Middle C (14 page)

Sometimes Joseph would slow himself up and remember to say, This was published in 1934, this …! Think of it! … ’34! Hey—

In Russia, the Stalinites hate Trotskyites, the Trotskyites hate Stalinites, and both hate Republicans and Democrats. Everywhere the Communists (so they say) hate their cousin fascists, and the fascists hate the Jews.

Though his quotes were pearls, his auditors were the swine the occasion called for, and they were indifferent to anything they decided they couldn’t eat. Why do you read such stuff, Athletic Sweater pretended to wonder. He’s a ruffian … a ranter, this Wolf. What was that about Stalin, the Giant Beanpole wondered, suspicious. There are writers more agreeable, Miss Pleat Skirt smirked. She knew she and her friends were better dressed. I hate him, whoever he is, Fat Blouse said, stumbling into the text. Stinking baloney, decided Mr. Yellow Corduroy. Keep it in your sandwich. To every gesture of disrespect Joseph would say: There’s
more. With you, Skizzy—they’d generally share a giggle before turning their backs and walking away, only to toss a shout over their collective shoulder—with you, Skizzy, there’s always more.

You never left high school, Joseph would volley after them. In retreat from the truth! All of you! Book-bag babies! But then he would realize—it would stop his shouts—that he was making a scene, becoming a character, and, as a minor nuisance, entangling himself in their lives.

Often Joseph just wanted to hear the words in their first form, their real guise—hear them said aloud, promulgated—and he didn’t need listeners, just as years later he would prefer the absence of an audience when he recited scripture in the company of the clippings that sanctified—muralized—his church.

In the center of that future room, amid strips of bad news like shags of animal hair—dangles ready to applaud a bellow—cans to kick like points after touchdowns—Joseph Skizzen would call out Wolfe’s words in the triumphant tones of “I told you so.”

And so it goes—around, around, around the tortured circumference of this aching globe—around, around, and back again, and up and down, with stitch and counterstitch until this whole earth and all the people in it are caught up in one gigantic web of hatred, greed, tyranny, injustice, war, theft, murder, lying, treachery, hunger, suffering, and devilish error!

Around and around the tortured circumference of this aching earth … the shrinking circumference of this tortured planet … Devilish error? What’s been done is done and no mistake! Round and round the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel. The human race thinks it runs for fun when
pop bam boom bang guny gun gun
—horn hid and tail tucked—Satan shoots his meal—monkey brains and veal.

But these thoughts would come later, when he’d heard more music, had been immersed in other books, and his sentence had seized him. Right now his future self was no bigger than a chrysalis, his goatee-to-be barely tickled, its womb rarely giggled. Wanna see? your baby—future you is kicking! No! I don’t want to see the bughouse bounce!

He lived at the church in the janitor’s room and did janitorial work
to earn his keep, in addition to sustaining the organ in tone and tune. He felt his room, though small and bare and gloomy, was a mighty fortress, and there, surrounded by walls of damp stone, he would preach his gospel though it went unheard: around, around, around the tortured circumference of this aching world …

Despite Joseph’s new enthusiasm for the word, he was no better a student in the classroom than he had formerly been. It was true that his teachers were pathetic and his fellow students pitiful, nor had his dislike of the limelight lessened, but he was led away from education by learning. In his memory Mr. Hirk had already become a magnificent teacher—his one and only—quirky as the great tutors had to be—and since Joseph was determined to be self-schooled, to learn from books as he imagined Lincoln had, and possess a mind free of received opinion, what he needed to gain from any academic enterprise was its cachet, which could be obtained from Augsburg Community College with an ease that would put a pan of grease to shame.

The school’s library was woeful. Though well stocked with hymnals, apologetics, hagiographies, testimonials, old atlases, and sermons, most of its worn and shaken volumes were in such sad shape they would qualify as cast-offs from charity book sales. Still, to someone who felt underfed, they were feast enough. There was even a ragged spine-loose volume of Bach scores. Joseph loved the long shiny table set in the middle of the stacks where he could sit in an appreciated silence and outstrip the table’s surface in its devotion to reflection.

