Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The next letter came only a few days later, also postmarked New York City.

  Dr. Vogel: never committed murder.

  T. W. Monk: never got killed.

  Not for Mother’s eyes. T. W. Monk read his poems last night at St. Marks. Do you remember him? Remember the man you almost killed? He told me all about you.

  So you tried to kill somebody once! Oh I love you.

  Thought I saw you the other day in the square. Man with red hair walking fast. Oh it wasn’t you. Oh there are thousands of men not you.

  I am going to have a baby.

  Love love love,

  Shelley

  9

  “And that was your daughter? That girl your daughter, really?”

  Monk was staring at Jesse and smiling vacuously.

  “You mean you have a daughter, that was really your daughter? I thought it was a joke or something … I was a little mixed-up that night.… That little girl was really the daughter of Jesse Vogel?”

  Jesse nodded stiffly.

  “Well, Dr. Vogel, my friend, I would recognize you, yes, but it’s quite a surprise for me and an honor, truly an honor,” Monk was saying rapidly, “to open the door and see you standing there.… I’m a little confused, but eventually I make perfect sense. There is a code to my confusion. And so you’re looking for her, that little girl who was evidently your daughter, no joke about it …?”

  “Yes. I thought you could help me.”

  “Oh yes. Yes. I can help you. Indeed, yes,” Monk said with a smile.

  Monk’s room was above a bar in the East Village. Jesse sat rigidly, in a kind of chair, while Monk sat on a ruined sofa with piles of candy wrappers on the cushions around him. The room stank.

  “You must have been surprised to discover that I am famous, after all that nonsense at Ann Arbor,” Monk said. He was thick and clammy, stripped to the waist, perspiring in spite of the chilly room. His chest was mottled, many colors, even bruised in great yellow and orangish and violet welts, and his chest hair was stubbly—it had evidently been shaved off some time ago and allowed to grow back in. His head was completely bald. The gleaming scalp was rotund and boastful. Even when Monk was not speaking, his mouth moved in silent, moist, circular movements, as if he were chewing gum though he did not seem to be chewing gum.

  “Yes, I was surprised to hear about you. I was surprised,” Jesse admitted.

  “Well, this is a time of magic. Anything can happen today,” Monk said. “My first book was published under the name T. W. Monk, not Trick Monk. I rejected Trick because it was undignified. Did you read my book?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Jesse said.

  “I knew you wouldn’t, and I don’t hold it against you,” Monk said with a swift, sweet smile, moving his mouth. “The title was Poems Without People. Do you remember that title?”

  Jesse frowned. No, he did not remember.

  “Ah, you don’t remember.… Poems are written to people like you, who don’t remember any of them,” Monk said wistfully. He had a garish, lined face; he appeared middle-aged. His face sagged. The skin of his scalp differed noticeably from the skin on his face, which was ruddy and pale in spots, caked over with something bright and muddy—it must have been make-up—that caught the light cruelly in this room.

  “Anyway, it’s good to meet an old friend after so many years,” Monk said, reaching out to shake Jesse’s hand again. It was the third time he had shaken Jesse’s hand. “I feel that I am about to synthesize great areas of American thought, I feel that I am on the brink of revelation—and then you appear! Jesse Vogel appears knocking at my door! Did you happen to read that review of my second book last year in—what was it—the Saturday Review? The reviewer took on twenty-five books of poetry, an avalanche, but such an avalanche is correct in our time because it reflects the avalanche that is to come. I don’t mind being considered in a mountain of other human beings. I feel, Dr. Vogel,” he said with a snicker, “that in a mountain of bodies my own will fare well enough—eh? An arm sticking out here, a leg there, a vital organ exhibited to public view, eh? There is a cult down here, you know, strongly behind President Nixon. I had a vision of him descending to us from the sky. I think he is the Second Coming in person. It was that conviction I tried to express in my book … it was not an easy vision to express.…” Monk got to his feet with a grunt. He began to pace back and forth in the cramped space in front of Jesse. “The reviewer for the Saturday Review misunderstood my poem, but with charity. There is no evil, Dr. Vogel, my dear Jesse, my friend Jesse.…” He turned to Jesse with a sudden warm, loose smile. Jesse tried not to draw back. “Oh, how I loved you! Seeing you at those morning lectures of Cady’s, sitting in the front row, sleepy and angelic and so attentive, so very attentive, as if your soul’s salvation depended upon your hearing everything, learning everything. Your strength and your brains, your lovely brains—There is no love without the struggle of the brains, sexual chess, no, nothing at all—but you had a kind of Protestant soul then, an unimaginative dreary Protestant soul, and there was no chance of your being converted … and … and so decades have passed.… Now, now what was I saying …?”

