The One Way Rejuvenation of Allowishus Scrimshaw
by
Eric Howerton
Copyright 2005
Table of Contents
BOOK 1: The Comedy
Section I: “My Cheese, My Digestion”
Chapter 1: Fromage
Chapter 2: How Allowishus Scrimshaw Beat Darwin
Chapter 3: Origination
Chapter 4: From Gutting Fish to Haute Couture
Chapter 5: The Ontological Argument
Chapter 6: Etymology
Chapter 7: The Beginning of the End
Chapter 8: The Have Nots
Chapter 9: What is Cheese?
Chapter 10: Wine and Dine
Chapter 11: Bullshit
Chapter 12: Rescued from the archives I
Chapter 13 :Rescued from the archives II
Chapter 14: Good Dancers Make The Best Lovers
Chapter 15: The Hair That Broke Mrs. Scrimshaw’s Back
Chapter 16: The Right To Peaceably Assemble
Chapter 17: Newspaper Article
Chapter 18: A Twelve Pack and a Temper
Section II: Rennet
Chapter 19: Easier Said Than Done
Chapter 20: The Labor Force
Chapter 21: Calling Upon the Gorgon
Chapter 22: Overly Ambitious
Chapter 23: The Unfinished Business of Devlin Tamarind
Chapter 24: College Bound
Chapter 25: An Obedient Dog
Chapter 26: What Is Horchata?
Chapter 27: Mad Libs Are for Recreational Purposes Only
Chapter 28: There’s a Shoe in my Oatmeal!
Chapter 29: The Post-Modern Restaurant or First Course
Chapter 30: Second Course
Chapter 31: Prepare for Liftoff
Chapter 32: The Haggler
Chapter 33: Just When Everything Seemed OK
Chapter 34: Monologue or Dialogue?
Section III: The Hospital
Chapter 35: Saint Vincent Bazzle
Chapter 36: The Battle of Slippery Mr. Butters
Chapter 37: Attempted Bribery
Chapter 38: Roll Call
Chapter 39: Using Words to Denounce Words
Chapter 40: No Bars on the Windows
Chapter 41: Buttering Him Up
Section IV: Entropy
Chapter 42: Catch and Release Program or Third Course
Chapter 43: All Sales Are Final in the Milky Way
Chapter 44: In a Calm, Orderly Fashion
Chapter 45: There Are Worse Ways to Go
Chapter 46: The Pomegran Residence
Chapter 47: The Waiting Room Is the Hardest Part
Chapter 48: The Hero Versus the Hydra
BOOK 2: THE TRAGEDY?
Section V: France
Chapter 49: The Airport
Chapter 50: Step Into My Time Machine
Chapter 51: And Now What You’ve All Been Waiting For
Chapter 52: Domestic Violence Over an International Flight
Chapter 53: The Truth at Last
Chapter 54: Juliette and the Empty Graves
Chapter 55: A Transcendental Experience
Chapter 56: Thieves in the Night
Chapter 57: Allowishus Scrimshaw: Philosopher. Degenerate. Zombie?
Chapter 58: Recollection of an Oceanic Omen
Section VI: Rajeunissement du Quercy
Chapter 59: Amaury
The Comedy
I
"My cheese, my digestion"
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, II, 3, 44
Chapter 1: Fromage Ruminology:
Lingot du Quercy was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Allowishus Scrimshaw’s favorite cheese. And the perceptive reader would not be in error in attributing all the qualities of this very fromage to the man who loved it so. In fact, such juxtapositions and extrapolations would have pleased Allowishus Scrimshaw greatly.
Lingot du Quercy is a cheese with three distinct layers. A cross-section of the curdled milk, which is fashioned to look like a brick of white gold or platinum, reveals distinct substrata almost geological in nature. Very much like the earth itself, lingot du Quercy has a crust, a mantle, and a core.
Just as Allowishus could at times be abrasive and repugnant like the mantle of the cheese, he could also be sweet and gentle, like the viscous mantle. Not dissimilar to a great many men of distinguished faculties, he cared less about outward appearances than he did of his own ability to overcompensate for physical defects with the turn of a phrase or a click of a tongue. He was a clever man, no doubt, so clever that dulcet words often veiled the bulbousness of his nose and the uninterrupted continuum of his eyebrows.
The eminent Professor Allowishus Scrimshaw and the cheese lingot du Quercy shared a crusty, tacky exterior that gave off the earthy aroma of mushrooms and the various bacterial species that call the mammary glands of Capra hircu – the common goat – home. The top layer of cheese is where the interaction of the penicillin fungi and the mildly fetid lait is most noticeable.
The second layer has an almost thinner–than–water quality. It has all the characteristics of a pale pool of opaque lipid. This layer is, without question, the most flavorful part of the cheese because it spreads most evenly over the palate. It was in this layer that Allowishus believed he could taste the very characteristics of the individual goats used to make each bar of lingot du Quercy. (“The predominant milk in this sample came from a gentle goat who loved to be scritched behind her left ear,” or “I taste a piquant quality only found in the milk of a brash specimen who enjoys kicking other goats in the ribs.”) Whether or not Allowishus could actually taste these characteristics was a completely untestable and agnostic inquiry.
One mustn’t forget the heart of the cheese, for it was here that Allowishus Scrimshaw and lingot du Quercy were most similar. The deeper one cuts into the lingot, the harder the cheese becomes. Even at room temperature, the core is as brittle and dense and unyielding to the knife as Greek feta. The core is wily and unpredictable, sometimes harder than others, and even if the cheese is allowed to fully ripen, if the scores of bacteria are allowed to consume and excrete to their hearts’ content, a stalwart core will always remain in the pith of the cheese. No matter to what extent the bacteria feast and empty their unicellular bowels, they will not be able to convert the core into an entirely gooey mantle, for deep within every bar of lingot du Quercy, somewhere nestled in the cholesterol-rich cell, you will find a rock-hard kernel that will not budge.
Such was the case with Allowishus Scrimshaw; like his favorite dairy dream, he was, at heart, a hard-boiled bastard through and through. Oh, he could lay it on thickly enough, and he could even managed to convince a few gullible beauties that he was a genuine sweetheart or an old lollipop, but alas, the softest thing about the old buzzard was the razor-barb stubble on his chin.
Chapter 2: How Allowishus Scrimshaw Beat Darwin
A genuine man of dissipated dispositions was he, though this surprisingly did not stop others from desiring his company. Allowishus was tolerable not through any physical appeal to the opposite sex or any symmetrical features may have that indicated superb genetic fitness. Not by any measure, fictional or factual, conceivable of inconceivable, was Allowishus Scrimshaw handsome. He was a robust man with uncontrollable hair, with one hand smaller than the other and a droopy behind. His whiskers came out his nose like the gasping heads of worms coming out for air after a sudden downpour.
He had penned many books, though none of the book jackets featured his picture for fear his ugly mug would somehow cause the text right to leap right off the page. Perhaps this is a bit of an exaggeration, for he was not categorically hideous. He was no Medusa, no Scylla nor Charybdis, no haunter of dreams, no evoker of screams. But he was not pretty, and we’ll leave it at that.
Despite his mangled features and tumescent proboscis, millions of years of evolution had afforded Allowishus Scrimshaw a minor celebrity status. “How?” you ask. Well, he was no dodo bird.
Whereas a male peacock has to strut and display the glamorous eyes of his tail feathers before the hens come a-running, a peacock has a brain no larger than a pea. Modern humans have a much larger, much more complex brain, and with complexity comes manipulation. The modern man with any hope of coital enterprise must capture a mate by more than just looking savvy and brutish; he must appear able to do more than spear an antelope. Modern man must, to some degree, be able to flex his brain. He must use speech. He must use intuition. He must be industrious. Modern man must score higher on the barometer of intellect than the shark or a triceratops can. And much to the benefit of modern man, as shocking as it may sound, some women prefer a large vocabulary to a large – well, you get the idea.
Allowishus Scrimshaw could speak. He had intuition. And he was industrious (although of the three, this was his weakest asset). He could write and read as well. And he could deliver a lecture. He wasn’t a nobody, he was a somebody. He used his mind. That is how he beat Darwin.
Chapter 3: Origination
He did not hail from the new world, though he resided there.
His father was a sailor, and Allowishus was consequently raised by his mother and two sisters, Ines and Juliette, in the city of Cahors, a small town in the south of France. He was the first male Scrimshaw in 183 years not to seek a profession where burial at sea was expected, where surrendering one’s life to the briny tar that danced a waltz of troughs and twirls was honored. From the calmest swells to the most internecine squalls, from the bottomless oblivion of the Mariana Trench to icy tundra and calved glacial spurs of the Cape of Good Hope, Allowishus’ ancestors’ bones rested at the bottom of the sea, the meat having long since been picked off by bioluminescent plankton and tiger sharks and astral Asteroidea.
Oh, Allowishus had his start on the sea like the others, but he was not the type of man who would die from an infection caused by the clamping claw of a king crab or the searing mucous sting of a Portuguese man-of-war; he was not the breed of man to get the cork soles of his boots strung in a fish net and be tossed overboard as live bait; he was never the ilk to lose a finger while feeding a dolphin nor catch a sea gull’s digested lunch in the eye. He was a man who would live most of his life on land.
The man in question sojourned from his native France at a time when he was still known as Amoury Objetsculpté. It was in the summer of 1968 that he signed up for a two-year contract on a salmon fisher, but when the boat landed in Boston Harbor, Allowishus flew overboard like a Earl Grey on December 16, 1773. Like so many other emigrants from Europe, it was in America where Allowishus would became a man of worth. And Allowishus was worth a fair amount- more than your average car mechanic or piano tuner- though whether his value was coveted by others was somewhat contended. He was notorious in the traditional sense, not in the misnomer of someone being well-known and well-received, but in the sense of a person having a sullied name that precedes them wherever they do roam.
Chapter 4: From Gutting Fish to Haute Couture
For three years after coming to America Allowishus worked on the docks, where he could get by with no passport and limited English. He was embarrassed to be an immigrant, and in his spare time he practiced his language skills, staying up late and reading books by candlelight, which was a challenge of dedication after 12 hours of slinging fish hither and thither. One day, on his way home from work, he was fortunate enough to stumble upon a box of discarded books the of which the library could find no use. Inside were texts by William James, Thoreau, and Emerson, and in translation books by Homer and Galileo and Descartes. He took them home and studied them religiously.
Working on the docks afforded Allowishus enough money to eat at least two meals a day. On occasion, a surplus of fish, or fish that had become mangled and unsellable, were given to the dockworkers to take home. Jawless salmon and finless albacore tasted just as good as their intact brethren. He shared a two bedroom apartment with three other immigrants. He was happy, but he wanted more.
He was called upon by his close friends as Wishus, an indication of his fanciful mind and constant daydreaming. He was full of hopes and dreams, and Wishus suited him. From this moniker he would later add Allo- to make it a full name. He was known as a man who would argue over anything, regardless of his own position. This attitude engaged him in a fair number of fights with dock workers who didn’t know his reputation as a verbal squabbler and acrobat of words. He was the greatest denouncer of truths and causality since Hume, except that he was not great. He was above average, but not terribly far above, and it was there that he would remain.
One day in 1971, the dean of a local college telephoned one of the fish mongers, informed him that of an impromptu party for which he required the delivery of 30 fresh lobsters. Wishus, being the youngest of the Stubbs and Starbucks and Ishmaels and Queequegs working on the pier, was nominated to make the delivery. He was also the only one with a bicycle and therefore the only one fit enough to make the 5 mile journey in time.
Ringing the doorbell of the stately manor he dismounted his bike before, he had a pauper’s thought: that someday, somehow, he would own a house twice as large and twice as valuable as the one his eyes cast upon. The door to the mansion opened slowly, Wishus entered, and let out a silent gasp. Busts of Greek philosophers and Roman generals lined the hall. A split staircase branched out at the ground level and joined at a landing ten feet above the ground floor before continuing another ten feet to the second story, the spires themselves pirouetting like the nucleotides of DNA strands. The chandelier above Allowishus’ head was bejeweled with more magnificent prisms than ten kings and ten queens could ever hope to wear without being dragged downward by the ravages of gravity.
“You coming in, or you going to stand there and drip lobster spit all over the Dean’s Afghan?” the Spanish maid asked him. With his eyes pasted to the mural on the vaulted ceiling, Wishus followed her.
He was directed to carry the lobsters through the foray, through the hallway, through the library, through the private study, through the reading room, through the smoking room, through the second library, through the sherry room, through the sun-porch and finally into the backyard, which was a verdant five–acre orchard of fruit trees and bursting flower arrangements. Wishus set the lobsters down next to a trench of steaming rocks and seaweed, which were requisites for a New England clam bake.
The owner of the house, who Wishus recognized from the newspapers he read while taking his morning coffee at a cafe 30 cobble-stoned steps from his apartment, was one Dean Charles Kazak. Dean Kazak, a primly dressed man of dignified manners, was engaged in an argument with a noteworthy, though none too popular in Catholic circles, professor of theology named Dr. Seymour Luscious. Dr. Luscious had been personally harangued by the Pope Paul VI as a “seditious pagan masquerading as a saint.” The papal attack was in response to a book Luscious had published entitled The God I Know, in which he claimed God was nothing more than a spoiled dilettante who had inherited this world on his 18th birthday, and that even though he had done his best to oversee it and monitor the earth’s progress, God was making a mess of the whole thing. Wishus had read Dr. Luscious’ work and had enjoyed it immensely. He was surprised, however, to see Luscious dressed in a rather garish, yellow velveteen suit. The man’s literary tone suggested more refined tastes.
Everybody at the party was smoking mundungus from corn cob pipes and sipping on clarets and pinotages, and Wishus was thrilled to be in the presence of men and women whose austerity he so admired.
“This world is a rough draft,” Kazak said to Luscious, “and once God realizes it, he’ll edit us out of it. Unless, of course, we leave a mark too indelible to erase.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Kazak,” Luscious countered, taking a large swig of red wine from his chalice, “you overestimate God. You think he has time to pay attention to every little particle of flotsam and jetsam? You think he has the patience to edit out every stray apostrophe, every misplaced semicolon? He’s a busy man. Surely some of us are likely to slip through the cracks.”
Seeing his in, Wishus could not contain himself.
Chapter 5: The Ontological Argument
“Dr. Luscious,” Wishus called out. His gaucherie elicited gasps from the guests, for not only was he gentry class, but he was also without the proper attire to address such prestigious crowds. He was a poor, uneducated immigrant standing in the midst of the social elite, the upper echelons of the upper crust of a riches and royalty sandwich. And the wet spot of dewy lobster drool covering the entirety of his back did little to improve his position. “Are you suggesting that God doesn’t have the time or the will to make the necessary alterations to the world?”
“I’m sorry?” the Dr. Luscious asked the boy, tapping the end of his cigar. “Come again, fishmonger.”
“He wants to know if God has penned his last will and testament,” someone shouted.
“Will he leave the Mercedes to Jesus or Moses?” someone else belted.
“No, no,” Wishus said, stepping away from the bag of lobsters, “what I’m asking is, if God doesn’t have the time to tie up the loose ends, his job will never be done.”
“Why do you say that, my boy?” Kazak asked.
“Because purity is far to easy to corrupt,” Wishus replied. “If God only had the time to cleanse the world of 99 percent of vice and sin at a time, the one percent of darkness that remained would spread like wildfire throughout the pious trenches. It would grow exponentially and corrupt with the greatest of ease, and before he realized his oversight, the world would be infected with the pandemic of vice and sin all over again. Then, the world would be 99 percent evil, and only 1 percent good.” The crowds of the party had circled in closer to hear the debate between Kazak and Luscious and the well-spoken dock worker.
“I agree with you boy. For the reasons you have just elucidated, it cannot be a matter of time. It is, quite obviously, a matter of will,” Luscious said. “Whatever God thinks, he does. There is no room for inhibition in the Almighty, for what he does, he does without cognizance and without regret, no matter the consequences. If he entirely eradicated the world of sin,” Luscious said, turning to the crowds, “he would have to let the likes of us into heaven!” The guests all laughed.
“Then his alternatives are to let alone the intoxication of sin or start the world anew?” Kazak offered.
“Yes,” Luscious said.
“Then why the delay? What could possibly detain him from amortizing this world and starting anew?” the confused dean asked.
“It is not so much a question of what delays him, as how it delays him,” the theologist said coolly. “It is quite possible that we have all been edited out, as you suggested only a few moments ago, but that we simply do not know it yet. It is quite possible, I reiterate, quite possible and very likely, that we are all in hell.”
“Then why are we having such a good time?” one of the guests asked.
Luscious started to answer this question, but Wishus interrupted. “I think I can answer this one, if you’d allow it, Dr. Luscious.”
“Of course, my boy. Be my guest,” Luscious said approvingly.
“If God, or whomever preceded him, erred in making the earth the first time, it is very likely that he erred in creating inferno as well. If we’re in hell, it’s an imperfect sort of hell, a hell where mirth and alcohol and clambakes are allowed.”
“Huzza,” cried Luscious. “Brilliantly put.”
“Huzza,” the crowds cheered, raising their glasses.
“I’m sorry,” interrupted the dean on the sly, “your name is?”
“Allowishus Scrimshaw.”
“Scrimshaw, eh? And how did your family come about that surname, son?”
Not wanting to tell the Dean that it Scrimshaw was nothing more than Objetsculpté translated, he said: “My grandfather six generations back was on the Pequod, sir.”
“The Pequod, are you sure?” a distinguished literature professor stepped forward. “The Pequod was a fictitious boat, my lad.”
“Yes,” Wishus said, “and my grandfather six generations back was on it.”
Chapter 6: Etymology
Lingot is French for “ingot,” meaning a brick of metal cast in manageable shape and size. It is not a very common word in the English language, rarely used in the vernacular of the American English, and equally rare in the dialect of the Canadian and the Australian. It tends to be one of those words that those who know it know it out of necessity. It falls in the category of words – like “plastron” and “cetaceous” and “epicanthic fold” – that Homo plebeians will never use.
Quercy is a region in France, a region that embodies Wishus’ hometown of Cahors. And du means “of,” which should require no further explanation. So, like his favorite cheese, Allowishus Scrimshaw was du quercy, but he differed from lingot in that he was not cast in an easy to manage shape or size. Quite the opposite, he had always been, and always would be, a very difficult man, in all physical and immaterial respects.
There is a secondary difference between the man and the cheese: unlike the version of lingot du Quercy imported to the United States from France, Wishus was crawling in bacteria. The imported lingot was not. In the 1950’s the United States placed a moratorium on importing unpasteurized cheese aged less than 60 days, and the lingot du Quercy , along with hundreds of other noteworthy varieties, were affected by this referendum.
When Dean Kazak led the wiry boy to the table of hors d’ouevres, Wishus was shocked to see before him a tray of lingot du Quercy. He had not had the cheese in more than three years, and he immediately smeared half a brick of the softened ambrosia onto a cracker. As he chewed, he realized something different about the cheese. Its taste was not as complex, not as awakening to the senses as the cheese back home. At the time he knew not the difference was effected by a pasteurization levy the FDA had imposed on foreign dairy products and that this imposition extricated the vital bacteria that gave lingot du Quercy its most seductive qualities. The integrity of the cheese as a living organism unto itself had been sacrificed in order to meet the needs of a society scared of the microscopic, a society that abhorred invisible organisms no matter how innocuous they proved to be.
Chapter 7: The Beginning of the End
Impressed by his wit and audacity, Dean Kazak offered the adroit Allowishus a full scholarship to Buttagers University, the liberal arts academy he presided over. Upon receiving his BA, Dean Kazak pulled some strings and got Wishus a teaching position while he did research on his Ph.D. By the time he earned his doctorate in 1980, Allowishus Scrimshaw was a forerunner in the revivalist skeptical movement called Neo-Destitute Abominationism – or Nay-Sayism – and Dean Kazak, only a few years away from retirement and the longest nap, saw to it that Dr. Allowishus Scrimshaw was immediately given a tenure track position at Buttagers. And so it was that Buttagers University in Massachusetts – only an hour’s walk from the harbor where a fourteen year old boy from France had jumped ship without so much as a German mark, an American nickel, a British pound, a Tajikistani ruble, a Spanish doubloon, or a Mexican peso to his name – became Dr. Scrimshaw’s terra firma. Massachusetts, became his permanent home, sanctuary, and coliseum of mental warfare. And the gladiators with which he did battle were those very students who matriculated and marched into his classroom willing to learn from him.
