Guide to Animal Behaviour (13 page)

I had wanted to thank the old couple for the wine, but words failed me.

In fact, I began to suspect I was suffering from some sort of speech impediment — fibrodisplasia ossificans progressiva of the vocal line-out. I had become the words on my walls, but had lost my voice. It was a strange condition, let me tell you (though I won't, or I wouldn't, except for the large number of fresh stick 'ems which allow me to make notes on the progress of my disease
her heart beneath her breasts, Hester
and leave them here upon the wall — LOAT #401 et passim — for later scholars of boxology, psychoarchaeologists and linguists of all persuasions; make no mistake, I am on the cutting edge of
a nervous breakdown
research into the limits of
dis(inter)course,
the pathology of
s(ex)peech
acts, the drag net of language, which floats through the sea of life killing everything that comes to it).

The wine had made me paranoid.

After an immense effort, I found a library.

I was able to trace one of the missing
NEW YORK TIMES
articles, a report on new developments in cosmology. Indications are that the universe would not have turned out the way it has unless there existed huge amounts of matter as yet unnoticed and unaccounted for. This missing stuff, the source of mysterious and powerful gravitational forces which shape our destinies, is called dark matter.

I knew at once that the red-haired woman and her minions, the synecdochic Lance and the S-Gs, were at the bottom of this. It wouldn't have surprised me to discover that the S-Gs had been secreting vast amounts of dark matter in that box next door to mine (suspicious coughs, amorous noises, cries of joy).

I left the library vindicated and went over to the mission for a shower, but was not allowed inside.

Stick 'em, unnumbered, shoebox collection:
The messages from the past rustle on the walls of my little home when the wind blows or when the dirty, bearded man brushes against the wall. I feel a kinship with the mysterious, lost writers, the ancient ones who penned their thoughts and stuck them inside the box — strange cardboard bottle floating on the concrete sea-pavements of the city.
(Ed. Note: The concluding sentences are in red ink and written by a different hand.)
The ancient anatomists were wiser than they knew when they chose to call the exterior female organ “labia” — lips as in mouth and as in the phonetic designation labial — thus etymologically linking the power of speech with a woman's nether parts (which, I have heard it said, are capable of generating sound and rudimentary speech acts by the sucking in and sudden expulsion of air). The noble male member, by contrast, is mute, stoic and incapable of falseness. It is the source of univocal meaning. When a woman speaketh, so says the Sumerian prophet Raz-el-dorab, it is prudent to stand up-wind.

The trick is to read all individual texts as part of one vast narrative the meaning of which will become clear as we approach textual totality (TT), that is when we have arranged enough or all of the individual texts (textuals or textettes) — the jigsaw puzzle analogy is helpful here — in their proper order.

At TT, for example, it will be possible, at last, to decide if life (L) is meant to be read as a comedy or a tragedy, as romance or thriller, or some combination of genres, styles and points of view.

It will also be possible to arrive at some
endlich
theoretical conclusions as to the nature of AOAT (the Author Of All Things, God, Amenhotep, Tom Wyatt, Herr S-G or whatever name it will be proved He goes by — all clues pointing to the writer being blessed with possession of a one-eyed trouser snake [Ed. Note: Except for the blue stick 'ems!]).

Of course, it must be admitted at the outset that TT, L and AOAT are all hypothetical constructs, moot, unproven and highly speculative. The LOAT Concordance and Preface are meant to be a sort of prolegomena, a kind of ground-clearing exercise and first attempt at TT, a preliminary structuring, if you will, of the hard data.

I returned to Wandlitz in haste, eager to put to paper my most recent impressions. It seemed to me, all things being equal, that TT = (t)n, where t stands for any individual textette and n is
Hester's bra size
the number of all existing, possible, putative, potential, virtual, spurious, forged, false and inspired textettes (or textuals [Ed. Note: It seems that the use of the technical terms “textette” and “textual” formed the basis of a heated scholarly debate among the authors represented inside the box. Half seem to follow Arturo Negril W in preferring the feminized “textette,” while the other half swear by rabbit dick who coined the designation “textual.” There is even some internal evidence to the effect that C and Ronald were living in the box at the same time as rabbit dick and that the latter was forced to leave after promulgating his heretical jargon.])

