The Broom of the System (45 page)

As the initials go down, hands and hair begin to protrude from the page; breasts swell, a tummy heaves, knees rise and part, feet stroke demurely at the edges of the page. Lang works his pen. Lenore emerges from the page and circles the room.

Fingernails click on the window. Outside the window is a young Mindy Metalman, very young, perhaps thirteen, with bright lipstick on her tiny bruised mouth. She holds hedge trimmers, points at the tea bag. I am sucked back into the shadow as it spreads like ink across the white wall. When I look away from the window, Lenore is kneeling, with the beer-bottle pen, signing Lang’s rear end, signing her name with long slow curves, in violet ink, while her other hand finds what purchase it can on Lang’s heroic front.

I scream an airless scream and begin explosively to urinate. The stream is upward, a fan of uncountably many lines, which lines are razor-thin and so hot that I am burned when I try to cross them. I am trapped behind my fan. Hot currents swirl on the office carpet, climbing to lap hollow white at Lenore’s breasts as they tremble with her efforts. The tea bag bleeds into the hot spray. Tea is being made. “Tea symptosis,” says Lang, laughing.

Lenore is drowning; Lang holds her head beneath the surface of the ocean of burnt-yellow tea with his rear end. She continues to sign. Mice boil in the hot currents, their tails wriggling. I am suffocating. It is Salada tea. On the tea bag is written a pithy “It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.”

Lang looks down at himself and begins ponderously to stir. I surrender myself to the horror. My diploma is washed from the wall and borne away in a rush of foam.

 

 

The thing is that they are at the Tissaws‘, and I am here. There is an unimaginable
thickness
about Cleveland after one has had a bad night, alone. One I am powerless even to hope to begin to describe. Really.

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP SESSION IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D., THURSDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER 1990.

PARTICIPANTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MS. LENORE BEADSMAN, AGE 24, FILE NUMBER 770-01-4266.

 

DR. JAY: And so how does that make you feel?

MS. LENORE BEADSMAN: How does what make me feel?

JAY: The state of affairs we were just trying to articulate, in which your grandmother’s separation from and silence toward you paradoxically evokes in you a feeling of greater closeness to and communication with the rest of your family.

LENORE: Well, except there’s the John thing, in Chicago or wherever. JAY: Let’s leave him out of the picture, for the nonce.

LENORE: For the what?

JAY: Go, go with your thoughts.

LENORE: What thoughts?

JAY: The thoughts we just characterized together.

LENORE : Well, I think in a certain way it’s true. Clarice was clueless, she really doesn’t click with the whole Lenore thing, she never has, but still I felt like when I went over there to tell her this troubling family stuff, and then watched her and her own family go through that whole little skit that in a way had to do with exactly what I needed to talk to her about—I felt good, somehow. It felt secure. Is it dumb to say it felt secure?

JAY: You felt connected.

LENORE: Connected and non-connected, too.

JAY: But all in the appropriate ways.

LENORE: Boy, you’re really hot, today.

JAY: There’s a ticklish, stimulating hint of breakthrough-odor. LENORE: And then there’s my other brother ... that’s the first time I’ve actually talked to LaVache about anything important in a really long time. He might have been flapped, but still. I just felt somehow like we were really ...

JAY: Communicating?

LENORE: I guess so.

JAY: And how long had it been since you two had had a meaningful dialogue? Communicated?

LENORE: Oh, gee, quite a while.

JAY: I see. And how long, just to play a bit of a scent-hunch, here, had your great-grandmother been ensconced in the Shaker Heights Home?

LENORE: Umm, quite a while.

JAY: Would this make you uncomfortable?

LENORE: What is that? Is that a gas mask?

JAY: (
muffled
) Purely precautionary.

LENORE: Why do I pay money to somebody to make me less flakey when that person is flakier than I am?

JAY: Than I.

LENORE: Good thing I’m strapped in again.

JAY: And then of course you’ve implied that your brother had insights on the whole grandmother-disappearance problem.

