I am enormously excited. Enormously. Today I began to dig; took my first bite of the earth; put in my first pick. Astonishing. That I have actually begun. Hard to believe. A beginning. With that first blow—what elation I felt! Feel. I am light. I float although there is no wind. I swoop low to gather altitude the way the roller coaster does, and there I see the thick world differently. Engineless and silent, I float under everything as easily as an image in the water. At last—at long last—I’ve felt fistfuls in my fists. Like Uncle Balt, I’ve got a good grip. I shall split the earth asunder. HAH! I write YES!—with a heavy bulbous exclamation point, borrowed from the comics. POW! The very absurdity of my swing, its narrow place and expansive purpose, made the blow I struck like a culminating thrust. I’ve acquired a short-handled pick like my build. BAM! Well, it’s dirty squatty work. But what a perfect location for the trip: better than under a bed or beneath a stove; better than a shower or a john; better even than an attic, although going up to get down has much to recommend it. Of course I’ve been clearing away dirt and rust and ash, coal, clinkers and undefinable dusts, for quite a while—weeks—carrying out all kinds of wet gunk in two-pound coffee cans, and loads of crusty stuff like shale I’ve scraped from the bottom of the firebox (that damn cat has been shitting there, coming through a pipe, I suppose, who knows? and finding cinders suitable). It is a barfy business. UGH! But today I began to dig. Yes. O YES! By becoming a worm, this worm turns.

I tiptoe down the stairs. It is another day. My guard is still asleep. The basement has a welcome moist smell like deep woods after rain. I imagine mushrooms, soft black leaves. I have learned the place like a lover. I know it better than I know myself. There is one large room where the washtubs squat. Clotheslines made of wire run across the ceiling among the water pipes. What could dry here, so far from warmth and light, out of all moving air? Adjacent, there is an old coal cellar where we store tin cans and jars, a few tools, a broken wagon and a rusting sled. A rug, which I don’t remember standing on end in its roll like a sentry, leans against the wall like a sentry. Waterlogged now, it sags slowly into itself, and smells gravely of wet wool and mold. The gray basement windows are like sightless eyes. The fourth room contains the body of the furnace with all its wrapped white pipes. It became a Gulliver too great to move when we converted to oil, and the new furnace sits there, too, in a corner, boxy and efficient, painted an electric blue. A leaky water heater which never got hauled away stands by its replacement like a metal memento mori. I measure my height against the still bright cylinder. Dials come up to my nose. “Time cannot do to ordinary things what we timelessly do to one another,” I announce, although in a careful whisper, repeating the first sentence of my masterpiece: and the sound is soaked up as if I spoke to a world of sand. The first thing I shall need is an excuse. I’ve known that all along. But I can’t think of any. We’re not in the body-burying business. I can’t pretend to be canning pears or running the old wringer or turning out chair legs on a lathe. She is nervous. nervous. Suspects X, fears Y. No one in his right mind would spend more than a minute down here. However, I am not in my right mind, am I? I am in my left mind, now, leaving like Columbus for a new world’s freedom, and for fame. Dear cellar: my concealed cell, where I shall be a mole if not a monk. Everywhere the bulbs are bare, of course, and hang from the cord which sends them light. The rough walls are poorly wedged and weakly mortared. Insects gather in the cracks like dirt and damp: the most obnoxious kinds of bug, I’m happy to say, because they are my protectors, my allies in these new dig-down days: millipedes and pale gray rolypolys, oozy slugs, roaches quick as a cricket’s click, and spiders with soft sticky webs and angry black backs, playing at the poisonous, pretending to be pouncy. I give praise, I render thanks to them.

There are nine stagnant rows of rocks, and each rock is roughly nine inches high and about a foot long. The mortar in some places n’existe pas and seems meant to be more of a plug than adhesive. The floor is cement washed smooth over cobbles, I think; and with my pick that’s what I’ve now proved. In any case, it undulates like land. I am not much more than five and a half feet beneath public footfall when I squeeze myself behind the old octopipe. That’s not far. It’s scarcely a beginning! There will certainly be drains, some septic plumbing. Have to be careful of that—the gas lines. And I shall want to run under the whole room, not simply pop under one outer wall like a con. Suppose I were suddenly to encounter my wife in this place, or, like a rat, she, me? What in the world are you doing back there, Kohlee, she inquires. What do I intone in my turn? Well, Marty, you see here an historian hunting for a false cause, for a reason why I’m here which will not be the reason why I’m here. Come off it. What’s going on? I’m thinking about digging a tunnel—you know—to escape from the camp. Can the crap, she says in her most hardened manner. Ah, you see, I say, I’ve told you the truth, but what does the truth receive? abuse, cuffs, disbelief. I’ve told you the truth as I always do when I know you really want me to hand you a lie on a paper plate like something the cat’s shat. Well, Kohlee, you’re a queer one. You’ve been tiptoeing around the house for weeks like some cartoon creature pursued by the furniture, and now I’ve caught you skulking in back of this heap of rust. I am down here, my dear, looking for a reason to be down here. She really hates it. Come on, Koh, don’t play the wimp, come straight. Her ghost is imposing, floating upstage like a prima donna, though she’s not into her mad scene yet—she’s playing mine. But how do you speak to a ghost if you’re not an Elizabethan? Ah, I’m a scholar, and thus well fit for it. Most ghosts come out of a corpse like a breath full of words, but Marty’s pale face betrays no vagrant spirituality. It is blank of being: that’s what makes her a ghost. Anyway, what an absurd question: what am I doing? List, fair queen. But list is what the ghost says. But say you’re a nation, Marty, a little country, and I march in to steal your wealth and take your land and rape your women; shall I confess before my crime’s commission and pass across the world’s fair face like an evil shadow? shall I? or shall I argue that I’ve come to recover my countrymen, marooned in your cities like shipwrecked sailors on Circe’s isle? eh? shall I say that? and when I rescue my minorities by extending their fatherland over them like a sheet (a pertinent ambiguity in our present circumstances, poignant even), the justification I need for my deed, like a brass plaque at a murder site, is sweetly complete (the couplet means the scene is over Marty, exeunt all but the octopipe, being real), so you see, Marty, I’ll say, I’m simply down here examining the size of the old furnace because I am considering having it hauled away. Eh? How’s that? I shall spread my arms as though to lie about a fish. Can’t you see a Ping-Pong table here, and the pitter-patter of little balls about? and a dartboard there, in the shape of a heart (do you hear the rhyme, old soul? like the menacing beat of my army’s boots: thap’thap’thap’ . . .). Are you beating your meat back there? is that why I’m getting speech instead of an answer? That is the sound of darts embedding themselves in the cork. You always were hand in love with yourself, Willie, I will say that, Martha says. That  . . . that  . . . that . . . Yes, I am beating out, Marty, as dust from a rug; I am going off—off into a world of words like Columbus, to discover an old land he’ll call new. But Martha does not jiggle a tit at my jokes, my nervous gibes, and stares at me as if I were imaginary. Columbus may have been a mockie, Marty, think of that, and he burnt blacks in the Indies as example to others who might have taken it into their woolly heads to be as lazy as their nature naturally inclined them. Wilfred? What are you writing in there? What are all those pieces of paper you’ve been secreting about between books and such? What is happening? In where? in here? In there! Won’t you ever finish? Won’t you ever give over scribbling and come out? I’ve locked myself in my pen for safekeeping. Koh—I am writing myself into a whirlworld, Martha. The circulation of sound shall draw me up up up up up. I am overcoming certain Protestant pressures from my Past by whaling away on my weenie. O Koh—. Cut it out.

Flo on sweet Flo till I tell my tune. O Flo, you sugared girl and cookie-hearted whore, our name for Time, thanks to Governali, Time with a capital like Columbus, back in Ohio, remember those eerie nights of? where we used to go to visit once every morose moon, to visit my aboveground parents, buried in the air like certain savages (your description, MKM, as your luggage still says, from B.C. our marriage, and one you wouldn’t have employed if you had seen a few plein-air ceremonies, the dead propped up in heaps, thrown down in ditches—corpses by the cornfield, tumbril, truckload, hay wain, rucksack, wheelbarrow, busload, train—clothed, half clothed, disheveled, slit, stripped, naked, limbed and unlimbed, washed and laid out, dirty and dumped and gutripped and raw and rotting, half melted, part burned, starved, a fuzzy cunt once, so innocent and lovely, what a loss!), their love spoiling like cut fruit, dear parents, soon there’d be the bee’s buzz as they come to the juice, and the flowers would bend with them, the petals of the roses like blood on the brown ground, back in Ohio, in Flo, early in our marriage, but not before your cunt had closed like a bankrupt company and caused my depression. Cut it out. The basement best resembles a dungeon, that’s why I’m here. I am a character in a Dumas novel, falsely accused. That’s why I’m here. Because I waste away while adding on, pace all the spaces of my days with a mental measure—so far, so square, so long—and do ///s to keep a calendar, etch initials, mottoes in the walls, recite my heart to keep my head. O god, deliver me from the body, of these bones! Remember in Ohio sleeping in my childhood bed and stroking my penis to remind me of my youth when I lay alone holding its heat as if that warmth were the only sign of life?

Tell me what you’re doing down here, she says, besides getting soot on your fly. And have the dignity, the decency, to tell it straight—the way it is, not what it’s like. Meanwhile, while you’re getting your guts up for it, let me tell you something, Willie: you aren’t funny. Sure, you crack wise, but there’s no fun inside, no crunchy kernel. Your wit is all shell, she says, hard over hollow, like a walnut pretending to be a beetle, she says, with her customary nerve-grating explicitness, carrying every figure to its last place. I am growing culpable, I answer—mea—mea—capable of Culp; and Martha’s lips draw themselves up in a Grosz. I shove my stomach past a pipe, listening to the cellar dampen just the way I heard, tiptoeing carefully down the stairs, the house haunt itself. Then I am startled by gunfire like a rattle of pans in the sink. This won’t be easy. Far too risky with Martha in the house. Yessirree, that tread above me does not belong to the funny fat lady who lives in the apartment on the next floor. No. She can descend through the ceiling like a god. I complete my circuit of the furnace. I am lecturing on history, educating the asbestos. So it’s like adding a man to the firing squad in order to argue that the extra gun fired the fatal shot. I check my fly for soot. I’m too big for this business. It’ll be hard to get my belly through that opening. A past event is like a slain man tied to a post, my dear, with all those deadly bullets in him, and historians standing around like county coroners claiming that the bullet through the belt or the button did it. Yesterday I said the same thing to my class. They snored without making a sound. In the snow-cold muumuu of a ghost, Martha’s face fades as her torso solidifies, her Aryan blood surfacing like lard. I work on her features, but I’ve forgotten what they are, the way I sometimes forget how to spell the commonest words when I’m writing them on the board. Without a mouth she’ll still talk back, from her crack like as not. A cause? a reason? There are so many. It’s a good place to spend the summer. I’ll have to take out the dirt in little dribs and drabs or she’ll get wise and where shall I dispose of it? An abandoned well. That would be nice. If Uncle Balt were about I could fill him up. Okay. Do you know why Culp and I and all the guys make our smart remarks? We are embarrassed by experience. We are one warm blush. We don’t know which way to look as when I blundered upon the breadman humped upon my mother lumped upon the sofa. Life suddenly becomes a dirty joke. A cause? a reason? What is not a cause? A fly in my ointment. There have been several occasions during the last few years (I’ve incised them in these seeping cellar walls the way a prisoner marks his bath days: b 33), when your genitals were genial; when you looked at me with something like contentment; when you simply enjoyed a joke, put a sugared finger to my mouth—moments might be a better word—when some of my old feelings for you reappeared like that boyhood friend one hardly recognizes and can no

nervous

longer cherish. Could I express them now? now that you tug nervously at the

nervous

skin of your left hand as though pulling a glove; now that you buy your smiles on sale at the cosmetics counter; now that you rebound from every bump like a balloon. Yup. Once you were a heaped and steaming plate. Well, I’ve eaten of you; licked you so you squirmed. I’ve choked you down; got fatter from your fat. But this hunger I have is misplaced in front of an emptied dish. A cause? I need my exercise. A reason? Everyone ought to have a hobby: a vagina to China. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, the radio would wonder. It is that third room—that heart of the house—the distant chamber in those gothic horror stories where a dead spouse lies undisturbed in a shroud of cobwebs and dust . . . Meet my marriage—looking as if she were alive, I vow . . . yes, it is the secret ventricle where the dead blood goes . . . that space under the sunporch where I keep my trunk of German memorabilia—nothing much: a flag, insignia, armbands, a pair of boots, a few hats, photos, letters from Magus Tabor, etc., one warning proclamation, and so on, a flask for schnapps—a collection which Martha has forbidden to rise above the level of the cellar, although no stake’s been driven through these souvenirs to guarantee their death, so there’s really nothing to prevent a little silver braid from winking in the dim light, or those black boots, naturally blacker in the black of night, from prowling the house, or some of that anti-Semitic porno stuff reading aloud to itself in a slow soft guttural voice until the swagger stick nearby gets stiff.

Of course I felt like a fool—forcing my way into an abandoned furnace as though it were a safe. I had no faith in what I was doing. There was no gold, no goal. I couldn’t confront the absurdity of it. I went from whim to whim like a bee. I told myself I was going to dismantle the thing and carry it, bit by bit, out of the house. I told myself that I would remove the water heater, too, one way or another. But I was simply a fat melancholy man with a crowbar—a Paul Pry.

Our world is old, Martha,

don’t you see?

and all our dreams are ironies;

our pieties have been exposed—

what principle is not a prejudice?—

and our philosophies rot in the back lots of our culture

like struck sets.

O my, such a speech, she says. You must have studied the Latins. You must have pebbled a lot of Demosthenes. Not least, Cicero. Demosthenes, Cicero: such recondite references, and you only a girl with a Grosz mouth. Yes, I am that age that Cicero had reached when, in a bit of peace between one Rome and another, he wrote of the orator’s art. “As I frequently contemplate and call to mind the times of old,” doesn’t his great work begin? Pish? Pish, you say, Marty, pish? I’m your wife and lower half and I can pish on you all I want. You are my memory’s ghost, Martha, a sheet of insubstantiality, without fat or fiber. So there were days of old even for Cicero. And what permits happiness to an honest and honorable man, our orator is asking. That’s the direction of this great oral gesture—the gist—the pith and pish of it. And his answer is: peaceful employment and dignified retirement. But the times had made a balls of everything, and so, now on the dark side of his life, this man who spoke his penship to the page begins his book as in my damp days as well, commence my labors. O I know my Cicero, my dear; didn’t I have to get a handle on the harangue, with old Tabor as my master, and Der Führer as my subject? I had to lay my eyes on all the ancients, but particularly on this man—spokesman for me now—man of the hour at least for a day, because in nearly a thousand letters, not to mention his essays and orations, he told the truth about himself and his time. The stupid bastard. He was a damned indiscretion industry. Well, that charming frankness has blackened his name. The toga fell from his torso, and there he stood, exposed and solid and unembarrassed as a statue: a man who paid for his bad judgment with his life, who was never as good as his word, but a man worthy of the shit of pigeons. He longed for peaceful employment and a dignified retirement, but he knew he would have to take sides, join the ROTC or the Falangists, be a breaking rock or broken window. If I am to emulate his honesty, then I shall have to tell the most revealing of my lies. I must dig a hole through this house. Well, I’ve begun. I feel some soreness already because my hands have not yet hardened to it. The pen, and not the pick, is their peaceful and customary employment. I shall descend and bend, creating, a whole, as Culp would certainly say, twelve philippics deep. And Cicero—diswholed—had his hand nailed to the rostrum he had so often ennobled with his eloquence, nailed there alongside his unkempt head, which silenced him not at all, of course, because his tongue was still loose, his voice howls even now for vengeance, although now its noise must be redirected away from Catiline, a ghost which only Cicero’s own orations let live, and sent against that mass murderer, Mankind, whom he once mistakenly extolled, a murderer who walks among us with all of Catiline’s arrogance and effrontery, full of plans for our death. Who will kill the killers when their killing is completed? The Germans did away with millions ineffectually, because millions of guilty ones remained, pretending to decorate and dignify their cities like so many public fountains while really fulsomely pissing on one another and offering to their mutual concerns the comfort of breasts and heads of stone. In the name of heaven, you scurrilous buffoons, how long must our patience be abused! how long will man’s savagery deface our so-called human look and make a mockery of us? to what limit, to what an ending, will you go? Who of us is any longer in doubt of our depravity; do we need another demonstration? for we know what we did yesterday in Europe, what we do today in Africa and Asia, what plans we have to destroy Tomorrow itself, as though Time were a fellow creature. O ye Wraiths, ye Absent Gods and dead Immortals, look upon us here! What an age! what moralities! Empty skies, plaster eagles, TV faces and their blatant lies are now our leaders. Look on us, then, and laugh your fill . . . at least while we remain to be amusing.

My big book, like this big house, bangs over me as though it were the limits of the universe—the ⋂—a world of guilt and Germans, innocence and Jews, and like Cicero’s, of murderers murdered. This house must have a cellar, a wrathkeller, Culp would certainly say: there must be an underworld under this world, a concealment of history beneath my exposition of it, a gesture which will symbolize my desperation. O my Father! country! house of Kohler! hole up here! cling to the furnacy end of this hollow rope, relinquish the air for the earth. A plaque on the front door may one day read: Herein lies a pointless passage put down by a Pretender to the Throne of Darkness. Let God uproot this pathway if He likes, we shall still stare at the hole the hole has left, and wonder at the works of Man, and marvel at the little bit that mostly Is, and at the awkward lot that mostly Aint. Martha hates it when I shape my sentences. She says it doesn’t sound sincere.

Wouldn’t it be nicer not to know the past? not to remember the madness of your mother, anger of dear old dad, the days of dressings-down, to forget how much has been forgotten and the consequent neglect of friends and children, to feel that milking love could still be luminous? Knowledge of Good and Evil, Martha: that’s what we were forbidden, and not without reason. But now—now we know all the ins, and that has put us on the outs.

Martha hates it when I shape my sentences. She says it falsifies feeling.

It is a killer—knowledge is the big K. It’s the reason why you’re hovering around down here in your light white nightie, Martha: you want to know what I’m doing down here; why I’ve been tiptoeing through the house and fearful of the furniture lately; you want a bit of info concerning my peculiar behaviour; well, if you knew, what would you do? You would unmold like a lamb made of butter. History with the Great H, Governali’s Idol, has destroyed tragedy, the epic as well (Sabining the Muses), and only incidentally done in love, marriage, kingship, religion, the Wild West, because heroes are creatures created by ignorance; like infatuations, they are born of hype, of superstition, fraud, as are gods, saints, and movie stars; and they all pass into legend, myth, romance, still further fictions, like clouds into clouds. Old Cicero, it seems, can only be admired so long as we haven’t read his letters and thus learned of his fears and hesitations, his envies and ambitions, as long as we remain ignorant of his all-too-human nature. Do you want to wonder at Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi, Churchill, Charles de Gaulle? believe in Washington and play at Lincoln logs? Goody. First put out your eyes: blind, you will dream them clearly. Why do you go on so, Martha says, you have more superstitions than a monk. It’s true. I do. Marty—you’re right. I believe what Culp believes: in dry tinder and a hot cock. O for christ’s sake, cut it out. You never tire of talking, do you? whether there’s anyone about or not, because otherwise you’re not alive; how would you know you still had a soul if it weren’t always leaking logoi. That’s why I’m down here, Marty, with my pick and shovel, putting a hole through the middle of fur ace. Look at that gap, God, like an upside-down smoke hole in an oven. No one will find it hidden between fur and ace, Who would suspect that pair? or even pair them in the first place? So at least, that’s safe. I shall need to lose weight. Look nice for my new lover and her eight arms. Trajan’s Column is a solid tunnel turning through the sky, while my pillar will be made of air and go the other way; it will celebrate defeat, not victory; for if our heroes have clay feet clear to their cocks, our villains can be believed. There’s no hell or hellfire, maybe, but there are fiends with forks. We can trust our traitors, our Judases, our Quislings; we can count on any Khan; Attila will never disappoint us; Stalin will remain stainless in his steel. We are all charter members of the 4-H Club: Hitler, Hess, Heydrich, Himmler. Heil nonny nonny and a Ho Ho Ho! We are even a bit put out with Mussolini because he was too comical a character, a cartoon Caesar, and, like that image on the tarot card, an upside-down clown. O, I know it is the ghost’s word—your word—Martha, but as I tell my students, list—list. Sure—sure it’s too simple to say that in our hearts only Evil is real, but, in fact, the Good—well—there is no big g, there are just dinky ones, and even they are fragile, intermittent, short-lived little pleasures, pulling-on-your-prick things, ambiguous, often costly in the long run, sometimes painful, embarrassing even, while wickedness prospers with a weed’s ease; rats are doing fine, flies ditto, pigeons, starlings, sparrows, they know how to eat off the streets and soil cement. Damn. It does drag one down: the dinginess down here. I’ll need light. How can I keep the cords concealed? Air will be at a premium. What else? Why must one bring the world into the tunnel, when the tunnel is supposed to be the way out? Lay the length of a lasting love alongside any hate, that of the Armenians, for instance, the Turks for the Greeks, the Serbs for everybody. Do you suppose if the Armenians had been done a good turn back then, instead of being thinned, they would remember? three square meals and clean clothes in corded bales and darned blankets and bandages and modern medicines for their festers and their flu? would such deeds be held tenderly against generations of grateful hearts? No one would think so. No one. No.

