Perfection and the aunt beneath the ground.
Ten thousand years go by. Then, perhaps, the glacier melts in darkness and perfection thrusts its way out of the grave to reveal itself on the earth’s surface. Everything on the earth is completely changed by then, but if by any chance the ceremony known as “wedding” still exists, the perfection left behind by the poor aunt might be invited to one, there to eat an entire dinner with impeccable table manners and be called upon to deliver heartfelt words of congratulation.
But never mind. These events would not take place until the year 11,980.
4
It was late in autumn when the poor aunt left my back. Recalling some work I had to complete before the onset of winter, my poor aunt and I boarded a suburban train. Like any suburban train in the afternoon, it was practically empty. This was my first trip out of the city for quite some time, and I enjoyed watching the scenery go by. The air was crisp and clear, the hills almost unnaturally green, and here and there along the tracks stood trees with bright red berries.
Sitting across the aisle from me on the return trip were a skinny woman in her midthirties and her two children. The older child, a girl, sat on her mother’s left wearing a navy serge dress—a kindergarten uniform. On her head she wore a brand-new gray felt hat with a red ribbon—a nice hat with a round, narrow brim. On the mother’s right sat a boy perhaps three years old. Nothing about the mother or her children was particularly noteworthy. Their faces, their clothing were ordinary in the extreme. The mother held a large package. She looked tired—but then, most mothers look tired. I had hardly noticed them board the train, perhaps glanced over at them once when they took their seats across from me, after which I continued to look down at the paperback I was reading.
Not long afterward, however, sounds from the little girl began to reach me across the aisle. There was an edge to her voice, an urgency that suggested pleading.
Then I heard the mother say, “I told you to keep still on the train!” She had a magazine spread open on top of her bundle and seemed reluctant to tear her eyes from it.
“But Mama, look what he’s doing to my hat,” said the little girl.
“Just shut up!”
The girl made as if to speak, but then she swallowed her words. Separated from her by the mother, the little boy held the hat that she had been wearing earlier, and he kept pawing and pulling on it. The girl reached out and tried to grab it, but he twisted himself away, determined to keep it out of her grasp.
“He’s going to ruin my hat,” the girl said, on the verge of tears.
The mother glanced up from her magazine with a look of annoyance and went through the motions of reaching for the hat, but the boy clamped both his hands on the brim and refused to give it up. So much for the mother’s attempt to retrieve it. “Let him play with it a while,” she said to the girl. “He’ll get bored soon enough.” The girl did not look convinced, but she didn’t try to argue. She pursed her lips and glared at the hat in her brother’s hands. The mother went on reading. Encouraged by his mother’s indifference, the boy started yanking at the red ribbon. He was obviously doing it out of sheer nastiness. He knew it would drive his sister crazy—and it had its effect on me as well. I was ready to stomp across the aisle and snatch the thing out of his hands.
The girl stared at her brother in silence, but you could see that she had a plan. Then, all of a sudden, she got to her feet and slapped him hard on the cheek. In the stunned moment that followed, she grabbed the hat and returned to her seat. The little girl did this with such speed and dispatch, it took the interval of one deep breath before the mother and brother could realize what had happened. As the brother let out a wail, the mother slapped the girl’s bare knee. She then turned to stroke the boy’s cheek and tried to comfort him, but he kept on wailing.
“But Mama, he was ruining my hat,” said the little girl.
“Don’t talk to me,” said the mother. “You don’t belong to me anymore.”
The girl bit her lip and looked down, staring at her hat.
“Get away from me,” the mother said. “Go over there.” She pointed at the empty seat next to mine.
The girl looked away, trying to ignore her mother’s outstretched finger, but it continued pointing at my left, as if it had been frozen in midair.
“Go on,” the mother insisted. “You’re not part of this family anymore.”
Resigned to her fate, the girl stood up with her hat and schoolbag, trudged across the aisle, and sat down next to me, head bowed. Hat on her lap, she tried smoothing its brim with her little fingers. It’s his fault, she was clearly thinking; he was going to tear the ribbon off my hat. Her cheeks were streaked with tears.
It was almost evening now. Dull yellow light seemed to filter down from the car lamps like dust from the wings of a doleful moth. It hovered in space to be silently inhaled through the passengers’ mouths and noses. I closed my book. Resting my hands on my knees, I stared at my upturned palms for the longest time. When had I last studied my hands like this? In the smoky light, they seemed grimy, even dirty—not like my hands at all. The sight of them filled me with sadness: these were hands that would never make anyone happy, never save anyone. I wanted to place a comforting hand on the shoulder of the little girl sobbing next to me, to tell her that she had been right, that she had done a great job taking the hat that way. But of course I never touched her, never spoke to her. It would only have confused and frightened her all the more. And besides, those hands of mine were so black and dirty.
By the time I left the train, a cold winter wind was blowing. Soon the sweater season would be over, the time for thick winter coats upon us. I thought about coats for a while, trying to decide whether or not to buy myself a new one. I was down the stairs and out the gate before I became aware that the poor aunt had vanished from my back.
