Glyph (15 page)

Madam Nanna managed to stroll me through the village without anyone raising an eyebrow. It seemed, in fact, that she had made a favorable impression on nearly everyone and that I was everybody’s darling baby boy. In one store, there was a television glowing behind the counter. The clerk watched, eating some kind of crunchy food all the while, and Madam Nanna browsed through a rack of blouses and such things. On the television screen, policemen were pushing and shoving, what the newsperson called “escorting” Dr. Steimmel, Boris, and Dr. Davis into a police van. A few steps behind them, also in handcuffs was Ronald the chimpanzee. Standing nearby were my parents and with them was Roland Barthes, a cigarette dangling from his lips. A reporter stuck a microphone in my mother’s face.

“Please, whoever you are, bring our baby back to us. You can have everything we own. Just bring our Ralph back to us.” She turned and buried her head in my father’s chest.

My father said to the camera: “This monster, this Steimmel, stole our son. Now, please. Please bring him back.”

Then the microphone was in front of Barthes, who smiled, said, “It’s the doubleness of the matter that perturbs me. That a child, at least I believe he is a child, and so should you, should be abducted, then rescued by abduction, yet never rescued, because the second abduction, much like the second coming, if you think about it, is only abduction, and the child possibly for only an instant was free, in that synaptic space between the hands of the abductors, like the instant between having a thought and not having one—well, it must be very confusing and yet illuminating for the little fellow. I’m French, you know.”

The news reporter said, “And there you have it, the bizarre story of a baby kidnapped from its kidnappers. Here is a photograph of Baby Ralph.” The picture looked like any baby in the world. How could anyone recognize me from that? Mo didn’t mention that I could read and write and that was the only thing which separated me from other very short incontinents. The clerk looked right at me and smiled.

“Cute baby,” the clerk said to Madam Nanna.

Madam Nanna strapped me into the car seat in her station wagon and drove me back to wherever the hell I was being held. Back in my room, I found that I felt more relaxed, a state my captors were no doubt seeking to cultivate. I didn’t think they believed that I would adopt the nurse as a surrogate mother, but it was clear to me that they were attempting to bridge the gap between us by a fostered dependence. In a way, I suppose, it was a necessary consequence of the intense and prolonged isolation, and the singular and sole contact with Madam Nanna was bound to nourish a kind of familiarity. I was like an inmate in a remote desert prison; if lost outside the walls, I would have to crawl back to the only place in the landscape that for me existed. Their plan was not without merit, but I was Ralph.

Writing, even in my little hands, was not dangerous, did not exist “in the place of,” did not seek to address the “deficiency and infirmity” of speech and thought.
³
My writing was no threat to my thinking, no threat to my meaning (as it was
my
meaning) and was in no way oppositional to thought or internal language or any fixity of meaning. It was what it was and that was all it was because how could it, like anything else, finally, have been anything else?

I had no agenda. I had developed a set of values, not out of my living with my parents, and not from having observed peers and coming to understand what behavior was expected, but from reading. I understood the logic of decency, categorical imperative, and all other statements of the “golden rule” aside. “Don’t shoot at me and I won’t shoot at you” seems far less effective than “I’m not going to shoot at you.” But then, of course, dead is dead. Giraffes got long necks and turtles got shells, but humans got
avarice
and
vanity
and
religion.
Death occurs for no other reasons. The three enemies of thought. Perhaps they are
nonthought.
At least, they are corrupted, malignant, putrid thought. Burros and elephants can smell water miles away.

Colonel Bill was just pulling himself out of the swimming pool when Madam Nanna came up to him. He dried his hat with a towel and placed it back on his head and patted down his uniform.

“Good evening, Nanna,” Colonel Bill said.

“Colonel, the boy has a photographic memory. And he’s able to understand the most complicated scientific material.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t you see?” Madam Nanna said, staring at the way the Colonel’s darkened uniformed hugged his muscular thighs. “He’s the perfect spy. He can look at the plans for anything and understand them, remember them. Perhaps he can even make them better.”

“Hmmm.”

“Imagine it. Mother and child visit nuclear-arms factory and take the group tour. Child waddles off. Child sees plans.”

“Does he trust you?”

“Not completely. He’s still resistant.”

“Okay. Very good.” Colonel Bill looked at Madam Nanna’s eyes. “Are you looking at my artillery, Nanna?”

Snapping to, “Why, no, Colonel.”

“I think you were, you little vixen.” Colonel Bill shook a playful finger in Madam Nanna’s face. “You’d like to see Mr. Howitzer, wouldn’t you?”

Melting somewhat. “Yes, Colonel, I would.”

“Well, you can’t.” His finger was withdrawn. “Never mix business with pleasure, I say. And this sex stuff, well, it’s business, finally, isn’t it? I’d open up a barrage if duty called, but only if that business presented itself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very good, Nanna.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“How is young Ralph this morning?” Madam Nanna asked as she entered my room. She lifted me and took me to the potty. She left me there while she got my meal together on the tray of the high chair. I had gotten good with my toilet and was pleased and comfortable with the lack of demonstrable praise from the nurse. In this regard, she was completing her intended mission. As I was bored with the room and the single relationship, I decided that I would cooperate, or at least give the appearance of cooperation, so that we could move on to whatever next stage there was.

