Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (31 page)

Aside from “The Moral Self Wears a White Shirt,” written earlier, this was to be Luther Penner’s only other public and published document. The remainder of his writing was confined to his journals and letters. Swift was of course its explicit inspiration, but I know from our conversations that his mind was filled with Dante, the supreme master of literary revenge, and in particular it focused upon that canto of the
Inferno
which describes Malbolge, the pit where flatterers and sycophants swim in shit.

It is one thing to
be
a Uriah Heep, Penner said, but quite another to play the part so wholesomely you seem a Heep, for
flattery is insulting when undeserved, and especially satisfying when it is humbly—ha—humbly accepted as the dope’s due. I learned that much of Luther’s success at school was the result of his ass-kissing. He has a brown nose as long as Pinocchio’s, Professor Hoch, not one of his champions, told me.

I no longer regretted Luther’s rejection of my friends, for we often—my circle—met at my house, and I didn’t want him contaminating my toothbrush or switching pills in my medicine bottles, as Mrs. Sowers said she felt sure Penner had when he’d been her roomer. Or losing one of my crystal goblets by simply putting it in an odd place, as he admitted doing to others on occasion. If matters warranted. Depending on how the party had gone. Let’s say that after washing up, an empty place in the rows of crystal becomes evident. A wineglass is missing, leaving puzzlement and mystery in its place, until the thought that it was secretly broken or even stolen appears. These worries will occur well before the thing is stumbled on, because the goblet has been slipped so slyly out of place only chance can recover it; and because the puzzled victim gives up the search to embrace a hypothesis made of suspicion, as the host wonders which one of the guests—quondam friends—has done the deed. Penner laughed. Once the prodigal returns there is more puzzlement and mystery: how could a flute have been put away among the tumblers? Preoccupying parts of people’s minds can make for fine requitals. The secret to secret revenges is the sowing of uncertainty.

Related to the revenge of disordered order is one whose lengthy description I found in the journals, although, oddly enough, Penner never spoke of what he called there “the implanted or time-bomb revenge.” It is a favorite of secretaries and accountants. What could be more natural than for such folks slowly to invade and erode the powers of their bosses by doing more and more for them, but inevitably in their own way,
so that in time a business or an office is ensnared in the secretary’s system. Nothing can be found unless she finds it; nothing can be invoiced, nothing commanded, unless it passes her eye and receives her OK. Then if the company decides to fire her or their figure man, they soon find themselves unable to function. The inventory, the billings, the filing system, the mailing lists—everything—hours worked, bonuses earned—is in code. She was indispensable after all. Profits and losses, income and outgo, grosses and nets, overheads and payoffs, are figured in Arcane. Yes, that quiet little squit learned how to make himself essential.

About this time, as if I knew a calamity was coming, I began to draw up a list of people I’d need to interview to complete the very account you are presently reading.

I’ve been pondering the problems of punishment and the nature of the vengeance society exacts from its criminals, Luther told me, rather portentously. We were in the college cafeteria. I think we treat one another like fools because we have become, by repeated practice, quite accomplished at both being fools and treating others in the same way, so we deserve the insults which fall like hail upon us. Penner paused. What size? he asked archly, what size should the hail that falls upon us be? rice size? pea? pearly onion? chunk of stew meat? baked potato? Luther was mocking his use of a cliché with a list of available items from the steam tables. I hated the cafeteria. It was one more place whose surfaces were so permeated with plastic the light sterilized the eyes, and there was no relief from noise.

