“Wait!” he begged, gigantic tears rolling down the bumps of his temples and off his earflaps. He seemed prepared to recant at last and, though it wouldn’t save his life, right his wrongs against us before he died. We set him on his bandy legs and stepped back, blocking any possible escape. He cocked his head impudently to one side. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. Ye gods, the little freak was incorrigible. It has been wisely observed, natures remain just as they first appear. When you do a bad man a service, some sage has said, all you can hope for is that he will not add injury to ingratitude, but even this hope was to prove in vain. “There was this old farmer,” he piped, “who had never seen the city and decided to hitch up the donkeys and go see it before he died. But a storm came up and they got lost among the cliffs. ‘Oh God, what have I done to die like this,’ he wept (and here he wept mockingly), in the company of these miserable jackasses?’ ” We rushed at him, enraged at such impiety, but he stopped us again with a wild bewitching screech, lurching forward as though stabbed from behind, and we fell back, momentarily startled. “A man once fell in love with his own daughter,” he wailed as though in great pain, rolling his lopsided eyes, and pointing at all of us—what?! what was he saying? “So he shipped his old lady off to the country and forced himself on his daughter. She said, as I say to you, men of Delphi: ‘This is an unholy thing you are doing! I would rather have submitted to a hundred good men than be fucked by you!’ ” We flung ourselves at his loathsome obscenity, but before we could reach him, he hurled himself, cackling derisively, off the cliff, flapping his stunted little arms as though the fool thought he might fall up instead of down.
12
He has just, with what dignity remains, his knees weak and threatening to buckle, stepped forth from the cave mouth to confront his erstwhile citizenry, when something whistles past his ear and explodes—SPLAT!—beside him, startling him just enough to tip him over. What an irony, he muses, shrugging tortoise shell out of his ear, nearly got him before he could even get started. As it is, his jaw is back on the ground again, his paws trapped under his belly. His rear legs seemed to have held, but he is not sure what overall impression this position makes. Perhaps they will think he is crouching, preparing to spring. More likely not.
Though he cannot see them, they are all out there, he knows, all the rejected, the trod-upon, the bitten and the stung, the ridiculed, the overladen, all of God’s spittle, lusting now for this compensatory kill. The great equalizer that makes their own poor lives and deaths less odious. Let them come. He will have one last glorious fray, one final sinking of tooth and claw into palpating flesh and gut, a great screaming music of rage and terror, before he dies. If he can just get his feet under him again. How was it he used to do that? He can feel his rump begin to sway, can hear them start to shift and mumble in the clearing down below. His aide-de-camp has slipped out of sight, of course. He has instructed the fox on how to kill him quickly when the time comes, when he’s too weak to fight on. He doesn’t want to die slowly, or ignobly. Or seem to. He has appealed to the fox’s own ambition: let the opposition cut itself up, and then, when he gets the nod, move in as the decisive and heroic liberator. The wily bastard actually seemed moved: perhaps there’s hope for him yet.
The sullen hesitant hush is shattered suddenly by another long shrieking whine from the intransigent magpie. “They who hesitate—SCRAWKK!—flourish only for an omen—hrreet!—MOMENT!”
And, just as his rump tips and smacks the ground, they are on him: wolves, boars, apes, moles, toads, dancing camels, plucked daws, serpents, spiders, snails, incestuous cocks and shamming cats, hares, asses, bats, bears, swarms of tongueless gnats, fleas, flies and murderous wasps, bears, beavers, doves, martins, lice and dungbeetles, mice and weasels, owls, crabs, and goats, hedgehogs and ticks, kites, frogs, peacocks and locusts, all the fabled denizens of the forest, all intent on electing him into the great democracy of the dead. A boar wounds him with a blow from its flashing tusks as he sprawls there, paws high, a bull gores him in the belly, a mosquito stings his nose, a cowardly ass kicks him in the forehead.