Chapter 8: The Have Nots
Allowishus never did achieve the goliath house he had pledged to own that day in 1971 with lobster spit on his back. He never built nor renovated a mansion with 35 bedrooms, 12 and a half baths, two kitchens, an olympic-sized swimming pool, two tennis courts, a gardener to kick in the pants, a private chef to compliment, stables of wild horses from Chingateague Island, a subterranean, climate controlled wine cellar, a jet tub the size of an Oldsmobile, or a Rolls Royce with calfskin seats and voice activated commands. Grecian columns never phallically welcomed guests to his ostentatious abode, nor did Arabian vaults on his ceilings provide spacious impressions, nor was his house equipped with Gothic steeples appropriate for spying on his kingdom, nor did Victorian facades relay his severity, nor did Persian minarets tower overhead, nor did a moat deter officious cultists from rapping on his door, and neither did a garden of lilacs and orchids decorate the grounds within his perimeter. He never had dinette sets from an ancient Chinese dynasties, nor Russian tea sets with inscriptions of the Romanov beheadings, nor Lebanese gold-trimmed serving platters, nor Moroccan rugs, nor Mexican folk masks with real bulls horns, nor wooden Tanzanian fertility dolls, nor a collection of Maori bone carvings. He had nothing except cheese and an incorrigible tongue for blaspheming.
And, for a period of time, he had Mrs. Scrimshaw, an administrative aid in the enrollment office who put up with his shenanigans for nigh six years before finally fleeing the scene crying. The house Allowishus and Mrs. Scrimshaw shared was a two bedroom hovel filled to the brim with hardcover books and splintered cheese crates. The house was kept at a frigid 58 degrees and two humidifiers ran without reprieve to preserve the precious cheese logs, moons, wedges, wheels, drums, barrels, bulbs, and balls Allowishus had imported from foreign distributors. The shades were always drawn to block out the stinging rays of the sun. The smell of mold wafted and penetrated deeply into everything. The house was a cave and a cache more than it was a casa or chateau. The paint on the walls peeled like bad sunburns; the shag on the carpet looked like the bloodied tufts of roadkill; the cabinet doors were falling of their hinges; the roof was water damaged; the mice were plentiful.
There were no niceties, nothing pleasing to the eye. No oil paintings hung on walls, no potted perennials blooming boisterously. Furniture was made from towels thrown over old wooden crates, and a small nail or staple in one’s backside was a common awakening. The dining room table was a piece of particle board lashed to a stack of used truck tires. The couple’s bed was a large hammock, which made for clumsy lovemaking. The floorboards were warped. Water spewed from the faucets in an array of colors, none of them eliciting sanitary impressions. The ceiling lights hadn’t been replaced in over four years and the window of the back door had a crack running diagonally from the upper right hand side down to the lower left. The house was, for all intensive purposes, a storage locker where two unhappy people squatted, slept, and shat irregularly.
Chapter 9: What is Cheese?
Cheese, in short, is mummified milk. It is nothing more than curdled moo-serum and baaa-butter. It is rotten, coagulated, mammalian fat–and–cream feed from a lactating bessy bitch, usually of the hoofed and horned variety. It is the putrefacted spoil of a droopy teat hell-bent on nursing its changelings. Scientifically, it is liquid gone solid, and there’s no turning back.
Cheese – of various appellations, locations, origins, sources, types, typologies, kindologies, genus, species, brand, beast, bovine and ovine, buffaloed and camel-toed – constituted well over 80 percent of Allowishus’ diet. He didn’t have blood coursing through his veins, he had whey. The number of wheels in his stomach at any given moment could have run a caravan of 19th century pioneers seeking to make manifest their destiny by moving west. From meals of nothing more than three baguettes, a pound of Spanish cabrales and a leather flask of Bin 75 Portp to a pachata loaf accompanied by two butternut squash shaped, candida–rich kefir rounds and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse chardonnay, cheese was Allowishus’ main staple.
The contents of his refrigerator were sparse, the cabinets more naked than a woman with low self-esteem, and the freezer as empty as a man’s prostate after buying a magazine displaying photos of said woman.
Chapter 10: Wine and Dine
Of course, what would good cheese be without good wine? “It would be fantastic,” Wishus was known to say. “However, wine and cheese together are the manna from which all life sprang.”
In his cellar were wines from all over the world, wines from places grapes dared not ferment for fear of being persecuted by imams and ayatollahs and other holy jihadists, and to preserve the safety of the viticulturists and oenologists in these regions, it is better not to enumerate them here.
However, It will do no harm to mention that with an airy boursin Wishus preferred a sweet vouvray; with camembert de Normandie, a Cabernet Sauvignon blended with Cabernet Franc and Petite Verdot; with an aged gouda, a Saperavi from the Caucasus served the purpose; the space-aged domes of Galician tetilla he paired with Jerez Fino; and for the sheep’s milk torta del casar he slipped into a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, dark, yet not so obfuscating as to drown out the mealy sourness of the finest cheese from Spain.
Chapter 11: Bullshit
Allowishus’ second passion - and a distant second it was, for cheese was always on the tip of his tongue - was his love for pontification. Nobody loved the sound of his own voice more than Dr. Allowishus Scrimshaw. And no other profession suited his needs better than that of college professor. He had the looks of Hephaestus and the ear of Narcissus.
Five days a week he was granted the liberty of speaking of his own “revolutionary” ideas and “profound interests.” Within the classroom, he liked nothing better than to look into the crowd of eager minds awaiting his pedagogy and see in their eyes a wild confusion. He loved to convolute, for he wrongly associated the students’ confusion with admiration, believing that the more he bastardized logic the more his students would think he spoke the gospel’s truth.
As a professor he developed several new schools of philosophical thought, none of them as incendiary or as devastating in their ripples as he would have liked to believe. Case in point, before the close of the 20th century, his methodologies had already appeared in a book titled Forgotten Philosophical Movements of the 20th Century. The entries were as follows:
(see Scrimshaw, Allowishus) The dissection of myth, science, history, and epistemology subjected to a rigorous and surreal scrutiny. The teleology of the movement is best described by its founder, Dr. Allowishus Scrimshaw: “Ruminology is the study and creative redress of skeptical inquiry, whereby the Ruminist, as it were, finds truth through the greatest amount of fabrication and personal interpolation.” There are fewer Ruminologists than there are extant dinosaurs.
Linguistic Micrco-Scopism or Rebootology:
Scrimshaw’s second forgotten philosophical system was not so much a novel way of thought as it was a frustrating and limiting exercise:
(see Scrimshaw, Allowishus) The linguistic school of addressing the seemingly inconsequential minutiae of the universe and beyond, all while limiting oneself to a vocabulary of no more than 35 words. Much like Zen koans, the practice of this school, while meant to clarify, creates poetic answers to philosophical dilemmas. Lambasted by other theoretical linguists (see Gandometer, J. Stephen J.) as “linguistic vagary,” the pages upon which Reebotological theory is printed being “not worthy to wrap offal from the local stockyard.”
Scrimshaw, Allowishus:
French-born Neo-Deconstructionist; founder of Ruminology and Linguistic Micro-Scopism. Works include, Nothing, Not Even Nothing Itself, Is Real (1981), Words Are Vomit (1984), God, Clean Up Your Room (1988), Does a Mirror Exist in 2 or 3 Dimensions? (1989), God, Take Out the Trash: Divine Eugenics (1991) and Rebootology: Your Guide to Discovering the Lesser Lies of Language (1994).
Dr. Allowishus Scrimshaw: Thus, signified E has ceased to denote the very quantitative tonalities initially imbued in the signifier little e, as the agency of signs has abandoned it with regard to probability, analogy, and emulation. Ergo, linguistic quantum symbolics such as phones, phonemes and morphemes comes a wassailing like silver bells, thereby reducing the celebration of synecdoche and metonymy as utter abstractions, as is exhibited in the Floundering Navigation Principle we spoke of earlier. The taxonomy of sound then becomes a mathematical miscalculation in itself and words, and their assumed roles as signified players, become nothing more than liturgical jargon in the religion of language. The dictionary becomes the church, the grammarian the priest, and the sentence the pulpit from which such rubbish is evangelized.
Chapter 12: Rescued from the Archives I
August 19th, 1988. Seminar: Theologistic Miscalculations 452/752:
Dr. Allowishus Scrimshaw: And so I asked unto God, ‘God, if you are so great, so powerful answer me these questions three :
‘Does your omnipotence enable you to make a being greater than yourself?’
‘And, once you create that being, does he not become God?’
‘And if that higher, higher being does indeed become God, do you become it, or does it absorb you, like a phagocytic cell consuming another cell?’
And God had no reply for me. He had none. He simply sat in a pile of toys and dilly dallied. He picked his nose. I’ll spare you the details of what he did with what he found because it nearly made me sick to my stomach.
I then asked him, ‘God, if you are omnipotent, why did it take you six days and one of rest to create the world? What was stopping you from creating everything in one day?’
And God answered, ‘I like green Jell-O the best!’
Student: You’re a heretic, Professor Scrimshaw!
End of transmission.
Chapter 13: Rescued from the Archives II
November 13, 1995. Seminar: The Language of Lacanian Id in Translation 389/689:
The genesis of language, according to the Old Testament, was a gift given from God to Adam, and Adam named things as things.
This ‘gift’ in itself is hegemony. The notion that Adam had no language before God gave it to him guides us to believe that at root, the only word we understand without a relation to other words, the only semantically autonomous word, is ‘God,’ because Adam understood what this meant before he was given language. Adam implicitly knew – a priori – the meaning of ‘God’ before he had words or syllables. Thus, ‘God’ was the first intelligible concept and the precursor to all words.
And so, language is the mouse trap God has set for us. We cannot understand the word ‘suitcase’ without its relation to the word ‘orgasm.’ We cannot understand ‘avocado’ without its relation to ‘turkey.’ But we can understand ‘God’ without its relation to anything else, because it precedes everything else. We can only ever use words to describe other words. Except the one thing we cannot describe with words, the one thing the whole infrastructure hinges upon is the notion, not the word, but the understood notion of ‘God.’
Student: You’re a fucking heretic, Professor Scrimshaw!
End of transmission.
Mrs: How was work today, honey?
Chapter 14: Good Dancers Make The Best Lovers
And so it went. Scrimshaw thought he was a genius; his students thought he was a lunatic and a genius, and his wife thought he was a genius trapped in the mind of a lunatic attached to the body of a buffoon. He was a rather clumsy man, always bumping funny bones, running into chairs, hitting things with his belly, banging his head on low doorways, spilling coffee on his pants, burning eggs, elbowing his wife in the face while he brushed his teeth, and slamming his fingers in dresser drawers. As far as Mrs. Scrimshaw was concerned, the worst aspect of his clumsiness was that he was more likely to give her a “suitcase” than an “orgasm,” regardless of how much he professed the two words to be connected. He was a greedy lover, a taker not a giver, a narcissistic needler, a self-centered stabber, a conceited cocksman, a lousy latex lobber, an inward-spiraling spire spitter, and a lazy, three-minute throbber. Needless to say, their sex life was as balanced as a trapeze artist with a heavy heart and a roll of quarters in his left pocket.
Chapter 15: The Hair That Broke Mrs. Scrimshaw’s Back
Mrs. Allowishus Scrimshaw was a beauty, a peach worth fighting for. She was 12 years Allowishus’ junior and 12 times too attractive to be with a man who, on any given day, looked like a detusked walrus. Each day with Wishus aged her one month. Her life was not easy, it was not normal, there were no placid moments of breezy happiness, no joyous afternoons spent wrapped in lover’s arms, no unconditional “I love you”s, and no recitation of sonnets. For Mrs. Allowishus Scrimshaw, living had become a job, a job with a boss who refused to accept her resignation. Breakfast was a bore. Lunch was laborious. And dinner was demanding. Most of Mrs. Allowishus’ best meals were ruined by moments of Wishus’ Ruminological and Sartrean verse. Observe the complete dissolution of marriage vows, on February 5, 1996, a day when Allowishus, disappointed by the new crop of dunderheaded students and the dwindling enrollment numbers in his seminars, pushed Mrs. Allowishus away forever:
Mr: Work is voluntary servitude, slavery on a stick, pimping on a platter. The daily grind is more coarsely ground sopressata. With the setting of each sun, the next day more and more resembles the picking of cotton.
Mrs: You want to talk about picking cotton? Do you honestly? Because I bust my hump day and night in this frigid house –
Mr: Would you rather have the hump of a sperm whale or a beluga whale?
Mrs: – and do I ever get a ‘thank you’? Do I ever get an, ‘I love you, dearest’? Do I ever get a ‘What do you say we go out to eat tonight’? No. All you say to me is, ‘Did my cheese arrive?’ ‘Did the cheese come?’ ‘Where’s my cheese?’ Who gives a shit –
Mr: On the one hand, a sperm whale is filled with valuable ambergris. It’s the largest of the toothed whales, you know. Quite an astonishing creature.
Mrs: –about your stinking cheese. And I mean stinking literally. Crates of that stuff, emolliating down in the basement. I can’t keep any food in the house because you always –
Mr: But a beluga whale, well, you’re smaller, more agile, and the skin tone, oh. Flawless. Alabaster. White as the moon, silken, like a slice of Limburger, not like the blue cheese chin of those gray whales, those barnacle encrusted –
Mrs: –throw out the vegetables and the rice and the eggs and the bacon to make room for your chevres, your San Nectaires, your precious neufchatel, your crumbling queso frescos. Well, speaking of crumbling –
Mr: –20 ton beasts of the brisk and the brine. Those flippered, flatulent, water–spouting hooligans. They thin they’re such hot stuff with their blow holes and their baleen. Whose idea was baleen? They stuff make me sick.
Mrs: –this marriage is crumbling. It’s over, Wishus, it’s over. I won’t do it anymore. Not another minute. I’m gone. I’m going. I hate you and I hate myself for ever falling in love with you.
Mr: Where are you going, my Gorgonzola? Where are you off to?
Mrs: (patter, patter, patter, weep, weep weep, slam.)
And was that was the last of the missus. She now lives in Baltimore and is happily remarried to an insurance salesman. Her new husband is, by no accident, dimwitted and lactose intolerant.
Chapter 16: The Right To Peaceably Assemble
The students standing outside the Humanities building wanted blood. Dangerous little lycanthropes they were. Vampires and cannibals. Sacs and Vandals. Huns and hunters. They gnashed their teeth like a pack of rabid wolves. They stomped their feet like Andalusian bulls, and readied their spear-head horns to plow down the decorated matador. They snarled their meanest snarls, growled their deepest growls, and grunted their most guttural grunts. They wanted blood spilled all over the cold asphalt.
Signs were held: “Scrim is Dim,” “Diss Dr. Wish,” “Boot the Coot.” And, more blatant and less lyrical: “God hates Scrimshaw,” “Yahweh wants Scrimshaw to burn with the other Pinko Frenchies,” and “Scrimshaw should be sodomized with his own propaganda.” Finding a sympathetic face amongst this crowd was like truffle hunting on the steppes of Mongolia.
From the third-story window of his private office, Scrimshaw’s teaching assistant, one Devlin Tamarind, was on his feet, peaking through the wooden louvre slates of the mini-blinds. Scrimshaw sat insouciantly in his office chair, legs up on his desk, glass of pinot gris in one hand, a slice of almond-crusted la yerbera in the other. He chewed loudly, smacked his lips, and cleansed his palate with a gargle of wine. The raucous taunts of the offended students below didn’t seem to bother him one iota. It was Devlin who was sweating profusely, and he was hardly able to follow the words Scrimshaw released between bites of the almond-crusted cheese and his minerally wine.
“The derivative universalis of (chomp chomp) A equaling here and now is fundamentally A sub-one here and now. A sub-two, to (chomp chomp) a lesser degree obviously, represents fascist economics and the rise and fall of communistic banking systems. A (chomp chomp) sub-two is even less of the here and now. Do you see why economics and communism are not here and now, Devlin? Do you see why they are to modern thought what a (chomp chomp) two–humped camel is to the an amphibious think-tank? Do you see it, Devlin? Do you see it?”
“What? Whose camel?”
“You’re distracted, Devlin. Usually (chomp chomp) you have a firm grasp on these things. Have a glass of wine. It’s got just a hint of ginger.”
“That’s a pretty big crowd, Dr. Scrimshaw. I think we’d better call security to escort you home.”
“Escort? Devlin, you’re crazy. (chomp chomp) I don’t need an escort. That crowd can’t hurt me. I’m infallible. If they make me bleed, I’ll simply say, ‘I’m not bleeding,’ (chomp chomp) and my wounds will be healed instantly. Such is the power of illusions, which I control.”
“Now’s not the time to speak in riddles, Dr. Scrimshaw. We’ve got a serious problem on our hands.” He peaked out the window again. “They want you dead!”
“Devlin. Sit down.”
Devlin did not sit down.
“Sit down, you worm. Drink your wine before I smite you.” Devlin obeyed, and quickly quaffed the gold liquid, his gullet burning with the palliative effects of the anodyne. “Now, ignore the crowds. Crowds are always gathering, everywhere, in all places in the world, and they’re usually harmless. Are you afraid of the horseshoe crabs when they come up on the beach to exercise their gonads?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir, I’ve never seen them.”
“Well, can you imagine them? Do you know what they look like?”
“A horseshoe?”
“Not at all. More like a trilobite.”
“I wouldn’t know, sir. I never had the need for an orthodontist. My teeth grew in perfectly straight.”
“Okay, forget that. Mating sea turtles then. The leather back. Live well into their eighties, I’m told. You know what a turtle is, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” Devlin rose and peaked out the slats again. The crowd seemed louder and angrier than it had just a few minutes ago. One could almost smell their sanguinary lust. A muscular man in the front row wore a T-shirt that said, “We Won’t Move Until Scrim Stops Moving.” He appeared to be chewing on a raw steak. Devlin was terribly frightened. Scrimshaw suggested that he have another glass of pinot gris. The graduate student poured some more wine and swallowed it as though it were to be his last. Scrimshaw did not offer his understudy any of his cheese.
“You wouldn’t be afraid (chomp chomp) of a gathering of sea turtles? Would you?”
“No, sir.”
“And why not?”
“Because they’re lethargic, harmless beasts of lower intelligence.”
“Exactly. And what distinguishes them (chomp chomp) from the philistines standing outside my window?”
“Scales?”
“Take a look out that window one more time, Devlin, and tell me you don’t see a group of harmless, lethargic beasts. Just like the sea turtle (chomp chomp) they’re guided by instinct. And you know what? They’ll retreat to the ocean soon enough. All we have to do (chomp chomp) is sit here wait for the dumb brutes to slink back into the ocean where they belong.”
Chapter 17: Newspaper Article
As Reported By the Buttagers Weekly Gazette, October 3, 2001:
Hundreds of irate students gathered outside the office of Dr. Allowishus Scrimshaw last Thursday to boycott the irregular teaching practices of the Buttagers University professor. Scrimshaw, a tenured gonzo-philosophy professor, is well-known for his off-color remarks and sacrilegious slander.
According to students, Scrimshaw is a deliberate agitator who claims to have had personal - and often condescending - conversations with God. Many find his retelling of Biblical parables and sacred myths an offensive and tabu parody.
“The Bible is the Bible is the Bible,” said annoyed Freshman Fritz Graham. “Professor Scrimshaw has no respect. I find his comments personally outrageous, and I fear for my eternal soul for having heard him speak. Buttagers is an institution of higher learning, not a place to burn effigies.”
A female student, wishing to speak on the condition of anonymity, admitted to feeling isolated and belittled by Scrimshaw when the professor frequently called her “Buxton Blue,” a strongly flavored cheese.
Toulouse Cocodrillo, a sophomore, confirmed the accusation that Scrimshaw often referred to students as cheeses. Though upset with the content of Scrimshaw’s lectures, Cocodrillo sympathized with the philosopher’s need to use gastronomic nicknames saying, “Some people have a hard time with names. I personally like cheese, so I never saw his calling students ‘Spicy Havarti in the second row,’ or ‘Bavarian Bergkase with the yellow parka,” as flagrantly foul as his religious epithets.”
