It’s not the risk, which is negligible. It’s the uncertainty, which is high.
We’ve reached a liminal state, I like to say, with my hands in my pockets, index fingers obliquely extended. I wheel around in this stance, assuming this or that attitude, allowing the secret thrusting of my fingers to add a hidden vector to my arguments until I notice him looking at the ceiling or at the hole in my sweater. I move to the elbow portion of my monologue. The transition from fingers – tools designed for pointing – to elbows, awkward pistons meant to indicate nothing, clues him in to my vulnerability.
While my talk draws interminably toward a point, I swing my elbows back and forth. One leads, then the other; both in high harmony for an aching moment, breaking, guttering again into sad turbulence. This uncoordinated display is meant to let him know that despite all the attitudes I’m in the process of assuming, I am in reality unsure of myself, dependent on the love and care of others, fundamentally unsuited to my unfair talents, bravely pretending to the air of personal responsibility which, like a toad sweating poison, I exude effortlessly when under attack.
I don’t like that name, I say, quietly, the next day.
What’s wrong with Franklin? he asks, plying my hairbrush with little strokes meant to make me both jealous and sad.
It’s too pragmatic, I say, straightening my back to indicate that I am self-sufficient and need nothing.
You’re thinking of Roosevelt, he says: a reference calculated to shame me due to the fact that I once, very late at night, argued forcefully and with abandon against the format of dimes.
I’m thinking of Aretha, I say.
The nick between his eyebrows deepens; I’ve been unfair. But at a time like this?
I was ready to go with Henrik, I say.
In a piece of coal country in the north of England a boy was born. The boy’s family named him Niall. Niall was afraid to go to work and told his mother so. Niall’s father was disappointed that he (Niall) would not be a coal man. He suggested that Niall be a timber man instead. Niall got a job in a dress factory writing down the names of blaxters and dubbers who came in late but struggled on account of his bad handwriting. As a consequence of this and other factors he endured a constant cutting sarcasm from his boss which prompted endless demonstrations of pity and affection from the factory girls, one of whom had contracted a husband despite all precautions, he was sorry to learn. These conditions made his life difficult. Niall wrote a letter to his brother in France with lots of jokes in it and included a shilling as another joke.
Niall sat on the opposite bank of the river and wondered whether Dora would accept Edward’s proposal.
Niall thanked Dora for her punctual response to his letter and politely inquired whether a pudding restaurant in Yorkshire was perhaps not an idea ahead of its time.
Dora confessed that Edward had said precisely the same thing about the pudding restaurant. Niall took a train to Yorkshire to meet Dora.
Henrik was born.
Three days ago, I put a chair out on the fire escape. By positioning the chair facedown in a reverse fireman’s carry, I was able to guide it through the window.
I went back inside yesterday for some books: The Plain English Guide, Philosophical Foundations of India, Sons and Lovers.
Someone (me?) has thought to put some millet in a dish on the fire escape for the sparrows. I observe that on occasion, a sparrow’s precarious social position is matched by an equally precarious physical position, such as when a bird of low status is crowded to the edge of the rail and struggles to keep its balance by means of rapid changes in weight distribution. Is this an instance of material or verbal irony? he would like to know.
His chief occupation seems to be the production of household noises. He is heavily involved in grinding coffee, placking dishes, squelching floorboards, objecting to television, flushing toilets. The rattling of pans, the soft embarrassed consumption of spaghetti, the running of showers, the secular prayer of recycling, the endless locking and unlocking of doors, are his stock in trade. The holding pattern of noises is developing an urgency and is cutting closer, I think, to the core of his anxiety. Christmas is coming. Ken, Paul, Niall?
Edward?
The judge joins me on the fire escape for the second time today.
Let’s parlay, he says.
I run my hand across his smooth tits. I thought judges were supposed to be serious, I say.
I am, he says, catching my little finger in a gesture of love-discipline.
And impartial, he adds.
I take a quick peek. There’s nothing impartial about that, I say.
A smile – thank god.
I’ve heard of a hung jury, I say.
That’s enough, he says, mildly.
A sparrow flakes down from the oak, twisting and wriggling, scampering in the air, imitating a leaf.
On some days, the judge observes, the leaves blow sideways but the sparrows still drop straight down. Are they evolving to address this, or have they decided it can’t be helped?
Can’t be helped, I say, mindlessly, catching my unconditional agreement and unbuckling my expression a little to display the artifacts of uncertainty.
The question of property could hinge on intent, the judge begins.
If both the leaves and the sparrows do it, I finish, obediently pressing his thought to extrude the question.
The leaves just drop, but the sparrows move in a direction, he continues, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
Using the turbulent motion of the leaves as a tool, I add.
