Even seen, vague and unfocused, through my crippled eyes, the transformation was astounding. The nascent naturalist within me began to formulate a strategy.
Wary, I lifted the heavy tome of Mr. Darwin. For as long as I could recollect I’d been the victim of schoolyard bullies, those giggling Miss Skanky Skankenheimers who’d misled and tormented me. No longer would I tolerate similar forms of demeaning abuse. Tensing the slight muscles of my youthful arms, I took aim. My plan was to swing the heavy book and swat the menacing poop with such force that it would fly the full extent of the room. After that, I’d bolt, running full speed, and return to the bright outside world before my lunatic harasser knew I’d so destroyed his sad, ridiculous toy.
DECEMBER 21, 9:05 A.M. CST
Besting the Minotaur
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Those long years thence, seated astride a stained toilet bowl in an upstate public bathroom, I tightened my grip on the Beagle book. With both hands I held the heavy, leather-bound volume. Like a golfer preparing to hit a drive down the fourteenth fairway at St. Donats, or a tennis star rearing back to hit a scorching serve over the net at the French Open, I slowly aligned the book with the offensive dog dooky. The magically swollen pet doo-doo jutted eagerly toward me, oblivious to my imminent violent actions. The cinder-block room echoed with the plink-plunk musical notes of dripping water, but otherwise a silence had settled, so intense it proved my harasser and I were both holding our respective breaths. The muscles of my frail shoulders and shoestring arms flexed, rigid as iron, focusing the strength garnered from my mom’s spacey yoga gurus in Kathmandu and Bar Harbor. A wild karate yelp took shape at the back of my throat. Squinting my nearsighted eyes, I told myself: Exhale. I told myself: Lean into the swing.
Steeling myself, I was Theseus about to do battle with the Minotaur in the dank basements of Crete. I was Hercules girding my loins to fight Cerberus, the fierce two-headed watchdog of the underworld.
I told myself: Now.
Wielding the heavy volume from above my head, swinging it diagonally, down and sideways simultaneously, I rendered the threatening doggie poo a mighty thwack. Without hesitation, my backswing landed a second, resounding smack against the loathsome doodie-caca, but it refused to detach and go flying as I’d hoped. Trapped by its own magically increased size, the menacing poo finger appeared to be wedged within the jagged metal hole. The awful dooky bobbed and flopped wildly, flailing and twisting in every direction. From behind the sheet-metal partition a sharp gasp of breath preceded a howling scream. The pressure which had bowed the partition in my direction now reversed, and some great force seemed to tug against the metal wall. The scratched, mutilated barrier pulled away from me, dragged backward by the efforts of the trapped dog boo-boo attempting to escape.
Flogging with the hardcover book, I pummeled my foe’s vile puppy poop with one savage blow after another. In response, the unseen opponent bellowed and shrieked. These were animal sounds. The wailing which might occur on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. This senseless keening might be a suffering horse or cow as likely as it was a human male.
Striking a hail of blows upon the struggling caca, I likewise found myself howling great screams of rage. Mine was the vengeful whoop of every child ever tormented by cruel bullies, a combination of fury and weeping and sheer hysterical laughter. The concrete room felt flooded, swamped with the outcries of two combatants, the fetid air vibrating with the multiplied echoes. So fiercely did I scream that frothy spittle ribboned from my lips.
Even in the throes of my fury, my naturalist instincts held sway. Even with my soft-focus vision, sans eyeglasses, I saw how the beaten dooky had begun to shrink in size. The noxious boo-boo was recoiling, becoming smaller, shorter, until it seemed about to retract itself back through the ragged hole. To prevent its impending escape I opened the Beagle book to roughly its midpoint and placed the opened volume so that the gutter would cradle the wilting poo. As my colleagues, the Pencil and the Blue Pen, had pressed samples of leaves and flowers, preserving those ferns and grasses for posterity, so would I press my own shocking discovery. At the moment before the poopie-doo-doo might flee, I slammed shut the huge tome. All of upstate trembled with the resulting scream. Kuala Lumpur, Calcutta, or Karachi, wherever my parents were sunbathing, watching their navels fill with sweat, they must’ve heard the outburst. All the world shook with the force of that howl.
