“Oh, what a fool I was to fall . . . to fall . . .”
“Jesus, Ilsa, are you crying . . . ? Ilsa . . . ?” He sighs irritably. He is never going to understand women. Her head is bowed as though in resignation: one has seen her like this often when Laszlo is near. She seems to be staring at the empty buttonholes in her blouse. Maybe she’s stupider than he thought. When the dimming light swings past, tears glint in the corners of her eyes, little points of light in the gathering shadows on her face. “Hey, dry up, kid! All I want you to do is go over there by the curtains where you were when I—”
“Can I tell you a . . . story, Richard?”
“Not now, Ilsa! Christ! The light’s almost gone and—”
“Anyway, it wouldn’t work.”
“What?”
“Trying to do it all again. It wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be the same. I won’t even haff my girdle on.”
“That doesn’t matter. Who’s gonna know? Come on, we can at least—”
“No, Richard. It is impossible. You are different, I am different. You haff cold cream on your penis—”
“But—!”
“My makeup is gone, there are stains on the carpet. And I would need the pistol—how could we effer find it in the dark? No, it’s useless, Richard. Belief me. Time goes by.”
“But maybe that’s just it . . .”
“Or what about your tsigarette? Eh? Can you imagine going through that without your tsigarette? Richard? I am laughing! Where are you, Richard . . . ?”
“Take it easy, I’m over here. By the balcony. Just lemme think.”
“Efen the airport light has stopped.”
“Yeah. I can’t see a fucking thing out there.”
“Well, you always said you wanted a wow finish . . . Maybe . . .”
“What?”
“What?”
“What did you say?”
“I said, maybe this is . . . you know, what we always wanted . . . Like a dream come true . . .”
“Speak up, kid. It’s getting hard to hear you.”
“I said, when we are fokking—”
“Nah, that won’t do any good, sweetheart, I know that now. We gotta get back into the goddamn world somehow. If we don’t we’ll regret it. Maybe not today—”
“What? We’ll forget it?”
“No, I said—”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Forget what, Richard?”
“I said I think I shoulda gone fishing with Sam when I had the chance.”
“I can’t seem to hear you . . .”
“No, wait a minute! Maybe you’re right! Maybe going back isn’t the right idea . . .”
“Richard . . . ?”
“Instead, maybe we gotta think ahead . . .”
“Richard, I am afraid . . .”
“Yeah, like you could sit there on the couch, see, we’ve been fucking, that’s all right, who cares, now we’re having some champagne—”
“I think I am already forgetting . . .”
“And you can tell me that story you’ve been wanting to tell—are you listening? A good story, that may do it—anything that moves! And meanwhile, lemme think, I’ll, let’s see, I’ll sit down—no, I’ll sort of lean here in the doorway and—oof!—shit! I think they moved it!”
“Richard. . . ?”
“Who the hell rearranged the—ungh!—goddamn geography?”
“Richard, it’s a crazy world . . .”
“Ah, here! this feels like it. Something like it. Now what was I—? Right! You’re telling a story, so, uh, I’ll say . . .”
“But wherever you are . . . ”
“And then—? Yeah, that’s good. It’s almost like I’m remembering this. You’ve stopped, see, but I want you to go on, I want you to keep spilling what’s on your mind, I’m filling in all the blanks . . .”
“. . . whatever happens . . .”
“So I say: And then—? C’mon, kid, can you hear me? Remember all those people downstairs! They’re depending on us! Just think it: if you think it, you’ll do it! And then—?”
“. . . I want you to know . . .”
“And then . . . ? Oh shit, Ilsa . . . ? Where are you? And then . . . ?”
“. . . I luff you . . .”
“And then . . . ? Ilsa . . . ? And then . . . ?”
AESOP’S FOREST
(1986)
1
Deep in the gloom of the forest, the old lion lies dying in his cave. His ancient hide drapes the royal bones like a worn blanket, rheum clots his warm nose, his eyes are dimmed with cataracts. Yet, even in such decline, the familiar hungers stir in him still, rippling in tremors across his body from time to time like mice scurrying under a tattered carpet, his appetite for power outlasting his power to move, his need for raw flesh biting deeper than his decaying teeth. “I would be king!” he rumbles wheezily, his roar muddied with catarrh.
