Glyph (24 page)

Colonel Bill drove while Ferdinand leaned out through the passenger-side window, whistling and calling to women on the street. “Hey, baby!” he shouted. “Want a pair of Joan and David slingbacks with three-inch heels?!” The women ignored him and he fell back into the seat, stared ahead through the windshield. “I’m really homesick.”

“I was in the Philippines once. Killed a bunch of people and left.”

“Me, too. At least the killing part.” Marcos looked out at a new group of women, but didn’t call to them. “So, you going to tell me what you’re looking for? You know, I’ve got ears on the street. I have to keep up with what the people are up to.”

“I’m looking for a baby,” Colonel Bill said.

“A baby?”

“A very special baby. A brown baby. That’s all I can tell you.”

“A baby. Imagine that.” Marcos opened a chrome flask and took a swig. “Want some?”

Colonel Bill shook his head.

“Did you know that my wife has over three thousand pairs of shoes?” Marcos took another drink from his flask.

“I’d heard something like that.”

“Those shoes are a problem. Everybody knows about her shoes. ‘You’ve only got two feet,’ I said to her. I said, ‘What do you need all those shoes for?’ Know what she said?”

“What’d she say?”

“She told me to shut up before she put on some Gucci boots and kicked my ass.”

I wondered while hiding there in the hallowed walls of god’s house whether tigers knew they were striped cats, whether mules found each other stubborn, whether language ever lacked meaning. I wondered whether meanings were the stripes on words and marveled at how words always erased themselves but never disappeared. I wondered where the window of meaning opened and what was in its place before, nonmeaning? nonsense? nondisjunction?
²
nonfeasance? The baby was bored in the back room.

The new morning was pushing light through the gaudy stained windows in the big room where now all of the team of priests had gathered. Mauricio and Rosenda sat on the far bench with the nuns. The priests were about to launch into some kind of cleansing ceremony when there was a knock at the door.

When Father Chacón opened the door a couple of men stepped in along with one woman. The men wore caps which read KIDD. The woman wore a bright red dress, her hair hanging loosely in the most controlled way imaginable. The men carried large cases and rolls of cable. The woman carried nothing. The woman said, “I’m Jenny Jenson from KIDD, I hope you haven’t forgotten what today is.” Her tone was friendly on the verge of joking.

“Today?” Father Chacón said.

“My god,” Jenny Jenson said, “you have forgotten.” She gave a glance at her crew, then looked back at the priest. “It’s that day of the year, Father. It’s the day that the mission’s bearded irises open.”

“Oh, yes,” Father Chacón said. “We’ll be right out.”

“We’ll be setting up,” Jenny Jenson said. “And hurry please, the light is good now, but it looks like it wants to get cloudy out here.”

“We’ll be out directly,” Chacón said and pushed the door shut.

I was able to hear Jenny Jenson say just before the door was closed, “He actually forgot, for crying out loud.”

Father Chacón turned and leaned his back against the door. “This is awful. It’s the Opening of the Irises and I forgot all about it. It’s that devil.” He shook his head and looked at the other priests. “First things first. We’ve got to get that news crew on its way. So, we’re going to go out there and bless those fucking flowers and get those people the hell back in here.”

The nuns gasped.

“Sorry, sisters,” Chacón said. “Okay. Are you ready, O’Blige? O’Boie? O’Meye?”

The other priests nodded.

“All right, then. Everybody outside. No one is safe in here alone.” Chacón gave a look at the walls, his gaze passing over me. I watched them file out into the light of the day. I went back along the corridor, opened the little door, and came out through the closet into the priest’s room, which was now disheveled from having been searched.

Mo’s friend Clyde, because she asked him to, put his penis in her vagina and moved it around. It was, in fact, my mother’s vagina, but I had no fond recollections of it and I certainly had no stake in what or whom she chose to put into it. I assume that there was some beneficial result, though I had witnessed the contrary when she had done the same with my father. She requested it and did it because she wanted to feel tenderness, something my father had long been unable to offer. And sadly, even when present, I was also incapable of much softness. I resigned myself to thinking the deficiency was a function of my overdeveloped intellect, though I did not believe that such was logically necessary, but only sufficient and I denied any notion that my hardness was an inherited character trait. Afterward, Mo hugged the man tightly, but she didn’t whisper anything to him, but she just squeezed him and prayed that I was okay.

My mother was not a believer in any god, but I knew that wherever she was, she was praying for my welfare and safe delivery. I wondered if by praying she was indeed creating god, making god real, and if real for her, then real for everyone, real, as a god, supposedly by definition, should and must be. I had no tobacco can to toss high into the air before shouting, “The ontological argument is sound,” but I did know that my intense desire to see a unicorn was not manufacturing a herd anywhere. And I wondered how god worked as metaphor, the concept of god being like
God,
the absolute Other, infinity and irreducible alterity. I considered my mother like god in a way, not as life-giving, but as one in a set of parentheses, left or right, yielding either the promise of sense coming or of sense rendered, the negation of spatial exteriority within language itself. I had nostalgic feelings about my mother’s attempt to connect me to her own postulates of sense in the world, regardless of the absence of obvious meaning in language, despite the general lack of connectedness in her own personal experience. I remembered once when I was just days old, she confided in me and told me, more or less, that life was empty and meaningless. She said, “I’m sorry.” In her painting, especially after my departure she was attempting to construct an anatomy of grief, not for my loss, but for hers.