But even as they convene upon his body, something stirs in the enfeebled lion, something like joy or pride or even love. The rage of. His battered head rears and roars, his pierced muscles flex, his blunted teeth and claws find flesh to rend, bones to crush. The air is thick suddenly with blood and feathers and smashed carapaces, shrieks and howls, mighty thrashings about. He even, for a splendid moment, feels young again, that renowned warrior of old, king of the beasts. He no longer knows which animals he’s embracing in this final exaltation—one eye is gone, the other clouded, an ear is clogged with bees, his hide’s in tatters—but it doesn’t matter. It is life itself he is clutching bloodily to his breast in this, his last delicious moment on earth, and it’s the most fun he’s had since he sneezed a cat.
But then, through the flurry of beaks and antlers and the blood in his eye, he sees the fox skulking toward him, head ducked, an insolent smirk on his skinny face. “No, wait!” he roars. “Not yet!” But he should have known better, take pity on such a creature, you get what you deserve. And what he gets is, too soon, oh much too soon, the treacherous villain at his throat. “You fool!” he gasps, while he’s still voice left. “I can’t help it,” snickers the miserable wretch, nuzzling in. “It’s just my—hee hee!—nature . . .” With a final swipe of his paw (he is being invaded from below, he knows, a seeding of teeth in his plowed-up nether parts as though to found a city there, but it has ceased to matter), he slashes the fox open from heart to groin, then hugs him close, locking his jaws around his nape, their organs mingling like scrambled morals. “It’s all shit anyway,” he seems to hear the devil grunt as his spine snaps—one final treachery! He feels then as though he’s falling, and he only wishes, hanging on as the light dies and the earth spins, that his friend the fabler were here to whisper in his ear, the one without the bees in it, one last word, not so much of wisdom, as of communion. Just so . . . What? What? “SKWWAARRRK!” replies the magpie, as the forest extinguishes itself around him.
CARTOON
(1987)
The cartoon man drives his cartoon car into the cartoon town and runs over a real man. The real man is not badly hurt—the cartoon car is virtually weightless after all, it’s hardly any worse than getting a cut lip from licking an envelope—but the real man feels that a wrong has nevertheless been done him, so he goes in search of a policeman. There are no real policemen around, so he takes his complaint to a cartoon policeman. The cartoon policeman salutes him briskly and, almost without turning around, darts off in the direction of the accident, but the real man is disconcerted by the way the policeman hurries along about four inches above the pavement, taking five or six airy steps for every one of his own and blowing his whistle ceaselessly. It’s as though they were walking side by side down two different streets. The cartoon town, meanwhile, slides past silently, more or less on its own.
At the scene of the accident, they find the cartoon man with a real policeman. The cartoon car is resting on its roof, looking ill and abused. “Is this the one?” demands the real policeman, pointing with his nightstick. The cartoon man jumps up and down and makes high-pitched incriminating noises, the car snorting and whimpering pathetically in the background. When the cartoon policeman blows his whistle in protest, or perhaps just out of habit, a huge cartoon dog, larger than the cartoon car, bounds onto the scene and chases him off. “You’ll have to come with me,” announces the real policeman severely, collaring the real man, and he can hear the cartoon car snickering wickedly. “There are procedural matters involved here!”
As though in enactment of this pronouncement, the huge cartoon dog comes lumbering through again from the opposite direction, chased now by a real cat, the cat in turn chased by a cartoon woman. The woman pulls up short upon spying the real policeman, who has meanwhile shot the cat (this is both probable and confounding), and, winking at the real man, bares her breasts for the policeman. These
breasts are nearly as large as the woman herself, and they have nipples on them that turn sequentially into pursed lips, dripping spigots, traffic lights, beckoning fingers, then lit-up pinball bumpers. The real policeman is not completely real, after all. He has cartoon eyes that stretch out of their sockets like paired erections, locking on the cartoon woman’s breasts with their fanciful nipples. She takes her breasts off and gives them to the real policeman, and he creeps furtively away, clutching the gift closely like a fearful secret, his eyes retracting deep into his skull as though to empty it of its own realness, what’s left of it.
