Excerpt from Pieces of Payne
Every three minutes: a positive diagnosis (in the United States,
one woman in eight, at some point in her life). And every fourteen minutes: a
death (“the rate has changed very little since the 1930s”—Barbara Ehrenreich,
“Welcome to Cancerland”). This is the background. This, and the scintillating
drizzle of stars across the night sky, and the whale, and the werewolf, and the
snick of a key unlocking a door at a cheap motel along I-35.
And here is
how it begins, since we need to declare some entryway: a story is being told to
me: and in it, a willful child is venting a teakettle steamhead of
peevishness.
--
“ Whyyyyy?”
“When daddy gets home from work,
he first needs to rest by himself for a while.”
“But whyyyyy?” Not any whine: the whine of a petulant three-year-old, dragged out
through miles of piping.
And then what to say that might
explain, yet still conceal?
“Because his job is…every day, he has to
tell somebody a very sad thing.”
“But whyyyyy?”—my friend Eliza
remembers squealing the question in just that annoyingly long-drawn way. She
imitates it; people look. We’re having a drink (well, seven, as it turns out)
after work. She’s said she wants to request my “advice” on “something,” and all
these stories seem to be required as a perfunctory gesture, although most of
them—the gold ring, the appointment book—I’ve heard before, and so have you: by
now, the various surfaces we model onto an armature of
childhood-angst-and-material-infidelity are ubiquitous enough so that…look into
your own friends’ faces, and you’ll find these narrative traces waiting for
drink number three to unleash them.
(There’s an image that comes to mind:
someone who’s falling, through a face the size of a firemen’s net or a circus
trampoline—and then she falls through another, and then another…all of the
possible permutations of human faceness, and all of their stories.)
--
Two people never get divorced.
It’s always a minimum of
four.
And I don’t mean merely adulterous liaisons—that lubricious pile of
legs like writhing Pick Up Sticks, which seems to power so many sagas of
marriages disintegrating.
No, I mean the person he was; and the one he’s
become. Her, too. That foursome.
So it was with Eliza’s
parents.
Proof? It’s everywhere, the proof of our astounding metamorphic
capability. Except that it’s not “astounding,” it’s our first prenatal
talent and we bear it all our years: we start as “stem cells,” undifferentiated,
each with the promise of specifying into, say, the isinglass rind of a toenail
or the tiny museum of bones inside the ear or…well, or anything bodily human (or selectively pre-human: we’re still things of
gill and wing in the womb). It ought to be clear by the time the intrauterine
photos show a fetus floating in its angelically silky hairshirt of lanugo: we
were born to be to identity what the chameleon is to color.
And:
“Canadian scientists grafted bits of ovary tissue onto a mouse’s muscles, then
harvested usable eggs from the grafts, maturing them in a lab” (this, to explore
the possibility of exo-womb fertility for “ovarian cancer patients or those with
such conditions as endometriosis or lupus”). Proof that we’re a fingersnap of
cellgerm transposition away from such cross-species intimacy as would have left
even Mendel and Darwin addle-eyed amid their specimen albums. But surely, now,
the “weird” conversions of our old dorm-room compadres—stalwart atheist, to
sober Roman Catholic; workaholic CEO, to gutter druggie—can be seen as just the
somewhat all-too-gung-ho application of an everyday potential.1
We could say that the ligatured psyche of the carnival
hermaphrodite Ed-Edna; and the physically elided lives of Siamese twins; and
(whether fraud or genuine) the blended speech of
medium-cum-channeled-“spirit-mentor”… are outlandish variations on the
dialogues that we’ve all, in some ways, welcomed to our consciousness, that
sometimes override us unexpectedly: the seepage of a chill, unreasoned sadness;
or a woes-erasing wave of gratuitous grace.
“I was so far from wanting
words, that I had only too many of them. I didn’t know what to do with them. I
floundered among them as if they were water which I was splashing about.”
Dickens had his hero report this somewhere amid the 8-to-900ish pages of David
Copperfield (as if, perhaps, it applied to himself?) and then, in a stroke of
what today we’d say was “metatextual gesture,” he cut those words from the
published version…a man of two minds. (A man, indeed, whose full oeuvre-tally
of
characters—“imaginary or real,” as Norrie Epstein says in The Friendly
Dickens—is 13,143: imagine being the chosen census-taker in a brain like
that.)2
Notes
When one tugs at a single thing in Nature, he finds it
hitched to the rest of the universe.
-- John Muir
1“All my life I have had an
awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in
me.—Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader” (the start of Jack London’s The
Star Rover, 1915).
2 “Dickens wrote Nickleby
when he was twenty-six, and the first half of the novel contains as many great
characters as any normal novelist would expect to produce in a lifetime”
(playwright David Edgar, quoted in The Friendly Dickens). An interesting sci-fi
variant on that marvelous Victorian mind occurs in a novel of Clifford D.
Simak’s. Carter Horton, the hero, is conversing with Nicodemus, a robot:
“You mean you have a box of auxiliary brains that you just plug
in!”
“Not really brains,” said Nicodemus. “They are called transmogs,
although I’m not sure why. Someone once told me the term was short for
transmogrification. Is there such a word?”
“I don’t know,” said Horton.
“Well, anyhow,” said Nicodemus, “I have a chef transmog and a physician
transmog and a biochemist transmog—well, you get the idea.”
Copyright © 2003 by Albert Goldbarth. All rights reserved.
