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UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS LINCOLN AND LONDON

Call Me Ahab
POST hOh ae On 0) OO a
© 2009 by Anne Finger
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the
United States of America

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Finger, Anne.
Call me Ahab:
a short story collection /
Anne Finger.
p- cm.
— (Prairie Schooner
book prize in fiction)
ISBN 978-0-8032-2533-6
(pbk. ; alk. paper)
1. People with disabilities
—Fiction. 2. Disabilities
—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3556.14677C36 2009
813'.54—dc22
2009004673
Set in Adobe Garamond by Bob Reitz.
Designed by R. W. Boeche.
To my mother, Mary Elizabeth Finger
Contents
Acknowledgments ix

Helen and Frida I

Vincent 15

The Artist and the Dwarf 39

Comrade Luxemburg and Comrade Gramsci

Pass Each Other at a Congress of the Second
International in Switzerland on the 1oth
of March, 1912 61

Gloucester 73

Goliath 95

The Blind Marksman 17

Our Ned 135

Moby Dick, or, The Leg 163

Acknowledgments

This collection of short fiction could not have been writ-

ten without the support and encouragement of many peo-
ple. Gene Chelberg, Ben Collins, Karen Donovan, Barbara
Faye Waxman Fiduccia, Mary Elizabeth Finger, Max Finger,
Kenny Fries, Christopher Leland, Victoria Ann Lewis, Simi
Linton, Deborah Najor, Stephen Pelton, Kevin Rashid, Nat
Sobel, Brian Thorstenson, and Cecilia Woloch gave valuable
feedback on these stories—and, more important, were won-
derful friends. Many other friends just as dear to me (too
many to list here) sustained me in countless ways through
the writing of this book: thanks to all of you.
I’ve been fortunate to live at a time when ideas about dis-
ability are undergoing a radical change, a transformation that
is reflected in these stories. | owe an enormous debt to many
disability studies scholars. In particular I want to mention—
although this list is by no means exhaustive—Lennard Davis,
Jim Ferris, Lakshmi Fjord, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson,
Carol Gill, David Hevey, Georgina Kleege, Petra Kupers,
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Stephen Kuusisto, Robert McRuer, David Mitchell and

Sharon Snyder, Sue Schweik, Tom Shakespeare, Alice Shep-
pard, and Tobin Siebers.
I’m grateful to Hilda Raz for selecting this volume as the
winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and appreciative
of the fine editing and warmth of everyone at University of
Nebraska Press.
Ismail Kadare’s Albanian Spring introduced me to the fig-
ure of the blind marksman. Although my approach is very
different from his, I drew on factual material in Leslie Fiedler’s
Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self in writing “The
Artist and the Dwarf.” Charlotte Bronté’s Shirley and D. E E.
Sykes and G. H. Walker’s Ben O'Bills: The Luddite provided
crucial background material for “Our Ned,” as did Kirk-
patrick Sale’s Rebels against the Future. The final story in
this collection, “Moby Dick, or, the Leg,” not surprisingly,
draws heavily on and appropriates passages from Herman
Medlville’s great novel.
I am also deeply grateful for residencies at Hedgebrook,
Yaddo, Djerassi, and Centrum, which gave me time free
from distraction to work on many of these stories. Invaluable
support was also provided by the Josephine Nevins Keal Fel-
lowship, which granted me a semester’s leave from teaching
in the English department at Wayne State University; and
by a summer faculty research fellowship and a grant from
the Diversity Project, both from Wayne State University.
My mother, Mary Elizabeth Finger, taught me from
childhood that the worlds of serious literature and everyday
life could permeate one another by quoting Shakespeare,
T. S. Eliot, Chaucer, and Ezra Pound as she carried on
with the work of raising five children. Before I started
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

kindergarten I knew that April was “the cruelest month,”

that one could rally oneself to scrub the toilet by declaring,
“Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more... ,”
and that sometimes the evening spread itself out “against the
sky like a patient etherized upon a table.” I hope the love
and playfulness she showed me is evident in these pages.

Thanks to the original publishers of these stories: “Goli-

ath” originally appeared in Southern Review (Winter 2004);
“Gloucester” in Southern Review (Spring 1999); “Comrade
Luxemburg and Comrade Gramsci Pass Each Other at a
Congress of the Second International on the roth of March,
1912” (under a slightly different title) in Ploughshares (Spring
1996); “Vincent” in Third Coast (Spring 1995); “Helen and
Frida” in Kenyon Review (Summer 1994); and “The Artist
and the Dwarf” in Southern Review (Fall 1993).

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Helen and Frida

I’m lying on the couch downstairs in the Tv room in the

house where I grew up, a farmhouse with sloping floors in
upstate New York. I’m nine years old. I’ve had surgery, and
I’m home, my leg ina plaster cast. Everyone else is off at work
or school. My mother re-covered this couch by hemming
a piece of fabric that she bought from a bin at the Wool-
worth’s in Utica (“Bargains! Bargains! Bargains! Remnants
Priced as Marked”) and laying it over the torn upholstery.
Autumn leaves—carrot, jaundice, brick—drift sluggishly
across a liver-brown background. I’m watching the Million
Dollar Movie on our black-and-white television: today it’s
Singin in the Rain. These movies always make me think of
the world that my mother lived in before I was born, a world
where women wore hats and gloves and had cinched-waist
suits with padded shoulders as if they were in the army. My
mother told me that in The Little Colonel Shirley Temple
had pointed her finger and said, “As red as those roses over
HELEN AND FRIDA

there,” and then the roses had turned red and everything in
the movie was in color after that. I thought that was how it
had been when I was born, everything in the world becom-
ing both more vivid and more ordinary, and the black-and-
white world, the world of magic and shadows, disappearing
forever in my wake.
Now it’s the scene where the men in blue jean coveralls are
wheeling props and sweeping the stage, carpenters shoulder-
ing boards, moving behind Gene Kelley as Don Lockwood
and Donald O’Connor as Cosmo. Cosmo is about to pull
his hat down over his forehead and sing, “Make ’em laugh!”
and hoof across the stage, pulling open a door only to be met
by a brick wall, careening up what appears to be a lengthy
marble-floored corridor but is in fact a painted backdrop.
Suddenly all the color drains from the room: not just from
the mottled sofa I’m lying on but also from the orange wall-
paper that looked so good on the shelf at Streeter’s (and was
only $1.29 a roll), the chipped blue willow plate: everything’s
black and silver now. I’m on a movie set, sitting in the direc-
tor’s chair. I’m grown up suddenly, eighteen or thirty-five.
Places, please!
Quiet on the set!
Speed! the soundman calls, and I point my index finger
at the camera, the clapper claps the board, and I see that
the movie we are making is called Helen and Frida. | slice
my finger quickly through the air and the camera rolls slow-
ly forward toward Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, who are
standing on a veranda with balustrades that appear to be
made of carved stone but are in fact made of plaster.
The part of Helen Keller isn’t played by Patty Duke this
time; there’s no Miracle Worker wild child to spunky rebel in
 HELEN AND FRIDA

under one hundred minutes, no grainy film stock, none of

that Alabama sun that bleaches out every soft shadow, leav-
ing only harshness, glare. This time Helen is played by Jean
Harlow.
Don't laugh: set pictures of the two of them side by side
and you'll see that it’s all there, the fair hair lying in loop-
ing curls against both faces, the same broad-cheeked bone
structure. Imagine that Helen’s eyebrows are plucked into
a thin arch and penciled, lashes mascared top and bottom,
lips cloisonnéd vermilion. Put Helen in pale peach mousse-
line de soie, hand her a white gardenia; bleach her hair from
its original honey blond to platinum, like Harlow’s was; re-
cline her on a Bombshell chaise with a white swan gliding
in front, a palm fan being waved overhead, while an ardent
lover presses sweet nothings into her hand.
I play the part of Frida Kahlo.
It isn’t so hard to imagine that the two of them might
meet. They moved, after all, in not so different circles, fash-
ionable and radical: Helen Keller meeting Charlie Chaplin
and Mary Pickford, joining the Wobblies, writing in the New
York Times, “I love the red flag . . . and if I could I should
gladly march it past the offices of the Times and let all the re-
porters and photographers make the most of the spectacle”;
Frida, friend of Henry Ford and Sergei Eisenstein, painting
a hammer and sickle on her body cast, leaving her bed in
1954, a few weeks before her death, to march in her wheel-
chair with a babushka tied under her chin, protesting the
overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala.
Of course, the years are all wrong, but that’s the thing
about the Million Dollar Movie: during Frank Sinatra Week,
on Monday Frank would be young and handsome in /t
HELEN AND FRIDA

Happened in Brooklyn, on Tuesday he'd have gray temples

and crow’s-feet, be older than my father, on Wednesday be
even younger than he had been on Monday. You could pour
the different decades in a bowl together and give them a sin-
gle quick fold with the smooth edge of a spatula, the way my
mother did when she made black-and-white marble cake
from two Betty Crocker mixes. It would be 1912, and Big Bill
Haywood would be waving the check Helen had sent over
his head atarally for the Little Falls strikers, and you, Frida,
would be in the crowd, not as afive-year-old child, before
the polio, before the bus accident, but as a grown woman,
cheering along with the strikers. Half an inch away it would
be August 31, 1932, and both of you would be standing on
the roof of the Detroit Institute of the Arts, along with Di-
ego, Frida looking up through smoked glass at the eclipse of
the sun, Helen’s face turned upward to feel the chill of night
descending.
Let’s get one thing straight right away. This isn’t going to
be one of those movies where they put their words into our
mouths. This isn’t Magnificent Obsession: blind Jane Wyman
isn’t going to blink back a tear when the doctors tell her they
can't cure her after all, saying, “And I thought I was going
to be able to get rid of these,” gesturing with her ridiculous
rhinestone-studded, cat’s-eye dark glasses (and we think,
“Really, Jane”); she’s not going to tell Rock Hudson she can’t
marry him—“I won't have you pitied because of me. I love
you too much,” and “I could only be a burden’—and then
disappear until the last scene when, as she lingers on the bor-
der between death and cure (the only two acceptable states),
Rock saves her life and her sight and they live happily ever
after. It’s not going to be A Patch of Blue: when the sterling
 HELEN AND FRIDA

young Negro hands us the dark glasses and, in answer to

our question, “But what are they for?” says, “Never mind,
put them on,” we're not going to grab them, hide our stone
Medusa gaze, grateful for the magic that’s made us a pretty
girl. This isn't Johnny Belinda: we're not sweetly mute, sur-
rounded by an aura of silence. No, in this movie the blind
women have milky eyes that make the sighted uncomfort-
able. The deaf women drag metal against metal, oblivious to
the jarring sound, make odd cries of delight at the sight of
the ocean, squawk when we are angry.

So now the two female icons of disability have met: Helen,

who is nothing but, who swells to fill up the category, sweet
Helen with her drooping dresses covering drooping bosom,
who is Blind and Deaf, her vocation; and Frida, who lifts
her skirt to reveal the gaping, cunt-like wound on her leg,
who rips her body open to reveal her back, a broken col-
umn, her back corset with its white canvas straps framing
her beautiful breasts, her body stuck with nails; but she can’t
be Disabled, she’s Sexual.
Here stands Frida, who this afternoon in the midst of a
row with Diego cropped off her jet black hair (“Now see
what you've made me do!”), and has schlepped herself to the
ball in one of his suits. Nothing Dietrichish and coy about
this drag: Diego won't get to parade his beautiful wife. Now
she’s snatched up Helen and walked with her out here onto
the veranda.
In the other room drunken Diego lurches, his body roll-
ing forward before his feet manage to shuffle themselves
ahead on the marble floor, giving himself more than ever the
appearance of being one of those children’s toys, bottom-
HELEN AND FRIDA

weighted with sand, that when punched roll back and then
forward, an eternal red grin painted on its rubber face. His
huge belly shakes with laughter, his laughter a gale that blows
above the smoke curling up toward the distant gilded ceil-
ing, gusting above the knots of men in tuxedos and women
with marcelled hair, the black of their satin dresses setting
off the glitter of their diamonds.
But the noises of the party, Diego’s drunken roar, will be
added later by the foley artists.
Helen’s thirty-six. She’s just come back from Montgom-
ery. Her mother had dragged her down there after she and
Peter Fagan took out a marriage license and the Boston pa-
pers got hold of the story. For so many years men had been
telling her that she was beautiful, that they worshipped her,
that when Peter declared himself in the parlor at Wrentham
she had at first thought this was just more palaver about his
pure love for her soul. But no, this was the real thing: carnal
and thrilling and forbidden. How could you? her mother
said. How people will laugh at you! The shame, the shame.
Her mother whisked her off to Montgomery, Peter trailing
after them. There her brother-in-law chased Peter off the
porch with a good old southern shotgun. Helen’s written her
poem:

What earthly consolation is there for one like me

Whom fate has denied a husband and the joy of
motherhood? . .
I shall have confidence as always,
That my unfilled longings will be gloriously satisfied
In a world where eyes never grow dim, nor ears dull.

Poor Helen, waiting, waiting to get fucked in heaven.

 HELEN AND FRIDA

Not Frida. She’s so narcissistic. What a relief to Helen!

None of those interrogations passing for conversation she
usually has to endure (after the standard pile of praise is
heaped upon her—I’ve read your book five, ten, twenty
times, I’ve admired you ever since—come the questions: Do
you mind if I ask you, Is everything black? Is Annie Sullivan
always with you?): no, Frida launches right into the tale of
Diego's betrayal. “Of course, I have my fun, too, but one
doesn’t want to have one’s nose rubbed in the shit,” she signs
into Helen’s hand.
Helen is delighted and shocked. In her circles Free Love is
believed in, spoken of solemnly, dutifully. Her ardent young
circle of socialists wants to do away with the sordid market-
place of prostitution—bourgeois marriage—where women
barter their hymens and throw in their souls to sweeten the
deal; Helen has read Emma, she has read Isadora; she be-
lieves in a holy, golden monogamy, an unfettered eternal
meeting of two souls-in-flesh. And here Frida speaks of the
act so casually that Helen, like a timid schoolgirl, stutters,
“You really? I mean, the both of you, you... ?”
Frida throws her magnificent head back and laughs. “Yes,
really,” Frida strokes gently into her hand. “He fucks other
women and I fuck other men—and other women.”
“F-U-C-K?” Helen asks. “What is this word?”
Frida explains it to her. “Now I’ve shocked you,” Frida
says.
“Yes, you have . . . I suppose it’s your Latin nature...”

I’m not in the director’s chair anymore. I’m sitting in the

audience of the Castro Theater in San Francisco watching
this unfold. I’m twenty-seven. When I was a kid I thought
HELEN AND FRIDA

being grown up would be like living in the movies, that I'd

be Rosalind Russell in Sister Kenny, riding a horse through
the Australian outback, or that I'd dance every night in a
sleek satin gown under paper palms at the Coconut Grove.
Now I go out to the movies two, three, four times a week.
The film cuts from the two figures on the balcony to the
night sky. It’s Technicolor: pale gold stars against midnight
blue. We're close to the equator now: there’s the Southern
Cross and the Clouds of Magellan, and you feel the press of
the stars, the mocking closeness of the heavens as you can
only feel it in the tropics. The veranda on which we are now
standing is part of a colonial Spanish palace built in a clear-
ing in a jungle that daily spreads its roots and tendrils closer,
closer. A macaw perches atop a broken Mayan statue and
calls, “I am queen / I am queen / I am queen.” A few yards
into the jungle a spider monkey shits on the face of a dead
god.

Wait a minute. What's going on? Is that someone out in the

lobby talking? But it’s so loud—
Dolores del Rio strides into the film, shouting, “Latin na-
ture! Who wrote this shit?” She’s wearing black silk pants
and a white linen blouse. She plants her fists on her hips and
demands: “Huh? Who wrote this shit?”
I look to my left, my right, shrug, stand up in the audi-
ence, and say, “I guess I did.”
“Latin nature! And a white woman? Playing Frida? I
should be playing Frida.”
“You?”
“Listen, honey.” She’s striding down the aisle toward me
now. “I know I filmed that Hollywood crap. Six movies in
 HELEN AND FRIDA

one year: crook reformation romance, romantic Klondike

melodrama, California romance, costume bedroom farce,
Passion in a jungle camp among chicle workers, romantic
drama of the Russian revolution. I know David Selznick
said, ‘I don’t care what story you use so long as we call it Bird
ofParadise and Del Rio jumps into a flaming volcano at the
finish.’ They couldn't tell a Hawaiian from a Mexican from
a lesbian. But I loved Frida and she loved me. She painted
What the Water Gave Me for me. At the end of her life we
were fighting, and she threatened to send me her amputat-
ed leg on a silver tray. If that’s not love, I don’t know what
is—”

I’m still twenty-seven but now it’s the year 2015. The Castro’s
still there, the organ still rises up out of the floor with the
organist playing “San Francisco, open your Golden Gate.”
In the lobby, alongside the photos of the original opening of
the Castro in 1927, are photos in black and white of loung-
ing hustlers and leather queens, circa 1979, a photographic
reproduction of the door of the women’s room a few years
later: “If they can send men to the moon, why don’t they?”
Underneath, in Braille, Spanish, and English: “In the 1960s,
the development of the felt-tip pen, combined with a grow-
ing philosophy of personal expression, caused an explosion
of graffiti. . . sadly unappreciated in its day, this portion of a
bathroom stall, believed by many experts to have originated
in the women’s room right here at the Castro Theater, sold
recently at Sotheby’s for $5 million.”
Of course, the Castro's now totally accessible, not just
integrated wheelchair seating but every film captioned, an
infrared listening device that interprets the action for blind
 HELEN AND FRIDA

people, over which now come the words: “As Dolores del
Rio argues with the actress playing Frida, Helen Keller waits
patiently—”
A woman in the audience stands up and shouts, “Patient-
ly! What the fuck are you talking about, ‘patiently’? You can't
tell the difference between patience and powerlessness. She's
being ignored.” The stage is stormed by angry women, one
of whom leaps into the screen and begins signing to Helen,
“Dolores del Rio’s just come out and—”
“Enough already!” someone in the audience shouts.
“Can't we please just get on with the story!”

Now that Frida is played by Dolores, she’s long haired again,

wearing one of her white Tehuana skirts with a deep red
shawl. She takes Helen’s hand in hers, that hand that has
been cradled by so many great men and great women.
“Latin nature?” Frida says and laughs. “I think perhaps it
is rather your cold Yankee nature that causes your reaction.”
And before Helen can object to being called a Yankee, Frida
says, “But enough about Diego...”
It’s the hand that fascinates Frida, in its infinite, unpassive
receptivity: she prattles on. When she makes the letters “z”
and “j” in sign, she gets to stroke the shape of the letter into
Helen’s palm. She so likes the sensation that she keeps trying
to work words with those letters in them into the conversa-
tion. The camera moves in close to Helen’s hand as Frida
says, “Here on the edge of the Yucatan jungle, one sometimes
see jaguars, although never jackals. I understand jackals are
sometimes seen in Zanzibar. I have never been there, nor
have I been to Zagreb nor Japan nor the Zermatt, nor Java. I
have seen the Oaxacan mountain Zempoaltepec. Once in a

10
 HELEN AND FRIDA

zoo in Zurich I saw a zebu and a zebra. Afterward, we sat in

a small cafe and ate cherries jubilee and zabaglione, washed
down with glasses of zinfandel. Or perhaps my memory is
confused: perhaps that day we ate jam on zwieback crusts
and drank a juniper tea, while an old Jew played a zither.”
“Oh,” says Helen.
Frida falls silent. Frida, you painted those endless self-
portraits, but you always looked at yourself level, straight
on, in full light. This is different: this time your face is tilted,
played over by shadows. In all those self-portraits you are si-
multaneously artist and subject, lover and beloved, the bride
of yourself. Now, here, in the movies, it’s different: the cam-
era stands in for the eye of the lover. But youre caught in the
unforgiving blank stare of a blind woman.
And now we cut from that face to the face of Helen. Here
I don’t put in any soothing music, nothing low and sweet
with violins, to make the audience more comfortable as the
camera moves in for its close-up. You understand why early
audiences were frightened by these looming heads. In all the
movies with blind women in them—or, let’s be real, sighted
women playing the role of blind women—Jane Wyman and
Irene Dunn in the different versions of Magnificent Obses-
sion, Audrey Hepburn in Wait until Dark, we've never seen
a blind woman shot this way before: never seen the camera
come in and linger lovingly on her face the way it does here.
We gaze at their faces only when bracketed by others’ or in
moments of terror when beautiful young blind women are
being stalked. We've never seen before this frightening blank
inward turning of passion, a face that has never seen itself in
the mirror, that does not arrange itself for consumption.
Lack = inferiority? Try it right now. Finish reading this
HELEN AND FRIDA

paragraph and then close your eyes, push the flaps of your
ears shut, and sit. Not just for a minute: give it five or ten.
Not in that meditative state, designed to take you out of your
mind, your body. Just the opposite. Feel the press of hand
crossed over hand: without any distraction, you feel your
body with the same distinctness as a lover’s touch makes you
feel yourself. You fold into yourself, you know the rhythm of
your breathing, the beating of your heart, the odd indepen-
dent twitch of a muscle: now in a shoulder, now in a thigh.
Your cunt, in all its patient hunger.
We cut back to Frida in close-up. But now Helen’s fingers
enter the frame, travel across that face, stroking the downy
mustache above Frida’s upper lip, the fleshy nose, the thick-
lobed ears.
Now it’s Frida’s turn to be shocked: shocked at the hunger
of these hands, at the almost-feral sniff, at the freedom with
which Helen blurs the line between knowing and needing.
“May I kiss you?” Helen asks.
“Yes,” Frida says.
Helen’s hands cup themselves around Frida’s face.
I’m not at the Castro anymore. I’m back home on the
foldout sofa in the slapped-together Tv room, watching
grainy images flickering on the tiny screen set in the wooden
console. I’m nine years old again, used to Hays-office kisses,
two mouths with teeth clenched, lips held rigid, pressing
stonily against each other. I’m not ready for the way that
Helen’s tongue probes into Frida’s mouth, the tongue that
seems to be not so much interested in giving pleasure as in
finding an answer in the emptiness of her mouth.
I shout, “Cut,” but the two of them keep right on. Now
we see Helen's face, her wide-open eyes that stare at nothing
 HELEN AND FRIDA

revealing a passion blank and insatiable, a void into which

you could plunge and never, never, never touch bottom.
Now she begins to make noises, animal mewlings and cries.
I will the screen to turn to snow, the sound to static. I do
not want to watch this, hear this. My leg is in a thick plas-
ter cast, inside of which scars are growing like mushrooms,
thick and white in the dark damp. I think that I must be a
lesbian, a word I have read once in a book, because I know
I am not like the women on television, with their high heels
and shapely calves and their firm asses swaying inside of
satin dresses waiting, waiting for a man, nor am Ilike the
women I know, the mothers with milky breasts, and what
else can there be?
I look at the screen and they are merging into each other,
Frida and Helen, the dark-haired and the light, the one who
will be disabled and nothing more, the other who will be
everything but. I can’t yet imagine a world where these two
might meet: the face that does not live under the reign of its
own reflection with the face that has spent its life looking in
the mirror; the woman who turns her rapt face up toward
others and the woman who exhibits her scars as talismans;
the one who is only, only and the one who is everything but.
I will the screen to turn to snow.

13
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Vincent

You all know the story of Vincent, the man with the scraggly
red hair and wild eyes, wearing the wrinkled linen suit, with
the battered straw hat sitting askew upon his head, Vincent
who at first seems destined to be a respectable, if slightly
eccentric, art dealer, like his burgher uncle. But at nine-
teen, Vincent is stranger than he was at eighteen, at twenty
stranger still. Vincent reads the Bible, the same Bible that his
father, Pastor Theodorus van Gogh, read to the assembled
congregation on Sunday, in his quavering voice that didn’t
quite reach to the back of the small unheated church, to the
bored Dutch peasants for whom the Sunday visit in their
dark clothes to the dark church was but one more thing to
be endured inalife filled with things to be endured.
But when Vincent reads the Bible he hears the voice of
God who calls him to the wilderness to face him, the mad
holiness of scorned John the Baptist; when Vincent sees the
blackthorn hedges around the snow-covered fields, their

TS
VINCENT

twisted bare black branches become characters upon the

white paper of snow, reminding him of the pages of the
gospel.
Vincent goes to preach in the coalfields of the Borinage,
where to mortify his flesh he will sleep without a blanket
on the coldest nights of the year, while the wind sails freely
through the cracks in the rude hut. It is there that the chil-
dren will chase him in the street, throwing rocks and call-
ing, “He’s mad! He’s mad!” In the underground mines of the
Borinage he will see the pit ponies, born in the darkness of
the mines, dying without ever having seen the sun.

This is where the Hollywood version of his life begins, im-

mediately after the opening credits, which give the great mu-
seums of the world, the Louvre and the Museum of Modern
Art, top billing, above Kirk Douglas and Vincente Minelli
even: without their help and that of private collectors across
the world, this movie could not have been. . .
There’s another film, now, a Robert Altman. This one
opens not in Vincent’s boyhood home nor in the coalfields
of the Borinage but at Sotheby’s. The climactic scene of Vin-
cent’s afterlife: the sale of Sunflowers: suited men in white
gloves wheel out the painting: “5.5 million . . . 8 million, 500
thousand ...10 million...” The auctioneer’s voice fades but
is still in the background beneath a scene of filthy, tortured
Vincent, pipe clenched in his teeth, lying on a filthy bed ina
filthy hovel, rowing with his brother Theo. As Theo storms
out, the auctioneer’s voice rises: £21 million . . . £22 million,
500 thousand .” The gavel pounds. Judgment passed. (I sup-
pose those of us who aren't philistines are meant to read this
as irony.)
 VINCENT

Vincent turns away from this evangelical path, writing to

Theo: “T think that everything which is really good and
beautiful—of inner moral, spiritual and sublime beauty in
men and their works—comes from God, and that all which
is bad and wrong in men and their works is not of God, and
God does not approve of it. . . . To give you an example:
someone loves Rembrandt, but seriously—that man will
know there is a God, he will surely believe it.”

Only this time around it’s not 1885 but 1985. Theo doesn’t
live in Paris but in a co-op on West 53rd Street in New York.
He’s still an art dealer. He’s just pulled off real coup: selling
an installation called Empty Space: one steps into a gallery,
the walls are whitewashed, the artist’s name appears in block
letters on the wall—and there is nothing else. Theo, dressed
in a slouchy teal silk shirt and wrinkled black linen pants,
urges prospective buyers to simply allow themselves to expe-
rience Empty Space: the whiteness of the walls, the sounds of
the city as they filter in through the silence. He may quote
Rilke on the two subjects that the artist has, childhood and
death, and how this installation starkly confronts us with
our blank beginning, the abyss toward which we rush.
Theo’s gone to see a therapist. She’s helped him work
through the thicket of guilt and envy, the legacies of that
dysfunctional family, his neurotic need to support his ma-
nipulative, artist brother, the one named Vincent, the one
who writes, “It is very urgent for me to have: 6 large tubes
of chrome yellow, 1 citron, 6 large tubes malachite green, 10
zinc white,” followed by another letter that asks, “Do you
know what I have left today out of the money you sent this
very day? Well, I have 6 francs... . So I really beg you to
VINCENT

send me a louis, and that by return mail, please.” The ther-

apist shakes her head as Theo tells her that this Vincent
was born a year to the day after the first son, also named
Vincent, arrived in the world stillborn. Theo writes to his
brother:

Dear Vincent, I know that what I am going to say in

this letter may well prove hard for you to hear. I have
given this matter a great deal of thought. I realize that
I have supported you financially as a way of not deal-
ing with my own feelings of guilt and envy, that I have
needed to feel superior to you. I have decided that I
can no longer send you money as I have in the past.
So Vincent will never write those hundreds of letters to his
brother filled with good elder-brother advice (“Ora et labora,
let us do our daily work, whatever the hand finds to do, with
all our strength and let us believe that God will give good
gifts. . . . Courage, boy”); passages where his love of color
melds with his feeling for the places he has traveled through,
his love for his brother (“Before sunrise I had already heard
the lark. When we were near the last station before London,
the sun rose. The bank of gray clouds had disappeared and
there was the sun, as simple and as grand as ever I saw it, a
real Easter sun. The grass sparkled with dew and night frost.
But I still prefer that gray hour when we parted”); biblical
quotations (“God hath made us sorrowful yet always rejoic-
ing”); and, later, his cool assessments of his mental state (“As
far as I can judge, I am not properly speaking a madman”)
and the brotherhood of the asylum (“Though here there are
some patients very seriously ill, the fear and horror of mad-
ness that I used to have has already lessened a great deal. And
 VINCENT

though here you continually hear terrible cries and howls like
beasts in a menagerie, in spite of that people get to know
each other very well and help each other when their attacks
come on’). No, this time around Vincent does not fill up
reams of paper with his firm, penciled script.
This time around, when Vincent gets this letter from
Theo he crumples it up and throws it into the corner of his
hotel room, a room cluttered with canvases and paints. Trust
in the Lord, he tells himself. He will provide. He paints fif-
teen hours a day, devotes the few remaining hours to sleep-
ing, eating instant oatmeal made with tap water as hot as
he can get it out of the stingy faucets of the Metropolitan
Hotel. (Vincent is the only resident who takes to heart the
injunction intoned by the manager and repeated on signs
Scotch-taped to the walls throughout the establishment: aB-
SOLUTELY NO COOKING IN THE ROOMS, while the hallways
are thick with the smells of curries and boiled cabbages and
hamburger grease.)
But then, when the landlord changes the lock on Vin-
cent’s room, demanding the three weeks’ back rent, adding,
“And don’t think I’m going to store that junk of yours for
long!” Vincent sets out to find a job. He scavenges news-
papers from trashcans and looks through the classifieds; he
walks from McDonald’s to Wendy’s to Burger King, duti-
fully filling out applications. PAST EMPLOYMENT HISTORY: art
dealer, minister. REASON FOR LEAVING: heard the call of God,
loss of faith. Poor, mad Vincent! For two weeks he tramps
the streets in the linen suit that shrunk and was thus passed
down to him from Theo, so short that it shows a gap of pasty
flesh between the top of his sock and the cuff of his pants, a
porkpie hat set atop his wild flame of hair.
 VINCENT

Finally he goes to Social Security to apply for benefits. He

takes a number (32), like in a deli. Sitting next to him in an
identical molded plastic orange chair is a boy with a bright
red seizure helmet; across from them a retiree. Hours pass.
Finally a voice mumbles his number.
“Name?” says the worker by way of greeting, following
that with “Address?” Vincent gives the address of Our Place,
a Bowery social service agency that collects his mail for him.
“Date of birth?”
“Have you ever been diagnosed as having a psychiatric
impairment?”
“No. But the children chase me in the street and throw
stones at me and call ‘He’s mad! He’s mad!”
The intake worker: a man with a shaggy bowl cut like
the Beatles had in 1964, a man who wears a too-large pair of
glasses that slide down his nose, a “C” student.
“The regulations of Social Security,” he says, with his eyes
fixed on a point on the distant wall, “provide for benefits to
those who can be shown, by objective tests and measure-
ments,” pushing his glasses with his forefinger back up the
bridge of his nose, “to have an impairment, whether mental,
emotional or physical, which prevents them from engaging
in employment.”
“Oh,” says Vincent, “I can work. I paint fifteen hours a
day. It’s just that everyone thinks I’m mad.”
“Objective tests and measurements,” the intake worker
repeats, backing thirty seconds into his speech. The wheels
of Social Security grind slowly, and they grind exceedingly
small. Vincent must wait, and wait and wait. The landlord
burns his canvases, throws away his paints. Poor, mad, hun-
gry Vincent walks the streets of New York. My art is what I

20
 VINCENT

see, Vincent tells himself. My art is an ever-changing canvas

I paint in my head.
Finally a notice arrives at Our Place. “An appointment
has been scheduled for you.”
Vincent enters the psychiatrist’s office. The shrink is mid-
forties, a smooth dome pate, not very successful, and so has
ended up taking these cases. Mostly he weeds out the fakers,
the ones whose notions of craziness have been formed by Ty,
and tell him of arms reaching out of the walls, monsters trail-
ing up the stairs, vivid hallucinations; he winnows them apart
from the more steady parade of those quagmired in misery.
“Mr. Van Go.”
“Van Gogh,” Vincent corrects him.
“Van Goff.”
“Just call me Vincent.”
“Mr. Vincent. Have a seat.”
Irritable, the shrink notes; that and the fact that this Mr.
Vincent has chosen the seat closest to him.
This is not a standard psychiatric first encounter. There is
no silence as an opening gambit, no “What brings you here
today?” no patient wait for the patient to begin. Instead the
doctor, yellow legal pad on his lap, writes briskly: name; ad-
dress; with whom do you live? Do you work? No? Have you
ever worked? Parents living? Sisters and brothers? Names;
ages; what do they do? Glancing at his watch, he sees it’s
time to move on to: Ever hear voices? Have mood swings?
Vincent does not dissemble. He tells the bored shrink ev-
erything. Yes, he hears the voice of God. It speaks to him
sometimes in the night; it speaks to him through the flowers
and trees, the blades of grass pushing their way up through
the Manhattan sidewalks. He tells the shrink that he read

21
 VINCENT

Thomas a Kempis’s /mitation of Christ and tried to live the

life of a true Christian, taking seriously the biblical injunc-
tion “Take all you have and give it to the poor,” doling out
his bedclothes, his food, his clothing.
Poor self-esteem, the shrink notes.
Vincent's chair will hardly contain him. He waves his arms
so wildly that the doctor moves objects back on his desk: the
vase holding the dried flower arrangement, his black lamp.
Several times the shrink murmurs, “Calm yourself, Mr. Vin-
cent,” and “We need to move on, Mr. Vincent.”
At the end of the session Vincent is dismissed. “That’s
all?” he asks. He had spoken to this man with such rare hon-
esty, it seemed their souls had touched: the doctor had mur-
mured, “Yes, tell me more” as Vincent told him about the
face of God glowing through the sunflower.

