And
he arose, and did eat and drink,
and went in the strength of that meat
forty days and forty nights unto Horeb
the mount of God.
--1 Kings 19: 8
How do you go about reviewing a novel that, in the present tense,
takes exactly twenty-seven minutes (a taxi's waiting with the meter
running the whole time), yet, before publication, occupied the same
number of reams of typing paper as the monstrosity by that other
nearly seven-foot-tall Tom, which legendarily required a pickup
truck to lug it to Scribner's, so Maxwell Perkins could nibble and
scratch and worry its balls off?
And how do you (critical descendant of that mincing deballocker
you'll never admit to being) even start to sketch out the rough
draft of an essay about the so-called "Pentateuch," the
new and lawless Torah, of which the abovementioned volume is but
the Genesis? How even formulate intelligent questions about a splintering
shelf-load of books, amounting to more than a million words--a
frightening sport of nature, like all sets of quints?
You steel yourself, is what you do: you buck up your courage, fling
out your bosom, throw antiquated "New Critical" theory
to the wind, and seek out the lawgiver himself. You try to catch
the new Moses on top of his personal Horeb, before he hikes down
and trips on the golden calf, after which point you'll never be
able to get near him again, except for three seconds every few years
at mob-scene book signings.
But how physically to locate this mountain of God? According to
the promo-copy, THE SAM EDWINE PENTATEUCH "follows a disruptive
Gargantua from the Far West to the Extreme Orient." Finding
myself adrift in the latter region of our planet, I thought it might
be possible to use the words of the great recluse himself as clues
in a kind of scavenger hunt, Tom Bradley as the grand prize. In
a recent essay published in London's magisterial Nthposition Magazine
(shortlisted for the European Online Journalism Award) Dr. Bradley
speaks of being surrounded by--
"...itinerant TEFL trash, who are here just to stockpile money
between heroin-soaked trips to the Golden Triangle."
Now there's a solid hint. It sounds as though he's been stranded,
or exiled, in some East Asian hell-hole that happens to be prosperous
enough, at the moment (thanks, no doubt, to America's noblesse oblige),
to support a troop of those white monkeys who feign "the Teaching
of the English as the Foreign Language." This couldn't be more
fortuitous, because that's exactly what I am (stranded in East Asia,
that is--though I guess I might qualify, in Dr. Bradley's book,
as a piece of TEFL trash, too).
It occurred to me that my author and I might be within tangible
reach. So I went, not bar-hopping (not just yet) but language school-hopping.
I tiptoed and cringed through the dockside alleys of a certain port
town on an obscure island in the East China Sea where he seems to
have been marooned--at least the most recent Bradley sightings
have occurred in the sordid vicinity. In dive after pedagogical
dive, I kept my auditory meati reluctantly dilated for sounds fitting
the following description (from the same Nthposition essay):
"Almost every sentence that comes out of these kids' mouths
turns up at the end, like a question, and most of their vowel sounds
are schwas."
I came upon one clip-joint in particular whose closet-sized "classrooms" exuded such muffled moans. So far so good. After standing on the
sidewalk outside and listening awhile, I had to agree with Dr. Bradley
that--
"It's very strange to imagine them at the helms of English
conversation classes. But it's reassuring to remember that they're
only working in storefront language schools where instruction is
but a secondary, or even tertiary concern, if that..."
"Storefront" is right. A member of the faculty was lying
on the stoop at my feet in a puddle of chemical beer, tousled braids
of pork-sauce ramen swirling from the side of his mouth. Shitzu
dogs serviced him like Lazarus, causing me to recall the remainder
of Dr. Bradley's paragraph:
"The managers don't seem to care, or notice, if their youthful
Caucasoid instructors have speech impediments, but are satisfied
if they agree to brighten their hair with bleach and their eyes
with turquoise contact lenses, and fornicate with the students on
demand, as it's good for business..."
Hardly any dark roots were showing under the educator's regulation
platinum dye job, and one of his corneal suction cups remained firmly
in place (the other had slipped from between flaccid eyelids and
was glistening like a sapphire zit on his chin). His adherence to
the dress code notwithstanding, it was hard to imagine this comatose
stud drumming up much business. This clearly was not the institution
my author had described. So I decided to hit the bars and collect
my thoughts. If you're going to step on drunks, anyway, you might
as well get in on the action.
