City (17 page)

21

It was five in the morning when Shatzy got home. She hated to spend the night after she went to bed with someone. It was silly, but she always found some excuse and left.

She sat outside on the steps. It was still dark. There were strange noises, noises that you didn't hear during the day. Like bits of things that had been left behind and now were busy trying to reach the world, to arrive punctually at dawn in the belly of the planetary noise.

You always lose something along the way, she thought.

I ought to stop it, she thought.

Ending up in the bed of someone you've never seen before is like traveling. At the moment it's a lot of trouble, even a little silly. It's nice later, when you think back on it. It's nice to have done it, to go around the day after, clean and impeccable, and think about how the night before you were doing those things and saying those things, above all
saying
those things, and to someone you'll never see again.

Usually she never saw them again.

I ought to stop it, she thought.

You end up nowhere, that way.

It would all be simpler if they hadn't hammered into you this business of ending up somewhere, if they had taught you, rather, to be happy standing still. All that nonsense about your road. Finding your road. Taking your own road. Maybe we were made to live in a plaza, or a park, instead, to stay there, as our life passes, or maybe we are a crossroads, and the world needs us to stand still, it would be a disaster if, at some point, we were to go off on our road, what road?, others are roads, I am a plaza, I lead nowhere, I
am
a place. Maybe I'll join a gym, she thought. There was one nearby, which was open at night. Why do I like to do everything at night? She looked at her shoes, and her bare feet in the shoes, and her bare legs above the shoes, up to the edge of her skirt, which was short. Her stockings, which were nylon, were rolled up in her purse. She never managed to put them back on when she got out of the bed to get dressed and leave. It was like reloading your gun after a shoot-out. Stupid. What would you say about it, old Bird? Did you put your guns back in the holster unloaded after firing them? Did you roll them up and stick them in your purse? Old Bird. I'll arrange a lovely death for you.

She thought about going in and going to sleep. But in the glow of the street lamps she saw the trailer, sitting motionless in the yard, slightly less yellow than usual. Once a week she washed it thoroughly, even the windows and the tires, the whole thing. Because she had been seeing it there, every day, for months, it had become a part of the landscape, like a tree, or a bridge over a river. All of a sudden, in the dark at the end of the night, with her whore's stockings rolled up in her purse, Shatzy understood: motionless, sparkling, yellow:
it was no longer something that was
waiting to leave.
It had become one of those things whose task is to remain, to anchor the roots of some piece of the world. The things that, when you wake up or come home, have been watching over you. It's strange. You go in search of some amazing contraption to have yourself transported
far
away, and then you cling to it with such love that
far,
sooner or later, comes to mean far from it.

Bullshit, it's only a matter of finding a car, she thought.

It couldn't be done without a car. Trailers don't move by themselves.

They'd find a car, that was it.

And they'd go far away.

It's like a tree, she thought. She felt something rising inside her that she didn't like, she knew it and she didn't like it, a kind of distant rumble of defeat. The secret, in this situation, was not to give it time to get out. It was to shout so loud that you couldn't hear it anymore. It was to put on a pair of black nylon stockings, leave the house, and end up in the bed of someone you've never seen before.

Already done, she thought. So she went for a version of “New York, New York” at the top of her lungs.

“Did you hear that drunk last night?” Gould said the next morning while they were making breakfast.

“No, I was sleeping.”

The telephone rang. Shatzy went to get it, and it was a while before she came back. She said it was Rector Bolder. He wanted to know if Gould was all right. Gould asked if he was still on the phone.

“No. He said he didn't want to disturb you, he just wanted to know if you were all right. Then he said something about a seminar, or something like that. A seminar on particulates?”

“On particles.”

“He says they had to put it off.”

Gould said something that was hard to understand. Shatzy got up and put a cup of milk in the microwave.

“Is Rector Bolder fat? I mean, is he fat, or what?” Shatzy asked.

“Why?”

“He has a fat voice.”

Gould closed the cereal box, then looked at Shatzy.

“What did he say exactly?”

