Glyph (22 page)

Somehow Steimmel and Davis understood all this and felt safe at least to the extent that the local cop on the beat was not after them, realizing all the while that the government agents could look like anyone on the street. The doctors panhandled enough money to buy food and some garments from a vintage-clothing store, then made their way south by hitchhiking. In Santa Monica, they appeared at the door of a screenwriter friend of Davis, an old boyfriend who had ended the relationship because of Ronald. In fact, when he let the women in, he said to Davis, “So, where’s what his name?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Davis said.

“The two of you had a falling out? Did he walk out on you because you decided to descend another rung down the evolutionary ladder?”

Steimmel frowned, trying to catch up. “Hey, wait a second, you little pipsqueak.”

Davis sought to calm Steimmel. “Don’t listen to him. He’s just trying to compensate for his little thingie and get to me through you.”

“I am not standing in his way!” Steimmel pointed a finger at the man. “If you want to get to her, do it!”

“Steimmel, this is Melvin. Melvin, Steimmel.” Davis walked across the room and looked out the window at the street. “We need a place to rest for a couple of days. And some money.”

“Oh, of course,” Melvin said. “I’ll just go to sleep on the street, but first I’ll go empty my bank account for you.”

“You slept with him?” Steimmel asked Davis.

“Just twice.”

“Get out,” Melvin said.

“Melvin, I really need your help. The government is after us.” Davis tried to look pathetic, biting her lip and hanging her head slightly.

“Whose government?”

“Our government. Why else would we be frightened?” Davis walked over and sat on the sofa, pushed through the magazines on the coffee table. There were no stories that were alarmingly new on the covers and no pictures of her or Steimmel or Ralph.

Steimmel went to the refrigerator and opened the door, stuck in her head, and came back with a beer in her hand.

“Help yourself,” Melvin said. He walked over and sat by Davis on the sofa. “You can’t stay here.”

“Just for a couple of days, Melvin.”

“No, no, no, no, no, no. I’ve got a new girlfriend.”

“Good for you.”

Steimmel fell into the chair across the coffee table from Davis and Melvin and took a swig of the beer. She stared at Melvin, unblinking.

Melvin was unnerved by Steimmel. He turned to Davis, “I don’t want you here. I don’t want Cynthia to find you here.”

“Cynthia,” Davis repeated the name. To Steimmel, she said, “Cynthia is her name.” She said the name into the air. “I’ve always wanted to be a CYNthia. Tell me, Mel, is she hot?”

“Okay, that’s it! Out!” When neither of the women moved, Melvin said, “If you’re not out in three seconds, I’m calling the police.”

That was when Steimmel produced the pistol and instructed Melvin to sit down and shut up.

Like all stories, any of these I offer here has another side.
⁴
My depiction of the stories of my
life,
if you will, is not mere hedonistic practice, no mere anarchism. Nor am I about a self-serving and uncomplex upbraiding of any poststructuralist thinking, however bedazzled such thinking might be by its own reflection, mesmerized and mechanically decisive in the face of academic action. The
presence
of the stories at all betrays some other
reading.
All I can do is give my text a helmet and condoms and send it out into the world. After Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and Blood River, there are no simple stories, there are no good neighborhoods, there are no safe meanings. Meaning has become a spatial metaphor for presence, a kind of constant self-pinching and asking if we’re really awake. But if you pinch too hard, you leave a bruise, a mark, a mark that might be construed as a gesture, and any gesture is quite simply that, but it occupies space and so must have a meaning and any meaning is just what we’ve said it is and oh, what a circle, what a circle, what a circle.

Father Chacón came back into the bedroom singing. “M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E.” He stood at the foot of the bed and stared at me. I looked at the closed door behind him. “Your new parents are sleeping in the shed out back. I told them you would be warmer in here with me.”

Colonel Bill, after a short and disappointing fueling stop at Strategic Air Command, flew his jet all over central and southern California hoping to spot his baby. From twenty thousand feet he could, of course, see nothing, and a couple of passes at fifteen hundred feet over the streets of Los Angeles and Long Beach only made the people below look like ants (in fact, to his thinking, they were ants), but he could not spot his baby. After several near misses with commercial airliners and a traffic helicopter, Colonel Bill landed his craft at March Air Force Base. From there he drove his Hummer to a nearby Filipino doughnut shop in Moreno Valley, where he sat and ate an apple fritter and drank a cup of black coffee. He stared at each of the customers as they came in. He passed the time chatting with the owner whom he knew.

“I don’t know where to start, Ferdinand, but it might as well be here,” Colonel Bill said.

“What are you looking for?” Ferdinand said.

“Can’t tell you.”

“Secret, eh? I keep many secrets, both here and at my home in Manila. Did you know that I was once tried for murder?”

“Murder? No shit?”

“No shit,” Ferdinand said. “They said I assassinated this guy. This guy was an enemy of my father. That was in nineteen thirty-three. But I wasn’t tried until nineteen forty.”

“Seven years? Were you in the pokey all that time?”

Ferdinand laughed. “No, no.”

