Savage Love (11 page)

The Poet Fishbein

After the incident in the commuter jet restroom, the poet Fishbein found a new career counselling troubled teenagers in a Staten Island halfway house, in part to fulfill his court-mandated eight hundred hours of community service but also because he genuinely enjoyed working with young people, seeing himself in every bad boy with spiked hair, tats, stainless steel tongue ball, and purple eyeshadow. One evening, Fishbein and a half-dozen residents were doing ecstasy in front of the fireplace as a cheery fire consumed cheerily the last of the maple-finish kitchen chairs, when the new staff volunteer, Reguiba Placentia, a recovering crack addict, sex worker and early childhood education professional, exploded through the door. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Group therapy,” said Fishbein dreamily. He found Reguiba, whom he had never seen before in his life, strangely familiar and mysteriously attractive. “Are you the guy who set his shoe on fire over Minneapolis?” she asked. Fishbein decided it would be better to use mental telepathy to explain to her the complicated situation involving the joint that flared up and scorched his moustache, how he simultaneously dropped the joint and jerked his head back, knocking himself nearly unconscious on the commuter jet restroom mirror, how the joint somehow became entangled in his sneaker laces, causing the plastic trim to smoulder and, yes, emit some noxious smoke, which Fishbein didn'
t really notice at first because he was trying to see if his head was cut by spying in the mirror through his peripheral vision, how finally the smoke alarm sounded and things suddenly became truly confusing — the words “shoe bomb” and “terrorist” came into the picture in ways he had yet to understand completely. After explaining all this telepathically, Fishbein realized Reguiba was still waiting for an answer, so he pointed to a pale, limp, neurasthenic, semi-conscious boy named Julian and said, “That would be him.”

The Night Glenn Gould
Played “Chopsticks”

The woman in 314 has a walleye, claims to have suffered a spiritual crisis when she was fourteen that led to bleeding from her palms and feet, claims also to have once lived in Glenn Gould's apartment building in Toronto and heard him playing “Chopsticks” one night from the roof, claims also to be a witch.

Tell the press I am unavailable for comment.

Don't be afraid, I tell myself. None of the things you fear the worst will come to pass.

Glenn died at the age of fifty, I am fifty. When I was thirty-three, I couldn't get over the fact that they crucified Jesus when he was thirty-three. It
's the same with Glenn.

Budd
y

Buddy is seven and sweet and fat and slow to speak like his dad and a latchkey kid of long standing and considerable resources since his dad is gone and I work two jobs to keep the household floating. Days, I work as a teaching aide for the special-needs kids at the elementary school, and nights, I work a flex shift transcribing medical dictation for the pediatric clinic. Days, Buddy goes to the elementary school, and when he's done he walks home and plays
Halo
on Xbox and eats Cheetos and macaroni and raises more fat cells. I am a responsible mother, but aside from making enough money to meet the house payments, also the phone and electricity, and keep him supplied with macaroni and Cheetos,
I haven't got time for much else. One weekend I took him to the beach, but he complained of sunstroke and West Nile virus and said there were dead things floating in the water. Another time we tried hiking at the state park, and Buddy lay down on the trail claiming dehydration and snakebite when we were still in sight of the parking lot. I blame my husband for taking off like that and living on the other side of the country with another woman named Millie (she is really nice and a Christian and was married to our pastor before the trouble). And then I blame myself for being too proud to take him to court and make him pay me to keep Buddy. I thought I could handle everything myself, a moment of hubris and lack of prudence I might now reconsider, though no one else will. I have a degree in classics from a respected college and a thirteen-year-old Volvo that Buddy's dad left instead of love. And a house with payments and a dog named Phanto of nondescript breed and personality. We live in the most Christian state in the Union, where churches and golf courses are the most common landmarks. The only fun I have is watching amateur porn sites on the Internet and playing with myself under the covers late at night when Buddy is asleep. This is not much of a life for a girl, let me tell you. But I console myself that it is only temporary. Soon Buddy will grow up and learn to take care of himself (or else he will become the state's responsibility). By then I will be across the Great Divide and on the downhill slope, waiting for breast cancer or some other such mercy, and death will put an end to this long regret.