So now my book is done: Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany needs only its impossible introduction to go forth. And what is all my labor worth? What does my work do but simply remove some of the armor, the glamour, of Evil. It small-e’s it. It shakes a little sugar on the shit. It dares to see a bit of the okay in our great bugaboche. Inexcusable. Slander our saints, if you will, but please leave our Satan undefiled by any virtue, his successes inexplicable by any standard.

Great undulating banners red as blood. And the brass bands. And the manly thud of uniformly set-down boots. And the rage inside the happy shouts. A hundred thousand spleens have found a mouth. Curtains of sperm are flung up the side of the sky. Hell has fertilized heaven. And now the hero comes—the trumpet of his people. And his voice is enlarged like a movie’s lion. He roars, he screams so well for everyone, his tantrums tame a people. He is the Son of God, if God is Resentment. And God is Resentment—a pharaoh for the disappointed people.

If you want to think about something really funny, kiddo, consider the fact that our favorite modern bad guys became villains by serving as heroes first—to millions. It is now a necessary apprenticeship.

Martha hates being called “kiddo.” She thinks it the first letter of condescension.

But if you want to think about something really funny; consider how the titles of tyrants change. We shall suffer no more Emperors, Kings, Czars, Shahs, or Caesars, to lop off our limbs and burn our homes, kiddo, defile our women and bugger our boys; the masses make such appointments now; the masses love tyranny; they demand it; they dance to it; they feel that their hand is forming the First Citizen’s Fist; so we shall murder more modestly in future: beneath the banners of Il Duce, Der Führer, the General Secretary or the Party Chairman, the CEO of something. I suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called Coach.

Outside the sky is a hard blue as though glazed. It won’t let a cloud cross, a bird in. Leaves are landing with the sound of sand. The sun has scissored its shadows out of the earth and walls and sold the silhouettes: side-nose view of someone with a flowing tie, steel beam, trouser pocket, twot made of twigs. The air would snap like a soda cracker if there were some soup on the spoon in my mouth. It is a day of definition, of clean and crisp distinctions like the dance of a fine mind. It is a day to move through without guilt or desire. And I have been down in the dirt commencing my dig. Thoughts have their shadows too, contours one could cut around, places they deprive of light. The sophisticated symbol of the tunnel, for instance, completes itself in the darkness of act; it is buried in the literal, in das plumpe Denken, in the vulgarities of practice. I had first hammered a hole through the cement only to strike rock, but I pried a heavy stone loose with my pick and soon held a big white boulder between my hands like a bowling ball. I’ve been wondering whether I should keep it as a souvenir. Scrubbed and bleached, it could hold back a door or sit like a skull on my desk. The shopkeeper frames his first sale; nails a banknote to the wall; to a chain, fastens the first dime he ever made in a ringlet of stainless steel. Perhaps I should keep a photographic record, too—befores and afters—the initial knock, the open door, the deeper stages of the dig, her panties on the floor, the piles of earth taken out, the confident sly look on my face, the head of my cock peeking from between her squoozen boobs like a pig in a blanket, the mummy’s curse, the sly smug look on my face, pieces of pot laid out to suggest the vessel. Signed snaps of stars and local notables, athletes and gangsters—each, it seems, squeezed in the same booth so the smiles would surface—they row the restaurant’s walls. Like my signed official photograph of Goering in full regalia that’s chested down in #3—dark chamber of the heart—with Susu’s severed head and the folded quickclick of a daughter going down on her dad—that’s the story line—though even there, in the old shoe box and soldier’s trunk, my silent symbols lie.

It is a day to be without aches and pains, without duties, without any bondage to belief. Uncoupled and Unculped.

It is another day.

OCT.

Culp

Culp is a calamity. He is a punishment for my sins, a plague of boils, a subcutaneous itch, a neural jangle. After everyone else has walked out of my mind, he lingers like a bad smell.

Culp claims to be a historian. He claims a special knowledge of the American Indian. He heads up a troop of scouts. They make moccasins and wear them on hikes. They make arrowheads out of flints, bows from the bushes, tomahawks out of stones tied to sticks. Culp is a kind of encyclopedia of survival. He shows his kids how to create headdresses from the feathers of table turkeys and city pigeons; he teaches them how to pound stale beef, rancid suet, and raisins only rabbits drop, into moist splats with a wooden mallet, and shape the mix into sullen, intractable cakes. He tells them it will stick to their ribs. He tells them it will help them live a long time underground. Pemmican: it’s good against the bomb.

Culp’s kids paint their faces with berry juice and dance as though demented in ungainly figure-eights. They like to take overnights; sleep on the ground; cook in tin cans like tramps; sing around a dying fire. Culp also knows about corn silk and canoes (how to roll, how to smoke, how not to tip, how to right, if, anyway), and he has memorized some Indian chat, or so he claims, which charms the children, perhaps because his flat cheeks puff: but I think it’s because they adore adults who play the fool and make themselves look ridiculous. Of course, to Culp, it matters: deer spoor, land lie, moss growth, cloud code. Culp believes. He carries his beliefs about like a charm to ward off disease. He doesn’t exactly believe that beliefs are male or made of money like the Mormons, but it is easy to imagine him going from door to door, the Wigwam magazine in hand, pleading to be let in so he can harangue some poor soul about the glorious history and present plight of the red man. Because he is convinced of the superiority of Indian culture and the nobility of its savages, he feels he must also believe that Indian blankets are better and more beautiful than Persian rugs; that Indian horses never stumble, tire, grow old, or leave tracks; that Indian arrows fly true; that their medicine men know both men and medicine in a deep mystical sense, and perform miracles as easily as we remove warts and cut corns; that their squaws sew and serve; their elders advise wisely, passing the pipe of peace from hand to hand and measuring the present by the sacred practices of the past; that therefore their rare confederacies were more perfect unions, bound, as the body is, by blood; but most of all, Culp believes that the Indian is untiring, stealthy, resourceful, and stoically brave. Ah, Culp is a man of cliché the way some men are men of the cloth. Of the loincloth, Culp would certainly say. Hence he believes that the Indian is a man of honor, and a man of his word, and a man of his bond. He believes that societies without writing are spiritually free, not stupidly becalmed. He believes in killing and roasting your own meat; growing your own grain; cleaning your own fish, tanning your own hides; slaying your enemies and settling scores; living as the sun and the snow and the seasons demand, following the great herds, worshiping bears and snakes.

Culp drives a pickup with a tarp that leaks, and fancies ponchos that let rain run down his neck. He pretends he can track, catch fish with his hands, make a fire by spinning his prick. Yet he lives in a little prefab the color of a dying daff, and has named his kids Deborah and Andrew—Andrew for the movie Rooney, and Deborah because everybody is born a Debby these days. Andy and Debby: how do you like that? Not Mist-in-the-Morning or after the name of a friendly Indian like Wawatam, or that of the fierce and unforgiving Minavavana, Chief of the Ojibways. No. Debby spelled D-e-b-b-y, and Andy spelled A-n-d-i-e.

On Halloween he will set his whole troop on me, each kid naked to the waist, capering in my living room, Culp too, with his twelve war-whooping boy sopranos, his normally smirky face chalk white, cheekbones on fire with vermilion (I always hope for frost or rain, or a sudden snow, that night), the little snots trying to scalp me because I’ve given them candy canes left from last Christmas ([but why should they complain, at least it’s not cookies containing pet poop or sneezing powder] [one of my own kids—Carl—is in their company—but how could I have decently prevented it? howling louder than all the others, the wretch, and brandishing his homemade tomahawk in my face]). Culp insists that he can interpret the ferocious designs and symbols of Iroquois war paint, and so the children cover their arms, face, and torso with egg dye and cake color, while enjoying a state of sick self-loving, sybaritic pleasure unique to the age of eleven. Culp has them rattle off the names of god knows how many American Indian tribes as though they were reciting the capitals of the States. I scarcely know the makeup of the Five Nations.

Even at the university, he springs this Indian lingo on us as if there were a Jack-in-his-Mouth. To an innocent and normally unmeant “good morning,” he will respond with something jolly in Ojibway. To his “how!” I say “heil!” but he thinks that’s fun.

Though Culp’s features are far from Indian, he is lean and swarthy, with dark eyes in fact like Lou’s. I suddenly see that. Neighbors deceive you about the nature of the neighborhood. Another nose alters the angle of the eye. Front stoops with ethnics squatting on them do the same. Shirley Temple’s indecent gestures subvert Little Orphan Annie’s, even on the comics page. Still, from a distance, Culp seems presentable and reasonable and normal enough. Approach, however, and you’ll hear whirs and clicks, rhymes and puns, jocularities in dialect, jingles in dirty high-schoolese, gibberish he says is pure Sioux.

Culp’s conversation is made-up like his Halloween Indian’s face. It is simply streaked with zaps, wheeps, and other illustrative noises. I guess I shouldn’t say “simply” or “streaked” either. That’s not exact. His speech is not outlined or punctuated with clacks or thonks in any ordinary way. It is engulfed in them—washed with them as though they were spit—the way street sounds surround us—surrounded us, you remember? during that intense noontime tête-à-tête in a sidewalk café where I confessed my passion to an emptied cup and you lifted your chin to look coolly away; yet that comparison is not correct either, since Culp’s incessant zits, yelps, zooms, and hip hips intervene; they serve as symbols themselves and carry on the action. If his pickup hasn’t started, first we hear last night’s icy wind, and the oil in the engine thicken. The truck’s doors open with a groan—which he gives us. His trousers slither over the—ah!—cold seat and the key snicks entering its lock. The engine’s frozen agonies are minutely replayed: the starter’s grind, the muffled puff of a single cylinder firing. Then the smell of a flooded engine is delicately rendered by, as if from a distance, the bassoon. Finally: zrrBLOOM! GLOOM ROOM AROOOM!

There is palpable silence, an emptiness in the line on the page: in the corridor there is no one, or the heart. Culp shrinks. He is shifting into another scenario. His right hand becomes a dinky little car puckpuckpucketing along toward school.

I heard not a single pucket as I approached the crowded café. The clatter of the city collected like lint in an unconscious corner: the corner, perhaps, the café was bent around. A comic strip.

Culp loved to reenact them, enliven their lines. He was surely brought up on Mickey Mouse and Porky Pig. He falsettoes in fright, as they do; he zips; he squeals to a halt; he vaaroo-ooms; he tsks; he thonks. His thonks are worthy of the Three Stooges. He does all the Popeye voices, but prefers Olive Oyl’s. He has noises for the nittles, the grawlix, the quimps, the jams. He blows each balloon up before your ears. He reels home, +’s on his eyes, singing the spirl that rises like heat from his head.

Don’t ask him the time. He’ll tell you it’s dong-dong-dong-a-ding and ten ticks.

I must admit he does a nice imitation of Planmantee’s mind turning over.

You remember? a small green hedge, not boxwood, I think, protected us from the street, and an awning, striped like peppermint, shaded us from an intense noonday sunshine which lay liquidly in the spoons. Remember? I am asking what has happened, why you’ve changed (that old bit of emotional business), and the street sounds safeguard your answer from any other ear: I believe, Bill, you do not say, I’ve finally grown up. You say, remember? you say it’s time to move out of the old neighborhood. What sounds would Culp use to render that cut?

How can a man who wants to be an Iroquois and wipe his ass with leaves go about huffing and clacking like some rusty machine? How can a man who puns with such compulsive passion believe that there is, in fact, a wealth of wisdom in the world; that these aphorisms he collects actually true; these gnomic wiseguys he reveres are really honest? How, I ask in Culp’s resonant Choctaw, and in that fashion, which is firmly his, complete the joke.

Ah, yes . . . Culp believes. He is as crammed with beliefs as peanut butter is with goodness. He believes that the hard ground is great for your back; that leaves cure eczema, impetigo, halitosis, gonorrhea, jaundice, the jim-jams— anything, with the exception of a few inner ailments only roots reach or bark relieves, like my Gongorism, he says, which little else will touch, not even nuts which solidify the stool, or those berries which make you shit in a stream. Roots, for Culp, are another universal remedy: they can restore a missing foreskin or soothe chapped teeth. He believes, as a drunk doesn’t, in the next day. He believes that the Indian’s dogs were devoted, not just hungry; that squaws were better in their blankets than a coed on the lawn; that Indians reared their kids to be kings, breathing nobility through nostrils taught to flare; and he papoosed his own baby all over town to improve its disposition. Don’t pack the squimp on your back, he says, put it against your chest where it can hear the heart and smell milk. He believes that alcohol pickles the liver, that cigarettes darken the lungs like the sides of caves. Yet he loves caves, firelight, primitive man and his magic markers. He believes that savages are children, but that children are pure and upright like saplings not yet bent by the wind, not yet dampened by the rain.

Odd that my thoughts should be interrupted by that little round marbletopped table where we sat, by a few crumbs the sparrows would eventually eat, and by the lazy strip of cellophane you’d pulled from a pack of Camel cigarettes, and which now lay across the rim of your saucer. None of this was normal for you: not the cigarettes, one of which you were trying awkwardly to extract, nor the chocolate you were drinking instead of espresso, nor the cold clench to your thin pale hands, those pensive, watchful eves which used to moisten my face with their emotion darting by me now like startled neons, no, nor the prim white color of the collar on your blouse—not to be mussed—nor your lipstick which had a hint of purple in it like a sunset—not to be smeared. My throat was suddenly full of puns, bad jokes, and all sorts of snappy retorts like risen bile. It was awful. It was awful. She was giving me the sack. And I realized, as I formed the words, how she was also kicking me out of hers. I smiled. I smiled. Culp smiled when he sent one of his Culpagrams: WHEN THE WORM HAS EATEN THE APPLE, THE APPLE IS IN THE WORM. A smile, then, like the glassine window in a yellow envelope. I smiled. In that selfsame instant, too, I thought of the brown, redly stenciled paper bag we had the grocer refill with our breakfast oranges during the splendid summer of sex and sleep just past—of sweetly sweating together, I would have dared to describe it then, for we were wonderfully foolish and full of ourselves, and nothing existed but your parted knees, my sighs, the torpid air. It was a bag—that bag—we’d become sentimental about because (its neck still twisted where we’d held it) you said it was as wrinkled and brown as my balls, and resembled an old cocoon, too, out of which we would both emerge as juicy and new as the oranges, like “Monarchs of Melody,” and so on, and I said to you simply, Dance the orange (a quotation from Rilke), and you said, What? There was a pause full of café clatter. What was I doing by that time—grinning like a ghoul? Thank you for making this easier for me—did you cliché say? you said. That was when you compared me to an old neighborhood. Nothing commonplace about that. There was so much blood in my head I heard you as if from a distance, as if my sinuses were stuffed. The flimsy red string of cellophane blew from the table like a strip of breeze, and I said, Thank you for shopping at IGA.

Just as I feel the Culp come up in me when I malice my Martha, my misery, my missus, I felt it then, losing without grace or even decency the only satisfying lover in my life, because I had put the problem in those words: getting the sack; and then seeing only the hard oblique light from the spoons, the lift of the little length of cellophane like a sail in that short sigh of air, your smoothly filed and lacquered nails tweezing a cigarette from its pack, a fragment of tobacco clinging to one red edge, and then remembering the smell of orange peel on my fingers as if it were my own quick and not the fruit’s, each step of my mind taking me further away from what was happening (and, indeed, what was happening?), from the terrible turn in your feelings, like the corner of the café, because, I presume, I couldn’t bear to sit there and watch your tongue remove a small residue of chocolate from your lips the way you were removing me.

Can I believe I’ve any hold on history when I find my memory is made of marimba music, sack trash, and teapot trivia? stacks of calmly folded grocery sacks, for instance, with those silly sentences stenciled on them; again, for instance, when I was having that soul-splitting quarrel with Martha, my misery, my missus, while she put away the groceries and I carefully flattened the bags and stuffed them in with the others to pretend to an accord until we’d take one out later to line the garbage can so our souls wouldn’t dirty; Martha fitting the broccoli into the crisper and screaming at the rear of the refrigerator, right at the frost line; I recreasing the holdings in the sacks, smoothing out old wrinkles, and yelling back like a bullhorn; the milk still steady on its rack, you slimy word-snake, BARGAINS GALORE. I’ll tell you what it’s like screwing you, four sticks of margarine brick up the butter keeper, a wedge of bags between tins of shortening like an elastic deck of cards, you ass-mouthed liar, AT YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD STORE, it’s like trying to fuck a cooked cabbage—after it’s set a spell—after it’s got cold—after its leaves have begun to wimp—ah, there is a freezing wind passing through the troughs of the celery; O Koh, you—what a corny conceit!—when your dingle—you—you never say it straight, always what it’s like, not what it is, well, your prick is a Polish pickle, she resolutely shouts, setting the jar inside and softly closing the door. I do not make the expected rejoinder. Her whole body is wide and white and seems to be suddenly just like the Kelvinator; you’ve left me holding the bag; O, I know, I’m the gab, when what you’d like to be holding is that skinny bit of Five & Dime baggage, SHOP AT SAFEWAY IT’S SAFER; O, Martha, you mean that skinny bit of baggage that this minute’s giving me my sack back? and what does the stupid bag hold? it has held my childhood head, I remember, with scissored eyes and a painted mouth: I am the Black Knight of this one-log bridge, and you shall not cross, Friar Tuck; I’ve killed ten of King Arthur’s clumsy champions with the backside of a plow; three Billy-Goats Gruff went down as easily as swallowing lard; I have unhorsed a heap of hotshots, too, each wearing their milady’s favor: garter, scarf, or hankie; and I’ve done in a dozen dragons, descaled like fish—so take that! and that! Pow! Well for christ’s sake, what are you up to now running from symbol to symbol like someone needing to pee; she did say my pick was a Polish pickle, what do you make of that? would you rather be an old neighborhood: would she have called my cock a gherkin if she had been holding a jar of those? a word with Polish roots, too, I shouldn’t wonder, Indian in intention; well, I didn’t make the expected rejoinder, anticipating her reply, and considering the difference between the nature of her banter and the strength of her scream, the deliberate way she put away the groceries—this into that—nothing set down stressfully, nothing slammed or banged or battered, while the words came out of her with the violence of a sneeze.