There is the matter of whether the trees or the leaves own the movement, he says, yielding to sophistry.
That would depend on whether the leaves are classified as employees or independent contractors, I say.
Neither party has a notion of motion, he says, facing into the rhyme like a stiff wind.
I vote for the sparrows, I say.
Fuck ‘em, he says, muddling his nose with the back of his hand.
Yeah, fuck ‘em, I say, forgetting what.
Bible animals, he says, massaging his middle finger.
A starling lands on the fire escape. Urkh, it says. Seew seew seew. Chvit. Hweeee heet. Schwew hewwww. Shewzhew. Schwee tivit ick. Hckew chew. Beweet? Skwrat. Schee schee schee. Unkh unkh. Kerchew keck wzeew werkitchee zzit. Idjee idjee idjee ek ek.
To find the hinge of symmetry between leaves and sparrows, we have been using simple operations of transposition and scaling to locate the conceptual axis along which important characteristics of one class of objects are roughly aligned with similar properties in the other. This allows us to create a simple model of forces and objects we can use to talk about the instrumental relationships in a much more complex system of relations, which thanks to the hardass judge, has something to do with intellectual property, or just as likely some piece of blessedly obscure French canon law that turned him out in law school. he and five of his drinking buddies know about. It’s hard to tell.
Analogies between simple and complex systems clarify behaviors that would be otherwise impossible to comprehend without an advanced background in logical debauchery, such as using a firearm to defend a parking space, or passing through Times Square regardless of where one seems to be headed.
A mirror is brought onto the fire escape. I regard myself in the blue-veined mirror, the judge lovingly biting my ear from behind.
Would it be proper to say I am in front of the mirror?
He asks, by way of answering, why I have felt the need to reproduce something that is quite obviously right in front of me?
I explain that a desire for symmetry underlies all human desires.
I claim, using the air between words to soothe my inflamed sense of self, that this fundamental need for symmetry is what distinguishes humans from other creatures: starfish, for example, or annelid worms.
An expert on torture, he readily agrees.
To be clear – I continue, emboldened – these organisms express symmetry and even prefer it, but they do not pine after it and get depressed when the balance of things is lost. They just get on with the unbalanced things.
Go on, he says.
The world appreciates symmetry, I elaborate, using my hands: symmetry of action, appearance, emotion, reason; symmetry between and within.
A dove creaks in for a landing, taking me in with one eye after the other, listening, white edges of its knife-tail quivering. I watch it twist its neck to look at me from a few different angles, tracking my hands, deciding what I’m up to. Perhaps it thinks I’m trying, unsuccessfully, to catch food. With this guess, the curiosity in its gaze resolves itself into an elevated species of pedantic goodwill. Patiently, to demonstrate proper technique, it bends its head and nips at the snow.
The judge nods and pats his bathrobe absently for a cigarette. I catch a whiff of lemon soap.
In the first case, I continue, one or both parties are simply looking to restore the necessary connection between the idea of a car and the condition of a place to put it, which is normally and for good reason taken for granted.
What car? he asks.
In the second, which is slightly more complicated owing to the sheer number of itineraries involved, an acceptable simplification might be that all journeys are discrete segments of lives lived and being so always move forward in time, but not necessarily in space.
A journey can begin and end in the same place, which in fact it often does, while except in the case of trivially small journeys, having set out at 8:00 in the morning, it is impossible to return at precisely the same time.
Ken rubs his blond head slowly.
It is my contention that many journeys both begin and end in Times Square owing to the fact that people are smart but not that smart and are trying but unfortunately failing to recoup their lost time by bribing it with a feast of particularly ephemeral experiences and souvenirs, things which time is known to particularly feed on, for the purpose of coercing it to fall in step with its dimensional counterpart, space, which has by then completed a full revolution and returned to its starting point.
Very nice, he says. Who the fuck is Ken?
Likewise, by extension, pitching words at a problem is not an inexact science but in fact gives me information in the form of an angle of deflection from the surface of the plane that represents a single facet of an unknown shape representing the problem which indicates the relative orientation of the surface at that point.
You lost me, he says.
Likewise, firing words at a problem allows me to observe the angle at which they deflect, and from that angle estimate the pitch of the field of play on which a certain dichotomous part of the problem is engaged in partial and ongoing self-defeat, and eventually decide whether the outcome of this game is important, or hopelessly fixed due to the profound and permanent topological disenfranchisement of the losing team.
That’s better, he says.
