The Cry of the Sloth

by Sam Savage

  Head bent over my page, I steal a surreptitious glance, through my eyebrows as it were, at the window across the street. And there they are, as always, the dual circles of her lenses aimed right at me. I scribble a few sentences, and I pause. I gnaw at the eraser. My face brightens—I have just discovered the perfect formulation!—and I return to the page with new vigor. I am now writing rapidly. I let my tongue protrude between my teeth as a visible sign of mental effort. I am conscious of her gaze burning on my cheek, tracing the line of my lips, dwelling on my tongue, examining my fingernails. I continue in this vein for some time, a model of the assiduous scribbler, in order to lull my audience, as it were, and leave her defenseless before the onslaught, which I am already rehearsing in my mind, even as I pretend to write calmly.

  When I judge the moment ripe, when a second glance across the street catches a slight wavering in the rigidity of her instrument, a nodding off as it were, suggestive of faltering attention, I begin to shake my head from side to side, as if crying No! No! to some hidden injunction. This is the first, and still relatively mild, manifestation of the creative throes which will soon hold me helpless in their awful grip. I thrash as if assaulted by insects. I make the most hideous grimaces you can imagine. I tear at my hair, roll my eyes, bite my lips, and howl. One moment I am trying to twist my ear off, and the next I am pounding my head against the table and sobbing. I once let myself go too far during the pounding, and next morning discovered a purple bulb on my forehead that persisted for several days. One day I bit my pencil in half and spit the pieces out the window. This proved so effective—I could see her bouncing in her chair with excitement—that I repeated it in subsequent episodes. It provided a nice dramatic finale to my performances. But of course it could not continue to have the same effect day after day. Like any addict, my audience would require ever-increasing doses in order to experience the same kicks, and maintaining that high level of performance has demanded all my ingenuity. Sometimes, unable to sleep, I get up in the night and rehearse in the bathroom in front of the mirror. I have developed a prodigious repertory of agonized expressions. But even so I have had to bring in various external props in order to keep the show going. Vases, for example, which can be thrown against a wall at the right moment, and shirts previously weakened by the judicious application of a razor, which can be horribly rent.

  Last Tuesday I so far surpassed myself that I have not dared perform since, knowing that whatever I do next will be a letdown. I had hauled a huge Royal office typewriter up from the basement, where it had been rusting for the past ten years. It was a massive piece of machinery, and getting it up the last flight of stairs was a feat in itself. Heaving it at last onto the table, I collapsed in the chair. It took me a few minutes to catch my breath, minutes which I was sure she was using to more precisely focus her instrument. I reflected how this panting collapse, even though perfectly genuine, was a fitting prelude to my performance, a mood-setting overture to the opera that was about to begin. And then I started to type, or pretend to type, since most of the keys had been rendered immobile by rust. I worked hesitantly at first, pecking at the keys with two fingers, pausing to scratch my head, yet gradually increasing the tempo as the creative wheels gained traction. I let the frenzy come on gradually, and yet relentlessly, until finally I stood up, knocking the chair over behind me, and worked standing, hunched over and hammering at the keys. And then, quite precipitously, I stopped, as if assailed by some awful final thought. I momentarily hid my face in my hands. I was overcome by strange grief! I staggered back against the wall, then stumbled forward. I grasped the typewriter in both hands, lifted it high above my head, and taking two running strides, hurled it through the open window. A second or so of exquisite silence ended with a tremendous crash. The machine hit the sidewalk and shattered. Some of the smaller parts flew all the way across the street, ricocheting off the side of a parked car. I turned away, but not before a glance confirmed that she was bouncing wildly in her chair. I ran downstairs and peeked around the edge of my tarp. She had slumped forward in her chair, and for a dreadful moment I thought that I had killed her. But a few seconds later she lifted her head, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I imagined her face streaked with tears.

  I am, otherwise, despite my histrionic talents, quite tired of myself. Do you ever have the wish that you were someone else? I would like very much to be someone named Walter Fudge.