This minute Culp is composing a limerick concerning Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. It is, as he says, another chapter in his limerickal history of the human race. It will have elephants in it. Hurray. That’s why I gave up poetry for history in my youth. And the novelist’s art as well: he would love the way the sun lay in the bowls of our metal spoons, and the fringed shadow of the shawled edge of the candy-striped awning—see?—it is crossing the table between us as if it were a fence; and surely he would have one of us put that spoon’s light like swallowed fire in our mouth. It would not have been your mouth the spoon went into. You were there to breathe fire, not swallow it, to tell me we were now another cliché, (uncoupled cars, spilled pearls, lost gloves—unpaired, unstrung); consequently you were nervous, full of fidgets—nervous—nervous—nervous—nervous—nervous—nervous—nervous—nervous—and had bought a quite uncustomary pack of Camels on the way to the café, peeling the wrapper off in my presence just to get at a smoke, and not at all as if you were smiling at me and removing your clothes, possibly that braided brown sash I gave you after the first time we made love in a real bed, then soon looped like a length of lust itself over the foot of it; no—it was time to burn holes in all our old habits: that was what the cigarette was for; so you scooted your chair close to the table (which certainly could have been better wiped, I could see the streaks of the rag like an added design), not to be close to me, but because it was crowded in the café, and I could not help but notice your slightly empurpled lips, freshly purchased—in a flap, in a rush—unquestionably the wrong shade, but, as it would turn out, the right shade for this occasion: “Twilight at Noon”; yet you could have been a secretary on her break, not a dime-store doxy, and this was autumn in New York, not a malt shop in Indiana, although you ordered chocolate, a childhood sweet; still you didn’t put a spoon in, perhaps fearing you might spill that sunshine from the silver and set a blaze like brandy; I suppose it’s because I’m a little older and my age has begun to make tracks across my face like a herd of horses; I suppose it’s because I’ve added a bit of stout to my fat, and you’re jealous of my piquant little tits; since it’s certainly not because I cuff you around, have gone limp in the stiff department, lost my job, fancy another—you can’t say that—or because I won’t leave my wife and fly you down to Rio; no, because you want less of me, not more; you want to rezip our relationship, close up every opening, put a cork on it, call the cows in: goodbye. I can call in Culp to do the zipper’s closing. You did say something finally about why: you had found a reason, something which had been bothering you for . . . well . . . a while (a while: the same sense of ‘while’ you might use to describe the shameful time you’ve nervously let pass since your fingers felt, say, a lump like a small pea in your left breast—”I’m afraid, doctor, it’s been there awhile”); anyway, you now knew why: why? it was because I had a loathsome mind. Loathsome, was it? a word from an English movie, a word popular with girls aged fourteen. That was why? Still, I have never been sure whether you were refusing my avowal or denying its truth, denying its truth by affirming yours. Then your spoon went swiftly and silently into your cup; I felt fat thickening on me, moment by moment, like cooling gravy; and I became the man I now am.

I once went to bed with a nun

who prayed the whole time it was done.

She prayed to her maker

to come quick and take her,

so I did as she bid and then some.

When I was a kid, I always found nuns a bit creepy. I never wondered what was under those black gowns (as I’m told some kids did) because whenever I saw a nun, or even thought momentarily of one, I also saw “death” with more detail than a youngster can comfortably stomach, so I immediately turned my mind off like a light and plunged her darkness into mine the way she, whoever she was, had blackened her body with denial—so white underneath like a sea-worm or slug in a cave, so pale she put each limb in relief against the black. I still feel that passing a nun on the street is more hazardous than passing a school bus. Culp is writing a series of limericks—a huge cycle, he says—endless, it seems to me—each one of which begins; I once went to bed with a nun. But in the name of Christ’s tears why, I ask him. Why nuns? What do you hope to accomplish? The limerick, he replies, making the shame-on-me sign for being such a dunce, the limerick should be blasphemous where possible—isn’t that the sainted tradition?—and always obscene. A clean limerick is an affront. The limerick is a tool, one of the skewers of Satan. It must be dirty like the toilet seats in public parks. The line which I have chosen takes care of such requirements quickly, automatically, almost prematurely, you might say, so that in the rest of the verse, I can get down to business. Culp assumes the posture of someone getting down to business. I picked nuns for the same dispassionate and professional reason that Poe chose his raven. Do you know Poe’s essay on composition? I refuse to acknowledge such a stupid question. I refrain from quoting the opening paragraph. Down to business, I say, still crookedly playing the straight, you said “down to business,” but what is a limerick’s “business”? isn’t it poetry gone out of business? isn’t it a syphilitic bum, a fraudulent bankrupt, and doesn’t it mug? isn’t it like a wino in rags? won’t we find it asog and asleep under Hart Crane’s bridge? Culp crows. I shall explain, he says, and I see once again that tutorial finger approaching my nose. He really crows: cock-a-doodle-do, and so forth. Ah, the limerick—he wets and warms his lips—the limerick has a nice, tight, hourglass figure like a Gibson girl in her corset. He grins. He loves his metaphors, his rhymes, the jingles of his mind. They make him feel happy-go-lucky, as if he has change in his pocket. Well Koh, you know I like to undo that corset a little, let what’ll pop out pop, but basically it’s laced as tight as time is, running out; it’s as closed as the candy store cash box. He does the little bell on the shop door. Ding-a-ling. Here comes Eckstein, with his huge hooked nose and greasy eyes. If Culp didn’t do Jews so well I’d think he was anti-Semitic. Eckstein looks over the counter at me. What do you want, little boy? Ah! you want an explanation of the limerick? That’ll he a dime. You got a dime? I got two nickels, I say. Is that a dime?

They sail over the ground in their long skirts, soft and full of silence, a lull before a lull, their carefully framed laces free of the wear of the world, like priests, too, plump as chickens. Brides. Like Myrna Loy—married to the Thin Man. Does He come to them in the night, when their skirts are lifted to blot out the moon and the sky? Does He come to them in His white robes like a gathering of cloud? Do they do it by mingling their nightgowns, robe rubbing robe, and do they culminate in a sliding of silks, a gossamer gasm, a whisper of holy words? I always had so many questions, but I realize now that I didn’t want real answers to any of them.

So the point is, Culp says, the point is to use this very orderly little object (his fingers form a very orderly little object) to manufacture disorder and to confound whatever it contains. The limerick is an instrument of disrespect. It is a tune toilet, a toy box. It gossips, it slanders, it ruins, it sneers, it snobs. It is a turd tub, a cock lock. IT IS (Culp stands straight and stretches out his arms, he is a billboard by the roadside, a cross on a crag) AN IMPLEMENT OF REVOLUTION! I still don’t understand this obsession of yours. These poor nuns—they don’t live in wigwams and scalp whites; why not use ‘abbot’ or ‘cardinal’ or ‘pope,’ if you have to blaspheme? Ah . . . ah . . . you ask what I aim to achieve by writing so many, Culp declaims, holding up that admonishing, tutorial finger. He’s wet it. Where is the wind from? I aim to achieve perfection! He wipes his teeth clean with the backside of his tie. His teeth gleam. You wanted an abbot? Okay.

A nun fell in love with an abbot,

and doffed both her vows and her habit.

She was sadly dismayed,

when finally laid,

for he fucked like a snake, not a rabbit.

I don’t know how to respond.

Hey, Culp says, there’s an upswing of interest in the bigot’s limerick. Is that so? How about cripples? how about the poor and the maimed? How about a series on unwed mothers? How about one on used-car salesmen who fall in love with exhaust pipes? What’s the market for fruitcakes? Nothing stirring there, he says, but the ethnic limerick is taking off.

There was a young lady, a nigger,

who had a remarkable figure.

She was shaped like a gun,

and went off just like one,

‘cause her butt was both handle and trigger.

That’s your version of the young lady of Niger? Sure. Hey. How about THERE WAS an OLD MAN of TOBAgo? Got to, I say. Hey. Culp grins like a mime—a grin placed on his face like bacon on a plate. You wanted rabbits as a rhyme, remember? I protest. I really do. But it’s useless. It really is. Abbots, I said; I suggested abbots. But it’s futile. Pointless. I’ve no innocence left, no resistance. I am guilty of everything, or I will be. I want rabbits as a rhyme. I want to be raped, buggered. Finish me. Do me in. Hey, Bill, he says, grinning like a clown cut out of cardboard, you ready? Ready? Am I ever ready? My hands muff my ears. Was I ready for the war? I sag at the knees. Was I ready for my first lay? I act almost in tears. Culp studies me. Did I anticipate my wife’s fleshly animosities? I hunt up a hankie. Was I prepared to get the sack? Culp applauds by repeatedly parting his palms. I gently tear my hair, slap my own cheeks. He grins. Grins. He loves such antics, such sad games.

For hangovers it was my habit

to find the hair of the dog and then grab it,

but one maddened Hatter

ended that matter,

when the hare wasn’t Welsh, it was rabid.

Anyone in my profession encounters a lot of jargon during his reading life. It is, to the eye, like polluted air, and one gets used to it, to breathing and reading shallowly, with a hankie, sometimes, in front of one’s face. But Culp’s talk was quite otherwise. It was, if you like, so free of all professional tone and temper as to be antagonistic to it. I finally realized that he spoke carefully under every subject, whatever it was; he was always a decade younger than necessary, so that if you wanted to discuss baseball, Culp became fourteen; if it were economics or sociology, he might carry on like a serious sophomore; and only about aging have I ever heard him sound mature. If the larded lingo of my colleagues—Planmantee or Governali—made them seem wiser than they were—like sibyls: darkly oracular—and appeared to exclude those unfamiliar with it from their little community of thought, Culp’s conversation was designed to make everything appear to be stupid, callow, scarcely whelped; and his language was so gee-whizzily imprecise, so stuffed to the nut with the nonce, it was no more particular than the wind, and spoke breezily to everyone like a politician at a rally. Only the future would find what he said inexplicable, and have to hunt up each meaning as though it were commanded by a crossword; for, by definition, the nonce lingers no longer than the daylily, and disappears like that wadded-up bloom from its stem; but that’s what Culp wanted and loved: if only language were made of slang, and each word had a brief green life, a short season in our speech before blowing away, there would be no real enrichment of meaning, no investment, over time, of careful human thought in any inscription; the right rhymes would continue to rob signs of their significance and overthrow thrones (hosanna/banana, Buddha/gouda, Duke/puke); we would express ourselves in jingles:

My name is William Frederick Kohler,

but as I grew both fat and older,

I lost the Willie and the Freddie,

until a simple K was ready;

though by the time I’m timed to die

that withered K will be an I—

an I that soon will melt away,

and only leave this I in clay;

the soul would close and open like a shop [SAVE AT PSEUDO’S]; punning would replace the rule of reason:

If all men were mortal as soap,

for the Jews there would be little hope,

since the brand they have been

didn’t wash out but in,

and who’d choose a Semitic soap?

and while life might become as shallow as a saucer, it couldn’t hold much hate, either; suicide would be reduced to self-deprecation: the Jew’s joke, the Polish putdown; seriousness of every kind would be canceled so the real show could go on: the Celebrity Roast. I’ve been digging into Culp’s love of noncey slanguage, and I’ve decided there has to be a lot of resentment there somewhere, an immense malice toward the mind.

Culp recalls that I asked for a cardinal.

A nun went to bed with a cardinal

whose tastes were quite plain, even ordinal.

By raising her quim

she kept him plugged in

till delight came on in her cardinal.

Alter that noontime nightmare, I was not to see you again (unless the future makes fun of me and turns your person up like a letter lying doggo in a drawer), though I have many times imagined a meeting between us, in another bar, perhaps, but in a bar as dark as the wood that built its booths. It’s fiveish, when life has fallen safely into the cocktail hour. The two of us are in out of the slush, out of the cheerless cold, packages under our arms. You will wear fur-topped boots and look painfully beautiful. A beer will be brought. A sherry. Nothing more. A damp ring from my glass will lie undangerously on the table—a table whose top is so impregnated with plastic it gleams like a lake in the darkness, your moist empillowed eye catching the night’s vagrant light; yes, it would he like that: so that the drift from my glass floats liquidly along like sweat on water. Have I complained again about my age? I had become an old neighborhood, I say; you were right to move away. I’ll not mention that the waiter has forgotten to bring me my nuts. O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni! I manage to hold my tongue without putting my hands near my mouth. I sit on my hands without sitting on my hands. That sweet smile, so malicious, so familiar, takes shape on your face—O Lou, it is painful to perceive it there, forming slowly like frost—and you lean your chin on the back of your hand—O so winsome, so appealing—while you meanly mock me. Old? I don’t know, you say, though you were always old, Bill, born old, I’ll bet, like my granddad always seemed, since I never saw him any other way than weak and wambly from my beginning to his end, well, you lived cautious, as if in a hole, drove slow, looked gray, grew old as if age were your only aim, and I . . . too young for anyone, you said, and it was true, I was, Bill, I was . . . yet we were young together once, and thin as scarves, remember? even though your breasts, Bill, were heavy anyway as mine, still, weren’t we slithery in one another’s arms? wow, they’d silk about me like those scarves I snitched from the Five & Dime, those scarves whose colors ran together as our moistures did, back then, summer under summer, when you would sweat a shower on your chest, a chain of lakes between your not so manly tits, summer over summer like a heavy cloud, and you’d see colors through me so you said . . . see . . . sure . . . you said you saw . . . those were the days, before my cradle became your grave, wasn’t that the way you put it to me, Bill? spat it at me, Bill? your chewed and wadded words? ah, god, the good old days, when I said kiss me—all it took—kiss me and you came . . . a youthful thing, I’d say, like the nervous spill of a boy who thinks he has you pinned in the backseat of his father’s Ford but can’t get it in and gurks instead on your hand or wets your thigh, because it’s still his poppa’s prick, too, he’s borrowed for the evening and can’t handle any better than he can the car, well, it was rather nice, nevertheless, for an old man to fumble and go off like a boy, a youngtime thing, though you were always old, born old, I’ll bet, old-eyed and cold inside, snowy as suet. O Lou . . . That’s when my play dreams dissipate, suddenly you are saying such things, and worse, forcing me to close down the show, distickling my Fancy. I regraze the shallow pastures of your upper thighs when suddenly you are boxing my ears. I recreate a nipple, lean near to nuzzle, when suddenly I see an unhealed wound. Daymare after daymare gallops away with your memory. Suddenly your sweet face sneers. Your soft voice curses me; you pfimpf! you klurch! I cannot connect you any longer to my life. Not without a shock. Not even your image will behave. At least that much of you should be my slave. The fault is yours, my dear.

Culp is here again like a nagging cough. He reminds me that I said I would prefer the pope. He is wearing a large button which says: LET’S PUT THE INDIAN BACK IN INDIANA!

A nun went to bed with the pope,

who tied her four limbs with a rope.

It’s not that, my dear,

you have something to fear,

but I want you quite still

so nothing will spill

when your holiness is filled by the pope.

I squat clumsily and pretend to defecate in the corridor. Is that the way to respond? Culp thinks so. I’m a card. A great kidder. A regular joe.

I am an old neighborhood. I have a loathsome mind. You start to rise, a bit awkwardly because the chairs have been set so close together some of their wire legs hove intertwined. My hands are palm up on the table in what I take to be a gesture of supplication. You are latching your purse. I remember the sound (between a click and a clack, perhaps a snock, Culp? would that be right?) and I try to scrub my mind clean of the sign’s sticky duplicities, but it’s no go. I hear Iago advising Roderigo: She must have change, she must; therefore put money in thy purse; Lou’s cunt is closing like a flytrap . . . snunk; I feel the hand’s bag; I read the pocket’s book; I lap my last lap. So she stands. Has stood. I am holding my tongue while keeping my hands palm up upon the table. Perhaps someone will drop a dime in them, Bill, her voice says, for she says nothing. Her voice says, Bill. It is the last time I will hear my name in her mouth. How wise we were to meet in such a public place where it is guaranteed I will not blubber, curse, or plead. A dissolution neat as her ensemble. Bill—it begins, but then her voice breaks off, and we are broken. I am broken. Bill—That’s all. all. My god . . . all? That was all. And she is slipping sideways out of my sight. Has slipped. The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly be bitter as coloquintida.

Culp is wearing a large badge which reads: BRING BACK THE BADGE!

Your clothes, as you rise, readjust; they slip into something smooth and stiff like the uniform of a nurse. The edge of the table presses against your belly. The purse yawns; catches the Camels; closes—they are as bitter as coloquintida—closes: snock. Dark glasses cover you suddenly with the brown of a fruit’s bruise, the brown of something brown in its seeds. I am seen.

How must it be when they go at it—Culp and his wifey. What sound accompanies the elevation of her nightie? A medal hangs from his naked neck. It says PEACE!

. . . to be the pressing edge . . . to glimpse again your soft white shoulder . . . that nostalgia—most painful—for the flesh, that former form . . . to slide your seat-slick skin . . . to be the pressing edge . . . I never understood what makes another body so appealing . . . but to glimpse again—by sorrow’s side—your soft white shoulder, soft as your slip . . . is it because we age, we die? or do we die because we age? ah . . . to otter on down you . . . to lie along the length of you again, slide your sweat-sweet skin . . . to be the caressing edge . . .

Over the Alps on an elephant, Culp yodels, went Hannibal out of his element.

And during that merciless noon light, Lou had delivered the final thrust, a quite conventional coup de grâce. But inside the banality of the blow was a fresh blade: it was time to move to a new neighborhood. No matter the matter of it. The pain was as stale as the stars. Nothing new in it. Nor in my compliant posture: dog cower. Haven’t you got our holy prepositions and positions mixed, I now imagine myself saying. Don’t you mean you’re thinking of moving onto a new neighbor? Which proves I am as Culpicated as ever, and unfazed, unfoxed. One Riposte on Toast. Or shall I play dazed? as if I didn’t understand? hadn’t caught the cut across my heart, even though I’d had a warding hand up? She stands, and the edge of the table presses itself against the place where she is divvied. It was that last cold and indirect caress I could not bear. Nevermore to do the downy. And so I rose—without the least sense of bloom or blush or black spot—and wriggled my way between the tiny tables—oops, so sorry, pardon me—amid the talk: Olga never thinks of me, all she does is buy shoes—the shadows are so distinct they seem made of paper—excuse me, please, that’s a nice nod, pardon me, sorry all to pieces, please excuse me, please, that’s a nice nod, pardon me, I’m sorry to my shoes, thanks, please excuse—through the clatter the cups, spoons, Zippo snicking, auto calls, purse clush, out into and under the bright summer-swallowing autumn day, its whitewashed sky, where Lou was entering a cab, not even affording me a final flash of her leg, for her car was already drawing away from a curb gray as ash, and moving out among the other glints, while behind me whole walls of window consumed her swimming image. How wholly ordinary were we? Ah, god. Utterly.

A nun went to bed with a barber.

Wilk his razor, she feared, he would carve her.

You will have to behave,

for your cunt’s close shave

means you steady the tool of this barber.

Culp, I say, with wonderment like a wreath about my earnest face, don’t you find those Eddie Lear–like last lines a little too predictable and pillowy? Sic et non, he says. (Geez.) Well, sure, he says agreeably, it’s obviously easier to find two rhymes than three, and sure, you land soft; it does seem a cinch, he says, blowing his breath in my direction, and there’s no automatic, built-in bite to it; but the thing is, that’s exactly the challenge, Kohlee, you bet, that’s the non that says sic’em to the oke (geeeez) because it’s ten/twenty/thirty times harder to write the soft version and still come up with something snappy. Look, he says patiently, suppose I began, oh . . . with . . . A faggot whose crimes were quite heinous . . . well, a line like that lets you get ahead of it like a cop on a cycle, doesn’t it? you’re there in the station when the train arrives, sure, so the problem is to create a little surprise nevertheless, like: A faggot whose crimes were quite heinous kept a switchblade sheathed in his anus . . . see, you didn’t expect that, did you? you were looking to hear rear, the old rump, all right—fond friend anus—but switchblade, now isn’t that a punch in the plexus? yeah, and when he was screwed, his buggers were chewed . . . get the nice twist there? really, this scorned form requires patience—passion—art—so when he was screwed, his buggers were chewed by that asshole for which he was famous. Now isn’t that one something! Isn’t that fully as fabulous as a wash nite? My land o’ lakes! I’ve also done a dirty on the pope which demonstrates what every success succeeds in demonstrating: namely the essence of success itself. I try to stop his traffic like a cop. I know, I say, I protest, I DO know. I’ve heard it. You’ve told it to me. You’ve recited it. A nun went to bed with the pope, who immediately started to grope, Culp whispers, as if imparting a secret. I find the words dismayingly unfamiliar, but I insist on my complete recollection of them anyhow. My complaints, my avowals, are useless, of course—useless, futile—so I begin to edge away, my back to the bulletin board where Culp has tacked up a cartoon. —for the place ‘neath her dress—I am facing north and walking west, off even rudely where the sun sets, I’d like to sashay, but it doesn’t matter, his meters follow my feet. —WHICH HE WANTED TO BLESS—he shouts in a whisper after me.

