“Now, now, Frances. Susan, tell us more. You said ‘a car.’ What about a car?”
“I was playing in the street with Pedro. A car ran us over and I lost my legs.”
“How old were you?”
“It was last year.”
“How old were you, Susan? was the question.”
“I was thirteen when the car hit me. It was the day before my birthday. I turned fourteen the day they hacked off my legs.”
“Who hacked them off?”
“The doctors.”
“Where did the doctors hack your legs off?”
“In a rondavel.”
“Susan!” Susan’s mother says.
“My legs were infected, Mom, and after lightly anesthetizing me with an orally administered paste of palm wine and pulverized valerian root, the doctors, as you like to call them, chopped off my legs with their rusty machetes in a dung-floored, thatch-roofed rondavel.”
“Medicar!”
“Just kidding,” Susan says. “It was at Children’s Memorial.”
“Liar. You’re lying. You don’t believe what you just said.”
“I need to go to school now,” Susan says.
“You need to go back to high school, young lady.”
“I hate high school.”
“High school was the most glorious time of your life.”
“I need to go to school.”
“Not until…”
“Please, Mommy. I’m sorry. I love you. You didn’t leave me to the teeth of that dastardly leopard. Please, let’s just eat our Eggs Jiselle and get on with the day.”
“Eggs Jiselle! Did you hear that, Frances?”
“She sure can turn a phrase, Mike, can’t she, our girl Susan. Little smartypants. How much do you love Mommy?”
“This much.”
CHAPTER 130,022
MIDRASH IN THE MORNING, NOWHERE DEEP INSIDE DOES SHE
Susan has the duration of the ride to campus to do yesterday’s assignment for Media Studies 761: Consuming God. She takes Genesis Rabbah, a book of midrash, from her bag, and reads a story about God and Adam that her professor has asked her to present to the class this afternoon. He wants her to frame it as “the first ever buyer-empowerment scheme.”
The story: Before there was an Eve, Adam was lonely and bored and sad, and, to fascinate him, God revealed the future of the world, taking care, as He did so, to remove all episodes that would occur within the span of Adam’s lifetime. Though God’s plan worked at first, Adam eventually grew distracted by his loneliness again. God reconsidered showing Adam his own (Adam’s own) future life, but judged, for the second and final time, that doing so would be a grave misstep, and instead chose to try His hand at improvisation. Rather than continuing to show Adam what would be, God showed him what could be, were one event that was slated to occur one way to instead occur another way.
1The story of David—who slew Goliath, loved Bathsheba, and, as its strongest king, made of Israel an empire—was particularly moving to Adam, despite his knowledge that it was only a could-be, that David would, as originally foretold by God, die at birth. Only a few words into the Psalms, which God had spelled out for him in clouds, Adam found himself weeping at the thought that David would never write them, and he transferred seventy years of his allotted thousand to David, so that David would survive beyond birth and do everything that, before the transfer, only he could have done.
What Susan believes: Adam gave life to David out of love for David.
What Susan would like to believe: Adam gave life to David out of love for the world—gave David life so that the world would not be deprived of David.
What she is being asked by her professor to spin: Adam gave life to David out of love for Adam. Being that Adam was the first man, Susan plans to tell the class, all men would be of him, and being that Israel, under David’s reign, would be the world’s greatest kingdom, Davidic-era Israel would be the greatest achievement to come of Adam’s creation. Susan would say that Adam, as he read the Psalms in the sky, was not moved 2as much by their beauty as by how their beauty would affect his legacy. She would say that Adam wept at the possibility that his legacy could be so glorious, yet wouldn’t be so glorious if he failed to take action. She would quip, “And therefore, Adam’s giving of life would be better described as spending, and better yet as investing, for its purpose was to ensure a future payoff.” If the class was with her—they rarely were—she planned to close with a joke about “the intricacies of calculating a time-lost to glory-increased ratio.” With or without the joke, she was confident she would get an A.
