Guide to Animal Behaviour (12 page)

I am the only real reader in the group. Sometimes this has led to misunderstandings and embarrassments.

The woman who claimed to be my wife has red hair. She returned this morning and spoke briefly with my neighbour, an act which filled me with foreboding.

I was unable to continue my work and had to go out.

In the street, I encountered several well-meaning individuals who pressed money on me (though I make a good living carrying a sandwich board around Times Square three evenings a week; I am a human sign which reads:
GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS! LIVE SEX ACTS! HE-SHES! GREEK AND FRENCH TRANSLATIONS! NO COVER! FREE HOTDOGS AT MIDNIGHT!
).

I went to the mission for my monthly shower though it had only been four days since my last. The concierge remarked upon this, a liberty and invasion of privacy to which I could not respond because of the angry feelings which welled up inside me. He told me to stop reading other people in the shower as this annoyed them.

In spite of the concierge's injunction, I read parts of several informative
TIMES
pieces while I soaked under a thin stream of lukewarm water. One article dealt with the mysterious disappearance of Pancho Villa's head, another discoursed on the End of History, an event, apparently, which occurred only a few short weeks ago.

When I returned to my box, the dirty, bearded man was pacing up and down before my door in an agitated manner. As soon as he sighted me, he came running over, shouting, “There was a woman here to see you. She talked to me. I think she wanted sex. I've always had an effect on women. That's how I ended up here. My health cracked.”

I didn't know what to say. He seemed so excited, so very pleased with himself
her breasts and red hair
, giving me his whole history and health record like that. I couldn't just turn away from him.

So we sat a while with our backs to the alley wall, watching the elderly black woman rummage in a dumpster. This was a profound moment of communion, let me tell you, though it ended abruptly when I tried to share my thoughts on the LOAT Concordance with him. The dirty, bearded man said something rude, and we ended up wrestling and spitting in one another's face.

The elderly black woman screamed at us, “Aaaooorrw! Aaaooorrw!” She seemed to derive some evil pleasure from our conflict.

(Aged stick 'em, shoebox collection:
The most common human experience is betrayal. All our relations are contaminated with sadness and terror
. [Ed. Note: A depressing thought.])

3) Then there is the infinity problem.

I am composing the LOAT Concordance and its explanatory preface on fresh unnumbered stick 'ems (there is a large supply in another corner of my box, origin unknown) which I glue to the ceiling in orderly rows easily readable from a recumbent position (sometimes jokingly referred to as “the missionary position”) with the aid of penlight.

I intend to begin numbering the ceiling stick 'ems sequentially as soon as I finish numbering all the previously numbered and unnumbered stick 'ems and the
NEW YORK TIMES
, also the trademarks, logos, company slogans and shipping instructions on the cardboard walls of my box (some of the box panels face inward, some outward, thus creating horrendous cataloguing problems).

Each numbered stick 'em generates at least two concordance stick 'ems and an abstract to which I append some brief, preliminary conclusions, a tally of possible connections (semantic, spatial or mathematical) with other texts, and assorted stray thoughts. To achieve my goal of total list integration (LOAT), I shall have to include the new concordance stick 'ems as a special subset of all stick 'ems. This means that the set of all stick 'ems grows at the same rate as my system list, making the job of including all stick 'ems within the list impossible to complete.

A task which I once undertook with a light heart, thinking perhaps to while away a few idle hours putting in order the thoughts, observations, quotations, theories, apophthegms, limericks, hypotheses, phone numbers and laundry lists earlier tenants had affixed to my cardboard walls, has turned into a pointless burden.

I worked on reconstructing the water-damaged notes on the s wall. When the red-haired woman knocked at my door, I had finished eighteen LOAT references, a good morning's work.

“Tom?'' she inquired, softly and wearily.

She had a black eye, a stunning instance of the convergence of text and reality.

“Tom?''

