Had a flask in a special file cabinet. Headed for it. Deep swig.
In the nightmare, which he’d had in other forms before, he stood beside his beautiful boxes, the boxes of his own design, the boxes that B. F. Skinner himself had admired. He mistook each infant monkey for a beloved soul. In that way the nightmare was confusing. He saw each infant in the heart of its mother, precious, unique, held so close because the mother was willing to die for it. The mother, in the dream, knew what he was doing as he took the infant from her. She was fully aware of what was happening to her and her baby. It was as though she were being forced to watch the infant waste away, left alone in the box—not for the length of its life, perhaps, but for the length of its self, until the self flew out and was forever gone.
In the nightmare it was always the mother monkey he faced, not the infants. The mother, with her wild, desperate eyes. He felt what he could think of only as her passion, like a heat emanating. The mother was crazy with love, mad with a singular devotion. All she wanted was the safety of her infant. She would chew off her feet for it. She would do anything.
But she was trapped, simply trapped. He had put her in a cage, and the cage was too strong for her. When he took the baby from her arms, her panic rose so high it could rise no higher; if she knew how to beg she would beg till the end of the world, scream until her throat split. Give me my baby back.
He knew the feeling of loss that would last till she died. He knew it the way he knew a distant country. They had their own customs there.
Chomsky, Rodents
IT WAS ON CAPE COD, in the dump near our summer place, that my husband met Noam Chomsky.
We knew the Chomskys had a house in Wellfleet. The town boasted an impressive roster of leftist intellects. At a pretentious but greasy restaurant we’d seen the dapper Howard Zinn raising his wine glass amid a cluster of ethnically diverse guests. And one weekday night, a bit reluctantly, I went to hear Robert Jay Lifton talk about war atrocities at the public library.
But Chomsky was the only one either of us ever saw at the dump.
In Wellfleet the town dump is practically a local haunt. Because there’s no trash collection in town, most everyone drives to the dump once a week. You pay for a square sticker to put on your windshield, pull into the dirt lot past a guard in a tollbooth and make the rounds, distributing the various parts of your refuse load at different sites according to their nature. A few yards away from the main pit for household garbage sits a small shack full of items that occupy the nebulous space between utility and trash; always it boasts a surfeit of drinking mugs and dusty saucers. There are half-broken, bright plastic toys, chipped portable fans and sun-faded life jackets spotted with mold (my husband, K., snaps these up like they’re bullion). Chomsky was there with a little girl K. said was probably a granddaughter—she was about the right age, at least, and hovered by his side in the way that indicates some proprietary connection.
K. first noticed Chomsky standing at the open door of the junk shed, holding up a weird object composed of interlocking tubes and chambers in a smoky yellow plastic. It took him a couple of sideways glances to be sure, because the last time he’d seen the eminent scholar on video he’d been twenty years younger. Chomsky was trying to find a taker for the large yellow object, which turned out to be a deluxe gerbil condo.
A tall, affable grandfather with gray hair and glasses—he was almost eighty by then—he was presenting the gerbil condo, K. said, with a kind of desperate eagerness to the assembled company, which consisted of my husband, a couple of indifferent teenagers and a cranky old woman who scavenged the dump frequently. Chomsky did not want the gerbil condo to get lost in the dusty saucers and half-broken toys. You could tell, said K., he thought it was a truly good thing, serviceable and worthy.
The cranky old woman drew near, her shrewish face calculating. Did the object have value? She reached out a hand and tapped the bottom as Chomsky held it up. “Good for gerbils and hamsters both,” said Chomsky. “Even mice. Modular and pretty easy to clean.”
The old woman made a sour expression and turned away, muttering about rats.
But Chomsky had not been interested in her patronage anyway, said K. Indeed he had seemed to dismiss her on sight as a less-than-serious prospect. He wanted someone who would appreciate the glorious condo for what it was; he wanted to secure the good opinion of a rational person like him, a person with discrimination and high standards.
K. thought maybe the gerbil or hamster had belonged to the grandchild, and was recently deceased. Was this why Chomsky hesitated to just leave the cage there with the rest of the castoffs? Maybe it was the little girl’s feelings he was trying to protect.
K. himself had no use for the condo, possessing no rodent pets, but he stepped up and pretended to inspect a segment of tubing.
“Oh. Are you Noam Chomsky?” he asked after a minute, as though this were purely an afterthought.
“Yes, yes I am,” said Chomsky, and then returned to showcasing the condo. “Good ventilation—see? And these chambers are for bedding and eating. You put aspen shavings in there. And here’s where you hang