What Susan Falls is considering for extra credit: how Adam, who was born a man, and who, without his Eve, without knowing he was a male in the male/female dichotomy—and so knowing nothing of human reproduction—could know that other men would come from him, rather than from the word of God, where Adam had come from.
As the limo exits the Drive at 55th, Susan sets the extra credit aside for later consideration and begins to write in the margins of Genesis Rabbah. While doing so, she is struck by the idea that Adam might be a lot like her—his seventy years her lower body, David her brain. Some time, early on, when she knew things in a pure sense, she might have made a deal with God, an investment of her earthly legs in a transcendent mind with high-capacity intellect. It was pretty to think so.
So pretty, in fact, that she doesn’t realize the limo has stopped, has been stopped for minutes, until Jake, the driver, lowers the separator and pronounces her name. “Susan,” he says, “are you not well? Would you like me to wheel you to class today?”
CHAPTER 130,023
CONSIDERING THE UTILITY OF BLUE SNOWPANTS
Susan Falls thinks Carla Ribisi has a big ass and that Carla Ribisi’s big ass is beautiful and that Carla does not know it. And Carla Ribisi is always wearing blue nylon snowpants. The intended effect of the snowpants is to disguise the bigness of the ass in bigger-ness, Susan Falls thinks. It is a complicated trick. It begins with a syllogism. The first premise is that anyone who wears snowpants appears to have a big ass:
1. Anyone who wears snowpants appears to have a big ass.
2. Carla Ribisi wears snowpants.
... Carla Ribisi appears to have a big ass.
The trick comes of the word appears. Appears allows for, but does not necessitate, visual trickery. Things that allow for but do not necessitate other things are tricky, and tricky things engender consideration. Things that allow for but do not necessitate trickery itself are even trickier, and these things engender much richer consideration. The richer the consideration engendered by a thing, the longer the time one will spend considering that thing. Consider the following hypothetical situation:
Susan Falls has just started dating Carla Ribisi, and the two go shopping for a T-shirt for Carla. They go into the changing room and Carla tries on one of two stretchy V-necks she’s deciding between, a red one, say, a warm kind of red, like that of the hair under Susan’s arms. The T-shirt looks good and Susan Falls tells Carla Ribisi that the T-shirt looks good.
Carla tells Susan Falls that this is the first time she’s shared a changing room with another woman since the long-lost days when she used to shop at indoor malls with her mother. Susan Falls blushes. Carla Ribisi removes T-shirt #1, and, reaching for T-shirt #2, looks at Susan Falls, longingly(?), and says, “Blusher.”
Being called on blushing causes dollar-coin-size spots of the same shade of blush as Susan Falls’s face to appear on Susan Falls’s neck.
Carla pulls her head up through T-shirt #2. “I’m sorry,” she says to Susan Falls. “I didn’t mean to make you embarrassed when I said you were a blusher.”
The dollar coins darken in time with Susan’s ecstasy.
Susan’s ecstasy is like neither a balloon nor a hat pin, but like a hat pin’s entrance and movement, under the guidance of a cotton-gloved birthday clown, through the skin of a balloon.
There is something that is so Goddamned hot about Carla
Ribisi considering and, further, discussing any effect that she has had on Susan Falls. Let alone in a Nordstrom dressing room, trying on T-shirts.
T-shirt #2 looks good, but in a different way than the way in which T-shirt #1 looked good.
“So?” Carla wants to know.
“It looks good,” Susan says. “It makes your tits look bigger.”
“Hmm.” Carla doesn’t know if she likes that. She has big-enough-looking tits already. Showing them off, she has decided at different times in her past, makes her look trampy. “That’s good?” she says. “That it makes my tits look bigger?”
“You have beautiful tits, Carla. The T-shirt just brings it out.”
“Do you mean to say that my tits are essentially beautiful, and that the appearance of more of my tits reveals more essential beauty?”
“Yes!” Susan says, now thrilled to damp underthings by Carla’s obsessive parsing and analysis of a sentence Susan has spoken.
