Glyph (14 page)

I stopped swinging my pick and looked at him.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m trying to remove this stump,” I said.

“See, I got the reply my question desired. If I hadn’t asked, then I would not have gotten that response.”

I said, “What if I said, ‘Just don’t stand there like a lump. Can’t you see I’m trying to remove this stump?”’

He ignored my statement and I began again to swing the pick, throwing dirt high into the air. Very high into the air.

“For example,” he said, “when Joseph says to Mary, ‘I love you,’ he’s seeking in return the same message, ‘I love you,’ only with the referents of the pronouns reversed.”

“Then, I suppose the same is true when she says it to him,” I said, still swinging.

“Precisely.”

“That could go on all day. What if he says, ‘Tell the truth, Mary, who really knocked you up?”’

One midmorning, when the sky outside my barred window was overcast and dingy, Madam Nanna presented me with a stack of books. Nine, to be precise. They ranged from a textbook in fluid dynamics to a handbook of popular astrology to Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus.
She put them into the crib with me, then sat in the rocker and rocked and watched and rocked. I finished reading the first of the books and closed it. I hadn’t noticed before, but Madam Nanna was timing me. I saw her glance at her watch.

There was a knock at the door and Madam Nanna got up and went to it. She opened it a crack and then disappeared into the hallway. I didn’t get the briefest glimpse of whoever was there, but I heard his deep voice. I heard him say, “Fantastic!” and then he said, “How long?” And then he said, “All right.”

Madam Nanna came back into the room all smiles and just sat in the rocker.

I gestured that I needed some paper and a pencil and she got up and supplied them.

Are you going to tell me what’s going on?

“Don’t you like the way Nanna is caring for you?”

Frankly, no.

“Don’t you like the books?”

I looked at the books, then around the room, then through my window outside.

Take me outside.

“That can be arranged.”

For whom do you work?

Madam Nanna just laughed and gave my head a pat.

No Place for a Pig

Paisley Porkstein and his sisters Peggy, Polly, and Penelope Porkstein rode in the bed of a pink pickup. They were being transported from Paul’s Porkorama in Pomona to the Big Pig Pavilion in Palisades.

While the pickup pressed on along the parkway, Paisley Porkstein poked his head up and said, “I’m feeling piggy? What’s to eat?”

Peggy Porkstein, whose plaid panties peeked from beneath her putrid purple skirt said, “Pipe down, pipsqueak.”

But Paisley Porkstein paid her no mind. He looked at his plain little sister, Penelope Porkstein, and asked, “Wouldn’t a portion of porridge dispatch the emptiness in your potbelly?”

“Not another peep,” cried Polly Porkstein, pulling up her pedal pushers.

Paisley Porkstein peered at the procession of pickups traveling parallel to them. He pointed and said, “That pickup is packed with pecks of peaches, pecans, and pears. If only I could reach over and pluck one.”

“Not possible,” said Peggy Porkstein. “Besides, that would be pilfering.”

“Precisely,” said Polly. “The police might plug you for swiping a pear.”

Paisley Porkstein was positive though that pilfering one peach or pear or pecan from the pickup would not hurt. And when the pickups were packed tight in traffic, he pushed out his pig paw toward the pecks of produce.

“Please, pull back,” little plain Penelope Porkstein pleaded, perceiving peril.

But Paisley Porkstein persisted, pushing and pressing his pig fingers while his plump piggy toes held to the pink edge of his own pickup, the prospect of the peach and its principal parts pleasing his popping eyes.

Penelope Porkstein pulled on her ponytail, she was so nervous. Polly Porkstein pounded her fist against the truck, trying to persuade her paunchy brother to pull back. Peggy Porkstein pouted and called her brother “pigheaded.”

Paisley Porkstein pondered pulling back to pacify his sisters, but the other pickup pitched toward them and Paisley Porkstein saw it as his portal of opportunity and pounced with purpose on a peach. “I told you I would prevail, you pooh-pooher,” said the prankish porker. “I now possess a peach.”

Paisley Porkstein plied the peach from the pile and then plopped, with preterminal ponderings, to the pavement. The pig was about to panic as pickups and Plymouths and Peugeots passed by on the parkway, but the pungent perfume of the peach calmed him down.

Paisley Porkstein peered ahead to see Peggy and Polly and Penelope Porkstein disappear in the pink pickup from Paul’s Porkorama.

The paunchy pig then picked a path through the pickups and panel trucks and Pontiacs until his plumpness was panting at the shoulder of the parkway. “Phew!” he said. “Not a pretty picture.” Paisley Porkstein pondered his pitiful plight. “A particularly putrid predicament and all I got was this piddly peach. This is the pits.”

Paisly Porkstein looked at the parkway and then at the roadside and saw it was planted with portulaca and pennyworts and periwinkle and he thought, “How pretty.”

Then a pleasant pair of people in a puce Packard paused at the side of the parkway to peruse the put-upon pig. “This is no place for a pig,” the pleasant female person said.

“Positively not,” said the pleasant male person, whose potbelly protruded much in the manner of Paisley Porkstein’s.

Paisley Porkstein presented the man with the pit of his peach and said, “What’s to eat?”

“Perhaps we should take this porker home,” the woman said. “He’s positively precious.”

“Perhaps,” the man said. “He has no poncho and I sense precipitation. Let’s transport him to our pad.”

