The Cry of the Sloth

  Your neighbor,

  Andrew Whittaker.

  ¶

  Dear Harold,

  Thanks for your letter; it was so very friendly. I too would like to have a regular correspondence. You must have read between the lines of my letter that I am really not well. It’s not just the chest; I am finding the house in which I am now living to be very oppressive, especially when it rains, as it has been doing practically nonstop for days, especially when it is untidy and cluttered, as it inevitably is, for reasons I can’t get to the bottom of, since I seem to be always cleaning. It’s not the rain itself so much as the silence the rain brings with it, the way the sound of the rain on the roof and windows makes the quiet inside the house so much more noticeable, perhaps because it drowns out the little noises I otherwise make, the padding of bare feet on the floor, the scratching of a pen, an occasional gentle clearing of the throat. I think of you and your work outdoors with plants and animals, and I am horribly envious. I lie on my back on the floor, looking up at the ceiling for leaks, and I think of you bouncing across the furrows on a tractor. I suppose it is often sunny down there. I have been working on a new story, set in the Wisconsin farm country (where I have never actually been), and it would be great if you could answer some technical questions now and then. Maybe I could even come down for a short visit, get a feeling for farm life. Your family sounds wonderful, and I am very fond of animals, especially baby donkeys.

  I have decided to move out of my house into a smaller place, where there will be less room for ghosts, and I have been packing things into boxes. I have a regular wall of boxes stacked in the living room. I can scarcely see out the front windows anymore. In the evening, when the light through the rain-streaked panes has softened the edges of the boxes, they look like sandbags, and I have the comfortable feeling of being fortified. I have closed off the dining room, since it’s jam full of stuff I brought up from the basement, and the hall is almost full as well. There is a hemmed-in feeling to the house now. Fortified, or hemmed in—it’s difficult to know what one feels nowadays. Packing the books has been particularly slow, because I keep finding ones I had forgotten I owned, and I end up sitting on the floor reading, my quiet breath and the occasional scrape of a turning page drowned, as I mentioned, by the constant susurration of the rain.

  Among those forgotten books, I discovered a huge encyclopedia of mammals, which Jolie must have bought years ago when she imagined she could write stories for children with animals in them, with animals in the stories. Or perhaps it descends from my father, who was fond of animals, especially dogs. My mother, who is still alive, says he had always wanted me to become a veterinarian and was disappointed when I decided to major in English, though I don’t remember him ever saying anything about that to me. Right now, the life of a busy veterinarian strikes me as quite interesting and desirable, as something I might have striven for had it occurred to me.

  I must never have looked at the book before. You can’t imagine how many animals there are that almost no one has ever heard of—sportive lemurs, needle-clawed bush babies, warty pigs, oriental spiny rats, punctated grass-mice, golden-rumped elephant shrews, and fairy armadillos, to pick a few at random. Such fabulous names—it’s obvious that among those creeping around in the jungle in pith helmets were at least a few mad poets. And what do you know about the ai? Next to nothing, I imagine. So you’ll be surprised to learn, as I just have, that it is a variety of three-toed sloth, even though it has, in fact, three fingers. For some reason the early naturalists were quite confused when it came to fingers and toes. This seems to me odd; are you ever confused about them? I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that they wore gloves, the naturalists, I mean, in those days often wore gloves. All sloths have three toes. As for fingers, some have two and some have three. The ai (Bradypus torquatus) has three of each, that is, six at each end of it, evenly divided. It moves so slowly and hangs out (literally) in such damp leafy places that green algae grows on its fur. As has happened to me during the current monsoon, or so it seems. There is mildew on everything, and I myself am feeling quite mossy in spots. As for inactivity, I don’t think I’ve moved two hundred yards in the past two days. Where would I move to, with the rain coming down as if for Noah’s flood? The sloth is, I suppose, the only green mammal. That’s odd when you think about it, considering how many green creatures there are otherwise, grasshoppers and frogs, for example. The green coloration is thought to help it hide from predators; from jaguars, I suppose, who must mistake it for a pile of leaves. The resourceful animal is, furthermore, alleged to breed colonies of “cockroach-like moths” in its green fur, though to what useful purpose the book doesn’t let on. Nor do I get a clear picture of those little creatures—I can’t imagine a less cockroach-like insect than a moth. I have not personally, even during the worst of my pluvial solitude, bred any of those, though I did a few nights ago find something awful crawling inside my pajama shirt. I had turned off the light and had just lain down on the bed. I always begin the night on my back, because it’s a yogic principle, and also lately because of the noise in my chest, which seems to become less intense in that position, or maybe just less audible, due to the soft pillow folding up around my ears. Though the creature must have been in there ever since my shower an hour earlier, it only began moving about when it found itself being crushed between my back and the mattress. It possessed, as I could tell from the texture of its walk, little spines along the backs of its legs. It was like being stabbed with rows of needles. I of course sprang up and tore off the shirt, pulling it violently off over my head. In the process I inadvertently flung the creature across the room—it struck the wall with a loud tick. It was quite dead when I found it in the morning; a large black beetle.