“Or do you mean to say,” Carla says, “that my tits are beautiful because they’re big, and therefore my tits, upon looking bigger, appear more beautiful because ‘you can’t get enough of a good thing’—the good thing being the bigness of tits?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Not at all. I’m having fun with you. And attempting to choose between T-shirts at the same time. So which T-shirt’s better?”
“I don’t know that we can make informed choices about the T-shirts at this point, because now that we’ve spent so much more time on the one you’re wearing than we did on the first one, we’re probably invested in the one you’re wearing, and—”
“I’m not gonna sweat that, Susan. Which one do you like better?”
“My opinion—”
“Your opinion isn’t founded on a bedrock of rigorous analysis and therefore etc. etc. etc.?”
“You are making fun of me.”
“I’m telling you that I want and will buy the T-shirt that you prefer,” Carla says.
“Are you sure? Because you’re saying it in this way that it sounds like maybe you’re making fun of me.” Susan Falls begins to shiver, and then she begins to cry—not really, but hypothetically.
Susan’s hypotheticals often end sadly and hardly ever make their point with force. Disregarding the ever-present effect that the Wheelchair Factor has on her confidence, the Sadly Ending Hypothetical Factor is the number one reason for why she can’t bring herself to engage Carla Ribisi in conversation. But back to trickery:
The considerer will arrive at two interpretations of “Carla Ribisi appears to have a big ass,” each one implicated by the other:
A. The actual size of Carla Ribisi’s ass cannot be known at this juncture (snowpantsed).
B. Carla Ribisi’s ass is a mystery.
Susan Falls has, by now, watched enough TV and studied enough social and cognitive psychology, she hopes, to soon fulfill her dream of becoming one half of a powerful and revered creative team at Leo Burnett. Susan knows about attribution. She knows self-perception theory. Susan knows that for every considerer, there is a specific amount of time, designated x, that must be spent considering a thing before the considerer becomes aware that she has spent time considering the thing. Moreover, Susan knows that after the considerer has considered an as-yet-neutral (unvalenced) thing for x, that thing will appear to the considerer—unless she is someone who suffers from terribly low self-esteem or clinical depression—to be a good (positively valenced) thing, for the (non-depressed, self-esteeming) considerer knows she wouldn’t spend her time on a thing that wasn’t good. Therefore, once the mystery of Carla Ribisi’s ass has been considered for x, the mystery of Carla Ribisi’s ass is good. And all good mysteries are good to solve, so solving the mystery is also good.
In order to solve the mystery—in order to see Carla Ribisi sans blue snowpants—one would have to spend time with Carla Ribisi, time enough to wind up in places where wearing snowpants would be out of the question: dressing rooms, beaches, showers, etc.
If Carla is a smarty—and Susan is sure that Carla must be, for Susan wouldn’t otherwise waste so much time gawking at and thinking about her—then Carla, to ensure that any given considerer’s x be met or surpassed, would stretch out this getting-to-know-Carla time for as long as possible before letting the considerer see her without snowpants, for in being kept from seeing what Susan will call Carla’s true ass for x or longer, the considerer, always considering, would work the previously outlined self-perception algorithm, but this time the considerer would transpose solving the mystery with true ass, itself, such that not only would to solve be a good thing, but true ass (the solution) would also be good.
If Susan Falls were to create a successful television advertising campaign for Carla Ribisi’s ass, the only two things she would have to figure out would be (1) how much time x equals for the average viewer, and (2) how to make the campaign compelling enough to keep the viewer considering it for ≥ x.
If Susan Falls could pull that off, then even if the viewer were to start with a bias (e.g., “prefers big asses,” “disdains small asses,” “abjures jacked-up small asses that look bigger than they are”), the bias would, by campaign’s end, be made irrelevant; whether im- or explicitly, the viewer would, once her x was met, reach the same conclusion as Susan:
Any ass worth spending all this time on must be some really good ass.
CHAPTER 130,024
AN ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
The other brilliant aspect of Carla Ribisi’s blue snowpants is the sound they make when Carla enters a packed lecture hall, tardy, as she just has. Except people in college are never called tardy. The tardy go to high school. In college they’re late, and this is the sort of thing—this usage of tardy—that Susan Falls wouldn’t want to betray to Carla Ribisi upon their first actual meeting, but might come in handy later on, when Susan decides it’s time to coyly let Carla know something that she wants the whole world to know.
