The Broom of the System

16
1990
/a/

9 September

A dream so completely frightening, disorienting, and ominous that Fieldbinder awoke streaming.
“Dr. J__ is in significant personal danger, ” he thought wryly,

Lang and I are in my office, in our respective chairs, the translation between us. We are both mysteriously and troublingly nude. It is noon; the shadow is moving. I look down and cover myself with a tea bag, but there is Lang in all his horror. Lang is drawing a picture of Lenore on the back of the final page of “Love.” It is a stunning, lifelike drawing of an unclothed Lenore. I begin to have an erection behind my tea bag. Lang’s pen is in the shape of a beer bottle; Lang sucks at the pen, periodically. Lenore is there on the page, on her back, a Vargas girl, a V. Lang puts his initials in the side of Lenore’s long, curving leg: a deep, wicked W.D.L.
As the initials go down, hands and hair begin to protrude from the page; breasts swell, a tummy heaves, knees rise and part, feet stroke demurely at the edges of the page. Lang works his pen. Lenore emerges from the page and circles the room.
Fingernails click on the window. Outside the window is a young Mindy Metalman, very young, perhaps thirteen, with bright lipstick on her tiny bruised mouth. She holds hedge trimmers, points at the tea bag. I am sucked back into the shadow as it spreads like ink across the white wall. When I look away from the window, Lenore is kneeling, with the beer-bottle pen, signing Lang’s rear end, signing her name with long slow curves, in violet ink, while her other hand finds what purchase it can on Lang’s heroic front.
I scream an airless scream and begin explosively to urinate. The stream is upward, a fan of uncountably many lines, which lines are razor-thin and so hot that I am burned when I try to cross them. I am trapped behind my fan. Hot currents swirl on the office carpet, climbing to lap hollow white at Lenore’s breasts as they tremble with her efforts. The tea bag bleeds into the hot spray. Tea is being made. “Tea symptosis,” says Lang, laughing.
Lenore is drowning; Lang holds her head beneath the surface of the ocean of burnt-yellow tea with his rear end. She continues to sign. Mice boil in the hot currents, their tails wriggling. I am suffocating. It is Salada tea. On the tea bag is written a pithy “It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.”
Lang looks down at himself and begins ponderously to stir. I surrender myself to the horror. My diploma is washed from the wall and borne away in a rush of foam.

Fieldbinder awoke streaming, to find that he had actually wet the bed, but fortunately that the stained area was no bigger than a spot of ink, which he rubbed away with his handkerchief.

The thing is that they are at the Tissaws‘, and I am here. There is an unimaginable thickness about Cleveland after one has had a bad night, alone. One I am powerless even to hope to begin to describe. Really.
/b/

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP SESSION IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D., THURSDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER 1990.
PARTICIPANTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MS. LENORE BEADSMAN, AGE 24, FILE NUMBER 770-01-4266.

