There’s a House in Graham’s Head or A Long Story Short
Amando Lo Dico: Multimedia student and speaker of the house. Theophilous Falsehoney: Theology student and independent researcher who captures the house and subjugates the other residents before being asphyxiated by mold. Hugo Nubdebeneau: Linguistics student who directs several of Dan Wédo’s children and a number of Ms. Greenwood’s second-grade class at Andrew Jackson Elementary School to construct a flight machine in order to escape to a place not yet corrupted by adults. Dan Wédo: Spirit of the king of France, husband of Marionetta and Bon Mama’s prisoner. Bon Mama: Sponsor of Dan Wédo and keeper of the fates of the residents of the house. Marionetta Wédo: Ethnobiology student and wife of Dan Wédo who writes the grammars of Rtsch and Kaskedyen. Louises I-XV: Children of Dan Wédo. Xavier Begoney: Historiography student and telephone market researcher who disappears shortly after the disappearance of his unfinished novel. Jack the Old: Who walks into the basement and is never seen again. Fabrizio de Andrè: Who emerges from the basement some time after the disappearance of Jack the Old. Ruth du Babylone: Gender studies student who invents the monologue exchange form of communication and reveals that Mortimer has been murdering people. Sid Sermann: English literature student who rapes Narcissa after being tricked by Bon Mama, ultimately causing his own death. Narcissa Mermerrick: Translator who convinces Mortimer to continue murdering and apparently drowns in the attic after being raped and having her room soiled by Sid. Gavin Golightly: Undecided student who moves into the house after leaving his wife Psychelle and falls in love with Narcissa, but, paralyzed by indecision, ultimately causes her death before finally deciding to dig a hole in the garden. Mortimer Kilthywell: Honors student, moralist and colleague of Xavier, who realizes he is a misanthrope when he falls in love with the girl he has never seen before named Ugdulena, kills the rapist Clarence Cuttlesworth and leaves his body in the basement, inadvertently bringing forth territorial disputes with the rats.
1. “I think I’ve just realized that my life is not fictional.” The only time she laid eyes on Sid, his left arm was in a sling made from two T-shirts tied together, where a bottle of tequila with a cartoonish illustration of an agave that looked like a deep sea monster on the label had been tucked as carefully as if it were an infant (actually, Sid would never take such care with an infant, as he despised them). Forty-five minutes earlier he had shattered his elbow on the brick path that passed from the front porch to the alley along the south side of the house under a large tree. He had wanted to go downstairs, but, justifying himself to onlookers that only invertebrates and cripples must take the stairs, had decided to instead jump from a window he happened to be standing next to, onto a sturdy-looking branch of the tree, which immediately broke. Had he not had the extra weight of the tequila (which at the time was roughly half full and tucked under his belt by the neck so that the bottle kneaded against his thin abdomen as he threw himself into oblivion), the branch could have supported his body, although the influence of the alcohol on his brain and muscles may have saved him from dying from the fall. His had been the house’s first residence application that included a “yes” on the criminal record question that was not drug-related. When he was eighteen years old he had slugged a girl in gym class, though he maintained quite truthfully to the end of his short life that that incident had been purely accidental. The cause was a hobby of his, that of running with his eyes closed, that by this time was already an addiction and was fast becoming a plunge into self-destruction, though he himself would define it as a challenge to what he saw in what most people consider common sense for the sake of personal safety, as a restriction on his self-affirmation —which he identified with his freedom (which, like most white people and all egomaniacs, he identified with himself). Sid had enrolled in school as a condition of a personal injury suit he had recently won against the owner of a sports car underneath which the driver and some bystanders had found his body, which was bloody, still, but not lifeless, as was evident from the pupils swimming frenetically beneath his eyelids and the erection that protruded from his black blue jeans. He had moved in the day before, the same day that a former resident, a graduate student of ethnobiology named Marionetta, arrived from Haiti and moved into a room on the second floor by the back stairs with her new husband (whom she had not decided to marry out of love or as the ultimate logical conclusion of the course of her actions and judgments up to that point, but, rather, for an outstanding awareness of the fact that her life was nothing more than a story of which the writer is not herself) and several of his relatives. Sid had little ability or desire for socializing, but he loved to drink and talk at length. He was soon to find many hours in which to gesticulate and yell with Hugo Nubdebeneau, an undergraduate of linguistics who, at the time that Sid moved in, had already renounced entirely speaking what he had formerly referred to as “the pre-scripted prose of apparently un-phatic language” and was beginning to forge the incessant flow of words that accompanied his entry into any room into an admirable iambic pentameter. The pair would present an interesting spectacle: two individuals holding two entirely unrelated conversations, seemingly in perfect understanding with one another, for each found what he himself was saying to be quite agreeable. The only time she laid eyes on Sid, he interrupted her in conversation and finished her sentence in her mind. “I think I’ve just realized that my life is not fictional,” she had said to Hugo as he turned his shoulders away from his bowl of unsalted rice adjacent her at the island as though to focus his eyes in order to listen more purposefully. Although he had effectively taken a vow of silence as far as small talk was concerned, he was still perfectly receptive to all who spoke to him, and she knew him well enough to imagine rather than presume what he might be thinking. He usually would reply, but his improvised verse was mostly incomprehensible to her. The only time she laid eyes on Sid he burst through the opposite door and said, “But you vertebrates don’t impress me either.” Hugo rose to his feet with an expression of utter disgust on his face and began reciting at the top of his lungs about the inimitable beauty of the rice paddies of Cambodia. She continued in her mind the conversation she had already begun there a few minutes before. I am not the girl sitting in the kitchen, she thought, I am here, behind these eyes… no, not behind. There’s really no better way to say it; language is never wholly egocentric, or at least that’s not quite the right way to put it… it always takes for granted that I really know where my self is… when I speak about myself it’s as though I keep myself on my shelf next to my body thrown over my dreams like a jacket. She is not a character in a story, she thought, as Hugo and Sid exited in a rush through the same door through which Sid had just entered, devising plans to embellish the arguably innocent but aesthetically unpleasant Mormon reading center on the corner of the block. She looked at Hugo’s bowl of rice alone on the stained stainless steel of the island, a slough of watery coffee reaching at it from the leaking French press at the other end. When he still spoke in complete sentences, Hugo had declared in a tone tinged with victory that he would no longer eat anything except rice, because rice is good. She smiled and marveled at how one is able to get away with having no purpose for so long as she had. No one saw or heard anything when she exploded there in the kitchen.
No one saw or heard anything when a girl exploded in the kitchen except for the cat coming in through the window opposite the door Hugo and Sid had just exited through. The cat, who familiar residents in this particular house knew as Gorilla Cat (with the exception of Hugo, who addressed him as Mustafa Kemal Pasha or “my so-called Atatürk”), was startled but kept his ground there on the windowsill. His instinct to flee the unexpected was beaten by his commitment to an appointment with some bowls of cat food next to the recycling in a partitioned area of the kitchen composed of steel counters and deep sinks overflowing with dirty dishes known by familiar residents as “the swamp” and a peculiar tendency that only Hugo noticed to do the opposite of what his instincts told him to do. He smelled the air as his eyes scanned the room and was immediately assured that he was not in danger. From the instant that the girl in the kitchen had exploded there had been only smoke, the smell of burnt hair and a fine, white dust that turned the slough of coffee into magma and coated Hugo’s rice like powder snow on rock cliffs and was still hanging in the air when two other residents entered and prepared dinner. The cat, whose fur was the color of moth’s wings, dropped onto the floor beneath his feet and went directly to his appointment. He ate quickly and left some kernels of what could justifiably be referred to as fish bran in the bottom of the bowl to dash between the dinner preparers (whose names were Xavier and Jack) as they entered and disappeared out the front door at the other end of the house. Though he generally avoided other residents, feline or otherwise, the house was his territory, so he only strayed so far as the porch to hunt flies. The traffic of felines, higher than that found in other suitable environments in the city, might be related to the way in which the nature of cats resembles the atmosphere of this place where space seems distorted and time is irrelevant.
