Glyph (16 page)

Eve’s knee found Barthes’ groin rather easily. She then bopped him on the head with an empty coffee can.

Barthes said, looking up at her from the floor: “Discreet, but obsessed. What I mean by that, as much as any string of sounds uttered in a throat can actually mean something, is that situations become complicated by insistence on contextual anchors and moorings. And what if I were to write out what has happened here? Oh, what a lie that would be! Necessary and contingent, both at once, but then neither really.”

Eve stood staring down at the man, realizing that she had knocked the sense out of him. But now that he was himself, she helped him to his feet.

The playroom was twice as large as Mo’s studio and it was,
interestingly,
located in the same building as my room. I couldn’t see the ceiling as it was dark above. Most of the light in the room came from terminals and consoles and a few lamps. Screens gave eerie, greenish casts to the faces of the several people who were already “at play” in the playroom. Computers chirped and telephones rang, but when one of the white-frocked crew observed Uncle Ned’s presence, they all snapped to their feet and looked his way. Our way, as I was in his arms.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Uncle Ned said, “this is Ralph.”

“Ralph, these people are your new playmates.”

I gave Madam Nanna my best look of alarm and she offered a comforting nod and smile and mouthed the words, “It’s all right.”

Uncle Ned bounced me on his arm. I studied my face in the lenses of his glasses. Then I thought about my lunch of bananas and crackers and half a frankfurter and spit up on his uniform.

“Oh, for corn’s sake,” Uncle Ned said, holding me away from his array of medals. He gave me back to Madam Nanna. “Somebody get me something.”

The crew scrambled around, searching for napkins and bottled water. I looked for the slightest break in at least one of their faces, but found none. Dabbing at his olive jacket with a hanky, Uncle Ned said, “Okay, everybody go back to your play or whatever else you were doing.” When no one moved, he barked, “As you were.”

The crew went back to their terminals.

In the center of the room was a playpen, much like the one I had had at my parents’ house and exactly like the one in my room there with Madam Nanna. Beside it was a little sofa and piled high on the floor were books. Books of all sizes and thicknesses, soft- and hardbound. Madam Nanna carried me to the center of the room and placed me gently on the sofa. The chair was just my size. No adult could have sat on it. It was soft and perfect and beside it was a lamp, which Madam Nanna switched on. I grabbed a book, leaned back on the sofa, and began to read. There was a collective intake of air by the crew, but I ignored them and turned a page. One of them said, “I don’t believe it.” “He’s just going through the motions,” from another. And much to Madam Nanna’s credit, she said not a word.

“Okay, team,” Uncle Ned said, “let’s get to work.” Then away from me, he said, not knowing that I could hear him, “I want to know what makes the little bastard work. And I want that knowledge yesterday. Do you understand me, mister?”

“Yes, sir.”

Uncle Ned then came back to me and Madam Nanna, where he stood over me at the sofa and showed me his teeth. He was still raking at the darkened spot on his lapel with the rag. “Nanna, I’m going to leave you and our little fellow here.”

“Okay, Uncle Ned,” she said. Then to me, “Wave bye-bye to Uncle Ned, Ralph.”

I glanced up from the page of my book, considered offering him only a smirk, but did the prudent thing instead, I waved bye-bye.

A demon may be good, bad, or indifferent. I was all three. What good is a demon who is not bad? Why, he’s no demon at all. And what is more frightening than a demon who is unmoved and unimpressed by his own evil? In fact, the scariest thought by those inclined to believe in demons is that there are no demons at all, that finally they are responsible for the evil they see, discover, perform. Therefore, demons are good. And a good demon is really, really bad. And an indifferent demon is as bad as it gets, which is good. Out of the
massa confusa
there must come evil, because without it, there is no good, or so the literature told me. The unconscious, however, is ambivalent, unfocused, even wishy-washy, and so knows no distinction between good and evil. This I knew from watching the words on the page, realizing that though those words were issued perhaps consciously by some writer, they were, once left alone, without consciousness, were indeed without conscience, and certainly no longer in any way represented the things that they, initially at least, were seen to be representations of. Even my notes to Inflato, now removed from their moment of creation and delivery, if saved at all, would have meant nothing like what they meant then, perhaps serving solely as some sign to my parents that I had not been a figment of their imaginations. Words, I decided, were worse than photographs in that way, that way of cutting off time before and after the image, worse because, at least in a photograph, the constituent parts did not turn up in every other photograph as the words did in writing.