I had no idea when it happened. Just as she had come, she had gone before anyone noticed. She had gone back to wherever it was that she had originally existed, and I was my original self again.
But what was my original self? I couldn’t be sure anymore. I couldn’t help feeling that it was another me, another self that strongly resembled my original self. So now what was I to do? I was all alone, like a blank signpost in the middle of the desert. I had lost all sense of direction. I shoved my hand in my pocket and fed every piece of change I found there into a pay phone. Eight rings. Nine. And then she answered.
“I was sleeping,” she said with a yawn.
“At six o’clock in the evening?”
“I was up all last night working. Just finished two hours ago.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said. “This may sound strange, but I called just to make sure you’re still alive. That’s all. Really.”
I could feel her smiling into the phone.
“Thanks, that was nice of you,” she said. “Don’t worry, though, I’m still alive. And I’m working my tail off to stay alive. Which is why I’m dead tired. OK? Are you relieved?”
“I’m relieved.”
“You know,” she said, as if she was about to share a secret with me, “life is pretty damn hard.”
“I know,” I said. And she was right. “So how would you like to have dinner with me now?”
“Sorry, I’m not hungry. The only thing I want to do right now is turn my head off and go to sleep.”
“I’m not really hungry, either,” I said. “I just wanted to talk to you. About things.”
In the silence at her end, I could sense her biting her lip and touching her little finger to her eyebrow.
“Not right now,” she said, emphasizing each syllable. “We’ll talk later. You have to let me sleep now. Not a lot. Everything will be fine if I can just sleep a little. I’ll call you when I wake up. OK?”
“OK,” I said. “Good night.”
“You, too. Good night.”
She hesitated a moment. “Was it some kind of emergency—what you wanted to talk about?”
<
br /> “No, no emergency,” I said. “We can talk about it later.” True, we had plenty of time. Ten thousand years, twenty thousand. I could wait.
“Good night,” she said again and hung up. For a while, I looked at the yellow receiver in my hand, then hung it in its cradle. The moment it left my hand, I felt an incredible hunger. I’d go mad if I didn’t get something to eat. Anything. Anything at all. If they’d give me something to put in my mouth, I’d crawl to them on all fours. I might even suck their fingers clean.
Yes, I would, I would suck your fingers clean. And then I’d sleep like a weathered crosstie. The meanest kick wouldn’t wake me. For ten thousand years I’d be sound asleep.
I leaned against the telephone, emptied my mind out, and closed my eyes. Then I heard footsteps, thousands of footsteps. They washed over me like a wave. They kept walking, on and on, tramping in time. Where was the poor aunt now? I wondered. Where had she gone back to? And where had I come back to?
If, ten thousand years from now, a society came into being that was peopled exclusively by poor aunts, would they open the gates of their town for me? In that town would be a government and town hall run by poor aunts who had been elected by poor aunts, a streetcar line for poor aunts driven by poor aunts, novels for poor aunts written by poor aunts.
Or, then again, they might not need any of those things—the government or the streetcars or the novels.
They might prefer instead to live quietly in giant vinegar bottles of their own making. From the air you could see tens—hundreds—of thousands of vinegar bottles lined up, covering the earth as far as the eye could see. And it would be a sight so beautiful it would take your breath away.
Yes, that’s it. And if, by any chance, that world had space to admit a single poem, I would gladly be the one to write it: the first honored poet laureate of the world of poor aunts.
Not bad. Not bad.
And I would sing in praise of the brilliant glow of the sun in the green bottles, sing in praise of the broad sea of grass below, sparkling with the morning dew.
But this is looking far ahead, to the year 11,980, and ten thousand years is too long for me to wait. I have many winters to survive until then.
—TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN
NAUSEA 1979
Thanks to his rare talent for keeping a diary over an extended period of time without missing a single day, he was able to cite the exact date his vomiting started and the exact date it stopped. It had started on June 4, 1979 (clear), and stopped on July 14, 1979 (cloudy). I knew this young illustrator from the time he did a drawing for a story I published in a certain magazine.
He was a few years younger than I, but we shared an interest in collecting old jazz LPs. Another thing he liked to do was sleep with his friends’ girlfriends and wives. There had been quite a number of them over the years, and often he would fill me in on his exploits. He had even done it a few times while the friend was out buying beer or was taking a shower during one of his visits.
“You do it as fast as you can, with most of your clothes on,” he said. “Ordinary sex can drag on and on, right? So once in a while you take exactly the opposite approach. It gives you a whole new perspective. It’s fun.”
This kind of tour de force was not the only kind of sex that interested him, of course. He could enjoy it the slow, old-fashioned way, too. But it was the act of sleeping with his friends’ girlfriends and wives that really turned him on.
“I have absolutely no interest in tricking my friends—in turning them into cuckolds, that sort of thing. Sleeping with their women makes me feel closer to them. It’s a family thing. And it’s just sex, after all. It’s not hurting anybody as long as it doesn’t come out in the open.”
“That never happened?”