Interim Dean Julia Fitzgerald announced early Friday morning that in response to students’ demands, she had no other option but to revoke the tenure of the iconic Scrimshaw and bring an end to the University’s relationship with him. Fitzgerald said Scrimshaw had until the end of the day to empty his office and clear his personal effects.
“It is unfortunate,” Dean Fitzgerald said at an open press conference, “that Dr. Scrimshaw, who for more than thirty years proved to be a valuable asset to this university, has caused such a public outcry. As the chief administrator of this institution, I must do what is best for the students and for the future of this university, and it would seem that Dr. Scrimshaw’s teaching methods are no longer acceptable nor furthering the field of philosophical study. We wish Dr. Scrimshaw the best of luck in his future pursuits, whatever those may be, and I’d like to remind Dr. Scrimshaw that I will personally write him a letter of recommendation, should he express such need.”
Scrimshaw received both BA from Buttagers in 1974 and his Ph.D. in 1978. He has been a full-time professor at the university since 1979 and his dismissal is only the second firing of a tenured professor in the history of Buttagers University. The first such dismissal, occurring in 1876, was in response to Dr. Tyron DeFronto’s claim that “Jesus was a baked potato.”
When asked to comment on Graham’s decision, Scrimshaw said, “Dean Fitzgerald masturbates to pictures of J. Robert Oppenheimer. That alone speaks volumes.”
Chapter 18: A Twelve Pack and a Temper
Jack’s Lounge was the type of place people went to when they felt like dying. It was a dark, muggy corner of nothingness. It was damp. There were spiders. Beers set the patrons back less than a dollar. And customers were welcome to sort through the peanut dish, so long as they didn’t mind sifting out the cockroaches.
In a booth next to the pool tables, Devlin Tamarind and Allowishus Scrimshaw nursed two frothy mugs. Devlin was forcing Scrimshaw to play one of his favorite word games, hoping the lift the professor’s spirits. The exercise was called Corkscrew-Bonanza and was intended to demonstrate the syllabic similarities of unrelated words. Like the interlocking tiers of a brick wall, the words didn’t align perfectly, but there was enough overlap to cause each brick to rely on the support of its neighbors, and therefore become reliant upon the support of all the bricks that were supported by the neighbors of its neighbors, and so on and so forth. Nothing noteworthy had ever come of the exercise, but it beat playing cards.
“Faux pas is to foie gras,” Scrimshaw said, feeling defrocked.
“Puncture is to pincher,” Devlin responded.
“Roof is to reef.”
“Fell is to feel.”
“Fluid is to flood.”
“Moon is to moan.”
“Ski is to skree.”
“Mountain is to fountain.”
“Goat is to coat.”
“Tact is to tacit.”
“Rape is to ripe.”
“Pilot is to plot.”
“Steam is to stymie.”
“Enough,” the unemployed man said impatiently. “You win. I’m a failure.”
“Relax, professor.”
“Let’s drink.”
And so they drank. Beer after beer after beer. Wishus had been drinking since eight that morning. Devlin joined him at noon, not knowing if he would continue his studies at Buttagers now that his mentor was persona non grata. Beer after beer after beer.
Wishus’ best friend, Grenadine Pomegran, an Applied Mathematics professor at Buttagers, arrived just after
two o’clock. Two days had passed since the publication of the condemning article, a mere 48 hours had slipped by since the ignobled Dr. Scrimshaw had been discarded like a sock with too-loose elastic. Beer after beer after beer
Upon seeing his friend, Wishus flew into a rage. “They can’t do this,” he said, and standing up he hurled his beer mug across the bar, nearly hitting the doorman in the head. The glass shattered on the cinder block wall and sent a million diamond replicas raining onto the bouncer’s shaved skull. The burly doorman didn’t so much as flinch.
“Sorry,” Grenadine said. “He’s had a rough week.”
“They’ll all burn in syntactic hell,” Wishus screamed. “They’ll expire in the inferno of anagrams. They’ll deflate like balloons in vats of acid. They’ll be fuel for the flames licking the feet of child molesters and jaywalkers as they burn in hell. This would never be allowed if Dean Kazak were alive. He’d have that Fitzgerald drawn and quartered.”
“Calm down,” Grenadine said.
“GRRRR!”
“Shh!”
“I’m a wild animal!”
“Jesus, Wishus. Calm down. I think you’ve had enough to drink.”
“What was it the poets said?” he raged. “Something about the arbiter being guided by hate is like a sparrow chasing the shadow of the hawk about to eat it? How does that go?” Beer after beer after beer.
“He’s been saying things like that all day,” the confused and weary Devlin said to Grenadine.
“I’m sure he has. I’ve never seen him in a state like this. What’s his summation?”
“He had about nine beers since lunch,” Devlin answered.
“What did you guys have for lunch?”
“Three beers.”
“I think the best thing for him is some sleep,” Grenadine suggested.
Beer after beer after beer.
Rennet: n. 1) a substance found in the stomach of an unweaned mammal; 2) a
membrane aiding in the digestion of milk; 3) any agent that curdles milk and renders it hard.
Chapter 19: Easier Said Than Done
For Dr. Allowishus Scrimshaw, it would have been easier to reach the moon with his outstretched hand. It would have been easier to bring to normal proportions the image reflected in a spoon by flattening the concavity of the instrument using nothing more than telekinetic powers. It would have been easier to determine which came first: the chicken sandwich or the scrambled egg decorated with a sprig of parsley. It would have been easier to levitate across a pond of ducks and cello-throated frogs mating with the fervor of the followers of Dionysus. It would have been easier for man to account for the 13 seconds God lost track of during the creation, a notion Dr. Luscious spoke of in his polemic tome. (According to Luscious, this mistake had been the Christian equivalent of Pandora’s box. On that day in 1971, over lobster tails and glasses of viognier, Luscious had convinced Scrimshaw that God was a narcoleptic, and during one of his black outs, right around the time he created light, God had passed out for 13 seconds and Lucifer had ruled for nearly a quarter of a minute. During that time, Luscious believed, Lucifer introduced pharmacons – seemingly helpful tonics of idea and invention that later spread like a bad rash throughout the world. The pharmacon was a deceptive device – it appeared to have beneficial uses, but left chaos in its wake. Writing was a pharmacon, because it induced forgetting. Alcohol was a pharmacon, because it provoked violence. Knowledge was a pharmacon, because it encouraged hubris.) It would have been easier for Dr. Allowishus Scrimshaw to do all of these things than it was for him to get out of bed that morning. His head was throbbing and his stomach felt lopsided. He was hung over.
Chapter 20: The Labor Force
If not for the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, man would have never had to work. Adam and Even had eaten buffaloed by the serpent and spoiled it all. They’d taken the apple from the tree of knowledge and devoured it, and because of this they were cast out into the world of harsh realities. A world where food did not grow naturally but had to be cultivated. A world where cooked spare ribs didn’t just fall off of passing swine, but had to be smoked and warmed over fire after a long day of hunting. A world where fruit had to be squeezed to make juice. Work was the true punishment for Adam and Eve and their progeny born in sin, not exile or nakedness or eternal damnation, but work.
Wishus contacted every university he could think, searching for the inalienable punishment of work, seeking gainful employment. Each college had their own reasons for not hiring him. Dechristo State was having a hiring freeze. San Bernadino Jesuit School was cutting their Philosophy Department due a decreased demand for thinking. The University of Louiskrill was closed indefinitely until damage caused by a flood could be repaired. Miasma State College had burned down in a fire started in the Chemistry lab. The College of Missilepipi, New Gruntswick, Old Finland, Bashington Institute, Dewey Mine, Motown City College of Arts and Sciences, Strident School of Music, Smiff and Blesston School Pyrotechnics – none of them wanted him. No school in the continental 48 would take him for fear of student upheaval. Of course, they didn’t tell Allowishus this.
Wishus rode the bus for six hours one day - not because he needed to go anywhere, but because he had no where to go - before being thrown off by the driver.
A copy of the Buttagers Gazette arrived in the mail, and at first he was hesitant to open the paper that had so callously issued his academic eulogy. After several hours of staring at the graying periodical, he resigned to his fate. He opened the classifieds and began job hunting. He soon learned that in the modern jungle, physical skills were more valuable than an ability to reason, cite the great works, or compose a profession of love in iambic pentameter:
Wanted: Buoyancy expert, 7-10 years experience. Must have knowledge of water, ice, and steam. Licensed for plasma disposal a plus. Speakers of Czech encouraged to apply. No citizens of Slovak Republic please. Pick up application in person at 394 Yawndling Ave.
Wanted: Automotive mechanic to help design more fuel efficient vehicle. Familiarity with internal combustion engines, outboard motors, solar paneling and/or natural gasses preferred. Non-certified need not apply.
Wanted: Whipping boy. Hemophiliacs and hemophobes, no way.
Wanted: Crew members for tuna boat. 1 or 2-year contracts available. Must love the smell of fish. Must love the sea. Must love the taste of tuna. Don’t like orders? Dance to a different tuna? Don’t bother.
Willing to die? Become a human shield. Great benefits package, dental, vision, medical. Temporary positions available immediately.
There seemed no jobs available for professors, theorists, published authors, world-renowned convolutors, or heretics. “What type of world is this?” Wishus thought to himself.
To lighten the mood he turned to the Personal Ads.
Anatomically correct male seeks suitable mate. All races welcome. Bipedalism preferred, ages 19-40, no history of criminality/cannibalism. Friendship? Maybe more. Enthusiasm for taxidermy and shuffleboard a plus.
Come fix broken things in my apartment. SWF seeks SM, ages 18-35, to make minor repairs to sink fixtures, door jambs, locks, painting, etc. Will provide eye candy and iced tea. Must have own tools.
Sexy dominatrix seeks purebred stud and saucy vixen for experimental designs. Come join the 10,000 Holler Pyramid.
He put down the paper, feeling slightly less queasy, and prepared his usual breakfast. For his stomach: a bowl of sheep’s milk yogurt with rose flower honey and grapes; to open his palate: Edam on melba toast with Granny Smith apple slices; to reward his palate: plantain chips and Bleu d’Auvergne; to sharpen his mind: a handful of pecans; to clear his throat: a shot of muscat grapa. And for longevity he finished off the meal with an entire 6 ounce brick of lingot du Quercy.
Chapter 21: Calling Upon the Gorgon
Sunday. The first day of the week according to some, the last day according to others. Either way it was the lazy day. It was the day most people atoned for their sins or watched tennis on TV because of nothing better to do. It was the day rooms were cleaned and kitchens mopped. It was the day children dressed in their finest clothes and had a perfect part applied by mom. It was the day fathers finally paid attention to the children they had ignored all week. It was the day those with schooners took their boats out into the harbor for a little fresh air, while mother and daughter slept off the combined six pounds of mashed potatoes they’d eaten at the Sludge ‘n’ Pudge country buffet after listening to a sermon on gluttony.
Allowishus leafed through his address book. He picked up the phone and began dialing numbers. When he heard his a woman’s voice on the other end, he quickly hung up. Seconds later the phone rang. He stared at it until it stopped. Then he drifted off to sleep.
He was jerked from his slumber on the couch by the ringing of the phone a few minutes later. Instinctively, he answered it.
“Hello?”
“What did you call here for?”
“Gorgonzola, so nice to hear from you.”
“What did you call here for?”
“Fine, fine. How are you?”
“What did you call here for?”
“Oh, everything is going quite well, still teaching, you know. Writing books that are changing the world, making millions. Rick as a fox, you know? Did I tell you I bought a planet? Mercury, you may have heard of it. Well, it’s mine. Not really inhabitable, but beautiful nonetheless. I’m thinking of planting some snap peas for next year’s harvest.”
“Cut the charade, Wishus, I know you got fired from the university. I got the alumni newsletter in the mail. I also may have heard something about that riot you caused on the news.”
“It was not a riot. It was a harmless rally that the media blew way out of proportion. My dismissal was all part of a nefarious plot to destroy me. NSA has been after me for years.”
“What were you thinking, addressing your students as cheeses? Saying what you said about God? I thought you only talked that way at home home. I knew you were irreverent, but I thought you saved it for your sycophantic TAs.”
“I’m a ruined man.”
“You’ve been a ruined man,” she said, “it’s only just now you realized it.”
“Well,” he said, sniffling, “at least I have my cheese.”
Click.
Chapter 22: Overly Ambitious
Allowishus had always considered himself a type of human rennet. Milk was often used to describe things that had an mollifying effect, a soothing nature: land of milk and honey, milquetoast, milk of magnesia. Milk was passive, rennet was aggressive.
He believed he’d improved upon the theorems he studied by giving them more body, more solidity. As human rennet, he took the safety milk offered, that lightness and tranquility, that heavenly peace, and made it harder, made it more difficult to handle, and in doing so, he gave it body. No longer would the milk simply take the shape of any container it was poured into, after Allowishus was through with it it would have a form of his own.
That the theorems he worked with became less intelligible was only a consequence of his having improved them. He’d taken the thin, watery milk of his predecessors, fermented it, and made it into the glorious cheese of progress. He’d given the great tracts of Democritus and Hegel a longer shelf-life; he given them the ability to age and become more complex; he given them a more substantial form. He’d given them longevity. Of course, the extent of his improvements was all in his mind, for over the years it had become clear to everyone else that he was not the greatest thinker in the world. He was not a genius, he was simply a 17 year-old fish monger who’d been mistaken for someone with great academic potential. He’d been mislead as much as everybody else.
In reality, no one had ever really understood anything he’d said, they’d simply nodded their heads in agreement to save face. None of his students or colleagues wanted to look like they didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about. He was surrounded by parades of “yes men” and “jolly good sirs.” His books were filled with unintelligible charts and crudely drawn sketches containing characters from the Greek, Cyrillic, and Aramaic alphabets. He rambled for hours about the inaccuracies of well-documented historical encounters (For example, Allowishus argued in one of his books that the seppuku of the Japanese samurai was nothing more than “repeated folly by inexperienced swordsmen.”). He developed a counter-intuititve system of mathematics called Triplonetics, which was premised on existence an unknown, whole number between three and four. And he had advocated something called “Insult Therapy” in which the maddened and maniacal were to be criticized back to sanity.
There was not doubt that, like a child with a box of crayons, Allowishus had an unbridled imagination. He saw things in unique way, that is true, but he confused his vision with an ability to alter the hardwiring of the human brain. Wishus held the contention that by mentally redistributing the power of one’s brain, by rearranging the receptors of the four lobes – the frontal, the temporal, the parietal, the occipital – one could scramble the human experience and open up new planes of knowledge. Through the right processes of meditation, he believed, one could become enlightened enough to smell colors and taste sounds. One could, as Wishus had claimed to do, speak with God. He believed in his heart that this type of deconstruction would set man free from his inhibitions, would make him a superior being more akin to the Greeks, and would allow man to experience all the forms of wisdom unattainable to pedestrian man. This is what he had tried to do to himself, and what he had been trying do to Devlin Tamarind, before the university tossed him in the gutter.
Chapter 23: The Unfinished Business of Devlin Tamarind
Devlin Tamarind was an agreeable man of 29 years old. He’d been with several women, all of whom adjudged him a decent lover up to a point, but it was his inability to wrap things up that left him a bachelor. Devlin would always roll over and go to sleep moments before reaching the culmination point of love’s desires. Devlin had a genuine phobia of finishing.
His phobia had its genesis in a long line of family accidents. His great grandfather, Stuart Tamarind, a gregarious Quaker from Pennsylvania, had gone on a mission trip to Mexico City. It was in Mexico that Stuart and several others church members had agreed to build houses for the ancestors of Aztecs, which Stuart referred to as the “seething heathens.” Rumor has it that as Stuart hit the final nail into the last house the entire contraption came crumbling down upon him and he was crushed like a quail egg between two encyclopedias.
Devlin’s grandfather Julius, eldest son of Stuart, was a thrifty man of high spirits. He was also a family man known for his clever epigrams, some of which were printed on buttons in the 1940s. His favorite phrases were, “More than others, misery loves the company of itself,” “If you’re the same person you were yesterday, you’re not trying hard enough,” and, “History repeating itself is proof it’s not very wise; I learn from my mistakes.”
Julius, not being a rich man, was adamant that whatever was on your plate, excluding bones, went into your mouth and into your craw. Nothing was to be wasted, not on his watch. Julius choked to death when the last spoonful of his morning oatmeal contained a piece of granite that suffocated him.
The most striking death in Devlin’s family was that of his own father, Marshall Tamarind. Marshall’s passing was the moment that cemented the phobia of finishing in Devlin’s mind, as he was a primary witness to the horror that follows.
Marshall was a gentle man, soft-spoken, and like his father and grandfather, always willing to pitch in. After a starchy dinner one night, Marshall rewarded Mrs. Tamarind by offering to do the dishes. Mrs. Tamarind was rather pleased with her husband and pecked him on the cheek. Devlin, age eight, helped scrape the chicken bones into the trash.
Devlin tugged at his father’s sleeve.
“Yes, son? What is it?” he said amiably.
“Can we play catch, daddy?”
“As soon as I’m done washing the dishes we’ll go to the park and play catch, okay sport?”
“Okay,” Devlin said excitedly.
“Until then, why don’t you go watch some TV.”
Devlin settled in to watch a few minutes of Colombo while his father finished the dishes. Peter Falk had a glass eye, Devlin knew this. During the first commercial break, Devlin turned around and asked if his father was almost done.
“I’m finishing up the last plate right now.”
It was then that Marshall Tamarind burst spontaneously into flames and was incinerated in a matter of seconds. Devlin witnessed the entire debacle, and was never again the same.
Chapter 24: College Bound
Devlin’s mother died in a car crash five years after the combustion of her husband, and little Devlin was left an errant orphan. For the remainder of his teenage years he lived with his aunt in Alabama.
He was at first hesitant to finish high school, though when given the ultimatum of taking his final exams or enlisting in the military he chose the former and graduated with straight As. In order to get out of Alabama, Devlin sent out applications to 30 different undergraduate institutions and he was accepted to 27 of them. He chose Buttagers University in Massachusetts because it was the college farthest from Alabama. After his second semester at Buttagers he received a scholarship and worked summers as a rodeo clown to earn extra money, though he found the work dangerous and unrewarding. Nobody respected a clown, not even one with a college education.
After eight years, earning 248 credits in 16 semesters, including one semester spent studying Arabic in Lebanon, Devlin still had not applied to receive his bachelor’s degree, though he had enough credits for three of them. It was his fear of finishing that prevented him from filling out the proper paper work; he believed as soon as he received his diploma he would get a paper cut and bleed to death. Either that or there would be a trace amount of cyanide in the letterhead of the diploma the dean would hand him, and the poison would seep into his bloodstream and close his esophagus or some such nonsense. He had conjured up a thousand ways that he might die from finishing his degree, and each one seemed more plausible than the next. So, instead of applying for graduation, he simply kept taking more classes.
Eventually the bureaucracy of the university caught up with him:
October 2, 2002
Office of Undergraduate Studies
MG HOK 5963
Mr. Devlin Tamarind,
It has come to our attention that you meet the qualifying criteria to receive three undergraduate degrees from Buttagers University. Congratulations! In order to save you the trouble of filing the proper paperwork, we have already begun processing a request to have your diplomas issued in the areas of Evolutionary Anthropology, Literature, and Devolved Methods of Thought. Your diplomas should be arriving shortly.
Our records also show that you are currently enrolled in 15 credits of undergraduate study. Should you to decide to further your academic career at Buttagers, a deadline of January 1, 2003 has been selected as the date by which you must either apply for a graduate program or change your status to a non-degree seeking student. As a non-degree seeking student, your scholarship will be revoked. As a graduate student, you can qualify for assistantships and fellowships, depending on the available funds in the department you select.
Good luck in whatever you decide to do.
Margareet Flistam
Admissions Counselor
Devlin threw the letter to the ground and, fearing his apartment would cave in on him in a fashion mimetic of the way his great grandfather had perished, he ran outside, fully expecting to see comets raining from the sky to bludgeon him to death. He neither consumed anything nor entered a building for three days. He spent most of his time in the wide open spaces of city parks. When he finally returned to his apartment he found a large manila envelope from the university in his mailbox, and he quickly set it ablaze on on his front porch with lighter fluid before even opening it. The contents of the envelope were his three diplomas.
