Horace Afoot (27 page)

The walk to Schroeder’s Shoes takes twice the time it should because I have to stop every ten minutes to give the soles of my feet a rest and to cool down inside the suit. By the time I get out to the strip of development that bulges like a tumor from the northern end of town my
feet have been thoroughly tenderized. I had considered doing without shoes and even thought the suit might make a sort of cowl-less habit. But asphalt is too hard to walk on and the suit is too hot for late spring weather.

When I enter the shoe store Tom Schroeder Sr. is nowhere to be seen. A bangled and teased-up young woman approaches me, a smile splashed across her face. Her name tag says she is Cathy, the manager. She takes one look at my feet and bursts out with, “Wow! Do we need shoes or what?”

“Is Tom Schroeder here?”

Cathy shakes her head vigorously. “Nope. He hardly comes in since the new store opened.”

“New store?”

“Out at the Pavilion.”

“Pavilion?”

“The new mall. Since they opened up out there, traffic’s down here by about half. They got a food court and a cineplex and a virtual-reality arcade called Hyperworld.”

“I’m looking for a pair of walking shoes.”

Cathy motions me over to a display. “These are what you want. Lumberlands.” She lifts up an object that looks like something for incubating eggs in. She turns it over in her hand and traces a finger along the sole. “They’ve got a patented insulation system, vacuum sealed to create a cushion of air between your foot and the ground. Try it on. It’s like walking on air.”

“I’m not interested in walking on air. What about a plain leather shoe?”

“This is no gimmick. These are the best shoes on the market. Everybody who buys ’em loves ’em. I got two pairs, I like them so much.”

“I just want a normal leather shoe.”

“These shoes let your foot breathe.”

“I don’t want my feet to breathe. I want them to walk.”

“Very funny.” She puts the shoe down. “Plain vanilla? We got plain vanilla.” She marches across the store, beckoning me with a crooked finger. “Here’s what you want.” She holds up a boot that is all laces and thickly notched sole. “A hiking boot.”

I shake my head. “I just want an ordinary shoe.”

“An ordinary old shoe,” she repeats. “Sit down. I’ll bring you the plainest oldest ordinariest shoe we got.”

I sit and watch the dazed procession of shoppers moving past the display window. Cathy reappears a few minutes later and hands me a pair of white socks. “You’ll need to put those on first. These are the plainest oldest shoes we have,” she says, kneeling. She begins threading the laces. “The company has been making these sexy things since 1921 and hasn’t changed a thing about them. Not even the color. They only come in black.” She grabs my foot to slip the shoe on.

“I can do it.” I take the shoes from her and put them on.

“How do they feel?”

I stand up and take a few steps toward the front of the store. “I’ll take them.”

“Need anything else?”

“More socks.”

“No problem.” She grins, snaps a bright red fingernail. “I’ll even let you keep the ones you have on for no extra charge.”

Across from Schroeder’s Shoes is a clothing store where I buy three pairs of jeans and four shirts, two white button-down and two black tee shirts. I’ve not bought or worn new clothes for over two years, and when I emerge from the mall wearing shiny black shoes, stiff new jeans, and a white shirt, a peculiar self-consciousness overwhelms me. I look at my reflection in the glass doors at the mall entrance. A stranger looks back. It occurs to me that the physical forces that bind me to the reflection in the glass are analogous to the semantic forces that link name and identity together; and that amid this phantasmagoria of names and things, to be named Lucian of Samosata is nothing more than to cast a reflection.

I walk back to town carrying a bag containing my new clothes and the snowsuit. Passages from
Selected Philosophical Essays
filter through my mind along the way, passages containing words like
Being, Transcendental Ego, Subject, Object
. What good is a name for a thing—a being—that transforms itself spontaneously by nature or by an act of willing? From nothing to egg to zygote to embryo to fetus to infant to child to adolescent to adult to geriatric to corpse to decaying flesh back to nothing. Or from
Quintus Horatius Flaccus to Lucian of Samosata? Is there a single identity that inheres and abides throughout? Or is identity an accretion that builds up like a crust around a name and even continues for a time after death like hair and nails growing on a corpse? If it is nonsense to say that two things are identical and meaningless to say that a thing is identical to itself; and if the universe is an infinity of names with different meanings—what then of identity?—except to say that it is a stream running through all of nature—and names are the hooks we use to fish in it.

At Town Hall the obnoxious clerk reviews the notarized form. He stamps it and scribbles on it, then disappears into another room, finally returning with another form that he hands to me. “That’ll be fifty dollars,” he says.

I pay him the money and he writes out a receipt.

“Go down the hall, left, to courtroom number one and wait inside. They’ll call you.”

“Today?”

The clerk looks at me as if I’ve asked exactly the wrong question. “I just said so, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t say anything.” I pick up my shopping bag to leave.

“Not tomorrow. Not yesterday. The judge will see you today.”

“Drop dead.”

“Same to you, Mister,” the clerk chimes back as I close the door.

Courtroom number one is a sleepy, windowless chamber. I sit in the rear, my bag between my feet, while the bailiff calls out name after name and the judge, a tired-looking gray old man, dispenses one by one with landlords and tenants, debtors and creditors, licenses and permits of all classes until, after a little over an hour, the bailiff calls, “Quintus? uh, Horatius? uh, Mr. Flaccus?” I am told to approach the bench.

