The Cry of the Sloth (23 page)

“I’ve come for my car.” Adam said.

“What car would that be, mister?” Dahlberg rasped. His voice was like a fly walking on sandpaper. Then he sat down in the chair, from which he had leaped “up” on Adam’s entrance, and took hold of the sandwich, as if to casually resume his lunch. He looked up at his brother. “Tiresome, you know anything about this gentleman’s car?”

Tiresome blinked vapidly, while Dahlberg casually hoisted the sandwich to his mouth, still looking at his brother. Adam took in the low sloping forehead, the thin upturned nose, and the sandwich slanting downward from the mouth. Recognition hit him like a fist at the same moment that Tiresome’s huge right fist, which he had secretly worked free of his pocket, crashed into his, Adam’s, face, as it had crashed into the faces of many others since he, Tiresome, was “small.”

¶

Dear Harold,

Yesterday I looked out the window and saw that someone had written “asshole” in red paint on my car. And in the midst of everything I forgot to tell you that my mother has died. I had meant to tell you also about some policemen I ran into. Now both will have to wait for another letter. The “Rapid Falls residents living it up at the State Fair” that you see pictured on this postcard are not any people I know. I am convinced their happiness is illusory. That is something I think you should know about me.

Andy

¶

Dear Stewart,

Given the state of my nerves, as cited previously, I have decided it would be a good idea for you to try and postpone this hearing thing. Also the fact that I do not currently have an outfit. I cannot sleep at all these days, in the nights of these days, or even in their afternoons, however emptily they creep, except sometimes on the grass in a few of the city’s nicer parks, lulled by the leafy rustling I mentioned in my previous letter. But in most parks I cannot, because the dogs walk on me. I have been writing a lot of letters lately, and I lie awake thinking about them, remembering the old ones and thinking up snappy new ones, and fresh people to write them to. Sometimes I stick them up on the refrigerator with magnets until I can think of someone to send them to. I often revise the old letters in my head, when they need revising, or just think about them with satisfaction when they do not. If they are satisfactory, it is easy to lie quietly in bed, and, though that is not sleeping, it is still something. But it frequently happens that, just as I begin to slide toward sleep, a new idea will charge into my mind, pop in there quick as a wink before I can do anything to stop it, and if it is a good one—and in that state of mental torpor they all seem good ones at first—I then begin to worry that, if I let it out of my mind, tuck it under the pillow, as it were, in order to go on sleeping, it will be forgotten in the morning. So sometimes I force myself to get up. Completely exhausted, I drag myself out of bed and over to the desk to write it down. The result, of course, is that by the time I have finished setting it all down, perhaps tweaking it a little at the corners or correcting some small inconsistency, I am wide awake and there is nothing to be done about it. Faced with that prospect, I sometimes choose a different course. Rather than leaping for a pencil, I stay in bed and say my invention over and over in a soft yet audible voice in the hope of lodging it in my brain so firmly it will still be there in the morning. And sometimes it is. But just as often it is not, and in that case I am left with only the empty fact that I thought something important during the night and have now lost it. Most mornings I don’t remember even that much, and in a way that is worst of all, because then I am unable to banish the suspicion that during the night I really did hatch an incredible idea which was subsequently so thoroughly erased while I slept that I don’t have any record of its passage. So I lie in bed for hours, torn between a desire for sleep and a hunger to preserve my ideas, either by getting up and writing them down, or by saying them over and over to myself. So equal are these opposing impulses that I am tossed back and forth from one to the other, unable to give in to either, and I wake up, if you can call it waking up, exhausted and irritable. The tragic part of all this is that even when I do succeed in memorizing an idea, or writing it down, it almost invariably proves worthless, its aura of brilliance nothing more than a trick of the half-dreaming state in which even the stupidest and most banal cognitions look like the products of genius.

