by Tito Perdue
“Fifty?”
“Well, maybe you can jew her down some. That lady will suck the juice out of you before you can get it up.”
“Fair enough. But I got to go to a concert tonight.”
“Concert?”
“Tchaikovsky.”
The man laughed uproariously, a tumultuous noise that caused another lout to come and gather around.
Concert: the program was to have begun at seven o’clock, though it needed some time for the audience to seat itself and grow quiet. He had arrived with sixteen dollars in his wallet together with perhaps a dozen pieces of silver change apportioned among his pockets. He had a watch, the same that had come down to him through his people. He had pilfered a boutonniere from his landlady’s garden, the sole single example in over two years of having broken the law in even this tiny respect. He had brought a book for the intermission, but knew he was not likely to use it. There were just too many beautiful women all about in clothes and heels. Just then, when things seemed to be proceeding in a positive direction, the boy set eyes on the woman just in front of him, a thirty- or forty-year-old entity dressed in a gown that perturbed him. He didn’t fail to notice how the straps indented the milk-colored flesh among her shoulder and neck. Nor were her earlobes to be sneezed at. Already he had fallen into one of those trances that came over him sometimes when he was assailed by music and beauty coalescing on him all at once. More and more as life went on, it was what he lived for.
For just $2.50, the child had reserved a seat on the eighth row, as good a place as was. Not only had he brought his best blue suit, he was wearing it. Six days earlier, he had given himself a haircut, and his appearance had more or less normalized by this time. From a distance, he looked like a garden-variety concert-attendee with a gloomy mien. And yet, as he couldn’t fail to notice, he was not so awful-looking that the women refused absolutely to look his way. Or not the naïve ones, anyway.
The conductor was serious, portly, and bald, the way he liked them, and from his demeanor he seemed not to expect much from the audience when he turned reluctantly to acknowledge the applause. Owing to what was printed on the program, my student had expected Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony to start the evening and wasn’t greatly surprised therefore when that particular piece was indeed brought forward before the others. The sound was good, pretty good, though the auditorium hadn’t especially been built for music. No, actually it was quite good, as the boy reported later. I wasn’t there.
The piece was sad, distant, forlorn, the players sitting motionless with eyes cast down. He saw a Japanese violinist, a minuscule woman showing more emotion than that demographic was wont to expose. People were at their best, he said, when collaborating on beauty, a project that caused them to be more beautiful, too.
Twenty-eight
On the twenty-seventh of that month, the boy drove down to the original Confederate Capitol to do a bit of research in the Alabama archives. He could just as well have slept in a hotel by this time—he had the money—but preferred his car. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as you might suppose, considering the equipment he brought—a sleeping bag, water, a half-dozen apples, the book he had been reading, lantern, revolver, and a short collection of classical recordings to be described later on.
The archivist himself turned out to be a pale sort of individual, very tall and apparently constipated. He had given his life to this sort of work, but the boy didn’t fault him for that. The building was full of documents, old ones, and when he spoke of them, there was tenderness in his voice. He pointed out that these letters and papers were all that remained of some really very interesting human beings, better people by a long shot than the current yield.
“Are you here to do some research?” he asked the boy. “Most of our patrons are older, you understand. Genealogy. Property deeds. And your interest is . . . ?”
“I’m interested in genealogy, too. Or genetics, I mean.”
“Genetics.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see. And I don’t suppose you’re here to look at Professor Duncan’s stuff?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not that you’re the first. Discredited, you realize. Years ago. Lost his job.”
The child was conducted into a high-ceilinged room adorned with the plaster busts of famous persons. He was not much past twenty years in age, and here he was, conducting research in a far-away city. His pen was full of ink, and he had brought an extra one with him. Because . . .
. . . an unpopular geneticist had died, and his unpublished papers had found a place here, and here only, where today the boy was waiting in dignity for the stuff to be brought to him. He nodded to the person at the next table, a middle-aged woman bending studiously over a green cardboard carton full of a toy bear and other memorabilia of various kinds.
“Sorry,” she said. “You can’t smoke in here.”
He apologized. He had expected to be brought a few inches of printed material and was nonplussed when several boxes were set before him containing a mass of letters (some never opened) and what proved to be a personal diary in three volumes held together with rubber bands.
Twenty-nine
It seemed to her on Thursday that she had become even more beautiful than just two days earlier. Her weight was what it should be, and she had invested in a sky-blue skirt that must have been tailored with her in mind. Posing with crossed legs just in front of her floor-to-ceiling mirror, she couldn’t imagine anyone refusing to look at her. Supplied with that, her books and music, her pet chameleons, her nuts and raisins, her cosmetics, her exercise paraphernalia, she could have lived a full life without leaving her apartment; instead, on the Monday following, she hefted up her cello and placed it atop the little wheeled cart devised for her by a certain trombone player who had delivered it in person to her door.
