The pretext, I suppose, was exercise, a kind of fitness. For surely, any fool can learn to swim, and in your mind’s redshot eyes one can just as well walk upon the water. But to walk through it, neither floating nor drowning, now that is a test — though the choleric Cannonian is sure to ask, what good is it to be a champion sprinter in a swimming pool?
I cannot recall exactly when this project began or ended, or how to factor in the crude determinants: my weight, his age, the velocity of the current as Time flowed back and forth. Read into it what you will. Read anything but comedy or dread. He cast me into the river which rose not over me; I was then what I was to be. As I saw the man pick the boy up, I was being picked up. From the water I saw the man carry the boy into the water. As the bubbles from my nostrils ascended to the surface, I saw the two beneath the riverine sheet, as if from a dirigible. From the far mountain bank I saw them clamber out of the river, then look back at the broken columns of their clothes. And from our clothes I saw the naked man and hairless boy turn to stare at me, then lay down like animal spirits in the mud.
How was it that in his arms, in that river, I was both behind and ahead of myself? Philosophers call this an affliction, and perhaps it is so. But I also know that no man can take leave of his father without it; I was where I had been for all time and where for all time I shall go.
From my father, who became a different man each day, I learned we have no choice but to be both hunter and prey. I saw that the bad boy becomes a good father as the best kind of cover. Even as the bad boy always remains bad, and gets badder still, the father’s guise is perfected. Like my father, I wanted desperately to be good. So I could be really bad.
My father was not on intimate terms with me; he was but a voice, an encouraging voice, let it be said, warm and straightforward, with never a catch. He talked like a book and rarely crossed out a line. He encouraged me to do what I wanted, on the condition that he would not have to pretend to be interested in it, and that I would not lie about it. I have lied to everyone but my father, which I trust was not good enough for him, but for him, nonetheless. When it became clear, however, that this world could not be passed on to me, he gave me some advice which I now pass on to you: 1. Neither marry nor wander, you are not strong enough for either. 2. Do not believe any confession, voluntary or otherwise. And most importantly, 3. Maxime constat ut suus canes cuique optimus. (Everyone has a cleverer dog than their neighbor; that is the only undisputed fact.)
And perhaps that is why I have never owned a dog, and even shy away from strangers’ pets, for every dog I see signifies to me a missed opportunity. My father kept a daybook every day of his life but one, not a record of the weather or personal experiences or even facts, but to keep faith with a complete record of one’s misfortunes. I, on the other hand, have erased each day with equal ledger-bound determination, all too often seeking with my exaggerations a forgetfulness of an all-too-faithful memory. But if I could not carry on my father’s punctilious bravery, and join the chorus of exalted apologists for heroic and intense living, I could do the one thing he could not do for himself. I could run away for him.
Sleeping beneath the reed beds, his head in the opposite direction of other pike, I was leaning on the Wodna Mze, my amphibian Waterman, the sorrowing seducer who shoots upwards from the abyss, his hiding place, and bolts through swine-clouds of semen to the dream of the double life.
PREOPS (Iulus)
It was with some trepidation that Felix Aufidius made his appointment with Doctor Psylander Sychaeus Pür, for he believed the first precondition of survival in the modern world was a profound aversion to the medical profession. He had never been to any sort of doctor in his life, including the moment of his birth, which was handled expertly by a sixteen-year-old Astingi midwife. He even pulled his own bad teeth, rocking back and forth in his armchair, fingers stuffed in his mouth, until the proud moment when he finally displayed the diseased molar, still attached to his face by a strand of bloody spittle. He regarded science as a perverse ideology devoted to the erasure of its own history and refusing to know its place in the world. He actually pitied physicians — merchants trading in the mitigation of miseries they could not understand — and their inevitable false humor and secret despair. Nevertheless, before submitting to an examination by the Professor, he wanted to be at the peak of his form, and given his inexperience in the domain of passive interlocution, he believed he owed it to his new comrade to at least have a practice session, a trial run in the white arts of preventative care.
Needless to say, he had previously steered clear of Dr. Pür, who functioned as village surgeon, midwife, apothecary, dentist, and barber, and who the peasants treated with the utmost respect, believing he was essentially a weak and desperate man who would hurt you less if he felt revered. My father also recognized Pür as having the strongest of all depressive addictions — that of always being helpful — and that if he did not receive his ameliorative fix of gratitude in every waking hour, he was never far from taking his own life.
Pür’s office was in the Legal and Medical Building, the most ornate in Silbürsmerze. The waiting room overlooked a trout farm formed by a diversion of the Vah through a series of chattering gates and broken concrete sluices, where countless fish kept the water in a constant frenzy awaiting their daily load of American Troutchow. He always had the most attractive village girls as nurses, and it clearly thrilled them to see the man from the big house on the volcano. Naked like the nurses under a billowing smock, Felix braced his buttocks against the cold edge of the examining table, determined to match the excellent spirits of his examiner. Pür’s glistening head hove into view, banded by a circular mirror, gazing longingly into his patient’s face as a man might look down a particularly dark and turbid well.
“And to what may I owe the honor of this visit, Councilor?”
Felix immediately felt the overpowering urge to lie. And Pür, to his credit, seemed to sense this, beginning each rote inquiry before Father finished his last answer.
“Lie down so you look to the stars,” Pür purred.
Dr. Pür was quite proud of his instruments, the cost of which, he constantly reminded his patients, actually required a city of five thousand to support them, not the twelve hundred, noble as they were, of Silbürsmerze — though to Felix’s non-industrial eye the office did not seem inordinately well-stocked. There was a medicine cabinet, an examining table, and what Pür called in a burst of pride, an “extra table.” His special equipment consisted of a thermometer, a stethoscope, an ophthalmometer, a laryngoscope, a sphygmomanometer, a prescription pad, and chemicals to detect the presence of albumen in the urine. There was also a nebulizer, a tank of compressed air, and a rare half-bath. Behind a single glass-fronted bookshelf Father could make out treatises on rubella and diptheria, facial neuralgia and the gibbous spine, relapsing fever and the sweetness of urine, and between bound volumes of a magazine called New Thought were Fothergill’s An Account of the Sore Throat, Baille’s Confessions of a Magnetizer, and Pekelharing’s trilogy, A propos de la pepsine.
The patient could barely suppress a sardonic smile, and took grim satisfaction as the doctor dismissed out of hand any comment he made describing his own health. To be fair to the doctor, Pür distrusted his own unaugmented observations as much as his patient’s narratized symptoms, and for that matter anything which remotely smacked of disease theory. He knew that for most people the body only really existed as a kind of delusion, a sort of error without trial, and that self-pity had become not a feeling but a regnant belief system. The only cure he could offer was to encourage his patients to somehow get their minds off their ailments, a treatment which could consume time unreckoned, and a patience and imagination beyond his own. This left him bitter, which he thought it noble to suppress. He had no whole world to offer the sick to be whole in, so why pretend otherwise? They should accept that both of them were caught up in the great cycle of medical history, absorbing all that had been condemned as quackery, while at the same moment awestruck as the discarded dogmas were taken up with avidity by new quacks. Yes, the earth, like the body, is mostly fluid — fluids and bad light. Quantify the shame, medicate it, and be done with it.