She was clearly deranged. I was not Tom, though I felt myself beginning to acquire a veneer of Tom-ness through repetition and association. (Ed. Note: See LOAT #437, Arturo Negril Q, s wall, ur quadrant:
The lover attempts to reflect the image of himself which he sees in her eyes. He steps outside of himself and becomes an other, a stranger. This stranger then has an affair with the poor fellow's girlfriend. Ha!
See under Lovers, Paranoid Schizophrenia, Betrayal, L-words, Doubles, Out-of-Body Experiences and Impossible Things.)

Who was Tom? Who was the red-haired woman, for that matter? And the ineffable Lance? (Ed. Note: See under
Love Triangles, Real and Imaginary.) I found myself adrift in a phantasmagoria of things which did not exist: missing
NEW YORK TIMES
articles, Pancho Villa's head (stolen from his grave in 1926), Tom, words left unsaid, not to mention the numbered stick 'ems which I had failed to locate.

I started to weep, abruptly aware of the futility and hubris compassed by my life in a box.

The red-haired woman seemed to understand. She placed a gloved hand on my ankle and pressed it. Her hair was heavily lacquered. She was wearing trousers and a short jacket made from animal skins. The odour of her perfume — Mankiller — was everywhere.

She was clearly ablaze inside, whether I was Tom or not. I tried to resist, but she was too strong for me, and soon we were involved in an embrace.

To the casual observer, there was little difference between our embrace and the wrestling match I had recently had with the dirty, bearded man.

We knocked over the urine carton.

I caught sight of Stick 'em LOAT #57:
His life was haunted by a sexual sadness.
This made no sense to me whatever.

“Stop it! Stop it, Tommy,” she said. “I'm with Lance now. You have to stop living in the past. It's not right what you're doing, making a public spectacle of yourself, hurting your Mom and Pop, harassing Lance and me. Dr. Reinhardt wants you to come back.”

Ha, I thought. I knew I was living in a box and that the
TIMES
had reported the End of History several weeks before. But her beauty gave me pause. I felt sorry for Tom, clearly a man like any other, like myself perhaps, a scholar equally obsessed by his work and this red-haired Siren, a tragic figure.

Her black eye, partially concealed with cream and powder (the smell of which reminded me of my mother), was exceedingly attractive.

I wanted to speak, though when I opened my mouth, I had nothing to say. I felt the need to come to an understanding, for some sort of communication to take place, but the words to express this failed me.

From the first onslaught of passion, I had felt my desire begin to wane. I had begun to think of the stick 'ems, ponder the meaning of the relationships, so far undiscovered, between the various authors. The truth was I felt my body dissolve as soon as she touched me. It became evanescent and airy, a thing of dentals and labials; I became nothing but words, ambiguous, ironic, fleeting and slippery.

The moment she touched me I was gone.

She knew this. I could see it by the tears in her eyes.

A new stick 'em has appeared. Blue. A different colour from all the rest. Provenance unknown. I should resolve to stay in my box continuously, but nature drives me out, not to mention the constant hacking and snuffling of the dirty, bearded man next door, his amourous sighs — my mind boggles at what is going on in the next box.

Blue Stick 'em LOAT #492 (it was such an event, finding a new stick 'em, that I registered it immediately in the List Of All Things):
Dr. Elkho Reinhardt, 3:30 p.m., Thursday. H.

I think the dirty, bearded man and the elderly black woman have formed a liaison, a cabal, a plot, against me. Alternatively, it has occurred to me that the dirty, bearded man and I are identical (he bears the marks and scars of Itness), or that he is the author of at least some of the stick 'em entries, the ones exhibiting a peculiar sexual obsessiveness, for example LOAT #12:
She hath an organ that smells like a wet horse blanket; by the size of it, I warrant she hath been entertaining large herbivores; she pisseth continuously, noisily and in huge volume. The house is awash!
(Ed. Note: See under LOAT #92.)

