Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (26 page)

It caused Luther Penner considerable distress to realize that although the dirty persons of his schoolmates came and went, he had little idea of how they did—they were there, they were not there. He supposed that adults were too darkly dyed by sin to be clearly seen or too weighed down by evil to materialize (or immaterialize, who knew?), but what about those girls? And then he realized to his shame that he rarely stared at the girls on account of their breasts, whose presence made him blush, and caused his eyes to misfocus. In short, he wasn’t looking in the right place. Neither knee, back, arm, nor face would do. The soul liked the strike zone.

He decided he’d gaze at Gilda, she had no breasts, at least not yet. He tried to address her during recess about algebra (she was a whiz), however she kept standing at an angle to him. Perhaps he was too obviously addressing her, and that was the
problem. Anyway, it wasn’t working out. Furthermore, he was teased for talking to a girl. The goons. He’d have called them the Three Stooges, but they liked the Three Stooges.

Meanwhile, Penner was walking with a spiritual limp. The principal (the aforenamed Horace McDill) had treated him unjustly, lumping him in with those bumpkins and giving him, as though he deserved it, an equal set of swats. There was no redress. And Luther knew he would continue to stumble about, injured by everybody, until he’d taken his revenge, for revenge was necessary in the absence of justice, and in distasteful equalitarian societies where the quiet merits of the meek were given but fat lip service.

The lady with the scales wore bandaged eyes. That symbolized the fact, Luther had been told, that justice was ideally indifferent to the person you were: male or female, rich or poor, black or white, Chicano or Jap. The unsymbolic fact—the actual matter of fact—however was that justice paid every attention to just that: who you were—it cheated, it peeked—because it wanted to know precisely whose donkey it was pinning a tail to. Which Penner thought was proper. Who you were ought to count. But only on the basis of an inner measure. Character ought to matter. Intelligence. Talent. Perhaps not looks. Certainly not wealth or parentage or nationality or color. Or health. The lady’s bandaged eyes ought honestly to mean what would in fact factually happen: justice would arrive unseen, unexpectedly, deal you your deserts, steal you blind, and then scoot.

Luther put on his best pair of downcast eyes and slipped into a contrite grovel (his self-deprecating language in a letter to me reflecting an adult’s opinion), and inserted himself slyly into Principal McDill’s office in order to confess that those boys had beaten him because he didn’t want to participate in—he’d better say “go along with”—their plan to steal the ditto masters of
the final exams, memorize or copy the questions, and return them undetected to the drums of the machines. Luther hinted that the gang had already made experimental forays to test their chances. Despite a performance (in Luther Penner’s opinion) that merited three stars and a round of applause, Principal McPickle seemed skeptical, as if feeling his leg pulled; however Syph’s inky fingers, Cy’s shirt stain, and the blue dirt beneath Larry’s nails convinced him of their guilt immediately he began his inquiries: when he saw those finger ends, that shirt splotch, and the dyed dirt.

Penner had simply soaked some marbles in Quink, a water-soluble ink popular then; allowed his three bullies to wrest the glassies from him (temptingly displayed in a cellophane sack); and waited for the marbles to mark the thieves and send them to their reward, which was a brief suspension from classes, nothing they would have minded if their parents hadn’t. The Master was never particularly proud of this revenge, since it was early and full of errors, but he understood perfectly well that its success depended first upon the predictable mendacity of his tormentors, second upon Principal McPickle’s penchant for rushing to judgment, and third upon that same Pickle’s suspicion of all kids, including, initially, Penner, based on a professional experience of twenty years. But the revenge was reinforced by circumstances Penner had not taken fully into account: namely that the ditto room was found to be insecure, so that the plot he had dreamed up would have been easy to perform, rendering his tale more plausible; and because his three dupes had joked wishfully on numerous occasions about how great it would be to “get aholt” of the test questions by one bit of magic or other (giving Luther the “germ” of his plan when he overheard), they were not as prompt and determined in their denials as they might have been. They
had
wanted the answers. They knew that. They
had
made plans, however imaginary. They
knew that too. In their heart of hearts, they knew they were guilty.

