Featuring Artists and Writers of Extreme Vision.
The Archives: Corrido by Mandy Keifetz.
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 Chapter 2. Doctor Silence. He spoke slowly, in a cutting nasal rasp. It was a wheedling kind of voice and in it, behind it, ten thousand smarmy echoes. "But what about your name," he said. "My name? What about it? Do you mean is my name a Rigid Designator? Is it subject to the Problem of Universals? Is it causal or denotive? Or do you just mean why is my name what it is?" Jasper Nitz maintained his even smirk, not answering, and in the shuffling quiet that followed, I felt the class realign itself. The power lines were a little screwy, but I was used to that by now. Every year, in every class, some kid asks me why I publish under the name Dr. Silence. Usually it's a tiny boy, dressed all in black, Converse sneakers, greatcoat, face a cross between Pierrot and a weasel. A Beat geek. And each one has a grinning point man, a sidekick, crouched inevitably in the shadow. I recognized Jasper's flunky. He was my new teaching assistant for an undergrad lecture in Language Acquisition, a gangly boy with a faint Amish accent and a new-wave tonsure. I couldn't stand him. But as I say, I know the drill by now. Jasper Nitz was unusual only in the girl he'd picked out to perform for. I cast a glance her way and froze. The rest of the major points in the day's discussion, which had been pristinely demarcated in my head, melted into murk. She had a blunt power to her, Louise Brooks hair and China Doll cheekbones. But that wasn't it. Perched neatly on the ripped black shoulder of her Nico T-shirt was a pint-sized version of the demon I call John. He kicked his feet into her collarbone, leering at me. Normally, I wouldn't care. Normally, my demons are such an easy, familiar part of the architecture of my day, I don't even blink. But I've found through years of, I don't know, attrition, that somehow they tend to occupy the same unnatural place in my brain as public speaking, and as a result, I'm fucking useless as a teacher when they're around. The classroom was hot and smelled of wet flannel. On the stage of Nico Shirt's slender shoulder, a tiny drama unfolded. A blond, square-jawed demon emerges from a rectangle pat of butter light, lugging a rocking chair out of sight, down her lightly sloped back. In front of him, oblivious, minute, my father shrugs elaborately. Bulge in his tiny pocket and I know he's brought his opium ball along (he always called it his opium softball), rendering him useless, and I wanna say "hey, stop him; he's stealing the chair," but now my father's squinting at me, concerned, insensible, opening his toy mouth, saying, "Nyugi, nyugi, Édesem." "Is that an answer?" Jasper Nitz, seizing control. "What's it supposed to mean?" "It means," I whisper, "hush, hush, my sweet. In Magyar." "What's the point?" "No point, Nitz. Just something my father used to say." He rolled his eyes, raising his arms in a lost-cause flap, a gesture I've grown accustomed to over the years, a gesture meant to imply: the chick's bughouse, but what do I care? Of course, if he knew my reputation, the gesture would've been superfluous; just as if he'd actually read my work, he'd already know why I published under the name Dr. Silence. But why would he? Who'd pick up a dusty treatise on psycho-linguistics? Or read an article in an obscure New England journal? Looking up, I saw Nico Shirt's shoulder blessedly free of demented parasites. I cleared my throat, then fell silent. I didn't want to be there. Teaching smartass graduate students is not exactly the ideal job for someone who regularly hallucinates hours of machine-gun dialogue with an entire bestiary of demons, even if that person has a facility for learning new languages akin to that of Captain Sir Richard fucking Francis Burton. As usual, I resented being made to feel like more of a fraud than I already was. But I was determined to earn my keep. The syllabus concerned the Language of Madness, a subject some might say I was ideally suited to take on. Also a subject on which intimacy renders me mute. It all depends on how you look at it. But if I couldn't teach them what was on the syllabus, I was nonetheless prepared to teach them something; to stake out a claim, to charge in. To take no prisoners. I was gonna play draughtsman extraordinaire and, early, draw them a field map for the mine fields, find them an inexhaustible source of rocket fuel for the imagination, and thus for the study of Linguistics as a whole. Better that, better anything, than diminishing speech by counting the rocks in the speaker's head. Anyway, that was the plan. I wasn't sure how to go about it, exactly, but it had something to do with the truth. The truth and carbon dating. The truth in pith helmets. The truth and the silence of the dig at night. The brutal shape of the pick, artifacts in shadow: the cast of language, the die of language. Alright, so I'm full of shit. But I was gonna have to read their papers for the next four months and I was determined about at least this much: if I was gonna read their stuff, I wanted to watch them listen first. Besides, Jasper Nitz was a smug little bastard but the kid'd asked me a legitimate question. I guess it