Who?
44
The question was whether there was some real value to which all of this, all our naming, thinking, speaking, breathing, wanting, loving, lusting, fearing, worrying, laughing, obsessing, liking, hating, changing, hindering, bringing, facilitating, curbing, retarding, tilting, running, sitting, looking, gazing, staring, listening, learning, ignoring, forgetting, misplacing, framing, distrusting, calling, naming, relinquishing, passing, entrusting, remembering, eating, drinking, sleeping, beating, hurting, contributing, basking, consigning, waking, stirring, losing, winning, drawing, informing, rigging, equipping, falling, disclosing, naming, administering, requiring, mustering, bathing, setting, washing, stalling, disguising, causing, ridding, masking, detailing, indicating, disposing, designating, clumping, breaking, counting, limiting, naming, eclipsing, assuming, flowing, tattling, tempering, flowering, veiling, dispensing, donating, teaching, helping, falsifying, disseminating, hurrying, dodging, naming, working, sullying, providing, succeeding, stonewalling, throwing, kicking, believing, uttering, serving, renouncing, attaining, venting, punching, treading, expanding, diminishing, devoting, hustling, stopping, dealing, allowing, qualifying, vacationing, showing, desiring, yearning, exploring, swearing, hedging, mining, raising, delivering, reneging, modulating, agreeing, betraying, naming, making, singing, whispering, exuding, burying, covering, occasioning, keeping, leaving, impeding, rising, clearing, deferring, sabotaging, executing, racing, balking, naming, stockpiling, sacrificing, distressing, coming, suppressing, slipping, inculpating, jacketing, shouting, lunging, frustrating, circulating, expressing, equivocating, flourishing, rotting, recoiling, repressing, emitting, impressing, collapsing, trusting, naming, thriving, trapping, pitying, depressing, convalescing, proffering, surrendering, renewing, hosting, slanting, stringing, ducking, knowing, deciding, lying, pussyfooting, challenging, doting, adhering, granting, hesitating, bequeathing, questioning, triumphing, obstructing, affecting, blocking, regarding, choking, grasping, delaying, inhibiting, shaping, milling, interfering, negating, reversing, revering, feeling, imploring, dipping, concocting, tergiversating, convincing, cherishing, naming, noticing, impugning, perceiving, camouflaging, arranging, tensing, evoking, sequestering, destroying, filling, sharing, healing, entwining, listing, steaming, petitioning, primping, separating, tainting, decentering, ambushing, refilling, becoming, sidestepping, sensing, emptying, steeling, calculating, identifying, smiting, converting, frolicking, achieving, adoring, refusing, dogging, constructing, clutching, stealing, extolling, quivering, faltering, menacing, imperiling, frothing, testing, abdicating, narrowing, opening, prospecting, directing, misunderstanding, judging, dividing, taking, producing, vacillating, hoping, indulging, tailoring, airing, atoning, sweeping, browbeating, repelling, surfacing, studying, reproducing, visiting, delighting, electing, copying, paralleling, creating, bracing, rattling, biting, reaching, taunting, functioning, obviating, gravitating, naming, turning, wavering, gambling, lapping, nailing, risking, discouraging, placating, divining, discerning, pushing, pulling, timing, preaching, spinning, yanking, processing, deducing, tracking, relying, lighting, preparing, referencing, stroking, understanding, substituting, facing, existing, portraying, moping, idling, furthering, sublimating, warning, hewing, darkening, petting, misdirecting, presiding, forcing, distancing, patting, rationalizing, alienating, elevating, putting, quibbling, caring, repairing, projecting, worshipping, apologizing, sizing, brownnosing, riddling, chancing, deploring, descending, prodding, skirting, orienting, asserting, gesturing, inserting, reducing, deserting, overtaking, righting, grating, echoing, fuming, torturing, insinuating, channeling, discounting, leaking, naming, diving, naming, practicing, deriding, continuing, sorting, laboring, interspersing, nodding, restoring, routing, situating, accounting, tightening, relaxing, doing, telling, occupying, uniting, ribbing, centering, releasing, revisiting, holing, pampering, losing, objecting, starring, appealing, doubling, positing, reviewing, giving, wobbling, referring, viewing, regulating, hooking, extinguishing, burnishing, encouraging, waffling, igniting, iterating, answering, reeling, naming, popping, recapitulating, shilly-shallying, dillydallying, refuting, disputing, blowing, tintinnabulating, conjuring, having, hunkering, rejecting, dithering, extending, undertaking, inhaling, exhaling, teasing, beating, scratching, defining, defaming, fooling, trimming, containing, cutting, nibbling, naming, attending, conforming, abiding, rerouting, lasting, taming, claiming, blaming, shaming, portaging, naming, ticking, kissing, tonguing, presuming, imagining, dreaming, graying, sectioning, lashing, jeopardizing, resting, meaning, testing, concluding, cresting, modeling, dragging, lifting, pickling, naming, inducing, tickling, slashing, licking, sticking, bounding, doubting, leaping, jumping, deeming, punctuating, naming, standing, tasting, spitting, swallowing, thumbing, fingering, naming, lounging, scrounging, hounding, resisting, clapping, waving, besieging, retreating, attacking, relenting, sucking, screwing, fucking, and naming, would lead to.