The kitchen had, for longer than anyone could remember, provided shelter to the debris of the transience of human beings and inanimate objects, like the busy sidewalk from whence the wind and traffic carry away the light and where the same deposit the heavy. And so on this particular day the kitchen was stocked with seventeen cans of coconut milk, but no olive oil, and offered several liters of balsamic vinegar, but no honey, and the only wooden spoon was cracked in half lengthwise, although there were four fondue sets, one of them complete, and three of them never used before, or at least not for the purposes of making fondue. After briefly investigating with no success the source of the smells of smoke and burnt hair and the cloud of dust that hung in the air, Xavier Begoney and Jack the Old decided what anyone would decide with so many variants in one kitchen, including the number of plates to be served (which on a given day was between twelve and twenty): they decided to cook spaghetti. But there was no tomato sauce in any of the cabinets, so Jack the Old decided to go and see if there was any in the basement and did not return for six weeks. Xavier Begoney was a student of historiography who had a theory that history could be divided between those individuals that are afraid of death and those that are afraid of life and who was himself terrified by the monotony of both and whom his housemates called simply “X” and who considered himself lucky to share a dinner shift with Jack the Old because although the latter was friendly and talkative most of the time, he was silent while he worked, and also because he entertained certain illusions about the character of the old man who had abandoned a wife and two daughters shortly before moving in. Although X had grown up with his brothers in his father’s house, his childhood and adolescence had been littered with mother figures due to the fact that all of the men in his family experienced an impeccable success at getting a woman into bed. X himself was, to his knowledge, the only exception to this, and he often wondered whether his contempt for women derived from his childhood experiences with them or vice versa. He set the water to boil, let it boil, and seeing that Jack the Old had still not come back from the basement with the tomato sauce, turned off the heat and waited another forty minutes before turning it back on and dropping the spaghetti in the water. When they were still a little harder than al dente, he strained them (with a little difficulty, as the pot was half his height and held nearly five gallons of boiling water) into a large colander and heated them a little longer in a large wok with peanut oil and a little chopped ginger. He left the spaghetti in the wok on a long wooden table in the dining room on the other side of the swamp, next to a few stacks of bowls and plates, and a large box with an unreasonable number of forks, and several times as many butter knives, and went straight to his room without calling dinner, as it was already six forty-five and several residents had already gathered around the table to chat with empty bowls in their hands. X’s was the largest room in the house, occupying nearly all of the south side of the third floor, and included two large windows, one of which was arcaded and would have provided a pleasant view of the large tree whose name he did not know that shaded the small garden on the east side of the house, had he not papered over both of them, like all the walls of his empty room, with prints of late Cézanne. At the center of the long wall opposite the arcaded window, beneath his loft bed, he kept his computer on a small, wooden desk he had found in the room the day he had moved in, which had been painted a milky violet with a pale, green vine climbing up the faces of the three drawers on its left. By this time he was spending virtually every minute in which he wasn’t immediately obligated to be somewhere else seated at his computer. He was writing a novel with no plot and no end about an anachronistic human society which attains absolute self-sustainability in every sense of the word, so that, for example, a renewable source of energy is found in the female orgasm, and inexhaustible nourishments are extracted from placentas and fecal matter. Not only has humanity achieved absolute autonomy from the rest of the organic world, but the individual has been largely emancipated from interpsychical relationships due to a highly specialized labor division system by which each worker’s individual perversions and fixations are identified and developed to suit that worker’s duties. And so over generations of specialization the defecators have chosen to spend their free time gorging themselves with fiber, the birthers pass the days following each birth anxiously preparing for the next, and when the nose-pickers run out of the versatile commodity which those with a booger-fixation (who before spoken language had deteriorated to mere grunts and moans were known as “snot-cutters”) divide into (among other things) building materials, food, and lubricant, they excavate the snorting nostrils of fat orgasmic women who do not so much as notice the further intrusion, so insatiable is their feverish yearning for their one and only diversion which happens to be one and the same with their one and only usefulness to the colony. The only individual with no job is a young man who each day exits the immense, porous bile-colored dome that encloses humanity in its perfect entirety, constructed primarily from the hair of newborn infants and a sort of glue made by mixing equal parts gray matter and the marrow of impotent forty-five year-olds, to stroll through the surrounding woods listening to the songs of birds and looking at the leaves of trees whose names he does not know. The writing of X’s novel had begun simply as a way to pass what he saw as a terrible vastness of time not filled by work or studies or the dreamless sleep he was capable of inducing on himself for at least six hours a day by staying awake until midnight and then counting the seconds, and the pages grew steadily with countless intervals between idyllic scenery described with that flowery and repetitive language that most books are filled with and a cold reportage of the nightmarish, orgiastic machinations of the underside of an anthill. X was satisfied with his newfound hobby and congratulated himself that his mind had finally reached something of an equilibrium until a few days before the dinner of spaghetti with ginger and the remains of the girl who had exploded in the kitchen, when his entire routine was cruelly disrupted. That day, as he opened the file entitled simply “Novel” to reread and grammar-check his work, just as he did every time he sat down at his computer, he noticed a large gap between two words on the first page. Upon closer investigation, he found that a word was missing. He reread the entire paragraph and tried to remember, without success, which was the word, and finally highlighted the line and moved on. Several hours later, when he had finished writing another twenty-two and a half pages, a full seventeen of which consisted in a meticulous description of the various processes of the various uses of the various parts of an aborted fetus, he remembered the highlighted line, and, thinking to solve once and for all this minor irritation, returned to the first page, which was dotted with blank spaces. Since that day he began sleeping less and less, scrolling almost unceasingly across pages of words that seemed to continuously transform, until one day, when the first three pages were all entirely blank, he noticed the first word that had gone missing (the word was “fingernail”), which had been inserted in the middle of the eleventh page. Soon after other missing words began reappearing at the same rate with which they had disappeared, creeping stealthily towards the end of the document, and by that time his sleep was no longer dreamless, but each time seemed to begin and end with one long dream in which he sat at his computer scrolling across blank pages as the sound of hundreds of footsteps approached his door. Things only got worse when during waking hours he would hear the sound in the halls of the two dozen or so children — a few of them were Haitian, the rest apparently members of Ms. Greenwood’s second-grade class at Andrew Jackson Elementary a block to the west —who had begun following Hugo when he was around and who could be seen in twos and threes at all hours when he was not. It was never very clear as to their exact number, in part because their arms were unfailingly loaded with buckets of compost, deflated bike wheels, scrap wood, useless and rusted metal implements and all other sorts of garbage to be carried to the roof to contribute to the construction of Hugo’s improbable flight machine, a kind of multi-faceted ornithopter supported by a giant rag-patchwork balloon to be fueled with vegetable oil and compost, which as he repeated repeatedly throughout the course of each day, but only ever in a whisper and only ever to each child individually as if it were a highly confidential secret between that particular child and himself, would carry them all to an unmapped island in the Indian ocean populated by a wise and generous race of hermaphroditic pygmy goats whose breasts bore chocolate milk, in part because they tended to flee at the sight of anyone but Hugo himself, especially Sid, who cackled maniacally and hurled objects at them whenever he saw them, and in part because for inexplicable reasons the exact population of the Haitian family staying in the room on the second floor by the back stairs was never very clear. This was a problem since the total number of residents and guests had to be known in order to calculate the chore hours to be ascribed to each resident, but each night at dinner when Amando Lo Dico —a very loud and very shy multimedia student with the face of either a grown-up Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes or a young Calvin of Calvinism who was the speaker of the house at the time —would conduct a head count he found himself counting new black faces and learning new French names and vaguely recalling other black faces and other French names no longer present at the east end of the amalgamation of desks and conference tables that constituted the dinner table, where the number of guests varied, not counting Marionetta and her husband, a mute specter of a man named Dan Wédo whose eyes spoke a dumb and infinite sadness and who was never seen not wearing a red necktie tied directly onto the skin of his neck with the word “ozetazini” written on it in felt pen, or opening his mouth or touching his juxtapositionally pale young wife with whom he always appeared shoulder to shoulder, and always counting seventeen children of seventeen different ages who all seemed to be named Louis regardless of sex and Bon Mama, who seemed old enough to be quite literally anyone’s grandmother, and who was never seen sitting, having passed most of the time since their arrival at the house in the kitchen, jabbering half the time in her own incomprehensible language and the other half in an English whose vocabulary seemed to grow in all directions equally like oak branches and taking over any task anyone attempted to do there with such grace and naturalness that it was not uncommon for one to arrive home with a craving for, say, sweet pickles and Veganaise and discover right there on the island at one’s usual place one’s favorite bowl lined with small pickles with a large mound of Veganaise in the center. When Ms. Greenwood came looking for her twenty-seven missing pupils, Bon Mama gave her a paper sack containing twenty-seven glass beads, and Ms. Greenwood thanked her unhappily and left. The chore hour equation was soon complicated further by the previously unnoticed disappearances of a female resident last seen in the kitchen of whom nobody could remember either the name or even in which room she had been staying and Jack the Old.