DR. JAY: And so how does that make you feel?
MS. LENORE BEADSMAN: How does what make me feel?
JAY: The state of affairs we were just trying to articulate, in which your grandmother’s separation from and silence toward you paradoxically evokes in you a feeling of greater closeness to and communication with the rest of your family.
LENORE: Well, except there’s the John thing, in Chicago or wherever. JAY: Let’s leave him out of the picture, for the nonce.
LENORE: For the what?
JAY: Go, go with your thoughts.
LENORE: What thoughts?
JAY: The thoughts we just characterized together.
LENORE : Well, I think in a certain way it’s true. Clarice was clueless, she really doesn’t click with the whole Lenore thing, she never has, but still I felt like when I went over there to tell her this troubling family stuff, and then watched her and her own family go through that whole little skit that in a way had to do with exactly what I needed to talk to her about—I felt good, somehow. It felt secure. Is it dumb to say it felt secure?
JAY: You felt connected.
LENORE: Connected and non-connected, too.
JAY: But all in the appropriate ways.
LENORE: Boy, you’re really hot, today.
JAY: There’s a ticklish, stimulating hint of breakthrough-odor. LENORE: And then there’s my other brother ... that’s the first time I’ve actually talked to LaVache about anything important in a really long time. He might have been flapped, but still. I just felt somehow like we were really ...
JAY: Communicating?
LENORE: I guess so.
JAY: And how long had it been since you two had had a meaningful dialogue? Communicated?
LENORE: Oh, gee, quite a while.
JAY: I see. And how long, just to play a bit of a scent-hunch, here, had your great-grandmother been ensconced in the Shaker Heights Home?
LENORE: Umm, quite a while.
JAY: Would this make you uncomfortable?
LENORE: What is that? Is that a gas mask?
JAY: (muffled) Purely precautionary.
LENORE: Why do I pay money to somebody to make me less flakey when that person is flakier than I am?
JAY: Than I.
LENORE: Good thing I’m strapped in again.
JAY: And then of course you’ve implied that your brother had insights on the whole grandmother-disappearance problem.
LENORE: Not really what you’d call insights. He’d gotten a drawing, too, a different one, of some guy on a dune in the Desert, and he played some flap-games with it, and ended up telling me never to think about myself. It wasn’t super helpful. And also it was pretty depressing to see that he’s still got this schizophrenic thing about his leg, and that he probably personally accounts for about half the drug consumption in New England.
JAY: It’s you I’m interested in, though.
LENORE: Well, sorry, but I tend to be concerned about my brother. Part of the me you’re so interested in is brother-concern.
JAY: The Desert?
LENORE: Pardon?
JAY: You mentioned Desert, in the context of the drawing in question. Do you mean the Desert?
LENORE: Well, the sand was black, and LaVache mentioned sinisterness.
JAY: So the G.O.D., then.
LENORE: Who knows.
JAY: But there’s at least a possibility that the Great Ohio Desert bears on the whereabouts of the nursing home people.
LENORE: What’s going on here?
JAY: Where?
LENORE: Don’t look around, in your stupid mask. Are you trying to put words in my mouth?
JAY: This guy? Me?
LENORE: Why do I get the feeling people are trying to push me out into the Desert? Which for me has all these really far less than pleasant memories of when I was a kid, and Gramma would take me out wandering, and I’d have to hear her go on and on about Auden and Wittgenstein, who she thinks are like jointly God, and we’d fish at the Desert’s edge, and look into the blackness ...
JAY: A conspicuous hmmm, here.
LENORE: In your ear. And how come you’re all trying to get me back out there? You, my brother, Rick’s mentioned Desert, Vlad quotes Auden to me, that Gramma used to read in the sand ...
JAY: A morsel for thought, if I may be so—
LENORE: And Mr. el creepo Bloemker was acting like some sort of Desert salesman with me before his girlfriend lost her dress and sprung a leak ...
JAY: Excuse me?
LENORE: And then also out of the unwelcome blue comes this guy, who I unfortunately met, when I was a kid, and is married to my sister’s old roommate, and it turns out his father more or less built the G.O. D., apparently. His father owns Industrial Desert Design. Dad was unbelievably interested in that. A lot more interested than in any stick-figure drawings, that’s for—
JAY: What guy?
LENORE: Andrew Sealander Lang, who’s doing obscure translation stuff at Frequent and Vigorous, whom Rick met in a bar in Amherst.
JAY: And you’d met him personally before.
LENORE: Why do you ask?
JAY: Why that face?
LENORE: What face?
JAY: You just got a dreamy, faraway expression on your face. LENORE: I did not.
JAY: You’re attracted to this man?
LENORE: Are you out of your mind? What’s with you today? Is air getting through the air-hole in that thing?
JAY: I know an attraction-face when I see one. Psychologists’ senses are keened to pick up on nonverbal signals.
LENORE: Keened?
JAY: Your pupils have dilated to the size of manhole covers.
LENORE: How lovely.
JAY: Does Rick know about this?
LENORE: About what?
JAY: Your infatuation with this Desert-and-translation person. LENORE: You’re really pissing me off.
JAY: It’s written all over your face.
LENORE: Face must be getting pretty crowded. Manhole covers, dreamy expressions, writing ...
JAY: Formal ejection warning.
LENORE: Boy, I’d think the one place where I could avoid getting pushed into places and having people pushed into me would be the place where I spend almost all my money for help with those very feelings of pushed-ness.
JAY: This guilt ploy is getting far less effective as time goes by. LENORE: Maybe I ought to just skeedaddle, then.
JAY: A hugely important and also redolent question, Lenore. Why, when you feel valid human inclinations and attractions, purely understandable inclinations to pay a visit to a place that may or may not bear on the whereabouts of a loved one, attractions to someone your own age, who can perhaps—
LENORE: How do you know his age?
JAY: It’s extractable from the context, you ninny. Cut the guano. Relax and let’s try to make a stride or two.
LENORE: Maybe just a quick dash to the ladies’ room, and then I could dash right on back—
JAY: Hush. If you feel a desire to go to the Desert, why don’t you just go? What are you afraid of?
LENORE: You’re blowing this way out of proportion, assuming there’s anything to blow. Which come to think of it there isn‘t, because I’m not afraid of anything. I’m just not dying to go out there, is all. And it would be pointless. There’s just no way twenty-six people, most of them incredibly old, and with walkers, and at least one needing things to be ninety-eight point six degrees all the time, are wandering around in the Desert in September. But what gets me is that it seems like everybody for some reason wants to get me out there. What I resent is just having no say in where I go or what I ostensibly want or—
JAY: I have one word for you.
LENORE: Goodbye?
JAY: Membrane. I say to you “membrane,” Lenore.
LENORE: I think I’d prefer goodbye.
JAY: Think of our work together, Lenore. Our strides. Our progress. Don’t you see that perceiving your own natural desires and inclinations and attractions as somehow being directed at and forced on you from outside, from Outside, is a truly classic instance of a malfunction in a hygiene-identity network? That it’s exhaustively reducible to and explainable in terms of membrane-theory? That a flabby membrane is unhealthily permeable, lets the Self out to soil the Other-set and the Other-set in to soil the Self?
LENORE: I’m afraid I’m really uncomfortably in need of a shower. JAY: And why, pray? I’ll simply tell you straight out that in my perception it’s because you are perceiving the above revelations, the above, yes, let’s take a great stride forward and say the above exhaustive and deadly-accurate characterization and explanation of your whole trouble-set, as coming from outside you, as somehow forced upon you. When it’s really coming from inside you, Lenore. It all is. Don’t you feel it? Direct your attention to your Inside. Feel how clean it is. Forget I’m here altogether. Pretend I’m you.
LENORE: It’s just impossible to take you seriously in that gas mask. JAY: Were I to remove this now, my na?ve young client and friend, the stench of breakthrough would blast me into unconsciousness. You would be truly and utterly alone.
LENORE: And what do you mean, pretend you’re me? I thought the whole problem was supposed to be that that flabby old membrane wasn’t keeping you on your side and me on my side. If I pretend you’re me, what does that do to the membrane?
JAY: But don’t you see, the pretending will come from inside you. A true pretending can only come off in the context of an intimate awareness of the real. For you to pretend I’m you, you must know I’m not; the membrane must be a strong, clean membrane. The strong, clean membrane chooses what to suck inside itself and lets all the rest bounce dirtily off. Only the secure can truly pretend, Lenore. The secure have membranes like strong, clean ova. Like ovums. These membranes withstand the onslaught of the countless Other-set, ceaselessly battering, the Others, their heads coated with filth, their underarms clotted with fungus, they batter, and the secure membrane/ovum waits patiently, strong, aloof, secure, and, yes, occasionally will let an Other in, will suck it in, on the membrane’s terms, will suck it in like a sperm, will take it inside itself to renew, to create itself anew. Only a strong membrane can suck in a sperm, Lenore. Here, I know, pretend I’m a sperm.
LENORE: I don’t care for the way this session is going one bit.
JAY: No, really. Be secure. Pretend I’m a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the ... hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so ...
LENORE: What in God’s name are you doing?
JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interior.
LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling your sweatshirt-string like that?
JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore.
LENORE: A sperm in a gas mask?
JAY: Batter batter.
LENORE: I demand that you set my chair in motion.
JAY: Admit that your inclinations and attractions come from inside you.
LENORE: Look, quit wriggling that string all over the place.
JAY: Admit you’re attracted to this young man. This translator. This blond Adonis who can offer you realms of Self-Other interaction you’ve never even dreamed of.
LENORE: How do you know he’s blond?
JAY: The context is the fluid of the uterus. I’m swimming, to batter at you. Batter batter. Let someone inside your membrane.
LENORE: Is this a pass? Are you making a pass?
JAY: Don’t misdirect so pathetically transparently. I speak ... speak of this man who spreads your pupils from the inside, like the soft petals of some helpless flower. Who can show you perhaps how the strong membrane is permeated. Who can batter! Batter batter.
LENORE: What are you saying?
JAY: We’re making gargantuan strides. The room is swirling with breakthrough-gases, in which, paradoxically, everything becomes strangely clear. Can’t you feel it?
LENORE: I think you’ve flipped. I never signed up for sperm-therapy, buster, I’m telling you right—
JAY: Admit that your attraction to this Other comes from inside your Self. Strengthen the membrane. Let it be permeated as you desire it so!
LENORE: And how might I ask is Rick supposed to fit into all this? What about Rick?
JAY: Rick knows he must forever remain an Other to you. Rick knows the meaning of membrane. Rick is like a sperm without a tail. An immobilized sperm in the uterus of life. Why do you think Rick is so desperately unhappy? What do you think he means by the Screen Door of Union?
Lenore Beadsman pauses.
JAY: He means membrane! Rick is trapped behind his own membrane. He hasn’t the equipment to get out.
LENORE: Hey, you’re not supposed to talk about your other patients. JAY: Why do you think he’s so possessive? He wants you in him. He wants to trap you behind the membrane with him. He knows he can never validly permeate the membrane of an Other, so he desires to bring that Other into him, for all time. He’s a sick man.
LENORE: Look, stop trying to swim around. You’ve made your point. JAY: No, you’ve made your point. All distinctions are shattered. I am not here. I am the sperm inside you. Remember that you are half sperm, Lenore.
LENORE: Pardon?
JAY: Your father’s sperm. It’s part of you. Inseparable.
LENORE: What does my father have to do with all this?
JAY: Admit.
LENORE: Admit what?
JAY: That you want someone truly inside you. That your membrane is crying out.
LENORE: Jesus.
JAY: Listen.... Hear that? The faint cry of a membrane, isn’t it? “Let me be an ovum, let—”
LENORE: He loves me.
JAY: He does? The Adonis? The valid Other?
LENORE: Rick, you dingwad. Rick loves me. He’s said so.
JAY: Rick cannot give us what we need. Admit it.
LENORE: He loves me.
JAY: It’s a sucking love, Lenore. An inherently unclean love. It’s the love of a flabby, unclean membrane, sucking at an Other, to dirty. Dirt is on this membrane’s mind. It wants to do you dirt.
Lenore Beadsman pauses.
JAY: Do you love him back? Does he batter validly at the membrane? LENORE: Please, a shower.
JAY: Admit the source of your dispositions.
LENORE: Leave me alone. Start my chair.
JAY: Batter batter. We are helpless and inefficacious as parts of a system until we recognize the existence of the system. Batter batter. Hear the syrupy squelch of your membrane.
LENORE: Look, let me leave right now or I’ll stop coming. I’m not kidding.
JAY: First admit it. Say it out loud. Bring it out. Your pupils don’t lie. Make it real. Bring it into the network. Batter back. Take an Other inside.
LENORE: Shower. Please, a shower.
JAY: Admit everything. Do you want a gas mask too? Is that it? No problem at all. A permeated membrane is not a pretty smell. LENORE: God.
JAY: What do we suppose Lenore would have to say to all this? LENORE: Who?
/c/

