Yet even though it might be a game, he thought these doodles were of particular importance. Corruption itself was a kind of ritual, a kind of obsession, which we ignored at our peril.
“That looks like a naked woman. Is that what you’ve been thinking about?”
Some of the doodles appeared vaguely pornographic. But a pornography of an elevated sort, as he could detect softnesses here which seemed to go far beyond that of normal flesh, certainly beyond that of any sort of flesh he had ever encountered: the softness of old women losing their hair, of young women in the fullness of life, of his own pale young son, and of his even paler daughter, of the pelts of animals, of silks, of swelling breads.
“You want to leave me, I can tell.”
His ex-wife accused him daily of wanting to escape her, until escape her he did. Occasionally a page filled with wings. This happened often during times of great stress. Sometimes he drew them all day, and on surfaces he would never think to scribble on, like walls and floors. Once his ex-wife discovered them drawn on their bedroom wall and he’d been a coward, blamed the doodles on one of the kids and was ashamed of himself for months afterward.
Later he realized he’d blamed both of their children. But that was impossible; that was crazy. What had he been thinking of?
It was strange that he never thought consciously of escaping, or felt consciously trapped, for that matter. He felt like a normal human being. But perhaps part of being a normal human being was to be trapped, unable to escape the confines of one’s own life and body.
“Sometimes you just talk and talk, but you really have nothing to say.”
One day his pen stopped writing, out of ink, then started again in fits and sputters. This disturbed him greatly, because although he imagined he could detect the patterns that the pressure of the pen nib had made, he could never be sure he had understood all of it.
And it was important to understand. He didn’t know why, but his life depended on it.
“Sometimes you say some pretty hurtful things.”
Sometimes the doodles appeared like mutilations of the pure white, expressionless page. They appeared to be angry, even though he didn’t think he was an angry man. They appeared to be hateful, even though he could think of no one he hated.
And sometimes they appeared as the worst sorts of obscenity: children being mutilated and destroyed, children burning to death.
“We’ve lived here so long. Maybe what you need is a change of scenery.”
Sometimes what began as a cityscape broke off into other directions that better expressed what the city had become for him. No matter how convoluted the network of lines of this urban representation became, he always seemed able to pick particular houses out of the complexity, important landmarks of his life there.
There was the house where he was born. There was the third-floor apartment in which he had first made love to the woman who would become first his wife, and then his ex-wife. There was the hospital where his daughter and son had been born.
There was the house on fire; the child within burning, her screams breaking up the lines he frantically drew and redrew, attempting repair, striving to make them permanent.
“Are you hearing me? Do you see what you’re doing to our marriage?”
Ears and eyes appeared frequently, most often together, evidence of a certain paranoia on his part. Everywhere he went, people were watching him, listening to him, and talking among themselves. They’d comment on the look of his face, its shifting expressions of sadness. They’d talk about how he cried, things he’d said when he’d had too much to drink.
Everywhere he went people knew he had lost a child.
“What’s that smell? Do you smell something?”
Misshapen noses were less frequent, but were more likely on hot, muggy days in August. Strong smells seemed to increase his need to doodle. Cooking smells, especially. Roasting meat, in particular.
Sometimes the smells so filled him it seemed as if he were all nose, and yet with no capacity to breathe.
“You’re always so nervous! What do you have to be nervous about?”
Overlays of squares always increased his anxiety. Like boxes, or cells. Or the scales of an artificial fish.
It was impossible to escape the box of one’s own nature. And in the end, when they boxed you, you couldn’t even imagine escaping.
“There are no secret messages here! What are you looking for?”
Sometimes scribbles resembled an exotic handwriting, and he would spend hours trying to decode them. The problems in his marriage had grown quite severe, but when he sought out the spiritualist in order to make contact with his dead daughter the rift between him and his wife became decidedly more pronounced.
One day he began examining every piece of handwriting that originated from or came into their house. He spent hours, in fact, studying his wife’s handwritten grocery lists. He’d become convinced that his daughter was trying to contact him in this manner, embedding her own childish scrawl within the handwriting of others.
He started saving all his own doodles and re-examined them, and found unmistakable proof that at times his dead daughter was guiding his hand. Many of the doodles had taken on her whimsical, sensitive nature.
He stopped going to work. He spent all day of every day doodling. His wife left him after one last appeal to reason. He was barely able to remember their conversation ten minutes after she’d slammed the front door.
“You talk in circles. You make me dizzy.”
He never knew quite what to make of spirals. Were they eyes, the insides of wombs, tornadoes as seen from outer space?
Their significance was certainly ambiguous, and even when he believed them to be something recognizable and concrete, they maintained a certain abstract quality above and beyond what he could interpret, a spiritual dimension.
He could remember a time when they resembled eyes, and these spiraled eyes were the most threatening thing he could draw. More recently they had become eyes again, but somehow these comforted him. He imagined the blue at their distant bottoms, drawing him into the depths of them, his daughter’s endless stare.
“Words, you keep using all these words. When are you going to do something?”
Mouths, he decided these were. They started out as eyes, and then grew teeth. People talked too much, when they should be listening. They talked about how things used to be, when they should be seeing how things really are now.
Eventually the memory of his daughter’s endless eyes grew teeth, and all the words in the world would not keep that vision away.
After his wife left him, there were no more voices to distract him from his doodling.
Sometimes they were faces turned inside out.
Or the internal organs of dream-selves and friends.
Sometimes they were the face your lover takes when she doesn’t believe you can see her.
Some might be the broken bodies of insects, or insects unknown to humankind: the flying brain zipper, the centipede of pain, the butterfly-roach of loss.
He created them at an ever-increasing frenzy, drawing them on the bathroom tiles and mirrors using lipsticks his wife had left behind, spray-painting them on the living room and kitchen ceilings, painting them with a broad brush on the outside walls of his house, using the leftover paint in his garage. Neighbors would gather and watch him, but out of anger or embarrassment they’d stopped trying to talk to him some time ago.