Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Caleb came into the kitchen, looked over his shoulder, and dropped one hand on Eric’s back.

  Eric said, “That’s gonna be interesting. There’re probably kids around here—I mean your age, under thirty—what never seen a real movie in a movie theater. There used to be an old thirty-five millimeter projector up in the projection room. Shit always wanted us to throw that thing out—but Myron, our projectionist, would never let him. That’s probably the one they’re using for this ‘festival’ thing right now.”

  Caleb’s hand fell away. “I think I’m gonna go to Runcible and see some of those.” From the dish in the middle of the table, he’d picked up a pastry. “I never saw King Kong. I mean on TV.”

  A few days later, sitting outside on the steps, for the first time in more than twenty years Eric retold—for the last time—the story Bill Bottom had told him, forty-five years before—with moral. As he told it, he thought: I’m almost old now. And to this boy, I ain’t almost: I am. He wondered at the velocity with which age had careered into him. “Hey—just a minute.” Eric stood and pushed back his chair. “You was in that Graduate School there, up in New England, and you was takin’ philosophy, you said. You know anything about…here, lemme go get it for you.” Eric went into the bedroom, and, from the bookshelf at the back of his dresser, he took out a brittle paperback with a cover under clear tape showing a man in a renaissance ruff and fancy hat. He brought them back into the kitchen.

  Caleb took the books and frowned at them. “Spinoza…?” He looked up. “What’re you doin’ with these?”

  “Readin’ ’em,” Eric said. “You know anything about ’im?”

  “I know that’s some pretty difficult stuff. How long you been readin’ this?”

  “I dunno.” Eric said. “’Bout thirty years. Thirty-five, maybe.”

  “Yeah, well.” Caleb turned the copy of Ethica over. “I guess that is the way you read Spinoza. If that print’s too small for you, you can use my screen—” he reached for his back pocket—“and call up a larger—”

  “Naw, that’s okay. I’m used to these. One of ’em’s a book about Spinoza—about his ideas and stuff. Otherwise I couldn’t understand none of it. You ever read ’im?”

  “A little bit,” Caleb said. “In a course on Descartes and Liebnitz and a few of them other seventeenth century fellows—and Spinoza. He was the hardest. My teacher said Spinoza was his favorite, though—but we didn’t read this one. I looked at it once, but it was beyond me. It’s more like a book on geometry.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “It’s that ‘Geometric Method’ he uses.”

  “I remember,” Caleb said, “that he figured everything in the universe was a part of God, because it was only the whole entire Universe itself, all together, that could do all the things that all the various people thought God was able to do. So that if there was a God, the totality of the universe itself had to be it.”

  “That’s right,” Eric said. “I remember that—that’s what some of it’s tryin’ to say. I think. But there’s stuff that’s ‘mind’ and then there’s stuff that ain’t ‘mind’—that’s material…extension, he calls it—and they can’t move each other directly. Only, somehow, in a living body, they’re two sides of the same thing—the same thing looked at in a different way—”

  Back against the white painted jamb, Shit sat on the threshold, the neck of his orange T-shirt sagging below one prominent collar bone, one wide, foot—bare—in the sunny trapezoid inside the kitchen door, the other down on a step outside. “That philosophy stuff is bullshit—right?” His eyes were closed. Along dark lids, silver lashes actually glittered. “Bullshit…yeah.” His beard was a gray-white brush standing out in tufts below brown cheekbones. Shadows filled folds down his cheeks, grayed his beard. “Go on. Tell ’im like you told me, about how that’s why you left that dumb university.”

  At the table, Caleb sat back to smile at the old man in the sunny door. Through the window screening on the wall beside him, sun fell over the knots of Caleb’s dark fists on the table planks. “Now that’s not exactly what I said, Mr. Haskell.” Caleb was a meaty young man. He wore a black T-shirt with a white band around the neck, the arms, and the bottom, which (unlike Shit’s) he didn’t tuck in. On one side was a red circle with half a dozen white spots—a sign connected with a phenomenally popular TV series current years before. Even though its colophon had been absorbed by the greater culture, Eric had never seen it because they’d never had a TV.

