The Cry of the Sloth (20 page)

When you say Crawford posed you, do you mean with his
hands
? I see him, out-of-shape, flabby, and drooling. I see his pot belly, that vile pumpkin, bulging his shirt buttons. Do not defend him! I see his filthy bloodshot eye peeping through the view-finder. What do you mean by “in on the ground floor”? On the floor of his house? Does he even have a house, or was it on the filthy carpet of his trailer? The images pour in like water through a ruptured dike. I hold my head in my hands and want to roll on the floor. Listen to me, Fern! I know all about cameras. I once owned a Leica M3.

Andy

¶

My dear Fern,

So much has been happening lately, both good and bad, and I feel up to my ears in it. I started a letter to you yesterday. No, I finished a letter to you last night. I even dropped it through the slot in the mailbox, only to plunge my arm after it. I retrieved the letter but managed to put a nasty scrape on the back of my hand. I have not been able to work up the reading list you asked for, though yesterday I made a start on that as well. I haven’t heard anything from you about my invitation. I need to hear something soon. Your silence seems part of a larger breakdown of organization. I haven’t slept, and now it’s morning. I am not at all tired. I know it sounds preposterous, but I am not able to shake the conviction that I won’t need to sleep again. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a fresh cup of coffee. Out the window I can see sunlight on the tops of the taller trees. I have been looking at the pictures in an illustrated encyclopedia of mammals that I keep on the kitchen table in order to have something to stare at while I eat. I sat down with the intention of telling you about the death of my mother, about my mother who recently died, as I think I must have mentioned, and how I feel about her and it, and also probably something about my sister and father, as they were part of the picture, since I don’t have anyone handy to talk to, but I have changed my mind, and I am going to tell you about the tree sloth instead, since this is a creature I feel personally very close to.

Tree sloths are misunderstood by almost everyone, including the so-called scientific community, where people are supposed to try and understand just such hard-to-understand facts as these unprepossessing creatures, who, unlike kangaroos, don’t wear their souls on their sleeves. Nature’s penchant for malicious impishness, which is evident in so many places, is an aspect that constantly eludes the scientific mind, plodding humorlessly on as it does, and the failure to grasp this penchant has made a deep understanding of the sloth impossible, since they are, in my view, the tragic victims of one of nature’s cruelest jokes.

Far from being the sulking solitaries portrayed in animal picture books, sloths are at heart amazingly outgoing fellows (I almost wrote “little fellows,” though of course they are quite large; it is just that one grows to really like them and “little fellows” seems to capture that feeling). In fact, they are by nature more gregarious than dogs. Yet who has ever heard of a pack of sloths? And while brimming with a desire to wag, they have no tail with which to do it, an absence that is pretty much a compendium of their difficulties. Instead of gamboling in bunches they are condemned (this is the trick part) to pass all their days in complete solitude, spending the handful of waking hours nature grants them each day creeping with glacial slowness among the branches of a single great tree, to the point that some observers go nearly crazy with boredom just watching them. Of that one tree consist their house, their city, their world.

Of course they hate this. For not only are they sociable to a fault, they are also quick-witted—in more favorable circumstances one would say they were bright as buttons—and the larval slowness at which they are condemned to crawl, and the tedium of the scenery they pass at a snail’s pace, not to mention the simple injustice of it all, drives them wild. In fact they often go insane, the only species besides man in which insanity occurs on a regular basis. Indeed, among sloths insanity is so widespread we should probably regard it as their normal state, with mental balance—found in any case only during their first year or two of existence, before a full awareness of their condition breaks in upon them—a youthful aberration.