“So, you got off.” Colonel Bill took a bite of fritter while he watched the man nod. “Did you do it?”

Ferdinand laughed. “I got off.”

Colonel Bill laughed, too.

“I really miss the Philippines when I’m here.” Ferdinand poured himself a cup of coffee and took a sip. “You know, there I’m considered a hero. I led the resistance against the Japanese back during World War Two, you know. I was in the Bataan Death March.”

“Damn Nips.”

Ferdinand nodded.

“You’ve seen a lot,” Colonel Bill said. “Now you have this shop and a presidency.”

“Yes, and two hundred thirty-seven million dollars. I love America.”

The two men laughed together.

Melvin shook his head. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “The two of you have twelve advanced degrees between you and all you could come up with was smashing the guy in the face with your skull?”

“It worked,” Steimmel said.

“So, what are you going to do to me?” Melvin asked.

“I haven’t decided. Just remember,
Mel,
we’ve got nothing to lose.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Davis was pacing the carpet in front of the window. “Steimmel, I’m stumped. I don’t know how we’re going to find that baby. The baby is the sign and I can’t even find him in my meta-perceptual field.” She began to sink. “And now I don’t even have Ronald. He was a good subject. Made Washoe seem like a rodent.”

Steimmel sneered. “That ape couldn’t communicate. It was Clever Hans Phenomenon and you know it.”

“It was not!” Davis shouted.

Melvin chuckled.

“What are you laughing at?” Davis asked.

“You two.”

“Tell me, Melvin, what kind of movies do you write?” Steimmel asked, mockingly engaged.

“I write action movies.”

Steimmel smiled and nodded. “I see. You write those phasic-level, mind-numbing, socially irredeemable, bar-dropping, celluloid anal wipettes. Well, I take photographs of ideas.”

Davis snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, Melvin, you’re Tavolga’s plot man. How do we find one particular baby out amongst twenty million people?”

“First of all, from what you tell me, your baby’s not out there among twenty million people. Some fantastic government agency has your baby. Some secret spy company has your baby in some covert day care.”

“Shall I just shoot him now?” Steimmel asked Davis.

“He’s right,” Davis said. “They’ve probably got the little sucker tucked away in a missile silo somewhere.”

“You two can leave anytime,” Melvin said. “I won’t call the police. I promise. Just walk out and I’ll say I never saw you. Please.”

“Stop begging, Melvin,” Davis snapped. “That’s why I left you. Always begging. Begging for sex. Then begging for me to stop.”

“I left you, monkey-slut,” Melvin said.

“Keep dreaming,” Davis said.

“Okay, that’s it!” Melvin said, standing. “Both of you, out of my fucking house, right now!”

Steimmel and Davis looked at each other and laughed.

As I recall Michelangelo’s god reaching down from above to touch the hand of Adam in whatever sacramental action is meant to represent, am I to be moved in a way that my more
obscure
rendering of the same
touching
cannot achieve because of my lack of literal
artistic
vision? The colors and line and form, even mere size, might well impress, but to move from that appreciation of craft to a spiritually moving encounter, regardless of my cultural connectedness and proximity to the work itself is not a compelling notion to a baby unmoved by talk of heaven and the garden and the devil. After all, my conception of a god is perhaps more to be trusted, as I am closer to that thing than any other
gesturing
being, my not having been corrupted by indoctrination and poorly told Biblical tales, and being a more recent arrival from the big house. And so, one might tell me that because of the “power of art” that chapel ceiling does more to achieve its end than say Schnabel in his amorphous blue depiction of the Almighty. But I come back to my image. The baby on the bed being approached by the fat priest, two pictures of Norwegian cub scouts adorning the wall behind him while the parents of the youth are tucked away in some cold room far away from the fray.

As the good father approached, I found it in myself to grab paper and pencil from the nightstand beside me and scribble,

I do not understand the nature of your approach. I am young and naive, but be warned that I am capable of accurate and detailed representation of any turn of events.

I handed the note to the stunned man. He fell to his knees in the middle of the room and broke into an immediate sweat across his brow, his prayer requiring, apparently, much exertion, his lips working madly and forming unintelligible words. Then he opened his eyes and stared at me, backed away, his face full of fear. “My Lord,” he said. “My Lord.” He turned and snatched the crucifix from the wall and held it to face me. He was shocked and terrified by the fact that the symbol caused me no discernible discomfort or consternation. He found the knob of the door behind him and backed out, closing me in, leaving me alone.

To wonder whether any age has failed is, of course, to miss the point. Snipers on the high ridge of the twentieth century can pick off the artists as they come out for food, but the work has not miscarried or failed. No more than dinosaurs were blunders of nature, no more than a fully conversant baby is a sign from god or the devil. Why make art? Why the gesture at all? Why worry? Let them all graze. Let the glaciers come. But, of course, my meaning is solely that, no more, simply what it is, sarcastic as it might be, a housel of sorts for the irreligious, an anthem for enemies of the state, a prayer to the dead god Plato. Things don’t twist, things don’t change, things don’t stay the same, things don’t
do
anything.