Mating (77 page)

One factor I should take into account is that America is driving me more insane than I already am. I know this because sometime last week I felt anguish because I don’t own a zester. I needed one urgently so that I could get little spirals and coils of carrot and jicama on top of the larmen soups I was eating for lunch that week. Then they would be attractive and I would like eating them better and my weight would go down. Another factor is that we seem to be in prefascism of some kind. The right is at the center everywhere. There could someday be a TV series set in the specious present called I Was a Liberal for the FBI. Of course if I’m a serious person the question should be What is to be done? by me about prefascism. Talking to people would be one answer. But that leads to nothing other than making them think I’m fabulous. The import of everything I say is that we’re locusts, all of us here in the white West, but that never comes through. I recur to Nelson so much it makes me sick. What am I doing? There are only two kinds of work in the world, he once said. One kind on balance adds to the work other people have to do, the other kind on balance lessens the labor of others. What am I doing, or which am I doing? Youth wants to know! and suppose you say Okay, then, I’ll write, I’ll talk. Everyone tells me to write a book. So you
say Okay. But too bad about the language. On television a commentator the other day described someone as morally devoid and a politician called someone a spineless puppet, in the same sentence praising his own steadforthness. His constituents demanded their freedom of rights. They said We want our voices spoken. And of course where is the man who could laugh alongside me at this and help me to not keep dipping into despair? I need the man who said Lyndon LaRouche should be called Lyndon FaRouche instead.

All of which brings me back to my message. I read it, and what does it tell me to do? It says either nothing or a great deal. It says Hector proven alive Manhope police agent. It says Bronwen sent from Tsau after one week.

I was on all fours cleaning up around their bedroom door when she came out in the morning looking as though she’d been inducted into something so very exalted. She almost tripped over me. She had the decency to look ashamed. I kept on polishing. She went back in. I had the place clean as a jewel for them. My knees were burning by the time I got through. This will fade. I made sure fresh orangeade was waiting in the breakfast nook before I left.

So: What is to be done, Lenin?

One possibility is that I should find a way to have sex before I decide anything. I am living asexually. I can get sex. My celibacy is known and is highly exciting to certain oaves on my periphery. What could be more pointless than what I’m doing, id est developing a sacral attitude toward historical sex with Nelson? Nothing.

The message was allegedly from a friend, and the call was placed in Gabs. I have no friend in Gabs, really, but that hardly means anything, because the call could have been made on or in behalf of someone someplace else, or by someone visiting Gabs.

One thing I have definitely ceased with is slavishly reading through the corpus of great books I unfortunately missed that he enlightened me as to the importance of, at least until I decide What is to be done? All it does is make me hopeless. His greatest of neglected books was too much trouble,
Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort,
by George K. Zipf. It’s full of equations. Also, apropos being furious with actually existing socialism, I am giving up on reading socialist apologetic of any kind or stripe. I thought maybe I could convince him, if we ever met again, that socialism was curable and we could be socialists together and life could be like Berlioz on the stereo. This is an extreme of my extremis.

This is another item calculated to drive me mad. An epitome of how
Nelson haunts me is his presence in the question of my weight. I may have left out that when I was hounding him on the details of his illumination in the desert and especially the fine detail of his discovery that the human body is a sort of confederation, I asked him if he thought I might be able to control my weight better if I ordered my body or my fat cells or whatever entity I settled on to cease absorbing lipids for a while. He balked at answering because he thought I was out to trivialize. But finally he did answer Yes, possibly. And then I pressed on and asked Well, would it be preferable to give my body an order to be slenderer or to ask it nicely to be slenderer, which? And I wouldn’t let him get away with saying that he didn’t know which would be better, commanding or requesting. But then he said Either one, with requesting probably better. So I’ve been doing this, and since I started I’m down six pounds.

The first part of the message is straightforward enough. Where it takes me is not. G’s being pronounced as H’s, Manhope has to mean Mangope, the dictator of the bantustan across the border that would someday like to engulf Botswana because they’re all Tswana after all, and there are five million of them under Mangope and only one million in Botswana. The Boers love Mangope’s irredentism and keep it pumped up. So this news, that Hector is a police agent working out of Mafikeng, leads in many strange surprising directions. It makes his amazing vanishment out of Tsau something that could have been arranged quite easily by the South Africans. A helicopter could have come down from the Caprivi Strip, for instance, and picked him up out at one of the pans. So it could have been meant to get Nelson ejected so that the South Africans through Mangope through Boso—and no doubt ultimately through a born-again Hector—could carry out some geopolitical maneuver for which they wanted Tsau as a base.

