The Broom of the System

11
1990
/a/

“I think maybe it’s time for me to just hop on my horse and git.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means I feel like I need to get the f*ck out.”
“Out of what?”
“How much time we got here, Melinda-Sue?”
“You said you loved Scarsdale. You said you loved me.”
“I think it’s turning out there’s problems with that analysis. I think what I unfortunately meant is that I loved f*cking you, is basically all. And I just don’t think I love f*cking you anymore.”
“....”
“... my razor...”
“Why not?”
“....”
“How come?”
“I’m not sure I really know. I’m hopin’ to give it some more thought. It’s just not wonderful anymore. Nothing personal. It’s just not wonderful.”
“Not wonderful? What do you mean, not wonderful?”
“Well, look at your leg.”
“What’s the matter with my leg? I’m only twenty-seven. I’ve got nice legs. I happen to know for a fact they’re nice.”
“You irritate all kinds of hell out of me when you don’t listen to what I say, Melinda-Sue. I never said you didn’t have nice legs. All I said was to just look at your goddamn leg.”
“....”
“We’re just missing the wonderfulness. Your leg, for an example. It’s all smooth and firm and shapely and all. It looks good and it feels good and it smells good. God knows you keep it real well shaved. It’s all beautiful and artistic and all that shit. But see, it’s just a leg. That’s all it is for me, now, is a f*cking leg. It could be my leg, if I shaved my leg.”
“What difference does that make?”
“It makes all kinds of difference, honeypot. You put your thinkin’ cap on about it for a while.”
“You’re being immature. You’re being totally unrealistic. You’re deliberately trying to hurt me.”
“No, what I’m deliberately trying to do is say f*ck off, is what I’m deliberately trying to do.”
“Well then what am I supposed to do?”
“It’s weird how I’m not at all worried about that. You got your work, if I get to use loose terms. You got your goddamned voice, still. I know that for a undeniable fact. It comes at me forty times a day. I can’t get the f*ck away from you. I get in the car and there you are. I feel like all the air I breathe you’ve already breathed.”
“....”
“Is cryin’ supposed to make me feel bad? ‘Cause it don’t. I don’t feel bad. I just feel like I need to get the f*ck out, still.”
“You’re just drunk.”
“I’m a tinch drunk. No bones about it. But I’m sincere, here, ma‘am. No more f*cking, no more love.”
“....”
“Take your robe off a second.”
“....”
“Take it off please I said.”
“Ow! God, what are—?”
“Thank you. Don’t worry, no rape on the horizon this morning, ma‘am. Look, mine comes off too, to be fair. Let’s just have us an objective look at the situation, here.”
“The curtains are open.”
“My analysis of the problem, if you want my analysis of the problem, is that you’ve just run out of holes in your pretty body, and I’ve run out of things to stick in them. My pecker, my fingers, my tongue, my toes ...”
“Oh, God.”
“... my hair, my nose. My wallet. My car keys. So on. I’ve just run the f*ck out of ideas. And this crying shit is starting to piss me off. I’m askin’ you right now to stop crying, ‘cause it’s not working, and it only pisses me off.”
“....”
“I’m getting pissed off.”
“Daddy ...”
“Well there we go. Daddy. I think maybe he’s just what you need right now. You can help him f*ck his lawn.”
“I hate you.”
“All I’m tryin’ to do is say f*ck off.”
“I love you. Please. Here ... see?”
“Now let’s don’t be misled here. What we got here is just purely perverse excitement at seein’ you upset. It’s just the reaction of a bored old soldier in the game of love. It’s not wonderfulness. And if we did do it, it’d be like two animals in the f*cking forest.”
“....”
“You care to hear how many women I’ve blasted since we got married?”
“....”
“I’ve personally blasted over a dozen women since I married you. Since I committed to you forever and ever, I have f*cking betrayed you, hundreds of times. There’s been times in the last year when I haven’t with you, ‘cause I was savin’ it up for somebody else. That ought to make you feel better about me taking a indefinite vacation.”
“Oh, God.”
“Have a Kleenex.”
....“
“And please don’t think I don’t know you’ve f*cked around too. I know about you and Gluskoter. The only reason I haven’t kicked his ass is that it would just be too f*cking boring. I know you’re not any better than me, don’t worry. But I’m talking about doing it on a grand, grand f*cking scale.”
“How can you be so ugly to me?”
“ ‘Cause I’m bored, and when a man gets bored enough he gets like an animal. I’m an animal now, feels like. I’m sick of this shit, your work, my work, worryin’ about other people’s taxes, hearing about your Daddy’s f*cking fertilizer strategies every day. I got to get out. When animals get so they feel trapped, they get ugly. You want to watch out for trapped animals, Melinda-Sue, I’m tellin’ you that for future reference.”
“I can’t take this. I don’t know what’s come over you.”
“It sure ain’t you, don’t you worry.”
“I think I want a divorce.”
“Christ, even my clothes smell like you.”
“There’s no way you can hate me the way you’re trying to convince me you hate me.”
“....”
“Oh, God.”
“... car keys ...”
“....”
“One drink for the road and I’m gone, like a desert breeze.”
“You’re contemptible.”
“We out of ice again? Shit on fire. You eat ice, or what? Do you go around takin’ the ice out of here after I make it? If you do, just admit it.”
“Just leave, if you’re going to leave.”
“Let me just take a quick squirt, if I may. One for the road.”
“Wait. I think you shouldn’t go.”
“Say please.”
“Please.”
“Too bad. Fooled you.”
“You’re drunk.”
“....”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I think first I’m gonna go home.”
“You’re going to drive to Texas? Now?”
“No, you very very dumb woman. I said I’m going the f*ck home. Home.”
“I love you.”
“Then you’re a confused little specimen.”
“And you love me.”
“You are an amazing woman if you think that’s today’s message. You amaze me, Melinda-Sue. I’d take my hat off to you, except I think I left it next door. And hey, you should probably either get out of the window, or else put something on.”
“....”
“No sense givin’ it away.”
/b/

A bright day, in very early September, everything dry, the sun an explicit thing, up there, with heat coming right off it, but a flat edge of cool running down the middle of the day. A jet airplane stood at lunchtime on Runway 1 at CHA, pointed west to go east, a red-ink drawing of a laughing baby on its side, guys with earmuffs and orange plastic flags torn at by the wind off the flatness taking iron prisms out from under the airplane’s wheels, the air behind the engines hot and melting the pale green fields through it, the engines hissing through the dry wind like torches, fuel-shimmers. The guys slowly waving the orange flags. The sun glinting off the slanted glass of the windshield, behind which there are sunglasses and thumbs-ups. One of the flag-guys is wearing a Walkman, instead of earmuffs, and he twirls with his flag.
/c/

“There is an ominous rumbling in my ears.”
“That’s the engine, right outside the window.”
“No, the engine is a piercing, nerve-jangling, screaming whine. I’m talking about an ominous rumbling.”
“....”
“My ears are going to hurt horribly on this flight, I know. The change in pressure is going to make my ears hurt like hell.”
“Rick, in my purse are like fifty packs of gum. I’ll keep shoving gum in your mouth, and you’ll chew, and swallow your saliva, and your ears will be OK. We’ve discussed this already.”
“Maybe I’d better have a piece now, all unwrapped and ready to go in my hand.”
“Here, then.”
“Bless you, Lenore.”
“A story, please.”
“A story? Here?”
“I’m really in the mood for a story. Maybe a story will take your mind off your ears.”
“My ears, God. I’d almost begun to have hopes of forgetting, what with the gum in my hand, and you go and mention my ears.”
“Let’s just have a minimum of spasms, here in public, on the plane, with a pilot and stewardess who’re probably going to tell my father everything we do and say.”
“How comforting.”
“Just no spasms, please.”
“But a story.”
“Please.”
“....”
“I know you’ve got some. I saw manila envelopes in your suitcase when I put stuff in.”
“Lord, they’re getting ready to take off. We’re moving. My ears are rumbling like mad.”
“....”
“Ironically enough, a man, in whom the instinct to love is as strong and natural and instinctive as can possibly be, is unable to find someone really to love.”
“We’re starting the story? Or is this just a Vigorous pithy?”
“The story is underway. The aforementioned pre-sarcastic-interruption fact is because this man, in whom the instincts and inclinations are so strong and pure, is completely unable to control these strong and pure instincts and inclinations. What invariably happens is that the man meets a halfway or even quarterway desirable woman, and he immediately falls head over heels in love with her, right there, first thing, on the spot, and blurts out ‘I love you’ as practically the first thing he says, because he can’t control the intensely warm feelings of love, and not just lust, now, it’s made clear, but deep, emotionally intricate, passionate love, the feelings that wash over him, and so immediately at the first opportunity he says ’I love you,‘ and his pupils dilate until they fill practically his whole eyes, and he moves unself-consciously toward the woman in question as if to touch her in a sexual way, and the women he does this to, which is more or less every woman he meets, quite understandably don’t react positively to this, a man who says ’I love you’ right away, and makes a bid for closeness right away, and so the women as an invariable rule reject him verbally on the spot, or hit him with their purse, or worst of all run away, screaming screams only he and they can hear.”
“Look down a second, Rick. Out the window.”
“Where?”
“Right down there.”
“Heavens, I know her! That’s...”
“Jayne Mansfield.”
“Jayne Mansfield, right. What’s she doing as a town? Is that East Corinth?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“My God, will you look at that west border. That 271. That’s the Inner Belt. I’ve driven over that.”
“Meanwhile, back with the lover whose love drives the lovee away with silent screams.”
“Right. So the man is understandably not too happy. Not only is he denied the opportunity to love, but it’s the very strength and intensity of his own love-urge that denies him the opportunity, which denial thus understandably causes him exponentially more sadness and depression and frustration than it would you or me, in whom the instincts are semi-under-control, and so semi-satisfiable.”
“More gum?”
“And so the man is in a bad way, and he loses his job at the New York State Department of Weights and Measures, at which he’d been incredibly successful before the love-intensity problem got really bad, and now he wanders the streets of New York City, living off the bank account he’d built up during his days as a brilliant weights-and-measures man, wandering the streets, stopping only when he falls in love, getting slapped or laughed at or hearing silent screams. And this goes on, for months, until one day in Times Square he sees a discreet little Xeroxed ad on a notice board, an ad for a doctor who claims to be a love therapist, one who can treat disorders stemming from and connected to the emotion of love.”
“What, like a sex therapist?”
“No, as a matter of fact it says ‘Not A Sex Therapist’ in italics at the bottom of the ad, and it gives an address, and so the man, who is neither overjoyed with his life nor overwhelmed with alternatives for working out his problems, hops the subway and starts heading across town to the love therapist’s office. And in his car on the subway there are four women, three of them reasonably desirable, and he falls in love in about two seconds with each of the three in turn, and gets hit, laughed at, and subjected to a silent scream, respectively, and then eventually he looks over at the fourth woman, who’s conspicuously fat, and has stringy hair, and Coke-bottle glasses, and an incredibly weak chin, weaker even than mine, and so the fourth woman is prohibitively undesirable, even for the man, and besides she’s very hard to see because she’s pressed back into the shadow of the rear of the car, with her coat collar pulled up around her neck, which neck is also encased in a thick scarf. Did I mention it was March in New York City?”
“No.”
“Well it is, and she’s in a scarf, pressed back into the shadow, with her cheek pressed against the grimy graffiti-spattered wall of the subway car, clutching an old Thermos bottle that’s jutting halfway out of her coat pocket, and she just basically looks like one of those troubled cases you don’t want to mess with, which cases New York City does not exactly have a scarcity of.”
“You’re telling me.”
“And then on top of everything else the fat stringy-haired woman with the Thermos has been watching the man telling the other three women that he loves them, and making bids for closeness, out of the comer of her eye, as she hugs the wall of the car in shadow, and then so when she sees the man even look at her, at all, she obviously flips out, it really bothers her, and she bolts for the door of the subway car, as fast as she can bolt, which isn’t too fast, because now it becomes clear that one of her legs is roughly one half the length of the other, but still she bolts, and the car is just pulling into a station, and the door opens, and out she flies, and in her excessive haste she drops the old Thermos she’d been clutching, and it rolls down the floor of the subway, and it finally clunks against the man’s shoe, and he picks it up, and it’s just an old black metal Thermos, but on the bottom is a piece of masking tape on which is written in a tiny faint hand a name and an address, which he and we assume to be the woman‘s, in Brooklyn, and so the man resolves to give the woman back her Thermos, since it was probably he and his inappropriate emotional behavior that had caused her to drop it in the first place. Besides, the love therapist’s office is in Brooklyn, too.
“And so the man arrives at the love therapist’s office, and actually wouldn’t ordinarily have gotten in to see the love therapist at all, because she’s apparently a truly great and respected love therapist, and incredibly busy, and her appointment calendar is booked up months in advance, but, as it happens, the love therapist’s receptionist is a ravingly desirable woman, and the man immediately and involuntarily falls head over heels in love with her, and actually begins involuntarily reciting love poems to her, then eventually sort of passes out, swoons from the intensity of his love, and falls to the carpeted floor, and so the receptionist runs in and tells the love therapist what’s happened, that this is obviously a guy who really needs to be seen right away, out here, on the rug, and so the love therapist skips her lunch hour, which she was just about to take, and they pick the man up off the reception-area rug and carry him into the office and revive him with cold water, and he gets an appointment right away.
“And it turns out that one of the reasons why this love therapist is so great is that she can usually hew to the bone of someone’s love-problem in one appointment, and doesn’t keep the patient stringing along month after expensive month with vague predictions of breakthrough, which we are both in a position to appreciate the desirability of, I think, and so the love therapist hews to the bone of the man’s problem, and tells the man that surprisingly enough it’s not that his emotional love-mechanism is too strong, but rather that some of its important features are actually too weak, because one of the big things about real love is the power to discriminate and decide whom and on the basis of what criteria to love, which the man is very obviously unable to do—witness the fact that the man fell deeply and intricately for the receptionist without even knowing her, and has already said ‘I love you’ to the love therapist, herself, about ten times, involuntarily. What the man needs to do, the love therapist says, is to strengthen his love-discrimination mechanism by being around women and trying not to fall in love with them. Since this obviously will be hard for the man to do at the start, the love therapist suggests that he begin by finding some woman so completely and entirely undesirable, looks-wise and personality-wise, that it won’t be all that hard to keep from falling in love with her right away, and then proceeding to hang around her as much as he can, to begin to strengthen the mechanism that lets men hang around with women without necessarily falling in love with them. And the man is dazed from the one-two punch of the ravingly desirable receptionist and the wise and kind and obviously exceedingly competent and also not unerotic love therapist, but the back part of his brain, the part that deals with basic self-preservation, knows that things cannot keep going as they have been, and he resolves to give the love therapist’s advice a try, and then he happens to look down at the Thermos he’s still holding, and he sees the piece of masking tape with the name and address of the Thermos woman on it, and he has an epiphany-ish flashback to the subway, and sees that the Thermos woman is just a prime candidate for non-love, stringy-hair-and-uneven-leg-wise, and clearly-troubled-personality-wise, and as the scene ends we see him looking speculatively at the Thermos and then at the love therapist.”
“How’s the gum doing?”
“New piece, please.”
“Here.”
“....”
“Is the gum working?”
“Do you hear me complaining yet?”
“Good point.”
“And so as the next scene opens it’s a few days later, and the man and the Thermos woman are walking in Central Park, or rather walking and limping, respectively, and they’re holding hands, although for the man it’s just a friendly platonic hand-holding, although we’re not sure what it is for the Thermos woman, and it’s made clear that the man had gone to the Thermos address and had talked to the woman and had, after a reasonably long time and many visits, broken down some of her really pathological shyness and introversion, though only some. And they’re walking hand in hand, although it’s inconvenient, because the woman clearly has a pathological need always to be in shadow, and so they keep having to veer all over Central Park to find shadow that she’ll be able to walk in, and she also has a pathological need to keep her neck covered, and keeps fingering at one of the seemingly uncountable number of scarves she owns, and she also strangely always seems to want to have only her right side facing the man, she keeps her left side turned away at all times, so all the man ever sees of her is her right profile, and as he turns from time to time and moves relative to her she keeps moving and positioning herself like mad to keep only her right side facing him.”
“....”
“And she also seems really aloof and not emotionally connected with anyone outside herself at all, except her family, who live in Yonkers, but as the man works to exercise his love-discrimination mechanism and starts hanging around the woman and beginning to get to know her better, it seems clear to him that she actually wants to be connected with people outside herself, very much, but can‘t, for some strange reason that he can’t figure out, but knows has something to do with the shadows, the scarves, and the profiles.”
“ ”
“And a funny thing happens. The man begins to like the Thermos woman. Not love, but like, which is something the man has never experienced before, and finds different, because it involves directing a lot more emotional attention to the actual other person than the old uncontrollable passionate love had involved, involves caring about the whole other person, including the facets and features that have nothing whatsoever to do with the man. And now it’s implied that what has happened is that the man has for the first time become really connected to a person other than himself, that he had not really ever been connected before, that his intense-love tendency, which might at first glance have seemed like the ultimate way to connect, has really been a way not to connect, at all, both in its results and, really, as a little psychological analysis is by implication indulged in, in its subconscious intent. The inability to bring the discriminating faculty of love to bear on the world outside him has been what has kept the man from connecting with that world outside him, the same way the Thermos woman has been kept from connecting by the mysterious shadow-scarf-and-profile thing.
