Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (33 page)

When taken to task by those who perceived this
volte-face
as an act of treachery, Luther Penner is reported to have replied that Ludwig Wittgenstein had done no differently when he rejected the
Tractatus
, confounding his copycats—who knew only how to meow as he had taught them—by setting off in a diametrically opposite direction, gathering a group of new strays as he went along—whom he would train to bark instead of mew, and piss on posts instead of scratch.

I perceived Penner’s new tack as a masterstroke (the preemptive betrayal of those who would certainly have betrayed him before long), because most people naturally, if naively, believed he had come to his senses, as sometimes happens, and would now embrace imprisonment, favor capital punishment where appropriate, encourage neighbors to spy on one another, and support the other humane measures—such as dog patrols, wiretaps, sting operations, search and seizure—which are commonly urged in order to reduce crime in communities. Nevertheless, though his letter had achieved a … well, mostly secret revenge … it was not yet a transcendental one, since for that even the revenger must be unconscious of what he’s done, and unaware, while reaping it, of any reward.

Harriet Hamlin Garland did do things by thoughtless instinct. That is: her self was her narcotic and put itself to sleep.
Which placed her above Penner on any scale measuring transcendence. She was of course surprised and hurt by his recantation, but that only meant his doctrines were all hers now; and the fact that it was a woman who was spreading such proposals through the state—that she had, in effect, embraced what were popularly believed to be venereal views—simply enlarged her, increased for some the attractiveness of her circle (such are our times); so if Penner’s clique had flown the farm when he chucked his recantation at them (as one wit remarked), Harriet Hamlin Garland soon had recooped, gathering a new group she deemed worthy by—as it were—crowing mightily every morn; and after a few months not many remembered that it was Penner’s pamphlet she was preaching from. She merely gave his views a new (rather appropriate) name: the Justice Restoration Movement. The eagerness with which some women took to these ideas and staunchly served under the banner of victimhood unnerved not a small number of husbands. They forgot that there have always been furies.

I don’t believe Luther Penner had calculated that Harriet Garland would simply steal his proposals and stump the state with them, but there she was, on the road, leading a picket line in front of the capitol. “Make Pits Happen,” the placards said. “It’s the Pits,” they avowed. “The Pits Shall Be Our Pendulum,” they sang. And got plenty of TV coverage. And were the lucky butt of anchorperson puns. Which spread her message like margarine. I saw a bumper sticker which read: Your John or Mine. Less public, though popular, were the cardboard coasters which encircled a black hole with the pointedly censored injunction: “Put the … its in the Pits.” The worst by far was: “I Pit Out.” At least, I thought so. And of course the entire brouhaha was called—doubtless deservedly—the piss war.

I have always wondered who the writer of these dubious slogans was. It could not have been Harriet Hamlin Garland. She
hadn’t a bawdy brain cell, she wasn’t a cutup, and had no wit in her longer than the word. It occurred to me that maybe—just maybe—Penner had been planning some sort of campaign, and that Harriet had appropriated his publicity propaganda too.

Whatever the reason—whether Penner was discouraged and disgruntled, or had another aim—he disappeared from more eyes than mine; and when, at last, I mustered the courage to approach his parents for an interview, I learned that they knew nothing of his whereabouts, nothing of his reputation, still less about the pamphlet “An Immodest Proposal,” with which I made bold to acquaint them. They were quite predictably horrified. Father’s eyebrows rose like a pair of startled birds. Mother’s mouth painfully pursed. I tried to put their son’s project in the best possible light; that is, find a place for them from where they might be most likely to perceive it favorably.

Penner’s father, who cursed Kaltenborn with such quiet gusto, had no trouble understanding the basic tenets of his son’s philosophy. His mother followed lamely along. But neither grasped the beauty of the pure revenge, which I was left to explain as best I could. I cast about for examples they would understand. I cast about and cast about. The cowbird. “The cowbird,” I said. The cowbird’s revenge is pure because the cardinal, in whose nest he lays his eggs, raises the cowbird’s brood in ignorance of the interloper’s true nature. The revenge in question becomes transcendental when we realize that the cowbird hasn’t a clue either. The cowbird is simply being cowbirdy, and cannot boast of his success because he doesn’t know that he’s succeeding.