  Your old friend,

  Andy

  ¶

  Dear Mr. Carmichael,

  Thank you for Mama’s box. I was expecting something much smaller. It is astonishing how much of her there still is. As to your offer of a durable urn in appropriate style, when I looked through your catalogue I was tempted by Grecian Classique Marble and also by Everlasting Bronze, but in the end I have followed your suggestion and just looked around me to see what would harmonize with my furnishings, and I have concluded that the box you sent her in is perfect.

  I have your invoice. While I can’t send anything right now, I want you to know that I am putting you on top of the pile.

  Sincerely,

  Andrew Whittaker

  ¶

  Dear Fern,

  You and Dahlberg?

  I hold my head in my hands and shake it until it laughs. What a jolly melon. And then I try to make it cry, but it can’t, since like most old melons it is completely hollow.

  When I saw the San Francisco postmark on your letter I thought it was Willy Laport inviting me to Stanford.

  I am fascinated that you find San Francisco hilly. But I was not, as you seemed to assume, “interested to learn” that Dahlberg can do a perfect imitation of the call of the sloth. That is my nose trick. That he is able to do it using your belly button is irrelevant and revolting. In fact, I can think of nothing which I personally would find more repellant than having a chubby hardware-store clerk wiffle on me, except perhaps having my intimate correspondence read by one. And you are right, I cannot imagine how much fun he is.

  Of course I am disappointed that you have thrown away the opportunities I dangled in front of you in order to go live in a truck.

  However, I am more disappointed that I am not going to lecture at Stanford.

  I wish you both the best.

  Your former editor,

  Andrew Whittaker

  ¶

  Freewinder!

  In your letter—or, rather, in your letters, since they float in one upon the other—you ask if I am “aware” that I have missed several mortgage payments. Rest assured, the awareness of this is like a light burning in my head. Yet even as I admit this awareness, which, as I said, burns like a light in what you, if you were in there with me, would see is a truly terrifying darkness, I would like for you also to become “aware” that I expect to miss even more payments in the future, perhaps gobs, as the saying goes. Hence more light! This is because I am in shit over my head. However, I assure you that the light burning in my head, proudly burning there, will burn brightly even as I and my head and everything burning in it sink from sight.

  Sincerely,

  Andrew Whittaker

  ¶

  sliced cheese

  rolls

  mouthwash

  t.p.

  cans

  turkey necks

  pig cheeks

  chicken backs

  what else?

  coffee

  Crisco

  a different life

  ¶

  Dear Jolie,

  First it was ants, and now it’s mice, or even rats. I can’t be sure. I hear them moving around in the walls, making scratching noises, or chewing noises, so it might be either one. I suppose rats would be louder, but because they are inside the walls there’s no way of knowing how loud the noise really is. Is that a mouse close up or is that a rat far away? That’s a question, I think, which can be asked of almost anything.

  The fact is I don’t want to do this anymore. All around me things are in decay, or in revolt. If only I
could walk out of myself the way one walks out of a house. Good-bye, old pal. Good-bye, old toaster, old sofa, old stack of old magazines. Stand on the stoop, feel the cool breeze coming down the street, feel it blowing through me. Gone at last will be the clogged mess of myself that made me once seem almost solid.

