“They were always there before, Nicholas, and you never noticed them. Why should they matter now?
Don’t pick at that.” She slaps my hand and my palm thrums with pain. “Why must you obsess over it so?
Here we are with a day off and you cannot leave it alone.”
Emily works for an ad agency. She designs sentences that sell perfection to the consumer public. Before I ever met Emily, I saw her work on billboards at the outskirts of town: “Buy Skuttles: We Expect No Rebuttals” and “Someday You Are Gonna Die: In the Meantime, Buy and Buy — at the Coriander Mall.”
At the bottom, in small print, the billboards read: “Ads by Emily.” At the time, I was girlfriendless so I called up the billboard makers, tracked down the ad agency, and asked her out. She liked my collection of erotic sentences and my manual dexterity. I liked the gossamer line of hair that runs down her forearms, the curves of her breasts with their tiny pink nipples.
But her sentences have become passé to me, too crude and manipulative. How can I expect more from her, given the nature of the business?
So I say, “Yes, dear,” and sigh and examine my palm. She is always reasonable. Always right. But I am not sure she understands me. I wonder what she would think about my memory of the arc of sky above with night coming down and the sea rustling on the shore. She did not argue when I insisted on separate apartments.
The circle on my palm has gone from pink to white and the way the wrinkle lines careen into one another, the scars like tiny fractures, fascinates me.
Emily giggles. “Nicholas, you are so perfectly silly sitting there with that bemused look on your face.
Anyone would think you’d just had a miscarriage.”
I wonder if there is something wrong with our relationship; it seems as blank as my life as an orphan.
Besides, “miscarriage” is not the appropriate logic leap to describe the look on my face. Granted, I cannot myself think of the appropriate hoop for this dog of syntax to leap through, but still…
We return to our separate apartments. All I can think about are dwarfs, hunchbacks, cripples. I sleep and dream of dwarfs, deformed and malicious, with sinister slits for smiles. But when I wake, I have the most curious of thoughts. I remember the weight of the dwarf woman’s body against my side as she stuck the sliver into my palm. I remember the smell of her: sweet and sharp, like honeysuckle; the feel of her hand, the fingers lithe and slender; her body beneath the clothes, the way parts do not match and could never match, and yet have unity.
V
A most peculiar assignment lies on my desk the next morning, so peculiar that I forget my damaged palm. I am to write a sentence about a dwarf. The Director has left a note that I am to complete this sentence ASAP. He has also left me photographs, a series of newspaper articles, and photocopies from a diary. The lead paragraph of the top newspaper article, a sensational bit of work, reads: David “Midge” Jones, 27, a 4-foot-5 dwarf, lived for attention, whether he ate fire at a carnival, walked barefoot on glass for spectators, or allowed himself to be hurled across a room for a dwarf-throwing contest. Jones yearned for the spotlight. Sunday, he died in the dark. He drank himself to death. Tests showed his blood alcohol level at.43, or four times the level at which a motorist would be charged with driving under the influence of alcohol.
I pick up the glossy color print atop the pile of documentation. It shows Jones at the carnival, the film overexposed, his eyes forming red dots against the curling half-smile of his mouth. At either side stand flashy showgirls with tinsel-adorned bikini tops crammed against his face. Jones stares into the camera lens, but the showgirls stare at Jones as though he were some carnival god. The light on the photograph breaks around his curly brown hair, but not his body, as if a spotlight had been trained on him. He stands on a wooden box, his arms around the showgirls.
The film’s speed is not nearly fast enough to catch the ferris wheel seats spinning crazily behind him, so that light spills into the dazzle of showgirl tinsel, showgirl cleavage. Behind the ferris wheel, blurry sand dunes roll, and beyond that, in the valley between dunes, the sea, like a squinting eye.
The photograph has a sordid quality to it. When I look closer, I see the sheen of sweat on Jones’s face, his flushed complexion. Sand clings to his gnarled arms and his forehead. The lines of his eyes, nose, and mouth seem charcoal pencil rough: a first, hurried sketch.
I turn the photograph over. In the upper right hand corner someone has written: David Jones, September 19—. The Amazing Mango BrothersSeaside Circus and Carnival Extravaganza.He cleaned out animal cages and gave 50 cent blow jobs behind the Big Top.
Jones is a brutish man. I want nothing to do with him. Yet I must write a sentence about him for a client I will never meet. I must capture David Jones in a single sentence.
I read the rest of the article, piecemeal.
In his most controversial job, Jones ignored criticism, strapped on a modified dog harness, and allowed burly men to hurl him across a room in a highly publicized dwarf-throwing contest at the King’s Head Pub.
“I’m a welder, which can be dangerous. But welders are frequently laid off, so I also work in a circus. I eat fire, I walk on broken glass with bare feet. I climb a ladder made of swords, I lie on a bed of nails and have tall people stand on me. This job is easy compared to what I usually do.”
I spend many hours trying to form a sentence, while sweat drips down my neck despite the slow swish of fans. I work through lunch, distracted only by a dwarf juggler (plying his trade with six knives and a baby) who has wrested the traffic circle away from a group of guildless mimes and town players.
I begin simply.
The dwarf’s life was tragic.
No.
David Jones’ life was tragic.
No.
David’s life was unnecessarily tragic.
Unnecessarily tragic? Tragedy does not waste time with the extraneous. A man’s life cannot be reduced to a Latinesque, one-line, eleven-syllable haiku. How do I identify with David? Did he ever spend time in an orphanage? Did he ever find himself on a beach, his parents dead and never coming back? How hard can it have been to be an anomaly, a misfit, a mistake?
Then my imagination unlocks a phrase from some compartment of my brain: David left the flesh in tragic fashion.
Again, my palm distracts me, but not as much. I see all the imperfections there and yet they do not seem as ugly as before. David may be ugly, but I am not ugly.
As I drive home in the sour, exhaust-choked light of dusk, I admire the oaks that line the boulevard, whorled and wind-scored and yet stronger and more soothing to the eye than the toothpick pines, the straight spruce.
VI
By now the plants have conquered my apartment in the name of CO2, compost, and photosynthesis. I let them wander like rejects from ’50s B-grade vegetable movies, ensuring that Emily will never stay for long. The purple and green passionflowers, stinking of sex, love the couch with gentle tendrils. The splash-red bougainvillea cat-cradles the kitchen table, then creeps toward the refrigerator and pulls on the door, thorns making a scratchy sound. Along with this invasion come the scavengers, the albino geckos that resemble swirls of mercury or white chocolate. I have no energy to evict them.
No, I sit in a chair, in underwear weathered pink by the whimsical permutations of the wash cycle, and read by the blue glow of the mute TV screen.
David grew up in Dalsohme, a bustling but inconsequential port town on the Gulf side of the Moth River Delta. His parents, Jemina and Simon Pultin, made their living by guiding tourists through the bayous in flatbottom boats. Simon talked about installing a glass bottom to improve business, but Jemina argued that no one would want to see the murky waters of a swamp under a microscope, so to speak. Instead, they supplemented their income by netting catfish and prawns. David was good at catching catfish, but Jemina and Simon preferred to have him work the pole on the boat because the tourists often gawked at him as much as at the scenery. It was Jemina’s way of improving business without giving in to Simon’s glass-bottom boat idea. Some of the documents the Director gave me suggested that Simon had adopted David precisely for the purpose of manning the boat. There is no record of what David thought of all of this, but at age fifteen he “ran away from home and joined a circus.” He did whatever he had to on the carnival circuit in order to survive, including male prostitution, but apparently never saved enough money to quit, though his schemes became grander and more complex.