The day was warm, and she had put herself into a pair of short—too short, really—red shorts. Drawing the cart behind her, the pedestrians tended to make way for her. Her hair was pretty much the same as the Sun’s and the color of her lips had been chosen with care from her own collection. She was full of power without having had to harm anyone ever, perhaps the single instance of that in recent history.
She went direct to ---- Hall, took the elevator to the third floor, chose one of the available practice chambers, and closed the door. She had less than a week to prepare for the April concert and her half-hour sonata that would require the best performance of her career.
Her method was peculiar. After reading the whole score from start to finish, she dawdled for a time, allowing the information to “settle,” as it were, and as it were to take up a place in her organized head. Next, she tried to imagine what had happened in the composer’s head, a divine happenstance that occurs sometimes in the life of certain personalities. And then, too, she enjoyed practicing in tight quarters, compassed by thick walls that held the world at bay.
She practiced most diligently, surprised by how the clock ran forward so quickly when in fact it seemed to her that time had almost stopped. To be alone was for her the opposite of being lonely. Her body and soul had cadences of their own.
At noon, she left the building and went to enjoy a cigarette. She was aware of all the people moving past, and when one of them, a baritone whom she faintly knew, smiled at her, she turned and smiled right back. She was courteous to all people, all of them equally unimportant to her. Surely someone somewhere was important, or it were better she had never lived.
Two more hours she rehearsed in her tiny cell and then repaired to the “tea room” that had been set aside for the orchestra people. She was invited to join one of the tables, but managed not to notice it. The tea was thin, the way she liked it. Did it hold as many as fifteen calories? She was aroused by the friction between her stockings each time she (slowly) crossed her legs. And yet her appearance was entirely respectable. No one could know what was going on inside her head. She had two sapphires, tiny and green, fixed to her earlobes. She smoked, he
r melancholy expression telling that her knowledge of life and dying was far in advance of her age.
“Ten years,” she said, “that’s all I want. And then I’ll send me back home again.”
Thirty
He had saved a not inconsiderable amount of money (one thousand four hundred eighty-four dollars) by this time, enough to support himself for four months if it came to that. A letter arrived on Monday. He disliked these things; particularly he disliked his parents inquiring after his finances. (Why were their checks never cashed, etc.) Disliked most of all his father’s threat to come and discover his lodging, his foodstuffs, and the wardrobe acquired second-hand from The Salvation Army and other outlets of that kind. (But might not the original owners also have possessed virtues that he put on with their clothing?) His crude furniture, narrow cot, his .32-caliber revolver, barbells made of cement blocks, old-fashioned quilt, framed portraits of Wagner, his wife, and Codreanu—how would the man respond to that? But mostly he regretted that he had advanced beyond his people’s range, and they would hate him. And so to preempt their visit, on Wednesday he occupied his dysfunctional automobile and steamed off toward native grounds, taking with him seventeen wild flowers harvested from the lee of the building. He was not unhappy. The day was sheer and bright with resolute clouds moving in the breeze.
On this day, he brought a first-class recording of Das Lied von der Erde, allowing it to repeat three times before switching over to other compositions of the same composer. He was moving swiftly through a tableau representative of a certain moment in history, a sight forever unavailable to the historians of the future. (“Historians of the future?” No, he had meant to say historians living in the future.) Just now he was capturing visions that he alone would ever witness—a child standing in his own footprints at a precise distance from an old Ford car of a certain color parked at its own special angle, never to be exactly repeated. As to the circular theory of history, no; life was a kaleidoscope, he believed, a hurricane of tiny particles brushing up against each other in higgledy-piggledy fashion. Anything might happen.
Thirty miles from home he pulled over, parked, and strode out into a long, level field that, if only he went far enough, would bring him face-to-face with the Sun. Here it was easy to believe that he might actually be the only person in the world, or if he turned, that he might find that the ocean had advanced so far that he was standing in the stuff. People were foolish to imagine that today had aught to say about tomorrow. Anything could and should take place, and he was impatient that it would. A gull flew over, demolishing his dream that he was alone. These are the sort of thoughts that were always scampering about in this boy’s head, a way of thinking for which I accept no personal responsibility. On the other hand, after my years in education, I adore any sort of thinking.
He arrived at his parents’ home at half past the hour. Which hour was that? He never said. His father had fallen asleep in the armchair with his lap full of cigarette ashes. The radio had drifted slightly and was ricocheting back and forth between two weak stations from far away. His mother was in the kitchen, still and forever meddling with the leftovers, the cups and saucers, and like matters.
“Hi,” he iterated.
“Oh! You scared me! Why didn’t you tell me? Has something happened? Something bad?”
(He could feel that he was getting bored already.)
“No, no. I just thought I should bring you some flowers. It’s time.”