  Andy

  ¶

  The sand has become deeper. It is pulverous, like powdered talc. They sink ankle-deep in it; it fills their shoes when they walk. The men and the boys have on socks of black silk, and the sand has infiltrated the cuffs. At first only a little sifted in, but gradually the opening at the top of the cuffs widened as the socks sagged, letting in more sand with each step they take. Now the socks hang in elephantine bulges around their ankles, and they walk with stumbling shuffles like men in shackles. Even the most optimistic among them knows that if the floating things in the river are crocodiles, they will not be able to escape. The women have taken off their shoes. Beneath the long dark dresses with bustles and jabot blouses, they wiggle their toes and remember walking barefoot in Deauville, and they remember how different the sand there was, how course and cool, though in the water there were sharks, concealed, swimming in patient circles beneath the waves. The people, the men and the women, even the most vociferous, are no longer talking. It is clear to everyone that argument is futile, and that the time for communion, if it ever existed, has now passed. The sun has reached the zenith, brilliant, blinding, unbearable. The men have removed their dark coats, dropping them in the sand at their feet. Now they take off their shirts and wrap them around their heads. The women have opened their blouses. They open and close the sides of their blouses, fanning their bare chests. The only shade is cast by the parasols which the women hold just inches above their heads. The children, desperate, perhaps already dying, have crawled under the women’s skirts. There in the mysterious dark, like the darkness in the churches at home, they kneel in the sand, and the bare legs of the women, rising up into the strange obscurity above, are like the columns of cathedrals. The men want to draw close to the women, to shrink into the shadows of their parasols, but they do not dare. Even now they do not dare. And when darkness finally comes, and all of consciousness is focused on a single sense, they become aware of the sound of the river behind them, the very faint liquid whispering of water against the bank. They turn, singly, and move toward the sound. The sand reaches above their knees. They struggle through it like travelers floundering in deep snow.

  ¶

  Dear Vikki,

  It’s all over. I enclose the letter I am mailing out to everyone. I should have done this years ago. I tell myself that, but it doesn’t help. I feel emptied out, hollowed and cored. I look into myself and it’s like peering into a dry cistern. I shout into it, “Is anybody down there?” You can imagine what I get for an answer. I still have a lot of things to do.

  Much love,

  Andy

  ¶

  Dear Contributor,

  We are returning your submission unread. We would have enjoyed reading it, probably, but were prevented doing so by the thought that you doubtless would like it back sooner rather than later, so you can submit it somewhere else, should that be your intention. For, alas, Soap is no more. The forces of conformity contrived to starve it of nourishment until it died. It is survived by its editor Andrew Whittaker, who was observed crawling from the wreckage last Friday afternoon and was seen again, several hours later, waving from a bus.

  Sincerely,

  Walter Fudge,

  Executor for the Estate

  ¶

  Dear Jolie,

  For the past couple of days, ever since I threw the Royal typewriter, the big gray thing we got from Papa, out the bedroom window, people stop on the sidewalk across the street and point. The police came in three cars and I told them I was typing on the windowsill and it fell out. There is not going to be a Soap Festival. I can’t imagine why I ever thought that would be an interesting thing to do. Come to think of it, I am not sure I ever told you about it. No point now.

  Andy

  ¶

  Dear Stewart,

  I did get the questionnaire and I did fill it out, but I never mailed it, and now it is lost. The inside pocket of my jacket is torn, and I sometimes forget this, and then the things I slip in there vanish for good, unless I happen to hear them hit the ground, which in the case of your questionnaire I am sure I did not. Since it was only one sheet it would not have made much noise anywhere it fell, and I have lately spent a lot of time walking on grass. Furthermore, as we are now in October, a falling questionnaire would have had to compete with the sound of descending leaves aptly described as a rustle.

  But losing it was probably for the best, as I have come to have second thoughts about some of my answers. I was, in any case, embarrassed by the condition of the sheet, which bore on its wrinkled surface evidence of once having been tightly balled up. I want you to know that this balling up, if it occurred, was not connected to my feelings about you and Jolie or the things you said about the accident with the vase, but was a result of the state my nerves are in these days and the frustration occasioned by some of your questions. Marital status, for example. There I just had to take a wild guess. Also the question, “Do you consider yourself innocent?” Here we have a question which kept Kafka and Dostoevsky, to name just two, on the mat, not to mention Kierkegaard, and you want me to check “Yes” or “No”? I puzzled over that one for hours before hitting on what I thought at the time was a satisfactory solution. But on reflection I now think that checking both boxes was probably more confusing than helpful. And even if I could have settled decisively on one or the other—or even on both or neither—that would still leave the whole question of degree as wide open as ever. I usually think I am thirty percent innocent, but you did not provide any place for that. I don’t suppose the judge is going to let me talk about this. Finally, your request that I describe myself in twenty-five words or less has me stumped, though I have made a start.

