Glyph (23 page)

RALPH

G

Staring at the door that had just been closed by the priest, I wondered if there was no inside and outside to the spirit of being, no body and soul, no opposite side to any orientation, but that we were Möbius surfaces, our topologies defined by the fact that we can never get around them to the other side, but are always there, both on the other side and staring at it confusedly, longingly, with much apprehension and eagerness. And if in an egomaniacal fit of reason I extrapolate from my picture of the individual to the world, perhaps the case is that there is no distinction between the real world and that which constitutes real for us in the use of this thing called language. There is no split or rupture from the world when it comes to the reporting of the
real,
as the consciousness of it is on the same side of the paradoxical tape, the Möbius strip of the world, all in the same place, tucked away in the same box in the attic, living in the same cage at the zoo. In fact, all fantasy, desire, falsehood, and delusion exist together with the
real
and language and so are all the same, which is why adults are prone to the supposedly irrational utterance, “This isn’t happening,” when under duress, but of course by even saying it isn’t happening, it is made so. Since there is, as I have said, no digression, let me add: The accused cannot deny guilt, for to deny it is to recognize it and so it is when denying the act itself, but to deny understanding of the charge is to deny the language, the soup in which the action and the guilt and the falsehood and the fantasy are all stirred. Such denial might well serve not only to get one off the hook but to erase the crime of which one is guilty anyway. Such was the case with the priest. Under his bed I found a scrapbook with newspaper clippings about his alleged activities with young boys in his last parish. He looked younger in one photograph, but by the clipping’s date I knew it was not so long ago. All along the margins were scribbled questions, all of a kind, asking more or less, “What does this mean?” or “I can’t even imagine what they’re describing.” The questions were interesting to me, because, as is the custom with newspapers, the stories of what reportedly transpired were so sketchy that I had no idea what had supposedly happened. The strangest thing was that the man had actually saved the clippings. Whether a sign of guilt or innocence, I do not know, but there they were, neatly pasted and taped onto the thick manila pages.

I resolved, as you can well guess, not to be there when Father Friendly returned. I went to the closet, the door of which was ajar, thinking that I would hide in there and then upon being found missing
¹
I would exit via the door of the bedroom. But as it turned out, inside the closet was a small door. I opened it and stepped through it into a corridor in which I could barely stand. I followed it.

I walked through that channel like the rat in the maze that Steimmel would have had me be. It was dark in there and there were many webs, but a tiny light at the end of it pulled me forward. I came to the end and saw that the light was from a room on the other side of a peephole. The room was furnished with stiff and square chairs and somber colors, brown and maroon. Father Chacón was waving his arms and talking to Mauricio and Rosenda, running his stubby fingers through the hair about his ears, then slamming his fat hands together as if in prayer.

“The child is possessed!” the priest said. “The devil is in him as certainly as I am standing here before you!” He held his face up to the dim light of the ornate chandelier.

Rosenda began to weep loudly and Mauricio held her. “It cannot be true,” she said. “He’s such a beautiful baby. He’s a good boy.”

“No, no, no. He is the devil’s tool! He wrote a note. The devil controlled his hand and he wrote a note.”

Rosenda pleaded with Mauricio. “Please, go get little Pepe so that Father Chacón can see how sweet he is.”

“He wrote letters on paper,” the priest said.

Mauricio left to collect me.

“Please, God,” Rosenda prayed out loud. “Please let the Father know how good my child is. Tell him that Pepe is not possessed,”

“Say what you will, Rosenda, but it will not change the truth. We must have an exorcism at once.”

Mauricio came running back, out of breath. He said, “The child, he is gone. He wasn’t in the room. I couldn’t find him.”

“The devil is loose in the house of God!” Father Chacón wailed. “Lord, protect us!”

Of the man who so loved metaphor, it was said that he wore a simile from ear to ear upon reading the first pages of Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake.
He was said to be counting the
dasein
until the book came out. But when he awoke the morning of the publication date, he learned that all metaphors had gone on strike, saying collectively that they were underpaid and miserably misunderstood by their employers. What their demands were remained unclear even after a second news conference.

Of the letter
I,
I have nothing to say, except where would I be without it and that there is no situation more self-affirming as seeing I to I with oneself. And there is no mutiny as when I can’t believe my
I
’s, as when one is accutely harassed and appears to be the
I
of the needled.

Steimmel and Davis ordered pizza and had it delivered to Melvin’s apartment, tipping the cute Indian boy generously and then laughing about his turban once the door was closed. “Thank you very much for the incredibly handsome tip, madam,” Davis mocked the rapid accent of the kid. “Who talks like that?”

Steimmel put the pizza on the counter and peeked into the box. “I never thought I’d look at a pizza the way I am now,” she said.

“How’s that?” Davis asked.

“As food.”

Melvin tried to say something, but the pair of his briefs stuffed into his mouth made his sounds unintelligible. His wrists were bound with a necktie behind his back and to the stiff-backed chair in which he sat in the center of the living room. Davis looked at him as she tried to take a bite of pizza, pulling it away from her lips because it was too hot.

“Shit,” she said. “Now, I’m going to have those little pieces of skin hanging from the roof of my mouth.” She walked over and stood in front of Melvin. “What do you think, Steimmel? Should we let Mel eat?”

