Glyph (13 page)

MORRIS

D

From morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve, I was carried by my parents from here to there and back, was tossed into the air, had heads rubbed into my belly while suspended above the ground, was handed to strangers on whose shoulders, if I could, I would spit up my mother’s nourishing but only adequate milk, and suffer through mindless compliments from mindless onlookers and my mindless parents. I had no legs, but I moved about, not because of a defiance of gravity, but because of a sickening, malignant, imposed, and necessary dependancy. And it all sat on me like a weight, a kind of self-referential density, as it was the case that whenever I was in the room, I was the object of attention, if not discussion. I was like a loaded gun resting on a table in front of a bludgeon of convicts. And like that gun, the fear seemed present in all the faces near me that I might at any second go off, whatever
going off
might come to. And so, right and wrong, truth and falsity, and clarity and confusion were not operative criteria for me. Escape was all I could think of, even if it was escape from observation for just a second or two, a bit of privacy when I could screw up my face and load my diaper, a moment to have gas without someone commenting on my smiling. I talked inwardly to myself, not separating myself into two parts at any time, but my thinking came to me as a flutist’s melodies to his own ears, but the melodies were a component of me, inextricably bound to me, in no way separate or different or distant from me. My language, my thinking, was all I had, all I could have, my only deliverance and distraction and finally, my sustenance. Still, I drooled and aimed my pee at the ceiling when my diaper was peeled away.

“Douglas, why doesn’t the baby make any sounds? I mean he doesn’t even cry.” Eve was arranging some cosmos and poppies she had picked in a vase on the table by the window.

“Count our blessings. Imagine a baby keeping us up all night long with wailing.” Douglas let his book come to rest on his lap, reached to the coffee table, and grabbed a cigarette.

“But no sound at all?”

Douglas shrugged, lighting up.

“My mother said I was a quiet baby.”

“Well, there you have it.”

“But not this quiet.”

“I’m sure there’s nothing wrong, but why don’t you ask the pediatrician, just to be certain.”

“I did.” Eve plopped down on the sofa and stared out the window. “Actually, I don’t think she quite believed me.” She looked over at me, wrapped up in blankets in my bassinet. “Ralph was with me and, of course, he didn’t make a sound, but it doesn’t seem strange for just five minutes. I told her he never cries.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said, ‘Count your blessings.”’

“Well, there you have it.”

The car sped like a bullet through the night. Young Ralph sat in the backseat of the modestly appointed sedan and stared forward at the goons who had nabbed him. The thugs weren’t from the mob; they weren’t dressed well enough. But neither were they poorly enough dressed to be cops, though they stank. And they knew enough to keep the headlights off in the parking lot, so they definitely were not cops, not regular cops anyway. Maybe they were feds. Ralph leaned against the door as the driver took a curve hard on the wet highway.

“That wasn’t too tough,” the shotgun rider said.

“Piece of cake,” said the driver. “Hey, reach down there and gimme one of them doughnuts.”

“What’s the story with this kid anyway?”

“Don’t know, don’t care. I just drive the bus.”

Shotgun looked into the backseat. “He don’t look special.”

“Something special about him.” The driver finished his doughnut and licked his fingers. “What do you say we head over to that dance place, Exotica, I think it’s called, after we drop off the cargo?”

“Sounds good to me. I hear they got a great Diana Ross impersonator there.”

“Cher and Liza Minelli, too.”

“Cool.”

The Other to which we turn for our identity is constipated. For Lacan, this Other is not being, but the place of speech where the assembly of the system of signifiers rests, i.e., language. Therefore the constipation of the Other is necessarily symbolic and resides in the fact that a particular signifier is in need of the Other. The missing or obscured signifier is the feces and the fact that it is missing from the Other means we cannot locate it in ourselves by appeal to the Other. Finally, the Other cannot constitute identity for us. Stated another way, “in the signifier there is nothing that guarantees the dimension of truth founded by the signifier,” and, as articulating beings, our constipation lies precisely in the deficiency of a secured truth or meaning. Truth is without hope, “a truth without truth,” and the Other’s constipation unveils the truth that constipation is the irresistible and inevitable state of the human condition.
¹

I could still see Ronald signing like crazy in the lab after Steimmel’s departure. The chimp was talking, not merely using symbols in a way that suggested some purely fixed correlation between signs and objects. I thought the ape was asking what was going on.

The room was like waiting rooms I had seen, at the doctor’s office, at several other places I had gone to with my parents. I was left sitting on a deep red sofa that was placed between two matching chairs. I was alone there, the lights bright, and the buzzing of them the only sound. Occasionally, off in some other room a telephone rang.