“Eh? Eh?” asks the fox insolently from the mouth of the cave.
“Damn your eyes. Bring me meat.”
He does not trust the fox, of course, but on the other hand he has never trusted anyone, and the fox at least is useful. It is a wise policy, he knows, to keep potential enemies where you can either watch them or eat them. Unfortunately, that now means keeping them pretty close (even now, though the mouth of the cave seems empty of his scrawny silhouette, he cannot be sure the devil’s gone) and so, fearing seditious alliances just beyond the reach of his shriveling senses, he has reduced his court to one, this fox, whose very notoriety for wiliness has isolated the wretch from any serious contenders for his power. The fox, a likely victim of any new regime, serves him because it is in the fox’s own best interest to do so, though such bitter truths—and his helpless reliance on them—sadden the old lion. He has roared against them all his life, knowing that some truths are just not worth having, and now they have returned to haunt him, as though the instinct for survival were itself the ultimate disgrace. A sigh rips through him like the windy echo of some half-remembered rage: his hatred of duplicity.
There was a time when such treacherous lickspits, leading him to trapped prey, would have served him as prior savories: dispassionately he would have slit their bellies with his fierce claws, nuzzled in the hot wound as though to caress them with their own culpability, and, staring resolutely into their craven eyes already glazing over, his cool majestic gaze the last thing on this earth their fading sight would see, would have eaten their still-pulsing hearts, just appetizers for the feast to follow, juicy morals for the hunchback’s fables. He who plots against another, the fabler would say then, plots his own destruction, and if this was a truth the world felt it could depend upon, it was a truth founded upon his own powerful claws and sharp white teeth, his incorruptible detachment. It is this—his sovereign independence, his lonely freedom—that he now misses most. As must all. For if he was once the source of all their truths, now, crippled, sinking into dry rot, reduced to begging from a thieving liar, he still is: it is truth itself that is changing. Yes, yes, he thinks, we take everything with us when we go.
“Who, what—?!” Ah. That dumb stag. Vainglory in the flesh. The more or less succulent flesh. The old king, tired eyes asquint, lies low, settling his jowls behind his paws. He’s seen this one before, smelled him before. That funk: the poor fool must still have his stripes, and yet here he is, serving himself up again, will wonders never cease. “I tell you, when he caught hold of your ear last time,” he hears the fox whispering, nudging the stag forward, “it was to give you his last advice before he died.” Such big eyes he has: eyes for looking where forbidden . . . “It is you he wants as our next king: your horns scare the snakes, he told me so!” Inwardly, waiting patiently, the old lion grins. Have to admire the sly bastard: in his way, he’s an artist. “You see? He’s smiling! He’s pleased you’re here! Now lean forward and tell him that you accept your great responsibilities!”
2
Death is everywhere in Aesop’s dark fores
t. Asses are drowning under sodden loads, vixens are being torn to pieces by maddened dogs, swans sacrificed for the sake of their songs. Cats are eating cocks. Kites frogs. “What an unexpected treat has come our way!” they cry, descending. All have butcher’s work to do. Eagles and vixens devour each other’s young, newborn apes are murdered by their mothers, hens by serpents they themselves have hatched. Partridges, goats, doves betray their own to preying men, nannies are butchered to doctor asses. At the request of horses, boars are slaughtered: yet happiness is elusive. Snakes are driven to suicide by the stinging of wasps, elephants by gnats in their ears, hares by their own weariness, as though it were time’s way of solving difficult problems. “The moral is that it is too late to be sorry after you have let things go wrong,” the fabler explains, but the fact is it is always too late. Lambs are being devoured by wolves, mice by weasels, fawns by bears, nightingales by hawks, and all by the patient intransigent vultures. Even lions. The news of the old despot’s decline, spread by the fox, stirs ambition in some (a lot of emptyheaded people rejoice over the wrong things, needless to say), but provokes skepticism in most: with that fox things are not always what they seem, most here in the forest know that all too well, having learned from painful experience, once bitten and all that, no, seeing is believing. Not too close, though: there are a lot of bones around the cave mouth, and tracks leading up but none leading away.
