The Broom of the System (46 page)

JAY: Don’t misdirect so pathetically transparently. I speak ... speak of this man who spreads your pupils from the inside, like the soft petals of some helpless flower. Who can show you perhaps how the strong membrane is permeated. Who can batter! Batter batter.

LENORE: What are you saying?

JAY: We’re making gargantuan strides. The room is swirling with breakthrough-gases, in which, paradoxically, everything becomes strangely clear. Can’t you feel it?

LENORE: I think you’ve flipped. I never signed up for sperm-therapy, buster, I’m telling you right—

JAY: Admit that your attraction to this Other comes from inside your Self. Strengthen the membrane. Let it be permeated as
you
desire it so!

LENORE: And how might I ask is Rick supposed to fit into all this? What about Rick?

JAY: Rick knows he must forever remain an Other to you. Rick knows the meaning of membrane. Rick is like a sperm without a tail. An immobilized sperm in the uterus of life. Why do you think Rick is so desperately unhappy? What do you think he means by the Screen Door of Union?

JAY: He means membrane! Rick is trapped behind his own membrane. He hasn’t the equipment to get out.

LENORE: Hey, you’re not supposed to talk about your other patients. JAY: Why do you think he’s so possessive? He wants you in him. He wants to trap you behind the membrane with him. He knows he can never validly permeate the membrane of an Other, so he desires to bring that Other into him, for all time. He’s a sick man.

LENORE: Look, stop trying to swim around. You’ve made your point. JAY: No, you’ve made
your
point. All distinctions are shattered. I am not here. I am the sperm inside you. Remember that you are half sperm, Lenore.

LENORE: Pardon?

JAY: Your father’s sperm. It’s part of you. Inseparable.

LENORE: What does my father have to do with all this?

JAY: Admit.

LENORE: Admit what?

JAY: That you want someone truly inside you. That your membrane is crying out.

LENORE: Jesus.

JAY: Listen.... Hear that? The faint cry of a membrane, isn’t it? “Let me be an ovum, let—”

LENORE: He loves me.

JAY: He does? The Adonis? The valid Other?

LENORE: Rick, you dingwad. Rick loves me. He’s said so.

JAY: Rick cannot give us what we need. Admit it.

LENORE: He loves me.

JAY: It’s a sucking love, Lenore. An inherently unclean love. It’s the love of a flabby, unclean membrane, sucking at an Other, to dirty. Dirt is on this membrane’s mind. It wants to do you dirt.

JAY: Do you love him back? Does he batter validly at the membrane? LENORE: Please, a shower.

JAY: Admit the source of your dispositions.

LENORE: Leave me alone. Start my chair.

JAY: Batter batter. We are helpless and inefficacious as parts of a system until we recognize the existence of the system. Batter batter. Hear the syrupy squelch of your membrane.

LENORE: Look, let me leave right now or I’ll stop coming. I’m not kidding.

JAY: First admit it. Say it out loud. Bring it out. Your pupils don’t lie. Make it real. Bring it into the network. Batter back. Take an Other inside.

LENORE: Shower. Please, a shower.

JAY: Admit everything. Do you want a gas mask too? Is that it? No problem at all. A permeated membrane is not a pretty smell. LENORE: God.

JAY: What do we suppose Lenore would have to say to all this? LENORE: Who?

“Are you all right?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“You look awfully pale.”

“....”

“Would you like some of my oyster stew?”

“You know I hate oyster stew. They look like little mouths, floating in there.”

“Surely you want more than just that tiny salad.”

“Please don’t tell me what I want, Rick. I’ve had more than enough of that already today.”

“What does that mean?”

“...”

“Is. that a Jay-reference?”

“....”

“Was it not a good appointment?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“But if it’s harmed you in some emotional way ...”

“We made a deal that we wouldn’t talk about Jay-appointments, remember?”

“You’re so pale you’re practically transparent.”

“Well, you can touch my chest if you want, like in that stupid story. ”

“Pardon me?”