A woman, thicker than my mother and dressed, well, motherly, came into the room all smiles and cooing sounds and she approached me directly. “So, you’re little Ralph,” she said. “My, my, my.” She hoisted me into the air and looked into my face. “You’re a handsome fellow, aren’t you?” She then pulled me close and held me to her chest, my chin on her shoulder. It was not an altogether bad feeling, being held by someone more like my mother than any of the handlers I had recently experienced. She carried me from that cliché of a waiting room into a cliché of an institutional hallway. The corridor looked and felt much like the hospital in which I first met Steimmel. But from that hall, we entered what some idiot someplace considered a prime example of a child’s bedroom.

There were yellow ducks swimming across the robin’s egg blue walls at the join to the ceiling. There was a white crib in the middle of the room just like the one I’d slept in at home. There was a low rocking chair beside the crib with a flowered cushion tied to its seat and a multicolored braided rug on the floor in front of it. There were paintings of clowns on the walls along with photographs of hot-air balloons in blue skies, and a pile of colorful balls of varied sizes in a corner by the window. The window however was barred.

The woman put me down in the crib and I was face to face with something I had never had, but only read about, a teddy bear. The thing was half my size with fur that floated in the air, button eyes and nose, expressionless, still, and cold. She grabbed the thing and rubbed it into my belly.

“I’m Nanna,” she said. “I’ll be taking care of you. If you need anything, just call out for Nanna. Let me hear you say it. Come on. Nan-na.”

I, of course, said nothing.

“Well, anyway, you’ll be more relaxed in time. You’ll find out that Nanna is here for you and that you can trust her.” She looked about the room, then walked over to a bureau, opened a drawer, and pulled out a set of pajamas. She came back to me. “Nanna will put these on you and I’ll give you your bath in the morning. You need a good night’s sleep.” She undressed me. “Would the little man like to try the potty before bed?” Her words and the sound of her voice were mesmerizing. She took my tiny naked body to the bathroom and sat me on a child’s training seat atop the toilet. I did my business and she praised me as if I were a dog.

She dressed me for sleep, switched off the light, and paused at the door before closing it. “Good night, little man,” she said.

SOCRATES: Tell me, Jimmy, how do things go these days?

BALDWIN: Things go fine.

SOCRATES: You know, I envy you your art. Being able to create a world, build people, lie the way you do so convincingly.

BALDWIN: I wouldn’t call it lying.

SOCRATES: Very well. But I have a question for you. You create a world and to do that you have to draw on the world we know and then re-create. Is that close to correct?

BALDWIN: More or less.

SOCRATES: So, in order to render a world as you do, you must fully comprehend the world from which you draw your material and substance.

BALDWIN: Actually, it is the act of creating the world of my fiction that allows me to understand the so-called real world.

SOCRATES: But how can that be when the real world is the one you need before you can begin your art? Suppose a man wanted to write a novel, but he knew nothing of the world. Could he do it?

BALDWIN: Why would such a man seek to write a novel?

SOCRATES: Just suppose he did.

BALDWIN: I can’t suppose that.

SOCRATES: Let’s try it this way. Suppose I understand the world completely. By virtue of that fact, would I necessarily be able to write a novel?

BALDWIN: Why would you want to?

SOCRATES: But suppose I did want to.

BALDWIN: Then you’d have no need for writing a novel.

SOCRATES: Suppose, I didn’t need to, but just wanted to write a novel.

BALDWIN: Then you wouldn’t understand the world.

Nanna, or Madam Nanna, as I liked to call her in my head, came every morning, dressed in her nurse’s uniform, and talked soothingly to me, fed me, sat me on the potty, threw the light-as-air inflated balls at me, and held me in her lap and rocked me while she read me stories. Stupid stories. Stories about simple-minded children and bears that talked, with improbable situations for no reason except that they were improbable. I hated them. They bored me to sleep every time. All she had to do was open one of the garishly colored, skinny volumes and I was out. A week went by and I was numbed into a weakened state. I had been keeping my talents to myself, not knowing who Madam Nanna was or what she wanted. All I knew was that she was connected with Fric and Frac, the two hoodlums who had spirited me away from the institute that rainy night.

Finally, fed up with her niceness, reeling from two pages of some story about a pig who opened a bank, I snatched the pen from the breast pocket of her uniform and wrote, beneath a picture of the pig signing a loan agreement,

Who the fuck are you?

If my message scared or even surprised her, Madam Nanna didn’t let on. She just smiled sweetly at me and said, “We mustn’t use such language.”

She was not frightened by me, but I was certainly frightened by her. Her response was completely unexpected, disarming, and, I felt, could only mean bad things.

She finished the story and said, “There, wasn’t that a good story?”

I wrote:

It wasn’t good the first seven readings and the eighth was no different.

“My, but aren’t you the little critic.” She got up from the rocker and put me in the crib. “Now, you get some sleep and I’ll see you in the morning.”

I dreamed that I was a big man and that I was working in a yard, trying to dig out a tree stump with a pickax. There was another man standing near me, watching, though he didn’t have eyes. In fact, he had no face, but was just a featureless wash of flesh. He was trying to tell me that speech always subjectively includes its own reply.