“Thank you,” says the real man. “You have probably saved my life.” He can hear the cartoon car sniggering and wheezing at this, but the cartoon woman simply shrugs and remarks enigmatically: “Plenty more where those came from.” She snuggles up to the huge cartoon dog, who has returned and is pawing curiously at the cadaver of the real cat. “I feel somehow,” murmurs the dog, sniffing the cat’s private parts, “a certain inexplicable anxiety.” The cartoon car hoots and wheezes mockingly again, and the dog, annoyed, lifts its leg over it. There is a violent hissing and popping, and then the car is silent. The cartoon man is infuriated at this, squeaking and yipping and beating his fists on the cartoon dog and the cartoon woman. They ignore him, cuddling up once more, the dog panting heavily after exerting himself, both mentally and physically, the woman erotically touching the dog’s huge floppy tongue with the tip of her own (she has a real mouth, the real man notices, and the touch of her tiny round tongue against the vast pink landscape of the dog’s flat one for some reason makes him want to cry), so the cartoon man scurries over to beat on the real man. It is not so much painful as vaguely unnerving, as though he were being nagged to remember something he had managed to forget.
The cartoon woman drifts off with the cartoon dog (“When,” the dog is musing, scratching philosophically behind his ear, “is a flea not a flea?”), and the cartoon man, his rage spent, walks over to pick up the dead cat. As the cartoon man walks away, he seems to grow, and when he returns, dragging the dead cat by its tail, he seems to shrink again. He gives the real man a huge cartoon knife, produced as if from nowhere, then dashes off, returning almost instantly with a cartoon table, tablecloth, napkins, plates and silverware, a candelabra, and two cartoon chairs: before these things can even be counted, they are already set in place. His voice makes shrill little speeded-up noises once more, which seem to suggest he wants the real man to cut the cat up for dinner. He zips away again, returning with cartoon salad, steak sauce, and cartoon wine, then streaks off to a cartoon bakery.
Who knows? thinks the real man, tucking in his napkin, all this may be in fulfillment of yet another local ordinance, so more out of respect than appetite, he prepares to cut up the dead cat. When he lays the cat out on the cartoon table, however, all the cartoon plates and silverware, condiments and candelabra leap off the table and run away shrieking, or else laughing, it’s hard to tell, and though the table looks horizontal, the cat slides right off it. Oh well, the real man sighs to himself, dropping the knife disconsolately on the table as though paying the check, they can’t say I didn’t try. He goes over to the cartoon car and sets it on its wheels again and, after a puddle has formed beneath it, gets inside and starts up the motor. Or rather, the motor starts up by itself, choking and sputtering at first and making loud flatulent noises out its exhaust pipes, then clearing its throat and revving up, eventually humming along smoothly. The cartoon town meanwhile slides by as before.
When they reach the real town, or when the real town, the one where the real man lives, reaches them, the cartoon car doesn’t seem to work anymore. The man finds he has to push his feet through the floor and walk it home, much to the apparent amusement of all the real or mostly real passersby. He is reminded of the time when, as a boy, he found himself looking up at his teacher, hovering over him with a humorless smile, wielding a wooden ruler (he thinks of her in retrospect as a cartoon teacher, but he could be mistaken about this—certainly the ruler was real), and accusing him, somewhat mysteriously, of “failing his interpolations.” “What?” he’d asked, much to his immediate regret, a regret he strangely feels again now, as if he were suffering some kind of spontaneous reenactment, and it suddenly occurs to him, as he walks his cartoon car miserably down the middle of the street through all the roaring real ones, that, yes, the teacher was almost certainly real—but her accusation was a cartoon.
At home he shows his wife, lying listlessly on the sofa, the cartoon car, now no bigger than the palm of his hand, and tells her about his adventures. “It’s like being the butt of a joke without a teller or something,” he says, casting about for explanations, when, in reality, there probably are none. “I know,” she replies with a certain weary bitterness. She lifts her skirts and shows him the cartoon man. “He’s been there all day.” The cartoon man smirks up at him over his shoulder, making exaggerated under-cranked thrusts with his tiny cartoon buttocks, powder white with red spots like a clown’s cheeks. “Is he . . . he hurting you?” the real man gasps. “No, it just makes me jittery. It’s sort of like cutting your lip on the edge of an envelope,” she adds with a grimace, letting her skirt drop, “if you know what I mean.”
