The Alphabet Cage
by Huntley Gibson Paton
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
The fiction reading happened before The Obliteration. We walked to both.
It was the three of us, at first, staggering along in the dark. Our words, loud and argumentative, flew away from us like debris in the wind, and I felt like we were the only things alive in all of Upstate, unless there were muggers in the shadows; always a possibility. I wanted Kurt and Samantha to feel that way, too. I wanted them to feel that they needed me. I hunched my shoulders and frowned, spoke disapprovingly of nearly everything. It was cold. We left the sidewalks and cut through vacant lots, across town to the old church where the reading would take place.
I learned about Charles Stansloski, guest author, as we went. My friends were tremendous admirers of his, it seemed. Kurt, every bit the freshman or perhaps merely parroting the critical jazz from a book jacket, said the writer visiting our campus that evening was a “tour de force of naked pain.” Samantha compared him to a number of great post-Vietnam storytellers. I had my doubts, since they also told me the man wrote an occasional think piece for Maxim. In any case, I pretended to know all about Stansloski; it has always been essential that they have total confidence in me.
I had molded them considerably, of course, all semester long, but I should have seen, even then, that I was finished. Being drunk was part of it. But this was a horrendous day.
First, a routine order on eBay failed to go through. Four hundred and twenty-three dollars, a pittance for a leather-bound set of second-tier Russian novelists and poets, drawn against my mother’s and father’s debit account and well within my agreed-upon allowance, denied. How could this be? And then there was Mother’s foolish e-mail about leaving, how she would call me in a week, how she was sneaking out of my father’s beloved, mortgaged front door while he, bundled in micro-fleece and ear muffs, swatted golf balls at the country-club driving range in Farmington, and how, PS., I should not make any purchases on their account, at least temporarily. I was in a low-grade panic all day. I damn near called Father.
But I wore a mask of control. I quizzed Samantha on Stansloski as we walked. “I bet you don’t even know the name of his latest book,” I said, bluffing my ass off. “The book isn’t advertised on TikTok, is that the problem?”
She spoke right up. “Blind and Crazy in Santa Fe,” she said confidently, and what could I do but take her word for it? Her tower of hair, held together with the gel she used like mortar, tilted in the wind. “A different Native American crucified in every chapter. The same Judas every time. But Stanley, do you really agree that Judas is the hero? You know, that we don’t just empathize, but envy him? That we’re all really screwed up and sick?”
“Yes,” I said, “but the one before that?”
“Well, I’m not sure,” she said, disturbed that I couldn’t be drawn into a thematic discussion, that I wasn’t encouraging her. Inebriated, she wiped her nose with the back of her hand, spiked leather bracelet brushing her cheek. “I know he wrote The Death Tractor and Other Stories. That’s his Pulitzer, his most famous, but—”
“I thought so,” I said. I shook my head severely. But what was this about a Pulitzer?
“Wait a minute,” Kurt offered. “Didn’t he do a couple of those genre books before Blind and Crazy in Santa Fe? To finance that one?”
“That’s right,” Samantha said. “All that really weird stuff.”
It turned out that the prestigious Mr. Stansloski was forced to write an occasional book with specific commercial appeal in order to survive. This made sense to me in light of the earlier disclosure about Maxim. According to Kurt, the great author had written a fairly successful Western entitled Big Barns Burning, as well as a softcore pornography novella, Helga’s Haltertop, for which Sony Pictures had optioned film rights.
The writer’s workshop was bringing in Stansloski because of his more serious books, though. The workshop of course overlooked and ignored Helga’s Haltertop as one might choose to overlook a small nick in the canvas of a museum painting.
Fed up with this nonsense about a writer whom I had neither read nor heard of — the very idea disturbed me — I channeled the spooky dark around us and hit them with some Shelley. “O wild West Wind,” I said, “thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead, Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red...”
“That’s beautiful, Stanley,” Samantha said. “Is that from Death Tractor?”
I was concerned about my ignorance of Stansloski. Who was he, and how could I not know of him? Could they see through my drunken bluff? Who was this man, and where on my shelves, dear God, was he?
* * *
Tolstoy wrote, “It’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
But who will defend me, if not me?
Into the world of books, then. Like pure grace and armor.
