The Broom of the System

18
1990
/a/

“Good morning, Patrice.”
“Good morning. How are you this morning?”
“I’m just fine thank you. The nurse tells me you have something for me. ”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask what it is?” “Three men go camping in the woods. One of the men starts out doing all the cooking, but the three men make an arrangement where, if either of the other two complain about the man’s cooking, the complainer will automatically take over the cooking.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Patrice.”
“The cook cooks and cooks, and the other two campers smile and say it’s very good, and they all continue to camp. And by and by the cook gets tired of cooking, and wishes someone would complain and so have to take over for him, but there are still no complaints. So the cook begins overcooking things on purpose, or burning them, or hardly cooking them and having them be raw. But the other two campers still eat it all and manage to smile. Soon the cook begins putting soap in the coffee, sprinkling dirt on everything he cooks, but still the other two go out of their way not to complain.”
“Is this a joke? This is a joke, Patrice, I can tell.”
“So finally the cook gets angry, he’s so very tired of cooking, and he goes deep into the woods and finds a pile of moose droppings, and he takes them back to camp and roasts them, and serves them for dinner, along with soapy coffee. And the other two campers dig in, and the cook smiles at them expectantly, and they’re eating very slowly, and also looking at each other, with faces. Finally one of them puts down his fork and says to the cook, ‘Hey, Joe, I’m afraid I’ve got to tell you that these things taste like moose droppings. Good, though.’”
“Ha-ha.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Patrice, that was splendid, that joke. Where did you hear that? Did you make that joke up?”
“My son told it to me.”
“Well isn’t that just good, Patrice.”
“Yes.”
“When exactly did he tell that joke to you?”
“I think a joke like that ought to be worth some breathing, don’t you?”
“I certainly do.”
“I sure think so.”
/b/

11 September

The End Is a Night Fire.

It is another May night, because May never ever ends. Here is a street that should be dark. In a gust of light the cement of the street can be seen to be new and rough. Some of the homes do not yet have lawns. All the trees are young and thin and supported by networks of ropes and stakes. They flicker and whip in the wind of light.
The wind is a wind of hot sparks. The sparks rise and whirl and die in the shrouds of light they make. At the end of the street sighs a burning home. The home looks the same as every other home on the street. It is on fire. Fire comes out of every opening in the home and rises. As the fire makes more openings in the home and rises from them, the home sighs and settles. The heat of the fire makes the fence in the lawn glow red, and the fence cooks the lawn around it.
The home begins to fold into its fire. Fire comes out of all the openings. It sounds like paper crinkling. It tightens the skin of your face. The fire cannot be controlled, and the home draws in all the air on the street and with a sigh folds down into itself. It takes farever. Everything falls into itself, slow as feathers.
Out the door of the home flies a bird with its tailfeathers on fire. It rises into the sky in circles. It spirals up and up into the sky until its light melts into a sparkle of stars. Down to the lawn floats a corkscrew pattern of burnt feathers.
Feet run over the lawn, through the flaming feathers. Fieldbinder and Evelyn Slotnik, hand in hand, run into the night, their hair on fire. In the light of their own hair they are wind. They make glowing cuts in the black square blocks of the suburbs as they run the tiny miles to the Slotniks’ pool. Fences blush and fall away. An airplane is flying low overhead. The passengers look down and see it all. They see one shining pond of fire soaking out into the lawns and making shrouds of needled light that float up toward them, disappear when they touch. They see two surprised points of orange fire moving too fast through black backyards and waffled fences, making for a kidney of clean new blue water that lies ahead in a line lit up from below. It is captured forever on quality film.
/c/

One of the oars fell into the water and Neil Obstat, Jr., lunged for it, knocking over his can of beer so that beer fizzed on his pantleg. He struggled to get the heavy oar back in its lock.
“God damn it,” he said.
“Just keep the f*cker still, Neil,” said Wang-Dang Lang.
“Shit,” said Obstat. Some people trying to fish over in the next rowboat were mad at the commotion and were giving Obstat the finger.
Lang was in the bow of the boat he and Obstat had rented at the Great Ohio Desert Fish License and Boat Rental Center for what Lang thought was a truly criminal amount of money.
“This whole thing’s just gettin’ too goddamn commercialized,” he’d said to Obstat. Obstat had shrugged and hefted the beer.
Lang had some binoculars through which he was watching Lenore Beadsman and Rick Vigorous wandering along the lake’s edge through one of the really blasted and forbidding parts of the Desert. Despite the weekend crowds, Lenore was easy to see in her bright white dress, and of course there was too the matter of Rick Vigorous’s beret. Lang and Obstat were way out in the lake. Obstat was supposed to be rowing the boat so that they stayed just even with Lenore and Rick.
“What do you see?” Obstat had asked from the oars.
When Rick and Lenore were turned the right way, Lang could see their faces, but he couldn’t yet make out what they were saying. They weren’t talking much. Lenore was moving pretty easily through the deep sand, but Lang could see Rick Vigorous having trouble and sometimes needing to trot to keep up. Lenore kept making him look at his watch, as if time were an issue. It was still only mid-morning, but it was hot for September. Crowds wove in and out around Lenore and Rick. Someone on the rim was hawking black tee-shirts in a voice Lang could hear clear out on the water.
