Glyph (10 page)

SAUSSURE

C

Ecce Signum.
There was an outdoor lamp that shone through the window just behind my new container. I was caged, but I could read. And I was caged, more than less, held illegally and clandestinely and against my will by someone who did not have my best interests at heart. It was certainly a screaming injustice, and had I been one for screaming, I would have. It was indeed a substantial injustice, but it was far from tragedy, in spite of the torture my parents were no doubt experiencing. I felt, in fact, privileged. Instead of spending day after endless day in the same surrounds, staring at the same walls, hearing the same voices, reading the same books, sucking the same nipples,
¹
I was out in the world at large, meeting people, going places. And better, the world was a secret one. I was a prisoner and an abductee, but I was, in my way, willing.

I was more than an innocent among the advantage-taking, sin-ridden heathens in a furtive world of professionals hell-bent on advancing personal fame. I was a babe in the woods. My circumstance, however, was not so upsetting to me, one of my dispositive characteristics being a kind of buoyant patience. I was ready and eager, naiveté my fuel, to watch the events unfold. I had read that young adults often entertained notions of immortality, but such delusions paled next to my complete absence of any concept of mortality. As well, no delusion of mine was sustained by hormones, dime novels, or television. Lacking a past, and so having no comprehension of future, I lived for the moment as a way to make the beat generation envious. My life was but a moment. My ideas and knowledge were more-or-less present; I didn’t know what waiting was, so I didn’t become anxious or apprehensive. To me the endgame was no different from the opening moves.

Although I was being toted around nearly all the time, I was developing stronger leg muscles. While sitting in the car I did isometric exercise, squeezing my knees together for a few seconds at a time. In my crib, I did deep knee bends while holding onto the rails. Just standing, bouncing, and walking around the confines of my cage I felt new strength and better balance. I was quick and small and my captors were big, slow, and lacking considerable attention spans.

The first meal taken together was the following morning’s breakfast. After a bit of arguing, Boris finally told Steimmel that he was taking me to the dining room whether she wanted me there or not. Go, Boris. As well, Boris made an early trip to the nearest market and bought baby food and cereal and zwieback. Boris was a good man.

The dining room was ostentatious, crowded with heavy furniture and ornate lamps, but lit mainly by a gigantic chandelier of hundreds of multicolored, faceted glass spheres tethered on a too-small-looking chain. The table was long, the dark wood visible through the lace tablecloth. Jelloffe greeted guests at the double-door entry and instructed them where to sit, but Steimmel ignored him and sat the three of us in a row, she and Boris on either side of me. I stood in the chair, my little white sneakers pressing into the cushioned seat.

Doctor Steimmel

Doctor Davis

Doctor Jelloffe

Doctor Kiernan

Doctor Kiernan

They all introduced themselves informally, smiling and pulling grapes from the platters of fruit in front of them. Standing on a chair directly opposite me was Davis’s chimpanzee. I had never seen an ape and I was fascinated, the more because it was more or less my size. Well, actually the chimp was quite a bit larger, but was so much smaller than the adults that I felt some bond with him. His name was Ronald and he wouldn’t keep still. Dr. Davis exhibited remarkable patience and treated the animal with much the same gentleness that I had experienced with Mo. Davis talked to Ronald with a soothing voice and fed him with her fingers, slices of banana and wedges of orange. She even let the ape drink from her own water glass.

Steimmel was going to uncover the secrets of language acquistion and the mechanism of meaning by cutting open my brain. But she didn’t tell anyone at the table that. She told them that I “was a mildly retarded, non-speaking toddler with exceptional manual dexterity.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke across the table. “I’m working on motor skills.” She sat there, smoking, continually smoothing out the lap of her khaki skirt, and left it at that.

Davis was going to show that apes were people too, that only the differently constructed larynxes of humans, allowing for a great range of vocal sounds, made us distinct. Her ape knew over ninety-five signs and could even construct simple sentences. Her ape could spell six five-letter words. Her ape liked some television shows and detested others. “He just loves CNN,” she said. “And the weather.” Davis was a nervous woman, her eyes darting from face to face at the table, though they never rested on mine. Whether she was looking for approval, I can’t say, but it was clear that she was not shy about her work. She must have been comfortable with the veil of covertness that covered the resort, but still her eyes darted. “Ronald also shits in the toilet. However, we’re still working on flushing.” After a round of hearty and overly polite laughter, Davis looked at me as if to ask if I could do that.

Doctors Kiernan were wife and husband psychiatrists from northern Minnesota and they believed a return to the the thinking of the eighteenth century was the path to doing away with mental disorders, believing as they did that all madness, and they insisted on calling it madness, was due to the absence of reason. They wanted to
purify
bodies, awaken patients, and force the return of reason. As they spoke, taking sentences in turn, they became more animated, their eyes glowing, the husband Kiernan even appearing to drool at one point.