Hô
tel
d
es Suicides

The girl looks familiar, and over sherry in the afternoon I admire the partial nudity of her skull, the pierced flesh, the rings in her lip.

She reciprocates, alluding to my eye patch, which on this occasion I have remembered to wear.

She knows nothing of her past, thinks “the war” is something that happened in Iraq and that we won it. She has a self like window glass, believes that irony is imperialism, threw a balloon inflated with her own blood at a mounted policeman in front of what she thought was the American embassy but was in fact a US Airways
ticket office.

I tell her she reminds me of someone.

I look like you, she says.

Twins

My twin brother Buddy shot his best friend Richard Maliciwicz to death in the garage the year we were twelve. He has always regarded this as the turning point in his life, that things got better afterward. I never shot anyone. Consequently (according to Buddy), my life has all been downhill. I wanted to be an artist but wound up in computer call centres (of course, I've been on disability for years and have forgotten everything I ever learned about computers). I marked life's stages with nervous breakdowns
— at age sixteen (the first time I had sex), at twenty-two (college graduation), at twenty-seven (marriage), at twenty-eight (divorce), and thirty-three (first job).

Buddy took a sociology course in college and will say things like, “It's a mistake not to think we're born from violence, that violence and sacrifice aren't at the root of the family and everything it stands for. I made myself the day I shot Richard. I'm not saying it wasn't hard on him. But we all need our Richard Maliciwicz.” And it
's true — Buddy has had a happy life. I find it shocking and mysterious how Fate has rewarded him. He enjoys a booming academic career with a well-paid consulting business on the side (he gives human relations seminars to large corporations). He loves his wife. They are raising two sons, ages eight and ten.

I admit it's unnerving to see the way he casually leaves his hunting rifle around the house. My heart stops whenever I'm over there and see his sons playing with the neighbourhood kids. “They might shoot me,” says Buddy airily. “Or each other, or you.”
Sometimes I think he's insane. But I'm the demonstrable madman in the family, so my opinion carries little weight.

Splash

In the early days, when settlers first scraped out their meagre holdings along Lake Erie's north shore, it was not uncommon for fishermen to catch mermaids in their nets. Dumped on the beach, the poor things died quickly, their darting eyes turning to gelid orbs, their hair becoming brittle like coral as it dries, their pitiful cries dwindling as their gills gaped spasmodically for oxygen. Dead, they were more like pubescent children, with seahorse tails, triangular faces, pointed ears, translucent skin above their scale lines, and veins green instead of blue. I saw a preserved specimen once in the home of a distant relative whose ancestors had been slavers in the Caribbean before coming to Canada in the nineteenth century. The little corpse was exhibited in a green glass jar the size of a puncheon, suspended in olive oil, its tail folded up in front of its face, its eyes shut, its arms and hands crossed neatly over its breasts. There is a persistent Internet rumour that another individual, less well preserved, is kept locked in a vault in the basement of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Xo & Annabel,
A Psychological Romance

The second night, when it was clear that something was starting between them, Xo began to lie to Annabel, tiny lies at first, minuscule evasions, shy reticences. It was not only that he wanted to impress Annabel but that he yearned to be in love with the sort of woman who would fall for the kind of man he pretended to be.

Wolven

After they made love the first time, things got strange. He peeped through the window blinds, shook himself like a dog, and muttered something about the moon. Then he said, “You must chain me in the closet. Whatever happens, don't let me out. Lock the door. There's a deadbolt.” She was drunk and naked and limbic, not thinking with her forebrain, something much lower.

“
Then what?” she asked flirtatiously.

Little Things

I think — I believe — Elind is trying to kill me.

Little things.

The other night I woke struggling with a pillow over my face.

She said she was making me comfortable.

Last month I had severe stomach poisoning. When he pumped my stomach, the doctor said I must have eaten a bowl of Weed & Feed mistaking it for porridge.