This is what I thought as I watched the crew scramble around me, jotting notes, attaching electrodes to my temples and my little chest, whispering to each other, then laughing at themselves for being afraid of my hearing. I read a couple of books while they monitored my brain activity, then mapped the
loci
of my brain functions (a term I use in spite of my disdain) and at one point they all gathered around one terminal and oohed and ahhed while I purposely shifted my thinking from Nietzsche to Ellison to Lowell to Mailer.
⁵
I was open on the table, but I didn’t care. I was in control of myself, therefore in control of my observers, and I enjoyed the feeling, which was not one of power, but comfort.

If I ended these pages here, where would I leave you? The abruptness of the ending would in a fiction be disconcerting, baffling, and disappointing, but in a reality? And what have I done by suggesting this? Have I betrayed myself as a fiction, or, by the self-conscious admission, simply reassured you that I am indeed real?

“I tried to turn the handle, but—”

If a man grasps truths that cannot be other than they are, in the way he grasps definitions through which demonstrations take place, he will have not opinion but knowledge.

We see now, as in all scenes, notably foreshadowed, the specter of much that is to befall our hero, our autobiographer; the historical personification of which, as it painfully takes shape in this story, lies scattered, in misty and nebulous detail, through this laboratory and that, and those that come next. I was a curiosity then and perhaps forever, a rhinoceros at a church social, a dwarf on a basketball court, a hawk in a chicken coop. And there I was in the lab, under the scope, my heat and energy being measured, my blood being analyzed, my eyes watched, and all by rather cold, detached, uncaring eyes. At least Steimmel hated me, was afraid of me. These people, Madam Nanna included, had no genuine reaction to me, but only to my measurements. They put me through tests not identical with but very similiar to those performed on me by Steimmel.

“What a memory,” the female member of the crew of five said.

“Memory is no sign of intelligence,” the tall, fat man said.

“Still, it’s a remarkable faculty,” said the short, fat man.

I hadn’t yet written anything for them and they didn’t mention it, though my ability must have been reported to them. Madam Nanna didn’t say anything, but just watched and catered to my needs, bringing me bottles of juices, helping me with exceptionally large books, taking me to the potty.

I was amazed at how much I perceived the team as machines, extensions of their instruments and computers. I was shocked when their hands were not cold to the touch as they connected electrodes and other sensors to my skin. Finally, tired of the testing and the monitoring, I wrote a note:

Please allow me to demonstrate a talent of which you are, no doubt aware, and which you have been waiting to observe firsthand. I must tell you, that I admire your considerable patience.

“Remarkable.”

“What do you have to say now?”

“I’m impressed.”

“Me, too.”

“How do we explain it?”

“Is there any way we can weigh his brain?”

“Not precisely.”

“His chromosomal structure is normal.”

“Site brain activity and AER and EEG are erratic.”

“Why doesn’t he talk?”

Let’s get on with the pogrom.

“My god!”

“What?”

“Is it a misspelling?”

“I don’t think so. Look at his expression.”

“He can make a pun.”

I felt not quite real, looking at their faces behind the green glow of their screens. I was no longer taken by my perception of them as cold and machine-like, but by my perception of myself as somehow unreal, intangible, a skiagram, a reflection.

“He’s usable.”

“Definitely usable.”

Could it have been, I thought, at that tender age, that the representation was the thing? Was there a real me, a complete and original me? Or was I simply the sum of their measurements, the tally of their observations, the compilation of their conjecture? Madam Nanna smiled at me, but was she smiling at
me?
No, she was smiling at my performance. Was she feeding me? No, she was feeding possibilities and potentialities. In several seconds, I moved from indifference to hatred of Madam Nanna and Uncle Ned and even the crew, with their interchangeable faces and bodies and voices. But I also experienced something a bit more profound, and troubling, a stirring of self-loathing as I recognized my capacity for emotional response. The self-loathing was exacerbated by the fact that its very existence was ironic testimony to the very thing in me that I was finding so unpalatable, namely a disposition toward witless and illogical responses.

The Papuans apparently, from rather old geographies, mind you, have a tradition of eliminating several words of their language upon the death of one of their number. So, the language must grow smaller and smaller, finally, following this to its logical end, disappearing all together. Except that there must come a time when the words necessary to express the custom to young members of the tribe are not sufficient. Therefore, the tradition necessarily kills itself and so language survives, in spite of the assassination attempt.
ne consummatum est

GREIMAS

E

Tinnitus is a ringing sensation caused by some such condition as a perforated tympanic membrane or an excess of wax in the ear. It is a sound heard only by the person with the condition, but it is a sound nonetheless, however unobservable by another. This makes it much like pain, but more interesting, of course, in that in all other matters we can hear, under normal circumstances, the same things. We never feel the same pain.

“I can hear the chicken,” I say.