That night as he drives home on the Long Island Expressway,

the doctor dictates a letter to the Social Security Administra-
tion. In bumper-to-bumper traffic, the drivers around him
bopping about in their bucket seats to the songs blasting out
of their car radios or with blank, unfocused stares, the doc-
tor speaks into the voice-activated mike: “On September
21, 1985, Mr. Vincent—Estelle, get the information, Social
Security number and everything from the notes, which I’m
attaching .. .” Vincent has dropped himself neatly into the
category of schizo-affective disorder: the religious mania and
the sheer joy, the inappropriate ecstasy, that the color yellow
evokes in him.
The next morning Estelle types the letter; by that afternoon
it has been signed, folded, placed in an envelope, stamped,
and mailed.

22
 VINCENT

Yet Vincent hears nothing from the Social Security

Administration.
What do we imagine happened to that letter? That it trav-
eled promptly through the mails to Washington pc, and
there was delivered to a mausoleum-like building of granite?
That within that building a woman sits alone at a battered
wooden desk, a battered wooden desk with a few devices
upon it: an elaborate rack holding rubber stamps, a stamp
pad, a letter opener, and a stapler? That in the top drawer
of this desk sit identical purple-inked stamp pads, shrink-
wrapped in clear plastic; that the bottom two drawers are
filled full with neat stacks of boxes of five thousand staples
each? That behind her is a mountain range of letters—letters
from doctors, petitions from rejected applicants, requests
for clarification from muddled recipients?
She swivels slowly in her wooden chair and extracts a sin-
gle letter from one mountain. Her eyes travel slowly over the
address. At first one thinks of the gaze with whichaletter
from a lover is studied: the eyes caress the handwriting; one
stares at the stamp: if it's a commemorative, you imagine
that she went to the post office, chose carefully, the one you
would appreciate most. If it’s a standard American flag you
figure that in her hurry to get it off to you, she rummaged in
a desk drawer, grabbed the first thing that came to hand.
But this woman isn’t alive with desire. With a slack jaw,
a dull gaze, she makes sure that the envelope is properly ad-
dressed: if the zip code is wrong, she leans slowly forward,
slowly turns the metal rack of rubber stamps in front of her
until she finds the one that says, “Incorrect Zip Code/Return
to Sender.” If the address is off by so much asa single digit,
it too is sent back. If all is in order, with practiced slowness

23
 VINCENT

she lifts the letter opener, inserts it into the ungummed cor-
ner, slowly, slowly tears the envelope open, lifts the letter
out, unfolds it, smoothes out the creases; lifts the largest of
her rubber stamps, her very favorite, with its elaborate rub-
ber loops of numbers, its cogs and arrows, presses the stamp
firmly against the purple ink pad, then finally against the
letter, rocking it ever so slowly back and forth: “Recd ssa,
10:00 a.m., September 24, 1985.” Every hour a buzzer rings,
and she pushes the time arrow ahead an hour. At 10:00 and
again at 2:00, a skinny young man wheels in great baskets of
mail to add to the mountain behind her.
Vincent, poor Vincent, wanders the streets of the city. He
has not eaten for days. The first day or so without food, hun-
ger makes you peevish, self-pitying. You notice how much of
the world is given over to eating: two or three storefronts out
of every block are restaurants: diners sit in windows, waiting
patiently at their white-topped tables with a basket of French
bread set in front of them from which they occasionally tear
a piece, munching slowly, thoughtlessly (what you wouldn't
do, Vincent, for a taste of that bread!); they eat pastrami
sandwiches and pizzas, glistening with fat, dripping mustard
or globs of tomato sauce onto black beards, blouses; mom-
and-pop stores display their cans of fava beans and frijoles ne-
gros, their potato chips (Cajun, sour cream and onion, bleu
cheese), Fritos, Cheetos, candy racks holding Baby Ruths,
Oh Henry’s!, Fifth Avenues, Butterfingers, Lifesavers; wom-
en emerge from grocery stores, pushing carts loaded with
children and paper or plastic sacks heavy with frozen corn,
spinach, peas, broccoli; fresh oranges, apples, cucumbers,
celery; tins of tuna, cans of condensed milk; steaks, tofu;
boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Thin women with good

24
 VINCENT

cheekbones sashay from take-out emporiums with white

containers; signs blink Eat, EaT, EAT. The world seems to be
organized around asingle principle: the shoving of food into
a great maw, outside of which you stand, gaunt, pale, with a
stomach that twists and cramps with unsated desire.
In the midst of your frantic yearning, you know—the
knowledge a dim reality—that in a day or two this hunger
will cease to bedevil you; it will be replaced bya feeling of
pure, transcendent calm. The pangs of hunger will burn
themselves out, burn away all longing. In another twenty-
four hours you will walk through the canyons of New York,
beaming benevolently at all the rushing yups, the dawdling
homeless, the hue and cry. You will have slept the previous
night under a blanket of light from the moon, will have
awakened this morning in Central Park, the birds weaving a
canopy of song over your head, trilling, “Vincent, Vincent,
Vincent.” You will be happy.
Impossible, however, to live for too long in that holy state
without food. On your wax and feather wings of hunger you
know you are soaring too close to the sun: your happiness
becomes frantic, high-pitched, a few steps away from mad-
ness. So you scavenge garbage cans for returnable bottles,
panhandle, look for the odd penny or dime lying on the
street. You go toa McDonald’s and buya small milk, a single
hamburger, which, like a drug, is both salvation and damna-
tion, a holy paradox. You are saved from the ecstatic state
that can only end in death but delivered again into that cycle
of need and want, the reawakening of the flesh.
And the reawakening of despair. When you are not eating
the food you imagine is the stuff of dreams: home-baked
bread dripping with sweet creamery butter, salads of romaine

25
 VINCENT

lettuce dressed with extra virgin olive oil and tarragon vine-
gar, salmon so delicate it dissolves in your mouth; a cheddar
that your grandfather unwrapped from a cheesecloth and
granted youa sliver of one Christmas Eve. And then there is
the reality of the cloying milk and the hamburger that tastes
of metal and decay. And the reaction of an empty stomach
to food, which forces you to rush down an alley, pull down
your pants, and allow the shit to hiss and roil out of you.

Meanwhile, she sits, the mountain of letters growing ever

taller behind her, and with studied lassitude opens an enve-
lope, pulls out the letter, stamps it with her “Rec'd” stamp,
staples the envelope onto the back of the letter, rolls the
letter and inserts it into a pneumatic tube, which carries
it down. Down to a vast underground nest of bureaucrats,
who, like the pit ponies of the Borinage, have never seen
the light of day. They are born, mate, reproduce, and die
in this fluorescent-lit hell. Only through dim recounting
do they have any knowledge of the world above: that day
gives way to starry night, that the Social Security numbers
they give out and process are attached to living human be-
ings. They do not know that the struggles for the twelve-
and then the ten-, the eight-hour day have been won. Pale
as white worms, they labor fourteen hours a day, wearing
old-fashioned green eyeshades and creosote cuffs. They sleep
next to their desks on folding cots, covered with Civil War—
era army surplus scratchy wool blankets. They mate quickly,
furtively in cubicles and broom closets, give shameful birth
in stalls of the women’s room. The new forms (ssa-L8170-
U3; SSA-561-U2) appear mysteriously in the supply room;
they take comfort in the notations in the upper-right-hand

26
 VINCENT

corners “Form approved oms’; religiously follow the di-

rectives, “Exhaust existing supplies of ssa-L8710-U2” or “De-
stroy prior editions,” which they do in rituals held around
the paper shredder. These are directives from their God,
OMB whose face they cannot imagine, whose name they are
forbidden to speak.

Vincent falls in love with a prostitute. Even in the Robert

Altman version, where we see Sien crouching over the cham-
ber pot to piss, even in that raw and gritty film, she’s not
ugly. But I’ve seen Vincent's drawings of Sien. She was. Her
breasts weren't symmetrical and they lay in flat folds against
her chest. Her face was wan. I know Sien. I pass her every
day in Detroit's Cass Corridor, she sits in the booth next to
me at Coney King, I see her in Parker’s buying a single beer
and a half liter of Pepsi. On a rich woman her fine features,
the skin tight against jutting cheekbones, would look beau-
tiful or at least dramatic, but on her poverty, exhaustion, bit-
terness leave her looking haggard, too thin, as she lurches
forward on spiked heels.
Poor Vincent: you shocked your uncle Cor by telling him
that you loved ugly women, that you would rather be with
someone whose pain and past were written on her face. But
even Altman won't allow an ugly woman to appear on film.
Vincent, starving Vincent, refuses to allow Sien to give
him any of the money she gets from apc. So he goes down
to General Assistance. Literally: the Ga offices are in the
basement of the City/County Welfare Building, the build-
ing with the marble facade and the white marble figures
with: perfectly muscled. bodies that embody justice, civic
duty, freedom, down into the linoleum-paved hallways, half

27
 VINCENT

lit by flickering fluorescent lights. Nearly two hundred of

them, men (a few women), most, but not all, of whom have
bathed within the past week, wait. Some scratch, some rock
slowly in their seats, some keep up a steady flow of curses.
Vincent waits and waits and waits; at the end of the day he
is given a number and told to come back again; the next day
he waits, and the day after that is given $160 a month, found
eligible for food stamps, given a Transit Pass.
He sells his food stamps for 65¢ on the dollar, stands at a
freeway entrance holding a sign that reads, “Will Work for
Food,” although who would dream of asking this man to do
odd jobs at her home, what restaurant owner would offer
him work busing tables? But cars do stop, offering folded
dollars, spare change. With the money he scrounges, Vin-
cent buys a canvas, paints.
Vincent is going to paint light.
But before he can paint light he must paint darkness. He
must paint the picture of the five homeless people in the
abandoned building, four men and one woman, a flashlight
dangling from a rope tied to a lighting fixture above them
casts deep shadows on their faces, as they share a meal of two
orders of large fries and Chicken McNuggets, the puny light
turning the white paper gray. He must paint the picture of the
Haitian refugees working in the dusk, not turning on their
lights, doing illegal homework in their one-room apartment.
He must paint the still life of the three pairs of shoes that he
pulled from trashcans and dumpsters; he must paint the skull
against black holding a burning cigarette in its teeth.

While Vincent yearns toward the light, in Washington pc

a Programmer descends into the dark bowels of the Social

28
 VINCENT

Security Administration. Wiry-haired, wiry, with an aston-

ishingly large Adam's apple that jounces up and down as he
speaks, speaks the language which they, the underground
beings, recognize as English, although its meaning is in-
comprehensible to them: “swizzling between multiple files,”
“Tve hacked lisp machines,” “the code that you snarf from
the net,” “the domain of munging text.” He is here to devise
a vast Network that will link this mother-office to the offices
on the surface, to take this system where clerks still scratch
with quill pens and rolled documents are pulled from pneu-
matic tubes and bring it—not just online but into the great-
est mainframe humanity has ever known.
At first the Programmer sends up three times a day for
double espresso, which arrives in ecologically correct paper
cups with not quite so ecologically correct plastic covers. He
downs one at 10:00 a.m., one at noon, and the third at 3:00
in the afternoon. Each morning he descends in the elevator
and each evening ascends.
He is happy, if such a mundane word can be applied to a
man who mastered differential equations at the age of seven,
who can recite the entire dialogue of every episode of The
Prisoner. He daydreams of installing a terminal in every ma-
ternity ward and birth center. Infants assigned Social Securi-
ty numbers at birth, entered along with their weight, height,
sex, and Apgar scores! Terminals in every morgue and fu-
neral parlor, to close the files of the dead!
He imagines himself as Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now
(he has seen it thirty-seven times, twelve at the movies and
twenty-five times on video). He inwardly crows, “I love the
smell of napalm in the morning!” as he strides through the
sub-sub-subbasement, past the Gs 2s and 3s whom he leaves

29
VINCENT

trembling in his wake, although they see in his unnatural-

ly long stride, the way he pumps his arms in front of him,
the off-gait of the maniac, declaiming to his assistant, “The
question of whether C or Lisp or Emacs Lisp or Mt or Shell
or any of the little languages is the appropriate method to
attack a problem is a religious one. . . I want tools that work
together, not one program that generates vsaM fixed-length
eighty-byte record files and can’t play with another, can read
only other format files. I want to be able to glue those pro-
grams easily and trivially reap the benefits of coarse-grain
parallelism.”
At first he dutifully clocks in, 9:00 to 5:00: no work-ob-
sessed Yuppie he; he knows where his real life lies: in front of
the television he jerry-rigged himself with the remote control
feature that enables him with a simple motion of his thumb
to make the screen go fuzzy, the browns red, the blues ma-
genta, turning back episodes of Dobie Gillis and The Aveng-
ers into expressionist art. His real life lies with his elaborate
computer game in which he casts as villains anyone who has
ever wronged him: his third-grade teacher, Mrs. Kaplan; his
older brother who lives in the Bay Area and disputes arcane
points of Trotskyist doctrine with his coreligionists; the gang
of kids who took one look at him on a Cambridge street five
years ago and beat him senseless: all stand in the way of the
elusive, nameless Maiden, a woman he once saw in a white
dress, backlit by a porch light, coming down the steps of
a California bungalow whom he has loved devotedly ever
since.
But one evening the Programmer looks up at the clock,
realizes that time has flown by: it is 7:30: he has missed the
Dr. Who rerun on Channel 42. He slams his fists on the
 VINCENT

computer keyboard, shouts, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-

Fuck,” but then goes back to work.
Before long he has almost become one of them. No lon-
ger do the espressos arrive from above at three-hour inter-
vals: instead his assistant finds that his duties have devolved
to being merely a cappuccino runner. He ascends to the
above and fetches double lattes, caffé macchiatos, triple mo-
chas for the Programmer, coming back trembling at what he
has seen: the brilliant pulsing yellow globe of the sun, the
flickering green leaves, the stark white marble and granite
buildings of the Capitol, the wild buckets of flowers set out
for sale next to the Metro station. He returns dizzy, almost
nauseous with the riot of color, afraid to speak of it to those
who live underground, pale as blank slugs in their murky
world of slate, smudged brown, mole.
At 3:00 one morning the exhausted Programmer, who has
an 8:00 a.m. meeting, decides it isn't worth going home to
sleep, and so sets up a cot next to his terminal. As he pulls
the scratchy wool blanket, redolent with a century’s worth
of odors, up to his chin, he little imagines how few times
he will again see the sun. The next evening he will leave af-
ter 9:00 and fall asleep in front of the vid running episode
number t5 of The Brady Bunch (he displays his porn proudly
and keeps his Brady Bunch tape under his socks in a bureau
drawer). Then for four more weeks he will not even surface
again.
Meanwhile he has had installed a La Pavoni, the queen of
espresso machines, at which his assistant now toils, making
him endless cups of brackish espresso. He has almost ceased
to eat.
The clerks with whom he must interface stare at him slack
 VINCENT

jawed, refuse to comprehend his frenetic speech. And end-

less glitches appear in the circuitry. They think they've found
the root of the problem when they discover that the circuit
boards are being deliberately mis-soldered, electrical connec-
tions skewed by the workers of Multinational Memory’s On
Wok Long Factory No. 3: unionization efforts there having
been stymied by repressive legislation and random firings,
the workers have formed the Rosa Luxembourg—King Lud
anarcho-syndicalist collective with the slogan “The Barri-
cades are in the Circuit Boards.” But even when the circuit
boards are repaired and Legal has filed a multibillion-dollar
lawsuit against Multinational Memory that promises, in its
scope and complexity, to take years if not decades to wend
its way through the court system—

But we have almost forgotten poor Vincent! Where is he?

The last time we saw him he was standing at a freeway en-
trance holding his sign. We return to that same freeway en-
trance, but he is not there: we search the city, checking out
each of those unshaven, unwashed men holding signs, the
men huddled around burning barrels, hanging on street cor-
ners outside shelters and service providers and liquor stores.
He’s nowhere. Has he died in some back alley? Left Manhat-
tan on foot, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, trudging
through Flatbush and Prospect Park, heading out to find the
Long Island that Whitman wrote about?
But no, Vincent has not left the city, not gone into the
countryside to paint light: he’s sleeping some nights in a
Bowery flophouse, sometimes sleeping days and walking the
streets all the dangerous night long. Weekly he treks to Our
Place, where the volunteer behind the desk flips through the

32
 VINCENT

vs and says. “Nothing. Sorry.” Vincent turns and walks away,

then turns back. “Perhaps it was—under G?” he ventures.
She sighs, rifles the letters filed under G and says, with
satisfaction, “No.”
Once there is something for him, but when the letter is
handed to him Vincent is dismayed to see that it is merely
from his brother Theo: a card of a Seurat print, “Think of
you so often and hope that you are well.”
But then, at last, one day it is there: when Vincent goes
into Our Place and stutters to the woman at the front of the
line: “Van Gogh, it’s two words, v-a-n and then G-o-G-H,
and so sometimes I get filed under v and other times under
G..., he is handed an official letter. It would take the
talents of one of the great romantic poets to describe the
throbbing of Vincent's heart inside his pale chest, the rush
of delighted color flooding his cheeks. With trembling,
trembling hands he tears open the envelope. Without sal-
utation the letter begins: “We are increasing your benefit
amount’ and then goes on to say, “We cannot pay you any
benefit at this time.” Vincent reads these words over and
over again. He can make no sense of them. He meditates on
this bureaucratic koan.
Vincent does not know that the first part of the Network
has at last gone online and begun to generate these letters.
Ten years previously a consulting firm (which actually con-
sisted of a woman with a master’s degree in educational psych
and a part-time secretary) landed a multimillion-dollar con-
tract to draft these epistles, mandated by an act designed to
simplify the baroque language of the Bureaucracy, as convo-
luted as medieval Latin, into a Basic English understandable
by over 95 percent of the U.S. population. So now instead

33
 VINCENT

of Byzantine incomprehensibility we have a clean Zen para-

dox: “We are increasing your benefit amount . . . we cannot
pay you any benefit at this time.”
And that letter from the good doctor that officially certi-
fies Vincent as mad? Where has that gone? Thank God we
are the Godlike narrator of this piece, that we have the pow-
er to peer into the great mountain of letters and immedi-
ately find Vincent's, that we do not have to paw through the
tens of thousands of pieces beneath which it is buried: pleas
from former miners with brown lung, desperate letters from
mothers of chronically ill children, Xeroxed medical records
still awaiting their official purple “Rec'd” stamps. There it is,
about three feet down, waiting, waiting still.

But the Programmer is hard at work. Geeked on espresso,

his fingers roil over the keyboard as his plans for the Net-
work become ever greater: now it will be linked into bank-
ing system computers, spying on recipients to ensure that
they are not collecting unreported interest on their check-
ing accounts, depositing unpedigreed sums of cash, into the
computers of every college and university; it will be mo-
demed into links between doctors’ offices and medical labs,
insurance companies, it will pick up credit card transactions,
driving records, so that when an applicant shows up at an
office of the Bureaucracy, the tapping in of her Social Secu-
rity number will produce a complete educational, medical,
social, and psychological profile.
Alas, the poor Programmer! Unbeknownst to him, a tumor
is growing in his brain, fed by the electromagnetic fields that
pulse from his computer; his story, like the story of Vincent, is
tragic. He will not live to see the Network go online.

34
 VINCENT

“Caffé macchiato,” he calls out to his assistant. “Make it a

triple.” He, who once checked his e-mail every waking hour,
has become so obsessed with the Network that sheaves of
messages pile up: from hackers in Australia and Azerbaijan,
from his college roommate who is trying to get him to come
to a celebration of Nikolai Tesla’s 129th birthday. The mes-
sage that follows: “All work and no play make Jack a dull
boy,” scrolls endlessly down the screen.

Vincent, who has not been able to scrounge any more mon-
ey for canvas or paint, a street-corner crazy, perches him-
self on a broken-down chair he has found in an alley and,
palette-less, canvas-less, begins to paint in the air. He paints
the Cafe Terrace at Night, the yellow light spilling out of the
bar, the night-blue sky above, alive with the dotted street-
lights that glow like fireflies. Holding an imaginary brush in
his hand, he leans forward to his imaginary canvas, swiftly
painting the black, yellow, orange, and blue streaks that
make the sidewalk. How thickly he would lay on the texture
of the zinc white that costs $8.58 a tube.
Poor, mad Vincent: he sits in the public library and stares,
stares at the man sitting opposite him, imagining how he
would paint him: exaggerating the fairness of the hair with
oranges, chromes, even pale citron yellows. Behind the head
he would paint infinity, a plain background of the richest,
intensest blue that he could contrive: a mysterious effect, so
the face would be like a star in the depths of an azure sky.
The face has something more to say to him: he stares and
stares, until the man slams the book he is reading shut, gets
up, and moves to another table.
Poor, mad Vincent: his imaginary paint never speaks back

35
VINCENT

to him the way real paint does. It never refuses to do his bid-
ding, surprises him. Vincent, in real life, pardon the expres-
sion, you dipped your fingers into the paint and made the
curving petals of the sunflowers with your thumb. Later on,
Vincent, when you were going mad, you drank turpentine,
tasted Prussian blue paint, profane Communion.
Leaning in a doorway, his shopping cart filled with alumi-
num cans, Japanese prints torn from art books in the library,
sharing his bottle of Midnight Express with a companion he
has just met, a black man who tells Vincent that whites are
the devil, marked by those eerie blue eyes of theirs. “Hiro-
shima,” the man ticks off, “slavery,” taking a swig, “concen-
tration camps...” Vincent, who believes so easily, believes.
He remembers that Christ said, “If a man hate not his life,
he cannot be my disciple,” and, full of self-hatred, stares at
his pasty white flesh with its mottled blues and yellows and
pinks. He stares at his companion: missing half his teeth,
his face covered with odd bumps, his fingernails thick and
yellowed, more like the hooves of cattle than the smooth,
shaped nails of that other race, the rich. Together the two
men dream aloud of the sun-drenched skies of Martinique,
Java, Africa. There they will know the truth: that the only
real infidels are those who don't believe in the sun.
There’s a high yellow note Vincent has to attain to do his
best work: to get there he has to be pretty keyed up, on end-
less coffee, loaves of Wonder Bread, and cheap, cheap wine.
But on it he will paint the colors beneath the stark flesh-
colors called black and white: the orange and yellow and
green hues of his own skin, the same tones that underlie his
companion’s skin, to bring together for a moment in color
what history has rent apart.
 VINCENT

You all know how this story ends: Vincent dies. In the Holly-
wood version, he is at his easel painting Crows over the Wheat
Field, a shrink’s dream of a painting made by someone with
bipolar disorder: the yellow fields of joyous wheat, malevo-
lent skies brooding above, and the crows—the only living
thing in the painting, the crows—carrying darkness down
into the light. Kirk Douglas's face expresses agony, torment,
and he pulls out the revolver. The camera cuts discreetly
away to a farmer passing in a wooden wagon and we hear
the shot.
But this time it isn’t in Hollywood and it isn’t in Auvers.
At the very moment when Vincent fires the shot, at that ex-
act moment, the white woman behind the wooden desk at
last reaches the letter from Vincent’s doctor and stamps it:
“Rec'd., July 27, 1990, 11:00 a.m.”

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The Artist and the Dwarf

The dwarf’s name was Mari Barbola. She glares out from the
lower-right-hand corner of Vel4zquez’s Las meninas, a paint-
ing that hangs in a darkened room of its own in Madrid’s
Prado, above a marble plaque reading La obra culminante del
arte universal: the culminating work of universal art.
It is a curious painting: the seemingly casual arrangement
of the figures, the vast looming darkness that takes up a
good two-thirds of the canvas give it the effect of a snapshot,
somehow overexposed at the bottom and underexposed
above, almost as if a tourist had taken a wrong turn in the
halls of the Alcazar and found herself in a corridor leading
back three hundred—odd years, the rubber soles of her Adi-
das squeaking against the marble tiles of the palace floor, the
snap of her gum echoing in the sepulchral halls, until, turn-
ing a corner, she suddenly caught a glimpse of the royal as-
sembly and lifted her Kodak to snap this picture where no
one, save Vel4zquez, who sneers out at her with a courtier’s

oD
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

contempt for a barbarian, is aware of her presence: catching

this canvas before the figures on it dissolve back into the air
of time.
Mari Barbola is scarcely taller than the five-year-old white-
white Infanta Margarita, the center of the painting, the child
of an Austrian mother and a Hapsburg father, the two pale
monarchs who rule over this dark-eyed, dark-haired people,
who in turn rule over others with darker eyes and darker
hair. Mari Barbola stares out of the canvas, her doughy face
defiant: she is the only one of nonroyal blood in the paint-
ing who does not bend, kneel, lean. She stands upright. Un-
like the dwarf next to her, his slipper-clad foot resting on
the back of a docile Alsatian, she is no perfect miniature. As
big around as she is tall, the critics who write in centuries
to come will cavalierly describe her as “ugly.” But we know
who makes the rules: who blesses the vapid, worm-white in-
fanta with the word “beautiful,” decides that the blond halo
of hair surrounding her face is to die for.
Barbola was brought to Madrid from Germany, having
been sold by her parents to a passing noble who offered them
ten astonishing pieces of silver (they could scarcely suppress
their glee: she had accompanied them to market not to be
sold but to watch over the stall as they went about their
business), then given by this viscount as a gift to a Spanish
noble, and finally passed up to the king.
And so she found herself, on the 17th day of September
1632, conveyed into Madrid in the back of a cart, the city
where Philip IV’s grandfather had settled the itinerant Span-
ish court, which previously had proceeded in an sluggish
imperial round from Toledo to Valladolid to Burgos—Ma-
drid, which had been a miserable town on a barren Castilian

40
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

plain, battered by hot winds in the summer and cold winds

in the winter. Oh, foolish, foolish Philip! Why did you fix
your court here, in the dead center of Spain, far from the
ports where your ships set sail to the distant dominions that
are your wealth? Why did you build the great carved Segov-
ia gate, the ornate entryway into this crude boomtown of
muddy streets and slapped-together shacks and open sew-
ers? With all those fey, turreted castles of Spain, why do you
chose to lock yourself up here in this squat, thick-walled,
narrow-windowed fortress, the Alcazar?
But to Mari Barbola, a daughter of the Bavarian peasantry
who had grown up in a one-room lumber hut, with pigs and
a donkey and a cow (the years her family was lucky enough
to have a cow) rooting and braying and lowing about her,
and then had spent a year or two in a dark cranny of the
viscount’s upper rooms, this Madrid with its rouge-cheeked
ladies with their ruff collars of linen spun so fine it is trans-
lucent, then locked into stiff waves (wheat going for starch
while the uprooted peasants wander the countryside eating
herbs and roots), those collars that seem to capture move-
ment, the gem-encrusted farthingales that catch light and
fling it laughingly back, both forbidden by the endlessly
contravened sumptuary laws, this Madrid seemed an incan-
descent city.
Oh, foolish, foolish race of Philips! In Las meninas, Philip
IV, alongside his second queen, is reflected dimly in a dis-
tant mirror. In the earlier portraits Velézquez painted of
him, Philip is dressed in black tights that do as much as they
can to disguise his knobby knees; a pasty-faced, liver-lipped
youth attempts a regal pose in Philip IV in Armor, but with
his peach fuzz mustache and frightened eyes, it is not hard to
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

imagine him hanging out at the mall, a Marlboro dangling

from his lips, willing to be the butt of his companions’ jokes
for the privilege of being near them; his queen, Mariana of
Austria, is a sullen flat-chested half-child, overwhelmed by
her hoop skirts of woven gold and silver and pearls; her hair
fixed into an elaborate starched coif that echoes the shape of
the flying buttresses of her skirts.
Poor you! Poor Philip! lost in the mist of his titles: His
Most Catholic Majesty, King of the Spains, Old and New,
King of the Goths, of Austria, of Lusitania, of Celtiberia,
of Cantabria, of Italy, of Flanders, the Planet King, King of
Castile and Aragon, of the two Sicilies, Jerusalem, Portugal,
the Canary Islands, of the East and West Indies, Archduke
and Phoenix of the Fragrant Remains of the House of Aus-
tria, king over the future realm of the LA freeways, Aspen,
John Wayne Airport, Acapulco, the beachfront condos in
Puerto Vallarta, the tin mines of Bolivia, the street corners
all across Latin America where the Chiclet vendors sell their
wares, Caracas, Buenos Aires, etc., ruler of Picardy, Lux-
embourg, the Philippines; King of Slaves and Slavers and
Torturers, Defender and Zealous Protector of the Blessed
Virgin’s Immaculate Conception, Duke of Brabant, Duke of
Milan, Count of Flanders, Count of Tyrol, Count of Barce-
lona, Monarch of Shadows.
But although Philip is king, Mariana of Austria is not yet
queen the day that Mari Barbola arrives in Madrid: someone
else fills that role, an Isabella, this one of Bourbon, who, like
her successor, gives birth to robust girls and sickly boys. It is
to one of these frail, pale infantes, Baltasar Carlos, that Mari
Barbola becomes companion.
I know what you expect of her: that she'll either be a dull

42
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

stone before whom the swirling waters of palace intrigue

part or she'll be a mini-Rasputin who spends her first years
at court staring dully and accumulating a storehouse of valu-
able gossip, which she'll later unleash to good use, finding
herself petted and curried and hated. But she’s neither: she
figures out what she needs to know, but she isn’t vicious;
she’s as devious and placid as you or I. She eats the leftovers
from the royal table: she’s happy.
Not that life at the court is any smooth round of pleasures.
The pale and sickly prince dies, to be replaced by another
pale prince who in turn, etc., until his mother, his noble,
petted mother, who is dressed in gold and lace and swathed
in titles and humped like a brood mare—weakened from
the unceasing rounds of pregnancies and births, fades, falls
ill, and, although the holy corpse of St. Isidore the Husband-
man and a fragment of the True Cross are brought to her
bedside, dies. How often Mari Barbola finds herself dressed
in black mourning and shuffling off to the Convent of the
Discalced Carmelites or to the mausoleum of a palace called
El Escorial, the slag heap, to attend another internment or
say yet another Mass for the repose of a royal soul.
Sometimes the gloomy round is broken by an auto-da-fé.
The best are held in the Plaza Mayor: once Mari even got to
sit with the king and queen and the infante (was it Baltasar
Carlos or was he dead by then? Maybe it was one of the infan-
tas; she can’t quite remember) in their balcony draped with
velvet of oxblood red held back by swags made of pure gold.
The ceremony must begin at night, because the processional
from the Convent of Dofia Maria de Aragon, which bears
the great green cross, is followed by great gangs of priests
bearing waxen tapers, torchbearers, and faggot bearers, yes,

43
THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

fire must be brought from every single monastery and nun-

nery in Madrid, and—well, you can’t imagine the torchlight
procession of the Nazi Youth in Triumph of the Will hap-
pening in broad daylight, can you? But of course, the actual
burning of the heretics couldn’t happen in the dark, because
nobody would be able to see a thing. No, so there has to be
a solemn, nightlong vigil, the flames kept alive with great
ceremony.
I wish that she had shuddered, my Mari, sneered (sure,
sure, and then the portrait of Christ wept tears of blood,
yeah, uh-huh), but she didn’t. While the queen blushes red
as the charge is read about unnatural acts with the Devil
right there in the lap of the Holy Mother church, Mari leans
forward, full of lascivious disgust. She doesn’t avert her eyes
for a single moment as each monastery adds its touch of
flame to the bonfire.
The next morning the Jews are brought out. They pre-
tended to have converted, but really in their hearts they never
bought that God’s seed entered the womb of Mary through
her ear or that four days dead, Lazarus draped his grave
clothes over his arm and trotted happily out of his tomb.
After five years of imprisonment and torture, they have con-
fessed it all: yes, just as the Inquisition was informed, they
met secretly and tortured a picture of Christ, who came alive
and gently, mournfully rebuked them for this sin, but no,
they did not listen. What did they do then? Why, then they
all went out and sneaked into churches, stole the consecrated
Host and wolfed it down like naughty boys at the cookie jar,
pissed in the font of holy water. And what else? the inquisi-
tor asked, nodding to his assistant, who tightens, tightens
the screws. What else? they plead, their brains so filled with
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

pain they have no room left for lies. Isn’t that enough? What
more did we do? they plead. The inquisitor nods again to his
assistant. What more did you do? Finally he asks, didn’t you
then have sexual congress with the devil in a female form?
Why yes, how could it possibly have slipped our minds? yes,
of course, then we all fucked the devil, right there on the
holy altar, only—not in a female form.
But now it seems there isn’t a single heretic left to torch,
and even the Moors are gone, not taken out to sea in ships
and sunk, as Philip’s grandfather seriously considered, nor
slaughtered wholesale, as Philip’s father’s most trusted advi-
sor counseled him, nor withered away through the castration
of all males and the abduction of all children, as more hu-
mane voices suggested, but, leaving behind all their worldly
goods and chattel and the garb of Christian belief that the
Inquisition had forced them to assume, have merely, like the
Jews, been expelled. Now they are all gone, those who were
supposed to take with them all their treachery and chicanery
and leave behind a Spain so pure it would almost rise of its
own accord, up, up into the unbearable blue of the Spanish
sky, and who instead have left behind this storm’s eye of de-
pression, the royal court.
Philip slumps on his throne while the fools and jesters try
in vain to bring a smile to his face. Hoping to relieve his impe-
rial boredom, he takes his queen to bed, fantasizing about the
pockmarked kitchen girl he has taken a fancy to. Hoping that
he has this time impregnated his seventeen-year-old consort
with a male but knowing that any child born of such a lust-
less coupling will be wan and frail, he wanders to Velézquez’s
studio where he spends the afternoon slumped onachaise,
watching the artist at work and yawning. Sulking Queen

45
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

Mariana, who cannot abide Philip's moodiness, who feels that

she will go mad if any more of Philip's depression seeps into
her, summons Mari Barbola to sit next to him at table.
“Mari,” he says, halfway through the supper, “why haven't
you said anything to amuse me?”
“Tm hungry,” she responds, gnawing at a lamb shank. “So
I’m eating.”
This remark sends the table into laughter. (Humor is like
beer: it doesn’t travel. The court fool Borra was said to have
killed his master, King Martin, by telling him the following
joke: “Out in the vineyard, I saw a young deer hanging by
his tail from a tree, as if some one had so punished him for
stealing figs.” Whereupon the king died of laughter.)
Queen Mariana hoots and slaps her knee, although she
has been warned that outright laughter is considered un-
seemly in the Spanish court, cries out, her speech punctu-
ated at odd intervals by burst of giggles: “Tell me, dear Mari,
when you walk in the marketplace, what say the people of
our great nation? How fares it?”
“Your Majesty,” Mari speaks around mouthfuls of stringy
lamb, “in the mercado one sees many beggars and many rich
people. The beggars implore alms and crusts of bread; yet
the rich envy them for at least they have nothing.”
“For at least they have nothing . . .” Queen Mariana
hoots, and even dour Philip smiles.
“Yes,” Mari repeats, blinking and staring coldly at the
queen, “because the rich have less than nothing; they owe
everywhere, to everyone—”
The queen hoots again and then, gathering her vast skirts
in her arms, comes toward Mari, takes her into her arms,
lifts her into the air, and kisses her.