Lang held the binoculars in one hand. His other hand hurt like hell today, from twirling his car keys on his injured finger last night. He thought his bird-bite might be getting infected.
“F*cking bird,” he said.
Obstat was grunting at the oars. He kept clunking them against the sides of the boat. Lang and Obstat were positively mowing over people’s fishing lines, and the people in the other boats were getting really pissed off, but Lang told Obstat not to pay them any mind.
“Just remember I get a gander or two at those unearthly legs, climbing dunes,” Obstat gasped as he pulled.
“They’ll start sayin’ important shit any minute now,” Lang said.
/d/

“I absolutely insist that you invite me to relate a story.”
“My shoes are full of this goddamned sand.”
“Lenore ...”
“Hey! Watch where you’re going for Christ’s sake!”
“Dear. Excuse us, please.”
“For crying out loud.”
“Terribly sorry.”
“Hell of a place for a picnic.”
“If you want my opinion, Lenore, they should either obliterate this place or enlarge it. The touristiness of the whole thing is negating whatever marginal attractions this place had to offer.”
“People aren’t smelling too terrific in this sun, either, I notice.”
“Forget smells. You’re here to concentrate on potential grandmother-signs.”
“What kind of signs, Rick? I should look for Lenore neither climbing up nor sliding down a dune, all because of a game my brother made up when he was flapped? This has got to be a waste of time. I don’t understand your obsession with this. With getting me out here today.”
“Apparently Lang and his anus-eyed Sancho Panza are about, too. Lurking, et cetera.”
“How do you know where Andy and Obstat are supposed to be?”
“I know what I know.”
“Look, Rick, speaking of knowing, I think we maybe ought to just talk, right here, at some length.”
“I implore you first to implore me for a story.”
“What’s with this story stuff?”
“....”
“Look, you might have forgotten I have to read the things now. They’re work now. When I’m not working, I’d rather not do a work-related thing.”
“You won’t be called on to evaluate, merely to enjoy. To be caught up, engaged, and entertained. You should find this entertaining and engaging.”
“Rick, the thing is we really need to talk. You’re dealing with an upset person, here. We really need to have a long talk.”
“I’m almost convinced the issues here can be treated and perhaps even resolved in the context of the story I have in mind.”
“I really doubt it.”
“Just keep your eyes peeled for things covertly elderly, and I’ll take it from here.”
“So you’re deciding how the talk I want to have is going to be. That’s just super.”
“This story concerns a man who is presented as the most phenomenally successful theoretical dentist of the twentieth century.”
“Theoretical dentist?”
“A scientist specializing in dental theory and in high-level abstract reasoning from empirical cases involving anything at all dental.”
“Wonderful.”
“Do you recall that sweetener that was positively omnipresent for a while? SupraSweet? The one that was abruptly yanked from the supermarket shelves when they discovered that it made certain women give birth to children with antennae, and fangs like vampires?”
“Do I ever.”
“Here the theoretical dentist in question is presented as the man who cracked the antennae-and-fang problem, working as it were from the dental end and tracing matters back to the ubiquitous and malignant sweetener.”
“Jesus, Rick, look at this crowd. How are we supposed to get through all this?”
“They’re just waiting for the shuttle to the interior wastes. It’ll be here soon—see the dust cloud? Perhaps we might just wait over here, under this statue, in this bit of shade ...”
“I remember this statue all right. I can’t stand this statue. It’s like Zusatz was trying to set himself up as god of the Desert or something. Sheesh.”
“So the man in question is a theoretical dentist of consummate skill.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And in his spare time he is also a thoroughly competent and experienced Scoutmaster.
“....”
“For the Boy Scouts of America.”
“Got it.”
“Having been himself in his youth a phenomenal Scout: a Ten derfoot at nine, a First Class Scout at eleven, a Star, Life, then finally an Eagle Scout at the amazing age of fourteen. Amazing for his era, anyhow. We may note for example that before my son, Vance, quit the Scouts he had been a Life Scout, the penultimate kind of Scout, at the age of twelve.”
“How nice for him.”
“But the point is that the theoretical dentist had been an exemplary Scout, and one so committed to Scouting in general that when he exited the Scouts because of his age he turned right around and became a Scoutmaster, while still training in theoretical dentistry. This was twenty years ago, fixing the dentist’s present age somewhere in his forties.”
“....”
“And one summer day the dentist is leading his troop of Scouts through some orientation and compass exercises in the dense and desolate interior regions of the coniferous forests that as you may or may not know cover vast portions of the state of Indiana. The whole story takes place in Indiana.”
“....”