Your devoted client,

Andy

¶

Dear Vikki,

It is night. Inside that night is another night. This empty house. And the house is not just empty, the emptiness is empty. Outside in the street a siren approaches, passes, fading, becomes an insect, dies. Night, emptiness, but not silence, oh no, not silence. Too cold for crickets, but not for dogs. They bark in relay across the neighborhood, for hours on end. Who can sleep? Who
wants
to sleep? A rumor is going around among the tenants, that because I’ve been arrested they don’t need to pay their rent anymore. God’s only excuse, as Stendhal (I think it was Stendhal) said, is that he does not exist. If all else fails, I can go shoot a dog. The notorious Andrew Whittaker, sentenced to death by a jury of dogs, his peers. Write me.

Andy

¶

Dear Dr. Hawktiter,

I was going to send you a little note weeks ago, to thank you for standing up for me in the newspaper. Somehow the note never got written. And now I am writing for a different reason, because you are a medical man and I have developed a strange noise in my head. Of course I don’t know if you are that kind of medical man. If you are a podiatrist you will probably be stumped. I suppose I need an ear, nose, and throat man, or even a brain specialist. If you know any of those perhaps you could pass this letter on to them. I hope you will not take this preference amiss in case you specialize in something else. There are so many interesting parts, organs and appendices, also canals of course, that I think it a wonder anyone can decide which way to go, and I certainly don’t blame you for making the choice you did. I used to have a leak somewhere, but that seems to have fixed itself. It is possible, however, that it has merely migrated upward and is now responsible for the buzzing sound, even though it was nothing like a buzzing before, in the place it was before. This is not implausible when you consider how the same event can make very different noises in different locations. Take something that, as a podiatrist, you will be familiar with: footsteps in an empty house sound entirely different from the steps made by the same feet, by the feet of the same person, on grass, for example. In the first case we have a kind of hollow knocking which is quite depressing in the long term, while the second is more of a pleasant whisper. I can’t render the latter in words exactly but “oopsy-whoosh” seems to come close. It is especially pleasant in autumn, when the fallen leaves chip in their little rustle. Perhaps that is not your view, though. It is difficult to divorce feet from shoes, and this makes the whole discussion almost impossible to conduct in an orderly way, since the different shoe styles and materials, of which there must be hundreds, if not thousands, just mean that there will be that many exceptions to any rule one might come up with. I know that buzzing is a loose term. So many things do buzz. Bees, of course, but also electric fans with things caught in them.

The buzzing I am talking about is very similar to the noise a television I once owned used to make after it had been on for a while. I realize that this will not bring anything to your mind, and hence will not be helpful in forming a diagnosis, unless of course you happen to be one of the men Jolie brought home during that period, and also looked at television with her, which I hardly think any of them ever did. But I believe that what I discovered as a consequence of this resemblance might be quite useful, which was that I could suppress the noise in my head in the same way I got rid of it in the television. In fact, when I experienced the former for the first time about a month ago I immediately thought of using the book trick, and to my surprise it worked like a charm, at least in the beginning. In the case of the TV, though, the fix was only temporary. The intervals without buzzing grew shorter and shorter, and we had to slap it with bigger and bigger books. Toward the end, if I wanted to watch my programs, Jolie had to sit behind the set and bang it with a dictionary every couple of minutes. Of course the banging combined with her grousing was almost worse than the buzzing, and finally I replaced the set with a new Zenith.

Now I am going to tell you about a strange coincidence. Last week I was in the grocery store. I was rummaging in the bin where they keep the bent cans, when I was accosted by a large woman digging next to me. “Hello, there,” she said, turning to me with what I thought was a blond leer. I naturally assumed she was making advances, as women will to me, still, but then she introduced me to the man standing behind her. “Charlie,” she said, pointing at me, “He’s the guy who sold us that TV.” And then I knew who she was. The TV she was referring to was the RCA with the buzz. I braced myself for something unpleasant to issue from Charlie, but instead he said, “Best TV we ever owned. Drop it. Leave it out in the rain. Can’t kill the little fucker. Wish they made color sets like that.” You can imagine my astonishment. I asked, “So the buzzing doesn’t bother you?” “What buzzing?” he said. It was then that I remembered I had not told him about that when I sold it, and I stammered out something about the weather we were having lately making my own set buzz. Of course, by my own set I meant my head, though naturally I didn’t want to discuss that with them in the grocery store, and in any case weather has nothing to do with it.

