“That reverses the pattern,” he said. “I used to tap all the time when I was a child. But I always started out with knuckles. This reverses the pattern.”
Although it was too dark to see anything, I rolled over in order to be facing him while we spoke.
“Why did you tap as a child, Anatole?”
“Children do that sort of thing. Probe everywhere for magic. There was always the chance somebody might answer.”
“Did anybody ever answer?”
“There was a warehouse on the other side of the wall. Nobody ever answered. But one night, as I was just getting into bed, I heard a sound from the wall. I started tapping. I tapped for at least half an hour. I tried to improvise codes. I tried to convey urgency by using both hands to tap. There was no reply. It was probably a rat.”
“Did this have some kind of effect on you, do you think?”
“It had no effect at all. What kind of effect would it have? It had a ridiculous effect. I was tapping at rats. That’s the only effect.”
“But why were you tapping so urgently, do you think?”
“I wanted to be sure the sound knew I was there. I didn’t know what kind of hearing the sound possessed. It occurred to me that the sound might possess a very primitive hearing apparatus. I wanted to impress on it the fact that there was somebody on the other side of the wall. The sound might have been anything. I felt this was not the time to be subtle. I wanted to be sure the sound heard me.”
“Why were you tapping a few minutes ago?” I said. “Had you heard a sound?”
“I didn’t know I was tapping. I have only your word for it. I guess it was some kind of locomotor memory retrogression. As you know, I also wet the bed.”
“But not nearly as much as you used to.”
“Just as much but not as often,” he said. “The improvement, obviously, is due to my recent efforts to forge a new consciousness.”
“Right,” I said. “A sort of new man kind of thing. The new man. The nonethnic superrational man. That kind of thing, right?”
“That’s about right, Gary.”
“Your phrasing gets more precise every day. I’ve been noticing that.”
“I try to speak in complete sentences at least ninety-five percent of the time. Subject, predicate, object. It’s a way of escaping the smelly undisciplined past with all its ridiculous customs and all its craziness — centuries of middle European anxiety and guilt. I want to think clearly. I train myself toward that end with every living fiber of my being.”
“Anatole, forgive me but that seems a little bit simplistic. Speak straight and you’ll think straight.”
“There’s a relatedness. Take my word.”
“Where did you grow up?” I said. “I’ve always been reluctant to ask.”
“I don’t want to discuss that. It no longer has any relevance. It’s excess baggage. I’m getting rid of it. Go to sleep now, Gary, and try not to snore.”
“Do you plan eventually to change your name?”
“There’s no need for that. I’ve already reached the point where my name connotes nothing more to me than the designation EK-seventeen might connote. I don’t feel I have to live up to my name, to defend it, to like it, to spell it. I used to think of Anatole Bloomberg as the essence of European Jewry. I used to think I had to live up to my name. I thought I had to become Anatole Bloomberg, an importer-exporter from Rotterdam with a hook nose and flat feet, or an Antwerp diamond merchant wearing a skullcap, or a hunchbacked Talmudic scholar in a woolly black coat and shoes without shoelaces. Those are just three of the autobiographical projections I had to contend with. It was my name that caused the trouble, the Europeness of my name. Its Europicity. And there was another thing. Some names possess a smell. I didn’t like the way my name smelled. It was like a hallway in a tenement where a lot of Bulgarians live. But that’s all over now. Now I’m free. I’m EK-seventeen.”
“It’s a fabulous name,” I said. “I mean the original one. I’m glad you’re keeping it.”
“It’s a means of identification. It has no significance beyond that.”
“Good night, Anatole.”