“And the dentist is effortlessly leading the Scouts through the forest, preparing them for woodsman merit-badge tests, and now in the densest and most desolate interior section the dentist and his Scouts come on an exhausted and haggard-looking man, dressed exclusively in flannel, with many days’ growth of beard, and bright-red eyes, and white pine-pitch residue smeared around his mouth, who right away moans and faints in the arms of a Star Scout; and with him is an also haggard-looking but still achingly lovely woman, with her dress in a noticeable state of disarray, who immediately falls weeping on the neck of the theoretical dentist, crying that she has been saved. The woman tells the dentist that she and her unconscious companion, who is also it turns out her psychologist, had been lost in the desolate interior coniferous region for days, that the psychologist’s magnetic clipboard-and-pen set had ruined their compass, and that they had been wandering for days, losing hope steadily, sustaining themselves only by eating the truly nauseating white remains of the pine pitch that crusted the bark of the trees all around. The woman tells the dentist all this as they stare deeply into each other’s eyes, and as all around them the badge-happy Scouts are running here and there, positively radiating Competence In The Wild, raising and striking tents, building elaborate multi-tiered fires, detoxifying water with Halazone pellets, and administering to the still swooned psychologist every form of first aid you could possibly imagine. And now, if I may import a bit of context to save time, it is made clear that the woman and the psychologist have been out in the Indiana forests for ostensibly therapeutic reasons, that the woman suffers from a nearly debilitating neurosis under the rules of which she needs constant and prodigious sexual attention and activity, in order to stave off feelings of raving paranoia and loss of three-dimensionality.”
“Let’s go. Here’s the bus. The crowd’s mostly getting on. Let’s get out of this shadow.”
“Did you get all that?”
“Dentist, Scoutmaster, merit badge, rescue, woman with dimension problems. Check. But I’d really rather be talking, Rick.”
“Listen, Lenore, shall we get on the bus? Just on a lark? What do you say?”
“Are you kidding? Do you know what the crowds’ll be like in the interior? It’s Saturday, you might have forgotten. Let’s just stay along the good old lake, here.”
“Why this fixation on the proximity of the lake?”
“....”
“At any rate, we are informed that the now still unconscious psychologist had in therapy sessions professed to see the achingly lovely woman’s psychological troubles as stemming from the con- , tinual sexual advances and erotic situations that necessarily confront the woman as she goes about her life in the collective societal environment of Indianapolis, where she lives, so that the problem is conceived of as, a, due to the constant erotic battering at the woman’s sexual identity from without by other members of Indianapolis’s society, which societal unit the psychologist clearly loathes, but and b, due to the woman’s own failure to develop a sufficiently strong sense of self and interior worth to allow her to be discriminating about which of the constant stream of advances to respond to and allow to have any bearing whatsoever on said interior self and sense of worth.”
“My nose is going to get sunburned. I can feel the sunburn starting.”
“I suppose you want me to ask about the gymnastics. I read a rather cutting review in the Dealer.”
“Look, if you want to talk, like as in have a conversation, good, because we really need to. Let’s just hunker right down here in the sand and—”
“No, no, wait. Not yet. We’re still dangling.”
“Beg pardon?”
“To return, the context gives us to understand that the psychologist is actually at best warped and at worst simply evil, and that though he had lured the achingly lovely but troubled woman out deep into the coniferous interior Indiana wastes ostensibly to rap, one on one, about her sense of self and the strength thereof, ostensibly away from all the disturbing exterior erotic assaults the woman suffers in collective society, actually the psychologist really just wanted to seduce the poor woman, which seduction is immediately attempted, in a positively oafish way, the minute the two have hiked out of earshot of civilization, and but which seduction, however oafish, the poor insecure ambiguously dimensional woman is in no shape to resist, and thus the better part of two days were spent by the psychologist and the woman rutting like crazed weasels on the bed of soft pine needles that covers the coniferous wastes, and actually it was in the throes of one such rutting-session that the psychologist’s magnetic clipboard came into contact with and potentially disastrously damaged the woman’s compass, which was the hikers’ only means of orientation.”
“....”
“The disaster being only potential, of course, because of the timely intervention, after a tense, pine-pitch-eating week or so, of the theoretical dentist and his troop of Scouts, which intervention and rescue prompts a gush of narrative and explanation and context from the woman, who clearly flips for the dentist at first sight, even though he has a slight hair-loss problem, but anyway the gushing and flipping, not to mention the initial aching loveliness, prompts a reciprocal rush of emotion in the dentist, who is a widower; and so in a dubious but not entirely inappropriate passage we are informed that a certain nascent love-plant sends up a fragile and vulnerable green shoot or two through the desolate coniferous soil between the woman and the dentist, while, all about them and the love-shoot, Scouts mill, and accomplish difficult merit-badge-related tasks, and chart elaborate retum-courses that involve steering by the lights of esoteric nebulae, and propose to drag the very worse-for-wear psychologist back to civilization on a gumey sled of branches and pitch and woven pine needles.”
“Rick, is this supposed to be a sign?”
“Just wait for the climax.”
“No, Rick, here. See? Footprints, but around every print four holes, like from an old person’s walker sinking in the sand. Is this supposed to be somebody walking, with a walker?”
“I think not. I think this person here was simply steering a course through a field of sun umbrellas. This place is after all positively littered with sun umbrellas. These holes don’t work for me as walker tracks. Besides, we’re duneless, here, you might have noticed.”
“I guess you’re right....”