LENORE: Not really what you’d call insights. He’d gotten a drawing, too, a different one, of some guy on a dune in the Desert, and he played some flap-games with it, and ended up telling me never to think about myself. It wasn’t super helpful. And also it was pretty depressing to see that he’s still got this schizophrenic thing about his leg, and that he probably personally accounts for about half the drug consumption in New England.

JAY: It’s you I’m interested in, though.

LENORE: Well, sorry, but I tend to be concerned about my brother. Part of the me you’re so interested in is brother-concern.

JAY: The Desert?

LENORE: Pardon?

JAY: You mentioned Desert, in the context of the drawing in question. Do you mean the Desert?

LENORE: Well, the sand was black, and LaVache mentioned sinisterness.

JAY: So the G.O.D., then.

LENORE: Who knows.

JAY: But there’s at least a possibility that the Great Ohio Desert bears on the whereabouts of the nursing home people.

LENORE: What’s going on here?

JAY: Where?

LENORE: Don’t look around, in your stupid mask. Are you trying to put words in my mouth?

JAY: This guy? Me?

LENORE: Why do I get the feeling people are trying to push me out into the Desert? Which for me has all these really far less than pleasant memories of when I was a kid, and Gramma would take me out wandering, and I’d have to hear her go on and on about Auden and Wittgenstein, who she thinks are like jointly God, and we’d fish at the Desert’s edge, and look into the blackness ...

JAY: A conspicuous hmmm, here.

LENORE: In your ear. And how come you’re all trying to get me back out there? You, my brother, Rick’s mentioned Desert, Vlad quotes Auden to me, that Gramma used to read in the sand ...

JAY: A morsel for thought, if I may be so—

LENORE: And Mr. el creepo Bloemker was acting like some sort of Desert salesman with me before his girlfriend lost her dress and sprung a leak ...

JAY: Excuse me?

LENORE: And then also out of the unwelcome blue comes this guy, who I unfortunately met, when I was a kid, and is married to my sister’s old roommate, and it turns out his father more or less built the G.O. D., apparently. His father owns Industrial Desert Design. Dad was unbelievably interested in that. A lot more interested than in any stick-figure drawings, that’s for—

JAY: What guy?

LENORE: Andrew Sealander Lang, who’s doing obscure translation stuff at Frequent and Vigorous, whom Rick met in a bar in Amherst.

JAY: And you’d met him personally before.

LENORE: Why do you ask?

JAY: Why that face?

LENORE: What face?

JAY: You just got a dreamy, faraway expression on your face. LENORE: I did not.

JAY: You’re attracted to this man?

LENORE: Are you out of your mind? What’s with you today? Is air getting through the air-hole in that thing?

JAY: I know an attraction-face when I see one. Psychologists’ senses are keened to pick up on nonverbal signals.

LENORE: Keened?

JAY: Your pupils have dilated to the size of manhole covers.

LENORE: How lovely.

JAY: Does Rick know about this?

LENORE: About what?

JAY: Your infatuation with this Desert-and-translation person. LENORE: You’re really pissing me off.

JAY: It’s written all over your face.

LENORE: Face must be getting pretty crowded. Manhole covers, dreamy expressions, writing ...

JAY: Formal ejection warning.

LENORE: Boy, I’d think the one place where I could avoid getting pushed into places and having people pushed into me would be the place where I spend almost all my money for help with those very feelings of pushed-ness.

JAY: This guilt ploy is getting far less effective as time goes by. LENORE: Maybe I ought to just skeedaddle, then.

JAY: A hugely important and also redolent question, Lenore. Why, when you feel valid human inclinations and attractions, purely understandable inclinations to pay a visit to a place that may or may not bear on the whereabouts of a loved one, attractions to someone your own age, who can perhaps—

LENORE: How do you know his age?

JAY: It’s extractable from the context, you ninny. Cut the guano. Relax and let’s try to make a stride or two.

