“Pshaw. Never edge him up right. Buck him up, yes. Stop that damned whimpering, yes. But the proper attitude of self-unimportance would cast him back into the aquarium in which he died. He did resemble, as you noted, the decaying Plectostomus you found as a child that shocked you because you thought it, for weeks, merely not moving.”
“Sir, you know everything I think?”
“Stop just short of everything.”
“What don’t you know, then? You said you stop short of—”
“You have had, I believe you confessed, my Traveling Woman while we’ve been Men at Our Best?”
“Yes.”
“Well. There are certain final things, in the nature of excretions and animal noises and the quality of ardor, that I choose not to know.”
“I see. But you could.”
“I could.”
“Because you are — is omniscient a meaningful term?”
“Left field. Nothing of the kind. Happy hour!”
With that, Mr. Irony left the suite, headed for the Acapulco Pulquería Número Three-a.
Mr. Irony Renounces Irony
MR. IRONY RENOUNCED IRONY and took his place in line at Unemployment. Where once he would have found the tedium of the protracted process a delight, akin to the moves of a child’s board game, he found the desk-to-desk ordeal — and getting in the wrong line, and then getting in the right line to have it closed when he was one party from the bureaucrat serving it — officious, small-minded, forgiveless horseshit.
With a sheaf of papers so bulky that he longed for a briefcase to hold them in, he stood on one pained leg or the other lamenting his decision to quit irony. It left him uninsulated against the world, as if he had renounced drink or drugs instead. Despair came after him — with little tentacles it reached toward his balding head from the low fiberboard ceiling tiles of the Unemployment Office complex. “I rue the day I quit irony,” he remarked to the woman behind him.
“I wish I hadn’t quit Toys “R” Us,” the woman said.
Despite himself, Mr. Irony felt a small thrill at her response. It was, with his remark … no, he was through with irony. Fourteen hours later, on their third shift of unemployment counselors, the same woman spoke to him again: “Honey, you didn’t really quit your job, did you?
At this instant Mr. Irony conceived of his Desired Vocation, still a blank line on several of his multitudinous forms. He wanted to be a circus rider, a trick rider of horses going in a circle, standing on them, flipping backwards on them, maybe flipping backwards from one to the other …
“I’m worrit about you, mister,” the woman was saying. “I don’t think you know the ropes.”
“Why not?”
“The way you stan there. You can’ stan there that way, all tired like, if you ever done this before. We ain’t begin to get nowhere. I’m fraid you did quit your job.”
“Of course I quit my job,” Mr. Irony said, worried that the woman had somehow detected his enjoyment in the irony of her quitting Toys “R” Us and his quitting irony.
“Child,” she said, “you can’ quit. You got to be fire. You quit, but you git them to fire your ass. You quit in your heart, but you git fire on paper.”
“Maybe I was fired,” Mr. Irony said.
“If you was, you know.”
“Actually, I never really had a job, I had a—”
“Honey, none us ever had no job. Who want that?”
“I had a … style, you might say.”
The woman looked at him with a grin. “You was some kind pimp, I bet. I like them miscegenational pimps—”
“No, madam, it’s—”
“Hell. Don’ get snitty.”
It was going to be a hard life, Mr. Irony saw. Without something to fill the void left by the departure of his vice, he was going to be subject to humorless days until he got high on something else. Christ was out of the question, precisely because He Himself contained no small measure of irony. Even getting high on “life itself” sounded inappropriately ironic. Only being a … circus rider made, at the moment, any kind of clean, unironical sense.
There would be no irony in standing on a horse, if you could. And if the horse moved in a circle, that was its business. And if you had to put on some tights and a sequined vest and some special slippers, and the horse had to wear some flashy, colorful hardware, that was show business. He did not see how a man who had renounced irony could go wrong being a circus rider.
He began trying to fill in Desired Vocation on his forms against his thigh. The woman behind him bent over also to see what he was writing.
“Circus rider. That’s a good one,” she said. “You catchin on. You never get hire.”
Even though there was a rich incense of irony about this woman and everything she said, Mr. Irony liked her. He looked at her fondly and she got down on her hands and knees.
“This the best part of Unemployment, honey. Put them foams on my back and write all you wont to. It feels good. Don’t poke too hard or you’ll come through.”
Mr. Irony did as he was told, and used the human desk as it and he moved incrementally toward their benefits.
Back at his apartment, Mr. Irony had a seizure, or something like a seizure. It was probably equivalent to the withdrawal anxiety common to boozers or druggers, only his fear was uncharted: he was sailing for the first time in the troubled, mundane waters of life without irony. It made him stand glumly beside the refrigerator, knowing that opening it and bending and looking at all the things — cruddy-lipped mustard jars, two olives in a tall bottle, a Baggie full of rotten parsley, a small German roach moving very slowly — that used to delight him in their queer combinations was not a pleasure open to him now. As a young man he had lost his women and lost his mind; as an older man he had lost money and his mind; now he had lost his irony, and it had never been this bad. Women and money were nothing to irony.
At the Unemployment Office he had been denied benefits because he had had no employer. His case worker finally did not doubt that he might have been fired after reading his aptitude questionnaire (under skills, Mr. Irony listed “left-handed”). When the issue of self-employment was broached, Mr. Irony denied stringently that he had been his own employer, a flatly ironic notion and one therefore not available to a reformed ironic. The entire affair — two days and six hours and forty-eight minutes from taking a number to being dismissed as ineligible for benefits — which once would have made his day, or week, was as disappointing as it would have been to the common fools down there trying to get something for nothing. He realized, finally, standing by the refrigerator, just before he opened it and ate the two olives and scared the roach and squeezed a green juice from the parsley Baggie, that being down there had been off limits; what was more ironic than getting paid for not working only if you could prove someone had deemed you unsuitable for working? Why couldn’t you be paid for not working if you were suitable? Only the unfit benefit. It was not Darwinian. It was ironic. It had been, he saw now, a close call, close to a “slip” in the parlance of reforming abusers of substance and, he supposed it was fair to regard himself, abusers of style. He was a reforming abuser of style, a reforming ironic.