Jack the Old was old. He often used this fact to explain why he habitually interrupted people who were speaking to him by suddenly walking away, reasoning that too often all sorts of things would come to his mind, and usually things that he remembered to wish to do before dying, although half the time he did this out of boredom with what was being said. Oftentimes this explanation would be incomprehensible to whomever he was explaining himself, due to another habit of his, that of not distinguishing between acquaintances and complete strangers. He was staying at the house indefinitely because it was a short walk’s distance from his own, which several months earlier he had left, along with his job at the post office, his daughters Chloe and Zoe and his wife Marzena, whom he had left with no more explanation than a post-it with the words “I’m so sorry but I think I’ve outlived our life together” written on it in ballpoint pen ink, and as he was walking by, he recognized the student housing cooperative he hadn’t stepped foot in since living there decades before. Seeing some people smoking cigarettes on the porch he approached and smoked a few cigarettes and conversed for about forty-five minutes about how it had been when he’d lived there and then asked if any rooms were available. He never saw his wife or two daughters or house or car or supervisor at the post office again. Upon considering his recent past, Jack the Old was fairly certain that he had been a perfectly functioning employee, loving father and husband, caring friend and safe driver while engaging in any of these activities, in spite of a vague feeling of unfamiliarity towards every person and place he knew that had grown to the moment of his abrupt abandonment of all of these things. He happened to be reflecting on these things while preparing the dinner of spaghetti with ginger and the remains of the girl who had exploded in the kitchen and while reflecting and descending unlighted stairs he momentarily forgot about the tomato sauce he had originally left the kitchen to get and mistook the basement he was entering for the one beneath the house where he had lived for the past forty years and, rather than turn left towards the tool room, where food was stored, mistakenly continued into the pantry, which was full of paints and tools and which contained, among other things, two female cannabis sativas, a goose, and a small electric mandolin. Not recognizing the room in which he found himself, Jack the Old went through a large door to his right. Unable to recall how he had arrived to where he found himself, and not seeing very well, Jack the Old walked through a cavernous crawl space that was nebulous with cobwebs to a large door in the far left. Jack the Old had the feeling of having just abruptly awoken and began walking through the dark, groping with his hands as though trying to grab hold of his memory. He could not discern whether he was in a small closet or an immense cave. He could not remember ever having found himself in such darkness, and wondered if he hadn’t become blind. He wanted to call out (more to hear the sound of his own voice, to learn something of his surroundings, or perhaps even to wake himself up than for any idea that someone might be there, as he could not remember having ever felt so completely alone), but no sound escaped his throat. After what seemed like a few minutes of walking he noticed a faint light in the distance. He walked more intently now, and as the light became clearer his memory began to come back to him —not the reason or the way by which he had arrived there, but the color of his childhood pet’s eyes, the recipe for the brownies he always made on his daughters’ birthdays, the number of stripes on the cushion of the couch in his wife’s parents’ living room, and finally the fair face of the folk singer he had seen on a television in a crowded waiting room in a Venice hostel during his youth. He saw this last memory graceful and gargantuan, hundreds of feet tall before him. It was then that he realized that this vision was not a memory, but what his eyes actually saw. Fabrizio de Andrè’s forearm lay as large as a hillside behind an irregular row of chess pieces, each pawn as tall as Jack himself. It occurred to him that he was standing in the middle of a white square of an enormous chessboard. The light he had seen in the distance before was no longer anywhere, and it seemed that the board itself was somehow luminous, as it cast immeasurable shadows on the landscape of Fabrizio de Andrè’s face. He suddenly looked very carefully at Jack the Old with the sort of look one gives a cockroach crawling out of one’s bowl of dates. “Quello,” he said, “non è un pedone.” The words were followed by a laughter that boomed like the white noise of an earthquake. Jack the Old turned around and saw in the infinite darkness beyond the opposite end of the chessboard, the vast, terrible, almost planetary body of Henry Kissinger, who declared with an effeminate squeal that he had been cheating. Fabrizio de Andrè swept away his remaining pieces with the back of his hand, spit in Kissinger’s mindbogglingly fat face, and scooped up Jack the Old with his hand and tucked him carefully into his shirt pocket.
When Fabrizio de Andrè emerged from the basement with a can of tomato sauce in one hand and the neck of a small electric mandolin in the other and Jack the Old shrinking exponentially somewhere in one of the spaces between the threads of his shirt pocket, the apparent purposefulness of the inexpressive expression on his beautiful face and of the grace of his gait instilled in Amando, who passed him on the stair on his way to the pantry to get a hammer to patch a hole which had mysteriously appeared on a wall in a hall on the third floor, an intangible feeling of perplexity at the enigma of this person he had never seen before who seemed almost to have emerged from the earth beneath the house and another still less tangible feeling that any enquiry would simply result in further perplexity. After passing through the kitchen and handing the can of tomato sauce to Bon Mama, who happened to be making spaghetti for dinner and accepted it as though she had just a second before asked him to pass that particular can of tomato sauce and thanked him as well as Jack the Old —whose “your welcome” if there was one, was entirely inaudible —with a smile that appeared about to tear open with her deep laughter before it in fact did as he continued west through the swamp after only the slightest glance as a reply, Fabrizio de Andrè went straight to a sagging armchair with one broken arm on the porch, where he was from that point on to pass the entirety of his days incessantly tuning and untuning the small electric mandolin and speaking passionately and at length more to himself than to whomever happened there to smoke cigarettes or hunt flies about how the year was not in fact 2007 but 1327, that the government had propagated this lie just like the one that the Christ had already come back and was selling insurance in Cincinnati, that the revolution had already come and passed and saturated itself. Neither the cat known most commonly among other residents as Gorilla Cat, who had been hunting flies, nor the girl most commonly not quite known at all among other residents, who was sitting on a lawn chair on the roof of the porch and had smoked three cigarettes in succession before he arrived and sat down directly beneath her feet and just out of sight knew what he was talking about, even though the latter was among other things a student of the Italian language, granted she was not technically a student at all.
Narcissa Mermerrick only audited Italian language courses at the university, just as she had done at one point with nearly every foreign language course offered at the university at one time or another. She had never taken a single exam, not even when she had first arrived there and had formally enrolled to attend her first foreign language classes, for the same reason for which she lived on translations of hotel brochures and on-line homeopathic medicine catalogs that read like the Vulgate and which she executed by commission over the internet in exchange for microscopic fees to avoid having to look at other human beings. As soon as Fabrizio de Andrè began speaking she put out the cigarette she had just lit on a window frame behind her and went inside. Narcissa’s room was little more than a narrow passageway from her small door to her much smaller window, which provided her awkward but viable access to the roof of the porch, where most mornings she would sit on a lawn chair she had discovered there the day she had moved in to watch the colors of the sky behind the black silhouettes of the evergreens on the horizon change at dawn, and through which the sounds of Fabrizio de Andrè’s voice and mandolin carried perfectly clear. Her room was cluttered with seventeen copies of Asimov’s “Constantinople: The Forgotten Empire” in seventeen different languages and mirrors of every kind and shape and condition, every one of them positioned in such a way that she could see her own reflection when she lay down on the three wilted mattresses covered with countless quilts and blankets of every color and cut and condition that made her bed. She passed most of each day there trying to memorize the endless and mesmerizing contours of her body and hair, which was soft and thin and nearly translucent like an infant’s, and gazing at the birthmark that covered two thirds of her face and whose color was more beautiful and engaging than any she had ever discerned in the sky behind the black silhouettes of the evergreens on the horizon at dawn. Long ago she had quit the vain endeavor of identifying this color with words and metaphor. No words or images approached the essence of her skin, not Porto or pomegranate, not Venus-mount nor velvet-stained-blood-orange, neither Burgundy-Bordeaux-battle nor Jaipur, Rajasthan. It was the voice of Fabrizio de Andrè coming in through her window that brought all of the awesome presence of her color gushing into all the colorblind parts of her body, stunning her in the kind of ecstasy only the idolater can know. Narcissa did not consider herself a narcissist. She recognized that the world was filled with beautiful subjects, but she was sure that these did not include the six billion or so human faces hovering outside her window. She found them repugnant, and the repugnant images of those repugnant faces with the repugnant lips of their repugnant mouths opening and closing and revealing repugnant tongues forming repugnant words obsessed her for long hours even after she had returned to her room and closed her door that had no lock so that she had to lean on it with her shoulder when someone knocked so she could talk to them through the door without the risk that they open it and peer at her with those repugnant eyes, and when she went out she looked instinctively at the applicator mirror she kept in her back pocket whenever one of them spoke directly to her to avoid this. She only left her room just after dawn, kept a plastic tub full of granola by her computer and urinated in a large mason jar she kept on the window sill. She lived in the cooperative because, paradoxically, it allowed her to avoid all but the most rare and essential human contact, free from grocer and landlord. This arrangement came crashing down in four clatters. The first was Fabrizio de Andrè’s voice and mandolin on the porch. The second was the goose, which she found in the basement looking for toothpaste in what she thought was the tool room, which ate out of her hand, which let her stroke its back and which gazed at her face in a way that convinced her that it was as enamored with her color as she was. The third was Mortimer Kilthywell bursting through her bedroom door with his moral dilemma.