46
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

The court little people straddle the divide between pets

and servants, sometimes acting as living toys, or sometimes
frank Cassandras: dogs whose yowling, warning of the com-
ing earthquake, will only be understood when it is too late.
Oh, the bankrupt splendor of the Spanish court! There
is nO money, not a single real; the royal archives are filled
with obsequiously worded petitions demanding back wag-
es from maidservants and grooms; yet there is no decrease
in the number of maidservants and grooms or in the fin-
ery in which they are arrayed: like every servant in Spain,
they go about clad in silks and linens which they pay for
in coins of air. A dinner is given for Philip and his queen
by one of his nobles, and one of the thousand dishes served
is a stew which contains one calf, four sheep, two hundred
pigeons, a hundred partridges, a hundred rabbits, one thou-
sand pigs’ trotters and one thousand tongues, two hundred
fowls, thirty hams, and five hundred sausages. Yet a few
months later a capon is served to the Infanta Maria The-
resa and her half-sister, Margarita, which the infanta orders
removed from their presence as it stinks like a dead dog;
instead she is served chicken on fingers of toast, which ar-
rives covered with a mantle of buzzing flies. Maria Theresa
gags, slaps the hand of the hungry Margarita who stretches
out her hand for the chicken, then weeps. There’s nothing
else in the kitchen, and the shopkeepers refuse to extend any
further credit. Mari Barbola lets Maria Theresa carry on for
a while, weeping and wailing and gnashing her teeth, be-
fore Mari pulls off her ring, a ring that the Infante Baltasar
Carlos traded her for a sweet bun when he was four years
old. The adults were so amused they allowed her to keep it.
She holds the ring aloft between thumb and forefinger, then

47
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

strides out into the street, returning shortly with the apron
of her skirt full of oranges and hams and loaves of bread, a
sweet bun. (For once a loan has not only been repaid to the
Spanish court but repaid with interest.)
What has happened to Moctezuma’s ransom, to the past
of the Aztecs and their subject nations, the rings and sacred
tablets and gold skulls that were melted down into bars of
pure gold? Some say that it passes through the hand of this
official and that bureaucrat, dribbling steadily away as it
moves, and then goes abroad to pay the interest on the usuri-
ous loans that were taken out during the glory days of Spain
and to buy silk purses, linen collars that the sumptuary laws
forbid the making of in Spain. Some say that no sooner does
the plunder of America arrive in Spain then it is returned to
the earth from which it was wrenched, reinterred to be safe
from the tax collectors. For this the Aztecs and Mayans and
Incas are being worked to death in the hot, hot American
sun, imploring their dead gods in Nahutal and Maya and
Quechua?

But now Mari Barbola has been summoned to the royal gal-
lery for a sitting (some sitting! Velazquez leaves them on their
feet all day, even the five-year-old Margarita, and poor Dofia
Mariana Sarmiento who has to balance herself, kneeling and
holding forth a golden tray). Stand here. Stand there. Yes.
No, no, more to the left. Your Most Royal Highness might
want to take a step to the right. Perfect! José Nieto, master of
the royal tapestry works, and the king and queen don’t have
to hang about posing: they appear in the painting but will
be added in later. It’s Mari Barbola and Nicolasico Pertusato
and the maids of honor who can be ordered to wait about

48
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

and the infanta, who must, after all, be taught to have the
desires of others be her desires, so that at the age of fifteen
she can be handed over as wife to the German emperor.
In the painting the embellished cross of the Order of Santi-
ago appears on Vel4zquez’s breast, but it was added afterward,
reportedly by the king himself: When he paints Las meninas
he is petitioning for admission to that order. A report, which
takes 113 days to prepare and for which 148 witnesses are
sworn and deposed, decrees that Vel4zquez has successfully
proved that his lineage is untainted by Moorish or Jewish
blood; yet he is unsuccessful in his claim to have sprung from
noble lineage (after all, Daddy, although he called himself a
merchant, was really a huckster, rushing about Seville buying
dear and selling cheap, and couldn’t even call himself Don),
no matter that his family insisted that the de Silvas, from
whence his father sprung, were descended from Aeneas Sil-
vius, king of Alba Longa and were thus related to the kings
of Leon. A dispensation from His Holiness Pope Alexander
VII is needed so that Velazquez can be, at last, be sworn into
that order that he has so long coveted.

Endless treatises will be written about this painting. One

tome sets forth, in the third of its appendices, a sampling
of the pigments that were used in it, identification of said
pigments having been made via polarizing microscopy, x-ray
powder diffraction, and x-ray fluorescence analysis using ei-
ther a scanning electron microscope or electron beam micro-
probe. For instance, the light brown stretcher support of the
canvas near the lower-left corner is painted with lead white
(with a percentage of hydrocerussite somewhere in the range
of 40 to 60 percent), yellow ochre, charcoal/bone black,

49
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

calcite, smalt, and perhaps red ochre or vermilion; while Ni-

colasico Pertusato’s left stocking is lead white, vermilion, red
lake, calcite, and charcoal/bone black. Others will plot the
geometric relationships between the figures that occupy this
space, drawing triangles, equilateral and isosceles, some that
reach beyond the frame of the painting.
The king and queen are there but not there, pale reflections
in the milk glass of a distant mirror; while Dofia Marcela de
Ulloa, dressed in mourning garb that resembles a nun’s hab-
it, speaks to another old retainer, both fading back into the
shadows. José Nieto, firmly planted in his rectangle of light,
the head of the royal tapestry factory whose offspring will be
the kings of industry, pauses on the steps that lead away from
the darkness that is settling over the Spanish court.
Dofia Mariana Sarmiento kneels before the Infanta Mar-
garita, offering her on alittle golden tray a cup of water in a
red bucaro, a cup made of soft clay from South America, clay
gathered from muddy riverbanks by Indians who have seen
their sisters and brothers burned alive by literal fire or those
plagues and poxes that the Europeans brought with them:
the special red clay cup that, when empty, can be chewed
and swallowed. The infanta is about to reach out her hand
and drink the blood and sweat, eat the dead flesh of her
American subjects.
Nicolasico Pertusato sets his foot on the drowsy Alsatian
recumbent at his feet, sets his foot on the uneasy divide be-
tween the human and the animal, us and them, while Mari
Barbola, frank and ugly Mari Barbola, stares out from the
edge of the canvas at us: Look, she says. Look. Here. This is
the way it was. Look.
A

50
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

Seventy-five years later an underpaid lackey in the kitchen

allows a flame too close to a vat of oil. When he sees what
he has done, he sneaks from the Alcazar and sits that night
in a tavern, nursing a bottle of thick red wine while he hears
the shouts of Fire! Fire! Fire! and the out-of-breath gossip de-
livered by those who have just come from the yards around
the court. The fire has climbed worn velvet curtains, lapped
up carved mahogany tables and silk brocades; the infantas
and the ladies-in-waiting have hitched up their skirts and
run pell-mell for the doors, dashing alongside scullery maids
and courtiers and the king. Outside the royal family catches
its collective breath and then orders the servants back in to
fetch jewels and gold and strands of pearls (the pretty globes
found lodged in clamshells that the mga katutubo used to
dive for late in the afternoon, roll about in their palms, and
perhaps leave lying in the sand, that the Kastila are ready to
risk their lives for). The lucky ones return with sweat run-
ning down their faces, wheezing, carrying jewelry boxes, for-
tunes stuffed in their pockets, or staggering under the weight
of the immense canvases, the paint blistering and running in
the heat of the fire. From across the way, where the painting
has been borne for safety, paint runs down Mari Barbola’s
doughy face as she stares out at the frantic racing, the flames
surging higher and higher through the doomed palace of the
Alcazar.

Two hundred and twelve years after the burning of the Al-
cazar, 287 years after Velazquez painted Las meninas, outside
a town in Poland 1,232 kilometers from Madrid, a man in a
military uniform speaks to a woman wearing thin pajamas.
“You see—the problem with the photographs,” he says
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

shaking them out of the manila file and onto his desk. They
stand, not exactly side by side, but as a junior clerk might
stand in the presence of the owner of a firm.
“Now you see, this one—she had a very interesting tex-
ture to her skin, a certain kind of fat deposit underneath her
chin,” he tugs at the flesh of his own neck to indicate, “which
the camera doesn’t capture at all.” In an irritated whisper he
adds, “That shivering is most annoying. Stop it.”
She stops. So much for what her professors had said
about involuntary movement. Or perhaps it was just that
at that place, in that time, the laws of nature had also been
suspended.
“And then this one,” he says, throwing down a photo-
graph of a fat dwarf with an outsized head, “he had sexual
organs like a child’s, but again the camera—”
“The camera's eye is flat. It captures everything and so,
sometimes, fails to see the essential.” She knows she is tak-
ing an enormous risk in saying these words, which might
be read as insolent. On the other hand, sometimes cower-
ing, putting one’s tail between one’s legs, didn’t work either.
Every day in this place you engaged in a game of Russian
roulette, holding a gun to your head, never certain if the
words you spoke would allow you to live for a while longer
or trigger your death. That, of course, was just a figure of
speech: the real gun was always in their hands.
“Precisely,” he says.
She is about to say, “When I was a medical illustrator in
Prague...” and mention the name of a famous doctor she
had worked with, but she decides against it, merely looks
at the floor and mumbles, “I was a medical illustrator in
Prague.”

52
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

“Oh, that’s good. Very good. I didn’t know that. Come

along. You can get started right away. The doctors will let
you know if there’s some feature they want emphasized.”
She is following him down the hallway when he adds,
“Also, there’s the matter of the cost of the photographic
process.” And laughs a little at his own joke. Only his way
of letting her know that although they are walking down
the corridor together, although she made an observation to
which he responded, “Precisely,” she is worth less than the
thin layer of emulsion that is spread over film, worth less
than a few pfennigs worth of developing salts.
A man in a white coat joins them. She is led to a cubicle.
Usually the dwarfs are brought in by an orderly; occasion-
ally it is a doctor who accompanies them, when he has some
special instruction he wants to give the illustrator, whose
given name is Dina, although it has been months now since
anyone has called her by her given name. The dwarfs arrive
quite naked and yet they never seem ashamed.
Once someone left a chair here, and for a few days Dina
was able to sit down as she worked. Her body has long since
gnawed up the fat of its own belly, its own breasts, and
turned finally to the fat that padded the balls of her heel,
leaving a raw pain between heel bone and ground.
And then one day the chair is gone.
Sometimes the door of the cubicle is left open; sometimes
it is closed. Although Dina prefers that it be closed, she nev-
er shuts it herself.
Sometimes the doctors bring her an inch or two of soup in
a coffee mug, a napkin holding a scrap of bread. It is against
the rules. But they like her work; they don’t want to lose her
to typhoid or cholera.

53
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

Usually it is quite straightforward: front, rear, left side,

right side. She doesn’t speak to them, except to ask them to
turn. What can they possibly say to each other? Sometimes
she is told to do a more detailed sketch: of a patient’s genita-
lia or of a deformity.
The doctor holds Lia Graf’s hand as they came down the
corridor. She smiles up at him as he bends down and lifts her
up onto the table. Dina has never seen a doctor touch one of
them before.
“Today we have a celebrity for you. From—” and he be-
gins to laugh.
“The Barnum & Bailey Circus, the Greatest Show on
Earth:
“Barnum & Bailey,” he repeats, his German accent turn-
ing the words into guttural commands. “And she became
quite a little celebrity when she sat on the lap of J. P. Mor-
gan. The usual four sketches.”
“Good-bye, Doctor,” she trills, but he makes no response.
She is perfectly proportioned, roughly two-thirds of a meter
tall. Instinctively, no doubt because of her theatrical back-
ground, she assumes a somewhat coquettish stance. She is in
her mid-thirties. Warts on her elbows. One missing tooth.
But otherwise quite well preserved.
“No. Don't pose. Just stand there. Arms at your sides. And
please turn around.” Dina dislikes doing the front views; she
always does them last.
Lia turns her head over her shoulder and mouths: “What
is your name?”
After a nearly thirty seconds’ pause, the answer is mouthed
back. “Dina.”
“Lia Graf... Where are you from?”

54
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

“Prague,” she whispers.

“Wiesbaden.” Then: “How long?”
“Just stand there,” Dina says aloud. “Your head as it was. I
cannot draw you properly if you don’t hold still.”
“Please. It’s important for me. To know.”
“Quiet,” Dina says, and draws her finger across her
throat.
Dina works in silence until the evening siren sounds.
Then she is returned to the barracks and Lia Graf to the
ward.
The next morning they resume. The doctor doesn’t bring
her this morning, but instead a nurse, dressed in white. Dina
is the one who hoists her onto the table. The nurse closes the
door behind him.
“Your left side now.”
After a few minutes Lia says, certainly not in a normal
speaking voice but not in the barely audible whisper of the
day before: “The door is closed. Will you not talk to me
now?”
“T talk to no one. It distracts me.”
“Distracts you from your drawing?”
“No. From staying alive.”
“But I talk to you because I want to live.”
“Everyone wants to live. They all wanted to live.” The cu-
bicle is windowless, so she cannot gesture to the plume of
smoke. Instead she wrinkles her nose at the stench in the air.
And then makes a sound. What shall we call it: laughter, a
hoot, a snort? Any of those will do equally well, or poorly.
Ordinary language is another thing that does not fare well
here.
“You are cruel.”

55
THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

“T am alive.”
“So am I. And I am going to go on living.”
Dina laughs again. “How long have you been here?”
“Don’t mistake me for a child. We are used to that as-
sumption. We often turn it to our advantage. I was arrested
in ’38.”
“38. It is I who should be trying to get you to talk. Tell
me your secret.”
“Be a dwarf. They call it a sign of degeneracy, inferiority,
but in this world they have made it is a distinct advantage. I
do not thrive on the rations they give us, but I can survive.”
“°38,” the artist repeats.
“A ‘useless person.’ I had been working in a revue. You
know, torch singers and jazz and an—the English expression
is ‘off-color —an off-color comedian. And me. I was billed
as ‘Lia Graf: The Miniature Sensation.’ I wore a top hat and
tails and sang ribald songs. They loved me, the audiences.
A woman who after all isn’t really a woman, after all, she’s a
dwarf dressed like a man and gives us the pleasure of allow-
ing us to lust without guilt after a child, a man, a woman.
Sang? Really, I couldn't carry a tune. A pianist played and I
half sang, half spoke in a gravelly pseudo-Dietrich. But we
sapped the strength of the German people. We were deca-
dent. Foreign. Cosmopolitan. But it wouldn't have mat-
tered for me—whatever kind of show I was in. At that time
we were forbidden altogether from appearing on the stage.
So then I was a ‘useless mouth’ and imprisoned. But I al-
ways managed to find myself a protector. To become some-
one’s mascot. And they wanted to study us.” She allows a
few moments to pass and utters, “Ah, why did I ever leave
America?”
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

Dina does not rise to the bait.

“That circus. You can’t imagine what it was like: the stink
from all those animals. And I never got a decent night’s sleep
there: the elephants bellowing and the lions roaring, not to
mention the goddamn hyena. Night after night, all night
long. So when I got the offer from the revue . . . The money
was better. I was homesick. Tired of speaking English. Bar-
num was so goddamn tightfisted. I thought, Things are bad
in Germany; they’re bad in America. So I came back in ’35.”
mg5e)7
“Politics bored me.”
“Fool.”
She whirls around: “Let me tell you something. When
they’ve had you for as long as they've had me, you can tell
who's going to survive and who isn’t. When I look at you,
Dina, I see a skull.”
“As you were.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Back as you were.”
She sits down on the table. “What do they do with these
drawings?”
“They go in your file. Along with the medical records, the
genealogy, and the autopsy report.”
“Dr. Baumgarten is very fond of me.”
“Yes, you are his little pet. But time is taking its toll on
you. Your flesh is sagging and soon your hair will turn gray.
Then you will be old: perhaps not old in outside years but
old in Auschwitz years, which pass much more quickly than
the years of a dog’s life. Remember that even the most loving
families, although they may be shedding tears as they do it,
put pets to sleep.”
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

“One-two-three-four. You know how they love order. If

step three is not completed, step four cannot be.”
“Stand up. As you were.”
“No.”
“If I tell them that you are refusing to pose—”
“I will tell them that you tried to enlist me in a seditious
plot.”
“All you will succeed in doing is sending me up in smoke.
They will find someone else to do the drawings.”
Lia looks at Dina, prepared to match her glare, an eye for
an angry eye. But Dina only looks hollowly at her, the dull
unfocused stare of people back in the other world when they
wait in bus terminals, wait.
Lia rises to her feet, resumes her pose. “Talk to me.”
Her voice is as hollow as her stare. “I’m Czech. A Jew.”
* Ves?’
“That's all.”
“No. There’s more.”
“I draw the pictures here in the hospital.”
es??
“That's-all”
“TIl call the guard. Tell him about the plot you tried to
enlist me in.”
“They won't believe you.”
“It wont matter whether they believe me or not. They'll
kill you just to be on the safe side.”
“I was born in Prague . . .” she begins. An old, familiar
story: The grandparents still living in the ghetto, in the dark
rooms of the past with their heavy curtains and their flick-
ering Sabbath candles. Her grandparents had believed the
old tale about the two white doves that for over a millennia

58
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

had come and perched on the roof of the synagogue to save

it from fire; yes, and believed too that there was an under-
ground tunnel leading straight from the Old Jewish Town to
Jerusalem. Right up until March 15, 1938, they had believed
these things. Her parents did not believe any such fairy tales;
no, they believed that their Jewishness was a coat they could
slip out of and hang on a convenient hook, to put on again
when they chose. Her mother even took Dina to the Mala
Strana at Christmas to see the pastry angels with their wings
of spun sugar set out in the windows of the bakery shop:
the quaint customs of the Christians. For a second, as Dina
speaks, she smells not the smell that was everywhere in that
place, but the smell of cinnamon, the smell of fresh snow,
the smell of the tram wheels as they spark to a stop.
“Yes,” Lia says, “go on.”
“That's all.”
“Go on.” Lia says. “That’s all.”
“Go on.”
“What do you hope to accomplish by this?”
“It helps me understand.”
“This? You will never understand this.”
“T think I almost do. Go on,” Lia orders.

Lia, you can see what this is doing to her. Why are you insist-
ing so? It’s not as if there were something unusual about this
story. It could be the story of any of a hundred, a thousand,
a million other sensitive girls with souls that aspired beyond
the quotidian. The desire to be an artist, the mother who
nurtured her dreams and the father who mocked her. She
compromised, agreed to study medical illustration as well.
And four years after she graduated, during the terrible winter

59
 THE ARTIST AND THE DWARF

of 31, working days doing drawings for medical professors,

nights her own work, she saw the boy wunderkind who had
sat next to her in life drawing class hauling coal and turned
away before he could see her and so be ashamed. Nights and
weekends she painted her pictures of robust young girls from
the country she hired as models. You've seen this play before,
Lia, you know the final act: the god of death goose-steps out
of a trapdoor in the floor of the stage and puts an end to all
this silly palavering about the soul of the artist.
But you say, “Go on.”
She’s furious now, Lia. That hand that once patiently de-
lineated the coils and flutings of a bacterium now presses the
pencil so hard it engraves the paper.
“Go on,” she says. “Tell me about the beautiful country
girls you drew. Go on. I think I almost understand this.”

The paintings Dina made in Prague are gone, chucked out

by the German-speaking Czechs who took over her family’s
house. A few prewar photos of Lia Graf remain: publicity
stills, the photographs the newsmen shot after they set her
on J. P. Morgan’s lap, but most of the pictures of her are
gone, gone up in smoke like Lia and Dina themselves. In a
brown manila envelope kept shut by a twisted piece of string
on a dusty shelf in an archive are the four drawings Dina
made of Lia, left side, right side, rear, front (is she really al-
most smiling?) along with the medical report, the genealogy,
and the autopsy report.

60
Comrade Luxemburg and Comrade Gramsci
Pass Each Other at a Congress of the
Second International in Switzerland
on the 10th of March, 1912
Italicized sections of the text are quotations from Johann Goethe, Rosa Luxemburg,
Johnny Cash, Alfred Déblin, Antonio Gramsci, Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini,
Adolf Hitler, Karl Koch, and the Bible.

It never happened.
It could not have happened.
Tt could not have happened that at a crowded congress of
the Second International held in a resort hotel on the shores
of Lake Catani in the foothills of the Swiss Alps, alongside a
snow-fed lake with waters of such pure crystalline blue that
even in the very center one could peer straight down and
clearly see the fluid shadows of the waters’ ripples speckling
the rocks at the bottom, the delegates from the socialist par-
ties of the world gathering in clots in the hallways, doing
the real business of the congress there with urgent impre-
cations, hands grasping forearms, voices dropped almost
to whispers and glances over their shoulders, while upstairs

61
 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

an overworked chambermaid with varicose veins, Madame

Robert, flicked a sheet in the air, sending motes of dust danc-
ing in the afternoon sunshine, Comrade Rosa Luxemburg
and Comrade Antonio Gramsci limped past each other.
It never happened that Luxemburg, who had been de-
tained after her speech by those anxious to get her advice,
to give her theirs, to merely say that they had spoken with
her, yes, individually, personally, at last signaled to her com-
panion with her eyes, who worked his way through the knot
of people surrounding her, laid a paternal hand on her arm,
said, “Rosa, you must . . .” and Rosa allowed herself to be
led away, departing the Geneva Room at 2:52 in the after-
noon, while at 2:51 Comrade Gramsci had sneezed, futilely
searched his pockets for a handkerchief, and, having wiped
his nose surreptitiously with the back of his hand, bowed his
head and hurried through the crowded corridor to ascend to
his room on the fifth floor to fetch one, so that, two-thirds
of the way along, the two of you would pass each other.
No, it could not have happened.
On March 10, 1912, at eight minutes before 3:00 in the
afternoon, Rosa Luxemburg was in her apartment on Lin-
denstrasse in Berlin, preparing a lecture for the Party School,
thumbing through Goethe's Faust, looking for the quotation
No one yields empire / To another; no one will yield it who has
gained it byforce. . . the same volume that she will drop into
her purse when she hears the footsteps coming up the stairs
of the house in Neukélln to take her to her death six years
later; and Gramsci was a twenty-one-year-old, a poverty-
stricken Sardinian student, eating his first meal in three days,
a plate of spaghetti con olio, at a trattoria on the Via Perugia in
Turin, readinga linguistics text as he ate at a table just a little

62
 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

bit too high for him, so that his arms ached slightly from
the odd angle at which they had to be maneuvered. At the
next table a father moaned and patted his belly, pushed his
chair back from the table, then urged his plump daughters
to eat desert, accompanying his coaxings with tugs at their
flesh: they were too thin, altogether too thin, his dumplings,
his darlings. The coy daughters protested; the padre signaled
the waiter to clear away the platters of calamari and pasta,
the remains of the spring lamb, the half flask of wine. Later,
limping home alone in a sharp wind with his half-empty
belly (why does one feel the cold so much more when one is
hungry?), Gramsci tried to name the force that allowed him
to watch the remains of the rich man’s dinner being taken
away while he still hungered: a dog, a dumb brute, would
have leapt for it, seized the lamb in his teeth. The dog would
have been a better socialist than I am, he thought.
No, Comrade Luxemburg does not pass Comrade Gram-
sci as she heads down the corridor on her way to sit next to
Karl Liebknecht at dinner, on her way to dine with him and
twelve Judases, on her way to the unprecedented, the incred-
ible 4th ofAugust, 1914, when the men she thought of as her
comrades will vote for war appropriations so that the work-
ers of Germany can kill and in turn be killed by the workers
of Italy and France and England; on her way to the gloomy
evening a few weeks later when she and Clara Zetkin will
sit in her parlor, four feet in scuffed slippers resting on the
fender before the fire, debating not the woman question, not
organizational questions of the party but whether laudanum
or prussic acid would be a better way to go because mass
murder has become a boring monotonous daily business; on
her way to listening to the whistle of the 3:19 train carrying

63
 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

Mathilde away from her in the prison where she was locked
up for her opposition to the war (/f they freed me from this
prison / if that railroad train was mine / you bet Id move it
on / a little further down the line / far from Folsom Prison);
she will promise Sonja Liebknecht to go to Corsica with her
after the war (On high, nothing except barren rock formations
which are a noble gray; below, luxuriant olive trees, cherry trees,
and age-old chestnut trees. And above everything, a prehistoric
quiet—no human voices, no bird calls, only a stream rippling
somewhere between rocks, or the wind on high whispering be-
tween the cliffs—still the same wind that swelled Ulysses’ sails),
but she will never see Corsica again; instead she will spend
her first night of freedom, a sleepless night, at the railway
workers’ union hall, preparing for a demonstration the next
day; on her way to Berlin, where red flags will be flying ev-
erywhere (precisely when on the surface everything seems hope-
less and miserable, a complete change is getting ready); on her
way to her dazed, lurching walk through the corridors of the
Hotel Eden (You know I really hope to die at my post, in a street
fight or in prison), past the chambermaids and valets who, a
few weeks previously, might have joined the throngs in the
streets of Berlin, might even have had asister or brother who
took part in the occupation of the Vorwarts building, de-
manding of a newcomer, “Why have you come so late? And
why have you not brought others with you?’, who will now
join in the jeering: Jew, sow, red whore, cripple, Jew; on her
way to the black car, on her way to the bullet to her brain
that pierces her left temporal lobe and wipes out the throne
within her brain where reason sat; on her way to becoming,
for a few brief minutes, no longer Dr. Luxemburg, no lon-
ger the visionary, the prophet, just a body, an unconscious

64
 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

(sometimes it seems to me thatIam not really a human being at

all, but rather a bird or a beast in human form); a body whose
dead weight will plummet into the waters of the Landwehr
Canal.
She does not pass Comrade Gramsci on his way to his
room on the fifth floor to fetch a handkerchief; on his way
to the Petrograd train station, where he will be met by a del-
egation of four men and one woman who will stand on the
platform scanning the air above him, and he will pretend
not to notice the few seconds lag after he announces himself
in a voice he has made as deep as possible (this shrunken
hunchback the famous leader?—sometimes they will have
been warned ahead of time that he is handicapped, deformed,
but then they will expect some Cyclops, a Minotaur, not this
limping dwarf); on his way to being led into the courtroom,
where everyone save the prisoners will appear in tragicomic
fascist splendor, a double cordon of militiamen in plumed
black helmets, heels of well-polished shoes clicked together,
backs straight, an emblematic dagger poised in an identical
position in the belt of each one, the marshals bearing stan-
dards that read spar, Senatus Populusque Romanarum—of
course, this will recall to him Marx’s comment about history
repeating itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as
farce; he will limp in dirty, unshaven, feeling like a wound-
ed, crawling animal: a ferret, perhaps, slithering and preda-
tory; he will feel a sense of physical shame and understand
again a sentence he will have written years before when the
Turin workers councils failed: the bourgeoisie lies in ambush
in the hearts of the proletariat, on his way to becoming the
great mind, the Gramsci who floats, a head without a body,
on fading posters once thumbtacked to apartment walls in

65
 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

Madison, Wisconsin, and Berkeley, California, now matted

and framed.
Rosa, you warned us, we can no more skip a period in our
historical development than a man can jump over his shadow.
But still I spray-paint on the walls of the Hotel Leveque
a slogan that wouldn't be heard for fifty-odd years hence:
“All power to the imagination!” I imagine that in those days
when we didn’t yet have a name for ourselves, when the only
words were handicapped, lame, deformed, hunchback, dwarf,
cripple, when the only words were silence, that we could
speak.
I imagine that Comrade Luxemburg stares, looks away,
but then laughs at herself for doing so: not out loud, not
a full-throated, rich deep laugh, but only a laugh of mild
amusement at her “instinctive” reaction. And then she turns,
smiles, as you or I might do, passing each other in the cor-
ridor at a meeting filled with aBs.
She stops, stretches out her hand, says, “We haven't met.
I’m Rosa Luxemburg.”
“Of course,” he mutters, “yes, of course,” stretching out
his hand in return, conscious of the fact that it’s the one he
used in the absence of a handkerchief.
“And you?” she says, helping out the flustered young man.
He gives his name. “Let’s talk,” she says.
After dinner when the coffee’s served, they meet out on
the veranda. Of course the stone benches out there are back-
less, and so they'll schlep three chairs out—one to prop their
feet on, which otherwise would dangle above the ground.
“So,” Rosa asks right out, “has your disability made dif-
ficulties for you, in the party?”
Antonio shrugs. “They—the workers—trust me.”

