The Deep Zoo

A Cup and a River

As the world leans ever more precariously above the abyss and folly reaches potentially irreversible extremes, I awaken, unceremoniously, “isolated and alone”¹ in those blue hours belonging to brigands and wolves — and return to a book that, from the first reading, has offered clairvoyance and an unsurpassable vision of erotic grace. As are all the best books, Omensetter’s Luck is unlike any other, yet conversant with those essential others that, by their very nature, persist — books you join as “a river swimming.”² Like Brackett Omensetter himself, they manifest without warning, their turbulence unsettling and enlivening the dead water that imperils our most necessary affections and dreams.

Meteoric, Omensetter’s Luck is a mutable book spoken in tongues, its language like the current weather, inked in a bloody hail. There are laments, laughter in gales, storms of piss and vinegar, limericks of course, headwinds, tailwinds, doldrums, squalls. And if Furber, the novel’s inclement demon, unleashes a storm like things coughed up by cats, Israbestis Tot (his name a stutter and a hiss) is the resident forecaster and demiurge who gives the novel its breath (and so its spark).

Israbestis knows all the stories that matter: “The story of the man who went to pieces. . the saga of Uncle Simon, of the Hen Woods burning, and the hunt for Hog Bellman.”³ His tales of cats — Mossteller’s, Skeleton’s, and Kick’s, and of the fated “fence that a good stick would make a good loud noise on it if you was to run it along”⁴—are the very stories we want, the necessary stories, miraculous as serpents who speak and apples on fire. “Imagine growing up in a world where only generals were geniuses, empires and companies had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha — none of the things you loved.”⁵

Israbestis is the one to tell Brackett Omensetter’s story because he is the one to see him and survive the seeing, and this because he is something like Brackett — he appeals to children, animals, and bees; despite his bad knees, he too moves in grace of a kind. By offering us Omensetter, “this wide and happy man, dark. . deep brown like a pot of roast gravy,”⁶ (a fertile clay, one supposes, adamic; a black clay), Israbestis spells an alchemical process in reverse, by which gold will be beaten down to lead. For Brackett Omensetter will suffer Adam’s losses — not only the loss of possibility’s garden, the garden he carries within himself, but the loving recognition of Lucy (in On Being Blue, Gass tells us there is a flower named the Blue Lucy!), his own Eve. Lucy who, as Brackett comes undone, will say, “Where is my husband?”⁷ She will say, “Why must we live in these lonely pieces?” She will say,

All our life till now I could live easy, breath in easy — swallow easy — loving you. It was as though you’d taken room in me. . And when I came to you with my arms before me like a present of flowers? And when I said sweet heart, dear love. . do you remember? Never a foolish name. Dear heart, I said, dear love—⁸

Just as Israbestis is a wealth, a world of stories, Omensetter, “his hands as quick as cats,”⁹ is himself a miracle. Dionysius, he holds “out his nature. . like an offering of fruit, his hands add themselves to what they touch enlarging them as rivers meet and magnify their streams.”¹⁰

“Sweetly merciful God,” says Henry Pimber upon meeting him for the first time, “what has struck me?”¹¹ Striking the world like a fallen star, Omensetter is Enkidu, his testicles “furry like a tiger’s,”¹² he is “what they call the magnetic kind.”¹³ Like Enkidu, “no better than an animal himself”¹⁴ and “as inhuman as a tree,”¹⁵ he is the perfect stranger. The stranger who causes some to awaken, some to lose balance, some to catch fire. Dionysius. Feared for infecting those who see him with the fever of Trance. He is a “dream you might enter,”¹⁶ and his smile is a “terrible wound.”¹⁷

Such is his miraculousness, Henry Pimber, “obedient to some overwhelming impulse, astonished and bewildered by it though it filled him with the sweetest pleasure. . secretly thrust[s] one of [Omensetter’s] tin spoons into his mouth.”¹⁸ And this in a failed attempt to heal his own split tongue, his heart broken again and again on the wheel of self-betrayal. Poor Henry Pimber! A man who, if he names the trees, hates the days. His jaw will seize up, a mirror of his soul, and if Brackett’s poultice of beets will loosen it and briefly save his life, the beets will stain Lucy Pimber’s temper as badly as her countertop. Having lived “little and low,”¹⁹ “as a stone with eyes,”²⁰ when he falls it will be from a tree, “like an unseen leaf.”²¹

But back to Israbestis, whose voice is “quieter than paws,”²² his words like the eyes of foxes, “burning the bark from trees.”²³ Burning, too, like Aladdin’s lamp, the eyes of Mossteller’s cat, Yorrick’s skull. Agitating like worms under saucers. Word tides, fairy lights, lunar words, solar words. A god housed under every stone, every tongue. Word rivers of mutabilities, the very ones that tumbled us here — you and I — in the first place. The first word that opens Omensetter’s book is now: a feline word, round as the first egg. Recall how things in eggs, like things in the mind, are all emanations of the initial impulse and so look alike: fish, lizard, fox, chick, Kick’s cat, and every human child. Each child is Eros if given the chance, if allowed to grow up “in good excitement.”²⁴ Eros: the firstborn, the one who makes things shine, the revelation, the one for whom all stories begin. Such a child: “There’s no time to him.”²⁵ Such a one as this: “Time goes through the funnel of his fingers — click, click, click, click — like water over stones.”²⁶ Such a one as this binds the world together, our world rent asunder time and time again by Quarrel.

The secret of Omensetter’s Luck is rooted in that intangible thing so unlike Lucy Pimber’s dead crockery: adoration. As when Brackett and Lucy stand together in time’s river, their flesh like lanterns, hotter even than the sun.

In this moment, and despite Furber’s titanic envy — an envy that will boil and roast and devour and spit them back out very much the worse for wear — Lucy and Brackett are the children of paradise. They offer a glimpse of a universe (could it possibly be our own?) in which adoration of the other embodies all that is divine. The mutable, finite body in all its moods and poses — divine.

The sun was cool. And she like an after image still, a scar of light, a sailor’s deep tattoo. She stepped from a pool of underclothing. . Then they kissed like needles. And he has a member, gentlemen, you might envy. It looked. . infinite. Beneath it. . a heap of thunderous cloud. It had risen with her rubbing as they shambled in the water. By its measure it might have been the massive ram and hammer of the gods. . Then — listen — then, so full herself, she spilled his seed, and they both laughed like gulls.²⁷

A witness of this kiss, this laughter, this prick, this needling of light, one wants the story to go on forever, “to be a long one.”

I want it to be a long story.

It is a long story.

Put everything in it.

I always put everything in it.²⁸

How can we thank you enough, dearest William, for putting everything in it? And this over and over again! All those blue books that like loving looks extend their objects into the surrounding space; books one thirsts for as one thirsts for “deep well water drunk from a cup.”²⁹

Of Omensetter, Henry Pimber says:

The Man was more than a model. He was a dream you might enter. From the well, in such a dream, you could easily swing two brimming buckets. In such water an image of the strength of your arms would fly up like the lark to its stinging. Such birds, in such a dream, would speed with the speed of your spirit through its body, where, in imitation of the air, flesh has turned itself to meadow.³⁰

One puts down Omensetter’s Luck and thinks, here is such a dream, such a bird, such a water, such a writer; its author: William Gass.