Glyph (18 page)

Madam Nanna moaned and said, “This child just gets so heavy sometimes.” And then she put me down on the floor.

I watched the adults talk, Chaein and Uncle Ned about blowing the world to smithereens and Lonnie and Madam Nanna about the wives’ taning club. Then I waddled away, weaving between desks and past the backs of chairs and white-jacketed problem-solvers. I looked at screens and notes and did what I was supposed to do,
look and memorize.
A couple of men looked at me strangely, but I was a baby and they turned away and continued their work.

Finally, the adults found me, all smiles and chuckles.

“Kids,” Chaein said.

“He’s a fast one, too,” Uncle Ned said.

“In the blood,” said Chaein and they all laughed.

Madam Nanna hoisted me up to her chest again and gave me a couple of playful bounces.

The question becomes, especially for one who chooses not to speak, whether there is a phenomenological value of the voice itself, whether it has any transcendence. Does the voice have an appearance? Can a voice be good? And does voice, the sounding voice, the speaking voice, carry the same impact as the voice of writing? And can the two work together or against each other, possibly even working to negate meaning altogether? A kind of complicity between sound and sign. I could change my voice even then, write them a baby note, a nasty note, a scary note. But it was always a note. The crew would look at it and ask, “What does the note say?” Never, “What did he say?”

“Hey, you can’t leave me in here with this woman,” Dr. Davis called through the rusty, but still-fast bars of the cell. She looked back at Steimmel who was sitting cross-legged on the bare mattress of the lower bunk, her eyes closed, her hair loose and wild about her face. “Hey!”

“Shut up,” Steimmel said, her eyes still shut. “I’m not going to kill you. Not just yet.”

“Guard!”

Steimmel opened her eyes and looked up at Davis. “What did you and that half-wit Boris think you were doing?”

Davis turned and faced Steimmel, braced herself by grasping the bars behind her back, put on a tough face. “Us? Why, you were going to try to keep that boy all to yourself.”

“You’re damn right.”

“But you kidnapped him.”

“What were you trying to do?”

Davis was caught short. “That’s beside the point.”

“No, that
is
the point. You know as well as I do what that kid could mean. All I needed was some time with the little bastard.”

Davis moved cautiously toward the bunk where Steimmel sat. “Don’t you see, that’s why we should be working together. If we go at the subject from a couple of angles then we have a better chance of figuring it out.”

Steimmel closed her eyes again.

“No, don’t shut me out. Listen, if the two of us could work on the baby, then…well, who knows? Me and you, Davis and Steimmel, we could have that infant sliced, diced, and sacrificed to science in no time flat.”

Steimmel opened one eye and looked at Davis. “Steimmel and Davis. But before I leap up and kill you, let me point out that not only are we incarcerated in the big house, the pokey!, the slammer!!, the clink!!!, but we don’t even know where the little weiner wagger is!!!!”

“I know that. But what if we escape?”

“Escape? Are you out of—” Steimmel stopped and looked up at the ceiling and stretched her neck and back. “If a dumb, uneducated, redneck peckerwood like James Earl Ray can escape from prison, then why can’t a couple of overachieving Vassar girls with Ivy League Ph.D.’s?”

“Now, you’re talking.”

Back at the playroom, I was debriefed by the crew and Uncle Ned. I was sitting at the small desk, a notepad in front of me and Madam Nanna was sitting on the floor behind me, rubbing my little neck. No doubt, she was doing this to keep me loose so the information would flow easily. I regurgitated everything I had seen, but I placed nothing into context for them. Still, they seemed excited to see the equations and the phone numbers and the schematics. Their experiment had been a success, I gathered. I had understood from the beginning that the actual information garnered would be irrelevant, but what was of significance was the fact that I had effectively moved through the course and accomplished my mission. I
worked.
More, I was fully operational and functional. Uncle Ned was on the phone to the President immediately after my interview, telling him that the world was safe for democracy and baseball and that he could go play golf in Palm Springs with complete impunity.

All of a sudden, I was no longer
Baby Ralph,
but Defense Stealth Operative 1369. I was no longer sleeping in the crib in my tacky little room, but in a bunk in a sterile, eight-by-eight cell with a toilet modified to accommodate my little keister and a guard just outside my door of bars. The little boy was growing up. There were no more novels for Ralph, only dry, technical, defense-oriented journals and manuals. No more strolls through the park, now it was policed parades across the exercise yard, the guard holding my hand while we walked to the far basketball goal, and then back. There were adult men, dressed similarly to me and there for reasons unknown to me, in the yard. I didn’t know if they were DSOs like me or rapists and murderers. They were heavily muscled and tattooed. The guard wouldn’t let them talk to me, but some shouted out, “Hey, look, baby meat!” and “What you in for?” and “What’d ja do? Take candy from another baby?” Finally, on the third day, I stopped and wrote on the pitcher’s mound of the baseball field with a stick,

I am small enough to squeeze through the bars of my cell in the wee hours.
Signed:
Paper Cut Mike.