The origins of Mortimer’s moral dilemma had begun six months earlier when he had heard the news that Helena Schjerfbeck, one of his colleagues at the honors college, had been shoved into a rhododendron patch on campus and raped there as the hour rang and the street she had been walking on was crowded with passersby, none of whom heard her cries for help over their mobile telephones, portable videogame consoles, digital music players and loud conversation, cellular televisions and peach-scented perfumes smeared on so thickly as to deaden the senses. Not even the Deep Listening class that her screams reached through an open window a few meters away realized what was happening because they were listening too deeply to the sound of her screams to recognize the signified for the signifier. The rapist was another honors student by the name of Clarence Cuttlesworth. Mortimer knew them both personally, and did not know what to do. It was the first time it had ever happened to him. Since his freshman year at high school he had considered his time and energy as resources that it was his duty to put to use as economically as possible to render himself as useful as possible in order to solve as many of the world’s injustices as soon as possible and in as lasting a way as possible. When he was not organizing protests against genetically modified organisms he was volunteering at food redistribution sites. When he was not writing letters to his congressmen about less the moral obligation than the simple good business sense for the sake of economic stability of eliminating third world debt, he was raising money for the defense fund of a man imprisoned unconstitutionally. And now he was at a loss. How to act? Naturally, Mortimer did not see any value whatsoever in our punishment-based justice system that did not seem to consider violence against women to be a serious or recurring problem. What troubled him was how to stop Clarence Cuttlesworth from raping again. Clarence was a remarkably intelligent kid on scholarship from some east coast slum. If he were to be convicted, stripped of his scholarship, it would be a condemnation to little poor girls in some shit-hole projects to live next door to a vindictive, intelligent predator. If he were to be let off the hook, it would send a message to Helena, to every woman, to every person who knows the story and others like it, a message that everyone receives on a regular basis —and of course Senator Cuttlesworth would find no trouble telling his driver to take a detour through the ghetto and inviting the very same little poor girls to see the inside of a limousine for the only time in their lives and get what society will tell you is exactly what they have coming to them. He was too intelligent for counseling and had too much to lose to be capable of catharsis. Castration would only render him a bitter sadist. Mortimer began spending entire days pacing back and forth on the floorboards of his cluttered room in the northeast corner of the third floor. He found himself unable to finish or even look at his unfinished thesis entitled “Here and Now: Eliminating the problem of sustained economic growth with immediate sterilization of the entire human race.” He fell into a deep depression, finding volunteer work uninteresting and newspapers unrewarding. He envied Xavier Begoney, whose words and actions seemed to reflect a total apathy towards other human beings. He spoke to him several times with little results and when it occurred to him that he should find a job to pay for his existence while he decided whether or not to continue his studies the first thing that came to mind was the call center where X worked, which the latter described as an ideal job for practicing one’s elocution without having to actually speak to anybody, where he began working within hours of presenting his résumé. It was a large, gray office brimming with old computers and lined with big windows that would let in lots of sunlight if not for the fact that the blinds were kept shut at all times. Mortimer’s job consisted in clicking on and off a telephone receiver and pressing the “enter” key and saying the words “Hello sir/ma’am, this is Justin King calling from Psychonomics Research… conducting a very brief survey concerning…” with as much allegro as possible. Most of the time no one answered and the dull, electronic tones sounded in his head like a mantra while he read Veblen or Huxley and dozed off intermittently. The first time he heard the voice of Ugdulena he had fallen asleep and woke only after she had said “¿Bueno?” for the fourth time, feeling the momentum of his own head falling forward. It happened often enough that a Spanish speaker answered, and he spoke passable Spanish, such that the first thing that occurred to him to say was that he was sorry, that he had fallen asleep for a moment. Rather than hang up she laughed softly and said that she had never heard of anyone falling asleep while making a telephone call. He spoke with her for several minutes without mentioning market research or explaining in any way why he had called her number, before abruptly saying that he needed to go. In flagrant violation of company policy and probably several laws, he wrote her number down on a piece of paper and decided to call her again when he got home. Riding his bike home in the rain it occurred to him why he felt so bizarrely euphoric. He realized that he loved Ugdulena, and that he had never loved another human being before in his life. When he arrived home Clarence Cuttlesworth was standing on the porch. Clarence greeted him with a charming grin and said he had knocked but no one answered. It was true, said Mortimer, nobody ever answered the door. Clarence explained that he was considering moving in. As was customary, Mortimer offered him a tour. Clarence had lost his scholarship, which had included room and board on campus, but was determined to finish his degree, and had heard that this house represented a friendly environment for people that needed a place to stay while they pieced their lives back together. He was extraordinarily charming, always compensating for his listener’s uneasiness, relating amusing details of his recent misfortunes while carefully avoiding mention of the central fact that connected them all, and he knew that Mortimer knew the details surrounding the rape. Mortimer knew that Clarence knew that Mortimer knew the details surrounding the rape, and he wondered at this creature’s ability to maintain that silly grin in spite of this. His euphoria had not abated at the sight of him, and he continued to feel quite good as he hiked beside him through countless open doors, long rooms full of furniture turned upside down with colored light-bulbs showing palely against the daylight coming in through tall windows, up the broad staircase at the front door that continued to creak after they’d left it, through unlighted corridors where the floor seemed to slouch downward, down the back stair, where between the third and ground floors the Haitian community had patched together a marketplace where shoes, clocks, tea sets and all other kinds of merchandise, retrieved from the city’s dumpsters with the tireless discrimination that can only be acquired from years of scavenging the pitiful contents of pre-industrial economy trash heaps and that puts even the most methodical North American anarchist dumpster-diver to shame, were traded for bits of colored cloth which were fashioned into rag dolls that were sold to tourists from Astoria and Bend. He laughed to himself with the feeling of having inadvertently lost a heavy burden he was supposed to be carrying as he realized that he hated Clarence, as well as every face he could imagine that was not Ugdulena’s, whose face he had never seen. He did not know what he expected to happen, whether Clarence would be moving into his home, but the idea did not displease him, for he felt truly happy for what seemed to him like the first time in his life at the thought of being near this person in order to savor every bit of the liberating sensation of such cleanly unfettered hatred. It was with this thought passing through his mind and for no particular reason, descending the unlighted steps down into the basement, that he noticed the single ice skate standing on its blade in the windowsill of the last stairwell, which, sharing a healthy, bellowing laugh with Clarence for the punchline of the joke the latter had not quite finished telling, he slipped onto his hand as if it were a glove to jam the edge of the blade into Clarence’s spine. Mortimer Kilthywell’s first thought after murdering the rapist Clarence Cuttlesworth was to tell Ruth du Babylone all about it.