The following equation then describes, in a form at once succinct, perspicuous and elegant — after all, scientific criteria are ultimately aesthetic — the meaning of existence: (t) n / AOAT = L.

I was tremendously excited by this discovery and only slightly worried about thoughts of dark matter, words left unsaid, Pancho Villa's head and the mysterious blue stick 'ems. I resolved not to spare myself in my efforts to complete the LOAT Concordance, but as I turned the corner into the alley (Wandlitz, East German Sodom, Box City) I was nearly run down by a bright-yellow city sanitation truck.

The elderly black woman (a.k.a. Frau Schalck-Golodkowsky, the Whore of Babylon, paramour of my neighbour, dark twin star of the red-haired woman
Hester —
in a flash, terrible doubts assailed me; what if L = Labia, Lance, or Lovelorn? Alliteration was only a circumstantial clue, yet no scientific or scholarly mind could ignore it; only a painstaking series of experiments could settle the issue) sat weeping in the doorway of Herr S-G's box, wiping her tears and blowing her nose in a green plastic garbage bag.

She said, “'e was takin' a shit in da dumpter an' det took oom away!”

I was struck speechless. (Ed. Note: Progressive fibrodisplasia ossificans was first diagnosed by the French physician Guy Patin in 1692. In the course of the disease, muscle turns to cartilage and then calcifies. As the tongue is a muscle, speechlessness is often the first symptom of onset. The patient generally dies after a few years by shattering, either from being dropped on the floor by clumsy attendants or by being knocked accidentally against door jambs. This is, of course, the origin of the term “brokenhearted.”)

As you know, I had never trusted these people. I could tell they held some mean-spirited grudge against me, perhaps through nothing more than sheer envy at my superior ambition and intellect (“Snob!” he would hiss every time I stuffed a fresh
BOOK REVIEW
down the back of my pants). Sometimes, however, I suspected them of more facinorous motivations, suspected, yes, that they were in league with (dupes, paid informants, hit men) unseen forces (dark matter, Hester, the Toys R Us corporation) out to compass my ruin — on the whole things had been going badly for me, oh, for the last thirty or forty years.

Still, it was a shock. We all used the dumpster as a comfort station, careless of the dangers involved. I thought of old S-G, neighbour, drinking companion, fellow cardboard troglodyte, honourable opponent, cut off and swept away in the act of defecation.

Sic transit gloria mundi,
I said to myself.

My heart went out to the sad, old woman in her hour of sorrow. I wanted to say something comforting, but words failed me. (Ed. Note: As usual. See
supra.
)

I reached out a hand and touched her trembling shoulder.

This is what life is like, I thought, loved ones disappearing for no reason, when your back was turned, going off in city sanitation trucks or with fast-talking toy entrepreneurs
from New Jersey, leaving you bereft, empty and wordless. What could it all mean?

At this moment, the red-haired woman drove up in a car with New York licence plates (I had thought, from internal evidence, that we were living in East Berlin), a dozen or so new blue stick 'ems in full view on the dash. She was wearing a plastic raincoat with the hood up.

I started off to the mission for my monthly shower, when she screamed “Stop!”

She went over to the elderly black woman and asked her what was wrong.

Frau S-G repeated her obscure but heart-rending story. I really wanted a shower, having, in the red-haired woman's presence, a strong desire to scrub my little man. But I could find no words to express my desires.

What I had begun to notice was that I had times when my energy was up, when all things seemed possible, when I would throw myself into my work with a positive and optimistic attitude; while at other times I was confused, fearful, melancholic, assailed by doubts, uninterested in even the simplest words. (What if, I suddenly thought, L = Laminate, Lobworm or Laxative? Once the argument for alliteration was admitted, all sorts of horrific and Lunatic possibilities became thinkable.)