Penner showed me his wrist, which bore, where one might wear a watch, a bruise which was passing purple and fading on to yellow. Hat gave me that. Hattie? the librarian? at the college? Yes. That mountain of fat. How? drop a dictionary? hit you
with her stamp? Penner gave me an intensely angry look. Hattie—yes—Hattie the Fattie thought it necessary to tell me how to pronounce
slough
—you know—the
slough
in “slough of despond.” With a weenie little smile in her immense face, she started to explain Meaning—to me!—I threw up my hands to cover my ears, and this happened—this bruise—the result of her condescension. Imagine if I had heard her clearly how my ears would ache. I don’t understand, I said … the bruise? Penner shook his head as if flicking water, like a dog, from his hair. I call—you know—that little superior pucker of hers—I call it a pook, he said. A pook in a pig. Luther’s laugh stood for a complete absence of good humor. Well, our exchange—Fat and me—(pook)—was as freighted with irony as a train. I cupped my ear, a gesture I don’t think Luther approved of, but it was clatterous—clatterous and sordid—the cafeteria—full of loud talky kids and clinking trays. Penner was oblivious. Hattie the Fattie … (pook) Hattie the Fattie … Luther crooned, ignoring the students who were sitting around us, chanting himself back to childhood—and carrying me with him. Hattie the Fattie was complaining to me about her boss—that guy Serkin—Ferkin?—Forkin?—she was going on and on about Serkin/Ferkin/Forkin’s mistreatment of her—well—I made a bad joke but still—I told her to just slew him off, and she looked at me, laughed, not at my pun but at my ignorance—and proceeded to explain to me the difference between
slew
and
sluff
. (pook pook pook) An awful moment. An awful moment … After I had done her the honor of supposing she would understand my little witticism and respond appropriately. Terrible—to be talked down to like that—terrible—to appear to have given cause, to be pooked. Are all fat people like that? eager to suck finally on any thumb that will signal their superiority?

Then Luther laughed a happy laugh. But good came of it.
Good? Good. I suddenly saw the solution. To what? what about the brew— ? Well, I wasn’t immediately there—at the solution—but I thought … I thought: you’d look pretty funny, Miss Hattie, in the stocks, only the stocks I had in mind had holes for her boobs, not her head. Yes. Laughed. Saw her in the stocks. Big laugh. Large as life. (pookedy pook)

I, however, wasn’t following. I was still puzzled by the origin of his injury. I had misheard. Or had he left out a key part of his story?

The Chinese do a lot of this sort of thing. What? wait—I don’t get—what—? Penner was impatient with me. Public humiliation. They’ll parade people they are going to execute through the street. They’ll box an official’s ears. We ought to go back to that. I’m sorry, I said, back to what? But he stood up, grabbed his books, and huffed out.

Weeks passed. Not a note, not a call, not a chance encounter. Of course I didn’t drop him a line or phone either. We were remote and apart as the two poles.

It was then I began my own research in earnest, and learned that my fears for my toothbrushes were well founded, for Luther had apparently been accused of polluting whole bunches of them when he was at scout camp as a kid. His scoutmaster told me that Luther had then pretended to have been the scoutmaster’s concubine, and gotten him into trouble from which he had never recovered. Luther was a horror, he alleged. Did he do a lot of practical jokes, I asked, like giving hot foots or tying shoelaces together or immersing sleeping fingers in lukey water? Not as far as he knew, the former scoutmaster said, but Luther had come to camp with the three-day measles, dipped other boys’ brushes in the toilet, and performed a shadow play in the leader’s tent one night which outdid Salome. Luther was furious because the scoutmaster had rejected
Luther’s advances, the dishonored scoutmaster told me. Who would want to make love to such a mouthful of teeth?

I am of the opinion, however, that Luther Penner had no sex, and was as neuter as
das des dem das
. Being accused of tainting toothbrushes would have been enough to provoke his revenge, I think. It didn’t take a lot. Luther could be as venomously reformist as his namesake, Martin.

I also discovered that Luther had been holding out on me, because the former scoutmaster told me that he had received a number of envelopes in the mail containing cutouts of young boys in bathing suits—nothing more. But with local postmarks, and addressed in smeary ink.

Miss Hat’s version of the
slough
slip was somewhat different than the one Penner had put to me (and I write the phrase
put to me
on purpose, because that’s how it felt: put to me). She had responded properly to the pun, she said, and had laughed, perhaps rather too politely, but she’d never complained about Lorkin, she said, who, although he was a bit of a stick, was still decent enough. Mr. Penner likes to show off his languages, Miss Hat told me, and likes to quote Latin mottoes or French and German poets. A few lines in each language are all he knows, though:
mais ou sont les neiges d’antan
, indeed. But when I went on, I thought, in my jolly way, to quote the next refrain:
autant en emporte ly vens
(after all, I’ve had a little French, anyway it’s not a poem that’s hidden itself in some lost volume, because the line is everywhere these days, blowing in the wind), he looked at me like a snowman, with a pitifully frozen expression, made of coals and a carrot, you know, before bustling off like he was late for something.