“Which thing, by the way, really begins to bother the man, and makes him intensely curious, especially as he begins to feel more and more connected to the woman, though not exactly in a passionate-love way, and thinks he feels her yearning to connect, too. And so he gradually wins her trust and affection, and she responds by starting to wash her hair, and dieting, and buying an extra thick shoe for her obscenely short leg, and things progress, although the Thermos woman is still clearly pathologically hung up about something. And then one night in very early April, after a walk all around the quainter parts of Brooklyn, the man takes the Thermos woman back to her apartment and has sex with her, seduces her, gets her all undressed—except, compassionately, for her scarf—and he makes love to her, and it’s at first surprisingly, but then when we think about it not all that surprisingly, revealed that this is the first time this incredibly passionate, love-oriented man, who’s about thirty, has ever had sex with anybody, at all.”
“....”
“Um, first time for the Thermos woman, too.”
“....”
“....”
“What’s the matter?”
“My ear! Shit! God!”
“Try to swallow.”
“....”
“Try to yawn.”
“....”
“....”
“Good God. I so hate airplanes, Lenore. I can think of no more convincing demonstration of my devotion to you than my coming on this trip. I am flying for you.”
“You’re going to get to see Amherst in the very early fall. You said early fall in Amherst used to make you weep with joy.”
“....”
“You’re less pale. Can we assume the ear is better?”
“Jesus.”
“....”
“So they have sex, and the man is able to be gentle and caring, which we can safely intuit he couldn’t have been, passion-wise, if he’d really been hopelessly in love in his old way with the Thermos woman, and the Thermos woman weeps tears of joy, at all the gentleness and caring, and we can practically hear the thud as she falls in love with the man, and she really begins to think it’s possible to connect with someone in the world outside her. And they’re lying in bed, and their limbs are unevenly intertwined, and the man is resting his head on the little shelf of the Thermos woman’s weak chin, and he’s playing idly with the scarf around her neck, which playing pathologically bothers the woman, which the man notices, and curiosity and concern wash over him, and he tries tentatively and experimentally slowly to undo the scarf and take it off, and the Thermos woman tenses all her muscles but through what is obviously great strength of will doesn’t stop him, although she’s weeping for real, now, and the man gently, and with kisses and reassurances, removes the scarf, throws it aside, and in the dimness of the bedroom sees something more than a little weird on the woman’s neck, and he goes and turns on the light, and in the light of the bedroom it’s revealed that the woman has a pale-green tree toad living in a pit at the base of her neck, on the left side.”
“Pardon me?”
“In a perfectly formed and non-woundish pit on the left side of the Thermos woman’s neck is a tiny tree toad, pale green, with a white throat that puffs rhythmically out and in. The toad stares up at the man from the woman’s neck with sad wise clear reptilian eyes, the clear and delicate lower lids of which blink upward, in reverse. And the woman is weeping, her secret is out, she has a tree toad living in her neck.”
“Is it my imagination, or did this story just get really weird all of a sudden?”
“Well, the context is supposed to explain and so minimize the weirdness. The tree toad in the pit in her neck is the thing that has kept the Thermos woman from connecting emotionally with the world outside her: it has been what has kept her in sadness and confusion, see also darkness and shadow, what has bound and constrained her, see also being wrapped in a scarf, what has kept her from facing the external world, see also staying in profile all the time. The tree toad is the mechanism of nonconnection and alienation, the symbol and cause of the Thermos woman’s isolation; yet it also becomes clear after a while that she is emotionally attached to the tree toad in a very big way, and cares more for it and gives it more attention than she gives herself, there in the privacy of her apartment. And the man also discovers that all the scarves the woman wears to cover up and hide the tree toad are full of tiny holes, air holes for the toad, holes that are practically invisible and that the woman herself makes via millions of tiny punctures of the cloth with a pin, late at night.”
“My ear even hurts a little. We must be really high.”
“So that the very thing that has made the woman unconnected when she wants to be connected and so has made her extremely unhappy is also the center of her life, a thing she cares a lot about, and is even, in certain ways the man can’t quite comprehend, proud of, and proud of the fact that she can feed the pale-green tree toad bits of food off her finger, and that it will let her scratch its white throat with a letter opener. So now things are understandably ambiguous, and it’s not clear whether deep down at the core of her being the Thermos woman really wants to connect, after all, at all. Except as time goes by and the man continues to hang around, exercising his non-love love-mechanism, being gentle and caring, the woman falls more and more for him, and clearly wants to connect, and her relation with the tree toad in the pit in her neck gets ambiguous, and at times she’s hostile toward it and flicks at it cruelly with her fingernail, except at other times she falls back into not wanting to connect, and so dotes on the tree toad, and scratches it with the letter opener, and is aloof toward the man. And this goes on and on, and she falls for the man on the whole more and more. And the man begins to be unsure about his formerly definitely non-love feelings for this strange and not too pretty but still quite complex and in many ways brave and in all ways certainly very interesting Thermos woman, and so his whole love-situation gets vastly more complicated than it’s ever been before.”
“Listen, would you like a Canadian Club? I can get Jennifer to bring you a Canadian Club.”
“Not too tasty with gum, I’m afraid, of which I would however like another piece.”
“Coming right up.”
“And so things are complicated, and the man earns the Thermos woman’s trust more and more, and finally one night she brings him to her family’s home in Yonkers, for a family get-together and dinner, and the man meets her whole family, and he knows right away something’s up, because they all have scarves around their necks, and they’re clearly extremely on edge about there being an outsider in their midst, but anyway they all sit around the living room for a while, in uncomfortable silence, with cocktails, and Cokes for the little kids, and then they sit down to dinner, and right before they all sit down, the Thermos woman looks significantly at the man, and then at her father, and then in a gesture of letting the family know she’s clued the man into her secret condition and initiated some kind of nascent emotional connection, she undoes her scarf and throws it aside, and her tree toad gives a little chirrup, and there’s a moment of incredibly tense silence, and then the father slowly undoes and discards his scarf, too, and in the pit in the left side of his neck there’s a mottle-throated fan-wing moth, and then the whole rest of the family undo their scarves, too, and they all have little animals living in pits in their necks: the mother has a narrow-tailed salamander, one brother has a driver ant, one sister has a wolf spider, another brother has an axolotl, one of the little children has a sod webworm. Et cetera et cetera.”
“I think I feel the need for context again.”
“Well, the father explains to the man, as the family is sitting around the table, eating, and also feeding their respective neck-tenants little morsels off the tips of their fingers, that their family is from an ancient and narratively unspecified area in Eastern Europe, in which area the people have always stood in really ambiguous relations to the world outside them, and that the area’s families were internally fiercely loyal, and their members were intimately and thoroughly connected with one another, but that the family units themselves were fiercely independent, and tended to view just about all non-family-members as outsiders, and didn’t connect with them, and that the tiny animals in their necks, which specific animal-types used to be unique to each family and the same for each member of a particular family, in the old days, were symbols of this difference from and non-connection with the rest of the outside world. But then the father goes on to say that these days inbreeding and the passage of time were making the animal-types in the necks of the family-members different, and that also, regrettably, some younger members of the fiercely loyal families were now inclined to resent the secrecy and non-connection with the world that having animals in their necks required and entitled them to, and that some members of his own family had unfortunately given him to understand that they weren’t entirely happy about the situation. And here he and all the other members of the family stop eating and glare at the Thermos woman, there in her glasses, who is silently trying to feed her tree toad a bit of pot roast off the tip of her finger. And the man’s heart just about breaks with pity for the Thermos woman, who so clearly now stands in such an ambiguous relation to everything and everyone around her, and his heart almost breaks, and he also realizes in an epiphany-ish flash that he has sort of fallen in love with the Thermos woman, in a way, though not in the way he’d fallen for any of the uncountable number of women he’d fallen in love with before.”
“Look down a second, if it doesn’t hurt your ear. I think we’re over Pennsylvania. I thought I saw a hex sign on a barn roof. We’re past Lake Erie, at least.”
“Thank God. Drowning in sludge is one of my special horrors.”
“....”
“And so things are complicated, enormously complicated, and the man feels he’s now experiencing the kind of strong discriminating love the love therapist had been recommending, so he’s pleased, and also maybe I neglected to mention he’s long since toned down his head-over-heels-in-love-in-public inclinations, things are now much more under control, and with all his professional weight-measure experience, plus his new-found amorous restraint, he manages to land a fairly good job with a company that makes scales, and he’s doing pretty well, although he does miss that exciting head-busting rush of hot feeling he used to get from being madly, passionately, non-discriminatingly in love. But the Thermos woman is clearly undergoing even more complicated changes and feelings than the man; she’s obviously fallen in love with him, and her nascent connection with him is obviously arousing in her a desire to begin to connect emotionally with the entire outside world, and she gets more concerned with and attentive to her own appearance; she loses more weight, and buys contact lenses to replace the Coke-bottle glasses, and gets a perm, and there’s still of course the problem of chinlessness and leg-length, but still. But most of all she now noticeably begins to perceive the green tree toad in the pit in her neck as a definite problem, and ceases to identify herelf with it and non-connection, and begins instead to identify herself with herself and connection. But now her perception of the tiny toad as a definite problem, which is, remember, a function of her new world view and desire to connect, now paradoxically causes her enormous grief and distress, because, now that she feels a bit connected to the world, she no longer feels that she wants to stay in shadow and present only profiles—so far so good—but that now even though she doesn’t want to hide away she feels more than ever as though she ought to, because she’s got a reptile living in a pit in her neck, after all, and is to that extent alienated and different and comparatively disgusting, with respect to the world she now wants to connect with.”
“Aren’t tree toads amphibians, really?”
“Wise-ass. Amphibian in a pit in her neck. But she suddenly and ominously gets even more fanatical about being in shadow and wearing the scarves, even though these are obviously alienating things: the more she wants to be accepted by the world, the more she’s beaten back by her heightened perception of her own difference, amphibian-tenant-wise. She becomes absolutely obsessed with the green tree toad, and gives it a really hard time with her fingernail, and cries, and tells the man she hates the toad, and the man tries to cheer her up by taking her out dancing at a nightclub that has lots of shadows. Gum, please.”
“...”
“And things get worse, and the Thermos woman is now drinking a lot, sitting in her apartment, and as she’s drinking, the man will look at her sadly, as he sits nearby working on the design for a scale; and the tree toad, when it’s not busy getting flicked by a fingernail, will look at the man and blink sadly, from the lower lid up, there in the pit in the Thermos woman’s neck.”
“....”
“And now, disastrously, it’s late April. It’s the height of spring, almost. Have you ever been around someplace that has tree toads, in the spring, Lenore?”
“Oh, no. ”
“They sing. It’s involuntary. It’s instinctive. They sing and chirrup like mad. And this, I rather like to think, is why the tree toad looked sadly at the man as the man was looking sadly at the drinking Thermos woman: the tree toad has its own nature to be true to, too. The toad’s maybe aware that its singing will have a disastrous effect on the Thermos woman, right now, because whereas in the past she always just used to keep herself hidden away, in the spring, in the singing season, now she’s clearly torn by strong desires to connect, to be a part of the world. And so maybe the tree toad knows it’s hurting the Thermos woman, maybe irreparably, by chirruping like mad, but what can it do? And the singing clearly drives the Thermos woman absolutely insane with frustration and horror, and her urges both to connect and to hide away in shadow are tearing at her like hell, and it’s all pathetic, and also, as should by now be apparent, more than a little ominous.”
“Oh, God.”
“And one day, not long after the toad began singing in the apartment, as the air is described as getting soft and sweet and tinged with gentle promises of warmth, with a flowery smell all around, even in New York City, the man gets a call at work from the Thermos woman’s father, in Yonkers: it seems that the Thermos woman had thrown herself in front of the subway and killed herself that morning in a truly horrible way.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“And the man is obviously incredibly upset, and doesn’t even thank the father for calling him, even though it was quite a thing for the Eastern European father to do, what with the man being an outsider, et cetera, and so but the man is incredibly upset, and doesn’t even go to the funeral, he’s so frantic, and he discovers now—the hard way—that he really was connected to the Thermos woman, really and truly, deeply and significantly, and that the severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection, and he wallows in grief, and also disastrously his old love problem immediately comes roaring back stronger than ever, and the man is falling passionately in love with anything with a pulse, practically, and now, disastrously, men as well as women, and he’s perceived as a homosexual, and starts getting regularly beaten up at work, and then he loses his job when he tells his supervisor he’s in love with him, and he’s back out wandering the streets, and now he starts falling in love with children, too, which is obviously frowned upon by society, and he commits some gross though of course involuntary indiscretions, and gets arrested, and thrown in jail overnight, and he’s in a truly horrible way, and he curses the love therapist for even suggesting that he try to love with his discriminating-love-faculty.”
“May I please ask a question?”
“Yes. ”
“Why didn’t the Thermos woman just take the tree toad out of her neck and put it in a coffee can or something?”
“A, the implication is that the only way the animal-in-neck people can rid themselves of the animals in their necks is to die, see for instance the subway, and b, you’re totally, completely missing what I at any rate perceive to be the point of the story.”
“....”
“And the man is in a horrible way, and his old love problem is raging, together with and compounded by his continued grief at the severed Thermos-woman-connection, and his desire never ever to connect again, which desire itself stands in a troublingly ambiguous and bad-way-producing relation to the original love problem. And so things are just horrible. And they go on this way for about a week, and then one night in May the man is lying totally overcome by grief and by his roughly twenty-five fallings in love and run-ins with the police that day, and he’s almost out of his mind, lying in a very bad way there on the rug of his apartment, and suddenly there’s an impossibly tiny knock at the apartment door.”
“Oh, no.”
“What do you mean, ‘Oh, no’?”
“....”
“Well he opens the door, and there on the floor of the hall outside his apartment is the Thermos woman’s tiny delicate pale-green tree toad, blinking up at him, from the lower eyelid up, with its left rear foot flattened and trailing way behind it and obviously hurt, no doubt we’re to assume from the subway episode, which episode however the toad at least seemed to have survived.”
“Wow.”
“And the story ends with the man, bleary-eyed and punchy from grief and love and connection-ambiguity, at the door, staring down at the tiny pale-green tree toad, which is still simply looking up at him, blinking sadly in reverse, and giving a few tentative little chirrups. And they’re just there in the hall looking at each other as the story ends.”
“Wow.”
“I think I’d like to try two pieces of gum at once, please.”
“....”
“It’s clearly not right for the Frequent Review, but I’m going to write a personal rejection note in which I say that I personally liked it, and thought it had possibilities, though it was not as yet a finished piece. ”
“Another troubled-collegiate-mind submission?”
“That’s the very strong sense I get, although the kid tried to pass himself off as much older in his cover letter, and included what I have now determined to be a phony bibliography of published material. ”
“Lordy.”
“I’m suddenly monstrously hungry, Lenore.”
“I know for a fact there are sandwiches. Let me buzz Jennifer.”
“....”
“Well, it’s about time somebody wanted something around here.”
“Hi Jennifer. I think Mr. Vigorous would like a sandwich.”
“Well, sure. Sir, what would you like?”
“What sorts of sandwiches do you have, please?”
“We have ham, today, and also turkey.”
“Does the turkey have mayonnaise?”
“I think so, sir.”
“Miracle Whip, or Hellman’s?”
“Sir, I’m afraid I’m not sure. Lenore, I’m sorry.” “That’s OK, Jennifer. Hellman’s makes Rick’s throat itch, is the thing.”
“How perfectly awful!”
“Perhaps I’ll have the ham, provided it’s mayonnaiseless, with the crusts removed from what I’ll naturally assume to be rye bread.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Please, and understandably again given the above it’s vital that there be no mayonnaise, though I would like a smidgeon of mustard, and also a Canadian Club with a spash of distilled water.”
“Lenore?”
“May I please have a ginger ale?”
“I’ll be right back.”
“Thanks, Jennifer.”
“Beautiful girl.”
“Trying to make me jealous?”
“Don’t I wish.”
“....”
“Speaking of which ... I saw Norman, yesterday, Lenore. He asked about you.”
“Really? I think we’re getting close to Bradley Field. I know we’re over New York state, anyway. See the traffic?”
“Norman asked about you.”
“Really.”
“Norman claims to be in love with you.”
“Why that tone, Rick?”
“What tone?”
“An obese, hideous, insane, aspirations-to-be-infinite person, who’s off his rocker, expresses a necessarily-given-his-universe-view temporary interest in someone who made every effort to be explicitly rude to him, and who clearly has no interest in him, and you get that tone.”
“I almost attacked him on the spot. I just had no idea where to begin hitting. He’s much larger than he was a week ago.”
“That seems longer ago than a week, doesn’t it?”
“Besides, his palanquin carriers were all quite burly. Otherwise I really would have lunged.”
“....”
“Norman hasn’t communicated with you directly, has he? Expressed things to you?”
“I’ll handle it, Rick.”
“Handle what?”
“Whatever needs to be handled.”
“....”
“I get to handle things too, you know. I’m a person.”
“What has he said?”
“Nothing even the tiniest bit interesting, and nothing that’s really any of your business.”
“None of my business?”
“....”
“None of my business?” “....”
“Aren’t you my—? Thank you. Thanks.”
“Looks super, Jennifer, thanks. Are we getting close?”
“I know we’re over New York. Captain says about half an hour.”
“Thanks.”
“Just buzz if there’s anything at all, you two.”
“She didn’t take the crusts off.”
