Erasure

18

I returned to Washington defeated and feeling as near suicide as I had ever felt. I considered putting my head in the oven, but as Mother had always exercised a preference for electricity over gas, I could only hope to cook myself to death. I contemplated putting my father’s pistol to some use, but years of reading led me to understand that there were just too many not-quite-fatal places a piece of metal might lodge itself, leaving me where? Just as I was. And there was the nagging fear that upon waking from a three-year coma I would find the identification bracelet on my wrist reading Stagg R. Leigh. I shuddered at the notion and the woman beside me thought that I was responding to her offer of a mint. She was Australian, I believe, and she said, “You only need to say no, mate.”

I apologized. “I was somewhere else,” I said.

“I don’t like flying either,” she said. “You look low.”

I nodded, not wanting to chat, but I had already been rude once.

“Yeah, you look low, all right. You seem like you wanna put your head in a croc’s mouth.”

“Is that an efficient method?”

She laughed. “Clean off,” she said, then leaned back to regard me. “You’re all right, mate.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, I like you. Course if you go off and kill yourself, then I’ll say I liked you. Past tense, you know.”

“I know.”

“You should come to Australia,” she said. She was not a large woman, but she sounded big. “There are some places in the desert that you’d think are just hell. Then you could come back here and everything would be right as rain by comparison.”

“You think so?”

“My daddy used to say, There isn’t anything so bad that seeing something worse won’t make better.”

“A poet, your father.”

“A bit of a bastard, he was. Made me love life though. Just by being there, if you catch my meaning.”

“I do.”

She again offered me a mint and this time I took it and thanked her. She said, “These are just god-awful,” as I put the thing in my mouth.

“Not so bad,” I said.

The phone discussions with the judges turned out to be disheartening, infuriating and stultifying. To a person, they had all fallen in love with Stagg Leigh’s Fuck.

“The best novel by an African American in years.”

“A true, raw, gritty work.”

“So vivid, so life-like.”

“The energy and savagery of the common black is so refreshing in the story.”

“I believe it will be taught in schools, despite its rough language. It’s that strong.”

“An important book.”

Of all them black-faced crewThe finest man I knewWas our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.

The house was cold. Mother was the same. Life was the same. I had a new book out, but no one, thank god, knew it was mine. And the damn thing was doing well, very well, enormously well. I read many books that I thought were fine, but my fellow judges would hear none of it. Because we had to, we came to five finalists.

They were:

(1) Traditions, by Zeena Lisner.

(2) Monte Cristo, by J. Thinman.

(3) Exit the Moon, by Jorge Jarretto.

(4) Warrior’s Happiness, by Chic Dong.

(5) Fuck, by Stagg R. Leigh.

We would sift through the finalists and shake out a winner at a final meeting right before the awards ceremony in New York in February.

Das Seitengewehr pflanzt auf! The scream came to me in a dream, but as much as it frightened me, I did not wake, but instead continued dreaming, understanding in fact that I was dreaming. The idea that Nazi soldiers were after me was scary enough, but my fear was compounded by my knowledge that I was aware of it all being a dream and my inability to actually awake. I was hiding in dense brush at dusk. There was a French farmhouse in the distance, across a pasture, and beyond that was an orchard of some kind. The Germans were coming through the orchard, bayonets fixed as ordered. They burned the house and came across the meadow, poking their weapons into mounds of hay. A woman ran from the burning house, falling, crying. I could not see her face, but she was carrying a canvas. I could see the picture well in spite of the distance and the failing light. It was Starry Night. The soldiers took the painting from the woman and lanced it. I felt a sharp pain in my middle, grabbed my stomach and when I looked down at my hand I found it covered with blood. But I kept telling myself, “This is a dream. This is a dream.” Behind the soldiers a male chorus sang “The Horst Wessel Song.” Then the painting was aflame and the heat I felt made me scream out and the soldiers heard me, reckoned my position and came toward me. I then realized that I was sitting in a foxhole with a.50 calibre machine gun. I forgot my bleeding and my burns and started shooting, mowing down the soldiers like so many cans. One soldier, though shot, crawled bleeding all the way to my foxhole while “Horst Wessel” was replaced by “Stars Fell on Alabama.” The wounded man looked at me, at my own blood on my shirt, and said, “Wie heißen Sie?” And I didn’t know.

I called Bill, but Bill was not home. Bill was never home, never at his office, never anywhere. He never called back, never left a message, never wrote. I wondered if Bill was dead. I wondered if it mattered.