Ruth du Babylone was majoring in Gender Studies with a minor in Spanish, but wasn’t quite sure she wanted to finish her degree now that she was about halfway through completing it, and she lived in a simply- and cozily-furnished room in the southeast corner of the second floor with pleasant yellow walls and bits of purple cloth on everything and this wonderful view of the front garden and the pear tree that unfortunately would have to be cut down if she didn’t find someone willing to transplant it (one of her favorite things about the cooperative was this big garden which she preferred working in over doing dishes any day of the week). One day she had mentioned to Mortimer with her usual tone of childlike enthusiasm that gave most people who spoke to her the idea that she was both uninformed (which was relatively true) and naïve (which, if arguably true, it should be noted she had cultivated consciously in a way that so many books on Zen for westerners she hadn’t read would recommend she do) that she would like to put an ad in the newspaper or something to meet for coffee once a week with a complete stranger taking turns to just go off with all the thoughts that come to your mind, ‘cause wouldn’t that be a refreshing way to get to know somebody, be completely receptive when it’s your turn to listen and be completely free to get out everything you want to get out when it’s your turn to talk. Of course you should only do it once a week, so you could spend every two weeks preparing what you want to get out and getting yourself in the mood to just listen, ‘cause in everyday conversation so much of our energy is spent preparing what we want to say as soon as other people shut up, or filtering our words to hit them the right way, and doesn’t it just make you feel kinda dirty, kind of like a fraud or something that so much of our interactions are conditioned by all these other factors, and so little of it is about really understanding? Mortimer had not listened to everything she had said, but he liked her idea so much that he insisted she try it with him, since after all they didn’t really know each other all that well anyway — everybody in this house is so wrapped up in themselves you know, and I know you know what I mean here, that each one of us is a different person outside this house, and here inside we’ve each got a role to play and you know if ten people answer an ad nine of them are just gonna ask you what are you wearing and stuff like that, and the other will just not get it completely or keep wanting to break the rules or even worse, read your ad and decide it’s just similar enough to some great idea of theirs that’s really completely different with some crazy pseudo-Marxist Hitlerian personality cult premise behind it, and even if it doesn’t fit at all what you had in mind, we might as well, because hey, why not? So for several months they would meet once a week for coffee in a café on campus to exchange charming, sincere and often ingenious monologues from Ruth’s end and improvised lectures about personal responsibility and public policy and the role of reason in both and reclaiming all of these things to the realm of simple logic from Mortimer’s end of the table. But when he went into crisis and started reading Sartre for entertainment (nausée) rather than insight (engagement) he lost the courage to meet her, having lost both the focus to string a series of water-holding arguments together, and the patience to sit through her endless introspective ramblings. And now for the first time in months Mortimer had much to do and little time. After running to the kitchen, looking for a bucket, not finding one, filling up a five-gallon steel pot with soapy water, carrying it back to the blood-spattered stairwell, discovering to his alarm that Clarence was no longer draped like a soggy fish filet over one corner of the stair where he had fallen, looking frantically in the dark for a few minutes, rushing back upstairs to look for a flashlight, not finding one, reassuring himself that there was no possibility that Clarence was still alive, leaving a note with the words “WET PAINT” in skinny, capital, felt pen letters on a furious weaving of purple yarn like a web spun by a spider doused in caffeine to block all but the most determined from going downstairs, washing most of the blood and a significantly higher proportion of the paint from the walls, searching by match light and still not finding Clarence, stepping on a rat, frightening himself, realizing that it was just a rat and that it was already eleven-thirty at night, deciding to give up his search for the night since no one would be coming down there anyway and he’d best figure things out early the next morning with a clear head and a little daylight, climbing over his purple cobweb with some difficulty and nearly strangling himself in the process, going upstairs to the third floor to call Ugdulena from the small closet where the telephone was kept (he felt that the one behind the front stairs on the first floor was not private enough and the one on the second floor was broken), not finding the scrap of paper where the number was written, returning to the basement stair, carefully and uncomfortably squirming through his purple cobweb, finding his jacket with the scrap of paper inside and the sleeve that had been drenched in blood somehow during his struggle with Clarence and a rat underneath it, frightening himself again (and the rat too), crawling through the bottom of his purple cobweb across the sticky, dusty floor, running back upstairs, calling Ugdulena, waking her up, professing his humble admiration of and sublime love for her and promising to call her the very next day, he rushed back down to the second floor to Ruth’s door to make a terrible ruckus knocking and apologize to her for it being so late and for all the ruckus and all but he was just too excited and needed to vent and you don’t mind do you, ‘cause if you do it can wait but it will just take a few minutes I just need to vent I think I’ve finally found a solution to this problem I was starting to doubt had any solution at all and if some people are destined to suffer what’s the point in searching for any justice if it’s not possible to give everybody justice you know and etc., etc. By the time he was done talking at Ruth, Mortimer was nearly as exhilarated as at the moment of the murder, but at the same time felt lucid and composed. He was sure that it would be a very short time before he was caught and arrested, and probably rendered largely useless to any cause he might have tried to serve with his newfound form of direct social action, so that although his idea as to who exactly he should kill first, who was worth it, and weighed against the time required for each strike (naturally, killing a poor person is much quicker and easier and less risky than killing a rich one, but probably their capacity for evil-doing is proportionately less as well), he was certain of the urgency to act as much as possible while he still could. Thus, over the next few days, he drained the brake fluid out of every SUV he could find, and broke into the bathrooms of prominent logging industry families, emptied little bottles of pills for treating depression, hair loss and undesirable penis smallness and replaced them with capsules filled with powdered peach pits, and on Wednesday, which happened to be Halloween, he painted a rubber Henry Kissinger mask red and hitched a ride out of town to the “haunted corn maze” where he chopped up twelve drunk teenagers under a strobe light with a big axe he’d found in the shed behind the small vegetable garden on the south side of the house, laughing so hard he thought he would collapse. The next morning at dawn when several police and a frowning man with broad shoulders and a severe shave followed Mortimer’s bloody shoeprints through the open front door, the front room and the dining hall to the swamp where the latter curtly introduced himself as “FBI” to Bon Mama, who was doing dishes, she extracted a green worm from a hog banana and placed it in the FBI agent’s hand, solemnly explaining that the worm had killed about twenty people during the last few days. The agent had the worm summarily arrested by two exasperated officers who had trouble with the handcuffs and insubordinately insisted on following the bloody shoeprints that led upstairs, before the agent, who was to spend the next several months of his career fighting through bureaucratic machinery to get the green worm convicted pulled rank on them and the whole party left with Bon Mama laughing and mopping up after them. When Mortimer learned of his good fortune —and Bon Mama made sure he understood that he would never be arrested as long as she lived under the same roof as him —rather than reevaluate his criteria for potential targets, he abandoned them entirely, each night prowling the city with the axe, now his undisputed weapon of choice, which he carried everywhere in a cello case he had found in the attic, as his cause was no longer a simple calculation of good weighed against bad, but a vainglorious purification of the community, a sort of moral cleansing. On one occasion, having thrown an infant in the river after killing its mother (whom he had discovered pushing the child in a stroller while night-jogging in complete Nike apparel), he justified himself that the odds were on his side, that he was every bit as justified —if not more so —as the killers of the Romanovs. When he explained this at Ruth du Babylone, she winced and her lips began to shiver like a leaf on a branch, which distracted him and was entirely irregular to the purposes of a proper monologue exchange, and inspired a string of thoughts he didn’t feel like talking at her about, even though feeling that way about a particular string of thoughts is distracting and entirely irregular to the purposes of a proper monologue exchange, like why is she crying, maybe she’s crying because she thinks I’m a monster, maybe she’s thinking about telling somebody about my action and I can’t let that happen and if she is I’ll have no choice but to kill her. He had had his suspicions about her since he first told her about his mission, and his suspicions grew when one evening, prancing his way violently to the front door, cello case in hand, on the blackboard that was customarily used by residents to list issues to be brought up, discussed and possibly resolved at dinner he saw the words “Ruth: Problem!” chalked down in cheerful, girlish handwriting to the point that that same evening he found himself going out of his way to pass by Ruth’s door before returning to his own room. He decided it was time to speak with the house counselor.
Narcissa Mermerrick managed to avoid doing chores altogether by assuming the duties that nobody else wanted to confront, and because nobody had the courage to tell her to confront them. The grill that nobody cooked on was never cleaned, the stairs that nobody walked on were never swept and nobody ever had any personal issues that they needed to talk about because Narcissa’s expression of absolute revulsion never failed to convince anybody who thought to ask her to counsel them that they ought to be ashamed of complaining about something so ephemeral as chronic depression or sexual harassment to a person who has a big, nasty stain on her face. She was privately rather smug about this sensuous sloth she managed to subsist on, so her natural response was to feign indifference when Mortimer Kilthywell woke her up in the middle of the night, knocking as he let himself in and already defending the principle of action based on probability before she had even sat up, in the hopes that he would in short time discover that she was not willing to help him and go away. But Mortimer was impervious to the possibilities of what whomever he happened to be talking at in a given moment might be thinking, and he debated with himself aloud about the undeniable fact of Ruth’s death as a lesser evil when weighed against the good that he could do if he stopped her from stopping him and the theoretical dangers of interfering with a rare bastion of direct democracy such as the cooperative by eliminating one of its voting members and the risky precedent he would be setting by killing one of his own housemates etc. — then, as though himself awoken by Narcissa’s own crude awakening, Fabrizio de Andrè began tuning his electric mandolin and with the sound of his indignant, lulling words, reverbed and suspended like the voice of God passing through her window and bones, Narcissa felt a wave of intoxication caress her and Mortimer’s chatter began to sting like a mosquito in a sleeping ear. He was sitting on the ground cross-legged next to her bed. She placed an irritated hand on the back of his head and, with a jerking movement as though to smother in her quilts the now silent Mortimer made docile from puzzlement, pressed his face against her bare belly, then pushing it down to her sultry sex as she uncovered herself completely. She refused to advise him or even comment on what he had to say, so he left with more doubts than when he had gone in. He did not find the courage to murder Ruth du Babylone, but had still not decided against it when dinner was served and Ruth choked an apology to him through tears while explaining as best she could the situation to the rest of the residents, who voted unanimously that Mortimer was not to murder anybody again, that if he did, or if he was even suspected of killing any residents of the house, or if any bodies or other such evidence that could compromise the other residents’ keeping out of prison were discovered in the house, he would be asked to leave. Ruth expressly waived her right to ask him to leave, and he thanked her graciously and apologized sorrily for terrifying her or putting her in difficulty in any other ways. They agreed to remain friends and that it was best they not share each others’ inner feelings since these might cause one of them to fear for her life. He was compelled to keep going back to Narcissa Mermerrick’s room to work through these and other issues and (he had to admit to himself) for the pleasure of exploring the supple stuff between her thighs. Narcissa was acquiescent about the daily interruptions, although she almost changed her mind each time she saw his chattering mouth come through the door (he never dared visit her without some meticulously sexless intellectual pretense to talk at her about), but she soon learned to look forward to the inevitable conclusions of their visits, the decision on whose start and finish was solely hers, but each time she opened her eyes she had to toss a quilt over his head to avoid seeing what looked like a hair-covered featureless face perching on her vulva and peering at her, which distracted her from the vibrations of her clitoris and the voice of Fabrizio de Andrè and the feel of the feathers of the goose she took to stroking towards the climax of their meetings before Gavin Golightly’s weak, unwanted love suspended them and every other weight of the balance of Narcissa’s delicate little life.