When I say I have a story, what I really have is a shape I can’t see all the way around, an extended emotional manifold in which each dimension represents a parameter of the story: light, depression, noise, England, coal, etc. A point on the manifold representing me, the speaker, can at any given time be located by a series of coordinates on the loose grid strung across each carefully crumpled in-out surface onto which the possible values, proportions, and permutations of each so-called substance contained by the story – grief, backbiting, Henrik – can be mapped. I move from one surface to another by way of analogies I obliquely draw between one type of matter and the next. This shape is so full of internal symmetries that it appears to have none at all.
By sending a rash of words instead of myself through this perplexity of surfaces and forces, I game a little objectivity from the investigation process. The words get blocked, appropriated, and assaulted systematically, and standing by, I can begin to soberly map the topological identity of this shape instead of doing it with my body. By sending a few thousand words in, we may start to get somewhere.
Would it be proper to say I am on the fire escape?
The judge’s audacity is his calling card. Audacity is never so delightful as when the judge is facing into it with all his spiritual training and working its gloves like a man in a coal pit who hears the flat whistle scream and begins to attack the emerging seam with renewed interest. His cheekbones light up and his formidable caution and intelligence becomes an accessory, secondary to his delight in being a body pointing itself with all its life-urge at the possibility of proving me dull.
Don’t go to some fucking hole in the wall clinic, he tells me. Go to a hospital.
Nothing tells me how to read the judge. He is by turns warm and inverted, cold and heedless, desperate and shiteating, calm and direct, present and reflective. Any one of these states might attend his next movement. Being a good judge, he is carefully agnostic about his own motives. He relies on my predictable range of expressions to tell him what he means by what he says. I’m usually right, apparently, but this gives me no greater insight into the tectonics of his personality.
Is this a sport or a pastime? I asked, once, just to make conversation.
Neither, he answered.
Incidentally, some theories of humor posit that a joke is never complete. When completed, it ceases to be a joke and simply becomes an observation. The joke is left open in order to secure the participation of a listener, who even though led by the nose to the punchline nevertheless manages to lose some private part of himself in getting there. This bit of essence, luckily, is the only thing standing between him and the miraculous but ordinary telescoping of logic that enables him to drop from one system of meanings laterally into another to finish the joke. In this way, the joke becomes infected by his intellectual labor and the pleasure of the punchline is the joy of self-recognition, the rediscovery of that lost bit of essence which returns sharpened and transfigured. Call it Paul.
Paul, a literary device fanned incessantly by anyone who tells themselves stories in the usual sense, is a self-perpetuating force, an engine running on his own fumes. The occurrence of Paul can be casually demonstrated using the following line from Byron:
Happiness was born a twin
in which the lost twin is Grief, and the loss itself causes grief. Grief is perpetually found and lost within the phrase, lost at birth and simultaneously renewed by its own loss. Because grief is not named but merely implied, the line sneaks grief into happiness like popcorn into a movie theater. These little holes are everywhere: dynamic heatsinks siphoning excess meaning from language so the whole mess stops short of melting down. You’ll see them in every sentence if you just close one eye; splinters of significance that seem to point to something definite but which are really there to keep a sentence from closing its mouth all the way so the hot breath of signal mingles with the cool air of noise, quietly depraving careful phrasing and bringing intention to equilibrium. This is the function of Paul.
A little precious, but okay, says Paul.
If a word starts as a point it does not go on to form a line but forms a call, the rote mechanics of language use inviting swarms of competing punchlines to be held apart as long as possible before smashing together into a decision.
If pressed to supply a name for this story, I might offer one of the following:
A Subtle Medium Disproved
Wink Nudgekin and His Four Rooms
Timber Tantrums
All’s Well That Ends
Peach Claret
A Nickel a Knuckle
The Popular Televangelist
Winter Sorghum
Gut Punches and Hot Cakes
We’re All One Large Family
Wee Reuben’s Toothache
Pity Was His Lease on Life
Tucker the Turtle’s Wife
Murder, by the Grace of God
Schnitzel on a Cold Bunk
Turn, Turn from Babylon, My Middle Child
Mother’s Clay Pipe
At Last, Scotland
Winner of the Garbage Prize
Henrik’s Bill of Fare
Cabbie Chronicles
Waste Not the Wine Cask’s Bung
Slick Fire
Classic Currier & Ives
A Sly Cavalree
Nuts
Leave Me Alone Forever
J’accuse Syracuse
Trains and Their Beds
Singing in High Voices with Cards
A Landowner’s Son Buries Him
Long Arguments at Tables
Franklin’s Tools
Please Walk
Nothing Less Than Brunswick Stew
I Guess the Hidden City
The Hobbled Mare
Pre-Cambrian Mazurka
From a Cup of Clabber
Popular Times
One God at a Time
P.T. Barnum Goes to Haiti
Or nothing at all.