  During the past several months I have moved my bowels once every day with clockwork regularity. I mention this because the ai shits and pisses only once a week—a remarkable achievement for what seems otherwise a rather stupid animal. It does it at the base of its tree. It feeds on leaves and pawpaws. Studying the photos in my book, however, it seems to me its head is too small for its body, and not just because it appears to have no ears. We seem to have here a violation of some sort of universal law of proportions. Curiously, this is something I have thought about myself as well, that my head seems to be less than normal size. Did I never tell you that? I am not the only one to have thought this. At school they called me BB head. My head is, in fact, not exceptionally small, or only slightly smaller than the norm, as I have verified with statistics at my doctor’s. Do you remember it as being smaller than the norm? It only looks that way because my neck is unusually large, and in the absence of contrast the head appears smaller. A simple case of optical illusion. Nevertheless, I’m still self-conscious in this regard—the wounds of childhood never really heal, do they? I prefer winter for that reason, as it permits me to hide my neck in two turns of woolen scarf. Did you ever notice this about me?

  You are thinking, aren’t you, how he does go on? And you are right, for I have not yet disposed of the ai. Perhaps you are not interested. Fortunately for me I can’t discern that from here. Poor Harold, you were always such a wonderful listener. In college I made jokes about the “agricultural engineer” I had for a roommate, amusing my friends with tales of your ineptness and bucolic ignorance, and your comical mispronunciations of unusual words. I still smile when I think how you would accent “plethora” and “amorous” on the second syllable. Marcus Quiller and I used to compete to see which of us could maneuver you into saying one of them in conversation. While in fact just being able to sit on my bed at night, and talk, and have you, in your bed, listen, were among the happiest moments of my college years, the only moments in which I felt I could be myself. I am sorry about the jokes now, perhaps because I have a feeling something similar is happening to me.

  The ai (pronounced “I”) gets its name from the Portuguese in imitation of the whistling sound the baby of the species makes through its nostrils when it
fears it has been abandoned by its mother. “Aie,” as you might know, is also the sound a French person makes when slightly wounded, equivalent to the English “ow.” Isn’t it wonderful how even something as natural as a cry of pain requires a listing in the dictionary? I was thinking someone should do a little booklet containing a list of those words from all the languages of the world, An International Dictionary of Pain. I think I’ll do that next. Meanwhile, I have been practicing, and I believe I have learned to do a pretty good imitation of the sloth’s cry. I place my thumbs firmly against the openings of my nostrils, blocking them completely. I then give a vigorous snort and at the same time fling both thumbs away from the nostrils in a decisive forward motion. The result is a woofling whistle which I imagine is quite close to what a young ai must sound like. I did it at the post office the other day when the clerk told me I had insufficient postage on my package. She was a mousy creature, so you can imagine the effect when I flung my thumbs from my nose in her direction and fired that noise at her. I could hear them all buzzing behind me as I was leaving the building. In the future I’ll always use this device when I want to express contempt, though that’s probably not what the baby ai does with it. Do your children imitate barnyard animals or is that something only city children do?

  I see this letter is much too long. I wonder if you are still reading. Maybe you got fed up halfway through, and all this time I’ve been talking to nobody. Imagine a man in a room talking about himself, perhaps in a very boring way, while looking down at the floor. And while he goes on with his monologue, which as I said is of interest only to himself, one by one the other people in the room tiptoe away until he is all alone, the last one shutting the door silently behind him. Finally the man looks up and sees what has happened, and of course he is overcome by feelings of ridicule and shame. Maybe this letter is now at the bottom of your wastepaper basket, a tiny trivial voice in the depths of a tin well, rattling on and on. Is your wastepaper basket made of tin? How unbearably sad. If you have come with me this far, I want to say that I appreciate your company, and also your letters, and would like to have more of those, if you feel like writing again.

  Andy

  ¶

  Dear Mr. Watts,

  I did receive the notice about the trash. I do understand that you cannot gather up any items that are not bagged, binned, or otherwise confined in approved receptacles. And yes, I am aware that this has happened before. I do not, however, feel that this justifies your use of the phrase “repeat offender.” Each time it has happened I have gone over there myself and picked it all up. If you drive by now you will find more than a sufficient number of trash cans; three, to be exact, unless one has been stolen already. It is really not my fault that they don’t use them.

  Sincerely.

