“As to poetry, you know,” said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great hands, “I can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that–”
“Oh, it needn’t come to that!” Alice hastily said…
Add comment December 14th, 2007
She went to a conference table and ran a finger along its black surface, leaving a faint trace in gypsum dust. “Is there really a magazine?”
“Everything,” said Bigend, “is potential.”
“Everything,” she said, “is potential bullshit.”
“Think of me as a patron. Please.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, thanks.”
“In the early 1920s,” Bigend said, “there were still some people in this country who hadn’t yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That’s less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a ‘recording artist’”– making the quotes with his hands– “took place toward the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing that which they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn’t reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star, as we knew her”– and here he bowed slightly in her direction– “was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media.”
“Of–?”
“Of a state in which ‘mass’ media existed, if you will, within the world.”
“As opposed to?”
“Comprising it.”
Add comment September 23rd, 2007
The stolen Paul Stuart overcoat had contained, in its slash-flapped side pocket, a chunky 1961 paperback history of revolutionary messianism in Medieval Europe. Owing to copious underlining in black fountain pen, this copy had most recently sold for $3.50, perhaps to the man from whom Milgrim had stolen the coat.
The Flagellant Messiah, as Milgrim imagined him, was a sort of brightly colored Hieronymous Bosch action figure molded from some very superior grade of Japanese vinyl. Tightly hooded in yellow, the Flagellant Messiah moved about a dun-colored landscape inhabited by other figures as well, all of them rendered in the same vinyl. Some of them were Bosch-influenced: say, an enormous and ambulatory pair of bare buttocks, from between which protruded the wooden shaft of a large arrow. Others, like the Flagellant Messiah, sprang from the stolen history, which he read every night, but after a rather circular fashion. He had never had any interest in this sort of thing before, that he could recall, but now he found it somehow comforting, to have his dreams colored this way.
He saw the IF, for whatever reason, as a bird-headed Bosch creature, pursued by Brown and Brown’s people, a brown hooded posse astride heraldic beasts that weren’t quite horses, their swirling banners inscribed with slogans in the IF’s Volapuk. Sometimes they journeyed for days into the stylized groves bordering that landscape, glimpsing strange creatures in wooded shadow. At times Brown and the Flagellant Messiah would merge, so that Milgrim sometimes woke from dreams in which Brown tore his own flesh with whips whose barbs were coated with the same graying green that covered his pistol, flashlight, and monocular.
But this new Devonian sea, the blood-warm shallows in which these visions swam, belonged not to Ativan but to Rize, a Japanese product for which Milgrim had immediately formed a firm respect. There were possibilities inherent in Rize, he sensed, that might only be revealed with further application. There was a sense of mobility that had been lacking recently– though he wondered if that had anything to do with the fact that he was being held captive.
Add comment September 23rd, 2007
Coombs grew up four houses down from me. A runty high-school dropout with tousled blond hair and a sharp Adam’s apple, he has, I believe, some sort of undiagnosed Tourette’s Syndrome, but he’s too poor, simple, and uncaring to do anything about it. (Until the last twenty out of a million years of our human history, our “neurological disorders” were simply our personalities.) Coombs is inclined to violence and has a variety of tics. He claps, hops, and hoots. He screeches, coughs, barks, spits, grunts, gurgles, clacks, hisses, whistles, whoops, give you the finger, wants to arm-wrestle you (he’s very strong), and finishes your sentences in a ghostly mumble that makes it seem for a moment as if he is reading your mind. I remember him in his baby carriage. I remember him catching me on the way to school one morning and showing me an Irish setter that had hung itself by jumping, still hooked to its leash, over a brick wall. Here he is at ten years old drinking from a bottle of Ten High bourbon on the couch in a ramshackle gas-and-chicken smelling house piled high with furniture and trash, his mother in her muumuu glued to the TV. As I recall, he began smoking pot in second grade. Marijuana ameliorates his symptoms, turns his jerking and swearing into squirming, giggling, blank stares, and occasionally pithy observations such as “Why do people have hair?”
