The Antichrist tore at some grass, looked at his sister. “No, ‘idea’ means ’idea,‘ but that, you may have noticed, is not an idea, but rather a sort of drawing. An infamous Lenore Beadsman drawing, right out of her infamous school of stick-figure symbolist art.” He smiled, did something to his hair. “You remember the drawing of John and Dad, that one Christmas? The time John had said something about Miss Malig, something pretty funny, and Dad had said that if you can’t say anything nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all, and John pointed out that that thing itself that Dad had just said to him really wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination ’nice,‘ and so shouldn’t itself have been said, and so was, interestingly, internally contradictory? And Lenore gave us that drawing of John and Dad, and Dad’s exploded head, and the corn-cob suppository? A really deadly drawing, I thought.”
“But when did you get this one?” Lenore asked, looking at the veal label. She thought she could make out a cactus in the splatter of ink surrounding the incline of the hill in the drawing.
“It was waiting in my p. o. box when I got here,” LaVache said. “Return-address-less, I might add, and interestingly not in Lenore’s distinctive indecipherable hand. That was ten… eleven days ago. I got it eleven days ago, Lenore.” The Antichrist suddenly hawked and spat white.
Lenore ignored the spitting, and the fact that the Antichrist’s head was lolling quite a bit now. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.
“Oh, very much so, don’t we, precious,” the Antichrist hissed to his leg.
“Then maybe you’ll be good enough to tell me, because I’m afraid I seem to be clueless on this one,” Lenore said, staring at the label.
The Antichrist sucked at the red eye of the corpse of his joint. Lenore saw that he held the nubbin delicately in his very long fingernails, avoided getting burned. He grinned at Lenore. “What would you do if I demanded that you first feed the leg?” he asked.
Lenore looked at her brother, then at the leg. She said, “I’d propose a deal. You tell me the thing you know, the thing that clearly bears on the well-being of a relative we’re both supposed to love, the thing that it looks like I came all the way out here to find out; you tell me, and in return I don’t throw the leg all the way down to the bottom of the hill, leaving you with a long and possibly dangerous and certainly very embarrassing retrieval-hop.”
“Oh, now, don’t be that way,” smiled the Antichrist, casually reattaching and strapping the leg, which took a minute. When he was attached, he said, “The drawing is of a sort referred to in the Investigations, as I’m sure you, the hotshot major, would remember a lot better than I, if you thought about it for about three seconds. I seem to recollect the reference being page fifty-four, note b, of the Geach and Anscombe translation. We’re presented with a picture of a man climbing a slope, in profile, one leg in front of the other as he progresses, marking motion, walking up the incline, facing the top, eyes directed at the top, all the standard climbing-association stuff. Et cetera et cetera. So it’s a picture of a man walking up a hill. But then remember Gramma Lenore’s own Dr. Wittgenstein says hold on now, pardner, because the picture could just as clearly and exactly and easily represent the man sliding down the slope, with one leg higher than the other, backwards, et cetera. Just as exactly.”
“Shit,” said Lenore.
“And then we’re invited to draw all these totally fecal conclusions about why we just automatically assume from just looking at the picture that the guy’s climbing and not sliding. Going up instead of coming down. Complete and total dribble, and really actually heart-rending psychological innocence, as far as I’m concerned, which you should remember, given this certain conversation we all had in the Volvo when you were in school, when Gramma decided I was evil and said I needed to be ‘stamped out,’ declared her intention to stop giving me Christmas presents. Anyway…”
“Well and then here, on the other hand, we’ve got this antinomy,” Lenore said, looking at the barber drawing.
“Right,” the Antichrist said, throwing away the tiny dot of black joint. He paused for a moment, looking out into nothing. Lenore looked at him. “Brenda,” she heard him say loudly, “you should go back to your parents immediately. Try not to be at all impressionable, at least while you’re around here.”
Lenore twisted around and looked. The little girl with green eyes was standing behind them, above them, on the cement rim of the Memorial, looking down at their heads. The wind ruffled her silky socks. She stared at the Antichrist.
“Shoo, love of mine,” LaVache said.
The girl turned and fled. Her shoes clicked on the cement, fading.
Lenore looked at her brother. More grass squeaked in his hands. The sprinklers suddenly all went off, stopped hissing, the water sucked back inside itself, in the pipes, down in the fields. The fields looked great. They shone fire in the red light, deepened to twinkle in the glossy black of the gym shadows. “So then here I guess I’m supposed to ask what you think the two together might be supposed to mean,” Lenore said.
LaVache laughed like a seal. His head lolled. “Gramma would be disappointed in her minion,” he said. “They obviously… mean whatever you want them to mean. Whatever you want to use them for. Ms. Beadsman…,” he pretended to hold a microphone under Lenore’s nose, “… how would you like the drawings to function? Audience, please just hold off on that input…” The Antichrist made tick-tock noises with his tongue. “Function,” he said. “The extreme unction of function. Function. From the Latin ‘func,’ meaning foul-smelling due to persistent overuse. She has crawled off. She is either dead, or functioning furiously. Speaking of functioning furiously, you might help me up, here, for a moment, please.”
Lenore helped her brother up. He limped behind a bush at the side of the hill. Lenore heard sounds of him going to the bathroom into the dry bush.
“I have an idea,” the Antichrist’s voice came over the bush to Lenore. “Let’s do the natural Beadsman thing. Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend just for fun that Lenore hasn’t expired, that Mrs. Yingst hasn’t chopped her up and fed her to Vlad the Impaler, that Gramma actually does give a hoot about your being potentially worried, and might actually be trying to use that worry in some nefarious way.” He came back over, slowly, keeping his balance on the incline. “Now, under this game-scenario, how might we wish to see the drawings as functioning, here?” He settled back down with Lenore’s help, looked at her. “The sliding-man drawing, under this scenario, might say, hey, ho, watch how you go. Perceive how you — we — perceive Lenore’s being… ‘missing.’ Don’t just look at it; think about how to look at it. Maybe it… means the opposite of what you think it does, of the way it… looks.” LaVache was having leg trouble, on the hump of the hill. Lenore helped him get more comfortable. She held the baby food labels in her hand.
LaVache continued, “See, maybe Lenore isn’t gone at all. Maybe you’re who’s gone, when all is said and done. Maybe… this one I particularly like… maybe Dad’s gone, spiralled into the industrial void. Maybe he’s taken us with him. Maybe Lenore’s found. Maybe instead of her sliding away from you, you’ve slid away from her. Or climbed away from her. Maybe it’s all a sliding-and-climbing game! Chutes and Ladders, risen from the dead!” The Antichrist was having trouble talking, because his mouth was all dry from the joint. He got the last of Clint Wood’s fee from his drawer and lit it.
“Hmmm,” Lenore was saying.
“Except don’t think about yourself, in this game, at all,” said the Antichrist. “Because in this game, the way we’re playing, the barber drawing means don’t think about yourself, in the context of the game, or your head explodes into art deco. Just think about other people, if you want to play. Which means that family-members have to be treated as explicitly Other, which I must say I find attractively refreshing.”