Gavin Golightly had a peculiar talent that nobody could ever detect, but that determined most everybody’s relationship with him. Due to a disposition at once innate as well as encouraged by the circumstances that had developed his person throughout the course of his life, any conversation with him would be accompanied by a symphony of minute, involuntary movements of his body away from the speaker; at first he was perfectly receptive and even affable, then his eyes would stray from the speaker’s, perhaps just a glance away that went unnoticed, then another, and another, the frequency and scope reaching a crescendo. In the meantime his elbow would wedge itself between his stomach and the counter he might be leaning on, working as a lever, ever so slowly rotating his body away from the speaker, as his voice dwindled to a whisper and his tone emptied of any conviction, until finally the speaker found themselves having lost track entirely of what it was they had to say with the back of Gavin’s head staring blankly at them. He moved into the house immediately after the last of a series of feeble attempts to leave Psychelle Pagdolene Golightly, formerly Psychelle Pagdolene O’Lookamey, whom he had married several years earlier in the midst of their escape from their mutual hometown, an unincorporated hamlet located in the Martian landscape where the great basin meets the eastern plateau known as Almost, Oregon where she had been molested by her father, ridiculed by her grandparents, burned with cigarettes by her mother, ostracized by the neighbors, pelted with rocks by their children, disowned by her brothers, drugged by the postman, force-fed by the butcher, stalked by a shepherd, beaten with fists by farmers, whipped by ranchers, threatened by the police, raped by the judge, kidnapped by the preacher and held captive by the mayor. He was entirely incapable of protecting her, and she did not expect him or anyone else to do so; she was dependent to him because he, unlike most other people, was also entirely incapable of harming her —or anyone else for that matter — which made leaving her, or any other act of determination, rather difficult. She was not alone in appreciating his peculiarity: a great many women and girls who had found themselves victimized systematically by males in life found sanctuary in his vanilla skin and gray eyes and exceptionally unthreatening manner, and even the most independent woman found it refreshing to chat with a man who never dared interrupt her to explain the what’s what of the matters about which she happened to express her feelings, and so naturally much of his life was spent absorbing the lamentations that the fairer sex, receptacle of man’s most embarrassing sins, so seldom finds audience for. His heart labored under the burden of consoling those he can do nothing for, and this was exacerbated by the belated realization that he did not particularly like the girl he had once felt so compelled to try so impossibly to save. Gavin Golightly found his own salvation (or hoped to in any case) in the person of Narcissa, with whom he was pathetically in love with all his pathetic heart because this mute, sensual, ghostly, Olympian embodiment of emotional autonomy he spied on the roof of the porch after pretending to go for a walk at dawn each day had no use for him whatsoever, so naturally he was intrigued when one of these mornings Sid, dressed all in black, deathly trim, sporting big plastic sunglasses that were wide-set on his bony face, a tall and narrow white stovepipe hat, a hardwood cane with the words “obstacle destroyer” notched illegibly down the shaft in one hand and a big, laminated bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken drumsticks in the other, landed two hobnail boots on the foot-high brick bulkhead that separated the garden in front of the porch from the sidewalk where Gavin had been walking as casually as he could, obstructing his spying of Narcissa and announcing that he had noticed him spying her, and what’s more, that he knew precisely why he thought she would always have nothing to do with him, and even more, that he was not to worry, because he knew just how to make her the kind of girl that would go for him, and then he leapt over the wild lettuce and bolted through the front door with what could justifiably be called either a crowing cackle or a cackling crow, leaving Gavin to gaze at the asphalt of Alder Street, paralyzed by indecision as to what to think, much more to do. When he finally decided to turn around, Narcissa was no longer sitting on the roof of the porch, and when he finally decided to go after Sid to see just exactly what he was up to, the latter appeared once more, burping invisible chicken fat bubbles in his face as he detailed with a forced nonchalance his bludgeoning and rape of Narcissa, soiling of her bed, kicking over of her mason jar, smashing of her computer and murder of her goose —all of which, he added with a forcedly indulgent smile, executed with all the diligence and disinterest of an Austro-Hungarian lieutenant in the twenty minutes that Gavin had passed so reliably doing nothing, just as was expected of him. All of this did in fact occur just as Sid described it with the door of Narcissa’s room open wide and the sound of the voice and mandolin of Fabrizio de André passing through her window, unseen and unheard by everyone except for Dan Wédo, who had been standing in the middle of the opposite end of the hall by the door of the room on the second floor by the back stairs and nearly intervened before Bon Mama sitting cross-legged on the floor in the southwest corner of the room reminded him with nothing more than a blank and momentary glance of her promise to pull his necktie loose and let his head drop and roll on the sticky dust of the floorboards if he ever interfered in the matters of the white people.
When Louis XVI’s head was removed from his body in the name of liberty, equality and brotherhood, his spirit left through his neck and traveled for the last time across the Atlantic Ocean to Haiti, where he was known as Dan Wédo and his dominion, though considerably re-dimensioned, had endured without interruption. Later his skin was dyed a bluish ebony hue and he was sent to the United States under Bon Mama’s supervision, condemned to experience the purgatory of living at the mercy of white people until the subjugation of his own people to the same had expired (by this time the Haitians were the only people he could justifiably refer to as his own). This was seen as a progressive redemption and not punishment and for the most part he was not expected to change in any significant way his habits from how they had been during his reign up until the revolution (unless one considers his fondness for sweets, which he could no longer enjoy in the way only the living can), and in fact, if he were to break even momentarily from his renowned history of inaction during their stay at the house, as Bon Mama often reminded him, not only would his tie be removed, but she would prepare his body and feed a part to every female in the house, saving his head for herself, which she would pickle and make into slaw, so that he would remain trapped in the bodies of women and girls, condemned to experience their pain while retaining his masculine incapacity for suffering and unable to relieve himself with either of the usual ways of men: using it to feed creative inspiration, or taking it out on a woman. He was wise enough to be afraid enough of this fate that he did nothing when Hugo flew away with a number of his children.