66
 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

She nods, she knows. The wound on the outside, so that

strangers on a train pick you to tell their tale to.
“But they fear it, too,” she supplies.
“Yes, they fear it, too.”
“And yet,” she says, “I often wonder if I would have got as
far in the party as I have if it weren't for—”
“The de-sexualization—”
“De-gendering was more what I was going to say,” she
says. Because of all those years of her growing up when it
seemed that she was destined to be permanently outside
the realm of desire, his words make her a bit prickly. If she
were honest with herself about this—although she couldn't
be—she'd admit that it was one of the things that led her to
socialism: that it was the place where her strength of mind,
of character could overcome her physical flaw, allow her to
be desired. She only lets herself know that she felt freedom
here, a freedom she couldn't feel anywhere else.
Comrades, I want you to go on but this conversation has
grown awkward, studded with anachronisms, impossible to
write. All power to the imagination? As difficult a slogan to
put into practice as All power to the soviets.
And although I want to holler back through time: “Please,
speak to each other,” I cannot let you know what’s to come.
Mussolini is not yet a fascist, he has not yet become a man of
steel, a man who will slap cold water on raw morning flesh,
his chest puffed out like an enormous steam engine; the mass-
es are a woman, he will say, and, at a certain moment when
haranguing them from a balcony he feels their submissive
spirit reach up toward him, he will strip off his shirt to show
those muscles like iron bands, jut forward that great leonine
head, the lumpishness of his bald skull giving the effect of a

67
 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

Roman head chiseled in marble. Hitler is still nothing more

than a gleam in the evil eye of history. He has not yet spun
that web of propaganda wherein disease, prostitution, the
kaftaned Jew lurking in the alley waiting to defile the Aryan
woman, the suffocating perfume of our modern eroticism, the
degenerates contaminating the healthy and passing on their
defective genes to their offspring blur together and become
one. He has not yet declared that Germany must become a
healthy state. Kommandant Koch of Buchenwald has not
yet said, There are no sick men in my camp. They are all either
well or dead. Mussolini, Hitler, Koch will understand: the
worship of the healthy body, the fear of us, is the taproot of
fascism.
But Rosa, sober Rosa, leans forward through time to rep-
rimand me: In the beginning was the act. No, they can’t yet
speak to each other. We don’t yet exist. We are the sons and
daughters of fascism as well as the daughters and sons of
ourselves.
So I try again. I fast-forward through the next four bloody
years of history: the soldiers look like Keystone Kops as they
rush out of their trenches, grimace, fall to the ground, and
the next wave of soldiers rises and does the same, and the
next does the same, and the next does the same and the next
does the same and the next does the same, until some 22
million have died and I hit the “play” button and return to
normal speed.
Rosa walks out the doors of Breslau Prison, she speaks at
the rally in Berlin, she writes, There is order in Berlin. ... your
order is built on sand. But she never takes that last dazed,
lurching walk through the corridors of the Hotel Eden; she
never is found, a bloated marshmallow of a corpse, eyeless,

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 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

bobbing against the locks of the Landwehr Canal. Instead

she escapes to the Soviet Union, from there she hopscotch-
es to New York. Antonio, at first I imagine that you were
persuaded to leave Italy before your arrest, but even in
the world of the imagination I can’t wish The Prison Note-
books, the Letters, out of existence. Forgive me, Nino, but
I am sending you into that first filthy cell in Regina Coeli
Prison, where the single bare bulb burns all night long and
the lice scuttle through the mattress—and into all the prison
cells that followed that one. Let’s suppose that Romain Rol-
land, who has worked so diligently for your release all these
years—circulating petitions, writing endless letters, lobby-
ing in the court of world opinion—despairs of those tactics:
instead, knowing how close you are to death, he organizes a
commando raid against the Quisisana Clinic. Chuck Norris
is the advance man, he disguises himself as a taciturn (male)
nurse—we'll explain away his fair complexion by having
him pretend to be German; at the appointed hour, while a
helicopter lowers itself toward the roof, he'll pick you up in
his arms like a baby (you weighed only forty-two kilograms
then), toss you over his shoulder and, a machine gun in his
free hand, taking out a few fascists as he rushes to the roof.
Chuck will cradle you in his arms, stroke your black hair
away from your hot forehead, say, “Hey, guy, it’s okay. You're
all right, Comrade.” There will be no flyer headlined “Ttal-
ian Fascism Has Murdered Gramsci.” No, Comrade, you
will live.
Neither of them will become famous. Sorry, there’s truth
to that old saw about death being good for your career. Rosa
ends up giving lectures at the New School, writing for maga-
zines with ever-dwindling circulations. She began her article

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 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

“Either/Or” with a quote from Revelations: J would thou

wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and nei-
ther cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. But now
the masses have moved to White Plains, they drive DeSotos,
she has become an apocalyptic crank. Antonio sits out the
war years in the warm dry air of southern California, regain-
ing some measure of health, joining up with that colony of
squabbling, quibbling, squalling leftist exiles.
What will I do with them now that I’ve saved them? Have
them meet again, on a subway platform in Brooklyn, Rosa,
103, with that papery, almost smooth-as-a-baby’s patch of
skin on her cheeks that old, old women get; and Antonio,
in his eighties, lumbering and wheezing up the steps. But
then, it could only be the early 1970s: too early still. No, Pll
have time pass but the two of them stay in their late forties,
the ages they were when they died; it’s 1990: Rosa is sitting
on the bench at Ditmas station in Brooklyn, waiting for the
F train, the Americans with Disabilities Act has just passed;
she’s reading the article about it in the New York Times. An-
tonio comes and sits down next to her. He knows enough
to leave a couple of New York inches between the two of
them, but still she sidles a bit away. He can’t help looking
over her shoulder, reading the same article she is. She shakes
the newspaper a bit, casts him a quick cold glance. He looks
away; but then she says, “Excuse me. We've met, haven't
we?”
What shall I have the two of them say? Shall I have An-
tonio say that our movement must concern itself with more
than legislation, must reach for the solution to more complex
tasks than those proposed by the present development of the
struggle; namely, for the creation ofa new, integral culture; shall

7O
 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

I have Rosa come back with the necessity of our movement

being democratic, that we must make our own errors, errors
... Infinitely more fruitful and more valuable than the infalli-
bility of any cit board and all its high-powered consultants?
But no, it’s another conversation I can’t imagine.
No, I have to go back to that hotel corridor.
Although it could not have happened that on the 1oth of
March, 1912, at a congress of the Second International in a
corridor of the Hotel Leveque at precisely 2:52, that Com-
rade Luxemburg, heading in a southerly direction down the
corridor toward the dining hall, while Comrade Gramsci,
headed toward the north staircase, passed each other, still,
had it happened, Rosa would have startled slightly as she
glimpsed him, the misshapen dwarf limping toward her in a
secondhand black suit so worn the fabric was turning green
with age, her eye immediately drawn to this disruption in
the visual field. Realizing she was staring, she would have
glanced quickly away. And then the moment after, realizing
that the quick aversion of her gaze was as much of an insult
as the stare, she would have turned her head back but tried
to make her gaze general. Comrade Rosa would have felt a
slight flicker of embarrassment? shame? revulsion? dread? of
a feeling that can have no name? |
Would Gramsci at first have bowed his head in shame,
then raised his head, stared back, deciding that her right to
look at him equaled his right to look at her? Did aslight
smile pass across his face because he was glad to know that
such a prominent comrade shared his condition?
It is all over in a matter of seconds.
But this never happened, and even if it had, it would have
not have mattered. What passed between the two of you

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 COMRADE LUXEMBURG AND COMRADE GRAMSCI

belongs to the realm of thought before speech, of the shape

of the future before it can be seen: a nameless discomfort,
not yet even a premonition.
No, there is no such place on earth. You will not find this
Lake Catani on any map: I have created it out of words. This
congress never happened; the two of you were not there.
Look down through those clear blue waters of Lake Cat-
ani to the shifting shadows of the lake’s ripples that speckle
the rocks at the bottom; see the shadows grow larger and
larger until they dissolve into nothingness; now the lake it-
self, which never existed, disappears. The scullery girl chop-
ping onions in the kitchen automatically wipes her cheeks
with the backs of her hands and discovers that her cheeks are
not wet with onion tears; surprised, she sniffs the air: it does
not smell of onions, it does not smell of anything. Upstairs,
the chambermaid, old Madame Robert, stands on her ach-
ing legs and snaps a freshly laundered sheet through the air.
Madame Robert, your legs will ache no more: J am writing
away your pain, I am writing away your very existence. For a
moment the motes of dust you have disturbed dance glisten-
ing in the air, but then they cease, and first the sheet itself
and then you yourself turn to shadows and vanish.

ae
Gloucester

I am propped up in my hospital bed, reading the New York

Times, as I have every day of my life since the age of ten. Al-
though my eyes are burning, I read. A war criminal has evad-
ed capture in Bosnia. One former Kennedy wife complains
of the manner in which she was disposed; another stands
loyally alongside her philandering husband. The Dow Jones
may soon break eight thousand. The Red Sox have beaten
the Tigers. I can manage only the headlines, but still I read.
A doctor enters.
“So, Mr. Gloucester,” he says, setting his hand not on
my shoulder but on the bed next to my shoulder. Then he
reaches behind him for the chair.
“First name’s Gloucester,” I tell him. “Remember?”
We had this conversation yesterday, word for word, ges-
ture for gesture. I remember, although I’m the one with de-
mentia. He’s allowed to forget: he’s a busy man. I was once
a busy man, and I forgot things: names of housekeepers,

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names of men with whom Id had brief encounters, shall we

say, once my son Charlie’s birthday.
“Oh, right,” he says, “right, right. Sure. Yeah.”
I suppose when he got into this field he was like Sisyphus
pushing the rock up the mountain. Then one day, incred-
ibly, the rock stayed up at the summit. Just a few loose peb-
bles came cascading down. I’m one of the loose pebbles. At
the amps Resource Center they are having a workshop on
reentering the workforce: Thursday evenings from 7:00 to
10:00 a group called Lazarus meets. I will not be reentering
the workforce; I will not be joining the Thursday evening
group.
“Mr. Uh—”
“Barrows.”
“Any relation to the senator?” he asks, chuckling.
“He's my brother,” I say, and his fingers, which are right
then in the middle of palpating the lymph nodes in my neck,
pause for a deferential second.
The doctor is a numbers man. He does not put his hand
on my shoulder and attempt to make eye contact. I am
grateful for this. 47, he says to me, telling me the results of
some test from the printout in his hand. 22. My white blood
cell count is holding steady. The Dow Jones is up. My cp4
cells are down.
“Your cholesterol’s 150. That’s great,” he says, and we both
laugh.
“T could go eat some lard,” I say.
“Haagen-Dazs,” he says.
“Well, I guess I don’t have to worry about my heart.”
“Yeah, well... ,” he says. He doesn’t want to give me any
false hope. Anything can happen.

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 GLOUCESTER

The doctor is telling me another number. The number is

12.
“What's the normal range on that?”
“Somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000.”
“And mine’s 12?”
“Yeah,” the doctor says. “Not 12,000. 12.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Now about your eyes . . . ,” he says.

My ancestors pepper the passenger list of the Mayflower; a

great-great-grandfather gave Henry Adams a black eye, an
event unrecorded in his Education. 1 am not from the most
distinguished branch of the family, I must admit. I am a
younger son, descended of younger sons. My father found
the notion of knotting a piece of silk around his neck and
going out to earn aliving a puzzling one. Instead he went to
the Gardner, read the Times, and watched his investments.
Between my junior and my senior year at Choate, while
the kids who were from nouveau riche families headed off to
Europe, those of us from solid old families went and worked
at canneries on the Cape or waited tables at restaurants in
Newport. Perhaps Chairman Mao got the idea of sending
intellectuals to live among the peasantry from this Yankee
custom. I worked at a bar in Provincetown. That summer
on the Cape, I learned that other people had middle names
like Ann or Thomas, not fine old family names, names that
couldn't go to waste, as middle or even first names. I gathered
in the kitchen with my coworkers to make fun of the fags. (I
modestly admit I did the best imitations.) A few years later
in a history class at Harvard taught by a junior professor (he
was not given tenure), I learned that via such mockery was

TD
 GLOUCESTER

justified class antagonism thwarted. At about the same time

in an expensive psychiatrist’s office, I was learning exactly
why my imitations had been so apt.
During a junior year at Oxford I got the hang of the British
way of doing things. Private proclivities could be just that: one
could couple dutifully, beget sons (and daughters); heterosex-
ual activity could be like a twice-a-year trip to the dentist.
And what of Patricia, my poor wife? She was not naive.
She lacked beauty, charm. I was her chance for making a
decent match. She got my name, sons out of her loins. Al-
though I wasn’t what one in a court of law would call faith-
ful, still, I kept my compact. Our marriage was loveless,
granted, but unlike many of the romantic matches around
us, after a few years we had not gone fetid and bitter.
She divorced me shortly after my diagnosis: public hu-
miliation was not part of the bargain.
Sons? Two. (Like most children, my sons probably count-
ed the issue of their generation and thought, They did it
twice. They were wrong, of course, but not by much.)
Ah, my sons, my sons!
Pardon me, I grow bathetic. It is an unpleasant side effect
of my condition.
But my poor, loony, Charlie! He was sixteen when I had
my first opportunistic infection. Charlie found it embarrass-
ing to: (a) have a father; (b) have a father who was dying; (c)
have a father who was dying of aps.
Dexter, my elder and, I must admit, my more favored
child, seems to be weathering this well. There is a gap of
nearly a decade between him and Charlie. (The spirit was
willing, but the flesh, etc.) Dexter is on the partnership track
at Burton, Myers & Dudley.

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 GLOUCESTER

Charlie is twenty now. He has a band. His band is called

Anti-Man.
“Are you lesbians?” I asked.
No, it’s an ecology thing. They are in favor of one species
becoming extinct: homo sapiens. Charlie is a font of informa-
tion: how many pounds of laundry detergent are used per
capita in the United States each year. (Pardon me, I have for-
gotten the exact figure. The dementia, you know.) Charlie
does not wear deodorant; he launders his clothes but rarely;
he bathes every other week. Not only is he sparing the envi-
ronment by this; it is also a consciousness-raising device: our
species devotes such enormous effort to escaping its animal
origins, and this act—or rather, I should say, omission—re-
minds us we are merely gussied-up primates.
A neurologist enters my room and asks me to repeat a
string of numbers. He asks me to track his moving finger
with my eyes. He says, “Okay” and leaves.

At the moment Charlie is in England. He checks in with

me weekly via telephone (I pick up the tab). On his most
recent call he told me that he had been at Stonehenge, where
he dropped acid and watched the sun rise in honor of the
summer solstice. He informed me that this was “cosmic”
and “heavy, but, you know, not in a bad way.” Charlie and I
seem to have what psychologists call good communication.
My own father was a remote figure. At Charlie’s age, had I
had any experiences that were either “cosmic” or “heavy’—
or both simultaneously—I would have been quite unable to
share these with my father.

They are in and out of my room all day: an infectious dis-

ease resident, an ophthalmologist, a physical therapist, an

77
 GLOUCESTER

occupational therapist, a social worker—she by the name of

Ms. Brenda A. O’Malley, the only one among the lot who
dresses in clothes like those people in the outside world wear.
The rest of them wear pale green scrubs, making them look
like children on a Sunday morning playing hospital in their
rumpled pajamas while their parents sleep in.
Ms. O'Malley sets her black satchel on the floor andI see
that it contains a book called Appreciating Opera. Dear Ms.
O’Malley wants to improve herself. Forgive me my many
petty cruelties, but understand: I must now seize all the op-
portunities. I will not get to be a garrulous old man. (I won-
der if the A. on Ms. O’Malley’s name tag stands for Ann.)
Ms. O’Malley is accompanied by someone called the Dis-
charge Planner.
“T don’t know,” Ms. Brenda A. O’Malley says, “much
about your financial circumstances—”
“T’ve always been comfortable,” I say. I allow the word
comfortable to roll around in my mouth. Does comfortable
mean capable of being comforted?
Ms. O’Malley and the Discharge Planner speak with me
about spending down. They say that even quite considerable
assets can be eaten up.
Munch, munch, munch, I’m a goat out to lunch. It’s a
line from a book I read the boys when they were little. It
cascades through my head all afternoon. Munch, munch,
munch, I’ma goat out to lunch.

Later my son Dexter pops in. “I can’t stay long,” he says, his
eyes darting about.
Dexter leans his right ankle against his left knee. “Dad,”
he says, “I want to ask your input on something! Christ!

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 GLOUCESTER

What a word! Advice, Dad, I want your advice.” Dexter is

drumming his fingers against the aquamarine vinyl arm of
the chair while he goes on: Rob—there is a lag time of a few
seconds while I figure out that this is my brother, the good
senator—has suggested that he make a run for the office of
attorney general. If my son is elected attorney general, the
correct form of address for him will be the Honorable Dex-
ter Barrows. My Dexter!
“Well, Dad, the other thing is—well, money.”
Ah, yes.

My lawyer is another numbers man. This many hundreds

of thousands here; this many hundreds of thousands there.
Sheltered, he says. When he says “trust” he is talking about
something which can be established with a wave of a pen.
Guardians. Majority. Structure. Assets. Closely held cor-
porations. Durable power of attorney. He also talks about
something referred to as “in the event of your—uh—”

I call my progeny together: faithful son and prodigal, who has

cut short his English adventure to return to my bedside. Dex-
ter arrives first, interrupting a book I am listening to on tape. I
can no longer read. Read print, as Ms. O’ Malley would say.
I had several mistaken impressions about this process of
going blind. I thought it was going to be Keatsian. I thought
the light would fade, grow dimmer and dimmer and then
flicker wanly out. But no, it’s quite Byronic. Dexter comes
in and sees me sitting in the dark, switches on the light.
“Christ, no. Jesus-God.” I put my hands over my eyes.
“The light!”
“What?” he says. “What?”

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 GLOUCESTER

“Turn off the fucking light!” I shout.

“Christ, Dad,” he says. The swearing in each other's pres-
ence is new. Then: “Sorry,” more annoyed than repentant.
“What’s up with your eyes?”
“T’m feeling a little better today. Overall. I think. How're
things going with you?”
“Fine,” Dexter says. “Dad. How about your eyes?”
“The infection isn’t responding to treatment,” I say.
“What does that mean?” Dexter asks.
“Tt means I am going blind.”
“Oh, God,” Dexter says. He folds himself double, pounds
his fists on the edges of the orange plastic chair in which he
is seated. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, fuck,” he says.
“Dexter,” I say. “Dexter. I’m sorry—”
“Dad,” he interrupts me. “This guy that’s treating you:
are you sure he’s good?”
“Yes,” I say. “He’s very highly thought of.”
“Yeah, okay,” Dexter says. “But will you just get a second
opinion?”
Poor Dexter. He just cannot believe that all my wit, all
my urbanity, all my cultivation, all my money, all my taste,
all my connections, all my breeding—none of those things
will help me now.
The other issue of my loins enters my room: shaggy, redo-
lent, muttish, ruttish.
“Don’t turn on the light,” Dexter warns. “Dad’s eyes . . .”
“Hey, bro,” Charlie says, hitting Dexter's arm.
“Hey, man,” Dexter says. “How was Europe?”
Charlie leans over and kisses me. He bicycled to the hos-
pital from his shared house in Somerville, and a droplet of
sweat drips off his face and onto mine.
“What's up with your eyes?”

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 GLOUCESTER

“By my lusts were my eyes put out. . .”

“He has an infection. It’s not responding to treatment.
He's going to get a second opinion.”
“Dad,” Charlie chides, “it’s cool that you're gay.”
I never thought of myself as gay. Rather, as having a bad
habit particularly resistant to being broken. The Freud-
ians attempted to bail out the sea of my guilt (that endless
gray Puritan ocean); a behaviorist prescribed a rubber band
around my wrist which I would snap when any “trouble-
some thoughts” surfaced.
“Well,” I say, “my sons.” I push a button and my bed rises
up into a throne. “My kingdom shall be divided.”
I give them a brief overview of the trusts and the guard-
ians, the process of spending down. Medi-Medi, I explain,
as Ms. O’Malley explained it to me. Given my foresight in
applying for ssp1 I have been Officially Disabled for more
than the requisite twenty-four months, so Medicare has
kicked in; and once I am asset-free, Medicaid will also. The
details—for instance, that Charlie’s birthright has been put
into a trust with Dexter as trustee—I glide swiftly over. (I
fear otherwise Charlie’s portion might end up tossed to
street children in Saigon—excuse me, Ho Chi Minh City—
or donated to some foundation for the preservation of ba-
nana slugs.) The lawyer will go over the details with them
tomorrow in his office at 10:00. The papers have been drawn
up. The instruments will be signed and duly witnessed.
Dexter shakes my hand—shakes my hand!—and leaves.
I walk my elbows back along the white sheets, lower my
torso. “You talk, Charlie.”
Like Hamlet, he has undergone a sea change. No, he has
not decided to follow his brother Dexter into public service.

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But the whole trip was—well, a trip. He has gotten in touch

with his heritage—not, you understand, Governor Bradford
and his dour great-great-great-great-great grandfathers. His
mother came from Main Line Philadelphia Quaker stock,
and he has, with great enthusiasm, been reading about the
early doings of Quaker founder George Fox. “Those guys
were really radical, Dad,” he says, growing so excited that
he sprays me with a soft offering of his saliva. “Oops, sor-
ry. You know what they used to do? They used to march
through the streets naked. Through the streets of London.
It was shocking because you couldn’ tell people’s rank—I
mean nobody looked rich or poor when they were naked,
they just looked—you know, like naked people. I mean, I’m
descended from them.”
He is going back beyond this, to the days when our fore-
bears worshipped stocks and stones. He has discovered the
pagan gods of Albion; the band is going to rename itself Ma-
gog after one of them. They will sing of a happier time when
we all lived in huts of twigs and mud, with our goats and
pigs and sheep wandering happily in and out of the manse.
Then he is silent. After a while he says: “Mom says, uh,
she says hi.”
“Tell her hi from me.”
He sits there, studying the elongated tips of his fingers
for so long that I wonder if he hasn’t perhaps imbibed some
illegal substance.
“Dad,” he says. “Dad. Do you worry about the end? I
mean, about really suffering?”
I find it slightly amusing that my son thinks this doesn’t
qualify as real suffering. I must wear it well.
“Because, Dad—I would do anything for you. If you

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ever—wanted—anything—” and I understand he is volun-

teering to help me kill myself. “You know, Dad. You know.”
I strove to break my son of the habit of saying ‘you know.’
I am glad I did not succeed. I reach out and rub his shoul-
ders. “Charlie,” I say. “Charlie.”

The Discharge Planner has done her work. Like pus oozing
from an orifice, like noxious effluent into the harbor, I have
been discharged—into a supported-living situation, a mo-
tel-like building that, although it is only a few years old, has
already begun to go to seed. I am taking classes to help me
adjust to my new state at an organization called Beacon for
the Blind. Even before I joined this elect company I found
the name a strange one—whatever did blind people want
with a beacon?
The Beacon for the Blind van drops me off at my apart-
ment. In dim light the world has become a work of abstract
expressionism. (Bright light has become a work of pain.) I
sit down on the couch, covered with such cheap material
that even through my trousers it makes my flesh prickle. I
lean over and turn on the radio. “What sort of an effect do
you think this will have on Senator Barrows’s career?” I must
admit that my heart leaps up—my brother in trouble! My
handsome, heterosexual brother! My brother the senator,
with his house five times the size of the one that had once
been mine! And then I remember Dexter’s alliance. Or per-
haps it is now a misalliance.
“Well,” the commentator sounds vaguely amused. “I
don’t think the problems that our state’s other political dy-
nasty has been experiencing will make the public any more
tolerant of this situation. I think it’s a lot more likely that

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 GLOUCESTER

their reaction will be ‘Enough is enough.’ It’s also safe to say

that either of these problems coming alone might have been
seen differently—but the fact that Senator Barrows seems to
have left his son to struggle alone with quite a severe drug
problem while he himself was off pursuing this—relation-
ship iia:
It turns out that my seventeen-year-old nephew, Joshua,
was found ina hallway in Roxbury “suffering from an ap-
parent drug overdose,” in the words of the Boston Police.
(I am no monster: the minute | hear this I feel guilty for
my momentary thrill of joy.) His mother was unreachable,
on a photo safari in Kenya; when Joshua came to, he gave
the hospital staff, who had been unable to reach his father, a
number where he could be contacted. His father was chauf-
feured to the hospital by a woman whom the tabloids will
describe as “a voluptuous blond.” An enterprising reporter
jotted down her license number, tracked her down, inter-
viewed her friends and neighbors: the scandal broke.
Four hundred years ago our ancestors would have been
put in stocks or in the dunking chair. My sister-in-law is
shown disembarking from a plane, looking grim and weary.
Joshua enters a fancy drug treatment program, the senator's
office issues a statement filled with “profound regret” and a
plea to be allowed “to work with his wife and son to do all
we can to heal the difficult situation in which we now find
ourselves.”
The press carries reports that his cousin had prostituted
himself to support his drug habit. Dexter has himself pho-
tographed at a childcare center. Dexter has himself pho-
tographed coaching a youth hockey team in Dorchester.
I learn that while Dexter does not believe that we can use

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volunteerism as a substitute for social programs which are

both needed and cost-effective he believes that our society
has become increasingly fragmented: we have an obliga-
tion to all work together for the common good. I am sur-
prised Dexter is not shown in some similar pose with the
alps-stricken. I had thought mine own afflictions would be
“spun.”
But no, Dexter patiently explains to me when he comes to
visit me a week after my discharge: his campaign is aimed at
the “demographics” that he hasn't got. He reports to me on
the results of various focus groups that assure him that “the
gays, as he puts it, will vote for him without his extend-
ing any particular nods in their direction, while the white
working-class vote—
“Well, Dad, I didn’t really come over here to talk to you
about demographics and focus groups.” Dexter is telling me
that he is going to marry. He tells me his fiancée’s name. I do
not recognize it. I was not aware that he even had a steady
girlfriend.
“Sure, sure,” he is saying. Don’t I remember—she came
to the summerhouse a couple of years ago?
I remember a girl, broad-shouldered, big-boned, athletic,
a trifle too hearty, given to guffawing at the dinner table,
long red hair and freckles—the sort who will still look girl-
ish at fifty. I remember that she and Dexter occupied sepa-
rate bedrooms at a time when it was tacitly agreed that no
concessions to propriety were needed.
“Has she been your girlfriend all this time?”
“No. We've been friends for a long time. I think it’s not
bad groundwork.”
He would like, he is telling me, to move into the flat I

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have left empty in Louisburg Square. Of course, I tell him.

Dexter will bed his bride in the same room in which I, on
rare occasion, bedded his mother. He will walk in scuffed
brown leather slippers down the uneven, charming front
steps to retrieve the morning papers which landed in the
bushes, as once I walked in scuffed brown leather slippers.
“Ts this on account of Rob’s shenanigans?”
“Tt moved the timetable alongalittle bit.”
This is how we know the truth in our family: you take
what is said and move it a few degrees to the left. So my son
will enter a marriage—“loveless” sounds too harsh, although
there will be no love there—a marriage of affection, a conve-
nient arrangement. He will follow in his father’s footsteps.

Charlie arrives at my door with an offering of fresh-baked

whole wheat bread. “I made you one myself but it came out
kind of like a brick. So I bought you this at the Zen bakery.”
“Thank you, Charlie,” I say. When I was sighted, I would
have called this action I now make “fumbling”; now I un-
derstand that I am searching the air for the proffered loaf.
Dexter thinks a brilliant doctor could cure me; Charlie
thinks whole wheat bread and Chinese herbs could cure me.
Despair is a meal you eat alone.
But I share the Zen loaf with Charlie, nibbling on my
portion: I’m afraid of what whole wheat bread will do to my
fragile digestive system.
“Dad, this place—it must depress you.”
“It's—” I want to say something clever, but I have noth-
ing clever to say. “Yes,” I say. “Yes.”
“Don’t you want some art to hang on the walls? I could
ask Mom—that Jasper Johns print, you really loved that—”

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 GLOUCESTER

How Patricia and I had rowed over that when we split

apart! Our twenty-five-year marriage may have been a sham in
some ways but, as that junior professor at Harvard who wasn't
given tenure taught me, bourgeois marriage is primarily an
economic arrangement. How we had fought over the spoils.
Recently diagnosed, knowing I would soon, too soon, leave
this world of things forever, how I had clung to every mol-
ecule I possessed. And our convenient marriage, our rational
marriage, our placid marriage turned into an orgy of smashed
crystal and slammed doors. I'd screamed words that I couldn't
have imagined coming out of my mouth: “You ugly bitch! You
ugly dog-faced bitch!” Once I'd called her that she was free to
scream, “You faggot! You fucking little cocksucker!” And then
I was free to come back with something even crueler; and then
she was free, etc. Was it exhaustion that finally made us aban-
don the battle? Or fear of how much further we might go?
“T couldn’ see it well enough, Charlie.”
“Really, Dad?”
“Really, Charlie.” How well could I see it? If I put my
face a few inches from it, I could see an inch or two of
color, which would no doubt awake in me the memory
of the whole . . . I don’t want to tell Charlie how flimsy,
from where I am now standing, all the things of this life are.
Those things, those things! The cars and country houses and
charming hand-painted three-footed teapots bought at the
Paris flea market, the first edition of To the Lighthouse, the
old Billie Holiday 78s, the antique weather vane, the quilt
my great-great-grandmother sewed. . .
My watch beeps. “Time for my Acilovar,” I say.

A month has passed. I am back in the hospital again. A

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 GLOUCESTER

stubborn respiratory infection. “I’m not pessimistic,” the

pulmonologist says. “I wouldn’t panic on this one.” (Will
they ever say: “I'd panic on this one”?)
I am shaking when Ms. Brenda A. O’Malley enters; she
asks me if I am cold.
“T’m scared.”
“What are you scared of?”
Death
I meant to say it with a certain ironic flip, but I didn’t
quite pull it off. Suddenly, there death is—not a man in a
black hood from a Bergman movie, not a Day of the Dead
figurine brought back from Mexico—but my death, my
very own death, my one and only death—hunched naked in
the air between us.
“Yes,” she says, and nods.
I hate her. I want to hit her. (For the record, I have never
hit a woman. I have hit my son Dexter once, my son Char-
lie more than once, I am ashamed to say.) I hate dear Ms.
Brenda A. O’Malley because she does not take thirty-seven
pills a day, because she has no lesions on her skin, no lesions
in her brain. I hate her for loving me; because I do think that
for a few seconds after I said the word “death” she did love
me, as momentarily and intensely as I hated her.
And then: she looks down, smoothes her skirt. We are like
two strangers who had coupled in some anonymous dark
corner.
“You're kind,” I say. “Youre very kind. I want you to go
away.”
“Shall I come back later?” she asks.
Tam not kind. I say, “No. Just go away.”
Forgive and forget: that is our motto here on Ward 148. Did

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 GLOUCESTER

liquid shit pour out of you onto the floor in the hallway
yesterday? Did you awake screaming in the night? Lose your
balance while tottering down the hall and trip over some-
one’s roving Iv pole, ripping the needle from his arm? No
problem. Did you tell nice Brenda A. O’Malley, Msw, to
go away? Why, no hard feelings. She’s back again the next
morning, smiling, swishing into your room in her silk skirt
that rustles against itself.

I sign a form. I understand that these drugs are experimen-

tal; side effects that have been reported so far include nausea,
dizziness, fatigue, anemia (may be severe), gastrointestinal
distress, diarrhea, vomiting...

The doctor comes in again. Up, he says. Down. Elevated.

Normal. A certain medication seems to be working: not,
you understand, on the root of the problem, but on one of
the more irritating symptoms.
Up, he says. Down. 57. 310. 17. 17. 18. When it gets up to
24 I can go home. Home to my motel-like apartment. 19. 21.
A dip down to 18. 22. 23. 27. You're out.
It is Charlie who escorts me home, driving my BMw. I
take his arm as we go into my living facility.
“Dad,” he says when I am ensconced on the cheap couch.
“Something kind of weird happened yesterday.”
“Yes, son?” I say.
“Well, it’s about the money, your money—”
“My former assets—”
“Yeah, whatever. I, uh, I, uh . . . I was going to buy you
this sculpture. From Jake’s gallery. On Beacon Street. I
thought, uh—you know, something you could touch. It’s

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 GLOUCESTER

kind of—Donatello. A lot of texture. I remember how much

you liked the Donatellos when we were in Florence—”
“That’s kind of you, Charlie, but—”
“You know, so I called Dexter, you know—”
“Yes,” I say, “I know Dexter.”
“Sorry. I had to get his permission, on account of him be-
ing the trustee.”
“You are only twenty, Charlie.”
“He said no.”
“I'm glad he did. I wouldn't want you spending your
money.”
“T don’t want the money, Dad. The way I live, I’m happy.
We kind of got ina fight. Dexter and I. And I ended up calling
the bank and thenI talked to the lawyer. It’s all gone, Dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“My money. Your money, the part of it that was supposed
to be for me. I called Dexter back. He said he'd had trouble
raising money—he said it was just a temporary cash flow
thing. Because of Rob’s—you know. Sorry.”
“What?” I say. “What?”
lam free, I am frail, I am light as the wind. Iam ascrap of
man. I have nothing.
“Charlie,” I say, and reach for his hand. It is not where I
expected it to be, and rather than searching the air for it I
withdraw.

The next morning I call Dexter. I leave a message on his

answering machine. I leave a message with his secretary at
Burton, Myers & Dudley. I leave a message at his campaign
headquarters.
He does not return my calls.

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 GLOUCESTER

I go to see my doctor. I have lost another three pounds. I go

to my class at Beacon for the Blind. I listen over and over
again to a single cut on a cp, Maria Callas singing Ombra
leggiera. | leave my daily round of messages for Dexter.

Charlie invites me for dinner at the run-down house in

Somerville he and some of his friends have rented. I'll like
his new place, he tells me: it’s cool. A sort of hippie com-
mune, I gather, although they themselves would not use
those words to describe it.
I must confess, I don’t find this place cool: rather, seedy
and depressing, and not at all clean: I am frightened I will
catch something. Charlie has gotten over his embarrassment
about my state; now he shows me off. “Hey, Gerald,” he says
to a friend of one of his housemates. “This is my father. He’s
got AIDS.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Gerald,” I say.
“Hey,” says Gerald. “Cool shades.”
Sitting in this house—my goodness, how many of these
shaggy youths who straggle through the living room actually
reside here?—reminds me a bit of visiting the New England
Aquarium. I am the observer: these strange creatures are the
ones behind glass. Not strange, mark you, on account of
their leopard print hair and their sundry pierced body parts.
Look at this one, entering the front door, tiptoeing in on his
Rollerblades —who can imagine having a body so obedient
to one’s commands? And look how they simply plunk them-
selves down in a chair without giving it a second thought:
no arranging of joints, no consideration of balance. One
minute they're standing up, then they're sitting down, then
they're up again! Amazing!

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 GLOUCESTER

When I rise, what an enormous number of calculations

I have to perform. Once I was like them. Once I, too, was
twenty and healthy and did not perform these tender, elabo-
rate computations. Once I was uncalculating.
Ten of us sit down at table. The dish we have eaten, I am
informed when we are nearly done with our dinner, is called
Dumpster Ratatouille. Yes, my son, out of his ecological
principles, scavenges what others have discarded. He is not,
he hastens to assure me, in competition with the others
who are neither reapers nor sowers, the genuine and official
Homeless. Having no kitchens, no cast-iron frying pans, no
cutting boards, they pass up the soft green peppers, the to-
matoes with a shopper’s thumbprint in them.
After dinner we drink spiced tea, and one by one they
drift away—to night jobs at Kinko’s, to movies showing at
dingy repertory houses, upstairs to read or listen to their ste-
reos or make love. Only Charlie and I are left.
“T’ve been trying to call Dexter,” I confess. “I’ve been call-
ing him, but he hasn’t—”
“T really wanted to buy that statue for you, Dad.”
“No, Charlie, but—”
“T really wanted to.”
“Tt’s just that I’m so tired,” I say.
“Are you too tired to go home? Do you want to stay here?”
I had meant I was tired in a much more general way, but
suddenly I want nothing more than to sleep—to sleep now,
to sleep here.
“Just for tonight.”
“You can sleep in my bed.”
“Tonight,” I say to Charlie. “Just tonight. I’m tired. I’m
just tired.”

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 GLOUCESTER

“Do you want to go to bed now?” he asks.