I do my chores. Pretend to want Martha. Because I can’t dance, I take her dancing. Fancy some firelight to stare at.

Meanwhile Culp does fowl in the barnyard, geese in the sky, a train entering a tunnel, a plane pulling out of a dive. He does dog noises. Sure. It’s no surprise. He can whine, yelp, growl, howl, and bay with the worst of them. He likes to represent to you a neighborhood in the early morning as the milkman wakes it. First the horse comes clippity down the dawning street. The bottles rattle in their wire baskets. Chinkaclink, Next: a chunk, because the cold bottom of the bottle has come to rest on the stoop. A moment of silence for rising cream. Then one dog outcries, soon another. He hopes you will appreciate the milkman’s noisy progress. He hopes you will admire the differences of the breeds.

A Nun went to bed with a sailor

who said he had come from a whaler.

It was like Moby’s dick—

his blubberous prick—

with which he promptly assailed her.

And after this sailor impaled her,

he said to the nun, whose voice failed her,

gee whiz, madam,

you ain’t built like a man,

and don’t come like the boys on the whaler.

My business is with history, my quarrel too. The things I remember about that September day: brittle little sounds speckled against all those incessant voices, monotonous as a fan’s hum, the hard bright light, my palm-up, pity-imploring hands, Lou’s outfit (I guess that’s the right word), her uncharacteristic cup of chocolate, Camel cigarette, and so on . . . ah, god, and the pressing edge—these do not belong in history. They lie along its lip like the milk always did around my kids’ mouths. They are what clings to the spoon you’ve used to stir your drink, the residue which wets the saucer, which remains in the ring the cup leaves when put imprudently down on a piece of paper or on a countertop to be wiped away by a waitress.

My feeling of being bereft, a painful numbness if that is possible, the self warding off rejection like someone dodging a blow, an awareness of how foolish I was, old jerk, old hat, old . . . old . . . no, none of that belongs to history. This is history:

Over the Alps on an elephant

went Hannibal out of his element,

for the elephant’s motion

was so like the ocean,

he continually punic’d

upon his best tunics,

and his slaves had to wash off the elephant.

I never know how to respond.

It was a bright and sunny day. I said we met in a sidewalk café. She entered as though in a play. The ash on the wall I was was gray. We greeted in a formal way. Neither of us could at first find a thing to say. Is it true, what you wrote me, that you’re going away? Yes, I’m going away to stay. I said, Dare I tell you my dismay? It’s a frightful decision I wish you’d delay. Don’t make a scene, she said, a display. The waiter’s tray slid with his presence between us. A cup clicked in its saucer. My nerves had begun to fray. I feared I might weep and my eyes grew hot, their rims red. No last hurrah, then, no last hurray? I don’t think we should betray all our former feelings. No, my love, she said, it’s really time for me to move on to a new neighborhood. So you’ve had, from your Lou, your last lay.

I didn’t know how to respond.

I said we met. Okay. But did we? If by ‘meeting’ one means the purposeful approximation of two or more persons, then we met—yes. A half-hostile conjunction. No touching, though. No berating. No meeting in that sense. In the sense of A Meeting, there was never any meeting. There were merely some incidents which I later shuffled together like a hand of cards and called “a meeting,” and beneath which—beneath that calm and covering name—the actual events disappeared like a table under lace and embroidery. My shoes carried me there, but they were not a part of any meeting. HITLER, CHAMBERLAIN, & THEIR SUITS & SHOES, MEET IN MUNICH. The place where the meeting occurred was no more a part of our meeting, either, than the rabbit’s snare is an ear of the rabbit. The day. The autumn. Awning. Awfulness. The strip of cellophane that blew lazily away. Yet erase these, remove the waiter’s tray, the cool spoon between Lou’s long slim fingers, and there’s no meeting.

Lou was not there when I arrived for our meeting. Our fleeting had arrived ahead of her. I stood stupidly on the passersby side of the hedge and searched unsystematically for a place. The sun made my eyes smart. Two seats were vacant, but they were out of the shade—in the squint—and on one I thought I saw a smear of custard. My heart was already racing. A man with a half-eaten brioche on his plate, his last bite still visibly indented in the eaten edge, folded his Times uncomfortably under his arm and rose, without the least sense of a bud’s shape, a bloom’s beauty, or leaves disfigured by black spot, that I could see, to make undulating way between the tables (rather gracefully, I believe I thought) out into the street—a barrier which he quickly and efficiently crossed. Don’t order brioche. Okay. You said okay. Until that moment I hadn’t realized that you never said okay. I say yeah a lot. More than is normal or necessary. But in your unfamiliar strict gray skirt and ununbuttonable blouse you said it: Yeah, okay, I won’t order brioche, but I do think I’ll have a cup of cocoa. Cocoa. It went wearily with my name. You came up the street, all very trim and tidy, as though on your lunch hour, secretary in the city, certainly not a clerk in a dime store anymore, now quite executive fuck-

ing your way up, as Culp would smugly point out if he knew, and no longer impressed by my mind, which had become loathsome finally, or had finally been seen for what it was: loathsome. In hose and heels. Ah, may no jokes culp up in my mouth in my misery. May no silly sallies soil, no wounding witticisms wound. Please, no employment of my extensive verbilities. No ripostes, no rejoinders, however easy and irresistible the opening offered. Opening. Ah, god, and the pressing edge. Moist mouth. Ah . . . soft hole made by hand. The long warm yum of inner thigh where my lips may linger. Gone. Gone. Good god, gone. For good. God, what an expression! What an idea! I’ve been given the sack. I’ll take any opening offered. The surface of you was all the deep I needed. And you felt surface too when my tongue went dancing. It was precisely that touch which scarcely turned a hair along the edge of your muff, which was light as the light of a fly, that curled my soul and made you touch my ear with a moan; it was the sweet cover of the word ‘love’ that made me love. Perched in your drugstore chair in such a way your seat doesn’t seem to meet the seat. So desirable in your natty new touch-me-nots and businesslike heel click. Don’t I notice now how free of heavy jewelry your hands are, your nails or garish gloss, a tasteful oval shape instead of the glistening spear-point they once were, and how your watchband is as slim and silver as a small swift fish, that your blouse is very pretty even if, and don’t I resentfully recognize that they are each one my improvement, they are my long lawn, my envied bed of blooms, bed from which I’m being barred, position of trust from which I am, after a moment here of stirring and staring down (the shade has made me swoon), going  to be firmly and efficiently sacked.

────────────────────────────────

NEW DOUBLE STRONG

EXTRA HEAVY BAG

NO DOUBLE BAGGING

NEEDED

────────────────────────────────

There was no meeting. Meetings are the imaginings of history and if I had not seen that smear of—what was it?—custard on that chair, perhaps I would have had us sit there in the sun’s scrutiny, the glare so severe you would have had to squint when you looked up at my woeful face when you spoke to my drooping ears and maybe you wouldn’t have felt you could say the things you said if, at the same time, you were unattractively squinting, and then there wouldn’t have been any separation, either, no grim goodbye, no broken Bill—no fondleless faretheewell. But we all know that thrown shoes don’t lose battles, bring down empires either. You would not have been impeded by such a small stone flung in your path, not even by so many as would have paved it with gravel. Our inertia is so immense it causes causes to collect like dammed-up water; we must amass motives like money before we make our move; we recruit a regiment of reasons; then let them, like a firing squad, fire obediently into the helpless body of their effect. In short, Lou must have wanted to give me the sack for some time. For a considerable spell, she must have been setting her sights on a new neighborhood. Some months back, who knows exactly when? she must have decided I had a loathsome mind. Even when we lay together like cream cheese on a bagel, the idea had to have been forming. Even while I was mooning over her “maw,” as I affectionately called her cunt, she must have been thinking that my affection had a little loathsomeness about it. O shitty suspicion that shadows so sunny a side of my past! O crapulous thought! But that’s it. Causes collect like waste in the bowels of history. History: in fact, is horse drop, cow plop, nose snot, rope knot, flesh rot, ink blot, blood clot, street shout. Who says I have a loathsome mind? Who dares to say so? And every event, then, is somebody’s—something’s—stool. History has an asshole, Culp old man, I shall say to him tomorrow, and the present is its most immediate relief. Culp will make a glad sad consecrated grateful forlorn face which resembles the one I make for him, except that it will have a scoutmaster’s kindness in it. So the future is a fart then, which heralds every bowel’s movement, every new break of day.

A nun went to bed with Herr Hitler,

whose cock just got littler and littler.

O what I would do

If you was a Jew,

he cried as he bit her and hit her.

I recite for Culp a limerick about a young man from Perugia, but he will have none of it. Ach, all that Niger/Tiger stuff is disgusting. Why must all these creeps be from some place like Nantucket? There was a young nun from a nunnery . . . Amateurs amble over everything like cows. The A which follows so many limericks stands for Amateur, not for Anonymous.  . . . who hated to neck, all such flummery . . . You get a line like “and his cock, when he came, cried out, ‘oogha,’ and you know right away the kid is going to come from Chattanooga. Put your tongue on that spot at the top of my twot, she’d say to the nuns from her nunnery. Where’s the challenge, you know? the inner art? the deep design?

Culp, I tell him, using a juridical tone, your character doesn’t compose. Here you are beating the tom-tom for the American Indian as if every one of them were running for public office; you’re boosting the simple life with all the zeal of a small-town chamber of commerce; you’re eating right, sleeping well, breathing evenly, thinking with your cleverly opposed thumbs, getting up early in the a.m., taking long hikes, keeping your prepuce loose, living like a scout; yet at the same time you are spending god knows how many hours trying to figure out what assflatulent word you can rhyme with ‘Hitler’ and ‘Hannibal’ and ‘oogha,’ and making mechanical sounds with your tongue, lips, teeth, and through your nose as though it were another mouth. Are you going to audition for Disney? And geez, Culp, those infantile puns of yours, those childish quips, your adolescent verses: you know, there’s nothing natural about them, nothing savage; I mean, they are total contrivances, complete artificialities; they’re cuckoo clocks. Geez, you’ve seen the stuff piled up in roadside stands, stacked up in stores, pictured in countless catalogues; it’s the world of walnut bowls and ceramic ducks—it’s a tool-shit civilization. It’s not the kind of waste you kick a few leaves over and hope to hide, I tell him. He smiles like a dog who’s just done a dirty on the rug. I mean, it’s embroidered turds, Culp, and smelly stools of Styrofoam and steel, crocks of that cheese that’s been soaked in port piss. You can’t even hole this stuff, wipe it away with a page of Monkey Ward’s, whose catalogue contains still more. I tell him he’s dealing in mind merde. I compare it to Chaucer chewed into learned multilingual notes, those spitballs of scholarship; I compare it to the Spenserian Society meeting over biscuits and sherry; I say that it’s facts stuck like gull droppings to the side of history, the guano of the learned professions. Culp is impressed. We often have rant contests, although usually the subject is set in advance. I conclude that it’s like copping a feel for Flaubert. (Culp begins, softly, to croon “Yiddisha Eyes,” which compels me to continue.) Knickknacks like yours, Chuck (he hates that name), vulgarities like the ones you extol shall overcome, shall inherit, shall overflow, the earth. Think of the crossword puzzle, for christ’s sake, the comic strip, the joke book, the movie magazine, the almanac, the graffiti chiseled in lintels, the whole air swept and shaken by storms of insipid conversation. In any well-run society, alliteration would be a hanging offense.

Culp hands me what he claims is his business card. One side reads like this:

 Listen, Culp says, we really agree—Kohler—you and I. We two are one. Don’t groan and make that frog’s face. All, the nightmare of the knickknack. Isn’t it wonderful! That’s the great aim of all these splendid artifacts, led on by the limerick, their true leader, and like the Führer, their destroyer, too. What is this aim, you ask, he says, giving me the finger. To raunchily, to suburp everything, to pollute the pollutants, explode the exploded, trash the trash. It sends back that annunciatory light and returns us to the Virgin. O, Koh, the limerick is the unrefiner’s fire. It is as false and lifeless, as anonymous, as a rubber snake, a Dixie cup. It is indeed the dildo of desire! No one ever found a thought in one. No one ever found a helpful hint concerning life, a consoling scense. The feelings it harbors are the cold, the bitter, dry ones: scorn, contempt, disdain, disgust. Yes. Yet for that reason, nothing is more civilized than this simple form. In that—in cultural sophistication—it is the equal of the heroic couplet. Could Benin, with its bronzes, have produced it? could the Mayans? the Greeks even? or foully glorious Aristophanes? Nope. Only old England in the raped richness of its colonies, in its wide führership of the waves. Only old England, with its vast number of idle, overeducated queers. But this high point, you must realize, Kohler, is a low blow. That’s the lesson of the limerick. You never know when a salacious meaning will break out of a trouser. It is all surface—a truly modern shape, a model’s body. There’s no inside however long or far you travel on it, no within, no deep. So it does not merely show, you see, it shows up! It forces you to face the facts without ever producing any. The noble savage does not know disgust, of course. He does not vomit his heart out into his head. I once went to bed with a nun . . . There’s little else left of that Italianate church.

I’ve turned his card over with a hand dealt in a crooked game. I am trying to read it while Culp rattles on and on into something like a song.

I hand him back his card which he slips into his jacket pocket with a smooth whistling sound which signifies the sneak’s speed. Satisfaction is scribbled over him like a schoolboy’s tablet. He is telling me of his new promotional scheme for the Indians. It’s called “Dial-a-Tribe.” His smirk is immaculate. A few Xmases ago he gave me a large sack such as Santa might carry. Stenciled darkly on it were the words IT’S IN on one side, and THE BAG on the other, and I feel that somehow I have been holding it ever since. According to Culp it is the very sack which Rigoletto used to shoulder off his mis-murdered daughter. “After the Ball Is Over,” I say to him. We have this little game. One of us confronts the other suddenly with a song title like “Can’t Yo’ Heah Me Callin’, Caroline?” The victim must then produce on the spot a pun which sums it up, which reduces it, which is an appropriate commentary. There is a little latitude, but not much. “After the Ball Is Over,” I say to Culp. He hesitates. “After the Ball Is Over,” I repeat in a mean voice like a movie thug’s. His pause has been purposeful. It is the sandbagger’s pause. He is only a few ticks off the comic’s timing. It’s a fête accompli, Culp says solemnly, and I lose again is I have lost so often: bitterly, badly. My smirk is shabby. I am being a poor sport. Culp makes the chalk-one-up sign. He racks the balls. Click. Clack. He powders his cue. Grins. Grins. The kids should be in uniform for the meeting tonight, he reminds me as he prepares to quit my company, and that includes the sash with the badges. I am indeed a dad. Was that why Lou left me? because I was too little or too large a dad? Your kid’s not doing too badly with the badges, he tells me.

The sack, Culp, I ask him. The bag. What am I supposed to do with it?

Fill it with fortunes. Like policy slips. You know. From those cardboard cookies. I’m filling mine with fortunes I’ve written. They’re dillies. They—you know—rhyme.

I don’t know how to respond.

But boy do I hate the Boy Scouts.

Grim day. Gray day. Tuesday. House wrapped in the wet wool of our Midwestern summers. Very like the day Planmantee invited me to his office for a chat about Lacelli. There’s the smell of wool, too, as close as cotton in the nose. The sun is like snow on the sidewalk. Super-, Planmantee says, -ficial. But I am breaking through the surface, I can tell him now—I can sneer at him while I am announcing it; I can sneer while spitting in his face—because the other day I began to dig. Yes. The sound my small pick makes, inside the furnace, now I’ve begun to dig—is it two days since?—is like those eerie echoes you sometimes get in caves (oh for a footfall and a confrontation, then all would be over: found in bed with my hobby, my honey, and my hole); it’s impossible for me to tell, of course, what kind of sounds get carried through these disconnected pipes, or whether a knock or two gets up the stairs disguised as the hiccup of a ghost, or what vibrations sink inside the stones and wait there like damp to wet a passing ear, what of my sweat seeps up the wrapped tubes to fill the fluid of the house with further fluid like mercury rising heatedly in the mouth. Caught in such a cunt will a man chew his own cock off to escape?

THE QUARREL

I have attended many a quarrel, many a Lick & Bicker, yes indeed, as a contestant in most cases, of course, the Lacelli affair the foremost public bout, although one’s parents quarrel, my god yes, often in front of their applauding children (didn’t we do so in the old days, Marty? setting our dreadful example?); and the children quarrel consequently, sure, it’s expected, nothing wrong in it really, simple mimicry if nothing else, natural, nothing to it; the grocer quarrels with his lock, stock, and barrels, his jumbled bins and ragged rows; the shepherd curses his sheep and their shit, their stupid ways and their incessant bleating, who wouldn’t? and the mountain’s precipitous slopes, its harsh cold rocks, his cute crook, bent to make the shepherd’s life seem easy, and the goddamn Alpine flowers always underfoot, his tinted image on those picturesque postcards, too, in the distance pictured, as if you could hear them, ding dong bells; then the machinist belabors his lathe and its pubic curls; mechanics overtighten screws and block exhausts; the teacher squabbles with her subject first, then belittles her pupils, suffers their uneasy parents, who are not very professional at pretending to be proud, and finally clashes (wouldn’t the papers say? yes, her nervous pencil-raps resound like a sword repeatedly beaten upon a shield), ‘clashes,’ the word was (didn’t I decide, just now, in my mock Homeric mood?) clashes with the school board—well, so what? nothing novel there—clashes are perfectly normal, what is the purpose of the pitiless bronze? certainly labor and management cheat one another—are suspicious, sullen, lazy greedy, deceitful, Mafia-manipulated—you name it, no surprises, ordinary shiftlessness, ordinary exploitation, ordinary rapacity; physicians pill their poor patients to death and then bill the estates, which are already being fucked over by lawyers who specialize in quarrels and in quarreling: in instigating quarrels, nurturing and sustaining quarrels, in broadening quarrels, in aggravating and deepening them, in spelling quarrels (pretending the word needs no q, arguing against doubling the r), in quarreling among themselves then, in sucking quarrels so dry they whapper back and forth like sheets in the wind (whereas the Third Reich tried to eliminate quarrelsome elements, sought peace inside itself, sought to flatten fulminations); but no one likes their state, their place, or what they’re doing—the copper quarters in their pockets, the two-dollar bill; thus riders kick their horses, peasants beat their oxen, dissociated personalities play mean pranks upon their not-so-innocent of other selves; wars break out in bleachers; psychoanalysts betray confidences and make out with their patients; journalists rake muck and ruin reputations; mystics and assorted fakes, lovers, men of the cloth, the soil, the sea: all go at it. The sparrows have learned from us how to fuss and sputter, squirrels saw away at their grievances; locusts stridulate; thorns prick; aspens clatter. What a world!

A casus belli was little Lacelli. Lacelli. Who betrayed me by being. The causa mali. Thin measly man. Leaning always to this side or that as if held up by an umbrella stand. My fault. The causa causans. I should have known what to expect from a name that suspended such a man from its one small eye and three ells like a marionette whose strings are tangled. What a mustache! what a mind! It was a mind that wanted to hunt through history for those events whose principal elements rhymed. The crucial question for Lacelli was simply who had pushed D’Annunzio out that open August window, and he threatened to devote his dissertation to it. I hope you choke on him, that disgrace to my native nation, Governali said. Having received news of Lacelli’s little intention (certainly not from me), Culp went prancing down the hall outside the history office singing in a high falsetto: Did Aldo Finzi do D’Annunzio inzi? Sift through Naples like the city dump it is and you won’t turn up two more differently disagreeable sorts of wop: Governali, who is a grand spray of spit, and Lacelli, who is a thin dry turd like a stretch of uncooked macaroni.

What mustached mimic of the King of Flume,

with all the last straws from his doctoral broom,

has swept our fat Heine from his Commager Chair,

and left its seat shiny and ever so bare?

Damn him. But well. In a way. The bastard did. Casus fortuitus. Wasn’t that the upshot? when my prat fell? when the soft shit hit? Ah, what a conniption Planmantee and Governali had! what a hissy fit! What a contretemps it caused! Planmantee and Governali buzzing around me like wasps and bees with their equal but opposite angers. And nearly worth it despite the bites, the stings, my painful swellings which have not yet eased, not yet subsided. Nearly worth it. Still, what a loss. I could have been king of this dunghill.

