“Who are you?” she said.
I just stood there and smiled—dumb, discovered, outed.
“Martin,” I said. The old word felt funny in my mouth. “My name is Martin Browne. Marty.”
* * * *
There is about Herman Yoder the stink of life. His thighs get hairy disappearing into his boxers. His toenails are bent and yellow. There is a brown haze of testosterone and semen hanging about him.
Under his yearbook photo it says Nickname: “Yo!” Quote: “See ya, suckers!” Somewhere in the fields, closing in on us, there’s the sound of that harvester still.
“Yo,” I say. He takes one of his hands out from under his thighs, gives me the finger, and then shoves his hand back under his leg. “You don’t seem to understand the position on the board,” I say and wave the gun in front of my face like there’s maybe a fly bothering me. “No one knows I’m here. There’s no apparent motive.”
He does a good job of hiding his fear behind the big man’s bravado. “You gonna tell her how I cried and begged for mercy? Is that it?”
“What?”
“That pot-smoking bitch!”
I close my eyes. I do not want Herman Yoder’s wives and/or girlfriends to clutter the equation. “Please,” I say. Through my clothes I can feel Action Comics #187 in my back pocket. On page twelve is Superman’s dream of a clarified world: a Fortress of Solitude in the artic waste, without germ, pulse, or decay.
“Tell her to go fuck herself!”
So I shoot his cat. I point the gun first at Herman Yoder’s face and then slide it to where Herman Yoder’s ugly yellow cat is walking with its slinky haunches and I shoot it. It’s a necessary demonstration. A visual aid. The cat flies apart from the impact, then reassembles, rolls over, hisses at the air, tries to get away from its own insides, and then lies down panting. There’s surprisingly little blood.
Herman Yoder is screaming. “Skunk!” he cries. “Skunk!”
What kind of human being names his cat Skunk?
“Skunk!”
“You’re a very ugly man, Herman Yoder.”
He starts to curse me again, but his voice is gone. Over the sofa there’s a sign, a molded plastic bas-relief of a handgun with the legend: WE DON’T CALL 911. That’s as good as a poem.
“Now,” I say in a tone of voice that says we understand the position on the board now, don’t we? “I’m going to ask you some questions.”
He turns on me a face the poets might describe as distraught, distrait, or disconsolate.
“First question.” I pause to get my thoughts in order. “If,” I say, “someone were to inform you that you were to be executed for a crime you had committed, what crime would come to mind?”
He doesn’t answer.
“What secret offense from your past proportionate to the punishment?”
It seems to be sinking in. The situation he’s in. He seems to be getting it.
“We posit a moral universe in this question,” I say. “Things add up. Crime and punishment.” And I draw an equals sign in the air with the barrel of the Special.
* * * *
It is to the defendant’s credit, your Honor, that he did not attempt to seduce the girl, to touch her, to force himself on her in any way. He simply wanted to live within the circumference of her spirit. To hear her voice and see her face. That is not stalking; it’s breathing.
It began quietly. I kept a discreet distance behind the school bus, following it out into the country along the two-lane roads, the snowy landscape broken into forty acre grids, the stubble of corn stalks under the melting white and the moraine of dirt on either side of the road. I followed her to and from school, sometimes to the library, to the mall with her girlfriends, twice into Iowa City where she went with her mother into the University of Iowa Medical Center. After a week the boys in the back of the bus began to catch on, waving and giving me the finger out the back window. How long it took for her to figure it out I don’t know, but by the time I started attending the Lower Deer Creek Mennonite Church—sitting well away from her, mind, but catching glimpses between the lumpen heads and shoulders—I could tell by the way her family sat stiff and self-conscious that they knew.
And then there was a period of a couple of weeks when she didn’t go to school, didn’t attend church. The pastor during Sharing and Announcements asked for prayers for her, for Grace Albrecht to recover from her affliction, and I was still sane enough to worry that she had fallen ill, mad enough to exult that it was Ichabod Sick they sought to save her from.