From Penner’s point of view, since his gulls had been innocent of conspiracy, the requital had been unjust; however they had bullied him badly, and had stolen his marbles, and had, like so many boys, failed to wash their hands with Aunt Spatz’s saving promptness. The stains on their moral souls would not be so simple a washday project. Penner’s revenge, of course, could not remain secret, at least the schoolboy side of it, and he paid the price of a good pummeling after; nevertheless there was a hidden and favorable facet to the affair: McPickle had been persuaded to revisit his poor judgment and repeat his previous error. And that constituted a secret revenge by any standard.

Socrates had wondered why you would want to make your enemies worse than they already were by punishing them. So noble himself, Socrates refused to accept the fact that making people worse than you are is one of the world’s true pleasures, one to be pursued even at the price of future pain. Socrates, wise as always, argued that justice was a harmony. Unfortunately, he accepted the least appropriate sense of that word. Justice is doing whatever it takes to restore the world’s moral balance. It is evening up, defending one’s honor, requiting wrongs.

If a robber had pointed a gun at Luther Penner’s boyhood head and demanded he hand over his marbles, Luther would not have been dishonored. His marbles would have been stolen, but the robber would have thought enough of his marbles and of him to have taken them at gunpoint. Penner need never feel ashamed. When they are laughingly snatched from his grasp, however, by a set of stupid boys, in front of the entire school, too, with even the teachers watching; when Syph shouts, “Loothie hath lost hith marbles!” and a crowd laughs, then such a humiliation needs to be paid for, and in kind. Like the dye
that gilds bank robbers by exploding onto their faces and their clothes, as well as over their stolen money, the marbles did them in.

An eye for an eye is the only moral law, Luther Penner wrote in his little-known though, for that few, notorious pamphlet “The Moral Self Wears a White Shirt.” Suppose we made, using Kant’s own rule, the law of the talon into a universally operative physical principle. Let us imagine a world in which, if I strike my brother, I am that moment struck; if I cheat on my wife, she fucks my father; if I rob a neighbor, the neighbor breaks open my money box; if I kill an enemy, I am a suicide, for I shall die in his instant, and in the same way, cut for cut, outcry for outcry, and bleed for bleed. Another merit of the code is that the instant retaliation ends the affair. It both inhibits crime and supplies society with an appropriate reply. The law of the talon won’t fuel a feud.

Consequently, capital punishment
is
a deterrent, if the punishment proceeds promptly and falls with certainty upon its subject. Society, which frowns on individual vengeance (with good reason), and instead takes revenge on miscreants for their victims’ sakes, pretends to be improving them when it imprisons; when it puts youthful felons with lifers so they may learn buggery and burglary at the same time; when it allows jails to reflect the very corrupt and prejudicial social order of the world at large—debauchery, bribery, corruption, racism, tyranny, there as well as here—when it sends its criminals to schools for scoundrels; but it is at bottom lying to its citizens. The honest efficiency of Hammurabi’s code must be admired—all thirty-six hundred characters of it. Makeshift imitations—I steal from the poor box so the state cuts off my hand, or I lose my dick if I am guilty of rape—are certainly better than incarcerations, so inefficient, so ineffective, so costly, but having lost one hand I will steal with the other, and like Popeye, Faulkner’s nasty bit of
business, I will continue to rape, though now, perhaps, with a corncob, no significant loss, since sexual pleasure was never a motive. Pause, Mister Rapist, Penner writes, to imagine that corncob up your own ass. Penner put it that way to remind us that there will always be a few who will choose murder as their suicide; who will want pain enough to pain others to receive it; who will enjoy theft so completely they are willing to pay with an equal loss for the pleasure; who will molest boys as they would love to be molested. No principle is perfect.

The only problem with the code is that it isn’t one. Society is naturally nervous, too, about making mistakes, castrating the wrong fellow, or executing someone guilty only of a forced confession. Nevertheless, the best way to cure crime is to scare the criminals so badly they desist ahead of time.