In the morning, Mo asked Clyde to leave. She wasn’t angry with him. She wasn’t annoyed with him. She wasn’t uncomfortable. She wasn’t in love with him. She was glad they’d had sex. He had been what my father had never been, there to express affection rather than prowess, but still it was no answer to any question that plagued her.

Zing!

“Well, I think the interview went just fine, Professor Townsend.”

“That call is for me, I guess. They’re boarding my section now.”

“It was really nice meeting you.”

“So, you think I might be hearing from you in the next week or so?”

“Oh, yeah, right. You don’t want to miss your plane.”

I made my way through the empty building to the very front door through which the team of holy men and the others had exited. The door was ajar and through the crack of it I could see them all there in the garden. Purple and lavender, yellow and white bearded irises standing nearly as tall as Rosenda, in huge mobs of color. A Morning Cloak butterfly flitted about blanket flowers, poppies, and cosmos beyond them in the garden.

The priests were whispering in a huddle, Father Chacón in the center, while the film crew and reporter set up the last of their equipment. Mauricio put his arm over Rosenda’s shoulder and pulled her well off to the side, behind an exhibit of some kind of grain grinder, away from the cameras, away from detection by the outside world. Rosenda was lost, her eyes empty, her short-fingered, fleshy hands limp and useless by her sides.

As a narrator telling my tale and not someone else’s tale, can I arrest the illusion of the tale being a fiction? But since you have come to this under the pretense of the work being a fiction, the book being so classified, then even I am an illusion. I am in exile from my own fiction, which turns out to be my reality, for I may insist on the truth of the telling only if I acknowledge it as fiction. It is perhaps a kind of figurative displacement or a resignation to a kind of self-reflexive, gesturing untruth, which is neither lie nor truth, but functions as an anaphoric hermeneutic.
³
Derr we have it.

I offer no information about society. I offer no truth about the culture. I offer only however many words there are here in the text and the frequency and order in which they are written, along with the marks ruling their starting, stopping, and pausing. I do not love humankind. Humankind does not love me. And though I answer to a couple of names and several descriptions, there is only one name that answers to me.

To make a liar of myself, let me offer just one truth: The search for the origins of reason, logic, and thinking is as sensible as the search for the origins of the bodily function called defecation.

From the doorway in which I stood I could see across the courtyard to another building, the door of which was wide open. To get there I would have to pass behind the irises and the ceremony, but there was the promise of cover from a hedge of gardenias. I squeezed through the door and stepped as quickly as I could to hide behind a large terra-cotta pot. I then made a dash for the hedge. The smell of of the blooms was intoxicating. I made my way slowly, hearing the voices of the priests as they offered a prayer of thanks for the irises. Then Jenny Jenson was putting questions to Father Chacón. I came to a gap in the hedge that I had been unable to see from the doorway. I glanced around the bush at the black backs of the priests. I tried to sprint across the opening, but I tripped and fell, face first into the dirt. The priests didn’t turn around, but I felt the eye of the camera seek me out and define me.

“Do the irises bloom on the same day every year?” Jenny Jenson asked the priest.

Chacón nodded. “Yes, Jenny. Our bearded irises seem to have a rather precise clock. Regardless of the weather or the amount of rainfall, our irises open this day, every year, like clockwork. We see it as testimony to God’s eternal precision.”

“Do you do anything special to keep them so lovely? Fertilizer, that sort of thing?”

“We weed and water, but the loveliness? That has nothing to do with any action of ours. And no, we don’t fertilize.”

“Do you spray for insects?”

“Well, yes, we do that regularly.”

Steimmel put another chopsticks load of fried rice into her mouth, then pointed at the television screen. “Would you look at that fat bastard. Like hell he doesn’t fertilize those plants.”

Davis sat beside her on the sofa and picked up the carton of sweet and sour chicken. “I hate priests,” she said. “My parents tried to raise me to be a Catholic. I could never understand that. They weren’t even Catholic. They said they thought the structure would be good for me.”

As the doctors watched the screen, the camera zoomed in on a small form pulling itself from the dirt.

“Hey, that’s our baby!” Steimmel shouted.

Colonel Bill and Ferdinand were standing in Big Carl’s Electronics Warehouse in Moreno Valley. Big Carl was showing Ferdinand an impossibly large, portable cassette-playing machine with detachable speakers.

“This thing gets so loud you wouldn’t believe,” Big Carl said. “It even scares me. Say you want to drive somebody out of a building they’re holed up in. Well, you put a tape of some of that rock ‘n’ roll music in this baby and set up the speakers and crank it up and they’ll be out soon enough. I guarantee it.”

Marcos ran his finger across the black plastic. “What other colors does it come in? You know, of course, I can buy this for a quarter of the price when I get back to Manila.”

Colonel Bill had turned away from the sales pitch and was watching a twenty-nine-inch RCA Victor color television. The camera zoomed past a fat priest standing in front of some flowers to a small form pulling itself from the dirt.

“That’s my fucking baby!” Colonel Bill shouted.

Eve had just settled in at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the newspaper. She glanced up at the television on the counter.

“My baby. My Ralph.”