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Authors: Sam Savage

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Except for calls from my son and my sister, calls I have always discouraged, the phone had stopped ringing. Now it rings again, from morning to night. She spends a lot of time on the phone.

Without a word of greeting she places a bowl of cereal on the table in front of me and goes back to cleaning. I add milk from the carton and spill some of it. A small brown beetle traverses the tabletop. It encounters the milk puddle and stops. It seems to be thinking, oscillating tiny feelers. It turns and lumbers off in another direction. It moves slowly, hesitantly, like a blind thing. It seems weary. Reaching the edge of the table it waves its front legs in the air, poised above the precipice, as if feeling for something out there.

She has cleaned the stove. She has even scrubbed off the brown baked-on grease streaking the oven door. I watch her while I eat. She empties the cabinets above the counter, making maximum noise, banging cans and jars down on the countertop, slamming cabinet doors, while conducting a muttered commentary on the dirt, complaining about it,
marveling
that anyone would live in filth like this. She fills a saucepan with soapy water and puts it on the counter. She wipes the cans and jars, dipping her cloth in the water. She changes the water in the saucepan. She stands on tiptoe and scrubs the bare shelves with the cloth, then climbs on a chair to scrub the top shelf. She scrubs vigorously, the hammocks of flesh beneath her raised arms jiggle and sway. She is wearing a purple sleeveless dress that goes badly with her skin, her pale, unnaturally white skin that is now covered with reddish-pink splotches. The skin of her face, sweaty and flushed with effort, is so red, so inflamed, it looks practically
roasted.

Sitting in my chair, I listen to her moving about overhead. She can’t sleep, she says, and she goes up in the afternoon to rest. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, hear the television playing softly in her room.

A fair-weather day, the fullness of spring, and they pass the house in steady procession, down the street to the little playground in the park. An hour, two hours, and the same people trudge back up it, tugging the arms of reluctant offspring, leaning stiff-armed to the carriages—women mostly, couples sometimes, rarely a man alone. They parade their progeny (or their employer’s progeny) in several kinds of conveyance: enormous big-wheeled buggies, little red plastic wagons, covered trailers towed by bicycles. To accommodate multiple offspring they have double- and even triple-wide strollers that span the sidewalk like threshing machines, forcing others to step off onto the grass. There are streamlined three-wheeled racing strollers powered by the hard-muscled pistons of jogging females. A fair number of the women, I notice, also push before them gibbous bellies in various stages of tumescence in which the pupate forms of new homunculi are riding. How fermenting and fertile the world around us is, I find myself thinking. From a district of aging working-class white people drinking cheap beer on collapsing porches we have become a neighborhood of middle-class
breeders.

The trees are in full leaf. The city’s mowers have striped the park in bands of varied green. It is the
fecund
season. Birds, insects, people, microbes surely, are breeding right and left, in trees, even under the ground, in cracks. Everywhere life swarms and pullulates, and meanwhile this house,
inside
this house, feels like a
dead zone.
I stand at my window and look out at the parade of families. They live in a world of beginnings, of the first step, tooth, word, date, marriage, child. So different from a world of terminals and closures. So many ways of marking an end. I am particularly fond of the phrase:
it is curtains for him.

We know scientifically that the “purpose” of human life, as of all life, is reproduction and death. What we don’t know, don’t
want
to know, is that beneath a veneer of foolish happiness our own individual lives are nothing but reproduction and death, have no point but that, we are on earth for no other reason than that. The problem is, this life of reproduction and death, if measured by the criteria and standards of significance of an even halfway civilized culture, is meaningless, completely pointless, and stupid.

She has come back with a little television for the kitchen. The idea is never to have silence or an instant without the chatter of idiotic voices. The idea is to drive me crazy. I scream at her to turn it down. She turns it slightly lower. A few minutes later it is back up again.

She helps me upstairs to the toilet. She comes into the bathroom afterward, and we stand side by side looking down at the blood and shit.