Later that week, he went to speak with the chair of the philosophy department about earning a Ph.D. The chairman smiled and gave Devlin the number of Dr. Scrimshaw’s office, offering the words, “Enjoy you mentor.”
Chapter 25: An Obedient Dog
Devlin wasn’t what you would call precocious child so much as a curious one. He had always been interested in the way things worked – how caterpillars turned into butterflies, how snakes produced venom without intoxicating themselves, how planes remained aloft – but he had to be told how things functioned in order to understand them. He could not figure out anything for himself. Like a dog being taught tricks, he was an obedient learner. He just failed to invented any tricks of his own.
For this reason, he was a perfect fit for the balmy pit under Professor Scrimshaw’s arm. He was a desperate student with an impressionable mind, an invertebrate sponge waiting to soak up everything he came in contact with. At first, Allowishus regarded Devlin as nothing more than a pet, though over the two years they had studied together he’d grown to confide in the boy, and, next to Grenadine Pomegran, Devlin Tamarind was Allowishus Scrimshaw’s closest friend.
Chapter 26: What Is Horchata?
Wishus didn’t want to see Grenadine Pomegran. He didn’t want to see the dour, superior look of the mathematician's face. He didn’t want to see Grenadine’s calculating eyes: one pessimistic and one judgmental. He didn’t want to see the man of numbers’ robotic blinking or algebraic breathing or predictable circuitry. Grenadine was too much a robot for Wishus to handle that day, and so, wearing his argyle pajamas and night cap, he found himself on Devlin Tamarind’s porch.
“If I don’t pay my electricity bill, all my cheese will rot,” Scrimshaw said as Devlin opened the door. Three weeks had passed since the imbroglio at the university, and in that time he’d failed to find a job prospect and, from reading the personals, had come to the conclusion that the singles scene in Massachusetts was filled with freaks and fetishists.
“Come inside, Dr. Scrimshaw, please come in. Pardon the mess, oh, don’t step on that, let me just clear off a place for you. I don’t even know why I have this guitar, I’ve never learned to play it. Oops, didn’t mean to drop it though. I know a C chord. Oh well, it’s only a hairline fracture. That won’t affect the sound, will it? There. Have a seat. Comfy? Good. Now, can I offer you anything to drink?”
“Do you have horchata?”
“I’m not sure I know what that is.”
“It’s a sweet Mexican rice drink. Very satisfying. Especially on a hot day like today.” It was 53 degree Fahrenheit and approaching 8:00 p.m.
“I’m afraid I don’t have any horchata,” Devlin said, going to the kitchen. “I have,” he shoved his head into the refrigerator, “some grape juice, a little bloody mary mix, coffee, tea, milk. Are these of any interest to you?”
“I guess if you don’t have horchata a cup of coffee wouldn’t hurt.”
“Probably not,” Devlin said, removing a can of chicory coffee from the ice box. “Coffee has antioxidants.”
“Fantastic,” the old professor said, dozing off. In his three weeks of unanticipated freedom he’d managed to exhausted all his resources, he’d failed to pay his bills, and his beard had grown bushy and large. He had moments insanity and even fewer moments of sanity.
Chapter 27: Mad Libs Are for Recreational Purposes Only
Wishus had had rather strange dreams lately. One dream was that he was trapped on a solar–powered plane
and he’d strangled the pilot for making a joke over the intercom. To hide the body of his victim, Scrimshaw had shoved the pilot into the overhead storage bin. Halfway through the flight the other passengers started to notice the smell of the rotting airline employee’s corpse. When he awoke from this dream he felt jet-lagged, had a craving for peanuts, and slept twelve more hours.
Another dream was that he was running a marathon. He’d never run a day in his life, but in the dream he kept running and running. He wanted to sprint faster, but his feet weren’t responding. Every seven minutes or so he’d pass mile marker number 18. He passed the same mile marker 20 times before waking up, his body covered in sweat, the balls of his feet throbbing, and the inside of his thighs chaffed. He was exhausted and slept another 12 hours.
Stranger than his dreams was his behavior since losing his job. As a lover of dada theater and non-sequitirs, Wishus had often used Mad Libs in his seminars as exercises. Apparently the method was locked somewhere in his unconscious mind. There was an instance at a fast food restaurant recently where he had modified his speech to mimic the style of a Mad Lib, though the practice had not gone over well:
Cashier: Hello, sir, welcome to Carnage Palace. What can I get for you today?
Wishus: The cashier looked at the adjective man standing before him. The man was wearing a(n) adjective, noun and looked as though he hadn’t verb, past tense in number, plural days.
Cashier: I’m sorry, sir. I don’t follow.
Wishus: The adjective cashier became utterly verb, past tense at the shenanigans of the adjective man.
Cashier: Very well, sir. If you haven’t decided yet, why don’t you step to the side so I can help the next customer. Just let me know when you’re ready. Please take your time.
Wishus: The adjective man was starting to grow angry with the cashier, and his body part, plural shook and he bared his adjective canines in a threatening display of dominance behavior. The adjective cashier looked like a frightened noun when the adjective man lunged at him and bit his body part until noun, liquid spewed from his veins.
Cashier: (worriedly) Manager!
Wishus: The adjective lunatic thought about how much he wanted to verb the cashier to death with a blunt noun.
Cashier: Manager!
(A manager rounds the corner)
Manager: What seems to be the problem here?
Cashier: I’m not sure. This guy is freaking me out. I think he’s the serial killer everybody’s been talking about. I’m getting the impression he’s about to hurt somebody.
Manager: It’s okay, Benny. Just take a deep breath. (To Allowishus) Sir, is there something I can help you with?
Wishus: (calmly) I certainly hope so. I was merely trying to receive some information regarding the contents of your sandwiches, my good man. Do pray, is the cheese on you MegaLux Bacon Bomb by chance a slice of Irish Orla? Or do you use Gruyere?
Manager: It’s plain American cheese, sir, straight from Wisconsin, presliced and melted to perfection.
Wishus: Quite right. And I’m sure it’s waxy and full of artificial colorings and coagulants. Is that an animal or vegetable rennet cheese?
Manager: Pardon?
Wishus: Nothing. I’ll have a soda and the sandwich but instead of your cheese-
(Scrimshaw removes a wedge of Australian goat’s milk grabetto from his coat)
Wishus: -would you be so kind as to put a slice of this on the burger?
(The manager stares blankly as Scrimshaw places the wedge of cheese in his hand. The cheese is tidily wrapped in wax paper.)
Wishus: And I want you to keep that and try it out later on the sandwich of your choice. See what you’ve been missing. It’s got the subtle hint of Brazil nuts. Amazing.
Manager: (unsurely) Any fries with that, sir?
Wishus: Indeed. And sprinkle some rosemary on them right after they come out of the vat, my good man.
Chapter 28: There’s a Shoe in my Oatmeal!
Devlin handed Wishus a cup of steaming coffee.
“I thought we agreed on horchata,” Wishus said dreamily.
“Professor,” Devlin said, ignoring his mentor’s comments, “what are you going to do with yourself?” He sat down in an armchair across from Wishus and sipped his own coffee. “You’ve been ostracized from the university, you’ve got a house full of cheese covered in enough penicillin to treat a brothel of clap-happy snappers-” (Wishus chortled) “-and you’re wondering around in your pajamas at eight o’clock at night. Have you got any job prospects?”
“No.”
“You mentioned a concern about your electricity bill, have you any money?”
“No.”
“What about a retirement pension from the university?”
“Voided.”
“What about social security?”
“Too young. I never became nationalized anyway.”
“You mean your still a French citizen?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s your answer, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Move back to France! Take advantaged of European socialized programs.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am serious.”
“You can’t be.”
“But I am.”
“What in the world would I want to move back to France for? I left years ago and for good reason. I can’t imagine it having changed enough to entice me to go back. Silly, slovenly people. If it weren’t for the cheese I’d say the Germans should take another stab at running the country.”
“When did they run it before?”
“In the 40s. You know, the Nazis and whatnot.”
“It’s comments like that you need to avoid if you plan on ever getting a job again.”
“I won’t go back.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for starters, I’m not sure I even remember how to speak French anymore.”
“But of course you do, Professor. It’s your mother tongue. It would come back to you in a jiff. You’re just
nervous because the prospect of returning after decades of living abroad has left you more American than French.”
“I don’t know if I should slug you or kiss you for that remark.”
“What? Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“If it meant nothing you should know better than to say it.”
“Point taken.”
“France, eh?”
“Just for a visit. Why not?”
“I would be able to get unpasteurized cheese.”
“You would.”
“And raw foie gras.”
“That too.”
“And pan chocolate.”
“Who doesn’t love pan chocolate?”
“No,” he said nervously, “I can’t. I don’t remember the language.”
“That’s a ridiculous fantasy, professor. I’m sure it’s like riding a bicycle again. Give it a shot.”
“I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be. They’re only words, they can’t hurt you.”
“Ci è un pattino in mia farina d'avena.”
“Try again professor, that was clearly Italian.”
“Es gibt einen Schuh in meinem Hafermehl.”
“That was German Professor. Focus, for the love of God. Think Foucault, not Heidelberg. Think Cote du Rhone, not Shopenhauer. Think Cannes not Kant.”
“Il y a une...”
“That sounds right.”
“Il y a une chassure en...”
“Yes, go on.”
“Il y a une chaussure en ma farine d'avoine.”
“That’s it professor, you’ve done it!”
“Un aigle magique a épuisé sur moi.”
“Keep going.”
“Le pâté court par mes veines. Mes reins ont joint le cirque. Un porc est mon amoureux et j'ai inventé l'herbe.”
“Wonderful, wonderful!”
The two men, one twice as old as the other, clasped hands and danced circles around the living room. They were so happy they didn’t notice their coffee spilling all over the living room carpet.
Chapter 29: The Post-Modern Restaurant or First Course
The Gala Dali restaurant was a favorite of ex-Professor Allowishus Scrimshaw. The building was an old roller disco converted into an eatery. It was a four-star restaurant and the service staff dressed as though attending a costume party. The matre’d often wore a giant squid outfit and every word that came out of his mouth was pronounced phonetically backwards. Similarly to those who listened to Dr. Scrimshaw’s lectures, people rarely understood what the matre’d said. On this particular occasion, the matre’d was dressed like a skyscraper. King Kong dangled on his head.
The cuisine at Gala Dali was like something out of a painting. It was exquisite fusion cuisine, combining the best of Europe, Africa, Japan, and the Americas. Specialties included a green tea and molasses infused rack of lamb served with mint and agave couscous and fig and morcilla – Spanish blood sausage – pudding. Also on the menu were reindeer spare ribs with rhubarb and lingonberry demi-glaze, BBQ Japanese broad beans with salt cured musk ox, stewed Saharan vegetable greens, and saffron grits. For dessert, foie gras ice cream with caramelized leeks, chocolate covered prosciutto and mulberries was popular, as was the chipotle fudge brownie and the gingered-parsnip creme brulee. Only those with daring and sophisticated tastes ate at Gala Dali.
It was not uncommon for a meal at Gala Dali to exceed three or four hundred dollars per person. The regurgitation chamber was available for parties of six or more.
Given his financial situation, Wishus would not have been able to dine at Gala Dali had Grenadine Tamarind not invited him to lunch. Wishus gladly accepted the offer, for not only did Gala Dali have the best food in town, but also the best unpasteurized cheese selection. Rumor had it the cheeses were flown to Mexico and smuggled in unmentionable circumstances often involving donkeys.
Chapter 30: Second Course
Lunch with Grenadine Pomegran did not go as planned. Wishus had hoped his friend would understand the significance of a return trip to France. Instead, Grenadine was absolutely appalled at the idea. Grenadine did not like surprises and he had a habit of becoming upset when others did things that he himself would not have done.
“Aside from wanting to go live with the pygmies, this is the most ludicrous thing a man your age could possibly do,” he said, pushing away his mole glazed duck breast and arugula-beet quiche. “You’ve no money, Wishus. How can you honestly expect to pay for a willy nilly trip to France.”
“I wouldn’t dare to call it willy nilly, my supercilious friend. And the trip will pay for itself,” Wishus said, his mouth full of wild rice and abalone dressed with granadillo chutney. Little pieces of cilantro were stuck in between his yellowed teeth.
“What exactly is that supposed to mean, anyway? I’ve no patience for you word games, Allowishus.”
“It will be a valuable trip, regardless of the expense.”
“I get the distinct feeling somebody put you up to this.”
“Are you suggesting I’m not able to make decisions on my own? It just so happens I think a trip to France will do a great deal to buoy my spirits.”
“Waiter,” the mathematician signaled, “I’d like another drink.” He tapped the rim of his martini glass. The olive still stuck with a toothpick rested in the glass’ navel. “You have never, not once in the twenty years I’ve known you, ever expressed any desire to go back to France. Why the sudden change?”
“I never understood why people order the martini and then don’t eat the olive.”
“What?”
“Why order a martini and not eat the olive?”
“It’s a garnish. Can you not change the subject, please? I beg of you? Stick to what’s at hand. After we hammer this out, I’ll spend as much time as you want debating olives and cocktail onions and lime wedges and maraschino cherries and even tomolives and sugar cane sticks if they tickle your fancy. But for now, just tell me, what the hell are you thinking? Who put you up to this? And where are you going to get the money to finance this endeavor?”
As an aside to the waiter, who replaced Grenadine’s martini with a new one, Wishus said, “You can bring the cheese course now, please.”
“But sir,” the waiter protested, “your main courses have only just arrived. The cheese course generally does not come until after dessert.”
“I’m French, I want the cheese immediately!” he erupted.
“Yes, sir. My apologies, sir. French you are.” The waiter retreated to the kitchen hastily.
“Ahem,” Wishus’ companion cleared his throat.
“In response to your questions, mon ami, the idea was Devlin’s.”
“Damn that kid!”
“And a fine idea it is.”
The cheese plate arrived. On it were four cheeses: a hearty slice of runny bucheron, a crumbly mound of buttery pecorino wrapped in walnut leaves, a greasy slab of British smoked cheddar, and a fine example of souring effects of Penicillium roquefort.
“I’ve convinced Devlin to come with me too. He’s dropped out of Buttagers and will accompany me as my apprentice. To compensate for my expertise on the matters of life, language, and Epicureanism, we’re using the $14,000 he would have spent on tuition as our travel money.”
“You’ve lost your mind, it’s clear to me. Ruin your own life, Allowishus, but don’t drag this kid down with you. Think about what you’re going to do to him. He’s only one year away from getting his Ph.D., and with a Ph.D. from Buttagers he’ll be able to get a tenure track position at almost any college he wants.”
“Not likely.”
“Why’s that?”
“He studied under me during the collapse of my empire. He’s a pariah now, an untouchable. You know how the collegiate caste system works. No university will hire him. That’s why the best thing for us to do is go to France. The world is the best classroom there is. You really should try this bucheron, it’s fantastic.”
“You know, Wishus, in all the years I’ve known you, you’re the one equation I’ve never been able to figure out,” his table mate said, digging his knife into the cheese.
“I like goat cheese the best. Think about the source. If you think about it, goat’s milk combines the notion of Christian demonology – the goat as a Luciferian animal – and of Greek sexuality as evidenced by satyrs. It’s a multicultural tabu for your mouth.”
“It’s good,” Grenadine said reluctantly.
“They say goat’s milk is the closet to mother’s milk, you know.”
Grenadine sighed, looked at his friend, and smiled. Then he took another stab at the cheese.
Chapter 31: Prepare for Liftoff
Things were moving so fast now Wishus had a hard time keeping up. He would often go to the curb and get in his car, and without starting the engine he would tap the brakes to see if things would slow down. They didn’t.
He and Devlin had decided they would be in France at the beginning of the new year. That gave them exactly two months and six days before the new year arrived. Because it wasn’t efficient to take his cheese with him to France, and because the unpasteurized cheese they could buy in France would be of better quality, Wishus returned the orders of cheese he could find receipts for. He received $3,298.56 in returned checks. However, this did little to rid his house of cheese.
He put a stake in his law that said “Cheese for Sale” but this did not attract the right type of clientele. The majority of inquiries came from drug-addled youth under the impression that “cheese” was a euphemism for psychotropic contraband. The police were also under this impression, and when they searched his house they found nothing incriminating save for an aerosol can containing chlorofluorocarbons. The police, frustrated after three hours of needless investigating, confiscated the aerosol can and gave Wishus a citation for $15, which he immediately crumpled up and threw in the waste paper basket.
In order to have more money for the trip, Wishus decided to sell his car. He put an ad in the paper, in the classified section where he’d seen the many colored and questionable posts seeking participants in bizarre sexcapades. The ad read as follows:
1987 Volvo box on wheels. Coasts excellently. Great radio reception. All original interior. Doors included. Needs good home. $2,000.
He received no calls. So he ran the ad for another week and made a few alterations to spice things up:
1987 Volvo matchbox on wheels. Perfect car for minority driver. Coasts excellently. Great radio reception. All original interior. Clearest windows in town. Doors included. Needs good home. House trained. $2,000 or best offer.
Chapter 32: The Haggler
The black man was brutish and bald. His muscles looked like they might take over at any moment and attack his head, leaving only adrenaline and brawn to rein. He was inspecting Allowishus’ car thoroughly and had already taken it for a test drive around the block.
“Pop the hood,” he demanded.
Wanting badly to sell the car, Wishus did as he was told. His additions to the ad had prompted dozens of responses, mostly from Blacks and Hispanic drivers. A few Asians had looked at the car, though most of them complained the car was too sluggish to make timely deliveries of lo mein and pad thai. Of all the potential buyers, the one with his head under the hood seemed the most interested.
“You need to replace the air filter, the spark plugs, the fan belt, the radiator, et cetera. What I’m saying is this car needs a lot of work. You should be paying me to take it off your hands, mister.”
“Ha ha,” Wishus laughed. “Right.”
“I’ll give you $700 cash.”
“What would you say if I told you I received an offer yesterday for $1,100, but I don’t really like the gentleman’s politics so I’d rather sell the car to you?” This was, of course, completely fabricated.
“I’d say if you didn’t really like him, selling him this car would be punishment enough.”
“Hmm,” Wishus pondered, dismayed.
“Look, mister. This car has almost 200,000 miles on it. The back door doesn’t even open–”
“It opens from the inside,” Wishus corrected.
“Okay, the backdoor opens from the inside, the tires are balder than I am,” he said, rubbing his hand against his smooth scalp. “The headlights are burned out, and there’s so much rust it looks like a high school kid with eczema. Do you honestly think anyone will offer you more than $700?”
“Tell you what,” Wishus bargained, “you give me $800 and I’ll throw in a peeing angel statue.” He pointed to his neighbor’s lawn, where a porcelain cherub fountain was urinating into the bird feeder on which it perched.
“Mister, I live on the sixth floor of an apartment complex with no patio and no windows. You tell me what the hell I’m going to do with a peeing angel statue?”
“I’ve got homemade pickles.”
“You can either take it or leave it”
Wishus shook the man’s hand.
Chapter 33: Just When Everything Seemed OK
For the next two weeks Wishus had to either walk to the grocery store or take the bus to buy his wine and bread. He had enough cheese to last him nearly a lifetime but, in order to budget for the trip, he cut out all dessert wines from his shopping and refused to spend more than $40 on a red wine and no more than $30 on a white.
After getting off the bus he entered the apartment and saw that he had a message on his machine. He pressed play. The voice was Grenadine’s:
“Allowishus, it’s me, I’m just calling to let you know, as a friend, about something I heard the other day. It may be nothing, it may not even be true. I hope you’re sitting down if it is. I was speaking with Ronaldo Gutierrez. The poet? Do you know him? He has the office next to your old one at Buttagers. He told me that because you refused to clean out your office the university confiscated everything you left behind. They cleared everything out and put it in storage. If you had anything of value, any writings, any recordings of your lectures, any notebooks, any journals, if you had anything that might be of any personal worth to you, contact the university. I’m not exactly sure how these things work but if you need a lawyer, call me. I have friends. Call me regardlessly. I’m sorry about the way lunch turned out the other day. Okay. Bye.”