In Action Comics #187 there’s a panel of Superman standing under a shower, only it’s not a regular shower, it’s a super-blowtorch shower and he’s burning off the dirt and stains of the world from his invulnerable suit. This is in his Fortress of Solitude. It’s made out of ice. He stands with his legs wide apart and powerful.
When one of the church elders approached me, asked me who I was, that’s what I told him. I told him about the super-blowtorch shower. And the cleanliness. And the dirt.
* * * *
On the floor between us, Skunk has finished expiring. I have just asked Herman Yoder if he has some electric clippers, and failing that, a pair of good scissors.
“Your hair,” I tell him, wagging the Special like an index finger at his mullet, his body, his whole being. “It’s giving off a sour odor.”
He gives his head a shake.
“Your body, too.”
He just gives me the stink eye.
“Undress,” I say. “We need to clean you up.”
* * * *
The prayers of the congregation worked. After ten days away she was back home, then back in school, back attending church. The poet Ichabod Sick increased his attentions.
Her house was one of those isolated farmhouses you see in the Midwest, with the long dirt drive that right angles through a cornfield up to a simple yard and a plain white frame house. Each afternoon she would step off the bus, empty the mailbox, pointedly not look at the black Pontiac idling at the side of the road, and then ascend the drive, the hem of her long skirt eddying about her ankles, her coat plain—everything about her gray, brown, dull blue—and her clunky shoes and hair swept under her hat, and the poet Ichabod Sick’s heart stinging under the super-blowtorch of the sight of her.
When I was away from her, there was the mire of the world all around me, the infection that reached me even out on the frozen plains.
I followed her into Wal-Mart, into Susan’s Fabrics. Always at a discreet distance. In the town library with her girlfriends she read People magazine under the buzzing lights at the back of the periodical room. When she saw me peering at her through the stacks, she dropped the magazine, hurried and found her friends. They whispered and pointed with their eyes.
At church her father came up and told me to stop it, just stop this, he said. She’s just a girl, he said. We’ll call the police, he said.
In the hospital it was a gastroenterologist she was seeing. The digestive organs. Colitis, ulcers, colon cancer—the bacteria raging, coliforms, fecal streptococci.
And all the time I was writing furious brilliant poems about Beatrice and Lana Lane, about the Sons of Levi and the fire that cleanses, poems that later in the hospital, mired in swales of depression, I would find to be breathless and incoherent, ugly on the page with their ill-formed limbs and microcephalic heads.
* * * *
“Grace Albrecht?” Herman Yoder says now. He fixes me with a look from behind the soap and the rivulets of blood oozing down his forehead from where he’s cut himself. “What about her?”
There is something inexpressibly ugly about Herman Yoder’s body. With its massive penis hanging between his legs like an elephant trunk. And the tufts of hair illegibly distributed. The lumpiness about the shoulders, the hirsute back, the thick waist with its red crenulations from the elastic in his boxers.
We have not stopped with cutting off his mullet, but have determined to cleanse his entire body of hair. Acco
rdingly, we have ordered him into his bathtub, and given him his razor and told him to start shaving. First his head, and then his arms, and then his legs, and finally his crotch. The bathwater is turning pink from where he has nicked himself. He has started blubbering once or twice, just like they do in the movies. Once or twice started cursing and calling me names. We have had to discharge a third round into the mirror above the sink by way of persuasion.
Also, the bathroom floor has flooded from where I tried to flush the Achy Breaky t-shirt down the toilet.
“Did you know her?” I ask.
“She’s dead,” he said.
“That wasn’t the question.”
He scrapes the soap from his face. “Of course I knew her. We all knew her.”
“We?” I prod. He names his wife or maybe girlfriend, some other names I’m supposed to recognize. He is still convinced that I am here to avenge a domestic squabble. I’m the guy his pot-smoking wife is seeing or something.
“Listen,” I say to Herman Yoder. I close my eyes because the shattered mirror is reflecting things I know are not there. “Forget your wife. Your wife doesn’t enter into the question. Try to concentrate and answer me: When in the presence of the Innocents, does Herman Yoder do what he can to save them, or does he partake of the massacre?”