Susan wants the whole world to know that she is a fifteen-year-old college freshman, but she doesn’t want the world to know that she wants the world to know. She wants the world to see her as the sort of person who would not only make light of such an achievement on her part in conversation, but the sort of person who would really not consider it an achievement. She has a statement prepared in explanation of her being a fifteen-year-old college freshman, and she hopes that the topic will come up so that, one day soon, she can make the statement. This is the statement:
“Ah, well… When you’re legless, no one wants to play with you, and TV gets boring fast, so all you have are books and time.”
CHAPTER 130,025
SHIKKA SHIKKA, A GLIMPSE AT DEATH
Carla Ribisi enters the packed lecture hall, late for Logic I: An Introduction to Propositional Logic. Her snowpants make the snowpants sound. For every person present, the sound is the seed of a tree of uncountable self-perceptions relating to Carla, and, three strides in, Carla sees them all watching her, the professor included. He’s clearing his throat, over and over.
Instead of making her way to her usual desk at the back of the lecture hall, she considerately heads to the nearest open seat, which is in the front row, between a deaf boy—in front of whom crouches an interpreter whose frantic signing distracts all hell out of the ASL-fluent Susan Falls—and Susan Falls, in front of whom is a wheelchair.
The interpreter signs, “Lecture interrupted by noise: S-H-I-K-K-A S-H-I-K-K-A,” and Susan’s mind twirls at the thought of signing sound for a deaf boy; at the thought of a deaf boy reading a sign for a sound; at what must be the sameness, to a deaf boy, of a sign for a sound and the sound the sign stands for. As if a sound were nothing more than the sign that stands for it.
Susan Falls shivers, like in the Nordstrom dressing room, but not hypothetically.
Carla Ribisi, while getting settled, inadvertently knocks loose the brake on Susan Falls’s wheelchair. The wheelchair rolls down the moderately sloping floor of the lecture hall. “Oh God,?
?? whispers Carla Ribisi.
And Susan’s shivering body starts to shake, only, with her mind still twirling, it’s as if it isn’t Susan’s field of vision that’s trembling, but that which is in her field of vision; the shaking of Susan’s body seems to be the shaking of the classroom, and although a part of her knows that it’s her body shaking—a part of her knows from experience that classrooms don’t shake—the shaking of her body, rather than being expressed by the words my body is shaking, seems to be the expression of the words my body is shaking. And no part of her knows otherwise, not from experience. And the thought of this makes her shake harder.
And harder, until the rolling wheelchair strikes the wall beneath the tray of the chalkboard and clatters, and Susan startles out of the twirl. Stops shaking. Ideas can’t get startled, is what she tells herself; they can’t shake. Names don’t shiver, she thinks. The world is not just a word with an l. Everything is fine. The twirl was an outcome of low blood sugar is all.
Look at things, Susan thinks, look at the wheelchair.
The wheelchair, having struck the wall, rolls back a few inches, as if the wall had struck it back, thus describing Newton’s third law of motion—rather, demonstrating Newton’s third law of motion… Or rather demonstrating the effect of Newton’s third law of motion, for the wheelchair doesn’t do the demonstrating, does it?—the motion of the wheelchair does the demonstrating… Newton’s third law of motion, which is the name of a principle described by Newton, explains why the wheelchair describes the motion that it describes after striking the wall. And a shiver comes on.
Better to look at Carla, Susan thinks.
“Oh God,” Carla says. “Oh no.” The shiver wavers, quits. Susan never got to eat her breakfast is all, her Eggs Jiselle, she tells herself, and to quell the last tiny remnant of her panic, she inhales deeply, slows her blood down. What Carla hears is mounting rage.
“Oh God,” says Carla Ribisi once more. “I’m really so sorry.”
“It’s okay, Carla,” says Susan. And all her panic is gone.
“It’s just, God, I mean, it’s just that…”