I am Stanley Dunaway, reader of books, self-made and self-serving librarian, the elusive and legendary campus poetry pusher, student of Literature at this university buried in the pale, overcast belly of the Empire State. I sell books, but I am happier not to sell them. I am happy to keep books. I am very good at that: keeping books. Ask anyone.
This is my final month here. I’m off to the holy turf of Oxford, or so I had planned. My biggest anxiety before today concerned the shipping of books overseas. Would my father pay the freight, or would I be forced to put beloved volumes in storage?
Oh, there are other trifling problems: Somehow, I have made enemies of the English professors here, even though I have excelled and am poised to graduate a semester early; they see me in the hallways and flee for their lives. I am a leper. I have the plague. I am a pain in the ass. What a disappointment they are.
The bookstore people, too, are suspicious of me. Whenever I go inside for a novel, I am followed by one of their spies. Everywhere I turn, this campus gives me difficulty, difficulty. People are not to be trusted.
For this reason — it occurs to me only now — the police are right to humiliate me. I knew better. I weep for my error and also because this orange jumpsuit is too tight in the crotch. The police are amused by it, and why should they not laugh at one who ushered a swine into a temple, expecting reverence?
Gone now, I suppose, is what little companionship I had, or wanted. Kurt and Samantha are — were? — my jewels. What strange children I had for friends. What strange protégés freshmen make!
I welcomed their arrival, you see. The breeze of their spirits was gentle, and warm, and — could it be true? — much needed. Yes, much needed. From the first day I met them, a pair of comrades freshly cut loose from the leash of high school and adult supervision, they filled a space in me that was decidedly empty before.
They approached me at the student union. I was reading Wordsworth to myself, I was finishing my meal, I was minding my own business. It was Samantha who spoke first, I think. She expressed appreciation for my choice of reading materials. “Cool” is the word she used, I believe.
Strange, yes, and when I looked at this pair of children, gazed at their razor-scarred hairdos and their ring-pierced faces, I thought, with conviction, Twits!
But at the same time, I also thought that they, like the break of a new morning, were fabulously undeveloped and somehow begging for cultivation, and I loved them instantly. Loved them. I cannot justify it with any degree of rationale, the double-edged effect of the single word — “cool” — from her lips, offending my ears but fertilizing the poet’s words on the page before me: She was a phantom of delight, When she first gleamed upon my sight, A lovely apparition sent, To be a moment’s ornament.
Enough. My bladder is full. Open this door, you illiterates, and let me pee!
* * *
My parents pay (should this be expressed in the past tense? I fear so) for my schooling and, in return, I stay away from home except for funerals and Christmas. Actually, Christmas has been optional. It’s the way we all want it. My father is president, babbling fool though he is, of the Mustard Information Council in Farmington, Connecticut. He is a gifted golfer. My mother is his wife. The three of us together, incompatible pieces of some lewd jigsaw puzzle, can’t agree on a thing and, when I went away to college, my mother cried but, deep down, she was happy about it. I’m happy about it.
For reasons of pure nonsense, I am sure, Mother has kicked this happy arrangement squarely in the teeth.
What a mysterious atrocity that my father would come to me in his hour of silly despair. Where I have been emotional, he has been calm and assured. Where I have been inept, he has been expert. On the golf course, my father wields his clubs with authority that only Zeus had the right to possess. The ball, when hit by his mighty swing, would scream and burn holes in the atmosphere, and would not stop until it had dutifully fallen, exhausted, onto the green.
I, on the other hand, disdainful of the way the grip felt in my hands, hating the unforgiving pinch of golf shoes, would lurch backwards and then forwards, decapitating the ball and causing it to burn the tips of grass blades for fifty yards or so.
I once saw my father make two holes-in-one on the same day.
And could that mighty warrior fall?
And so inglorious, after all!
Swift indeed. I am astonished at the swiftness of it.
* * *
Sometimes I get a text from my father. He asks me how things are going, how I like my professors, and other mindless questions like that. The texts typically are very brief, usually referencing money that he has placed in my account. His texts are offensively dull, keyed thoughtlessly by an offensive dullard. To be fair, though, the majority of the texts merely reference the money.
