How had he become a hermit? It was difficult to recall. If he tried to recall, he might come up with something like this: I met a girl who told me she had made a fortune making other women believe that the gizmo she sold them would effortlessly fry the fat off their ass. He would say also: That’s the way she put it, which for some reason really made me laugh: “Fry the fat off their ass!” I would see one ass, one quantity of fat, millions of women buying this gizmo.
In fact the hermit had met no such woman. If he tried to recall how he had become a hermit he might deliver himself of other fictions as well. A dog told him to become a hermit. As a hermit he would be able to position himself eventually to repudiate plumbing and be a natural man. As a hermit he would never have the means to deliberately go to an air show, and it was probable that one would never accidentally come to him. The problem of not having enough bricks of the right color was never going to trouble him, if he became a hermit. And so forth.
So he became more comfortable with however he had become what he’d become, and more comfortable with the realization that what he had most become was stupid. People not speaking to him, which had once worried him when it developed, now served as a kind of validation. He liked them over there not speaking, as opposed to over here causing trouble with their attentions in which he was not that interested and which he could not comprehend anyway in his fast-draining neap-tide stupidity. My head so out of water, he said one day, I can see fiddlers running in and out of they tiny holes. He wanted to talk like a Mississippi blues man but knew that that too was a pose of intellection that he could not sustain. Those guys were smart enough to all sound the same way, to talk in a code of agreed-upon stylization to fool the doofus acolytes. He did not really have any such theories about Mississippi blues men duping their congregation or want to talk like one. It was just another kind of lie that drifted through his head, across the mudflat of his brain, as agreeable as any other lie. He had no idea what a post-horse was, if there even was such a thing. There was some logic to faulting God for making incense, but he had no idea what might be meant by a radio day. This was the essence of the new condition: nonsense now made sense as he realized the sense he had insisted upon had never actually made sense. His life had become a fabric of tiny lies instead of a construction of some truths and verities around which some lies might buzz. His life was all a buzzing lie, and it always had been. In one way, once this stopped alarming you, it made you very happy. It took the pressure off. It was like skydiving without leaving the house, or even one’s chair.
It was time, in this new condition, to get a good tank of fish and send off to Russia for a mail-order bride. He would like a school of lipstick-red platys and a Ukrainian girl named Elena. She was thirty-six and had a boy eight years old. She skied and reported that she tried to keep fit. She did not describe herself bizarrely as the younger women tended to. (“It is difficult to judge myself but I can describe myself as trustful, emotional, calm, serious, tidy, purposeful, friendly, sincere, thrifty, sexy, patient, persistent, sacrificial, responsible, accurate, and honest. I have a lot of friends who say that I am communicative, modest, sensitive, sentimental, calm, democratic, reasonable, romantic, sympathetic, womanly, and economical woman.”) All Elena said was “I’m warm-hearted, communicative, tender, kind, and loving. I like traveling, picnics with my friends in the open air. I adore skiing. I try to keep fit.” Would he no longer be a hermit if he secured these fish and this bride? He would be a hermit with some fish who did not talk and with a Russian bride who did not talk much, apparently, so in a way, he thought, taking the perspective from outside, he would be even more of a hermit than he now was. The hermit has taken a bowl of fish and a silent Russian wife, they would say down in the village or wherever it was that people discussed hermits. It was a fine plan. But it was not a fine plan.
It would require energy to acquire a bowl of fish and a bride, even one by mail-order. He could perhaps, if she was to deliver herself to the door — he did not know how it worked, but something this easy was going to be necessary — ask her to pick up the fish on the way. This idea was appealing but it caused the first fear associated with the plan. These Russian women had spunk and did not want to marry a layabout or a retarded person, that much was clear from their ambitions and desires in the catalog profiles. They seemed like good soldiers in this regard: rugged, ready to work, to party, and expecting their comrades in the trench to be good heads beside theirs. It did not bode well in his imagination, even as low-tide as it was, to tell such a woman to get fish along the ten-thousand-mile journey unto him and to then unwrap herself and present herself to him without his getting up off the bed, which is how he saw this all happening in the mudflat of his brain. This fish-and-bride plan was a non-starter.
Language of that sort had once irritated him. That’s a non-starter and I’m a self-starter so it’s not copacetic with moi. But now to say something was a non-starter was a delight. He himself was a non-ender. He was not in the middle of anything either. Oh, Elena, he said to no one, not even really to himself, and arguably not even to her phantom self ten thousand miles away keeping fit in Ukraine: Oh, Elena, I’d make you a good man if I were a different man, but as it is you’d get here on radio day and little Sergei — is he eight? — would want to play soccer and I’d have to take him down to Little League, if I could even find it, and he’d wind up on the crummy team for boys who can’t play, as I wound up, and then he’d be headed for a life not unlike his mad stepfather’s and he would come to long even more than he does now for his real Ukrainian father, and you, well your own disappointments would accrue just as certainly and vigorously, and, besides, I am older than the age range you say you want your partner to fall within and would have to petition for an extension of about ten years, and I would ask you to get some tropical fish on the way, just like step out of line after customs and pick some up, and it would be hard with your “with-dictionary” English level for me to explain what a lipstick-red platy is, and how disappointing it is that all they have now are these swordfish-orange platys, so you really have to look hard, maybe go to twenty tropical-fish shops in brand-new huge and confusing America en route to the hermit’s lair and still probably not find lipstick-red fish, so, really, and also, I am retarded now, so really I think it better that you stay in Ukraine with Sergei and wait for a better offer from a better man. I hope you agree.
The New World
In the New World we went our Separate Ways. There’s a rat in separate. In the New World large colorful fruit hung from trees, and pink piglets trotted about cleaning up the downfall. There was consequently no smell of rot, or fruit flies, and these piglets did not seem to mature and be seen as gross adults wallowing in mud or otherwise stinking up the place. Just cute pink pigs scarfing up the red and green and yellow fruit on the ground and running off before any of it came out of them the other way. When I first apprehended this system of fruit disposal by permanently cute pigs who do not defecate in your presence it occurred to me that I must be in a Utopia with a good mind at the helm — nay, a superior mind. I gave my wife all the credit cards, putting them into a pistol holster I had had lying around, and she went over the dale happily, armed. I thought for a moment she resembled a horse going over the horizon, agreeably clopping her Separate Way with a bouncy if clumsy gait. There was nothing to be bought in the New World with the credit cards, or with anything else other than your luck or your charm. She knew this, or I thought she knew this, but having all the credit cards nonetheless made her happy, and I was happy to have made her happy, for once. After all, Separate Ways would not have been obtaining unless there had been failure in this dimension, The Making Happy of the Other. It is of course the final dimension, and accordingly the most difficult to negotiate successfully. You enter this dimension usually without having mastered the other, preceding impossible dimensions, such as Tumescence at the Right Time. Here’s a good saying: He (or she, or it) is not worth the powder it would take to blow him.