“Anyway, to make something long attractively shorter, the theoretical dentist and the achingly lovely woman get married. They fall madly, uncontrollably in love, and decide to unite forever, and the woman tells the dentist about her whole neurosis-set, and the dentist is incredibly compassionate, and says he doesn’t care, and he goes and has a long talk with the eventually physically recovered psychologist, and forgives him for taking advantage of a completely helpless patient, and purely out of compassion and goodness asks him to be the best man at the impending wedding, the wedding is impending, and the psychologist is understandably relieved at the dentist’s discretion, but he’s also still wildly infatuated with the achingly lovely woman, and so even during the wedding—which is attended by, among others, the dentist’s brother, the woman’s whole huge Indianapolis clan, and by everyone who’s anyone in the field of theoretical dentistry—the psychologist is covertly smirking and chuckling and checking out the woman’s body under her wedding dress.”
“I’m tired.”
“Which checking out is at this point futile, though, because although the woman still has the pathological need for sexual attention and activity in order to stave off violent neurotic upheavals, said need is let’s just say being more than adequately fulfilled by the theoretical dentist, in whom the lovely woman has reawakened a surge of passion and an urge for intimacy the dentist has not felt since his youth, when he was fresh out of the Scouts. And here a long section is devoted to graphic descriptions of the implications of all these reawakened surges and fulfilled needs, some of the most vivid of which involve certain dental apparati being put to uses which—although emotionally innocent, and so of course ultimately OK—are far in excess of the average dentist’s wildest fantasies. If you get my drift.”
“Maybe the drift should be sped up. I really want to talk to you.”
“I sense that, Lenore, believe me. Let’s do it within the context provided.”
“So at least get on with it, then.”
“And so the theoretical dentist and the achingly lovely woman are married, and truly staggering levels of intimacy are being attained, and neither partner rejects anything the other wants to do as undesirable or sick, and the woman is unbelievably happy, because she is wildly in love with this admittedly older but still very impressive theoretical dentist, and because her pathological needs are being satisfied within an emotionally and socially acceptable framework. And the theoretical dentist is unbelievably happy, too, because of his fierce and complete love for the achingly lovely woman, and because satisfying her prodigious needs is not exactly torture for him, either. So things are simply wonderful.”
“....”
“Until, that is, the theoretical dentist is the victim of a hideous auto accident, in which he was not at fault, and is catastrophically injured, being as a result of the accident now deaf, dumb, blind, and nearly completely paralyzed and insensate, again through absolutely no fault of his own.”
“Another one of these real happy stories, I see.”
“And now the theoretical dentist lies in the hospital bed that will be his home for the rest of his life, and the lovely woman is of course frantic with grief and love for her husband, and the dentist is lying there, in complete blackness, numb blackness, paralyzed, almost wholly insensate. But not, and now I repeat not, entirely incommunicado.”
“You can tell my socks are going to be all black and nasty from this rotten sand, Rick. This is that cheap kind of sand. Shit on fire.”
“Yes, not incommunicado, as I’m sure you see would be a very significant and precious thing for someone otherwise plunged completely into numb silent blackness. Not incommunicado because exactly one area of the dentist’s devastated body actually retains some feeling and power of movement, namely the central portion of his upper lip. And also because the dentist, having been as we know a consummate Scout, knew and knows Morse code, inside and out.”
“Morse code? Lips?”
“Communications to the dentist are effected simply by tapping the relevant message out in Morse code on the dentist’s upper lip. Messages from the dentist are possible provided that one is willing patiently to tap each letter of the Morse code alphabet onto the lip and wait for a signal from the dentist—a heart-tweakingly feeble and tiny movement of the upper lip—when the right letter has been reached. Needless to say, communications from the shattered dentist are incredibly slow and difficult to receive.”
“....”
“But see that communications to the dentist are comparatively easy. And now the Midwestern theoretical dentistry community, out of sheer respect for the broken and insensate dentist, and a desire to get his input, however understandably slight, on certain vexing high-level dental problems, seeks to engage someone in the Indianapolis area with a working knowledge of Morse code, to tap some of the current and pertinent developments in the dentist’s professional world onto his lip. Meanwhile the achingly lovely woman has undergone an intensive course in Morse code, so that she can communicate on a personal level with the broken dentist, and she visits him every day, relating items of interest, comforting the dentist in his numb black silence, tapping onto his upper lip how very much she loves him, et cetera, and also reading fiction to him, via Morse code, because the dentist has been a fanatical fiction reader, when sighted and whole. Specifically she begins tapping onto the theoretical dentist’s lip Frank Norris’s stunning novel McTeague, which the dentist had been reading just before his hideous mishap, and which she had picked up and seen on the very first page concerned the adventures of a dentist, and which indeed, you can tell from her husband’s lip movements, he enjoys having Morse-coded onto him. ”
“But and meanwhile the psychologist, having seen the news of the hideous auto accident, and having begun to scan the journals of theoretical dentistry for further news of the brilliant dentist’s physical and professional condition, sees in said journals the appeal for an Indianapolis Morse code tapper with some dental savvy, and he immediately comes forward to volunteer his services, although in reality we’re informed that his sole exposure to Morse code had been when he sent away for a Lone Ranger decoder ring as a boy, which ring turned out to be simply a Morse code key, which the boy was to use to decode disappointingly dull ads for Ralston that were transmitted in a supposedly mysterious code at the end of every episode of ‘The Lone Ranger,’ in Indianapolis.”