“He says it's been twenty-two days since they've seen you at the university, and so he wanted to know if you were all right. And then he said that thing about the seminar.”

“You want some more cereal?”

“No, thanks.”

“If you get to two hundred boxes you win a trip to Miami.”

“Splendid.”

“And it took all that time just to tell you those two things?”

“Well, then I suggested some stratagems for losing weight, people usually don't know that with just a couple of tricks you can spare yourself a lot of pounds, you just have to eat with a little intelligence. I told him that.”

“And what did he say?”

“I don't know, he seemed uncomfortable. He said something that didn't make sense.”

“He's very thin. He must be seventy years old, and he's very thin.”

“Oh.”

Shatzy began to clear the table. Gould went upstairs, and came down with his jacket on. He looked for his shoes.

“Gould . . .”

“Yes?”

“I wonder . . . imagine a boy who is a genius, OK?, and who ever since he was born has been going to the university every blessed day that God puts on earth, OK?, well, at a certain point it happens that for twenty-two days in a row he leaves the house but he doesn't go to his damn university, not even once, ever, so I ask myself, do you have any idea where a boy like that might go, every blessed day?”

“Around.”

“Around?”

“Around.”

“It's possible. Yes, it's possible. Likely, that he goes around.”

“Bye, Shatzy.”

“Bye.”

That morning he ended up near the Renemport school, the one that had a rusting fence all around it, high enough so that you couldn't get over it. Through the windows you could see children in class, but on the playground there was a boy who wasn't in class because he was on the playground and, to be precise, was playing with a basketball, precisely in the corner of the playground where there was a basketball net. The backboard was peeling, but the net must have been replaced recently, it was almost new. The boy was maybe twelve. Thirteen, something like that. He was black. He was dribbling the ball, confidently, as if looking for something within himself, and when he found it he stopped and took a shot at the basket. He always hit it. You could hear the sound of the net, a kind of breath, or a tiny gust of wind. The boy went over to the basket, retrieved the ball, which was coming to a stop, as if worn out from exhaling that microscopic breath, picked it up, and began dribbling again. He didn't seem sad, or happy, either, he dribbled the ball and shot at the basket, simply, as if it had been written thus, for centuries.

I
know
all that, Gould thought.

First, he recognized the rhythm. He closed his eyes so that he could hear it better. It was that rhythm.

I am seeing a thought,
Gould thought.

Thoughts when they take the form of a question. They bounce, strolling around to pick up all the fragments of the question, following a course that seems random, an end in itself. When they have reconstructed the question they stop. Eyes on the basket. Silence. Lifted off the ground, intuition gives it all the strength necessary to sew up the distance to a possible response. Shoot. Fantasy and reason. In the air unrolls the logically deduced parabola of a thought sent spinning by a flick of the wrist initiated by the imagination. Basket. The statement of the response: a sort of breath. To state it is to lose it. It slips away and already it is the bouncing pieces of the next question. From the beginning.

Shatzy, the trailer, a psychiatric hospital, Prof. Taltomar's hands, the trailer, Couverney would be an honor for us to be associated with the chair of, either you watch or you play, Prof. Kilroy's tears, when Shatzy smiles, the soccer field, Couverney, Diesel and Poomerang, the railroad tracks, bam, right left, mother. Eyes on the basket. Lift. Shoot.

The black child played, and he was solitary, inevitable, and secret, like thoughts when they are true and take the form of a question.

Behind him was the appointed home of knowledge, the school, armored and separate, with its production of questions and answers in accordance with an established method, within the comfortable framework of a community intent on rounding the sharp corners of the questions, and astutely transforming into a public ritual that which, isolated, would be hyperbole, and abandoned.

Expelled from knowledge, thoughts struggle, Gould thought.

(Fellow-child, you in the emptiness of an empty playground, you and your questions, teach me that confidence, the sure movement that finds the net, the breath, at the other end of every fear.)