“Give me your knife. I’ll do it.”
“We’re her only responsibility, the one thing she has to do, and she doesn’t take the crusts off.”
“....”
“You’re not my business? I’m confused about what’s my business and what isn’t?”
“Got a knife, here, remember.”
“....”
“I’m your friend. Your girlfriend. I’m not your business.”
“My girlfriend?”
“Whatever you want to call it. May I please eat these crusts, or do you want them for some reason?”
“The things I love are my business.”
“That’s just untrue. The things you love and the people you love are the things and people you love. Your business is you.”
“....”
“Just like my business is me.”
“....”
“Which I’ll handle, Rick.”
“My, aren’t we assertive and confident and sure of ourselves all of a sudden.”
“I don’t think this is the place for this. When you start using the plural tense, I sense spasm-potential.”
“This ham is far too salty.”
“You did take your gum out, right?”
“I’m losing you, Lenore. My ears were rumbling ominously at impending loss. That’s what that rumbling really was.”
“Why do you perceive everything in terms of having and losing? Have you ever for about one second thought of how that makes me feel? You haven’t ‘lost me,’ whatever on God’s green earth that means. I’ll handle the people who might happen to be temporarily infatuated with me on my own, is all.”
“People?”
“Sweet shrieking mother of God! Listen to yourself! You’re not even insanely jealous, you’re just ... pathetically jealous.”
“So now I’m pathetic.”
“No more. I’m going to sleep. May I please put my ginger ale on your tray?”
“You may not go to sleep, Lenore.”
“....”
“At least have the decency to give me some gum, to have, for the landing, which I might tell you I’m not looking forward to one bit.”
“Here.”
“....”
“....”
“You are too my business.”
“Fnoof. ”
“Christ.”
/d/

EXCERPT FROM DUTY LOG OF DR. DANIEL JOY, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR EMERGENCY SERVICES, CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF MENTAL HEALTH, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, FRIDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER 1990.

10:40 a.m. Arrive Lake Lady Medical Center, Chicago.
10:42 Arrive Floor 5. ID check complete. Station log verifies assignment to observe patient “JB, ” Room 573, admitted p.m. of Thursday, 26 August.
10:45 Arrive Room 573. ID check complete. Occupants of 573 as of 10:45: Joy; patient “JB”; Dr. Robert Golden, Supervisor Emotional/Psychological Services, Lake Lady Center; Dr. Daniel Nelm, Staff Physician, /P S, L.L.C. Observe patient “JB.” Patient male, Caucasian, fair, dark hair, height appr. 5’ 9”, weight appr. 100 lbs. Prominent features: eyes. Exceptionally large, black. Condition skin around eyes indicates lack of/difficulties connected with sleep. Patient conscious but sedated. Medication indicated Golden to be 110 Thor. Pcm #7 drip ver. saline x 2 hrs.; increased to 220 Thor. Pcm #7 post shift #3 (11 p.m.-7 a.m.).
Observe filming apparatus on tripod at foot of patient’s bed. Observe director’s chair. Observe sunglasses worn by Drs. Golden, Nelm. N explains patient delusion e.g. admittance, believes he is contestant on television “quiz-” or “game-show, ” refuses/unable to give correct name, refers to himself only as “The Contestant, ” variously under heavy post-#3 sedation “He Who Smites From Afar” (per report Golden, Nelm). Patient “JB” refuses to speak unless believes being filmed, recorded; refuses to acknowledge questions posed by any but those representing selves as “game-show” personnel (per G, N). Food refused 27 August, thereafter; Drip Class 7 initiated 27 August, thereafter.
Malnutrition advanced but not sufficient for exhaustive explanation condition (Golden, concurrence Joy).
Nelm explains camera is Motorola home-movie outfit owned by Mrs. Nelm. Patient appears to ignore. Patient stares into camera. Am handed by Nelm pair sunglasses, director’s bullhorn. Am instructed to address patient as “Contestant, Baby. ” Sit in director’s chair. (Here see E/ P S L.L.C. reports 8-28, 8-29, 8-30, 8-31, tag 573, L.L.M.C.) Am introduced as “Mr. Barris of Screen Gems, nc. Patient response noticeable. Difficulty observing patient from behind sunglasses judged acceptable, offset by desirability patient response. Delusion observed. Delusion constant only with respect to television. Patient appears confused as to whether appearing on game show or being interviewed for/about appearance game show. Nelm suggestion (positive impression Nelm, unorthodox vs. highly competent, formally noted 9-3) Mr. ”Barris“ ask ”prospective contestant“ for previous ”game-show experience. “ Patient’s voice exceptionally raw, scratchy; intelligibility inconstant. Hoarseness see admission report JB-L.L.M.C. 8-26, Nelm report 8-27 tag 573. Patient responds request ”experience“ (from tape, N):
“The experience I have had was on
the ... (unintelligible) ... In the Desert? And I was ... where we were I was contestant. I am the contestant. The host opened the showcase and from where / was the audience screamed. It was the most desirable prize imaginable. The prize impossible to conceive of a more desirable prize. The totally desirable prize. And the audience had to be restrained with electrified wire mesh. And where / was I was not restrained. And ... “ (unintelligible). ”And the host in the robe set the clock and shots of Dad and ...“ ” (unintelligible) “and wires affixed. Host in robe says...” (here patient adopts different voice, possibly one of game-show quizmaster [N], pain at vocal effort obvious):
“ ‘And the contestant will of course receive in which he receives the most widely desirable prize imaginable, on the condition that he, here we are, not want it, for the next 60 seconds.’
“Contestant, where I was, did not receive prize. Shouts from audience: ‘Don’t think about it. ’ ‘Renounce all desire.’ Shouts from audience behind electrified wire mesh. To receive totally desirable prize by not desiring prize I did not receive prize. Failure occurred at 50 seconds. Per the rules of the game received the electric shocks, on the tip? Every 2 seconds? For the 50? And the audience completely howled, threw water from behind the wire mesh, were thrown back ...”
Patient emits screams, rhythm appr. every 2 seconds, over 20 seconds, throat condition prohibits excessive noise or potential for harm (G, N). Dosage increased Nelm x 1.5; patient now conscious but heavily sedated. Eyes roll white.
Here c. f. formal report Joy CDMH 9-3-90 tag L.L.M.C. #573: identity patient sought via standard police, media procedure. Initials J.B., relative (?) L.B., established by jewelry worn date admittance. Nelm emphasis mention “Dad.” Reference to Desert, together with accent, establishes experience (residence?) in Ohio post-1972. Directive Nelm; proceed through all missing persons reports male Caucasion—Illinois, Ohio—past 30 days. Observation assignment Nelm. Observation continued through 9-10 authorized (see Joy, 9-3 tag 573 L.L.M.C.). Follow-up assignment Nelm authorized. Use of equipment authorized through 9-10. For following refer Joy formal 9-3 tag 573 L.L.M.C.
Overrall impressions none. Parallel/Precedent impression none.
11:30 Leave Lake Lady Medical Center, Chicago. dj/hvs
/e/

“It sure is weird having it be Monday and no telephones. You were awesome with Walinda, Rick. I never would have believed it.”
“My ears still hurt like hell. It was as if the takeoff merely softened my ears up for the landing. It was beyond belief, Lenore.”
“I’m so sorry. What can I do?”
“Oh, Route 9. Here it is. We’re on Route 9. God, the memories I have of Route 9. Good Lord, the Coolidge Bridge.”
“Haven’t you ever been back here, for reunions or stuff like that?”
“You must be joking.”
“....”
“The plane isn’t simply going to idle and wait for us at Bradley Field, Lenore, is it?”
“No way. That’s Stonecipheco’s one jet.”
“How thrifty.”
“I think it took off again almost right away. I think it had to get back home.”
“Places to go and people to see.”
“I’m not even sure. You hustled us into this limo in like four seconds.”
“The law of the East Coast. You see available transportation, you grab it immediately.”
“The plane’s supposed to be back for us by lunchtime tomorrow ... eleven-thirty.”
“Plenty of time to talk to LaVache.”
“Which is obviously going to be a waste of time, in terms of Dad, I predict. There’s no way Lenore’s talking to LaVache if she hasn’t talked to me. LaVache and Lenore hate each other. And he doesn’t even have a phone. And he and John hate each other, too. Or rather at least he hates John.”
“So much hating.”
“Well, it’s just family hating. It’s not like real hating.”
“My God. The Aqua Vitae restaurant. I thought that had been tom down. I haven’t thought of the Aqua Vitae in years. Good God. We used to pile in the car and go on down to the Aqua Vitae for monstrously huge hamburg pizzas.”
“Hamburger.”
“Ah, regional linguistic clash. I love it. It all comes flooding back.”
“....”
“I really do have to pee, though.”
“Should we pull over? We can pull in really quick at this mall, here.”
“God, no, not a mall. We’re nearly there. We’re nearly here. I think perhaps it’s just excitement. Amherst is rife with restroom facilities, anyway. At least it used to be. I knew them all.”
“Hang in there, soldier.”
“At least you can watch the putative future of Stonecipheco in academic action. You can issue a full report to your father, back at his lair.”
“I’m not going to tell Dad anything except what I want to tell him. Dad told me like ninety lies in his office. I’m beginning to think Dad is maybe a compulsive liar. He lies pathologically, even sort of pathetically, when it comes to Miss Malig. And he had this guy who works for him, who I used to go to school with, spying on us. And he didn’t even tell him to come out until it was obvious that I’d seen his shoes under the window curtain.”
“Who is this person you went to school with? Have I been told about him before?”
“Look, an absolute moratorium on spasms is declared, here, Rick, OK? I’m just not in the mood at all.”
“....”
“And you should know I’m not my father’s messenger, or spy.”
“Relax. You’re among friends. You’re with the one person who places your interests above his own. Remember that.”
“Oh Rick.”
“I love you, Lenore.”
“But I have to admit I am sort of anxious to see what LaVache is like at school. He’s really smarter than John, I think. In terms of pure smarts, he’s the one person in the family who’s smarter than John. He never had to work a bit at Shaker School, I know. And at home in the summer he’s just a waste-product. He just sits around all day in the east wing, getting flapped and watching soap operas, and stuff like ‘The Flintstones,’ and carving designs in his leg.”
“ ”
“And at night, every night, he just goes out drinking with his spooky buddies, in their cars where the back is higher off the ground than the front.”
“Jacked-up.”
“Jacked-up cars. And Dad never knows what he’s doing, because Dad’s hardly ever around, or when he is he’s like tiptoeing around ever so discreetly with Miss Malig. Dad thinks LaVache works. He thinks LaVache is another him.”
“We’re almost there. This hill. We’re going to crest this hill, and we’ll be there.”
“I’m sure he must work, now, in college. I know I sure did.”
“And ... ahh, there it is. Good heavens.”
“Your eyes are misting.”
“Bet your ass. I make no bones about it. I haven’t been back here in exactly twenty years. This is my alma mater.”
“Well, of course it is, you silly.”
“Alma mater.”
“....”
“Shall we just proceed right to Stone, Lenore? That is where LaVache lives, correct?”
“Right.”
“Driver, please take us directly to Stone Dormitory, Amherst College. You are, I’m afraid, on your own in terms of finding it. It’s one of the new ones, with which I’m not familiar, not having—”
“No problem, buddy.”
“How nice. Good heavens. How truly eerie, seeing all this. The trees are just barely hinting at beginning to turn, see? You can see it in some more than in others. Look there, for instance.”
“Pretty, all right.”
“Have you ever been here?”
“I’ve been to Mount Holyoke. I went there once, when Clarice was there.”
“Did you find it pretty?”
“It was March, but it was pretty. The campus was really pretty.”
“I’ve always liked Mount Holyoke, in a general sort of way.”
“What does that mean?”
“God, I really must pee, Lenore.”
“You can pee in LaVache’s room.”
“....”
“Oh, God, no! Rick, those shoes, still.”
“Pardon?”
“Those shoes. See those shoes, on those people? The boat shoes? With the leather shoe and white plastic sole?”
“Well, yes.”
“See those two girls and that guy? God, everybody’s still wearing them out here. Boy do I hate those shoes.”
“They, umm, seem all right to me. They seem harmless enough.”
“I have what I’m sure is this totally irrational hatred for those shoes. I think a big reason is that everyone at school wore them with no socks.”
“....”
“Which meant that they weren’t just wearing sneakers without socks, which would have been plenty repulsive enough, they were wearing nonsneakers without socks. Which is just incredibly ...”
“Unhygienic?”
“Make fun if you want, smart guy. You’re the one who’s dumb if you pay Dr. Jay all that money and then don’t even listen to him. It’s not just that it’s unhygienic, it’s downright sick. It stinks. At school, I can remember, I’d be sitting in my carrel, in the library, doing homework or something, minding my own business, and somebody would sit down in the next carrel, with those shoes, and then they’d take them off, and I’d all of a sudden be smelling somebody else’s feet.”
“....”
“Which did not smell good, let me tell you, from constantly being in shoes without socks. I mean I really think foot-smell should be a private thing, don’t you?”
“....”
“What are you grinning at? Are those ridiculous feelings? Does that make no sense at all?”
“Lenore, it makes perfect sense. It’s just that I’d never given the matter that much thought. Never much thought to the ... socio-ethics of foot-smell.”
“Now I can tell you’re being sarcastic.”
“You completely misread me.”
“....”
“Is that why you always wear two pairs of socks? Under constant and invariable sneakers?”
“Partly. Partly because it’s comfortable, too.”
“Stone Dorm, pal.”
“Which one of these is Stone?”
“The one we’re right in front of, pal.”
“I see .... Lord am I stiff.”
“You want to just bolt right in and pee?”
“....”
“Rick?”
“I rather think not, now that the moment has arrived.”
“What does that mean? You did nothing but talk pee, in the car.”
“Have you the bags?”
“You know perfectly well they’re in the trunk.”
“The question really meant, do you suppose you could manage getting them inside yourself, making absolutely sure to take my bag in, too, with my underwear and toothbrush and Old Spice and all essentials?”
“I suppose so, but I don’t get it.”
“Meter’s still running, ace.”
“I think with your permission I will simply leave you, here, for a bit. I feel emotions and feelings washing over me that are perhaps best confronted alone.”
“What?”
“I’m going to go wander among the blasted crags of memory, for a while.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’m going to go take a look around.”
“Oh. Well, OK.”
“Till later, then.”
“You want to just come back here and meet me? We can check in at Howard Johnson’s at five and then go to dinner?”
“Fine. Goodbye.”
“It’s room 101, remember.”
“Righto. See you soon.”
“Are you OK?”
“Yes. Goodbye. Thank you ever so much, driver.”
“....”
“Can you please help me with the bags?”
“I guess so, lady. What’s with him?”
“He gets this way, sometimes, when he has to go to the bathroom.”
/f/

6 September
The sudden strength with which the desire to go see whether the initials I’d carved so long ago in the wood of the stall in the men’s room of the Art Building were still there, the sudden and unexpected and overwhelming strength with which these feelings had washed over me, there at the dormitory, with Lenore, was a frightening thing. As I joined the serpentine line of students walking up the ungentle hill to the Art and Science Buildings, all of us falling into the vaguely floppy, seal-like gait of the hurried hill-climber, most of us seals apparently late for class, one of us late for an appointment with a tiny ocean of his own past, stretching away and down beside the carved dock of his childhood, an ocean into which this particular seal was going to pour a strong (hopefully unitary) stream of his own presence, to prove that he still is, and so was—that is, provided of course the bathroom and toilet and stall were still there—as I joined the line of seals in short pants and loose short-sleeved shirts and boat shoes and backpacks, and as I felt the fear that accompanied and was in a way caused by the intensity of the wash of feelings and desires and so on that accompanied even the thought of a silly men’s room in a silly building at a silly college where a sad silly boy had spent four years twenty years ago, as I felt all these things, there occurred to me a fact which I think now as I sit up in bed in our motel room, writing, the television softly on, the sharp-haired object of my adoration and absolute center of my entire existence asleep and snoring softly in the bed beside me, a fact which I think now is undeniably true, the truth being that Amherst College in the 1960’s was for me a devourer of the emotional middle, a maker of psychic canyons, a whacker of the pendulum of Mood with the paddle of Immoderation.
That is, it occurs to me now in force that in college things were never, not ever, at no single point, simply all right. Things were never just OK. I was never just getting by. Never. I can remember I was always horribly afraid. Or, if not horribly afraid, horribly angry. I was always desperately tense. Or, if not tense, then in an odd hot euphoria that made me walk with the water-jointed jaunt of the person who truly does not give a shit one way or the other. I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.
One of the trees at the top of the hill, which I stopped to look at as I played with my hat and recovered from the climb, the line of students forking past either side of me and disappearing into buildings to the sound of bells, one of the trees was just beginning to bum, a bit, with color, a flush of hesitant red suffusing the outline of the tree against the southerly sun, the tree’s blood draining out of those leaves most distant from the heart first; and I looked at the flush of crinkled red crowning a body of soft green, with the sunlight winking through the branches as they moved and creaked in the breeze, until I was drawn away by the twin urges to remember and to pee.
And the initials were still there, the tiny carved “R.V.,” near the bottom of the stall. Someone had filled in the carving with ballpoint pen. Near the initials were another set of initials, “S.U.X.,” which I come to see now were to be a joke at my expense. And, near the joke-at-my-expense initials, someone, some tiny soul, probably during exam time, in a gesture the emotion behind which I could completely understand, had put the single word, “Mommy”—which predictably, someone else, a mean person, had altered in a slightly different color to become “Your Mommy hates you.”