I stumbled onto the right track. In a seawall tavern that offered
the services of a sad gaggle of early-teenaged hand-job hostesses,
some young and youngish American alcoholics said things like, "You
mean that really, really, um, huge-ungus-type dude? With the sort
of, like, orange beard? He never comes to drink here? But newspaper
delivery guys and milk, um, men? You know? They, kind of, whisper
about someone? Like on top of that, um, sort of mountain?"
A thumb was aimed over a shoulder at the largest of several dark
entities that lifted their cloudy masses from among hovels in a
muggy-looking suburb a few blocks inland: not quite the "backside
of the desert" mentioned in that other Pentateuch, but wilderness
enough for me.
Between rib-splitting coughs, a certain Englishman chimed in. (I
didn't see his face because he was slouched in a dark booth and
receiving a lap-job from a tiny Filipina white slave who seemed,
strangely, at first glance, to have fastened her fingernails deep
into his bony chest.) "If this is going to be one of those
literary blowjobs, Mate, best be ready to grin and swallow when
that 'orrible old cunt squirts spunk."
A subject of Elizabeth II in these special circumstances is allowed
to express his thoughts in more developed periods than our own countrymen
because, after all, his ancestors invented the lingo. It also helps
if he happens to be the manager of the educational institution which
furnishes this dive with the bulk of its clientele. I left this
Brit drilling his little lap-dancer on today's lesson, which she
was obliged to recite to the accompaniment of his agonizing, chronic
lung seizures:
You taught me language, an my profit on't
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language.
I'm already tired of reporting the dialog of Tom Bradley's fellow
ejectees, with whom he never deigns to associate, but who seem to
have made him the main subject of their amphetamined and opiated
gossip. So let me just paraphrase the remainder: stomping around
on top of that geological formation in the blackest hours before
each dawn, someone fitting his description (and who else in this
whole hemisphere comes close?) has been glimpsed. I can't imagine
how he's been glimpsed. Maybe a pair of those infra-red night-vision
binocks the Syrians pilfered from our stalwarts in Iraq have made
it here on the black market to please insomniac voyeurs. I doubt
many people would sneak up and try verifying his puzzling presence
with naked eyes. It would take a foolhardy weirdo or an obsessed
stalker type, or a hybrid of both.
All that remained for me was to dig in on a bus bench and wait for
the first subtle insinuations of sunrise. This did not require the
patienza of Mother Teresa because, around here, it comes at four
o'clock. The natives, who are mostly middle-class office-workers
(though that's about to change, as their country relaxes deeper
and deeper into the trance called penury) are not allowed to go
home until the boss does, and it's easier to make the old rooster
feel guilty if it's pitch dark outside; therefore Daylight Savings
Time is a taboo subject among elected officials.
There. That's all you know, and all you need to know, about the
setting of this encounter. (Incidentally it's Nippon we're talking
about--Nagasaki, if you insist on pinching and puckering it
down even further.) Now you understand why this brush with genius
has to happen on top of Horeb East, in the wee hours, elevated in
space and insulated in time from the inscrutability, the misdirection,
the willful uncommunicativeness, the suffocating group-pressure
brought to bear with exquisite obliquity even on the slave masters
themselves. So, the boss won't close up at a decent hour? Instead
of rising up like other prisoners of major industrialized economies
and demanding a contract with set work-hours, let's just quietly
cause the sun to go down and come up again with unnatural prematurity,
and meantime huddle together, sullen at our desks in the gathering
gloom. Land of the Rising Sun, and how.
Why in God's name is our author here? Though craving an immediate
solution to this and countless other Bradleyan perplexities, I decided
for the time being to tuck them all away, to empty my head as far
as possible for a non-zen master or an American over the age of
twenty-five, and just start climbing blindly.