Add comment July 19th, 2007
Nathan had hit Paula, but I’m not sure if that was true or as what everyone assumed. Living with Nathan seemed the same as being hit.
[…]
Nathan’s indifference to consequence: first he had it, then it went away, then it came back and killed him. It’s shape that makes a person’s life interesting. When Nathan ducked into my room, pulled down his pants, and set fire to his pubic hair, he seemed to do it without thought. It was just a crazy idea that had struck him. Then he left and the smell would hang there. You could almost see it as bits of black ash drifted down over my books and papers. I hated to brush them away with my bare hand. Nobody liked him for it. Burning the Black Forest was an absurdity without issue, except to the dean and those jocks who get excited by what they didn’t understand. It wasn’t a graceful action, but it was done with a kind of grace. It wasn’t the action of a guy who feels he must work sixteen hours a day to keep people from yelling at him, a guy who wakes up before the crows to think about mortgage payments, health insurance, life insurance, his kids’ college education, and how he’s going to pay for his retirement. Does Nathan’s son have any of that? Sometimes I hope he’s hairy like his father, just a ball of thick black hair. And when Nathan’s foot had swollen up to the size of a basketball, what did he think then? I imagine him sitting in his hut with the Indians hovering outside the door. He had a terrible fever and was sweating his guts out. There must have been flies all over the place. Was he afraid? I like to think he didn’t care. An ex-wife who hated him, a child he didn’t know, his foot as big as a basketball– I liked to think that Nathan didn’t even feel fear. That’s how he stays fixed in my mind: indifferent to consequence. It’s something we like to hear that other people can do. I mean, even if we can’t imagine it for ourselves, don’t we want to believe it’s possible?
Add comment June 25th, 2007
But seriousness had amounted to Jason Plover’s trademark. He had been a tall, heavyset man fond of wearing a thick tweed overcoat, which made his figure resemble a rolled-up mattress. When he walked he like to set his entire foot flat upon the ground before lifting it for the next step. His heavy tread was well known in the English department at Tufts, where he had taught for fifteen years. He had vast black eyebrows that he could wield as a samurai wields his sword. One position showed scorn, another superiority, and a third deep thought. There are many writers in the Boston area. Toss a stone in a public place and you are likely to hit one. But for seriousness–sheer, bullying, heavy-lidded, I’m-the-most-important-poet-on-God’s-green-acre seriousness–Jason Plover had the rest of the writers beat.
Now all was changed.
The headline in the Boston Herald read Plummeting Porker Pulverizes Poet.
[…]
There was something about these stories that made time seem causal, and Harriet realized she was attempting to repair her sense of causality. Her husband’s death appeared to lie outside causality. The malignant Demiurge who hangs life’s carrot before our eyes had been having his or her little joke. What do we do with an extremely serious poet? We kill him with a falling pig. Those people who had laughed at the manner of her husband’s death: shouldn’t they have been terrified? Didn’t Jason’s death indicate an awful truth about the cosmos–that if it has a divine direction, then its prime mover is whimsy?
[…]
She thought of her husband’s seriousness, how he wore it like a garment. Most often his laughter had been ironic or sarcastic or superior. His laughter had been judgmental and, as a result, all his laughter had been serious. Was it possible to laugh without any element of judgment? Jason Plover’s life had been an edifice built to demonstrate the solemnity of his endeavor. Poor Jason, killed by a falling pig; his death had overturned the premises of his life.
[…]
Harriet Spense considered how Franklin yearned for the fame that had resulted in her husband’s ultimate trivialization. She found herself laughing. She put her hands on her knees, leaned her head back, and gasped for breath. It was neither a guffar nor the hysterical shriek of nervousness. It was the laugh of someone whose solemnity has been overthrown, the laugh that erases every other concern. Our plans, our memories, our fears are all replaced by a peculiar yet distinctive hooting. To some it sounds like a mob of crows; to others, a donkeys bray. In fact, it is the sound of the world disappearing as all the content is sucked from our heads, to be replaced–briefly; oh, too briefly–by a happy vacancy. And doesn’t this sustain us? Doesn’t it provide the strength to let us bear up our burden and continue our mortal journey?