Otherwise she is loving and attentive in the old way.

And I keep my suspicions to myself, not wanting to hurt her feelings. She likes to be needed.

THE COMEDIES

The Lost Language of Ng

According to the Maya, their grandfathers, the Ng, refused to assimilate with later civilizations but instead retreated, after a period of decadence and decline, into the southern jungles whence they had emerged. They are rumoured to be living there still, a hermetic and retired existence, keeping the Secret Names in their hearts, playing their sacred ball game, and copulating with their women to inflate the world skin bladder and supply the cosmos with ambient energy, the source of all life.

The last known speaker of the language of the ancient race of Ng passed quietly in his hospital bed at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he had been flown the week before for emergency surgery. The cause of death was listed as “
massive organ failure.” He was 92 years old, according to estimates, though he himself claimed to be 148. He went by the name of Trqba, though he always said this wasn't his real name; it was “my name for the outlanders.” His real name, Trqba told researchers shortly before his death, was a secret, a secret so mysterious and terrible that were he to utter the name, the world would end the instant his breath stopped on the last vowel of the last syllable.

The Ng are believed to have been a proto-Mayan people who emerged, somewhat mysteriously, from the jungles south of the Yucatán a thousand years before the birth of Christ and established regional hegemony over the inhabitants of the dry central plains, impoverished tribes that lived by eating insects and grubbing for roots, given to war and venery but incompetent at both, according to Trqba (see C.V. Panofsky,
“An Account of the Ng Creation Epic,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society
, 1932). A carved stele discovered at the ancient Ng capital, long concealed beneath temple ruins, depicts the dramatic emergence of the Ng people, their great tattooed war god
stepping naked from behind a tree, brandishing a cucumber (or boomerang; listed as “unidentifiable” elsewhere) in his hand, his erect penis dripping blood (according to Trqba; according to Giambattista et al., 1953, possibly water, sweat, urine, semen, or “unidentified fluid”) on a row of diminutive, dolorous, and emaciated natives who are about to have their limbs severed (see Farrell, “Ng Stele Recounts Imperial Conquest
,”
National Geographic
, 1951). The name of the Ng war god is lost because to utter even one of the eighteen divine diphthongs would have meant the sudden and cataclysmic end of life on earth. But Trqba (see Trilby Hawthorn, “New Light on the Ng, a Jungle Romance,”
People
, 2009) said that the Ng referred to him in conversation using conventional epithets such as Snake or My Girl'
s Delight.

Soon after migrating out of the jungle, the Ng invented canals, roads, terraced agriculture, pyramids (prototypes of the stepped Mayan E type, aligned with the solstice and equinox), cannibalism, and the mass sacrifice of captured enemy maidens (also, poss. the wheel, the automobile, and an early computer-like device; see von Däniken, 1964; von Däniken believed the Ng were extraterrestrials from the planet Cephhebox). They built immense cities with central plazas surrounded by the usual towering stone temples and played a peculiar version of the Meso-American ball game at the end of which the winners would be bludgeoned with gorgeously carved obsidian death mauls — the losers would become kings and nobles. Since no one wanted to win (especially in the Age of Decadence
, when the Ng Empire went into precipitate decline — between the years 7 Narthex and 27 Px on the Ng calendar), in practice the Ng ball game went on forever; players would grow feeble and die and be replaced by younger men, who in turn would be replaced, and so on. (See Proctor, “The Final 16: Ritual Roots of American College Basketball,”
Harper's
, 2001.)