45
It was a small stage, but it was our stage, a kind of theater-in-the-round, we endlessly confusing each other with directions left and right and up and down, our backs always to our audience, our terrorists. Our terrorists had no names, no affiliations, would show up on no arrays of radar, and their insignificance in the world spoke grimly to our place in the world, even though the stakes of our performance were high, could not have been higher, and they, the stakes, were certainly not diminished by our temporal and physical proximity to that most supreme of all stakes. The fact that Billy was so old did not, would not, cause us to mourn his death any less, but no one heard us. The same with Dorothea Greene, Clarissa Madden, and Diego Jones. Considering the lost ones, the murdered ones, and the nature of administrative and familial reactions and response, the criteria for our selection became painfully obvious and glaring. We, each of us, subjected to the torment of the Gang of Six, had no one, no children, no friends, no spouses. We had outlived everyone and this was our reward, this was what we had found or what had found us.
Maria Cortez might have been smarter than all of us. Even after her interlude with Sheldon Cohen. She not only reported that her pearl earrings had disappeared one at a time and also her late husband’s pocket watch with the relief image of a horse’s head on the cover, but she told the floor administrator that whoever had done it left, on her dresser surface, three threaded needles.
Harley was hunched down on a pale-blue knee not too far away at the time of Maria’s well-rehearsed and brilliant performance, complete with plenty of hand waving and stammering, ending with the true bit of genius, And the thread didn’t even match any of my clothes. He was attempting or pretending to adjust the lower straps on a patient lift and his lack of reaction betrayed his seething anger. I could read his lips through the back of his square head, Leon, he said, Leon.
I followed as closely as I could or I should I did my best to keep up as Harley took his deliberate, appliance strides across the lawn, toward the central building. I went to the window of the breakroom window and caught the ruler in mid-rail.
Don’t lie to me, you overgrown, misshapen creature, you enormous hog with lips, you gorilla-mitted moron! Don’t you lie to me!
But, boss, I. . I. . I ain’t stole nothing without talkin’ it over with you.
Then who’s threading the damn needles!
Not me.
Do I look stupid to you, you hulking heap of hyperthyroidic heft, you bumbling bearish behemoth bedbug!
Hey!
Shut up!
Boss.
Shut up!
You don’t have a brain in your head. It just can’t be you. Somebody’s up to no good around here.
Harley came to the window and peered out. I was plastered back-flat against the wall. It was broad daylight. I was just hoping no one would see me when someone saw me. It was Coco or Cecily or whatever her name was, the lovely night nurse on her way to her shift, and she was strolling across the green in her white clogs, shaking her tiny bottom, the late afternoon sun making her appear alluring, ghostlike. She saw me and she waved, not to or at me, but to Harley, who was calling out and making what he took to be alluring animal sounds and perhaps were. She observed me as clear as the ass on Harley’s face but did not give me up or away or however that goes. Soon she was gone and I slunk off back to my rooms.
There I sat alone and fretted about what retaliatory measures Harley might take. It seemed clear to me that he suspected me and my comrades, but I was not certain of this and decided to not give myself or us away by either acting rashly or seeming nervous or wary. I read. I read Schopenhauer, perhaps as a kind of perverse self-punishment for something, I did not know what, but more for his sheer analysis of will and motivation. My friends and I had not articulated our final move, our finale, so to speak, but it was all too clear to us how everything must go. I turned a page and heard an administrator, oh those administrators, shouting at Harley for leaving open the pharmaceutical cabinet, Yet again! I heard this and smiled to myself and then bored myself into a deep and beautiful sleep by reading Zola’s Thérèse Raquin. I dreamed troubled and dysfunctional French dreams about first cousins marrying and about controlling and narcissistic aunt, uncle, father, and mothers and about artists who cannot find their own pathetic and pitiful voices amid the noise of family struggle. I dreamed like that and was glad for it as I was bored into deeper and deeper sleep, lower and lower into the abyss of myself, down into the rooted, fathomless, subaqueous heart of my psychosis, my abstruse, mantic core, where I knew there was something to find, but knew I would never find it.