Add comment June 25th, 2007
Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self - vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised. That’s why writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great. This is hard for young writers, like Clive, to grasp at first. A skilled cabinet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. There is a rogue element somewhere - for convenience’s sake we’ll call it the self, although, in less metaphysically challenged times, the “soul” would have done just as well.
***
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person’s truth as far as it can be rendered through language. This single duty, properly pursued, produces complicated, various results. It’s certainly not a call to arms for the autobiographer, although some writers will always mistake the readerly desire for personal truth as their cue to write a treatise or a speech or a thinly disguised memoir in which they themselves are the hero. Fictional truth is a question of perspective, not autobiography. It is what you can’t help tell if you write well; it is the watermark of self that runs through everything you do. It is language as the revelation of a consciousness.
***
Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry - we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street.
***
But there’s no reason to cry. If it’s true that first-rate novels are rare, it’s also true that what we call the literary canon is really the history of the second-rate, the legacy of honourable failures. Any writer should be proud to join that list just as any reader should count themselves lucky to read them. The literature we love amounts to the fractured shards of an attempt, not the monument of fulfilment. The art is in the attempt, and this matter of understanding-that-which-is-outside-of-ourselves using only what we have inside ourselves amounts to some of the hardest intellectual and emotional work you’ll ever do. It is a writer’s duty. It is also a reader’s duty.
***
What I’m saying is, a reader must have talent. Quite a lot of talent, actually, because even the most talented reader will find much of the land of literature tricky terrain. For how many of us feel the world to be as Kafka felt it, too impossibly foreshortened to ride from one village to the next? Or can imagine a world without nouns, as Borges did? How many are willing to be as emotionally generous as Dickens, or to take religious faith as seriously as did Graham Greene? Who among us have Zora Neale Hurston’s capacity for joy or Douglas Coupland’s strong stomach for the future? Who has the delicacy to tease out Flaubert’s faintest nuance, or the patience and the will to follow David Foster Wallace down his intricate recursive spirals of thought?
***
Read the complete essay in The Guardian
Add comment January 13th, 2007
Right after returning he went on a trip. He was gone for about two weeks, and just before returning, he called his friends to tell them he had walked into a door at the bank and blackened his eyes. When he got home the black eyes were almost gone. But it was clear that he hadn't walked into a glass door. Howie had had his face lifted. It is not possible to really explain the effect on us, his old friends and acquaintances, of his new glossiness: the incisions behind the ears, the Polynesian serenity of his new gaze left many of our circle in Deadrock speechless.
Add comment July 2nd, 2006
The dinosaur tracks in England all went from west to east, the book said. By what light was this fact called "knowledge"? Wasn't it just one more inexplicable thing to mystify them, didn't it subtract from what they knew, rather than add to it? The sabotage of knowledge by a wealth of facts–they weren't professors, but guerrillas.
***
"My name is Fiskadoro." He was aware that mucus flowed from his nostrils, but he felt he would demean himself by wiping it away. "My father is dead."
The others nodded. Harvard gouged a depression in the sand with his toes and placed a heel in it.
"My father is dead!" As soon as he'd said it, Fiskadoro saw he'd made it true again–again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn't simple. It wasn't one thing, but a thousand things carrying him away to the Ocean: the work of a person's life was to drink it.
***
He moved his hands as if gnarling up a bunch of string. "In the time when it was cold, we, my family, we burned our copy of the Constitution to get the fire going one day. Everybody was in despair, the children were coming out crooked, every tide left dead poison fish, nobody put out the boats, nobody could get together and say, Let's keep the fires going in our stoves–I remember this, my father told me and I remember a little bit. Our family burned a copy of the Constitution and all the books to stay alive, but first they memorized the Constitution, everyone took two paragraphs, they clung to the ways they knew–they did this, Eileen, because it would keep them going on, step by step. It isn't good, calling yourself Swanson-Johnson, as if a name is a joke. Next a word will be a joke, and then comes a time when even a thought is a joke.