So, after a bit, Penner’s mother says, “What had the cardinal done to the cowbird?”

They were comforted only after I showed them Luther’s letter to the freebee press. “It’s where you end up that counts, sane and settled,” his father said, “but some of those ideas were
pretty good really,” a certain disappointment showing in his voice.

I shall relate the next part of Penner’s story with some reluctance, since I have misgivings about my own part in it, but I feel that honesty with respect to the historical record requires me to fess up. My concern for Luther’s whereabouts had drawn, as it naturally might, a favorable response from his family, and after several visits I was able to offer my services, not exactly as a private eye, but as a worried friend, to help locate him, and inquire as to his condition and state of mind. I pointed out that I had performed certain services for Luther in the past, and was quite willing to do so again. With this intention, then, I was allowed access to Luther’s boyhood room, where, with no difficulty at all, I found journals and letters in a desk drawer, as if waiting for me, just as I had retrieved two, formatted like account books, from his former landlady. These freshly discovered treasures I took away with me to peruse at length, and, as the reader will surmise, I have based much of this study on their remarkable contents.

Here, I found, early on, the difference between the pure and the transcendental revenge spelled out in no uncertain terms. What surprised me was the major source for the method of its achievement, since Penner had said not a word about this part of his reading. One could see how a pure revenge might be achieved, so that its victim might remain in ignorance of—not his plight, certainly, of which he would, no doubt, be painfully aware—but its cause. It is well known, for instance, that those who come suddenly into undeserved wealth by winning the lottery or growing seven feet tall are frequently ruined by it. They become the object of thieving sycophants, predatory agents, packs of hungry relatives. They invest unwisely, quit their jobs, reject former friends, overspend, take to drugs or loose women, permit their character to be corrupted, and end—so much for
good luck—in the gutter, alone and unmourned. Fairy tales are fond of achieving the same results by granting wishes to greedy people. Thus the general “kill with kindness” principle can be confidently embraced. Supply the jealous with fragile treasures. In front of the envious flaunt advantage. By means of overindulgence and generosity, by encouraging stupid endeavors, by feeding the fat and offering another drink to a drunk, much damage can be discreetly done. Unconsciously unwanted, a child receives
Liebestod
for a lifetime.

Penner reports that he had heard of a woman whose rich sister had been seduced by a painter unhappy at home and momentarily on the prowl; and how she had captured the painter for herself (with great economy getting even with her sister, whose wealth she envied), then succeeding to second-wifehood by repairing the painter’s sexual insufficiencies; and in that way, then, she had proceeded to become his muse as well as his wife and mistress; but an evil muse, praising his weaknesses and poohpoohing his strengths, surrounding him with her poisonous worship, while encouraging his for her breasts, which he drew and redrew, nippled and renippled, as if in a whirlpool of narrowing attention, since that’s the way worship invariably goes, until his work was ruined and his career destroyed—all unbeknownst.

No … understanding—even obtaining—the property of “purity” for one’s revenge was not a problem. What surprised me was the discovery that Penner had painstakingly pored over Dr. Goebbels’
Diaries
, which had been published with some scandal and fanfare. The lesson that he drew from them became central, if not essential, to the achievement of Transcendental Retribution. Goebbels was a professional liar. His ministry was a ministry of deception. The delicious irony was that Goebbels himself became both deceiver and deceivee. He fell for his own
line—hook and sinker. This was a kind of “eureka” for young Penner. Of course Joseph Smith (“Joseph Smith!” Penner’s journal exclaims) didn’t receive the Book of Mormon as he claimed, “on gold! plates! and in Palmyra, New York! for Pete’s sake!” Nor had Mohammad, nor Moses, nor any other glory guy, taken Allah’s dictation, or found the Tablets of the Law by climbing to a mountaintop and seeing them leaning against a rock. But the liar who lies long enough, the liar who wants his lie to be the truth, the liar who sees belief in other people’s faces, for whom his lie is honey to their ears, is eventually a believer too, sincere as sunshine, clean as stream, faithful, too, as old clubfoot was, to his hope-filled falsehoods, and to Adolf Hitler.