  Shit said, “That’s what you said to me.”

  “I said—” Caleb let one arm bend—“that’s what it made me feel like…sometimes.”

  “Ain’t that the same thing?’

  Eric chuckled.

  Shit pulled his hands into his lap. “You can’t understand it. It don’t make no sense. So it’s bullshit. That’s just sensible.”

  “Sometimes,” Caleb said, “it means you just have to work a little harder at it. Don’t it, Mr. Jeffers?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Eric said. “Talk to him.”

  “Oh, you’re just tryin’ to weasel out of it, now. Well, that’s all right. You go on and weasel all you want.” Shit opened his eyes and looked over toward the two men at the table. “He used to try and explain it to me sometimes. But he wouldn’t admit that it didn’t make no sense. And he wouldn’t see that meant it was crazy bullshit. I swear, sometimes it would get me so mad, there, I’d wanna cry. Like all that business about baskets bein’ in apples instead of apples bein’ in baskets.”

  “Jesus.” At the table Eric turned around. “Are you still worryin’ over that one? That was fifteen, twenty years ago, Shit.”

  “Well, you just be glad I decided to laugh at your dumb white ass—’cause if I hadn’t, I woulda knocked your damned head in with a shovel!”

  “And it wasn’t baskets.” Eric sat up at the table. “It was apples in piles; or apples in groups.”

  “See.” Shit turned his face back to the sun. “There he goes again. He’s tryin’ to get me started.”

  “Oh, yeah—you mean the Spinozan ‘in.’” Caleb looked over at Eric. “I remember that one now. We talked about it in class. But a lotta people have a tough time getting their minds wrapped around that. It is difficult, sir.”

  “There was nothin’ to get your mind wrapped around,” Shit said. “It’s just wrong.”

  Caleb turned back to Shit, considering a moment. “It’s not really that hard…sir. Try this, now. You and me, when we say ‘in,’ we mean something like: people are in groups. They’re members of the group. Or an apple is in a pile—the apple is part of the pile. But when Spinoza wrote ‘in,’ he meant something else. He meant you couldn’t have a group of people unless you had the individuals first. So the origin of the group, the potentiality for the group, is in the individuals. The potentiality for the pile is in the apples. The potentiality for the bunch is in the grapes. The potentiality for the sea is in the drops of water from the rain and streams and rivers that go into making it up. That’s all he was saying. So when he says all things are ‘in’ Nature, he means ‘in’ in that sense: birds and fish and clouds and flowers, but also dinosaurs from a hundred million years ago as well as any species that might evolve ten million years from now—in the sense of their potentiality.”

  “Well, if that’s what he meant, why didn’t he say so?” Shit humphed, opened his eyes a second time, then shut them again. “Besides, fish and animals and birds are in nature. But piles ain’t in apples.”

  “He did say it,” Caleb said, “more or less.”

  “I mean him.” Eyes still closed, Shit jabbed a thumb at Eric more than half again as wide as either of theirs.

  “I tried to,” Eric said. “But you were so busy tellin’ me how stupid I was and it was, and what a dumb-ass I was, you wouldn’t follow it.”

  “You didn’t say nothin’ about no ‘potential,’” Shit said. “Least ways that I remember—besides, I ain’t even sure if I know what ‘potential’ means.”

/>   Caleb laughed. “You and a lot of other people. But that’s what everybody’s arguin’ about in philosophy departments, now; like ‘difference,’ about forty or fifty years ago.”

  “Well.” Shit lifted his butt, then settled it again. “All it looks like to me is a lot of people usin’ words they don’t half understand to make everybody feel stupid and scared.”