***
He understood, but didn't remember, that in the world before his dream and his death his mother had been everything to him, that she had gradually become only a part of the world, but the biggest part, and had turned eventually into just one person in the world, but the person he loved the most. Fiskadoro didn't mind knowing about this, but he didn't want to remember it. His mother was sick. She was getting smaller and smaller. After she closed her eyes there would be a hole in the air where she'd been, and then nothing where she'd been, only the air. He didn't want to eat the wafer. He didn't want the hole in the air to be a hole in Fiskadoro. He didn't want to remember what he was losing.
***
Nodding down into a nap beneath the canopy of her memories, she jerked awake and saw the form again in the early mist of the second morning and the third day–a rock, a whale, some white place to cling to, sleep, and breathe. And in her state of waking, she jerked awake. And from that waking, she woke up.
Add comment July 2nd, 2006
“When I use a word,†Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.â€
“The question is,†said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.â€
“The question is,†said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.â€
Add comment October 17th, 2005
A policeman walked slowly passed by the windows: that was not for nothing. Here were two men standing still and silent near the house. Why were they silent? And agonizing days and nights followed for Ivan Dmitritch. Everyone who passed by the windows or came into the yard seemed to him a spy or a detective. At midday the chief of the police usually drove down the street with a pair of horses; he was going from his estate near the town to the police department; but Ivan Dmitritch fancied every time that he was driving especially quickly, and that he had a peculiar expression; it was evident that he was in haste to announce that there was a very important criminal in the town. Ivan Dmitritch started at every ring at the bell and knock at the gate, and was agitated whenever he came upon anyone new at his landlady’s; when he met police officers and gendarmes he smiled and began whistling so as to seem unconcerned. He could not sleep for whole nights in succession expecting to be arrested, but he snored loudly and sighed as though in deep sleep, that his landlady might think he was asleep; for if he could not sleep it meant that he was tormented by the stings of conscience– what a piece of evidence! Facts and common sense persuaded him that all these terrors were nonsense and morbidity, that if one looked at the matter more broadly there was nothing really terrible in arrest and imprisonment– so long as the conscience is at ease; but the more sensibly and logically he he reasoned, the more acute and agonizing his mental distress became. It might be compared with the story of a hermit who tried to cut a dwelling-place for himself in virgin forest; the more zealously he worked with his axe, the thicker the forest grew. In the end Ivan Dmitritch, seeing it was useless, gave up reasoning altogether, and abandoned himself entirely to despair and terror.
Add comment July 11th, 2005
And the baby screams, and is worn out with screaming. Again Varka sees the high muddy road, the people with wallets, her mother Pelageya, her father Yefim. She understands everything, she recognizes everyone, but through her half sleep she cannot understand the force which binds her, hand and foot, weighs upon her, and prevents her from living. She looks around, searches for that, force that she may escape from it, but she cannot find it. At last, tired to death, she does her very utmost, strains her eyes, looks up at the flickering green patch, and listening to the screaming, finds the foe who will not let her live.
That foe is the baby.
She laughs. It seems strange to her that she has failed to grasp such a simple thing before. The green patch, the shadows, and the cricket seem to laugh and wonder too.
The hallucination takes possession of Varka. She gets up from her stool, and with a broad smile on her face and wide unblinking eyes, she walks up and down the room. She feels pleased and tickled at the thought that she will be rid directly of the baby that binds her hand and foot… Kill the baby and then sleep, sleep, sleep…
Laughing and winking and shaking her fingers at the green patch, Varka steals up to the cradle and bends over the baby. When she has strangled him, she quickly lies down on the floor, laughs with delight that she can sleep, and in a minute is sleeping as sound as the dead.
Add comment July 11th, 2005
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).