He stops shaving his thigh, blinks at me.
“Finds another way home, or not?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Grace Albrecht,” I say. “I’m talking about Grace Albrecht.”
“I haven’t seen Grace Albrecht since high school,” Herman Yoder says; then, like enough is enough: “C’mon, man!”
* * * *
In the State of Iowa “Stalking in the Fourth Degree” is unwanted behavior constituted of, but not limited to, following, telephoning or initiating communication or contact with a person so as to cause material harm to the mental or emotional health of said person, and is a Class B Misdemeanor.
I was arrested, arraigned, released.
A week later I was arrested again. Two sheriffs showed up at the tent I had pitched on the frozen front yard, rousted me out of my Blue Kazoo sleeping bag, cuffed me in full view of the Albrecht family picture window, and drove me to the University of Iowa Hospital where after a lot of this and that I was held in a locked ward awaiting a competency hearing. The records from my previous hospitalizations were entered as evidence. My sister had to come and testify. And the Director of the Writers’ Workshop. And then it was back to the locked ward where the manic break happened and I went plunging downward. The walls moved in, the grotto reappeared, I lay flat and two-dimensional on my hospital bed. The Spring semester began without me.
In the crescendos of these episodes my memory gets unreliable, but what I think I remember from those last days in the tent is not sleeping and not eating so as not to have to evacuate waste, and rewriting the Paradiso by the light of a can of Sterno, and the cleansing cold, and telling Grace as she came up the drive of the plans I was making, me in my smiling madness clutching Superman’s Fortress of Solitude in one mitten and telling her as she hurried away about the artic desolation, about the ice and the stainless steel cold—how we would live with no food, no waste, no tinge of color.
After a month they moved me out of the locked ward and I began the slow crawl upward, like one of those grade-school graphics on the creation of life: the piscine creature humping itself out of the primordial slime, the nubby fins growing into lizard legs, the starter-kit mammal, the monkey puzzled by its tail, and finally the hunched but erect-walking Ichabod Sick.
* * * *
I have asked Herman Yoder for his last words. He is standing in the bathtub with the hairy bathwater lapping at his ankles, a ring of hairy scum about his middle, and his flaccid penis looking like a hanged man.
“The sum of what you’ve learned in your thirty years. That sort of thing.”
I parade him back into the living room, tell him to say goodbye to the pictures on the wall, his mother and father, his kids, the wife I’m sleeping with. And it’s here he loses it. Starts to blubber and cry over his kids, Janie and Buddy for god’s sakes. And he starts to apologize to his wife, says he’s sorry, turns to me, his face all blotchy from the tears and the shaving job, and starts to apologize to me, too, says he’s sorry for whatever it is, whatever he’s done, until I tell him to shut up—just shut the fuck up, Herman Yoder and say goodbye to your kids. He makes a stumbling lunge at me, all blubbery and uncoordinated so that it’s an easy thing to dodge him as he sails past. He ends up on the floor, on his hands and knees, crying into the carpet.
“Skunk,” he says at the sight of his dead cat, and then like a cri de coeur, “Skunk!”
Somewhere there’s a tornado siren going off but it’s a balmy October day so maybe there isn’t a tornado siren going off. I kick Herman Yoder and tell him to stand up, march him through the kitchen and out into the backyard. There’s a stupid Jack’n’Jill well and the corn seven feet tall on three sides and growling unseen in it somewhere the harvester guaranteed to appeal to a poet’s fancy. I tell him to enter the corn. “What?” he says and I stick the barrel of the Special right in his naked back and push him toward the cornfield.
“We’re going to find the Grim Reaper,” I say and someone starts laughing.
* * * *
When the weather warmed and I had made it back to being half human, some of the Workshop students began coming to the hospital for tutorials. We met in the sun room. They brought me flowers, cards, Jujubes because of that poem I wrote about movie-theater candy. I was only thirty-two but I shuffled about the corridors in my pajamas like I was seventy-two. My hair stuck out like Einstein’s. I affected a grandfatherly German accent, sucking on my Jujubes and offering suggestions to their poems, a bland word changed here, a stale image there, and let’s calm down the overactive lineation, ja?