“Well gollee, we have flowers! Lots and lots. Your father planted those gladiolas last year, and we always have that crabapple and so forth. And your sister has that African Violet. You need to talk to her. I just don’t know. Gracious, I don’t remember that suit. Looks good on you, whew. Have you been eating? Well, we finally broke down and bought that new washer. Makes my life a lot easier, that’s for sure. Where’d you get that car, honey? You could of bought a good one with all the money we’ve been sending you. What do you do with all that money, that’s what we wonder. Anyway, I suppose you’re making real good grades up there. You always do. Don’t know where that comes from. Me, I couldn’t get past algebra. Why do we have to know that kind of stuff?”
Etcetera.
Thirty-one
Three days later he returned to Knoxville. His apartment was worse than he remembered, bleak beyond repair. And yet he had no choice in this matter. The human race by an enormous majority desired more comfort than was needed or good. His arrogance always increasing, he had determined that it were better never to have lived than turn out to have been an average person. Any person who had, he said, “was doomed to repeat himself.”
He returned to his work, finding pleasure in research and reading and finding strange things in archival materials as would have dismayed the ordinary run of people alluded to above. Small wonder they kept this stuff under lock and key.
And so by Tuesday, he had already composed seventeen pages of an unassigned essay on the problem of dysgenics and its manifestations in the modern world. Great help had come to him from the (unpublished) papers of that deceased geneticist who had landed in so much trouble for discussing the human races in terms of certain plants. He found these plausible, the boy, and greeted them in the full-hearted way of the young and naïve and very gifted. He used to stroll about campus accumulating evidence in support of his new theories. No one doubted that cattle had been improved by selective breeding.
He worked for seven days on his paper, neglecting the formal course of studies that could have advanced his resume. Seven, too, was the number of copies he made. Of these, two went into the box under his cot while another he passed over to the one single chemistry professor he seemed actually to respect. The remaining copies he offered to the more humdrum professors he admired less and less each passing day.
Pleased with himself, he now resumed his regular course of studies. He moved from place to place, head held high. As an act of extravagance, he had taken his suits, some of them, to a seamstress, ending up with a scavenged wardrobe that distinguished him as a man of great probable wealth. He seemed to be important and wore a forbidding expression. No one spoke, and he was compassed by a general silence that extended for about eighteen inches on all sides.
By the time he was twenty-two, his work had begun to appear in certain small, transgressive journals loaded with good and bad poetry and the like. And then on Wednesday, while sitting three-fourths asleep in his literature class, he was proffered a note on blue paper inviting him to see the Dean of Arts and Sciences. He rose at once and went, determined on this one occasion at least not to reveal the arrogance that he recognized as his own worst trait. Having put on a mature expression, he crossed campus, slowly staring straight ahead. Gloomy was the Dean, a jowly man with wattle and a head of hair that looked like pins and needles, or sticks of wire, or larva gasping for air.
“I’ve seen your disquisition,” the man reported, holding the pages in the air. “Now, exactly how many copies of this have you spread about, if I may ask?”
“Five. No, four.”
“Four.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And who exactly were the happy recipients, I wonder? If you don’t mind me asking?”
He provided the information—three garden-variety supernumeraries standing among my own name.
“But they probably haven’t read it yet.”
“Good, good. Good. Now let’s continue on with this a little bit. Is this a project that you were assigned, or did it just sort of occur to you? Something you wanted to get off your chest?”
The boy cast down his eyes. He didn’t yearn for compliments. Or rather he yearned not to so yearn. Even so, he couldn’t altogether keep from smiling.
“Proud of yourself?”
“Naw. Just something I wanted to do.”
“Wonderful. And so this is why the state is shelling out six thousand dollars per annum of taxpayer money so you can produce this kind of stuff? Great God A’mighty, boy, this is exactly the sort of stuff we’re
trying to get away from! Us in the South. Who authorized you to do this, that’s mainly what I want to know. Was it Professor . . . ?” (He used my name.)
“No, sir.”
The Dean now brought the paper down out of the air, spread it flat on his yellow blotter, and read aloud, “The best society requires the best demographic.”
“Right.”
“And that’s not what we’re doing now? You don’t consider yourself part of a good demographic?”
“Me? Sure. But I’m talking about . . .” (He pointed to the outside world.)
“Yes, I had a pretty good idea what you’re talking about. Now listen to this, buster, we’ve been willing to go a long way with you people, a very long way. But there’s a limit. And you’ve crossed it. There’re lawyers in this town. And newspapers. We have parents and other groups. There’s the United States government. No, my friend, you need to collect your things and go. Back to your own people. And today!”
The child was baffled. Instead of the trophy he had expected, the silver platter, the gold-encrusted timepiece, it appeared that he was being hied back to whence he had come! So it was that he came to my office for only the third time in our mutual association, sat without being invited to be so, and for the space of about a minute and half, said nothing.
“They kicked me out.”
“What?”
“Kicked me out. No question about it.”
“Out?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Blimey. Things are getting worse. Because of your paper?” (I lifted the paper, brought it down, and recited some stuff from one of the middle pages.) “Sterilization? Gene therapy? You’re lucky they didn’t stand you up against the wall. Who kicked you out?”
He gave the name.
“Ach! That imbecile? Consider it a compliment. And so now what?”