As they hitch along a branch they nibble now and then from the thick foliage that surrounds them in suffocating green clouds, thoroughly masticating one leaf before inching on to the next. One can imagine how tasteless such a monotonous diet must seem after a few years, and how sick of it they become. In fact starvation is believed to be the leading cause of death among adult sloths, when they just can’t get any more of it down. As a natural expression of all this, indeed as its inevitable consequence, the sloth has acquired what is without doubt the most pitiable cry in the whole animal kingdom. As they wend their way among the leaves they emit a constant series of small desperate squeaks from their noses. They do this by stopping their nostrils with two of their large flat toes. They then attempt to exhale vehemently through the nose until they build up considerable internal pressure, which they release with explosive effect by suddenly jerking both toes free of the nostrils with a swift forward motion. The resulting wiffle, though not exactly loud, has extraordinary carrying power. And it conveys such an extreme of pathos and grief that the native people will cover their ears and flee rather than listen to it for a second, even if this means abandoning the bananas or whatever it is they are carrying, perhaps a warthog they had just speared and had hoped to bring home to feed a numerous family. They would much prefer the wailing of a hut full of hungry children, though it last for many hours, to even one instant of the cry of the sloth! The sloth, for its part, appears not to have any ears and so probably can’t hear itself, the only silver lining in the creature’s cloudy existence. Unable ever to find anything new or remotely interesting in its tree, which though huge is still just one tree, the sloth finally gives up trying altogether, losing even the will to stuff a pair of fat toes up its nostrils. At which point it enters its final stage, known as “the great silence,” when it hangs all day upside down. Wrapped in silent gloom it sinks deeper and deeper into an imaginary world of fond companions and giddy social life. Colonies of insects breed in its fur and it does not move a paw to scratch. Gradually a thick green moss grows over it, until it is scarcely more than a green bump on a branch, until one day, absorbed in its dreams, it forgets to hold on and plunges to its death on the forest floor.

I have learned to imitate the sloth’s cry almost exactly. I am able to do this, I think, because I have been upside down for so long. When I am not upside down I am bathing.

Andy

¶

Dear Vikki,

Sorry to have taken this long to answer your letter, which was so kind, so full of real concern, and to thank you for the money. I was laid up for four days last week with what I guess was food poisoning. I had found a pack of franks at the back of the fridge, where they had been for God knows how long, as I had stopped opening the refrigerator quite some time ago, not expecting anything to be in there. I thought they would be safe to eat if I cut the blue parts off, but apparently not. I dragged a quilt and pillow into the bathroom and slept on the floor there. Regular geysers at both ends, and horrible cramps. I really thought I was dying. I thought of trying to get to the hospital but that seemed too much bother, as I would have had either to drive myself or crawl to a neighbor’s. I am glad now that I don’t have a telephone, because I’m sure I would never have had the fortitude not to call you had this been possible. I hate thinking how I might have had you and Chumley racing down here, knowing what it would have cost you both. Lying there on the linoleum I was bothered less by the prospect of dying than by the thought that, if I died, I had wasted my life.

Then, almost suddenly, it was over. At four a.m. I was gasping my last, and at seven I was well, not fit as a fiddle but fit to walk downstairs while clinging tightly to the banister. Morning light was pouring in at the kitchen window. I toasted a piece of stale bread. I have never tasted anything so delicious. I think I’ll take a few days off.

Much love to you both,

Andy

¶

To the Editor:

I was disappointed by the
Current’s
coverage of this year’s Arts in the Park picnic. The errors were manifold and grievous. They piled one upon another, rolling down the slopes of verisimilitude, picking up platitudes and bits of gossip along the way, to land at our feet in the shape of a large comic ball. By “our feet” I mean mine and my husband Henry’s. The cascade of misprisions began with Melissa Salzmann’s article purporting to describe the events, and was amplified by the familiar irate bombast of Dr. Hawktiter and the vague musings of one Dyna Wreathkit. The resulting large mendacious ball, as I mentioned, finally rolled to a stop at our feet. When Henry and I opened it you can imagine our surprise at finding poor Andrew Whittaker curled up inside, in the sadly reduced state of tabloid fodder. As two people who were present at the picnic,
témoins occulaires
, if you will allow some French, without personal axes to grind, your article and the subsequent letters left us wondering if we were ocular observers at the same occasion.

