The Beast God Forgot to Invent

by Jim Harrison

  I drank my delicious coffee, and the unhealthy donut was equally good. They chattered on about a “dialogue” they were going to present to a philosophy class. Some dirty but merry little sparrows were on the windowsill feeding from a bowl of seeds Donna had put there as a female Saint Francis. If Bob hadn’t been there I might have said something otiose like the night had been in the top ten of my life, but then I loathe the anal fascism of lists that my guilty profession creates. I settled to dressing quickly to the tune of their Hegel, Schlegel, Heidegger, and Leibniz. When I finished dressing Donna arose from the desk and gave me a polite buss, then a licky kiss.

  “Would you like to go to Spain?” I asked.

  “No. You go ahead. If you like, call me when you get back.” She rummaged through her books and gave me a biography of John Muir by Frederick Turner, at least four times as long as my own products. “You’ll love this,” she said, opening the door.

  I caught a cab on West End Avenue and stopped at my travel agent on the way home to re-ticket for a later flight. I was experienced enough to know that my euphoria would disappear by mid-morning, and a hangover might descend. I’d need a good nap before heading to LaGuardia.

  At the apartment the super had put a Fed Ex from Cindy on the counter plus a note, “Did your walls have an accident?” The wine stains still didn’t look all that bad to me. Cindy’s package contained a book called Humanistic Botany and a note that asked me to read it so I wouldn’t ask her stupid questions. How kind. Homework. I called Don for damage control and he was solicitous about my malaria attack which I had forgotten, and reminded me that my Eisner was due in three weeks. Michael Eisner is, of course, the chairman of Disney. My sister had delivered the usual large folder of well-ordered research but I hadn’t begun the writing. I had never missed a deadline and quickly toted up that I’d have to do five pages a day for twenty days. Kid stuff assuming that I could begin with a stirring first sentence. Soon after he was born Eisner began breathing. Part of my self-training is to actually remember what people say. Sometimes I do this with visual cues. For instance during Donna’s theological babbling at dinner I was slicing the calf’s tongue when she said that you have to willingly wish without knowing what to wish for, the meaning of which lacked lucidity. There was more after the first bite of tongue with its juicy freight of garlic to the effect that the best examples of the human race allow their hearts to break. This had brought a nervous glance from Rico who was picking at a jowl.

  I went to the front window from which I could see a slice of the river. The night had seemed to be a stunning achievement of life herself and, as a not altogether willing participant, I wondered if I could better be drawn along if I did not continue to think of life in five-page segments. There had been this urgency for thirty years to get something done only to start something else fresh. If you worked too fast and hard, then what? You were free to go ahead. I recalled a grade-school lesson that said Thursday had something to do with Thor, a Nordic deity of sorts. The chair at my work desk in the corner might very well be electric, but then the reception of complaints about work is properly based on how much the complainer received for the work. How could I complain? I’m mostly puzzled. Writers are only people who, above all else, write. The catchphrase, almost sadly, is “above all else.” I doubt most plumbers plumb above all else, or farmers farm—add several dozen professions. They leave room for something else, or so I suspect. Maybe the justifiable trap is when we call it the “art” of writing so that ever afterward any hack may feel himself raised to a mysterious domain.

  These troublesome thoughts might have given me a headache if I hadn’t been hungry which takes precedence over everything else for men and beasts. I made a hasty cheese omelet and recalled my grandmother’s prayer that I become a Lutheran minister, but then ministers never get to stop being ministers and the similarity to writers ruined an entire bite of omelet. I glanced over at the Eisner folder and thought of giving it an East River burial. From the evidence I unwittingly gather, men my age are worried about their jobs as I am now, but also about their adult children which I don’t have, their health and the health of their wives, and also about the impending end of the story. You don’t hear about these much on daytime flights with meetings in the prospect, but on evening flights, and after a drink or two, it becomes a burbling brook or, better yet, a roiled mud puddle. Dropping dead at any minute is not discussed directly but is as present as the earth far beneath the plane, in short, reliably obvious. Maybe the best response is always “Please tell me something I don’t know.”