“He can have what’s left,” Steimmel said.

“Okay.” Davis went to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer, opened it, and leaned back against the counter. “I feel sick,” she said. “Not physically sick, but lost. I don’t know where I am or where I’m going. I’ve always known exactly where I was going. I knew where I was going to college and graduate school and where I was going to do my postdoc and even where I was going to publish my first article and my first book and I knew it all when I was only twelve. And now, I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tomorrow night. Direction has always been a kind of neurosis for me and to have it taken away, well, it’s shattering. But also freeing. Do you know what I mean?”

Steimmel nodded with a mouth full of cheese and pepperoni, then said around her food, “I was the same kind of obsessional neurotic. In fact, I had dreams, rather nightmares, when I was a child that my mother and father were forcing my future into my anus like suppositories.” She caught Davis’s expression and continued, “I know, I know. But the enema wasn’t the half of it. In the dream, I would defecate myself out as a doctor or a great scholar and my parents would praise me wildly while wiping the shit from me.”

Melvin managed to spit out his underwear and he screamed at the top of his lungs, “You’re both fucking lunatics!”

The two women studied him briefly and then broke into hysterical laughter. “You don’t know the half of it, Melvin,” Steimmel said. She pulled a chair over and sat beside him, put her lips close to his chubby cheek and said, “You see it wasn’t just getting out what you put in that my parents were achieving in my dream. It was a kind of treatment for my deeper problem, my self-clogging, so to speak. The whole idea was a kind of glycerinic signifier for washing out whatever impaction was so crippling me. Perhaps that’s why I became an
anal
-yst.”

“Would you please shoot me now?”

The water that is spirit, the water of all things, the water of tears, the water of blood, dream water, streams, and rivers where life begins, where things are washed, like Circe in that creek, the dreams like water, mixing with water, like water, the water that is a kiss, water, that drink, full of parasites, drink it only when it flows faster than you can walk.

But here am I, young Ralph, hidden away in the walls of a house of some god, watching through peepholes while priests sprinkle holy water in the corners and toss nervous glances to each other.

“Father Chacón,” a tall priest called. “How will we recognize the baby in question?”

“Why, Father O’Blige,” said Chacón with mock patience, “he is the only baby here. If you see a baby, then it’s the right baby, it’s the devil. And do not assume that the devil has not the power to change the appearance of this child.”

“How big is the baby?” asked Father O’Blige.

“I don’t know. Baby-size.”

“I’d hate to splash holy water on the wrong baby.”

Father Chacón rubbed a palm over his face. “If, for the sake of argument, there is another baby running around here and that second baby is not the devil, then what ill effects will the holy water have if administered to him?”

“None, I suppose.”

“Very good. Now, keep searching! And keep praying and splashing the water around. The devil will be burned by the spirit of God and the baby will come out into the open. Then we will drive Lucifer from the little body and back into the deep recesses of hell!”

Rosenda was now dressed in a black dress and was wearing a larger cross around her neck, being attended to by a pair of hefty, black-wrapped nuns whose fingers were busy with rosaries. Rosenda kept wailing my name, my name as far as she was concerned, and effectively my name as when she wailed it, I knew that she was referring to me. Steimmel might have seen a thousand “little bastards” in her lifetime, but Rosenda had seen only one Pepe and if O’Blige’s second baby had crawled in at that moment and caused Rosenda to say, “Pepe,” I would have thought,
Impostor!
So, I was Ralph, the little bastard who also went by Pepe.

Mauricio was seated on a bench against the far wall. He was alone and his expression was more or less unchanged. He looked a little weary, but he always looked weary. He watched closely as the bearded priest who stood near him crossed himself repeatedly.

“You should be praying, my son,” the priest said to Mauricio. “You should be praying for your salvation.”

Mauricio nodded. The priest splashed him with some of the special juice and blessed him. Mauricio nodded again and closed his eyes.

Fragments are perhaps woven like threads, but maybe even driven like spikes into tracks, and serve to create the thing itself, and in so doing, the thing itself increasingly magnetizes; thus it constructs itself, without mission, without sense of parts, but only of the whole, an endeavor both finite and perpetual like the business of language itself. To call any portion of any language or life or story a fragment is to miss the point or at least to beg the question. In fact, there are no fragments, but each part of language, life, or story are, in the spirit of Leibniz’s monads, whole, complete, and self-contained. There is no more space between what we routinely and naively refer to as a fragment and its presumed parent whole than there is between me and my name. My arm is a fragment only if I am blown to bits and even then, if I come around to your house looking for my appendage, you will not say, “I have your fragment in the kitchen on ice.” To understand a piece is to understand a whole.
Understanding
as a thing must be the same whether understanding an algebra problem or why the sky is blue, the only difference being the stuff understood.
I understood something once and it felt just like this.
And so if you tie this to the whole and recognize it as the anti-fragment that it is, and do not consider it a piece of the thing it purports to have nothing to do with, it existing from page whatever to page whatever, then you must understand that this is finally no anti-fragment either, because the whole thing argues against the thing itself and its negation. What a circle. The tangle of an intransitive verb. Infinite verb has no home. Finite verbs run in packs like feral dogs.