“Look at it now!” the madman cried joyfully. “A cardboard box!”
77: FLEISCHMAN’S PREDICAMENT
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Fleischman, the film critic’s son, once explained his predicament to me.
His great-grandfather rebelled against his great-great-grandfather over the issue of Judaism; his grandfather rebelled against his great-grandfather over the issue of Marxism; and his father rebelled against his grandfather by becoming a film critic.
The family business, Fleischman realized, is rebellion! He was even expected by his father, the film critic, to rebel! Thus, he realized, as he put it to me over lunch at the Pakistani restaurant in our neighborhood, the only way he could actually rebel would be not to rebel at all.
By rebelling he would not be rebelling, but by not rebelling he would be rebelling. The Fleischman predicament, he declared.
This was why he was making himself over in his father’s image. If I was wondering why he was wearing one of his father’s old suits and his father’s old glasses, with the prescription lenses popped out and plain glass put in, Fleischman told me at the Pakistani place, this was why. This was why he was writing unpaid film reviews for our town’s free alternative newsweekly. And had I noticed, he wanted to know, that he had even adopted many of his father’s speech patterns? “These words are his words!” cried Fleischman excitedly. “It is even possible that these thoughts are his thoughts!” He had also, he said, perfected his father’s laugh. He showed me this laugh at some length. By becoming his father, he was, ironically, becoming his own man, Fleischman explained, laughing his father’s laugh.
Needless to say, I turned down all future lunch invitations from Fleischman. His father called a few months later to inform me that Fleischman was being hospitalized. I got an enthusiastic voicemail from Fleischman the same night, calling from the asylum. He said that his father’s failure to recognize his actions as nothing more than a form of rebellion was a sign that he was rebelling — or rather not rebelling — properly. I need to keep doing exactly what I’m doing, Fleischman said, and then hung up.
78: THE BALKAN HISTORIAN
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A soft-spoken Balkan historian at our college was inordinately sensitive to the subtle means by which power operates. For reasons that were never completely clear, he was absurdly careful not to influence us intellectually — consciously or subconsciously — in any way, and always strove in his lectures to separate his Balkan facts from his Balkan interpretations. At first we assumed this was just his pedagogical philosophy, but later, when it became so clearly pathological, we suspected that it might be connected to his upbringing. (His father was, depending on whom you asked, a Serbian war criminal, a Macedonian statesman, a Croatian optician, or a Bosnian cobbler.)
In any case, the Balkan historian finally broke down during the third of his three lectures on the Congress of Berlin when he realized that he could not give us a single fact about the Congress of Berlin without also impressing upon us, implicitly or explicitly, his judgment or interpretation of it, even if the judgment was simply that it was a fact worth knowing. In the end, he was reduced to stating again and again the dates during which the Congress took place—June 13 to July 13, 1878—while inserting intermittently that it was “entirely up to [us]” whether or not we considered these dates to be of any importance.
He resigned his appointment that day and later drowned himself in a local lake. According to a note, he was horrified by the number of students he had unintentionally influenced and imprinted himself on over the years. How could he bear the guilt of his Balkan history thoughts occupying their heads? (We were confused: we had signed up for the course as much for his thoughts as for his facts.) Only by drowning himself, he wrote, could he prevent himself from ever insidiously influencing another student. Unfortunately, the lake in which he drowned himself was also, unbeknownst to him, a reservoir, and soon the entire college population was virulently ill.
79: GRIEF
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Visitors to the San Antonio Zoo have long been moved by the sad sight of Samson, an elderly African elephant who spends some fourteen hours a day pushing a huge tractor tire in a circle around his enclosure, moaning the entire time.
Rumor spread that Samson was in mourning for his son, transferred many years ago to another zoo.
His zookeepers, who knew that Samson had never had children and was simply driven insane by the conditions of his existence, thus had a decision to make. They could explain to the public that Samson moaned and pushed his tractor tire in a circle because he was deranged, or they could let the public continue thinking that he did so because he was deranged by grief.
Needless to say, they went with the second option. They even nailed a sign beside Samson’s pen describing the exceptionally close-knit nature of the elephant family unit.
This seeming confirmation of Samson’s circumstance has attracted more visitors to his enclosure than ever before. They crowd around him. He moans and pushes his huge tractor tire. “A father driven to grief by the loss of his son,” they think, never suspecting that he’s just a berserk bachelor totally unhinged by every single aspect of his life.
80: TWO MUSEUMS
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The two sons of Portugal’s greatest poet agreed, at last, to turn his house into a museum, but they could not agree on its design. The older son, fiercely loyal to his father, wanted to showcase the poet’s study, with its simple but sturdy desk, as well as the grand, extensive library and the little garden in which he strolled after work. The younger son, loyal above all, he said, to the truth, maintained that the two bathrooms, the downstairs bathroom but especially the upstairs bathroom, had to be the focal point of any “honest” museum about their father. A Nunes museum that did not emphasize the bathrooms, the younger son insisted, was not an “honest” Nunes Museum at all.
The two sons ultimately agreed to split the house and open their own museums: the Nunes House and the Nunes Estate. Both offer guided tours depicting a day in the life of Nunes. The Nunes House tour starts in the bedroom, heads first to the study, then to the library, and concludes in the garden. The tour guide recites poems related to each location. The Nunes Estate tour begins, likewise, in the bedroom, but proceeds first to the upstairs bathroom, then to the kitchen, and then to the downstairs bathroom. The tour guide recites a poem related to this location. The tour guide then sort of wanders aimlessly through the house, shouting at everyone to shut up, he’s trying to think, before winding up back at the upstairs bathroom. He recites a poem related to this location. Visitors are then encouraged to journey back and forth between the two bathrooms on their own, following the well-demarcated “Path of Nunes” from the upstairs bathroom to the downstairs bathroom to the upstairs bathroom to the downstairs bathroom, and finally back to the bedroom. Interactive stations along the path invite younger visitors to stop, listen closely, and report, via the touchscreen, whether there are any sounds that might “interfere with your ability to think.”