LENORE: Maybe just a quick dash to the ladies’ room, and then I could dash right on back—

JAY: Hush. If you feel a desire to go to the Desert, why don’t you just go? What are you afraid of?

LENORE: You’re blowing this way out of proportion, assuming there’s anything to blow. Which come to think of it there isn‘t, because I’m not afraid of anything. I’m just not dying to go out there, is all. And it would be pointless. There’s just no way twenty-six people, most of them incredibly old, and with walkers, and at least one needing things to be ninety-eight point six degrees all the time, are wandering around in the Desert in September. But what gets me is that it seems like everybody for some reason wants to
get
me out there. What I resent is just having no say in where I go or what I ostensibly want or—

JAY: I have one word for you.

LENORE: Goodbye?

JAY: Membrane. I say to you “membrane,” Lenore.

LENORE: I think I’d prefer goodbye.

JAY: Think of our work together, Lenore. Our strides. Our progress. Don’t you see that perceiving your own natural desires and inclinations and attractions as somehow being directed at and forced on you from outside, from
Outside,
is a truly classic instance of a malfunction in a hygiene-identity network? That it’s exhaustively reducible to and explainable in terms of membrane-theory? That a flabby membrane is unhealthily permeable, lets the Self out to soil the Other-set and the Other-set in to soil the Self?

LENORE: I’m afraid I’m really uncomfortably in need of a shower. JAY: And why, pray? I’ll simply tell you straight out that in my perception it’s because you are perceiving the above revelations, the above, yes, let’s take a great stride forward and say the above exhaustive and deadly-accurate characterization and explanation of your whole trouble-set, as coming from
outside
you, as somehow
forced
upon you. When it’s really coming from inside you, Lenore. It all is. Don’t you feel it? Direct your attention to your Inside. Feel how clean it is. Forget I’m here altogether. Pretend I’m you.

LENORE: It’s just impossible to take you seriously in that gas mask. JAY: Were I to remove this now, my naïve young client and friend, the stench of breakthrough would blast me into unconsciousness. You would be truly and utterly alone.

LENORE: And what do you mean, pretend you’re me? I thought the whole problem was supposed to be that that flabby old membrane wasn’t keeping you on your side and me on my side. If I pretend you’re me, what does that do to the membrane?

JAY: But don’t you see, the pretending will come from
inside
you. A true pretending can only come off in the context of an intimate awareness of the real. For you to pretend I’m you, you must know I’m not; the membrane must be a strong, clean membrane. The strong, clean membrane chooses what to suck inside itself and lets all the rest bounce dirtily off. Only the secure can truly pretend, Lenore. The secure have membranes like strong, clean ova. Like ovums. These membranes withstand the onslaught of the countless Other-set, ceaselessly battering, the Others, their heads coated with filth, their underarms clotted with fungus, they batter, and the secure membrane/ovum waits patiently, strong, aloof, secure, and, yes, occasionally will let an Other in, will suck it in, on the membrane’s terms, will suck it in like a sperm, will take it inside itself to renew, to create itself anew. Only a strong membrane can suck in a sperm, Lenore. Here, I know, pretend I’m a sperm.

LENORE: I don’t care for the way this session is going one bit.

JAY: No, really. Be secure. Pretend I’m a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the ... hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so ...

LENORE: What in God’s name are you doing?

JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interior.

LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling your sweatshirt-string like that?

JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore.

LENORE: A sperm in a gas mask?

JAY: Batter batter.

LENORE: I demand that you set my chair in motion.

JAY: Admit that your inclinations and attractions come from inside you.

LENORE: Look, quit wriggling that string all over the place.

JAY: Admit you’re attracted to this young man. This translator. This blond Adonis who can offer you realms of Self-Other interaction you’ve never even dreamed of.

LENORE: How do you know he’s blond?

JAY: The context is the fluid of the uterus. I’m swimming, to batter at you. Batter batter. Let someone inside your membrane.

LENORE: Is this a pass? Are you making a pass?