Blot them out. Blot it out. THE QUARREL. Blot. Because anyway I have attended many a quarrel—more quarrels certainly than ballets, plays, and concerts—and (not counting the quarrel buried beneath the blot I just now used to blot it out, and setting aside as too perfect, too Platonically Ideal, the one with Martha which began that everlasting Sunday on the stroke of breakfast when Martha suddenly said, as she sliced the bread lengthwise along the loaf, “Maybe you’d like life better if it went in this direction,” achieving a surprise like that the Japanese enjoyed in their attack on Pearl Harbor, and starting a domestic war which still continues, cutting pounds of flesh from both of us in strips like packaged bacon that, in pretend calm, we put back on ourselves when we swallow one another, so that one day we shall have accomplished a complete exchange of fats and fluids if not of bones), not one of them, no, not one of them has realized the profundity my high kick reached when I led the boys’ chorus in the twelfth-grade Follies, flashing pink underwear like a silk light when I flung my downy leg up. Beneath my bloomers, I had no penis that day, and I was wow, a hit, the promise of a great lay. But the audience was as much amused by the woman who wasn’t there as by the woman who was. Well, not a woman, really, not so big a bust, not so big a bottom, not so big an avaricious eye. Under that girl there was a boy, Culp would have said; and what was I doing to her? feeling around? blending in.? humping my twin? Culpagram coming up, I’m afraid. It goes: when the plumb sways, nothing’s plumbed. Quarrels are like that: flounce and flash. Alleys of tin pans rocketing around. Though full of that celebrated sound and fury, the quarrel is—in firm fact, students, in sober truth—all sign; but unlike most signs which naively point in the direction of their meanings like a hunting dog, the quarrel manages to quail us away from the nest which conceals the speckled eggs or the hungry, cacking young, by feigning a wimpled wing and awkward walk to which we give our stupidly misguided and predatory attention. In that sense, the quarrel is like a work of art: all sentiment and sensation, all flounce and flash, hairy legs hung from a silk dress.

THE QUARREL

A scream, a blow, a stomp, a roar, a curse, the hateful lines which anger draws on, an otherwise vacant face, the proud stalk, the strategic weep, each of these devices is as easily produced as a fart, and has, to its nature, no more substance. Yet that obnoxious effluvium may be actually air from an injury, the breath of a mortally winded bellows, a costly loss which is cast in our school play as a cheap joke—à la Culp, hélas—death, for instance, dressed in diapers— and we don’t fail to whiff the rumpus that’s been released; we wrinkle our nose, snort, smile, stare at the wall or an early star, and ignore the boiling bowel that produced it, the burning within which gave off such stinking smoke. My tunnel is my quarrel with the earth. The quarrel is the play, but not the producer.

There may be some truth in what you say, Herschel says, with his customary Cream of Wheat agreement: mildness of a sort which could never cause a bilious blowup, bland as ordinary atmosphere and nearly as impalpable. I call him the hedgehog because he is such a believer in both sides. You have a point, he likes to say, he enjoys saying; there is more than a little merit in that, he declares, as if removing a pipe from his mouth (actually, Herschel never declares, or asserts, or avers—I do that; Governali avows and Planmantee affirms; they do that—Herschel assents, or suggests; he elaborates, or gently opines); yes, well, what you say seems, yes, well, plausible to me, upon my brief entertainment of it anyway, yes, at first glance a nice notion, on the face of it a pleasant guise; but will such an idea survive a long haul over stony ground, you think? the scrutiny of a dental pick? the footsteps of many a traveler across the same ground? and will it survive journalists and cameramen, you know? town meetings? picnics spread out abundantly upon?

I walk to my window, that gloomy schoolroom slate where my words congeal like cold smoke, and there I write THE QUARREL on it in the style of a Roman wall. Beneath it the number 1 will soon arrive, then the letter a, and often after that a single paren and the tiny i which multiplies as pickets do to form a fence. Each will designate a place within my subject, less substantial than that which stands so solidly above it, subordinate of course, but deeper in, for I indent as I drop toward the bottom of the board, and in that way mark our march to the interior. The quarrel has a structure and a destiny which are quite definable, but it never delivers itself to observers so directly, or follows its own outline like a loving finger. That is the habit of the orator or lecturer. Instead, it flings its hardened grains of feeling into space, and at our faces, like a repeated pelt of stones. The students will never understand my passionate and detailed exposition of the origins of war or my claim that they are to be found in the domestic character of quarreling, because to understand—ah, to understand—that will require them to stand thenceforward under (a period and a place as awkward as the phrase), to accept their limitations, to risk being pissed on; and my students (sweet Americans, almost every one) dutifully believe in equality, hygiene, and safety; they believe that it’s in all ways a bad business to be pissed on; they live like Flatland royalty in a world where everyone is king and no one is the mountain. My students (sweet Americans, almost every one) wish to move through life like a referee’s whistle—without further physical accretion—taking in only that which may be immediately trilled, and trusting that their spit will lubricate the wooden ball in the barrel. The soul shall not grow old, gain weight, or wrinkle either, but shall remain lean as a saint’s: certifiably efficient and ineffably stupid. The abyss is before them, I tell them, so they naturally cherish whatever will shield them from this fact, whatever will float over that hole (as they imagine it) like a lily, padding the dreadful pond and hiding all that soiled breath and fallen sky. DOOM! ABYSS! Abyss doom bah, Culp says. Through a carelessly open door, Culp has caught sight of the words on the blackboard and with his customary bad manners pantomimes a cheer first, then a cheering crowd. It’s true, though, that ‘abyss’ makes an absurd sound and that it has become an absurd word: “After five years of victorious struggle, continuous triumph, and the unstinting sacrifice of his people, Der Führer had nevertheless brought Germany to the edge of the abyss.” There is evidently but the one abyss. There is no abyss in Trenton, New Jersey. There is a Blue Hole in Ohio, and one remembers, from the map, the name of the Pacific Deep and the Philippine Trench, but about a Boston Abyss, a Pensacola or a Butte Abyss, there is no hint. In folklore, cliffs line the edge of the abyss like ladyfingers around a bowl of Christmas trifle. Indeed, sometimes the abyss seems scarcely more than edge. Actually, a long lawn dotted with white chairs gently reclines toward the abyss. Images of the abyss are always inadequate. Saturn swallowing his children is an arresting one. The perceptions which enter the restless panther’s eye, in Rilke’s poem, and which slide through the nervous tension of the limbs to be snuffed out in the bitter darkness of its heart: that image is an even better one, for if the abyss has an opening, it is the parted lid. The abyss shucks one like corn. The abyss is the nothingness you occupy when you are merely seen, simply sensed; when your image goes on tickulating though the tock is stopped; when you become a ghost that cannot haunt a house or heart or thought.

The abyss exists only in English, Der Abgrund, le gouffre; they can’t express it. Le gouffre is a furry mammal. Der Abgrund is the ultimate basis for an illicit negotiation. The Greeks thought there were many roads to hell. They were right; however, the English have signposted only one: the abyss. Some think that the abyss is the space Satan fell through when he became the first outcast, but that allows the abyss to touch its toes: as if one went thus-and-so-far down like an anvil falling forty years to arrive at those literary lakes of fire and smoking rivers of molten ore and loud flocks of acid-shitting birds and all that moaning like a great wind; and then once there—the anvil having docked—to watch the tourists being taken through in loads measurable only by the seats in a Greyhound bus, listening to their guide as though they were in Mammoth Cave, and covering their cameras in disgust.

NO PICTURES PLEASE

FLASHBULBS DISTURB THE DEMONS

The abyss is not geographical like the Grand Canyon, which isn’t an abyss any more than the cleft between my breasts is. Nor do you go over the abyss, for instance in a barrel, as you might Niagara Falls. The abyss doesn’t gape; it doesn’t yawn; it has better manners; it is always awake, open like a lively eye; nor is the abyss funnel-shaped, or a bag without a bottom; the abyss goes nowhere; the abyss is the obliteration of the sign; it is reality without disguise, without appearance, without remainder. The abyss is not merely where the soul goes when it’s gone; it’s where the self is exposed like sensitive paper, till, exhausted, it draws a blank. That is the abyss. Oh Lou, in you, I was at the legendary edge of the abyss. The abyss is honest absence; it is not just the word wool-gathering; it is true not-being-there. It is nein da sein, Culp yodels.

DO NOT SCORN THE PITIFUL AND ABANDONED

THEIR DAILY RATION ALREADY CONTAINS THE RIGHT AMOUNT

It is difficult to stop talking about the abyss because one is so fearful of it and because nothing can be said. Behind Culp and his profound superficialities, beneath the oil slick or what all film registers, is—nevertheless—the abyss. The abyss is not the departure of the thing behind that surface, nor is it a reflection of outer space that’s somehow been trapped inside the earth; it is the utter absence of significance; it is the world as unread and unreadable. It is das Ding an sich. I will not strike the abyss in my basement like a passing pipe, however deep I dig, or cleverly turn my tunnel—the abyss is not a vein of gold, a glut of oil—but I may do better than strike it rich: I may become the abyss myself.

‘Doom’ has become a comic word as well: “Der Führer went recklessly to his doom.” It’s silly—’doom.’ But I write down ‘doom’—I prefer the word ‘doom’ to others—because of its skull-like eye-holes, sockets into which darkness can he screwed like a dead bulb. Sein Schicksal ereilte ihn. Adolf Hitler could go to his doom because he had one. Only those who have made a pact with the devil have a doom. Hitler, Faust, Don Juan, Leverkühn, have dooms. I’m sure none of my students merits such distinction. The devil does not sign contracts with just anyone. Upon the tens of tons of anonymous millions, no judgment is pronounced. For them there is death, of course, but no doom. The trouble with history is its incorrigible and horrifying honesty. Only the truly doomed matter a damn to it. History is the abyss of the doomed. How does that hit you, Henry? Doom. Yes. ‘Doom’ is securely Middle English. ‘Doom’ is not der Schicksal. Der Schicksal cannot hack it. Der Schicksal is a shop where you can buy pork. So I write down ‘doom’—I prefer the word ‘doom’ to its brothers—because it looks like a busker’s malevolent mask; the consonants hook over the ears. And those same ears do not fail to hear the snickers which arise from my class like a rustle of leaves when I complete block-lettering the big pair on the blackboard and turn my unsmiling face to face them. Damn you, I think. What do you aspire to? Nothing. Me too. But I want to be made an offer. I want a doom to go to. I aspire to the abyss.

THE QUARREL

The quarrel has, first or all (and this makes it quite unlike the abyss), a bottom, a base, its secret cause and condition, its complex and poisonous source. Three factors feed this source (for sources have sources, and so on): my history prior to Martha (to select an example quite at random, but one rich with instruction), Martha’s history prior to my presence on her scene, and then the history we have had in bed, at board, up country together. Ah, bliss! Ah, misery! Yes, I have made a copy of Baudelaire’s suicide note. I keep a collection. “The fatigue of going to sleep and the fatigue of waking up have become insupportable.” Time to change beds, everyone! Next, the quarrel must have its formal field, a ring or arena which forcibly contains the contestants (marries them, so to speak), because if even one of them can avoid the dispute while achieving its aim, you can bet that’ll be the bugger who will take a walk, back off, lose interest, quit the game. ¶I am not considering under this heading any cases of kowtow; I am not thinking of the grovel or some other act of obeisance, such as fetching your perfectly able spouse a glass of water, or of those instances in which you bow to someone’s superior strength or prior right (that, of course, has happened to me often enough, and each incident is vividly etched—as they say—on my memory like a dog tag around my neck, anchor on the arm, rose on my inner thigh). I am simply recognizing the fact that the bully feels as cornered and forced to fight as the victim of his bullying does. ¶So our pit must have barred gates and high sides, legalities like wires, otherwise our bulls, our bulldogs, fighting cocks and bears, will fall asleep or run away. Nevertheless, we shall not have to look hard or go far to find one—a fair field, I mean. Most likely we come to the contest already in chains. The love nest is a Roman coliseum. There have been more fights than fucks in those parked automobiles. The nursery is where you beat the baby; where the bellowing comes from both sides; where the crib is shaken in a wind of helpless anger. And no one needs to be reminded that the castle which is Everyman’s rose-covered country cottage has cold wet walls, dark back stairs, dungeons, roaches, stinking johns, rats which harbor plague-infested fleas. If we look warily about, we shall find we are a fly in many webs at once. (Or should I say we are a fly, at once, in many webs?) ¶The students are weary of my cheerless aphorisms, my Culpagrams. These pithy sayings got written down in the old days; they were guides for the good conduct of life, mottoes hung up in the head,

BLESS THIS HAPPY HOLE

but now their bored fingers fiddle with those cheap felt-tipped pens, and the eyes, which once ran hands excitedly along a tablet’s laddered courses as if heading up a thigh, look on in puzzled wonder while I rant. Highlight me, dammit. Run yellow lines over my voice. To those students a paperback book is a disposable rag. It gives them a hankie to honk their heads in. The subject, students, is the aphorism, or the quarrel between form and content. When sentences are sufficiently condensed the sweetness gets squeezed out, I tell them. I ask if they know any cheerful ones. Aphorisms, I mean. Silence greets that. At least one dumbo out of this herd ought to offer me a proverb. What does Culp call them? His slobwebs. “Little by little small things don’t get large.” Silence greets that. The slogan is also short, I say, but in the slogan’s case it is the thought that gets trimmed. And set aside. You know. Like fat. Silence greets that. Brief entreaties are common, terse petitions frequent. The subject, students, appears to be brevity. Brevity is not the soul of wit, of course, but its body. Prayerful outcries are curt because they neglect to stipulate the grounds for their request. Whines without whys. No response. They couldn’t take a shit without consulting a pony. God Bless This Happy Home, for instance. JESUS SAVES is a slogan, okay? How about WORK IS SALVATION? whereas “Never underestimate your insignificance in the eyes of others” is an aphorism. The students were expecting a mini-lecture on Wolfgang Kapp’s abortive Putsch and the government’s failure to disband the Freikorps. Not that they are disappointed. Since it is nearly impossible to interest them, it is also nearly impossible to disappoint them. They study the initials carved in the paddle-like right arms of their chairs. Lefties may use their laps. Lefties must use their laps. The students are diligent. They darken the designs with pencil points. They lay up in little abysses like boats in a bayou. Playing with words is a sign of an infantile imagination; it is worse than playing with your tiddlywiddler; it displays a gruesome . . . what was it? it demonstrates a disagreeable . . . deplorable . . . no—it argues a . . . a loathsome mind. Sometimes I modestly attribute my own smart remarks to Benjamin Franklin or Aaron Burr. The students are still and their silence continues. They are confident. They are silent. They are still. They know nothing. It comforts them. It promotes peace. Their heads are as empty as the hole the anvil did an Alice in for forty nights some days ago only to light in a lake of fire on whose ordered surface like a gas grill the shadows of the acid-shitting birds are sharply defined, and upon whose verge the tourists stand, shading their shutters. Just as well, for if the students knew what I know (and won’t teach them), they would run amok with their felt pens and bobbies, defacing bystanders and marking up other innocents. Life will get you bastards yet. Where was I? In the pit. The tourists are alighting, like the anvils, from their buses. KERSPLUNK! An anvil arrives with a toot like a train. Anvils are arriving at notorious intervals. It is raining cats and anvils. Forty trains a day are skyjacked while hurtling through the abyss by abyss-pirates.

DO NOT DIVE

THE LAKE IS TOO SHALLOW FOR SWIMMING

All my designs are dimming. It begins to rain anvils and dogs.

THE QUARREL

So far, then, we have our secret reasons, our almost ancestral resentments, the grave grounds for the quarrel, and we are also in possession of the cornered combatants. Now we must imagine that a threat to that secrecy has somehow arisen, as if a fox had entered a quail’s quiet field. Where was I? In the pit. Yes. I remember I said of the abyss—inaccurately—that it was das Ding an sich, but actually it is das Ding an sich as if seen. Seen. Not, therefore, by the mind, which always meddles, but by the eye, and I alone. The lid lifts. “It” looks at what was me, and I look back at the abyss.

So far, then, we have that slid-up skirt in one of the front seats. This time, I think, it has been accidentally elevated. Alas! what joy! what misery! foofaraw must be devised as a deception. The quail will wimple across the meadow. This constitutes—this foofaraw—the quarrel proper and includes the complaints, the insults, the slaps, the slammed doors and broken dishes. One used to get a little nookie at the end as a reward. No more. This concluding phase (of which probably not another word will be said) is quaintly called “making up,” Clichés are brief because they must be easily remembered, frequently repeated, and because their meaning needs to be forgotten immediately. Hence the honesty of the original expression, which plainly says that the reconciliation is imaginary and cosmetic, is confused with the idea of becoming mates again, i.e., “mate up.” No more. Well. I have broken one cutting board, one trivet, one plate, my reading glasses, the spines of several books, and a couple of ghastly plastic bowls which were supposed to be unbreakable. That break cut one of our quarrels short, I remember. I bled, Martha said, like the pig I was. Bowls and bombs don’t explode and hurt people, people explode and hurt people—isn’t that the sainted slogan? The cat began to lap up my little spots of blood, my bloodlets. I kicked at the cat with some sincerity and we nearly suffered another outbreak. You never liked those bowls. You are correct, kiddo; I never liked them; I remember how they were displayed (hung from strips and blown back and forth by fans, I think) so that at least two of them would be clacking together at any time to create a noise of repellent irregularity: safe for this, safe for that; won’t chip, won’t scratch, won’t break; won’t craze, stain, or discolor; won’t fade, melt, or buckle—won’t, won’t, won’t. You said you liked them when we bought them, I remember, and I remember you said the display was clever. I did say I liked them, you are quite right, kiddo, but I’m glad one of them is done for and dead and I’m delighted only the ugly cousin’s left and I heartily hope whatever its sex (let’s say it’s a she on account of the bowl’s breast shape), that she’s sent to the country to serve swine their swine-slop. Why did you say you liked them if you didn’t like them? I said I liked them to please you. To please me? a first! even a second and a third! a clean sweep! to please me? Well, you liked them, so I thought what the hell I’ll like them too, but I never liked the display—that perversion of the wind chime—that chink-a-clink cacophony—it was a pain in the eye, in the ear, in the ass. You thought you’d indulge me, is that it? patronize me, right? I did it to confuse you; I did it to irregularize your habits and expectations; I did it to fuck you up. I can bet—boy—I could bet my butt and get back a chorus. Just keep that bloodthirsty cat out of the kitchen. Thank god you got cut in the kitchen instead of in the living room. There’s nothing as handily smashable in the living room; I could have broken up your collection of coral, I guess, and gotten a cut like this. You’d have liked that, wouldn’t you, smashing my coral? what a lot of little creatures have taken centuries to stick together. What? and leaked blood on your precious rug? You have never liked that rug, have you? I know I’ve always said I didn’t like it, but I like it all right; I like it comme si, comme seesaw; I like it so-so. Why did you say you didn’t like it then? To see if you’d buy it to spite me; to see if my opinion mattered; to fuck you up. Well, I knew you liked it. I didn’t like it. I knew you’d come to like it, and you just said you have. I haven’t come to like it; I definitely don’t like it. You’ll like it all right—you’ll like it well enough—in time you’ll like it fine. What I really don’t like is the furniture you’ve got squatting on it: I don’t like chairs with carved arms; I don’t like chests held up by bears; I don’t like that damn dung-colored vine-entangled rug. You don’t like me is what you mean. What I like—What you like is to break things. Kidsy, you are correct; I like to break things. It’s me you wish you were breaking. You are entirely correct again, kidsy, but you won’t break—pillows and puddings and spoonfuls of smooth white lard can’t break—even bread will break, waves break, fasts break, but you won’t break—won’t, won’t, won’t. That bowl when it broke could have cut me, the way those pieces flew. Well it didn’t—a piece cut me, the way those pieces flew. The bowl took its revenge on you—the way those pieces flew—you banged it about so. I should bleed into its grinning twin—so far still whole, I see, and the color of something sick, so I think it may just die, wither, fade away, and never suffer busting. I don’t want one drop of your racist play-blood in my bowl—the thought makes my stomach turn. Have we got any Band-Aids? Pinch it shut. Too late; I’ve been slit open like an envelope. Everything is open, even on Sunday, so I can pick up some Band-Aids anytime. What? you’ll wait until after I’ve done a Petronius into your puke basin? —yeah, it looks like a turned-out tummy, come to think. I won’t have you peeing in it either. Too late; too late for everything. Hold the cut closed. I need a big Band-Aid: do we have any big Band-Aids? Pinch it shut. Too late. At least it’s a clean cut. Cuts from coral are supposed to be nasty. Good, I like that supposition. Damn, I’ve been cut open like a piece of cake. Listen at that, world, my SS honey fancies himself a sweet. I’ll wipe up the blood if you’ll sweep up the glass. It isn’t glass, and why the hell should I? why should I clean up after your brutalities? I was making a point. Listen at that! making a point! a foul shot like in basketball, isn’t it? making a point! hear that? that’s the sound a bowl-breaker makes. Get the glass up like a good girl. I’m not a good girl, damn you. That’s right, good girls don’t swear; but be a good kid, anyway, and get the glass. It’s not glass. It behaved like glass and whatever acts like glass is glass and you’ll pick it up because I sure as hell won’t—I won’t, ma’am, won’t, won’t—because otherwise you’ll get slivers in your tootsies, because your feet are bare beneath that muumuu, aren’t they? sure, as always. Look out, you’re dripping fresh blood new places. Oh god—open like an outcry. Even on Sunday, everything’s open, so I can get you some big Band-Aids and some of that painless tape and some aspirin if it turns out we’re out. My god, but it’s beginning to hurt. Take an aspirin—that’s what you always advise me to do when I monthly. My clothes gape, the front door’s ajar, the drapes droop, keyholes are staring. You suppose someone saw? Someone certainly heard. You shout so. It was nothing. You bang about. So tell me now whether I’ll feel bad tomorrow because I broke the bowl? is this glass-assed plastic bowl a symbol of our marriage? You never liked our marriage either. You are correct. Don’t call me kiddo. Okay, all kiddo-ing aside. And I feel bad you broke it, even if you don’t feel bad you broke it; it wasn’t a bad bowl, even if you don’t think much of chartreuse—it’s a fashionable color—and it wasn’t a bad bowl; it was a useful bowl; I used it all the time—once a week anyway—I liked it. It was an overpriced piece of crap. Can’t even tell what shade it was now; all the color has leached out of the shards. Am I pale? I’m leaking a lot; I must be pale. I thought you said you liked it though. That was your lousy rug said I liked. Liar—you said when we bought them that you liked them both—the chartreuse one as well as the ruby one. As samples of overpriced plastic shit, I suppose they were okay. When we bought them that’s what you said: you said you liked them. Christ, Martha, christ, that was then.