* * * *
Through near-pitch blackness my way spiraled up and up, switching
back and forth in the foreign air. The track's soggy surface seemed
always to bank in the direction opposite to what any sane surveyor
would choose, assuming his purpose was to discourage vehicles and
beings from falling off the outer edge. Below, in blackish-greenness,
fanged with fronds, a bamboo maw gaped and groaned with the breeze,
as if some exotic category of the damned were lodged in its throat-thick
stalks. And beyond that weedy perdition, steadily sinking from my
point of view, our author's adopted city moaned out its own continuo
to the chorus. The further each of my steps lifted me above it,
the more definitely I could hear Nagasaki's song--and it wasn't
Puccini's greatest hit.
Dr. Bradley's mainland neighbors have, for thousands of years, recognized
the Root Tone of Nature. A city of any time or nation, if situated
far enough away to be apprehended as a whole, produces this note,
the same sung by a river in full springtime spate, or a vast deciduous
forest when the wind rushes through its boughs. It is said to share
the wavelength of F above middle-C on a piano well-tempered and
tuned precisely to A at 440 hertz, of which there are precious few
in China--and small wonder: imagine the interlocking layers
of high civilization required to bring such a marvel into existence.
Back in the dynastic days when this notion was formulated the Celestials
were using guitar-like contraptions.
"Hast thou attuned thy heart and mind to the great mind and
heart of all mankind? For as all Nature-sounds are echoed back by
the sacred River's roaring voice, so the heart of him who in the
stream would enter must thrill in response to every sigh and thought
of all that lives and breathes." Thus says the Book of Golden
Precepts, as translated by the mighty Pythoness of Dnepropetrovsk--whom
I've long suspected of being Tom Bradley's spiritual guide. (And
if it seems strange to you that the author of such works as "Squirting
Chubbies" and "Baptizing Dead People for Fun and Profit" should have one of those, imagine how it strikes me, his disciple.)
Did I hear the Root Tone of Nature on this dwindling night? Elijah
was privy to nothing less than the "still small voice"
when he hiked Horeb; but what about simple Cye Johan? Was he worthy
of even a single sigh or thought from anything that lives and breathes?
Or perhaps just a whispering hint of the "eternal note of sadness"?
I can't say. But I can identify what did get my poor unenlightened
timpanic membranes quivering in their merely mechanical way--and
dare I admit that the Bradley-possessed "heart of me"
did indeed "thrill in response" to it?
I heard "...the dogs and delivery trucks of the distant East
Asiatic metropolis; the screams of prepubescent Filipina sex slaves
waking chained in attics; the rhythmic sucks of police helicopters
circling over some famished housebreaker; a psychotic voice bellowing
into a megaphone as the rabble yawns in the face of yet another
day's wage slavery; displacements, varied and numerous, of styrofoam
smoke and stale fish-breath at overpopulated bus stops--everything,
at a grateful distance, blends into a single sigh that strains softly
like a half-dead fly against a greasy windowpane..." Thus goes
BLACK CLASS CUR, which constitutes the reluctant Exodus of our one-man
diaspora, Sam Edwine.
Gradually, on black reptile wings, this made-in-Japan counterfeit
of the Big F rose up to the same small number of meters above sea
level that I had already attained on foot. There it separated into
its constituent frequencies, several of the higher and more piercing
overtones grinding together to form a jagged decibel wedge, the
narrow end of which drove straight into the hole on the downhill
side of my head. I could hear a noisy herd or gaggle or pack or
gang approaching--from which of the many directions they were
capable of swooping, creeping, burrowing or sidling, I couldn't
say; but it threatened to surround me, the wall of cacophony upon
which hell's unquiet denizens advertise their regrettable existence
and trumpet their approach. And it was played not in the Daoist
key of F, but something closer to deteriorated Bud Powell's key
of S.
Like the foxes that have overrun the ruins of Jerusalem more than
once, these hellions make many different kinds of weird noises at
those times when the sun has selfishly forsaken the sky--so
they stand accused, at any rate. To make that accusation plausible,
their vocabulary would have to exceed any other inhuman creature's--at
least those apprehensible by the usual five human senses. Some people
claim the deviated beings, whatever their nature may be, took up
local tenure on a certain August morning in 1945; others say they
were here first, hovering in the foam even before the magma destined
to coagulate into Nippon oozed up from between mismatched rocks
that grind like the molars of hateful spouses at the bottom of the
East China Sea. In either case, hills like this one become particularly
noisy right about now, toward dawn, much to the perturbation of
superstitious native Shinto animists, as well as secular-humanist
violators of the foreigner curfew, such as me.