  Caleb turned on his chair. The rungs creaked. “Well, sometimes, sir, feelin’ stupid and scared is simply the human condition—especially when you got your thoughts up against some big philosophical problem—birth, death, difference, infinity, potentiality. Stuff like that—”

  “Well,” Shit repeated. “I gave up on that a long time back…feelin’ stupid and scared, I mean. Weren’t no gain from it. If I went with that, I’d be livin’ three hun’er’d miles away from everybody, on another island all by myself. Hey, come on over here, boy.”

  “Sir?” Caleb pulled his hands back to the table edge and sat up straighter. “What you want?”

  “I want you to unzip your jeans and get your black ass over here, so I can suck on your dick some. Then I’m gonna turn you around, stick my nose between your butt cheeks, and blow some air up your asshole so you can fart in my face. You got to smell a man’s insides every once in a while. It’s part of bindin’. Then, after we done that, I’m gonna get up from here and make another pot of coffee.”

  “Oh…!” Caleb stood, sharply, fingering the waist button on his jeans. “Yes, sir!” As he rose, he glanced back at Eric. “You sure, sir…I mean, Eric—” both of them had almost stopped arguing with him about calling them “sir” and “mister”—“you don’t wanna use my reader? You can probably call up all them books you got and a lot more besides.”

  At the table, Eric opened the paperback Spinoza to the last part (Part V. “Of Human Freedom”), shaking his head, smiling some.

  * * *

  [100] THIS ACTUALLY MADE it into memory to pulse there over the years:

  You’d have thought it was something tenacious and obsessive that had happened in childhood, though it occurred when Eric was seventy-six. He’d gone out for an hour and a half with the kid—well, Caleb was twenty-nine now—in the row boat, when, over three minutes, a surprise October fog had obliterated all sight of land. “That was awful nice of your friend, Anne, to have me over there at her big dinner again. I mean, she didn’t know me at all, hardly.”

  “Well,” Eric said, “you’re a friend of ours—she’s a friend of ours.” Eric was a little worried, though he tried not to show it.

  But leaning into the oars, Caleb began to row. “You know, out here like this, I can understand what Thales was all about.”

  “Huh?” Eric asked, one hand on the gunwale. “Who was Thales?” He wondered if he’d lost some thread of the conversation to some passing reverie of his own.

  But Caleb leaned and pulled, leaned and pulled. “You know—that Greek philosopher—the first one. He thought everything in the universe was made of water.”

  “Naw.” Eric smiled. “I never heard of ’im.” He looked around the mist-diminished sea, which, without horizon, in that state, could look even larger than usual.

  But not now.

  Four o’clock sun was a faint pearl to the sky’s left, dim enough to look at directly for five, six, seven seconds.

  Caleb went on rowing—and laughed. “How can you know all about Spinoza, Mr. Jeffers, but…not know about Thales?”

  “Don’t ask me.” Looking back down at cross-hatching on the boat’s bottom, Eric laughed back. “But I sure don’t.” No, there was nothing to worry about. That was the sun, so the island was over there.

  Then, as if to remind them they were moving with Caleb’s labors, both in space and in time, surging through moist gray, Gilead gathered itself into visibility, right where it should have been, as the Earth might once have gathered itself according to nature’s order, from the sea. (Looking at the sea too long always made Eric feel that there was something he should have remembered, something insignificant and particularly specific that had slipped his mind, that for some reason he could not bring back…) With its foliage, and buildings, and dock, the island loomed above the waves.

  * * *

  [101] ERIC PUSHED HIS rough forefinger into one nostril, turned it one way, then the other—and suddenly smiled. I’m a seventy-seven-year-old man. And I’m still comfortin’ myself by pickin’ my damned nose and eatin’ my own damned snot—same as when I was six or seven.

  The image that came to him now was not Shit, about whom, at seventy-nine, you could say the same thing, but—rather—sitting in the corner of the old island docking platform, before Anne or Hanna or Ed or Reba’s Place or Nightwood or the Settlement itself—sitting beside Jay, with Mex, under glittering night. Was anyone alive except him and Shit who remembered that old boathouse and the dock beside it, from before they had pulled it down to replace it with concrete steps?