is pretty stupid to publish academic work under a wacko pulp fiction name like Dr. Silence. To tell the truth, even given the fact that it's common knowledge among the higher philological circles that I'm mad as a fucking hatter, I can't believe I've gotten away with it this long. So I told Jasper Nitz the truth, told him, "It was Flan's idea." He gave me this look. This really impressive look. This mean, squinty look which said "I know exactly what you are." He said, "Is that your boyfriend?" "Not exactly. Want me to answer your question?" He shrugged. "Not exactly," he said, in a precise imitation of my voice. No mean feat, that, the nervous crash-down on syllables, the barest glaze of Romany; and so, delighted with him, I decided to tell them the story. It's a long story, and it's pretty goofy but, fuck, it's true. At least it's true. First time I met Goliath Flanagan was in this scummy bar on Ludlow Street. I was wild, desperate to come up with a proposal for my doctoral thesis, and I'd been on a three-day drunk with this guy, Spin Burke, who claimed he was a shinto-bassist. I never heard him play, in fact I don't think he even owned a bass, so I have no idea what the fuck that means, but cut me some slack. I was a young widow, drunk, probably half mad from grief. Spin had the requisite skull ring gleaming on his knuckle and this long ugly face that just slayed me at the time. Anyway, I was sitting cross-legged on a table and Spin was knuckling the shellac with his Keith ring when this dream in a black leather cop jacket shows up. Goliath C. Flanagan. Flan looked about the same in those days. Bar light suits him. He was a pinch more hungry then maybe, a tweak less worn, but he hasn't aged much in the decade-plus I've known him. He looks like a wrecked angel. He's all wide square angles, rib cage out to here, insane mop of auburn hair, baggy eyes of the murkiest green. And always a cigarette angling his jaw. Just about half a beer short of perfect, in short. Anyhow, he casts the briefest of appraising looks over Spin's slumped body, turns to me, and says, "Jesus, Doll, that face. Let's cruise." "I'm with him," I said, nodding at Spin. Spin raised his head, looked at me, at Flan, sighed, and settled his head on the table. He had a kind of resigned zeal about bar fights. Flan caught his look and grinned at me. "What if I hit him?" "Then I'll be with a hit guy." "What if I beat him to a bloody pulp, Doll?" he said, and now I sighed. "Then, I guess, I'll be with a bloody pulp and I'll be mad at you." "What if I kill him?" I looked at him. "Then I'll be with a corpse and you'll have me for an enemy." Flan looked at me a long time. He was back lit by a Rolling Rock sign. His nose was a knife in the shadow. He rubbed his hand across his jaw and burned it on the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He jumped back, dropping the cigarette. Just about half a beer short of perfect. He said, "Jesus, Doll, you love him that much?" "He's alright," I said. "I'm with him's all." "Well," he said, coughing, "that's an answer." I laughed at him. He was acting so fucking hard-boiled. But whatever my erstwhile faculties, and they were probably at their lowest right about then, I knew a sap when I saw one. Flan's hard all over. But he's a swooning romantic fool. His eyes get wet at baseball games and he addresses dogs on the street. After a minute, he laughed too and his face softened some. He bought us a round, then another. Then I bought several. Shitty bar tequila. It suited us. Spin had a few words with the bartender, followed her up to the office, and came back with a bottle. Passing it around, the long pulls burned at my gut. Spin probably knew he was licked by then but we all played it out cheerfully. For about an hour, I drank, consorting silently, as was my wont, with an endless parade of hatted phantoms. I think at one point I must've borrowed a crushed brown fedora from a greasy mongoose named Cump, a favorite specter of mine back then, a dapper anarchical fellow possessed of the sheer joyful exuberance of "Surfin' Bird." I'm certain I felt it poised rakishly on my head when I turned, tuning in on the boys. They were arguing baseball. Spin was a die-hard Yankee fan. It went with his long gray face, his cool eyes. Flan, with quieter vehemence, was a Mets man. It flushed his skin, a slow burn. I didn't know about the Mets then. Everybody talked about the Yanks. They were the magic men, could do no wrong. Everyone talked about the democratic fairness of the designated hitter, the Yanks, the wunderkinder. Unless you follow baseball, just about every player you've ever heard of is a Yankee. Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio. Lou Gehrig, the tragic Iron Man. Bill Dickey off the '27 Murderer's Row. Yogi Berra's blather. (C'mon, you've probably said "it ain't over 'til it's over" dozens of times, admit it; and what do you know about baseball?) Like I said, I didn't know about the Mets then. Sweet. Balletic. Tough. And mortal. Incredibly mortal. The tang of strive and failure, of labor in obscurity, underdog magic, long muscles stretching under sweaty skin. It's one of the main things Flan gave me. But that was later on. At the time, I watched my two drunk suitors, listening, drinking. Maybe you think I'm a little too hip, gnomic, an asshole; and Flan's a little too smooth, working that big tough-guy seduction game: a pair of assholes. But such, as Flan might say, were the numbers we were running. We were young. We were in a bar. Seated. Drunk. We were seated in a bar drunk. We were all kinds of fucked up. After all, this story has a point of sorts. I was trying to tell about how it came to be that this long talker, this tall drunken girl, not two months a widow and in reckless need of a shape to her dementia, how it was that this girl came to call herself Dr. Silence. If the story's kind of slick so far, I guess it's because madness can be slick that way. And so can tequila. In the right company. The point is listen. Listen to how you listen. Listen to me. Toward the end, almost at last call, almost at four o'clock in the morning, Flan was having two conversations at once. He was talking to Spin about what a cool girlfriend he had. Me. And he was talking to me about, well, me. He said, "What are you so drunk for?" I told him. I told him that Evan was dead, coughing out the words "my husband"; told him that, tripping, he'd walked under a bus. (That one time, I kept the dope-sick part to myself. I wasn't ashamed, but it seemed so over-determined, somehow, like he'd died in a motorcycle accident or got eaten up by syphilis.) I told Flan that, including creoles, I spoke 39 languages. He blinked at me like a lizard. I told him I had next to no interest in any aspect of my chosen profession. He nickered and shook his head sadly. I told him I had to have the proposal in in two days or lose my funding and all I really wanted was for someone to pay me to sit around acquiring new languages. And, as I told him this, he whipped his head around, saying to Spin, "And do you know what the coolest thing about her is, what I love, what I've been looking for all my life," beating him up with the words. Spin shrugged. "She just sits there, absorbed, absolutely silent. Or watching you speak. She measures every word. No cop could make her talk. Her silence is her bond," whipping his hard face back to me, "your silence is your bond." I remember the moment perfectly, Evan. It was the first time you ever appeared to me. Goofy, your severed head floating and grinning. Now we're pals, sure. Now I can take it: Evan the honor guard, Evan the apparition. Maybe I even like it better than when you were alive. But that was the first time. I was startled, cool, startled. How many times had I addressed you in the weeks after you died? A thousand times? A million? And you chose that instant, a drunk instant, wild, flirtatious, a brink, to make your schlocky entrance. You hovered inches over an ashtray, one long shock of your bloody balk hair curling into the smoldering butts. Someone came by collecting empties, grabbed the ashtray out from under you, and your head shot straight up like a jackrabbit. You teetered, off balance, against a Slits poster, then gracefully double-somersaulted your way across the table 'til you were hanging right between Spin and Flan. Isn't nostalgia sickening? Viscous and patently absurd, the way it slaps that sepia clarity on everything? "Now there's a notion, Chica," your dumb head said. "Silence. Damn. It's got a ring to it, no doubt about that. Damn, Chica. Get a load of the cowboy." I turned my attention from your severed head to the raving guy your head had indicated. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Spin raise his head from the table, look askance at Flan, raise his eyebrows, shrug again. "Okay," I said, cool, knuckles white, my voice a little high. "Silence it is. Dr. Silence. Makes sense. Can't choose a facet of language, make it no language at all." "That's how it happened. Suit you?" I said, inserting myself into the tired quiet, into their boredom, their desire, the quiet catch of breath. Jasper Nitz shifted in his seat and grinned. He'd won, apparently. He'd won his battle of Bohemian Honor. I'd expressed emotion about something. I was wearing myself on my sleeve. But of course I'd won because he'd listened very carefully to my story, measuring it for, whatever, for phoniness, I guess. Anyway, I won. That much was clear. I gathered my papers, looking over the sluggish faces. Nico Shirt, smiling, cleared her throat. Her voice perfumed the room. "So, did you write your thesis on silence?" "Well, actually no," I laughed. "The next day I got a bunch of stolen chicory blossoms from Flan and a call from Uncle Sam. I did a small job for the Feds and kind of slipped into an assistant professorship on the strength of that." We were ten minutes over and at the far end of the table, watches were checked repeatedly, amid nervous coughs and twitches. I was happy. I'd rather talk about just about anything than Naming and Necessity. "But I'll tell you about that another time. And you can check the thesis I did end up writing out of the library. I won't be here Thursday. I have to pick something up for a friend. We can get back to how loons talk after that. Finish the Althusser memoir and I'll give you each five bucks if no one has any questions about it. Stay out of trouble." Right. Get back to how loons talk. As if we ever left. - Biograph and ordering info. |
