Cries for Help, Various Read online

You can in fact walk a long time in the desert having shed your Taupist cold-cut-disc shirt, or still wearing it, hoping for ice cream and knowing, in equal measure, there will be no ice cream. Your walking and hoping, and knowing and despairing, will not abate. You will be an honest and clear-headed and perplexed and dishonest man, or woman, all at once. You will be like unto a dog. This, this steady trudge of belief and disbelief, is what you were made for. If you have shed your meat shirt and happen upon another meat shirt you might, and probably will, put it on and carry it on your voyage until you shed it, and then find another, and don it, and shed and don and shed and don all the livelong day. You will be approaching the end and denying it is the end. One step is knowing, the next step not knowing, one caring, one not, one presuming, one not, one believing and the next disbelieving and the next believing and the next disbelieving. This tiny pendulum is the engine of your heart, the motor of man. You will litter money and feces along the way. Kill and maim fellows and flora and fauna, and pollute. Wear meat shirts again and again. Be afraid of Taupists, then discredit Taupists. Debate the existence and nature of Taupists. And, finally, expire, to the relief of all.

  We are glad to be rid of you, despite our maunderings at the cemetery, and we will be glad to join you, despite our hand-wringing and heel-digging. We’ll be there with you in the end, happy and done ourselves with the bipolar daily marching lies.

  Spy

  My daughter has become a spy. One prepares for surprises, but still. I had braced most against tattoo and mutilation, particularly the multiple perforation of the ear giving it the aspect of a python’s lip, and metal deep on the tongue also is very high on the low list of things I wanted to see, so her working for the CIA, if that’s who it is, has thrown me. She did not talk to me before her employ, and now she has official authorization not to talk to me. Trying to find out where she has been on a Saturday night may be a breach of national security. Instead of the hand, which I used to get, as she walked away from me, now I get a patronizing look as she holds her ground: Dad, the look says, please, I was on a date with Uncle Sam, okayee? She does not retreat into the cover of her room, but pours a bowl of cereal and begins to eat it, open-mouthed, a secret agent staring me, nosy security risk, down.

  As a young man I protested CIA recruiting on campus and clearly failed. They got her on a high-school campus, apparently, where we never would have suspected they’d go. I have come to the horrible suspicion that I am directly responsible for her taking up with the CIA by buying her as I did last year a BMW. Can the CIA have a spy in suburban America without wheels? Without good wheels? I bought her the good car so that she would not be broken down on the side of the road, and apparently the CIA thinks the same way. This at any rate is one straw I grasp at. One may grasp at straws all day. As my fuddiness comes on, accelerated by having a daughter not out of high school working in government intelligence, it would be appropriate for me to be code-named Straw Grasper were I to get in the field. My daughter wears a wire, I a diaper.

  Now the spy wants a better sound system in her BMW. You would think that a matter precisely up her employer’s alley, not mine. “Why can’t they add a CD changer and do a speaker upgrade when they install the transponder?” I ask her. She looks at me with a patronizing smile, slightly shaking her head in that universal gesture of condescending incredulity.

  You are so sad, this little one-millimeter shake of the head says. “Who is they, Dad?”

  “The transponder people,” I say. I don’t say “The Agency” because I know better. “The Man. Let The Man buy some high fidelity.”

  The proposition seems to be that a girl in her BMW without a subwoofer lifting bark off trees does not look like a proper girl in a BMW but suspiciously quiet, like a spy. My daughter the secret agent cannot of course articulate this to me; she merely says her radio rattles at high volume, that, in fact, “My radio sucks if I turn it up.” It sucks.

  It has not snowed here in thirty years, and today it is snowing.

  Thang Phong and the Son of the Chief of Police

  I wake up stunned and hurt. Should I not do sit-ups and push-ups until this little fit of stunned and hurt passes over?

  The son of the ex-chief of police, gone to seed, walks fatly and loosely down the street.