“She does not,” I put—still being a really incorrigible graffiti man, I’m afraid—under the cruel alteration, although I had to get on hands and knees in the scum-laden stall to do it, and managed to dip my tie neatly in the toilet bowl in the process; let Jay and Blentner have a look at this. And my present bubbled and frothed in my past, and was borne naturally away.
Out the door of the Art Building and through the courtyard I pass into a quad, the quad, where loosely clothed barefoot boys with liquid wrists are playing Frisbee under the lying leaves, running like deer, throwing the plastic plate every which way. We dinosaurs used to play a similar game here, with trays taken from the dining hall, metal trays back then, with sharp digit-removing edges, so that, I remember, the trays had to be caught in midair by the tweezer of finger and thumb.... We would play and bleed. Now they are only high-tech and beautiful, and the bright disc hangs motionless in the air while earth and trees and lithe slippery boys slide underneath as if on oil to receive it again. I clap my hands a bit, hem and haw, throw my cap into the air, practice some motions, make it clear that I want to be invited to play, but I am ignored.
I walk around the quad, kicking at exposed tree roots, listening to snatches of conversation in languages with which I am unfamiliar. I stay well clear of North Dormitory, to be sure. I make a giant detour around it. Out of the comer of my eye I can see its win dowshades fluttering. I can see its tree-fingers pointing. North Dormitory. Scene of perhaps the single most disastrous, unthinkable moment of my life, thus far.
Actually probably second to my wedding night.
Whom do I see, here, in the quad? Can the present of a past fail to be ugly? But it isn’t so. As I really should have remembered, ugliness is absent from the College. I have visions of it, bound and muffled, its walleyes rolling helplessly, stuffed into the darkest closets and boiler rooms in the deepest basements of the thickest buildings. I think I can hear its soft cries for help. The crazy relative everyone ignores, and denies, and feeds. Ugliness is absent from the quad.
Whom do I see, here? I see students and adults. I see parents, obvious parents, the ones with name tags. I watch the students, and they watch back. Ability To Handle Oneself, elaborate defense structures, exit their eyes and begin to assemble on the ground before them. But the eyes and faces are as always left bare. In the girls’ faces I see softness, beauty, the shiny and relaxed eyes of wealth, and the vital capacity for creating problems where none exist. For some reason I see these girls also older, pale television ghosts flickering beside the originals: middle-aged women, with bright-red fin gemails and deeply tanned, hard, seamed faces, sprayed hair shaped by the professional fingers of men with French names; and eyes, eyes that will stare without pity or doubt over salted tequila rims at the glare of the summer sun off the country club pool. The structures spread out, grow, wave at me with the epileptic flutter of the film-in-reverse. The boys are different, appropriately, from the girls. From each other. I see blond heads and lean jaws and bow-legged swaggers and biceps with veins in them. I see so many calm, impassive, or cheerful faces, faces at peace, for now and always, with the context of their own appearance and being, that sort of long-term peace and smooth acquaintance with invariable destiny that renders the faces bloodlessly pastable onto cut-outs of corporate directors in oak-lined boardrooms, professors with plaid ties and leather patches at the elbows of their sport jackets, doctors on bright putting greens with heavy gold shock-resistant watches at their wrists and tiny beepers at their belts, black-jacketed soldiers efficiently bayoneting the infirm. I see Best faces, faces I remember well. Faces whose owners are going to be the Very Best.
I see the faces of those who belong and those who do not belong. The belonging faces appear in rows, like belts of coins. The coins bob up and down, because belongers swagger. The belonging faces are tiringly complex, the expression of each created and propped up, through processes obscure, by the faces on either side of it. These structures intertwine and mesh, have not yet begun to tear at one another. And the nonbelongers. Of course the faces of those who do not belong are the adjustable dark-eyed faces of Vance Vigorous. Many of these faces are tilted downward, for fear of tripping on a root, for fear of being seen tripping on a root. These are the ones who do not sleep, sleep badly, sleep alone, and think of other things when they hear the sounds through the walls of their rooms. I intuit that the Frisbee players, whom I continue to watch, are nonbelongers. The Frisbee traces faint lines between them, strands that are swept and snapped like spidersilk by the wind off the Memorial Hill and athletic fields to the south. The nonbelongers’ faces are the unfirm faces that are really firm, the self-defined faces, the faces defined by not belonging in a place defined by belonging. These alone are the faces that stare out, protected and imprisoned, from behind the barbed borders of their own structures, the faces that know that, but for the grace of a God distinguished for the arbitrariness of his grace, it is they who would be bound and muffled in the College closets. The faces that are unreachable from this far away, and that look through you and digest you in a moment, against everyone’s will.
Who knows how long I watch. My pantcuffs fill with leaf bits and clippings of hollow-stemmed grass. Parents go by with their name tags. Older men, for whom bellies are burdens wrapped and hefted in checked sportcoats. Older women I have already seen and known in the faces of their daughters. Seals on hills, bright discs in the air. Lovers on stomachs, legs up, ankles lazily crossed against the fluttering approach of the odd falling leaf. The sun moves out over the mountains. I am able to feel it. The ellipse of my quad-orbit absorbs the indentation of North Dormitory.
Oh, why the hate? Why, when a horrible, worse-than-worst thing happens to you, when in all honesty you do something horrible, why is it the situation in the context of which the thing happens, the physical place where it happens, the other people whom it involves, that you hate, the thought of which and whom sends organs leaping inside you and corridors in your brain clanging shut against the assault? Why is it not yourself whom you hate, the mirror away from which you reel in horror? Can Jay explain this? What an entirely inappropriate question. How very far I’ve come.
On 2, soon to be 3, March 1968, North Dormitory, of which I was a resident, sponsored a mixer for the junior class, of which I was a member, and for the residents of our sister dormitory at Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s institution ten miles away, the institution Lenore’s sister and grandmother—mother, too, I think—had all passed through. In attendance at this mixer was a Mount Holyoke sophomore named Janet Dibdin, a small, quiet, curved girl, straight red hair and blue eyes with tiny, fluffy white diamonds in the irises. Really. A girl about whom I was privately wild. A girl I met at another mixer, another of the year’s endless string, this one at Mount Holyoke; and at this mixer I had met her, and had survived the agony of dancing with her. And so. And so this was a girl in whose presence I was stupid, damp, tongue-tied, and comparatively huge. One of the three females in my life to whom I have been overwhelmingly sexually attracted, the others being Lenore Beadsman and the daughter of my next-door neighbor in Scarsdale, Rex Metalman’s daughter, an objectively erotic young thing who undulated her way into my heart in the summer of her thirteenth year while ostensibly playing with the sprinkler in the lawn.
In any event, there were we, grouped in blue suits and gray suits and slicked-back hair and shiny nervous noses, and there were they, a sweet shifting miasma of wool, shaped hair, cashmere, eyes, cotton, calves and pearls, in the midst of which she stood, by the hors d‘oeuvre bar, in a skirt and monogrammed sweater, talking quietly with friends, conspicuously danceless all night, and it was close to twelve, and there were we, in suits, gathering our saliva for the final assault. And there we were, moving through geologic time, impossibly slowly, imperceptibly, across the cedar floor, the fire in the fireplace doubtless and not inappropriately reflected and dancing in the centers of our eyes. We moved, and I was suddenly beside her, talking to her, good heavens hello, pretending it be by accident lest all dissolve, one or two of her friends standing with towering hairdos off to the side, wary lest they be caught in the ropes of sexual tension that snapped and crackled in the air between Janet and me, the friends watching us, me, for the tiniest error, the Beatles on the record player playing “Eight Days a Week,” and my hands prepared some sort of hors d’oeuvre, what do I mean some sort, a fastened cylinder of bologna on a Ritz cracker, and she declined it, and stared at me kindly, telling me with her eyes that she was willing to play the elaborate and exhausting game, that it was all right, and I put the hors d‘oeuvre into my mouth, and the cracker seemed to explode into deserts of dust, and there was meat, and I recall she was talking about the upcoming election, and the unavoidable and untalkaboutably horrible invitation to dance began its salmon’s migration from my intestine up toward my brain, and my hand was in the pocket of my slacks, soaking through the wool, and in a disastrous flash I thought of something witty to say, to delay the invitation, and my heart leapt, and my throat constricted, and I turned convulsively from myself to say the thing to Janet Dibdin, as she stared with undeserved trust into my eyes, and I tried to say the thing, and as I opened my mouth there somehow flew out of my mouth an enormous glob of the chewed hors d’oeuvre, the Ritz cracker and bologna, chewed, with saliva in it, with shocking force, and it flew out and landed on the fleshy part of Janet Dibdin’s nose, and stayed there. And the friends were blasted into silence, and the rest of the hors d‘oeuvre in my mouth turned to ice, adhered forever to my palate, and the Beatles sang, “Guess you know it’s true,” and Janet stopped all life processes, virtually killed with horror, which she out of a compassion not of this earth tried to hide by smiling, and she began to look in her purse for a Kleenex, with the obscenely flesh-and-bone-colored glob of chewed food on the end of her nose, and I watched it all through the large end of a telescope, and then the world ceased mercifully to be, and I became infinitely small and infinitely dense, a tiny black star twinkling negatively amid a crumple of empty suit and shoes. This was my taste of hell at twenty. The month following that night is an irretrievable blank in my memory, an expletive deleted. That portion of my brain is cooked smooth.
An unprecedentedly enormous veer around North Dormitory, effected with hands over ears, flings me out past Memorial Hill and into the bleeding forests south of the campus, and I wander, crunching needles and the weak leaves already down, as I used to wander alone for hours as a student, elbowing through the throngs of other students wandering alone, as I elbow students and parents aside now and head for the really isolated, natural part of the New England forest, beyond the road, past dry fields of baking, screaming crickets, out through the wind, elbowing, to find the really secluded places already full, lines of belongers cracking like whips around the sap-sprung trees, sending nonbelongers spinning into the brush. I am outside. And I wait my turn for admission, and smoke two clove cigarettes under the angry eye of a blue-haired mother in a yellow Bonwit pantsuit unfortunately right downwind from me, hissing into the ear of a son with a note concerning laundry pinned to the sleeve of his brand new AMHERST jacket. I buy a hot dog from a vendor and watch the sun glitter faraway against the windows of the buildings on the southern face of the broad ridge, the southern wall of the citadel. One of my R. V. ‘s“ was still here, and I had, in the back of my mind, one other place where I might still be, and these things somehow made me unreasonably happy—as happy as seeing the immoderate curve of Lenore’s hip under her scratchy Howard Johnson’s blanket, here, next to me. I love you, Lenore. There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it. My ears rumble still.
/g/

There was simply no getting around the fact that Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman looked satanic. His skin was a dark, glossy red, his hair an oily black and swept back without care over a deep widow’s peak, his eyebrows Brezhnevian in thickness and starting up high off to the side to slant down evilly over his eyes, his head small and smooth and oval and not too securely attached to his neck and tending to flop, like the head of a shoe tree. An OBERLIN sweatshirt and corduroy shorts and a hurricane of hair on his foot, beside his black hightops. A clipboard with a pen hanging by a string was attached to his leg as he sat in an easy chair, watching television, his profile to Lenore, at the door. On television was “The Bob Newhart Show.” In the big social room with LaVache were three boys who all seemed to look precisely alike, although Lenore wasn’t completely sure about this, because the heavy window curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun and the room was dim. The room smelled of, in descending order, pot, Mennen Speed Stick, hot alcohol, feet. The three identical guys all sat sockless beside tumbled empty pairs of those shoes.
“Lenore, this is Cat, this is Heat, this is the Breather,” LaVache said from his chair in front of the television. “My sister Lenore, guys.”
“Hi,” said Cat.
“Hello,” said Heat.
“Hi,” said the Breather.
Heat and the Breather were on a spring-sprung sofa, sharing what was obviously a joint. Cat was on the floor, sitting, a bottle of vodka before him, and he clutched it with his bare toes, staring anxiously at the television screen.
“Hi Bob,” Suzanne Pleshette said to Bob Newhart on the screen.
“Merde du temps,” Cat said. He took a swig from the bottle.
LaVache looked up from his clipboard at Lenore. “We’re playing Hi Bob. You want to play Hi Bob with us?” He spoke sort of slowly.
Lenore made a place to sit on the luggage. “What’s Hi Bob?”
The Breather grinned at her from the sofa, where he now held the bottle of vodka. “Hi Bob is where, when somebody on ‘The Bob Newhart Show’ says ’Hi Bob,‘ you have to take a drink.”
“And but if Bill Dailey says, ‘Hi Bob,” said Cat, tending to the joint with a wet finger, “that is to say, if the character Howard Borden on the show says ’Hi Bob,‘ it’s death, you have to chug the whole bottle.”
“Hi Bob,” said Bill Dailey, on the screen.
“Death!” yelled Cat.
The Breather drained the bottle of vodka without hesitation. “Lucky it was almost empty,” he said.
“Guess I’ll probably pass,” said Lenore. “You’re out of vodka, anyway.”
“The duration of a game of Hi Bob is according to the rules determined by the show, not the vodka,” the Breather said, getting another bottle of vodka from a rack behind the sofa and breaking the seal. The liquor-rack was a glitter of glass and labels in the sun through a gap in the curtains. “The serious Hi Bob player makes it his business never to run out of vodka.”
LaVache drummed idly on his leg with his pen. “Vodka gives Lenore lung-troubles, anyway, as I recall.” He looked at Lenore. “Lenore, baby, sweetheart, how are you? What are you doing here?”
The Breather leaned close to Lenore and told her in a hot sweet whisper, “It’s a Quaalude day, so we all have to be accommodating.”
Lenore looked at LaVache’s lolling head. “Didn’t you get my message? I left this detailed message about how I was coming today. I left it with one of your neighbors, next door, a guy from New Jersey. The college operator connected me to him.”
“Wood, yes,” LaVache said. “He’s actually coming by real soon. He and the leg have an appointment. Yes, I got the message, but why didn’t you just call me?”
“You told Dad you didn’t have a phone, Dad told me.”
“I don’t have a phone. This isn’t a phone, this is a lymph node,” LaVache said, gesturing at a phone next to the television. “I call this a lymph node, not a phone. So when Dad asks me do I have a phone, I can in all good conscience say no. I do, however, have a lymph node.”
“You’re horrible,” said Lenore.
“Hi Bob,” said someone on the screen.
“Zango,” said LaVache, and took a big drink.
“Dead bird, here, A.C.,” Heat said to LaVache.
LaVache detached the clipboard and slid out a drawer in the plastic of his artificial leg and tossed a white new joint to Heat.
“You have a drawer?” said Lenore.
“I’ve had a drawer since high school,” said LaVache. “ I just wear long pants, at home, as a rule. Come on, you knew I had a drawer all the time.”
“No I didn‘t,” said Lenore.
“Crafty girl.”
There was a knock at the outside door.
“Entrez!” Cat yelled.
In came a tall thin guy with glasses and an adam’s apple and a notebook and a baggie.
“Clint Wood,” Heat said from over the bottle, which he was blowing into like a jug, sounding a deep note.
“Guys,” said Clint Wood. “Antichrist.”
“What can we do for you, big guy?” LaVache said, slapping the leg affectionately.
“Introductory Economics. Second quiz. Bonds.”
“Feed the leg,” said LaVache.
LaVache opened the drawer in his leg and Clint Wood put the baggie inside. LaVache slapped the drawer shut and patted it. “Professor?”
“Fursich.”
“All you need to remember for Fursich is, when the interest rate goes up, the price of any bond already issued goes down.”
“Interest rate ... up, price ... bond ... down.” Clint Wood wrote it down.
“And when the rate goes down, the price goes up.”
“Down ... up.” Clint Wood looked up. “That’s it?”
“Trust me,” said LaVache.
“What a guy,” said the Breather. “A little Hi Bob, Wood?”
Clint Wood shook his head regretfully. “Can’t. I got class in like ten minutes. I gotta go memorize what the Antichrist told me.” He looked over at Lenore and smiled.
“Well, hey, good luck,” Cat said.
“Thank you very much for taking my message, if you were the person who took my message,” said Lenore.
“Oh, OK, you’re the Antichrist’s sister,” said Clint Wood, sizing Lenore up. “Can’t do enough for the Antichrist, no problem. Thanks again, guys.” He left.
“Hi Bob.”
“Oomph. ”
“This is a deadly one. There’ve been like twenty ‘Hi Bobs’ in this one.”
“What’s the leg got there?”
“Looks to be three j-birds. Poorly rolled.”
“None of you guys have classes?” Lenore asked. Ed McMahon came on the television.
“I have classes,” LaVache said. “I know I do, because it says on my schedule I do.” He cleaned under his fingernail with the corner of his clipboard clasp.
“He’s going to go to a class this semester, he told me,” Heat said to Lenore, doing a handstand in the middle of the floor, so that his shirt fell over his face. “He’s determined to go to at least one class.”
“Well I’m disabled,” LaVache said. “They can’t expect a disabled person to hobble to every faraway, top-of-the-hill class of the semester.”
Lenore looked at LaVache. “You don’t work, here, do you?”
LaVache smiled at her. “That was just work, what I did. I do lots of work.”
“He literally does the work of like forty or fifty guys, and even more girls,” said Heat. “He does all our work, the big lug.”