  “You were going to tell me about my daughter,” Jesse said nervously.

  “Your daughter. Yes. It’s strange, that you are a father.” Monk went to sit on the edge of a tub. Evidently, the tub was not used for baths but was piled with books and magazines and papers and clothes. Behind Monk’s head a banging had begun on the other side of the wall, but he did not seem to notice it. “Did you follow her footsteps to me, or what? I mean, is it still snowing?”

  “What?”

  Monk got up with another grunt and went to peer out of the window.

  “They must have shoveled it up. Who sent you here?”

  “Someone clerking in a bookstore. I asked about you and he told me where you live.”

  “But, look … the girl never came up here, did she?” Monk said, frowning. “She never came up to this room. I’m sure of that. So how did you follow her here?”

  Jesse stared at Monk and could think of no reply.

  Monk said vaguely, as he looked out the window, “I met her or someone like her at the Tupperware Corner, where I give poetry readings. I read them my Nixon sonnet a dozen times. They always ask for it, it’s an audience-pleaser. I am working on another poem about the President. But I have trouble keeping track of my notebook. People are anxious to see what I’m doing, so they borrow it. They don’t steal, they don’t mean harm. But the notebook is not here now, I notice. Are you sitting on it? I have a problem with the central image. I want the scene to be the Washington Easter-egg roll, and I want a giant egg that will crack open so that the President can step out of it, but at the same time … I have this disturbing, maddening image of a baked potato … yes … a very American baked potato that is cut open, and it too will reveal the President.… Art is hallucinatory, it comes up out of the depths and cannot be explained. It is instinctive. I must follow my instincts and I can’t decide between these two images.”

  “You gave a poetry reading,” Jesse said. “That was last week, wasn’t it? And my daughter somehow met you, talked with you at that time …?”

  “The Tupperware Corner, a coffeehouse. I’m their star. They have my picture on the wall next to Mae West and Calvin Coolidge. It was the picture that ran in the New York Times two years ago, did you happen to see it? A professor at Columbia put together an anthology of antiwar poems and he asked me for a poem. Well, I didn’t have anything about Vietnam or any other war, but everyone really wanted me in this anthology because of my reputation in the Village here, they wanted to spread me across the nation … they are so kind … well, I had a poem on the central nervous system, four pages long, so I retitled it ‘Vietnam’ and somehow it became the star of the anthology … the New York Times singled it out to discuss.… Here, I have the picture handy. Don’t think I’m aggressive about this, really I am only part of a national movement and in advancing myself I am ad
vancing all my brothers and sisters. See, here.…” He searched through the pockets of his tight-fitting trousers. Jesse watched him with apprehension. But Monk did have a wallet, made of imitation reptile skin, and he took from it a news clipping that had been covered carefully with transparent adhesive tape. Just the look of this—the care that had gone into its preservation—made Jesse realize suddenly that there might be some truth to what Monk was saying.

  Monk handed him the clipping and stood at the window self-consciously. He began to hum and clap his hands lightly together.

  The clipping was several inches long. A photograph of Monk, just as bald as he was today, with a shy beatific grin and pouched eyes; the caption read “T. W. Monk.” Jesse skimmed the review:

  … the increasing irony of the distance between the object as perceived and the object as conceived in American society has given rise to a new school of tragic-minded poets … for whom the tactile is the only measure of historical value.… One of the poets in this shocking little anthology declares that “Paisley print is a Braille of love/but our fingers must be sanctified”—and the reader comes away immensely shaken, immensely changed. The most original poet of all, T. W. Monk, seems to sum up an entire decade—perhaps an entire era—of our apocalyptic American experience, in his cool, brilliant denunciation of the Vietnam tragedy. His poems, which I wish I could quote in full, contain these lines: “fed fed fed by small arteries/an epilepsy unpetals/it is electric in the discs/the brain heaving like a penis/oh unleash us! un-teach us! carcinoma of/the brain hail/full/of grace/now and at the hour of our birth/Amen.”