Thus I held captive the shrinking tortured number two: sandwiched in the paper middle of Mr. Darwin’s voyage, by my estimate clamped somewhere within his account of Tierra del Fuego. I retained possession of the evil poopie by squeezing the book shut, and continued my efforts to pull it free, yanking from side to side, pulling with all my strength. Getting jerked this way and that meant the poochie-poo-poo was snagged and chewed by the hole’s jagged, snaggletoothed edge. By this point the flimsy sheet-metal toilet cubicle swayed, its bolts rattling loose, and readied itself to collapse.
It happens on rare occasion, Gentle Tweeter, that natural phenomena occur for which we’ve no ready explanation. The role of the naturalist is to take note and to record a description of said occurrence, trusting that eventually that rogue event will make sense. I mention this because the oddest thing happened: As I held fast, gripping my book with the boo-boo-caca shut snugly inside it—me yanking the book on its short tether—the book appeared to vomit. A thin stream of vile sputum jetted from between the pages. This viscous off-white vomitus erupted from the depths of Mr. Darwin’s journal. My memory slows the moment, stretching the seconds so as to depict the finer details: A pulse followed by a second and third pulse of colorless sputum burst from the book clasped in my hands. Not a large quantity, nonetheless it presented itself at such a velocity that I’d no time to react. Before I could move aside, the jelly’s trajectory landed it upon the chest of my blue chambray shirt. Here, my professional demeanor failed me. The spoutings of mysterious phlegm still clinging to my meager child’s bosom, I abandoned the fight. I deserted the Beagle book and the dog boo-boo it still held prisoner. I burst from my toilet stall, and I ran squealing at the top of my lungs.
DECEMBER 21, 9:13 A.M. CST
I Flee the Scene
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When I burst from the brown-painted door of that hellish public toilet in tedious upstate, the lackluster sun had dropped to late afternoon. Where I’d sated my thirst with too much tea, the empty glass jar still lay in the scorched grass. Soon my deranged attacker would emerge from the men’s restroom behind me, perhaps not deterred by our struggle, perhaps only enraged and bent on the single purpose of seizing me and rending me limb from limb and completing a frenzied sexual act upon my lifeless, beheaded torso within full view of a million speeding upstate motorists.
That endless stream of tailgating tanker trucks and logging trucks and minivans continued to roar around the edges of this shunned traffic island. To my naked face, with my eyeglasses still abandoned back on the bathroom floor, the vehicles layered and overlapped each other until they became the solid wall of their growling tire tread sound. No space existed between them. I stooped to retrieve the gallon-size tea jar, distracted by my impending doom.
Perhaps I had brashly overreacted to the proffered dirty-poo finger? After all, I was a stranger in upstate. Perhaps thrusting doo-doo sticks through holes in toilet stalls constituted a local backwoods custom akin to a mild flirtation. My Nana Minnie once told me, “Boys only tease the girls they like.” In response, I’d quoted Oscar Wilde, saying, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”
Nonetheless, upstate being upstate, it’s not impossible that I’d just now thwarted an amorous country swain. If, indeed, waving caca logs at young girls was some rural prelude to romance, then I’d lost myself a potential suitor.
Whether I’d foiled a rustic courtship or escaped a murderer, my heart still struggled high in my throat, and the
cold sweat of shock washed down from my forehead. The mysterious ejaculate that had sprung from the Beagle book hung heavily, in coagulated lumps, on the bosom of my shirt. Sans my eyeglasses, everything in the world was either too close or too far away for me to see it clearly. I was in no good condition to fling myself into the clockwork tangle of dense traffic, but if a poo-wielding madman were to emerge from the cinder-block building, I felt I’d have precious little choice. Here my bleary gaze fell upon the glass tea jar I’d grasped and lifted, the walls of which now showed themselves to be studded—nay, fairly paved—with black houseflies trapped by the thick residue of sugar. Recoiling from these vermin, I dropped the jar and watched it bounce in the grass. As it had before, the cunning naturalist within me formulated a plan. Carefully, I once more stooped and lifted the empty jar, gingerly avoiding its carpet of gluey bug life. With a few steps I carried it to the margin where the parched lawn met the asphalt parking lot; there, a curb awaited, the white concrete fairly shimmering in the day’s heat. Granted, my nana needed this jar to brew her windowsill tea, but my self-protection seemed a higher priority. In the future, if my Nana Minnie missed her homemade swill, I’d simply telephone Spago and have them FedEx a single serving of their delicious blend. For now, using both hands, I lifted the sticky, insect-laden vessel over my head. With a cathartic yelp, I hurled it against the curb, where the glass burst into countless shards. The largest, cruelest, most daggerlike of these jagged glass pieces I selected as my weapon.
