Years passed.
We didn’t save enough pennies to get to Disneyland.
My stepfather did something to me and I refused to eat with him anymore.
Before dinnertime I would go into the kitchen and my mother would make me some food. I had to eat it as fast as I could before my step-father came home from work for the official family dinner.
Years passed.
One night I was late. I only had thirty seconds to eat.Mom tried to get things ready but there was no time.
My stepfather stormed into the kitchen. I slipped aside and went upstairs.
I waited.
I waited.
I waited.
After awhile I became deranged with hunger and I had to do something about it.
I went downstairs to the kitchen. There was my stepfather counting all of the pennies and stacking them onto the counter. He stacked them as high as they would go until they fell over. He stacked them again until he could get a good read and the pile wouldn’t fall over. Then he’d start a new pile.
I watched him from the wall corner.
He stacked and restacked and stacked and restacked and stacked and restacked the pennies until I fell asleep on the carpet.
Then he put the pennies away and went to bed.
50
I have lost track of what semester it is. I have lost track of how many semesters I have left. I have lost track of what my field of study is. I can’t remember if I’m a student or a professor, a self or an other, a subject or an object, an Oversoul or the Underneath. Am I married? Do I own a house? Do I believe in God? When was my last meal? Have I ever hired a bodyguard? Do I care what people think of me? Do I write good books? What is the square root of the angle of my disposition? What happened to the tendons in my index finger? Do I go to my classes on a regular basis? Where is the men’s room? Over there? Is that my 1966 Fender Bandmaster guitar amplifier? What has become of the guitar itself? Bass players worry me. I always have the feeling that they really want to be involved with a cello. But is it wrong to desire the cello above all else? Why must cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine pour into my bloodstream during moments of extreme panic? Can I have some more wine? Where did my copy of the latest issue of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery go? And the antelope? Is utopia possible or are we destined to endure the bogeys of nomad subjectivity and social Darwinism forever? Why do my armpits sweat all day long? Why wouldn’t my students ever tell me when my fly was open? Why do I get good pumps during some workouts and bad pumps during other workouts? Can I have some more wine? Shawty! Does that professor like me? What’s my grade point average? Is mankind proud of me? As a child, did I kill a bullfrog by hurling it against a brownstone with a makeshift trebuchet? Or did I merely hurl it into a pond? Given sufficient velocity, the frog explodes either way.
51
I give this guy my card. My “business” card.
There’s only one word on it.
This word:
Miāo.
“That’s onomatopoeia,” I tell him. “But it’s in a different language than the one we speak.”
He blinks at me.
I say the word aloud, if only to encourage him, to assure him that the sum total of his fascia may not amount to the calibrated arrangement of his physiognomy. Therein lies my terminal modus operandi: to convince everybody, one social subject at a time, that they lack the fertility of tripe.
Nearby a Tesseract collapses into a morbid integer.
52
And so I thought to myself:. . This liebestod is no mere subliminal excrescence. It is some queer manner of Faustian, brick-layered scatology. Do you think the emission of my selfhood into the commode is funny, or cute? I am on the threshold of transformation from overcoded schiz-flow to self-immolating becoming-tortoise, a process implicating certain transversals that will bind all of my vectors together and possibly jeopardize my admittedly destratified concept of molecular conformity. If only I had a beak; my dripping cathexis might have been subject to an entirely different manner of abjection. I remember — yes, I remember everything now, if only for a wilting and perilous moment — when I took the agrégation. I performed well on the examination despite my stepfather, who occupied the starboard flank of the classroom and heckled me, lobbing insults and scribbling fearsome genitals on the blackboard as a means of distraction. But nothing distracts me when I accomplish a certain quantum focus. I feel like I’ve done this before. I feel like I’ll do this again. Once you engage a singularity you are doomed to fondle the ticklish parts of its shadow for eternity. The commiseration of meat. Chickenscratch. The logic of sense. Damnation is a far cry from the blues. I have neglected to remain impartial to dogpoets. I mention dogpoets in all of my books. I don’t know what they are.
53
I have a secret to tell somebody, anybody.
I go off campus to get my sushi.
The sushi that they serve in the cafeteria of the Student Union doesn’t even qualify as sushi. It insults real sushi with its glib artificiality.
So I go to this place in the city.
Very covert.
None of the employees speak a word of English, but I can tell they like me. The inflection of their gazes indicates nothing to the contrary.
There’s a problem.
Every time I eat my dish of sashimi salmon and tuna draped over sticky brown rice, I use more and more wasabi.
Every time.
At this rate, soon there will be only wasabi.
The fish, the rice, even the soy sauce and the garnish of pickled ginger — it will inevitably dwindle to an nth degree of meaning in the face of such Rampancy.
The laws of thermodynamics command it.
Zeno was not the idiot that the Eleans so desperately wanted him to be.
This doesn’t stop me. I’m concerned. But I still need and want my sushi.
One day I go to get my sushi and the place is gone.
Not closed.
Gone.
There’s a building, but it’s not the same building.
There are no doors or windows.
It’s really just a colossal, upended cinderblock. I wonder if anybody’s trapped inside. The city looks different too.
I try to ignore it. All of it.
Depressed, I go back to campus.
I walk around for a couple of days. It gets dark and light and dark and light and the air is cool and warm and cool and warm and it always smells crisp and natural and earthy, like good incense.
At some point I realize the University has fallen apart.
Despite my situation, and despite faculty residences, I recall how the gothic beauty of the architecture used to invoke feelings of the Kantian sublime in my sensorium. How the seas of fog flowed beneath the stately, dark-bricked buildings and halls. How the cathedrals and the gymnasiums and the bibliotheques crouched beneath the heavens like autocratic Nephilim with garden-fresh breath. The elegant steeples. The cobbled turrets and their wayward belfries. Stone bridges ran between the tallest bluffs; they were at once medieval and futuristic. To walk among the architecture was to stand atop the Fell and gaze into the Tarn.
Now the University lies in ruins.
I don’t remember when this happened. I don’t remember hearing any buildings fall down.
My dorm is still intact. So are all of the administrative fortresses and sanctuaries and gazebos.
Everything else is rocks and dust, flotsam and jetsam, savannah and wind.