The noise has been going on, as I said, for several months. I don’t think there is any swelling. I check for this every day, knowing it would be a bad sign. Of course I am not foolish enough to think one can just look in the mirror and tell whether one’s head is still the same size. I have a hat which once belonged to my father, which fits me quite snuggly, and I use this as the test. Lately, however, I have begun to wonder whether, by dint of pulling the hat on and off several times a day, I might be stretching it. So there could be some undetected swelling. I once had a doctor measure my head to see if it was the right size, the size of other people my size, with bodies my size, and he used an enormous pair of calipers. I suppose using a hat will strike you as incredibly amateurish.

I am writing you now because I sense that things are approaching a climax. Two nights ago I was on Seventh Street on my way back from a park, when I stopped in front of Little Champion Sporting Goods to look at the display in the window. It was just football equipment, jerseys, helmets, and the like, and did not interest me in the slightest. The noise had been getting worse ever since I had left the park, and I was cursing myself for having forgotten to bring along a book. Even a small paperback will usually do the trick, and I had always carried one in my hip pocket until that ripped. Not having a book I tried the flat of my hand to no effect. I was surprised at how feeble the blow was. I suppose it was the sight of the football equipment that prompted me to think of butting. Of course I should have moved over a few feet to where the concrete wall was, but by that time I was feeling really quite desperate, and so, in the throes of that desperation, I butted my head against the glass. It did not seem to me that I was butting very hard at all, it was not hurting to any real extent, and yet on the third or forth blow a silver line slithered up the glass from the bottom left, passed in front of my eyes, and raced to the opposite corner. It made a dreadful, dry, tearing noise as it went. I turned and began to run down the street. I had not taken two steps when the whole window crashed to the sidewalk. It was two a.m., there were only a couple of people on the street, and in the silence the sound of the breaking glass seemed deafening.

I am aware that the glass incident is not medically significant, but I bring it up as an illustration of how fed up I am with this noise. When I hold my head in my hands, as I do often these days, I can feel it bombinate. Perhaps the cause is something simple, even humdrum, and you could recommend a medication. I have thought of trying yoga but I am not sure being upside down is a good idea, especially when I consider that there may be a leak involved. Just thinking about it produces horrible images of stuff running out everywhere.

Your author in distress,

Andrew Whittaker

¶

Dear Jolie,

Yesterday I was at the opening of Stanley’s show at the Downtown Gallery—a place where I am sure no one expected to see me—and I found myself on a sofa next to Billy Kippers, to whom I have not spoken a civil word in years. He was chatting with the Simms woman, who was sitting next to him on the other side. In the midst of all the noise I couldn’t overhear much of what they were saying, but I caught her stealing glances in my direction, so I presumed the worst. I refrained from sticking my tongue out, because I had promised Stanley I would behave. After a while the Simms creature left, and Billy turned to me. Resting a hand on my shoulder and inclining his head close to mine he asked, in almost a whisper, “How’s the novel going?” I was so surprised that at first I couldn’t think what to answer. I suspected malice. But when I looked in his face, into that porcelain-pale dinner-plate of a face with its blue unblinking gaze, he seemed
concerned
. I stammered out something to the effect that it was going great guns. I was so affected by his question that I thought for a moment I was going to cry real tears. I wonder what he would have thought if I had laid my head on his shoulder and sobbed?

I have been saying to myself, Perhaps there is someone who will. But then I ask myself, Is there anyone who can? Something has been falling from the sky. It could be snow. It could be tears. It could be the chain of days. Imagine, the chain of days falling like snow! What would that look like? The fact is, somewhere there is something, as I have been saying to myself repeatedly. But not really. Whittaker, what are you doing in there? is what I have really been saying for a long time. I have said it over and over, but no one has answered. That is because I was whispering it. It sounded like shouting to me. In here it is horribly loud, but out there it is not even a whisper. What is less than a whisper? Too terrible to think.