“No, never.” He seemed a little surprised by my question. “As long as you don’t have some kind of subconscious desire to expose what you’re doing, these things don’t come out. True, you have to be careful not to do or say anything that’s going to give the guy ideas. And you have to set very clear ground rules right at the beginning, make sure the woman knows that this is just a friendly game, that you’re not going to get involved or hurt anybody. Of course, you don’t say it quite so directly.”
I found it hard to believe that such things could be carried off so easily, but he didn’t seem the type to spout a lot of nonsense just to make himself look good, so I began to think he might be right.
“And finally, most of the women have been looking for something like this. Their husbands or lovers—which is to say, my friends—are usually way better than me: they’re better looking, say, or smarter, or they’ve got bigger penises. But the women don’t care about things like that. They’re OK as long as their men are reasonably normal and kind and they’ve achieved some level of understanding. What they want is for somebody to be interested in them beyond the—in a sense—static framework of ‘girlfriend’ or ‘wife.’ That’s the most fundamental rule in all this. Of course, on a more superficial level, their motives are all over the map.”
“For example?”
“For example, getting even with a husband for fooling around, or boredom, or the sheer satisfaction of attracting another man. That kind of thing. I just have to look at them to know. It’s not a question of learning a technique. This is strictly an inborn talent. You either have it or you don’t.”
He did not have a steady girlfriend himself.
As I said, we were both record collectors, and we’d get together now and then to trade. We collected jazz from the fifties and early sixties, but our interests were different enough so that we could always find stuff to exchange. I concentrated on some of the lesser known West Coast musicians, and he liked the later recordings of more nearly middlebrow people like Coleman Hawkins or Lionel Hampton. So if he had a Pete Jolly Trio on Victor and I had Vic Dickenson’s Mainstream, we’d be happy to call it an even swap. We’d spend the day drinking beer and checking out performances and examining our disks for flaws and striking deals.
It was after one of our LP-trading sessions that he told me about his vomiting. We were in his apartment, drinking whiskey. Our conversation had moved from music to whiskey to experiences of getting drunk.
“I once vomited every day for forty days. Every single day without a break. Not from drinking, though. And I wasn’t sick, either. I’d just throw up for no reason at all. Forty straight days it went on like that. Forty days. It was really something.”
His first round of nausea and vomiting came on June 4. This particular episode was not a complete surprise because he had slugged down a good deal of whiskey and beer the night before. He had also, as usual, slept with a friend’s wife that night—the night of June 3.
So when he vomited the entire contents of his stomach into his toilet bowl at eight o’clock in the morning on June 4, general common sense could hardly have pronounced this an unnatural occurrence. Neither could it be said of the sheer fact that this was the first time he had vomited from drinking since college. Pressing the flush handle, he sent the unpleasant products of his stomach down the sewer, sat at his desk, and set to work. He did not feel sick at all. If anything, he approached his drawing that day with a special vigor. His work went well, and by noon he had developed a healthy appetite.
He made himself a ham and cucumber sandwich, which he washed down with a can of beer. Half an hour later, the second wave of nausea hit him, and he disgorged the whole sandwich in the toilet. Soppy chunks of bread and ham floated to the surface of the water in the bowl. Still, he did not feel unwell. He had simply vomited. He had felt as if something might be stuck at the back of his throat, and he had knelt down at the toilet more or less out of curiosity when everything in his stomach came gushing out the way a magician pulls pigeons or rabbits or the flags of the world from a hat.
“I had experienced nausea any number of times—in college, when I drank like crazy, or sometimes on buses and things, but this was something completely different. I didn’t e
ven have the usual knotting in the stomach. It was as if my stomach was pushing up the food with no particular feeling at all, and absolutely no resistance. I didn’t feel bad, and there was none of that suffocating smell. So then I started to feel very strange. I mean, it had happened not once but twice. It was beginning to worry me, so I decided to lay off alcohol for a while.”
His third round of vomiting hit him, though, right on schedule the next morning. The eel he had eaten the night before and that morning’s marmalade-smeared English muffin emerged from his stomach all but unscathed.
He was brushing his teeth afterward when the telephone rang. He lifted the receiver to hear a man’s voice speak his name, and the connection was cut, nothing more.
“It must have been the husband or boyfriend of one of the women you slept with, don’t you think?” I asked.
“No way,” he said. “I knew all their voices. This was definitely a voice I had never heard before. And it had a nasty ring to it. I started getting calls like this every day. From June 5 to July 14. This coincided almost exactly with the period of my vomiting, you realize.”
“OK, but I don’t see any way there could be a connection between these prank calls and your vomiting.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “Which is why I’m still kind of upset by the whole thing. Anyhow, every call was the same. The phone would ring, he’d say my name and hang up. Once a day, every day, but I never knew when—morning, evening, the middle of the night. Of course, I could have just not answered the phone, but that’s the way I get jobs, and girls call me sometimes, too.”
“Well, sure…,” I said.
“And right along with the calls the nausea continued without a single day’s break. I think I threw up almost everything I ate. Then I’d get starved and eat again, and then throw up every bit of that. It was a vicious circle. Still, I managed to keep down, say, one meal in three—probably just enough to stay alive. If I had been vomiting three meals out of three, I would have needed intravenous feeding or something.”