  Thang Phong (tong pong) will murder his piano teacher, whom he loves, or loved, very much, and respects, and calls, or called for years anyway, and probably will not stop calling after he has killed her, a “word-crass piano prayer.” Thang Phong will not be able to say why he killed her. He will remain cheerful about his long and successful tutelage under her and is himself accomplished at the piano, for which he gives all credit to Mrs. . . . We have, strangely, misplaced the name of the piano teacher—precisely, we have forgotten it. It is like Harrison or Garrison but slightly off, perhaps in a French or German way.

  •

  It is a little sloppy to say that the son of the police chief has gone to seed. The son of the police chief was not ever in that state one is in before he goes to seed—would it be ripe? In full bloom? At stud? Is a horse put to stud after his racing career not “gone to seed”? The son of the police chief was not ever virile or prepossessing or upstanding, but he was a young man with a nice fresh face and possessed of a cheer, if not an innocence, that you did not expect of a boy whose father was locally famous for enmeshing himself in minor scandal and being, after all, the chief of police. By one argument the sons of police chiefs are born gone to seed. There is no hope for them: they are juvenile delinquents whose fathers will keep them out of the system of juvenile jurisprudence. But this particular boy showed hope of a sort. He was, well, nice. It is easy to say now, having seen him before, and seeing him now, perhaps too nice. Something went awry. Like milk in a bottle, something spoiled. The teeth in the nice smile of the bright child of the police chief are now furry-looking, and there is too much saliva in the smile, which he still proffers. He is soft-looking now, and weak-looking, and a bit splay-footed. He has as he walks no apparent direction. That is not quite accurate. He has direction, but not enough speed to suggest he is really going anywhere he needs to go; nor is he ambling in such a carefree way that he appears to be walking for health. It is impossible to say what he is up to. He is the fat son of the police chief who, the son, was once almost handsome now with dirty teeth and an oblique smile and a loose walk. He looks like a young man who has said to himself, “I have nothing better to do, I should at least walk somewhere,” and has obeyed his own command. His father lost his office finally by claiming falsely to have played football for a famous football coach. He had also dislocated the affections of voters by wearing makeup for televised press conferences. This was not the casual makeup applied last-minute by a television crew to prevent a subject’s nose from shining, but makeup that the chief of police self-administered in unartful excessive quantity toward an apparent attempt to have himself resemble Elvis Presley. People seeing the chief of police in this plumage did not think of Elvis so much as they thought of men who liked to dress up as women. The son of the ex-chief of police ambling about as he does looks lost.

  Had an observer seen the initial contact between Thang Phong and the son of the chief of police, he would have said it appeared to be accidental and he would be baffled by its escalation and its outcome. The first shambling misstep a little across the sidewalk by the son of the chief of police into the path of the approaching Phong, Phong’s halt, their both sidestepping the same way back over to the son of the police chief’s initial side of the sidewalk, their both stepping then back to Phong’s side, was a classic Willie Pep maneuver in which both parties, seeking to allow the other pass, inadvertently block the passage of the other. Perhaps it was the smiling, the wet yellow grin, by the police chief’s son, which smile does not seem to be extinguishable, a fact Phong could not have known—perhaps this salacious-looking expression on the face of the fat boy in his way put Phong on the defensive, made him think a large grub-like Westerner was de
liberately fucking with him.