“What about your own work?” Lenore said to LaVache.
“What can I tell you? I’ve got a leg to support, after all.”
“Dad thinks you work.”
“Surely you of all people didn’t come all the way out here after seeing me only a few weeks ago to tell me what Dad thinks. Or to find out what I think and do and then scuttle back to Dad.”
“Not exactly,” Lenore said, shifting because her suitcase handle was digging into her bottom. “There’s stuff we need to talk about, that’s sort of come up.” She looked around at Cat, Heat, and the Breather.
“Well goody. Stuff.” LaVache looked back at the television. “We have a game of Hi Bob to finish, and then there’s an episode of ‘The Munsters’ on Channel 22 I particularly want to see, and then we can go conversationally wild.”
“He’ll be asleep by then, though, I predict,” the Breather whispered into Lenore’s ear as his elbow brushed her chest.
“Hi Bob,” said Bill Dailey, the character Howard Borden, on the screen.
“Death, big time,” said LaVache, looking at Cat and the nearly full bottle of vodka on the floor in front of him. “See you tomorrow, Cat.”
“A l‘enfer, ” Cat muttered. He began sucking on the bottle. He had to stop almost immediately.
“You’ve got five minutes to finish that,” LaVache said to Cat.
“He’s going to be really sick,” said Lenore.
“We don’t get sick here anymore,” said LaVache. “This Amherst guy, this legendary guy a few years back started this tradition where, instead of getting sick, we pound our heads against the wall.”
“You pound your heads?”
“Really hard.”
“I see.”
The phone rang. “Breather, you want to get the lymph node?” LaVache said, returning to writing on his clipboard. The Breather stepped over Cat, who was crawling on the gray carpet, and got the phone. The Antichrist was writing something.
“Antichrist, it’s Snadgener,” the Breather said after a bit, putting his hand over the phone. “Evolution as Cultural Phenomenon Paper Number One. Were Darwin’s critics right about the theory of natural selection being deeply dangerous to Christianity.”
“Tell Snadge the leg is wondering what he has for it,” said LaVache.
“Mushrooms, he says.”
“Professor?”
“Summerville.”
“Tell Snadge the interesting answer for Summerville is yes,” LaVache said. The Breather whispered into the phone. LaVache continued, “After the Origin, the Bible has to retreat, he thinks. The Bible ceases to be a historical record of actual events and instead becomes a piece of moral fiction, useful only as a guide for making decisions about how to live. No longer purporting to tell what was and is, but only what ought to be.” LaVache opened his eyes. “Summerville’ll lap it up.”
The Breather talked into the phone. Cat had a third of the bottle to go and was green and moist. Heat sat cross-legged with the joint on the sofa.
“Snadge says it sounds kick-ass,” the Breather said. “Snadge says thanks, Antichrist.”
“Tell Snadge the leg and I look forward to seeing him and his fungal fee sometime tonight,” said LaVache.
Lenore leaned as far as she could over toward LaVache. “Antichrist?” she said.
“What can I tell you?” said the Antichrist. “We can’t deny I look satanic. Heat, you want to clear a space on the wall for Cat?”
Heat got up slowly and began to move posters.
“Mother,” moaned Cat.
“The really sadistic aspect of this game,” the Breather whispered to Lenore, leaning over her so she had to lean way back and almost fell off her suitcase, “is that if someone else on the show says ‘Hi Bob’ before Cat has discharged his vodka-responsibility, Cat has to drink a whole ’nother bottle in another five minutes.”
“Does Cat know that?” Lenore asked, looking at Cat. Cat sat slumped on the floor, the back of his head resting and intermittently pounding weakly on the wall behind him, the bottle of vodka in his lap and a thin rope of spittle joining his lip and the lip of the bottle.
“I think at this point Cat knows what’s up in a sort of ganglial sense,” the Antichrist said, “although he’d have a hard time actually articulating the rule if you asked him to.”
“Mommy,” Cat squeaked faintly.
“You can do it, you great big enormous guy,” the Breather said, massaging Cat’s shoulders.
Ed McMahon came on the television screen. “Sell it, Ed!” yelled the Antichrist.
Heat put aside the corpse of the joint and sipped thoughtfully at a beer. He turned dense red eyes and looked at Lenore for so long that Lenore felt uncomfortable. Heat then looked at LaVache, who ignored him. Then back at Lenore. “Hey Antichrist,” he said. “You care if I ask your sister a question?”
“Be my guest,” the Antichrist said, alternately watching the screen and Cat’s attempts to finish the bottle, attempts that were at this point pretty pathetic, because there was just a little bit of vodka left, and Cat kept trying to get it in his mouth, but it kept somehow bouncing off, or at any rate not staying in, and sliding back inside the bottle and down the outside and onto the rug and his shirt.
Heat looked at Lenore as the Breather massaged his shoulders, now, from behind. “Lenore, how did the Antichrist lose his leg?”
“Well, now, hey, that’s not fair, because it’s not a question, because I’ve already answered it,” the Antichrist said. Lenore looked at him. His head rested on his shoulder. “I’ve already told you it was a dancing accident. I had such an unreasonably happy childhood that I simply danced, all the time, for joy, and one day the dancing just got to be too much, and I had an accident. Quod est demon stratum.”
Lenore laughed.
“Is that true?” Heat said to Lenore. “Are you going to back him up?”
“By all means,” Lenore said, not looking at LaVache, who was not looking at her.
LaVache turned to Heat. “And don’t you know disability etiquette? You don’t discuss a disability in the presence of a disabled person unless the disabled person brings up the disability. For all you know I could be reeling, from hurt, on the inside. How’d you like to do your own Calculus homework for a while?”
“Antichrist,” Heat said with an easy grin, “I hereby tender a sincere apology for my gaucheness, and also take the opportunity to point out that another joint seems to have expired, here.”
“Harumph,” the Antichrist said, sliding open his drawer. “Clint Wood and bonds to the rescue.”
“Five minutes is up, Antichrist,” said the Breather.
Cat’s chin was resting on his chest. One of his arms was incongruously outstretched, with a finger pointing at the stairs leading up to the social room’s bathroom.
“Has he done it?” asked LaVache.
The Breather held up the bottle. “The merest smidgeon left.”
“More than a smidgeon on his shirt, though, I see,” Heat said, lifting up Cat’s head to have a look at the dark field of vodka-soaked shirt on his chest.
The Antichrist rubbed the leg thoughtfully. “I say if Cat consents to suck on his shirt for the rest of the show, which is about five more minutes, he’ll have acquitted himself in his usual thoroughly admirable way.”
“Congratulations, big kitty,” the Breather said softly, tucking part of Cat’s shirt in Cat’s mouth, caressing a cheek under fluttering eyelids. “Still the undisputed prince of Hi Bob.”
“Did you come alone?” LaVache asked Lenore. “Did you come by plane, or by toy?”
“I came via the Company jet,” said Lenore.
The Antichrist’s eyebrows went up, so it looked like he had more hair.
Lenore continued, “I came with a friend, who’s also sort of my boss at Frequent and Vigorous.”
“Mr. Vigorous.” The Antichrist nodded his head. “The one Candy told me about.”
“What did Candy tell you, when?” asked Lenore.
The Antichrist looked away, drew a smile-face on the plastic of his leg with his pen, wiped it away with a moist finger. “That your boss was also your friend, so you were lucky. In July. Please don’t have a spasm; I sense Cat really not feeling well at all.”
“Is Candy the Mandible babe you blasted?” Heat asked the Antichrist with a grin.
Lenore looked at her brother with wide eyes. “You and Candy? Blasting?”
LaVache turned slowly and rested absolutely icy eyes on Heat. Heat’s clothes seemed suddenly to get roomier, as if he’d developed a slow leak. “Sorry,” he muttered. He closed his eyes.
The Antichrist looked at Lenore. “Heat knows not whereof he speaks, as I will no doubt be explaining at considerable length later. Heat, don’t you have some math you better do?”
“Shit,” Heat whispered. He sucked on the Antichrist’s joint.
Lenore stood up. “May I please ask a favor?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure it’s an imposition, but Rick and I don’t get to check in at the motel till five, and it’s been a really long day, and also sort of a dirty one, what with travel....”
“I understand entirely,” the Antichrist said soothingly. The “Bob Newhart Show” credits came on. The Breather went to the television and changed the channel. LaVache beamed at Lenore. “There is a clean, neatly folded towel for you in the bathroom, a bathroom which you’ll be happy to know you can secure for a brief period with the hanger on the door, although in a crisis Cat may find himself forced to impose, and there is on the towel, for your personal use, a crisp new bar of soap.”
“What, is she going to take a shower?” the Breather asked from the television, where he was twidgeling the vertical-hold controls.
“If it’s OK,” said Lenore.
“Hubba-hubba,” said the Breather.
“Steady, big guy,” said the Antichrist. “Lenore’s traveling companion is, I understand, fanatically jealous.”
Lenore looked at her brother.
“Where is this Mr. Vigorous, anyway,” LaVache asked quietly, looking back down at the leg.
The phone rang. The Breather reached over and picked it up. “It’s Nervous Roy Keller for you, A.C.,” he said to LaVache.
The Antichrist’s eyes lit up. “May I please have the lymph node?” The Breather handed him the phone. Lenore, not sure if she should stay around to explain where Rick Vigorous was, stood awkwardly, hefting her suitcase, hurting for a shower. Heat lay curled up on the sofa, apparently alseep. The Breather quietly went over and removed the red eye of the burning nubbin of the joint from between Heat’s fingers. Cat lay crumpled against the wall under the window, his shirt in his mouth.
“Nervous Roy Keller,” the Antichrist said into the phone. “Is it possible that I have not yet seen you this year? Are you spending all your time in the library again? In spite of what we talked about last spring?”
Nervous Roy Keller said something.
“Nervous, Nervous Roy,” laughed LaVache. “OK. I sense that a certain limb and I can do something for you. Right. You’re what? You’re taking Hegel? With Professor Huffman? I thought that got canceled for lack. He turned it into a tutorial? Just you and Huffman, and Hegel? That’s going to be death and destruction, you huge guy you. Well I’m sure sorry, is all. Uh-huh. Obliteration of Nature by Spirit? That’s the first assignment? What’s he going to do for an encore I wonder.” The Antichrist looked up at the Breather from the phone. “Breather, you want to be a good Sancho and go get me my Phenomenology of Spirit?”
The Breather went up the little set of stairs from the social room into the bedroom/bathroom area. On the television, marred only by a few vertical flutters, Marilyn Munster was bringing a date home, and the date saw her father, Herman, and ran away and climbed a telephone pole in sped-up motion, which Herman and Lily interpreted as a reflection on Marilyn’s seductive charms, and the audience laughed. The Breather reappeared and handed the Antichrist the book.
“Obliteration N by S, let’s see,” LaVache said, thumbing through. He stopped. “Bingo. Let’s see.... OK, look, N.R., why don’t you come by the room right before dinner, and we’ll talk Sublation Through Concepts. OK? Right. The leg will of course be positively growling with hunger by that time. Verstehen Sie? Right. See you then, then.”
The Antichrist hung up the phone and put it on the floor. “A tutorial on Hegel with Huffman,” he said to the Breather. “The leg likes that.”
The Breather grinned and manipulated his eyebrows at Lenore.
“Rick’s taking ... walk around ... alumnus ... intense emotions washing... ,” Lenore was muttering.
The Antichrist looked at her. “Why aren’t you in the shower this very moment?” he asked. “Take until four, and ‘The Munsters’ will be over, and my catharsis will be effected, and away we’ll go, leaving Heat to his homework.”
“Right,” said Lenore. She undid the straps of a suitcase and dug through Rick’s underwear and got her washcloth and toothbrush, and headed for the stairs.
“Need any help, don’t hesitate to call,” said the Breather.
“Thanks,” Lenore said. She shivered.
“Guess I might as well have a Quaalude, too, A.C., since there’s going to be no one left to play with,” the Breather said to LaVache.
Lenore unhooked the wire hanger bent and fastened to keep the bathroom door open and closed the door against the noise of the television and low voices and the sliding of the drawer.
/h/

I’m not exactly sure how I arrived at the Flange, at three o‘clock, and I really have no idea when the Flange became a gay bar, although I do know it was sometime after 1968, during which year a group of marginal Psi Phi fraternity brothers—including myself—would come every Wednesday to hoist a few and play pool and try, in our tweed jackets and white socks and Weejun loafers, to blend in with the public-university- and townie-crowd. A crowd that I can say with all confidence was at this point not the least bit gay.
But the bead curtain at the inner room clicketed and in I came, feeling warm from my walking and with a sneezy, burning afterdust of dry leaves in my nose. The place was relatively empty on this Monday, apart from some couples dancing and a group sitting at one end of the bar watching an episode of “The Bob Newhart Show,” a program I’d always enjoyed. The place did not scream gay bar, as so many gay bars seem to, not of course that I’ve personally been to many. In any event, here the choice and placement of posters and mirrors, the planty, velvety decor, the male bartender with orange mascara, the dancer-gender situation, told me all I needed to know. I didn’t care. My plans were simple. I wanted a Canadian Club with distilled water, then I would go initial-hunting in the restroom. I was sure I had left myself here. I sat on a stool, away from the television crowd, feeling a bit childish. Barstools make me feel a bit childish, because my feet do not quite reach the supports; they dangle, and sometimes swing, and my thighs plump out from the weight of the dangling and swinging legs, and my feet sometimes go to sleep.
I slipped unconsciously into my bar mode. I looked at people. The people at the actual bar were easy, because of the huge mirror we were all looking into. The mirror revealed that the young bartender’s hair became a mohawk in back. I was given the Canadian Club and immediately tasted tapwater, to which I am acutely sensitive.
The man nearest me, a few stools away, even farther than I from the “Bob Newhart” audience, was the best-looking man in the room. He had a strong face, a chin I admired wistfully over my whiskey, his high features stronger for the fact that he was engagingly in need of a shave. Hair a kind of deep, dark blond, cut short and almost brushed up. The muscles of his jaw worked as he chewed peanuts. He drank beer; he had a small brown forest of bottles around him. The eyes were bright green, but bright and still soft, somehow, plant-green as opposed to emerald-green, so that he still looked like a human being, and not a product of technology, as so many green-eyed people in my opinion do. Look like products of technology. His chin, his generous chin was cleft. Enough about chins. I’m certain this person felt the stares of all the men in the room, but he didn’t seem to notice, simply sat hunched on his stool, legs reaching the supports and then some, in designer jeans and sportcoat and dress shirt opened at the neck, eating nuts and drinking beer at an impressive rate. I somehow smelled Amherst College.
The only Approach I had the misfortune to witness personally came from a big, sleek, blue-eyed man in a rugby shirt and white cotton pants. How he slid in between the man and myself, then slid the upper part of his body down the bar toward the man, hiding him a bit, so that I had to make exclusive use of the angle of the mirror above the glitter of the bar’s arsenal of bottles to watch. I shivered. I shivered only because the Approach looked so troublingly familiar. I had seen it at every single one of the singles bars, heterosexual singles bars I’d attended during the first desolate Lenoreless year after my hegira to Cleveland. It was indeed an Approach.
“Hi there,” said the Approacher to the man, in the mirror. “Do you come here often?”
I shivered.
“Nope,” said the man, popping a handful of nuts in his mouth. His eye caught mine in the mirror.
“No, I didn’t think so,” said the Approacher, gauging the man’s bicep under his sportcoat. “I come here fairly regularly, and I certainly would have noticed you, but I haven’t noticed you here before.” He played with his daiquiri glass.
The man looked the Approacher in the eye through the mirror, considering something. His green eyes grew liddy, sleepy, amused. “I think you’re probably barking up the wrong tree, here, guy,” he said to the Approacher. “I’m here as a rememberer, not a patron.”
The Approacher looked down at the man’s hands, around his beer glass, on the bar. “A rememberer?”
“Yup,” said the man. “I used to go to school around here. A few years ago.” A nut, into his mouth. “I used to come to this bar, a lot, before it changed.”
“Oh?” The Approacher cupped his chin in his hand, looked at the side of the man’s chewing face. “The Flange changed? I never heard about any change.”
“Sure enough.” The man looked levelly at the Approacher through the mirror. “Now, I’m sorry to say, it looks to be a place for faggots.” He said this slowly and distinctly. I looked down at my drink and my handkerchief. When I looked up the Approacher was gone, back at the television, and the man was placidly ordering what appeared to be his tenth beer, patiently repeating the order until the bartender could no longer pretend to ignore him.
Careful to make it in no way resemble an Approach, I came over to the man and sat on the stool beside him, my feet dangling.
“Look, I’m not a homosexual either,” I found myself saying, though thank God quietly. “In fact I too am here as a ... rememberer and not a patron. But I think if one comes to a place like this, for whatever reason, it behooves one not to be overtly rude to the people for whom coming here is ... entirely appropriate.” My ice snapped suddenly in my drink.
The man looked at me in the mirror, chewing. We waited while his mouth cleared of peanuts. “I got nothing against homosexuals,” he said. “They can go around being homosexuals amongst themselves all they want, far as I’m concerned. It’s just when it’s my own personal ass that they start sniffin’ after and checkin’ out, I find my tolerance level really plummets, for some reason.” He took some beer. “As for coming into this place, I was coming into this place when these old boys were all out kneeling in alleys in the rain.” He gestured slightly through the mirror at the Approacher and his friends. “This is more my place than theirs. I used to spend hours here, when it was a real bar. I used to talk to the whores here. They were real nice. I got educated here. My house used to come down here, en-f*cking-masse, on Wednesday nights.”