  As if to prove me wrong my seatmate on the Minneapolis flight was a nerdish computer whiz who had just spent three days in New York art museums. I had been struggling along with my homework, Humanistic Botany, and had envied the large art book on his lap, however ungainly. He turned out to be a divorced father of a twelve-year-old daughter who was an art obsessive. He was unable to “communicate” on this level so in the last month he had visited the Walker in his own city, the Chicago Institute of Art, and now he had “covered” New York. He was thinking of buying a set of paints and having a “go” at it.

  This was curious enough that I wanted to prolong the conversation but was only on page 9 of Humanistic Botany and had six hundred to go. There obviously wasn’t a Classic Comic available that covered the subject. You would think that having had a botanist father I would have absorbed something substantial but such was not the case. Once I had idly opened a book in his library and out fell a photo of Ava Gardner clipped from a magazine. I was about fourteen at the time and was a little startled, though Ava was a great deal more winsome than my mother.

  I was struggling with the idea that the root, stem, and leaf of a flowering plant are referred to as “organs,” tripping on the fact that organs had loomed large only recently, but more so, a very Big businessman across the aisle (physically large) had closed his laptop and was talking to a Big partner about Big business in a Big voice just as the Big pilot (I had seen him) announced that we were passing Big Chicago (“stormy, husky, brawling”) a ways to the south. I recalled that before its economic Big decline the top officers of General Motors were generally over six foot two. I had sensed a love of Bigness in Detroit early in my career when I did a Bioprobe on Henry Ford II, widely referred to in Big Detroit as “Hank Deuce.” Soon we would reach the Big Mississippi. Struggling with the “alternate, pinnately veined leaves of sassafras” I began to think of how many time I had witnessed Big florid Texans board a plane with really Big voices. Once one had insisted on trading seats in order to sit next to a Big friend but I stuck to my habitual 3B much to his apparent disgust.

  All of these thoughts made tiny flowers most interesting for the time being. I had a glass of cheapish syrupy California Cabernet which the stewardess said was the best available. Oak smoke and Hershey with almonds, worthy of being served with a Whopper at Burger King.

  I leafed through the whole book but there were no photos of Ava Gardner. A stewardess with a fine fanny stooped to pick up an errant napkin, surely the highlight of the flight. Far in the back a baby was crying, a far sweeter music than the Big businessman’s Rottweiler voice. I suddenly longed for smallish France, my small walks, small coffees, small baguettes, even small Claire who required Biggish money. How rarely lovely-looking women like Claire had the sexual energy of Donna. Never in my experience.

  When we landed in Minneapolis before dinner I was delighted to realize that I had never been there, though unlike Barcelona and Seville there was no emotional content to the realization. I was ready to bolt from the plane per usual when a woman with two young children, one crying, rushed forward. She was desperate and loaded with carry-on crap so I carried the child she had been dragging off the plane. The stewardess with the fine fanny thanked me and for a moment I felt warm all over in the manner of those Reader’s Digest anecdotes I had read as a child. The kid was a plump little bugger, weighing as much as my Eisner-loaded briefcase and the light garment bag I held with my
other arm. It was a relief to turn over the wriggling tyke to a sullen father at the gate.

  There was a brief, somewhat frightening moment when I got in my rent-a-car and rehearsed, as I always do, just what I was doing. Cindy tomorrow near La Crosse by dinnertime. Read the book. I had written down where Rico had told me to eat dinner. Rico was terrified of flying but had driven throughout America on his vacations. He had asked me to join him many times but I never seemed to have the time what with my Bioprobe projects. His travel notebooks, however, were invaluable for restaurant advice.