“That one story, the first one you had me read? Where the old man touches the little boy to make sure he’s not a window?”

“You didn’t care for that story? What was it called ... ?”

“ ‘Love.’ ”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

“I liked that other one, though. That ‘Metamorphosis for the Eighties.’ I thought it was a killer. The part when the people threw coins at the rock star on stage and they stuck in him and he died was maybe a little hokey, but overall it was deadly. I put a big asterisk on it for you.”

“.... ”

“You don’t want your stew anymore? I didn’t mean it about the mouths. Eat up.”

“But you didn’t much care for the other one, then.”

“Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought it sucked canal-water, big time.”

“.... ”

“Oh no, did you really like it? Am I ignorantly stomping on a good thing, that you liked?”

“My tastes are for the moment on the back burner. I’d simply be interested to hear why you disliked it.”

“I’m really not sure. It just seemed ... it was like you said about all the other troubled collegiate stuff. It just seemed artificial. Like the kid who wrote it was trying too hard.”

“I see.”

“All that stuff about, ‘And then context came in, and Fieldbaum looked bland.’ ”

“Fieldbinder. ”

“What?”

“Wasn’t the protagonist’s name Fieldbinder? In the story?”

“Right, Fieldbinder. But that stuff about context, though. Shouldn’t a story
make
the context that makes people do certain things and have the things be appropriate or not appropriate? A story shouldn’t just
mention
the exact context it’s supposed to try really to create, right?”

“....”

“And the writing was just so ... This one line I remember: ‘He grinned wryly.’ Grinned wryly? Who grins wryly? Nobody grins wryly, at all, except in stories. It wasn’t real at all. It was like a story about a story. I put it on Mavis’s desk with the ones about the proctologist and the snowblower.”

“ ...”

“But I’ll take it right back off if you liked it. You did like it, didn’t you? This means my tastes aren’t keened to the right pitch, doesn’t it?”

“Not ... not necessarily. I’m trying to remember where I got the thing. Must have been some kid, somewhere. Troubled. Trying to remember his cover letter ...”

“Although it was well typed, I noticed.”

“.... ”

“Let me just try one little smidgeon of your stew, here.”

“Think he said it was almost like a story about a story. The narrative center being the wife’s description of the occasion on which Costigan touched the son.... Almost a story about the way a story waits and waits but never dies, can always come back, even after ostensible characters have long since departed the real scene.”

“Really not all that bad.”

“What?”

“The broth is pretty good. Creamy. I guess it’s just the oysters I don’t like.”

“I seem to remember he said he conceived it as a story of neighborhood obsession. About how sometimes neighbors can become obsessed with other neighbors, even children, and perhaps even peer into their bedrooms across the fence from their dens ... but how it’s usually impossible for the respective neighbors to know about such things, because each neighbor is shut away inside his own property, his house, surrounded by a fence. Locked away. Everything meaningful both good-meaningful and bad-meaningful, kept private.”

“.... ”

“Except that ocasionally the Private leaked out, every once in a while, and became Incident. And that perceived Incident became Story. And that Story endured, in Mind, even behind and within the isolating membrane of house and property and fence that surrounded and isolated each individual suburb-resident.”

“Membrane?”

“Sorry. Poor choice of word. I’m sure I’ll hear it often enough this afternoon.”

“You see Jay this afternoon?”

“I told you that yesterday. We discussed it yesterday.”

“....”

“Is there some reason why you’d like me not to see him today?”

“....”

“And that, as I recall, some of the references in the story, the bird business, the burning house, the grinning-wryly business, had to do with a context created by a larger narrative system of which this piece was a part.”

“Well you can imagine I found the bird stuff upsetting. Especially about its being dead. Which Vlad the Impaler now in effect is, at least as far as I’m concerned, at least for a while.”

“He was on television last night, I’m told. Apparently Sykes’s show airs every single evening.”

“I know. Candy watched him last night. I guess he was really good. She said Sykes looked like he was in ecstasies.”

“You didn’t watch it?”

