The Wretch of the Sun, page 12
(.)
Trudy waves to Dr. Cottataris and receives a distracted, half-hearted wave in return. Dr. Cottataris moves away, fumbling with an address book and a newspaper. Trudy is unsure whether or not she’s been slighted, which would not be like Dr. Cottataris. A moment later she suspects she has the answer—the distinguished African professor, Dr. Cicoya, is, arms folded, eyes hardened, in conversation with a tall rumple-faced man in a waterproof coat. The coat is pressed and very straight, and at odds a bit with the haphazard look of the man’s face and hair.
Miss Houseman suddenly emerges from one of the buildings. She strides over to Dr. Cicoya and lifts her arm, guiding him, without touching him, away from the detective.
“Hey, ma’am—ma’am, do me a favor and wait please, I wasn’t quite done with this gentleman.”
The man points with his pen, remaining planted where he is. He doesn’t talk like a man who’s asking a favor.
“Sir, come back please,” he says.
Dr. Cicoya is giving his full attention to Miss Houseman. They cease conferring, and he departs with his customary gravity. Miss Houseman silently approaches the man in the raincoat.
He leans in and begins remonstrating but she has already turned aside and left him there, briskly vanishing from sight down a side street. The man drops his arms slowly. Movement catches Trudy’s eye—someone on a rooftop above the side street, and a hasty intimation of motion in an alleyway. Trudy trots around the block thinking to catch up with her on the other side.
When she next catches sight of Miss Houseman, she is not so far down the side street than expected. A shape lunges out of a deep doorway, grabbing clumsily for Miss Houseman as she passes. Trudy can’t see past him, but Miss Houseman somehow evades the beefy young man with the close-cropped blond hair.
Miss Houseman glares at him, full in the eye, with coltish excitement around her nose and mouth; her lips part in a smile that makes her look a little crazy.
“William,” she calls.
Like magic, William steps out from the alley that opens behind her. In two steps he’s behind the man and with the barest movement of his back and shoulders somehow he has him on the ground, a foot in his armpit and bending back his forearm. William didn’t even use his left hand.
The man on the ground is gasping with shock and dismay. He fell hard, and now he can’t seem to move.
Miss Houseman takes two steps forward, her eyes riveted on the prone man, and now there’s a light of rapturous excitement in her face.
“Hurt him, William!” she says, avidly.
William alters the angle of the man’s arm and bears down on it. The man’s exclamations of distress now change to grunts, then to cries. A thrilling sickliness, vivid and wicked and icy goes through Trudy as she watches. Miss Houseman bends forward, bringing her face closer to the man’s.
“Am I frightened?” she asks in a buttery voice.
Her eyes are silver. She flicks them up to William, who had slackened his grip while she spoke. His grip tightens again and the man bellows, driving his knees into the ground. Trudy is suddenly trembling violently
—I’m going—
—I’m going—
A block and a half later she dashes herself sideways onto a bench and doubles over her knees shivering, teeth chattering, bulbs of ice water crashing in her brain. Her vision solarizes. The spinning coins by her kidneys turn at once to cannonballs, twirling one inside another: don’t let them knock together!
(.)
Celada slumps woozily into a chair by the window in headache mist, a lead wheel coagulating around his ears. Almost every day now. More days than not. He’s getting serious about them.
See and hear: the cold, level tone, and the dim form, colorless and austere, like a shadow thrown across the sumptuous leather chair.
The eorla sets down a pre-Columbian statue of Mictlantecuhtli and completes his transformation into the man in the chair, the cold correcter.
“Daniel,” he says faintly.
He lets a full minute pass before he speaks again.
“Daniel,” he repeats emphatically.
Only now does he let it be understood he’s expecting a response.
“Yes, sir?”
“I would have thought that you might have known better by now how very much I dislike having to repeat myself.”
“Well sir, I—”
“I find I am repeating myself rather too often with you, Daniel. I’m starting to get the idea that you lack respect for the maxims of this house . . .”