In a library who knows what book the eye may fall upon and curiosity withdraw. Among such was the sixth volume of
History of Dogma
by Adolf von Harnack. Augsburg had three of an apparent set of seven: two tattered, one unaccountably mint. Nita might know something of the sixth’s subject, Joseph guessed, since it spoke in passing of a pope named Innocent III who was accomplished in the sponsorship of crusades, having initiated one against the Moors in Spain, another to obliterate a group called the Albigenses, and finally a grand one, as if they’d been arranged in a series like Adolf von Harnack’s volumes, designated as the Fourth. But it was this pope’s establishment of the doctrine of transubstantiation that caught Joseph’s attention, since, for him, the word was full of mystery and promised much.

Names that seemed redolent with the romance of antiquity, of distant
times and climes, fastened themselves to Joseph’s mind. They stood for nearly hidden lives, for quarrels worthy of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, such as was the one between a monk of Corbey called Paschasius, who believed that bread could be converted into Christ (what a wonder!), and another member of that abbey who thought that the connection was purely spiritual.

One work he especially treasured was
The Paderewski Memoirs
. He was a happy reader until the book’s conclusion neared; then the master went on and on about the importance of the pedal, passages that left Joseph discontented with his idol and dissatisfied with himself. It seemed that, even as a boy, Paderewski had displayed an instinct for pedaling. Well, Joseph thought, so did I.

In this way, though, he discovered that there was something unsafe about books. You began one; you were suitably entranced; the style, the subject, the arrangement—the noble sentiments, the brilliant thoughts, the charming creatures therein portrayed, such exciting situations: each seemed so satisfying that the eye could scarcely wait for the page to turn. It was, he remembered, how his fingers felt when they were playing well and music was majestically flowing from them as if by magic. But then the Paderewski passage would occur: a gesture that stooped, a boast that offended, an idea that was as grotesque as a two-headed calf, a sentiment that steamed like rotting flesh, like a childhood ramble in the ruins that suddenly betrayed you with a sight not meant for living eyes. You’d turn like the globe did in a day. You’d learn that men were murdered over the meaning of a wafer.

From a student who had to leave school suddenly because of the alleged illness of his father, Joseph purchased a record player so technically adept it had three speeds—33, 45, and 78 rpm. Consequently, the remainder of his discretionary funds, small enough as nearly not to matter, was set aside for records he didn’t dare try to obtain from the High Note and would therefore have to do without, for there was no other shop in miles; but by cutting back on treats and by not buying any books and by mending a pair of his own pants, Joseph was able to mail-order several: the Chopin waltzes played by Dinu Lipatti,
Great Opera Singers of the Golden Age
, and some outrageously discounted pieces for two pianos by Erik Satie, a composer entirely unknown to him, and to everyone, he assumed.

Joey needed to replace the needle of his “gramophone,” which was worn sore by the previous owner’s pop rock; and he could have pressed into service one of the diamond points he had been accused of stealing had he actually done the deed. For his mother the entire affair had been reduced to an episode, now only occasionally remembered, but for Joseph the injustice he had suffered had become a chronic ailment like migraine, and he would lie on his bed sometimes compacting, as though his hands held snow, an explosive bunch of curses to catapult at Castle Cairfill till the castle’s walls came tumbling down, the castle’s keep was breeched, and Cairfill’s limbs and organs were put to the sword; although he knew in his heart that his curses were popgun and pasteboard, that “May your nose drip forever” would not send a shiver through grass let alone a wall of stone. As for Kazan, he imagined the terrors that kept the storekeeper’s lights lit at night had multiplied like germs so that even on a noonday street Mr. Emil would now need torchbearers every few feet to put the
bogeymensch
to flight.

9

When Skizzen first became aware of it, he laughed, for he had miss-spelled “spell.” Well, not exactly. The additional
l
was a typo. “Spelll.” It was a machine-mad error, but the extra
l
could be easily deleted. That was one of the great virtues of this new invention. If words magically appeared on the screen (he was often unaware he was typing his fingers flew so fast, so briefly did they need to light upon the keys), they could be sent away just as readily. Not like a note that would leave of its own accord yet could not be erased and could not be said to have disappeared. He had been saying that a spell had been put upon mankind. Writing, not saying. He had been writing that a spell had been put upon our race. As if Circe had changed us into swine so that our little noses were wrinkled by concealed snouts, and inside those of us
who possessed a male member a hog’s reproductive implement curled—a pig’s … sexual implement—a memoir of the moment of enchantment. Anyway, we did not see how foolish, how absurd, how wicked we were being. That was the gist.