“Candy watched it at Mr. Allied’s. He’s got cable. We don’t get cable, at the Tissaws‘. Their house isn’t hooked up. Mrs. Tissaw usually just watches Oral Roberts on a regular channel. Actually the whole East Corinth-cable story is pretty unhappy, because the cable company and Dad are still—”

“Where were you?”

“What?”

“Where were you last night?”

“Oh, God, what all did I do. I went for a walk for a while. Watched some of a softball game at the park. They were pitching fast. I like it when they pitch fast. I talked to Dad on the phone about the LaVache thing for what turned out to be a long time. And then I went to sleep early. I did read some more of the stories, though. I read—”

“Where was Lang, then, I wonder.”

“....”

“You’re awfully pale.”

“Why do you think I’d know where Lang was?”

“I was just thinking out loud.”

“I heard a definite tone.”

“You heard nothing but your own imagination.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What is wrong with you, Lenore? Darling I swear I meant nothing at all.”

“....”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“....”

“Was the Fieldbinder piece that awful? Is that it?”

“A story can’t make you pale, or sick, Rick. That thing wasn’t even good enough in my opinion to have any effect on me, good or bad, at all.”

“Then what is it, Lenore?”

“....”

“Shall we just go? Norman has been tending to come in here, a lot; for lunches, at about this time, so perhaps—”

“And now what’s that supposed to mean?”

“My God, it meant nothing! I just thought you’d want to avoid seeing him, is all.”

“How does he even get in here anymore?”

“Apparently he simply establishes himself on the sidewalk. Newspapers are laid down. Things are brought to him in huge industrial containers. It’s not a pretty sight.”

“I guess we should go, then. I don’t want to have to try to get past him.”

“The Bombardini Company vice presidents are deeply worried. They claim in all seriousness that Norman is trying to eat himself to death.”

“Or everybody else to death.”

“Surely you don’t take those pathetic plans he was spinning seriously.”

“Don’t presume to tell me what I take seriously and don’t take seriously, Rick.”

“Good Lord, what is the matter with you?”

“.... ”

“Listen.... Listen to that.”

“....”

“Hear it?”

“I do hear something. It’s not thunder, is it?”

“Can’t be. Sun’s shining out past the shadow, see? I’m afraid I sense impending Norman.”

“We better go. You better finish your mouths.”

“Are you absolutely sure you’re all right?”

“....”

At work, Candy Mandible was smoking and sipping a Tab and enjoying Judith Prietht’s lunch break. Judith had been entering the too-much range. Today she had brought baggies full of sugar cookies in the shapes of cats and birds for Lenore and Candy. Judith was getting to be a real pain in the ass.

The console began beeping. Candy Started In and amused herself for a minute with a hoarse man wanting to know whether she preferred rough banisters to smooth banisters. Then she handled the next call.

“Frequent and Vigorous,” she said.

“Who?” said a voice.

“Frequent and Vigorous Publishing, Inc., may I help you,” Candy said, rolling her eyes.

“Christ, I thought I’d never get through,” the voice said. “Miss, did you know your phones are all fouled up?”

“There’ve been rumors to that effect, ma‘am. Can I help you with something?” Candy took some Tab, around the mouthpiece. She tried to place the voice on the phone. The voice sounded vaguely familiar.

“To whom am I speaking, please,” said the voice.

“This is Ms. Mandible, a Frequent and Vigorous operator,” said Candy Mandible.

“Ms. Mandible, I’m calling to see first whether you have a co-worker there, a Ms. Lenore Beadsman,” said the voice.

“Yes, we do,” said Candy. “Can I take a message for you.” She reached for the Legitimate Call Log.

“And second to see whether you also have a new employee there, a Mr. Lang,” said the voice. “I think he’s in the babyfood department, whatever that means.”

“Ma‘am whom shall I say is calling?” Candy said, opening the Log.

“This is Mrs. Andrew Sealander Lang, of New York,” said the voice.

Candy looked at the console, the circuit buttons in their gelatins of light.