“Lone Ranger rings? Ralston?”
“He also passes himself off as having a keen amateur interest in the whole theoretical dentistry scene, et cetera. Of course the psychologist’s true motive is to insinuate himself back into the arms and lap of the achingly lovely, but also as he and we can anticipate given the situation and context increasingly troubled, woman. So the psychologist appears in the dentist’s hospital room with armloads of cutting-edge-theoretical-dentistry literature, and he and the woman reestablish an acquaintance, because the woman is almost always in the room tapping McTeague onto the dentist’s lip when the psychologist arrives.”
“Here’s the curve of the lake. We’re getting near the end of the trail.”
“And the psychologist begins ostensibly tapping important cutting-edge dental theory onto the dentist’s lip, while the woman stands there at the door, her eyes shining with gratitude at the psychologist. But in reality the psychologist is simply tapping random and meaningless taps onto the lip, he doesn’t give a damn what he’s tapping, and the paralyzed, deaf-dumb-and-blind dentist gets enormously confused, there in the numb black, and he begins trying to move his upper lip, to communicate his confusion to his wife, to ask what the problem is, what’s this gobbledygook being tapped onto his lip, but the psychologist is meanwhile engaging the woman in clever conversation, and mild flirtation, and the woman has been without the erotic attention and activity she involuntarily craves so desperately for an ominously long time, now, and so she’s distracted, and beginning to be tom, but at any rate she’s distracted, and since the relevant signal-movement of the theoretical dentist’s lip is such a truly pathetically tiny movement, she doesn’t ever see it, and so the wildly disoriented and frightened paralyzed dentist continues to have gibberish tapped onto his lip for hours each day, until one day the psychologist taps and repeats one particular Morse code message that he went to the trouble especially to learn, the message being to the effect that he was going to ball the paralyzed dentist’s achingly lovely wife until she bled, that he was going to take her away from the dentist and leave the dentist all alone in his numb lonely blackness, and that there was nothing the pathetic, paralyzed, helpless dentist could do about it; he was as inefficacious as he was inadequate.”
“Jesus, Rick, what is this?”
“I promise we’ll be able to relate to it. Let’s just bear with. On receipt of this Morse code message, the dentist in his hospital bed is flung into a state of such depression and despair that he stops moving his lip, however pathetically tinily, to signal his wife, even when she taps ‘I love you’ onto the lip. And the lovely wife perceives this sudden absence of lip movement as a sign of further physical deterioration in the dentist, and so she too is thrown into despair, which despair further aggravates her emotional condition vis à vis the sex-and-dimensionality neurosis, and she begins to offer less and less resistance to the malevolent blond psychologist’s frequent and oafish sexual advances, many of them made right there in the dentist’s hospital room, while the dentist lies right there, helpless and insensate.”
“Blond? A blond psychologist?”
“Affirmative.”
“Why is this story beginning to give me the creeps?”
“It means you’re beginning really to relate. You’re being intuitive about it.”
“What does being intuitive have to do with it?”
“Here’s the end of the trail. Shall we strike off into the interior? I sense that whatever it is we’re looking for is best looked for in the interior. In the heart of the Desert, Lenore. What do you say?”
“Let’s just go back the way we came. My nose hurts. This is clearly a waste of time. At least this way I get to look at the lake.”
“Christ, the lake, again. The lake is just a bunch of people fishing for black fish. Who cares about the lake?”
“Rick, why are you sweating like this? It’s hot, but it’s not that hot. Are you OK?”
“...”
“Rick, are you all right I said.”
“Maybe just the effects of trying to relate a difficult and emotionally intricate story in the face of your complete insensitivity you bitch!”
“What?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What did you say to me?”
“Please, forget I said anything. Let’s just walk back along the lake.”
“We really need to talk, buster, and I mean now.”
“Just trust me.”
“What the hell are we even doing out here? Andy was right.”
“Have I not earned some trust?”
/e/

“I don’t like this at all,” Lang was saying. He squatted on his hams in the bow, resting his elbows on his knees and looking through the binoculars. “Not one little red bit, good buddy.”
Obstat took two Pop Tarts out of their wrapper and tossed the wrapper into the lake. “At least they’ve stopped for a second,” he said with his mouth full. “My arms are f*cking numb, Wanger.”
“Something’s up,” said Lang. “The little dung beetle’s up to something.”
“What’s he doing?”
“It’s not so much what he’s doing.” Lang shifted up into a seat. “It’s the way Lenore’s looking, here.”
“How’s that dress doing in all this heat, is what I want to know,” Obstat said eagerly. “She got that little V of sweat at the chest yet? I love that little V.”
“F*ck off,” Lang said.
“Hey now Wanger, you said I could look at the legs, and the V too if there was one!”
“Stop whining goddammit Neil,” Lang said angrily. He looked at Obstat, who was looking at him as he chewed. Lang rolled his eyes. “Here, then. Just take a fast goddamn look if you have to.” He passed the binoculars over to Obstat and rubbed his face.