The judge doesn’t look up from the papers he is reading but leaves me to stand suppliantly before him. At last he looks up and, appraising me from head to foot, says, “Expression of personal identity—would you mind explaining yourself a little more, ah, completely?”

“I don’t know that I can.”

The judge seems to regard this as an evasion. “You just feel like changing your name. Have I got it right?”

“I don’t feel like it. I want to do it.”

The judge pauses to consider this response. “And this new, ah, appellation, Lucian of Samosata. Why exactly have you chosen it?”

“Everybody needs a name.”

The judge nods. “Why not George or Harold, say, or even Lucian? Lucian’s a fine name.” Then, to demonstrate his fatigue and his infinite patience, he takes off his reading glasses and rubs his eyes. When he realizes that I am not ready with an answer, he puts them back on and looks at me over the rim. “What I’m asking, sir, is what exactly is it that you think will be, ah, conferred on you by this change?”

“A new identity.”

The judge leans back and regards me with a frown that rises over his brow and into the baldness of his pate. “You trying to run away from something?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“How about someone? You got someone chasing you?” No.

“No family?”

“No.”

“Creditors?”

“No.”

“Bankruptcy?”

“No.”

“I see here that you listed your occupation as ‘retired.’ Mind telling me what you retired from?”

“I’m retired from society.”

The judge glances up from the paper, then nods his head. “Fair enough. Sometimes I wish I was too. Ever been convicted of a felony?”

“No. I answered all those questions on the form.”

“I’m just making sure. Have you ever been married?”

“No.”

“You’ll have to explain yourself more fully. I’m having trouble understanding you. A name change is not something that this court takes
lightly. Nor should you. So please tell me what you mean by, ah, a new identity.”

To appease the judge, who by his look seems the sort of man who will continue to listen to a complaint despite having formed an opinion, I reach for an answer from
Selected Philosophical Essays
. “Identity is a relation that obtains between the names of an object.”

The judge’s eyes shift from the paper he is holding back to me, then to the paper again. “Between names, you say?”

“Yes.”

“And you want to change yours,” he says, putting the papers down and taking off his reading glasses again.

“Yes.”

“From Quintus Horatius Flaccus, which, I see here, has been your name for, ah, five years. Before that you went by … William Blake?”

I nod.

“
And did those feet in ancient time
William Blake? William Blake the poet?”

I nod again.

The judge pinches the bridge of his nose, closes his eyes. “Because …” he loses his train of thought, passes his hand over his brow. “Because …” He waves the docket of papers at me. “This is a pretty esoteric little hobby you’re practicing here, son. And I don’t find it amusing. This is a court of law, not a place for frivolous games. Now tell me: Why do you want to change your name?”

“Because I want to.”

The judge’s eyes narrow. “Tell me what you said about identity again.”

“A relation that obtains between the names of an object.”

“Between the names or the objects themselves?”

“Between the names.”

“Explain.”

“What kind of car do you drive?”

“A Ford.”

“If I had a Ford we would say that we both drive the same car, right?”

The judge nods and looks over at the bailiff, who is standing near the bench, smiling.

“But my Ford and yours are in fact two different cars. The relationship between the name, Ford, and the object, car, is purely a matter of convenience. In fact, it obscures the real relationship between your car and my car—which are in fact two entirely different objects sharing the names
car
and
Ford
. Strictly speaking, a thing can only be identical to itself, so identity can never obtain to the relationship between objects because no two objects can be the same object. Identity can only obtain to the
names
for objects.”

There is silence for a moment.

“And I want to change mine.”

The bailiff is still smiling. The judge picks up the docket of papers, puts his glasses back on, and skims through it once again. Then he looks back at me. “I don’t know if you’re trying to be funny or if you’re just nutty or what.” He picks up a pen and signs the papers. “I’m going to go along with you because”—he measures out his words—“because I
want
to. And because I believe in freedom of expression.” He hands the papers down to me. “But don’t expect to come back into this courtroom again with another frivolous request because I’ll send your logic-chopping carcass right back out.”

On the way out I stop to read the paper the judge has handed me. It is an Order of Publication and reads:

I step out into bright sunshine. New clothes, new shoes, new name. Maybe the judge would have been more sympathetic if, instead of citing Gottlob Frege’s selected philosophical essay, I’d told him about the birds I watched out at the Indian mound, their existence defined by seasonal migrations and continual reconstruction of habitus. Now, walking down Oblivion’s Main Street and carrying my packages, I feel like one of them, an anonymous migrant inhabiting little more than an ostensible name—and that too subject to change.

The Sentinel Building is farther down Main Street. It is one of the larger buildings on the block, with a hammered tin cornice peeling green paint that names the building and dates it to 1919. The entrance is not off the street but in the rear next to an old loading dock that functions as the delivery entrance for the store called Purrfection on the ground floor.

I climb the steep stairs to the second floor, feeling like an intruder. At the top of the stairs is a glass-paneled door that reads
Sentinel
, Editorial Office. I knock and enter a light-filled room that runs the entire length of the building. It is cluttered with desks and drafting tables and old letterpresses that have not been used in years. The walls are decorated with yellowed maps of country, state, and county. There are issues of the paper mounted in wooden frames and political posters dating back over decades, and the whole place smells of machinery and ink and bristling brittleness. A young man stands up behind a desk in the center of the room. He is wearing a shirt with sleeves rolled up in reporterly fashion and a dirty tie and looks as if he has been awake all night. “Can I help you?”