“Are you all right?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“You look awfully pale.”
“....”
“Would you like some of my oyster stew?”
“You know I hate oyster stew. They look like little mouths, floating in there.”
“Surely you want more than just that tiny salad.”
“Please don’t tell me what I want, Rick. I’ve had more than enough of that already today.”
“What does that mean?”
“...”
“Is. that a Jay-reference?”
“....”
“Was it not a good appointment?”
“Don’t want to talk about it.”
“But if it’s harmed you in some emotional way ...”
“We made a deal that we wouldn’t talk about Jay-appointments, remember?”
“You’re so pale you’re practically transparent.”
“Well, you can touch my chest if you want, like in that stupid story. ”
“Pardon me?”
“That one story, the first one you had me read? Where the old man touches the little boy to make sure he’s not a window?”
“You didn’t care for that story? What was it called ... ?”
“ ‘Love.’ ”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“I liked that other one, though. That ‘Metamorphosis for the Eighties.’ I thought it was a killer. The part when the people threw coins at the rock star on stage and they stuck in him and he died was maybe a little hokey, but overall it was deadly. I put a big asterisk on it for you.”
“.... ”
“You don’t want your stew anymore? I didn’t mean it about the mouths. Eat up.”
“But you didn’t much care for the other one, then.”
“Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought it sucked canal-water, big time.”
“.... ”
“Oh no, did you really like it? Am I ignorantly stomping on a good thing, that you liked?”
“My tastes are for the moment on the back burner. I’d simply be interested to hear why you disliked it.”
“I’m really not sure. It just seemed ... it was like you said about all the other troubled collegiate stuff. It just seemed artificial. Like the kid who wrote it was trying too hard.”
“I see.”
“All that stuff about, ‘And then context came in, and Fieldbaum looked bland.’ ”
“Fieldbinder. ”
“What?”
“Wasn’t the protagonist’s name Fieldbinder? In the story?”
“Right, Fieldbinder. But that stuff about context, though. Shouldn’t a story make the context that makes people do certain things and have the things be appropriate or not appropriate? A story shouldn’t just mention the exact context it’s supposed to try really to create, right?”
“....”
“And the writing was just so ... This one line I remember: ‘He grinned wryly.’ Grinned wryly? Who grins wryly? Nobody grins wryly, at all, except in stories. It wasn’t real at all. It was like a story about a story. I put it on Mavis’s desk with the ones about the proctologist and the snowblower.”
“ ...”
“But I’ll take it right back off if you liked it. You did like it, didn’t you? This means my tastes aren’t keened to the right pitch, doesn’t it?”
“Not ... not necessarily. I’m trying to remember where I got the thing. Must have been some kid, somewhere. Troubled. Trying to remember his cover letter ...”
“Although it was well typed, I noticed.”
“.... ”
“Let me just try one little smidgeon of your stew, here.”
“Think he said it was almost like a story about a story. The narrative center being the wife’s description of the occasion on which Costigan touched the son.... Almost a story about the way a story waits and waits but never dies, can always come back, even after ostensible characters have long since departed the real scene.”
“Really not all that bad.”
“What?”
“The broth is pretty good. Creamy. I guess it’s just the oysters I don’t like.”
“I seem to remember he said he conceived it as a story of neighborhood obsession. About how sometimes neighbors can become obsessed with other neighbors, even children, and perhaps even peer into their bedrooms across the fence from their dens ... but how it’s usually impossible for the respective neighbors to know about such things, because each neighbor is shut away inside his own property, his house, surrounded by a fence. Locked away. Everything meaningful both good-meaningful and bad-meaningful, kept private.”
“.... ”
“Except that ocasionally the Private leaked out, every once in a while, and became Incident. And that perceived Incident became Story. And that Story endured, in Mind, even behind and within the isolating membrane of house and property and fence that surrounded and isolated each individual suburb-resident.”
“Membrane?”
“Sorry. Poor choice of word. I’m sure I’ll hear it often enough this afternoon.”
“You see Jay this afternoon?”
“I told you that yesterday. We discussed it yesterday.”
“....”
“Is there some reason why you’d like me not to see him today?”
“....”
“And that, as I recall, some of the references in the story, the bird business, the burning house, the grinning-wryly business, had to do with a context created by a larger narrative system of which this piece was a part.”
“Well you can imagine I found the bird stuff upsetting. Especially about its being dead. Which Vlad the Impaler now in effect is, at least as far as I’m concerned, at least for a while.”
“He was on television last night, I’m told. Apparently Sykes’s show airs every single evening.”
“I know. Candy watched him last night. I guess he was really good. She said Sykes looked like he was in ecstasies.”
“You didn’t watch it?”
“Candy watched it at Mr. Allied’s. He’s got cable. We don’t get cable, at the Tissaws‘. Their house isn’t hooked up. Mrs. Tissaw usually just watches Oral Roberts on a regular channel. Actually the whole East Corinth-cable story is pretty unhappy, because the cable company and Dad are still—”
“Where were you?”
“What?”
“Where were you last night?”
“Oh, God, what all did I do. I went for a walk for a while. Watched some of a softball game at the park. They were pitching fast. I like it when they pitch fast. I talked to Dad on the phone about the LaVache thing for what turned out to be a long time. And then I went to sleep early. I did read some more of the stories, though. I read—”
“Where was Lang, then, I wonder.”
“....”
“You’re awfully pale.”
“Why do you think I’d know where Lang was?”
“I was just thinking out loud.”
“I heard a definite tone.”
“You heard nothing but your own imagination.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What is wrong with you, Lenore? Darling I swear I meant nothing at all.”
“....”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“....”
“Was the Fieldbinder piece that awful? Is that it?”
“A story can’t make you pale, or sick, Rick. That thing wasn’t even good enough in my opinion to have any effect on me, good or bad, at all.”
“Then what is it, Lenore?”
“....”
“Shall we just go? Norman has been tending to come in here, a lot; for lunches, at about this time, so perhaps—”
“And now what’s that supposed to mean?”
“My God, it meant nothing! I just thought you’d want to avoid seeing him, is all.”
“How does he even get in here anymore?”
“Apparently he simply establishes himself on the sidewalk. Newspapers are laid down. Things are brought to him in huge industrial containers. It’s not a pretty sight.”
“I guess we should go, then. I don’t want to have to try to get past him.”
“The Bombardini Company vice presidents are deeply worried. They claim in all seriousness that Norman is trying to eat himself to death.”
“Or everybody else to death.”
“Surely you don’t take those pathetic plans he was spinning seriously.”
“Don’t presume to tell me what I take seriously and don’t take seriously, Rick.”
“Good Lord, what is the matter with you?”
“.... ”
“Listen.... Listen to that.”
“....”
“Hear it?”
“I do hear something. It’s not thunder, is it?”
“Can’t be. Sun’s shining out past the shadow, see? I’m afraid I sense impending Norman.”
“We better go. You better finish your mouths.”
“Are you absolutely sure you’re all right?”
“....”
/d/