“When I arrived here last year,” he said, “I was still in a state of confusion and inner panic. But the remoteness helped me. The desert was an ideal place in which to begin the process of unjewing. I spoke aloud to myself in the desert, straightening out my grammar, getting rid of the old slang and the old speech rhythms. I walked in straight lines. I tried to line myself up parallel to the horizon and then walk in a perfectly straight line. I tried to become single-minded and straightforward, to keep my mind set on one thought or problem until I was finished with it. It was hot and lonely. I wore a lot of clothing to keep the sun from burning me and causing my skin to peel. Sometimes I read aloud from a children’s reader. I wanted to start all over with simple declarative sentences Subject, predicate, object. Dick opened the door. Jane fed the dog. It helped me immensely. I began to think more clearly, to concentrate, to leave behind the old words and aromas and guilts. Then I was called to the telephone. My mother had been shot to death by a lunatic. It all came back, who I was, what I was, where the past crossed over into the present and from being to being. Another innocent victim. I didn’t go home to look at her small dead body. That would have been too much of a bringing back. I was sure I would never recover from the unspeakable heartbreak and Jewishness of her funeral. So I didn’t go home. Instead I went into the desert with a paintbrush and a can of black paint. Among all those flat stones I found a single round one. I painted it black. It’s my mother’s burial marker.”
27
IT RAINED AND THEN SNOWED. I wrote letters through the blurred afternoons, embryonic queries on the nature of silence and time, notes really, laconic and hopeful, ready for bottling, and I mailed them to friends and former teachers, to people back home, to self-possessed young women in prospering colleges. There were no picnics with Myna. The days seemed even longer than the incandescent days of summer. Mrs. Tom died finally after remaining in a coma for several weeks.
I took a walk down the hall and dropped into Taft’s room. He was sitting on his bed, legs bent in, back quite straight, reading a huge gray book. I sat by his desk. Beyond the window was that other world, unsyllabled, snow lifted in the wind, swirling up, massing within the lightless white day, falling toward the sky. The blanket was gray. The walls were bare except for an inch of transparent tape curling into itself, thumb-smudged, just one corner sticking now, a small light imprint on the wall indicating (to anyone who was interested) exactly how the tape had first been applied, at what angle to the ceiling, at what approximate angle to the intersection of that wall with each adjacent wall, at what angle to all other fixed lines in the room. The complete and absolute bareness of the walls (tapeless) made the tape seem historic. This room had not existed one year before. Room and building were new. Tape was (most likely) almost as old as the room itself, judged by poor coloring and generally shriveled appearance. Tape therefore (applied) was as old as the man occupying the room in terms of room-age or the lapsed-time-occupancy factor. Tape and man had a special relationship. (As did room and man. tape and room.) They were coeval, in room-time, and existed as the sum of a number of varying angles. I yawned and rubbed my eyes, bored with myself. Both my shoelaces were untied. Taft went on reading, his head bowed slightly. I studied the topography of his skull, searching for mountain ranges and rivers, for a sign of ancient civilizations under the saltwhite sand. Without hair, I thought, you will run even faster. Vision of a torchbearer black in the high dawn of a mountain country. (Spurgeon Cole stood beneath the goal posts, repeating them, arms raised in the shape of a crossbar and uprights, his fists clenched. The crowd was still up, leaning, in full voice, addressing its own noise. This was it then, the legend, the beauty, the mystery of black speed. Perhaps twenty thousand people watched, overjoyed to see it finally, to partake in the ceremony of speed, in statistical prayer, the human effort tracked by pulsing lights. Th
ey were privileged to witness what happened in real time, nonelectronically, in that obscure compass point of America, all standing now, the young men of boot-camp countenance, the light-haired girls with freckled arms, the men with sheriff bellies, the bespectacled and long-necked women — crafty grim inedible birds — of middle age, the old men with one shoulder higher than the other, with dented felt hats and stained teeth. It was not just the run that had brought them to their feet; it was the idea of the run, the history of it. Taft’s speed had a life and history of its own, independent of him. To wonder at this past. To understand the speed, that it was something unknown to them, never to be known. Hip-width. Leg-length. Tendon and tibia. Hyperextensibility. But more too: wizardry drawn from wells in black buckets. Much to consider that could not be measured in simple centimeters. Strange that this demon speed could be distilled from the doldrums of old lands. But at least they had seen it now. The hawks in their lonesome sky. It had been a sight to ease the greed of all sporting souls. Maybe they had loved him in those few raw seconds. Truly loved him in the dark art of his speed. That was the far reach of the moment, their difficult love for magic.) Taft wore a white shirt and gray pants. His socks were black. I wondered if he had planned to put a poster on the wall and if he had then changed his mind, stripping off all but one piece of tape. What kind of poster, I thought. Of what or whom. It would have told something. That, I knew, was why he hadn’t put it up. And now he enveloped his presence in neutral shades. (A somber cream covered the walls and ceiling.) In his austerity he blended with the shadowless room, reading his gray history, a dreamer of facts. Everywhere it was possible to perceive varieties of silence, small pauses in comers, rectangular planes of stillness, the insides of desks and closets (where shoes curl in dust), the spaces between things, the endless silence of surfaces, time swallowed by methodically silent clocks, whispering air and the speechlessness of sentient beings, all these broken codes contained in the surrounding calm, the vastness beyond the window, sun-blaze, a clash of metals no louder than heat on flesh. The snow had stopped falling. I got up and went back to my room.