“Oh, no, sir—” Daniel says in the protracted pause. The eorla, with exact timing, says “. . . and . . .” at just the same moment. Daniel catches himself, so as not to speak over the eorla. The eorla looks up at him, white rims beneath his trapezoidal eyes, mouth pursing in displeasure. He clears his throat, which doesn’t need clearing.
“—hm/m . . . and, by extension, that you lack respect for me.”
“No sir,” Daniel says when he dares.
“Perhaps in that case you are merely becoming forgetful. Do you find your capacities exceeded by your duties, Daniel?”
“No sir.”
“Is your time insufficiently ample?”
. . . or . . .
“You were born into a . . . Jewish family, I believe, Joseph?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And are all Jewish boys as lazy and indisciplined as you are?”
The voice is old and light. This deliberately crude question is intended to test Joseph’s self-control.
“I don’t know sir,” he says quickly, after swiftly discarding a number of other possibilities, all equally deferential, but too elaborate. Joseph has learned that the best answer, under such conditions, is the quick, medium-stupid answer.
The eorla doesn’t move, only blinking.
“We are Protestants here, Joseph. That means we learn to discipline ourselves. That means we do not have quaint little bearded men telling us what to think. We must take our own council in the inviolate solitude of our own hearts, Joseph, by means of the strictest, most pitiless self-observation of which we are capable.”
He raises a finger limply in the vicinity of his lapel. He will lay it on as thick as he can. Double it, quadruple it, stifle every last breath out of him, crush him.
“The systematic and unsentimental cultivation of the self while alone, and the detection and extirpation—ruthless excision—of error . . . My decision to admit you to Ukehy, Joseph . . . was that an error, I wonder?”
Weighed . . . the glaring dark of reason, impersonal and abstract like a light that does not radiate . . . excised . . .
Celada sees the stranger in the silent movie of his migraine.
Ukehy is just a made-up word for the glue or the space between the buildings, listening and watching in all the gaps where it hovers like witchcraft. It’s nothing more than an imaginary static, paralyzing radioactivity that can jerk to life in an instant and vaporize a human being, suffocate a whole town.
But he’d invented it. Witch police, who could be anybody or nobody. Witches aren’t fake people, they’re unpeople. You never catch one, never see one. They are only what might be there. This person might be a witch only for a moment.
A stunned, numb old woman, who’s no more a witch than she is a doorstop, is trundled into the court. The trial is witchcraft and the secret police, judges, executioners, are the witches. Witchcraft slobbers down each and every street in town: a viscous, caustic flow of cold sludge, cameras, police, stamps . . . Fly through the air on thundering brooms, blades cackling as they churn by—witch aviation involved churns, laundry bats, pestles, rocking chairs, sawhorses, big kettles, hammers, golf bags, vacuum cleaners, cappuccino machines, bowling balls, toilet plungers, leaf blowers, baby carriages, statues of jockeys from the fronts of houses of a certain age, console TV sets, jacuzzis, insurance policies, political speeches, superficial digests of Eastern spirituality, huge blocks of wasted time and of waiting. Giant black-and-white scarab-beetle witches glide along the streets, hooting and screeching like owls.
He sees the dim courtrooms, air filled with brown film. The shadowy judges like sketched figures on a backdrop. Miscellaneous activity going on to the sides and behind. The atmosphere of doom couldn’t be more perfect. Nothing is ever decided here. This is a smokehouse where a ready-made decision is cured in grime, and heat, and terror, and foulness, and despair.
Did he really say “Ukehy”? Really? Maybe he’d been overheard, telling Trudy about them—his fantasy?
Are they witches? The ones who always might be spying? It isn’t necessary to watch everyone, you only need to make them believe they could be watched at any time. It isn’t necessary to arrest everyone. You only need to arrest the occasional example—without a word, without a sign, without warning. Whoever it is simply disappears, and no one knows anything about it. The one who’s gone is erased from memory. Did it happen? That’s all that it takes to get control.
He hadn’t dared bring up the word to Dr. Crapelin when he saw him earlier.
Instead, he asked again about ghosts.
“Your preferred topic.”