  Andrew Whittaker

  ¶

  Ahoy, Willy,

  I have had no word from you about the April thing. I know it has been less than three weeks since I wrote, but I had assumed you would jump at the chance for that kind of exposure. Maybe your teaching job lets you feel secure enough that you can turn your back on the larger public, and even your old friends, if that’s what you are doing. I envy you the luxury of both. I myself have to descend every day into the pit and battle for a living, and I have been cursed with a dogged loyalty to anyone who has ever given me a pat on the head or a shake to my furry paw. After a month of tropical heat, it has been raining here for weeks. The newspaper is full of pictures of flooded farms. I am getting quite moldy. Moldy and morose. Morose and wondering why I am not hearing from Willy. I have at last begun work on the big novel I had been putting off for so long. I have bided my time, I have practiced my craft, I have collected experiences. And now the words are coming out perfect; I excrete them almost without effort. They land on the page and stay there. I envisage an oddly musical structure: a groaning basso profundo of despair broken by burlesque interludes and periodic shrieks of hysteria. I am especially fond of the shrieks—they strike me as just so typical. I think by next April I’ll have enough to be able to read a chapter or two at the gala. A lot of people around here have got used to thinking that I’ll never produce anything, and so that’s sure to make a splash.

  Along with the novel, which is the really important thing, I have in the works a very funny parody of that bastard Troy Sokal, set in Wisconsin farm country, same place he puts his novels. Until you’ve tried it you can’t imagine how hard it is to write badly well. And I have ideas for a series of prose poems, little existential parables of tedium and despair, set in Africa probably.

  I’d like to tell you more about everything, especially about what the last couple of years have been like, but right now my brand-new maid is turning the house upside down around my ears. I requested an experienced cleaning woman and they sent me a Mexican girl who has to ask how to turn on the vacuum. Charmingly shy, but a little too Aztec for my taste. From the neck down, though, she’s what people used to call a tomato.

  Let me hear from you soon, as I’ll have to invite someone else if you really can’t make it.

  All the best,

  Andy

  ¶

  Dear Peg,

  Thank you for your note. I was already aware that I was a great disappointment to Papa and that you were a little princess. You are so disagreeable that I am sorry I ever wrote. Prior to reading your charming note, with its references to my intellectual capacities and my physique, there existed a large number of delightful pictures of you at all stages of childhood, including one on a pony. If you’d like me to send you a box with all the itty-bitty pieces, just let me know.

  Your brother,

  Andy

  ¶

  The scene: a wide river, sluggish, muddy, some kind of estuary. It is in Africa probably. On both sides of the river, or estuary, a sandy desert stretches away as far as the eye can see. No trees, not even palm trees, dot the landscape. In the beginning, a group of children, boys and girls, dressed in sailor suits and pinafores, are playing, or attempting to play, in the sand. But the sand is extremely fine and dry, almost a dry powder, and they are able to construct only formless piles like anthills. In the face of repeated failures, sweating in their city clothes, the children become quarrelsome and listless, some one and some the other, the quarrelsome ones striking the listless ones sharply in the face or dumping handfuls of hot sand down their shirts, the listless ones lying down in the sand, weeping softly. (They will remember this later.) The grown-ups, meanwhile, men and women whose children these presumably are, also dressed in dark city clothes, the men with top hats and canes, the women with parasols and bustles and exaggerated bosoms, stand in little clusters on the bank, cluster in little stands there, like trees in a landscape without any, and discuss whether the darkish things they see far out in the river are logs, almost submerged after months in the water, or crocodiles. The discussion is tedious, anfractuous, inconclusive. In their heart of hearts, they all, adults and children, would like just to dive in and get it over with.

  ¶

  Dear Anita,

  What a terrible misunderstanding. I feel like a complete fool. You can well believe I had no idea you and Rick were back together. But if that’s really what you want, what can I do except wish you both all the best? I had meant to write a letter of tender reminiscence about a time that I foolishly thought was important to us both. It hurts me that you say it made you feel pawed. I’ll not write again.

  Andy

  ¶

  paint thinner

  tile mastic

  ant poison

  garbage can

  interior white

  I write like my mother

  post office

  light bill

  courthouse

  pills

  stay home

  read

  go somewhere

  so. comfort

  food

  ¶

  Dear Dahlberg,

  First you accuse me of rejecting your work out of anti-Canadian
prejudice, and now you tell me that thanks to being published in Soap you were finally able to get laid. What do you expect me to do with this information?

  Andy

  ¶

  GET READY TO BOAST TO YOUR FRIENDS! 125 S. Spalding St. Three-story five-unit traditional style bldng. Two units available. Each unit 2 bdrm 1 bath. Distinctive arched doorways. Some new wndows. New paint last year. Conveniently located in quiet neighborhood near Interstate. Lighted parking. LIVE FIRST MONTH RENT FREE wth 1 yr lease. $110 + utils.

  ¶

  Dear Jolie,

  I have been having some kind of trouble with my eyes. They are bloodshot, and the slightest glare is painful. It seems to me the whites have acquired a yellow cast that makes me look like a drunk.

  *

  The sun has finally reappeared, having used its two weeks absence to move farther to the south than when we last saw it. With the elm tree gone, there is now nothing to prevent it blazing in through the living room windows for the better part of the day. See above.

  *

  I don’t talk to anyone for days on end. At the grocery store this morning, when I reached the checkout counter and asked the girl for a pack of cigarettes, my voice cracked. I tried to make a joke about it, but she backed away. So I just left.