Lest my course of action seem overly dramatic, please understand that I’d written my name within the end pages of the Beagle book. Even if I quickly fled the scene, that book—and my eyeglasses—remained with my foe. The psychotic fiend would see my name. A poop-brandishing nutcase would discover my name and begin stalking me to exact his revenge. To protect my hand I wrapped the hilt of my glass dagger in euro notes. Thus armed to retrieve my book, I crept soundlessly back toward the dingy cinder-block toilets.
Scattered around me on the grass were doodie dog logs so like the one that had recently been thrust at me, and I could tell that for the rest of my life the sight of a dog boo-boo would make my heart stumble with terror. My eyes would see inflating doodie-cacas lurking in every shadow. Every future nightmare would be an echo of today.
At the building’s entrance I turned my head sideways and placed a listening ear to the brown-painted door. No sounds emerged from within. From that stance my flawed peripheral vision included the rest-area parking lot, the sun-toasted lawn, the endless riptides of motor vehicle traffic. Only a single automobile waited, unoccupied, in the lot. It was a dented, rusted truck of the type known as a “pickup.” A crack bisected the windshield lengthwise. My poor eyesight might’ve been mistaken, but a taillight appeared to be repaired with layers of red-colored adhesive tape. My deranged nemesis, I deemed, had arrived here in that sad, mud-dappled, well-scratched truck.
World’s Best Dad …
My brain belched up something I refused to taste. I choked back the possibility, the as-yet-unrealized horror that lodged itself within my throat. This new idea was like seeing an Asian person speaking Spanish. It was too impossible a concept.
Without question, I was in a state of shock. As an animated zombie, clutching my glass knife, I shouldered open the door and reentered the reeking public toilet. The movement from blazing day to dim interior blinded me, but I could hear the plink-plunk of dripping water. In that catacomb echo I heard a man’s raspy breathing. My eyes beheld, in the next blink, a figure sprawled on the filthy concrete. It was a man, his head resting on the floor. His wrinkled skin and gray hair had matted together until you couldn’t, in surety, vouchsafe where his face ended and his scalp began. At first I wouldn’t swear whether he lay faceup or -down, but then I saw his knees were together, pulled to his chest in a fetal pose. His slacks were still wadded around his ankles, and his belt with its WORLD’S BEST DAD buckle was splayed open. Of his naked legs, the exposed flanks were so white they glowed, pearlescent, hazed with small, black hairs. Between his knobby pink knees stretched the empty hammock of his dingy underbriefs, and one of his hands disappeared into his crotch, where it appeared to be cupping his shame. His other hand had reached the full length of his extended arm and clutched the air near my dropped book. As bright as a spot of sunlight in this stony traffic island tomb, a gold band circled the base of his ring finger. It was, to my handicapped vision, nothing better than nine-carat.
Even my bad eyes could see a stream of crimson running from the man’s withered loins. This rivulet of red rolled down the slight slope of the floor, collecting his discarded flecks of tobacco spit and edging toward the rusted central drain. There, all of his various fluids were disappearing in sizable amounts. Following his gaze, his reaching hand, my worst fears were confirmed, for he certainly intended to examine the book.
With my next step my Bass Weejun foot found my lost glasses. Under my baby-fat weight they weren’t anyone’s glasses; they weren’t even eyeglasses anymore. A loud pop and the crunch of glass and plastic turned the old man’s head in my direction.
The Beagle book had fallen, facedown and open, so its precious pages were pressed flat to that awful floor. A pathetic assortment of dried flowers and leaves had fallen from their hiding places deep inside Mr. Darwin’s narrative. After being safely preserved for decades, these tiny blossoms were scattered and sprinkled over the body of the fallen pervert. In a panicked impulse I lunged forward, closing the short distance, and leaned down to seize my paper property.