28
JIM DEERING BROUGHT a football out to the parade grounds and we played for several hours in the fresh snow. It began as a game of touch, five on a side, no contact except for brush blocks and tagging the ballcarrier. The snow was ankle-high. We let the large men do all the throwing. Some of us cut classes in order to keep playing. It was very cold at first but we didn’t notice so much after a while. Nobody cared how many passes were dropped or badly thrown and it didn’t matter how slowly we ran or if we fell trying to cut or stop short. The idea was to keep playing, keep moving, get it going again. Some students and teachers, walking to and from classes, stood and watched for a few minutes and then went away. Two more players entered the game, making it six to a side. They left their books on top of the pile of heavy coats in the snow. Most of us wore regular shoes and nothing heavier than a sweater. George Dole, his first chance to play quarterback, wore a checkered cowboy shirt with the sleeves rolled way up. Nobody wore gloves after John Jessup said gloves were outlawed. Toward the end of the first hour it began getting windy. The wind blew loose snow into our faces, making it hard to keep track of the ball’s flight. Between plays I crossed my arms over my chest, keeping my hands wedged in my armpits for warmth. We blocked a little more emphatically now, partly to keep warm, to increase movement, and also to compensate for the wind, the poor playing conditions; more hitting helped us forget the sting of cold snow blowing in our faces. Each team had just one deep back to do all the throwing and running; there were three linemen blocking and two receivers. Defense was a 3–3 most of the time. It was getting harder to complete a pass or turn the corner on a running play. I noticed that Buddy Shock’s nose was bleeding. It started to snow now, lightly at first, then more heavily, and in time it was almost impossible to see beyond the limits of the parade grounds. It was lovely to be hemmed in that way, everything white except for the clothes we wore and the football and the bundle of coats and books in the snow nearby. We were part of the weather, right inside it, isolated from objects on the land, from land, from perspective itself. There were no spectators now; we were totally alone. I was beginning to enjoy skidding and falling. I didn’t even try to retain my balance when I felt myself slipping. Certain reflexes were kept slack; it seemed fitting to let the conditions determine how our bodies behaved. We were adrift within this time and place and what I experienced then, speaking just for myself, was some variety of environmental bliss. Jessup outlawed the placing of hands under armpits between plays. I found merit in this regulation; even the smallest warmth compromised immersion in the elements. Then he outlawed huddles and the making of plays in the usual way. Each play, he decreed, would be announced aloud by the team with the ball. There would be no surprise at all, not the slightest deception; the defense would know exactly what was coming. Again I found it easy to agree. We were getting extremely basic, moving into elemental realms, seeking harmony with the weather and the earth. The snowfall was very heavy now, reducing visibility to about fifteen yards. Suddenly Tim Flanders and Larry Nix were standing near the coats. Someone had told them about the game and they had come down hoping to get in. That made it seven men on each team, four blockers, an unbalanced line, a 4–3 defense. I was playing center now, stooped way over, my body warped and about to buckle, hands positioned on the cold wet ball, eyes on huge George Dole awaiting the snap four yards behind me and upside-down, calling out the play and number, his face that of an outlandishly large Navaho infant, dull muddy red in color, his feet lost in snow, sniffling now as he shouted out the cadence, white haired in the biting wind, abominable and looming. The blocking became more spirited and since we wore no equipment it was inevitable that tempera would flare. Randall and Nix butted each other a few times, throwing no punches because of the severe cold. Then Jessup outlawed passing plays. It became strictly a ground game. After two plays it was decided, by unanimous consent, to replace tagging with tackling. Naturally the