  This made little sense to Jesse, who was extremely nervous anyway, so he handed it back to Monk. Monk said quickly, “I despise exhibitionists and I only offered this to you as a gesture, so that we might meet as equals. I want to spare you the embarrassment of not knowing that I … I am … well, I am … a kind of equivalent of yours, Dr. Vogel, though not,” he said hastily, “not in the world of reality, only in the world of poetry. This reviewer was perceptive and kind, don’t you think? The other review … which I seem to have misplaced, unless someone borrowed it … is kind also, but seems to have misunderstood my stand on President Nixon. The reviewer seems to think that I am attacking our President. But really he is a kind of hero to me … he is a cult down here actually, America’s attempt to create the Übermensch.… When I shoot myself up I ask only to be transformed into him, for that lovely split second of radiance, you know … or don’t you know? At any rate I would never attack our President.”

  “And your life is … it consists of writing and reading poetry now?” Jesse said, baffled. “Can you make a living that way?”

  “I have consecrated myself to purity of all kinds,” Monk said. “My only grossness is a craving for Milky Way candy bars. Do you like them? Excuse all these wrappers,” he said, embarrassed, as the papers crackled beneath his feet like leaves. “I have come a long way, Jesse, since the last time we saw each other. Utterly transformed. I can’t remember much except a series of hospitals after Ann Arbor … and then my freedom, my apotheosis. You see before you not a man but an abstraction, an essence. My only grossness is chocolate candy. I have to take care of my head, you know, and the only way is by tending the stalk that leads up. I am very speedy even without shooting. There’s a joke in the Village, that T. W. Monk should be put in the nearest refrigerator when he is high, but I cherish my metabolism because it is the metabolism of a poet. No artist wishes to be cured.”

  “You’re taking drugs?—speed?”

  “I handle one-third of a gram nicely,” Monk said with a large smile. “I’m the original T. W. Monk. You should see me in my own environment. Give me another chance, you might become affectionate after all,” he said wistfully. “But … but … I have consecrated myself to purity … I can’t let my audience down.… What did you want to see me about? I know you’re a doctor now, are you doing a routine examination?”

  At this moment the banging on the other side of the wall began.

  “What is that?” Jesse said, alarmed.

  The door opened, kicked inward. It slammed back against the wall. Monk crouched and put his arms over his head.

  A boy in his early twenties stood in the doorway, staring at Jesse.

  “Just checking!” he cried.

  He turned and ran away. Monk shut the door.

  “What was … what was that?” Jesse asked faintly.

  “Conrad. He must have seen you come up. I don’t blame him, you look so prepared and so dangerous,” Monk whispered. “When you walk through us, the crowd shivers and ripples. Dr. Vogel, my dear Jesse, you don’t understand. You want to kill us. Don’t kill us. Don’t look at us like that,” Monk said. He had begun to cry. “I can feel it in you, the desire to do something—to dissect us, or operate on us—to snip our nerves—to clean us out with a scouring pad—Oh yes! We sense it! Conrad is like my own son. He gets off and everywhere he goes I accompany him, in my soul. Don’t hurt us, don’t kill us.…”

  “But why are you crying?” Jesse asked, amazed. “I’m not going to hurt you. I explained my reason for looking you up.…”

  Monk shook his head sorrowfully, as if he could not believe this.

  “You want to walk through us and part us, like parting the sea. Your shoes hurt us. Look at my poor chest … my arms, the inside of my arms.…” He held out his arms for Jesse to inspect: a mess of scarry tissue, bruises and welts, veins that must have been like leather. “You want to dissect us with your special instruments, but to us they feel like ice picks. Believe me. I know you are a surgeon. But have mercy. More patients die under anesthetic than under the tracks of a steamroller.…”

  “My daughter,” Jesse said. “The girl you were talking to. Try to remember her, please.”