  Unlike the police chief’s son, Thang Phong had direction and conviction: he was, before this clown got in his way, on stride and on time, precisely on time, for his piano lesson with Mrs. Guerre or Mrs. Garre or Mrs. Huarre. In his head he was going over the piece he was to play for her when suddenly someone was blocking his way and apparently finding it funny, and to Phong’s acute sense of smell the boy seemed unwashed. This sour-milk smell might have panicked Phong, for he was antiseptic in his outlook and habits. He touched the son of the police chief deftly in the solar plexus with his middle finger and the son of the police chief collapsed on him. The finger went to the correct spot and stiffened from Thang Phong’s root, which came out of the ground with the power of the earth. It was a thing Thang Phong had not thought of since a boy when they had all done martial arts as, say, American boys all do Little League baseball. He knew how to touch the son of the police chief with maximum effect, and without malice, just as an American man will know, thirty years later on a softball team, to charge a grounder, when he would otherwise wait for the ball to come to him. When Thang Phong’s middle finger went into the soft center of the police chief’s son, with his two other fingers flanking it in what he had known thirty years ago was called a snake strike, he touched something down in there very firmly, like playing that gratifying E-flat in the opening of Beethoven’s fifth, and the boy shuddered as the piano would, but unlike the piano the son of the chief of police lost his breath and grasped for Phong to try to keep from going down to the sidewalk. The clabbery smell and the clammy feel of the son of the chief of police panicked Phong more deeply as he was grabbed onto, and he twisted hard and inadvertently elbowed the boy in the temple, again with a ground-root force that he did not intend and that seemed to come from the provinces of both martial arts and music. The police chief’s son’s creepy smile dimmed a bit and he went to the side and down hard on the sidewalk, hitting first on blubber and then on his head, and he did not move.

  Thang Phong was upset that this encounter had made him late for his lesson with Mrs. Legare. It did not occur to him that the man in his way was hurt. He wanted now to somehow take a shower before playing his piece for Mrs. Garreisen but he knew this was impractical short of his getting there and asking her if he could take a shower. You did not do that at a piano lesson or at any other occasion when entering someone’s home, and especially in Mrs. Heinson’s house it would be a problem because she would have to set out a matching set of towel and face towel and washcloth for him and these would have to match the rugs in the bathroom, which matched the cover on the tank of the toilet, which upholstery Thang Phong had already made note of in his innocent use of the bathroom on other less trying occasions when he had merely needed a toilet and not a shower. He resolved to march through the pain of being dirty and play his piece well for Mrs. Garhoolie and not be such a whiner.

  But when he got there, a tad breathless from hurrying, and Mrs. Jeemstripe opened the door and received him with her warm smile as she did every week, he burst out, “Mrs. Hometapes, some crodhopper slime me, I needa take shower prease.” He was wrong to have anticipated an ordeal, because even though, as he had predicted, a complete matching stack of high-grade earthtone terrycloth was supplied him, it was done instantly, without fuss, and Mrs. Thorsenguille even drew the water and had the shower running and was closing him into the bathroom before he could say another word and retract his request and insist he could play with germs on him almost as well as he could play without germs on him. The image of Mrs. Tomarre smiling at him so solicitously as she closed the bathroom door was so motherly and generous and she seemed so genuinely happy in being helpful this way that he thought of her at that moment as his mother, and he could not momentarily picture his own mother. He said aloud, “Who was my mother?” No image or idea of his mother or of any family at all came into his head, which he held in one hand, trying to think, absently fondling his genitals in the shower stream with the other hand, when the shower curtain ripped open and Mrs. Theneglassen stood there naked and white as a powder puff except for her dark triangular business in the middle of the largest white triangle of her, grinning at him hugely, stepping in, and Thang Phong recoiled and slipped and going down he grabbed behind him for purchase with the hand that had held his head while he had tried to think, and with the hand that had absently been at his genitals he formed and sent the snake strike that was now becoming second nature to him into Mrs. Horbeglieve’s throat.

  My problems exceed those of Thang Phong. But not by much. I am freshly divorced and at an age (a preserved fifty-plus) that forces young women to gauge their readiness to take on a man as old as their fathers, with a fathery set of smells. The less imaginative of them, which is nearly all of them, regard a fifty-year-old man’s owning a red sports car a midlife crisis, a phrase of which they are most fond. The intractability of young women is not my real problem; it is but the problem I like to think about. The real problem is that I have no ambition or desire for anything at all—not for the women, not for work, not for barbecuing, not for life. If I have a problem, it is that I have no problem.