One Tuesday, Mother seemed herself for a couple of minutes near the end of my visit. She gazed up at me from her darkness and said, “Monksie, we are all such vain creatures. The hard part is seeing myself, what I’ve become. I see for a couple of seconds and then I don’t know where I am. I wish I could tell you I’m in here looking out. Thursday I plan to have a good day. Be sure to be here on Thursday.” The nurse told me as I was leaving that a couple of Mother’s old friends had come by to see her.

“They stood at the foot of her bed, but she just stared past them out the window,” the woman reported. “Then they left. One of them had been by before. Same thing happened.”

“Does my mother know who you are?”

The nurse nodded her head. “Much of the time. That’s not unusual though. I don’t mean anything to her. I’m just furniture.”

On Thursday, just as she predicted, she smiled to me with a smile that was indeed hers, asked me to put on some music. “Something nice,” she said. “Some Ravel.” She floated her hands in the air. “Ravel is so dancey.” I put the music on and she closed her eyes. “At times, I believe your father was bored with me. I think I annoyed him. But he never said anything, never let it show on his face or in his tone, but I believe I saw it. In the way he moved, the way he would turn a page. I know he loved me, because why would he have hidden his feelings so. Oh, we had good times, Monksie. Your father and I got along beautifully, but still there were those moments, moments when I felt so small.” She sighed, but kept her eyes shut. “Once I mentioned to him that I thought he was wearied, but he shook his head and smiled and wondered where I got such an idea.” She breathed in a deep breath and smiled sadly. “I always promised myself I wouldn’t become old and smell of mentholated spirits. But I do, don’t I, Monksie.”

“I can’t smell it, Mother.”

“You’re sweet. Like your father.”

“We promise ourselves all sorts of things during our lives,” I said.

“What have you promised yourself?”

I looked at her quiet face. “I promised myself once that I would not compromise my art.”

Mother’s eyes opened and she said, “What a fine promise. Are you sure I don’t smell of mentholated spirits?”

“Yes, Mother.”

Mother’s eyes closed again.

I tried Bill again. Left a message. No response.

So, I had managed to take myself, the writer, reconfigure myself, then disintegrate myself, leaving two bodies of work, two bodies, no boundaries yet walls everywhere. I had caught myself standing naked in front of the mirror and discovered that I had nothing to hide and that lack was exactly what forced me to turn away. Somehow I had whacked off my own

willy

stick

dick

doink

rod

pecker

poker

member

prick

putz

schmuck

tallywhacker

johnson

thing

little friend

and now had to pay the price. I had to rescue myself, find myself and that meant, it was ever so clear for a very brief moment, losing myself.

Another list of keywords (phrases):

echoes

dead

clock

thunder

obstupefactus

poached eyes

arabesque

nightmaze

et tu Bruno?

species

nocturnal

cad

C₅H₁₄N₂

moral cement

London Bridge’s Fallin’ Down

Maybe it’s the heat

dancing doll

lynch

Hahal shalal hashbaz

I had the strangest of thoughts. I reasoned, for lack of a better word, but perhaps no word is better, that if I were to go out into the streets of Washington, say around 14th Street and T, I might find an individual who by all measure was Stagg Leigh and then I could kill him, perhaps bring him home first for a meal, but kill him after all. But there was no such person and yet there was and he was me. I had not only made him, but I had made him well enough that he created a work of so-called art. I felt like god considering Hitler or any number of terrorists or Congressmen. I resolved that I could not let the committee select Fuck as the winner of the most prestigious book award in the nation. I had to defeat myself to save my self, my own identity. I had to toss a spear through the mouth of my own creation, silence him forever, kill him, press him down a dark hole and have the world admit that he never existed.

Christmas and New Year’s passed the way I had always wanted them to, without note. In the middle of January Fuck was number one on the New York Times bestseller list, had been picked up by two more book clubs.

I sat up all night for several nights, pretending to look over my notes for a real novel.

When I was near delirium, I recalled the Icarus myth and pointed out to myself that whereas Icarus did plummet to earth, Daedalus in fact flew. I decided that Zeno was too slow getting to his point and that Thales’ theory didn’t hold water. I also determined that there is no alternative to madness, that if you take all the blue out of purple, you aren’t really left with red; it just looks that way.

