The Blazing World (9 page)

Reading the book again as an adult, however, I felt a door had been opened. I walked through it and found Harry. I found Harry in a novel that had been written by a nineteen-year-old girl on a bet. In 1816, Mary Shelley was spending the summer in Switzerland with her husband, their neighbor Lord Byron, and another person less celebrated whose name I cannot remember. The challenge was to write a ghost story for the pleasure of the others. Mary was the only one who fulfilled the bargain. In the preface, she writes that the story came to her in a “waking dream,” as one image after another possessed her. She watched as a “pale student of unhallowed arts” created a monster.

“Behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”

It is impossible to forget the novel’s essential story. I knew the terrible being Frankenstein makes is so lonely and misunderstood that his very existence is cursed. I knew his awful isolation is transformed into vengeance, but I had forgotten, or probably had never felt before, the ferocity of his feeling—his fury, grief, and bloodlust. And then I came across these lines spoken by the monster in Chapter 15:

“My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions steadily recurred, but I was unable to solve them.”

I felt as if Harry’s ghost were speaking to me.

A Compendium of Thirteen

Characters, a Non Sequitur, a Confession, a Riddle, and Memories for H.B.

Ethan Lord

1.
H
ow did Gobliatron, hero of the Fervidlies, who inhabit a country far to the north of Nowhere, disentangle himself from the ice-cold clutches of the Bobblehead, a machine man who froze great lakes by looking at them? Bobblehead froze Gobliatron solid with a mere glance. So Gobliatron, stranded in mid-step on a field of ice, began to think hot. He thought so hot he gave himself a fever. The fever melted the ice, and the hero was free.

2.
A
word eludes a picture. How do you draw
whenever
,
but
,
and then
, or
last week
? Arrows.

3.
R
ed roosters all over pajamas purchased in France that Edward Boyle said belonged on girls. I took a pair of scissors, cut a hole in one leg, and threw the scrap in the garbage. The slashed pajamas disappeared. This is a confession. I was eight.

4.
R
iddle: What is so fragile even saying its name can break it?

Silence. . . . F.L., paterfamilias, asked me this riddle when I was nine. I could not answer him, but after he gave up the secret, I could not stop thinking about the answer. I lay in bed and said
Silence
again and again to hear it break. You asked me what I was doing, and I told you, and you smiled, but the smile went crooked, and I did not know exactly what it meant.

5.
I
remember the closet was my enemy. I remember there was something behind the door. I remember you put a flashlight inside the closet and that, when it burned out, you let me change the batteries.

6.
E
verything has a pattern or a rhythm that can be discerned through close attention, but whether those repetitions exist outside the mind is an open question. You and I did not see the same patterns.

7. “
T
heory is good but it does not prevent things from happening.” You told me that one month, two days, and thirty-seven minutes before you died. It is a quote from a neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, who dressed in black, admired paintings, and wrote the first descriptive analysis of multiple sclerosis.

8.
B
oredom never touched you, except when waiting for suitcases at the airport.

9.
U
nder the logical fallacy argumentum ad popular, the biggest brand is the best brand. This false reasoning is used by every cultural herd, however large or small. The herd runs to gape at the spectacle of whitening toothpaste. The herd runs to see the new hot gallery star. The herd thinks in unison. The herd is a collective voyeur, driven by received knowledge to see beauty, sophistication, cleverness in the shining thing, the empty vehicle of worth and wealth and glory. But the herd loves ugliness, too: humiliations, murders, suicides, and corpses—not actual corpses within reach, not corpses that stink, but the mediated dead, the dead and dying on screen. The familiar herd, our own herd, is mostly sanitary in its tastes. The herd reads
The
Gothamite
to discover sanitary tastes that will not interfere with the spectacle of whitening toothpaste that brightens its collective Madison Avenue grin and will not sully its Wall Street suit. The herds, large and small, create varying identities through one or another commodity of choice, their raison d’être. Images of the living as well as the dead are sold on the open market as delectable bodies. Their reality is exclusively of the third-person pronominal variety. The bodies have no inside because the first-person singular is not allowed. Value is determined within each herd by collective perception and the number of viewers.

10.
R
ubik’s Cube: 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 permutations. You gave it to me because you knew its algorithms would haunt me. M.L., Maisie Lord, aka Twinkletoes, the tutus-and-Mad-Hatter’s-tea-party sibling, did not understand that this was a hexahedral universe to be mastered by movement and color, that it was a cosmology, a separate reality, a place to be. She broke my Rubik’s Cube. I cut off her ponytail. I held the ponytail over the toilet while she screamed. I flushed. The toilet did not want to digest the hair. You came, you looked, you yelled, and while you yelled, you waved your hands beside your ears. Then you brought towels, and you spoke to us about tolerance, but we were not interested in it, not interested in tolerance, that is. We were too old, you said, to be breaking Rubik’s Cubes and flushing ponytails down toilets, and you were dead tired of it—of us. I was eleven and Maisie was thirteen. And then you sat down on the bathroom floor (with the towel that had a beige stripe at one end) even though the floor was not dry. Your head flopped down onto your chest and a sound came from you—a choking sound and sniffs. I froze like Gobliatron. I could not move. Twinkletoes said to me, Now look what you’ve done! Now look what you’ve done! But my mouth was too tight and cold to answer.