Obstat scanned with the glasses. Lang could see that he was getting Pop Tart filling on them. “Oh Jesus God I’m in love,” Obstat whispered. “This is it. Mommy.”
“I told you to cut that shit out about Lenore.”
“Who’s talking about Lenore? I’m talking about this totally unbelievable babe under a sun umbrella that Lenore and the little double-chinned guy just went by.”
“Just went by?” Lang sat up. “Where’re they going?”
“They just turned around, looks like. They’re going back the way they came I guess.” Obstat was still aimed at the beautiful woman, in a black swimsuit, under an umbrella.
“Turned around? The f*ck. Give me those things.”
Obstat looked up from the glasses, pissed off. “Hey,” he said. “Look here. If my ass gets dragged all the way out here and then gets made to row a stupid boat so you can try to read people’s lips, and if you’re going to get all hinkey about Lenore and not let me express feelings, you can at least let me scope a little bit.”
“You little skull-head,” Lang said. He yanked the binoculars out of Obstat’s hands and scanned the black rim of the Desert. “Holy shit, they are goin’ back,” he said. Obstat munched his Pop Tart in a funk. “I don’t like this at all,” Lang was saying. He reached out and knocked the Pop Tart out of Obstat’s hand into the water.
“Hey!” Obstat said.
“Row!” yelled Lang. People in the other boats looked over. Lang squatted back in the bow. “Turn this f*cker around and row back the way we came.” He looked through the binoculars again as Obstat muttered and picked up the heavy oars.
“And also start gettin’ us in closer to shore,‘” Lang said, pausing for just a moment to look back at what was undeniably a really unbelievable woman, in that swimsuit. “I want us a whole lot closer to shore.”
/f/

11 September
“So where do you get off, Fieldbinder?” Slotnik said, crossing and uncrossing his legs on the love seat.
The living room smetled vaguely of burn. Fieldbinder sat in wet clothes, shivering, the black wires of his burnt hair protruding up in a fan from his head, his hands full of stiff black feathers.
“What can I say, Don?” he said.
“An excellent question, Monroe, ” said Slotnik, glancing over at Evelyn, in a new dry robe and nothing else, looking at her reflection in the dark living room window and trying on wigs. Slotnik turned back. “]ust what can you say, my friend, with your wet wrinkled clothes and smelly, kinky head? What can the universe say, when my supposedly good and respectable neighbors worship my children on the sly, and my supposedly good friend and colleague balls my wife, pokes and punctures the object of my every non-professional thought, tries to take my wife away, from me, to whom she rightfully belongs. ” He stared at Fieldbinder. “What is to say, Monroe?”
“Don, you’ve raised a number of interesting points, ” said Fieldbinder. He glanced up at the staircase and saw two sets of pajama-feet, the children‘s, as the Slotnik children stood at the top of the case and listened, and perhaps sucked their thumbs.
“Just where do you get off, is what I want to know, ” said Slotnik, crossing and uncrossing his legs, jangling a pair of open handcuffs. “Because, for your own information and files, you’ve gotten off for the last time. This is the end. This is it. ”
Fieldbinder grinned coolly, then wryly. “Is it, ” he said. He slowly felt at the feathers with his good hand.
“Yes, ” said Slotnik, returning Fieldbinder’s smile with one equally wry. He went to Evelyn, at the window, and in a single motion calmly handcuffed her wrist to his wrist. Evelyn said nothing; she continued to put on wigs, making Slotnik’s arm rise and fall with her own. Slotnik stared past his wife at Fieldbinder’s tiny reflection in the dark window.
“Yes, ” he said again. “This is it. You’ve let yourself in for it, Monroe. ” He turned. “You’ve put your precious, prodigious self in connection with another. And now I’m taking the other back. Evelyn and I are now joined together, forever, in discipline and negatian. ”
“Discipline?” Fieldbinder said, removing some mud and a twig from the crease of his slacks.
“She is now gone, the connection severed, and so you are done, ” said Slotnik, holding up his handcuffed wrist for effect. Evelyn’s arm moved with his.
“I see, said Fieldbinder.
“Yes I’m sure you do, ” Slotnik said coolly. “The connection is severed, you are yourself punctured, you are done. You will bleed out of yourseif and rise like a husk on a dry wind. There will be less and less of you. You will grow smaller and smaller in your stylish clothes, until you disappear altogether. ” Slotnik grinned wryly. “You will return to the night sky with your satanic bird, and every dawn and dusk the horizon will run with your juices. ”
“What an interestingly absurd theory, Don, ” Fieldbinder said coolly.
“I’m afraid he means it, Monroe, ” said Evelyn into the window. “Don has always been a man of his word. ” She turned and cocked her head, modelling a blond wig. “What do you think of this one, before you have to go?”
Fieldbinder moved to look at his watch, but it had already slipped off his wrist onto the carpet without a sound.
/g/

“What’s this? Are we checking out today?”
“....”
“Is that what we’re doing, Mr. Beadsman? Checking out?”
“Yes.”