But when he leads me to his room and I sit down on his
bed, the sheets are gritty to my touch. “Would you mind,” I
say, “terribly? Changing the sheets . . .”
“Sure, Dad,” he says. I stand gingerly up, and he yanks at
the sheet, reeling it in toward him like a fisherman his net.
He disappears down the hallway, then returns.
“Hey, Dad, you got any quarters?”
“Charlie?”
“For the Laundromat.”
“Oh, don’t—” I say. “Don’t you have a spare sheet?”
“It’s cool,” he says. “The Laundromat’s not far.”
I reach into my pocket and feel for quarters. Quarters are
easy.
“Ts this enough?” I haven't done laundry in a public Laun-
dromat since that summer on the Cape.
“Yeah, Dad. It’s great. You going to be okay? It'll take me
about an hour and a half.”
“I’m fine,”I say.
“T could bring the boom box in here. I have some opera
cps. Well, one, I think—”
“No,” I say. “I'll just rest.”
“You sure, Dad?”
“Tm sure.”
I curl up like a fetus on the bare blue and white mattress
ticking, my head on the naked white pillow, which for some
reason has the word Pillow repeated over and over again on
it in letters several inches high.
I do not drift off to sleep. Drifting is something that
happened in that other world. Here fatigue wars with pain
which wars with a restless feeling in my legs.

a3
 GLOUCESTER

At some point Charlie returns, shakes me awake, leads me

to a chair, makes the bed. Then he unbuttons the buttons of
my shirt, kneels at my feet and unlaces my shoes, pulls my
feet free, tugs off my socks. He leaves my trousers on and
takes me back to bed. :
When I wake up in the morning a breathing blue blur is
lying on the uncarpeted floor next to me. I can just make
out unkempt hair rising like a halo around a head. I smell
his smell.
“Charlie,” I whisper. “Charlie. Are you there? Charlie?”
He grunts. “Dad,” he mumbles. “Dad.”

94
Goliath

The scrivener smoothes the damp clay. With his stylus he

presses down the call to the face-off: “Valley of Elah, Exit 27 off
the Beersheba-Shiloh Freeway. The day after the first full moon
in Kislev. Mark ye this number: 24. Later. PS. Ye are toast.”

Men whose breath smells of wine and herbs clap Goliath on

the back and roar, “24, man. Fucking 24!”
“We're counting on you, boy!”
“24!” they whoop.
Not a wineshop in Gath but they’re saying, “What’s your
pleasure? Wine or barley-brew?” Once disgrace was Goliath's
meat and shame his wine. Now Goliath doesn’t go out with-
out his brothers, who like him are possessors of supernumer-
ary digits, so that the number of their fingers and toes totals
twenty-four, but unlike him having an ordinary height of
three and a half cubits: his posse to protect him from the
force of wild love.

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 GOLIATH

“24, man, fucking 24!”

“Those goddamn sons of Abraham won't know what hit
them.”
Goliath can’t stop a goofy grin from spreading over his
face. ;
“Next one’s on me!” shouts another voice from the dark
cave of a bar.
His brother Lahmi says, “Neither wine nor brew shall
pass his lips till the battle hath been joined and won.” Truth:
the wine and brew make the headaches worse, but if Goliath
says, “I am sore and aching. A thumping is in my head and
the very jointures of my body swell and offend me”—well,
then it’s just: “Brother, what you need is a good fornication!”
“T know a wanton you could lie with carnally,” “Corruption,
”> «

lad, corruption—we all have need of it.”

Lahmi hoists himself up onto a table and puts both his
hands on his brother’s shoulders. “Let not his might run out
of him, like a spring-river overflowing its banks. He shall
make his strength safe and fast, until after our enemies have
been smited. When their blood waters the grasses of the
Valley of Elah, then shall my brother’s seed flow out from
him.
»

Once Goliath was a boy like any other boy: scampering with
his brothers and cousins out of the city gates when they were
opened to let a caravan in, feasting on the wild grapes and
honey they gathered in the wilderness, throwing rocks at the
soldiers guarding the checkpoints. One day they had even
ventured to the chain-link fence topped with coiled razor
wire and hung with metal signs inscribed with runes none
could any longer decode. In the unpruned trees beyond the

96
 GOLIATH

fence they saw the fluttering remnants of torn plastic carrier

bags hanging like moss in the trees.
A wailing hermit, barefooted and white-bearded, pa-
trolling the perimeter of the fence came toward them. The
hermit’s fingernails were long and yellowed, mottled like
the horn of some beast: “The tale has been told to me,” he
wailed, “and I will tell it to thee, how this place came to
be a wasteland giving birth to naught but death: A beast of
the air—some scorned god, mayhaps, or demon—rained
upon the cities of the plain fire and brimstone. The people
within those cities became in a flash naught but shadows.”
The hermit wept as he spake these words and, weeping
still, continued on his way. He turned and called back to
them: “Stay away, my lads, stay well away. Megadeath!
Megamegadeath!”

Goliath grew. At first his growth was measured in mere dig-

its and palms: with pride he felt himself to be gaining in
stature, leaving his boyhood behind. But he grew and grew.
First he towered over his elder brothers by a single cubit,
then by two. From an ordinary boy whom the elders could
not always tell apart from his brothers and cousins, he be-
came singular: the one, the only Goliath. He was taunted in
the streets: “Fee-Fie-Fo-Fum,” the children called after him.
“Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum.”
War looms, and everything changes: the endless 24/7, day
in, day out, same old, same‘old; the whole Monday-noth-
ing, Tuesday-nothing, Wednesday-and-Thursday-nothing,
Friday-for-a-change-a-little-more-nothing, |Saturday-and-
Sunday-nothing thing flies away. No longer do the men of
Gath tremble before death: they rush to meet it, eager to be

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 GOLIATH

tested like metal in the fire. It seems the events of their lives,
which heretofore have been a mere collection of haphazard
incidents, now form themselves into a coherent narrative.
The Philistines look back over their own lives and their life
as a people: the course of it has been leading en to
zero hour in the Valley of Elah.

Pain wakes Goliath. He works his mouth open and shut,

twisting it around, unkinking it. He cups his hands around
his jaw and rubs. The surfeit of growth hormone that causes
giantism results in overgrowth of the bone and temporo-
mandibular joint pain.
It’s not just his jaw that aches: the very sinews and join-
ings of his body do. The shin bone’s connected to the knee
bone, the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh
bone’s connected to the hip bone, etc., and he is aware of ev-
ery one of those bonds.
Sometimes when he wakes in the night, Goliath feels an
overarching tenderness for his body. He imagines that be-
yond the hills of Judea or past the Negev Desert there is a
tribe of beings so colossal that the women of that race could
scoop him up in their arms, cradle him like a baby, rub away
his pains with ointments of camphor and myrrh and some
magical substance of which only they have knowledge.
His brothers, sprawled around him on the portico, breathe
heavily. That sound mingles with the snuffles and sighs from
the sheep and goats in the pens of the adjacent yard. Goliath
clambers to his feet, and, crouching almost double, passes
through the doorway into the house, threading his way
across the sleeping forms of other brothers and cousins who
during the night migrated into the house from the garden.

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 GOLIATH

Peoples of the desert are scavengers, and scavengers are wan-

derers, following water and the promise of water, budging
their flocks of sheep and goats before them, seeking forage
and scrub, moving from the harvest in the olive groves to
tend the terraced hillsides where barley is grown. Inside the
houses of their villages they are not still, not even at night:
they may fall asleep in the gardens at the core of their houses
and then in the middle of the night make their way to the
roofs or stretch out upon carpets laid on the inner floors of
packed earth.
He hears, from the women’s quarters above, the sound of
his sister Asthah’s slow and steady rocking, matched by her
slow and steady mumbling: “Caleb, Judah, Arba, Hebron,
Anak, Sheshai, Ahiman, Talmai, Debir, Kirjath-sepher Oth-
niel Kenaz. Caleb.” She says again, “Caleb, Caleb” and whis-
pers out a hollow laugh.
At first when she came back from captivity, every member
of the household—old and young, master and servant, male
and female—was kept awake by her ceaseless chanting of
the names of cities and towns, kings and gods, the naming
of the lines laid across this land. Now her babble has become
part of the fabric of their lives.
He steps outside into the moonless night. He hears the
chirp of crickets. The stars press close and closer; it seems
they might leave their firmament behind and descend down
to this earthly realm. He hears the sound of cartwheels rum-
bling against cobblestones: no doubt some scavenger seek-
ing discarded wine jugs. The night world of Gath belongs
to those who glean in the dumpsters, the eaters of parched
corn, the harlots and the vagabonds.
“Hey, big boy.”

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GOLIATH

He answers not.
The wanton draws closer to him; the musky scent of attar
of roses fills his nostrils.
“Don't be shy.” Her lips so close the words are lambent
upon his ear. She strokes a single finger down the ridge of
his collarbone.
He shakes himself free of her touch. “Gold have I not;
silver neither.”
“Neither gold nor silver do I seek. Only the pleasure of
lying with you.”
“You think I have forgot who you are. I know you, and I
know your name. Japar. Not long ago you mocked me.”
“Tis ancient history.”
“T am at once far more a man than any other man and far
less. You said my thing was like the budded rose of a child.”
“That was then, and this is now.”
He shows to her his broad back.
“You think we harlots are weak-willed?” she says, massag-
ing his shoulders as she speaks. Her touch soothes his aching
joints. “It is no easy thing to be a woman such as I, in this
new world of the patriarchs. I shall not easily surrender my
desire for you.”
“Now you desire me...”
“We all live within these city walls,” she says, her hands
kneading deep within the muscles of his shoulder. “You like
this, do you not? True enough, once I mocked you, as all
once did. But now thou art no longer scorned and pilloried;
now thou art raised up and praised above all men.”
“Your hands soothe the aching within me.”
“The night is deep and velvet dark. No one will see us.
We can join together in whatever fashion pleaseth us both.”
 GOLIATH

Seeing that he hesitates still, she adds, “Our pleasures

shall be manifold. We may sate ourselves not in some grunt-
ing act of copulation but in a manner more cunning and
more subtle. And in addition to the fleshly pleasures that
our joining brings, on the morrow I shall have the pleasure
of bragging that I have lain with Goliath, that I have borne
our hero's great weight. And you—you may glory in taking
the one who once derided you.”
She takes his hand and leads him toward the room where
she abides, beyond the souk, far from the decent quarters of
the town. He pads after her like an overgrown puppy, watch-
ing her haunches ripple beneath the fine linen of her gown,
drawing in the musky smell wafting after her.

Shortly after Asthah and the others left alive returned, a del-
egation of women from the tribe of Ruth came down from
the hills. The elders barred the city gates against them. The
women veiled themselves in white and chanted, clapping in
rhythmic time, turning now to the right, now to the left: “Tsis/
Astarte/Diana/Hecate/Demeter/ . . . Kali/Demeter/Hecate/
Diana/Astarte/Isis . .. Our goddess gave birth to your god.”
The young men mounted the ramparts of the city walls
and hiked up their robes, showing their bare backsides.
The women shouted, one after another: “Do you think
such a sight strikes fear in our hearts?” “Were you not born
of woman?” 2 “Have not we women given birth to you men?”
0 «

“Have we not wiped clean such butts a million times?” “Nay,

a million multiplied by a million times?”
“Get thee hence!” the men called down.
One of the men lifted a bullhorn to his lips and called
out, “What was the first plague visited upon our people?”
 GOLIATH

“Laser-guided missiles!” the other men chorused back.

“And the second plague?”
“Apache helicopters!”
“And the next plague?”
“Kalashnikovs!”
“And the next?”
“Sidewinders!”
“And?”
“Arrowheads!”
“Hydra rockets!”
“Scuds!”
“And the next plague?”
“F-16s!”
“And the last plague, the worst plague of all?”
“The last plague, the worst plague of all: the plague of
feminists!”
It was said that at night a few of the women who had
returned from captivity made their way—whether of their
own volition or thrust out by their families—to join Ruth's
people beyond the walls of the city.

The next night Goliath awakens again. He lies still upon

the carpet spread upon the earth, staring up at the moon, a
newborn's fingernail. He hears Asthah’s whispered chanting:
“...from the shore of the salt sea, from the bay that looketh
southward, to Maaleh-acrabbim, along to Zin.”
He looks to his left: she is hunkered on the ground next
to him, her eyes fixed intently on him.
She smiles when she sees him, although she does not cease
to speak: “And the fenced cities are Ziddim, Zer, and Ham-
math, Rakkath, and Chinnereth and. . .”

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 GOLIATH

“Hush,” he whispers, “hush.”

He stretches out his hand to her, and she takes it. When
she first came back she could not abide the touch of any
man, not even him.
“Sister, why do you watch over me so?”
“These are the dukes that came of the Horites . . . I did
not join the women of Ruth... Duke Lotan, Duke Shobal,
Duke Zibeon . . . they spoke of healing and 1... Duke Anah,
Duke Dishon, Duke Ezer, Duke Dishan . . . I would that I
could drink their blood . . . and Bela the son of Beor reigned
in Edom: and the name of his city was Dinhabah . . . a cup
of it would I drain to its very dregs . . . And Bela died, and
Jobab the son of Zerah of Bozrah reigned in his stead . ...”
“If it is what thou truly desires, I will hang an Israelite by
his toes and let his blood drain from him and bring it back
to thee.”
“And Jobab died, and Husham of the land of Temani
reigned in his stead . . . I would there could be justice. . . .
And Husham died, and Hadad the son of Bedad, who smote
Midian in the field of Moab, reigned in his stead: and the
name of his city was Avith . . . vengeance is a poor second
... And Hadad died, and Samlah of Masrekah reigned in
his stead... . Yet the poor second must I take. . . and Samlah
died, and Saul of Rehboth by the river reigned in his stead
. . . My hatred sickens me . . . And Baal-hanan the son of
Achbor died . . . to lust for blood . . . and Hadar reigned in
his stead .. . yet I can no more will myself free of it... and
the name of his city was Pau . . . then will the stars from the
Shays 9.7
“Sister, would it soothe you to walk outside beneath the
stars?”

103
 GOLIATH

Her only answer is the slipping of her thin hand into his
paw.
The night is silent save for her whispering, “Pharez begat
Hezron / And Hezron begat Ram .. .” Each time she says
“begat” her voice lilts upward as if she were puzzled.
In the midst of her chant a single word rises like a bubble
in water: “Stars.” And then she continues, “. .. Amminadab
/ And Amminadab begat? Nahshon / and—stars—”
“The stars?” Goliath asks. “The stars are beautiful?”
“Yes, yes,” she mutters, then hurries on, “and Ram begat
Amminadab / And Amminadab begat Nahshon / and Nah-
shon wit
Her shift has slipped down off her shoulder and he glimps-
es her breast, which could be the breast of any other girl on
the verge of womanhood. Her experiences have not marked
her; her body has swallowed up within itself all evidence.
Goliath imagines his foot crushing a grizzled face that
might have belonged to one of her captors; he imagines en-
tering the soldiers they will defeat not with his own member
but with a stick or a spear.
“Hush,” he says.
Asthah is silent but rocks back and forth in agitation.
Shortly a plea bursts out of her mouth: “Oh, brother, let me
say my words again. When they do not issue forth, they dam
up inside me. They clot in my mouth.”
“If silence pains you, you must speak.”
She furrows her brow, taps the air with her left index fin-
ger. “Nahshon, Nahshon, yes, Nahshon. Nahshon begat
Salmon / And Salmon begat Boaz, and Boaz begat Obed.
Issue have I none. I beget naught but these begats.” She spits
these last two sentences into the void that would usually be

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a pause for the drawing in of breath. “Obed begat Jesse, and

Jesse begat David.”
She leans her head against him, not ceasing her mutter-
ing. A night breeze blows the scent of olives from the groves
on the hillside above the city.
At last he speaks the words he has been intending for the
past hour to utter: “Last night—I knew a woman for the
first time.”
He feels her body grow tense, her chanting becoming
more frantic. “Caleb, Judah, Arba—Kind?—Hebron, Anak,
Sheshai, Ahiman, Talmai—thought you of me?—Debir—”
“As the ether that surrounds us are my thoughts of you.”
Pain?” |
“Knowledge had I of her, and there is no knowledge with-
out pain,” Goliath says, but he sees he has not answered her
question in saying this.

When Asthah’s physical wounds had healed they took her to

the witch doctor. Asthah wailed when a dove was sacrificed
so its entrails could be read. The healer steepled his fingers
and said to the family: “Post-traumatic stress disorder hath
triggered an underlying psychosis . . . Go ye to the herbalist
and she will give unto thine child an infusion which may
alleviate some symptoms.” He raised his gaze and met that
of Asthah’s father: “Hereafter will she be mad, even unto the
hour of her death.”
They led her home and shut her up safely in the women’s
quarters.
Goliath’s pain is not the only secret kept locked within
the walls of this house. Better she should have been returned
to them a corpse, a martyr safe in the ground, than this liv-
ing reminder of their humiliation.
eA

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 GOLIATH

The king speaks, and his tribunes and spin doctors and min-
ions sit in the square underneath the date palms alongside
the gurgling spring and relay what he has said: “Evil must
be purged from our world. If the tribes of this land join not
with us, we will make our way alone—for are we not the
Philistines, great lovers of freedom and defenders of liberty?
Yet the Canaanites are now yoked with us, and the Hittites,
and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites—even the Jebus-
ites are getting with the program.”
In the distance dust is being raised by the grunts drilling
on the plateaus in the hills above Gath. The sound of their
chants fades in and out of earshot of those gathered in the
square: “ Left-right-left/ left-right-left / keep ye in step . . .”
“All the tribes of the world,” the minions continue, “cry out
against the crimes of the Israelites. Did not Joshua son of
Nun cause the walls of Jericho to tumble down, and then
did he not utterly destroy all that was in the city, both man
and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass and
then, add ignominy to horror, torching the corpses of man
and beast alike? Did he not then, unashamed, proclaim these
deeds to all the world, and say that his god had commanded
him to do this? And did not their Samson carry out his sui-
cide mission, bringing down the pillars and the roof above, a
mass murderer of innocents?”
“Left-right-left / left-right-left . . .” is carried by the winds
coming down out of the hills.
A chariot with a bumper sticker that says “NUKE SAMMY”
whips past.
Spray-painted in red paint on an adobe wall are the words
GOLIATH IS NOT THE ANSWER. A spray-painted x is splayed

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 GOLIATH

across it, with the words next to it: IF YOU ARENT FOR THE
HOME TEAM, GET OUT OF THE STADIUM.
The town crier, making his circuit, calls out: “The shad-
ow of the sundial stands at its most paltry: noon is nigh. The
king is in his palace; Dagon in his temple; all is well.
“Weather here in Gath: the sun shineth above us, and
sweet rain will fall tonight. Weather in the Vale of Elah: cur-
rent temperature—16 degrees centigrade, with precipitation.
Yet take heart, fellow Philistines, for the casting of sticks this
morning by the prognosticators reveal there shall be blue
skies and bright sun on game day!”
Toward dusk the warriors troop down from training in
the hills. Their faces are streaked with dirt and sweat so their
eyes glisten like black jewels.

A beardless youth rushes to Goliath’s house. “Quickly come!

The co hath need of thee.”
His mother calls to Asthah, “A clean linen tunic! Kohl for
his eyes! Aye, brothers too give hand. Perfumed oils!” She
claps her hands once, twice, thrice: “Apace! Apace!”
“Yet nine days remain until the battle is to be joined,”
Goliath says, lumbering to his feet. “The armies of Israel—
have they attacked?”
“No, no, fear not—” says the messenger.
“My son knows not the meaning of the word fear.”
Goliath stares into his mother’s eyes, which give him no
signal of complicity, only her shining belief in him.
“All the foot soldiers,” gasps out the messenger, “are called
together, arrayed in order in their brigades and their mani-
ples. The light armored vehicles draw nigh into the square,
the pommelers are called for, also the spear-carriers and the

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 GOLIATH

axmen and the javeliners and the thrusters of pikes. Thou

must shew thyself to the armies of our king, that they shall
have the sweet foretaste of victory.”
As Goliath approaches the center of the city, a brother on
either side of him, he smells the sweet water of the spring,
the scent of dates in the air, mixed with the smell of dust
raised by a thousand tromping feet and hears a drill instruc-
tor bellowing at one of the recruits: “Once thou wast regard-
ed as an insect, but now it is evident that thou art less than
that: a maggot. Dost thou admit thou art a maggot?”
“Sire, yes, sire.”
“Say it, soldier.”
“I am a maggot, sire.”
“Louder, damsel—”
Espying Goliath, the drill sergeant turns his attention to
all the men of his company: “Ah, pray silence, for comes
before us now a man who crawleth not on his belly like the
spawn of some slug, but a man whose grasp doth graze the
very heavens . . . the one, the only: Goliath!”
Goliath breaks his stride; looks abashed at all the huzzahs
and alarums, but his Sergeant-York-aw-gee-shucks manner
just makes the crowd exult the more.
Now the overlord strides in front of the assembly, pulls
himself up to his full height, adjusts the folds of his robe,
and says, “Men, looking out upon you, I see arrayed before
me the finest pommels and javelins and chariots and light
armored vehicles in all the Fertile Crescent.” Here he pauses
for the cheers, which duly come. “Yet it is not with these
pommels and these javelins and chariots and light armored
vehicles that the victory shall be ours.”
Goliath hears his name, spoken by a single voice with-

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 GOLIATH

in the crowd then taken up in general: “Goliath! Goliath!

Goliath!”
The commander lets them get pumped up for a while,
then raises both his arms next to his head and gestures for
silence.
“Human factors. Human factors. That shall the battle
decide.”
“And the greatest of the human factors,” calls out a voice
from the crowd, “Goliath!”
“Goliath! Goliath! Goliath!”
“Get up here, boy!” the overlord says.
The hurrahs ricochet inside Goliath’s head. He wonders
what would happen if he were to clap his hands over his ears,
hunker down into a squat, rock from side to side, shouting,
“Cease! Cease forthwith!” But only wonders.
“When they see our Goliath, then shall they turn tail and
run. For his presence shall strike more fear into their hearts
than any of our missiles which seeketh heat or our daisy cut-
ters; yea, even more than the sight of our stealth bombers
in the sky. But then, my men, it must be your duty to turn
this rout into a cleansing: we must purge this evil from our
world forevermore.”
Still they chant his name.

The moon is no longer a Turkish crescent. The moon waxes;

Goliath’s fear waxes with it. He eats the bread of cowardice
alone: it is dry and sticks in his‘craw. He knows full well what
the Israelites will do should they take him captive: double
payback for what the Philistines did to Samson. They will
devise some torment that makes having eyes gouged out, be-
ing bound in fetters of brass and forced to turn a grindstone

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 GOLIATH

in an unending circuit—a human, eyeless mule—make that

look enviable.

That night Goliath watches the waxing moon above the

hills of Judea. The next night it has crossed some boundary
so now it can be said to be swollen, like a hunchback or a
pregnant woman. Just days now.

Asthah finds him in the garden, running his fingernail down

a shaft of grass, splitting it in half.
She lays her hand on his shoulder; he shakes it off, clam-
bers to his feet, paces. (Her frantic speech continues all the
while: “The king of Jericho; the king of Ai; the king of Jeru-
salem; the king of Hebron; the king of Jarmuth .. .”)
“Pray, silence, sister dear.”
She lowers her voice, but does not cease to speak. “. . . the
king of Gezer; the king of Debir . . . I seek to wear out these
words, as a cloth is worn to tatters by usage . . . the king of
Arad; the king of Libnah . . . I love you. . . . Kedesh, Gaza,
Goshen ... As I never have . . . Moab, Kadesh, Golan...
and never will another...”
“IT would it were the day of battle. I cannot abide this
waiting.”
“Gilid, Gilgal . . . in the hills... Lebanon, Manasseh .. .
the first rain hath .. . Jabbok, Bashan. . .”
Goliath speaks for her: “The first rain has fallen?
“Yea . . . Bene-berak, Jahaz, Seir . . . walk outside the
gates? .. . Mizpeh, Jahaz, Bene-berak. . .”
“To walk out in the hills and see the infant grasses that
blanket the hillsides, just arisen after the first rains?”
“Yes! Yes! . . . Gilid, Gilgal, Lebanon, Manasseh . . .”

IIo
 GOLIATH

“I fear to leave the safety of the gates of this city. For whilst
we tarried in the hills, unmindful and distracted, might not
some stranger waylay us? For who would not gloat to say
that they have felled the Philistines’ giant?”
“These are the names of Esau’s sons . . . Flee . . . Eliphaz
the son of Adah the wife of Esau . . . Hie into the hills. . .
Reuel the son of Bashemath the wife of Esau . . . I with thee
... and the sons of Eliphaz were Teman, Omar, Sepho, and
Gatam, and Kenaz...”
“How would we then live? Thou knowest what a poor,
poor specimen of a man am I. My strength is no match for
my vastness: I can neither plow nor sow a field, nor can I trot
alongside of goats or sheep. I suppose I might exhibit myself
to those who would, in terror of me, push toward me aplate
of victuals or a jug of wine, and plead that I, in recompense
of these offerings, depart and harry them no more? We are
trapped within these walls of Gath, and trapped would we
be without them.”
“These are the dukes that came of the Horites, Duke
Lotan, Duke Shobal, Duke Zibeon. . . locusts and wild honey
... Duke Anah /Duke Dishon, Duke Ezer, Duke Dishan...
our bread could be. . . And these the kings: Bela son of Beor
reigned in Edom... water our wine...”
He cannot say to her: My hatred for the enemy seizes me
more fiercely than lust for a woman ever has. I long to see
their skulls cracked open, the soft jelly of their brains oozing
onto the earth, as a jackal’s jaw spills the slime from a bird's
egg upon the ground. I long to hear the wails of their moth-
ers, as even a mother hawk, returning to her nest to find
it ravaged, her never-born fledglings fodder for some fox,
keens as pitifully as any dove.
III
 GOLIATH

I could speak, sister, and I could say many words, but

those words would be like the words you chant. My lan-
guage is like a flock of birds that rises up from some outcrop-
ping and flies away, disappearing into the infinite sky. And
what they would leave behind is the stone upon which they
roosted, dark and motionless: the black rock of my hatred.

Then, at last, the terrible waiting for the day of battle is

coming to an end: the moon is one night shy of full. The
soldiers gather in marching order and set out to the patriotic
shouts (and muffled sobs) of the women and the men too
young or old for battle. Goliath, in a tumbrel surrounded by
his brothers, is the last to go.
Soon they are arrived at the mountaintop where the
armies of the Philistines are encamped, opposite the moun-
taintop where the armies of the Israelites are encamped. He
finds at the very forefront of the bivouac a tent of gargan-
tuan proportions for him to therein lodge—an omen unto
the enemy.
He ambles toward the tent, but the morale officer and his
crew stop him and say, “Not yet, brother. Not yet.”
One of the crew adds, “For fear, like desire, is always
about the event which has not yet occurred.”
“College boy,” says the morale officer, and claps his sub-
altern fondly on the back. “Hold fast, Goliath, let you show
yourself in the sliver of time between dusk and darkness. Let
the sight of you beget fear in them, and then their night shall
be a confinement in which that fear shall swell and grow like
a babe in its mother’s womb.”
And so he waits, seated at a trestle table at the front of
the improvised mess, devouring the food put in front of

II2
 GOLIATH

him: mutton, squab, figs, olives, loaves of bread, pomegran-

ate juice mixed with honey and water, goat, a vast pottage
of barley. The mess hall grows quieter and quieter and then
quiet. Goliath is licking goat grease from his fingers when he
notices the absence of talk, hearing nothing but the chirping
of crickets and the wind rustling the leaves of the olive trees
in the groves below them.
And he sees that they are watching him attempting to fill
the gorge within him. He surveys the mound of olive pits,
the ribs of goat and sheep, the bowls scraped almost clean
with the edge of his spoon. Yet he hungers still.
He turns his head away in shame.
But then he hears a single voice crying out, “Goliath!”
And then the chant becomes general: “Go-li-ath! Go-li-
ath!” They clap their hands and stamp their feet upon the
earth in rhythmic time, and his brothers urge him to his
feet, put a jug of wine in each of his hands.
“Go-li-ath! Go-li-ath!”
“Down ’em, bro. Down ’em.”
He sets first one then the other jug on the table. If he were
to walk down this mountaintop, walk north, might he not
live a life in the desert? Slay with his hands the wild beasts—
lions and bears and crocodiles—all other men fear; or per-
haps pluck locusts and doves from the air? His bones would
ache from sleeping in the open; loneliness would be his lot,
but might it not be better than this?
Lahmi fixes his eyes on him. The eyes of his brother are
like the eyes of Asthah; they are like his own eyes. If Samuel’s
army routs the Philistines, what fate will befall them?
He hoists a jug into the air, chugalugs the wine, repeats
the action with the other jug.

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 GOLIATH

“Goliath! Goliath! Goliath!”

Lahmi hands him another jug of wine, and then another,
and then another.

A Bedouin, acting as a spy for the Philistines, comes to their

encampment and is led into the king’s tent.
“Of the giant they have word, and the more they whisper
about him, the more his height increases. From six cubits
to eight to nine: now the common soldiers say he is the
very image of the colossus which bestrides the harbor at
Rhodes.
“Their morale office brought in a doctor from U. of Beth-
lehem who delivered unto them a lecture in which he spoke
much of the excess of growth hormone which causeth gi-
antism resulting in carpal tunnel syndrome, hypogonadism,
lethargy, male lactation, cardiomyopathy—but afterward I
heard the soldiers aver to one another that it was all just so
much Bs to keep them from deserting.
“Another rumor hath gone round—started, I believe, by
the brass when the lecture by the physician failed to soothe
the men—that Goliath is not a man at all but a form of
wood or wicker, clothed like a man and animated by guy
wires and pulleys and levers. But in response to this the
common troops doth say: If they have the cleverness to cre-
ate such a thing, which walketh and talketh and moveth like
a man, had we not best fear them, and fear them sorely—for
verily what other sorts of weapons might they have?”

Goliath spins from all the wine. How sweet this addled dull-
ness! He gets led to the front of the encampment, paraded
back and forth, men of normal height walking next to him.

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 GOLIATH

He sees the watch fires in the opposite valley flickering on

the faces of his enemy.
Full night descends; he half staggers, is half carried to his
tent. In and out of drunken sleep he hears the women camp
followers playing psaltery, tabouret, pipe, and harp, their
songs at times elegies for those who have fallen in battles
past, at other times taunts directed at the opposite moun-
tain: Our slaves were you once, and again will be... Our god’
greater than your god, our gods greater than yours / Dagon’
greater than Jahweh, Dagon’ greater than all...

His body being shaken. “The time is nigh.”

He groans and rolls over onto his side.
“Up, man. The army awaits.” Lahmi holds forth a cup of
strong drink: “Hair of the dog that bit you.”
“Go ’way.”
Lahmi leans toward him, uses all his strength to hoist Go-
liath’s head up, raises the cup to his lips. “Drink, bro. Drink.
The enemy masses upon the opposite hillside. Ye must
arise.
“We will win or we will lose...’
>

“We will win.”

“Yesterday I scarce dare bid farewell to Asthah. I could
not bear the look upon her face.”
“What need have you for fond farewells? In yet a few
hours the enemy will be routed and you will be home. Soon-
er than this night shall you see Asthah again; you shall eat
the midday meal with her. Within hours will she feed you
figs and almonds and rub your skin with fragrant oils.”
“Ye speak with such great surety. Yet when a battle is un-
dertaken who but Dagon knows where it shall end?”
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 GOLIATH

“Goliath, none of your philosophy.”

From outside the tent Goliath hears the sounds of march-
ing feet as the men form themselves into platoons and then
squadrons. Underneath their feet they trample wild sage and
rotting figs, releasing smells both sharp and fetid into the
alr.

116
The Blind Marksman

The blindness in this story isn’t a metaphor.

Where are you reading this? Maybe you are home on
your living-room sofa, pillows propped behind you, feet up
on the coffee table, Npr playing in the background. May-
be youre hanging onto a subway strap, taking the D train
from Brooklyn into the city. You don’t ask, “Why is this sofa
here?” “What does this subway strap mean?” The blindness
in this story is a solid, meaningless thing, like the sofa or the
subway strap.
The blind marksman awakes at dawn in a land far, far
away from the land of D trains and radios playing Npr. The
country of the blind marksman is rocky and mountainous,
and it is only with a tremendous force of will that its people
have ever managed to wrest a living from its poor soil. It is
also, alas, in between two great land masses that frequently
go to war against each other, so that first one side comes
tromping across its borders and lays claim to it, and then the

oy)
 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

other, and then the first side again. This has been going on
for millennia.