As my fingers closed around an edge of the book, likewise did the hand of the psycho grasp the volume. For a terrible eternity he held fast. We endured a dark tug-of-war, me and this anonymous Other. I still could not see his face, masked as it was by the disarray of his hair. As his arm strength failed, his grip did not, and my efforts dragged the man closer. He was old, an old man with gaunt sunken cheeks and glazed, rheumy eyes. His cheekbones and chin were as craggy as the totem sculptures people carved with chain saws and sold in vacant lots next to upstate gas stations. The dried flowers, ancient violets and pansies, age-old foxgloves, sprigs of lavender, desiccated marigolds, and fragile four-leafed clovers, all of these still retained their colors from long-vanished summers. From summers before I’d been born. These preserved daisies and asters formed a bier under his body, and a final, fading breath of their long-ago perfume sweetened the fetid air of that profane setting.
My arms tugged the book free, and I backed away a step but could not bring myself to take flight. Strewn among the flowers and broken eyeglass lenses was a scarlet butterfly, dead and pressed flat. It was the blaze-colored butterfly of my greatest naturalist dreams. My own species: Papilio madisonspencerii. But on closer examination it was neither scarlet nor a butterfly. It was merely a white moth newly saturated in this stranger’s rapidly issuing blood.
The man, shrouded with flowers, resting upon flowers, he lifted a quivering hand toward me. His old lips twitched with a single word, but no voice emerged. His pale lips moved again, this time saying, “Madison?”
Involuntarily the hand holding my makeshift knife relaxed—that longish shard of glass with a handle of tightly wrapped currency notes—and the dagger fell. The room’s hardened walls, scarred with their layers of graffiti, resounded with the fragile ringing sound of something brittle breaking into infinite fragments. Shattered glass sparkled, and the paper money fluttered to land in the escaping blood. My nose could smell air I didn’t want inside my mouth.
The familiar dented pickup truck parked outside. The World’s Best Dad.
Leonard wants me to pick some flowers for my dad.
The old lips hissed the words, “Little Maddy?”
My heart overcame my brains, and I inched closer, close enough that I could see the red was soaking his pants and the front of his shirt. He reached a trembling hand, and my hand, now empty of its weapon, met his halfway. Our fingers laced together, his skin feeling icy cold despite the summer heat. The stranger was
my mother’s father. He was Nana Minnie’s husband. He was Papadaddy Ben, my grandpa, and his failing lips worked softly, saying, “You have murdered me, you evil child.… Don’t think you won’t burn in hell for this!” He hissed, “Forever are you condemned to the unquenchable lake of fire!”
His bony grip crushed my fingers. And like the repeating song of a finch … like waves lapping at a Galápagos beach, he kept saying, “You are a wicked, despicable girl.…” He rasped, “Your mama and grandma will hate you for breaking their hearts!”
On and on, with his every dying breath my papadaddy cursed me.
DECEMBER 21, 9:17 A.M. CST
Toilet Ambush, the Aftermath
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As an actor my mother hates sitting for still photographers. Fashion models, she says, are able to communicate themselves in a fixed expression, but an actor needs to use the pitch and volume of her voice, the motion of her gestures. Limiting an actor to a still, silent image is a reduction, as flavorless and aroma-free as a perfect snapshot of the most delicious mesquite-roasted, Cajun-rubbed tofu. That’s how absurd this feels: reducing Papadaddy Ben’s death to a blog entry. Mere words. To make you experience the scene fully I’d need to smear his warm dying blood on your hands. Instead of just reading this, you’d have to sit next to him on that concrete paved with dirt until his fingers felt nothing but cold. You’d need to take the biggest chunk surviving from my busted eyeglasses and hold it over his gaped-open lips while you prayed to see the glass fog even a little bit. Not that my parents ever taught me how to pray. Spurred by your gigantic panic, your feet would launch you out through the brown-painted bathroom door, sprinting down pathways across soft steps of dead grass, your soles slapping parking lot until you were waving for somebody’s attention from the edge of freeway traffic. Crying all the way. Hearing nothing except the loud sound of your lungs yelling air in and out. Without thinking twice you’d do jumping jacks between lanes of air-horning, headlight-flashing trucks and cars, and you’d perform all these verbs without seeing anything clearly. You’d be fluttering your blood-painted hands like red flags for some grown-up to please stop.