“Well I have a form for you to sign right here, and then I guess off you go into the blue.”
“... ”
“We usually don’t release on Saturday you know Mr. Beadsman. I had to get this form out of a locked drawer you know.”
“I apologize for any inconvenience.”
“Oh I was just joking with you. That was just a joke. There’s no inconvenience at all.”
“May I please leave, then?”
“That’s a good signature you’ve got there, Mr. Beadsman, isn’t it? Now is somebody meeting you, or what?”
“No.”
“Dr. Nelm told me to expect somebody to meet you, Mr. Beadsman. Are we being naughty?”
“I want to take a taxi to the airport.”
“Are we going home, Mr. Beadsman? Are we going home to see our family?”
“....”
“Well all I can say is you just get your mother to give you something to eat. You just don’t eat enough, is part of your problem, if you want my two cents’ worth. You just eat, you hear?”
“Can you please call me a taxi?”
“And your father’s been notified, Dr. Nelm told me.”
“I’ll notify everyone.”
“Looks like a beautiful day out there. I heard it was going to rain, but I’ll take sunshine bouncing off our lake any old day won’t you?”
“....”
“I wish I was going to the airport on such a beautiful day.”
“I’m afraid the sun will hurt my eyes, I’ve been inside so long.”
“Now don’t you worry. You can just squint until you get used to it. Your old eyes will adjust to the outside lickety-split, mine always do.”
....“
“This is just a bright town we live in Mr. Beadsman.”
/h/

“So this goes on, really for longer than is necessary in order to get the narrative job done, with scene after scene of the wife coming in, tapping some McTeague onto the theoretical dentist’s lip, the psychologist coming in and fondling the achingly lovely wife from behind, even as she taps the McTeague code, the wife finally unable to resist any longer and throwing herself into the arms of the psychologist, and their rutting like crazed weasels on the hospital room floor while the theoretical dentist lies helpless in his bed, drowning in numb blackness and despair, vividly imagining precisely the scene that is taking place on the floor below him.”
“Although I bet it’s at least ninety-eight point six out here right now, don’t you think? I don’t know about at night, but I think the Desert could maybe support Lenore during the day. But maybe I’m just grasping at straws. Do you think I’m just grasping?”
“But see, part of the theoretical dentist’s despair stems from the fact that he really doesn’t and can’t blame his achingly lovely wife for what is happening. He knows all about his wife’s being troubled. He knows that she needs something which he is now, through no fault of his own, unable to give her. So he doesn’t and cannot blame her. But imagine his despair, Lenore. In his numb helpless black isolation he needs the emotional center of his life, the object of his complete adoration, his fiancée, more than ever; and yet he knows that it is precisely his state of helpless, inefficacious isolation—a state he is in through exactly zero fault of his own—that is of necessity driving the lovely woman he adores farther and farther away. So he forgives, Lenore. He forgives. But he bums every minute in a cold flame of unimaginable torment.”
“What’s going on, Rick?”
“He forgives her, Lenore. From the icy depths of his helpless isolation and fierce and complete love, he extends a theoretical hand of forgiveness, like so ...”
“Ow!”
“Dear me, excuse us, please.”
“Watch where you’re waving your hands, buddy!”
“Terribly sorry.”
“Freaking crowds. Let’s get, Rick. We’re just playing games. Lenore isn’t around here.”
“So on it goes. Finally the theoretical dentist’s brother, who is an estate attorney in Philadelphia, is able to break away from his incredibly successful practice and personal life to come see the withered husk of the theoretical dentist. Since the brother had gone through the Scouts right alongside the dentist, for him Morse code communication to the dentist is no problem, though communications from the dentist are still cumbersome as hell. Nevertheless we’re subjected to long and difficult coded conversations between the two in the hospital room, while the lovely wife, consumed with understandable self-loathing, and afraid that she would not be able to help making a pass at the devastatingly handsome estate-attorney brother, stays shacked up in the malevolent blond psychologist’s apartment, rutting, and also watching gymnastics on television, the symbolism of which doesn’t escape the reader, rest assured.”
“OK Rick, that’s it. Cut the story charade. We’re having a talk.”
“You bet your lovely bottom we are.”
“So why can’t we just have a talk without you pretending it’s something else, Rick? I find this pretty disturbing.”
“But see finally the wife can no longer stay away, she realizes that whatever physical connection she may crave because of her disastrously weak self-network, she and the dentist are connected in a much deeper and more profound and yes in some sense even more fulfilling and three-dimensional way, namely an emotional way, and so she rushes to the hospital, brushes aside nurses and orderlies, and bursts into the theoretical dentist’s room, only to see to her horror the dentist’s brother, leaning over the prone dentist, beginning to remove the dentist’s upper lip with a Boy Scout knife.”
“Oh, really, come on.”