At work, Candy Mandible was smoking and sipping a Tab and enjoying Judith Prietht’s lunch break. Judith had been entering the too-much range. Today she had brought baggies full of sugar cookies in the shapes of cats and birds for Lenore and Candy. Judith was getting to be a real pain in the ass.
The console began beeping. Candy Started In and amused herself for a minute with a hoarse man wanting to know whether she preferred rough banisters to smooth banisters. Then she handled the next call.
“Frequent and Vigorous,” she said.
“Who?” said a voice.
“Frequent and Vigorous Publishing, Inc., may I help you,” Candy said, rolling her eyes.
“Christ, I thought I’d never get through,” the voice said. “Miss, did you know your phones are all fouled up?”
“There’ve been rumors to that effect, ma‘am. Can I help you with something?” Candy took some Tab, around the mouthpiece. She tried to place the voice on the phone. The voice sounded vaguely familiar.
“To whom am I speaking, please,” said the voice.
“This is Ms. Mandible, a Frequent and Vigorous operator,” said Candy Mandible.
“Ms. Mandible, I’m calling to see first whether you have a co-worker there, a Ms. Lenore Beadsman,” said the voice.
“Yes, we do,” said Candy. “Can I take a message for you.” She reached for the Legitimate Call Log.
“And second to see whether you also have a new employee there, a Mr. Lang,” said the voice. “I think he’s in the babyfood department, whatever that means.”
“Ma‘am whom shall I say is calling?” Candy said, opening the Log.
“This is Mrs. Andrew Sealander Lang, of New York,” said the voice.
Candy looked at the console, the circuit buttons in their gelatins of light.
“Hello?” the voice said.
“Yes, hello,” said Candy.
“Is my husband there, is what I need to know.”
“I believe he is with the firm at the present time, ma‘am, yes,” said Candy. “Shall I transfer you to his temporary office?”
“Does he have a direct number there?”
“All individual transfers are done through me at the switchboard, ma‘am. Please hold on.” Candy looked at the switchboard directory, got the number, Started In again, and transferred the call, just as Judith Prietht slouched wearily back into the cubicle.
“What’s happening, Candy?” Judith made a smile and changed her shoes for the slippers beneath her counter.
“Just fine,” Candy said, still staring at the lights in the console, reaching again for her Tab.
/e/

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP-SESSION IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D., THURSDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER 1990. PARTICIPANTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MR. RICK VIGOROUS, AGE 42, FILE NUMBER 744-25-4291.