  I have made Thang Phong also have, strangely, no problem where he should have a huge problem. He reached toward Mrs. Wallenstein more for balance than to strike her, which he did only inadvertently, as was the formation of the snake strike inadvertent (for the second time in the day, for the second time in thirty years). He dressed neatly, refolding the towel he lightly used, and left Mrs. Thorsen where she lay asphyxiated on the mauve polyester bath mat that also matched the toilet upholstery and the towels. He was remorseful to see her indisposed like that but not overcome by grief or anxiety. Two people had tried to put germs on him within a space of about twenty minutes and both of them had fallen down. Mrs. Terrebone had been really going to put some germs on him.

  Mrs. Treglassen was found the following week, assumed to have slipped and crushed her trachea on the edge of the tub, which she had in fact done after Phong touched her, and no inquiry was made. The son of the chief of police was found by the coroner to have died from a heart attack with an incidental non-fatal blow to the head from his fall, which was accurate. No witness saw Thang Phong at either site and no one thought to inquire of him if he had had his lesson with Mrs. James on Friday and been thereby possibly the last person to see her alive. He would have said he had a very instructive lesson and that he had indeed been the last person to see her alive if they said so.

  There are secret thoughts that each of these people had during these somewhat sad, possibly tawdry, conceivably whimsical events I have recorded. The son of the chief of police, as he Willie Pepped with Thang Phong and could not get by him, suddenly thought that if his father had said he played for Barry Switzer instead of Bear Bryant he would still be in office—it was dumb to lie but there were smart lies and stupid lies—and then he just could not breathe and tried to grab the guy in front of him to keep from going down. Mrs. Horve thought she should have taken Thang’s hand at the keyboard during any one of their hundreds of piano lessons instead of going whole-hog overboard like this and probably scaring the poor thing to death, and then she too just could not breathe. When she saw Thang Phong falling backwards with an alarmed expression on his face, she felt a small hurt of rejection for just a second before the more pressing issue of no air overrode her hurt feelings and in fact wiped her emotional slate, which had been moments ago bristling with hope and energy and girlish moist ideas, clean.

  With the police chief’s son tackling him as it were, and smelling awful, and as hot and moist as dim sum, Thang Phong thought, Why you even in my country, get off me (the violent elbowing twist that sent the boy to the ground came with the word off). When Mrs. Grieveport slashed open the curtain and he saw all her puffy whiteness, he was still desperately trying and failing to conjure an image of his own dark mother. His reaching back and forward to prevent falling had no thoughts within it; one merely never wishes to fall, especially on porcelain. The
urge to not fall on porcelain is pre-intellectual.

  Thang Phong did not ever realize that he was connected to the death of the son of the chief of police, because he never read in the paper about the boy’s being found dead of a heart attack on the sidewalk, and he did not know about the police chief’s troubles, or his troubled boy, or any of it. About Mrs. Nielson’s demise he knew he was responsible, but in a defensible if regrettable manslaughtery self-defensive accidental way only. The guilt that was natural he sought to assuage by playing the piano intensely at concerts that in any way memorialized her: at recitals of her former students, say. When he played at venues unrelated to her, he often found a way to mention that she had been his best teacher and that he considered her not only a world-class teacher but a world-class player in her own right.

  It gives me some pleasure, at a time when I have come to not take pleasure in pleasure, to hazard that Thang Phong loved Mrs. Jones, and loves her still. In time of course he came to recall his own mother clearly, but the image of his naked piano teacher reaching for him still comes much more readily to his mind.

  Breakdown

  One does not decide to stop being oneself; one merely stops deciding to be oneself. There is a quotient of energy the expenditure of which is necessary for one to be perceived in a way one is accustomed to, and to perceive oneself in a way one is accustomed to. And this expenditure becomes optional, its expense even a matter to chuckle at. It is like the energy required to eat meat and to be perceived as a red-blooded kind of dude. Suddenly, or gradually, it would be just as well to be a vegetarian, or anything else. The energy for holding course is gone. It is the incipience, this waving away of the compass bearing, of a nervous breakdown, a term that would disturb someone still holding course but a prospect that sounds inviting to someone waving off the compass. So, ladies, what I mean to say is that I have become a vegan in my head and no longer care who I am or who you think I am. I realize all this makes not a large ripple on the universal pond of vanity.