The rationalist minority in these parts comfort themselves by positing
the vociferous presence of Rikki Tikki's cousins--you know,
"rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite
like a weasel in his head and his habits...and his war-cry, as he
scuttles through the long grass, is 'Rik-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!'"
The assumption is that the noises must come from the throats of
certain sundry razor-clawed but reassuringly material mongooses
whose ancestors, ostensibly, time gone by, were introduced into
Nagasaki's environs from someplace even more purulent than Kipling's
Segowlee cantonment in Gujarat. Tom Bradley decrees it to have been
Sumatra, probably because he likes the sound of the name--and
therefore Sumatra it is.
All this can be gotten, passim, from the SAM EDWINE PENTATEUCH's
Asiatic volumes. And nobody who has been transported into the upper
crannies and convolutions of his own frontal lobes by the prose
in which these claims are expressed will feel the faintest inclination
to check the accuracy or thoroughness of Dr. Bradley's research,
if any, into this land and its lore. If the natives want mongooses--more
to the point, if he thinks that we, his readers, should be given
mongooses--then rest assured that he will supply the most serviceable
members of that tribe, and plenty of them, with his usual furious
noblesse oblige. The spatial and temporal entirety of Nippon itself
puckers to less than nothingness in the presence of the consonants,
vowels, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters
and books in which it has been couched, or rather entombed, by my
author. We, his fans, just lie back in the volcanic quicksand and
enjoy the sensation of being raped with such doctrine, and are pleased
to assimilate it as gospel, secure in the knowledge that nobody
with a much bigger readership (at least among our sort) will contradict
our man to the particular notice of anyone whose opinion we'll ever
value to the extent of bothering to make ourselves aware of it.
As he is fond of saying in interviews, "I'll libel a whole
race, religion, ethnicity, tribal affiliation--I'll sink a
fucking continent--if it makes for a nice transition between
paragraphs."
So he makes with the Rikki Tikkis. The notion of such an infestation
might not sit too badly with the world-view of a bourgeois homeowner
with four more or less solid, if paper, walls to cringe behind (his
flesh crawling from the rodent revulsion that seems to cross the
broadest racial boundaries with no loss of intensity). But it offered
small comfort to a nocturnal pedestrian like me. The frisky Sumatrans,
or some entity capable of doing a fair impression of them, began
shrieking and dry-heaving in the nipple-deep grass on the slope
below. They kept close harmony with the internal combustions of
what sounded like several oriental-style motorbikes revving and
rolling in concert somewhere in the distance, in definite crescendo,
which I chose to ignore for the moment. Then, invisibly crossing
my path, they occupied the slope above me, bringing their stridulations
with them like cicadas stirring at the close of a clammy night,
or blood-sport fans doing The Wave across a stadium overgrown with
vines and underbrush. I was surrounded. This prompted me to ask,
out loud, the question which, in the unlikely event that the story
might be true, addresses the most implausible part of all: "Who
was dumb enough to come up with the bright idea to import such skittering
horrors?" (I mean the mongooses, not the motorcycles.) As with
all such questions, the intelligent hiker will consult the pertinent
book of the new Torah, specifically FLIP-KUN, our Leviticus.
As it turns out, this being the Extreme Orient, nobody, not even
sage Dr. Bradley, is able to name a specific mortal human on whom
the irruption can be blamed; but credit is taken, just as the date
is defined, by the living god who happened to occupy the Chrysanthemum
Throne at the moment when the shipload of miniature carnivores supposedly
arrived from the abovementioned booger of geography in the Indian
Ocean: in this case, the emperor's sneezy-sounding moniker was Taisho.