“Wednesdays?” I asked. Wednesdays. “House as in ... fraternity house?”
His green eyes were on mine in the mirror. I thought I could see something, in those eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“Not ... Amherst College fraternity house.”
“Yeah, I went to Amherst,” he said.
“Not ... Psi Phi fraternity at Amherst,” I said.
He swiveled on his stool to face me. “Yeah.” I felt the jealous stares of the “Bob Newhart” crowd.
“My Lord,” I said. “Myself as well. Psi Phi. Class of ‘69.”
The man grinned widely. “ ‘83 here,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed; he held out his hand, each finger pointing in a different direction. Testing me, I knew. After only the briefest hesitation, I joined him in the Psi Phi handshake. I had not done it in so, so long. My throat ached a little bit. I found my arm tingling. “Quaaaango!” we yelled in unison at the end, and grabbed each other’s wrists, and tapped elbows. I felt eyes.
“Sheeit.”
“Heavens.”
I held out my hand in the conventional way. “I am Richard Vigorous of Cleveland, Ohio.”
The man took it. “Andrew Sealander Lang,” he said, “of Nugget Bluff, which is to say really Dallas, Texas, and lately of Scarsdale, New York.”
“Scarsdale, Andrew?” I said. “I lived in Scarsdale, myself, for a good while. Mostly in the seventies.”
“But you moved,” Andrew Lang said, smiling. “I can understand, completely and entirely. Yes.”
What am I to say, retrospectively, here? Perhaps that I felt myself in the presence of a kinsman. Not simply a fraternity brother: I had been a completely marginal Psi Phi, and had actually moved out of the place in some haste in the middle of my sophomore year, when the House upperclassmen cut our stairs off halfway and fashioned a crude diving board and cut open the House’s living-room floor and filled the basement with beer and called the entire creation a swimming pool, into which it was dictated that all sophomores were to be required to dive and then drink themselves to safety. I was marginal. And I sensed in Lang a really hard-core Psi Phi: he had had at least ten beers, was entering into negotiations for the eleventh, and didn’t seem the slightest bit tipsy; nor, even more important, had he been to the restroom once since I arrived. This was collegiate manhood as I had come to know it.
No, but still I felt affinities, elective or otherwise. I sensed somehow in Lang another inside outsider, another lonely alumnus here at an alumniless time. Surrounded by insiders, now: children, swaggering and belonging, with their complicated eyes. Lang’s eyes, eyes the color of plants, were not complicated. I looked at them in the mirror. They were like my eyes. They were the eyes of a man gone back to the house where he grew up, to watch new children play in his yard, a new Rawlings Everbounce pass through a new basketball hoop over his garage, a new dog diddle on his mother’s rhododendrons. Sad, sad. Perhaps it was only the whiskey, and the beer, but I sensed sadness in Lang. His bar was my college. They were the same. And we simply no longer belonged, now.
“Why are you in town?” I asked Lang. “Is ‘83 having some function?”
“Naw,” said the Texan. “ ‘83 never has functions. I just felt like I had to ... to get the heck out of Scarsdale. Just get out for a while. Plus I really like it up here in the fall. ’Course it’s not really fall yet. Too goddamned hot.”
“Still, though.”
“Right. Exactly. Now but I bet you didn’t come all the way out here from Ohio just to get out, though, right?”
“No, you’re right.” I shook my head. I asked the now explicitly hostile bartender for another drink. The bartender glared at Lang. Lang ignored him. “No,” I said, “my fiancée is here visiting her brother, ‘93, and I just came along on a bit of a lark. I hadn’t even been back before.”
Lang stared into the mirror. “Naw, I haven’t been back much either. ‘Course I only been out a few years. And I’ve come back for a couple Homecomings. Those kick ass.”
“I remember they were fun.”
“You bet.”
“Are you married, in Scarsdale?” I asked. I must here confess that I asked the question for an admittedly immature and selfish reason. I instinctively and involuntarily regard all other men as potential threats to my relationship with Lenore. One more married man was one fewer member of the great threat-set.
“Yeah, I’m married.” Lang looked at his reflection in the mirror.
I giggled sympathetically.
“Is the wife up with you?” I asked.
“No she is not,” said Lang. He paused to belch. “The wife ... ,” he looked at his watch, “... the wife is at this second indubitably out in the back yard, on the lawn chair, with a martini and a Cosmopolitan, reinforcin’ the old tan.”
“I see,” I said.
Lang looked at me. “I really don’t know why the hell I came up here, to tell the truth. I just ... felt like I needed to come home, somehow.” He drummed his knuckle on the bar.
“Yes, yes.” I almost clutched at his arm. “I understand completely. Trying to come back inside ...”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. What do you do, Andrew? May I call you Andrew?”
“Sure you can, Dick,” he said. He turned back toward me, and there was peanut-smell. His eyes went dull. “Right now I’m in accounting. My wife’s Daddy’s an accountant and all, and so I do some work for him. I mostly f*ck off, though. I’m gonna quit. I think I in effect quit today, by not showing up.” He gulped beer and wiped his lip, looking faraway. “When I got out of school, I worked overseas for a while, for my Daddy. My Daddy owns this company, in Texas, and I worked for them overseas, for a couple years. That was the balls.”
“But then you got married.”
“Yup.” Peanuts. “You married, Dick? That’s right, you said you’re engaged. ”
“I ... I am engaged. To a wonderful, wonderful girl.” He was married, after all. “I was married before. I got divorced.”
“And engaged again now. Whooee. A glutton for punishment, Dick.”
“Please call me Rick,” I said. “My friends call me Rick. And an entirely different situation, this time, fortunately.” I felt a bit uncomfortable. Lenore and I were, after all, not explicitly engaged, although it was only a matter of waiting for the combination of the right moment and sufficient saliva.
“Well good for you. What’s the lucky little lady’s name?”
“Ms. Lenore Beadsman, of East Corinth, which is to say Cleveland, Ohio,” I said.
Lang speculatively sucked the salt off a peanut. He looked in the mirror and removed something from his lip. “Beadsman. Beadsman.” He looked at me. “Hmmm. She didn’t go to school around here, did she? Or more exactly Mount Holyoke?”
“No, no,” I said, excited, feeling connection potential—‘83, after all. “But her sister did. Ms. Clarice Beadsman. Now Mrs. Alvin Spaniard, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.”
“Well I will be goddamned,” said Lang. “Clarice Beadsman was one of my wife’s roommates, one year. My sophomore year. I knew her. Christ in a camper, that seems like just too goddamned long ago. My wife and her didn’t get along too good.”
“But they knew each other. Really. Really.” I squirmed with excitement and a full bladder. No possible way I was going to the men’s room before Lang, though. “What is your wife’s name, pray, so I can tell it to Lenore and she to Clarice?”
“My wife’s maiden name was Miss Melinda Metalman,” said Andrew Lang to the mirror.
The earth tipped on its axis. The spit was vacuumed from my mouth and disappeared out the back of my head. Melinda Metalman. Mindy Metalman, perhaps the most erotic girl I have ever seen in person. Rex Metalman’s daughter, who had done things around a lawn sprinkler no thirteen-year-old should be able to do. Sweat leapt to my brow.
“Mindy Metalman?” I croaked.
Lang turned again. “Yeah.” His eyes were old, dull.
I looked at my whiskey. “You don’t perhaps know whether her father might by any chance live on ... Vine Street, in Scarsdale,” I said.
Lang grinned to himself. “Yeah, you’re from Scarsdale, that’s right. Well, yup. 14 Vine Street. Except he don’t anymore, ‘cause he gave the house to me and Mindy last year. He lives in an apartment now. One supposedly without a lawn. Having a lawn f*cked with old Rex’s mind. But except now he’s starting a lawn at his building, he says. Just a real tiny one. Hardly a lawn at all, he says. Who the hell knows.” Lang looked at the mirror. “I live at 14 Vine now, more or less.”
“I used to live at 16 Vine,” I said quietly. Lang turned to me. The “Bob Newhart” crowd must have thought we were in love. Our eyes shone with the thrill of apparent connection. It was something of a thrill, given the context. I tingle a bit even now, in the motel. “My ex-wife still lives there, though I’ve been led to believe she’s preparing to sell,” I said.
“Mrs. Peck?” Lang’s eyes opened wide. “Veronica?”
“Ms. Peck,” I said, clutching for real now at Lang’s sportcoat sleeve. “Peck was her maiden name. And I used to play tennis with Rex Metalman, long ago. I used to watch Rex go at his lawn almost every day. It was a neighborhood event.”
“I will be dipped and fried and completely goddamned,” said Lang. “I just had no idea Ronnie’d been married to an Amherst alum. Sheeit.” He thumped the bar with his hand again. I noticed his hand, suddenly. It was heavy, and brown, and strong. A hard hand.
“Ronnie?” I said.
“Well, I know her pretty good, her living next door and all.” Lang looked down to play with the ring of moisture his beer glass had made on the dark wood of the bar.
“I see,” I said. “How is Ronnie?”
We looked at each other in the mirror. “Last time I saw her, she was just fine,” Lang said. He poured more beer into the suds at the bottom of the glass. I saw salt, from the peanuts, on the rim. “What exactly do you do, Rick? In Cleveland.”
“Publishing,” I said. “I manage a publishing firm in Cleveland. Frequent and Vigorous, Publishing, Inc.”
“Hmmm,” Lang said.
“What about Mindy?” I asked. “I knew her, slightly, as a girl. Is Mindy well? Does Mindy have a career of her own?”
“Mindy does have a career,” Lang said after a moment. “Mindy is a voice.”
“A voice?” I said. My head was filled with visions of Mindy Metalman. Her bedroom had been directly across the fence from my den.
“A voice,” said Lang. He played with a cocktail napkin decorated with a huge lipstick-kiss design. “You ever been in a grocery? And when you pay for your items and all at the cash register, the girl pushes the items over the scanner thing, that beeps, and then this voice in the register says the price? Or do you have one of them late-model cars that says to please fasten seat belts when you didn’t fasten your seat belts? Melinda Sue is the voice in things.”
“That’s Mindy Metalman?” I shopped. I drove a late-model car.
“Mrs. A. S. Lang herself, now,” said Lang. “The big voice used to be this lady in Centerport, on Long Island? But she’s getting old, scratchy. Melinda Sue’s pretty much pushin’ her out of the business. ”
“Heavens,” I said, “That certainly sounds like an enormously interesting career. Does Mindy enjoy it?”
“Sure she enjoys it. It’s easy as shit. She just sits around like once a week, with a drink and a million-dollar tape recorder and a script with lines like ‘Change due, four dollars.’ It’s easy as hell. But she’s ambitious now, all of a sudden. Her and her manager.” Lang swallowed half his beer. “Alan Gluskoter, her manager. Ambitious Al. They’re ambitious, now.” More beer. “She wants television.”
“Television?”
Lang stared at himself. “You know the voice that says ‘This is CBS,’ or ‘This is ABC,’ or ‘Stay tuned to CBS, please’? She wants to be that voice. That’s her great aspiration.”
“Good heavens.”
“Yeah.”
I was about to wet my pants. The only pair of pants I’d brought on the trip.
I slid off my stool, stretched, pretended to yawn. “Think I’ll just dash into the men’s room,” I said. “I want to see something. I think I may have left my initials in the wood of the stall here.”
Lang smiled at both of us. “I know I did. I carved hell out of everything when I was a student here.” He stood. “Hell, I’ll go with you. Could use a squirt myself.”
“Quite,” I said.
In the men’s room Lang ranged expertly over the urinal, aiming for the deodorant disc. “Room for two, here, big guy,” he said.
I muttered something and hurried into the stall, ostensibly to hunt for initials, really so that I could shut the door. I tried to last just as long as I could. Long after my last tinkle had ceased to sound, I could still hear the roar of Lang’s jet. This was an Amherst man.
I looked for my initials. All I can say at this point is that I must have been confused. I was sure I’d left another R.V. in the Flange’s stall, up over the door latch, to the left, actually I even thought I could remember the occasion of the carving, but here in the spot I remembered was, instead of an R.V., a deep, wickedly sharp set of W.D.L., long since filled in with violet pen. I pored over the wooden surfaces of the stall until I saw Lang’s boat shoes under the door.
“Not there,” I said, opening the door. “My initials don’t seem to be there.”
“Maybe they went ahead and changed the door sometime since ‘69,” said Lang, coming into the stall with me and swinging the door shut, so that I had to sit on the toilet to give him room to look at the door.
“Same door as ‘83, though, ’cause here are mine, still,” he said, pointing at the deep W.D.L. over the latch. He brushed at the letters with a big thumb, removing a smidgeon of God knows what.
“W.D.L. for Andrew Sealander Lang?” I said.
“I got called Wang-Dang Lang all through school,” said Lang, grinning. “Actually I still get called Wang-Dang Lang, by my real good friends. You can call me Wang-Dang, if you want.” He stared lovingly at his initials.
“Thank you,” I said. I had to pee again, already, I felt.
There were sounds of the restroom door opening. Snickering. I thought I recognized the Approacher’s voice. They must have been looking at our four shoes in the crowded stall. The group attended to business, noisily, and eventually left, after teasing us by flicking the lights off and on several times. I was lost in thought, for the most part, trying to account for my memory of my initials in the Flange’s door, which memory was clear and distinct, in the face of the evidence. It certainly looked like the same door. Lang studied the door with me, thinking.
“Is your girlfriend Clarice’s younger sister?” he suddenly asked.
I looked up at him from the toilet. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, Lenore is two years younger than Clarice.”
“You know, I’m pretty sure I’ve met her, then,” said Lang, absently digging with his finger at some peanut in a molar, extracting some beige material. He looked at it. “ ‘Cause Clarice had a sister visiting her the night I met my wife. Or was it that other girl had a sister up?” He scratched. “No, I’m real sure it was Beadsman. I think I remember for sure she said her name was Lenore Beadsman.” He looked faraway.
“So you probably met my fiancée before I did,” I said.
Lang grinned down at me. “And you knew my wife before I even met her, when she was a little girl.”
I grinned back. “Not all that little.”
“I know what you mean,” Lang laughed. Spontaneously, out of the sheer odd warmth of the moment, we did the Psi Phi handshake again. “Quaaaango!” We laughed.
I got off the toilet. We left the restroom and went back into the bar. There were stage titters from the Approacher’s little television coterie. Wang-Dang Lang ignored them and clapped his arm around my shoulders.
“Ah, Rick, Rick,” he said. “I just don’t know what the hell to do.” He looked around. “I just feel like I need to ...”
“Get outside,” I said. For us inside outsiders, the only real place to go was outside.
“Well, yeah. Exactly.” He looked me in the eye. “I feel like I need to get out. Just ... out, for a while.” He ordered another beer as I chewed the whiskey out of my ice.
“Are things not well with you and the wife?”
In the mirror Lang said, “Things are the same as ever, fine and Daddy—excuse—fine and dandy as ever. I just feel ... constricted, like I can’t breathe. Like I’m breathin’ used-up air. I’m living in the bitch’s town, in her house, working for her Daddy, hearing her voice when I get in my freaking car. I think we need a slight vacation from each other. Things are just less than wonderful right now. I think I just need to get out, for a period of time.”
“Establish other connections,” I said. “Hence the utter appropriateness of your little trip up here. It’ll do you a world of good.” God, there was a time when I would have given limbs to be constricted by Mindy Metalman.
“Eggzackly,” Lang said. He punched me affectionately in the arm. I struggled not to rub my shoulder.
“And so just one hell of a buzz, meetin’ you,” Land said to me in the mirror. “A House brother, a neighbor, damn near a relative. Like an uncle or something. Shit on fire. Ti symptosis.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“What was what?”
“ ‘Tea’ something,” I said.
“Ti symptosis?” said Lang. “It’s just this expression. ‘Ti symptosis’ is idiomatic modern Greek for, like, ’What a hell of a coincidence.‘ Which this is, sure enough, let me tell you.”
“Greek?” I said. “You speak modem Greek?”
Lang laughed loudly. “Does a bear make skata in the woods?” I intuited that even such as he was beginning to feel the lake of beer inside him. “Yeah,” he said, “I picked up Greek real well after college. I told you I was overseas? I was working for my Daddy’s company? This really kick-ass company called Industrial Desert Design, Dallas?”
I stared at Lang. “Your father owns Industrial Desert Design?”
“You know Industrial Desert Design?” said Lang.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, “I live in Ohio. Just north of your magnum opus.”
“I will be slapped, pinched, and rolled,” Lang said, pounding the bar with his fist. “This is just too goddamned great. Is that thing great or what? I worked on the crew for that, in the summer, when I was just eleven, twelve years old. I planted cactuses. That was a f*cking blast.”
“So then you travelled for I.D.D. after college?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Lang. “Best couple years of this little life, so far. I more or less oversaw this one whole project, this real tasteful little desert—nothing fancy, mind you, but small, solid, tasteful, and sinister. This really kick-ass desert project on the west side of Kerkira, near Italy.”
“Kerkira?” I said.
“Yeah. Beautifulest goddamn place I ever seen. This island. I loved it there. I was all over it, did all kinds of wild shit. Why, one time, me and Ed Roy Yancey, Jr., who was more or less my right hand, we took this goat, and about ten pounds of butter, and we ...”
“Kerkira?” I said.