I took off my clothes to examine myself. On my shrunken member, I found the words:
Several women in the chamber broke into sobs. Some men buried their faces in their hands.
Under my left nipple, I read:
Wandlitz, the name of the elite compound outside East Berlin, soon became a synonym for corruption.
And using a hand mirror, I discovered, imprinted on my buttocks, the words:
The most serious allegations for now are those against Mr. Schalck-Golodkowsky, but his dealings could not compete for public indignation with the revelations of the lifestyle of the elite.

I made appropriate notes and stuck them to the common wall.

I was extremely pleased. Clues were beginning to point to this man Schalck-Golodkowsky as the agent of all my distress. I barely thought of the red-haired woman
her breasts
until I perceived that she was walking up and down outside my box, slapping her hands against her sides to keep warm, her breath going up like smoke.

How long had she been there?

I felt a sudden thrill of fear. Having decided at the outset to eliminate the time element from the LOAT Concordance and Preface on sound philosophical grounds (the number and contents of the original stick 'ems being fixed, time references were assumed superfluous), I now found myself with no objective scale for determining the sequence of events referred to on the walls of my box.

How many times had she visited? The words “morning” and “Thursday” suddenly appeared less fixed and precise than hitherto assumed. The morning of what day? I thought,
Hester I am all alone and you with your toy man.
Or were they all the same morning? The urine carton was full again, so one could deduce that time had passed since it was overturned. But how much time? How long had I been there? Where did I come from?

The red-haired woman had cast me out of the Eden of my certainties and flung me into the Hell of relativity. (LOAT #87:
Her nether hair hangeth even to her knees.)

When I poked my head out of my box, she said, “It's Thursday. You're late. You were out at the store yesterday, bothering Lance's customers. I've come to take you.”

I threw the milk carton full of urine over her and walked to the door of the box occupied by the dirty, bearded man. In the murky darkness of his dwelling, I could see him and the elderly black woman with their ears pressed against the common wall.

I have you now, Mr. Schalck-Golodkowsky, I thought in triumph.

Clicking my heels with aristocratic disdain, I gave them a curt nod and said,
“Guten abend.”

I went to the mission for my monthly shower. The concierge mentioned quite rudely that I had only been there the day before. I went into the common shower and immediately noticed, on a fellow bather's shoulder-blade, the words I had so recently (?) recorded:
Several women in the chamber broke into sobs. Some men buried their faces in their hands.

The concierge ushered me into the street once more, begging me never to return. Apparently, I had been following the words with my fingertip, my devil's finger.

I felt the same painful embarrassment a boy feels when caught touching his member by his Mom. I want my Hester, I thought, in a bleak and fleeting sort of way. What was
a Hester?

I thought of going to the library to check on this, but went by the alley which I now believed was called Wandlitz, a place of vice and corruption. Old Schalck-Golodkowsky invited me to share a bottle of Thunderbird with him and the elderly black woman. They had the sign of venery over their door, but I could not refuse their kind offer. I wiped the mouth of the bottle with a dirty sock before taking a sip.

“Yer missus were har win you wuz out,” said Frau Schalck-Golodkowsky. For the first time, I noticed she had only one eye. She was very old, upwards of one hundred and fifty, I should have guessed, looking into that morbid orb. Her words struck me as having a persecutory ring.

She broke wind alarmingly. Old Schalck-Golodkowsky giggled.

What did it all mean? I asked myself — the red-haired woman and the sudden unreliability of words; Tom and his evil twin, Lance; their collusion with the dirty, bearded man and the elderly black woman, now unmasked as the nefarious Schalck-Golodkowskys; the fresh note of asperity in the voice of the mission concierge; and the messages on the walls of my box, which had once seemed so open and eloquent, so ready to give up their meaning, offer advice, make predictions about past events, which, until so recently (?), had seemed about to body forth for me their laws, structures and universal explanations in simple lists, diagrams and equations?