  After rehearsing what is called my “game plan,” and coming up short this time, I usually try to learn how the car functions while stationary rather than in traffic. I held the key in my hand but failed to find the ignition. Others in the rent-a-car parking lot were wheeling off with gusto, including the Big businessman and his Big friend who had rented a maroon Lincoln. Plugging in lamps tests the outer limits of my technical abilities. I reached in the glove compartment for the manual which was in five languages, including Japanese. The car was overwarm but I couldn’t open the windows or turn on the air conditioner and it didn’t occur to me to open the door. My eyes became moist with frustration, the dashboard an inscrutable collection of high-tech gizmos that blurred with my tears. Maybe I should take a few days off, but then in the remaining time before my deadline that would gradually increase my Eisner quota from five a day, to six, to seven, to thirteen, and so on until I was down to doing the final hundred in a single day. At last a passing black attendant in a natty uniform opened the door and aptly said, “These motherfucking Jap cars are pure Greek,” then showed me the ignition. I tried to give my savior twenty bucks but he refused and walked off laughing.

  At the hotel there was a plaque in my suite announcing that Gorbachev had slept here. This caused only the briefest moments of turmoil bound up in the question of what are we to believe nowadays? To avoid further leakage I lay on the bed and burrowed ever deeper into Humanistic Botany. Without my previous knowledge auxins, gibberellins, and cytokinins were hormone and regulatory substances essential to cellular growth in plants. This was a halcyon announcement, and I meant the pill. I slept.

  By coincidence, when I awoke in a half-hour, there was a brief child’s cry in the hall. Why hadn’t I become a father? Raising my brother and sister from twelve and fifteen had been enough. My mother’s sister hadn’t been much help and we drove her away after a year. She had been married twice, the second and longest to an Italian stevedore, and her entire emotional contents, limited as they were, went into cooking. She had all the bad aspects of her sister, my mother, and none of the few good ones such as humor and forbearance. The last straw for me was when she beat Thad over the head with a wooden spatula for eating raw cookie dough, then pushed up the volume by accusing him of spending his study time masturbating over his Playboys and Penthouses. Poor Thad was convulsed with embarrassment, then burst into tears. We were all in the kitchen at the time and my sister who has always loved swearing yelled, “Shut up, you stupid old cunt.” There was no retreat and she was gone the next day, never to be heard from again though I regularly sent her a Christmas card.

  I checked the room-service menu’s wine list and was pleased to be able to order up a good Pomerol. I found the name of the restaurant and the concierge made a reservation for a half-hour before closing. Time to boogie down to work. There was a struggle between Eisner and botany but fierce Cindy was in the offing so I plopped the book on the desk with a resonant thud. Stern duty calls. The wine came in a trice but a corkscrew was a foreign object to the slack-jawed young woman who brought it so I took over. She was new at the job and didn’t know who Gorbachev was so I told her, adding a description of his birthmark that looked like a wine stain on a pale wall. Ten minutes of solid reading caused mental discomfort so I called Donna but only got a message to the effect that she was not to be called unless it was a matter of utmost importance. I recalled a terrifying line from the postscript poems in Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, something about it taking a lot of volume to fill a life. Like Kennedy’s death I could remember what I had been doing when I read the line. It was a warm summer evening in Indiana and I was listening to the raucous love songs of a thousand cicadas. My father told me that whippoorwills ate cicadas but I hadn’t thought it important at the time. For some reason I did now. Perhaps calling Cindy and the night with Donna had opened a window which at normal times would have required a crowbar.

  I reached page 50 of Humanistic Botany and the discussion of Carolus Linnaeus before I was interrupted by dinnertime, and the raw notion of an old girlfriend from Rye, New York, a devout Catholic and Sarah Lawrence graduate (magna cum laude when it still meant something): to wit, my talents were limited by excessively subdued grief and a mediocre education. This young woman could make your mental teeth chatter. She had interrupted her Ph.D. in the psychology department at New York University to help edit a series of do-it-yourself mental health books for my publisher. She was delicate and remote about her psychologizing but it was always there. Why could I only have my coffee in the morning after I shaved? Why did I only smoke excessively while writing? Only I knew that she was an off-again, on-again heroin addict, a matter New York neglects to discuss about its higher minds. She even researched the accident reports on my father’s death which I had never managed to deal with: the Ecuadorian boat captain, under the influence of rum, had failed to balance the ballast tanks of the research boat. The only two survivors, excluding the captain, had been sleeping on deck. In my mother’s case it was merely announced that there had been a five hundred percent increase in brain cancer since World War II for those born and raised in industrial areas of New Jersey.