Why am I in here?

I asked Uncle Ned when he finally came to see me.

“Just trying to protect you, boy,” Uncled Ned said. “You should know there are forces out there that will do nearly anything to get their mitts on you. Believe me, this is for your own good.”

But a prison?

“Not just a prison, Ralph. This is a high-tech, state-of-the-art, maximum-security facility where some of the deadliest and most ruthless of the scum of society have been sentenced to spend the rest of their, hopefully, short lives. Why, even I, get the willies just thinking about this place.”

I want some novels.

“No can do. You’ve got to be prepared at a moment’s notice for any mission I dream up. So, it’s the manuals for you.”

I want to see my mother.

“I’m afraid Nanna has been reassigned.”

My real mother.

Uncle Ned just looked at me as if I were crazy, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. “Well, you read those journals and I’ll get you a lot more.” He stood and looked at me. “My, you’re growing like a weed, aren’t you?” Turning to the door, “Guard, let me out of this stinking cesspool.”

With a limited past, the present can only mean so much. Or so my reading would have had me believe. As I saw it, at least the quality of my experiences had run the range of any life, however long. I lacked volume, but bulk is probably, and perhaps necessarily, a bad thing. Uncle Ned was my sole contact to the outside world. The guard, who held my hand during my daily crossings of the yard, never said anything. He never even turned around to observe me in my cell, but just sat there reading fat novels about spies and sea creatures. I wrote him a note introducing myself and slipped it to him. He looked at it and, with an unchanged expression, folded it, and put it in his breast pocket. I observed him receiving orders, but never responding in any way other than nodding. He never made a sound, silencing my fellow inmates with glares and a show of his baton. I felt a closeness to my guard. Finally, I wrote him a note that read:

Please, would you help me? I miss my mother.

The guard read the note and for the first time looked me right in the face. He put his novel in the back pocket of his trousers as he always did before our walks across the yard, then put his finger to his pursed lips.

I nodded and watched him unlock my cell. He came in and wrapped me in a blanket, hoisted me up under his arm, and walked out of the block. He waved to a guard at the desk by the door, and in the locker room he stuffed me into a duffel bag with his smelly socks and dirty shirts. He carried me out and put me into a car, which upon being started made a whirring sound that some of my technical reading had allowed me to recognize as a failing water pump. I managed to work the zipper of the bag down some so that I could get some air and see out. I was in the backseat, again, and all I could see was a bit of bright blue sky through the window and the back of my guard’s head. Hanging from the rearview mirror was a green figure of a tree and a white crucifix. He drove rapidly. I could tell by the way the car took corners and curves and it seemed that as his deed sunk into his thinking his driving became faster and more frenetic.

It occurred to me that for those who spoke, the idea of silently speaking to oneself was not strange, but to me it made virtually no sense. I cannot tell you how I expressed my thinking inwardly, if even that makes sense, but it was not a matter of some inner voice finding some inner ear. The whole notion of the inner voice and the inner hearer raised the question of spatial orientation. If indeed there is no space between the two, then they are one, and it makes no sense to express either in terms of a contrary function to the other. I did not talk to myself, of course. But neither did I think to myself.
²
I think, I thought, I have thunk. I had no voice and Husserl would have perhaps suggested that for me there was no possibility of consciousness and for all I know that’s right. For Husserl, I would have lived constantly with a broken proximity of the signifier (me) to the signified (whatever the hell I was thinking), since instead of speaking, I wrote, a gesture that somehow stood away from me. Whether that made me more or less vague or diaphanous, or standing nearer to or farther from my meaning and my self, I did not know.

The guard’s name was Mauricio, I learned when he walked into his house and his wife ran up to him and said, “Mauricio!” I was still in the stinking duffel. Then he pulled me out of the bag and she said again, “Mauricio!” Both utterances were complete sentences and meant nothing like each other.

“It’s a baby,” she said.

Mauricio, to his credit, said nothing.

“Is this the little boy you’ve been guarding?”

“Get packed,” Mauricio said.

“Packed?”

Mauricio nodded. He was indeed a man of few words.

“Mauricio?”

“Hurry.”

Rosenda didn’t need the situation explained to her. She began to pack. I sat on the sofa and looked at the mute, but switched-on television across the living room. There was a picture of Jesus on the wall and the wallpaper was peeling just above it.

Rosenda was a short woman, a little fleshy, soft looking. I liked seeing her breasts through the thin white shirt she was wearing. I was hungry, but just then was not the time for a note. Especially with Rosenda already in a state.

“Mauricio? Where are we going to go?”

“Mexico.”