  Andy

  ¶

  Smart aleck

  Wiseass

  A storm of criticism

  A shadow of himself

  A blind man in a blind house

  A coruscating ape

  ¶

  Adam raised an edge of the window shade. A sliver of afternoon sunlight raced across the room, forcing Fern to lift a slim hand to her face in order to shield her eyes from the impact of the sudden brightness. Adam turned and leaned an elbow on a narrow dresser from which the veneer had begun to peel in jagged strips. He did not need to open the top drawer to know that in it was a Gideon Bible, for this hotel room, with its yellow wallpaper and iron bed, was all the hotel rooms he had ever stayed in. Leaning there, he looked at Fern sprawled on the bed, bisected by the beam, half in light and half in shadow, one arm raised as if to ward off his gaze, while with the other she struggled with something in her lap, and she was all the women he had ever been with. And now he thought of the previous night, and of her in that night, and his mouth, hitherto a resolute crease, twitched merrily at both corners. Fern saw this and smiled wanly, for lack of sleep and an abundance of alcohol had reduced her to a stupor. Chuckling grimly, he turned from her, to peer cautiously through the crack at the edge of the shade. For a moment he could see nothing, while his bloodshot eyes adjusted to the glare. Then, as the scene across the street seeped into focus, the chuckles died like strangled marbles in his throat. From the bed Fern could see his whole body heave as if seized by some spasm. She was not surprised, as she also felt queasy. She could not, however, supine as she was at the far end of the room, small though it was, actually glimpse what he was looking at.

  This was a low brick building, resembling a warehouse, with STINT BROS. TOWING in white paint above the doorway. The doors were open and Adam could see the back half of a wrecker parked inside, its iron hook hanging from the steel cable like an upside-down question mark. But it was not just this that had caused him to stagger backwards two steps. At the side of the b
uilding was a dirt yard, and there he had spotted the familiar remains of his vehicle, the remains of his familiar vehicle, stacked in several neat piles: fenders together in one place, doors in another, the smaller parts in little heaps of their own. And in the midst of them all the once-powerful engine lay on its side in the dirt, wires and tubes cruelly severed, their mutilated stubs sticking up. Adam knew there was no mechanic on earth able to fit those pieces back together, and he cursed himself for having stayed in bed so late, and cursed Fern too for twice dragging him back when he had tried to get up. Dozens of other cars, mostly luxury models in various states of dismantlement, were scattered about among the puddles and dismal weeds that tufted the yard here and there. Around it all ran a high chain-link fence topped by three rows of barbed wire. Adam had seen operations like this before, for he had been an investigator for one of America’s leading insurance companies probably, before his life had taken the turn which had brought him to this place, which was as near nowhere as a place can get, and into the arms of this woman, who was now sitting on the edge of the bed trying to get the cap off a vodka bottle. Adam walked over. “This way,” he said, showing her which way to turn it. “I know how to fuckin’ do it” she slurred irritably.

  Adam shrugged and resumed his vigil at the window. His eyes hurt and he was annoyed by the continuing sounds of struggle behind him. And then he saw the dog. It was lying on a car seat in front of a rack of chrome bumpers, concealed, as it were, in their dazzle, and it appeared to be asleep. Adam had mistaken it at first for a large bag of garbage, of which there were indeed many scattered about the yard, one of the most untidy places he had ever witnessed, but now he saw that it was a Doberman pinscher. The animal must have felt his gaze upon it, as dogs are wont to do even as they sleep, for it opened one eye and stared at Adam, who quickly let the shade drop. He turned back to the room. Leaning a pensive elbow on the dresser, he looked at Fern working at the bottle cap with her teeth. He contemplated her smeared lipstick, dirt-streaked face, the bits of straw in her hair, the torn flower-print blouse with sweat stains at the armpits. Then he thought of his wife Glenda in her white tennis shorts, leaping over the net at the end of a vigorous match, her shirt still neatly tucked. His mind reeled.