Late afternoon, and the windows were open wide, letting in sounds from the street. I lay in bed, eyes closed, and pretended to sleep. She sat in the armchair. I opened my eyes, and she had closed hers. She was moving her mouth, gnawing on her tongue.

My son comes with flowers, a bouquet of yellow roses. His wife arranges them in a vase. She tries several spots, standing back a ways and considering, before deciding to place the vase on the mantel. Obviously the roses are her idea.

He has to visit. He doesn’t have the courage to just not come, and so he brings his family. They are here to make the visit into an occasion, to turn it into a superficial
social event.
Instead of painful silences we are going to have mindless chatter.

He regards the house with distaste, he has taught his family to regard it with distaste. That much is clear from the way they look at everything, the four of them sitting about the room, occupying every chair in the room, and in their boredom looking around with distaste at the paintings, as if these were somehow malevolent, as if the paintings were to blame for everything. Janine considers this house the locus of her husband’s suffering, the place that originally wounded him, the source, she probably thinks in her pop-culture way, of his
primal abuse.

It is quite possible her husband has indoctrinated her into thinking that.

He has his mother’s large eyes. Eyes that expect the worse. He has been waiting his whole life for the gesture of affection that will wipe out all the wrongs of the past.

Meanwhile his wife walks around the house, appraising everything, writing it all down in her little notebook.

I walk in and find Moll at the kitchen table, staring at the little
TV
she has set up on the counter. Hypnotized by the television, she doesn’t seem to notice me passing through. As if she were losing her mind.

She looks weary, completely worn out. She has bursts of energy, an hour or two of activity so intense it is practically
frenetic
, cleaning, cooking, digging through decades of stuff piled everywhere in the house, sorting, stacking, and all the while humming or even singing, and then she collapses, falls asleep in a chair, arms hanging at her sides. A tall, obese woman who has gone completely limp, sitting at the table staring at television. The phrase:
she’s had the stuffing knocked out of her.

I have not been able to put into words how astonishing it is to see Moll old.

They are moving furniture from a large Mayflower van parked in the street in front of a house at the end of the block. I watch them unload an enormous crescent-shaped leather sofa with matching easy chairs and a gigantic so-called
entertainment center.
They are obliged to disassemble the sofa, breaking it down into three separate pieces, each the size of an ordinary couch, in order to work it through the front door. A middle-aged couples hovers about, meddling and
supervising
the men who are moving their furniture. Now and then one or the other makes a little dart at some item being transported past them. The man addresses the movers, two burly black men and a smaller white man, with a familiarity that strikes me as false and forced, dropping his
g
’s in a completely shameless way that betrays his unease in the presence of people of a lower class, even though, I am thinking, he does not allow himself to think of people as belonging to a lower class, especially black people. He has a neat white-streaked beard and wears a Grateful Dead
T
-shirt and jeans. His wife flutters in and out of the house with the movers, practically stepping on their heels, hovering and interfering. The two of them strike me as typical
university
figures. A
pair
of university figures, I think, working in a department of the so-called humanities. A typical pair of shameless pretenders, who have long since lost faith in the humanities. Universities teem with such people, who in clever career moves have turned themselves into the foremost apologists and intellectual defenders of contemporary media trash culture. The university as presently constituted—
minus
those departments within it that now form a nearly self-contained scientific-technical institute, that have already effectively
quarantined
themselves from the rest—is a death trap for the mind, I have long thought. Standing across the street, watching the movers, I can picture the crescent-shaped sofa and chairs packed with upper-middle-class professional
barbarians
staring gape-mouthed at a television so big it is practically a cinema screen, just the sort of university people who are relocating, as they phrase it, to this part of town.

I think of André Breton’s remark—that “the simplest surrealist act consists of going into the street, pistols in hand, and firing blindly into the crowd.”

To which he adds: “Anyone who has not wanted at least once to be done with the current system of debasement and cretinism in this manner has a place reserved for him in that crowd, belly level with the barrel.”

