The Cry of the Sloth (21 page)

Sincerely,

Kitten Hardway

¶

Dear Harold,

I have definitely decided to pay you a visit as soon as I can find the right outfit.

Meanwhile I am going to tell you another funny story. Across the street from my house stands an ugly brick duplex, a featureless box with a metal awning above the front door. The ground floor is occupied by a woman alone—faded, middle-aged, and in a wheelchair. Her skin is so pale it looks bleached. Though her apartment must have several rooms, she spends all her time in a single room fronting the street. The television is always turned on in that room, yet I have never observed her watching it. I have never seen her reading. She looks out the window instead, hour after hour. Even at night I have noticed her with her forehead pressed against the glass. She sometimes looks bare-eyed, as it were, but just as often she is peering through the largest binoculars I have ever seen. She looks quite frail, emaciated even. The binoculars must be extremely heavy, and it is a wonder she can hoist them to eye level, much less hold them there without shaking. That she is able in fact to do this for long minutes at a time I can personally attest, since I have spent many odd moments over the years enclosed in their inquisitive circles. At almost any hour of the day, if I peer across at her house, she will be at the window, swiveling her glasses in my direction the instant she catches sight of me. With her pointed chin, blunt nose, and triangular face widening upward to the huge bulging lenses where her eyes should be, and with the skinny rachitic arms supporting the binoculars jutting outward at each side of her head, she reminds me of an enormous fly, an enormously quizzical fly. I would not be surprised to hear her buzzing. Yet in her comportment she is more like a spider. Take even the most banal occurrence on our very ordinary street—a postman walks past, whistling perhaps, or cursing softly, as usual; or a bushy-tailed squirrel scampers up an oak tree or digs for an elusive morsel in the grassy margin between the sidewalk and the street; or even, given the prodigious magnification of her instrument, a small insect, perhaps a ladybug with attractive spots, laboriously climbs a utility pole—and she pounces instantly upon it, twirling the focus knob until she has it clinched in the death grip of her hemispheres. Her curiosity seems never to slacken, and, depending on one’s mood and how one feels about being watched from close up, a stroll down our street can be comforting or terrifying. The tedium of a life driven to such behavior is painful to contemplate. I, of course, cannot help but contemplate it every time I look in that direction, which I can hardly refrain from doing and still find my way off the block. So far as I can tell, she never goes out of her apartment, and almost never out of that one street-fronting room, and no one except delivery people and occasionally some sort of nurse ever goes in. I could, of course, pay her little visits, little drop-ins with cookies and a good book, and I have considered it once or twice, but I know I never shall. I am afraid of becoming entangled with someone so needy, caught as it were by those pincerlike arms. I realize that this sounds heartless, and in the end I have come up with something which I think is considerably more entertaining than a visit. I put on little shows for her instead. I call them episodes.

The theater is my own upstairs window. Directly in front of it I have placed a small desk at which I sit and pretend to write (I do my actual writing at the kitchen table). I am quite deliberate about this. I pull out the chair, sit down, take up a pencil, test the point, go to the window and sharpen it, leaning out so the shavings will drift down to the street. I return to my desk, draw up the chair, adjust the angle of the blank sheet in front of me, and I begin to write. I am never more than seconds into this ritual before I feel the focus of her attention on me. Perhaps I should say the
clamp
of her attention on me, since I often experience a small jolt at the precise moment I am snapped into focus, or surmise that I have been snapped into focus, since of course I am not in a position to actually witness that occurrence, if it is an occurrence. In any case, the jolt is so slight, even faint, that I am not sure whether I should call it a mental jolt or a physical jolt. It is possible, of course, that I am merely imagining a jolt or—and this seems most likely of all—that I experience an actual jolt but only as a consequence of having imagined myself suddenly snapping into focus. Be that as it may, what is certain is that following the jolt, or the imagination of a jolt, I feel myself growing large and curiously foreshortened—I seem to be sitting at the window and yet I am pressed against the closet door behind me. I am sure that, however uncomfortable it may be for me, from her side this foreshortening gives a nice stagy appearance to the episodes.

