When asked, which happens from time to time, I say I am researching Verner Vanderloon and, come to think of it, this is true. After all, his papers are here along with the books, and I am deep into all of it. (Read some Malinowski! Axel admonished me before his death. Read some Lévi-Strauss, some Boas! Read Margaret Mead! But I have a mind to finish what I have begun; such an interesting mind, Loon’s!) If asked (this has never happened) there is much I can say about him, his intimate and groundbreaking work (his obsession Axel said) with human cruelty, the connections he makes (considered by his peers ill-advised) between man’s terror and resentment of mortality, and his paradoxical impulse to take life’s side, to esteem promiscuous wives (one example) who he imagines, in one of his most charming digressions, being revered on another planet for all they do for the public good, arousing feelings of conviviality, good cheer, fraternity — not to mention inspiring the erotic fires of all the wives. (His chapter on the Temple Whores of Tantric India could not be more wistful.) Yet his detractors call him the dog who always barks up the wrong tree.
There is, admittedly, some weird stuff about the name of God and Vanderloon’s inquiries into the origins of self-awareness. My own, he writes, was awakened by the sound of my grandmother’s garter pistol going off, not by accident, and shattering my granddad’s ribs.
Vanderloon’s research into the many forms marriage takes miraculously coincides with the ways in which the gods conspire and interfere with family life. What comes to mind is the familial traditions of the Episcopate Islands of the Eastern Rim, in which the eldest brother deflowers his sisters, who then defer to him in all things, including the vocabulary they are to use for the rest of their lives, the time of day they may speak, and the subjects of their discourse — such as the migrations of lizards, the color of edible moth pupae, the (limited) ways in which the backs of chairs may be decorated. On another island the bride is made to name the groom’s every family member and ancestor but forget her own; on yet another the bride in coitus cuts off her groom’s left ear, which she then gives to her mother-in-law as proof of her undying fealty.
Vanderloon also darkly rejoices in stories of mothers tossing mush at their infants’ faces; it must learn to swallow what it can of the mush and its pride simultaneously. “Our species is doomed to perish cursing its own boundless absurdity,” Vanderloon is said to have asserted when asked to speak at his retirement supper.
Back to Asthma. She is eight, the very age I was when Mother vanished into the box forever and Father, once so kind, began to devolve into debility and viciousness. Little Asthma! As mine was, her mother, Blackie, is a screamer. Asthma. A name that is soft on the tongue, that, like cotton candy, dissolves. My own fairy child. One day I hope to know her as well as I know Vanderloon’s books, the way I know every pop and snap the library makes in the dark after hours and the taste of canned minestrone when you have spooned it into your mouth for twenty consecutive days. (I believe I am the only person on the planet who knows just what this tastes like.) If I could, I would count every hair on Asthma’s head, and not just to know their number, mind you, but to uncover that number’s precise meaning, cabalistically if you will — in terms not of God’s name or the numbers of hairs He had on his head or chin (a childish exercise), but of how that number coincides with the scattered pieces of the world as they couple and uncouple ceaselessly: there is a pattern to all this, only it is invisible, and furthermore it takes a particular frame of mind, and it takes time (!), it takes intention (!), to see it. Asthma. I hear Blackie scream and think: Go in peace, my little bell, my little snail, my little seaside pail; Asthma the salt, the surf of my soul.
Deep in the dark days of winter, I think: How good is the summer! I can get around joyfully and tirelessly, live in comfort in the Utilities House, its windows open to the breeze, and much like a cartoon character, snag a pie from a windowsill (or a kitchen table) and in the dark of night, make off with the plump promise of a refrigerated chicken!
One of the fine things about campus life is that intellectuals (well, maybe this isn’t true of French intellectuals) are not into dogs, and if they are, it’s not a watchdog but a child-friendly dog, a sleepy dog with floppy ears and droopy jowls, a cat-friendly dog. A dog that will protect the parakeet from the cat. Parakeets are popular and as long as I don’t collide into a cage in the dark (this learned the hard way) don’t set off any alarms. For one thing, they appear to be much like chickens; as long as they are in the dark they sleep a deep and dreamless sleep. (The one time I collided into a cage it belonged to a large gray parrot who roused the house with the word: Parcheesi! [It turned out that was its name.] Like an adulterer I had to hide behind the sofa until everything settled down. Parrots, I have noticed, are popular with narcissists.)
When the faculty brats play in the forest that unfolds behind the Circle, their shouts are shuttled by the trees. Decomposing trunks bridge the moon. Being the children of professors, their dragons guard golden apples. They play at pharaohs, the collapse of Thebes. They know something of the great plague. Sometimes the games they play are dangerous, as when Asthma spends a long afternoon tied to a tree. Lost among the seething wars of starships deeper in the woods, the boys forget her, abandon her for the river’s rocky beaches and then, at day’s end, the comfort of the Indian Wars at home, televised in black and white.
The curious thing about Asthma is that she is not afraid. Her captivity provides an occasion to ponder a number of beauties, paradoxes, and contradictions. Overhead, several thousand geese row the air. Almost imperceptible, a fox, terrible and wonderful, slips past with a rabbit in its mouth. The two animals stain the air with a scent of appetite and fear that lingers for hours. And Asthma sees a copperhead uncoil and spill from under a fallen tree, mossy and hectic with the comings and goings of beetles the size of thumbs. What, she wonders, what on earth can they be thinking?
Asthma has seen copperheads before — the woods are alive with them; the children walk with sticks, thrashing their way through everything, underbrush, bramble, high grass, sumac, and cattails. They rejoice whenever they see a snake because they thrive on risk (one will become a pilot, one a stockbroker, one a gambler, and one a suicide) — enfevered when they see a hornet nest hanging above them like a severed head or whenever they see something dead. Tied to her tree, Asthma remains composed as the afternoon submits to evening — composed because her mind is gorged with fairy tales and she knows something miraculous will happen. Which at last it does, when the boys, smelling of piss and clay, and looking frightened and hurried, brandish their pocketknives and cut her free as she glowers. She may only be eight, but she twists this way and that in a manner she knows is provocative. And when Roland — her favorite — dares look her in the eyes and stutter an apology, she coyly turns her head away in a gesture both studied and rehearsed. (Asthma has seen how Blackie does this very thing when her playmates’ fathers provoke her with their eyes.)