It was "his" idea. In other words, the blunder, if it
was performed at all, was performed under his administration, and
he wound up personally symbolizing it--very aptly, in this
case, as that divine and august personage was inbred to a vicious
degree, and behaved like a mongoose himself, once again according
to Tom Bradley, the World's Greatest Old Japan Hand. (I'm proud
to say I helped bury the former holder of that title in my Exquisite
Corpse review of THE CURVED JEWELS.)
Therefore, as far as you and I know and care, it is a fact, established
solidly as if it were engraved three fingers deep in black diorite,
that, in the Taisho era, Rikki Tikki's cousins were brought in for
rat control, but wound up being much better at beating the shit
out of grannies' lap-poodles instead, so were chased up into suburban
hills, like this Horeb, where their kind yet thrives on the steaming
contents of stray pets' jugulars. And their liberation is all the
more ironic because mad Emperor Taisho himself, their rabid personification,
was "kept in a cage...and let out only to get mooncalf princes
on his few fecund nieces."
Furthermore, it is a Bradleyan given that the most egregious specimen
of imperial mooncalf was Taisho's heir, "...blood-bloated Hirohito,
of Nanking-rape fame, whose nibbly buck-teeth and rapacious character
suggest that his cousin-mother must have entered upon parturition
in the middle of a royal progress into the countryside and been
frightened at the key moment by a gang of the helpful little verminators.
By the time the nipping godlet hunched on his homunculus-sized coat
of skin, the patterns for his physical build and moral makeup had
already been driven from the rat- and poodle-rich downtown and were
probably occupying the rice terraces with their third or fourth
generation."
One can see (or, at any rate, the good doctor, and therefore we,
can see) how the mythos of the mongoose was generated and encouraged
on several levels by the persons and manners of the sovereigns themselves,
just as the Chakravarti kings of India were consecrated by the blood
of white horses, and the emperors of China were harbingered by dragons
and phoenixes. The bestiarial bathos is deliberate and couldn't
be more apropos.
But, even though these living symbols of His Divine Imperial Nipponese
Majesty are capable of several scalp-corrugating cries, such as
the one cited above, "Rik-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk" (at fifty
paces the sound can nibble the hairs off the nape of your neck),
it seemed more and more likely to me, as I labored uphill to keep
my appointment with the redoubtable novelist who put all this in
my head, that Nagasaki's enormous variety of nighttime snarls and
cackles might be attributed a bit too readily to the feral descendants
of these strangers from conveniently demon-rife subequatorial regions.
If you have spent at least one night in this haggard land, you will
know all to well the racket I was hearing now, and will scoff at
anyone who attributes it to mere woodland creatures, rapacious though
they may be.
Like an audible and perverted version of Proust's cookie, it filled
my body with dismay, from the collarbones down to the callus ridges
in the soles of my feet, in the instant before my brain had time
to put a name to its source. On this night the local damned had
chosen to coat themselves not in sleek fur, but in pocked and pitted
skins which usually belong to another species of tiny monster, known,
in the quaint lingo of the country, as bosozokus: "...those
unemployable highway virtuosos, bringers of insomnia to an already
sleep-disordered land, teen bikers who spend each night trying to
play Marilyn Manson riffs on the throttles of their unmuffled rice-burners," to quote HUSTLING THE EAST, Tom Bradley's Dai Nippon Trilogy.
Such a presence on his mountain in the wee hours was no easier to
explain than the mongooses'. There was an overcrowded stomach cancer
hospice lodged in a kind of duodenal kink in the foothills; and,
one of their few stated functions in life being gleefully to increase
the misery of the dying, this particular contingent of bozos (or
however you care to abbreviate their name) had probably gotten lost
on their way to or from making sure that no in-patients were able
to sleep away a few moments of the impending day's agony. The marginally
less cretinous bozos, who tend to ride somewhere near the front
of the pack, would justify buzzing that sad place with eugenic theories
inherited from General Tojo: one must speed the way of weaklings
incapable of survival; mouths unworthy of food should be closed
sooner than later (timely conceits, ripe for revival, now that this
society is graying even faster than Caucasian America). The rank
and file bozos, on the other hand, like all gnomes of subhuman rank,
require no theory, but just do what they do for sheer dharmic spite.