As soon as he learned that while he had been sleeping on the pile of coats on the small armchair in the corner of the kitchen, curled tightly like a housecat around a sticky and near-empty bottle of spiced rum with a picture of a pirate on the label, he had missed the spectacle of Hugo’s flight machine carrying away Ms. Greenwood’s second-grade class and several of Dan Wédo’s children, taking nearly an hour to disappear beneath the horizon and heading west, Sid went straight to the roof where the haphazardly-strewn compost fermented in the sun and the sort of circus tent of dress shirts and bellbottoms piled over bicycle frames were tied together in impossible positions that served as a pulpit for Hugo’s rants, and where a number of children would be found sleeping at any given hour of the day during the past months struggling to stay erect against the wind, offered him no consolation. He felt something squishy and bitter like a ripe eggplant inside him as he thought about the good times he’d spent with his friend, like the time when they had improvised an art showing in the park space surrounding the university’s museum of art where an art showing had been scheduled for the same day, cordoning off an impressive labyrinth of velvet roping that crisscrossed between the oak trees that surrounded the gallery building, that were each soberly but prominently labeled as the latest pieces of a nonexistent artist named Ogden Noh, whose debut was excitedly lauded by several important critics who, among other patrons, were charged eight dollars each, provided with a brief tour conducted by a feverishly enthusiastic Hugo and finally directed to the exit to find themselves in the graveyard behind the gallery as Sid cackled maniacally in the distance, or the time when they commandeered a Red Cross van, donned white coats found inside and drove around town collecting blood donations and administering morphine before parking it carefully back in front of the campus clinic where they had found it in exactly the same position except facing the opposite direction, before returning home to trade a garbage bag full of blood packets in the Haitian market for counterfeited postage stamps which they then traded for a dusty Triumph with bad brakes that they rode around town together singing “El Hombre Que Yo Más Quiero,” Sid driving blindfolded, Hugo navigating and saturated with sweat before nearly running over a turtle on the bike path on the esplanade and crashing into the river. He felt violated in a way he hadn’t since before he had invented the art of blindplay, suddenly astounded at the impotence of his every action if the loved ones he shares them with are capable of disappearing and condemning him to retain the memory and not the object. Standing on the roof and glaring with absolute spite at the colors of the sky behind the black silhouettes of the evergreens on the horizon, he convinced himself that freedom is like money, both relative and finite. The only real freedom is that which is taken from others. After carefully visualizing Hugo and the children on the flight machine bumping across the Pacific, Sid concentrated with all his mental might and exploded the engine and caught the dirty walls of the balloon in a greasy fire and crashed it all into the icy waters below and froze to death those who did not drown immediately (incidentally, a very similar scene was to manifest itself a few weeks later when the craft was shot down by the Royal Australian Navy, the children rocking in the waves hand in hand and dying one by one from exposure as Hugo, finally broken, whispered the story of his life backwards, his disillusionment with spoken words, his abhorrence of prepositions, his bile for dictionaries, finally murmuring with his last bit of strength the words that the midwife had hummed at his birth to the dead ears of his disciples, which happened to be “We Didn’t Start the Fire”). The eggplant in his heart became a suffocating mush squeezing down his veins to the extremities of his limbs as he saw the bloated floating bellies of the bodies of the children who had taught him the language that Marionetta referred to as Kaskedyen, which was really just Haitian Creole that incorporated co-op jargon and the odd English figure of speech. He’d invented so many games with each of them, like little Louis IX whom he always greeted by removing his hat and telling the hatless boy to remove his hat or he would kill him, and the sleeping infant Louis XIV whom he would sneak up on to pick up and carry to the park and float in a basket down the river like baby Moses and who would show up dirty and hungry days later. It occurred to him that there was only one person in the house who still exercised such a power over him: Bon Mama had established a maternal jurisdiction over his life at the house so firm that her smell and that of the house, his home, were indistinguishable to him and he had taken to sleeping with his head in her lap as she sat cross-legged on the floor in the southwest corner of the room on the second floor by the back stairs telling stories to the dozens of people who gathered there at night. He resolved to discover the thing that would hurt her most deeply and do it. When he went back downstairs Bon Mama was sitting rigidly on the chair where he had slept. He bent over in a right angle to greet her grinning in Kaskedyen and she looked back at him with a solemn expression and murmured that now that he had extricated himself from the attachments of the living he could lord over the same with death. Then she extracted from her sleeve the thirteenth trump card of a tarot deck with the words “Baron Samedì” written along the edge in felt pen, specifying that in this house he would remain absolute master of the destinies of himself and others as long as he ate his weight in meat and drank his weight in liquor each day and never entered a room uninvited and then began to laugh heartily and at length. He set up a sort of office in the closet in the northwest corner of the room on the second floor by the back stairs where he granted wishes to the letter and accepted donations in the form of live fowl that Bon Mama cooked for him each night in the hearth in the middle of the room. When she told him about the parallel paths of the lives of Narcissa Mermerrick and Gavin Golightly and winked as she said that this was her favorite kind of story, he couldn’t sleep that night and waited outside Gavin’s door until the latter went outside faking an early morning walk.
When a special meeting was called to discuss Gavin’s accusation that Sid had raped Narcissa and the rat problem, Bon Mama released a hedgehog on the table and stated solemnly that the hedgehog had bludgeoned and raped Narcissa, soiled her bed, kicked over her mason jar, smashed her computer and murdered her goose, and it was decided that the hedgehog be banned permanently from the house. As soon as the hedgehog was released in the squash patch in the small garden on the south side of the house, it began to rain and did not stop for several months. That night when Gavin Golightly knocked on the trap door to the attic, that Narcissa had not left since Sid’s assault several weeks earlier, spitting in Gavin Golightly’s face each time she opened the trap door to take her meals, and spitting in it once more as she handed him the dirty plate each morning, there was no reply. After two days had passed, he and Amando Lo Dico and Dan Wédo (who agreed to everything he was asked to do) climbed to the roof in the rain from the fire escape on the west side of the house with the use of Amando’s grappling hook and rope. Once on the roof they found the trap door that led from the roof to the attic open and the attic completely filled up with black water. Amando dived in but found only some rusted bicycle parts and long strands of seaweed that entangled his limbs and that he had to break to keep from drowning. Gavin resolved that instant that Narcissa was dead and the only thing left for him to do was to avenge her by finding and killing the hedgehog. He began digging within the hour and seemed to dig so fast as to beat the rising of the level of the rainwater collecting in the hole. Within three days the hole was so deep that nobody could see far enough down to glimpse him and nobody who called his name from the edge of the hole ever got an answer. The day the rain stopped the trap door that lead to the attic came open and black water poured out directly onto Sid who happened to be walking under the trap door that same moment and flooded the third floor for several minutes as it cascaded down stairways and out windows to the ground. When everyone came out of their rooms to see what had happened they discovered Sid lying on his back with his head inside a fish. The fish had fleshy white eyes with small, blue pupils and soft, thin, nearly translucent whiskers like an infant’s hair fraying off its fins and enormous jaws that were clamped so tightly to Sid’s spinal cord that Amando had to use a jack to open them, revealing Sid’s smiling and immaculate skull. Bon Mama announced that she would hold a funeral service for Sid at the hole with no bottom on the south side of the house and cook the fish with chili and lime for dinner. She then proceeded to hold a funeral service for the fish which no one but she and Marionetta and Dan Wédo attended at the hole with no bottom on the south side of the house and cooked Sid’s remains with chili and lime for dinner.
When a special meeting was called to discuss Gavin’s accusation that Sid had raped Narcissa and the rat problem, Amando Lo Dico presided with a thoughtful ease, unshaken by the circumstances. He had a peculiar talent that everybody noticed and that determined most everybody’s relationship with him in that he was capable of speaking with a large group of people exhibiting a wide gamut of opinions and attitudes about a given topic and treat it as one collective mind without ignoring anybody. He would use the first person plural to regurgitate the collective standing with such craft that everybody was happy with the outcome, at least until the next time they met with one another. So we’ve definitely got a rat problem folks. There are rats in the basement. There are rats in the attic. There are rats in the compost and rats in the garden. Rats in the halls and rats in the walls. When we do our laundry there’s a dead rat thumping around in the washing machine, and when we hang our clothes to dry there are live ones in our socks. When we sit down on the porch to smoke a cigarette there are rats between the couch cushions. When they scatter as we sit down they move in packs and surround the cat like so many Neanderthals stalking a mammoth. When we pour ourselves a bowl of granola a rat falls into the bowl. When we open the faucet instead of water, out pours a bunch of rats. Ruth du Babylone, who had gone home to visit her family and found three rats in her backpack that scattered when she opened it and ate the toes off her bedridden grandmother, was against extermination since she didn’t see who had ever decided they had more rights to be here than the rats and it would be kinda weird for a bunch of hippies to decide that might really does make right, but Mortimer countered that he had taken to sleeping in the hammock on the porch because when he tried to sleep in his loft bed in his room he could hear rats screeching at him from the crawl space over his head, and he was convinced that the rats were specifically out to get him. Sid suggested snakes and that hippies can go fuck themselves. It was decided that the rats be invited to a meeting to hammer out a treaty, and that this treaty would not be called a treaty but a contract since treaties are used to fuck over brown people while contracts are apparently most often used to fuck over celebrities, which is okay. After much stepping on of toes and tails and breaking of taboos at both ends a meeting was held during which, with much misunderstanding and offenses to pride at both ends, it was stipulated that the rats could stay for as long as they liked in all the rooms of the basement, but would have to be safe and stay out of the washing machine or be sorry, and would not be allowed under any circumstances uninvited into the rooms of other residents. They would enjoy exclusive rights to any food found on the ground for a period of five seconds or more with the stipulation that it was their exclusive responsibility that said food be removed from said floor within five days. Cereals, rice, tofu and all other packaged foodstuffs found to be clearly outside of their designated bag, box, crate or bucket would be designated “up for grabs,” with the express prohibition of any rat to enter, chew on, open, climb on top of or shit on said bag, box, crate or bucket. The light bulb in the basement would be changed in order to avoid further fatal steppings-on. A flashlight would furthermore be purchased and placed in a special flashlight niche for cases of emergency and in the eventuality that said light bulb for some reason or other does not get changed. Said flashlight would be tied to a special flashlight string to avoid the losing thereof. Purchaser(s) of said string and/or said flashlight would remember to cut said string really long to avoid impediment to flashlight users to illuminate more than just the fucking stairs. In closing, a delegate representing rat residents would be invited to participate in house discussions and, in particular, dinners on Sunday and special meetings, especially if said meetings regard rat issues, as would a delegate representing non-rat residents be invited to participate in any reunions of thirty or more rats especially if said reunions regard any aforementioned issues. The discussing, debating, voting on, drawing up, writing down, tearing up, spitting on, voting on, debating, discussing, writing down, voting on and signing of the contract took three long days of exasperated gesturing and fierce squeaking, providing Marionetta plenty of time to sketch a rudimentary grammar book for the resulting pidgin that she referred to as Rtsch. The contract was written twice and signed or shat on by all present. One copy was put up on the corkboard in the dining room and the other was carried to the basement and shredded into a nest, and although the wording was never altered, the de facto understanding between the rat population and the various minority groups — humans, felines and ghosts — quickly adjusted itself to harmonious cohabitation in practice. The light bulb was never changed. The flashlight was bought, but the string was too short and was cut off and then the flashlight ran out of batteries and was later lost forever. An occasional dead rat was still to be found floating in the tofu water, though not as often as before. Peace had, however, been achieved for the first time since the night that Mortimer Kilthywell had left a corpse in the basement and fostered the octupling of the rat population and everyone was willing to compromise to maintain it until Theophilous Falsehoney took over the house and installed a sonic disinfestation system that disrupted the house ecology and flooded the Mormon reading center on the corner of the block with rats.
