at all.” I told Marianne. “It’s about me.”

  “You!” Sterne squealed. “Lasting fame indeed.” he repeated.

  Sterne was certifiably insane but most likely correct. Perhaps, as my mother, my graduate advisor, and Liz had insisted, I did have the intellectual apparatus requisite for literary scholarship, but the extraordinary and often dangerous lengths to which I went to avoid schoolwork pointed to one incontrovertible fact: I didn’t believe in research, and I had little respect for people who did. It’s only the most grievously wounded people who require the hollow recognition that fame brings, and fame in academia is hollower still, a marrowless bone scrabbled after by professors and lecturers and graduate students, pathetic worried creatures who sell their fine and creative intellects for the protection of the university, at best a cold-titted and psychologically abusive mother who, while providing them with health insurance and barely enough cash to make their house payments, neither loves nor nurtures them, and who eventually turns them in upon themselves and ultimately against each other, like those lice I read about once—or maybe it was mites—that devour their brothers and sisters in the womb. No art in that, of course, and little satisfaction. If Art itself was the subject of George Eliot’s art,49 then George had come to remind me that Art presents only those truths whose contraries are also true, and that if your dick is caught in one theoretical windowframe of reference, then you’re probably missing the beauty, and surely the humor.

  I had undertaken to pursue the intellectual grail because my family prized it above all else. My grandfather, steeped as he was in a Talmudic tradition which viewed scholarship as a singular act of devotion leading one directly to favor in God’s jaundiced eye and status in the community, handed this prejudice down to my mother, who didn’t
love me too much—there can’t be too much love, I still believed almost a decade after the Summer of Same—but with too much of the wrong kind of love, a solipsistic clinging by the self to its own idealized image, which in my mother’s case was so tangled up with her only child that she used my diplomas unknowingly to paper the holes in her own ego—that is, to gain favor in the critical eye of her long-dead father, my sweet Zaydeh, who once snubbed her for marrying a Gentile, and in the smog-reddened eye of polite L. A. society, if such a thing exists. Ma didn’t see, because she couldn’t, that schoolwork was not something I loved to do, but rather something I had to force myself to do because it was expected of me; and George Eliot’s message, by the example of choices she had made in her own life, was clear on that point. Nobody should make a career out of doing what they don’t like or believe in, said George. (Not unless it pays a whole lot more than a T.A.’s salary, adds Harmon.) Discretion, wisdom even, would therefore lie—for this wave-shredding, dirt-riding, blues-picking, poetasting gumshoe at least—in relinquishing the custody of literary antiquities to those who deserve them.

  What it all amounted to, when you totted up the pros and cons, was that it wasn’t too late. I was still a kid, not yet thirty and in reasonably good shape, and I could go scholarly renown one better. I could get my life together by moving out of the house, by finding a more expansive, more generative, occupation, one worthy of lifelong attention … and I might even revive my blasted sexuality in the process. I recalled the moment when providence dropped my surfboard right beside me at Point Zero and saved my life. This time, I understood, the tiny sliver of my salvation had come not from sheer luck—however welcome—but from deep within myself, and in the unlikely image of George, who had never looked lovelier. Liz would be proud, and out of a client, if I could tenderly nurture the seed of my insight into a blossoming of emotional health and maturity.

  “What does it mean?” Marianne asked again.

  I moved my mouth vainly, like a hooked perch trying vainly to form words that might express his rage and horror at being untimely yanked from the sea, and his astonishment at the surpassing beauty of the world out of water.

  Sterne beat me to speech. “It means.” he said with a sneer, “that there are a lot of geniuses who find themselves out of work, and Mr. Nails is going to be one of them.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  My first act as a free man in my own house was to fry up a mess of Hoffies and Wonder Bread in Teflon and butter, pour a mess of ketchup over them and scarf. Sated, invigorated by my first substantial meal since who knows when, I felt strong enough to call Ma in Tucson. She asked where had I been and why hadn’t I called. I said busy, I’d explain when she got back, and I loved her. I meant it, too. Maybe George Eliot was right: It takes a not-so-casual brush with extremity to make us appreciate what we once took for granted, and Ma’s voice never sounded so good.

  Unfortunately, Ma had no idea how much extremity I’d brushed up against recently, so she thanked me with sarcastic effusiveness for my attention to her “needs.” the ever-lengthening list of which she scrolled out telephonically while I nodded and intoned the random “Mm-hmm” into the mouthpiece. I told her again I loved her, and I still meant it. With Ma, repetition is the sincerest form of flatware: I keep on forking it out, and she eats it up, reluctantly at first, like a zoo elephant warily sniffing out a tendered nut roll, but then always lickerishly. I used to get annoyed at having to make the same loving filial pronouncements over and over again, but this time I was mellow, benevolent even, and pronounced with patient fondness until she got it.

  Pleased—not to mention surprised by what must have seemed a dramatic improvement in the attitude and comportment of her formerly bratty boychik—Ma said she’d be home in two days and gave me more than enough information to locate her: the airline and flight number, the projected arrival time, her seat number, aisle non-smoking, the names of the pilot and flight crew and the air traffic controller. I promised I’d be there to meet her at the gate. Without undressing I got into bed and slept half the day and all night. For the first time in a quarter-century I didn’t have to use the TreeTop jar.