Chapter 34: Monologue or Dialogue?
“What do you mean you won’t give it back? I had three manuscripts in there, ready for publication. Well, no I didn’t have any offers on the table. Yes, I know the university press gets first publication rights, I’m familiar with the conditions of my contract. What’s your name again? How do you spell that? With an X or a Z? Fine. Well, Ms. Zanbrinski, I strongly request that the manuscripts be delivered to my place of residence no later than tomorrow evening. What do you mean I relinquished control over them by leaving them in my office? Why, yes they are the only copies. The university does want to publish them? Are you qualified to make that statement? You are. You speak for the university press and the payroll department? Okay, then. How much is the university willing to offer me? What do you mean one dollar? Well, thank you but no thank you, may I have my manuscripts, please? In escrow? Where did you learn a word like that, you sea cow? Do I mind repeating myself? Of course not. I called you a sea cow. No, you heard right. Yes. Yes. No I haven’t seen you in person and I don’t think I’d like to. I don’t care if my attitude isn’t encouraging the university to be lenient with me, those are my manuscripts, they’re my brainchildren, and I want them delivered to my house, ipso facto. That’s right, I won’t take no for an answer. I see. I don’t care whether or not I left them there, they’re my intellectual property. No, they’re not the university’s property. You’re confusing your terms, young lady. You’re a real piece of work, you know that? What’s mine is not yours. We’re not playground chums here, don’t try and swindle me. Well, I think you’re a real bitch. That’s right. You’re a bitch because you represent an institution that’s trying to scam an old man out of his life’s work. Well, I want those copies. That’s right. Well, you’re both a lemon and a lime, you saucy tart. You’re a big sour puss, lady. A real tight-faced meany. I don’t care if you think I have a dirty mouth. No, I don’t care. Well kiss my grits, there’s gonna be no hominy between us. No there’s not. You’ve leave me no option but to call my lawyer. He’ll cut you to shreds. He’s a Jew, I’ll have you know. He’s a real Abraham type. Ashkenazi and all that. He’d sacrifice his own child to win a case, if that’s what it took. I don’t care what I signed when I started working at Buttagers, Buttagers has transformed into a monster, a monster whose belly is filled with charlatans and confidence tricksters. You’re all a band of dirty, thieving gypsies. I don’t care it that’s not politically correct...is that so? Well, when I enrolled in Buttagers in 1971, the administrators were still in the habit of treating people fairly. Why don’t I climb in my time machine? Ha, that’s a real hoot. If I had a time machine I’d go back and stab you in the cradle. How do you like that? Are you laughing or crying? I can’t tell. Laughing. I see. When I went to school, people were still threatened by the Titans, this was long before the deity overhaul. You new generations, you’re all for Zeus and Apollo and Athena and that band of merry pranksters, aren’t you? I’m Prometheus, that’s who I am and you can send all the crows you want to peck out my liver, I’m not going anywhere. You don’t know who Prometheus is? My point exactly. You’re an ignorant twit. You’re head ought to be pinched right off and pitched in the waste bin. I’ll do it myself if I have to. You send me those manuscripts. I’m warning you. What do you mean no? Yes, I’m sure another publisher will publish them. What do you have to say about that? Well, yeah, I guess it will be a little difficult for them to publish a book they won’t ever see. How’s that again? Lock them up and throw away the key? What is this, The Count of Monte Christo? I wasn’t born yesterday. Well, I hope a pack of mangy dogs eats your face while you sleep. Good day. No, you hang up. Hang up, damn you. Stop laughing and hang up this phone! I’ll come down there and slap you myself if that’s what it takes. You’re a gorgon, you hear me, a dirty, slutty gorgon. Hang up! Hang up! You hang up! Hang up...”
The Hospital
Chapter 35: Saint Vincent Bazzle
The Saint Vincent Bazzle Hospital was one of the most modern cardiac research centers in the country. The building itself looked more like a giant tea kettle than an epicenter of pioneering medical study. It was hemisphere of silver windows with a tall chimney flue flying out at an 45 degree angle and a small, raised button of a platform on the north pole of the globular structure. The raised platform acted as the nippled lid of the tea pot. This nipple was where helicopters landed, depositing patients in need of immediate care before taking off to rescue another poor soul who hadn’t heeded his doctor’s advice.
Saint Vincent Bazzle was neither a saint nor a Catholic. He was not even Christian. He was, in fact, a Hasidic Jew from Poland and he had been given the moniker Saint Vincent Bazzle when he arrived with his suitcase at Ellis Island in 1912. His name had been changed by a wary immigration officer who feared that the miniscule Hebrew would suffered greatly should he keep his real name of Hymen Achtenkauff. And so the immigration officer augmented Hymen’s name, and the change was forever emboldened by the existence of the hospital.
Saint Vincent Bazzle was a medical anomaly. It would be presumptuous to say that he had the largest heart of any man ever alive (for who had ever compiled such a compendium?) but Saint Vincent Bazzle had the largest heart ever recorded by an American doctor. The average human heart weighs just under one pound. It weighs less than a loaf of whole wheat bread. Being only five feet four inches tall, one would assume that Saint Vincent Bazzle’s heart would be smaller than that of a larger man. And yet, his heart weighed nearly two pounds. It was so large that one could hear it beating from up to ten feet away. Vincent Bazzle was his own bass drum, and wherever he went people were sure to say, “Do you hear that? I think there’s a parade heading this way.”
The heart has four chambers: the right atrium, the right ventricle, the left atrium and the left ventricle. The right side of the heart is responsible for sucking in poorly oxygenated blood, blood that has been circulating through the body. The left side of the heart reoxygenates this blood and sends it back out to do its business.
Saint Vincent Bazzle had a completely ordinary heart, the proportions were all in the normal range, and the walls of the heart were of normal thickness. The only difference was that were you to look at it, you would assume it was the heart of a grizzly bear or an hippopotamus, but certainly not a man. And yet it had belonged to man, a little Jew who ate kosher except on Yom Kippur (when he didn’t eat anything at all), a little man who exercised regularly, and read the works of Kafka and Gogol before going to bed each night. The mammoth heart belonged to a man who never knew the splendor of a cheeseburger, the satisfaction of a strip of peppered bacon, or the succulence of an oyster.
Chapter 36: The Battle of Slippery Mr. Butters
The doctors at Saint Vincent Bazzle told Allowishus point blank: “You cannot go to France and you cannot eat any more cheese. At least not for six weeks, maybe more depending on how slowly you recover.”
They stuck Allowishus in a corner room with a brilliant view of the city. From his bed he could see the harbor where he had arrived some thirty years before, though his favorite part of the water – the waves – was barely noticeable from such a distance. He found it fitting that while he was on his deathbed, as he made the grand egress into world’s unknown, he should see where he made his grand entrance. In the metaphorical sense, the view complemented nicely his current condition.
His roommate was a man in his eighties, a man who writhed in pain in his bed and screamed. His medications made him a bit delirious. For the past three days he had been complaining about his teeth, and it had become such a nuisance that Allowishus could no longer tolerate the old man’s griping. Wishus pushed the Pavlovian button that would summon a nurse and waited.
“These teeth, oh why won’t they come in. Molars. Bicuspids. Canines. Premolars. Incisors. Bane, bane, bane of my existence. Nurse? Nurse! Bring me some ice. My teeth. My bleeding gums! I’m being torn asunder from the inside out!” Mr. Butters screamed.
“Will you shut up!?” Wishus yelled.
“You can’t speak to him like that,” the nurse scolded as she entered the room. She was a Caucasian woman in her early forties and had the puggish face of a middle American, the kind of face you wouldn’t want your own children to wake up next to though you'd wholly expect their friends to. She was dressed in white, a trick designed to impart a certain sentiment of sterility, and her hair was pinned up in the back.
“That geriatric howler monkey is going to give me hypertension. If there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s hypertension.”
“If you get hypertension, it’s because you let this sick, old man get inside your head. If you would just relax and ignore him you’d be fine.”
“You don’t know square one about psychology, lady. Don’t attempt to get in my head, you wouldn’t like it in there.”
Allowishus’ roommate began scissoring his legs like an unruly child throwing a tantrum because his mother refused him candy.
“Just enjoy the view,” she told Wishus, pushing down on Mr. Butters’ legs.
“Enjoy the view? How can I? Ivan Ilyich over there is driving me nuts. Can’t you muzzle him?”
“We’re not in the habit of muzzling our patients,” the nurse said, taking offense to the suggestion.
“Well, you should be.”
“My poor bleeding gums! Make it stop! Oh, lord have mercy. For what am I being crucified?”
“Shush up, Mr. Butters.” The old man started thrashing in a violent paroxysm, the stout nurse doing all she could to detain him. “The whole hospital can hear you. You don’t want them to think you’re a big baby now, do you?”
“I’m a teething infant.”
“You’re perfectly alright.”
“The wisdom teeth are the worst. They’re searing me like molten magma from Hawaii. I hate this. Oh, how I hate this.”
“Mr. Butters. Control yourself.”
“That’s right. Shut up, you daft of codger.”
“Mr. Scrimshaw, you will not refer to your roommate with such pejoratives.”
“It’s like my own teeth are biting me. Make them stop. Bicuspid, I thought we were friends!”
“Would that you keeled over right now, old man.”
“Mr. Scrimshaw!” the nurse said, perfectly aghast.
“Would that your head just exploded like a balloon left on the nozzle of a helium tank.”
“Mr. Scrimshaw, you lay down and enjoy the view and stop wishing murderous thoughts on Mr. Butters. He’s done you no wrong. And you, Mr. Butters, shush up.”
“Get that old codger a muzzle.”
“Help, help, she’s strangling me. She’s in cahoots with the teeth. She’s their ring leader.”
“Mr. Butters.”
“You see? He’s trying to bite you, Nurse Jessup. He’s liable take a finger off if you’re not careful. That’s why he needs a muzzle. Sick men are wild animals, you know. Jaundice makes a man a mouse, rabies a man a lion.”
“Mr. Scrimshaw, you’re making this situation intolerable. Really you are.”
“Pull them out. Pull them all out.”
“Put him out. Put him out. Out of his misery.”
“Mr. Scrimshaw, for the last time clap your trap. Your dinner will be arriving soon. You’re just cranky because you’re hungry. And you, Mr. Butters, gosh your a slippery one,” she said, the arm she had pinned down worming its way out of her grasp. “You’re an eel. But I guess that’s apropos isn’t it, Mr. Butters?”
“Nurse, I’ll open the window and you just wheel his bed over there and toss the daft old bastard right out.”
“Mr. Scrimshaw, get back in your bed! I forbid you to open that window.”
“We’ll make it look like an accident,” Wishus said. “I won’t tell if you won’t”
“No, Mr. Scrimshaw, no.”
“Yes, Mr. Scrimshaw, yes,” the old man yelled encouragingly. “Anything to stop this horrible teething. Even death. I’d welcome it.”
Chapter 37: Attempted Bribery
Dinner arrived shortly after Mr. Butters had been sedated with a heavy dose of morphine. There was no part of it Wishus wanted. Green peas, those little orbs of sugary carbohydrates, previously frozen and defrosted and frozen and defrosted again in an endless cycle that made Nietzsche’s eternal return look like a fleeting moment. Fresh spinach with balsamic vinegar. Whole wheat toast with sugar-free jam. A raw tomato, sliced of course. A bottle of water. A cup of grapefruit juice.
“You call this a meal?” he asked.
“Mr. Scrimshaw.” The nurse who brought him his food was younger and better looking than Nurse Jessup. She wore a uniform that was one size too small for her and accented her most desirable features. “I know it’s not what you’re used to, but with your numbers so high there are only so many options we have. We’re afraid to give you nuts, that’s how serious your case is.”
“Listen, I know you’re lusting after me–” Scrimshaw said to the nurse. She blushed and turned her head. “–so I’ll give you one hell of a throttling if you go down to the cafeteria and get me just a nibble of cheese,anything. Fleur du maquis. Parmigiano reggiano. Idiazabal. I’ll even settle for a little smear of garotxa if that’s all you’ve got. Please. Just give it to me.”
“Mr. Scrimshaw, I’ll lose my job. Just eat your spinach, it’s as fresh as can be.”
“So am I.”
“Behave.”
He took a bite of the spinach, wanting to impress the nurse. “Did they finally put a muzzle on that bumbling
octogenarian?” The curtain between the patients had been drawn, putting Mr. Butters out of sight.
“Mr. Butters is a man, Mr. Scrimshaw, not an octopus. And no, they didn’t put a muzzle on him. They merely gave him something to make him sleep.”
“Hopefully a trepanning.”
“You’re unconscionable, really you are.”
Chapter 38: Roll Call
Devlin and Grenadine, being Wishus’ only friends, were informed of their compatriot’s dire condition. Wishus had suffered a massive coronary attack, evidently exacerbated by his strict diet of cheese and the agitation of his feud with the legal representative of the university. The doctor who performed the surgery stealthily told Devlin and Grenadine that Wishus’ arteries looked more like strands of string cheese than canals for blood. “There was so much cholesterol in there I could literally scrape it out with my fingernail.”
“But the surgery is over with?” Grenadine asked.
“The angioplasty is done. We still had to go in and repair a tear in the heart wall caused by the stress of the infarction. He’s going to be in pain for quite a while. I wouldn’t recommend he move much in the next couple months. For the first thirty days, at least, he should be immobilized as much as possible. Even if you have to restrain him. And his dietary needs should be strictly monitored. We’ve already caught him offering the nurses sexual favors and the numbers of Swiss bank accounts if only they’ll smuggle him in a slice or cheese.”
“He’s relentless.”
‘He’s ruthless.”
“He is that,” the doctor said. “But the nurses all get a kick out of him. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard any of them use terms like ‘existential malaise’ or ‘deontological imperative.’ He’s taken to delivering lectures during their lunch break. The nurses quite enjoy it.”
“Does he charge admission?” Devlin joked.
“No,” the doctor said, “admittance is allowed so long as the top two buttons of the nurses’ uniforms are undone. Can’t say I have any problem with that attendance policy.”
Chapter 39: Using Words to Denounce Words
“But if language doesn’t relay what we’re thinking, if words are empty vessels, how do you know what I’m talking about? How do you respond? How is meaning communicated at all?” a nurse named Susan Getty asked. She was the tallest of the nurses, though not very physically stunning. She moved with the grace of a heron and had a beak to match. “What is it that imbues words with any power whatsoever?”
“It is that we agree they are empty,” Wishus said, “that gives them the illusion of meaning. If we agree, however foolishly, that the handshake of two men will cure world hunger, does this mean the clasping of hands has filled the bellies of babies in Bambaloobistan? Of course not, but we can say we’ve accomplished just that, and so the thought of starving children is replaced with the thought of plump little babies. It’s human. We enjoy deluding ourselves. If we all concur on the meaning of the word and the emptiness of its sound, we are tricked into believing that meaning is applied.”
“But doesn’t this agreement, this lie as you say, give meaning to these empty vessels?”
“If you and I agree to call a circle a square does it make it any less circular?” he posed.
The nurses remained silent.
“Regardless of the answer,” Wishus said, “I’ve enjoyed talking to all you, even if my words have no effect due to their void.”
“Oh, but they do have an effect, Professor Scrimshaw,” one of the younger nurses said, “they have a profound effect. It’s been a long time since I heard somebody talk as you do, and even though I love to hear your words, I can’t agree with you, because what you say is so extraordinarily different from what everyone else has to say it’s really changed me. I can’t commit myself to accepting that your words are empty and meaningless.”
The others agreed unanimously.
The same nurse continued her thought. “Maybe you’re the only one who knows how to really use words, Professor Scrimshaw. Maybe it’s everybody else whose words are vacant shells, but yours burst from the seams.”
Underneath his bed sheet Allowishus Scrimshaw was bursting through the seams of his nightgown. The nurses blushed. He did not, for he was not embarrassed.
Chapter 40: No Bars on the Windows
Devlin and Grenadine came to the decision that Wishus was to stay in the hospital for another two weeks, as neither one of them wanted the responsibility of waiting on him hand and foot while Wishus, confined to a bed, demanded cheese be peeled from the wax wrappings and fed to him piecemeal. The doctor supported their decision to leave Wishus in the hospital, citing the error most people make in wanting to remove their loved ones from the hospital too quickly.
“The shorter the hospital visit, the shorter the interregnum before a patient relapses,” the doctor said. “We find if you confine people against their will until they’re an inch away from madness, until the sight of white and the smell of pine makes them want to wretch, they’re more likely to commit themselves to serious revisions in their lifestyle so as to avoid hospitals at all costs.”
Wishus continued his daily discussion groups with the nurses. They all grew to care for him so much that despite the budding friendships, the nurses remained firm in their denial to bring him his requested cheese. It was not that any one of them them feared the disciplinary repercussions of violating Wishus’ dietary restrictions, it was that none of the nurses wanted to live with the guilt themselves should the serving of cheese knock him off his perch. It wasn’t the fear of public ridicule that prevented them from bringing him a mouse’s share smoke cheddar, it was the fear of personal disgust.
The luncheon discussions weren’t always riveting, though they did much to inform the nurses about a good number of things they had taken for granted. Wishus spoke of how the deities of Norse mythology morphed into the names of days – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday – and about the theory of the seven day week representing the seven notes of the chromatic scale. He spoke of Hegel’s dialectic, of Lacan’s symbolic order, of Freud’s id-ego-superego triangulation, and of the evolution and vanities of mankind. The day after he’d pointed out that he hadn’t seen his own face in six days due to his being laid up in bed four nurses rushed to his room, their hair in disarray and their faces smeared with misapplied rouge and eyeliner. His earlier admission that not seeing his own face made him feel more handsome had impacted the nurses greatly, and in an effort to increase their own perception of beauty, they too had abandoned mirrors. Allowishus had, once again, fooled the naifs.
Chapter 41: Buttering Him Up
Eventually Mr. Butters was released to the care of his niece. Wishus’ new roommate was more trouble than the last. Once Mr. Butter’s delirium wore off he was quite an affable fellow. He had served as an infantryman in France during W.W.II, and he and Wishus spoke at great length about the country, about the topography, and the landscape. They spoke and expostulated as to why France had the best cuisine, the best women, the best cinema, the best contemporary philosophy, the best theater, and, of course, the best cheese. Speaking with Mr. Butters made Wishus’ being sequestered in bed instead of dipping his toes into the gentle burblings of the Rhine all the more difficult. He longed for the wind sweeping off the Pyrenees, and for the smell of clover and dairy in the hair of nubile French maids. Wishus promised Mr. Butters that as soon as his feet touched French soil, he would send his roommate a bottle of Bordeaux and a brick of unpasteurized lingot du Quercy, and he’d be damned if he didn’t pay any importation tax or follow the American FDA’s guidelines regarding raw milk products.
The new roommate was a laconic fellow, younger than Mr. Butters though no doubt in worse shape. Dr. Melvin Mosoter was a retired physicist who had been suffering from strange series of lesions and cysts that erupted all over his body. It was believed that his work with heavy metals during the ‘40s contributed directly to his condition. Whereas Wishus was a man who didn’t believe in the meaning of words but hypocritically used them to excess, Mosoter was the type of man who believed words were so valuable that if you didn’t have anything important to say, you should shut up. Wasting words was like pissing gold. For this very reason, Mosoter and Wishus did not get along.
“Hey, you over there,” Wishus called to the man with whom he now shared quarters. “What’s your name? What they got you in here for? Appendicitis? Liver disease? No, you’re a type II diabetic, aren’t you? I knew it when they wheeled you in. Sugar addict.”
“Mind your business and nobody gets hurt,” came back the gruff voice. For a physicist Mosoter was a robust man, nearly six and a half feet tall and 250 pounds. He had gorilla arms and sideburns that looked like they could score a kitchen sink. Truth be told, he had once been a kindhearted man, perhaps too parochial in his politics, but he had been much kinder than Wishus had ever been. Unfortunately, years of being kind and receiving nothing in return but a fatal illness had left him jaded. The world had changed so much because of people like Allowishus Scrimshaw and all the other nay-sayers that Mosoter didn’t know how to get along anymore. He was lost in the confusion of the contemporary. When he was younger, men were men and women were wives, and that’s the way he liked it. Now men were hardly men, and women were working, and he wasn’t sure what this meant.