In recent years, ever since returning from Henry’s last post in Zurich, we have spent most of our time at the ranch, where he can concentrate on his inventions without worrying about the neighbors. But still we make a point of coming into town for the arts picnic every year. And every year I am beset by a hope that the large sums that Henry, as a native Rapid Fallsian, feels he must lavish on the several arts organizations that flood our mailbox with ritual pleas will show some signs of bearing fruit. And if not fruit, then flowers or a few meager buds. But there is never anything, and after wandering hopelessly among the craft stalls and standing glumly in front of paintings and sculptures in the big tent while Henry was being fawned over, I saw that this year was going to conform to type. I was very disappointed. Henry sends these people
a lot
of money. There was, however, as we discovered shortly after setting up our little picnic on the grass, one lively innovation in the offing, though it owed nothing to any of the groups that are always after him. The poetry readings had just begun and I was easing Henry down on our quilt, taking care not to let him sit on the ice bucket, when our attention was arrested by the figure of a large unkempt man with an oddly small head emerging rapidly, loping really, from the woods at the edge of the park. It was, we learned later, the writer and publisher Andrew Whittaker. At first we took him for a vagrant or hobo, from the look of his clothes—his trousers had big ragged holes in both knees—and from the way he dug into the items at the food table, as if he had not had a square meal in weeks. Though it sounds cruel to admit, it was entertaining just to watch him go at it. We seldom see out-of-the-ordinary things at the ranch, and Henry was delighted. The man at first seemed totally absorbed in the potato salad, forking it up with his fingers. Then he spent considerable time stuffing his jacket pockets full of brownies, or should I say “trying to,” for he seemed to want to get more of them in than his pockets could hold, and whenever one fell out on the ground, as happened repeatedly, he would stamp on it and grind it into the grass with the toe of his shoe. For a long while after that he just stood there munching. He seemed to be in a kind of trance, or dozing on his feet. And then, suddenly, for no reason that we could see, he came alive again. He snatched up a folding chair, and carrying it high above his head, made his way through the crowd of picnickers sitting on blankets around the performance stage, high-stepping over people’s heads and walking on their blankets. He was wearing snakeskin boots in which he seemed to be having trouble walking. He was saying “excuse me, excuse me” in a loud voice, and tottering side to side in a way that caused some of the people in his path to scramble off on all fours, and all the while the poet up on the stage was trying to say her poem. She had to speak louder so people could still hear her, but his excuse-mes just got louder too, for he had a booming voice, though she had a microphone. She was shouting by the time he reached the foot of the stage, where he unfolded the chair with a bang (it was a metal chair) and sat down. He slouched down really, his arms flung across his chest and his legs sprawled out in front of him. This was a very provocative posture, and we could tell that things were about to take an interesting turn.

But interesting is too weak a word for what happened next. The events themselves were described accurately enough in your sanctimonious article and later in the earnest and typically obtuse letter from Dr. Hawktiter. The two agree more or less on the bare facts. But bare facts must be clothed by context, and indeed without context are nothing, as everyone knows if they think about it for one second. In the end both so-called eyewitnesses miss the point by miles, and they miss it for the same reason: they take for granted that Whittaker had somehow “lost it” or, in the words of the policeman quoted in your article, that he had “blown a fuse.” The only difference between them is whether, generally speaking, they approve of him or not, whether they are, in other words, “on his side” or not. Neither seems to suspect that maybe he had not “lost it” at all, that he was in perfect control, not just of himself but of the audience as well, that all his fuses were intact, and that the whole episode might just be his own far-out contribution to the art exhibit. I believe,
au contraire
, that Whittaker, through the orchestrated chaos of his multiple interventions, amid a dreary chorus of boos only faintly elevated by the laughter of two young men at the back of the crowd, and Henry’s giggles, was attempting to force the assembled picnickers to ask themselves the question everybody in America seems to be asking himself and herself today, namely, What is art? Is it a picture frame encrusted with quaint and colorful seashells or small pine cones painted silver? Is it a poem about a dying grandmother’s slippers, however sad and worn and yet still pink in places? Is it a painting of buffalos up to their knee-joints in a sea of vanished sawgrass or whatever that stuff is? Or is it cold cuts sailing like Frisbees above all that? I leave this question for your readers to ponder. In the meantime Henry has already pondered it and will know where to send
his
money next year.