Head bent over my page, I steal a surreptitious glance, through my eyebrows as it were, at the window across the street. And there they are, as always, the dual circles of her lenses aimed right at me. I scribble a few sentences, and I pause. I gnaw at the eraser. My face brightens—I have just discovered the perfect formulation!—and I return to the page with new vigor. I am now writing rapidly. I let my tongue protrude between my teeth as a visible sign of mental effort. I am conscious of her gaze burning on my cheek, tracing the line of my lips, dwelling on my tongue, examining my fingernails. I continue in this vein for some time, a model of the assiduous scribbler, in order to lull my audience, as it were, and leave her defenseless before the onslaught, which I am already rehearsing in my mind, even as I pretend to write calmly.

When I judge the moment ripe, when a second glance across the street catches a slight wavering in the rigidity of her instrument, a nodding off as it were, suggestive of faltering attention, I begin to shake my head from side to side, as if crying No! No! to some hidden injunction. This is the first, and still relatively mild, manifestation of the creative throes which will soon hold me helpless in their awful grip. I thrash as if assaulted by insects. I make the most hideous grimaces you can imagine. I tear at my hair, roll my eyes, bite my lips, and howl. One moment I am trying to twist my ear off, and the next I am pounding my head against the table and sobbing. I once let myself go too far during the pounding, and next morning discovered a purple bulb on my forehead that persisted for several days. One day I bit my pencil in half and spit the pieces out the window. This proved so effective—I could see her bouncing in her chair with excitement—that I repeated it in subsequent episodes. It provided a nice dramatic finale to my performances. But of course it could not continue to have the same effect day after day. Like any addict, my audience would require ever-increasing doses in order to experience the same kicks, and maintaining that high level of performance has demanded all my ingenuity. Sometimes, unable to sleep, I get up in the night and rehearse in the bathroom in front of the mirror. I have developed a prodigious repertory of agonized expressions. But even so I have had to bring in various external props in order to keep the show going. Vases, for example, which can be thrown against a wall at the right moment, and shirts previously weakened by the judicious application of a razor, which can be horribly rent.

Last Tuesday I so far surpassed myself that I have not dared perform since, knowing that whatever I do next will be a letdown. I had hauled a huge Royal office typewriter up from the basement, where it had been rusting for the past ten years. It was a massive piece of machinery, and getting it up the last flight of stairs was a feat in itself. Heaving it at last onto the table, I collapsed in the chair. It took me a few minutes to catch my breath, minutes which I was sure she was using to more precisely focus her instrument. I reflected how this panting collapse, even though perfectly genuine, was a fitting prelude to my performance, a mood-setting overture to the opera that was about to begin. And then I started to type, or pretend to type, since most of the keys had been rendered immobile by rust. I worked hesitantly at first, pecking at the keys with two fingers, pausing to scratch my head, yet gradually increasing the tempo as the creative wheels gained traction. I let the frenzy come on gradually, and yet relentlessly, until finally I stood up, knocking the chair over behind me, and worked standing, hunched over and hammering at the keys. And then, quite precipitously, I stopped, as if assailed by some awful final thought. I momentarily hid my face in my hands. I was overcome by strange grief! I staggered back against the wall, then stumbled forward. I grasped the typewriter in both hands, lifted it high above my head, and taking two running strides, hurled it through the open window. A second or so of exquisite silence ended with a tremendous crash. The machine hit the sidewalk and shattered. Some of the smaller parts flew all the way across the street, ricocheting off the side of a parked car. I turned away, but not before a glance confirmed that she was bouncing wildly in her chair. I ran downstairs and peeked around the edge of my tarp. She had slumped forward in her chair, and for a dreadful moment I thought that I had killed her. But a few seconds later she lifted her head, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I imagined her face streaked with tears.

I am, otherwise, despite my histrionic talents, quite tired of myself. Do you ever have the wish that you were someone else? I would like very much to be someone named Walter Fudge.

Your old friend,

Andy

¶

Dear Mr. Carmichael,

Thank you for Mama’s box. I was expecting something much smaller. It is astonishing how much of her there still is. As to your offer of a durable urn in appropriate style, when I looked through your catalogue I was tempted by Grecian Classique Marble and also by Everlasting Bronze, but in the end I have followed your suggestion and just looked around me to see what would harmonize with my furnishings, and I have concluded that the box you sent her in is perfect.

I have your invoice. While I can’t send anything right now, I want you to know that I am putting you on top of the pile.

Sincerely,

Andrew Whittaker

¶

Dear Fern,

You and Dahlberg?