Joseph had pursued a request for some books that he had asked the library to acquire as far as the library entrance, where a smilling young man had greeted him with this suitcase fulll of magic. We ordered some of these computers, he said with some excitement, and they just came. Want to play? The Music Department had been threatened with digitization, but their three-person claim on modernity was weak. So Professor Skizzen dutifullly sat at one end of a long library table and began pecking away: It is as if a spelll had been put upon mankind. How quickly the spelll enveloped the screen. We oinked and thought it singing, he wrote. The young man approached bearing his grin like a tidbit on a salver, so Skizzen hit
DELETE
and saw nothing more, neither his practice sentence nor the grin. Go on, the young man said, take it for a spin. Our new system will make it easy for us to keep records, he boasted. The bursar is out of his mind with delight. We rolled in the mud and believed we were bathing, Skizzen wrote, with his best hunt-and-peck. He knew Grin was grinning again, over his shoulder. Let the piker peek, Skizzen thought, I shall complete my edifying lines about the spelll that been put upon mankind. “We fought one another and afterward celebrated the carnage” soon materialized. With writing, he said aloud, the writing inscribes the letters, letters build the words, and, subsequently, the thought arrives—handmade like kneaded bread. With typewriting, you get letters by hammering them into existence. Or out, with
x
’s, if you don’t like them. With this sweet machine here, you issue a requisition. Well, now, I hadn’t thought about it that way, the Grinner said. With pen and ink, before we write, we think, because we hate the sight of corrections. With the computer we write first and think later, corrections are so easy to perform. I like the delete key best; it has a good appearance, Skizzen said, typing furiously. “We ate our farrow and supposed it was a splendidly healthy, indeed toothsome, way to dine.” Joseph determined to leave something behind as an animal might to signal its presence, so he keyed: “We eagerly awaited our own slaughter, as though we were receiving an award.” Now he spoke it as he played it. “Our haunch would hang in the smokehouse to season, and those of us
who remained to feel would feel, like parvenus, that we had Arrived.” I’m glad you got these, he said to the Grin, though the young man didn’t seem to have any more grins to spend. I wonder how many unordered books these cost me. He slid his words the length of the long table where they disappeared over its edge into delete. Then Skizzen took his goatee away where it would be better appreciated.

Professor Joseph Skizzen had been apprehensive about the survival of the human race but now he was worried that it might, in fact, endure
.

For the moment, there didn’t appear to be such a place. He knew these machines swallowed data, and that vaguely threatened him. No formal charges had been made, so Skizzen’s written defense was not yet needed, nor would it be very useful in his case to refer with such obsessive constancy to the evils that men do, when it was only his paltry transgressions that were at issue. Could Skizzen persuade his prosecutors to admit that his malfeasances were entirely precautionary—lies white as alabaster, or at least chalk—committed in order to prevent his own contamination and having, otherwise, no hope of profit. They were crimes only in his enemies’ criminalized eyes. Because he had lived apart from the system even when inside the system, it appeared that he had made the genuine less to be esteemed than the fraudulent; that his counterfeit bill would buy more than their good one. Well, that admission they would not make; it ate at their pride; it proved they were as fundamentally stupid as they superficially seemed to be; it made a mockery of their allegedly superior educational enterprise.

Any misgiving one might have had about the continuance of the human species has been replaced by serious concerns that it might muddle through after all
.

So he was not one of them; he had not, as the common saying was, paid his dues; worse, he had surpassed them too easily. He, the least likely to succeed, the laziest boy in the class—the least eager, the least attentive—had solved the great conundrum, the most mysterious equation, the sphinx’s riddle; and they were angry, the way Cinderella’s sisters or Grimm’s evil brothers were, when the simpleton showed up with
the solution. They were reluctant, but they had promoted him. It was grudging, yet applause was applause. They had accepted his advice; let themselves be led by an apparition.