New York Times 17 January

Fuck

by Stagg R. Leigh

Random House. 110 pp. $23.95

by Wayne WaxenThere is so much excitement over this new novel by unknown Leigh that it is difficult to write a review which approaches objectivity. But that is the point. This novel is so honest, so raw, so down-and-dirty-gritty, so real, that talk of objectivity is out of place. To address the book on that level would be the same as comparing the medicine beliefs of Amazon Indians to our advanced biomedical science. This novel must be taken on its own terms; it’s a black thang.The life of Van Go Jenkins is one of sheer animal existence, one that we can all recognize. Our young protagonist has no father, is ghetto tough and resists education and reason like the plague. It is natural, right for him to do so. He is hard, cruel, lost and we are afraid of him; that much is clear. But he is so real that we must offer him pity. He is the hood whom Dirty Harry blows away and we say, “Good, you got him,” then feel the loss, at least of our own innocence.Van Go has fo babies by four different mothers. He pays no child support, has no job, and no ambition except that he is on the verge of becoming a criminal. His mother, whom he stabs in the novel’s opening dream sequence, arranges employment for him. He goes to work for a wealthy black family with a beautiful daughter who soon becomes the target of Van Go’s burgeoning criminality.The characters are so well drawn that often one forgets that Fuck is a novel. It is more like the evening news. The ghetto comes to life in these pages and for this glimpse of hood existence we owe the author a tremendous debt. The writing is dazzling, the dialogue as true as dialogue gets and it is simply honest. Fuck is a must read for every sensitive person who has ever seen these people on the street and asked, “What’s up with him?”

Call it expediently located irony, or convenient rationalization, but I was keeping the money.

New York. Lunch with my fellow judges was had in a little, but expensive, Italian restaurant not far from the hotel where the awards ceremony would be held later that evening. I hardly ate, having left my appetite behind some months earlier, but the others seemed particularly grateful for free meal and drink. We made small talk and I came to understand that they all had been accompanied to the event by their wives, girlfriend and husband and so I felt even more conspicuously alone.

I listened at first rather patiently to their dismissal of the four finalists that were not Fuck. I became more disheartened as it became clear that their pathetic discussion was ranking that most disgusting of novels as clearly superior to its opponents. I began by mentioning the strength of one or another of the other books, but soon I had turned to a pointed attack against Fuck.

“It’s not that it’s a bad novel,” I said, sipping wine, then placing down my glass. “It’s no novel at all. It is a failed conception, an unformed fetus, seed cast into the sand, a hand without fingers, a word with no vowels. It is offensive, poorly written, racist and mindless.”

Wilson Harnet, Ailene Hoover, Thomas Tomad and Jon Paul Sigmarsen just looked at me, none of them speaking.

“It’s not art,” I said.

Ailene Hoover said, “I should think as an African American you’d be happy to see one of your own people get an award like this.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Are you nuts?”

“I don’t think we have to resort to name calling,” Wilson Harnet said.

“I would think you’d be happy to have the story of your people so vividly portrayed,” Hoover said.

“These are no more my people than Abbot and Costello are your people,” I said, considering that I had perhaps offered a flawed analogy.

“I learned a lot reading that book,” Jon Paul Sigmarsen said. “I haven’t had a lot of experience with color — black people — and so Fuck was a great thing for me.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” I said. “People will read this shit and believe that there is truth to it.”

Thomas Tomad laughed. “This is the truest novel I’ve ever read. It could only have been written by someone who has done hard time. It’s the real thing.”

“I agree,” said Harnet.

“Oh, my god,” I said. I leaned back and looked out at the day.

“I say we vote,” Sigmarsen said.

“I second,” from Hoover.

“I don’t want to vote,” I said.

“I’m afraid we have a second,” Harnet said. “All in favor of Fuck as our winner for this year’s Book Award, raise a hand.”

Of course, all four of them did.

“I believe we have a winner.”

“That’s democracy,” I said and offered what might have been construed as a smile.

They smiled back, then ordered dessert.

In my room, I stretched out on the bed and contemplated my course of action. Stagg Leigh would in fact be awarded the Book Award. I considered my motivation in creating Stagg in the first place, felt again my anger and dissatisfaction with my world and my course of action became clear to me. I dressed and as I did I hummed. I had not hummed in a very long time; music had left me. I felt the spirit of Mother in my humming. I felt the spirit of my sister in my pithiness and that of my father in my playful arrogance. I even felt something of my brother and I knew that tonight I would be exposed.

Tarski: Don’t I know you?Carnap: You might.