Disregarding the fact that Breton was a notorious windbag, his infamous and shocking remarks are actually the most humdrum of observations: a frank acknowledgment that in the heart of any halfway decent artist lies a murderous hatred of the so-called wider public, a huge store of resentment and loathing of the so-called
average person
, who quite rightly recognizes genuine art as inimical to himself and his life habits and who therefore
necessarily
experiences it as something unpleasant and destructive. There is of course a near-universal agreement among people in the art-supply-and-consumption business to hide this fact from the wider public, and of course the artists themselves collaborate in this obfuscation for obvious motives having to do with career enhancement and ordinary human cowardice.

André Breton was born the same year as Antonin Artaud.

It has occurred to me that I can shoot Professor Diamond off her bicycle.

In my case the idea does not spring from an innate impulse to violence. I am not conscious of any such impulse in regard to Professor Diamond. I don’t imagine that in some hour of determined anguish I will, like Raskolnikov,
resolve
to shoot her, though I think it possible that I will shoot her.

Possible, but not very likely. As things stand, I find it
im
possible to say just how likely.

Like Raskolnikov I have on occasion thought of myself as an
exceptional
man.

Nor would it be out of some existentialist project to prove that “I am free.” I have never believed that I am free. I am absolutely
not
free, which is why I think it possible and perhaps even
unavoidable
that I will shoot Professor Diamond.

Likeliest of all is that I am not an exceptional person and that I am simply incapable of shooting my neighbor.

Raskolnikov anguished over his murderous thoughts. I toy with mine.

If I do shoot her it will be in extremely cold blood.

I am not well.

It is possible that a so-called “mindlessly destructive act” is really an attempt by the perpetrator to rescue himself from a destructive
disease
, to wrench himself back into mental balance. After such an act, such a physical and mental
emetic
, the perpetrator, who is also the principle sufferer, returns to being a good person. In psychiatry, electroshock therapy achieves a similar effect, I believe.

I don’t expect people to understand that.

Some days I find my mood in perfect harmony with Breton’s statement. It
resonates
with me. And then the next day I see something, see someone, I catch a foolish smile, a moment of unreflective grace, a gesture of compassion, an old woman feeding pigeons, a mother caressing the hair of a child, and I want to throw my arms around them. Stay with me, I want to say then, Don’t leave me out here alone.

I sometimes regard my life as a succession of diseases. No sooner cured of one than I was infected by another. And I was not ever really
cured
of any of them. They were pushed into remission, but I was still infected with them. I was scarred and weakened, and the ground was made fertile for a new one. The terrible thing is, each of these diseases at first impressed me as perfect health. I would become infected with a brand-new malady, and I would congratulate myself, thinking that I was well at last.

Harold Nivenson went this way, then that way, then another way altogether, and so forth, and he made a pattern of ragged zigzags down the road of life.

Just after sunrise and the spandexed giraffes are outside doing stretches on the little patch of lawn in front of their house. I sit on the edge of the bed in the new pajamas she has bought me and watch them through the window. They go through this stretching ritual before every bike ride. Despite being extremely tall they are able to bend at the waist and place both palms flat on the ground in front of them and walk their hands away from their feet, forming a wider and wider upside-down V. I watch them walk their hands back to their feet and stand like that, folded over, immobile, heads turned to face each other, talking. They straighten and look around, slim and graceful, sniffing the morning air. Maybe they smell lion. Moll comes up behind me, stands by the window. I instinctively move my arm to shield the paper from view. “Stop
staring
at people,” she says, and jerks the shade down. I send it rattling back up. The couple walk to their bikes, stumping clumsily across the lawn in black biking shoes, the way people walk in front of children when they are pretending to be giants. On their bikes now, they flow down the drive and sweep into the sunlit street, wheels bright, shimmering blurs.

BOOK: The Way of the Dog
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