“Like zees,” I would say, drawing a line through a word while a young poetess sat next to me with her breasts like frankincense and myrrh, “and zees, ja?”
I lay around my room reading Boethius, took part in group, set off on shuffling hikes through the hospital. I went from ward to ward, through clinics, up to the closed doors that led to the ICU, checked out this sun room, that sun room, stared out the front doors at the brightly-colored world outside. In the pediatric oncology ward I’d sit in the waiting area like a strung-out parent while wispy-headed gnomes tried to play like normal kids. I got down on the floor and played with them—trucks, Legos, Candyland—shared my Jujubes, and whenever the door that led to the examining rooms swung open made loud steam-shovel noises to cover the sound of crying children.
Sometimes I just sat there like a lobotomized Lepke, missing all the connections.
But my medication was adjusted, adjusted again, and the world began to fit itself back together. My roommate thought it was hilarious that I was a poet. His name was Foster and I called him John Foster Dulles for no reason at all and we watched ESPN together and played Go Fish! and I Doubt It! He was a big guy, farted a lot, which made the delicate red scars on his wrists seem all wrong. When I got tired of cards I’d take to the hallways, bringing the hundreds of pages of my winter mania with me. I’d sit in one of the sun rooms and read through them like they were tablets of cuneiform, looking for a comprehensible image, a salvageable line. I would jot these down in a fresh notebook, maybe start playing with the seed of a poem. During one of these sessions my lawyer called with the news that the Albrecht family had asked that the charges be dropped. The air began to lighten. A poem about the three Magi looking for another way home so as not to have to tell Herod about the Christ child began to stumble toward its themes. Advent. Childhood. Destruction. I was working on it—hospital bed cranked up into a reclining position, reading glasses on—trying to rewrite the first line of the second stanza, something about where I had misplaced myself, when Fat Nettie the Nurse came to tell me I had visitors.
“Shoo, fly,” I said.
She turned and headed back down the hall, her enormous rear-end square and flat like the back of a snow shovel. In the bed next over, behind the privacy curtain, John Foster Dulles farted.
“I lost him out behind second base,” I tried out, “my sane self, I mean.”
I let the line hang in the air a moment, then unplugged “him,” and stuck in “Marty.” Tried that out. Then unplugged “Marty” and stuck “him” back in. I listened for the zones of radiation, for the breeze from right field. It took me a good minute to realize someone was in the doorway again. And that it wasn’t Fat Nettie come back to plump my pillows, or some student, or one of the neighboring nutcases about to claim he was John Wilkes Booth—
She was in a wheelchair and so changed that even with my reading glasses fumbled off I don’t think I would have recognized her if her mother hadn’t been standing behind her. Her mother with her mouth pursed, hair up under her cap, body in rigid disapprobation as if she’d lost some argument just minutes before and was here under protest. It was the girl’s face that was so different. The clarity was gone—the perfect bone structure I had caressed in the ether of madness—and in its place some illness or medication had painted her features on a ball of dough. Everything was swollen, out-sized, and there was a wash of acne across her cheeks and gray crescents under her eyes. But she was smiling, friendly, maybe a little shy at being so bold.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi,” I answered like I was fifteen again and couldn’t talk to girls. She wheeled her chair a little further into the room. She was in a green bathrobe with fuzzy slippers on her feet. On her lap there was a stack of what looked like music, those old, yellow Schirmer piano editions.
“We heard you were feeling better.”
“Yes,” I managed, “thank you.”
“We saw you the other day,” she added by way of explanation, “in the sunroom. The one with the piano. I hope you don’t mind.”
I shook my head “no.” I could think of nothing else to say except to ask what was wrong with her, what had happened to her lovely face. But of course I couldn’t ask that. One of my legs began to quiver under the covers. “I’m sorry,” I said in a shaky voice.