An interesting synergy is that the arrival of the message coincided with my decision not to go on with my Denoonian lifetime reading plan, which followed my strange surprising discoveries in the
Tao Te Ching.
I had never touched the
Tao Te Ching
until lately. This is an instance of the patchiness of my education. If I ever had touched it, that might have made a difference. I wonder. But then I haven’t read the Rig-Veda yet, either. My attitude to the East is out of
The Lotus and the Robot,
from my youth. What I thought when I got into the Tao was that I had the explanation of Nelson’s fall. He had made an intellectual mistake! In a moment of vertigo he had embraced something that in his right mind he would have recognized as propaganda, imperial propaganda, a noxious thing albeit very poetical. Halt! cria-t-elle, I thought, when XXXIV hit
me:
The way is broad, reaching left as well as right / The myriad creatures depend on it for life yet it claims no authority. / It accomplishes its task yet lays claim to no merit. / It clothes and feeds the myriad creatures yet lays no claim to being their master. / Forever free of desire, it can be called small; yet, as it lays no claim to being master when the myriad creatures turn to it, it can be called great. / It is because it never attempts itself to be great that it succeeds in becoming great.
That sent me back through the whole text. Halt! I kept thinking. Another gem was
This is called subtle discernment: The submissive and weak will overcome the hard and strong.
Then there was I
shall press it down with the weight of the nameless uncarved block. / The nameless uncarved block is but freedom from desire, / And if I cease to desire and remain still, / The empire will be at peace of its own accord.
Which I put together with something earlier:
When the uncarved block shatters it becomes vessels: / The sage makes use of these and becomes the lord / Over the officials.
Halt! There was more of the same, Take XLIII:
The most submissive thing in the world can ride roughshod over the hardest in the world—that which is without substance entering that which has no crevices.
For a day or so it was clear to me that all Nelson needed was Scientiae Athena to come back and illuminate what he had become on a dark night. He had become an impostor. The
Tao Te Ching
was a textbook on how to be one, and what kind to be. Or had Denoon always been an impostor without my noticing it, starting with so eloquently leading the world to expect Tsau was going to be some liberating municipal bromeliad running on sun and sweet breezes when in fact although the place was bristling and glittering with solar hardware how much did it do? A little water heating, some cooling, some grain drying? There was his marvelous personal solar crucible, but that was a toy. People had solar cookers but barely used them. And what was Tsau to him, really? Who was Tsau for?

Something had happened in the desert. Had he decided to prolong that thing for his own reasons, such as putting me to some impossible test, which I had failed, making me obsolete, and then had he prolonged his state in order to get rid of me or so he could relax into Tsau in some whole new mode involving dressing in white? So now was he sorry about it? Was this message from him: had he made the call or had it made? This was where my mind was. I’ve been over and over the list of candidates for secret caller so often it makes me sick. Could Dineo have organized the call? Would the idea be to tell me that all’s well at Tsau and I could come back, or more likely that I should descend and take away the increasingly irrelevant Nelson? Or on the other hand was it a
genuine nervous breakdown thanks to his own whole particular foregoing, his mother, his father, the Tao, the events that precipitated the trip to Tikwe, the horror of his experience in the desert? But then I thought: you left to leave. Staying in his ambience like this is stupid and it is lacerative. I told myself I am hardly going to save him via a marxist interpretation of the Tao, although stranger things have probably happened. Who else could have sent the message? Could? have? And what had lustrous Bronwen been about? Irritation this intense is intolerable.

The Bronwen part of the message reads Bronwen sent from Tsau after one week. That means Bronwen is no more.

And of course what finally enrages me is that it feels highly possible to me that I have been maneuvered by a liar somewhere in all this. And the thing is that Nelson knows that you lie to me at your peril. I will not have it. He had ample warning. What is to be done?

Je viens.

Why not?