amount of hitting increased. Somebody tore my sweater and left me buried in snow. I got up and kept going. With passing outlawed the game changed completely. Its range was now limited to a very small area and its degree of specialization diminished. There were no receivers and defenders to scatter the action. We were all blockers, all tacklers. Only the ballcarrier, one man, could attempt to use evasion and finesse in avoiding the primal impact. After a clumsy double-reverse I stood alone watching Ron Steeples, way over at the far rim of vision, whirl in a rotary cloud of snow and take a swing at Jim Deering, whose back was turned. Steeples lost his balance as he swung; the punch missed completely and he fell. Deering, unaware of any of this, trotted over to his side of the line. Steeples got up and walked slowly toward the defense, wiping his hands on his stiff wet trousers. At this point Jessup banned reverses of any kind. The ball had to be handled by one man and one man alone. Even fake reverses were outlawed. No offensive player could pass in front of or behind the ballcarrier while the ballcarrier was still behind the line of scrimmage. Jessup shouted these regulations into the wind. I asked about laterals. Absolutely forbidden, Jessup said. My hands were numb. I looked at them. They were purplish red. Snow on my lashes blurred everything. Lines of sight shortened. My shoes weighed me down. We kept playing, we kept hitting, and we were comforted by the noise and brunt of our bodies in contact, by the simple physical warmth generated through violent action, by the sight of each other, the torn clothing, the bruises and scratches, the wildness of all fourteen, numb, purple, coughing, white heads solemn in the healing snow. Jessup banned end runs. It became a straight-ahead game, tackle to tackle. We hand-fought and butted. Linemen fired out and the ballcarrier just lowered his head and went pounding into the tense rhythmic mass. Blocking did not necessarily cease when the ballcarrier went down. Private battles continued until one man gave ground or was buried in snow. These individual contests raged on every play, each man grunting and panting, trying to maintain traction, t
o move the other man, to chop him down, to overwhelm him. Randall grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to toss me off to the side. I slipped out of his grip, getting hit on the back of the neck with a stray elbow, and then I rammed a shoulder into his gut and kept on moving, kept driving, making him give way; but he tightened up, hardening considerably now, too strong for me, coming back with a slap to my left ear which turned me half-around and then moving straight in with everything, head, shoulders, hands, until he buried me. He dug me out and slapped me on the rump. On the next play I cross-blocked, going after Deering, more my size, standing him up with two shoulder-blows to the chest, getting shoved from behind and going down with three or four others. The cold was painful now; it hurt more than the blocking and tackling. I got up, one shoe missing. I saw it a few yards away. I went over and picked it up. It felt like a dead animal. I forced it over my foot. The laces were stiff and my hands too frozen to make a knot. I looked up. Oscar Veech was standing directly in front of me, wearing a padded ski jacket and a pair of snow goggles.
“Coach wants to see you,” he said.
Everybody stood around watching. I went over and found my coat. I put it over my head and followed Veech into the dimness and silence. We went over to Staley Hall. Veech didn’t say anything. We went downstairs and he simply nodded toward the closed door at the end of the isometrics room. I left my coat bundled on a scale. Then I blew my nose, walked to the door and knocked. The room was small and barely furnished, just an army cot, a small folding table, two folding chairs. There were no windows. On the wall was a page torn from a book, a black-and-white plate of a girl praying in a medieval cell, an upper corner of the page loose and casting a limp shadow. Near the door, at my shoulder, a whistle hung from a string looped over a bent nail. Emmett Creed was in a wheelchair. His legs were covered with a heavy blanket, gray and white, not quite the school colors. Ten or twelve loose-leaf binders were stacked neatly on the floor.