He walked home, his steps closely following the imaginary bounces of a hypothetical ball pushed into the emptiness by his hand; he heard it hitting the pavement, warm and regular, like heartbeats rebounding away from a quiet life. What people could see, and saw, was a boy who as he walked played with a yo-yo that wasn't there. So they stared, struck by that rhythmic glimpse of the absurd, incorporated into adolescence, as if to announce, far in advance, madness. People are afraid of madness. Gould, then, went along like a threat, although he didn't know it—without knowing it, like an attack.

He arrived home.

In the yard was a trailer. Yellow.

22

An English scholar arrived at Gould's university. He was very famous. Rector Bolder introduced him in the Great Hall. The Rector rose to his feet and, standing at the microphone, reviewed the scholar's professional life and accomplishments. It took a long time, because the English scholar had written numerous books and in addition had translated and founded and promoted, and in addition to that had been the chairman of a lot of things, or an adviser to them. Finally, he collaborated. He did that to a truly massive degree. He collaborated like a madman. So Rector Bolder had to speak for quite a while. He spoke standing, holding up the pages of the speech in his hand as he read.

Next to him, seated, was the English scholar.

It was a curious situation, because Rector Bolder was speaking of him as if he were dead, not out of rudeness but because such situations require the speaker to say things that inevitably seem to be from a eulogy, that have something funereal about them, and the odd thing is that usually the dead person is very much alive, and is sitting right there, and, contrary to every expectation, is sitting there contentedly, without protesting, although he is being subjected to this torture, and is sometimes, in fact, unaccountably enjoying it.

It was one of those times. Instead of sinking into embarrassment, the English scholar let Rector Bolder's funeral eulogy pour down on him in an utterly knowing and natural way. Although the loudspeakers of the Great Hall emitted phrases like “with driving passion and incomparable intellectual rigor” and “
last but not
least,
he accepted the honorary chairmanship of the Latin Alliance, a post already endowed with,” he seemed to be shielded from any embarrassment, armored, so to speak, in his own, already tested hyperbaric chamber. He stared out into space with a fixed expression, but he did so with a firm and noble determination; a slightly lifted chin supported this, along with a few wrinkles that furrowed his brow, demonstrating a serene state of concentration. At regular intervals, he clenched his jaws slightly, sharpening his profile and allowing an observer to imagine an inner vitality that had never been tamed. Every so often, the English scholar swallowed, but the way someone else might turn over an hourglass: with a graceful gesture he introduced an immobility into another immobility, sealing the impression of a patience that had been dueling with time forever, and forever winning. Altogether he presented a figure that displayed to near-perfection concentrated power and absent-minded detachment simultaneously: the first confirming the praises of Rector Bolder and the second relieving them of the weight of vulgar flattery. Wonderful. At one point, just as Rector Bolder was speaking of his pedagogical activities (“always in the midst of his students, but as
primus
inter pares
”), the English scholar surpassed himself: he suddenly abandoned his hyperbaric chamber, took off his eyeglasses, inclined his head, as if overcome by an unexpected trace of weariness, brought the thumb and index finger of his right hand to his eyes and, dropping his eyelids, allowed himself a light circular pressure on the eyeballs, a most human gesture in which the entire audience could see, summed up, all the moments of pain, disillusion and difficulty that a life of successes had not eliminated, and the memory of which the English scholar now, before all, wished to share. It was lovely. Then suddenly, as if reawakening from a dream, he raised his head again, put on his glasses with a rapid but precise gesture, and returned to his perfect immobility, staring into space, with the strength of one who has known pain but has not been defeated by it.

It was precisely at this point that Prof. Mondrian Kilroy started vomiting. He was sitting in the third row, and he started vomiting.

Apart from weeping—something that he did often now and with a certain pleasure—Prof. Mondrian Kilroy had begun to vomit from time to time, and this, too, had to do with his research and in particular with an essay he had written which, oddly, he termed “the definitive and redeeming refutation of whatever I have written, write, or will write.” In fact it was a very special essay. Mondrian Kilroy had worked on it for fourteen years, without ever taking a note. Then one day, when he was shut in a pornvideo booth where, by pressing numbered keys, you could choose among 212 different programs, he understood that he had understood, and he left the booth, grabbed a brochure that listed the prices of the “contact room,” and on the back wrote the essay. He wrote it right there, standing at the cashier's counter. It didn't take more than two minutes: the essay consisted of a series of six brief theses. The longest was no more than five lines. Then he returned to the booth, because he still had three minutes of paid-for viewing left, and he didn't want to waste them. He pushed the buttons at random. When he ended up with a gay video, he was irritated.