For the blind marksman dawn isn’t rosy-fingered; dawn is

the sound of water rumbling and gushing and whistling
through the pipes above and below him. His neighbors in
the grim block of flats are arising and padding, some in bare
feet, some in scuffed brown slippers, to their bathrooms.
They are washing themselves; they are emptying their
bowels and bladders; some are shaving the hair from their
faces. They brush their teeth, ridding their mouths of the
aftertaste of the grain liquor they consumed the previous
evening. Soon the blind marksman arises; he slips his feet
into scuffed brown slippers and pads down the hallway and
cleanses himself inside and out; he shaves his face clean.
Next door to this block of flats there is another one, quite
identical: the same concrete block construction—indeed,
the exact same number of concrete blocks has gone into
building it; it, too, sits on a scrub patch of earth; it has peo-
ple inside it more or less like the ones in the building of the
blind marksman; and next to it there is another building,
and next to it another one, and so on and so on and so on,
all throughout the capital of this beleaguered land.
It would undoubtedly be more pleasant for my reader if
I could describe, in addition to these grim buildings built
during the Era of Socialist Construction another, older part
of the city—perhaps a squat, thousand-year-old Orthodox
cathedral across the way from a blue and white mosque; and
further tell you that at certain hours the pealing of church
bells and the voice of the muezzin calling the faithful to
prayer coincide, weaving in and out of each other. But |

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 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

cannot. In the 1920s this place was chosen as the capital pre-
cisely because it had no history, because none of the rival reli-
gions and clans and regions of this beleaguered land thought
of it as belonging to them. It was merely a place where one
changed horses or spent the night on a long journey. It
would be something like a truck stop along 1-80 in Nebraska
being declared our capital. At the center of the town, a num-
ber of state buildings grouped around a central square were
erected and later these concrete block apartments surround-
ing them. There are no outskirts to this town: it just ends.
And then there are only the winding narrow roads leading
into the battered mountains.
The blind marksman goes into the kitchen, where he
knows there is no food. Nevertheless he opens the cupboard
and there finds only a bag with some flour in it. He can
hardly have plain flour for breakfast.
He sits down at the table. One the table is the medal he
received for being a blind marksman. The medal is solid in
his hand, solid like a sofa or a subway strap or his blindness.
He touches it all over; he touches the words engraved on it
and he touches the face of the late Great Pilot of Our People,
the Beacon of Hope to the Proletarians of the World, the
Heroic Leader of the Struggle against the Fascist Invader. He
sets the medal back down on the table, sighs, and starts out
into the hallway and down the stairs.

This is how the blind marksman became the blind marks-

man.
When he was seven years old he was sent away from his
village in the mountains to a school for blind children; there
he learned to read Braille and was one of a small group that
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 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

sang songs to distinguished visitors about the beauties of

his native land and the glories of socialism. He was chosen
for this honor because he had a sweet, clear voice and also
because he had not, unlike many of his fellow students,
been paradoxically blinded by the venereal diseases that had
ceased to exist under socialism.
He also learned to mend shoes.
In the Era of Socialist Construction, no longer was the
cobbling of shoes to be carried out in small, dusty shops by
petty bourgeois entrepreneurs, who might toil on the col-
lective farm by day and then make a few extra deks in the
evening hammering heels back onto soles and restitching
tongues. It was inevitable that such cobblers would find
themselves having more than others around them; and hay-
ing more, they would want more, and thus the whole ter-
rible cycle would begin again. Each nail they drove into a
sole would be a nail in the coffin of socialism.
In the glorious new world shoes were to be repaired as part
of a state enterprise, and the blind were to be the employees
of this enterprise. The blind boy, now a blind youth, went to
the capital city and worked in this great undertaking. Every
week a truck pulled up and discharged an enormous load
of shoes, each pair tied together with a wire that also ran
through a yellow tag bearing the name and address of the
possessor of the shoes, who was usually going about barefoot
while awaiting their return, having no second pair.
(Part of this great enterprise was a vast room where shoes
that had become separated from either their opposite num-
ber or their yellow tag waited patiently to be reunited with
that to which they belonged. Of course, there was also a
form (in quintuplicate, please) filled out by those whose

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 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

shoes did not return from their trip to the city. “Color of
shoes?” the form asked, and everyone wrote: “Brown,” for
no one possessed shoes of any other color; when asked for a
description, the befuddled peasants simply wrote the word
“Shoes.” They could not imagine what else one could say
about a pair of shoes.)
The shoes in this land were repaired over and over again;
they were soled and resoled; their leather had the texture of
the palm of a hand. The humble feet of the proletarians and
peasants sweated in these shoes as they labored in their rocky,
mountainous fields and trod through barnyards or jumped
out of the way of a hot ingot dancing across the floor of a
steel mill. Their shoes smelled like old cheese, they smelled
like barnyards, they smelled faintly of dead flesh.
During this period, the Era of Socialist Construction,
honors were bestowed once a year on the anniversary of the
day when the fascists had been driven from the land. It was a
known secret that the Great Pilot of Our People, the Beacon
of Hope to the Proletarians of the World, the Heroic Leader
of the Struggle against the Fascist Invader preferred not to
give medals to those who could, in any way, someday pose
a threat to him. The Great Pilot of Our People, the Beacon
of Hope to the Proletarians of the World, the Heroic Leader
of the Struggle against the Fascist Invader preferred to make
heroines of women who had given birth to fifteen children
and whose bodies were thick and square and spongy and to
make heroes of workers who had been terribly maimed in
the Battle for Production.
(One year an agricultural worker who had lost a leg rush-
ing to save a child from a threshing machine was nominated
for honors by the local branch of the party. His nomination
THE BLIND MARKSMAN

was duly accepted, the required affidavits were obtained, his

political and family background investigated, all proved sat-
isfactory and finally, on the great day, he strode across the
stage set up in the main square of the capital to receive a
medal and a handshake from the Great Pilot of Our People,
the Beacon of Hope to the Proletarians of the World, the
Heroic Leader of the Struggle against the Fascist Invader.
Those whose job it was to read the mercurial moods of the
Great Pilot of Our People, etc., understood immediately
that a terrible mistake had been made, for the agricultural
worker scarcely limped—the loss of the limb had been be-
low the knee. Furthermore, he was square-jawed and rug-
ged and handsome: he looked like a socialist realist painting
come to life. Alas, he died in a tragic accident not long after;
those who had moved his nomination along were discov-
ered to have engaged in various nefarious schemes for the
destruction of socialism and were duly tried, found guilty,
and sentenced for their heinous crimes.)
The blind marksman, who was not yet a marksman, be-
lieved in the word the way the sighted believe the evidence of
their eyes. (Maybe the God of the Gospel According to John
was a blind God.) When he heard about the horrors of the
war in Viet Nam, they were as real to him as the color brown.
He read about the war in Braille and sometimes at night he
dreamed the feel of certain words beneath his fingers: defoli-
ation, Mekong, Ho Chi Minh, massacre. His friends described
for him the picture of a napalmed Vietnamese girl running
toward the camera, her clothes and her skin burned off—
running from the temple where the people of her village had
taken refuge, the temple that had then been bombed by the
imperialist aggressor.
ca,
 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

You are now to shed that ironical attitude I have worked

so hard to awaken in you during the course of this story. You
are to think of that feel of napalm on flesh as you think of the
marksman’s blindness and the sofa and the subway strap.

The Great Pilot of Our People, the Beacon of Hope to the

Proletarians of the World, the Heroic Leader of the Struggle
against the Fascist Invader said that nothing would stop the
imperialist aggressor and that here, too, in this tiny, poor
country, they must make ready for the battle that would
someday come. The Great Pilot, etc., waxed most eloquent:
he said that although their rivers would run red with blood,
they would not surrender; the wails of women mourning the
dead would resound through all the hills and valleys of this
great and poor land, and still they would fight on.
So the blind man learned to be a marksman so he could
play a role in the coming battle. It is not as hard to be a blind
marksman as many sighted people would imagine. You must
stand in exactly the same place on the firing range every
time, you must have a furrow against which you always push
your toes, and the target must always be placed in the exact
same place. You must learn where the butt of your rifle must
rest; your bones and muscles must know it to the fraction of
a millimeter. Then, once you have got it right, you will hit
the bull’s-eye every time. (How exactly this skill would be
translated to the battlefield is difficult to imagine.)
Soon the prowess of the man on the rifle range came to
the attention of the district party leader; the blind marksman
was nominated for the highest honor in the land; the man’s
background was investigated. It was confirmed that not only
did he come from the poorest sector of the peasantry but his
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 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

father and seven of his eight uncles had fought in the War of
National Liberation.
On the day of the ceremony a car was sent for him—while
he had ridden in buses and trucks, he had never before been
in a car—and he was driven to the edge of the great square
in the center of the city. There three schoolgirls stepped for-
ward and sang himasong, as he used to sing songs for dis-
tinguished visitors to the blind school. His arms were filled
with heady-smelling roses. He was led into another car and
was driven as part of a motorcade around the streets of the
city, past the cheering throngs.
Then the Great Pilot of Our People, the Beacon of Hope
to the Proletarians of the World, the Heroic Leader of the
Struggle against the Fascist Invader presented the medal
to the blind marksman and read out a commendation that
stated that the blind marksman could hit moving targets
at a range of half a mile and that the blind marksman had
trained himself to smell an airplane in the sky long before it
could be heard. The blind marksman stood on the stage in
front of the cheering throngs with his mouth working like a
fish’s: he was about to tell the Great Pilot of Our People, etc.,
that no, it was not true he could hit a moving target at such
a range, and as for smelling an airplane in the sky—why,
such a notion defied the laws of physics. But how could he
possibly publicly contradict such a great man?
The cheering throngs departed. They went home to their
apartments made of cement blocks and poured themselves
shots of grain liquor. They remembered the original Day of
National Liberation. Each of them recalled something from
that day with great joy—maybe the quality of exception-
ally bright sunlight or the cacophony of all the church bells

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 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

ringing wildly together or a child standing in the middle of

a square, shouting over and over again a word for which she
might have been shot for saying the day before.
They could not understand why they were now so
unhappy.
Their neighbors came over, each carrying a bottle of grain
liquor dangling between two fingers. One neighbor poured
the other a drink and said, “The blind marksman can smell
an airplane ten miles distant in the sky.” He said it with deep
devotion.
They drank some more.
After a while one said to the other, “The blind marks-
man can smell an airplane ten miles distant in the sky,” and
instead of wiping a tear of socialist pride from his eye he
began to laugh. His friend was at first shocked, and then he
began to laugh too. They laughed so long and hard that an
angry wife appeared in the doorway, her face bruised with
sleep, and said, “What’s so goddamn funny that you woke
me up?” But they were laughing so hard they couldn’ say,
and she stalked back to bed, muttering, “Everything’s an ex-
cuse to get goddamn drunk. It’s Sunday, no work, he gets
drunk to celebrate. Monday, back to work, well, he has to
console himself. Day of National Liberation—it's his patri-
otic duty!”

Within a few weeks, when women had been waiting in line

for three hours to buy half a pound of meat, one of them
would be sure to say—If only the blind marksman were
here!—The blind marksman?—Yes, don't you know the blind
marksman can smell a sheep two hundred miles away, in It-
aly, even, aim at it, and his bullet will hit so true that it will
125
 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

go straight into the sheep’s heart.—But what good does a dead

sheep in Italy do us? And the person who had spoken origi-
nally would shrug and say—Yes, thats why were waiting in
line, in spite ofthe blind marksman.
Or when the bus broke down someone was sure to say—
Ifonly the blind marksman were here.—The blind marksman?
What would he do?—About a bus that doesn't work? Nothing
at all. And then everyone would laugh.
(This was the sort of humor that flourished under the
regime.)
One day the blind marksman was waiting for a bus; the
bus stop happened to be next to a public toilet. A woman
exited the toilet, releasing an onslaught of foul air as she did
so. She took her place in the bus queue, muttering to the
woman who happened to be standing next to her about the
filth. (She complained only about this single toilet, which
was not a crime against the state. If she had said what she
wanted to say: Why is it that our drains are always clogged
with filth, that our city has such a rank odor, that we always
feel as ifwe are wading through viscous air when we walk down
the street? —that would have been a crime against the state.)
The stranger next to her nodded in weary sympathy and,
jutting out her lower lip, said, “If only the blind marksman
were here.”
The woman nodded and chuckled in response.
“But I am the blind marksman,” the blind marksman
said.
They began to laugh.
“Why are you laughing?” the blind marksman asked.
“He says he’ the blind marksman!” the woman called out,
and everyone in the line laughed.

126
 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

A few weeks later the blind marksman was waiting in a

line to buy toilet paper, and a woman with tired legs said to
another woman with tired legs, “I hear that the blind marks-
man can shoot rolls of toilet paper out of the sky.”
“If only he were here.”
“T am here,” the blind marksman said, stretching out his
hands for the arms of the women. Of course they began to
laugh. He tried to explain to them about how the Great Lead-
er had perhaps overstated things a bit, and about the picture
of the Vietnamese girl running as her skin was eaten with na-
palm, and the way he dreamed at night of the feel of the words
Mekong and defoliation, but they only laughed harder.
The blind marksman shouted, “What is so funny?” and
then he felt a hand from behind shoving him down to the
ground.
(It is my personal opinion that the Great Pilot was like
the cooker of kasha who understood that in order to keep
the pot from boiling over the lid must be set slightly askew.)

Many years later the imperialist aggressor did come to

these shores. He came not in a B52 with canisters of napalm
but in a Santa Claus sleigh. He flew over those mountains
and villages and muddy, unpaved roads, flinging from his
enormous sack bottles of Coca-Cola, televisions, laundry
soap, organically grown coffee from the highlands of Gua-
temala, laptop computers, Mercedes Benzes, sushi, Swatch
watches. Santa sent down penicillin, pornography, birth
control pills, silk underwear, goose down comforters, and
electric wheelchairs. He scattered cameras, costume jewel-
ry, aluminum cooking pans, Georgia O’Keefe prints, video
games, cellular telephones, bottles of wine, eyeglasses, cars,

127
 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

sunscreen, seventy-seven different kinds of soap, cashmere

sweaters, Johnny Walker Red, jams made from organically
grown raspberries, aloe vera lotion, sunglasses, fur coats,
down jackets, vermicelli and fusilli wrapped in airtight plas-
tic packages; he shoved out cheap sectional sofas with their
joints glued together upholstered in imitation leather, con-
doms, compact discs of Mozart's Requiem Mass in B Minor
and Snoop Doggy Dogg, bagels, polyester clothing in styles
that had long since ceased to be fashionable in the West,
bottled mineral water, cartons of cigarettes, underwear
that came packaged in plastic wrap like the pasta. The be-
wildered people ran about underneath this rain of gifts. In
their eagerness to catch them they jostled each other aside,
sometimes even stepping squarely on those who were down
in the mud, struggling to get back on their feet. The lucky
ones held out their arms to catch the manna from heaven
and then staggered under its weight. Others stood resolutely
with their arms folded across their chests, saying, “We will
not be bought by the capitalists’ trinkets,” and were then
clunked squarely in the head by the outpouring.
“Ho-ho-ho,” Santa called as his magic sled flew through
the sky. “Ho-ho-ho.”
And then one day the state for which the blind marksman
had toiled was no more. For a few days afterward the blind
marksman reported for work at the shoe cobbling enterprise,
but the trucks no longer arrived either to drop off new loads
of to-be-mended shoes or to cart just-mended shoes up into
the mountain villages along the narrow, winding roads. The
People’s Printing Office no longer printed either the yellow
tags or the quintuplicate forms for the reporting of mislaid
shoes.

128
 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

One by one the other blind cobblers made off with the
tools the state had provided for their use: that is to say, they
expropriated the means of production. They also took for
themselves a goodly share of the shoes that had been cobbled
and not yet fetched and those from the vast storeroom wait-
ing to be returned to their long-lost owners. But the blind
marksman refused to have any part of this. He showed up
every day and sat in the empty room, now silent; that room
which had once resounded with the plinking of hammers. It
was a crime against the People to do otherwise. His friends,
the other cobblers, laughed and said after all, there was no
more People, only people, and what was he going to do, sit
there forever, waiting for the state to resurrect itself? Why,
he might as well wait for the Second Coming of Christ.
But the blind marksman understood that no one had
wanted the young girl to run, naked and screaming, from the
temple as the napalm burned her flesh—not the photogra-
pher whose reputation was made by taking this photograph;
not the workers in the napalm factory; not the grocers who
sold string beans and chicken to the workers who worked
in the napalm factory; not even the simple cobbler in the
faraway land who cobbled the shoes of the workers in the
napalm factory; not even the man who had flown the air-
plane—none of them had wanted this to happen, but none-
theless it had happened, and each one—the photographer,
the cobbler, the greengrocer, the pilot—was a part of it.
But at last the blind marksman surrendered himself to the
reality that there was no path open to him except to become
a member of the petty bourgeoisie. So he took the tools he
had worked with all these years and went to the square at
the center of the capital with a blanket that he spread upon
129
 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

the ground and asign that said “Shoes Repaired.” People

came and stood, sometimes like a flamingo on one foot,
sometimes their two stockinged feet planted solidly on the
cobblestones of the central square, while he repaired their
shoes. He handed them their fixed shoes; they handed him
the agreed-upon sum of money. The cobbler was moved by
the simplicity of this transaction.
Soon the square was transversed by foreigners who had
come out of the sky like the capitalists’ commodities. Some
of them were tourists and some of them were twenty-seven-
year-old assistant vice presidents at Chase Manhattan Bank
and 1BM. The people of this beleaguered land trailed after the
foreigners as they walked across the square, or they watched
them when they were sitting in a cafe. They were so astonish-
ingly foreign! The shoes of the foreigners were smooth and
did not reek of cheese and barnyards and death. One could
even imagine that after going about the town for the entire
day, carrying their laptop computers and having lunch with
this. person and coffee with that and handing the person
across the table from them a thick gold-nibbed fountain pen
with which to sign the papers the foreigners had drawn up,
the foreigners would drift back to their hotel rooms together
and drink champagne from one another’s shoes.
The people were ashamed of having shoes as finely
grained with cracks and fissures as the palms of their hands;
they were ashamed of having shoes that smelled. They asked
the Imperialist Santa for shoes. The next time he flew over
their land he showered them with Nikes and Reeboks and
black stiletto heels; he flung down Gucci loafers and cheap
imitations of Gucci loafers, shoes made of leather and ones
made of canvas and plastic. People began to throw their

130
 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

shoes away when the heels wore down or the leather ripped:
it was cheaper to buy a new plastic pair. Fewer and fewer
people came to get their shoes repaired at the blind marks-
man’s corner of the square.

One day when he was gathering up his things to go home,

he discovered a small pile of coins in the corner of his blan-
ket. At first he could not understand what they were do-
ing there. Then the knowledge struck him with the force
of a blow: someone had mistaken him for a beggar and set
a coin on the corner of his blanket and then someone else,
seeing the coin there, had made the same assumption. His
first thought was that he would give these coins to one of the
beggars who sat near him. But he had so little food in his flat
that he slipped the coins into his pocket, feeling like a thief.
Shame was a luxury he could no longer afford.
His sign “Shoes Repaired” came to seem like the signs
that are held at busy intersections in the U.S.: “Will Work
for Food.”

But on this day, the day that began with the dawn sounds of
rushings and gurglings in the pipes, when he was sitting on
‘his blanket with his cobbler’s tools in front of him and his
sign next to him, he heard a series of rapid clicks.
“What is happening?” he called into the air. “What is go-
ing on?”
In response he heard only the click-click-click again.
“What are you doing?” he called, with fear in his voice.
A sighted beggar who sat near him called to him, “Don't
worry. It’s only a foreign photographer. He's taking pictures
of you.”

131
 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

“No,” the blind marksman shouted to the photographer.

“T don’t give you permission to take my picture.”
The photographer was a young man with a social con-
science from a well-to-do family. He might have gone to
law school or taken over his father’s business, but instead he
had become a photographer. He had come here to show the
world the devastation that this thing called “freedom” had
wrought on this poor land.
“How much do you want?” the photographer said.
“I want nothing from you,” the blind marksman shouted.
“Tr’s all right. I'll pay you,” the photographer said, shov-
ing several folded bills into the blind marksman’s hand.
The blind marksman crumpled up the money and threw
it back.
The camera kept clicking.
The blind marksman leaped to his feet. “I repair shoes! I
am not a beggar! My name is Memal Keshu. I am the blind
marksman. I taught myself to fire a rifle so that I could de-
fend our poor country against the imperialists. I do not give
you permission to take my photograph.”
Memal Keshu darted about, going after the sound of the
camera's click-click-click, but of course the photographer,
being much younger than Memal and also sighted, darted
swiftly out of his way.
He continued taking pictures.
The first photographs, the ones he had taken before the
blind marksman realized he was having his picture taken,
showed a face that might have belonged to a Buddhist monk
in Viet Nam assuming the lotus position before he set him-
self on fire to protest the war.
The photographer imagined the caption that might run
132
 THE BLIND MARKSMAN

under the later shots: “This nation retains its fierce and
quixotic pride. A blind beggar becomes angry at a photo-
journalist for taking his picture...”
Memal Keshu’s face burned with rage, and his hands were
formed into fists that beat at the empty air in front of him.
The camera kept shooting.

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 Our Ned

Iam not Charlotte Bronté, and this is not a nineteenth-cen-

tury novel. I know better than to part my hair straight down
the middle of my head, a proto—Calvin Coolidge do that
makes anyone look altogether too chaste and stalwart. In this
text there’s no madwoman infected with a dark hereditary
taint roistering about in the attic; no heroine yearning for—
what exactly is it those Dorotheas and Shirleys and Janes
want?—hankering after some—ineffable!—something. No
‘hero out to test his mettle, battered about by the vicissitudes
of life, a child of the industrial revolution and bourgeois in-
dividualism following the orb of his ambition.
In this story the fools come out of the attic.
And here’s Ned Ludd now, clambering down the ladder
from the loft above the family’s hall, having set a bolt of just-
weaved cloth up there, waiting for the clothier, who comes
on Tuesday, to fetch it.
Ned Ludd. Hang a little flesh on the bones of those two

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 OUR NED

words. Not a lot; this was Leicestershire in the waning days

of the eighteenth century and few of Ned’s kind were plump.
Although the cottagers hereabouts will soon come to look
back on these days as a time of almost paradisiacal bliss and
plenty, the Ludds ate porridge and milk for breakfast every
morning and too often for supper as well, although some-
times there was bread and rancid bacon and beer for the
nighttime meal, suet dumpling on the odd Sunday.
And from that phrase, “hanga little flesh on his bones,”
the image of a jut of shoulder bone where it joins the clav-
icle: young Ned, a lad of sixteen, shirtless on a hot day in
July, in a cottage where the treadle of a loom worked by
Ned’s dad creak-creak-creaked, and the air was filled with
filaments of cotton and linen, white motes dancing in the
shafts of light that streamed through the unshuttered win-
dows. Ned carded the fleece, laying the fibers straight be-
tween two steel-pronged brushes; his mam and sister Liza
spun; his brothers George and William were supposed to be
foddering the ox, although they'd taken advantage of their
respite from the watchful parental eye and were having a bit
of a lie-down out in the pasture.
He liked his name, Ned did, the flat-footed spondee of
it, the way his family name echoed his Christian one. Of
course, the curate hadn’t said “Ned” when he dabbed his
head with water, for there was no Saint Ned. Edward. A lad’s
tongue could get twisted around itself trying to say some
words. The best words were short. Eat. Beer. Gin. Cock.
Cock. That was a good one. Temperance and starvation and
clothier, those were all big words. Ned. Ludd. Simple.
The room smelt of sheep’s tallow: so many thousands of
candles had burned in it of a night that the house exhaled a

136
 OUR NED

constant odor of mutton fat. The close air was made closer
still by the fire, on which their evening meal—porridge; you
didn’t expect something finer, did you?—was simmering in
a kettle, bubbles of air rising through the thick oats, pucker-
ing the surface and going phut.
Ned scratched himself. His ma was a cheery sort, big-
bosomed and quick with a laugh, but not, it must be con-
fessed, the finest of housewives—she’d rather sit by the fire
and warm the soles of her feet than lug the bedding and
straw mattresses out to the yard for an airing and chase the
bedbugs, fleas, and lice with a vinegar-soaked rag, so the
family shared not just collective cottage labour but also a
common itch.
A bead of sweat oozed from a pore above Ned’s left nip-
ple, joined with another, and another, and trickled down his
chest. He felt its progress, thought it was a fly crawling along
him, swatted at it, started a little at the dampness, continued
to card the fleece, but his swatting and starting had made his
stroke go off, and one of the spikes gashed open his index
finger. Tears sprang into his eyes.
“Mind!” his father shouted. “You're bleeding all over the
wool.” ;
Ned glared at his dad. Bad temper ran in this family’s
blood. His father moved his gaze from his son to the strap
hanging on the wall, gave a “mind yourself” nod to Ned.
“Don't cry, Neddie.” His mam bustled about, fetching a
cloth from the cupboard, ripping it into a bandage.
“Tt hurts.”
“Don’t coddle the boy. Weak in the head’s bad enough.”
Further familial pother was prevented by the arrival of
Clever Jack the Methodist, a weaver six days a week and a

137
 OUR NED

preacher on the seventh, a man with a face that could clab-

ber milk. (Perhaps they should have asked Clever Jack to
have a glare at the bedding, and all the mites and midges
therein would be struck stone dead.) But Clever Jack had
his reproving eye on mightier beings than insects—having
just come from dropping his bolts of cloth off at the crop-
pers—and what an occasion for the remonstrance of sin that
was proving to be, what with their gin drinking and general
misdemeaning—and further, he had seen the evidence in
the yard of last night’s cock-baiting & dog fighting, and—
and hereat Clever Jack dropt his voice and straightened his
already fearsome backbone, a tall and thin man making
himself even taller and thinner—he suspected whoring, yea!
fornication—at which, Ned’s mam glanced over to Ned, but
Clever Jack might have been speaking foreign gibberish for
all it meant to Ned.
Clever Jack continued to expound on divers matters: sin,
sin, and more sin, oppression of the poor in general, the
crimes of landlords—
“Have some beer,” said Ned’s dad. “Talking’s dry work,”
and handed him a mug.
At length, having dispensed with near all the iniquity and
trouble abroad in the land, Clever Jack deigned to ask, “And
how is your family keeping?”
“Well enough. Working hard, the lot of us, but well
enough.”
“And how about you, young Neddie?” His voice filled
with false bonhomie.
Ned ducked his head.
“Say ‘all right,” prompted Ned’s mam.
“All right,” muttered Ned.

138
 OUR NED

“Good lad,” Mam said, tousling his hair. “Our Neddie

may be thick, but he’s got a fine set of teeth.” Then, “Go on,
open your mouth. Let him see.”
“You're right. The Lord’s blest you with quite a set of
choppers.” Clever Jack gave him an amiable cuff on the
shoulder, which gave Neddie rathera start.
When at last Clever Jack & Son had departed Ned’s dad
said, “I reckon he’s trying to get us to come to his service of a
Sunday. As if we'd want to hear more of his blab.”
“He knows a powerful lot of big words,” said George.
“Fine words butter no parsnips.”
“Are we to have parsnips with butter for dinner?” asked
Ned. “Are we?”

A planet, pale blue flecked with white, twirled, as it had for

eons, through the blackness of space, rushing along with
its sister planets after the sun, like a flock of newly hatched
chicks after a brood hen. After eons of long, slow unfurling
of life—one-celled organisms becoming two-celled, two-
celled becoming four (sing it to a calypso beat: one-celled,
two-celled, three-celled, four), amoebas evolved and algae, and
so on and on and on, until the Earth teemed: lemmings and
giraffes and wolves and primates. On a plain on this Earth, a
band of simians loped through the long grasses, squatting to
eat grubs and ants, finding night shelter beneath the canopy
of baobab trees, the trees’ blossoms pink cunts that flared
open at sunset and gave off a “Hey, sailor” lurid smell, draw-
ing swooping bats that our band of ancestors felled with
stones. The mothers and fathers begat sons and daughters,
and these daughters and sons begat more sons and daugh-
ters, and the first tribe split asunder and asunder again,

139
 OUR NED

wandering north and south, east and west. ‘Tectonic plates

shifted, continents split, ice slithered down from the polar
ice cap and then receded, land bridges rose and fell. They
made stone tools and hunted larger prey, woolly mammoths,
monkeys, deer—plucked wild plums, ground seeds of grass-
es between their molars, gave birth to gods and goddesses:
Cuchulainn, Yahweh, Kokopelli, Thor, Baba-Yaga. The Age
of Stone gave way to the Age of Iron, and no sooner had
these sons of man learned how to smelt ore than they figured
out how to use iron for weapons—the better to split your head
open, my dear!; the cities of Uruk and Ur grew up between
the Tigris and the Euphrates; the horse was domesticated in
the Ukraine; empires rose and fell; gold was traded for salt
and later molasses for slaves; peoples hopscotched across the
globe—the Aryans flooded into India; the Mongols pushed
the Turkic peoples west; the Bantu pulsed out from central
Africa; the Goths, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Van-
dals sacked Rome. Now back to that planet, hurtling itself
through space. Europe descended into the long torpor of
the Middle Ages. Then ships began to travel forth from Lis-
bon, from Genoa, from Southampton, spreading the world
open to the European colonists; the Enlightenment shone
the harsh light of rationality into every heretofore shadowy
nook. The long sleep of unreason was beginning.

Ned liked to go down Sheepwash Lane and over the stone

bridge across Rothley Brook and into the woods. In a glade
made by the sheltering branches of an ancient oak, he twirled
himself dizzy, the branches and the sky and the mottled loam
of the earth reeling themselves around him. A sweet kind of
a fuddle it was, not like when his dad thwacked him.

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 OUR NED

As he lay on the ground he heard a fragment of a song,

half sung, half whispered: [fponies rode men and ifgrass ate
the cows .. . The tune was being sung by Richard Sloper, a
man who wouldnt be out of place in a nineteenth-century
novel. Richard’s father was a successful clothier—that is, he
led a line of pack mules that weekly carried raw bales of cot-
ton, wool, and flax to the cottagers and picked up the fin-
ished cloth they had woven, took it to market, saw that it
fetched a fair price—or, if it fetched an unfair price, that the
inequity inured to the elder Sloper’s advantage—purchased
more raw materials, loaded them onto his pack mules, and
began again on his rounds. He was a man most indulgent
toward his only son; it was his deepest wish that Richard
might spend his life pursuing his scientific interests as one
of better birth would be able to, unhampered by the crass
concerns of money-getting.
For Richard, there was no greater pleasure than walk-
ing in the woods, but he did not dally thereabouts. He was
diligent—always with his notebook and charcoal tucked in
his satchel, his head bent down, searching for an as yet un-
named plant, seeking to lay the grid of Linnaean botanical
classification over the wild profusion of nature, to sketch ex-
actly the arrangement of the stamens and the shape of the
petals of his specimens; to save a plant by pressing it and
adding it to his private museum. Richard had already had
several letters published in the Proceedings of the Royal Bo-
tanical Society, and hoped he might have the chance to ven-
ture beyond the environs in which he had been raised to
pursue his searches on the arid plains of the Hindu Kush or
in the lush jungles of Borneo.
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse...

I4I
 OUR NED

Liza had said if you caught a fairy you could pull its wings
off and keep it in your pocket and make it do your bidding.
“You're a man,” Ned said.
“What did you think?”
“I dunno.” He knew were he to say sprite or fairy the man
would laugh. “You'll get your britches dirty.”
“You're one to talk,” the stranger said fondly.
“But you've got fancy ones.”
The man was hunkered down by a plant, drawing a rough
sketch of it with a charcoal pencil.
“You draw real good. You can write, too. I can’t write, but
I know writing when Isee it. What’s that word?”
“Aethusa.”
“And that one?”
“Cynapium.”
“Is that your name?”
“No, it’s the name of the plant.”
“Not that one there. That one there is fool’s parsley.”
“That’s its common name. Aethusa cynapium is its scien-
tific name.”
“It give off a powerful nasty pong. When you pick it. I
brought it home to my mam, I thought it was parsley, and
she said, get that stinking stuff out of my house. Out of my
house.”
The man rubbed a leaf between his thumb and index fin-
ger, lifted it to his nose. “Right you are. Perhaps one day we
shall have a way of quantifying smells. But for now Ishall
just note, “Bruised leaves emit foul odor.”
The lad was restless, couldn't stop moving. He had an
odd, bumble-footed gait that gave him the appearance of
forever being about to trip over his toes and fall forward,

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and then, just before he stumbled, recovering himself, only

to take another step in a similar manner.
“Say that I’m the one what telled you that. Write my name
in your book. Ned. Ned Ludd is my name.”
“One ‘d’ or two?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
“You're clever, aren't you? I am foolish, my mam says, but
not entirely a fool. Only on account of Liza dropping me on
the head when I was a babe . . . Am I vexing you? I do that
sometimes. I vex folks. I ask too many questions. Am I ask-
ing too many questions?”
“It’s all right,” said Richard, setting down his sketchbook.
“I know someone else clever,” Ned said. “Clever Jack the
Methodist. He’s powerful clever, is Clever Jack.”
“Well, he certainly seems to be well named.” Richard took
his farewell. He knew he would get precious little else ac-
complished with this village simpleton traipsing after him.
Wandering home, Ned saw a wash of red amidst the mot-
tled brown and green. The dead body of an animal, he knew
it. He gave the corpse a poke with a stick, watched a cloud of
black flies rise up. He flipped it over and saw it was a hedge-
‘hog. Worms and maggots had already eaten away its eyes. ,
He ran, legs and arms windmilling, chest aching, home
to his mother, ran as if he could outrun his sick terror of
death—of the rot and stink of it—crying, “Mam, Mam, |
don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”
“You won't die, Neddie. You won't die.” His mother held
him, pressing his head against the two overstuffed pillows of
her breasts.
“All that is flesh passeth away,” said his dad.

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“Will I rot in the ground?”

“You'll leave your body behind like a husk, and your soul
will fly to heaven to be with Jesus, and then on the day of
judgment, your soul and your body will be reunited,” his
mother assured him. Not much for religion, these Ludds,
but then again, not above using it when it suited them.
His mother’s words offered him no comfort; in fact trou-
bled him more: the thought of his soul watching his rotting
corpse for long millennia while vermin and insects gnawed
at his flesh.
“T don't want it to happen. I’m scared.”
“Oh, for the love of Jesus, have some gin and quit your
moaning.”
“Yes, lad.” For once Ned’s mother agreed with his dad. “A
drop of strong water will ease your pain.”
So Ned had a drop, Ned’s mam had a drop, George had
one, as did Liza, as did William, as did Ned’s dad—it was
just the thing for his lumbago—and then, that made them
feel so good, they had another and then another.
“All right,” said Dad, “enough larking about. Now back
to work.”
“A toast to hard labour. May he rest in peace.” Mam
knocked her mug against those of George and William and
Ned and tried to click it against Liza’s, but she said, “Dad’s
right. The clothier will be here on Tuesday.”
“Tuesday?” said Mam. “Oh, Tuesday’s a long way off.”
“Let’s raise a glass to Tuesday.”
“Tuesday!”
“Tuesday!”
“Tuesday! »

“May it stay well away.”