THE QUARREL

Grim. ¶The abyss, to continue off my Kantian course, plunges everything into the emptiness of space and time, into the senselessness of the senses by themselves, those senses whose function it is endlessly to prolong every axis—x spread out like a whorelet on a bed—to widen and deepen y and z—to widen and deepen to infinity—thus the abyss is the swelling of Substance like a sore place; it is an inflammation in the je ne sais quoi.

THE QUARREL

Grim. ¶Martha, for her part, tears things up; she can make a proclamation out of a swift rip; she can confetti an entire chapter of one’s life in a matter of minutes; and that’s why I say she tears things up rather than down or—as is implied— apart, because the bits get flung in my face, are tossed with an angry gaiety into space, settle like snow in the stairwell, cloud and then petal the coffee table (mornings I may find a lonely confetto in a corner): Martha tore up both the canceled checks and the check stubs, for instance, that time she overdrew our account and I called her on it; then there was the letter from Lou I had the reckless bad manners to read aloud (a story in itself, as they say), which she snatched from my hand in mid-recital and, holding the pinkish paper pinched at one end as you might someone’s filthy hankie, nibbled it into nothingness with her nails; or that memorable night she made rents in our bedsheets with her teeth and then slowly ripped them into long thin strips, weeping at what she was doing because she fancied the design, but persisting because something like that, once begun, like hacking up a body, cannot be left uncompleted; and of course I cannot forget the pair of symphony tickets she chewed into sodden wads the afternoon after school when I slipped a breast out of that student’s bra (it was little Rue—what work it was to coax that lovely nipple to my mouth! cliché calls it a berry, got that right, it was), and consequently got home late and hot under the zipper (you got that roll warm in another oven, Marty yelled, though she knew nothing of Ruth’s existence, and got destructively angry when I laughed, and angrier still when she realized that I didn’t mind missing Franck and Delibes, it was a blessing, by god); then once she picked apart a paper cup after a party (who was it who had snuffed her butts in the bottom?) so the cup looked like buzzards had been at it (I wasn’t the object of her anger that time); what else? the sports pages are often thrown about in large soft wads or occasionally kicked and trampled; and I remember a pinup poster advertising automotive parts which she carefully divisibled into a stack of two-inch squares, and the wrappings around an ill-intentioned Christmas gift which were shredded like salad and presented to me on a smeary plate; oh, and she’s undone underwear of all sorts, pulling at opposing parts of panties until a seam gives (self-rape, sometimes, I think, but also the natural action of her hips as they enlarge), and there have been innumerable napkins, doilies ditto, snapshots of me dressed like a barrel of beer, as the face on the barroom floor, and in other compromising positions—as Santa Claus exposing his belly, in my Brown Shirt rig (what an unhappy Halloween that was)—which have suffered a similar fate, like the cardboard coaster with the three overlapping circles on it, representing, I imagine, the damp squatprints of sweaty glasses, she broke into bits like a table water biscuit (one ring was my mouth, she said, one was my asshole, while—it’s strange—I’ve forgotten what part of my pulled-apart person the third ring was—Pentheus? Orpheus? who else?); anyway, she fancies these merrie melodramatics, and they are usually harmless enough, for instance, when she tried to tear up a two-dollar bill in the face of a resistance by the U.S. mint which was better than the bowl’s, prompting me to suggest a pair of scissors, a suggestion she refused, being in a bad mood, and feeling, as she said, like a two-dollar whore. ¶You mean, I said, like a whore with two bucks and no scissors.

THE QUARREL

Well, class, we were trying to make some sense of the quarrel the last time we met, you may remember, and the reason for our doing that was my belief that war works in history the way the quarrel works in a marriage, or somewhat the way a feud functions in a backward society. I never meant to suggest that nations at war must have been in love with one another once, but obviously every case of military conflict involves a vital relationship which has gone, or is going, sour. Wars don’t necessarily make permanent enemies any more than quarrels do. We are friendlier with the Japanese now than we were before the Pacific war. I pointed out that like quarrels, too, the loser may not be the loser. Results are deceptive. If the American Civil War was, as some think, a conflict between industry and agriculture, then, given the pressures of history, industry would have won its war whether the North did or not. Actually, at the most pertinent level of historical abstraction (i.e., Time), this war simply signified the birth pangs of the twentieth century, for our century was born a few weeks before Appomattox in 1865—in front of the logs at Bloody Angle where Grant invented victory by means of matériel superiority and attrition. That century lasted until 1945 and died its dumb brute’s death at Hiroshima when Harry Truman ordered the sorry epoch destroyed. That wasn’t wise, in my opinion, because the twentieth century was to be ours, and ours alone, while it lasted, awful as it was. Centuries are no longer those genial 150-year stretches which we once enjoyed. Centuries, now are considerably shorter. The life span of eras approaches fifty. Anyway, my point was that the new age will arrive willynilly like a weight in a void. Where was I? In the pit. I work with a wet handkerchief across my face because, in that cramped space, it takes only a few blows to raise dust enough to engulf me. Surely deep dirt will be less powdery—more like earth and less like air. I suffer from black snot now. Martha has begun to watch me wash. My most recent aperçu is that jailers are jealous of the freedom of their prisoners. If we had the true and complete history of one man—which would be the history of his head—we would sign the warrants and end ourselves forever, not because of the wickedness we would find within that man, no, but because of the meagerness of feeling, the miniaturization of meaning, the pettiness of ambition, the vulgarities, the vanities, the diminution of intelligence, the endless trivia we’d encounter, the ever present dust. I need better tools. I need goggles, picks and shovels, an auger, gloves, flash, hardhat, mask. Or should I be sporting and create my own excavation equipment out of sardine tins and bedspring wire? It is already obvious, isn’t it? that Germany was not the loser of our last European war (if we set aside her present schizophrenia), Great Britain was. All that’s left of it is England like a set atrophy antlers. Martha always wants to play some stupid tune or other to honor Harry Truman, but I’ve glued two of the white keys together and I want to watch her face cloud the next time she plays “The Missouri Waltz.” It is probably too late to fight back, yet I have to do something, life has come to an unquiet stall, and I am gathering dust like the rest of her ruck. We were so commodious once, but this house has eaten itself small, stuffed as it is now with outsize Victoriana and malevolent geegaws. Dressers like a line of sideshow fatties crowd one upstairs hall, each one haunted by its ranks of empty drawers. I am, myself, an outsize malevolent geegaw. I sit here and stare at the machine which makes me go on. I shall need identity papers, passport, map. Ach, what a task my dreams have drawn me into! Men heave chiffoniers and wardrobes into this house as if it were a haven for the secondhand. Martha wipes them off and cleans them out and neatly lines all the drawers with fresh old newspaper. She measures them and places them, finally, here and there, where they draw rectangles around their inner darkness, sustaining out of sight and far from breathing a kind of closet air. As far as I can see, she stores nothing in them. I shall need a compass, matches in a waterproof container, cardboard suitcase, some sort of story, a little string or twine. Cultures exist in different times and climates like the stars, and that class, is our present misery. I carry on the spirit of Flaubert, but even he has a heavy corpse. I shall not quote Flaubert to this crowd or mention any other hater of mankind. Take a vacation from your constant confrontations, I tell them; lift your noses from your beer; get off the pot; forsake a sit-in for a thoughtful walk; go deep into the country some quiet Sunday, away from loud talk, sing-alongs, bullhorns, gropes, and the cops; stand still as a listening animal and listen; then you will hear Time’s labored breathing—somewhat like the sea’s heave—the death rattle of History. Vietnam. Dear me. You’ve frightful manners and no perspective. You read one word and think you recognize the world. Vietnam is simply the latest in our lengthy run of Asian wars. These will conclude with the downfall of the West and the collapse of European culture. Ho hum. Who cares? But you don’t think of yourselves as Europeans, do you? you simple Illini, you down-home Hoosiers, you cornrow Hawkeyes—god, no—you’ve put away your past like a mothballed fleet; yet, sad to say, you are Europe’s last legs. You’ve got to stop watching the second hand and look at the slow sweep of the centuries: at what the Greeks began and where Rome reached. Governali is right, our culture has always ridden on the forward flow of the future, and you were its leading edge, my little darlings—even that dolly from Elkhart with her skirt hiked halfway to her navel? Ho hum. Who cares? Halfway from where? One day, will her cunt crack open and a Hero bellow his way into being? What a miracle that would be! Time after time, Time has turned upon itself, and the past has overtaken the present as if to say; there shall be no tomorrow unless it is yesterday. Christianity—a Semitic substance, never forget—seeped into the pagan bloodline like a pollutant into a stream, and sickened the mind; it perverted that Greek worldword, λόγos, with which every rational thought begins, and darkened its outline. Although the Islamic threat was turned back, Christianity and Judaism sullied those white Roman robes with their benighted mysticisms. Then finally, my simple friends—and the way you behave, I cannot approach you without condescension—the European head began to clear, the ideas of Greece became our proper ideals again, the clouds rolled back, the sun appeared upon a peal of trumpets, and the word was rescued from monastic servitude, from writing, and returned to the mouth again. The soul sang! Remember: every real rebirth is Physical, Pagan, Pantheistic, Positivist, Philosophical, Fun. (Good heavens—dear me!—I’ve got my Planmantee voice turned on.) Our forefathers, who brought forth, as we say, this country, were themselves the product of the Enlightenment, the children of reason. But now—Now—You don’t know when our Asian wars began, of course: in those little teenage Balkan rumbles, in those piddly disputes which nevertheless drove the Turks out of Tripoli, for example, and kept the coastal lands of the Mediterranean largely European. Austria had already declared war on Serbia (to set off another petty Balkan kuddlmuddl) when the Russians started to mobilize along the German and Austrian frontiers. Learning this, as it was intended they should, the German government sent the czar a shut-up-shop sign, and when this friendly ultimatum was ignored, the first Asian war began. PLAY BRAWL, Culp shouts down the length of the corridor upon hearing the sirens outside. That was August 1, 1914. A nice simple date. A simple time. The fighting in France, which some film may have made familiar to you, was a civil war really, West versus West, a badly managed divorce case, and it obscured the true Causes, Conditions, Character, and Consequences of the Conflict in the East. World War II, about which even more movies have been made, and about which you therefore have even more misinformation, was also deceptively cut, this time into three racial and regional pieces, so that when the Germans invaded Russia again the action was not immediately seen as the grand opening of the second Asian war; nor was the fighting in the Pacific, which followed almost immediately afterward, properly numbered III. The fourth, of course, we fought in Korea. No trouble noticing that. And so yours, kids, is the fifth—the fifth. It’s been a long bout. We lost the first two rounds (we were confused, you see, about our purposes and our real opponent); we won the third rather decisively, and fought the fourth to a draw. But we have begun to tire in the fifth; we are well behind on points by this time; our enemy is patient, in better shape, and prepared for a long fight; we appear to have lost the small heart we had. Peace. Yes. Peace to the daffodils, the daisies. You flower children are ready for the vases. Dope is just one of the enemy’s weapons. Has been for ages. Ho hum, hey? Then why the rages? Ah, but you only hate what’s going on in the world because it interferes with your indifference. I understand. With you, love is a benevolent indolence. Your professor, however—your pompous, overbearing, scornful, behind-the-times professor—has not had an indifferent moment in his life. You shake fistfuls of noise and run about in the street, carrying signs like peddlers; you burn down a shanty and call it rebellion; you parade and call it protest; you go grimace to grimace with the pigs and celebrate your confrontation; but I—who fought in the Good War, who had my heave on Kristallnacht—I look at you sitting in front of me and I see secretaries and office boys: post-Bomb pre-Boom babies. You should have those initials blazoned on your banners: pBpB. Perhaps I shall design one for you. Then if I can find a compliant Betsy you’ll be in business. That’s where you want to be, honestly, isn’t it? At IBM. At AT&T. Have you burned a single Reichstag? smashed a single pane of glass? betrayed a friend for the cause? beaten someone bloody or broken up a rally? Burn books. Bone up on bricks and stones. For the future, you lack every preparation. You say you oppose the military-industrial complex, and yet you haven’t tipped over one lonely phone booth. Do you realize what the Age of the Mass Man means? Mass man means mass management. Are you ready for that? For Führership by committee. The collective, comrade, means we shall crap in concert and spread the music on our fields. On your banners, because of the way they’ll look when they waffle in the wind, I think you need your B’s to be a little ragged. Or pointed perhaps like pennants.

Mass man means mass murder. Put that on your Boom-Baby-Bunting. MASS MAN MEANS MASS MURDER. Can that qualify as a slobweb? Could be a Culpagram. But probably it’s only a slowcon. Holocaust, Hiroshima: warm-up tosses in the bullpen, dearies. I should try to find out the name of the young woman with the inviting thighs. She’s been sitting too long with her mini around her maxi for that show to be accidental. Maybe she wants me to get up something? The true enemy of—What should the colors of the banners be? Underwear white? panty pink?

We need to establish a condom sanitaire, Culp says. There is no penalty for pinching back the future. What is the German word for “never-being-there”? That human life is of infinite worth, ought never to he wasted or taken, but always revered, is now a wardrobe too expensive to dry-clean. Who is not a member of the mass, you ask. Though not a hand went up, I answer anyway: those who detach themselves from it as a piece of potter’s clay is taken from ground; those who seek freedom and individuality, who refuse to believe en bloc or act on cue, who reject regimentation, decline membership in the order or the club, live alone and don’t cooperate, throw their trash under the house, let dishes pile up in the sink, sleep in cats’ stink. A man’s solemn duty, now, is to cast his seed upon the ground. Where it will poison the soil like salt. Nature’s way of safely decreasing the population is to increase the numbers of queers, queers of all kinds: bachelors, old maids, monks, masturbators, butches, buggerers, suck-offs, idiosyncrats. We are even subdividing Hades. Busloads of Japanese tourists picnic in the pit. The steaming lakes are much admired, although the prohibition of photography is not understood and consequently resented. Anvils arrive with comforting irregularity, occasionally striking a bus which then explodes its people like pus from a boil. Each person bursts in turn and cameras fly out of the nose and eyes. The cameras disintegrate in motions apparently slowed. Lengths of film unfurl like narrow flags. Images, such as those which infect the mind’s eye, leap from the flaming spools while uttering gray outcries and other prognostications. THE END OF THE WORLD IS AT HAND Students sigh in their snoozes, while I rhythmically slap my right palm on the podium, alert to sidestep a skirt slide. Her name will turn up on a class list: Carol Adam Spindley. I wonder how many male members in my class are erect, not many I suspect, except for a few boners due only to boredom—I’ve known those—the blood falls asleep in the prick.

All right. All right. But the orchestra, as Culp says, is in the pit. Susu is in the pit. She wears a slit-length dress the color of Carol’s carpet. Sing, Susu. Sing. She sings:

I love

the arm of my man

a round me,

a bove

the arm of my man

my heart is poun ding

THE QUARREL

Every war has its distant causes and conditions. We’ve gone over that. It is absolutely necessary that these factors remain hidden and continue undisturbed, because, if they are once dragged into the light and confronted, their nature realized, all restraints will be snapped, all principles forsworn. Neither unconditional surrender, total war, nor Blitzkrieg will do—none of that kindergarten temporizing—only extirpation, only utter cancellation, the Carthaginian solution: the blot that blots out its blotting. We’ve gone over that. Never look beneath the surface of life, because beneath the surface of life you will not find neat schools of gently swimming fish, seaweed swaying, as Culp claims, to water music, or even cicadas somewhere in their seven-year sleep, or moles stubbornly contriving their succulent runnels; beneath the surface of life is the pit, the abyss, the awful truth, a truth that cannot be lived with, that cannot be abided: human worthlessness, our worthlessness, yours and mine. So what the hell. The anvils do not burst when they hit as the buses do when hit by the anvils. The anvils plunge out of sight in the soft earth the lakes also lie on: earth made of muscle, callused skin, and organ flesh—boneless as some hams. The pit is a grave made of man. The fires feed on his subcutaneous fat. So a background complaint must be readied, you see, some grievance which will be brought forward eventually—during the terminal dillydallying which makes up the fight—as the real, the finally honest, reason for the quarrel. This surrogate must be substantial; it must be persuasive; but it must be a bright red herring as well. I have lost a Roman numeral somewhere, V for the vee between . . . What sort of name is Carol Adam Spindley? Next a signal must be sent—dit dit dit dah—which will alert one’s fellow quarrelee, if only at some subliminal level, to the fact that the weather will soon be foul, that their companion is not as sweetly companionable as she or he seems, so that, in the secrecy of still another self, the soul may begin to arm.

I love

the mouth of my man

up on me

a bove

the mouth of my man

my heart is poun ding

The next factor we are obliged to list (although we must awkwardly approach the bottom of the board) is the customarily trivial, deviously displaced, igniting cause: some little stupidity which sets the explosion off and which puts its instigator immediately in a childish light and sounds the tantrum’s tone. Our provocateur realizes, at the very moment of commitment, that he or she has poured wrath into the wrong cup, gone off prematurely, put climax before penetration, and this mistake increases the general grievance both parties feel—one senselessly put upon, the other shamed. Although quarrels regularly get off on the wrong foot, that foot is nevertheless in the right shoe—for there is always a connection—hidden perhaps, yet altogether essential—between the surrogate and the source, first of all, and then again between the detonator and the nature of its demolition. Every quarrel requires at least tacit complicity of the quarrelers, for nothing ends a quarrel sooner than surrender. Whenever there is direct retaliation for some real and mutually recognized wrong, there is no quarrel either.