11.
D
ebord, Guy. He invented the Game of War. It was a board game about the Napoleonic Wars. Guy Debord, Julien Sorel, Ethan Lord—all wanting to play the game, move the pieces. Tell me the rules. Men love games. You said that once to me. But you loved games, too.

12.
E
than Lord, only son of Harriet Burden and Felix Lord, product of aforementioned two persons in nuclear family arrangement, aspirant scribbler, puzzle-maker, neo-Situationist orphan, remembers his mother. I am trying to remember you, Mother, to find those brain scraps and turn them into more than a Humian bundle of impressions, as you would have said, Humian, after David Hume. Kantian and Hegelian, but not Spinozaian, perhaps Husserlian? There is
Husserliana,
Gesammelte Werke
. You would be glad to know that I’ve looked, read a few pages of him. He is difficult. You, too, could be difficult to understand.

13.
N
obisa Notfinger lived in Paciland, a country beside Fervid where the inhabitants were well dressed and serene and followed the rules, but Nobisa had a temper, and she was a messy, dirty, chubby girl, and life was hard for her, and so she left to make her fortune in Fervid. You created Nobisa for Maisie, but you armed her for me. In her trusty brown suitcase she had a ray gun and a sword and a special ear-pincher given to her by the Fairy of Ill-Will and Malice that Nobisa could use only seven times. Maisie doesn’t remember the stories as well as I do. Different patterns of mind.

Harriet Burden

Notebook A

September 25, 1998, 10:00 p.m.

Vindication of the Rights of Harriet Burden! They have swallowed the Tish shit whole, gulped it down so readily I am dizzy with success, to quote that demon, Joseph Stalin. We have removed the
c
from his name to make the anagram work. Table no more! The little boy with a few fresh acne scars has whetted their appetites for more Wunderkind works, more smartass jokes with art historical flourishes, and the buffoons are pounding out their enthusiasm in reviews. They haven’t found a tenth of my little witticisms, my references, my puzzles, but who cares? They’ve had little to say about the story boxes, but that only demonstrates their blindness, doesn’t it? The other day one of their ranks showed up at Anton’s, someone Case, a dwarf in a suit and bow tie with anachronistic hair pomade and a fake Brahmin accent that made me wince. He asked me for my “views.” Poor, self-important little man.

After he left, Anton and I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the folding chair in the studio and rock back and forth. We are a team, I told him, a twosome deep in research on the nature of perception: Why do people see what they see? There must be conventions. There must be expectations. We see nothing otherwise; all would be chaos. Types, codes, categories, concepts. I put him in, didn’t I? The fellow in the suit looking oh-so-seriously at immense naked woman. How quick they are to embrace and anoint the smiling young male artist with innocent air; look how knowledgeable, how sophisticated, how clever he is. Big Venus has made a big (little) buzz. I hear the sound of bees, and bees sting. I have told Dr. Fertig that I hate the bees.
Hate
is not a word I use lightly. He knows that. He knows that the joke is also no joke. He wants to know when I will reveal my identity. The phrase itself is exciting. It makes me feel as if I am living in a thriller. When will I reveal my identity?

He asks about Anton, too.

But Big Venus belongs to Anton Tish, I said. Dear Dr. Fertig, without Anton she would not exist. It is a work that came into being between him and me because it was made by a boy, an
enfant terrible
, not by me, old lady artist Harry Burden with two adult children and a grandchild and a bank account.

Dr. Fertig pointed out that the money is rarely simple.

Anton gets the money from sales. That is the deal.

I close my eyes. I close my eyes. It is my time now. It is my time, and I will not let them take it away from me. The Greeks knew that the mask in the theater was not a disguise but a means of revelation. And now that I have started I can feel the winds behind me, not because Big Venus is so much—cynical fun—but because I see what they gobble down and with the right face I can do more.
Nota bene
.

And yet, Anton says she is beautiful in the gallery space asleep, that she is better than I imagine because we couldn’t see her so well when we assembled her. I have not dared to go yet, but maybe I will peek in from outside and look through the window at my big doll, my first success.

Nobody knows but me and Anton and Dr. Fertig. Edgar is suspicious. The other little assistants know that I paid for her, but they believe the lady is blown straight from Anton’s imagination. One of them, with a preposterous name, Falling Leaves or Autumn Sunshine, no doubt the offspring of New Age fruitcakes, seems to have glued herself to Anton—an
unheimlich
little creature, very pretty with blond curls and poppy-colored lips, and strange, large, knowing blue eyes.

Speaking of winds, where is the Barometer? I looked in his room. He is usually curled up in his sleeping bag by now with his eye mask and earphones on to keep out the pressure so he can rest from his labors of feeling the weather. I hope the poor man hasn’t burst and been taken to a hospital. Although Rachel insists medicine can help him, I know that he doesn’t want the poison pellets the doctors give him, which mute his gift, and it is a gift, strange to say. Sometimes when I listen to him talk, I begin to feel the barometric variations myself—the ups and downs in my own bodily register—a hum in the system.