I suspected, then, that Luther Penner had absented himself from his home and town and little circle, from Harriet’s expressionless ardor and self-serving attentions, hence from me and from his recent past, in order to remake his nature; for if Luther Penner wanted to revenge himself upon the world, how better to do it than to corrupt that world’s consciousness and mislead its mind with a fresh religion, straight from the shop, perhaps with a bit of tradition for reassurance, a touch of the exotic for excitement, a whiff of novelty to suggest to all those sheepish feet that at last there was before them a new path.

Luther Penner, I thought, is somewhere sewing robes, and getting guruized. Then his social awkwardness, bad teeth, and poor complexion, his stoop, his shuffle, his oddly forceful, overly candid glance, would be an advantage. If the beautiful are believed to be stupid, the handsome are thought to be anything but saintly. Lucky for Socrates he had thyroid eyes. What, I wondered, would Luther be preparing? from where would his inspiration come? how would he save mankind? what must we do to deserve the gift of his word, his wisdom?

Every pitchman, huckster, con artist, liar, joker, pol, great
Satan and his hench-imps, needs someone to pitch to, to imp with, those gullible ears and empty heads and greedy hearts eager for the grifter’s whisper … eager for the love of Lucifer … to lick their private fears, bestir their lusts.

So: secret revenges are secret when not felt to be requitals by their victim, who lives with a limp he learns to take for granted; and they become transcendental when even the inflictor is in ignorance of the nature of his deed. Such as the passing on of stupid ideas. Such as the sincere creation of illusions, no longer lies, but falsehoods served on porcelain and eaten with sterling.

Yet … what had the cardinal done to the cowbird? how come the cuckoo was offended? What was the cause, in Luther’s case, of so general a grudge? A little schoolboy bullying could not account for it. His family seemed in no way to blame. What could explain Penner’s profound sense of being wronged, wronged by Nature? Might it be the recognition, in himself, of a disparity between ambition and ability so great as to seem a natal punishment; the perception of a distance between wish and satisfaction so common and so painful and so vast that Luther Penner could accept it for Everyman, represent it, be the modest plain one on their behalf, holy and lowly, one more time: appear to give comfort to the meek, who will not—in truth—inherit the earth, only breathe its dust and eat its dirt, die and go into its ground. Unless …

Then an unsigned letter arrived in the mail for me, postmarked Gahanna, Ohio. Penner must have received some information about my inquiries. The note accused me of being nosy to no good purpose, and a few other things best left unreported. Months of silence followed.

When I heard of Luther Penner again, he had changed his name to Romulus. Simply Romulus. He was preaching a new paganism based upon the idea of multiplying sacred objects
through certain rigorously formal acts of devotion, and in this way conquering the secular world. Eight hundred objects: scarfs, pans, potted plants, three chairs, several windowpanes, a staircase, ferris wheel, wooden canoe, similar items, had so far been rescued, and had had holiness conferred upon them. I gathered from a few scattered news reports, mostly snide and condescending in tone, that there were degrees of purity in this ancient, now revived, theology, as well as levels of worldly removal, and that even a used soup can had been elevated already a dozen steps toward rare.

His followers said they felt like magicians and gods because they had become capable of creating objects of spiritual devotion out of the most ordinary things: a puddle, for instance, which had to be replenished, a spoon and a shoe, a dill pickle but not yet its jar. One woman, who was otherwise average to an extraordinary degree, had been given, through Romulus’ ministrations, a sacred ankle. He was, the reporter smirked, working to ennoble other parts. And one day, in the distant future, the world would resemble a museum full of priceless and useless and adorable things—icons of the ordinary: sand and snails and lipsticks—each equal in the sight of one another, even corncobs and slop pails, divinities like the divan upon which Romulus nightly reclined.

The world had really been holy once, with deities, in effect, who dwelt in ditches and shrouded peaks. There were divinities identified with the winds in the trees, the water in rivers, the smell of hay in the hayloft on a warm fall day, for both mayflies in clouds and crowds of flowers, so why not for a bent or broken nail? for a toy, or vase, or windowpane—each and all looked at in a special way, a way that (though there was a recipe for this sort of gazing only regulars of the religion might receive) rendered them priceless, yes, beyond price and pricing, made them
rich in their benign individuality, rich in their resonance, rich in the richness of their multitudinous properties, full to the brim with Being—in short, infinite, and infinitely
soi
.