“We use water mostly.”

“We have the pool house and we blindfold the patient and walk him around and when he least expects it, we push him in.”

“The shock we hope will restore reason.”

“We also use a big tub.”

“A terribly large container.”

“We tie a patient down and act really upset with him.”

“We convince him that we’re truly angry and fed up.”

“Then we begin to fill the tub with water.”

“We let the level rise and rise, until it’s lapping at the tip of the patient’s nose.”

“It’s a kind of baptism.”

When asked if the therapy became expected after a couple of times and so ineffective, one of the Kiernans said, “That’s why we’ve brought fifteen subjects.”

“And they are raving mad, let me tell you.”

“You’d be surprised how nearly drowning to death can be repeated as a startling event.”

“All this brouhaha about mental disease is just a ploy to get grant money for drugs and hospitals.”

“Believe me, if you take a paranoid-schizophrenic and point a.44 magnum at his forehead and pull the trigger, he’ll straighten out.”
²

“One way or the other.”

The Doctors Kiernan laughed.

Dr. Jelloffe said little during the meal, but listened intently, laughing at the doctors’ jokes, and asking occasionally if anyone needed anything. And when someone did, he would pass the information along to one of the three servants who were standing close enough to hear the request anyway. He was the only one of them who smiled at me, even asked Steimmel if he could have one of his people, as he called them, “heat up a little milk for the tike.”

Jelloffe did ask near the end of the meal, “Dr. Steimmel, what kinds of things does the baby write?”

“Write?” Steimmel asked.

“Yes, he wrote me a note at the desk, a very funny note. At least, he handed the note to me.”

“He does make letters,” Steimmel said, slowly. “A function of his superior maunual dexterity, but as far as writing notes—” She laughed and looked at Boris, nudged him with her eyes, and so he chuckled, too.

“I could have sworn,” Jelloffe said.

“That would be something,” Davis said, staring at me from across the table, her monkey climbing all over her. “That would be something indeed.”

It might be said of me that I am a throwback to the Renaissance, not insofar as I am particularly accomplished in several areas or even one, but because I create not as an act of expression, but rather to exercise my craft, whether poetic or not. This in spite of my autobiographical pretensions and my rather bold assumption that my observations and analyses will be of interest to anyone else. But neither is it quite true that I consider my art an objective discipline, which by the imitation and practice of rhetorical devices is made better or more beautiful.

What I did do in my little crib with pen and paper was not a turnpike to personal freedom. Nor did I engage in the description or illustration of societal or cultural truths. I was, after all, a baby, a baby being held captive. Social truths could have no meaning for me. Morality was a mere vapor, a unicorn of a notion. National character was a distant target with no identifying attributes. I was indeed an island. Baby Island. But even then I did not disavow a social role for myself as artist, but simply found the designation unintelligible. I felt no guilt for this. I felt no guilt about anything. I understood, abstractly, the concept of guilt, could spot it in stories and novels without explicit notification of the condition, but I did not have the proper
stuff
to experience it. Even if I had, I would not have fallen for it. Baby Island. Fuck them all.
³

Apathy, as I saw it, had a bad reputation, being seen as the wall at the end of a dead-end alley. But in that alley, at the very wall itself, I found necessary possibility. It was irony incarnate, a condition that required, at least, the energy to turn away, more energy than is required in a crisis to act heroic. For apathy took thought, decision. Not caring was no mean feat. While engaged in apathetic meditation, options appeared clearly, much like projected images on a screen, two-dimensional and harmless, but present nonetheless. Apathy was not a head buried in the sand, but a position taken on high ground. (Perhaps even next to the artillery.)
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Steimmel stood at the window and of the laboratory (Ralph’s room) and held back the curtain for a furtive peek outside. She sucked on her cigarette and said to Boris without looking at him, “Did you see the way she was looking at the kid? I tell you, that monkey lady is up to no good.”

“What harm can she do? You said yourself that she’s here with a stolen ape.” Boris put another couple of books in the cage with me, gave me a brief smile. “If you ask me, everybody in this place is certifiable.”

“We’ll have to put up with them. What I’m worried about is the Kiernan subjects getting loose and running amuck.” She dropped her butt on the floor and stepped on it with toe of her espadrille. “I really hate that monkey lady. I remember her from Brussels pretty vividly now. She gave a paper on the functions of animal semiosis or some shit. She’s got more than monkeys on her mind. She’s interested in language. I bet she would like to get our Ralph together with—what’s that monkey’s name?”

“Ronald.”

“Ronald? What kind of name is that for an ape? Bobo or Cheetah or Kong, now those are ape names. Ronald, my ass.”
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