Gilda is our next case. In the succeeding year, Gilda grew into a properly appealing girl while remaining a genius at algebra and adding solid geometry. Their first encounters were contrived. Luther Penner wanted to test his perceptions. As if she suspected something, she stood to one side or behind things. However, when her breasts appeared, she grew noticeably less shy, and Penner had to conclude that she had been embarrassed by her flat chest, but was proud of her hilly one, which she rather liked having admired. She accepted his stares as her bosom’s just deserts. And moved on to uplift bras.

Although Luther was now allowed to gaze at Gilda as if she were a work of art, his look had become impure, and he saw nothing but her “suckle centers,” as he termed them in those desperate journal entries. Puberty threw Penner some strong punches, none of which he managed to dodge. He had no charm to begin with; now he had acne, and longings, and ejaculations so embarrassing he dreaded sleep. Nature itself was humiliating him. How did you get back at Nature? He wasn’t sure about girls, maybe they deserved their fluxions, but a boy
was born naked with a nasty character, required to live and grow up with strangers who would then believe they had an understanding of him as well as rights over his every thought. Before he knew it his balls would be aching because some sweet little girl had allowed him to pet her leg in a movie. Oh but it does feel fully magical, that soft stretch of inner thigh, the low highway of lust and longing. Then life snaps its sex shut and he is captured like an animal. Must he chew his own cock off in order to escape?

Monks surely had the right idea: to retire behind walls and eat roots; but more than likely it was the root of another brother they ate, or they climaxed between chosen pages of their missals, or dreamt of ravishments so total they were, in effect, tossed off all night. Later, Luther would lecture me about the virtues of the Shaker way of life. Instead of making love, they made cupboards. Lovingly. And lots of perfectly fitting, smoothly sliding drawers.

Penner’s reformatory plans would have to become metaphysical, no less than his namesake, Martin Luther’s, had. Abetted by their parents (like father one son, like mother the other), Larry and Syph had connected him with some long lost comedian of the Penner name whose tag had apparently been “Wanna buy a duck?” Thusly he was now greeted. Well, it was better than being pinched in the ass and pounded on the arm, although by this time Luther had perfected his defense against his tormentors, which was to become another person while being bullied: either the Joey Penner the comedian was called, or Millicent Peezy, after his earliest enemy. It was as if she, then, suffered the sore arm, and it served her right.

Penner confesses that he now passed through a period of delinquency. He felt out of sorts with everyone and everything. Pretending he could drive, he got a Christmas job as a delivery boy. He figured he’d learn by doing. Fired for caving in a fender
on his first day, he got even so promptly it elevated his attitudes. He’d suffer many blows in life. He certainly knew that by now. His meekness had grown worse as though in tune with his acne. He felt lower than the worm and less wiggly. In those days, gas caps weren’t locked as they are in our more suspicious age. When Luther left the company’s parking lot he pissed profusely into the pipe of the offending van. He buttoned his pants. He screwed the car’s cap tight. He strode happily away. But Luther then returned every day at first light to inoculate all four of the Philander Brothers’ trucks, one morning at a time.

He was almost caught by a kid who was driving for the same store, and then chased from the place, which was certainly humiliating. It cast him down again. To revive his spirits, he asked himself: do what? Wait until the cars wheezed to a halt in huge drifts and the drivers were fired for incompetence? In the holiday snow, by the side of each car, he’d left his prints. That realization threw him into a cold sweat. Merderation. He’d failed to think things through. Again. He didn’t even know how many gallons of urine he’d need to pump into those machines before they’d feel any marked lowering of octane and begin to cough. Of course, he argued with himself, what mattered was, he’d done it, and he at least knew it: he’d pissed in Philander’s tank. It was a revenge so secret, its consequences were a secret even to himself.

He could have sugared the gas, had he known of that trick; he could have thrust a banana into the tailpipe, but he was ignorant of the chemistry of machinery; however he did consider smearing honey on the steering wheel and waxing the side mirrors with soap. Still, wasn’t that Halloween stuff, and beneath the level of skill he’d reached? What acumen could he really claim, though, when he’d left a trail like a moose in the snow, and probably his fingerprints on the cap like the most ordinary criminal,
and chilled his instrument once to the point of pain when the glans had brushed frozen metal.