“Don’t threaten me, pal,” Wishus said, sitting up in his bed and looking directly at the jaunty face of his new bedroom buddy. “I’ve been here long enough to know how things work. I have the remote control, so as far as you’re concerned, I’m rex and your dust mites in this world. Just because I got a bum ticker doesn’t mean tiddlywinks in this prison, Jack.”
“If you must know, my name is Melvin Mosoter and I just want to die in peace,” Mosoter said. “I don’t like spendthrifty orators, so save your poetics for Nurse Ratched and Chief and Patrick McMurphy. It’s high time I shut up, and if you want us to get along, I suggest you do the same.”
“Wise guy,” Wishus said. “Fantastic. First I get Mr. Sad-Sack-Tooth-ring, then I get the mordant moose. Fine, have it your way. Die in peace, just don’t stink up my side of the room when your humus starts to attract pests. You hear me, keep the flies on your half.”
Nurse Getty flew in the room with two trays of food for her patients. She set them down in front of their respective owner and asked, “You two getting aquatinted?” Her long legs shimmered in the sunlight.
“Oh, yeah. He’s a real chatterbox, that one is. To tell you the truth, I think I’d rather have old Butters back, caterwaul and all. I kind of liked all that shrill business about teeth and bloody murder. Entertaining. He was nearly laid to rest in that bed there, but you wouldn’t know it, full of life, jumping and jolting like an electroshocker.”
“That’s enough, Professor Scrimshaw. Dr. Moloster is just going through a transitionary period. You complained about Mr. Butter’s racket more than once, as I recall. Dr. Moloster is quiet as a church mouse, so now you can enjoy your view of the harbor in peace.”
“What’s this I’m eating?” Wishus asked.
“Cauliflower, lima beans, some white meat chicken for protein. I’m sure you’re happy that you’re allowed small amounts of meat again–”
“That’s not meat, woman,” he decried. “That’s a bird!”
“–there’s also some brown rice pilaf,” she continued unphased, “and a peach for dessert.”
“What does he get?”
“Dr. Moloster is having a chicken fried steak with macaroni and cheese.”
“Some people get all the breaks,” Wishus said.
“Listen here, pip-squeak,” Dr. Moloster violently flipped the cafeteria tray off the bedside table Nurse Getty had placed it on. Pieces of macaroni and cheese flew across the room and the chicken fried steak slammed against the window where it stuck like a wet noodle, the gravy juices running down the paneled glass, obscuring Wishus’ view of the harbor. “I got no breaks left. I’m kaputo. I’m grist for the mill, break me up in the organ grinder, render me into a gallon of waste and dump me in the river. Game over. The only difference between me and some poor schmuck a medical student is cutting into as we speak is the wait’s already over for that lucky son of a bitch!”
“Mr. Moloster, please calm down. I’ll have to get you another lunch tray.”
“Don’t bother,” he said.
“Great,” Wishus said, noticing the lubriciously smeared window, “now it looks like Pittsburgh out there.”
Entropy
Chapter 42: Catch and Release Program or Third Course
The sky had that hue only someone who has walked to the edge of oblivion, peered into the darkness below where lemmings plummet, and joined the ranks of the living again can see. These people become children; their minds pick up on the structures beneath the infrastructures; the clouds look more billowy; the sky is bluer; the sun feels less oppressive and more prodigious. These people become especially attuned to textures: the feathery radiance of a dandelion; the weave and hugging contours of an aged cotton shirt worn only in one’s private time; the unimaginably creamy viscousness of a room-temperature brie, free from the overripe stink of ammonia and urine, the unctuous ooze pressed cleanly against the familiar ridges of one’s palate. And for these people, even if just for a second, the intangible become tangible, the unthinkable becomes thought, and the unknown becomes known. Zest for life is effortlessly returned.
As he no longer had a car of his own, Devlin and Grenadine picked Wishus up from the hospital and took him to Gala Dali’s for lunch.
The waiter, dressed as a police officer, sauntered to the table and announced the daily specials.
“Today we have a fresh chorizo, queso fresco, and caramelized fennel Wellington with a port veal reduction, served with tempura-battered curried eggplant strips and parmigiano reggiano mandolin rutabaga frittes. We also have a piton smoked, jamon iberico wrapped pheasant incubating an macadamia nut, pluot, and sweet bread pierogie. That comes with ginger and sweet onion yam moussline and a terrine of white truffles and Tanzanian wild boar pate. And lastly, we have a gorgonzola and raspberry steak tartare, served with raw pelican egg, a side of anchovy and green bean manioc custard, and a morel mushroom fondue of fontina/gruyere blend and Mexican ancho peppers.”
“I’ll have the pheasant,” Devlin said, “and a glass of something from the Priorat.”
“I’ll have the chorizo Wellington,” Grenadine said, “and a red zinfandel.”
“And I’ll have,” the two friends turned their heads toward Wishus, “the steak tartare and a bottle of 1986 Rouge Baux Mas Baux.”
Grenadine leaned forward and clasped his friend’s forearm, “For God’s sake man, you just got out of the hospital from a triple bypass. If you don’t change the way you eat now, you never will.”
“Nonsense,” Wishus said. “I’ve been eating nothing but vegetarian kibble for three weeks. My muscles are dying for protein. I feel faint. What’s one meal? Besides, red wine brushes clean your arteries.”
Devlin and Grenadine looked at each other, hoping for their friend’s sake that one meal truly meant one meal.
Chapter 43: All Sales Are Final in the Milky Way
While he was in the hospital, a real estate agent called Allowishus and said someone had made an offer on his house. He hadn’t been in the market of selling, but when she called and offered him $50,000 for it, he said yes. The people who had purchased it were more interested in retaining property than using the structure as a private residence. They anticipated that real estate near Buttagers University would rise in value as the years ticked on. The realtor had all of Wishus’ belongings packed up and placed in a storage unit. When she asked him what she should do with all the cheese in the basement, Wishus did what anybody who retains possession of something they no longer want that could be of use to somebody else – he told her to throw it away.
He hadn’t told his school yard chums that his house had been sold, and when they dropped him off at the front door of what they still believed to be his home Wishus pretended to enter. When they left, he took a bus to the Milky Way Motel by the airport. Rooms were $225 dollars a week, or $15 per hour. Wishus paid for two weeks in advance.
The hotel was a large, three story U, and all the rooms opened up onto a balcony that oversaw the pool below. Allowishus’ room was on the second floor of the building. A group of twenty-year olds were drinking beer and playing water volleyball in the pool. With an overnight bag of clothes and toiletries in hand, Wishus opened the door to his hotel room and flipped on the light. The room came equipped with a television, a lamp, two twin beds, and a naked man and a woman having sex on the floor. Shocked at the sight of the intruder, the woman screamed. The man didn’t skip a beat, and kept his fervid momentum going for several seconds until the woman pushed him off.
“Oh. The proprietor didn’t say anything about bunkmates,” Wishus said. “I’m Dr. Allowishus Scrimshaw.” He walked toward the couple, his hand extended in perfunctorily.
The woman quickly hid behind one of the beds. She was mortified. She turned her head toward her lover, who was putting his pants on and screamed again. Here eyes were wider than an aye aye’s. She screamed a third time.
“Don’t let me ruin your fun,” Wishus said. “I was just planning on reading the newspaper anyway. You’ll barely even notice I’m here.”
The man, fully dressed, finally addressed Wishus.
“What-ee thinkya done? Inerrupting mee funs-ee ain’t no joke-ums.” His thick accent indicated he clearly
hailed from somewhere south of the Mason Dixon line. Because the arms of his t-shirt had been cut off Wishus could clearly see the tattoos of eagles and Confederate flags and motorcycles that graced his sinewy muscles.
“Apologies, friend. Like I said, information regarding the number of occupants was withheld by the
concierge.”
The woman screamed a fourth time. The man walked over to her and began choking her. “Shut-ee,” he said. “The cops-ums hear ya screams-ee they come-ums, put-ums in jailers. You wants-ee?” The woman, shivering, shook her head no.
“Seeing as how we’re going to be rooming together, in the future perhaps it would be best to develop some kind of system so as to avoid further embarrassments. For example, a neck tie hung from the door knob usually works. Had I known we were sharing quarter I assure I would have knocked before entering,” Wishus said.
“Hows-ee I knock-ums outs some tooths? Gives-umsee some bleeding gumses?” the man said. Letting go of the woman’s throat he approached Wishus rapidly.
“Sounds like you know my friend, Mr. Butters. How are the two of you acquainted?”
Just then the woman yelled, “Checkers, no!” and Wishus went crashing to the floor.
Chapter 44: In a Calm, Orderly Fashion
It was the first time Wishus had been hit by a man since his days on the docks, and he’d forgotten how much it smarted. His cheek was swollen and throbbing. When he came to he was on one of the beds with a bag of frozen okra pressed against his face. The area under his eye had a half-moon crowning in the color of royalty.
After hearing the commotion, the desk clerk arrived at the hotel room in a panic to see the naked woman pulling the southerner off of an unconscious Allowishus. After the situation was explained to the desk clerk, Wishus discovered the man’s name was Checkers, the woman was Jackie Smoke Ring, and the desk clerk, who Wishus had earlier mistaken for the proprietor of the motel, was Ronald Ptarmigan.
“The owner’s gonna kill me. I should flee now. Save face. Wipe the egg off of it. Start looking for a new job. I’m a dead man. He’s mafia, you know. He’ll have me fit for a pair of cementer loafers. Did I say that out loud? Oh no.” Ronald could not be calmed. He was barely a man at 24 years of age and he wore a pink t-shirt underneath a hideous tan sweater vest, a pair of lime green corduroys, and dingy penny loafers. Jackie Smoke ring had donned a bikini top and was wearing what appeared to be a dress made out of old teddy bears. Checkers was wearing jeans, the REO Speedwagon shirt he had put on moments before slugging Wishus, and cowboy boots. They were a very interesting crowd.
“What did you say your name was again,” Wishus asked the pacing boy.
“Ronald, sir,” he said. “Did I’m already say I’m sorry you got hit? I’m sorry. Really I am. I was told this was Checkers’ regular room, I knew it was his room, we call it the Game Room because it’s Checkers’ room. That’s why they call it that. It’s one of those things, a double...”
“Entendre,” Jackie Smoke Ring added. Wishus was surprised at the women’s precociousness.
“Right. Double entendre. The Game Room. So why did I give you the key then? Why? It doesn’t make any sense. I must have wanted you to get beat up. Either that or I wanted to get fired and beat up myself. I don’t know. I’ve been out of sorts lately. They switched my medication. I think it’s screwing things up. Yesterday I tried to eat my belt buckle.”
“Sit down before I sick Checkers on you,” Jackie Smoke Ring said. Unclothed she was a very timid woman, with her her clothes on she was a virago. “Sit down, shut up, and don’t say a peep until we sort this out.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ronald said, taking a seat on the bed Allowishus was lying down on. The frozen okra stung his eye. Ronald kept muttering, “Oh no. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Oh no,” out of the corner of his mouth as he rocked back and forth.
“What are we gonna do, Checkers?” Jackie Smoke Ring muttered to her lover.
“If it’s all the same to you,” Wishus interjected, “I don’t see that we need to make this any more complicated than it already is. As I see it, Mr. Checkers and his wife have a regular room here at the Milky Way, and you, Ronald, made an honest mistake while under the influence of prescription drugs, giving me the key to Mr. Checkers’ room. And Mr. Checkers–”
“Mee name not Mr. Checkers-ee. Just-ums Checkers-ism.”
“Dually noted,” Wishus said. “Checkers attacked me out of pure chivalry for his lady. As I see it, he was trying to protect Ms. Smoke Ring, as any courteous lover would be expected to do. It’s all just a big misunderstanding. Now Ronald, if you’ll just go fetch me the key to another room I’d like to get some shut eye.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Jackie said, lighting up a cigarette.
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Well, Checkers here is on probation. If you go to the cops, press charges or anything like that, he’ll go to the pinch for a long time. Then who’s gonna look out for me?”
The image of Checkers choking the nude woman was fresh in Wishus’ mind, though he thought it best not to provoke the pair by reminding Jackie of Checkers’ bestiality.
“If the cops-ums come, mee-sa goona cut ya likee tic-um tac-um toe-sum,” Checkers snarled at Ronald, pulling a filet knife out off the sheath attached to his belt.
“Who said anything about pressing charges? I don’t see the need to involve the police.”
“You don’t?” Jackie said. “You got knocked down like a bowling pin.”
“I’ve been hit harder than that,” Wishus said coolly. “It’s a bee sting. Be gone by morning.”
“What’re you saying? You don’t want to file a report?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Wishus said.
“That just don’t make sense to me. Only person I’ve ever seen Checkers hit that hard was his own mother, and she had him locked up for a year.” A look of surprise at Wishus’ decision swept across Jackie Smoke Ring’s face. She took a drag from her cigarette and as she exhaled it looked as though a question mark were hovering in the diaphanous haze that had filled her lungs.
“What are the police going to do that we can’t settle ourselves?” Wishus asked.
Chapter 45: Chapter 45: There Are Worse Ways to Go
Checkers and Jackie Smoke Ring agreed that the only way to set things right was to let Wishus hit Ronald in the face twice, once for the initial error of mixing up the rooms, and a second time for the resulting injury to an innocent patron of the Milky Way Motel. Wishus hadn’t hit anybody in over thirty years and he didn’t much like the prospect of boxing up the face of somebody he felt sorry for, but wanting to leave the motel as soon as possible he caught Ronald off guard with a right hook to the nose that caused a spritz of blood to spray out the tear duct of his left eye with such force it hit the ceiling. With the second punch, not wanting to damage the boy, Wishus skewed his aim and landed a glancing blow on Ronald’s cheek From the grins on their faces, it appeared Checkers and Jackie Smoke Ring were satisfied. Ronald was covered in blood and Wishus was assigned a new room on the opposite side of the balcony.
Wishus ducked into his new room but instead of going to bed he sat in a chair and peaked through the curtains until the light in Jackie and Checkers’ room went out. When it did, he grabbed his overnight bag and left the motel, running through the lobby where Ronald was watching a rerun of Three’s Company, his unattended nose still bleeding.
“I’d advise you to find a less hazardous line of work,” Wishus said, tossing the kid his room key, “I saw an ad in the paper a couple weeks ago for human shields. Look into that.”
At the corner of Light Street and Donkey Avenue Wishus stopped running. There was an aching in his chest. He decided to hail a cab.
Three Checker Cabs stopped for him, but he waved them off, thinking them a bad omen. As he waited, a young girl of no more than 16 approached him, her face painted up like a doll’s, her hair lifted and teased in a style popular 20 years ago. She sucked her thumb and wore fishnet stockings that reminded Wishus of his days, years ago, when he sailed across the Atlantic and came to America. The leggings reminded him of his mariner’s heritage, of the history he had left behind. Maybe he would have been better off with a life at sea. He’d spent every day since the age of 17 in a classroom debating things that, from as far as he could tell, had no application in the real world. People like Jackie Smoke Ring and Ronald and Checkers and this girl who salaciously sucked her thumb before him him didn’t give a damn about semantic wholism or Sausserian algorithms or the absurd hero or anything that he had ever taught at the university. The university, as Wishus now saw it, was a decepticon, an arm of thievery, eating up people’s money while claiming to give them an education they could use. Use for what? It was an apocryphal lie; none of what he had taught could be used in any line of work. His entire career had been spent denouncing this and denouncing that. He was a career negativist, an activist for deactivation.
Standing on the street corner, he came to the conclusion that philosophical thoughts were nothing more than the filler between the chapters of life. The only problem was his own life had been more filler than anything else, and that pretty much invalidated his entire existence. He’d missed out on all the real chapters of life. Like Mrs. Scrimshaw, for example, that was something he regretted. There was a woman who had loved him and cared for him and cooked his meals. And what he done for her? Called her “Gorgonzola” and made her live in a cold, smelly house the size of a two-car garage.
Was he any happier because religion was nothing but misinformed dogma? Did it make life any more enjoyable to realize he was a slave to his baser instincts and would spend most of his days denying them? How much had Heraclitus’ idea that the world is a mysterious flux with no rhyme or reason enhanced his zest for life? Not one bit.
“Want some fresh fruit, mister?” the childish whore asked, seeing the depressed look on his face.
“I just had a heart attack, muffin. You’d kill me.”
“Wouldn’t be such a bad way to go, would it?”
He looked her up and down.
“I suppose not.”
“What do you have in mind,” she prompted.
“Where do you usually conduct your business?” he said, not sure if he was conceding to her charms or needlessly gathering census information.
“The Milky Way,” she said.
“I just escaped from there. No way I’m going back, darling.”
“We could go to the Neon Steer,” she said, wrapping hair around her finger. “It’s only a few blocks farther down.”
He looked at her again. Inspected her closely. She appeared to have a marble stuck in her navel. Or a gumball.
“Thanks but no thanks,” he said. “I’m not a very good tipper, anyway.”
The hooker moved on.
“College is a waste of money,” he called after her.
She blew him a kiss, shook her ass, and headed south on Light Street.
Chapter 46: The Pomegran Residence
It was well after midnight when Wishus rang the doorbell of Grenadine’s house on Polychrome Glacier Avenue. The lights were all off and he hesitated to even ring it, but when he finally did he listened closely for the chimes. After several minutes of waiting, Wishus went to the side gate, undid the latch, and entered the back yard.
He used the wood slats nailed to the trunk of a large oak tree to ascend to the tree house Grenadine had built for his son. In the tree house Wishus hoped to find a sleeping bag or a blanket, but the inside was barren. As he lay prostrate, his head angled so as to look out the door frame at the night sky, he listened to the crickets, let the wash of wildlife come over him, and was certain he could hear the tugboats in the harbor burping. Or maybe that was the mating call of the whales. He fell asleep, shivering, just as a spider crawled into his mouth.
The next morning he woke up at sunset and felt a tickle in the back of his throat. He hacked up a black leg, which he mistook for one of his own hairs.
When he heard noises coming from the Pomegran’s kitchen, he descended from the tree house and knocked on the back door. Mrs. Pomegran opened the door with a look of shock and disapproval. She’d never much cared for Wishus, but she was the matronly type and had been nothing but civil to him.
“You look a wreck, Allowishus. What’s happened to you? Come in and have some breakfast. I’m making pancakes.”
Wishus entered and smelled the blueberry delights sizzling on the griddle. He waved to Septum Pomegran, Grenadine’s 14 year-old daughter, and Rascus Pomegran, his 11 year-old son.
“Grenadine will be down in a minute. Do you want to wash up before breakfast?” Mrs. Pomegran felt obliged to ask.
“I think that’s in order.”
Staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, he was shocked by his appearance. He had the appearance of a panhandling flaneur. He wasn’t even 55 and already he looked as though he’d seen the origin of the planets, the rise and fall of the lizard kings, and the uphill battle that humanity had been fighting for the past 20 million years or so. His eyes looked lost and crazed. His skin had grown blotchy and dry. His hair needed to be trimmed. And the black eye, which he’d momentarily forgotten, was the icing on the cake.
He washed his face and searched the medicine cabinets for something aromatic to spray in his underarms. When he couldn’t find anything he filled the sink with warm water, removed his shirt, and washed his torso with a wet hand towel and a bar of lavender hand soap. He exited the bathroom feeling much fresher. Grenadine was sitting at the table, dressed for work, having some pancakes.
“Wishus,” he said, wiping the corners of his mouth with a napkin, “what are you doing here?
“I spent the night in your tree house.”
“You did?” Septum squealed. “In that dirty old thing?”
“Kids, why don’t you go upstairs and get ready for school, okay?” Mrs. Pomegran said, ushering the children upstairs so the adults could talk. The kids, wanting to stay and hear what circumstances could have possibly encouraged a grown man to sleep in a child’s tree house in November, didn’t move.
“Go on,” Mrs. Pomegran coaxed. She handed Wishus a mug of coffee.
“But I’m still eating,” Rascus said.
“Scoot,” Grenadine demanded. The children left.