According to Trqba, the ancient Ng came to believe that the sacred ball game generated a spiritual current or life force (analogous to the Chinese concept of
Qi
; see R.V. Hemlock, “The Ng Generator: Prehistoric Experiments in Conductivity,”
Popular Mechanics
, 1955) that kept the world dome inflated (like a skin bladder, a curiously foundational concept in the Ng metaphysics) and animated all living things, and that if the Ng heroes — oiled, naked, emaciated, arthritic, toothless, and decrepit — ever ceased their listless ebb and flow upon the court, the world would end catastrophically. (For the ancient Ng, it seems, time was equivalent to constant motion with no linear progression, something like treading water or jogging on the spot; see Larios,
Changeless Change: The Ng Enigma of Time
, Oxford University Press, 1999.) Though he claimed to be the last of the Ng, Trqba paradoxically seems to have believed that somewhere deep in the jungle, on a rocky, weed-strewn court hidden by the overarching green canopy, men and boys, lost tribal remnants or even spectral reanimates, still played the ancient game, the score forever tied at 0-0.

He also said that the Ng kings and queens were required to have sex continuously, night and day, an intimate analogue of the ball game. When they stopped, he said, “the world will end.” He himself, he claimed, was a descendant of the Great Kings and had “tired out” several women in his day. How the Ng chose their kings when no one ever won or lost the sacred ball game remains unclear; in practice, it seems, they may have been selected by lottery using the incised peccary knucklebones found in heaps scattered randomly around the ancient Ng cities. When the sexual prowess of the Ng kings began to wane, priests would dispatch them ceremonially in the night, catching them unawares and in flagrante, as it were, using the garr
otte and those famous obsidian death mauls simultaneously. (For a lurid fictional account of the legendary erotic practices of Ng royalty, see Anonymous,
The Love Diary of Anaconda, King of the Ng
, Black Cat Press, 1963.)

Trqba was raised an orphan on the edge of a vast yam and cucumber plantation owned by a multinational conglomerate, where he earned his living as a farm worker from the age of five. Married, the first time, at twelve, Trqba converted to Christianity under the influence of a fanatical missionary sect based in Idaho and known as The Last Days of the Rising of the Great West in Christ. When he was sixteen, Trqba eloped with the young wife of Preacher Malachi and immigrated to the United States, where he resided for several years in Sea Hills, New Jersey, working as a school janitor. At the end of this period, Trqba'
s wife reconciled with Jesus, returned to her native Idaho, and went into couples therapy with Preacher Malachi. Trqba always claimed he had “tired her out.” But the incident coincided with a vision of the Sacred Ng Ocelot Lord (real name unrecorded for the usual reasons) in the girls' changing room adjacent to the Sea Hills High gymnasium. (For details of Trqba's biography, see his Wikipedia entry, much of which is sourced to
News of the World
interviews with Rachel Malachi, his ex-wife, who alleged that Trqba was born in Sea Hills of Puerto Rican parentage, a claim that scholars have dismissed; see J.V. Oliveira,
“New Light on the Last King of the Ng,” posted to her archaeology blog
Picking Old Bones
, 2008. Note also that Trqba's sojourn in New Jersey corresponds to the liminal stage in the van Gennep sequence; see V. Turner,
The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
, 1969.)

Trqba had no formal education and could neither read nor write, although he claimed to be able to translate the complex glyphs archaeologists discovered carved into the inner walls of the Ng temples. When asked how he knew the ancient language, Trqba said his grandfather had taught him. This is a common locution amongst primitive oral cultures, who view all older people indiscriminately as “grandfathers
” and “ancestors.” What is now known for certain is that upon his return to the Yucatán, Trqba hired a local medicine man and plantain farmer named Nunez de Vaca (Nunez of the Cow — not a sacred name) to teach him the ancient wisdom of the Ng. During this period, Trqba's half-American daughter Naomi supported him, earning their living as a surfing coach, burrito chef, and sex worker in nearby Cancún.