DR. JAY: So as I see it we have three major and not unrelated themes for discussion. Dream. You. Lenore.
MR. RICK VIGOROUS: Preferably the latter. What did you do to her in here, today? She looked simply awful at lunch.
DR. JAY: No pain, no gain. Enormous, enormous strides, today. Breakthrough positively looming on the emotional horizon. And of course there is the Lang issue.
RICK: The Lang issue?
JAY: The young man from your dream?
RICK: Why is he an issue outside the confines of the dream?
JAY: Who said he was?
RICK: You did.
JAY: Did I? I don’t really recall explicitly saying that.
RICK: What an ass-pain you are.
Dr. Jay pauses.
RICK: I officially demand to know how and why Lang is an issue. JAY: You said the Lang dream made you wake up screaming.
RICK,. Streaming.
JAY: Watch me exercise self-control.
Rick Vigorous pauses.
JAY: Penis problems, still. Am I right?
RICK: Listen to this. I’m amazed. Last time I was here you said “penis shmenis.”
JAY: But I sense intuitively that Lang has become for you the Other, no? The Other in reference to whom you choose to understand Self, in all its perceived inadequacy?
RICK: I don’t know. What, did Lenore mention Lang to you?
JAY: Why did you bring this person back to Cleveland with you, if he upsets you so?
RICK: I really do not know. We met in our old fraternity bar. Things were strange. Affinities seemed to be jutting out everywhere. He simply seemed to fit in. To click.
JAY: So you brought him within your network.
RICK: I hate to sound like a mutual acquaintance of ours, but somehow
I felt I had little choice. It was as though a context was created in which it would have been inappropriate not to bring him inside.
JAY: Inside?
RICK: Into the nexus of my professional and emotional life.
JAY: I see. And what about Lenore? Is Lenore “inside,” to continue your use of a term positively dripping with Blentnerian connotations? RICK: I hope that she will be someday.
JAY: A conspicuous hmmm. And you, Rick. Are you “inside,” in the context of Lenore’s network?
RICK: Don’t be sadistic. You know I can never be that.
JAY: The Screen Door of Union, et cetera.
RICK: Make my ears stop rumbling.
Dr. Jay pauses.
Rick Vigorous pauses.
JAY: Rick, friend, has it never occurred to you that you might actually represent the genetic cutting edge?
RICK: The what?
JAY: I invite you to think about it. We as a species used to have tails, no? A full coat of thick body-hair? Prehensile toes? Far keener senses of taste, small, hearing, et cetera than we possess today? We eventually lost all these features.Tossed them aside. Why was this?
RICK: What are you trying to say?
JAY: Rick, we didn’t need them. The context in which they had an appropriate function dissolved. They had no use.
RICK: What are you trying to say?
JAY: I suppose I am trying to bring into the focus of our emotional attention the following features of the contemporary society we both enjoy. Genetic engineering. Artificial insemination. Quantum leaps in the technology of sexual aids and implements and prostheses. Perhaps what most of us perceive as the centers of ourselves are simply no longer needed. And we both know that the absence of function, in nature, means death. There is nothing superfluous in nature. Perhaps you are the next wave, Rick. Have you ever thought of that, in the quiet times? Perhaps you are to this Lang what the first upright man was to the crouched, hunched, drooling simian. A sort of god. A prototype, seated on nature’s right hand, for the nonce. A man for the future.
RICK: I think I’d prefer to be the drooling simian, thank you very much. JAY: And why is that?
RICK: I’ll bet you can puzzle it out.
JAY: It has to do with Lenore.
Rick Vigorous pauses.
JAY: Rick, I put a vital question to you in the gentlest and most diplomatic terms possible. Do you think you are truly what Lenore Beadsman wants? What she really needs?
RICK: We love each other.
JAY: You didn’t answer my question. We both know that Lenore is a wonderful but not insignificantly troubled girl. Are you helping her? Are you concerned with her needs? Are you engaged in the sort of discriminating, mature love that focuses primary attention on the needs and interests of the beloved?
RICK: I definitely don’t think Lang is what she needs.
JAY: Who said Lang is what Lenore needs? It’s you we’re discussing, here.
RICK: I think I’d rather discuss Lenore.
JAY: And the issues are separate, aren’t they? And recognized as such. Discussing Lenore is different from discussing you.
RICK: There’s something wrong with that?
JAY: I didn’t say that, Rick. I was simply making an observation. You and Lenore are distinct. Your networks may overlap, but they are distinct. They are neither identical nor coextensive. They are distinct. RICK: What about my dream? Now I’m both afraid to go to the bathroom and afraid to go to sleep. There’s not too much left.
JAY: I personally think the dream is far too complicated to tackle in the short time remaining to us today. For what it’s worth to you, I believe it represents a gigantic foot in the door of breakthrough. I might make a few off-the-cuff observations, if you wish. Shall I?
RICK: (uninteUigible).
JAY: The dream strikes me as being simply chock full of networks. Inside-Outside relations. Inside is the office, outside is the shadow and the little girl, both threatening to enter, to suck you in. Lenore is inside the page, inside the drawing Lang creates with his bottle, but she transcends her context and comes quickly to emblazon her context on his outside. You are trapped behind, inside, the fan of urine, but the tea bag you use to try to cover your difference from the Other “bleeds out” into the hot liquid and stains, discolors, soils the already unclean out-of-contro! extension of Self that imprisons you. A tea bag in hot liquid strikes this psychologist as a perfect archetypal image for the disorienting and disrupting influence of a weak-membraned hygiene-identity network on the associations of distinct networks in relation to which it does, must, understand itself. So on and so on. Airless scream: air cannot get inside your lungs. Lenore “drowning”: clean air in lungs displaced by the exponentially soiled element of soiling tea in soiling Self-extending liquid. Lang holds Lenore under the stained surface with his anus, the absolute archetypal locus of the unclean. There are of course the seemingly ever-present mice, in the putrid currents. Mice we’ve discussed at length already ...
RICK: OK, that’s enough. I might have known that—
JAY: But, see, it’s not at all surprisingly Lenore who really fascinates me, in the context of the dream. Your unconscious conceiving of Lenore as somehow “rising off a page.” The Lang drawing serving to place Lenore initially in the network he constructs, making her two-dimensional, non-real, existing and defined wholly within the border of a page, a page on the reverse of which is a story, a network very definitely of your construction, so that—
RICK: A story Lenore went out of her way to scoff at, at lunch, by the way.
JAY: I’m not equipped to discuss that; that’s not my area. My area is the fact that Lang constructs a Lenore, constructs her the way we each of course construct, impose our frameworks of perception and understanding on, the persons who inhabit our individual networks. Yes, Lang constructs a Lenore, and initially she is trapped and two-dimensional and unreal.... Ah, but then he puts marks, initials, his initials, on her, in her. Penetrates her carefully constructed network with his Self, his self, of which the initials are an elegantly transparent symbol and flag. So Lang in the dream is able to bring himself within the very Lenore-membrane he has constructed. He puts himself in her. And what happens, Rick?
RICK: Jesus.
JAY: What happens, my friend?
Rick Vigorous pauses.
JAY: Oh, she becomes real, Rick. She becomes free. She bursts out from behind the membrane of two-dimensionality the page represents and becomes real. Hair, hands, breasts, feet tumesce and burst up and out from the flattening, constricting network of membrane. She rises and circles the room. Was this circling a walking circling, Rick, or a floating circling?
RICK: It wasn’t clear.
JAY: Well, no matter. She escapes, Rick. She is free, real. That is to say, she is no longer merely inside a network, she is a network. Reality and identity rear their Siamese heads at the junction of Network. And what is the newly three-dimensional Lenore doing? She is signing the Other, putting herself on, in, the Other who set her free through membrane-permeation. She puts herself inside a network.
RICK: Lang’s network.
JAY: The network that set her free, Rick. The network that made her real. Only as real is she able to bring herself truly inside an Other. A clean thing is necessarily a reciprocal thing, Rick. Lenore kneels, with overtones perhaps not so much sexual as they are religious, I think, and puts herself on, in. She is valid, Rick. You are watching Lang and Lenore give birth to validity.
RICK: But where am I in all this? Am I chopped liver in the validity-scheme?
JAY: You are watching, Rick. You are the watcher, the observer, looking on from a spatial-dash-emotional elsewhere. You are intrinsically Outside, here. You cannot enter the networks. Why not?
RICK: Jesus.
JAY: And what is the last recourse of an inefficacious hygiene network unable validly to interact with the networks of the Other-set? You soil, Rick. You soil. You enter the networks by dirtying. The childish loss of bladder control, the fan, the swirling currents. The uncleanness made all the more unclean by the introduction of the contents of the tea bag, the shield and symbol within the dream of the locus of your difference and inability validly to enter, its introduction into the hot unclean liquid that represents your only interaction-vehicle. From Outside, you can influence only by soiling, dirtying, disrupting the hygiene networks of those who are valid.
RICK: You’re being cruel, Jay. Go back to blatant bullshit. I vastly prefer blatant bullshit to overt cruelty.
JAY: You know, Olaf Blentner once said to me, over tea, that when reality is unpleasant, realists tend to be unpopular. Rick, as a last resort you try to soil. You try to drown and negate the valid Lenore by dirtying. But it does not work. It cannot. Even from below the currents of your filth and difference, Lenore’s hand, with the violet pen, emerges to carry on the valid membrane-interaction. You are truly Outside, here, Rick. You cannot meaningfully influence. The only recourse of the defective hygiene network is the unclean, and it is impotent in the face of the real, the true.
RICK: Lenore has spoken to you of Lang, hasn’t she?
JAY: Rick, you and your dreaming unconscious have spoken to me of Lang far more eloquently than poor Lenore ever did, or even could. You have, I think, truly perceived a valid need in an Other. You are. striding, in my opinion.
Rick Vigorous pauses.
JAY: And why are you and Lang naked in the dream, Rick? Why is the validating pen in the shape of a beer bottle, with all of that image’s attendant phallic and urological overtones?
RICK: And then why, in this context, does Lenore grasp Lang’s member as she signs? Is the member supposed to be the symbol of membrane-penetration ?
JAY: The symbol, Rick? The symbol?
RICK: More than the symbol?
JAY: I am being knocked backward by the force of breakthrough-smell.
RICK: Sit back up, you ass. This is my life you’re f*cking with.
JAY: What an interesting choice of verb.
RICK’ So when I’d come to you with these clearly profoundly sexual dreams and you’d say that they were just hygiene-dreams, you weren‘t, under your analysis, really disagreeing with me, were you? The hygiene-fixated is the sexually fixated.
Dr. Jay pauses,
RICK: Don’t just smile at me, damn you. And the hygiene-identity membrane is you’re implying the what? What is it?
JAY: What might the membrane be, here, Rick? Let’s think together. What membrane might Lenore have needed to have permeated in order to feel real, connected? Valid? Transcending in and for her reality the mere reference and emotional attention of the Other, of you? What membrane does the thinking student and friend of the center of your existence conclude that Lenore needed to have penetrated for her?
RICK: What do you mean needed to have penetrated? What does that mean? What has she told you?
JAY: Was Lenore a virgin when she became part of your intrinsically inefficacious network, Rick?
RICK: My God.
JAY: No symbol is merely a symbol, Rick. A symbol is valid and appropriate because its reference is real. You should know that, being a man of letters yourself.
RICK: Lang has had her.
JAY: Would that make you uncomfortable in this context?
RICK: Oh my ears! God!
JAY: Would you like to try some gum?
RICK: I’ll kill him. I’ll kill her.
JAY: That’s right, Rick. Perform the ultimate soiling. Blacken, erase, discipline and negate the valid network that of necessity finds its validity-reference outside your own system.
RICK: My life is over. It’s all over.
JAY: Please see that I have here said nothing to you about Lenore Beadsman’s private affairs. That is not my place. Whatever interactions she might choose to engage in with a virile blond bestower of validity, close to her own age and socio-economic background, are no matter for my tale-telling relationship with you. Let your dreams speak, Rick. That’s what they’re for.
RICK: How do you know his age? That he’s blond and virile, with a socio-economic background?
JAY: I’m simply going to have to put this gas mask on. Also please note that our time is nearly up.
RICK: Wear whatever you want. But I’m not leaving until I’m good and ready.
JAY: (muffled) What a task lies before us, my old friend. What a horrible, wonderful opportunity for the exercise of strength. The vital question: Are we mature? Do we love truly? Do we love an as yet two-dimensional membrane enough to afford that membrane entry into validity, reality, three-dimensionality, to afford it an escape from the very flattening context exclusively within which the original love can be exercised and pseudo-reciprocated? Do we, recognizing our inability to enter and fertilize and permeate and validate a membrane, an Other, let that Other out, back outside, to a clean, odor-free place where she can find fullness, fulfillment, realness?
RICK: I suddenly take it all back. This is utter tripe. I reject everything you’ve said. Your supposed to be helping me, you shit. Your function here is to help me. All this Blentnerian crapola boils down to the fact that you want me to sit idly by and watch the object of my adoration and the complete reference and telos of every action of my whole life go off and get balled until she bleeds by some horny, silky-smooth, lecherous yuppie, one who just happens to have a large organ where I do not.
JAY: But precisely my point has just been borne out, Rick. Listen to what you just said. The object of your so-and-so. The reference of your so-and-so. An object and reference are intrinsically and eternally Other, Rick. See? And so she must remain for you. The question: have we the wherewithal to allow that Other to be a Self?
RICK: Shall I simply eat her? That’s what Norman Bombardini apparently proposes to do. Shall I consume her? Then the Other will certainly become Self.
Dr. Jay pauses.
RICK: Lang wears a type of shoe toward which Lenore feels a rabid hatred.
JAY: Lenore Beadsman’s foot- and shoe-fixations occur and exist within a disordered hygiene-network thoroughly infected with membrane ambiguity. Surely you can see that.
RICK: This is shit. I cannot believe I’m listening to this.
Dr. Jay pauses.
RICK: Where is this Olaf Blentner? I’ll talk to him directly. Spit in his eye. How’ll he like those apples?
JAY: Olaf Blentner is no more. Professor Blentner has returned to the soil.
RICK: How appropriately ironic. Hopefully interred in a cow pasture, laced with bullshit. Dust to dust.
JAY: Anger is absolutely appropriate and natural, here, Rick. Shall I get out the Nerf clubs, and we’ll go a few rounds? I’m here to help as best I can, within the limits imposed by the reality of the situation we find ourselves in.
RICK: Shut up. Where are these so-called Heidelberg Hygiene Lectures? Let me read them. I’ll write and publish a review of them so scathing your eyes will bleed.
JAY: I’m afraid they’re on loan to another client and friend.
RICK: Not Lenore.
JAY: Rick, I’m afraid our time looks to be truly up. I have other longtime clients and friends waiting. Shall I start your chair?
RICK: You bastard.
JAY: Come see me again just as soon as possible. Tell Mrs. Schorr you’re to be given the very next available appointment.
RICK: Jay, convince Lenore that I am what she needs. Help me bring her into me. Then nothing will matter. I’ll pay absolutely anything. JAY: You insult my integrity. You also cast doubt on the very emotion you profess to believe motivates all your actions. I’ll dismiss this as coming from the understandable emotional strain of the moment. RICK: Oh, God.
JAY: Goodbye, Rick. Think over what we’ve seen together today. Call me anytime. I am truly here for you. Here goes the chair. Goodbye.
Rick Vigorous pauses.
JAY: Goodbye.
RICK: (unintelligible).
DOOR: Click.
JAY: (unmuffled) Wow.
/f/