“Ah . . .” He too feels a stinging somewhere, though perhaps only in his reflections. Distantly, he hears a policeman’s whistle, momentarily persuasive, but he knows this is no solution, real or otherwise. It would be like scratching an itch with legislation or an analogy—something that cartoon dog might have said and perhaps did, he wasn’t listening all the time. No, one tries, but it’s never enough. With a heavy heart (what a universe!), he goes into the bathroom to flush the cartoon car down the toilet and discovers, glancing in the mirror, that, above the cartoon napkin still tucked into his collar like a lolling tongue, he seems to have grown a pair of cartoon ears. They stick out from the sides of his head like butterfly wings. Well, well, he thinks, wagging his new ears animatedly, or perhaps being wagged by them, there’s hope for me yet . . .
TOP HAT
(1987)
Uniformed men move in a dark choral mass at the foot of an iron tower under unlit lamps, their top hats squared, their shadowed faces anonymous and interchangeable. They suggest power without themselves possessing it, moving with ceremonial precision, otherwise silent, their secret motives concealed. They seem to want their walking sticks, carried like emblems of the elect, to speak for them.
Suddenly their decorum is shattered, as out of the vanishing point of the night a new figure emerges, strolling jauntily into their midst as though a door were being opened, light thrown, a die cast: they all fall back. At first glance, he might seem to be one of their own: he too wears top hat and tails, white tie, spats, carries a stick. But he is dressed like them and not like them: the top hat is tilted defiantly over one ear, the walking stick twirls like a vulgar unriddling of sacrament, his lapels are pulled back to show more of his snowy white breast by a hand flicking in and out of his pants pocket like a lizard’s tongue. He is unmistakably (his face is lit up with an open disarming grin, he is a loner and extravagant and his grip is firm) an outsider here. And he means to offend.
The others close ranks behind him as though to seal a wound, watch him apprehensively. Perhaps he is one of them, as yet unformed. Is this possible? As though in reply, that frisky hand takes another dip, emerges this time with a scrap of paper: “I’ve just got an invitation through the mail,” he crows, wagging the paper about like a press release. They lean on their sticks, studying this strutting intruder: perhaps they find heresy momentarily fascinating. Perhaps this is a weakness. “Your presence requested this evening, it’s formal, top hat, white tie, and tails!” He has been slapping the paper with his walking stick as though it were a sales pitch, a sermon, a writ, but now he wads it up and impiously—the men behind him stiffen, their walking sticks gripped tightly between their legs—tosses it away. Credentials? Hey, who needs them? He twirls his stick and swaggers up and down in front
of them, grinningly mocking their vestments, their rituals, their very raison d’être, as the natives might say. “And I trust you’ll excuse my dust when I step on the gas!” he laughs, beating back their tentative lockstep challenge with a cocky, limbs-akimbo reply of his own.
There is an indignant bang of walking sticks bringing him to a halt. He hesitates, then shrugs as though to say, oh well, when in Rome (if that’s where he is), even if they’re crazy—and (maybe, deep down, this is what he truly wants, it’s not much fun being a loner in this world, after all, even if you are number one) joins the others in a formal strut. But not for long. He just doesn’t fit in somehow. They turn away, perhaps to lead him back where he came from, but he’s in no mood to go home yet. Not like this. He follows them for a step or two, but then, as though overcoming temptation (all social forms are conspiracies in the end, are they not?), breaks away and, shoulders bobbing and hips swiveling, lets them know who he really is. He drums it out loud and clear with stick, heels, and toes, all four limbs rapping away at once, then plants the walking stick as though claiming turf. They watch impassively, their own sticks discreetly concealed. He restates his dissent, even more emphatically, elbows out and pumping as though he might be trying to take off.
He pauses. Has he won his case? He looks back over his shoulder. No, they are not even impressed. They repeat his sequence, but staidly and en masse. It’s a kind of reprimand: the movement is possible, technically anyway, but unbridled egoism is not. He insists, throwing himself into ever more unorthodox convulsions, his walking stick flicking around his head like a cracked whip. He is incorrigible. A barbarian, a peacock. He does not even seem completely white. They leave him.