Let’s just say it is a boy. Do we have to name him?
What do you mean, do we have to name him?
Do we have to give him a name? Is there some law requiring that we give him a name? Is there a law that any of us have to have names? What will happen? Will the government come and give him a name?
Why would you do that to a child?
Do what? Save him the ridicule that names cause? If you name him Buck, kids will call him Fuck. If you name him Richard, they’ll call him Dickyard. If you name him Louis, they’ll call him Lois. You can’t mess up ——. I want to think that a name is like a poem. It is not like a practical message that can be considered functional only if we can infer its intended meaning. A name says something, but no one need know whether what is inferred is what was meant. Gone are the days of Cartwrights and Masons and Smiths.
You’ve lost your mind.
And with it, my name.
And I’m supposed to believe you had this conversation with Mom.
Believe what you like. Or, better, believe what you believe; it’s always easier, if you ask me. You would have me imagine that in some cases language really is just a simple transmission of rather functional, if not banal, messages between speakers. Not only is that not true, but it is necessarily untrue, even in the most functional of exchanges, say between two firemen or a pilot and her navigator or a surgeon and his operating-room nurse and here between you and me as you attend to me, where I use she and where I use he and even why I might have put she before he, or did not phrase the question as he following she.
She was claiming to be my daughter and I could not refute her by simply saying I was not her father. Perhaps if she had been Chinese, but she was, in fact, racially ambiguous, as so many of us are. For all I know she was Chinese. I know only that I am not Chinese.
The morning came with a silent treatment that I did not believe was deserved. More than that, I did not believe a word of the silent treatment. Sylvia stood in the kitchen preparing breakfast, not an odd thing for anyone else, but the woman had never prepared a breakfast in our thirteen years together. Bacon was releasing its grease into several layers of paper towel and eggs were scrambling in the skillet.
I’ve done nothing wrong, I said.
Of course you haven’t.
Well, what if she is my daughter?
The more the merrier.
No, really, what if she is my daughter?
Then you will be Papa and I will be Sylvia and she will be your child and my stepchild and when she has babies you will be a grandpa and I will be Sylvia. I began to understand some of Sylvia’s anxiety. I don’t mean to be silent. I simply do not know what to say. Do you want her to be your daughter?
She’s not my daughter.
That was not my question.
No, I don’t want her to be my daughter.
And if she is, how will you feel about having said that?
Are you trying to drive me mad? I’ll feel like shit for having thought it, that’s how I feel. But it is how I feel. A person feels what a person feels.
She favors you slightly.
You go from not talking to this?
I’m not attacking you.
I know.
If Meg Caro was my daughter, what was I supposed to do? It was a little late for diaper changing and parent-teacher conferences. I tried to think what I would want if I were her and all I could come up with was knowledge. I guessed that she would want to know me, as a person, as an artist perhaps. She’d said she was a painter, told me the first day she’d come around, and I hadn’t received her too kindly. Still, she came back. She did not return to modify our initial meeting, to recast it or even to say something she forgot to say. She returned to punctuate her original request that I allow her to be my apprentice. Only now did I understand the apprentice business. But all interpretation relies in some part, if not all, on charity, I realized, appreciating (a generous term) that I had to dispraise or at least blink at some differences in our use of the term. Her notion of apprentice was layered in ways I could not have anticipated and, given the discongruity of our experiences, the inequality of our stati or statae or, splitting the gender difference, stata, it became clear that, though we were participating in the social activity of language, we were not speaking the same one. All this to say that we never know what the fuck anyone is saying to us, that the only legitimate and correct response to anyone uttering any sentence, even Your pants are on fire, is: Excuse me?
Murphy? I’ll be Murphy again.
Lang?
How does one go about getting a DNA test to prove or disprove paternity?
I take it you’d like to disprove paternity, else you would not have said prove or disprove. Well, you don’t need me for this, you just get a kit from a lab and send in your samples.
Samples of what?
They’ll give you a kit.
You don’t sound particularly intrigued by my question. Don’t you want to know why I need such a service? We’ve been friends for a long time.
Long enough for you to know that I never care about other people’s business. I assume your pecker has come back to haunt you, or bite you, or whatever metaphor you find the most accurate.
I might have a daughter.
I guessed son. I had a fifty percent chance and blew it.
It could be that I’m pulling your leg and simply need this bit of information for something I’m writing.
You’re not that funny. And you’re not a writer. And I don’t care why you want to know the ins and outs of this, in spite of the fact that ins and outs must have been involved at some point to create this situation.
Situation is right.
Before you go, let me tell you this joke.
I’m not in the mood.
Won’t take a second. The president is on a tour of this new hospital. There are Secret Service guys all around, but that doesn’t matter. Anyway, the doctor leading the tour takes the president through this ward and there’s the House minority leader sitting in the corridor and he’s jacking off. The president shakes his head and says, Christ, what’s that all about? And the doctor says, That poor man has advanced semen over-production syndrome, ASOPS. His seminal vesicles and his testes are hyperactive and so he must ejaculate every ten minutes or he’ll suffer severe damage to his reproductive system. The president says, My God. And so they go up to the next floor, right, and there is the chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations and there’s this orderly and he’s sucking the chair’s penis. And the president says, Jesus H. Christ on a crutch in a cornfield, what’s the problem here? The doctor says, Oh, this is the same condition, ASOPS, but he’s got a better health-care plan.
Can I hang up now?
Not yet. I want to tell you one more thing, something Hippocrates said.
And what’s that?
He said, he said, he said that you can discover no measure, no weight, no form of calculation, to which you can refer your judgments in order to give them absolute certainty. In our art there exists no certainty except in our sensations. What do you think of that?
Now may I hang up?
You bet.
They have big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. This was the line that Nat remembered from somewhere as he considered his station as narrator. He didn’t want to be any kind of mediator, yet he understood that he had to murder the authorial presence and to do that he’d have to find the author and kill him, for it was all too clear to him that in spite of his station, there was yet another layer sitting on the world, like a blanket of volcanic ash, smothering meaning and, while changing meaning, covering meaning while making it. He would have to rise up with all others like him and slit the sleeping throat of the master. That this master would put an eye in his mouth was too much.