Collected Stories

The Zetlands settled in. Crusts, butts, coffee grounds, dishes of dog food, books, journals, music stands, odors of Macedonian cookery (mutton, yogurt, lemon, rice), and white Chilean wine in bulbous bottles. Zetland reconnoitered the philosophy department, brought home loads of books from the library, and put himself to work. His industry might have pleased Ozymandias. But nothing, he would say, could really please the old guy. Or perhaps his ultimate pleasure was never to be pleased, and never to approve. With an M. A. of her own in sociology, Lottie went to work in an office. Look at her, said Zet, such an impulsive young woman, and so efficient, such a crack executive secretary. See how steady she was, how uncomplaining about getting up in the dark, and what a dependable employee this Balkan Gypsy had turned out to be. He found a sort of sadness in this, and he was astonished. Office work would have killed him. He had tried that. Ozymandias had found jobs for him. But routine and paperwork paralyzed him. He had worked in the company warehouse helping the zoologist to see what ailed the filberts and the figs and the raisins, keeping parasites in check. That was interesting, but not for long. And one week he had worked in the shops of the Field Museum, learning to make plastic leaves for habitats. Dead animals, he learned, were preserved in many poisons and that, he said, was how he felt about being an employee—a toxic condition.

So it was Lottie who worked, and the afternoons were very long. Zet and the dog waited for her at five o’clock. At last she came, with groceries, hurrying westward from Broadway. In the street Zet and Miss Katusha ran toward her. Zet called out, “Lottie!” and the brown dog scrabbled on the pavement and whined. Lottie was wan from the subway, and warm, and made contralto sounds in her throat when she was kissed. She brought home hamburger meat and yogurt, bones for Katusha, and small gifts for Zetland. They were still honeymooners. They were ecstatic in New York. They had the animal ecstasies of the dog for emphasis or analogy. They made friends in the building with a pulp writer and his wife—Giddings and Gertrude. Giddings wrote Westerns: the Balzac of the Badlands, Zet named him. Giddings called him the Wittgenstein of the West Side. Zetland thus had an audience for his cheerful inventions. He read aloud funny sentences from the Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences and put H. Rider Haggard, Gidding’s favorite novelist, into the language of symbolic logic. Evenings, Lottie became again a Macedonian Gypsy, her mama’s daughter. Mama was a necromancer from Skoplje, said Zetland, and made spells with cats’ urine and snakes’ navels. She knew the erotic secrets of antiquity. Evidently Lottie knew them, too. It was established that Lottie’s female qualities were rich, and deep and sweet. Romantic Zetland said fervent and grateful things about them.

From so much sweetness, this chocolate life, nerves glowing too hotly, came pangs of anxiety. In its own way the anxiety was also delicious, he said. He explained that he had two kinds of ecstasy, sensuous and sick. Those early months in New York were too much for him. His lung trouble came back, and he ran a fever; he ached, passed urine painfully, and he lay in bed, the faded wine-colored pajamas binding him at the crotch and under the plump arms. His skin developed its old irritability.

It was his invalid childhood all over again for a few weeks. It was awful that he should fall into it, a grown man, just married, but it was delectable, too. He remembered the hospital very well, the booming in his head when he was etherized and the horrible open wound in his belly. It was infected and wouldn’t heal. He drained through a rubber tube which an ordinary diaper pin secured. He understood that he was going to die, but he read the funny papers. All the kids in the ward had to read were funny papers and the Bible: Slim Jim, Boob McNutt, Noah’s ark, Hagar, Ishmael ran into each other like the many colors of the funnies. It was a harsh Chicago winter, there were golden icon rays at the frosted windows in the morning, and the streetcars droned and ground, clanged. Somehow he had made it out of the hospital, and his aunts nursed him at home with marrow broth and scalded milk and melted butter, soda biscuits as big as playing cards. His illness in New York brought back the open wound with its rotten smell and the rubber tube which a diaper pin kept from falling into his belly, and bedsores and his having to learn again at the age of eight how to walk. A very early and truthful sense of the seizure of matter by life energies, the painful, difficult, intricate chemical-electrical transformation and organization, gorgeous, streaming with radiant colors, and all the scent and the stinking. This combination was too harsh. It whirled too much. It troubled and intimidated the soul too much. What were we here for, of all strange beings and creatures the strangest? Clear colloid eyes to see with, for a while, and see so finely, and a palpitating universe to see, and so many human messages to give and to receive. And the bony box for thinking and for the storage of thoughts, and a cloudy heart for feelings. Ephemerids, grinding up other creatures, flavoring and heating their flesh, devouring this flesh. A kind of being filled with death-knowledge, and also filled with infinite longings. These peculiar internal phrases were not intentional. That was just it, they simply came to Zetland, naturally, involuntarily, as he was consulting with himself about this tangle of bright and terrifying qualities.