It may seem surprising, but the essay in question did not have to do with Prof. Mondrian Kilroy's favorite subject, that is, curved objects. No. To stick to the facts: the essay was entitled:

ESSAY ON INTELLECTUAL HONESTY

Poomerang, who was a great admirer of it and knew it practically by heart, had once summed up the contents like this:

If a bank robber goes to jail, why do intellectuals roam free?

It should be said that, with banks, Poomerang had a “suspense account” (the phrase was Shatzy's, she found it ingenious). He hated banks, even though it wasn't clear why. At one time, he had undertaken an educational campaign against the excessive use of ATM machines. Along with Diesel and Gould he was constantly chewing gum, and he would stick the gum, still warm, on the keypad of an automatic teller machine. Usually he put it on the 5. People would go up to the machine, and right as they were entering their secret code they would notice the gum. If they didn't need the number 5 they would keep going, paying careful attention to where they put their finger. If their code had a 5 they panicked. The anguished need for money had to do battle with the revulsion at the chewed gum. Some tried to remove the sticky substance; they used all types of objects. Usually they ended up plastering the whole screen. A minority gave up and left. Sad to say, most people swallowed hard and then hit the number, their finger on the gum. Once Diesel saw an unfortunate woman who had three 5s in a row in her secret code. She hit the first with great dignity, and on the second her mouth was weirdly contorted. On the third she started vomiting.

In this connection: the first thesis of the
Essay on Intellectual
Honesty
went like this:

Men have ideas.

“Clever,” remarked Shatzy.

“It's only the beginning, Miss Shell. And then, careful, it's not at all obvious. Someone like Kant, for instance, wouldn't let it pass so easily.”

“Kant?”

“He's a German.”

“Oh.”

“Do I wash here, too?”

“Let me see.”

Every so often, when they washed the trailer, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy joined them. After the business of the Vancouver purée, he and Gould had become friends. And the professor liked the others a lot, too, Shatzy, the giant and the mute. They talked while they washed. One of their favorite topics was the
Essay on Intellectual
Honesty.
It engaged them.

Men have ideas.

Prof. Mondrian Kilroy said that ideas are like galaxies of little intuitions, a confused thing, he declared, which is continually changing and is essentially useless for practical purposes. They are beautiful, that's all, they are beautiful. But they are a mess. Ideas, in their pure state, are a marvelous mess. They are
provisional
apparitions of infinity
, he said. “Clear and distinct” ideas, he added, are an invention of Descartes, are a fraud, clear ideas do not exist, ideas are obscure by definition, if you have a clear idea, it's not an idea.

“Then what is it?”

“Thesis No. 2, kids.”

Thesis No. 2 went like this:

Men express ideas.

Here's the trouble, said Prof. Mondrian Kilroy. When you express an idea you give it a coherence that it did not originally possess. Somehow you have to give it a form that is organized, and concise, and comprehensible to others. As long as you limit yourself to thinking it, the idea can remain the marvelous mess that it is. But when you decide to express it you begin to discard one thing, to summarize something else, to simplify this and cut that, to put it in order, by imposing a certain logic: you work on it a bit, and in the end you have something that people can understand. A “clear and distinct” idea. At first you try to do this in a responsible way: you try not to throw away too much, you'd like to preserve the whole infinity of the idea you had in your head. You try. But they don't give you time, they are on you, they want to know, they attack you.

“They who?”

“The others, all the others.”

“For example?”

“People. People. You express an idea and people listen. And want to understand. Or, even worse, they want to know if it's right or wrong. It's a perversion.”

“What are they supposed to do? Swallow it and that's the end?”