Nunez of the Cow schooled Trqba in the Ng creation epic, the famous Mlx Draf Ng'
dal. (See the excellent Helwig translation, University of Toronto Press, 1995; a literal translation published on the Web in 2009 by R.J. LeRoi is infelicitous and a sieve of errors, e.g., “. . . he raddled them with his rapier Snake” [Helwig] v. “he hit them with a worm causing multiple puncture wounds and contusions
” [LeRoi], and “sunlight struck sparks from his night-coloured death maul” [Helwig] v. “the sun was reflected off his brown stone hammer with a wooden handle” [LeRoi].) Trqba also studied numerology, the cyclical order of the years in the Ng calendar (Spot, Narthex, Rx, Nuht, and Px) and their relationship to Ng astrological signs (seven as opposed to the usual twelve) and astronomical observations (highly advanced, it seems, for the Ng priests were clearly aware of the recession of the equinox and other stellar arcana, including a concept very close to Dark Matter). He learned the names of the various medicinal plants in the Ng pharmacopo
eia and practised decocting remedies in a homemade lab in a lean-to behind the house he shared with Naomi in the ancient Mayan village of Zarthapan on the edge of the Great Yucatán Sand Plain. (See Dr. Baron Rappaport, MD, PhD, MFA, “How the Ng Cured Cancer,”
Modern Medical Bulletin of the White Plains Psychiatric Center
, 1967.)

Trqba also become an adept in Qx-Qx, the Ng martial art known for its unique combination of quietist meditation techniques and brutality. It is no secret that at this time he became addicted to narcotics and natural psychotropics, which he manufactured himself according to ancient Ng recipes and sold to tourists. Nunez of the Cow taught him the usual shamanic repertoire of non-rational metamorphic practices: shape-changing, time-travelling, and flying. Using secret drugs and Ng breathing exercises, Trqba claimed to have maintained an erection continuously for three years and “tired out”
five successive young lovers, local village girls noted for their robust appetites. He learned the Secret Names telepathically while sleeping off a six-day bender on a straw mat in Nunez of the Cow's summer kitchen (but, of course, went to his deathbed without revealing them). One story, perhaps only a rumour, has it that he was bitten by a deadly fer-de-lance
while communing with the gods in a ruined stone sanctuary hidden in the jungle, and the snake promptly died in agony. At the University of Michigan's Rudolph X. Hartshorn Archives, there exists a scratchy recording of Trqba singing a primordial Ng war song, a tape made by the noted American folklorist Wendel Bateman in 1952. Bateman died soon after while attempting to reproduce the mystic Ng art of cliff-jumping under Trqba's tutelage. (See T. Wilberforce, “The Curse of the Ng: NEH Halts Research Grants Following Mysterious Yucatán Deaths
,”
New York Times
, May 10, 2010. The
Times
puts the number of dead or hospitalized since 1950 at fifteen, but unofficial estimates are much higher.)

Battle Song of the Ng Host

I have copulated with the bodies

Of the enemy dead

I have copulated with the ocelot

And the jaguar

And the tree sloth

And the garden slug
(possible mistranslation).

Yea, I have slain them with my spear-snake-thing,

Have impaled them on my righteousness.

Their women have groaned with envy

And thrown themselves upon my terrible spear-snake-thing.

Yea, I have made love with Death,

And her children are the glorious Ng

Whose every word is poetry.

— Helwig translation

In later years, Trqba followed a more conventional and abstemious lifestyle. After Nunez of the Cow's death in 1973, Trqba continued to study the Ng language and lore through dreams, astral projection, and the use of psychotropic drugs, which, he said, was the traditional method. (He claimed that the more achieved Ng intellectuals and members of the priestly class eschewed speaking altogether and communicated by “signs and thoughts.”
See Boris Napkin and V.I. Urpanzurov, “Some Thoughts on Sacral Communication among the Primitives of the Yucatán Desert,”
St. Petersburg Philological Review
, 1982, wherein the authors dispute Trqba's claim, insisting that the Ng actually possessed two languages, one High language, complex and poetic, and a Low language, or Ngian demotic,
for the common people; no one actually spoke High Ngian since to utter a single syllable would instantly bring the world to an end.) He was adopted by the “chefe” or Lord of the rare (possibly extinct) Yucatán hairless marmot (
Cynopius sesquipedelia
), a diminutive yet vicious mammal with neurotoxins in its saliva, known to eat its paralyzed victims alive, which became his tutelary spirit and totem. Trqba married three more times; all his wives eventually left him, satisfied but “tired out,” he said.