Making sure that the coast is clear, as sure as one can be, anyway, Celada edges sideways through the bent lace of the grill barring the side entrance to the swimming school, only to find the lecture has already begun. Dr. Crapelin is sitting comfortably, his legs crossed, in the high lifeguard’s seat. A miniature samovar bubbles on the wide armrest, from which an elastic tuft of steam spouts toward the ragged ceiling. His voice shimmers in space above the lined blue troughs of the empty pools.
“With regard to the question of the existence of ghosts . . . Questions of an ontological character generally take yes or no for an answer, with special provision for ‘I don’t know.’
“Ghosts exist.
“Ghosts do not exist.
“Ghosts may exist.
“One wonders if there are any real differences between these answers.
“One doesn’t wonder if there is any real difference between these answers.
“One doesn’t know whether there is any real difference between these answers.
“But, in surveying them, one may notice some opportunity. An inchoate thought, in which would be re-rendered all three answers as the different moments of a single answer, such that all three are true, and none are false—provided they are not affirmed simultaneously. Whether or not that re-rendering amounts to anything other than a piece of sophistry, however deftly brought off, would remain to be seen. In any case, we’re still only playing with the idea, although we keep our eyes peeled for the first indication that there may be something more to the question than play . . .
“Ghosts don’t exist. If we adopt this as an axiom, the other possibilities are removed from consideration. Certainly, there is no physical evidence of the existence of ghosts. Meaning and beauty are incalculably important to us, and yet neither of them is physically detectable as such. A machine may detect vocal sounds, but those sounds cannot have meaning, strictly speaking, for it. We say these things are abstractions, and yet we can’t define them as abstractions either. They are both as certain to us as our breathing, all the same. Adverbs name conditions or manners of action, but while we will recognize what it is to do something ‘cautiously’ or ‘slowly,’ can we physically detect and identify the content of these adverbs? Can a machine distinguish what is to do something slowly, if it cannot know intention? Cautiously? How would it know?”
Dr. Crapelin picks at the nubs of fabric at his knees.
“Kant’s transcendental aesthetic does not amount to saying that space and time are all in our heads. To say so, is already a spatial designation.”
A reasonable fanning out of the fingers in the air.
“Kant argued that space and time are forms that spontaneously develop in the infant mind as the sine qua non of all experience. One might argue that a mystic state often involves much simultaneous experience, but then we might say this is the transference of an arrangement in time to an arrangement in space, like the translation of a syllogism or narrative into a diagram or a painting. Even though one might see the thing entire and at once, it seems still to be necessary to focus attention successively on different parts of the diagram or image, first this, then that, in order to apprehend it fully.”
Celada sits on the ruin of a bleacher, wanting to lean back but not feeling informal enough to, knits his hands in his lap and tries to follow the promiscuous arc of reasoning going on in the swimming school. Around him the other listeners are silent and still as dummies, but a faint rustle hums around them.
“A more significant observation, however, is that Kant’s philosophy leans heavily on the distinction between subject and object. The subject is clearly sequential, more so than spatial. However, if this boundary is elasticized . . .”
Dr. Crapelin shrugs slightly.
“Ghosts exist, don’t exist, might exist. These answers are all still entirely too crude.”
His tone shifts from that of a lecturer, re-presenting ready thoughts, to that of extemporaneous reasoning.
“Ghosts don’t exist—as objects. We have noted that this need not mean they don’t exist at all. Ghosts exist uncertainly. This is not equivalent to saying ‘I don’t know.’ I stipulate positively that ghosts do literally exist.
“Ghosts are not figurative. Figuration is ghostly.”
Uplifted finger. Where would thinking be without gestures like this?
“The ghost story often simply stipulates that ghosts are real. Some do so in earnest, others only provisionally, for the sake of a good story. Some purport to be true accounts, others make no claims, but most will go so far as to say they present a plausible encounter with a ghost.
“Or, instead of trying to win the reader over, if only for an instant, to the idea that ghosts are real, they show the reader instead that reality is ghostly. This is promising, but here one begins to feel that one is drawing near to an eddy where all tension goes slack, and which is haunted by complaisant sighs, because here one can relax in the assurance that the writer is not going to trouble us after all by trying to posit the actual existence of ghosts. It’s one thing to toy with ideas and tell stories, it’s another thing to make claims in earnest about unseen things in this world. But,”
He leans forward in the chair, over his crossed legs, looking directly at Celada,
“. . . figuration is ghostly. Literally ghostly. How can we account for the mysterious power of figures? Symbols?”