3
The fabler watches the watchers watch. It is comforting to the wretched, he knows, to see others worse off than themselves. The victor vanquished, the mighty fallen—it’s a kind of narcotic, this pageant, numbing for the cowardly their common wound of mortality. The fabler envies them this easy consolation. In him, something more fundamental is dying with the dying lion, and just when he needs it most, his own death approaching inexorably and apace. Not so much the courage, no, for though his is not so lofty perhaps, being that bitter grit of the misfit, the freak, the taunted cripple, it is no less mettlesome. Not the fabled power either, far from it, he has often reveled in forcing humiliating compromise upon the old tyrant, throwing him into bad company, jamming thorns in his paws and enfeebling love in his heart, snatching him up in nets and cages to spoil his appetite with a moral lesson or two, chiding him with avarice and brutality. Sour grapes? Perhaps, especially now at life’s and wit’s end when he could use a little last-minute clout, but political power as such has never held the fabler’s fancy. Hasn’t he turned his crooked back on it all his life, abandoning the court life again and again for his dark uncivil forest? Yes, freedom has been his one desire, freedom and—and this is what the old lion’s death means to him, this is what he fears to lose, even as he’s losing it—his ruthless solitude.
As though to dramatize his sense of loss, the fox, that cartload of mischief, emerges from the cave mouth now, swaggering presumptuously, his red tail on high, a bloody heart between his jaws. Not the lion’s heart, of course—a consumptive rumble from the cave behind the charlatan attests irritably to that—yet it might as well be. That lion’s kingly roar once caused havoc at three hundred miles, women miscarried, men’s teeth fell out; now it flutters thinly from the cave mouth like wisps of dirty fleece. In the end, crushed by fortune, even the strongest become the playthings of cowards: this is the message of the dripping heart in the fox’s grinning jaws. And it enrages him. Not the message, but the grin. It is his, the fabler’s own.
4
There is a grisly tension building in the forest, he can feel it as he stalks the cave mouth, the stag’s heart in his jowls like a gag, bitter foretaste of the impending disaster. Well, foretasted, forearmed, he reminds himself with a giddiness that brings a grimace to his clamped jaws—for how does one arm himself against the sort of nightmare about to descend here? Eyes blink and glitter behind tree trunks, clumps of grass, leaves, heavy stones: in them he sees avarice, panic, vanity, distrust, lust for glory and for flesh, hatred, hope, all the fabled terrors and appetites of the mortal condition, drawn together here now for one last demented frolic. The louring forest is literally atwinkle with that madness that attends despair.
Two eyes in particular absorb his gaze: the dark squinty lopsided orbs of the little brown humpback, come to hurl himself like a clown into the final horror—for isn’t it the cripple who always wants to lead off the dance? The grotesque grotesqued. That loathsome monscrosity now huddles swarthily behind a pale boulder, hugging it as if afraid it might fly away from him, his knee-knobs stuck out like a locust’s. A turnip with teeth, he’s been fairly called, a misshapen pisspot. His hump rises behind his flapping ears like a second head, but one stripped of its senses as though struck mute and blind with terror. Or wisdom, same thing. What that snubnosed bandylegged piece of human garbage has never appreciated is how much they’re two of a kind, and how much the fraud owes him for his bloated reputation. The fox has been the butt of too many horseshit anecdotes not to have grasped a moral the fabler seems to have missed: that we ridicule in others what we most despise in ourselves.
The humpback lets go the boulder now and hops, toadlike, behind a stunted laurel. Headed this way, it seems. Can’t leave well enough alone. Or ill enough. Perhaps he dreams still of some last-minute escape from the calamity that awaits him, awaits them all in this airless stinkhole of a so-called forest. Well, if he hopes for help from the sorehead behind him, still grumbling in his tubercular senility about the missing heart (“You can stop looking, he didn’t have one,” he’d told the motheaten old geezer, talking with his mouth full, “anybody who’d come twice into a lion’s den and within reach of his paws has to be ninety percent asshole, and that’s what you just ate . . .”), then the fool’s in for a bitter experience.
5
As the fabler advances through the penumbral forest, creeping, bounding, stumbling over roots, crouching under bushes, zigging and zagging in the general direction of the lion’s den, he stirs a wide commotion. There are scurryings, flutterings, rustlings all around. Twigs pop, pebbles scatter, leaves and feathers float on the air like the tatters of muffled rumors, stifled panic, as though the forest were beset on all sides—and from within as well—by strange and unexpected dangers. Wild rumors. Hopes. Mad ambitions.