“Y‘all probably know it as Corfu,” said Lang. “Kerkira is the Greek name for Corfu. Corfusian, too, since Greek is their language, too, over there.”
I stared at the mirror. The bartender was fingering his mohawk and looking at Lang. On the television some sort of obscene Fran kenstein figure was lumbering around to the accompaniment of canned laughter.
“Let me review this for a moment,” I said, trying to collect my thoughts. “You, who were in my fraternity, at college, and are married to my former next-door neighbor, who was roommates in college with the sister of my fiancée, whom you have met, are intimately familiar with the culture and language of the inhabitants of the island of Corfu, and are furthermore as of now probably unemployed, and chafing for some sort of at least temporary change in your geographical, professional, and personal circumstances right now. Is all that correct?”
Lang looked at me in the mirror. His eyes were sleepy again. But simple. He was knocking at the door. Our houses, our rhododendrons were fundamentally the same. “Not at all sure what it is you’re tryin’ to drive at, Dick,” he said. The jukebox broke suddenly into “Eight Days a Week”; I fancied I saw the Approacher grinning at me from the machine. I felt an overwhelming urge to wander, to take Lang with me back to the admission line for the forests, as the sun began to die.
“Ti symptosis,” I said.
Lenore is sleeping, unusually soundly tonight, under her scratchy Howard Johnson’s blanket. Her breath as it comes up to me is soft and sweet; I feed on it. Her lips are moist, with the tiniest bits of the white paste of sleep at the comers.
I do not know a horizontal Lenore. Lenore in her bed is an otherworldly, protean thing. Lying on her side, defined by the swell of a breast and the curve of a hip, she is an S. A chance curl around the pillow she holds to her stomach, and she becomes variously a question mark, a comma, a parenthesis. And then spread out before me, open, wet, completely and rarely vulnerable, her eyes looking into mine, she is a V. I will confess that her shoe is in my lap as I write this. The soft light of the lamp bolted into the wall over my shoulder blends with the inconstant grainy gray of the television’s cold flicker to cast for me a shadow of Lenore’s chin, down her throat, to cover her tiny adam’s grape, just caressed by the razor point of a hair-mandible, in a soft black various as breath. Who knows how long I watch. The whine of an Indian-head test pattern brings me around. I find that sitting up in bed for any length of time makes my bottom terrifically numb.
/i/

Cat, Heat, and the Breather all lay around the room they shared with the Antichrist, in various states of distress, in the sun, which now came through the big windows in the west wall, because the Antichrist had opened the curtains at four, at Lenore’s suggestion, and the sun washed the room in late heat, and lit up the systems of dust moving in the air. The sun itself, in the sky, slowly lowered on its wire, swelling and getting inflamed, soon to drop behind the Art Building and leave the room in cool black again. Cat’s preemp tive head banging had unfortunately not been able to keep things from becoming very unpleasant indeed in his comer.
While all this happened, Lenore and the Antichrist walked outside, and Lenore let the warmth of the big sun and the motion of the breeze dry her hair, and LaVache got some badly needed exercise. They talked while they walked, some. It took a long time for Lenore and LaVache, with Lenore helping LaVache, to get up to the Art Building, orbit the quad, amid tree roots and Frisbee players, and come out on Memorial Hill, to look south at the forests and the bird sanctuary behind the sprawling space of the athletic fields, the fields themselves covered with writhing wind-influenced jets of water from the industrial sprinklers, the mist from the sprinklers’ plumes hanging low over the wet fields and breaking into color as the sun lowered to touch it, some tiny fine wind-blown water bits migrating north and gently dotting Lenore’s eyelids and lips as she and the Antichrist settled on the hump of the hill, as she helped the Antichrist lower himself to the ground and stretch the leg out before him in the curve of the grass. They looked out at the fields, and the forests, and the mountains beyond that, purple and vaguely gauzy in the faraway heat.
With Lenore and the Antichrist on the crest of the hill, nearby, was a family: a father in checked sportcoat and white leather loafers, a mother with a red cotton skirt and high hair and blue broken veins in her calves, a tiny red-haired girl, maybe five, with great green eyes and shiny black shoes and silky white socks, beneath a tiny white dress, and also two older children of indeterminate gender who were struggling and wrestling on the curve, trying to shove each other down the hill. While the father and mother worked with their camera to take a picture of the view off the hill, really stunning in the strange light of late afternoon, with the wash of watery red mixed with gymnasium shadows spilling in like ink from the right, the west, and while the two older children struggled, the little girl watched LaVache, who noticed her and detached the leg and played with it, a bit, to amuse the girl, who stared with huge eyes, and tugged at the hem of the mother’s red skirt, and was ignored.
Lenore watched LaVache lean back and put the foot of the leg on his nose and balance the leg with no hands. The little girl, who had come closer, sat down heavily with her legs out in front of her, staring at Lenore and the Antichrist and the leg. The Antichrist took the leg off his nose and manipulated his heavy eyebrows at the little girl, grinning. The little girl rolled up to her feet and ran to her mother’s hem, hiding behind a calf.
Lenore laughed. “You’re horrible,” she said.
LaVache removed some grass from between the toes of the leg. “Yes.” Lenore’s hair felt lovely and light and soft, clean, dried by the hot wind off the fields. The two older children suddenly shrieked in unison and rolled away down the hill, becoming small.
“Did Candy really seduce you?” Lenore asked her brother.
The Antichrist scratched at his hip. “No, Lenore, she didn’t. I lied to Heat and the Breather.” He looked at the leg. “A really important part of being here is learning how to lie. ‘Strategic misrepresentation,’ we call it. I’ve been wildly infatuated with Candy for a long time. To be honest with you, it was really her breasts that launched me into puberty, that time she came home with you for spring break, I think four years ago. Last summer was just particularly bad, in terms of the infatuation. I simply presented fantasy as fact to Heat and the Breather. Heat has a huge mouth. My latest theory is that Heat isn’t busy enough with homework, a situation you can be quite sure I’ll be remedying.”
“Oh,” Lenore said. She felt the grass. “You know, to be honest, I don’t much like the Breather, either, I’m afraid. The Breather seems awfully touchy-feely to me.”
The Antichrist didn’t say anything.
“What’s his name, anyway?” said Lenore.
“His name’s the Breather.”
“I mean his real name.”
“Who cares. Mike something.”
“Hmmm.”
The Antichrist was staring out into the thin twisting fountains in the fields, and the forests, all in the reddening shadowy light. “Do you still drink a lot of Tab?” he said, out of the blue.
Lenore looked at him. She decided he was high. “I don’t drink Tab much anymore,” she said. “I mostly drink seltzer water now. Tab tastes to me like some little kid made it with his chemistry set.”
The Antichrist laughed and hefted the leg. His hightop was with Lenore’s hightops, out in front of them in the grass. The little girl was peering around her mother’s leg at the Antichrist, who pretended to ignore her.
“Where’s your friend Mr. Vigorous? What’s he supposed to be doing?”
“I don’t really know. I think he’s wandering around. I think he sort of has some internal catching up to do. He hasn’t been back here, ever, since he graduated.”
“I see.”
The two older children had stopped rolling and now started to trudge heavily back up the steep hill. The father and mother hissed at each other over the camera’s light meter. Around the woman’s calf were green eyes and wisps of red hair. The Antichrist put part of the leg inside his shirt.
“Are you pretty sleepy?” Lenore asked. “From the Quaaludes, I mean?”
LaVache looked at the trees. “The Breather told you this was a Quaalude day? What a garrulous room-group, today. It was a very small Quaalude. And no, not really, Quaaludes don’t make me sleepy, anymore, really.”
“How do they make you feel?”
The Antichrist looked at his ankle. “Like I’m elsewhere.”
Lenore looked at the little girl.
“Elseone,” LaVache said to his ankle. “Besides,” he looked up, “the old cortex is a flurry of activity now, because I have to get all prepared to talk Hegelian sublation with Nervous Roy Keller, which will be a bitch, because Nervous Roy is far too nervous to assimilate any but the most clearly presented information. Clear presentation is not Hegel’s strength.”
Lenore tugged at a blade of grass. It came out of the ground with a faint squeak. “How come you do everybody else’s work for them, Stoney?”
“Where do you think Lenore is?” the Antichrist asked the leg.
“Why do you do other people’s work and not your own?” said Lenore. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. John included.”
“Speaking of which ...”
“How come you’re doing this? You’re flapped here all the time, aren’t you?”
The Antichrist brought a joint out of the drawer. “I have a leg to support.”
“How come?”
The Antichrist lit up with practiced ease in the wind and looked at his sister from behind his cloud. “It’s my thing,” he said. “Everybody here has a thing. You have to have a thing here. My thing is being the Antichrist, more or less being a waste-product and supporting my leg. A tragically wasted intellect. So to speak. You can’t be thingless, Lenore. Mr. Vigorous notwithstanding.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
LaVache looked over Lenore’s head, at the sun. “Let’s pause for just a moment to let me try to get all this straight.” He scratched at an eyebrow. “You came all the way out here, to the very most tangential of Beadsmans, to inform me that you don’t know where certain people are, and to ask me whether I know where certain people are. And you did so at Dad’s request.”
“What Dad wants me to find out is whether you’ve heard or have any idea where exactly Lenore or John are. Is. Especially Gramma, for Dad.”
“Of course.”
“And you say you have no idea.”
“Right.”
“Did you know about the stuff Gramma was doing with Dad?” Lenore asked. “The nursing home stuff?”
“More or less. More less than more.”
The little green-eyed girl was cautiously approaching Lenore and LaVache, moving inside her mother’s long late shadow. The Antichrist, still pretending to ignore her, nevertheless enticed her with the leg.
“How come?” Lenore said.
“How come what?”
“How come you knew?”
“I believe Lenore told me, in her own unique epigrammatic way.”
“Well, when?”
“A while ago. Actually I did some math for her and Mrs. Kling.”
“Yingst.”
“Yingst. Some multiple regression. Last Christmas. Really more John’s area than mine, but since dear John is, or was, busy starving himself, and the leg quite obviously isn‘t, it cheerfully gobbled up the hundred clams with nary a qualm.”
“Have any thoughts of how come Lenore told me exactly nothing about any of this, by any chance?”
“Nothing even remotely resembling a thought,” LaVache said. When Lenore looked up from her blade of grass, she saw that the little girl was now sitting next to the Antichrist, her small soft legs with shiny black shoes out in front of her. The Antichrist was letting her touch the leg. To Lenore he said, “I really must confess to wondering, in the dark part of the night, what you and Lenore actually talk about all the time. You were over there constantly, this past summer.”
“Well, I was reading to Concamadine, some of the time, too.”
“I’m glad someone can stand to see her.”
“Who says I can stand to see her?”
“She still likes Old Mother West Wind? Ollie the otter and Sergio the snake and all that?”
“I really haven’t seen her in a while. She liked it the last time I read it to her. At least she made what I interpreted as liking-sounds.”
“How lovely,” LaVache said. “You better go see her. She must get really lonely. You think?”
The little girl was looking at the side of the Antichrist’s dark shiny face, Lenore could see. The girl tugged on the sleeve of his sweatshirt.
“Are you the devil?” she asked in a loud voice. Her parents didn’t seem to hear her.
“Not right at the moment,” the Antichrist said to the little girl, turning the leg over to her completely, for a bit.
“I don’t want to go there anymore, at least until Lenore gets back,” Lenore said softly, shaping a hooked curve of hair under her chin. “I’m afraid I really and truly hate Concamadine. I don’t know if your theory is right, but I’m afraid I do. And that Mr. Bloemker who’s constantly around gives me even more big-time creeps than he did before, for reasons I don’t feel like going into right at the moment. And plus of course now Lenore’s just gone, for over a week, and after working awfully hard to make really sure I’d care about her, she now doesn’t even bother to say where she is. She should know I’m not Dad. Just like you, of all people, should know I’m not Dad.”
The Antichrist played with the floppy empty leg of his corduroy shorts.
“I’m beginning to think Lenore’s dead,” said Lenore. “It’s horrible to think that and still not be able to really grieve. I think she maybe even died in the nursing home, and Mrs. Yingst did something to her, when she wasn’t busy giving innocent animals LSD or pineal-food.”
“You know, in my opinion, if you want my off the-top-of-my-head opinion, I think Lenore’s maybe dead, too,” the Antichrist said, amusing the little girl by guiding her hands so as to make the leg dance on the ground, his joint held easily between two fingers. “She’s about a hundred, after all, isn’t she? I think she’s just gone off somewhere to die. Somewhere where no one could see her being for the briefest second defenseless. I think that would be her style. Either that or she’s down at Gerber’s right now, preparing to give Dad an incredible kick in the corporate groin. To which I say go for it.”
The little red-haired girl laughed loudly as the leg performed a particularly tricky dance step. The man in white loafers and the woman with veins turned from the field.
“Brenda!” the mother yelled. The little girl looked up from the leg at her mother. “Come away from there right this minute!” The mother bore down.
“Just a quick anatomy lesson, here, ma‘am,” said the Antichrist.
“Come away from there I said.” The little girl was lifted away by a wrist. The leg lay in the grass. The two older children were struggling on the curve again. A shadow in a sportcoat fell over Lenore and LaVache. Lenore made a visor out of her hand. The father stared down, his complicated camera obviously really heavy around his neck. Lenore looked at his shoes. They had networks of tiny black cracks in the white leather.
The father sniffed the air, his hands on his hips. “Is that one of those funny cigarettes?”
LaVache held up the nubbin of joint and looked at it reflectively. “Sir,” he said, “this is a deadly serious cigarette.”
“You ought to be ashamed, using drugs in a public place, around little children, who are impressionable,” the mother said. Lenore resisted the impulse to touch the mother’s stockingless calf. She considered the fact that the veins in some older women’s calves are a blue found nowhere else in nature. A nicotine blue, almost.
“I think I’m so ashamed I suddenly don’t feel like being around people, right now,” the Antichrist said slowly, squinting up into the two shadows. There were “Hmmphs,” and the parents came away, calling to the struggling children to come this instant. Lenore heard Brenda’s tiny shoes on the cement of the War Memorial, above them, a moment later. They were alone on the curve of the hill. The Antichrist was scratching at his hip, Lenore saw. No he wasn’t: he was reaching into his pocket. He pulled something out. It was a Stonecipheco label. Veal purée. He finished unfolding it and turned it over and smoothed it against his hip, then gave it to Lenore. Lenore noticed that LaVache’s nails really needed cutting.
On the white, slightly fuzzy back of the label was an ink drawing of a man walking up a hill, as seen from the side. The man’s profile was smiling. The hill looked sandy. It was the same sort of doodle Lenore had found in Lenore’s room at the Shaker Heights Nursing Home.
“Hmmm,” she said. She looked at the Antichrist. She took out of the zippered compartment at the side of her vinyl purse the drawing of the barber with the exploded head. She gave it to LaVache. LaVache laughed.
“Ah, the barber,” he said. “Boy, she may be a ring-tailed bitch, but I do get a kick out of Lenore. I really sort of hope she isn’t dead, after all, to tell the truth.”
Lenore looked at the Antichrist. “How unbelievably decent of you, seeing she’s your relative.” She reached way out with her foot into the grass and gave the leg an angry little kick.
“Ow,” said LaVache.
Lenore wiped a couple of tiny sprinkler-droplets from the skin under her eyes. “When did you get this?” she asked. “I thought you said you had no ideas about Gramma. Or does ‘idea’ mean ’toenail,‘ for you, or something?”
The Antichrist tore at some grass, looked at his sister. “No, ‘idea’ means ’idea,‘ but that, you may have noticed, is not an idea, but rather a sort of drawing. An infamous Lenore Beadsman drawing, right out of her infamous school of stick-figure symbolist art.” He smiled, did something to his hair. “You remember the drawing of John and Dad, that one Christmas? The time John had said something about Miss Malig, something pretty funny, and Dad had said that if you can’t say anything nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all, and John pointed out that that thing itself that Dad had just said to him really wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination ’nice,‘ and so shouldn’t itself have been said, and so was, interestingly, internally contradictory? And Lenore gave us that drawing of John and Dad, and Dad’s exploded head, and the corn-cob suppository? A really deadly drawing, I thought.”
“But when did you get this one?” Lenore asked, looking at the veal label. She thought she could make out a cactus in the splatter of ink surrounding the incline of the hill in the drawing.
“It was waiting in my p. o. box when I got here,” LaVache said. “Return-address-less, I might add, and interestingly not in Lenore’s distinctive indecipherable hand. That was ten ... eleven days ago. I got it eleven days ago, Lenore.” The Antichrist suddenly hawked and spat white.
Lenore ignored the spitting, and the fact that the Antichrist’s head was lolling quite a bit now. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.
“Oh, very much so, don’t we, precious,” the Antichrist hissed to his leg.
“Then maybe you’ll be good enough to tell me, because I’m afraid I seem to be clueless on this one,” Lenore said, staring at the label.
The Antichrist sucked at the red eye of the corpse of his joint. Lenore saw that he held the nubbin delicately in his very long fingernails, avoided getting burned. He grinned at Lenore. “What would you do if I demanded that you first feed the leg?” he asked.
Lenore looked at her brother, then at the leg. She said, “I’d propose a deal. You tell me the thing you know, the thing that clearly bears on the well-being of a relative we’re both supposed to love, the thing that it looks like I came all the way out here to find out; you tell me, and in return I don’t throw the leg all the way down to the bottom of the hill, leaving you with a long and possibly dangerous and certainly very embarrassing retrieval-hop.”