And so the pleasant people took the pathetic pig, one Paisley Porkstein, to their palace by the Pacific, which for the potbellied porker turned out to be paradise.

If I make a noise in the woods and there is no one around to hear it, am I real? How could I make a noise if I were not real? Is the noise real? Can the unreal me make a real noise? Can the real me make an unreal noise? Can the real me make any noise at all? Can there be an unreal thought? Can I prove there is a god by kicking a large stone? Have I written myself into existence or have I doomed myself to an unreal fictional planet? Am I Ralph or
Ralph?

Suppose a cantilever beam of length
Q
and that it has one end built into a wall, while the other end is merely supported. If the beam has a weight of
R
pounds per unit length, its deflection
y
at distance
x
from the built-in terminal satisfies the equation

where
T
and
A
are constants hinging on the material of the beam and the configuration of its cross section. How far from the built-in terminal does the maximum deflection occur?

Not only did Madam Nanna take me outside into the sunlight and fresh air, but she took me into the world. I was strapped helplessly into a buggy and pushed along the small, but bustling rues of whatever sleepy little town I was being held near. What Madam didn’t know was that I had spent most of the previous night not reading, but writing note after note that read more or less the same:

Help me! I am a kidnapped baby and this woman is not my mother. We have no relationship beyond captor and captive. Please get help.

At every opportunity, and they were numerous, I would slip a note to someone. People kept leaning over my buggy and making faces while coming close to tickle my chin with index fingers. I watched Madam Nanna and when she looked away I slipped a note into a hand. And to a person, each would brazenly open the message in plain view of the Madam and read it aloud. Madam Nanna appeared unbothered by the whole business and would simply share a laugh with them. “His older brother,” she would say, shaking her head.

A couple of people, however, though they didn’t seem to grow suspicious of Madam Nanna, did display discernible discomfort with me. We strolled on; she began to whistle as I slipped into what I think was my first depression.

The geometry of this text is more than metaphorical. This I say so that the reader will understand the direct spatial implications of the work. I
want
the reader to trouble herself over structural analysis. I want there to be questions about orientation and location,
dispositio
and
locus, praeceptum
and
datum.
The shortest distance between two meanings is a straight ambiguity. There are prime signs that are divisible by only themselves and one.

His name was Billy Joe Bob Roy, Colonel Billy Joe Bob Roy, and he was commading officer of the Division of Exploitation of Potentially and Reportedly Trainable Mentally Exceptional Neophytic Tikes, DEPARTMENT Department of the Pentagon, reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President of the United States. Colonel Bill Roy wore on his chest all two hundred sixteen Purple Hearts he had been awarded while “fighting the yellow threat” in Vietnam. The Colonel listed to one side because of his medals and both moved and talked as if he had experienced a mild stroke. The mission of the DEPARTMENT Department was to detect, isolate, convert, and exploit any gifted individual, especially children for service to the armed forces of the United States of America.

Colonel Bill Roy was six-feet-three-inches tall and broad in the shoulders. His shoes were shined to distraction and he wore glasses with dark, reflective lenses indoors and out. Colonel Bill flew his own F-5E Phantom II jet all over the country and had once received a reprimand for buzzing the tower at O’Hare. Now his fighter jet was parked in a hanger at March Air Force Base outside Riverside, California. From March he had taken a spanking new olive green “Hummer,” driven north to Carmel where he and his team, the Tike Evaluation and Manipulation team, the TEAM team, had set up shop in the abandoned offices of a failed investment firm. The TEAM team of the DEPARTMENT Department worked around the clock tracking down leads and determining whether certain children were worth a commitment of government resources and time.

Colonel Bill never slept. Colonel Bill took his clothes off only once a day, to shower, and then put on a clean uniform. He did push-ups, sit-ups, and chin-ups in his uniform. He ran three miles and then swam six laps in his uniform just before his shower. Colonel Bill always held a pipe clenched between his very white teeth. Colonel Bill had a booming voice and he whistled his s’s.

“How’s the subject, Nanna?” Colonel Bill asked. He moved his pipe from the left side of his mouth to the right.

“He’s coming along,” said Nanna. “I think he’s the one. He’s truly gifted.”

Colonel Bill nodded. “How long?”

“I can’t say yet. He’s resistant, but I’ve got him confused. He’s terribly bright, but at least he’s physically helpless. Sleep deprivation won’t work, since he doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t care much about food. He loves books. He reads everything and he’s very critical. He will not be easily tricked.”

Colonel Bill had lowered himself to the floor and was doing push-ups. “Sounds like you’ve got things pretty well under control.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Are you going to want to see the subject soon?”

“You decide. Thirty-three. I think we should take it slow, as planned. You get him dependent on you and then we work him.”

To scribble is to produce a mark that will constitute a kind of fuzzy mess that is in turn productive in the way of constructing obscurity, that my future dissipation in principle will not deflect from operating and from capitulating, and capitulating itself to scribbling and deciphering. For the scribble to be scribbled, it must continue to function and to be a fuzzy mess even if that creature called the author no longer receives blame or credit for what is scribbled, for what he appears to have marked, whether he is conditionally truant, or if the victim of self-inflicted death, or if in general he fails to brace,
avec
his unequivocally rampant and fashionable design or regard, the repletion and amplitude of his signification, of that very thing which appears to be scribbled “in his name.”
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