Gray even when he is not dressed in gray, Herschel goes dismayingly well with this gray day. Tuesdays are terrible because the mail is always skimpy—local leaflets, memos, drugstore coupons, bills arriving as if set adrift in the gutter across the street—yet, in spite of the carrier’s lighter load, late. Late. And this afternoon the overcast is like dust; it is as if the entire earth were descending into my tunnel, filling it to overflowing. As if: for the hole I’ve dug is scarcely bigger than a basin. But a beginning, didn’t I say? a beginning to my inscape. Then why is my heart no longer light? because two days have passed and it is still Tuesday? because the legs of my love sur round me so my heart is poun ding? Surely I’ve not gone on mooning the loss of Lou? No-o-oh. My relationship with Culp is almost wholly one of tiresome repartee, but I customarily try to talk some sense into dear gray Henry Herschel; and it’s not because ideas slide right off him that I fail, although he is all slope. No. Ideas stick to Herschel like snot. He is a little dog-jowled, a bit pigeon-breasted, a little likewise-toed. With clothes, he cannot be fitted. His head is so much bigger than the rest of him, it appears to float above his neck like a balloon on a stick; and his round eyes watch your every move, open as an owl’s are sometimes; and he likes to bring them up close to you, as if, by peeking through yours, he’d see a secret; however, his frame shrinks from anything physical, from contact that near and neighborly; his feet stand their small ground stubbornly; so Herschel leans toward you like a rake against a tree, and since he is of only average height, his eyes, so close and large, need to tilt up slightly, toward yours, to which they seem drawn then like leaves to light.

I remember only one other head like his. It belonged to the superintendent of schools in my hometown—was Trifocal his name?—he had diabetes?—what sort of name is Carol Adam whatever?—a big man, though, unlike Herschel, who is a water tank on top of two sticks. Tri-tif-tiffany? Trivogal moved like molasses, and his lids seemed always about to close. A huge round head—not a bit of pudge upon it—and it was that large slow figure my mother kept expecting me to return in triumph to replace. Tribunal? He had a habit of falling asleep in public: at meetings, banquets, plays. The scandal was sustained by his lorislike look. Herschel has a similarly heavy head, large lids, but his eyes are wide and wondering. If his feet would bring his body closer, he could pour that full wet gaze of his like syrup down upon my neck and nose.

I’ve had to hunt up Herschel in order to head off this little burgeoning conspiracy concerning my pet dunce, Lacelli. Lacelli the belli. The most warlike small man since my father and Jimmy Cagney slapped that movie dame. A true punk. With a grapefruit, was it? A true punk. But my own: my own slow glowing coal, my personal thread of smoke. To hang a fuse from. And Herschel always stands up to greet me, shakes my hand as if we had not seen one another since the beginning of summer, waves me to the one seat available as if I might be really wondering where to put my ass, smiles a smile of honest pleasure at my actually entering his office instead, as it usually happens, of Herschel having to float like a fog by mine, drifting in through an incautiously open door with nothing immediate on his mind, nothing specific to say, just gathering near me to mood up my life, cloud my day, waiting for me to open my mouth so he can rain down reservations. Hello, Hershey. Howzit?

It is impossible—not to say, nettlesome—to carry on a debate with Herschel because he is invariably prepared to grant you your point . . . after he has blunted it. He is quick to applaud your overall attitude (for the most part, of course) (on the whole) (by and large) (in the main). Meanwhile, he has so effectively clouded the countryside that you can never perceive the defining edge of anything, or circumscribe an ordinary outline in order to locate its elbows or touch its tits. Blur, fuzz, smear: that’s what he does—his specialty. It’s not that, like Governali, he hates distinctions, but rather that he makes too many, and lays them down on top of one another repeatedly like an angry scratch-out of lines. On the other hand, you can never come to an accord, either—sing harmony. Not with Good King Qualification, Handsome Prince Perhaps. Not with Mister Maybe. Not with Kid Yes-But. Not with every idea developed as an endless polyhedron. No, you cannot quarrel with Herschel, yet the Hedgehog lets nothing pass. If thoughts wore ties, he’d always feel compelled, in his wifely way, to straighten them. So with Herschel one is habitually in a state of mitigated exasperation.

Lacelli. The dolus belli. Deplorable twerp. Hard, shiny, well-shaped little tummy like an overturned metal mixing bowl. It shines through his shirts. A small smeary mustache, which he’s cut from photographs of his heroic masterposeur, struggles to survive on a pitted unarable lip. He frigs its greasy ends, but to no avail: they will not even form points, let alone stand stiff. He doesn’t dare do the D’Annunzio goatee. And I think he’s receding his hairline with a raspy eraser. I fancy he wears a blue cape borrowed from a nursey doll when he lays his Bonnie Barley on her ample back. Bonnie Barley: ex-sec, ex-stew, ex-wife of an account exec she met on a flt from Chi to LA, she is now a simple student of Italian disunion, especially, I believe, of the late Kingdom of Naples (that’s what she and Lacelli have in common besides their hard-core commonness); but it’s Lacelli’s strut that gets me: it’s his dimpled dandification I can’t abide; his come-and-get-it tough-guy hand-on-gun-butt stance, the stare he turns up and down rheostatically behind a pair of imaginary airman’s goggles, his tromping about in tennis shoes as if he were wearing boots, dedicating his unwritten books to Bonnie Barley as if she were Donna Anguissola Gravina Cruyllas di Ramacca, or some other similarly dubbed and bubbied Sicilian slut. As Culp says, she’s a soft tush. Hi Hersh. What say?

THE QUARREL

The quarrel not only has definite operating elements, which I have written on the blackboard with a squeaky chalk, it has several successive, almost necessary stages. During the first, the preparatory signal is sent, or rather, a number of signals are sent and received. These are like subliminal warnings. Above the restless and barren flood of normal life, as it were, in place of the peaceful dove—the leaf-laden harbinger of land—hawks with pieces of bone in their beaks are sighted. We got plenty of such signals from the Japanese, but we suppressed them because we knew we needed to be surprised. Most of the time one party is first to alert the other, but, when the quarrel finally breaks out, accusations will be rapidly bandied: Well, you started it.

I started it! You started it! You are the one who—

Jesus. I don’t believe it. You can stand there and lie like that—

As if you’ve forgotten already—

When?

Just now! Jesus!

Some of this righteous amazement will be genuine, because the messages may have been transmitted hours before, and their significance, scarcely conscious even then, since suppressed; hence the startled outrage with which the commencement of hostilities is customarily greeted. Among couples, and even countries, one is usually the aggressor while the other invites the aggression. These roles are conveniently forgotten each time. Everyone pretends not to know their part, or the title of the play. So the second phase, as I’ve said, consists of a quarrel about who it was who started the quarrel. It is a kind of warm up quarrel and sets the initial agenda. Of course, the idea is to fix the blame for everything upon the person who broke the peace, and not upon the factors and forces responsible for the massive hidden grievances whose humbling collision is being so rambunctiously but deceptively registered. Nor, at this point, will any acceptable or plausible substitute cause for the quarrel be advanced—tramps passing their shapes safely through hooked screens—since the substitute cause must appear to be lying under—not over—circumstances, otherwise it cannot be “discovered,” “revealed,” or “admitted.”

The day my father discovered that my mother was offering strong drink to vagrants, there was a terrible quarrel—one of the worst in my memory—my father’s voice low and choked with words as if they were debris obstructing a flood, my mother pale and pouty, eyes slowly filling with tears like a leaking boat, silence her only defense, except when, with a desperate giggle and a defiant flip of her head, she tossed back the jigger of gin which still stood on the kitchen counter—that glass his finger had been firing his feelings at; so he subsequently forced her, in place of her own dinner, to sit on the back stoop and eat the meal she had prepared for the tramp. Most times I think the kid, here, is the shiftless layabout, he told her in tones as measured as powder for a bomb, but you are the real beggar, the real bum, the total good-for-nothing in this house. On the back step, beside a spoon at rest in a wide red bowl, she sat for an hour in the evening light like a heap of thrown clothes.

THE QUARREL

The third stage might be called the quarrel proper, although quarrels are by nature repetitive and recursive: early injuries are reinflicted, earlier remarks are returned to center stage, bite after bite is taken from the same piece of already rent flesh. How protracted any quarrel is—whether it becomes physically violent or remains at the level of verbal abuse, whether it is carried on in calm cold tones, in a condition of feigned indifference, or by means of screams and shouts and slams—depends on the stamina, style, sex, and personality of the combatants; but most of all upon the extent of its motivating distress, the depth of the anger that lies hidden beneath the battle like oil deep in the earth. Temporary truces may be made, and a lull fall upon the field, but no quarrel concludes until it is clear that the quarrel will be remembered more vividly than its causes, until words have been spoken, blows struck, truths revealed, feelings exposed, dishes or furniture broken, which add fresh injuries to the old store. The satisfied quarrelers return to a pallid state of peace with new enormities to fasten into history—the attack on Pearl Harbor, the destruction of Hiroshima—as the fruits of their conflict.

Physical violence is said to be the preferred recourse of the male; taunting and recrimination are supposed to be the favorites of the female. In fact, women like to slap, men to tease and otherwise provoke; however, women have managed to persuade the world that beating them is the cruelest kind of quarelsome exercise, as if bodily injuries were the worst sort. My father never laid a hand on me. Had he, I would have felt vindicated, and hated him then for solid and wholesomely acceptable reasons. Instead, he belittled me, cut me down to size, broke my ego’s every bone, blackened my capital I, and left me less visibly scarred than did my adolescent acne.

I guess I should add enormities to my list of elements in a quarrel. (I said elements. Elements are not the same as stages. Will you ever get anything straight?) Well, there are always enormities. My mother didn’t say “down the hatch” when she in put away the gin, which would have been an enormity in itself, but drinking the liquor was enormity enough. Enormities are notoriously relative. In the midst of the Holocaust, the murder of a few more Jews is not an enormity. G & I leaves such patterns in a too abbreviated or buried state perhaps. G & I. Not R & R. G & I. Dear me. My book, das Meisterstücke. The object of my former life was to write it, and there it sits at my left hand like an empty glass. Yes, there it rests—so near—yet I only dimly remember the text and its roll call of crimes, its sordid revelations, real villains, victims, vindications. I remember better mother’s sodden body on the back step. I imagine better Bonnie Barley rewarding that sneak, Lacelli, with the roly-poly of her boobs, the soft pillow of her belly. I did tush her tuft once, in a dry dream. Never ruffled Ruth’s ruff either. Never got below the waist. Lousy Catholic upbringing. Some sort of dumb social rule she came across in high school. And I wanted my mother to stand up and come in through the door like a wind and toss off another gin. Through the screen, hooked from within, I saw her sitting, jelly bleeding from the sandwich on the white plate beside her. There are no miracles in history. Not in my autobio either. Nor in G & I. In the movies. In the funnies. These days to be innocent is the worst crime. Slobweb #9. And my white pile? it now serves to conceal these soiled and disgraced sheets, and grows without growing spontaneously—like a turvy Topsy.

Herschel, I think, is a kind of cruel copy editor, and I, alas, am often his hapless text. He replaces every ‘which’ with ‘that; and every ‘that’ with ‘which.’ He prefers commas to semicolons because commas are more noncommittal, comforting, egalitarian, and because he cannot be happy and still stay in harmony with the way I breathe. He faults my parallels. He snips off anything that dangles. He hates my elisions, my transpositions, my sloppy use of ‘you’ and ‘one.’ He invariably finds that my position hasn’t the preferred spelling. He l.c.’s my heavily Germanic Capitals, deletes my ‘!’s, eliminates italics, prefers the peace of parens to my more aggressive brackets, disputes, every time, the way I break ideas into images, and dislikes single quotes. He says dots and dashes should be reserved exclusively for Morse. He always wants me to check my sources, moderate my intemperate verbs if not their Latinate length, avoid the first person, words in bad taste, the present tense, the subjunctive mood, and the passive voice. He covers the margins of my mind with niggling little queries. Which is to say, he is a thorough P in that p-art of the a;ss called Crack!

One summer, on vacation, we were motoring through New England. It was midmorning. My mother suddenly caught sight of her left hand, ringless in her lap like a clutch of loose keys. I can still recall the indescribable soft sound she made. It wasn’t raining, but nothing else about the weather now occurs to me. Apparently she had left her wedding and engagement rings at the motel where we’d spent the previous night. My father took the loss of the rings hard. To share his sentiments, you did not have to have my father’s character or my symbolic cast of mind, since it also meant a return trip of sixty or more miles—unavoidable, of course, because the rings had to be retrieved. I was in the backseat where I could see the loss enter his spine like a stake. Maybe she had left them on the side of the sink. Perhaps they were still on the table by the bed. There would be no reason to have put them down in the outhouse someplace. It was likely, even now, that the shaving mirror was reflecting them. Every morning, when we had collected our things and loaded the car, my father would wipe the room with his eyes just to be sure nothing of value was left behind. Nevertheless, the rings had been overlooked. They were on the nightstand or the side of the sink, in the soap dish, on the glass shelf where the water glass stood. They were surely somewhere like that if the old crone who cleaned hadn’t pocketed them for good. My mother wept. In his cold low constricted voice, my father berated her as though her sorrow did not exist. Images of the old crone crossed the windshield. My mother wasn’t able to find a handkerchief in her purse and nobody helped her. All that aimless fumbling was just an additional annoyance. Her face seemed to slip down and drip from her chin. I was twelve, ten. Caught in the car like a fly in a bottle, my eyes flew against the windows. There, an image of the old crone appeared suddenly like the spatter of a bug. I did not think I could endure the return journey. And then, after all that, suppose the rings were not recovered? There would be no remedy. Suppose my mother had absentmindedly put them down in some odd unrememberable place? Yet they had to be on the sill or the sink or between their bed’s folded-over sheets. My father was speeding now, of course, but he was too angry to curse, as was his custom, the traffic that impeded us. The honesty of the couple who seemed to own the tourist court was briefly debated. I said nothing. My heart was choking on its own blood. No one, least of all myself, wanted to be reminded of my existence. If we could remember the name of the tourist court, we might phone. It was too easy to say no on the phone, my father said. Confrontation was the only recourse. As if the world were at an end, the road rolled toward us. Our horn blew suddenly as if a tire had blown. Maybe the rings had somehow got mislaid in the luggage, I believe my mother finally suggested, and the car was roughly halted in a patch of buzzing grass while the trunk was opened and our baggage searched. Perhaps she had simply lost them in the trash and folds of her purse. After all, she was unable to locate a hankie. Perhaps they had fallen beneath a pillow. A passing truck shook the elevated trunk lid and light fluttered up from it as from a mirror. My father opened out a suitcase on the hood and began pawing through a stack of shirts. The old crones left cheek was puffed as though she had a chaw in it. That’s where the rings are, I thought. Sure enough, in the top tray of the small trunk where my mother kept her cosmetics, the rings were found, looking less large at that moment, I think I felt, than I had somehow remembered them. I can recall her deflationary sigh then, too. It was not of relief but of another sort of despair. I stood by the road and watched my father watch my mother push her rings back on her marriage finger. They never went on easily. It was not as if a fresh troth were being plighted. Except for an occasional sniffle from my mother, neither made a significant noise or said even a short word the rest of the day. She’s found the rings, I thought, so why are things worse? We hadn’t lost our home or a loved one—we had lost nothing, as it turned out—yet an enormity had occurred. I couldn’t understand it. I was ten, eleven, twelve. I did not know there was no loved one to be lost. My mother wouldn’t take her rings off after that and they became encrusted with flour, I thought, old soap, and dirt. Until her fingers became infected, and her whole hand burst: then the doctor removed them. They weren’t in the envelope of her belongings the hospital handed me after her death. We stayed in a cabin near a slipper-shaped lake that evening, and my mother and father walked arm-in-arm up the small rocky beach in the failing light. I shall never forget how grateful I was for the peace. It came as quietly as the darkness, and was complete.

If I am truly a man of peace—and I am such a man—then why am I always at war? The calm untroubled life seems a contradiction. Even when it’s cold outside, I boil within. At first Martha hated our quarrels as much as I did, but now I think she rather enjoys them. They give us something to do together, something which focuses our feelings. Perhaps matters will improve—now that I’ve begun to dig. A little manual labor for the mind. A little secrecy in the public realm. A little indicative mood and active voice.

The fart misleads the nose, Henry, I should practice hollering at him. The scowl confuses the eye. The lion’s roar merely rattles the panes of the ear. Wars similarly leave not a false, but an enticing, trail—a ruin which represents another ruin, a ruin entirely intact, as buried in poisonous ash as Pompeii, as in dullness are dismayed the days of my life. Yes. To cover the pit: war, eloquence, art—each wears a domino designed to be more interesting than the face behind it. I shall tell him that. Once. Twice. Can you hold that in your helpful hand, Hershey? He flinches at the vulgar word—’fart.’ Fah! Fireworks on the Fourth. Hear them? Farting the heavens full. As if to take the stars apart. God’s tender bowels run out galaxies of gas. Ah, the clouds explode! O, the sky is rent! Here comes the flag floating down. pBpB And the grand finale follows: what a rat-tat-tat! deaths by the baker’s dozens. Cloth, skin, hair, bowels. Wow! Bowels bursting in air! Wow! Fart-art-tart-de-fart!

If that were the case, Herschel responds calmly, as if nothing had gone off (he’s not even twisting his hankie; he’s not even mopping his brow); if wars were like quarrels, he says, spooning a dubious tone over his words like sand on a sundae—that is, like quarrels as you describe them—then the usual values we give to referent and sign would be reversed, wouldn’t they? and servants would be served by their masters. A small fan lifts the corners of a pair of papers as it oscillates. Herschel claims that air-conditioning gives him a sore throat. So he sits in a draft. You mentioned the scowl a moment ago, he says, his throat in good shape, but don’t we always read the face like a paper, interested only in the news? Isn’t that what a face is for? doesn’t the scowl speak of an annoyance elsewhere in the inner city? give us a picture of the anger which shaped it? The fan’s breath licks me unpleasantly—like a lover I no longer like. I wave the air away with my hand but it is immediately back again. Wars though—well—he says—wars aren’t some posture put before the world, or an expression on the face of an irascible tuition, to be read as we read the moon. To have sign and sense swap places so completely—isn’t that a mite radical, a mite strange, perverse even? (A mite?) Shouldn’t we look closely at such a dexterous exchange? (How dismally deferential Herschel is, how cautious, how picky, how mulish, how polite.) He, but not his body, looks me in the eye. I am curious about those flapping papers, weighted on one corner by—by a book by—I mean, he says, it’s more than arguing that the occasion for the war or the bust-up or the quarrel—perhaps Culpy’s thermonuclear tiff—isn’t that his label?—well—the spark is often trivial and offset from its true cause—(Culpy’s label? is it a pickle jar, the jam we’re in?)—the way most genuine sparks are—(genuine? what would a counterfeit spark ignite? a counterfeit catastrophe? and Culpy? my god!)—so that the true condition of affairs is somewhat hidden or disguised. (The true condition of affairs, he said yes, what—what is the true condition of affairs?) Well, we both know how frequently that happens. (What happens?) I take a peek at the papers while Hershey puts a common kitchen match to his idea. However distantly ignited, though, he says, I suspect the quarrel feeds on its grievances like a flame, always moving toward fresh fuel, so that we see what it’s eating, and everything is ash behind its path—(ashes, injuries, dust, debris, dismay, looks like a couple of office memos curling up in a flame)—whereas what you are suggesting, Herschel says, ignoring, as if he were not privy to them, all the images of burning which I earlier applied to this particular problem, is that the entire conflict conceals its source by being so completely absorbing in itself, so devastating in terms of its own effects (isn’t that a fancy loop he’s written there, an L? Lacelli’s name? Lacelli), that it earns our total attention. (Who calls Culp Culpy? no one I know; is there perhaps an unexplored area of intimacy . . . ? and then Lacelli’s name—all I can see—shit!) To a geologist, Herschel continues, while I melt in the heal and the fan laves my cheek and my suspicions mount: yes, Herschel, to a geologist? To a geologist a long thin lake may be a sign of some far-gone glacial activity, but never mind, because the geologist, along with the rest of us, likes to go boating; he gives up the sign for the swimming.