He settles back.
“Think of despotism.
“Let me say that everything that I have so far designated as being not possible is of the same order of impossibility. A distinction here between personal and impersonal impossibility should not be made; even less so between subjective and objective. This is the case in part because my ideas having to do with ghosts have also to do with exactly the spots where these distinctions can no longer be made. Or moments. Ghosts might be, and here I speculate very hastily, thought of as climatic conditions like mist, which obscures or erases—and here it’s hard to see the difference—the landmarks by means of which object and subject, or persons and what aren’t persons, are discriminated.”
Dr. Crapelin vanishes.
(O)
Always clean, I. wakes in a stairway . . . far away, the gleaming little square of linoleum floor and the open doorway, the double flash of passing legs and their image in the floor ,,, on Calle Cavalcanti, escalarde mo tutinga presca combolizando des puedes como eso zachrimos podestes est pluma, bon clave de condecina jorca, de cola, el banco del Sud frontas bas pieces, escujabadar como trigande ,,, just a murmuring drape on the stairs . . . a taste like a bad raisin in his mouth.
On Calle Cavalcanti, en el banco del Sol ,,, LA Sol, Sola ,,, y no sabe yo eso no saber, no sabre, no espada, no espejo viejo, no spade, no sapien, uniform no sapien = uninformed ,,, from Mediterraneanao, know sapientar, basta miserable ,,,
,,, que serable ,,,
Look up to her, with love. Calm love swells every nerve and vessel. Her arms wide to embrace him in the world, crashing down power in gently breaking circles. Esmashing. Power races all around him teeming with phantoms of heat and light. A spade is leaning against the corner of Calle Cavalcanti and Espejo Viejo, not far from where he entered the street. He reaches out his hand to take it, and his fingers only crush into his palm. Someone has removed the spade. He can see a few crumbs of the dust it left at the white seam where the building is welded to the grid.
He walks without eating or looking, his head back, listening for her without success. She keeps shattering panes of light over his head. Each intangible fracture tears away a minute quantity of its mass, which is a ghost occupying matter like Espiririr Exacto no Sancto Santo. A trail of his head behind him.
His throat hurts.
He’s half blind with visual bruises, and what he can see is pink. He shuts his eyes and opens them again. The house is above him, on the other side of the wall. And there’s the same spade leaning against the wall surrounding the house. He reaches out his hand to take it, slowly, and his fingers clamp like a vice on the thick wooden handle. He lifts and draws it slowly back toward himself, blade down, solemnly.
He follows her pointing fingers down the streets, she at his back lighting his way without hurting his eyes this time. Perhaps she has to learn how roughly she can handle him. He can’t take much, not since . . .
Her transparent, bladelike hands, and slender fingers, slant from on high to the ground in long beams.
Headstones all around in Calle Calavera. Somber black marbles like filled Gothic arches in cool shade of funereal trees. So still all he can hear is his own panting. No wind. No suburban street.
Chough of the spade into the ground. The soil is like hard cheese. Nothing there—no wonder, there’s no headstone. It’s not a grave. He puts the spade down. Spectral cemeteries swim in his eyes.
He picks up rocks and discards them. Then he peels his pocket from his thigh and fumbles in it, presently withdrawing from it a stout coin. He spins around in place and throws it “mas casin casado.” It flashes once as it turns in the air. Opens his eyes as he throws it to see where it goes, and digs up the grave on which it lands. The coin he retrieves first, and places in the breast pocket of his shirt. The casket is made of flimsy wood he cuts open with the spade. A papier mâché hand rests on the buttoned front of the jacket. The head is shrunken and tea-colored, but there is no real putrefaction, because the body associated once upon a time with the name inscribed in stone here is itself not here, but mashed into a pulp of corpses in a sealed pit in a nameless, forsaken spot.