“I don't know what they're supposed to do, but I know what they do, and for you, who had an idea, and are now trying to express it, it's like being attacked. With impressive velocity you think only of how to make it as compact and strong as possible, to withstand the attack, so that it comes out alive, and, using all your intelligence, you strive to make it an unassailable system, and the better you succeed the less you realize that what you're doing, what you're really doing at that moment, is losing touch, little by little but with impressive velocity, with the origin of your idea, with the marvelous instinctive infinite mess that was your idea, and you're doing this for the sole, sad purpose of expressing it, that is, of establishing it in such a way that it is strong and coherent and refined enough to withstand the shock wave of the surrounding world, the objections, the obtuse faces of those who don't understand, the telephone call from the head of your department who . . .”

“It's getting cold, Professor.”

Often they talked about it while they ate, because Prof. Mondrian Kilroy liked pizza the way Shatzy made it, and so, especially on Saturdays, they ate pizza. Which, cold, was inedible.

Men express ideas.

But they are no longer ideas, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy burst out. They are the detritus of ideas, arranged in masterly fashion to become solid objects, perfect mechanisms, instruments of war. They are artificial ideas. They have only a distant relationship with that marvelous and infinite mess in which they began, an almost imperceptible relationship, like a faint perfume. In reality they are now plastic, artificial stuff, with no relation to the truth, mere gadgets to make a good show in public. Which, according to him, led logically to Thesis No. 3. Which went like this:

Men express ideas that are not theirs.

“Are you joking?”

“I'm totally serious.”

“How do they express ideas that are not theirs?”

“Let's say that they are
no longer
theirs. They were. But they very quickly slip out of control and become artificial creatures that develop almost autonomously, and they have a single objective: to survive. Man lends them his intelligence and they use it to become ever more solid and precise. In a certain sense, human intelligence is constantly working to dissipate the marvelous infinite chaos of original ideas and replace it with the stainless perfection of artificial ideas. They were apparitions: they are now objects: and man takes hold of them, and knows them perfectly, but would be unable to say where they came from and, finally, what possible relationship they now have to the truth. In a certain sense it doesn't even matter to him any more. They function, they withstand attack, they succeed in dissecting the weaknesses of others, they almost never break: why should he rock the boat? Man looks at them, discovers the pleasure of holding them, using them, seeing them in action. Sooner or later, inevitably, he learns that one can fight with them. He had never thought of that before. They were apparitions: he had thought only of making others see them. But in time: nothing of the original desire survives. They were apparitions: man has made them into weapons.”

This was the part that Shatzy liked best. They were apparitions: man has made them into weapons.

“You know what I often think, Professor?”

“Tell me, Miss Shell.”

“Gunfighters, you know, the gunfighters of the West?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they were fantastic shots, and they knew everything about their guns, but if you think about it, well: none of them would have known how to make a gun. You see?”

“Go on.”

“I mean: it's one thing to use a weapon, another to invent it, or produce it.”

“Exactly.”

“I don't know what it means, but I often think about it.”

“You're doing very well, Miss Shell.”

“You think so?”

“I'm absolutely certain.”

On the other hand, Gould, if you think about it, look what happens in a man's head when he expresses an idea and someone standing before him raises an objection. Do you think that that man has the time, or the
honesty,
to return to the apparition that was the long-ago origin of that idea and check back, to see if the objection is reasonable? He will never do it. It is much easier to refine the artificial idea now in his possession in such a way that it can withstand the objection and maybe move to the offensive, and attack, in turn, the objection. What does respect for the truth have to do with all this? Nothing. This is a duel. They are establishing who is the stronger. They don't want to use other weapons, because they don't know how to: they use ideas. It may seem that the point of all this is to elucidate the truth, but in reality what both of them want is to establish who is the stronger. It's a duel. They may seem like brilliant intellectuals, but they are animals who are defending their territory, they are fighting over a female, they are hunting for food. Listen to me, Gould: you will never find anything more savage and more primitive than two intellectuals dueling. Anything more dishonest.