  Still, I had loved this young woman for her antic wit, however melancholy. Her father was an insurance actuary and a terminal depressive and I suspect I was second choice in someone she could cheer up, having failed at the first. Our final quarrel had begun with my notion, over her superlative macaroni and cheese (made with twelve-bucks-a-pound English cheddar from Dean & Deluca), that her psychology series was bound to raise the suicide rate and, failing that, would be a boon to pharmaceutical companies. She threw my favorite Bioprobe thus far (Linus Pauling) out the window of our West Tenth Street walk-up.

  But how do we get at the ice that is possibly nestled in our hearts? “Fais ce que voudras” (Do what you want) was far from adequate. I used to construct sets of worthless rules, worthless because I had followed these rules before I wrote them down. A later girlfriend, a pediatrician in Chicago, said that “He got his work done” should be engraved on my tombstone.

  On the short walk to the restaurant Rico had recommended (D’Amico Cucina) I was amused by the idea that my psychology girlfriend scorned the human-potential movement to the degree she was a victim of it. She had been thoroughly pissed off one Sunday morning when she demanded that I pick the favorite activity of my life and spend the day doing it, rather than working. I said hoeing my grandmother’s garden on the farm back in Indiana. Since this was plainly impossible she requested my second favorite and I offered fucking my first wife Cindy dog-style in a cornfield on a July afternoon. She suggested we drive to the country and try it but I pointed out that it was late May and the corn wouldn’t be high enough. Sure enough, in her mental health series, also edited by Don, there was a depression-preventive chapter called “Pick Your Favorite Things and Do Them.”

  At the restaurant I ordered an older Barbaresco and had a plate of prosciutto and imported figs to start with. The waiter frowned at the idea that I was reading a book and I inwardly agreed. Life overexamined also seemed an unworthy idea in the face of good food. I wondered where the Mississippi, that watery knife that cuts our country in half, was located so that I could drop the book in the river. I knew that John Berryman, a once famous poet in the poetry world, had jumped from a local bridge and it might also be a good grave for the book. Inside the front cover it said, “Cindy McLauglen, 1977,” the year the book was published, wit
h an added note, “please return.” Here I am at fifty-five years old with a couple of million bucks doing a homework assignment. Any smart person would lie and say he’d left for the airport before Fed Ex delivered, or somesuch fib.

  It was during my pasta course, a simple but perfect puttanesca, that I had an epiphany of sorts. The damnable book on the table beside my radicchio salad was making me suffer because of the voluminous nature of its contents. Since my father’s heyday, the thirties, forties, and fifties, we have seen the gradual triumph of process over content. For instance my Bioprobes are full of fact but not an overwhelming amount, actually an underwhelming amount, and I’ve long since understood that their popularity is due to packaging. Of course this isn’t profound, and the fact of the matter could be easily sensed by anyone with a three-digit I.Q., but the rage for computers is based on process. The nation and its people got plumb tired of learning so it turned to process in the manner of the hundreds of teachers colleges whose students, the future teachers, largely can’t pass any test that requires substantial knowledge, thus our students habitually finish dead last among the twenty or so Western nations.

  Frankly I didn’t give a flat fuck about any of this except inasmuch as I could extrapolate the core of the notion for my own life. It was clear, however, that my sister had the contents and I was the process, and my brother Thad merely doctored the shell of the process.

  Evidently my lips were moving nervously because my waiter came trotting over. He glanced down anxiously at an illustration on page 109 of a longitudinal section of the apical meristem in the ash stem. From a distance of a few feet it did look possibly sexual in nature like those old cross sections of women’s parts in biology class. He said that my veal chop was nearly ready and I asked about the location of the Mississippi River as I had passed over the Minnesota River, or so I thought, on the way in from the airport. The question spooked him.