  “Your daughter.…”

  “A very pretty girl. You should have noticed her, anyone would notice her. She has red hair, she’s about five foot four, she wrote me a letter and said she had met you. She’s been missing from home for several months. Evidently, the two of you talked about me. Did that happen? Or didn’t it?” Jesse said wildly. He was beginning to doubt everything. “Please, Trick, please help me … I have to find her.… I love her and I have to bring her back home; please, you could help me if you’d just remember, remember.…”

  “A girl. Last name Vogel. Yes,” Monk muttered. “I have all that straight. A long time ago. Vogel. Vogel. Jesse. You wouldn’t accept my poems, you tried to murder me. A boy of passion who tried to murder me,” Monk said, beginning to weep again so that tears gathered in creases in his face. “A girl. But I need money. My head is clean today and I can plan for the future, except for my notebook, but they’ll tell me where it is if I can get out on the street. I feel very clean today. I need money.”

  “Money …?”

  “Yes, money. Money.”

  Jesse took out his wallet. He fumbled, opening it, and took out a hundred-dollar bill.

  “Thank you,” Monk whispered.

  He sighed. His head was smoothly shining, his eyes sunken but oddly sweet, even innocent, frank as a child’s. “I don’t see very well. But I thank you for whatever you’ve given me. I know you’re generous.”

  “It’s a hundred dollars.…” Jesse said uncertainly.

  “I don’t see too well, there’s no point to it,” Monk said. He folded the bill carefully and put it in his pocket and sat down on the floor. He sighed heavily. He no longer seemed to be aware of Jesse.

  “But … but what about Shelley?” Jesse said after a few seconds.

  Monk leaned his head back against the wall. His pouchy eyes went slowly out of focus.

  “Trick? Trick? Aren’t you well?” Jesse cried. “Wait, don’t fall asleep, I need your help. Please. I need your help.…”

  Trick waved him away. “A baked potato … would destroy life inside it … cracked and puffed open.… An Easter egg is our approximation of the divinity. Out of the egg comes new life. Out of the potato … sprouts.…”
He shook his head as if besieged by fears, doubts, complexities. “No. No. Don’t keep after me.”

  Jesse got to his feet. “I didn’t try to murder you—I don’t remember it that way—I was only trying to defend myself, I tried to push you away from me—that was all—I didn’t—”

  He watched as Monk fell asleep, or fell into a state of semi-consciousness. Then it seemed to him that he was alone in the room. He was alone. Monk sat with his stomach grotesquely squeezed together, in long lardy ridges, his head back against the wall, his eyes partly closed. Jesse understood that he was alone.

  After three or four days in New York City, looking for Shelley, he gave up and went back home.

  10

  Dear Dr. Vogel:

  Ancient here & ruined. The sun has done its work, you can see that. The land is all one giant body. We were in San Angelo for a few days, they wanted us to leave. The sun is still cold. It gets on the inside of your head and worries you. Went to places I wrote down to save for you—Best, the Glass Mountains, the Christmas Mountains. They wouldn’t let us over the Rio Grande. Are you surprised I came so far? Found a name on a map I wanted to get to—the Caverns of Sonora. But we never got there. Noel wants to get to California to meet up with someone. Best, Texas. That is a town. We went in and out again. Luth who is our friend and giving us a ride all across the country took me off to the side & told me to go back home. Said he would give me money for a bus ticket himself. He got sunburned in the desert even though it isn’t warm yet. It’s still winter.

  Noel went under the name Judge Roy Bean for a while in Texas. I’m afraid of the sun. It makes my eyes water. I’m afraid I will crawl out into the desert sometime and die there. Something drains out of me—like pus. It is clear and smells fresh. Should I rub some on a piece of paper and mail it to you, Father, for a test? Either I should have a baby or I should start to bleed again, I don’t know which, the insides of me should swell up with a baby or they should thin out and bleed again, but they don’t. Noel says not to worry about it. He is the superior mind. Luth doesn’t understand us.