9 September. 9 September.
Lenore Beadsman is f*cking Andrew Sealander (“Wang-Dang”) Lang. It is. In a matter of moments this boy, with a grin, perhaps a brief nail-polishing brush of his hand against his shirt, has taken something I can never have. My object and reference sits outside, punctured and validated by the extension of another. And
9 September

Idea for Fieldbinder Collection

Fieldbinder ruminates in presence of pathetic and sadistic psychologist Dr.J___ on the comparative merits of the word “f*ck. ”
“We beg your pardon?” said Dr. J___, curling his harelip in incre dulity.
Fieldbinder smiled coolly. “The word ‘f*ck,’ Dr. J__. Has it never occurred to you that the word, far from being harsh or ugly, is in truth a strangely lovely word? An appropriate word? I’ll not say onomatopoetic, \ but rather lovely and appropriate. Perhaps even musical. ”
Dr. J__ wriggled his hideous body in his chair. Fieldbinder smiled coolly, continuing, “The word chosen to designate the act—the supreme act of a distinctively human life, the act in reference to the pleasure and meaning of which I naturally understand myself, being as you once remarked an almost exclusively sexual enn‘ty—the word chosen to designate the act must also be extremely important, no?”
“God, what a man he is, ” whispered the doctor, barely audibly, rolling his walleyes until the action hurt the styes which crusted his eyelids.
“No, really, ” smiled Fieldbinder. “Think of the sound, ‘f*ck. ’ ‘F*ck’ A good sound. A solid sound. The sound of a heavy coin rattling in a thick porcelain cup. The sound of a drop of clear cold water falling into a still pond from a great height. Roll the word on your tongue for a while, Dr. J___.”
There was a silence while the doctor rolled the word silently on his cold gray tongue. Across the ambiguously lit room, Fieldbinder obliterated a tiny wrinkle from his impeccable slacks.
“I can recall being a student in college, ” Fieldbinder ruminated after a time. “I can recall even then a deep dissatisfaction with the words used by my peers to designate the act. In college, women were locutionally reduced to earth, or impediment. ‘Have you blasted her?’ ‘Drill her yet?’ ‘I pounded hell out of her last night.’ None of these are right, Dr. J___, is this not transparently clear? None of these words are adequate to capture not only the reference but the sense of an act in which two distinct selves interpenetrate, not only physically, but also of course emotionally. I simply must say, as crass as we are conditioned by a troubled society to regard the word, I am a firm believer in the comparative merits of the word ‘f*ck.’ ” Fieldbinder looked up and smiled coolly. “Have I offended you?”
“No, hissed Dr, J____, playing maniacally with the controls of his mechanical chair, making it bounce up and down suggestively, as drool coated the doctor’s pathetically weak chin.
Fietdbinder smiled coolly and speculatively stroked his own generous jaw, lingering over the deep cleft that somehow through physical processes obscure caught and reflected light in such a way as to blind anyone who tried to look directly into Fieldbinder’s deep green eyes deep blue eyes, the color of cold crystal, with tiny fluffy white diamonds frozen in irises of ice.
Fieldbinder grinned wryly. “The word has a music, in my opinion, is all.”
I just
“And your house?” Dr. J_____ lispingly hissed. “Are we not deeply upset at the destruction of your house, at the death of your phenomenal pet in its iron cage, at the disastrous fire and the plunge into disorientation and chaos which such an event must symbolize and entail?” J_____ played with himself covertly under his note pad.
Fieldbinder smiled coolly. “Doctor, I believe I have progressed to the point where I can honestly say that the event did not significantly ‘upset’ me—with all the ramifications and meanings implicit in your choice of the word. Attachment to things, to places, to other living beings requires in my view expenditures of energy and attention far in excess of the value of the things thus brought into the relation of attachment. Does this seem unreasonable! The attempt to have the order of one’s life depend on things and persons outside that life is a silly thing, a thing perhaps appropriate only for those weaker, less successful, less fortunate, less advanced than I. ”
“We are not sure what you mean, Mooted Dr. J_____, lovingly stroking the controls of his mechanical chair.
“Think of it this way, doctor,” said Fieldbinder patiently, smiling coolly. “Think of the Self as at the node of a fan-shaped network of emotions, dispositions, extensions of that feeling and thinking Self. Each line in the protruding network-fan may of course have an external reference and attachment. A house, a woman, a bird, a woman. But it need not be so. The line that seeks purchase in and attachment to an exterior Other is necessarily buttressed, supported, held; it thus becomes small, weak, flabby, reliant on Other. Were the exterior reference and attachment to disappear, unlikely as that obviously sounds in my own case, the atrophied line would crumble weakly, might also disappear. The Self would be smaller than before. And even a Self as prodigious as myself must look upon diminution with disfavor.” Fiekibinder grinned wryly, removed a molecule of lint from his impeccable slacks. “Better to have the lines of the fan stand on their own: self-sufficient, rigid, hard, jutting out into space. Should someone find herself attracted to one of the lines, she could of course fall upon it with all the ravenousness that would be only natural. But she shall not be the reference. Only the ephemeral night insect, drawn to a light that is intrinsically inaccessible. She may be consumed in the line’s light, but still the line stands, juts out, rigidly, far into the space exterior to the Self. ”
“We are afraid we are inequipped to understand such a thing, ” hissed J_____ “Please allow me to consult and masturbate over the writings of my teacher.”
“No real need for that, doctor. ” Fieldbinder held up a stop-palm and smiled coolly. “I think it is in my power to put the insight in terms you can readily understand. Have you by any chance ever watched an animated television program called ‘The Road Runner’?”
“I watch the cartoon ever week; I am a rabid fan. ” Drool cascaded over _____ ’s chin as he wriggled in his chair, his feet dangling far above the burnt-yellow office carpet.
“I somehow guessed as much, ” smiled Fieldbinder. “So too is my latest mistress, when she is not busy working as an incredibly successful recorder of messages for cash registers in high-quality supermarkets. I have on occasion taken a Saturday morning off and watched the program with her. Has it occurred to you that ‘The Road Runner’ is what might aptly be termed an existential program? That it comments not uninter estingly on the very attitudes that would be implicit in a person’s feeling ’upset’ over a catastrophic fire in his home? I see you are puzzled, ” Fieldbinder said, noticing Dr. J______ frantically scratching his head, a plume of dandruff shooting up into the air of the office only to resettle on the obscene bald spot in the middle of the doctor’s skull-shaped head.
Fieldbinder smiled and continued, “I invite you to realize that this program does nothing other than present us with a protagonist, a coyote, functioning within a system interestingly characterixed as a malevolent Nature, a protagonist who endlessly, tirelessly, disastrously pursues a thing, a telos—the bird in the title role—a thing and goal far, far less valuable than the effort and resources the protagonist puts into its pursuit.” Fieldbinder grinned wryly. “The thing pursued—a skinny meatless bird—is far less valuable than the energy and attention and economic resources expended by the coyote on the process of pursuit. Just as an attachment radiating from the Self outward is worth far less than the price the establishment of such an attachment inevitably exacts. ”
Dr. J___ inflated an anatomically correct doll and began to fondle it as it stared blankly. Fieldbinder smiled patiently.
“A question, doctor, ” he said. “Why doesn’t the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapaults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?” He smiled coolly. “Why doesn’t the coyote simply go eat Chinese food? ”Fieidbinder’s face assumed a cool, bland, wry expression as he attended to his impeccable slacks.
Dr. J____ snarkd and
/g/

