25
Murky as it is, the conventional precept that the idea signification contains an augmentation/intensification uncertainty has rather obvious ramifications. The theory that the signification of a term is, in fact, a concept supports the implication that significations actually have individual substance. But are not the significations here for all of us? Are they not public? I’m afrege this is true. Maybe not. Cannot the same be signified for more than one person regardless of psychological predisposition or disposition, for that matter? Even still, understanding the signification, grasping the individual substance of such a thing, is an act of cognitive individuation. So then it comes down to the occupation of a particular and singular, if not nameable or isolatable, psychological state for some meaning to be available or even possible. Alcohol.
This I thought while dead Billy sat at my table. We were drinking. I more than he. He was contained in a forest-green cremation urn wrapped with three tan stripes and a tan cap. It was shaped a like Russian nesting doll and maybe it was, because I never opened it. I would scatter you someplace, my friend, but I would not know where.
Thankfully, Billy did not reply.
We went through the keys together. Some were obviously door keys, others keys to either cabinets or locks. A couple were certainly padlock keys. None was marked in any way to yield to me its corresponding lock. Billy suggested that I take one short key and one long, or at least two keys quite dissimilarly shaped, and search with them alone until I discovered their mates in the world. This made sense. I would not confuse the keys and I could finally create a key to the keys. And then I would devise a plan for my keys.
And what is this one?
Odd, isn’t it?
Billy held the old rusty key and studied it. It must be a keepsake or a charm. It certainly opens no door around here.
Like Zeno to the roost, you are. When was the last time you visited? I know, I know, you just can’t seem to get here or there or anywhere for that matter. Half a step, half a step, half a step home. There is a nice nurse at the desk during the afternoon into the evening. I like her short hair because it does not make her look like a boy. I like her in spite of her taste in men. But because of her taste in men, I can know a little. A little about whens and wheres, goings and comings. And she keeps my secret, our secret, and so I guess that makes us accomplices and I guess that means we’re on the same side and I suppose that means we share the same enemies and I wonder if that means that I am all wrong about her taste in men.
26
Dear Adverbs, Adverbial Phrases, and Turns of Phrase,
I am writing to express, an odious word, perhaps rather then, to impress upon you, in no uncertain terms, enthusiastically even, my indebtedness to you. Your unqualified and qualifying force, your abating timbre, your mitigating music, your bombastic possibility, oh, how gently you insert yourselves, allowing such modest station as extraneous expression, superfluous excess. I will probably, without a doubt, and without fail admit to your undying, if I may be so dramatic, importance to the language I speak, and you would do well to recognize that the language to which I refer is not English, but, merely, crucially, human language. It has taken me, and I hate even to count, many years to so happily employ my unused and, surprisingly, up until recently, unwanted and, largely, unnoticed supply of ly’s.
Yours ever so truly,
I have been reduced to addressing parts of speech, as if they might answer and of course they do. I was thinking I might chat up nouns next when the short, copper-colored key with the rubber head cover opened the drug locker on the west building nurse’s station. I slipped the key into my pocket just as the nurse rounded the corner. It was in fact the nurse who had seen me in the orderlies’ break room. She gave me a suspicious look. I had seen her name tag many times, had known her name, yet this time the pin that adorned her breast spoke to me. Delilah.
Delilah Zorn was around twenty-five years old and beautiful, and as an old man, I can say this, having seen many, many people in my long life. She was graceful, light on her feet, though I would not say she floated, and her skin was a rich reddish brown that seemed to glow yet did not. She was too beautiful to imagine with Harley, so I chose not to, choice being an important activity that I seldom employed in my first sixty years of life. Choice is more complicated than it first seems. There is the axiom of choice that makes me happy just to consider but confuses me when I do, the notion that for every collection of nonempty sets there is a function that chooses an element from each set. I assume that we are each, at least, a nonempty set, even any of the Gang of Six, even Hitler, Cheney, or some other war criminal. So, I made such a choice and Delilah Zorn remained a flower, a star, a waterfall, a stand of aspens.
What were you doing back there, she said.
I learned long ago that the worst answer to any question is nothing, the word or no response. I said, I have a headache and was looking for something to take.
What kind of headache?
Sinus.
Here, take these.
Do you like working at this place? I asked. I had closed my hand around the two pills she had given me.
It pays the bills, she said.
Thank you for the medicine.
Why were you in there? she asked.
Why didn’t you give me away?
I’m not sure.
Do you like that man, that Harley?
Not particularly. Her answer seemed to surprise both of us. I didn’t tell him because I hate to see trouble.
I was looking for something.
I figured that much. What?
Something they took from Billy.
What is it? Maybe I can help.
I found it. But thank you.
It wasn’t keys.
No.
Do you have any children? she asked.
My son was born probably thirty years before you. You see, I’m a very old man.
Not so old, she said. You still have a twinkle in your eye.
Cataracts.
We were flirting. A sad activity. A bit of push. A bit of pull.
Der ganze Strudel strebt nach oben:
Du glaubst zu schieben, und du wirst geschoben.
27
I have a second face.
Perhaps a third.
Access to separate worlds.
The awful and the fruit litter my worlds at the same time. Oh, January, dear Janus, Ianus Bifrons, guardian of doors and gates, looking both forward and back. Up past the pines someplace, past the aspens, is Zoagli, with its view of the sea. Behold the sign.
In a dream, in the repetition of the dream, the riddle is solved. I kill myself as my father in order to commit incest with myself as my mother, but as my father I prevent my own conception.
Leben wir oder werden wir gelebt?
28
Sheldon Cohen had been a doctor and he was proud that, unlike so many in his profession, he had lived well into his nineties. He also boasted an every-morning gotta-pee erection that I was privileged never to witness, but he talked about it unabashedly with anyone who would listen. Ninety-four with a boner, he would say at the breakfast table full of old ladies. He never mentioned it at lunch or dinner, I assumed because he had forgotten about it by then, but the ladies didn’t forget and so raced to his table at every meal. Since Billy’s death Sheldon had taken to sitting with me and therefore so did five women.
Who’s to say they won’t kill one of us next, said Maria Cortez. She was always dressed impeccably. She was still beautiful even though she was hunched over a bit. She knew she was beautiful and moved in that way. Billy was kind.