I hold my head in my hands and shake it until it laughs. What a jolly melon. And then I try to make it cry, but it can’t, since like most old melons it is completely hollow.

When I saw the San Francisco postmark on your letter I thought it was Willy Laport inviting me to Stanford.

I am fascinated that you find San Francisco hilly. But I was not, as you seemed to assume, “interested to learn” that Dahlberg can do a perfect imitation of the call of the sloth. That is
my
nose trick. That he is able to do it using your belly button is irrelevant and revolting. In fact, I can think of nothing which I personally would find more repellant than having a chubby hardware-store clerk wiffle on me, except perhaps having my intimate correspondence read by one. And you are right, I cannot imagine how much fun he is.

Of course I am disappointed that you have thrown away the opportunities I dangled in front of you in order to go live in a truck.

However, I am more disappointed that I am not going to lecture at Stanford.

I wish you both the best.

Your former editor,

Andrew Whittaker

¶

Freewinder!

In your letter—or, rather, in your letters, since they float in one upon the other—you ask if I am “aware” that I have missed several mortgage payments. Rest assured, the awareness of this is like a light burning in my head. Yet even as I admit this awareness, which, as I said, burns like a light in what you, if you were in there with me, would see is a truly terrifying darkness, I would like for you also to become “aware” that I expect to miss even more payments in the future, perhaps gobs, as the saying goes. Hence more light! This is because I am in shit over my head. However, I assure you that the light burning in my head, proudly burning there, will burn brightly even as I and my head and everything burning in it sink from sight.

Sincerely,

Andrew Whittaker

¶

sliced cheese

rolls

mouthwash

t.p.

cans

turkey necks

pig cheeks

chicken backs

what else?

coffee

Crisco

a different life

¶

Dear Jolie,

First it was ants, and now it’s mice, or even rats. I can’t be sure. I hear them moving around in the walls, making scratching noises, or chewing noises, so it might be either one. I suppose rats would be louder, but because they are inside the walls there’s no way of knowing how loud the noise really is. Is that a mouse close up or is that a rat far away? That’s a question, I think, which can be asked of almost anything.

The fact is I don’t want to do this anymore. All around me things are in decay, or in revolt. If only I could walk out of myself the way one walks out of a house. Good-bye, old pal. Good-bye, old toaster, old sofa, old stack of old magazines. Stand on the stoop, feel the cool breeze coming down the street, feel it blowing through me. Gone at last will be the clogged mess of myself that made me once seem almost solid.

Andy

¶

The sand has become deeper. It is pulverous, like powdered talc. They sink ankle-deep in it; it fills their shoes when they walk. The men and the boys have on socks of black silk, and the sand has infiltrated the cuffs. At first only a little sifted in, but gradually the opening at the top of the cuffs widened as the socks sagged, letting in more sand with each step they take. Now the socks hang in elephantine bulges around their ankles, and they walk with stumbling shuffles like men in shackles. Even the most optimistic among them knows that if the floating things in the river are crocodiles, they will not be able to escape. The women have taken off their shoes. Beneath the long dark dresses with bustles and jabot blouses, they wiggle their toes and remember walking barefoot in Deauville, and they remember how different the sand there was, how course and cool, though in the water there were sharks, concealed, swimming in patient circles beneath the waves. The people, the men and the women, even the most vociferous, are no longer talking. It is clear to everyone that argument is futile, and that the time for communion, if it ever existed, has now passed. The sun has reached the zenith, brilliant, blinding, unbearable. The men have removed their dark coats, dropping them in the sand at their feet. Now they take off their shirts and wrap them around their heads. The women have opened their blouses. They open and close the sides of their blouses, fanning their bare chests. The only shade is cast by the parasols which the women hold just inches above their heads. The children, desperate, perhaps already dying, have crawled under the women’s skirts. There in the mysterious dark, like the darkness in the churches at home, they kneel in the sand, and the bare legs of the women, rising up into the strange obscurity above, are like the columns of cathedrals. The men want to draw close to the women, to shrink into the shadows of their parasols, but they do not dare. Even now they do not dare. And when darkness finally comes, and all of consciousness is focused on a single sense, they become aware of the sound of the river behind them, the very faint liquid whispering of water against the bank. They turn, singly, and move toward the sound. The sand reaches above their knees. They struggle through it like travelers floundering in deep snow.