“Rick? Am I interrupting?”
“....”
“I can come back.”
“What is it.”
“It’s just about this kid-putting-himself-through-prep-school submission. Is the Physicians’ Desk Reference a real book, or is it just a made-up name?”
“The P.D.R. is real.”
“.... ”
“It numbers among its features a cataloguing, chemical breakdown, manufacturer, dosage, and contraindications for almost every known form of prescription medication available in the United States, in a given year.”
“Oh.”
“People seriously interested in drugs and things medical, but particularly drugs, swear by it.”
“Even kids?”
“Especially kids.”
“How come you know all this?”
“I knew a child who swore by his copy of the P.D.R. Who used to keep it hidden in his toychest, under his old football pads and helmet.”
“Your son?”
“.... ”
“It‘s,pretty late, you know. The lake’s all spoiled mayonnaise now, see?”
“....”
“Look, I’m sorry I was testy at lunch. Dr. Jay had just got done being incredibly weird and obnoxious. I’m seriously considering not seeing him anymore. I think we need to talk about it.”
“Do we.”
“Anyway, I’m sorry.”
“Not a problem at all. Not a problem, at all.”
“Are you going to work much more? Is that Norslan stuff?”
“No. Yes.”
“Is Andy still around?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know, Lenore.”
“You should have heard what he said to Candy this afternoon, at Mr. Bombardini’s meeting. You want to hear about it?”
“Not particularly.”
“Are you going to work much more?”
“I haven’t picked up my Plain Dealer yet. I believe I’ll drop down and pick it up and catch up on things, for a bit.”
“You don’t feel like going to dinner, then?”
“.... ”
“Um, maybe I’ll just stay out at Mavis’s desk and do some more submissions, and wait until you maybe want to go.”
“....”
“Are you OK?”
“Come closer. I can’t see you in this light.”
“Look, I’m sorry I said that that Fieldbinder story you obviously liked sucked canal-water. It was one an eminent friend sent you, right? It all became clear to me this afternoon. Let’s consider it one of the things that keened my pitch. I took it off the rejection pile. I asterisked it.”
“Not a problem at all.”
“So should I wait for you, for dinner?”
“Do whatever you feel valid and three-dimensional doing, Lenore.”
“Pardon me?”
“In answer to your question, the Physicians’ Desk Reference is very real. It has transcended its context, one might say.”
“Are you sure you’re OK? Was Jay a total shit to you too?”
“Just feel a bit ... tired and small tonight. A little coyote-ish.”
“Coyote-ish?”
“....”
/h/

