TELL US A JOKE
I hate telling jokes on command. It has to be one of the worst situations a person can be in. That’s why you have to respect the jesters of medieval times. They were always ready to be funny, but in exchange they forfeited all dignity—and in return, they got a special kind of permanent dignity that wasn’t destroyed by scrounging around with the dogs to get a scrap now and then. Or “that’s how it’s been told to me. Maybe there weren’t even jesters. Have they ever found any jester bones? If they have, I certainly haven’t seen them. That would be something—to see a full set of jester bones in a museum, strung up like an ankylosaurus.
The funniest things are usually the most revealing. I thought about Lana and I thought—she is really good at telling stories. I’ll just tell one of the stories that she told me the first time we hung out.
I turned my chair around.
TELL US A JOKE
Okay, so this is a true story. There is a golden eagle that was being observed by scientists, and it found a spot on top of this cathedral where it could nest. It liked that spot pretty well. I think there ended up being two of them—which means it somehow convinced another one the spot was good, but that isn’t part of the story. The story goes like this: the eagle looks around for food in the town, but it is having trouble finding food, so it starts hunting people’s dogs. First it kills a Chihuahua. Then, it kills a Yorkie. It catches a guy with his Belgian Malinois on his back stairs and whips the Malinois off so it falls to its death, then it drags it god knows where to have a nice meal.
Okay, so this is funny to begin with. I mean, if you like this sort of thing. But, what’s funnier is this: one day it kills this beagle, and the beagle is wearing a kind of stupid knit party hat. While it is eating the beagle, I guess the beagle turned out to be a good meal and the golden eagle lost its cool, the knit party hat, which was bright purple and green, gets transferred onto the eagle’s head. It gets stuck there, somehow it is thoroughly stuck to the eagle’s head. What does this mean? And this is the joke: for the next two months, people were running around in this town pulling on their dogs’ leashes and looking to the sky for an eagle wearing a party hat. And sometimes the eagle comes. There’s even a video of it—the eagle is doing a cool eagle dive, and the party hat is flapping ominously in the wind.
BEEKMAN
Beekman asked me how it went, and I said: they don’t let you down these Hausmann people. That is a real test. I mean—certainly you can chop up a group of people with that test. You can slice them up real thin.
He asked me if I got sliced up thin.
I said, it was more like in a dream where I was both being sliced and the one slicing.
Beekman told me about a samurai sword exhibit he took his son to once and how the blades are all very beautiful but you know that each and every one got tested on a peasant’s back.
GARDEN
When I got home, my aunt was sitting in the garden. She was drawing a diagram on a piece of paper. I sat next to her.
What is that?
It is for you, she said. I am preparing a plan for you to make a garden like this if you want to, sometime in the future.
Her rules were: plant some things almost randomly. Let weeds grow. If you like the weeds, then weed the plants out.
She had a diagram with all the beds that looked like this:
BED (weeds)
BED (garlic)
BED (weeds)
BED (carrots)
BED (weeds)
BED (weeds)
BED (dirt)
BED (dill/weeds)
BED (
She wasn’t finished yet.
How did the test go?
I kind of kicked at the ground a bit and didn’t say anything. My right sneaker had a huge hole and you could see my big toe sometimes.
We need to get you some new shoes, she observed. I think there is a box with a few pairs in it at the church.
I said, Beekman was pretty nice, telling me about the test.
She said she had talked to Beekman on the phone and he seemed, yes, like a nice man. I asked her why she had talked to him on the phone.
She said he had called. She answered the phone. Then she was talking to him on the phone. That was the order of events.
I said, but why did he call?
She said, he needed permission if he was going to give me a ride somewhere. Otherwise he could be accused of all sorts of bad business.
That’s the world we live in, she said.
We sat there for a while. I noticed that her hands were shaky as hell. They are just trembling and trembling. It made my stomach feel funny.
Lucia, dear, did you ever think that maybe I died already—when the ambulance came for me, and that you have just been imagining all this ever since because your mind can’t cope with the reality of the situation? Right now, you are just sitting here by yourself in the garden, for instance, and …
Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
My aunt likes to put it on me sometimes. She calls that sort of thing an improvement lesson.
I’m just bringing you up to snuff, she says.
THE PAMPHLET!
And now I will put in my pamphlet (after this).
It’s my opinion that you will find it to be quite interesting. Of course, you may hate it, and that would be completely understandable. I tried to make the language more formal—since I was imagining as I went that I don’t know who will read it. Sometimes you put a thing out into the wind, and the wind carries it—to where?
There are a few copies of this. My aunt has one. Lana has one. I stuck one in the library at school, somewhere it won’t be discovered for years.
You have seen the cover—I stuck that in earlier. So, I’ll just jump to the first page.
HALL
It was early—just before school. The hall had that feeling, like an empty train station. Any second this empty space would be packed with people and whatever was comforting about it would vanish.
I’d just printed the pamphlets out at the multimedia lab (on thick gray-colored paper)—which is the reason I was there early to begin with.
You can imagine how proud I was—I mean, I had never written a pamphlet before, not once in my life! And there I was, standing with them in my hand. Up walks Stephan and he asks me how the fire went. Of all the people. I was hoping not to see him.
I figured he’d ask, but I wasn’t prepared—not while I was holding my pamphlet! Also—what a jackass, to say that shit out loud. But, I guess his pride was hurt and he wasn’t thinking.