  I got up and called Lissa first thing. Even though my face still ached and I had a dull throb in the lower back where I had caught Sweeney’s rabbit punch, I was in high spirits, expecting a tearful exchange of vocables with Lissa, to be followed by a mutual pledge of undying love. In choners and my Walt Whitman T-shirt I stretched out in the breakfast nook of the big house, my bare feet up on the red Formica table and my head on taut red vinyl. I touch-toned, and the faint electronic beeps, which resembled in their timbre the plastic Emenee trumpet I had when I was a kid, heralded a much-anticipated joyous reunion with the poor tragic soul who had been yearning for me miserably during my brief absence. I would re-weave her frayed psyche with assurances of immutable contentment and unnatural sex.

  Two rings over the wire, and Sergeant Freitag answered. I wasn’t expecting to hear him, and he plainly not me. There was a long impromptu concert of static in dead air and muffled human sounds in the background, and then Freitag said, so heartily that I had to hold the receiver at arm’s length, “Harmon. I was going to call you. We need you to come in and file an official complaint. Ms. Evans already did. I just came here to get Ernst’s statement, and I’m getting Lissa’s now.”

  “It’s swell of you to make house calls, Freitag, and terrific to hear your voice, but can I please talk to Lissa?” I asked impatiently.

  “Sure. No problem.”

  More crackling dead air and mumbles. Lissa got on. She said, and a bit formally I thought, “Harmon, what a lovely surprise. Larry told me all about what you did. Isn’t it wonderful, my father is back, you have your books, and Larry and I can’t begin to express our gratitude. You must be very proud.”

  “Larry and I?” I demanded with nascent suspicion.

  “Yes. If it hadn’t been for you, we never would have met.”

  My mind contorted itself into cruller-like whorlings, writhing to misinterpret the obvious truth for which Lissa was preparing me none too gently. The best misconstruction my mind could come up with was a tautologically fatuous, “If it hadn’t been for me or you, of course you and I would never have met.”

  “Not we you and I.”

  “We who then?”

  “Larry and me. We’re engaged.” she fluted.

  “We must have a bad connection.” I said. “A lot of static on the line. You say you’re enraged at Sergeant Freitag?”

  “Engaged to him.”

  “You don’t mean …”

  “Yes, Harmon.”

  “As in betrothed, with a ring and a smooch, Minute Rice and dog-food cans?”

  “Yes, Harmon.”

  “But I thought. You and me. We had.”

  “Harmon, I think you’re really cute and fun, but you’re a little bit too … how can I say …”

  “Witty? Debonair?”

  “Puerile I think comes closer.”

  “Puerile? Frippery! Certainly I possess a boyish sense of wonderment at a world forever revealing its mysteries, but underneath I’m really a mature, evolved being. Besides, I’ve changed.”

  “I’m sure you have. But I just can’t see myself living with a guy who goes over his body every morning like a road map, to make sure none of his beauty marks has gone malignant overnight.”

  “You can’t be too careful.” I responded defensively. “The AMA says the big C is the number two killer right behind heart disease, which is what you’re giving me now. I think I’m developing an aneurism.”

  “Besides, Larry is serious about his literature. He’s going to quit the force and go to grad school. You’ve been reading Browning for six months, and the most you’ve said about him is that he makes your urethra seep. Larry says Browning can turn himself into truth like fishes turn into lizards in surrealist art. The author becomes the truth …”

  “… and the truth becomes the poet.” I
repeated wearily. “I’ve heard it before. Larry probably practiced that speech a thousand times while he was in the psych ward at the VA hospital, doing the Thorazine shuffle through the halls and blowing spit bubbles out the corners of his mouth.”

  “Please don’t be bitter.”

  “No, really, it’s OK, Freitag’s a great guy. He helped me engineer this whole Sterne business, and I owe him. I guess it’s only fitting that I pay the debt with the only woman I’ve ever truly loved.” At least this month, I told myself. “But I thought we had something.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I still feel physically attracted to you, much more than I am to Larry, in fact. Don’t ever tell him that. But there’s no way we would work out, Harmon. There are just too many little things …”

  “Name one.” I challenged.

  She spent no time. “Your eating habits. You equate frozen food with autonomy. Your idea of gourmet fare is to take a burrito out of its wrapper and microwave it instead of eating it cold. You eat peas and carrots right from the freezer, without bothering to thaw them out, like M&Ms.”

  “If you cook frozen foods, you run the risk of boiling away all the essential vitamins and nutrients.”

  “See. Puerile.”

  “So I can change some more. I promise to steam my succotash from now on.” I begged shamelessly.

  “I’m sorry, Harmon.”

  Thrown over for an acne-scarred cop. In a world where puzzling crimes are solved routinely, if sometimes blunderingly, where the loose folds of plot are tucked neatly into hospital-cornered denouement, leave it to relationships to provide the surprise endings.

  “This might make you feel better. Larry says this Marianne Evans has a thing for you. When he was taking her deposition, all she kept talking about was Harmon this and Harmon that.”

  “I’m not that kind of guy. I don’t shift my affection casually from one person to another, like some people.”

  “Larry says she’s probably more your type, anyway. She’s beautiful and sensuous and bright and she knows it, but she has a fragile self-image and she sneezes all the time. Larry says …”