  Was there anyone who knew how much urine had once spilled in that corner, drenching those boards in starlight?

  Or even smelled them the next day and wondered?

  Other than him and Shit.

  Eric pulled his finger free to suck.

  Damn! It really was good. Why couldn’t people accept it? Dr. Greene used to tell them it helped their immune system and probably accounted for why Shit and he never had colds.

  Caleb had said watching old guys do any sort of nastiness got him off. Eric grinned. Now that was luck.

  But good for you or not, why couldn’t they let little girls—on the beach only that summer, behind a boulder at the wood’s edge pushed out onto the sand, he’d seen a little girl doing it, and smiled at her, but, entirely in her own world, she hadn’t noticed—and little boys who did it alone?

  * * *

  [102] ERIC WAS COOKING burgers on the side-porch grill, with gulls and the sea the only noise. (He had an orange stool he rested on when he was wasn’t actually turning them with his spatula or checking them with the spatula’s corner for doneness.) Sitting around waiting for them, Caleb and Shit started talking: “Did you get in a lot of trouble when you was a kid?”

  “Me?” Shit asked. “When I was comin’ up around here, there wasn’t enough people out here to get in no trouble with. Besides, all I was interested in when I was a kid was bitin’ my nails and findin’ a place where I could get off and pull my dick—which wasn’t too difficult around here, back then. ’Specially in the winter. I did the nail bitin’ with my dad—he was into that, too. And some dick pullin’ with ’im, too, actually. You live out here, and there’s so few people—or at least there used to be—you kinda got used to doin’ it when you wanted. And as long as it was somebody from the Dump came by, you didn’t even mind that. At least that’s what it was like in the Dump—the place we used to live. ’Cause all the niggers there was faggots, too. Then, when Eric hooked up with us, I had me a white boy I could always run off with and we could jerk off together as much as we wanted to. Or suck or fuck or eat each other’s assholes out. I mean I was a fifteen-time-a-day fella—Dynamite, my dad, used to say I didn’t have no time to get in trouble. I was too busy beatin’ off.”

  Caleb laughed.

  “Fifteen times a day? Come on. Don’t exaggerate, Shit.” Eric moved the three toasted buns to the aluminum foil spread over the table beside the grill. “You’re worse than I am.”

  “Well, I could do it fifteen times in a day, when I wanted.”

  “Yeah—but you didn’t,” Eric said, lifting another burger with the spatula. “I mean not every day. Hell—that’s nothin’, anyway.”

  “Here he goes now,” Shit said. “Here he goes. Go on, just watch ’im—”

  Eric turned over two of the patties at the grill’s back. “Well, I told you before. When I was in Hugantown, I knew this Greek guy who did it twenty-two times over one day. I counted, once—lookin’ at him through a crack in his bathroom window.”

  “See, there?” Shit pulled a can of pop from the cooler?
??s chuckling ice. “He always been like that—Mr. Eric Jeffers, big city slicker. You show him a nigger with a thirteen-inch dick, and he gonna tell you about one he knew with fifteen. I swear I wouldn’t put up with him if he wasn’t such a good cocksucker—and a decent cook.”

  “I knew one with fifteen inches,” Eric said, while sun reflecting off the window behind him put a net of light through Shits beard against the dark siding. “I was fuckin’ around with him, too, just a few days before I came out here to the Harbor for the first time. I went lookin’ for him that mornin’. ” He shrugged and turned over a burger. “But I couldn’t find ’im. So I made do with this nigger here, when I got to Turpens.”

  “There he goes,” Shit said. “See what I told you…? Bullshit. That’s all his talk is—bullshit, more than half the time.”

  “We could tell ’im about Haystack. We both knew him—”

  “Oh, shit—” Shit said. “I forgot about that boy—he had enough to make you wanna lie about ’im—either add a couple of inches so that folks what thought you must be lyin’ would just stop arguin’ with you, or cut off a few inches ’cause there ain’t no man what’s supposed to have what that boy had swingin’ down between his legs—”