So, while she fed me I smiled. I wrote polite notes to her, asking for certain foods, certain books, telling her what I thought of Frege and Husserl and Hjelmslev. And she responded by softening, in a rehearsed and totally unconvincing manner, and giving me what I wanted. I wrote panicked notes asking her not to leave me and even contrived a bogus journal, which I pretended to hide away in my crib beneath my pillow and new teddy, that gave the clear impression that I was pining for her company and protection.

last night was a very long night    where is my Nanna?    there are noises outside    frightening noises    maybe some other men are coming to get me    Nanna brought me
The Crying of Lot 49
    it put me to sleep, but she brought it to me    i wish Nanna would not leave me

The sky was robin’s egg blue, clear, with some woolly white clouds far off. I was bundled up in a little parka and I could still feel the crisp air. It felt good to breathe it into my throat and lungs. We had walked out through the front door of the building in which was located my bedroom. It was an office building and there was a blank sign where a sign that was not blank must have once hung. Madam Nanna let me out of the stroller and I ran around on the grass of the front lawn. She chased after and I squealed silently with mute laughter.
⁴

There were a few passersby, but they were all on the other side of the street. Many cars traveled the road, one of them being the dark sedan and the two dolts who had grabbed me that night in the rain. They drove by again and again, from the north and then from the south, staring as they rolled by. Then a man in an olive drab uniform and dark glasses came walking along on our side of the street, turned onto the lawn, and approached us.

“Hello, Nanna,” the man said. “Who is our little friend here?”

“Oh, Uncle Ned,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you. Uncle Ned, I’d like you to meet Ralph. Ralph, this is Uncle Ned.”

“Hello there, Ralph.” Uncle Ned patted my head and smiled down at me. “He’s a handsome lad.”

“We’re just out enjoying the day,” Madam Nanna said.

I shied away from Uncle Ned, ever so slightly, and hid behind Madam Nanna’s ample legs, hugging her hose and smelling baby powder from somewhere on her body. I stole a peek at their exchanged glances. Uncle Ned was pleased and offered Madam Nanna a quick nod. She smiled, a haughty, self-satisfied smile and reached a hand down to touch the top of my head.

Madam Nanna knelt to talk to me. She said, “Uncle Ned has a very special playroom with some very special toys and there are books there and pretty lights. Would you like to play in Uncle Ned’s playroom?”

I looked at Uncle Ned and then at Madam Nanna and offered a cautious nod.

“That’s good, Ralph. That’s very good. We’ll have to get you a treat for being so agreeable.”

I

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There! I have spelled the word incorrectly.

Eve sat in her studio, in front of an easel with no canvas. She had no more tears to shed over the loss of Ralph. Now, her grief and pain were silent, gnawing inward. She asked herself why she hadn’t kept Ralph’s talent to herself. Was she afraid of him? Did she truly not know how to handle him? Was there some piece of her deep down that wanted the world to see her baby boy and what he could do? Was it in some small way pride that had caused this great loss?

Douglas was off visiting his little graduate student. Eve knew all too well what he was up to. Those late-night trips to the office to grade papers. Eve had seen her once. Douglas had been talking to her and when she spotted Eve coming, the little cow had skedaddled off into the main office and out through another door.

And now, the disappearance of Ralph had caused a thicker wedge to be driven between them. They didn’t touch anymore and all conversation was strained. In bed at night, the accidental brushing of a foot against a leg resulted in the leg being moved away. There was a lot of sighing. The second one to awake in the morning would wait until the other was finished dressing and gone before rising.

Barthes had come back to California because he enjoyed the beach and liked being away from his mother and had been hanging around Douglas because he admired the way Douglas worshipped him. Barthes took to coming around unannounced. Eve didn’t like that. The man was impossible to talk to. In fact, language barrier aside, even the simplest transaction in a market became a huge production for the man. If it wasn’t his insisting that he could not possibly understand why apples had different names since they were, after all, all apples, it was because the line was too long or the store was too cold or the cashier was too surly or that the cashier didn’t know who he was.

Eve sat there in her studio in front of the easel and in walked Roland Barthes. He paused at the door to light a cigarette and tossed the spent match out into the yard.

“Hello, Roland,” Eve said, knowing that those would be the last intelligible words she would hear for some time.

But Barthes said simply, clearly, plainly, “Douglas is poking a graduate student.”

Eve was not so much stunned by the news (as she had known it, but still to have it shoved in one’s face was painful), but by the fact that Barthes had not simply uttered a simple declarative sentence, but one that had some meaning, and, no less, meaning in the world in which she lived. “Yes, I know,” she said, staring at Barthes as if he might at any second explode.

“I have the greatest respect for you,” Barthes said.

Eve eased off her stool and began to back away. There was something wrong. The man was making sense. Then Eve was taken by the fact that she was afraid because the man was making sense and the backwardness of it all made her even more confused. “That’s nice of you to say,” she said.

Barthes drew on his cigarette and blew out smoke. “He’s in her apartment right now. I saw them go in.”

Now, the image of her husband with that floozie up in her apartment, kissing and touching each other swam through her brain. It made her sick and she forgot about the strange man in front of her making sense.

“It’s awful,” Barthes said. “Let’s go there.”

Sudden anger swelled in Eve’s chest and she slammed her fists against her thighs and said. “Yes! Let’s go!”

“No,” Barthes said. “It would be better to get even with him. We French have a saying.
C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute.
You see, because Douglas is off doing what he is doing, he is not here and so he cannot stop us. Do you know what I mean?” With that, Barthes approached. “I’m French, you know.”