So Zet laid aside his logic books. They had lost their usefulness. They joined the funny papers he had put away when he was eight years old. He had no more use for Rudolf Carnap than for Boob McNutt. He said to Lottie, “What other books are there?” She went to the shelf and read off the titles. He stopped her at Moby Dick, and she handed him the large volume. After reading a few pages he knew that he would never be a Ph. D. in philosophy. The sea came into his inland, Lake Michigan soul, he told me. Oceanic cold was just the thing for his fever. He felt polluted, but he read about purity. He had reached a bad stage of limited selfhood, disaffection, unwillingness to be; he was sick; he wanted out. Then he read this dazzling book. It rushed over him. He thought he would drown. But he didn’t drown; he floated.

The creature of flesh and blood, and ill, went to the toilet. Because of his intestines he shuffled to sit on the board and over the porcelain, over the sewer-connected hole and its water—the necessary disgrace. And when the dizzy floor tiles wavered under his sick eyes like chicken wire, the amethyst of the ocean was also there in the bevels of the medicine-chest mirror, and the white power of the whale, to which the bathtub gave a fleeting gauge. The cloaca was there, the nausea, and also the coziness of bowel smells going back to childhood, the old brown colors. And the dismay and sweetness of ragged coughing and the tropical swampiness of the fever. But also there rose up the seas. Straight through the air shaft, west, and turn left at the Hudson. The Atlantic was there.

The real business of his life was with comprehensive vision, he decided. He had been working in philosophy with the resemblance theory of universals. He had an original approach to the predicate “resemble.” But that was finished. When sick, he was decisive. He had the weak sweats and was coughing up blue phlegm with his fist to his mouth and his eyes swelling. He cleared his throat and said to Lottie, who sat on the bed holding his tea for him during this coughing fit, “I don’t think I can go on in the philosophy department.”

“It’s really worrying you, isn’t it? You were talking philosophy in your sleep the other night.”

“Was I?”

“Talking in your sleep about epistemology or something. I don’t understand that stuff, you know that.”

“Ah, well, it’s not really for me, either.”

“But, honey, you don’t have to do anything you don’t like. Switch to something else. I’ll back you all the way.”

“Ah, you’re a dear woman. But we’ll have to get along without the fellowship.” What’s it worth? Those cheap bastards don’t give you enough to live on anyway. Zet, dear, screw the money. I can see you’ve gone through a change of heart because ofthat book.”

‘Oh, Lottie, it’s a miracle, that book. It takes you out of this human world.”

“What do you mean?”

‘I mean it takes you out of the universe of mental projections or insulating fictions of ordinary social practice or psychological habit. It gives you elemental liberty. What really frees you from these insulating social and psychological fictions is the other fiction, of art. There really is no human life without this poetry. Ah, Lottie, I’ve been starving on symbolic logic.”

“I’ve got to read that book now,” she said.

But she didn’t get far with it. Sea books were for men, and anyway she wasn’t bookish; she was too impulsive to sit long with any book. That was Zet’s department. He would tell her all she needed to know about Moby Dick.

“I’ll have to go and talk to Professor Edman.”

“As soon as you’re strong enough, go on down and quit. Just quit. All the better. What the hell do you want to be a professor for? Oh, that dog!” Katusha had gotten into a barking duel with an animal in the next yard. “Shut up, you bitch! Sometimes I really hate that lousy dog. I feel her barking right in the middle of my head.”

“Give her to the Chinese laundryman; he likes her.”

“Likes her? He’d cook her. Now look, Zet, don’t you worry about a thing. Screw that logic. Okay? You can do a hundred things. You know French, Russian, German, and you’re a real brain. We don’t need much to live on. No