Theophilous Falsehoney was an intelligent and deeply religious child who gazed at people fixedly while they spoke and stared at the table in front of him while he spoke and who found that his prayers were always replied to by a voice in his head that he took to be the voice of God until, at the age of ten, he read Trigger’s “The Huron: Farmers of the North” and discovered that the voice in his head was his own and decided without hesitation that this discovery was irrelevant to his reverential sentiment and converted to Roman Catholicism to the dismay of his Closed Brethren parents. Theophilous enjoyed Bacon, Herbert, Donne, and genetic engineering. He moved into a narrow room by the fire escape on the third floor because it offered direct access by way of the rope ladder Amando Lo Dico had hung there to the roof of the house, which provided plenty of sunlight for cultivating the variety of saffron flower with big, bulbous stigmas weighing up to forty grams that had won him a scholarship at the university and gotten his picture on the cover of “American Scientist” and attracted numerous offers from the larger companies to purchase his patent. After his proposal to construct a sterile greenhouse on the roof for his genetic experiments was voted down by everyone but himself, a number of Chinese children from the Zhejiang province in black pajamas moved into the rooms of Jack the Old, Hugo, Narcissa, Gavin, Sid and X, whose room had been discovered empty except for a desk with a computer turned on with an open word-processing document empty except for the blinking cursor at the bottom of the page, as well as another room in which nobody could remember who had lived. The Chinese children were never seen by anyone except at dinner, and then they did not eat, but simply insisted that Theophilous’s proposal be voted on again. When Amando accused Theophilous of paying the Chinese children’s rent in exchange for absolute obedience, Theophilous stated, staring fixedly at the table directly in front of him, that he had every right to do so since the house had belonged to him since the day before when the university sold it to him after the Army agreed to a multimillion-dollar grant in exchange for a fast-growing tapeworm he had developed that induced lethargy, memory loss and docility in the host, the cooperative having fallen under the direct administration of the university when its charter had been violated when one of the members of the house had sold a patent for a new species of tapeworm developed in the house and offered free housing in exchange for absolute obedience. This statement was met with an uproar of objections that dwindled under the weight of an overwhelming lethargy that swept over everyone present and the fact that everyone had forgotten what it was they were objecting to. Mortimer Kilthywell, who had continued to sleep in the hammock on the porch after the contract with the rats had been signed and had not had a sugar pill containing tapeworm eggs slipped down his throat as he slept the night before, was not present at dinner that night. Some months earlier he had had another crisis after Narcissa’s rape and at the thought that, while if when someone like Dr. King is assassinated their work dies with them, bad ideas and the fear and hatred of those who propagate them always multiply upon the violent death of their makers, so he put his axe back in the shed for good and began staging the suicides of as many as three people a night. When he arrived home, and, finding the door closed, opened one of the windows and climbed inside and, finding Theophilous Falsehoney waiting for him to update him on the new state of affairs since his absence, his immediate reaction was to kick him in the testicles and proceed to tie him up and shove a funnel down his throat and begin pouring in Nyquil until he was tackled by a throng of Chinese children who threw him out the door and his cello case after him. One minute later two patrol cars screeched to halts on the sidewalk he was walking along and arrested him. His cello case was full of aspirin, morphine, Oxycontin, zolpidem, Nyquil, datura seed pods, Colorado River toad venom, bungee cords, a bottle of peppermint schnapps and a funnel. He was found guilty of conspiracy to distribute dangerous narcotics and sentenced to life in Pendleton state prison, where he died soon after of exhaustion during a one-man hunger strike to expand the inmates’ library. The Army Corps of Engineers arrived the next day to begin constructing state-of-the-art greenhouses and laboratories. Theophilous declared racial intermingling immoral and abolished Kaskedyen and made everybody speak Volapük instead. He had an attachment made on the west side of the house with a spiraling marble stairway that led from behind the house to his room and the greenhouses on the roof that was lined with pictures of the saints and that only he had access to. All other exterior doors were locked permanently. A helipad was installed so that foreigners in white lab coats or suits and ties or extravagant military uniforms of all colors with countless medals of mammoth dimensions in precious metals could tour the facilities. The other residents worked all day cultivating big, reeking saffron pom-poms that were placed in plastic crates that were placed onto a conveyor belt that emptied them into the backs of trucks that departed every seven minutes and waited with their engines on in a long line at all hours of the day. Theophilous cultivated an international celebrity and was given astronomical sums of money to appear in private homes to talk about the importance of disregarding patents held by governments unfriendly to capitalism. He received an honorary Ph.D. in theology from the Gregorian, but when he sent a personal letter to the Pope expounding a comprehensive interpretation of Genesis in which stone tools, agriculture, genetic modification and cloning, robotics and artificial intelligence and molecular nanotechnology were considered inevitable steps in a Divine plan by which Man is made in God’s image in a gradual process that culminates with the Former’s rise to the state of Creator-Godhead on Earth, he never received a response and was quietly excommunicated. He fell into a deep depression and began toying with blue cheese molds in his small room in the northwest corner of the house at all hours until he developed one which instilled a hypnotic state in whomever ingested it that cross-bred with the red mold that permeated the walls of the house and asphyxiated him. Minutes later Bon Mama walked through the door and recited a ceremonious thanksgiving to the spirit of Theophilous Falsehoney and squatted over his body to remove the laces from his right shoe to tie to a string of knots she had extracted from her sleeve that included the knots of the laces of the right shoes of Jack the Old, Xavier Begoney, Hugo Nubdebeneau, Narcissa Mermerrick, Gavin Golightly, Mortimer Kilthywell and Sid, as well as those of another former resident whose name shall not be here recorded.
On August 24, 1734, Marie Ifa DuBois, aged 14, walked into the woods beyond the walls of Fort de Chartres in a hazy delirium and wondered if the blood trickling down her leg meant that she would die. She was discovered in a hollow tree stump days later by a Fox man who spoke no language since his people had left him as an infant in the forest as is custom for remedying the cosmic imbalance represented by the birth of twins. He laughed at her when she asked if she was dead, and since he pitied her he taught her how to avoid death by removing and burying the left shoelace of whomever she chose and tying the right one onto her own and cutting it off to the knot.
Marionetta Wédo was a tall and wan young woman with good posture who subjugated herself entirely to the will of Bon Mama because she was terrified of the otherwise inevitable fate of finding herself subjugated entirely to the will of forces she did not see and could not speak to. She had first decided to go to Haiti when she still did not know Bon Mama and went to sleep each night exhausted by the thought of drowning in a sea of Circumstance — a word which in her mind was always spelled with a capital “C” — upon seeing a graph in a school textbook showing the fecundity and mortality rates of that country in comparison to the United States. Now in this house where the dead were wedded to the living and the living consumed themselves like match heads and words and matter seemed to divide itself like cancer cells she slept easily each night with her head in Bon Mama’s lap as the latter sat cross-legged on the floor in the southwest corner of the room on the second floor by the back stairs telling stories to the dozens of people who gathered there at night and running her crackling fingers through the girl’s hair while Marionetta thought about the story she incorrectly remembered reading in the Decameron about the Venetian valet of a seignior of Florence and the Florentine housemaid of a widower of Venice who fall in love and arrange their masters’ marriage by tricking each into incorrectly believing the arrangement to be his/her own invention and incalculably profitable to his personal wealth and her personal prestige. Fictional characters, Marionetta would reflect with sleepy self-satisfaction, these splinters of the author’s self, residing in a world appositely created by the same, are the only truly free. The rest of us are condemned to choose between laboring for not enough and fighting for nothing. We are, each of us, alone in a house full of people, ghosts to everyone but ourselves, pacing circles in our room with the door locked, frightened by the echoes of footsteps in the other rooms.
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© 2007 prickofthespindle.com |
 Graham John Trim, born in 1987, spent most of his childhood in Vancouver, Canada and various localities of the Oregon Territory, watching television, and at age 15 went as an exchange student to Sicily, where he now lives with his wife, the as yet obscure linguist and translator Claudia Letizia, who edits all of his work, and impedes most of it. His writing has been rejected by such publications as AGNI and the American Literary Review. |