The Ceremony

We judges, not only of fiction but of poetry, nonfiction and children’s literature, were all seated at tables with important guests. It was a good thing, because I could no longer stand the sight of my colleagues. I was seated with the Director of the Board of Boston General Hospital, the CEO of General Mills, a vice president from General Motors and head of marketing from General Electric, all with their spouses.

After introductions, I said, “I feel generally out of place.”

This made them laugh.

I was sitting between the wife of General Motors and the husband of General Electric and to my dismay, they wanted to talk to me. Finally, General Mills looked across the table and in a stage whisper said, “So, are you going to tell us who wins the big prize?”

“I do,” I said.

They laughed again.

“The process wasn’t all that grueling, was it?”

“Nearly four hundred books to read,” I said.

“Whew. I don’t think I’ve read half that many in my life.”

“Sure you have, dear.”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it a tough decision?”

“It was quite easy actually,” I said. “I’d say it was decided over a month ago.”

“I know which one it is.”

I look at the wife of Boston General.

“Will you tell me if I’m right?”

“No, I won’t,” I said. “This has to be done correctly.”

“Oh, you artists and your integrity.”

That made me burst out with a short laugh which caused them to look at me.

“It’s the word integrity,” I said. “It always tickles me.”

They all nodded, as if to say, “A writer.” Then they shared glances and seemed more soothed as they perhaps shared the thought, “A black writer.” But that observation was no doubt my anxiety getting the better of me.

The awards were given for the other categories and people applauded, but as always they waited for the fiction. Wilson Harnet stepped from his table to the front of the room and smiled. He said, “I know something you don’t know.”

The audience roared.

I looked across the room and saw my agent, Yul. He spotted me and with his eyes asked me what was up. With mine, I told him to stick around.

“It was an onerous task,” Harnet said. “I’m told that we received more submissions this year than ever before. I can believe it. We read over five hundred novels and collections of short stories.”

The audience let go a gasp, tutti.

“But it was a labor of love. Our decision was a difficult one, but one I believe will meet with much approval. The finalists of course are the cream of the crop in our eyes. Each of these books is remarkable in its own way. Sadly, however, four of them came up against a monster of a work, a real beauty, we writers like to say.”

“Do you say that?” Mrs. General Mills asked.

“All the time.”

Harnet laughed for no apparent reason. “I’m sure I could bore you by going on, but I will simply tell you the name of the winner. This year’s committee for the Book Award in fiction has chosen Fuck by Stagg R. Leigh.”

Whistling, cheering, applauding. “Here, here!”

“I hope Mr. Leigh was able to make it,” Harnet said.

I stood and began to approach the front of the room.

But somehow the floor had now turned to sand …

My steps were difficult and my head was spinning as if I had been drugged. Cameras flashed and people murmured and I couldn’t believe that I was walking through sand, through dream sand. Off to the right were members of the Noveau Roman Society along with Linda Mallory and perhaps my high school librarian. To my left were my father, my mother and the woman I knew to be Fiona on either side of him and behind them my brother, sister and half-sister. There were others I knew but failed to recognize and they all pressed around me, urging me forward and the camera flashes blinded me and made the room black during their moments of absence.

“Ah, here comes one of my fellow judges,” Harnet said. “Perhaps Mr. Ellison has heard something about the whereabouts of our winner.”

I was halfway there.

“It’s a black thang maybe,” Harnet said.

Laughter.

The faces of my life, of my past, of my world became as real as the unreal Harnet and the corporations and their wives and they were all talking to me, saying lines from novels that I loved, but when I tried to repeat them to myself, I faltered, unable to recall them. Then there was a small boy, perhaps me as boy, and he held up a mirror so that I could see my face and it was the face of Stagg Leigh.

“Now you’re free of illusion,” Stagg said. “How does it feel to be free of one’s illusions?”

“I know those lines,” I said aloud, knowing I was saying them to no one.

Harnet covered the microphone when I was next to him and asked me what I thought I was doing.

“The answer is Painful and empty,” I said.

“This man needs help,” Harnet said.

I looked at the faces, all of them, from time and out of time, but it was my mother to whom I spoke most directly. “The roses will forever smell beautiful,” I said. Then the lights were brighter than ever, not flashes but constant, flooding light. I looked at the television cameras looking at me.

I looked at the mirror, still held by the boy. He held it by his thigh and I could only imagine the image the glass held.

I chose one of the TV cameras and stared into it. I said, “Egads, I’m on television.”

hypotheses non fingo