Much of this the fabler reads in all the shit he squats and tumbles in: the hard nuggets of avidity and pride, puddled funk, noisome pretense, the frantic scatter of droppings unloosed on the run in uncertainty and confusion—that eloquent text of the forest floor. He knows it well, he’s had his nose in it since the day he was born. “Has he lost something?” people would ask. “He’s like a hog rooting in mud.” He was pretending to be studying the ground, of course, in order to pretend he could straighten up if he wanted to, an impostor twice over. But out of adversity, wisdom. Once a famous Hellenic philosopher, his master in the dark days of his enslaved youth, had asked him why it was, when we shat, we so often turned around to examine our own turds, and he’d told that great sage the story of the king’s loose-living son who one day, purging his belly, passed his own wits, inducing a like fear in all men since. “But you don’t have to worry, sire,” he’d added, “you’ve no wit to shit.” Well, cost him a beating, but it was worth it, even if it was all a lie. For the real reason we look back of course is to gaze for a moment in awe and wonder at what we’ve made—it’s the closest we ever come to being at one with the gods.
Now what he reads in this analecta of turds is rampant disharmony and anxiety: it’s almost suffocating. Boundaries are breaking down: eagles are shitting with serpents, monkeys with dolphins, kites with horses, fleas with crayfish, it’s as though there were some mad violent effort here to link the unlinkable, cross impossible abysses. And there’s some dejecta he’s not sure he even recognizes. That foul mound could be the movement of a hippogriff, for example, this slime that of a basilisk or a harpy. His own bowels, convulsed by all this ripe disorder, fill suddenly with a plunging weight, as though heart, hump, and all might have just descended there: he squats hastily, breeches down (well, Zeus
sent Modesty in through the asshole, so may she exit there as well), to leave his own urgent message on the forest floor. Ah! yes! a man must put his hand to his wealth and use it, example is—grunt!—better than precept. Just so . . . But quality, not quantity. Inconsistency is harmful in everything, though no forethought, of course, can prevail against destiny. Oof! Easy. Accomplishments are not judged by speed but by completeness. With what measure you mete shall it be measured to you again, and so on. That’s better. He wipes himself with his soiled breeches, leaves them behind. Doesn’t need them here anyway. When in Delphi, as they say . . .
6
Not all here in Aesop’s troubled forest are pleased, of course, to have their miserable excrement read so explicitly. It makes many of them feel vulnerable and exposed, especially at a time when all the comforting old covenants are dissolving, and no one knows for certain who they are anymore, or who they’re supposed to fuck or eat. Can one not even take a homely shit without worrying about the consequences, they ask, are there no limits? But of course that’s just the point, there are no limits any longer, that’s the message of the old king’s desperate condition, this pointy-headed freak’s intrusion here, his frantic bare-ass bob through these dark brambly thickets at the core. Though he talks wolfy enough at times, he rarely comes this deep, skirting the edges mostly where the shepherds keep their sheep, plummeting in here only when lust or terror overtake him. What beast here wouldn’t raise its tail for the hunchback, painful as the experience can be, if that’s all it would take to resume the old peaceful carnage? But, alas, it’s plain to see it’s not rut that’s brought the fabler back—that heavy wattle he’s dragging through the pine needles and dead leaves between his crooked shanks is, by itself in its gross wilt, cause enough for panic here.
So it is that birds screech, beetles scurry, moles burrow in blind desperation, as Aesop makes his way toward the lion’s den. Stupidity, fear, deceit, carnality, treason break out in the forest like scabies. There is the sharpening of tusks, the popping of toads, breath-sucking, the casting of long shadows. Suicidal hares and frogs hurl themselves out of their element, elephants eat their own testicles, worms blind themselves so as not to see the approaching catastrophe. As Aesop reaches the cave mouth, the fox slinks aside, lips curled back, baring his teeth above the stag’s heart cradled bloodily in his paws. He snarls. Clouds of fleas, gnats, lice, mosquitos explode from foul-smelling holes in the forest floor like a sudden pestilence. Wells clog with bewildered beasts fallen they know not where. Storms rumble and winds whistle. Flames lap at an eagle’s nest. And from high in the sky, a frightened humpbacked tortoise falls.