“Oh, now, don’t be that way,” smiled the Antichrist, casually reattaching and strapping the leg, which took a minute. When he was attached, he said, “The drawing is of a sort referred to in the Investigations, as I’m sure you, the hotshot major, would remember a lot better than I, if you thought about it for about three seconds. I seem to recollect the reference being page fifty-four, note b, of the Geach and Anscombe translation. We’re presented with a picture of a man climbing a slope, in profile, one leg in front of the other as he progresses, marking motion, walking up the incline, facing the top, eyes directed at the top, all the standard climbing-association stuff. Et cetera et cetera. So it’s a picture of a man walking up a hill. But then remember Gramma Lenore’s own Dr. Wittgenstein says hold on now, pardner, because the picture could just as clearly and exactly and easily represent the man sliding down the slope, with one leg higher than the other, backwards, et cetera. Just as exactly.”
“Shit,” said Lenore.
“And then we’re invited to draw all these totally fecal conclusions about why we just automatically assume from just looking at the picture that the guy’s climbing and not sliding. Going up instead of coming down. Complete and total dribble, and really actually heart-rending psychological innocence, as far as I’m concerned, which you should remember, given this certain conversation we all had in the Volvo when you were in school, when Gramma decided I was evil and said I needed to be ‘stamped out,’ declared her intention to stop giving me Christmas presents. Anyway ...”
“Well and then here, on the other hand, we’ve got this antinomy,” Lenore said, looking at the barber drawing.
“Right,” the Antichrist said, throwing away the tiny dot of black joint. He paused for a moment, looking out into nothing. Lenore looked at him. “Brenda,” she heard him say loudly, “you should go back to your parents immediately. Try not to be at all impressionable, at least while you’re around here.”
Lenore twisted around and looked. The little girl with green eyes was standing behind them, above them, on the cement rim of the Memorial, looking down at their heads. The wind ruffled her silky socks. She stared at the Antichrist.
“Shoo, love of mine,” LaVache said.
The girl turned and fled. Her shoes clicked on the cement, fading.
Lenore looked at her brother. More grass squeaked in his hands. The sprinklers suddenly all went off, stopped hissing, the water sucked back inside itself, in the pipes, down in the fields. The fields looked great. They shone fire in the red light, deepened to twinkle in the glossy black of the gym shadows. “So then here I guess I’m supposed to ask what you think the two together might be supposed to mean,” Lenore said.
LaVache laughed like a seal. His head lolled. “Gramma would be disappointed in her minion,” he said. “They obviously ... mean whatever you want them to mean. Whatever you want to use them for. Ms. Beadsman ... ,” he pretended to hold a microphone under Lenore’s nose, “... how would you like the drawings to function? Audience, please just hold off on that input ...” The Antichrist made tick-tock noises with his tongue. “Function,” he said. “The extreme unction of function. Function. From the Latin ‘func,’ meaning foul-smelling due to persistent overuse. She has crawled off. She is either dead, or functioning furiously. Speaking of functioning furiously, you might help me up, here, for a moment, please.”
Lenore helped her brother up. He limped behind a bush at the side of the hill. Lenore heard sounds of him going to the bathroom into the dry bush.
“I have an idea,” the Antichrist’s voice came over the bush to Lenore. “Let’s do the natural Beadsman thing. Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend just for fun that Lenore hasn’t expired, that Mrs. Yingst hasn’t chopped her up and fed her to Vlad the Impaler, that Gramma actually does give a hoot about your being potentially worried, and might actually be trying to use that worry in some nefarious way.” He came back over, slowly, keeping his balance on the incline. “Now, under this game-scenario, how might we wish to see the drawings as functioning, here?” He settled back down with Lenore’s help, looked at her. “The sliding-man drawing, under this scenario, might say, hey, ho, watch how you go. Perceive how you—we—perceive Lenore’s being ... ‘missing.’ Don’t just look at it; think about how to look at it. Maybe it ... means the opposite of what you think it does, of the way it ... looks.” LaVache was having leg trouble, on the hump of the hill. Lenore helped him get more comfortable. She held the baby food labels in her hand.
LaVache continued, “See, maybe Lenore isn’t gone at all. Maybe you’re who’s gone, when all is said and done. Maybe ... this one I particularly like ... maybe Dad’s gone, spiralled into the industrial void. Maybe he’s taken us with him. Maybe Lenore’s found. Maybe instead of her sliding away from you, you’ve slid away from her. Or climbed away from her. Maybe it’s all a sliding-and-climbing game! Chutes and Ladders, risen from the dead!” The Antichrist was having trouble talking, because his mouth was all dry from the joint. He got the last of Clint Wood’s fee from his drawer and lit it.
“Hmmm,” Lenore was saying.
“Except don’t think about yourself, in this game, at all,” said the Antichrist. “Because in this game, the way we’re playing, the barber drawing means don’t think about yourself, in the context of the game, or your head explodes into art deco. Just think about other people, if you want to play. Which means that family-members have to be treated as explicitly Other, which I must say I find attractively refreshing.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Lenore said.
The Antichrist exhaled. “Let’s pretend just for fun that it’s the late seventies, and Lenore is in her blue period, and is still keeping exclusively to her study, and snapping at anyone who comes near, including poor old Grampa, who was getting ready to die, and being generally pathetic ...”
“Get on with it. My bottom hurts.”
“And anyway, in this game-context, that Lenore is still Skeptical as hell, or at least strenuously adopting the pose, and ostensibly convinced that all she is is the act of her thinking, à la the French-man, although Lenore would say all she is is the act of speaking and telling, but that’s so bullshitty it makes my tongue hurt, and anyway luckily unnecessary, and so we say that all she is is the act of her thinking; that’s the only thing she can be sure of, is just her being her thinking.”
“Is this real, or are you saying all this because you’re flapped?” asked Lenore.
“Please hush,” LaVache said. “I’m hard at play. So all Lenore is is her act of thought, nothing else can be ‘assumed.’ ” He lay back and looked at the reddening sky, the joint resting in a carved initial in the leg. “So she’s her thinking. And, as we know, all thinking requires an object, something to think of or about. And the only things that can be thought about are the things that are not that act of thought, that are Other, right? You can’t think of your own act of thinking-of, any more than a blade can cut itself, right? Unless you’re the guy who’s significantly lowering Nervous Roy Keller’s quality of life, but I refuse to think about that until the leg demands that I do so. So, we can’t think ourselves, if all we are is the act of thinking. So we’re like the barber. The barber, if I recall, shaves all and only those who don’t shave themselves. Here Lenore thinks we think all and only those things which do not think themselves, which aren’t the act of our thought, which are Other.”
“Hell of a game,” Lenore muttered.
“But then we remember that all we are is our act of thought, in the game, for Lenore,” LaVache said, fast, now, and slightly slurry. “So if we think about ourselves with respect to the game, we’re thinking about our thinking. And we decided the one thing we couldn’t think about was our thinking, because the object has to be Other. We can think only the things that can’t think themselves. So if we think ourselves, see for instance conceiving ourselves as thought, we can’t ourselves be the object of our thinking. Q.E.D.”
Lenore cleared her throat.
“But if we can’t think ourselves,” the Antichrist continued to the sky, trying to lick his lips, “that means we, ourselves, are things that can’t think themselves, and so are the proper objects for our thought; we fulfill the game’s condition, we are ourselves Other. So if we can think ourselves, we can’t; and if we can‘t, we can. KA-BLAM,” LaVache gestured broadly. “There go the old crania.”
“Dumb game,” said Lenore. “I can think of myself any time I want. Here, watch.” Lenore thought of herself sitting in the Spaniard home in Cleveland Heights, eating a frozen pea.
“Dumb objection, especially from you,” the Antichrist said to the sky. “ ‘Cause do you really think of yourself? What do you think of yourself as? Shall I recall some of our more interesting and to me more than a little disturbing conversations of the last two years? If you don’t think of yourself as real, then you’re cheating, you’re not playing fair, you’re chute-hopping, you’re not thinking of yourself.”
“Who says I don’t think of myself as real?” Lenore said, looking past the Antichrist at the bush he’d gone to the bathroom in.
“I’d be inclined to say you say so, from your general attitude, unless that little guy with the big mustache and the movable chairs has conked you on the head or something,” said the Antichrist. “It’s my clinical opinion that you, in a perfectly natural defensive reaction to your circumstances, have decided you’re not real—of course with Gramma’s help.” LaVache looked at her. “Why is this all so, you ask?”
“I haven’t asked anything, you might have noticed.”
“It’s because you’re the one on whom the real brunt of the evil—shall I say ‘evil’?—the brunt of the evil of this family has fallen. Evil in the form of these little indoctrination sessions with Lenore, which I’ve got to tell you I’ve always regarded as pathetic in the extremus. Evil in the form of Dad, who, having totally f*cked with our mother’s life, for all time, is trying to f*ck with your life in all kinds of ways I bet you don’t even know about, or want to know about. Think now of the circumstances leading up to my own particular birth. The same way Dad’s tried to f*ck with my life, everybody’s. Just as he was f*cked with in his turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats.” The Antichrist laughed. “That’s a poem. Anyway, you’ve borne the brunt. John was off to Chicago with his slide rule and a whole lot of masochistic baggage by the time he would have been any use to Dad or Lenore; I’ve had a limb and a thing to fall back on; Clarice was clearly inappropriate in terms of disposition—we needn’t discuss all that. But so you’re it. You are the family, Lenore. And in Dad’s case, go ahead and substitute ‘Company’ in the obvious place in the above sentence.”
Lenore reached under and removed a bit of stick she’d been sitting on.
“But Lenore has f*cked up your life even further, sweetness,” the Antichrist said, sitting back up with the joint and looking at Lenore. “Lenore has you believing—stop me if I’m wrong—Lenore has you believing, with your complicity, circumstantially speaking, that you’re not really real, or that you’re only real insofar as you’re told about, so that to the extent that you’re real you’re controlled, and thus not in control, so that you’re more like a sort of character than a person, really—and of course Lenore would say the two are the same, now, wouldn’t she?”
“I wish it would rain,” Lenore said.
“You just had a shower a little while ago,” LaVache laughed. “You’re a nervous wreck, sis. Don’t be so nervous. Here. Kiss the bird for a second.” The Antichrist was holding up the joint, which Lenore saw was burning down one side much faster than the other.
“I don’t want any,” Lenore said. She glanced at the sun, which was now sticking Kilroyishly over the top of the gymnasium. “How about if we just spontaneously abort this line of conversation, Stoney, OK? Since, if I were maybe to ask you to help me out with respect to this supposed evil-and-reality-as-opposed-to-telling problem, what you’d do is obviously just tell me something, so that the whole thing would—”
“Don’t call me Stoney,” said LaVache. “Call me LaVache, or the Antichrist, but no more Stoney.”
“You don’t mind Antichrist, which I have to say is just about the most disturbing nickname I’ve ever heard? But you mind Stoney?”
“Stoney is everybody’s name,” the Antichrist said. He spat white again. “Everybody in the family with male genitals is Stoney. Stoney reminds me I’m probably just a part in a machine I wish I wasn’t part of. Stoney reminds me of deeply annoying expectations. Stoney reminds me of Dad. As Stoney I’m more or less just educed ...”
“What?”
“... but as the Antichrist I just am, ” said the Antichrist, waving the joint grandly at the red and black horizon. “As the Antichrist I have a thing, and it’s gloriously clear where I leave off and others start, and no one expects me to be anything other than what I am, which is a waste-product, slaving endlessly to support his leg. I’ve also just sort of helped you, here, I think, if you bothered to notice.” With his finger the Antichrist wet the side of the joint that was burning too fast, to make it bum slower.
Lenore wasn’t looking at her brother, but at the gym shadows, which were visibly moving across the fields. A shadow from a different part of the gym began to edge up the west side of the hill, to their right.
“Do you hate Dad?” Lenore asked. “Do you think I hate Dad?”
“Well, now, seeing as how you’re you ... ,” the Antichrist playfully pretended to punch Lenore in the arm, “I can’t speak for you, but only for me, regardless of what I might say about you. Verstehen?”
“Pain in the ass.”
“I don’t hate Dad,” said the Antichrist. “Dad just makes me millenially weary. I find Dad exhausting. The stump aches, horribly, whenever I’m around Dad.”
Lenore hugged a knee to her chest.
“The one who hates Dad is Mom,” LaVache continued, “or, that is, she would if she were Mom. The person I saw last month resembled a mom in no way whatsoever. John Lennon, yes. A mom, no.”
“You miss Mom.”
“I miss a mom. Mom’s been in that place practically my whole life. Certainly at the beginning. My whole life is to an extent why she’s in there, right? Although I do remember that one year when I was nine. And then Dad and Miss Malig sent her right back again.”
“Well, she was trying to climb again. You can’t just have somebody trying to climb up the side of your house all the time.”
LaVache didn’t say anything.
“But it’s a shame you never got to really know her. I thought she was a good person. Really good.” Lenore moved her head to make the fields sparkle in the half-light.
“I just feel an affinity, is all, probably,” LaVache said. “No, for sure I do. Mom’s head and my leg were taken out in the same dancing accident, after all. At least I got left with a thing. Mom’s thingless.” He picked the sliding-man label up from where it lay on Lenore’s leg near the lacy hem of her white dress. “Interesting thing here is that it looks like this guy is climbing up dash sliding down a sort of sand dune. See the way his feet sink? And see this sort of cactus? I feel the implication of Desert, Lenore. Food for thought, in my opinion—no pun intended.”
“But since his feet sink in the sand, then we know for sure he’s climbing and not sliding,” Lenore said, taking the drawing. “ ‘Cause if he had slid, there would have to be slide tracks all the way down from the top.”
LaVache looked at the label and fingered his red chin. “But if he’s climbing, then there ought to be footprints leading up from the bottom, in the sand, which there aren’t.”
“Hmmm.”
“Looks like Gramma screwed up, unless perhaps the guy was dropped from a helicopter into this exact position; that’s one possibility Dr. W. never fathomed. I guess there were no helicopters back in his day. Technology does affect interpretation, after all, doesn’t it?”
“Hmmm.”
The Antichrist gave Lenore the drawing back. “Can Vlad the Impaler really talk now?”
“You should hear it. His language was getting worse, too, over the last week or so, although I haven’t been home in a couple days. ” Lenore saw that the man in the drawing was smiling broadly, in profile, and had what seemed to be a shadow, unless it was just the sand.
“What does he say?”
“Unfortunately mostly really obscene stuff, because he’s around Candy all the time.”
The Antichrist groaned. “I’m tingling all over. The leg may spontaneously detach.”
“Except we’ve been teaching him stuff out of the Bible, so Mrs. Tissaw hopefully won’t evict me if she hears him,” Lenore said. “She’s already ticked off because Vlad tends to chew the wall.”
“Can’t wait to hear him.”
“My bottom really hurts,” Lenore said. “I think I’d like to go back. Rick might be back at your dorm and wondering where we are. Would you like to come to dinner with us? I predict Rick’s going to want to go to the Aqua Vitae.”
“Let me just gather my resources for the trip back, for a second,” said LaVache. He massaged the leg with a hand. “If I can drive a stake through the heart of Nervous Roy’s Hegel problem without making you guys wait too long, I’ll gladly come.”
“Look, by the way, do you mind if I tell Dad you have a phone?” Lenore said. “Dad is crazy about you.”
“All sorts of different truths in that statement.”
“He’s pinned all his hopes on you, he says.”
“Pins tend to smart, I’ve found,” LaVache said.
“At least you should tell him you call a phone a lymph node.”
“Well, gee, then I might as well call it a phone,” the Antichrist said sulkily.
They both looked at the athletic fields and the forests behind them. Long spears of shadow were moving across the breadth of the grass. Shadow-gaps sparkled with sprinkler-dew. Two very tiny figures emerged from the edge of the trees of the bird sanctuary, far away, and started walking across the wet fields toward the hill. One of the figures, the shorter one, wore a brown beret.
“Hey,” Lenore said quietly.
She saw the two figures stop. The taller one, whose hair looked red in the red sun between the gym-shadows, bent over and felt the wet grass with his hand. The two figures slipped off their shoes and socks—the taller one merely his shoes, because he wore no socks underneath—and continued walking. They got to the bottom of the hill.
“Well that’s Rick right there,” Lenore said to the Antichrist, pointing to the man in the beret. She waved. Rick looked up at her for a bit, his hand to his hat, confused, then finally smiled broadly and waved back. He said something to the other man, pointing at Lenore.
“Who’s that other guy?” asked LaVache. He tossed away his roach and struggled to get to his feet.
“I don’t think I know,” Lenore said. She stared at the taller man, who walked the hill well, one hand holding boat shoes, the other helping Rick Vigorous, who was having trouble, sliding back in his bare feet in the wet grass of the bottom of the steep hill. The taller man grinned at his efforts, and some of the last bits of fiery sunset over the gym hit his teeth, which shone red.
“Do I look all right?” Lenore said to LaVache.
“Nut,” LaVache said. “Help me up, please.”
Lenore helped her brother up. The two men got close to the curve of the top of the hill, where the grass became dry and brown. Rick no longer needed help. There were voices, back and forth. The Antichrist was having balance problems. The very last of the sun sucked itself down behind the gymnasium, to the west. A cool shadow filled up the field, then climbed the hill all the way to the Memorial. The shadow covered the four figures, as they came together, and they were gone.