Sometimes I write e-mails to my father at work, in the form of questions regarding the use of mustard in everyday recipes. “Can you suggest a way to incorporate yellow mustard into Italian dishes?” I inquire. Or, “My young son has just eaten an entire jar of spicy brown mustard and is very sick. Are there any long-term harmful effects from eating so much mustard at once?” The notes are always “signed” by some person I have made up and sent through a phony Hotmail account. Once in a while I threaten to sue: I have gotten a bad batch of mustard, I have found a dead mouse in my mustard, etcetera.
It had been fourteen months, until tonight, since I had last seen my father.
* * *
Beer. Bourbon. Vodka. What else? What else have I poisoned myself with tonight? If there is one thing I must blame Kurt and Samantha for, it is my present — though thankfully declining — state of pollution. Those two, they love the sauce. Me, no. It was a sore point. This gap between our tastes for alcohol was the one thing that stood in our way, or rather, stood in my way.
Ask them now, and they’ll tell you. Who has been their educator, their mentor, in all things non-alcoholic? Who introduced them to Heller, Elkin, Updike, Le Guin, Ovid and Eliot? Who taught them to read aloud with pain and love and fire? Who taught them to shun as heresy the Kindle, iPad and Nook, to smell ink with wonder, fondle paper with adoration? Ask them, and they’ll tell you: Dunaway.
I feared that they were slipping away from me, gradually, as this woeful semester progressed. I had grown accustomed to Kurt’s marveling at everything I told him. And perhaps, without realizing it, I had gotten used to indulging furtive glances at Samantha, despite her black lipstick. Why oh why were they always running off to drink in places where the only words were on cocktail napkins and bathroom walls? Suffice it to say, I was angry.
Suffice it to say, I panicked, after my mother’s e-mail. I let go my better judgment and followed them from bar to bar this past afternoon, watching them flash those ridiculously fake identification cards and getting away with it; I went glass for glass with them until happy hour was over, and we kept on from there, in escalating degrees of drunkenness, until the time came for us to attend the fiction reading.
Did I meet the author? Go to my lamented sanctuary to see for yourself. There, amongst the desecrated wreckage of my holy stacks, you will find Shiva the Destroyer, frothing madman, known on this earth as Charles Stansloski, but better known now and through the ages simply as the Anti-Christ.
There is no consolation for me.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We were at my apartment before the fiction reading: Kurt, Samantha and me. This was my first unforgivable mistake. My policy has always been strict: no visitors.
Two years ago, I found a place on the edge of town, a basement dwelling in an old dog-food factory. I am the sole resident and guard my basement territory carefully. The privacy is splendid; I can wander about the rest of the building freely whenever the urge strikes me, even climbing the service ladders and reading Marquez or Pynchon from high in the rafters, my headlamp casting Goliath-like book shadows on the floor below.
Only Monday nights are dreadful — that’s when the campus Socialists meet on the first floor. They speechify, play loathsome anthems on acoustic guitar, and reek of fermented kimchi and delusion. I ritualistically pass through their space after they leave, emptying a can of Febreze all around.
I say that I guard my basement carefully, and it’s true: my mother has never seen it; my father saw the place only once, when I moved in and it was still empty, and just shook his head. He understood neither my wants nor the space’s potential to fulfill them. And so I have learned to cloak rather than explain.
The strangers who come to my door at night for a book never get past the welcome mat. (Yes, I have one, for irony.) They give me their order and I process it while they wait sheepishly in the dark hall. I never solicit these customers, they come to me on the basis of reputation alone. Respect keeps them in the hallway, and fear.
I’ve heard it said that I try to summon the souls of Homer and Milton with a Ouija board late at night, and that my business is Mafia-owned. All balderdash, of course, but I let them believe whatever they wish so long as it keeps them in their place.
Alas, the cackle of Poe’s raven: “Nevermore!”
Samantha and Kurt had expressed a desire to see my apartment for some time, a desire that I consistently squelched. I see now a link between their drinking and my refusal to admit them to the basement. They were punishing me. Samantha in particular made the request several times a week and, when I declined, she would look to Kurt and say, “Oh, well, let’s go party,” and I would be left alone.
Today she did not have to ask. I sat on a bar stool, looking her directly in the eye, and said, through the wind of a spontaneous belch, that I would take them there at last. My breath wafted sweet to her face, stoked with the belly coals of 80-proof bravado.
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Huntley Gibson Paton