“As the dentist, it turns out, had requested. Which, given the context, the sensitive reader of course regards as food for thought. But and so the wife screams, and the previously brushed-aside nurses and orderlies rush in, and they restrain the estate-attorney brother, and he is carried off, and the achingly lovely woman positively falls on the dentist’s mangled upper lip, trying to stop the bleeding and save the lip, lashing out at doctors who come near, tapping over and over into the gore that she loves the dentist, that she is sorry, please to forgive her. And through his pain the helpless dentist feels her tap, and his heart almost breaks, and though he knows it will do no good, because her pathetic neurosis will, he knows, soon drive the wife into outside connections again, he does forgive her, he does, and he moves his lip in his pathetically tiny way, to let her know he forgives her, but the heart-tweakingly tiny familiar movement of the lip is here of course obscured by the flow of blood from the attempted lip-removal, and so the wife just cannot see the movement, no matter how frantically the helpless dentist tries to move his lip, and so the wife, getting no visible results, finally reels from the dentist’s room in despair and horror and guilt, and immediately goes shopping.”
“Shopping?”
“....”
“Shopping?”
“Lenore, look out there. What is that flash, out on the water? Is that a sunlight-off-binoculars flash?”
“....”
“Good Lord it is. Lenore, what’s going on?”
“ ”
“It is. It’s Lang, in a boat. They’re rowing this way. They’ve been watching. Lenore, what is Lang shouting? Is that Lang, shouting?”
“Rick, I can explain ...”
“No problem at all. Let me just ... I have to hurry.”
“What are those?”
“These are our connection, Lenore. I forgive you.”
“Handcuffs? You’re going to forgive me with handcuffs that say ‘Bambi’s Den of Discipline’ on them?”
“The ... achingly lovely woman returns that night to the dentist’s hospital room with her copy of McTeague. She comes in the night to the numb dentist and taps to him. She taps the conclusion of McTeague. The book’s climax. Have you ever experienced the climax of McTeague?”
“Rick, you just take it easy.”
“The climax consists of McTeague, the dentist, handcuffed to the corpse of his malevolent foe, Marcus Schouler, in the middle of a desert.”
“Desert? Handcuffs? Corpses? Oh shit. Andy! Andy!”
“Andy? No, Schouler.”
“Rick ...”
“And as she taps it, ever so gently, taking care not to hurt him any more than she has already, she looks at the dentist’s motionless face and sees a single tear emerge from one partly sedated eye and course down his cheek until it is silently absorbed by a cotton bandage. She, too, weeps, with no sound.... And she produces a pair of handcuffs, which she had gone to enormous expense and embarrassment to buy ... and ... joins herself ... to the wrist of the theoretical dentist, his inefficacious wrist ...”
“What are you doing? Let me go!”
“... with the deep oiled ... click of the handcuffs.”
“Jesus, Rick. This is it. You get these off right now. You get me out. I’ve told you I hate this torture and pain stuff, and you just don’t care! You’re a sick man!”
“Torture and pain? Lenore, I forgive you.”
“Forgive what, for Christ’s sake? Help! Andy! Neil!”
“Lenore!”
“God damn it, Rick, this is it. No talking, even. I wanted to talk, I said let’s talk Rick, but no, so now forget it, I’m sorry but that’s it.”
“We are now joined, my center and reference! In negation and discipline! Our bodies are husks!”
“You just better have the key. God, Andy, see if he’s got the key. ”
“What the f*ck’s going on here?”
“Can’t you see? He’s locked us together!”
“Look you little wiener, cough up the key to these things or your ass is grass.”
“You are fired, Lang! You are dismissed!”
“F*ck being dismissed. You let this little lady go.”
“Lenore, we will shrink into husks together. We will bleed in the sky. See it?”
“Wanger, is he crying? Is the little sucker crying?”
“Shut up, Neil.”
“Rick, please don’t. Let’s just talk about it. Don’t sit in the sand and cry. Everybody can see. Let’s stand up.”
“We’ll be joined in the light of the sky, Lenore. See the light of the sky? The dawn and sunset will be fed from our veins. We’ll be spread all over. We’ll be everything. We’ll be gigantic.”
“How f*cking pathetic.”
“Shut up, Neil.”
“Larger than life.”
“Look here, R.V., let’s just stand on up and talk this over, and unlock all this shit.”
“She is handcuffed. to a corpse, in the Desert. Don’t you see the ... irony?”
“Want me to just get a cop, here, Wanger?”
“If she weren’t three-dimensional, she wouldn’t be caught! Don’t you see? A three-dimensional husk!”
“I think old R.V.’s just lost a few cards out of a certain deck, Lenore. ”
“Rick.”
“That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be prodigious enough to feed the whole sky! Don’t you see? And whose fault is it, after all?”
“Aw, Rick, don’t you see? Fault just doesn’t enter into it at all.”
“Exactly. Exactly. It’s no one’s fault. We all agree.”
“Rick ...”
“Lenore sugar doll I care about you. I do. I don’t care who knows it. I care about you as a person. R. V. can put all the shit on you he wants. You’re mine now. I don’t care if the whole world knows it. Hey y‘all! I care about this little lady right here!”
“We’re in the sky. We can’t hear you.”
“F*ck off, R. V. Look, Lenore, I’m gonna go ahead and just break the chain on these things. OK? I think I can break ‘em. I’ve broke shit like this before.”
“Go ahead and try, Lang. You just go ahead and try it, and see what happens!”
“Is that OK, Lenore?”
“....”
“You ready?”