Miss Hat confirmed a suspicion I’d had for some time: that Luther Penner memorized lines and sayings from all types of texts and all sorts of languages; phrases and catchwords he
thought would be of use in his rationales of revenge; but of the languages and their literatures as a whole he was woefully ignorant.

Single fat chocolates, wrapped in ruby, gold, and deep green foil, began to show up on Miss Hat’s desk, one at a time, by the phone, in the raffia sack in which she carried books home from the library, at the cloudy bottom of a vase of flowers which decorated her cubicle, unnervingly shoved in an open pack of cigarettes, an especially vexing event, since, by smoking, she was trying to lose weight. As tempting as they looked, except for the one she fished from several inches of stem-slimy water, she didn’t dare eat any, because, well, why were they there? what did they mean? were they undoctored? or had they been inoculated with an embarrassing jolt of Ex-Lax? They lay in an open ashtray like jewels for weeks, unwrapped, until they had to be too stale to be beheld, whereupon, with what she described to me as a sniffle, Miss Hat slid them into a bin of used paper towels when she visited the ladies’.

The pamphlet, “An Immodest Proposal,” appeared on the giveaway racks of supermarkets and drugstores, and on the outdoor tables of bookstores, as suddenly and as unexpectedly as toadstools pop up in the morning yard and garden. They were ignored at first. Finally a few readers were reached. Soon slow word of mouth was like a shout. Then there was outrage; there was laughter; there was suspicion. Copies were confiscated and removed, but it was too late, the shouted word of mouth became the outcry of a crowd; shortly the pamphlet was being eagerly sought by those for whom scandal and shock were necessities. The pamphlet had been crudely printed on the cheapest newsprint, and was the modest size of those booklets which advertise houses for sale and rooms for rent. It occasionally used the color yellow, as if the paper were already sulphurized.

The pamphlet contained a proposal to cut down the population of prisons, and hence to reduce the expense of maintaining them, as well as simultaneously creating an effective deterrent against crime, a deterrent which would also be vindictive enough to satisfy society and crime’s victims while avoiding barbarism and the chance that corporal and capital punishments would be inflicted on innocent persons.

Closely supervised groups of criminals would be employed in the construction of what Luther Penner coarsely called “pisspits.” Some would hold a single person as though in a tube, others would be more ample and might have half a dozen occupants. They were to be built like large sunken urinals: slick, well-drained holes which would be topped by a grid through which any citizen so minded—or bladdered (it was Penner’s joke)—might pee upon the deserving wretch below. The principal ones would be located in parks, airports, and stadiums, where use could be expected to be frequent and urination copious, and where the outcries (as Penner supposed) of those thus urinated on would be muffled by aircraft engines or crowd noise.

For those who required privacy for their peeing (and Penner, I think shrewdly, believed many men, as well as adolescent boys and surly punks of all kinds, would take to relieving themselves in public with a kind of eager bravado), tents resembling old-fashioned bathing machines would be pitched on the mesh at appropriate places. Penner was clearly not concerned with details that any bureaucrat could work out in an afternoon. I shall restore the pissoir to power, he said, raising an admonitory hand. I found him holding forth in our town’s only sidewalk café, surrounded by supporters (in numbers which surprised me) and by obstreperous opponents, hugely enjoying himself. Depending upon the time of year, prisoners would be placed in the pisspits naked or lightly clothed in sackcloth, he responded,
in answer to questions. When their period of punishment was up, they would be drenched with antiseptics, hosed and scrubbed like cars in a Wash, before being released (in the same way as they’d been condemned) in a public ceremony.

How would the prisoners be fed? Unpleasantly, Penner replied, and the group laughed, even those who were obviously in opposition. From time to time the pit would be flushed, just as an ordinary urinal is, to cut down on a stench which might disturb the public. Mightn’t numerous nasty people throw swill and dump excrement into these pits as well? Yes, Penner replied, all to the good. Would women be inclined to participate in what one man called “these festivals of urination”? and Penner answered with a serious smile that the pleasure for a woman who’d been raped in peeing directly on the prick who’d raped her, for instance, or the gratification of those who’d had their handbags snatched, would be more satisfying than sex. There was more laughter, and Penner looked puffed and red and pleased in a rare way.