***
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“As long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
***
“One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
***
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least… at least I mean what I say– that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
***
And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.
***
“And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”
***
I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is “Who in the world am I?” Ah, that’s the great puzzle!
***
“Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” said Alice to herself rather sharply. “I advise you to leave off this minute!” She generally gave herself good advice (though she very seldom followed it).
***
“A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon, in a tone of the deepest contempt. “I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it. I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!”
“I have tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice, who was a very truthful child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.”
“I don’t believe it,” said the Pigeon; “but if they do, then they’re a kind of serpent: that’s all I can say.”
***
“I couldn’t afford to learn it,” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. “I only took the regular course.”
“What was that?” inquired Alice.
“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic– Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”
***
The Queen had one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. “Off with his head!” she said without even looking around.
***
“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
Add comment February 7th, 2005
Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Add comment February 7th, 2005
I have said that the visible product of Menard’s pen is easily enumerated. Having examined his personal files with the greatest care, I have established that his body of work consists of the following pieces:
This is the full extent (save for a few vague sonnets of occasion destined for Mme. Henri Bachelier’s hospitable, or greedy, album des souvenirs) of the visible lifework of Pierre Menard, in proper chronological order. I shall turn now to the other, the subterranean, the interminably heroic production– the oeuvre nonpareil, the oeuvre that must remain– for such are our human limitations!– unfinished. This work, perhaps the most significant writing of our time, consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part I of Don Quixote and a fragment of Chapter XXII. I know that such a claim is on the face of it absurd; justifying that “absurdity” shall be the primary object of this note.
1Mme. Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo’s literal translation of St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction a lavie devote. In Pierre Menard’s library there is no trace of such a work. This must be an instance of one of our friend’s droll jokes, misheard or misunderstood.
***
Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which is surely easy enough–he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided–word for word and line for line–with those of Miguel de Cervantes.
“My purpose is merely astonishing,” he wrote me on September 30, 1934, from Bayonne. “The final term of a theological or metaphysical proof– the world around us, or God, or chance, or universal Forms– is no more final, no more uncommon, than my revealed novel. The sole difference is that philosopher’s publish pleasant volumes containing the intermediate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own.” And indeed there is not a single draft to bear witness to that years-long labor.
Initially, Menard’s method was relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918– be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered seventeenth-century Castilian) but he discarded it as too easy. Too impossible, rather!, the reader will say. Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the possible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting. To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote– that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard. (It was that conviction, by the way, that obliged him to leave out the autobiographical forward to Part II of the novel. Including the prologue would have meant creating another character– “Cervantes”– and also presenting Quixote through that character’s eyes, not Pierre Menard’s. Menard, of course, spurned that easy solution.) “The task I have undertaken is not in essence difficult,” I read at another place in that letter. “If I could just be immortal, I could do it.” Shall I confess that he did complete it, and that I read the Quixote– the entire Quixote– as if Menard had conceived it?
***
It is a revolution to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):
…truth, whose mother is history, rival of our time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
…truth, whose mother is history, rival of our time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
History, the mother of truth!– the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened. The final phrases–exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor– are brazenly pragmatic.
The contrast in styles is equally striking. The archaic style of Menard– who is, in addition, not a native speaker of the language in which he writes– is somehat affected. Not so the style of his precursor, who employs the Spanish of his time with complete naturalness.
Add comment February 7th, 2005
…the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lives its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self’s soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.
Add comment November 21st, 2004
I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement– or an unusual construction. But it’s a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police. I am a police. I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also.
…
Here is my personal “ten-card.” At the age of eighteen I enrolled for a master’s in Criminal Justice at Pete Brown. But what I really wanted was the streets. And I couldn’t wait. I took tests for state trooper, for border patrol, and even for state corrections officer. I passed them all. I also took the police test, and I passed that, too. I quit Pete and enrolled at the Academy.