“What exactly is going on with you? Why is your face all puffy and bruised on one side,” Grenadine asked.
“Checkers is a dangerous game, my friend,” sitting down in front of a plate of steaming hotcakes.
“The past couple months have been difficult, no doubt,” Pomegran said, “but pull yourself together, Allowishus. Things change, you have to adapt. What do you have in the works? Not still thinking of that trip to France are you?”
“Great pancakes,” he said to the missus. “I haven’t had homemade pancakes since before my wife left me.”
“Wishus, if you can’t stay on topic, I’m not going to help,” Grenadine threatened. Mrs. Pomegran left the two men to talk.
“Okay,” he said, putting his fork down. “The fact of the matter is I’m washed up, Grenadine. I’ve got nothing left. There’s nothing in here,” he said, beating his hand against his chest. He winced and reminded himself not to do that again. His wound was still healing. “There’s nothing out there for me and there’s nothing in here. It’s all over. I’m a dead man with a live man’s body. If I stink it’s because my soul’s rotting away. Just bury me alive and save me the indignity of facing another day.”
“You’re speaking like a crazed lunatic.”
“That’s an oxymoron.”
“You’re out of control.”
“Am I?”
“Yes, you are. Look. You’re a brilliant philosopher, Wishus. I may not understand half the things you say, but thousands of people admire you. You’re famous and you’re respected. What more could you ask for?”
“You still think people admire me? Not two months ago the student body at Buttagers wanted to see me roasted on a spit.”
“The student body at Buttagers doesn’t know their ass from a fig. Who cares what they think?”
“Said the man who takes their money.”
“Let’s stay focused on you, okay?”
“I’m going back to France where I’m going to kill myself.”
“You’re insane.”
“But before I do that, I’m going to get my manuscripts back.”
Chapter 47: The Waiting Room Is the Hardest Part
“I want to speak with Dean Fitzgerald, and if she won’t see me I’m going to wait here until she comes out of her office, and when she does, so help me, I’ll have ten little piggies waiting to deliver two solid kicks to that enormous backside of hers.”
“She’ll see you now,” the receptionist said.
“Why thank you.”
Chapter 48: The Hero Versus the Hydra
“Dr. Scrimshaw.” Dean Fitzgerald held out her hand to Wishus. He grasped it reluctantly for a second before releasing it. It felt like a dead fish, cold and clammy.
Dean Fitzgerald was a slender woman who most men found to be attractive, though there was something awry with her teeth Wishus couldn’t quite put his finger on. Her hair was a chestnut brown and she cut it to shoulder length. She wore a yellow blouse and a pair of navy blue slacks. “You look well.” The truth of the matter was he had come to her office straight away after leaving Grenadine’s house and did not look well at all. “I hope you’ve been productive during your...sabatical.”
“Oh, yes, quite productive.”
“Really? What is it you’ve been doing to occupy your time?”
“I’ve been inventing mostly,” he said.
“Oh, that’s fascinating. What have you been working on?”
“Let’s see,” Wishus’ mind was racing, though he was very mellow on the exterior. “I invented liquid gum.”
“Liquid gum?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“It’s just like gum...but liquid.”
“Liquid.”
“Hmm.”
“Can you chew it?”
“Of course. What would gum be without the chewing?”
“Can you blow bubbles with it?”
“You can blow bubbles till kingdom come.”
“And it’s liquid?”
“Yes.”
“Gum?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a demand for such a product?”
“Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. In the industry, the genius business, we say things three times for good luck.”
“And who, may I ask is demanding this product?”
“Who knows what the public wants?” he reproached. “But it’s not without its benefits over traditional gum.”
“Pray, do tell.”
“Well,” he said, beginning to sweat, “if you get some in your hair, you just shampoo it out.”
“That’s quite an improvement.”
“And it can be bought by the gallon.”
“Cut the crap, Scrimshaw, we both know why you’re here. I am aware of your situation and I have spoken with the lawyers at the university. You want your manuscripts back and we don’t have to give them to you. There’s no wiggle room here, we’ve got all the cards.”
“I don’t follow.”
“What don’t you follow.”
“What do you mean, you’ve got ‘all the cards.’ Are you coming on to me, Dean Fitzgerald, because if you are–”
“No, I’m not coming on to you, you lout! ‘All the cards,’ is an expression. It means we’ve got the loot and you get the boot. We’re keeping the manuscripts, Scrimshaw and you can’t stop us from putting them in a vault or burning them or–”
“Before we continue, I must say something.”
“Yes, what is it?” she said. The more frazzled she became the more wrinkled her cleanly pressed clothes got.
“I don’t like the way you say my name.”
“Pardon?”
“I don’t like the way you say my name, Dr. Fitzgerald. I find your inflection offensive, brackish even. I would rather you not utter the syllables in my name the way you do.”
“How would you have me say them?”
“I would rather you didn’t say them at all.”
“How am I to address you?”
“Don’t address me as anything.”
“Why, that’s ludicrous.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, you’re here. You’re sitting in front of me. I’m must to refer to you as something. My manners don’t permit me to do otherwise.”
“Okay then, for the sake of your manners, which I have yet to see, refer to me as Moby Dick.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
“Melville then.”
“Fine. Melville it is. As I was saying, Melville–”
“Much better.”
“–the manuscripts are ours. And as the chief administrator of this university, I have the responsibility of protecting the reputation of this institution. And from what I’ve read of your books, our publishing them would only put a blemish on the name Buttagers.”
“You’ve read all of them then?”
“Yes, indeed. And I find them quite offensive.”
“In what respect?”
“In every respect. For that reason, we are rescinding our earlier offer of one dollar.”
“You don’t want to publish the manuscripts?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then I can sell them to a private publisher?”
“Melville, without a copy of your books, what do you have to sell?”
“It appears we’re at a stale mate then.”
“It looks like a check mate from where I’m sitting.”
“You won’t return the manuscripts and neither will you publish them?”
“That is correct.”
“You’ve got two sets of canines on top!” Wishus exclaimed, finally putting his finger on what it was about Dean Fitzgerald’s teeth that was not quite right.
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing,” he said refocusing. “I must warn you though, I’ll rewrite the manuscripts.” He said this though he knew it to be false. He didn’t have the energy to rewrite the thousands of pages of lies and deceit he’d thought up. He wasn’t even sure why he had come to argue with Dean Fitzgerald. It wasn’t for any interest of his own, he just liked upsetting her. It was one of the few pleasures still allowed to him. “I’ll rewrite them and make them twice as vile and seditious as before. And I’ll publish them without this damned university and without your corrupted presses!”
“That will take years, Melville, and you know it. And by the time they’re done, you’ll be long forgotten and some other quack will have filled your shoes as America’s most controversial philosopher. You forget, without the university, you’ve got no audience. The public doesn’t like you anymore, Melville. And if you’re telling the truth, I’ll see to it that liquid gum is banned from this campus before it ever hits the candy aisles. Good day.”
The Tragedy?
V
France
Chapter 49: The Airport
The airport was crowded. Wishus had brought only one piece of carryon luggage, a canvas rucksack containing three change of clothes, a new toothbrush, a box of baking soda, and the $30,000 that remained from the sale of his house after erasing his debt. Even though he planned on killing himself he didn’t want to go down in history as a penniless philosopher.
Devlin had grown a mustache in the past few weeks and Wishus rather liked it. It made him look older, more distinguished. Allowishus had agreed to let his former TA come to France with him under the condition that Devlin came as a friend, not as a student. Wishus’ teaching days were over, and he’d given up on regaining possession of his manuscripts. Even if he did get them back, he probably wouldn’t have had the energy to send them off to publishers and go on book tours and autograph thousands of copies for people who would give his book to siblings as birthday presents, where they would end up on a shelf next to Grading’s History of Carpet Cleaning and 1001 Things You Never Knew About Aluminum Siding. Had he been a man of greatness, he would have fought harder for the manuscripts, but he wasn’t, he could see that now. He’d had an epiphany on the corner of Light Street and Donkey Avenue. He now saw himself as an ordinary man who’d made himself miserable by trying to fill shoes an extraordinary man’s shoes. This was a difficult morsel to stomach, but it was the truth. Allowishus Scrimshaw was one of those men just smart enough to see the ledge of greatness before him, but even on tippy toes he could not peak over it. From now on he was just a man.
In preparation for his trip he’d gone to the barber shop and gotten a straight razor shave and a haircut. He’d bought himself a new seersucker suit, a hat, and a cane and had frequented Gala Dali one last time with his old friend Grenadine Pomegran. Grenadine had ordered the global paella with emu gizzards, conch, sea urchin roe, Tibetan yak tongue, pickled guayabana, and beef hearts. Wishus ordered the crocodile egg quiche with pumpkin seeds and marjoram, served with mashed celeriac and swiss chard kim chee. Neither man said a word the entire time except to ask their waiter, who was dressed like Frankenstein, to freshen their drinks. Wishus skipped the cheese course and paid the bill himself. As the car was being brought around by the valet, Grenadine Pomegran put his hand on Wishus’ shoulder and wept a single tear.
The plane to France was leaving Gate A-14. After putting on the shoes they had been instructed to remove before passing through the all-seeing eye of the metal detector, Devlin and Wishus rode the moving walkway to their terminal, stopping along the way to have a cup of Mexican hot chocolate. For both men, one knowing why and one not, the walk to the gate felt like the march of a funeral procession. Wishus had not told Devlin that he was going to France to live out the last days of his life. As far as Devlin knew the trip was a celebration, not a requiem.
The plane was a two-story beast of the skies, with the capacity to hold some 400 people. Total flight time, including a layover in Amsterdam, was just under nine hours. From the day he’d gotten out of the hospital, Wishus had not had a single nibble of cheese. His abstemious behavior was not arbitrarily derived; he wanted France to be a rennaisance for his tongue, and by depriving his taste buds of their favorite snack he hoped the first bite of cheese he’d take would be as powerful as the first bite he’d ever taken. In lieu of the cheese he’d been on hiatus from, Wishus had eaten nothing but bacon hamburgers from the Carnage Palace. His goal was to kill himself in a specific manner - by eating cheese until his heart burst anew - and it would do no good to let his cholesterol levels drop should he want to be successful.
It had been six months since his release from the hospital, and in that time, from November to May, he’d gotten an apartment down by the waterfront. He his afternoons on a wooden park bench with a pair of binoculars, peering out into the great blue sea. He was searching for whales, those behemoths of the mar, so large that other species grew on them and in them, like barnacles and Jonah.
Even though he saw no whales he was not disappointed by his outings; the absence of the whales somehow made him feel better about himself. He likened the whales’ shyness to the paucity of great men, and he did not feel slighted by either of these two groups. And somewhere in the midst of his revelations, somehow, Allowishus Scrimshaw had become a less grotesque man.
The day before departing for France, as an experiment, he’d walked through Buttagers campus during the midday rush, wondering if anyone would recognize him. He saw the ring leaders of the angry mob that had stood outside his office months ago - their voices demanding his head on a stake - but the owners of the angry faces no longer recognized the man they had so loathed. He was already a faded memory to them, a fading memory of ire.
When the plane landed in Paris Allowishus and Devlin stopped at a diner near the opera and sipped espressos. In the ensuing days, they visited the Louvre, the Picasso Gallery, the Sacre Coure, the Pompidou Center, Jim Morrison’s grave, Notre Dame, and the red light district, where Devlin was taken aback by the forwardness of a prostitute who groped him and stuck her filthy tongue so deeply into his ear she tasted frontal lobe. Devlin nearly jumped out of his trousers and Allowishus paid for Devlin to fully jump out of them.
It would have been much more efficient for the men to fly to Barcelona, then take their rental car north through the Pyrenees and on into Quercy, a region cradling the Mediterranean, where days are spent herding sheep and goats and milking them too. But the men wanted to take full advantage of their eight days, they wanted to drive through the heart of France and then back up again, stopping along the way to taste wine and cheese at the local shops. And because it was Devlin’s first time in France it was required that they spend enough time in Paris for him to see the sights.
Though they drank fine wine and pastries every day, neither of them touched any cheese. Instead they consumed escargot and soufflés and lapin and canard confit and drank until they could hardly stand to drink anymore. They had both sworn to the other that the first cheese they would taste would be the unpasteurized lingot du Quercy, and they would not eat it until they themselves were in Quercy.
On the fourth day of their trip, they boarded a small plane and flew to Montpellier, where they rented a petite, red Peugeot with minimal trunk space and a horn that sounded more like a dog’s rubber toy than automotive admonishment. Arriving in Wishus’ hometown of Cahors right at sunset, the two men crossed the Port Valentre – a bridge of archaic stone, complete with arcs and pointed steeples – and dined at the cafe where Wishus’ mother and father had met, where an unmarried merchant marine had come inland to visit his own family and been distracted by a gorgeous girl sitting alone, sipping a glass of the region’s heartiest Malbec. As Wishus and Devlin sat on the patio near the portico, not three feet from where - in 1948 - Gertrude Mont Marcal had been approached by Jean Luc Objetsculpté. Wishus, without being prompted, told the story of his parents’ introduction. It was the first time he had spoken of someone other than himself in years.
Chapter 50: Step Into My Time Machine
If Gertrude Mont Marcal had known Jean Luc Objetsculpté was a fisherman, she never would have allowed herself to fall in love with him. It wasn’t the smell deeply imbedded in his skin or the multiplying scrapes and scars on his hands that would have dissuaded her heart, it was the risk of losing someone to the mouth of the world. That’s what she thought the ocean was: a mouth that swallowed everything that dared sets sail in it. Fortunately for love, Jean Luc had changed out of his work clothes that day and washed his body with the juice of four lemons to kill the stench of the fish. When he saw the beautiful girl, her lips peaked and puffy like the crimson curves of a blooming snap dragon, he immediately went into a chocolaterie and bought a truffle with marzipan inside, because the skin of the woman had immediately reminded him of the nougat-colored heart of an almond and her hair was the shade of dark cocoa.
After buying the chocolate he went back to the restaurant where the young lady was seated. He approached her table and held the chocolate out for her to take.
“I know sometimes the wine of Cahors can be a bit dry and bitter,” he said, waiting for an invitation to sit down. The girl’s lips were stained red, not from any cosmetic applicator, but from the robustness of the Malbec.
“Sometimes our wine is dry,” Gertrude said. “However, on a night like tonight, with the smell of clover and the sweetness of milk in the air, the tannins are not so strong.”
“A chocolate would then be an unwelcome treat?” the mariner asked slyly.
“Not at all,” she replied, snatching the confection from his hand. She smiled slyly. She was already in love with him. If he turned out to be a sailor it was too late for her to turn back. She was head over heals on the starboard side. “The waiter will not offer you a glass of wine if you continue to stand there like a dullard,” she scolded.
The sailor took a seat across from the young girl and the two were forever entwined.
Chapter 51: And Now What You’ve All Been Waiting For
The next day Wishus and Devlin set out to find the unpasteurized lingot du Quercy. They did not have to look far. They found an ingot of blooming gold in a humidified deli cabinet. The powdery white skin streaked with sweaty tracks was a godsend. Ordering two blocks from the vendor they asked if he would wrap the cheese and place them in a bag with a banette and a bottle of his finest wine. The lingots cost two euros each, the banette one euro, and the wine was 200 euros. Devlin offered to pay but Allowishus stopped him. He even tipped the vendor 10 euros.
The pair marched to the top of a hill overlooking the town, where they could see the Port Valentre and the River Lot it straddled, the waters from the river deeper and a more satisfying blue than that of the sky.
Spreading out a blanket, they sat down and with plastic knives and dug into the lingot. The brief walk to the top of the hill had given the cheese just enough time to shake off the chilliness of the humidor and soften nicely. The skin of the cheese surrendered to their blades; the soft inner layer seeped through the grooves of the ingot; the hard, crumbly interior was smeared onto the broken pieces of banette with ease.
“It’s amazing,” Devlin said ecstatically.
“Yes,” Wishus lied, “it is amazing.”
Chapter 52: Domestic Violence Over an International Flight
For the next four days the duo drove to the smaller towns, repeating their experience of purchasing a cheese and a local wine and marching to a nice vantage to enjoy their prize. The wine was always strong and intoxicating, the cheese was always satisfying and fattening. During the trip the men kept their promise to each other; neither of them spoke of academics and, along with other regional cheeses, they each at ate least one bar of lingot du Quercy a day, usually splitting one for lunch and sharing another after dinner day. Most of the trip was spent in a deeply satisfying quietude except for every luncheon the following conversation ensued:
:
Wishus: Have that last bite of lingot, Devlin. Go ahead, finish it.
Devlin: (nervously) No, Wishus. I can’t. You finish it. I know how much you love it.
Wishus: Don’t be obstinate, friend. I know you’re after it.
Devlin: Honestly...I couldn’t eat another bite.
On the last day of the trip Wishus had still not told Devlin he didn’t plan on returning to the United States. He had planned on slipping away from Devlin in the hustle and bustle of the airport, but so that he would not have to go through the rigmarole of packing his bag and going to the airport in Montpelier in , Wishus simply came out with it: “I’m not going back to the United States, Devlin. I’m staying here. I’m staying in Quercy.”
“But what for?” Devlin asked. “The cheese, the wine, the fresh air, it’s all so quaint and pastoral, I see that, but what is there here for you?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just the imminent death I plan on accelerating.”
“Since when did you become so morbid?”
“I’m going to eat myself to death,” Wishus said. “Even though it doesn’t taste any different to me, even though it is the biggest disappointment of my life, I’m going to eat nothing but lingot du Quercy until it kills me. I’ve lost my lust for it, I can’t tell the how the lingot here differs from the lingot in America, but I’m going to eat it until it makes my heart explode.”
“That’s absurd, Wishus. What do you possibly stand to gain by performing this gruesome experiment?”
“The satisfaction of hearing my own heart pop.”
“And what else?”
“Nothing else. Though I hope my death will teach you something.”
“What could it possibly teach me?”
“I can’t tell you that. That would make it all the less valuable.”
“I won’t let you do this. I’m going to call Grenadine right now and let him know how crazy you’re being. Maybe he can talk some sense into you.”
“He knows,” Wishus admitted, “I told him before we left.”
“And he didn’t tell me? He didn’t try and stop you? I’ll kill him.”
“He knew there was nothing he could do for me. There comes a time in every man’s life when he must resign himself to his fate, even if fate has forgotten him long ago. Now go, you have a plane to catch.”
“You can’t expect me to leave you alone in this hotel after hearing your intentions, Wishus. You’re not right in the head. Pack your bag and come with me. Get moving.”
“There’s nothing left to live for.”
“What about your manuscripts? Your life’s work? Don’t those mean anything to you anymore?”
“No,” he declared, “they mean nothing. Words strung together can’t mimic the authenticity of a life I never had. They’re the diary of a useless old man who never helped anybody.”
“You helped me.”
“Helped? I impaired you, boy. Everything I ever taught you was a lie. I gave you the symptoms of the disease of knowledge. I infected you with my brain, my pestilence. Don’t you see how much better life is here? These people aren’t preoccupied with radio waves and wind energy and fossil fuels and urban paradoxes. They don’t care about rock music and subways and television. Their only concerns are wine and cheese and love and happiness. And they are truly happy.”
“Then stay here with them. But be happy.”
“It’s too late. I’m already infected, and once infected there’s no cure. Now leave before I shoot you, Devlin.”
“You don’t have a gun, Wishus, what could you possibly shoot me with?”
“If you don’t leave I will be forced to steal a gun and shoot you. And then, because of your ignorance, I will end up in jail and it will be your fault. You’ll be dead and I’ll be a criminal. Leave the guilt and the dying to me, my boy. Leave them to me. I’m better at them than you are. Now go. Get in a taxi, go to Montpelier, fly home and forget all about this. Find a dignified living and look back on me fondly.”
Devlin didn’t move.
“Go!” Wishus shouted. “Go!” He approached Devlin and started hurling his fists into the soft body of his closest friend. A solid blow cracked one of Devlin’s ribs and knocked him to the floor. Devlin looked up at the apoplectic Frenchman, looked up at his red face and heaving chest, looked up at his pain. During the bout Wishus’ shirt had come unbuttoned, and Devlin could see the X over his heart, evidence of his heart surgery.
“Go,” he said calmly again. “For your own sake.”