I felt the latter most strongly, as I say, in the presence of the red-haired woman, who at that moment was busy trying to squeeze Mme S-G into the back seat of her car.

I craned my neck and tried to read one of the blue stick 'ems — LOAT #92. With a growing sense of alarm, I realized she had fathomed my system, had tumbled to the LOAT Concordance and had begun fabricating false (though blue) entries to the List Of All Things
en masse.

This filled me with dread. The red-haired woman had subdued Mrs. S-G who was blubbering in the back; I found myself in the front passenger seat of a BMW sedan (proof, I thought, of the German connection) with a Blaupunkt tapedeck blaring my favourite Julio Iglesias tape. We sped off at once, leaving the Sink of Sin, Wandlitz, in pursuit of the yellow city sanitation truck.

Though I still had nothing to say, I admired the red-haired woman for her decisiveness, her quick-witted willingness to intercede on behalf of old Schalck-Golodkowsky and his stricken lover. My own obsession with words, with the LOAT Concordance, with
her breasts,
subterranean plots, infidelities, ambiguities, showers, stick 'ems, concierges, etc., rendered me useless in a situation that called for action. At the same time, I really despised her for foisting her vision of reality on me, for her constant references to Tom, her persistence (the black eye had all but healed) and the truly insidious scheme to introduce spurious stick 'ems (blue) into the box at Wandlitz.

I caught a glimpse of my face in the side mirror. On my cheek I could clearly make out the words:
Several women in the chamber broke into sobs. Some men buried their faces in their hands.
I carefully laid a hand over my cheek so as to preserve the message till I had a chance to transfer it to a stick 'em.

The sanitation truck came into view just ahead of us. Old Schalck-G was in the process of climbing out the back, though his progress was impeded by the circumstance of his pants being down around his ankles and also somehow caught in the machinery.

With my free hand, I rifled through the stack of blue stick 'ems on the dash. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the red-haired woman glance at me as she threaded the grid-locked traffic. (It was a strange city; sometimes it seemed to me that cars stood motionless at blocked intersections for years on end, their bodies dissolving into piles of rust, mice making homes in their engines, their drivers growing old at the wheel.)

Horns were blaring.

Frau S-G was screaming, “Aaaoorw! Aaaoorw!”

Blue LOAT #1287:
We all love you and pray for you but Lance is about to call the police. He says somebody tried to jimmy the back door of the store.

Blue LOAT #37:
You wrote all those stick 'ems yourself. H.

My mind was in a state of ultra-confusion.

The dirty, bearded man fell off the sanitation truck into the path of a Yellow Cab. A Haitian cabbie jumped out and began to shout French epithets.

I recalled LOAT #37 in the box (yes, in her haste, she had duplicated an already extant stick 'em number):
Man hath an eye for eternity; his works are multifarious, austere and transcendent; his Organ. is the Rod of Justice. Woman hath a wayward eye; her purpose on Earth is obscure; she is a Temptress, and her Organ is the Swamp of Iniquity.
(Ed. Note: Once again the handwriting changes in mid-text.)
She says she loves me, but she just woke up one morning and knew she would die if she didn't change her life. She says I don't listen to her, that I make funny whistling sounds with my nose when I sleep, that I gobble my food in barbaric and gluttonous haste (watching me eat makes her want to be sick), that I bore her with my constant complaints against Fate and mediocre people (“Look who's talking,” she says). She hates Julio Iglesias and the
NEW YORK TIMES
and thinks my nervous laugh is maniacal.
(Ed. Note: Not exactly what one would call a ringing indictment.)
Evidently, changing her life means going out with L., who once gave her a T-shirt with the motto “Life's A Beach” printed on it. How can she take seriously a man who has made a career in Barbie dolls?