Nearly six, the sun low and the shadow full and the watery lights lit high overhead in the lobby ceiling, Judith Prietht was closing up shop and getting ready to shut down the console for the night, the Bombardini Company getting more than enough legitimate calls during business hours. Into her shopping bag went the limp-necked sweater she had almost finished knitting; off went her slippers and on went her street shoes; now off when her console (Position Release and Position Busy pushed together shut down a Centrex 28 equipped with a special Shutdown feature, which the Frequent and Vigorous console wasn‘t, and could only be put to rest by removing the console cable itself from its jack in the back with a ratchet wrench, an option exercised on more than one occasion by Vern Raring in the really empty, quiet part of the night); off went her lamp, leaving the Frequent and Vigorous half of the switchboard cubicle in a softer kind of light; on went her hair net; in went a Certs. Out she went, blowing a not-returned kiss to Candy Mandible, home to feed her cat.
Candy sat smoking again, waiting for Vem Raring to come in at six, trying not to look at the little clock over the console while she told the latest Lang story to Walinda Peahen, who sat completing time sheets for submission to Payroll the next morning, Friday. Walinda was not in a good mood, having been kept overtime in her other job at Frequent Leisure Suit today, but Candy Mandible was the kind of woman who tended to ignore moods not caused directly by her; and since Walinda Peahen was the kind of woman whose bad moods tended to be made worse by people around her behaving as if she were in a bad mood, she and Candy actually got on fairly well, and it was Candy who had originally gotten Lenore her job, this fact now being the only really sore point in Candy-Walinda relations.
“Be needin’ to hire somebody else now that the girl finally got promoted by her squeeze,” Walinda had said.
“Only a temporary person, though,” Candy said. “Because she’s only going to be helping Mr. Vigorous temporarily, while he’s incredibly busy with the Stonecipheco account.”
“Huh,” said Walinda. She turned eyes thick with shadow on Candy. “Girl what you mean Stonecipheco? Vigorous told me it was a big new Norslan account they got.”
“Andy Lang told me that’s what Mr. Vigorous is supposed to tell people,” Candy said, turning slightly to avoid blowing smoke in Walinda’s face. “But it’s really not. It’s really Stonecipheco baby food.”
“And that crap be nasty?” said Walinda. “On sale once, and I give it to my child, and he like to die. Lenore be makin’ some foul-ass food, for all her money.”
“Lenore doesn’t make the food, Walinda, you know that.” Candy sighed. “And you know she doesn’t get any money from it. And just please remember to only hire somebody temporary, is all.”
Walinda didn’t say anything, and Candy launched into the Lang story.
“It was a scream,” she said. “I died. I laughed so hard that I died.”
Walinda worked the adding machine and didn’t say anything.
“I know you couldn’t come,” Candy continued, “but you know today Mr. Bombardini was having a meeting for everybody in both firms in the Building? You got the memo about that, right?”
“I got it. And I heard y‘all just had to hear the fat man talk about his Building.”
“Well it was just really bizarre, is all I can say. He was on this platform, with these like eight incredible hunks in loincloths holding him up in the air, and he was going on and on about how we all needed to begin to reconcile ourselves to having less space in the Building, because there was going to be a steadily decreasing amount of space for us, and then he stopped even mentioning the Building at all and. started talking about there like being less space for us in general, like the world was getting small or something, and he had this weird fiendish light in his eyes, and plus it looked like he’d gained about a thousand pounds or so, and he kept looking at Lenore like he wanted to eat her, and kept dropping all these hints about how there could be some space for some of us if we came around and played our cards right. Bombardini’s totally infatuated with Lenore, ever since his wife left him for a yogurt salesman. He sends her flowers almost every day.”
“Maybe she can get us a bigger cubicle in here, then,” Walinda said thoughtfully, adding up hours.
“But anyway the point is that it was supposed to be an incredibly serious meeting, and it was really a tense scene, and deadly quiet, ‘cause everybody’s scared to death of Mr. Bombardini,” Candy said, blowing a ring and putting a red-nailed finger through it. “So it was deadly quiet, and Bombardini was going on and on, and this Andy Lang guy was sitting right in front of Lenore and me, and he all of a sudden starts turning around in his chair, really slowly, and looks all intensely at us, like he’s got something really important to say, and we lean forward, and he leans back to us, and he whispers to us, real loud, ’I have an erection.‘ ” Candy began to laugh, with big breaths, making Walinda laugh too. “And I died, and started laughing, and it was even worse because it was such a deadly quiet and serious situation, and Lenore started laughing too, and we couldn’t stop. And then but Lang turned back around innocent as can be and started listening to Mr. Bombardini again, and there we were dying, laughing like hell. It was ... awful.” Candy was laughing so hard that smoking became impossible. She dropped her cigarette in an old can of Tab, where it hissed and fizzed and died.
Walinda chuckled. “Ooh child. What’d Lenore’s little man think of that, I wonder. Was he sittin’ in her lap at the time?”
“Mr. Vigorous wasn’t there,” said Candy. “He apparently had some kind of appointment. I think you two were the only ones not there, of the day people.”
Walinda wet her finger and turned a time sheet. Candy started to get her things together in preparation for Vem’s arrival. Into her purse went her pack of Djarum; on went her shoes ...
“Excuse me,” said a voice in front of the switchboard counter. “I’m looking for Mr. Lang.”
Walinda looked up briefly and narrowed her eyes and went back to her adding machine. Candy straightened up from putting on her shoes and looked into the eyes of Mindy Metalman Lang.
“I’m Mrs. Lang,” the woman said coolly. “I’m here looking for Mr. Lang. My husband. I was told by someone on the phone that he works here, even though the number they said was his when they put me through to him didn’t answer after thirty rings.”
Candy didn’t answer right away. She was busy staring at what she, Candice Eunice Mandible, would very probably be, had she not had the ever so slightest bit of an overbite, and had she had perhaps ten more judiciously distributed pounds, and eyes more like wings, and had she been rich per se. She saw perfection; she smelled White Shoulders; she assumed the fur jacket was sable. This was an enormously beautiful woman, here, and Candy stared, and also unconsciously began smoothing the tight old violet cotton dress she had on.
Mindy was staring back, but not really at Candy so much as at Candy’s dress. Her eyes faded a bit, as if she were trying to latch onto an elusive memory. Her eyes were different from Candy‘s, too. Very. Where Candy’s were light brown and almost perfectly round, giving her face almost too much symmetry, making it an almost triangular face when it would have been nicer and more comforting as a rounder, more vague-at-the-edges face, Mindy’s eyes were so dark they were almost black, and they seemed to spread out far more across the upper ridges of her cheeks, and back at the sides, like the wings of a dark sort of fluttery bird: large, delicate, full of a kind of motion even when still. Really nice eyes. A face very much like Candy’s, but vaguer at the edges, and so really better. Candy smoothed at her dress some more.
“Girl what you doin‘, employee addresses in the directory,” Walinda said to Candy, and she pushed the directory across the white counter until it hit Candy’s hand. “Wrote his address down at the back myself,” Walinda said.
Candy didn’t have to look at the directory. “Mr. Lang’s temporarily staying in a building in East Corinth, which is a suburb south of here.” She smiled at Mindy. “Actually the same building, or house is more like it, as mine, which is how come I know, although it’s a rooming house, so still like a building; it’s not like he’s living in my house.” She laughed breathily.
“I see,” Mindy said with a bit of a smile, nodding. “Perhaps then you could just jot down the address for me.”
Candy reached for a pad and pen and jotted.
“There was, too, the office number, which the operator tried before,” said Mindy. “Perhaps you could try him again for me. What ... department is he in?” She looked around her at the marble lobby and the soft red chairs for lobby-dwellers and the tiny veins of the last bit of sunset moving together in the blackness of the walls.
“Translation,” Candy told her, not looking up.
“Translation?”
“Baby food,” Walinda Peahen said, flashing hostile green-shadowed eyes at Mindy’s fur jacket and then returning to tax forms.
“Baby food?”
“Nix,” Candy murmured into Walinda’s ear. She stood up and pushed the Tissaws’ address across the counter to Mindy.
“And I’d ring his office for you, but I happen to know he’s not there, Candy smiled. ”He left the office after a Building-wide meeting, about three this afternoon. I know more or less where he’ll be tonight, though.“
“Do you.” it
“He’s going to be in a bar called Gilligan’s Isle with an old friend of his, watching religious television.”
Mindy was putting Lang’s address into a really nice étienne Aig ner purse. She snapped it closed and looked up. “Religious television ? Andy?”
“One of the ... The show features a bird who belongs to a friend of mine, and of Mr. Lang‘s,” said Candy. “We’re all going to try to watch the bird tonight.”
“A bird? Andy’s going to watch a bird on religious television?”
“Gilligan’s Isle is just right across Erieview Plaza from here,” Candy said, pointing in the correct direction out through the revolving door of the lobby. “It’s pretty easy to find. Has big colored statues in it.”
Mindy was staring at the violet dress again. She looked up into Candy’s round eyes. “Have we met before?” she said.
“No we haven‘t, I don’t think.” Candy shook her head and then cocked it. “Why?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t mean to be impolite, but I know I’ve seen that dress before.”
“This dress?” Candy looked down at herself. “This is an incredibly ancient dress. It used to belong to a friend of mine, the person who also owns the bird I just mentioned. Do you know Lenore Beadsman?”
The console began to beep. “Wait a minute,” Candy was saying to Mindy. “You mentioned Lenore on the phone when I talked to you.” Mindy just looked at her. Walinda was making no move toward the console. Candy bent to the call. A rapid, in-house flash. “Operator,” she said.
Mindy had suddenly bent over the top of the cubicle counter and was looking down at the equipment. “That’s a Centrex,” she said to Walinda. “Is that a Centrex?”
Walinda looked up and narrowed her eyes again. “Yeah, it is.”
“In school, in Massachusetts, my roommate worked as a student operator, for the college, and sometimes I’d read at the switchboard at night to keep her company. They had a Centrex.”
“Twenty-eight?”
“I really have no idea.”
“Mmmm.”
Candy released and straightened up. “Well that was just Mr. Lang’s supervisor, on the phone, Mrs. Lang. He’s coming down for his newspaper, the supervisor.” Candy gestured over at a well-perused issue of that day’s Plain Dealer that lay on top of the cubicle typewriter’s gray plastic dustcover. “If you’ll wait here a second, he could probably answer your questions a lot better than I could.”
Mindy continued to look down at the console. Then she smiled up at Candy. “I was freshman roommates at Holyoke with Lenore Beadsman’s sister,” she said in a low voice.
Candy’s jaw dropped. “God, is this Clarice’s dress?” she said. “Lenore sure didn’t tell me. And well I had no idea you knew Lenore’s family.” Through the doors came Vem Raring, at 6:05. “Listen, here’s my relief, so to speak,” Candy said. “Let’s just go have a seat out in the lobby, here, and we can—”
“But Lenore and I have met too,” said Mindy, as if she had decided something, smiling for Candy a truly beautiful smile.
“No kidding. Well I had no idea Lenore knew Andy’s wife.” Candy clapped her hands once and smiled back into the wings of Mindy Metalman’s eyes. “Listen,” Candy said. “I really just love your jacket. Can I maybe touch it?”
“I suppose so.”
Candy was stroking Mindy’s sleeve when she looked past Mindy at the elevators in the northeast comer and saw Rick Vigorous and Lenore emerge.
“Well here’s Lenore and Mr. Vigorous both, now,” she said. Vem Raring entered the cubicle and gave Walinda Peahen a big kiss on the cheek, and she pretended to swat him, both of them laughing.
Mindy turned way around, so that her sleeve was all of a sudden out of Candy’s reach. Candy’s hand hit the counter. Mindy looked into the orange and black.
“Mr. Vigorous?”