The teary boy climbed to his feet, hugged the heaving professor, and fled from the hotel, his footsteps dissipating down the cobblestone steps until they grew so faint their patter was lost amongst the noises of rickety milk carts run by tanned old men more sickly looking than Dr. Mosoter. The irony was that these men, who knew nothing of modern medicine, would live twice as long as Wishus and Dr. Mosoter because of their lack of concern for things that didn’t concern them.
Chapter 53: The Truth at Last
Seventeen days had passed of eating nothing but lingot du Quercy and the only thing that Wishus had to show for it was chronic bad breath and infrequent bowel movements. Not so much as a twinge, not a stab nor a prick in the heart had inconvenienced him. He was beginning to think that he was incapable of death, that his heart attack had somehow made him twice as hard to kill. The doctors at Saint Vincent Bazzle had told him his cholesterol level was somewhere in the 300 range, he wondered if he now had to get it up to 600 before any sort of tragedy would befall him.
His days were spent in an all-consuming preponderance. He had been working up the courage to contact his sisters, who still had no idea after all these years where their brother had disappeared to. He assumed his mother and father were dead, as Gertrude was in ailing health when he left, pining over her husband who hadn’t returned home in almost three years. As a child Wishus had often dreamt of Jean Luc, rocking in the ebb and flow of the rushing tides, being tossed about the inside of a cabin as his boat was tormented by yet another bout of crests and troughs and troughs and crests, the salinity of the ocean washing up on deck and, on hot days, leaving tiny salt crystals on the poop that crunched under heavy boots.
Jean Luc used to write Gertrude letters when he got the chance, and Wishus would sneak into his mother’s room and read them while she did the shopping. There was one letter in particular that stuck in his mind. As a child Wishus had adored his father, and his father’s absence made it all the easier to admire him. Neither Wishus nor his sisters really knew their father, which meant that they loved an illusion they believed to be their father, because children often embellish the goodness of those who infrequently visit.
When Wishus was 11, Jean Luc came home in early March and left a week later. A letter arrived some time after that, and in that letter Jean Luc expressed dismay that his only son didn’t seem fit for a life at sea. Just as Devlin’s lineage was full of foolhardy death by finishing, Wishus’ lineage was an unbroken continuum of deaths at sea. It was partly to spite his father that Wishus had absconded to America.
After sneaking into his mother’s room and reading the letter he was distraught. His own father thought him a weak and unworthy to carry the family name. Year later, when Wishus landed in Massachusetts, he swore he would never write to his family, he would never let them know he was alive and well. He wanted all of them to believe he had died nobly at sea like his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his great-great-grandfather, his great-great-great-grandfather, his...
Chapter 54: Juliette and the Empty Graves
Wishus felt it only fitting that he find out what had happened to his family before he died. By questioning the elderly inhabitants of Cahors, he discovered his sister Juliette was living a few miles to the east, on the outer rim of Quercy in a town called Narbonne. The woman he spoke with, who was living in the house Wishus was raised in, said a few years after Wishus left for America his family moved to Narbonne. He vividly remembered having gone there as a boy to visit cousins, where he was taken to largest fish market he’d ever seen. Baskets of crevettes, langoustines, mollusques, huîtres, moules, morues, rougets, éperlans, and calmars surrounded him. All the gilled, glassy-eyed creatures one could possibly want to devour were available for purchase in Narbonne.
At six o’clock, Wishus knocked on the door of the address he had been given, and when Juliette answered he didn’t recognize her, nor she him. She was much older now, no longer the rambunctious seven year-old bother he had left behind, no longer a button-nosed brunette with unkempt hair and skinned knees. Juliette had graying hair and crow’s feet, and a small scar running through her eyebrow.
“I’m looking for Juliette Objetsculpté.” Wishus said.
“Je suis,” the woman said, meaning, “That’s me.”
He embraced her suddenly. The old woman squirmed out of his grasp and pushed him away. Then, taking a step toward him, she smacked him on the forehead with the wooden spoon in her grasp, leaving a small puddle of consommé on his forehead.
“Would that my husband were here, he would slice you in two, you pervert,” she spat at his feet.
“You were always fiery, weren’t you? I think your husband would not feel threatened by me, I have no interest in the taboo.”
She started to close the door.
“You would leave your own flesh and blood standing in the streets of Narbonne would you, Juliette?”
The door stood half open. The woman’s head peaked from around the corner.
“Flesh and blood?” Her eyes fixed on him, her brow wrinkled like a paper bag and suddenly a smile sprang across her lips. She opened the door and wrapped her pudgy arms around him.
“Would you like to see your tombstone, brother?”
“My tombstone?”
“Yes. We thought you were dead.”
“Good.”
“What?”
“Yes, let’s go see it,” he said, hoping the prospect of seeing where he was believed to be buried might invite death to correct its mistake. Juliette threw the wooden spoon inside and locked the door behind them.
Hand in hand, Juliette and Wishus walked through the macadam streets of outer Narbonne for what seemed like miles, then they climbed a steep hillside before arriving at a small grove of trees. They stood before a fenced-in cemetery situated beneath a row of shady cypress trees. All in a row were his father’s grave, his mother’s grave, the grave of his sister Ines, and his own grave. A piece of limestone with the inscription read:
1954 - ?
Like so many others,
consumed by the sea,
the hungry, insatiable
sea.
“Of course, yours and father’s coffins are empty. And there were no formal services for either or you. When Ines” - Wishus’ youngest sister - “died, we buried you and father, or what was left in the house that reminded us of you.”
“Why did you wait until Ines died to put us to rest?”
“We didn’t want Ines to be lonely.”
“And how did she die?” he asked, not wanting to look at his sister’s grave.
“She was hit by a car as she rode her bicycle.”
“And mother?”
“You knew mother was sick with jaundice, but it was the grief that killed her. Looking back on it, it was unwise to bury the three of you at once. It proved to be too much for mother. One death she could have endure, but three is rugged.”
“Yes,” he said, “I suppose so.”
Chapter 55: A Transcendental Experience
Despite Juliette’s pleas, Wishus lied and told his sister he couldn’t stay for dinner but that he would come
again and visit soon. She made him promise to come and meet her husband when he returned from business in a few days. Wishus didn’t know if he would be alive when Juliette’s husband returned, but he agreed nevertheless because he wanted to her smile.
Crawling into his rental car, he immediately went to a cheese shop he and Juliette had passed on their walk to the graves. It was late and he hadn’t eaten in hours. He stopped the car in front of the shop, which abutted a small plaza. A fountain of Poseidon spat water in the middle of the plaza, the Greek god busily stabbing fish with his trident.
He ran to the storefront window, praying it was still open, and tapped on the window. An old woman was slowly sweeping the floor of the fromagerie with an old, hand-bound straw broom.
“Please, madam,” he said. “I only need some cheese. It won’t take but a minute.”
“We’re closed.”
“Just three bars of lingot du Quercy,” he shouted through the window.
“We don’t have any,” she said, and went about her sweeping.
“Madam, I beg you. Open the door. I will pay you twice the asking price. Three times if your heart is so cold. But you must sell me some cheese. It’s a matter of life or death, preferably the latter.”
The old woman looked at her watch, then at the pleading eyes of Allowishus Scrimshaw. She opened the door not because of the desperation he wore shamelessly, but because of his offer to pay her three times the going rate. She could have cared less about his lugubrious look or his wanton needs; she was greedy, and her lassitude only amplified her greed.
“Get inside,” she said quickly once the door was opened.
He leapt through the gateway, his heart pounding. When the woman turned around he leaned in for introductions and attempted to give her a kiss on the cheek. He started to say, “My name is–” but she smacked him forcefully in the shin with the broom, leaving him with an oasis of lint on his trousers.
“This isn’t a social visit,” she said cantankerously.
“Right,” he said. “As I said, three bars of lingot du Quercy, one loaf of bread, whatever you have, and I’ll be on my way.”
“No lingot.”
“Come again.”
“What are you deaf? We don’t have any lingot. Pick something else.”
“But I don’t want anything else. I want lingot.”
“People in Hell want ice water. Pick something else or get out of my store. You’re wasting my time.”
Wishus inspected the case of cheeses before him and was immediately drawn to a pyramid made of crottins, which meant “droppings.” The crottins were different than others he’d seen. They had bright sunny streaks running down the sides, not at all like the sallow gold tracks of the lingot or the orange marmalade wax of sealed gouda, but a true radiance of light. They seemed to be little micro-orbs of fusion, emitting tiny of particles of energy.
“What are those?” he pointed.
“Crottins lisses du Quercy.”
“I’ll take three,” he said after a moment’s hesitation.
After giving the woman 10 euros, Wishus wedged himself back into his car and drove to the trailhead where he and Juliette had ventured earlier. He parked the car and started out on foot, using the ample moonlight to guide him to the graves. When he arrived at his deathbed he sat facing his tombstone and ate the crottins like apples. The loaf of bread the woman had sold him was stale and leathery and he threw it over his shoulder for the birds.
The cheese, whose name meant “smooth droppings of Quercy” tasted exactly like he had expected the unpasteurized lingot to taste. It was amazing. The only difference between the two cheeses was that the bars of the lingot du Quercy aged from the outside in, giving the cheese the hard core. The crottins lisses aged from the inside out, and, like a bon bon, the softer, more precious cheese was directly in the center.
As he thought about the differences between the two cheeses, his arm began to throb and his breathing became clipped. He couldn’t remember how strenuous the hike to the graves was, though it must have been arduous because he was clearly out of breath. The last thing he remembered before he lost consciousness was reading the inscription on his father’s tombstone through failing eyes:
1930-?
Sailor, Captain, Father.
Lost somewhere near Crete.
As Wishus lay there in the grass, his belly full of cheese, his heart seizing and collapsing upon itself, a smile came across his face and he laughed. The pain in his chest was excruciating, much worse than his first heart attack. But he did not put up a fight. He did not flex his muscles nor strain himself. He peaceably surrendered to the pain and fell softly to the grass, fell softly into the darkness, fell softly into the night of Quercy.
Chapter 56: Thieves in the Night
Bottom of the hill. 2:37 a.m.
Light shuffling. Footsteps. Clip clop clip clop. Cat meows. Lit cigarette falls. Ashes scatter. Shoe steps it out.
“Nous volerons cette voiture.”
“Oui, oui. Je connais un homme qui pachètera 5.000 euros un
Peugeot.”
“Est-ce que je casse la fenêtre ?”
“Non. Il n'est pas verrouillé.”
“Nous sommes riches!”
“Hâte!”
Doors open. Doors shut. Seconds pass. Engine starts. Tires squeal. Bye.
Chapter 57: Allowishus Scrimshaw: Philosopher. Degenerate. Zombie?
Top of Hill. 8:04 a.m.
The poke of a wooden cane in one’s side.
“Hello? Hello? Are you alive. Are you breathing, sir? Great, just what I need. A dead man to report. Leave it to me to find all the dead men in this town. I’m no coroner.”
“Good, because I’m not dead.”
“You’re not dead?”
“Most certainly not.”
“Thank God, you’re alive.”
“That’s what you say.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing, old man. Help me to my feet, would you?”
“Certainly, sir. May I be so bold as to ask what you’re doing sleeping next to graves.”
With uncaned hand. Lifting. Grunting. On feet now. Blinding sun.
“You would have me sleep inside them?”
“No, sir, no. I didn’t mean to imply that, it’s just that–”
“It would be fitting. That is my grave. And from what I’m told a coffin with all my childhood belongings is just
underfoot.”
“It is?” The old man was confused. “So then you are dead. You’ve come from the afterlife to eat the living haven’t you?”
Cane smacking head. Crack. Crack.
“What?”
“You’ve crawled out of your grave to consume the souls of the living. Demon seed! Back to the underworld with you!”
Crack crack.
“Calm down, old man! Just calm down. I’m not dead. I’m perfectly alive despite my attempts to rectify that problem. The tombstone is obviously mistaken. Just further proof to my theory that there is no truth anymore. Not even in death. Used to be you could rely on Death to be the end of it all, but like everyone else he’s unreliable.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, sir.”
“My family thought I was dead so they erected my tombstone. But I’m not dead, you see. I’m alive.”
“You swear you’re not here to feast on my brain?”
“Good heavens no. I swear it.”
“That’s a relief. You speak rather strangely though. You’re not from around here, are you?”
“I was born in Cahors.”
“Hmmm.”
“But I’ve lived most of my live in America.”
“That would explain it then. Do most Americans sweat as much as you do?”
“I am rather drenched, aren’t I?”
“No offense, sir but you look like you’ve only just been dipped in the ocean.”
“That bad, eh?”
“You appear to have just crawled out of the womb.”
“Quite a grotesque apparition, I’m sure.”
“You look rather fetal, like you’re covered in placenta.”
“Thank you. I quite understand the impression.”
“Would you like to come have a shower? My house isn’t far from here.”
“I appreciate the offer, old man, but I have a car at the bottom of the hill. I think it would be better that I drive to my hotel and shower there.”
“As you wish. I’ll walk with you though. That’s what I do up here, walk. I find it keeps one alive to walk through these hills of Quercy. Wards off death. The smell of the ocean preserves you, the hills revive you.”
“No wonder.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Just talking to myself.”
“I’m Gaston.”
“Allowishus.”
“Peculiar name.”
“Well, my real name is Amaury.”
“I like that better. Allowishus trips the tongue, not at all poetic. Was that really your grave?”
“Yes. And my father’s, mother’s and my sister’s too.”
“I’m sorry for your losses.”
“It was years ago.”
“Doesn’t make it any less painful, does it?”
Pondering. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
The footsteps stop.
“Is there a problem, Amaury?”
“This is where I parked my car, I’m sure of it.”
“Where? I don’t see any car.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s missing.”
“Well, what do you think happened to it?”
“From the looks of it, it’s been stolen.”
“That’s a disappointment, isn’t it?”
“Not the first and surely not the last.”
“Come now. You can shower at my place.”
Chapter 58: Recollection of an Oceanic Omen
After showering and shaving, Allowishus was offered a seat at Gaston’s table. Indoors Gaston looked less like an old man and more like a weathered one. Wishus placed him around 65 years of age, not much older than he was. Gaston’s skin had the look of tanned sheep hide.
The old man’s daughter, Marine, cooked lunch for them, the highlights of which were fresh lamb sausages and crepes filled with chevre and chives. Marine was a beauty, and why she had never married was something Gaston could not explain. He suspected her of not liking men. When Marine left the two men to enjoy their meals Gaston leaned over the table and said to Wishus, “I fear my daughter may never know the pleasure of an orgasm, and I cry for her at night.”
“Are their no men who take an interest in her?”
“Of course there are,” Gaston shouted. Then, lowering his voice, “She rebuffs them all. She is much more interested in her books and her studies. She speaks all the time of wanting a child. So I tell her, ‘Unless the Angel Gabriel pays you a visit you better find a man.’ She gets upset when I say such things and stomps around the house.”
After lunch, Wishus told Gaston he was going for a walk for some exercise, though his true intention was to find the fromagerie where he had bought the crottins lisses. If three of them had almost killed him, six would surely do the trick. He hadn’t told Gaston of his heart attack the night before for fear the old man, who seemed so thankful to be alive himself, would make Wishus go to the hospital for examinations. All the doctors would do is clean out his arteries and then he would have to start the process of poisoning himself from ground zero.
Wishus wandered around the streets on the outskirts of Narbonne for several hours but could not find the fromagerie from the night before. He asked the people he passed where he might find the plaza with the fountain of Poseidon. The people only stared back at him as though he were crazy.
Coming across another cheese shop, he went in.
“Bon jour,” he said.
“Bon jour,” came the reply of the man in the apron.
“If you please, I’ll take six, no, seven crottins lisses.”
The shopkeeper stared at him blankly.
“Cheeseman, you do have crottins lisses du Quercy, do you not?”
“No, sir. We do not have any cheese by that name.”
“Well, do you know where I will find them. I bought some last night at a fromagerie around here, but now I can’t seem to find it and nobody knows where the Poseidon fountain is. Have you any knowledge of that fountain?”
“No, sir. I don’t know it. I’ve lived in this town all my life and have never laid my eyes on such a fountain.” The cheeseman’s eyes had a look of stupefaction.
“Are you toying with me?”
“No sir.”
Wishus retreated and walked back to Gaston’s house. When he arrived, Marine was standing in the door way weeping.
“Marine,” he said, taking her hand, “what has happened? Is Gaston alright?”
“He is fine, for the time being.”
“What’s the matter then?”
“He promised, he promised he would not go again. But while you were out the phone rang. He got a call, and now he is speaking of leaving. I fear he won’t return this time. He is an old man Oh, what am I to do?”
“You’re afraid he won’t return from where?”
“From the sea. Papa is a fisherman and he promised he would not go out to sea any more. He nearly died the last time. But the sea calls to him. He dreams about it. Like a harpoon stuck in his side it pulls and pulls until he gives in. But he is old and the sea is unforgiving. If he goes and doesn’t return what will I do? Amaury, stop him. Please.”
VI
Rajeunissement du Quercy
Chapter 59: Amaury
It was 34 feet long, equipped with strong nets and a powerful motor. The boat was brand new, the wood was solid and there were no leaks. All the equipment on board was designed to catch longostina, the half lobster, half shrimp. After Marine’s crying spell weeks before Amaury had spoken with Gaston and told him of his daughter’s worry, and as a compromise Gaston sold his deep sea vessel and, with a generous loan from his new friend who was certainly not a zombie, Gaston bought a newer, smaller boat. A boat meant for fishing the calmer waters. To pacify Marine, Gaston had agreed never to take the boat out further than one day’s journey. And to see that he stuck to his promise, Amaury offered to be Gaston’s first mate.
Marine and Amaury stood on the dock before the boat, which Gaston had named the RAJEUNISSEMENT DU QUERCY – the Rejuvenation of Quercy. They watched as Gaston prepared for the first launch.
“Is this not the most beautiful boat you have ever seen, Amaury?”
“It certainly is, Gaston.”
Amaury turned to Marine and looked into her eyes. Gaston was right; she did not like men. It was a shame, for Allowishus could have loved her. After decades of loving himself he was finally ready to love another person. But she was too beautiful for him. For that reason he was all the more grateful she had allowed him to make love to her three times. She wanted a child badly enough to sleep with a man like Allowishus Scrimshaw. But since conception, she had refused his overtures in a flattering way; she had allowed him to climb into bed with here where she held him in her arms and stroked his hair until he fell asleep. It was for the best that she didn’t enjoy their sexual encounters; his heart could not stand the hardship of falling in love with someone who fancied women as much as he did.
“Are you ready?” Gaston asked Amaury.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Okay then.”
Gaston started the engine. Amaury smashed a bottle of champagne against the side of the vessel. Then he turned to Marine.
“Take care of our unborn child, or I will sail this boat to the Greek isle of Lesbos and live out your fantasy.”
She laughed and kissed him on the cheek.
“And no unpasteurized cheese until after he’s born.”
Marine nodded.
“And-” Amaury started.
“You’re only leaving for a few hours,” Marine interrupted. “I think I should be able to manage.”
Agreeing, Amaury put his leg over the side of the boat and rolled the rest of his body onto the deck of the RAJEUNISSEMENT DU QUERCY. Gaston undid the moorings and they were off. Amaury waved to Gaston’s daughter, the mother of his child, and watched as she grew smaller and smaller until she was indistinguishable from the rest of the dots in the harbor. Even though he couldn’t see her, he knew she was real.
When they were out to sea, toiling with the nets and the catches, listening to the squeaks of the pulleys, Gaston pulled in the first net of longostina and Amaury stood on the salon with his shirt off, the X marking the spot where death had attempted to shoot him down twice but failed. The wind rushed over his bare shoulders and into his lungs. He could faintly smell hints of sweet milk and clover from the mainland mixing with the briny depth of the sea. He felt alive. He felt like life was finally worth living, and he was finally living it. And should he accidentally die on a shrimping voyage, should some misfortune push him overboard, should he get carried away into the mouth of the sea that would be alright, for he had spent his entire life denouncing truths, and it would be nice to finally confirm one, even if it meant validating the wrongful inscription on his own tombstone.
posted by Bizzle Fitz @ 12:03 AM
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