I started out as a beat cop in the Southern. I was part of the Neighborhood Stabilization Unit in the Forty-Four. We walked footposts and did radio runs. Then for five years I was in the Senior Citizens Robbery Unit. Going proactive– decoy and equipment– was my ticket to plainclothes. LAter, in another test, and downtown, with my shield. I’m now in Asset Forfeiture, but for eight years I was in Homicide. I worked murders. I was a murder police.
A few words about my appearance. The physique I inherited from my mother. Way ahead of her time, she had the look now associated with highly politicized feminists. Ma could have played the male villain in a post-nuclear road movie. I copped her voice, too: It has been further deepened by three decades of nicotine abuse. My features I inherited from my father. They are rural rather than urban–flat, undecided. The hair is dyed blonde. I was born and raised in this city, out in Moon Park. But all that went to pieces, when I was ten, and thereafter I was raised by the state. I don’t know where my parents are. I’m five-ten and I go 180.
Some say you can’t top the adrenalin (and the dirty cash) of Narcotics, and all agree that Kidnapping is a million laughs (if murder in America is largely black on black cime, then kidnapping is largely gang on gang), and Sex Offenses has its followers, and Vice has its votaries, and Intelligence means what it says (Intelligence runs deep, and brings in the deep-sea malefactors), but everyone is quietly aware that Homicide is the daddy. Homicide is the Show.
In this second-echelon American city, mildly fames for its Jap-financed Babel Tower, its harbors and marinas, its university, its futuristically enlightened corporations (computer software, aerospace, pharmaceuticals), its high unemployment, and its catastrophic inner-city taxpayer flight, a homicide police works maybe a dozen murders per year. Sometimes you’re a primary investigator on the case, sometimes a secondary. I worked one hundred murders. My clearance rate was just above average. I could read a crime scene and, more than once, I was described as an “exceptional interrogator.” My paperwork was outstanding. When I came to CID from the Southern everybody expected my reports to be district quality. But they were downtown quality, right from the start. And I sought to improve still further and gave it a hundred percent. One time I did a very, very competent job, collating two rival acocunts of a hot-potato homicide in the Seventy-Three: One witness/suspect versus another witness/suspect. “Compared to what you guys give me to read,” prounounced Detective Sergeant Henrik Overmars, brandishing my report at the whole squad, “this is fucking oratory. It’s goddamn Cicero versus Robespierre.” I did the work as best I could until I entered my own end-zone and couldn’t do it anymore. In my time, I have come in on the aftermath of maybe a thousand suspicious deaths, most of which turned out to be suicides or accidentals or plain unattendeds. So I’ve seen them all: Jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, drunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, burders. I have seen the bodies of bludgeoned one-year-olds. I have seen the bodies of gang-raped nonagenarians. I have seen bodies left dead so long that your only shot at a t.o.d. is to weigh the maggots. But of all the bodies I have ever seen, none has stayed with me, in my gut, like the body of Jennifer Rockwell.
***
The Psychological Autopsy
Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won’t get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have. But it’s just one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there. It’s the night train.
Now I feel that someone is inside of me, like an intruder, her flashlight playing. Jennifer Rockwell is inside of me, trying to reveal what I don’t want to see.
Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner.
I’ve got to slow this shit down. I’ve got to slow it all down.
***
With TV you expect everything to measure up. Things are meant to measure up. The punishment will answer the crime. The crime will fall within the psychological profile of the malefactor. The alibi will disintegrate. The gun will smoke. The veiled woman will appear in the courthouse.
Motive, motive. “Motive”: That which moves, that which impels. But with homicide, now, we don’t care about motive. We never give it a second’s thought. We don’t care about the why. We say: Fuck the why. Motive might have been worth considering, might have been pretty reliable, might have been in okay shape half a century ago. But now it’s all up in the fucking air. With the TV.
I’ll tell you who wants a why. Jurors want a why. They want reruns of Perry Mason and The Defenders. They want Car Fifty-Four, Where Are You?
They want commercials every ten minutes or it never happened.
That’s homicide. This is suicide. And we all want a why for suicide.
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