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“Now see here, woman—”

“Huzzah for Tuesday!”
“Tl not be mocked,” shouted Dad. “Not under my roof.”
“Whose roof? It was my grandfather what built this
cottage.”
“Wives, submit to your husbands,” yelled Dad, going for
the strap.
“You leave my mam alone!”
Ned’s mother was on her feet now, her hands on her boy’s
shoulders: “Neddie. Keep your temper in check, lad. It'll be
all right.”
“Neddie,” Dad mocked, his voice falsetto. “Keep your
temper in check. It'll be all right.”
“Take Ned out the cottage,” Mam ordered George and
John.
“Come on, Ned.”
“No. Mam! Mam! I won't let him take the strap to you!”
“This is what comes of drinking gin in the afternoon,”
screamed Liza.
And Ned broke free of his brothers’ grasp, grabbed the
poker from the hearth, swung it above his head. His heart
galloped; his breath came ragged and fierce. Usually his
mam smelled like yeast and his dad like old leather, but now
he could smell the acrid scent of fear pulsing from their bod-
ies. He could bring this poker down on his dad’s head, crack
open his skull, and his brains would come slithering out.
Death was inside all of us, waiting, waiting.
“Dont raise your hand against your father! Ned, promise
me just one thing: that you won’ hit your father!”
“No one better come near me,” Ned cried, holding the
poker above his shoulder.

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“Ned. It’s your mam who has never ask’t anything be-
fore of you. Promise me you won't touch your dad. Neddie,
promise?”
“I promise,” Ned said, but he kept swinging the poker,
back and forth, back and forth. It was glorious to behold the
darting eyes of his dad in fear, like a trapp'd animal. —
“Neddie. Neddie. You promised.”
“I promised,” Ned shouted, as he brought the poker down
on the wooden strut of the loom. What a sound, that crack
of wood! And the collective in-gasp of breath by the family.
And again. “I promised. I promised I wouldn't—”
“Neddie, not the loom.”
“not take the poker to Dad,” and brought it down
harder yet against the wood. “But I didn’t say nothing about
the loom.”
“Neddie, Neddie, darling! Stop! Stop!”
But he didn’t stop, not until it lay on the floor all smashed
to bits, utterly and completely undone.
Dad and Liza and the brothers tried to set the loom to
rights, fitting the shattered pieces back together, boiling
cattle hooves to make glue, wrapping the broken bits with
warp-string, but try as they might, they couldn’ get it set
to rights. The clothier—Richard Sloper’s father, as it hap-
pened—was the owner of the loom, and was not inclined
to put another in the home where that idiot might have at
it again. Ned’s mum slept next to him that night and for
nearly a week after, so afraid she was that Ned’s dad or his
brothers might do him in at night.
“A fiend, a very devil,” his dad could be heard mutter-
ing over his gin as he sipped it beyond the front door. “Our
ruin. The lad should have been drowned in the river—”

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“You shut your drunken mouth,” Mam shouted out the

door. “You lay a hand on my son and I'll see you hanging
from the gibbet!”

Folks took to saying, when the workings of a loom got bol-

lixed up, “Looks like Ned Ludd’s been here,” or, when out of
temper with their employer, “I’ve a mind to Ned Ludd it.”

And Richard Sloper, the gentleman with the notebook Ned

met near Rothley Brook? About two weeks after his encoun-
ter with Ned, he returned home to find his father feverish—
a nicked finger had gone septic—and within a week the
illness ended in his untimely death, forcing young Sloper to
abandon the pursuit of his scientific interests and enter into
the hurly-burly of the mercantile realm. His father’s demise
also revealed that the elder gentleman—who had seemed to
all the world quite prosperous and staid—was in fact deeply
in debt, and his son was forced to scramble not only to pro-
vide the barest sustenance for his mother and sisters but also
to keep the world from uncovering the chaotic state of his
father’s affairs, as his creditors, who had been kept at bay by
his father’s expansiveness and air of good fortune, now de-
scended like a flock of kites on a just-cold corpse.
Young Sloper sometimes felt as if he, too, had entered the
grave. His very aspect was so changed—his posture stooped,
his brow furrowed—that more than once an acquaintance
of his youth passed him on the street and thought: That
man looks familiar. Why yes, he reminds me of Richard
Sloper; perhaps that’s some relation—an elder brother or
uncle. As in his appearance, so in his character: resignation
to the harshness of life, the gradual extinction of dreams and

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fantasies that usually happens slowly in a man’s character

through the years from youth to middle age occurred almost
overnight in him.
About ayear after his father’s passing, Sloper—he thought
of himself by his surname now—went into his study on a
Sunday afternoon and took his illustrated notebooks down
from the shelf and undid the ties on them but found he
could not bear to look at them, to recall the delight he had
taken in mixing his inks to capture exactly the hue of nature,
his dreams of traveling to some land where no civilized man
had yet been. He threw his drawings into the fire along with
his pressed plant specimens. His once-precious volumes of
Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, and Newton grew dusty on the
shelves.
But he did not entirely abandon his interest in scien-
tific pursuits. After nearly ten years, through great frugal-
ity and even greater industry, his father’s debts were at last
discharged. Through all those bleak years, Sloper held one
hope—the idea had come to him slowly, accreting itself
layer by layer as the pearl is formed within a patient mol-
lusk—that he might apply scientific principles to the affairs
of business. He led his pack mules round about the cottag-
ers, dropping off the raw materials and picking up the fin-
ished, because this was what his father had done before him.
What changes there were in the methods of manufacturing
seemed to come about haphazardly. Suppose rather than fol-
lowing custom he took stock of the situation, rationalized
his business dealings, thought of them asa series of great ex-
periments? Would it not be more efficient to gather workers
together in a manufactory, with the power of steam-driven
machines to do what the power of the human body now

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did? And since the operation of these looms would require

but little strength, the work could be done, not by the cur-
rent weavers whose demand for wages made the cloth dear,
but by women and even children. In the factory, eliminated
also would be variations in the cloth—not only was that of
Thomas Brigham always woven too tightly and that of Les-
ter Ballford too loose, but Sloper could trace the patterns
of a weaver’s day as he examined the textile: the texture fine
and regular at the start of the morning, then errors creeping
in as the day wore on and the weaver’s attention flagged. He
would be a god over this minor kingdom, setting down the
order of things. Was it blasphemy to think such a thought?
No—surely it was not sacrilege to use reason—the greatest
of God’s gifts—to throw off the sad old bonds of supersti-
tion—to shape the world over which man had been given
dominion. He knew there would be opposition; threats and
perhaps even violence from those whose old and established
ways were being overturned—had not the inventor of the
spinning jenny, himself a once-poor weaver, found himself
attacked by his former fellows, driven from his Blackburn
home?—but Sloper determined to do what was right, as
against what was easy.
He began to sketch—not with the carefully colored inks
he had once used to draw his botanical observations but in
quick India black—the plan for a great factory. He would
not borrow, he would not encumber—no, he would not al-
low himself to be trammeled by what had ensnared his fa-
ther. The substantial portion of his earnings that had once
gone to the discharge of the old debts was now stockpiled;
his mother and sisters lived as they had been accustomed to
living—although the house they had inherited was grander

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than those of the weavers, neither their victuals nor their rai-
ments was any finer.

Ned’s mam and dad soon went to their Rest, few made old
bones in those days. The cottage got sold to keep the fam-
ily from starving; consumption got George; Liza matried a
man from another shire; John hied himself off to America,
the leech that bleeds the excess population from these lands,
perhaps becoming the ancestor of the North American
branch of the family, an Alfred and an Ada Ludd, a Waldo
and a Fanny who will pop up in early twentieth-century cen-
sus records in Denver and Altoona, Pa; William went to the
fair in Loughborough and never returned—whether he was
set upon by scoundrels, impressed into the Navy, balloted as
a soldier, or what, none knew; and our Ned was left alone.

Ned walked. He walked because he was walking. He walked

because he was hungry, and the walking distracted him from
the pangs in his belly. He walked because he did not know
what else to do.
Along a lane he encountered an old woman who gave
him a cup of buttermilk but told him not to lollygag around
there: her husband had got a frightful temper. He slept in
the hollow of a half-burnt tree and woke up with bugs and
spiders and worms crawling all over him, which gave him a
fright he'd woken up dead. He knew the first thing they eat
is your eyes, because your eyeballs are made of treacle and
jelly. He tried to touch them to see if they were still there,
but his lids kept closing over them.
A dog chased him and he ran. He found a dead squirrel
by the side of the road, built a fire, and ate it. He came in

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to a town; he asked someone where he was. “Paris, France.”

Later he learnt the truth: Leicester. He passed a man with
stumps for legs wearing a sign about his neck.
“What's that say? The writing?”
“Born crippled.”
“Where did your legs go?”
“A devil took them. While I was in my mother’s womb.”
“My sister dropt me on the hearth. That’s why I’m fool-
ish. ’m hungry,” Ned said.
The crippled man took him up an alley, pulled a goodly
hunk of cheese from his pocket, broke it in two pieces, giv-
ing Ned the larger.
“T filched it. From the shop over by the church. Teach
him a lesson. Folk should mind their goods better.”
“Good cheese,” Ned managed around a mouthful. Then:
“What's he want with them?”
“Who?”
“The devil what took your legs.”
“The ways of the demons are legion and mysterious.”
Caleb and Ned slept together that night, sharing the
warmth from one another's bodies.
“He give that to you?” Ned asked the next day. “Instead?”
~ “Who?” |
“The devil what took your legs.”
“No. Old Crankton. Well, hired it out to me. It’s called a
tambourine.”
“Big word,” Ned said.
They traded Ned’s shoes for a cloth cap and by the Corn
Exchange Caleb danced on his odd stumps of legs and Ned
passed the hat.
Tut, tut, the ladies said, passing by. Oh, dear me, I cant
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look, but they did nothing but look. Caleb hollered after
one skinflint: “You stopped and had a good gawp, mate. Pay
up!”
Thursday was market day, and Caleb reckoned they'd do
well, but folks were distracted by a learned pig a local farmer
was showing off for a farthing.

A pair of spectacles was a fine thing for allowing to slip down

the bridge of one’s nose and then staring over, as one of the
bank of overseers of the parish poor did, asking a series of
questions:
“Your name?”
“Ned, sir.”
“Surely Edward.”
“Edward, sir.”
“And?”
“And, sir?”
“And your surname, man?”
“Lud, sir. My name was longer—Ludlum, I think, or Lud-
ham, something like that—but my tongue would always get
confused, so my mam said we'll make it Lud. Ned Lud. “
“Now, your mother gave birth to how many children?”
“T don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” A bit of phlegm in the throat was al-
most as good as a pair of spectacles, for the noise that can be
made when the throat was cleared, a sound that suggested
simultaneously disapproval and disgust.
“Had she ten? Twenty? Thirty?”
“Not thirty, sir. Thirty’s a powerful lot.”
“Well. Do you know how many survived infancy?”
“There was me. George. Mary. The two Williams.”

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“Two Williams?”
“When one died, she named the next William, too. Sir.
An elder and a younger.”
“Rather like the Pitts,” the overseer said, glancing first to
his left and then to his right at the other overseers, who each
returned his look with a facial expression closer to a sneer
than a smile.
“John. Me. Of course me. Liza.”
“Liza? Liza? Surely she was not christened Liza.”
“Elizabeth, I imagine it was,” said one of the others, shift-
ing a bit in his chair to show his discomfort: certainly those
who came before the parish in need of sustenance must be
questioned, but it was clear that this man before them was
half-witted at best.
The fates of all the family members were gone over: dead,
dead, went to the fair and never come back, gone to Ameri-
ca, destitute himself.
“And what about other relations? Have you no friends?”
“There’s many folks as are fond of me. But none I know
has aught to spare.”
“Now, you do understand, don’t you, that begging is a
criminal offense?”
Ned wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer that ques-
tion yes or no, so he hung his head and both nodded it
slightly and shook it slightly while muttering “Sir.”
“And those companions you fell in with in Leicester. They
are a bad sort, and you are to steer clear of them, and others
like them.”
“No, sir.”
“No?”
One of the other men leaned forward and said, “I believe

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the man is confused.” Then to Ned: “You want to be good,

don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I want to be good, sir. I want to go to heaven and
be with my mam.”
Ned was farmed out by the overseers to work in the house
of a weaver along with a gang of others, mostly old women
and children. He was fed gruel and skilly and milk pottage,
beer and cheese for Sunday dinner, and carded rough cot-
ton, day in, day out; the hours of work stretched from first
light to last, and so he loved the winter, despite the cold, for
the shortness of the days. Sometimes he sneaked off with
Old Maude and she sucked his nob behind the jakes, and he
was in such heaven he hardly noticed the privy stink.

Sloper felt the winds of history breathing down his neck.

The notion of a manufactory, of mechanisation, that had
grown up in his mind had also grown in the minds of a doz-
en—nay, a hundred—other men, so that it almost seemed
the notion had spread via contagion. He knew he must get a
foothold in this new enterprise or he would be shut out from
it altogether. Flocks of geese flew west from the linen fields
of Flanders crying out, “Expand! Expand! Or die! Or die!”
their honking growing deeper as they traveled into the dis-
tance, spreading the alarm: “Expand! Or die!” Sloper broke
the vow he had made never to encumber himself with debt,
borrowing in order to purchase a parcel of land.
The copse in which his factory was to be erected was
quickly cleared, gangs of itinerant farmhands and Irish la-
bourers tearing from the ground the confusion of brambles
and grasses as they plunged their shovels into the yielding
earth. The sleeping larks, disturbed before full light by the

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commotion, launched themselves heavenwards, not in exul-

tation but with a full-throated cry of alarm. The eagles and
the martens, the polecats, the ravens, the weasels, the voles
that had once made this glade their home fled, none knew
where. Soon the bricks were laid, one atop the other and the
other and the other. The building rose six stories high: twen-
ty-four windows on the side facing east and twenty-four win-
dows on the west-facing side; twelve each on the sides facing
north and south. Atop it all a great chimney, which soon
belched a black cloud of coal smoke into the air; from below
the works evacuated its dejecta into a nearby river, making
it a cesspool. One might have assumed that Sloper, who had
once been so enamored of the natural world, might have felt
a pang of guilt at so despoiling it, but he had instead a sense
of gleeful retribution, as if Nature had abandoned him, and
he were now visiting his vengeance on her.
Sloper did not sleep easy; in fact, he slept only to wake
with a racing heart and a sense of panic: his debt, his very
being pledged to others, the thing he had most valued, his
independence—in jeopardy; mostly he was haunted by the
two letters received in the past week, one written in a hand
most fine: The Machines have thrown thousands ofyour pett-
tioners out of employ, whereby they are brought into great dis-
tress, for we are made slaves to things inanimate, and shall come
to envy the Africans who labour in the sugar fields of the West
Indies, who at least are provided with sustenance by their own-
ers, while to us a grain ofwheat has come to seem as precious as a
ruby or an emerald. We honest workingmen are being improved
to death. Shall not the justice of man as well as the judgment of
the Almighty shall be visited on those who make their riches on
the ruin of their fellow men? The other writ in a crude hand:

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Ifyou bring dev'l machines here you will be deserving ofthe gib-
bet and that is what you shall get, both signed N. Ludd, the
first with the honorific “Captain” preceding it, the second
with the bare name followed by the address: His office, Sher-
wood Forest. The week before he'd received reports of ma-
chine-manufactured cloth being set afire in Leeds; and just
last week Josiah Slocum’s man, escorting machinery along
a lane by night, had been set upon and killed, and it was
clear it was no ordinary highway robbery, for his purse had
been left untouched. It was blasphemy to do so but Sloper
thought of God beset by Satan’s rebellion in the midst of his
plan of Creation.
From a distance of half a mile the sound given off by the
factory seemed to bea hum, not unlike that made by a swarm
of bees returning to its hive with the product of its labour;
but as one drew closer the rumble not only grew louder but
became aseries of distinct sounds: the steady clang of cast
iron against cast iron, the queer skirls of a thousand spin-
ning bobbins and spindles. Indeed, the human voice could
not make itself heard amidst the terrible din, and the labour-
ers soon:developed a system of signs and meemaws, whilst
the foremen spoke the language of the strap. Sloper could
not enter his own premises without in short order devel-
oping a pounding headache, and wondered how his hands
could bear it all the day.
One day during his weekly perambulation across the fac-
tory floor he glimpsed a strange figure and he suddenly felt
as if a cold hand had gripped his heart. Was he on the verge
of a stroke, apoplexy? It rushed back to him—the last time
he had walked in the woods before his father’s 'death—the
dullard he'd encountered there, the curious lad with the

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queer manner of walking. The sharp edge of sorrow changed

to a knife blade of disgust. In nature one such as he—the
runt of the litter—would have been shunted aside, left to
perish, the weak giving way before the strong. He motioned
to his foreman, and the two walked into the relative quiet of
the yard.
The foreman answered Sloper’s questions: the man was a
half-wit, let out to the factory by the man charged with his
care by the parish overseers.
“This is most irregular. | am not running a charity.”
The foreman objected: the man was no object of charity.
If he had a fault it was a tendency towards being too perse-
vering—set to a task, he would keep at it, at it, at it.
“Is he some relative of yours?”
The foreman denied this but allowed as how their two
fathers had known one another.
Sloper had no need of giving a direct order; the look of
disapproval on his face said all that needed to be said, and
Ned was dismissed.

This pale blue planet continues to hurtle itself through

space, while that tribe of ex-simians continues on its journey
into the light. In revolutionary France, everything was made
rational, even time itself—the calendar beginning over at
Year Zero, the old units of measure—based on the amount
of land two oxen could plow in a day or the distance along
the outstretched arms of a man—replaced by the meter, the
centimeter, the millimeter. The words of the philosophers
were shouted upon the barricades. The very Earth found her
skin rent by the makers of bricks, who quarried the ancient
clay beds, taking that old stuff—odd bits of metal left from

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the Big Bang, the shells of mollusks, plankton, and krill that
died eons upon eons before Ned Ludd’s ancestors walked the
Serengeti—and firing it into bricks, bricks, and more bricks,
bricks to make factories, bricks to make row houses to house
the workers for said factories, bricks to make asylums for
the weak and feeble. Bricks bricks bricks bricks bricks bricks
bricks. The guillotine and the Terror followed the bliss of
Revolution—become a sow that eats her farrow—and now
Napoleon spread liberty across Europe by the sword—which
had led to England’s Orders in Council embargoing trade
with any nation that trafficked with France, thereby cutting
off the Americas and wrecking Midland weavers, who fur-
thermore were undercut by the new manufactories. Bolts of
cloth were piling up in lofts and storerooms, bolts of fustian,
bolts of linsey-woolsey, bolts of twill, bolts of burlap, bolts
of dimity, bolts of muslin.
Which brings us now to anno Domini 1811. A lurid comet
has been crashing across the heavens like a sword aflame,
perhaps seeding pestilence and discord, and Nature herself
seems in rebellion: in June it had been so cold ice appeared
in the River Irk and now we find ourselves in a hot October.
Babes die at the dry teats of their famished mothers.

The only sound the crowd of men made moving through the
night was the basso profundo of their tromping footsteps,
with an occasional slurp as a boot unstuck itself from muck
and mire. Still it was enough of a sound to startle the flocks
of tits roosting in the bushes, which flung themselves up-
ward with an alarmed chatter and rush of wings as Ned Lud’s
army marched past them. The faces of the men‘were black-
ened with charcoal, others hidden—all but the eyes—with

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kerchiefs folded into triangles, like outlaws in old-time West-

erns, yet others dressed in women’s clothes, frocks and bon-
nets above hobnail boots. Those men who were by natural
formation gaunt have been rendered by the force of the fam-
ine now abroad in the land positively cadaverous.
Light, faint but constant, shone from a crescent moon,
the mob of stars above. The torches the plodding men car-
ried brought certain things into high contrast—now the
gnarled roots of trees, now the shining eyes of badgers, pole-
cats, foxes disturbed on their nocturnal rambles, cowering
in the gorse.
At the front of the parade was Ned Lud, that is the
scaffolding of his name, with the addition of the honor-
ific “General”—Leader of the Army of the Distressed and
Wrecked Weavers and a Friend to the Poore!—and a pair of
patched and mended breeches stuffed with straw, a swallow-
tailed jacket of navy-colored fustian. A bit of gold gimcrack
tacked onto the shoulders and cuffs was meant to impart
an overall military sense, as was the cap set atop his muslin-
and-batting head, although the men who have made him
have certainly never seen a general, never mind the cap of
one. A pole up his backside, for he was borne aloft, arms and
legs flopping this way and that.
At the gate of the mill the throng paused. A few men had
pots of ale, and who wouldn't like a gulp of courage at a
moment such as this? Men slugged it back, passing the jars
from one to another, formed their hands into rough cups
and slurped from them. One whispered to the man next to
him, “At least I’ll die with the taste of ale in my mouth.” The
one whispered to thought, “Die. Die,” and his knees started
to wobble.

159
OUR NED

And then the crowd made a noise which could perhaps be

described as a holler or a yowl; at any rate, it is a word that
cannot be written save with a string of caroming vowels. Per-
haps it is the bellow the Luddites’ stomachs, cramped with
starvation, would have given off had the individual organs
within them the power of direct speech.
The language ceased to be Pentecostal; it shattered itself
into individual words:
“Hurrah! Ned Ludd!”
“Down with all kings but King Lud!”
“Now to the gates!”
Which were in short order broken down, and then the
rioters had at the machines with blacksmiths’ hammers,
the butt ends of farm implements, muskets, blunderbusses.
Smithereens! Time ran backward. All those long, long hours
spent making those machines were undone; the black ore,
mined out of Satan’s bowels, the tempering, the casting, the
fitting together into those mechanical looms, all turned to
naught.
A fire was kindled; a voice called, “All out!” and Ned was
flung through the air, landing atop the fire, the flames flar-
ing through his straw limbs and belly, for none dared march
off with him, as he had become evidence which could indict
a man for the capital offense of machine wrecking, so his
immolation became General Ludd’s last act, at least in this
scene of the drama.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites Pellew’s Life ofLord Sid-

mouth (1847) as the source for the story about the youth of
weak intellect who smashed the looms ina Leicestershire vil-
lage, although there is an earlier version of it in The Beggar’
 OUR NED

Complaint, Against Rack-Rent Landlords, Corn Factors, Great

Farmers, Monopolizes, Paper Money Makers, and War, and
many other Oppressors and Oppressions, Also, Some Observa-
tions on the Conduct of the Luddites, In Reference to the De-
struction of Machinery, @c., @c., authored by “One who
Pities the Oppressed” in 1813. But perhaps the locals were
pulling the leg of Lord Sidmouth, who'd been sent to lead
the army that put down the Luddite rebellion. One alterna-
tive etymology posits that “Lud” is derived from the Latin
word for play, /udus. The Luddites—dressed in women’s
clothes or with coal-blackened faces—were marching un-
derneath a figure representing merrymaking and fun, out to
destroy the grim factories. The Norse word /udden (thick),
from which is derived a synonym of buttocks, luds, offers
yet another possibility: the Luddites celebrating their rear
ends, their holy backsides—our sweet arses, which reason
and logic can go kiss.
So perhaps there never was a Ned; perhaps Liza never did
drop him on his head on the bricks by the hearth; perhaps
he never did clamber over the stone hedge and wander in
the woods; perhaps he never did get examined by the poor-
law administrators; perhaps he never did sit, slack-jawed and
missing his mam, carding cotton and looking for a chance to
sneak off with old Maude—thick Ned, dull Ned, our Ned.
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Moby Dick, or, The Leg

Bloomings

Call me Ahab.
What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell
as sweet, as the Bard once said. Although, alas, he couldn't
have foreseen today’s hybridized, gene-monkeyed floral rac-
es, bred to bloom in uniform, boring splendor on the 14th
of February or some other day—Secretaries’ Day! Grandpar-
ents’ Day! Bosses’ Day! Aye, Bosses’ Day!—which the florists
have decreed must stir a sentiment within our hearts which
cannot be expressed save by the purchase of a dozen or two
of these overbred perfect monstrosities, still called roses but
smelling nowhere near as sweet. A pox on Luther Burbank
and all his tinkering progeny! But I digress—or do I?
Do not think me ignorant of that other tome, penned by
a lowly seaman under my command who dubbed himself
Ishmael. (Although he neglected to mention that aboard the

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 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

Pequod he—a ginger-haired lad with a bouncing, prominent

Adam’s apple and goggle eyes—was known by the diminu-
tive “Ish.”) Ah, Ishmael! You of the pierced nose and dirty T-
shirt, lounging in the dark corner of a grungy coffeehouse,
nursing a bitter single espresso and a depression!
In Ish’s account he had no surname and I had no Chris-
tian one—as if mine own dear wife might murmur in my
ear on an intimate occasion, “Captain! Yes, Captain! Stave
on! I am almost in port, Captain!” Ishmael, son of a dark
woman of the desert, no patronymic, wanderer, owing fe-
alty and bond to no man; and Captain Ahab, a man known
by his title and his clan, tied to wife and babe, beholden to
those who have sent him out on this voyage, a man of sub-
stance, even if some of that substance be whalebone.
It was said that my name should not fill one with pride:
for when the biblical Ahab died the dogs did lick his blood.
Who do ye think shall feast on that hunk of animated meat
you are when the spirit passes from it? If in a graveyard ye
are interred, maggots and worms shall slither over thee—ye
shall be digested by a most lowly order. A watery bower thy
last sleeping place? Full fathom five, don’t hope for bones
turned into coral or pearls for eyes—it’s a slimy business
down there, too. Choose fire and ye are but pollution for
the air. I can think of few finer ends for any body than to be
recycled in canine flesh. Lap on, curs!
Where was I? Ah, yes. What’s in a name? A rose, etc. Ms.
Stein adds: Rose is a rose is a rose. Much discussion could go
into that sentence, which we have not the time for here—
for it seems we are allotted but the space of a short story.
Ish was given a whole book; he was permitted the space to
ramble through the subject of fast-fish and loose-fish, to

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 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

contemplate the philosophic import of the sperm whale’s

lacking a nose, to speak of the possible routes the whale
that bore Jonah might have taken—while I, I am truncat-
ed, reduced, cut short. Such is my fate. I must hold the el-
bows of my narrative tight against my literary sides; I must
squeeze myself into the shortened shift of this abbreviated
form. Why? Because the modern reader has not the time;
she wont sit still for long disquisitions. A century and ahalf
ago having one’s morning toast involved the baking of the
bread, and not some concoction quickly whipped up in a
bread machine—no, the flour must have been sifted, the
yeast proofed in slightly heated water, the dough kneaded
and set out to rise, the wood-fired oven tended while it
baked—whereas now you think yourself industrious, a ver-
itable homebody, if you make yourself a slice of toast in-
stead of dashing into Bruegger’s Bagels (by the way, I know
you parked illegally in handicapped parking when you did
so—and don’t you go whimpering, “But all the other spaces
were full! I was only two seconds!”) and grabbing a cinna-
mon raisin. To wash your clothes you have no need of scrub
boards, no soaps you yourself have concocted with treasured
fat culled from pig and goat and sheep and cooked with lye.
No, you merely dump in the dirty garments, pour some liq-
uid from a plastic jug, push a button—but with all that, you
are so busy saving time you can’t spare enough to plough
your way through an entire novel; you swallow a short story
as you down your daily tablets of vitamin C and gingko ex-
tract. The more time you save, the less you have. Weren't
you told what you seek to keep you lose? But did you listen?
No, you never do.
Well, we haven't gotten off to a very good start, have we?
165
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

You've no doubt written me off as a cantankerous old cripple

by now, lurching about on my whalebone leg and scatter-
ing aspersions where I will. Well, this is a work of art, not a
popularity contest. Ye need not love your narrator: ye need
only hear him out.
Hear. Yes, that reminds me. Back to good Gertrude: the
spoken version of her most famous epigraph sounds rather
like: Eros is eros is eros. Amongst the other possible readings
you might decipher from that plainest of palimpsest is this:
the word writ by the finger on the page is one thing, the
word as it hums and hisses its vibrato upon the tympanic
membrane of the ear quite another.
And so your narrator would be most appreciative if you,
good reader, as well as perceiving this text through your eyes,
could imagine it being read aloud—and, moreover, read by
someone with a rolling, profound, stentorian voice. Hear
Jahweh herself—or, better yet, Barbara Jordan—intoning
the words here writ.
Now, fair reader, if I may be permitted to guess at the
thoughts that are currently in your mind: How comes this
man Ahab to know of Barbara Jordan, Gertrude Stein,
Bruegger's Bagels, and the text by young Ish writ? For he was
drowned, was he not, and the sole survivor of that literary
disaster being Ishmael, AND-I-ONLY-AM-ESCAPED-ALONE-TO-
TELL-THEE Ishmael? Was it not so?
No, it was not.
I was on a later voyage shipwrecked; but on the one where
Ish was under my command we returned to Nantucket, our
holds stuffed full with oil and near my whole crew intact.
(Half a decade later my craft was dashed on some South Sea
shoals and I eventually washed up on the shore of an isle, yet

166
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

still uncharted, where the inhabitants possess a marvelous

fruit which prolongs longevity beyond all previous limits:
and so I survived, while the decades turned into a century
and then beyond—still one-legged, of course, at times a bit
soft in the head—although, on this atoll, where great age is
held a blessing, a high compliment is paid when it is said,
“His mind has begun to wander,” for they think this to be
the richest kind of thought. At any rate, this is how I come
now to be tapping out this story on the keys of a computer.)
So, having got that bit of narrative tomfoolery out of the
way, let us swim back to the beginning of our text.
My name begins with no phallic “I” but a letter “A,” two
legs spread open, a hole to receive. When type was hand-
set the letter “A” could be picked up, held in the hand: it
had a weight. Type with a cracked leg or missing serif was
called crippled type. My “A” is a crippled letter, with one
leg cracked, dismasted, dead-stumped. Such crippled type
was thrown into a special box, to be melted down and made
anew. But I refuse to be smelted. I aim to write this text with
crippled type. But . . . where was I? Oh, yes, right back at the
beginning; I hadn’t even weighed anchor, so to speak.

Plunging On

Well, it seems I am not to be given the space to wander at

liberty about New Bedford, to inform my reader of how I
slept and with whom, of where and upon what I breakfasted
and dined; no, it is not given to me to deck out my tale as
the Pequod was bedecked: no polished gimcracks shall orna-
ment this opus, I shall hang no trophies upon her frame,
no verbal sea-ivory shall her embellish. No etymology of
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 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

the words “crip,” “freak,” “amputee” supplied by a late con-

sumptive usher to a grammar school shall front this text, nor
extracts from great texts on our condition set down by the
pen of a sub-sub-librarian.
A mere thousand-something words down and I am
plunged upon the waters of the cold Atlantic. Let us put it
briefly: the ship was outfitted, crew signed on, orders were
given and obeyed, kicks were meted out and buttocks re-
ceived kicks, the anchor weighed, salty songs were sung,
sweet melancholy touched the air, a great huzzah! went up
and we were off, etc.

The Self-Advocate

As we are now fairly embarked in this business, and as my

lege—or should I say the absence of my leg—plays so great
a part in this tale, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye aBs, of
the injustice done us crips.
In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous
to establish the fact that among people at large the family of
cripples is not thought one worth joining. Indeed, when a
child is spat from its mother’s womb, the first two questions
heard are: “Boy or girl?” and “Is it all right?” No practitioner
of the midwife’s art ever stands beaming above the mother
and proclaims, “What a fascinating child you've given birth
to! Six-fingered!” or “Legs fused into afin! A veritable mer-
man!” Nay!
Allow me, as a brief aside, to allude to a passage in Ish-
mael’s version of this text in which he makes much of the
Sperm Whale having no nose. One might equally make the
argument that he is little save nose, that his whole vast head

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 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

is homologous to that part of us that goes before us into the

world. So, too, ifa man has no leg, the world can see little of
him save that leg which is not there.
Aye, more than one of us has atale to tell of sitting on a
corner, dressed for success, waiting to board a bus, holding
a cup of Starbuck’s, and having a quarter tossed into it. A
filthy quarter, germ-ridden by the hands of the tossing phi-
lanthropist, ruining our $3.95 coffee, not to mention our
silk suit!
But are we worthy of this pitying contempt in which we
are generally held?
Consider, ye ABs, this: we do ye, if | may make so bold,
the inestimable service of making ye normal.
Well, after pondering that statement for some time ye
may it to me concede, but still ye say:
The crip no place in myth.
The crip no place in myth? Did not the ancient Greeks
have a gimp sitting atop Mount Olympus, the own dear
brother of Zeus? Did not the Romans, when they recycled
the Greeks’ gods, import wholesale this selfsame Hephaes-
tus and dub him Vulcan, the finest celestial mechanic who
ever lived? Did not the ancient Nordic lays tell that the gods
would be led out to battle on the last day by a one-eyed god,
Odin, followed by blind Hoder and one-armed Tyr? Do not
tourists to this day bring back from the Pueblos sterling sil-
ver pins and T-shirts bearing the image of the magnificently
endowed and hunchbacked Kokopelli? Did not the Egyp-
tians worship a dwarf god, Bes?
The crip no famous author, and cripdom no famous art-
ists? Who wrote the first account of Hephaestus? Who but
mighty Homer, himself blind! And who our greatest poet

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 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

after Mr. Shakespeare? Why, blind John Milton. And in my

own century of origin, Monsieur Proust was by his asthma-
laden lungs “impaired in a major life function’—if I may
be forgiven this bureaucratese—to wit, breathing. I could
mention fit-shaken van Gogh, dwarf Toulouse-Lautrec, and
mad Miss Woolf . . . I'll stop there before the aBs start to
squirm in their seats.
True enough, but then crips themselves are poor devils;
they have no good blood in their veins.
No good blood in their veins? They have something bet-
ter than royal blood there. Look to the signing of the Decla-
ration of Independence. What see you? A one-legged man,
and another who adds a palsied scrawl. Who raised this na-
tion up from the depths of her Depression? Why a man with
a pair of legs liked cooked spaghetti.
The crip never figured in any grand imposing way? Well,
if I may be permitted to be so immodest as to speak of mine
own accomplishments, never was there a figure that so cap-
tured the American literary imagination as myself. Ishmael?
Bah, the teller of the tale is but a wan presence, while I, rag-
ing at the blank inscrutable universe, commanding my flock
of able-bodied seamen to follow me, follow me recklessly
on, standing athwart the deck, the Great, Castrated Father,
omnipotent and frail, the emblem of my loss on full display
in my abbreviated seagoing pantaloons, wearing my heart
on my sleeve, so to speak, I proclaim to all and sundry that
the white phallus is but a paper tiger. (Oh, but what a roar!)
But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that crip-
ping has no aesthetically noble associations connected with
it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there and
unhorse you with a split helmet every time.