SWIMMERS SHOULD WATCH OUT FOR FALLING ANVILS

 Men and women with their mouths agape, perhaps because they were fellators in a past life or because they just popped off too often, swim hungrily after schools of fish shaped from shit, while an orderly line of Japanese collects at the fire’s edge to await the moment when the lake will flush. The flames will form a violent swirl of the sort one sees in outer space, and then the configuration will seem to swallow itself, a great gurgle will go up, astonishing the tourists, some of whom will capture the outcry on tape (there being no prohibition of tape recorders, only of flashy cameras, as I’ve said, a rule much resented); then the lake, drawn into a spot of intense incandescence, will disappear like an ingot thrown in the sea, plunging the surrounding desert into a sooty darkness itself so indelible the Japanese will be dyed black as Nigerians—souvenir of the descent. Soon the pool will begin to glow again, as if spotlit, filling with foaming fire like a mug with beer, and the anvils will begin to splash in as always, with a comforting inconstancy and uneven aim. Isn’t that what you’re saying, Herschel says. (Another well-meant but unpleasant habit of Herschel’s is the way he takes up your ideas, identifies with them, expands upon them, develops their implications, drives them on like an old Ford so that soon they seem to have taken a U-turn into another identity: not even the year or the make are the same.)

(Funny he should mention my lake—our lake—Lou’s and mine—especially since it has resumed for us its function as a sign and not as a place for bathing—but what made him think; long thin glacial lake just now?) with a memo maybe from the chairman on his desk, a memo which calls attention to itself—wait, what is on the other one? I couldn’t make it out, the flapping is so foolishly irregular, and the heat is so heavy cigarette smoke simply spills out of the ash like a slow hose and heads for that coffee can he’s halved with sand as though urging my butt to follow. I mean, he says, suppose I didn’t want to play tennis with you today, would I really break my racquet when a simple regret would suffice? We never play tennis, Hershey. Neither of us plays a swat. Well, perhaps that’s not an attractive example, then—tennis. I’d lend you a racquet; I have a spare. I can see his head bob about hunting for a more attractive example, so I Culp him off. Simple regrets, in the kinds of cases I mean, well, they never suffice. The question is: why don’t I want to play tennis with you today? Have I discovered you are screwing my wife? Herschel’s arms rise slowly as if they were being inflated by the fan. Look, I say, I don’t want to play tennis with you today, so I break my hand. You can’t lend me a spare hand, so I’m safe. Now, Hershey, who would suspect me of impotence, inertia, or high blood pressure? Herschel follows his gesture with an odd look. It disturbs him when I up the ante. The quail breaks a wing, doesn’t it, I ask him with a sourness that comes from somewhere else, but I’ve used the wrong image—stupid—the heat has turned my head into a stove; besides, I must find out the subject of the second memo before it blows into the wastebasket; what about the book, too, what’s on the jacket? what the devil is he doing? putting his homemade urn on those memos, presumably to stop their flapping; that’s what I’m supposed to think, the fart, I’ll ash on the floor. Listen, I say, I don’t know what you’ve been told about Lacelli—The bird only pretends, Bill, Herschel says calmly, as if nothing has gone off, as if the terrible subject has never been broached. The fan wears a mask of mesh like a fencer, and turns its bland face here and there, its blown air gone almost at once without a trace, especially now his coffee can is squatting on those memos. Bye-bye is a gesture they can no longer make. Cheap brand. Drip. Suppose you were screwing my wife. His arms begin to balloon again, his body grows light. In that case, it’s not the tennis game I wish to avoid, it’s another sort of love, eh? it’s—I give him the Al Jolson gesture, the “Mammy” singer bit that Culp taught me—it’s the whole loaf of life. Herschel is slow to recover from my dip. Sure, I’d pretend to break my hand, if I could get away with it. But there’s more to fool than just you. When you got in bed with my wife (I continue to flatter him uncomfortably with the possibility), you rearranged the furniture in my house, the pencils on my desk, the clutch in the car, the stones in the garden, the way the world seems when I look out my attic window. And I don’t have to mow the lawn, now, do I?—with my hand in a cast—or shuffle cards, take tea, or play pat-a-cake. We fight wars to conceal a world—a whole world and its desperate condition—not one itty-bitty social gaffe or sneaky office memo. Wars and quarrels differ in scope—sure—in comprehensiveness, in destruction and general violence—of course—but the figure of the family is the model in the photo. With the quarrel, for instance, I might conceal a large lack of love with a little; I might moan about empty pockets when my wallet is flat and I’m also overdrawn at the bank. So a slight slap might be my symbolic response to the fucking I think she’s had from another—a substitute for beating the happy pulch to a sorry pulp. Herschel flinches predictably—such a nice man—but it doesn’t help me make out the name of his silly book. We hide bad blood with blood, Herschel, that’s the trouble. We gild ourselves with this other guilt so we shall seem innocent of some deeper, dearer, darker, crime—a crime we shall constantly repeat because it defines us—is us—is what we are. Wars disguise differences too great for a simple symbol to express. By hiding our basic urges, leanings, dispositions, sometimes inside their opposite like a tramp in a tux, we make them look—feel—sinful, as Freud saw, when, of course, they aren’t in the least. And the concrete corrupts; particular cases always make their general principles look ridiculous. Even the laws of nature have to express themselves in crudities and outrage, in bee stings and earthquakes. That fan there, for instance—there’s not a thing it does that doesn’t exemplify the highest and most important principles of physics; yet look at it: how does it distinguish and ennoble them? The quarrel suffers the same shortcomings. One of its functions is to disgrace the ideal. Then the farther the division goes—right through the apple from top to bottom—and the greater the distance between the two sides—as Adam eats one half, Eve the other—the more the matter becomes Manichean and metaphysical—Good against Evil, Greek versus Persian—the less interesting it is when put on public view; the sillier it looks clothed, out in the open, as if you were to advertise a crack as a canyon, and try to explain, in the middle of the laughter, that although it is small and not even interestingly irregular or indecently suggestive, it is nevertheless more serious than a break in some bell or a little hole in the Grand Coulee.; it is a fracture in Reality itself. How do you persuade people of that, who prefer to stare at the crack of an ass or the slit of a whore? They may not even be halves of the same whole, you see. Herschel—it may be that bad. In a war, then, there is nothing to argue about: how can Body and Mind trade blows, for instance? Only, I should say, if they can find mercenaries to do the trading, and a common field for the fight. But the sword beats only upon the shield, and body thrusts itself only against another body, reason wrestles reasons not angels, feelings collide with feelings not cars, sensations interfere with other sensations—the spirit is as crazed as a plate—so that any passion which would cloud perception must find a percept willing to make itself a mist, and any part of Spirit that would trip the tongue or heat the heart will have to enlist an organ or a nerve to carry out its wishes. The Marxist believes that the mind is another organ of the body, whereas the Idealist believes the weapons fire the other way; but, in fact, the real catastrophe which their quarrel is designed to cover up is the irreconcilable divisions that cut us, not into pieces as a cake might be, but into heteronymous kinds. The One and the Many can occupy the same camp because every Many is made of Ones; but between Mind and Matter, and who knows how many other oppositions, there is no sweet little worm-shaped serpent—a pineal gland—there is no mark of recognition like a circumcision; there is only the abyss: the abyss, the pit with its lakes of fire, their shit-shaped fish, the Japanese tourists at the firewater’s edge, and the anvils coming down like hail, huge and heavy, sometimes striking the lake as luck would have it, or a tourist, or the top of a parked bus, bursting windows, blooming tulips of fire, exploding corpuscles of blood:

Mind must find, across the divide, a traitor to its kind. And vice versa.

If the fan’s oscillations are regular, the papers should flap in time, too, but they act the way the anvils do. And why is the smoke of my cigarette like thick gray pee, nowhere ruffled by moving air, or dissipated in some small degree? What is going on here? Shit. I’ll just reach over his double row of dictionaries and pick the book up—what harm? Whatya into now, Hershey, I say. I see it’s not from the library, because it’s wearing a dust jacket. Beneath the dust the letters read, D’Annunzio Abroad; a Bibliographical Essay. Geezee peezee. My enemies are collecting like clouds—softly, silently. How to dodge the anvils? I put the book down. I make no comment. I do not raise an eyebrow, though every hackle’s up. Ye gods of heaven, give me earth.

My tunnel shall have a body made of simple soilage like the rest of us. Like the rest of us, it will have a spirit which is certainly no thing, too, for its hollow bore is no more palpable than spirit is, than consciousness, the ghost which Martha was just now when I conjured her, which I am when I conjure me, or Herschel, here, is when I conjure him. Yes. in that sense, it’s as if I were making a creature down there in my dust, a creature out of pure crawl.

Herschel isn’t an imbecile. He catches my nifty allusion to Macbeth. But he just doesn’t know how to get the ball out of his glove, or where to throw it when he does. It happens all the time, Herschel. Sure, the disease—the inner illness—kills. Nevertheless, it’s the symptoms—right?—which disfigure, which denude, which scrofulate and scar and maim. It hurts, we say, buy we don’t care a howl about it; we never cared about it before the pain came, only until the pain came, only because the pain came (perhaps that’s why we have to suffer now); and we don’t care about it today. We care about the presence of our feeling. Period. We want it gone. Soonest. Make the pain go away, doc; rub the spots out; make the quarreling stop; let the war end. Peace is the death we rest in under that stone that says so. Herschel’s face undergoes an undesirable change. O, wait, now—much can be said for that, I say quickly, anticipating Herschel, heading him off again, peace is everybody’s favorite teddy, peace is splendiferous, and it’s not simply the habit of the sandy-nosed. It’s the “get well” word. But after all, Hersch, without a symptom, what do we see? without an outbreak of anger or impatience, what do we feel? without a heart-warming war, would we ever know or care or concern ourselves with what was wrong? The trouble is that the wrong we care for is soon the war itself, the family wrangle, the bellyache, the coated tongue, the blurry eyes, the fever—ah—the fever in the fevertube.

The crime and its conditions, to be sure. Herschel begins, prevention or cure becomes the problem, of course—

History is one damned anvil after another, Hershey. Duck!

I duck. I do duck. I dodge and weave. I snake my hips. But I get hit anyway: stomach cramp, smoker’s cough, Martha’s coldness, apoplectic rage. And by conspiracies, hostility, envy, incompetence, malice, jealousy, pettiness, meanness, shame, chagrin, spite. I am struck. Thonked. Repeatedly. By thoughts. Bumped. But not by Bonnie Barley’s Jell-O’y boobs. Her gentle belly. Her hidden thighs. Nevermore to do the downie. Zonked. By Lacelli bang between the eyes. By an old woman walking her dog. By an old woman out on dung duty. I come out of the café on the run. The sun is like a heavy rain. Suddenly I feel a leash across my legs and nearly take a tumble. My terrible day is continuing. The leash is a light chain interlaced with leather. Lou’s cab is drawing away. No. It is gone. The old lady says something tart. I lean across the leash and threaten to throttle her little dear dog. I force all my fingers fiercely together. She pulls back in dismay. The little dog barks once like a Pekingese. Once like a pug. I growl like a Kohler. Could you call this a quarrel? No skin off my teeth, I gesture in Italian. She lifts her poop scoop, shakes it at me. Get out of my neighborhood, you old tart, I tell her. She looks aghast. I confess to Culp that I’ve been having these terrible recurrent dreams—dreams about oblivion. Oh, Bosch, that’s nothing, he says. One thought distracts me from another. I open the fridge and wonder why. I turn on the tap and can only wet a finger. I take down a book to give it a blank stare. A feeling flickers. This thought—that thought—this notion—flits by like a swift in search of its swallow. Each lures me away from the others. They rush wildly about as if there were a frightened bunch of Bonnie Barleys fleeing from me in all directions like a bursting bag of white beans. O god. I can’t go after all of them. Did you catch a glimpse of the ass on that one? Now why have I closed the curtains? Jewish Jell-O. Kosher cunt. Ah, friend, it’s one hell of a life! Could you call this scatter a meeting of minds, a convening of thoughts? This way to the gaz, Elli, Valli, and Ottla. Nice ass of the last. Don’t you like their vulnerability finally? Docile even unto. Dolci in addition. Dolci. Clothes piled up neatly. Why not? This way. Now. Now. All out of favor am I.

Sometimes I think, Herschel says to surprise me, you really don’t have any point of view.

What? what? what’s that arrow à propos de? what? Is it like not having a sense of humor? A hurricane, hey Herschel? a hurricane has an eye, but does it have a point of view?

Its eye is empty, I believe. Otherwise it’s all wind.

Ah. Ah. Who is this? who is this I’m talking to? who is this who, who is so quick, like Culp, with the comeback? So is a whistle, I say, breaking wind. Hold that thought. Question; where did this tempest come from? Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Think of it. Lou. Lou’s. Rue’s I never reached. Susu’s I only saw. Through the slit of her skirt like a parted drape. Martha’s are now as flooded as the Yangtze. Just one tiny tongue walk. Is that so much? Small stroll below. How little harm? No harm, no fault, right? Who? Oh, I’m reaching it, Herschel, I’m getting there—to the point, I mean. I’m arriving after a long hot trip. I’ve been traveling along the Zuider Zee in search of the V in the V. But now let’s see—in what direction am I writing? west to east? Our problem is the problem of perception. We say “I see,” as if we saw. Surfaces—that’s all sight sets its sights on—surfaces. We have this problem. The problem is that perception isn’t—it ain’t—it’s nuthin—is evanescent—farty as fireworks—that’s right. This way to the pouf plant. Stick it in my ear. Up your eye! Yet we have this problem, and the problem is that this insufferable zero—this zilch has a damn strong odor like a drain’s; it has a tempting taste like a pie’s; it has Lou’s long slim soothing handhold—O—and its southern surfaces are sunny, its round combinations are seductive, but its heart is a hollow, a sounded gong. So long. Like war, perception is a form of distraction. We dodge one shell to be struck by another. Here comes a daisy. There’s an orange, a breeze, a whirl of wine. Anvils after all.

Appalling piece of paper, Herschel says, pointing to one of the memos. Shameful suggestion, ugly allegation. What’s going on? Here I am, an historian of my own evil, and I don’t know what’s going on. The rings my mother didn’t lose—remember?—the road which flew back like a cinder toward my eye, the alliterating light as it lifted from the lid of our car’s trunk, my cowardly and constricted chest, and all the rest . . .

THE QUARREL

and the anger, too, the escalation of antagonism and violence that’s so much a quality of the quarrel, my father hiding behind his hurt like a count in his castle: oh, all of it can be explained by means of the back door’s screen—that image, yes—the beggar’s pale sincere face behind it, the pain in his supplicating eyes like something essential lost sight of, the flimflam, I mean, of every feeling, like that spoon leaning in her soup, cool, stiff, gleaming, sitting beside her as she was sitting, soft . . . the problem of perception . . . sitting soft as a spill . . . the composition compels you to look away . . . you proceed to the next day the way the next day will, inevitably . . .

I’m tired. Hey. Suddenly I’m very tired. I’m not used to bending my body like a pretzel, or laboring in confinement of this kind, in air like wire wool, hacking my way back to my beginnings, as if, from this house, any road led anywhere. Today—no, yesterday—no, many days before, each day gray, each grim, I began to dig. No more hurray.

Alice—to refuse all imitation, all literary allusion—did not have, like an anthill, to excavate her hole. She only had to fall down hers; she only had to fall head over heels like a spindle of unwinding kite twine.

Herschel has heavied me out. He refused to be real. Under the circumstances, I am incapable of Lisztkrieg. What it will take. The anger can be explained.

THE QUARREL

 One wants . . . O sure, one wants, but what? One wants as a wife a woman . . . what? One wants as a wife a woman who is . . what? . . . malleable of mind, pliable in her passions, firm yet soft of spirit as one of her firm soft buttocks is firm yet soft. One wants . . . what? One wants a wife, a woman, who is not merely physically yielding, not simply a pretty and practiced piece of randy pulch, one easily puttied into pleasing, who will let you pee between her legs and aim the stream, but . . . what? . . . one who is naturally pleased to be pleased, and naturally pleased to be pleasing. How often the opposite everywhere. How always the opposite anytime. Every cunt closed like a Sunday shop. Yup. And then—how often have I wanted to shake Carl’s thoughts loose from the sullen web they were caught in, and tell him to be happy, dammit: you’re a kid, you’re supposed to be carefree, so get going! And then—how often has the cat defied me—daily—the damn beast. How often have I wanted to shout—to shout at Martha—to holler her heart out—when I see that slow set to her face, that frozen smart look in her eye, that morally superior wisegal smile—as if she were saying what I wish I were shouting: don’t you dare to feel what you are feeling; don’t you ever think that thought another time. I can slap her silly and not redden the side she has taken. To love is to trust another with your self-esteem. And then to see them measure you, to see the red line drop into the bulb at the bottom—my god, how you hate yourself, then, for the gift of your vanity, the care of your conceit! Think of it: you have given someone else the right to think ill of you.

When the Germans went against the English, they went against the trustees of their taste and temperament. In a way, they fought against the men they would have liked to be and pretended they were. Nertz, Culp says. Wars are fought for scalps and booty. Wars are fought with fists, knives, money, lies, and Sherman tanks. I don’t believe in your metaphysical imbruegelios. Well, Culp, you have no depths. True, he says, in the well I never hear the penny hit the water’s bottom.

I once went to bed with a nun

who said she was ready for some

slap and some tickle,

some kosher dill pickle,

and some ass, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Lou left me because I had, she said, a loathsome mind. And Martha’s contempt for that mind of mine (for I admit my mind is my mind) angers me out of all equanimity. I think what bothers me most about you, Martha told me once with more than her customary heat, is that you’re not ashamed of what you are. What am I, for god’s sake, some sideshow freak? an androgynous Andy and Annie? What have I done? put on a Brown Shirt? been a Boy Scout? I’m middle-aged, married, normally horny. I teach school with sufficient diligence to keep an enrollment. I practice a profession with sufficient skill to receive promotion. I’ve raised a couple of unexceptional kids who are now in unexceptional colleges doing quite unexceptional work. I live in a house full of empty drawers and decaying mirrors. I am deeper in debt than my delights are worth and my purse can afford. I am overweight like my wife, who won’t give me any of my rightful nookie. So what’s so special? There is nothing genuinely German about me. I can confess to the merest middle-class crimes. I shall not become famous. I’m resigned to that now. No. I am perfectly ordinary. A humble burgher. O sweet humility, how it shames us, Martha exclaimed on the occasion of my submitted estimate. Do you really think you’re like everybody else, Martha went on, scraping some carrots as if she were flaying my skin, what an insult to humanity! Marty, what bothers you—I don’t need to be told I what bothers me; I know what bothers me. Marty, what bothers you about me is that I have access to the whole of myself, not just to this part or that; I have complete clearance; I can talk to all my selves on a relatively free and open basis. Well, that’s what I told her, and that’s what I believed. But now I haven’t got that confidence. Susu’s severed head suggests to me that I may not have spoken to all of them.

Tired. Suddenly quite tired. I’m not used to this. And I haven’t the right tools. I cut a smile into the ground with only half a spade. I have this little hesitation even as I do: shouldn’t I fashion my own earth’s ax the way it has always been done in the past? from the age of stone on? my knife and fork and auger, my counterfeit credentials, my maps? yes, and my Luftwaffe uniform? out of potato and sugar sacks, candle wax and food tins? But I’ve no comrades, no warning net or lookouts, no disposal team, no captured engravers or former tailors, no gifted scavengers and thieves, no packages from far away with cigarettes or other rations. The work is hard, hot:, I’m fat, old, out of shape. So I shall have to get a set at Sears: shovels, picks, hoes, blades, bits, drill. I might as well make digging this tunnel as easy as possible. A trouble-light, long cord, some surgical masks, a pair of goggles, overalls. What else? Rope. Things will come up. Unexpecteds. Can I buy bed boards? Martha has those evening meetings at the Historical Museum. I can do the noisier work then. I have to be terribly careful about cave-ins. Caution for all 360º, for the twenty-four, not just nine to five. Too early to worry about the air supply. A good flashlight in addition. Even careful plans will go awry. I have to count on that and cultivate nature’s patience. The imagination may be maimed at any minute. Yes. A long labor. But even by cups of dust were the Great Plains filled. Someday, instead of feeling as down as I do now, I shall want to commemorate with plaque or song or some suitable ceremonial the day I began to dig.