170
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet

undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any
real repute in that small but high hushed world which I
might not unreasonably be ambitious of; if, at my death,
my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any pre-
cious Mss in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all
the honor and the glory to the knowledge I learned from
being a gimp. This whale ship on which I was crippled was
my Yale College and my Harvard, complete, I tell you, with
a disability studies program, a culturally diverse faculty, and
a queer studies department.

The Quarter-Deck

From New Bedford we had set out and, as you may recall
from my antagonist’s tome, I made no appearance until we
were well at sea. It is a silly game we captains must play;
methinks I am akin to Oz’s Wizard in that I must conceal
myself behind an elaborate deceitful drapery.
Consider ye this: I—or perhaps, to be more honest, it is
the unseen Hand of Capital working its will through me—
asks of my men to set out to sea; to leave behind the dear
solidity of land; to leave behind the soft hands and sweet
smells of women; to partake of naught but hardtack, gruel,
and brined meat till, if the Devil would be so good as to
make an offer, they would gladly barter their eternal souls
for a mess of collard greens; to risk their lives for the death
of the whale; to know that they might ne’er return to port.
Moreover, our old friend, the Mighty Dollar, decrees that
these hands receive but poor financial recompense for their
works and pains.
I7I
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

So how then do we motivate—to use your contemporary

parlance—our men to sail with us? To answer this question
we must turn not just to Marx but to Gramsci (whom, I
may here add, we are proud to number in our Confederacy
of Crips). That is to say, we needs must speak of the ter-
rible economic forces that pushed our men to sea but also
of how the men’s consent was manufactured. To so do, I,
the captain, must pretend that this is something more than
a pursuit of money, cold hard cash, filthy lucre, the need-
ful. Just as the Crusades hid their true purpose of economic
domination under the veil of the quest for the Holy Grail,
so, too, must our voyage become a Noble Cause.
And so one day I, at last, ascended the cabin gangway
to the deck. There, as do most sea-captains at that hour, I
walked the deck, as country gentlemen, after the morning
meal, take a few turns in the garden.
An art there is to such a walk: one must not stroll but
tread and on one’s face fix a gaze and furrow one’s brow as
if engaged in monomaniacal thought. Oh, it was a fine per-
formance | put on, pacing from binnacle to mainmast and
mainmast to binnacle.
And chanced I then to overhear, as I trod past, seeming-
ly in my own thoughts deeply mired, Stubb whispering to
Flask, “D’ye mark him, Flask? The chick that’s in him pecks
against the shell. "Twill soon be out.”
I spent the day a-pacing; now above decks, now below,
till it drew near dusk. “Starbuck!” I bellowed then. “Send
everybody aft.”
“Sir?” said he, for such an order was only in extraordinary
circumstances given. .
“Send everybody aft. Mastheads, there! Come down!”

172
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

Gathered they all there in front of me, but I then ignored

them and continued my heavy turns upon the deck. If I may
immodestly say, I gave quite a masterful performance and
had them in my thrall ere ever I spoke my first words. Then,
seeming to start myself out from a trance, I spoke: “What do
ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
“Sing out for him!”
“Good!” I cried. “And what do ye next, men?” Like the
one whose job it is to warm up the audience before a quiz
show, I understood that I must get them shouting, and get
them shouting in unison, too.
“Lower away and after him!” they rejoined, as one.
“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
“A dead whale ora stove boat!”
We were all intoxicated, and we intoxicated one another.
“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders
about a white whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of
gold? It is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye see it?” And, hav-
ing commanded Mr. Starbuck to fetch me a top-maul that
I might hammer the coin to the mast, I commenced giv-
ing great attention to this coin, polishing it upon my jacket
whilst at the same time making a low hum to myself.
“Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale witha
wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me
that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his
starboard fluke—look you, whosoever of ye raises me that
same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
“Huzzah! Huzzah!” cried the men in one voice.
“Captain Ahab,” now said Tashtego, a Gay Head Indian
and our harpooner. “That white whale must be the same
that some call Moby Dick.”

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 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

Then shouts I: “Moby Dick? Moby Dick? Do ye know

the white whale then, Tash?”
And one by one the harpooneers commenced to speak,
discoursing on his manner of fan-tailing, his way of spout-
ing, and the punctures in his flank.
“Aye,” I shouted back after each comment. “Aye. Aye.”
Then spoke Starbuck—as if on cue, although I had con-
fided in no one the workings of my plan—*“Captain Ahab, I
have heard of Moby Dick—was it not Moby Dick that took
off thy leg?”
I showed myself all aquiver, as if found out. “Who—who
told you that?” Then, after a pause, “Aye, Starbuck, aye,
my hearties all around: it was Moby Dick who dismasted
me,” and saying this, I gave off an animal sob. Oh, Brando,
Bernhardt, De Niro: I put them all to shame. “Aye, aye! and
Pll chase him round Good Hope and round the Horn and
round the Norway Maelstrom and round perdition’s flames
before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for,
men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land and
over all sides of earth, till he spout black blood and rolls fin
out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now?”
And “Aye,” they shouted back. “Aye! Aye!”
“God bless ye,” I said, with much dramatic effect. “God
bless ye, men. Steward! Go draw the great measure of grog.”
And then I cast my eye on Starbuck and noticed his grim
demeanor. Ah, he plays his role as if I had coached him on
it. “But what's this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; art thou
not game for Moby Dick?”
And now Starbuck, all right angles and rectitude, chided
me: dry Starbuck, Quaker Starbuck, hard as a twice-baked
biscuit Starbuck, render-unto-Caesar-that-which-is-Caesar’s

174
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

Starbuck: “I am game for the crooked jaw of Moby Dick,

and for the jaws of Death, too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly
comes in the way of business; but I came here to hunt
whales, not my commander's vengeance. Thy vengeance will
not fetch much in our Nantucket market.” Not the glitter-
ing Spanish dollar but the crisp freshly minted greenback
should we chase!
“Nantucket market! Hoot!” says I. “Is the world now
made of guineas and the accountants the new popes who
divvy it up?” I glared Starbuck down until he retreated into
the counting house of his bosom and locked the door from
inside.
“The measure! The measure!” cried I then. And like a
Communion cup we of the grog each partook, swearing
to each other vows of fealty, and pledged, “Death to Moby
Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his
death!”

The Absence of the Leg

(Ruminations overheard)
__I, being captain, shout aloud what I have to say; but Ish-
mael, having no such exalted position, can only stand at the
rail and murmur his thoughts to the wind. (Recall Ms. Park-
er’s quip: A girl’s best friend is her mutter.)
“What is it about that absent leg that so disarms me? How
can I even hope to articulate these thoughts, when these
thoughts are like miasmic gas? Yet put them into some form
I must, or they will drive me mad as Ahab.
“Ts it the mechanical aspect of it which me appalls? The
fact that a bone of whale is substituted for a human bone?

175
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

But don’t we mark it a great difference between ourselves and

the rest of the animal kingdom that we are makers of tools,
that while the great ape may curl up ’neath the branches of a
tree she happens upon, we build shelters for ourselves? How,
then, should we not think the man who fashions for himself
a leg of whale more fully human rather than less?
“Logic decrees that it should be so, but there is something
in me that logic cannot touch.
“How is it that sometimes that leg appears to be leering
at me? I know it wants me, as surely as I know that a thing
cannot want.
“Oh, I do not understand. My reason seems to be about
to grasp hold of it, but while my fingers can graze it, I can-
not grab it. My mind is like a caged bird—it beats its wings
against its wire prison trying to be free of this thing.
“There is something powerful queer at work here.”

The White Leg

What, then, did young Ish know of my white leg? He had

gathered the bare outlines of the story on the deck, but I
knew that much is made when little is said; and that beneath
the deck, out of my earshot, that white leg took on a nearly
legendary cast.
Two legs have I: one of bone, muscle, blood, and that
flesh custom has decreed we call white, although if you lay
the hand of a white man or white woman on a white sheet
of paper it is clear that White is not white; ah, but my other
leg, that is indeed white. Perhaps that is part of what so riles
them about this leg of mine. For the white race had been
told that we have dominion over other, darker races; and the

176
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

sign of heaven's favor is the paleness of our skin. Yet when

whiteness is whitened, it ceases to be White and becomes
merely white.
And further, when we stare at the amputated stump, at
what are we staring? How can nothingness so enthrall us?
Is it that it recalls the abyss from which we all came and to
which we all return?
Surely these associations and thoughts tumbled through
young Ish’s mind, as they did in some manner with all the
men. And yet, for this young one, who made it clear he was
no ordinary seaman, these troubl’d musings took on added
import: he was like a dog with a bone, with that bone leg of
mine.
The other men did not ship out because they had grown
grim about the mouth and found themselves bringing up
the rear of funerals; they weren't given to getting their feet
stuck in philosophic quagmires; these other ship hands had
been born in bawdy houses or on failing family farms; their
mothers had stuck a gin-soaked rag in their mouths as a
substitute for their teats or passed them to their older sis-
ters, only slightly out of infancy themselves, to rear; these
men had known not just the soul’s hunger but the body's;
they had reached satori one night in a tavern in the Brook-
lyn dockyards; these men, Ish, my boy, didn’t get themselves
all tangled up in what isn’t there. What does my leg mean?
What, pray tell, aB sisters and brothers, does your leg mean?
To these questions the ordinary seamen respond with Zen
simplicity: We know that in heaven there is no beer, so cer-
tainly there won't be any in hell: so pass the bottle, mate.
Ish wants to be a man among men, to stand shoulder to
shoulder with others whose bodies give off the rank sweetish
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 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

odor of old sweat and cheap tobacco, not to be the effete son
of a merchant, not to be gawky and odd: he wants to pre-
figure Hemingway and Mailer—to be a drinker, a carouser,
a roustabout, a whorer, a sot, a mutineer; he wants to for-
get all his bookish l’arning, everything his mother and his
schoolmarms taught him. But oh, how he’s revolted at the
smell of the meat served aboard ship, how the sight of flog-
ging brings tears to his eyes; he can’t stand to think that he
will live out his life without some sense of Purpose. He's got
to make something of everything; he’s got to make some-
thing of that whalebone leg of mine: he don’t know what
else to do with it.

Business, Narrative and Otherwise

And so, with the men’s souls forged to mine, we continued

on our voyage until one day from the crow’s nest we heard
Tashtego give the call: “There she blows! There! There!
There! She blows! She blows!”
And then it was all shouts: “Lower away! Lower away!”
“Ready! Ready!” “Spread yourselves, boys,” for we were by
then in the water. “Pull, pull, my children.” »
“Break your
«

backbones, my boys.” “Oh, ye ragamuffin rapscallions,

pull!” And after the whale we were, and all the gloominess of
that endless sea, which had but lately set us to finding it akin
to the vast expanse of featureless eternity that everywhere
surrounds us, was suddenly alive, a carnival of destruction.
A squall was coming up; we fought the squall and the squall
fought us; in our boats we chased the whale and the Pequod
chased us and Death seemed to chase us all.
But we did not perish; only whales perished. We had

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 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

crossed the blear Atlantic to the Azores; we now skirted that

string of islands called the Cape Verdes; we then sailed down
the coast of Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. The mood of
the ship was sometimes made dreary by the grayness of the
sky and the grayness of the sea, causing each of us to retreat
inside himself; in the sunny south sea climes, we were gay as
the swabbies aboard the ums Pinafore.
Were I not forced by circumstance to speak to you in this
truncated form, I would at as great length as did the first
scribbler of this tale set down my version of what unfolded
during those long months at sea—and with as much verbal
facility (nay, more) I, too, would have writ on the sea ravens
and the albatross or gooney bird, regaled you with a tale of
far more interest than the Town-Ho’s Story; with what ten-
der honesty I would have described the marital bed of the
whales and the scene of the nursing calves. But the Pequod
did not set sail for the sake of wandering about the globe: no,
it had an end, a Final Purpose. Its aim was not my vengeance
on a dumb brute nor a chance for melancholic young men
to wax philosophic nor a place for the below-decks cavort-
ing of randy lads; its aim was not even the lighting of lamps
and the cinching of female waists with whalebone stays: no,
ats aim was to take living things and turn them into dollars,
and for all that I might stand on the deck and shout at dour
Starbuck, “Hoot on the Nantucket Market!” still, for that
end we sailed and slaughtered. So, too, this story has an aim,
and just as it is not permitted to return to the port from
whence we set out and say to the bankers and widows and
other investors who greet us at the dock, “Oil? Ambergris?”
and strike our foreheads with our palms, “Why, we were so
busy thinking about how meditation is wedded to water and

179
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

pondering the philosophic import of whiteness we plum

forgot! Hey, Starbuck, we forgot the whale oil!” as if wed
come back from Safeway without the milk. No, we must
come to an ending, we must gather up the scattered threads,
we must roll on towards an inevitable conclusion much asa
human life rolls on inevitable towards death. Cash, sisters;
cash, brothers: cash, cash, cash!
But first, time out for this:

The Dirty Part

Pay no attention to the story told; mark the story not told!
What Ishmael could write of only in hints and intima-
tions, I can, in this more frank age in which we now find
ourselves, write of with far greater candor. Do ye think that,
finding ourselves at sea for months stretching into years, we
maintained a chaste demeanor and knew each other not?
No, we were not monks. Now when Ishmael penned his tale,
he could not speak of this except obliquely: thus he told of
the fearsome hierarchy of the officer’s dining table, whereat
Flask recalled his days when he was a common man before
the mast and could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the
forecastle: but we know that one kind of orifice represents
another, and the same can be said for appetite.
And need I tell you that the captain is a lonely man? The
ship sails to a warm clime and the men, while carrying out
their labors, strip their torsos bare and are sheened with
sweat; if the day be particularly warm, they draw up buckets
of water and toss them upon each other, which makes them
appear as good as naked. (Idle hands being thé devil’s play-
ground, I set them to swabbing and polishing every bit of

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 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

the gimcrackery which adorned the ship, till we would have

held our ground against the most house-proud of Nantucket
housewives.) The captain's flesh is pale, for it would not be
seemly for him to strut about bare-chested; while the ship
mens arms grow thick and muscled from hauling rig and
swabbing decks, the sole exercise the captain gets is mosey-
ing along the deck, his hands clasped behind his back and
stroking his chin.
I am one whose affections have always been most catho-
lic. Aye, let it be known that whilst among the feminine I
find myself drawn to sunny girls with rosy cheeks and blond
hair, when a lad catches my eye he is wont to be gaunt and
dark, with several days’ worth of beard, at least, and a mel-
ancholy mien.
I count myself no more vain then most men, but prob-
ably, too, no less. It is a fact that when a man reaches the age
I then was and he finds a lad some two decades his junior
lapping about his heels like a puppy dog, he will be in some
wise flattered.
But did I delude myself? Ish was fascinated by me; he
feared me; he feared his fascination. My absent leg to him
was like the head of old Medusa: it aroused in him a simul-
taneous dread and desire, a yearning of and hatred for some
thing he dared not look on and yet must look on.
Oh, but what is love but obsession wrapped up ina pretty
bow? It may be just as apt to say he hated me. Aye, more
apt.
But he could not take his eye from me; he could not get
enough of the part of me that was not there. My blank leg
was like his own face: the part to us most dear, yet the part
Fate keeps us ever from knowing save in dim reflection.
MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

Twas as if his fascination with my kind was immutably de-

creed. What found he when he went searching for a place to
lodge in New Bedford? Why, a house to stay in that was—
palsied. And that text of his, lurching first this way, then
that, misshapen, deformed, totally lacking in any sense of
pleasing wholeness or symmetry—it is as crippled as the Co-
logne Cathedral with its mismatched spires. Ish told you he
loves to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts. He
made of me his forbidden sea, his barbarous land. Aye, he
had been looking for me ere ever he laid his piercing eye on
me. He had been looking for me ere this poor place we call
the universe was formed.
And then one day when we were off the coast of Japan,
having been at sea for some six months, Ish and I chanced
to find ourselves alone on deck when our first—and only—
physical intimacy occurred.
It was a kiss.
Oh what a democratic device is the kiss! I have a mouth,
thou hast a mouth, she or he has a mouth, ye have mouths—
we all have mouths. In this act two bodies connect, not as male
and female, not as top and bottom, but in perfect, egalitarian
harmony. Would it not be a good thing for this fragmented
Nation of ours if, encountering each other on city streets and
in rural post offices, on underground trains and in supermar-
ket lines, we turned to the stranger next to us and bussed their
lips? Hath not a Jew arms, legs? asks Will. Well, frankly, sweet
William, some do not. But in all my travels through this world
of the impaired, while I have met some with palsied tongues
and quivering lips, I have never met man or woman lacking
that sublimely hermaphroditic organ, the mouth! Let us away
then with this lovely democratic tumble of the tongues!
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

Yet the man seeking intimacy at sea faces an odd conun-

drum. What is the ocean upon which he sails? True enough,
it is the vast amniotic fluid of the world itself, a womb
wherein we all were stewed into being; but it is a grave, too.
Think ye on all the countless millions of organisms that
have graced this world with their presence: most have made
the ocean both their home and their final bed. From the
lowly amoeba to the regal walrus, the dugong and the mana-
tee, the anchovies that swim in great schools, the smelt and
sprat, sea anemones and kelp, lobster, octopus, and squid,
all are decayed into the ocean brine. We not only sail upon
the plantation and the cemetery of plankton and of krill, of
the mighty shark and of the mightier whale: the very atoms
of the dead are inextricably mixed, part of the spray that sat-
urates the air, of the salt water with which we wash.
When we pressed lip to lip, Ishmael and I, we felt not
only a nervous tingle but also the taste of death.
Oh, that kiss! We seek to break out of the prison of the
body, to have our ethereal soul touched by another, but the
filthy body—unbathed for months save with the spray of
seawater, the mouth acave filled with ferment—demands
that we make our way to the soul through it!
The ship itself, Pll warrant, is the perfect microcosm of
poor humanity's lot. We stand on the deck and look out at
the endless vistas of the infinite gray sky and the infinite gray
sea; this singular sight sends us pondering eternal nirvanic
emptiness. We shudder to know that we are a solitary quark,
space stretching dimensionless all around us. And beneath
decks? What we wouldn't give for a fragment of that infinite
expanse. We bow our heads, not to any cosmic notions but
to the profane fact of the deck boards above our heads. That
183
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

bliss of masculine marriage, when men yoke themselves to-

gether at their above-deck labors, finds its counterpart in the
stifling horror of the mass-marital bed where, netted up in
their hammocks like so many caught fish, the men sway, giv-
ing off their pestilential night odors, farts that stink of hard-
tack, oatmeal, and cured meats. The smell of the hold makes
you yearn for the sharp smell of sulfur and brimstone, sear-
ing nostrils clean!
And then there was the sound of footsteps on the fore-
deck ladder, our embrace broke itself off.
For some weeks thereafter he seemed to be avoiding me.
I am not given to calling one of the men under me on some
pretext to my cabin there to press an unwanted suit on him.
If he wished to steer clear of me, so be it: to steer clear as if I
were a fearsome iceberg in the northern sea, an iceberg that
would wreck him ere he drew too close.
Ah, but that doltish, loutish stare of his! I care not what
the learned professors of optics may say: that the eye is mere-
ly a passive receiver, that it gives off no vapors, no humors,
that it can only be penetrated by light, never penetrate. I tell
you, I could feel him staring at me, feel the laser beam of his
eye on my flesh. I whipped around, caught him looking: he
darted his eye away, like a naughty lad caught with his hand
in the cookie jar. Oh, he was concocting something in that
brain of his. He looked and looked and looked—and I had
not even the privacy of skin! There my whalebone leg was,
exposed, naked, plain, bone-white.

The Squeezing of the Sperm

Well, we went on about our business; to wit, thé business of

turning things which lived and swam and dove and nursed

184
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

their babes, objects strange and mysterious, into objects

without mystery, into things that are worth so many dollars,
cash on the barrel. A dead whale is just so much blubber and
dead meat fit for sea dogs: it must be tried into products,
and I must become not just a captain but a factory boss.
And so one day I was at the helm, holding a steady course,
trolling out my nine fathoms an hour. The men under my
command were busying themselves round a vat which held
the sperm of a whale that had been cooled and crystallized
to such a degree that it was necessary to squeeze the lumps
therein back into liquid. Ishmael was one of the crew I as-
signed to this task: he sat himself down on the deck, cross-
legged like a Hindoo, much to the amused derision of his
fellows, and began to squeeze. The ship, under a blue tran-
quil sky, was gliding serenely along; as the men squeezed, the
globules discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes
their wine; we sniffed up that uncontaminated aroma—lit-
erally and truly like the smell of spring violets.
Oh, what a paradise there was in that task. I drew near
to it, as to a musky meadow. I broke rank, cast aside my
fearsome solitude, and joined the men in their squeezing. I
almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that
sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while
bathing in that bath of sperm I felt divinely free from my
rancor at Ish for his infernal, boorish staring; I cast off all ill-
will or petulance, or malice of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! I squeezed that sperm till |
myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself
unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking
their hands for the gentle globules. The selfsame sensibility
185
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

seemed to oertake us all, such an abounding, affectionate,

friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I
was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into
their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say—Oh! my dear
fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acer-
bities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us
squeeze hands all around; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves
into each other. It seemed that Ish and I might cease to exist
in our separate skins; our very globules of flesh might merge
in some universal soup.
I do not expect that I shall be so happy again until I am
laid beneath the ground and sleep in happy fellowship with a
graveyard of diverse comrades—blissfully, all one and one all.
But then Ish squeezed my finger, thinking it a globule of
coagulated sperm. He stared moonily up. In that moment
there was no division between us: not the divisions between
those with hair of gray and hair untouched by time; not the
division of rank; not the division of our diverse tempers;
not even, for a moment, that fearsome division of our skin.
And then his face changed its mien: as sudden and swift as a
South Seas squall comes up, his face became all beclouded.
He dropped my hand, started back: I was not some undif-
ferentiated, universal stuff but myself, a man apart, with my
own peculiar body, my own smells, my own own-ness, my
own absent leg.

Moby Dick
In the face of this, what might I have done? Shut my soul to
all but its own society? But what man can make of himself
a thing entirely apart? I am not a whale; I do not breach,

186
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

solitary and splendid, regally indifferent to the water in

which I swim, to poor humanity. I am a man; it is the nature
of my soul to mingle with other souls; my fellows are my
quadrant and my compass.
And so when ye dare to tremble in my presence, my heart
cries out: I'll give ye reason enow to tremble! Look away
from me in shame? I’ll become a very machine for the mak-
ing of shame!
Was I made mad by him? Was I Jim Jones, some other
mad pastor bewitching myself as I my flock bewitched?
Mad?
Nay!
Emotionally disturbed?
Aye, that.
For how could I not be disturbed? Doth not the great
serene Pacific find her vast waters agitated, e’en sent wild,
by a gale-force wind? How, then, could we expect of a man
that he be grander and more placid than the mighty ocean?
Flog me with your shameful whip and think that I shall not
even flinch? Only a man who has never known the lash in
any form could expect such magnanimity. Did not our Lord
himself on the cross writhe, flail, moan, cry out that he was
bereft?
And my heart filled with a monomania anda species of
horrible delight. In every life, sisters and brothers, some-
thing must be chased: be it a Spanish sixteen-dollar piece or
the greenback dollar, a whale, nirvana, a place in the literary
pantheon, justice; I do not fancy myself so fine a fellow that
on my very deathbed I will not chase after one more breath;
and then please, dear God, having given me that one, give
me just one more.

187
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

So I made of myself the thing they made of me: I chased

the whale, the mighty whale, the whale who had dismasted
me. I chased Moby Dick. I chased him as though nothing in
heaven or earth meant what that chase meant; I chased him
to my peril, and the peril of my men.
And then one night, at last, mid-watch, I smelled that
smell which is a sort of calling card for the Sperm Whale.
How can I best describe it? Let me say that it is the odor of
the sea but the sea condensed, boiled down, reduced to its
essence. I sniffed the air and reset our course slightly.
And then I saw him and gave a loud cry: “Thar she blows!
Tis Moby Dick! Thar she blows!”
Soon all the boats were manned, all dropped, all the
boat sails set, all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness,
shooting to leeward, and I, I led the flock. And through the
calm tropical waters Moby Dick moved on, concealing his
magnificent bulk as an iceberg reveals but a small portion of
itself above the waves. To see Moby Dick moving was to see
a mountain move, and perhaps that suggests a tearing asun-
der, a rain of soil and stones, a quaking of the earth—yet de-
spite vast bulk and his great speed his motion was in no wise
cumbersome; he did glide most regal and smooth.
But soon the forepart of him slowly rose from the water;
for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch
and, warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the
grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.
Hoveringly halting and dipping on the wing, the white sea-
fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left.
With oars apeak and paddles down, the sheets of their
sails adrift, our three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby
Dick’s reappearance.

188
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

Tashtego was the first to spy the white birds that had sur-
rounded the whale, which were turning towards my boat
and had begun to flutter over the water there. But suddenly,
as I peered down and down into its depths, I saw a white
living spot no bigger than a white weasel with wonderful
celerity uprising and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and
then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of
white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable
bottom. It was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw!
And yet the great White Whale seemed strangely oblivi-
ous of our advance—as the whale sometimes will—and we
were in the smoky mountain mist that, thrown off from the
. whale’s spout, curled round his great Monadnock hump;
then darted I my fierce iron. And Moby Dick sideways
writhed; spasmodically rolled his high flank against the bow,
and was taken.
Yes, Moby Dick was caught, as thousands of nameless le-
viathans before him had been captured and thousands after
him would be. He was tried out: of his bones were corset
stays made; his whale oil a flame did light—a flame that died
ere you, dear reader, were ever born. Moby Dick became,
as millions—aye, billions—of living things have become,
naught but a commodity, worth so many dollars, cash on the
barrel, in the Nantucket market. His blood and bile became
so many greenbacks, and those dollars were exchanged for
other dollars, which were exchanged for other cold commod-
ities, and so on, as the drops of water in the ocean mingle and
become indistinguishable; and mayhap some remnant of old
Moby finds himself in your change purse now.
What? This, then, is the ending of our tale? A dead whale?
A once-magnificent creature tried down into blubber and

189
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

oil and ladies’ corsets? A solitary ship tacking across a vast,

becalmed, dull Pacific? A pocketful of loose change? A crip
who is neither cured nor dies? This the ending to the tale?

The Drama’s Done

That night e’er our labors were done, after those great, infi-
del doings of stripping the whale of its flesh had been carried
out, after the ship had become an abattoir—or mayhaps an
altar to a pagan god—we celebrated the day’s hunt with a
feast of grog and whale meat. In profane Communion,
we ate the flesh of the one we had both hunted and wor-
shipped. The measure of grog was most liberally passed, and
with great, good gluttony we unashamedly grew thick and
dopey with both the liquor and the meat. In that wild feast
we dined on our enemy: that is to say, he became us, and in
he becoming us, we became him. We lurched about with
drunken footsteps on the deck, yet still slick with blood, as
our frail ship lurched upon the drunken sea. In that happy
carnival we no longer knew divisions of rank or tempera-
ment: we were as one—save one.
Young Ish held himself aloof.
He had taken his old familiar place at the rail and was
once again to be seen muttering, muttering to the wind:
“Moby Dick dead and Ahab alive! It cannot be! And yet—it
is! Moby Dick dead! The old man alive!”
Some days later I happened to espy him again. That
gloomy aspect and melancholy mien that he had heretofore
cultivated as a sort of sham, no longer seemed an affectation.
Indeed, it seemed some monomania had got hold of him.
At his labors he seemed always to be muttering, and when

190
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

I chanced to put myself within earshot of his mumblings I

heard, “A mighty book—a mighty theme! . . . Science! Curse
thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast
man’s eyes aloft to that heaven . . . Fate the handspike. Yes,
the handspike. Oh! . . . Whiteness. Fearsome albino!” and
then, his mood seeming to turn, he would sing out, “Such
a funny, sporty, gamey, jesty, jokey, hokey-pokey lad is the
Ocean, oh!” and dance alittle jig whilst still at his labors.
This was but the least of the strange monomania that had
taken possession of him. He had contrived to fashion him-
self, out of the quill of an albatross, a pen, and from some
substances he had begged from the ship’s surgeon he made
himself ink, and commenced to scribble on any scribbleable
surface that could be found, no mean task aboard a whaler,
which is not fitted out in any wise for penmen or for schol-
ars. Still, he managed to get a bit of old newspaper here,
an envelope that had once held a letter there (and what he
traded for this I can only imagine), and in a hand so quaint
and fine it itself seemed obsession incarnate, he wrote and
wrote and wrote.
Did I know then what it was he was at? An inkling had I,
so that a century anda half later when I was “rescued” from
my South Seas atoll—a portion of the tale I must here skip —
over—and found myself repatriated to Nantucket, and there
entered a bookseller’s shop, and discovered on a rustic table
(rustic out of a Pottery Barn catalogue, you understand) a
thick tome entitled Moby Dick—printed on vellum paper,
amply illustrated with woodcuts—souvenirs for those whose
refined tastes kept them from purchasing miniature lobster
pots and plastic scrimshaw—I found between its covers only
dreadful confirmation.

191
 MOBY DICK, OR, THE LEG

Ish could not cease his fearsome meaning making. The

sky must fill with portents, the waves and krill must speak
to him, the very brine shrimp must shout hosannas or chant
kaddish; this whole vast insensible universe must be turned
into a machine for making sense. Yes, my White Leg must
be made to bleed meaning, if it could not bleed blood, till
it strode before him in the monomaniac incarnation of all
those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating
them. All that maddens and torments; all that stirs up the
lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the
sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life
and thought; all evil, to poor Ishmael, were visibly personi-
fied, and made practically assailable in the White Leg. He
piled on my white stump the sum of all the general rage and
hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as
if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell
upon it.
His thoughts had created a creature in him, and that crea-
ture was me.
Shouldst thou beware Ahab, Ishmael?
No, lad, beware thyselft
Beware thyself, Ishmael!

FINIS

192
In the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction series

Last Call: Stories

By K. L. Cook

Carrying the Torch: Stories

By Brock Clarke
Nocturnal America
By John Keeble

The Alice Stories

By Jesse Lee Kercheval
Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other
.Portuguese-American Stories
By Katherine Vaz

Call Me Ahab: A Short Story Collection

By Anne Finger

To order or obtain more information on these

or other University of Nebraska Press titles,
visit www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.
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“An Anne Finger story is unlike any other, In the stories of Call Me Ahab she -
magically combines fact and fiction, imaginatively re-creating the context of
how we understand and look at our bodies, as well as how we look at literature,
the stories we tell. This book is entertaining, illuminating, and necessary.”
enny Fries, author of Body, Remember: A Memoir and The History
of My Shoes and The Evolution of Darwin’s Theory

“Call Me Ahab intricately embroiders vivid new lives for a range of characters —
from art and literature whose stories we think we already know....These
elegant stories rewrite the lives of the unusually embodied, imbuing them with
magic and depth to show us how we collectively misrecognize what it means to
inhabit a body that looks and works apart from the ordinary.”
— Jasna Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies
*

Froagine aHollywood ééncounter between Hees Keller and Frida Kahlo,

“two female icons of disability.” Or the story of “Moby Dick, or, The Leg,” told
_ from Ahab’s perspective. What if Vincent Van Gogh resided in a twentieth-
century New York hotel, surviving on food stamps and direct communications
with God? Or if the dwarf pictured in a seventeenth-century painting by
Velazquez should tell her story? And, finally,imagine the encounter between
David and Goliath from the Philistine’s point of view,
These are the characters who people history and myth as counterpoints to the
“normal.” ‘They are also the characters who populate Anne Finger’s remarkable
short stories. Affecting but never sentimental, ironic but never cynical, thesewon-
derfully rich ~~ comic tales reimagine life oe the margins of ae

TA,nne Finger has taueb eo gS “Wayne State University in Detgoit

and at the University © ai
including Bone Truth:
Elegy for a Disease: A I

UNIVERSITY OF
Lincoln NE 68588

bisonbooks.com