Possibly they derive a sort of superficial annelid stimulation from
such pursuits, but this must remain a matter of speculation, as
they are inarticulate and unable to account for themselves and their
behavior.
I knew, yet again from careful perusals of my favorite author's
novels, that it would be best to shield myself somehow, not so much
from their noise and knives as their adulation and halitosis. In
emulation of their colleagues in more sophisticated places such
as Tokyo and Osaka, these troubled teens tend to halt their motorcades
and gather around any non-doddering occidental in sight, chatting
him up for fashion tips, and also for practical advice on what to
eat to make themselves seven feet tall, or pretty near, like a white
man--"maple syrup" is what they want to hear, as
trees don't lack height (an example of Asiatic thinking). But what
they want most are solid LSD connections--ghastly as it is
to imagine what might go on in their minds, or any mind at all,
while trying to trip on these islands.
I was new around here, and in the Controlled Substances Department
was only aware of the Israelis who everyone stumbles over when arriving
in town. They stake out their gutterside pitches in front of the
train station after shelling out for protection from the Yakuza,
who permit them to occupy rectangles of sidewalk precisely circumscribed,
not to say quarantined, among steaming-fresh street pizzas of bibulous
native "salary men." Exactly as they do in the Bradley
books, these sons o' Jacob spread out their quaint tasseled rugs,
hunker down in a picturesque manner, and set to work hawking generic
middle eastern-style ormolu trinkets, which, you might be surprised
to learn, are actually not hand-crafted by quizzical old Hassidic
craftsmen in the little town of Bethlehem, but rather churned out
by babies in purgatorial Indonesian sweat shops.
Bric-a-brac flogging is the Israelis' stated purpose for being in
Cherry Blossom Land, according to their official work permits (purchased
no less dearly than their barf-puddled parcels of pavement). But,
true to the entrepreneurial instincts for which the Levantine peoples
are anciently famed, they also brave Nippon's draconian dope laws
in order to part, more or less discreetly, with dog-shit blotter
acid, for which they are willing to accept the equivalent of seventy-five
American dollars per hit, or maybe sixty, if you are capable of
dickering in the noble tongue of King David and Isaiah and Jeremiah
and Ezekiel. This earns them the contempt of otherwise knee-jerk
philosemites, such as Tom Bradley, who (unlike the present scribbler)
is old enough to recall the days when legendary What'hisname, also
Jewish, but American and upper-middle-class all the way, used to
ramble through the Home of the Brave in his VW van with the portable
chem lab in the back, broadcasting little tabs of the purest and
most beautiful Orange Sunshine as liberally as Johnny did apple
seeds, with a profit margin of comparable dimensions.
Though Orientals themselves, Nagasaki's strychnine peddlers are,
after all, Tom Bradley's fellow exiles, and mine as well, and one's
heart is prepared, by reflex as well as by Hollywood, to go out
to them--especially when, to attract business, they break out
their battered clarinets and little violins with the hairline cracks
in the varnish, and render simple traditional happy Hebrew sodbuster
tunes from Norman Jewison's heartwarming "Fiddler on the Roof."
(I'm particularly susceptible to "Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make
Me a Match," which is what they were playing about eight or
ten hours ago when I squeezed my love-handles, one by one, through
the turnstile.)
But, charming as they are, this particular branch of whichever tribe
they belong to hardly warrants the sort of special consideration
granted, say, to the gypsies in Europe, which persuades all right-thinkers
to turn a blind eye upon what small depredations upon society-at-large
their unhappy condition necessitates. Nagasaki's pseudo-psychedelic
vomit-squatters may not be comfortable as their cousins the Rothschilds,
but they're not particularly to be pitied. I just demonstrated that
they have achieved at least one out of the total of three ambitions
cherished by so many of their youthful countrymen, as expressed
in the famous proverb, "Get high, get laid, get the fuck out." (Of Zion, that is.) One out of three is more than most of us are
granted in a single incarnation.
So I felt no liberal guilt in taking upon my shoulders the civic
as well as consumerist responsibility to foil these pushers of dangerous
narcotics. Proudly as it would have done my heart to watch them
burn the noisy bozos almost as badly as my own tribe of intrusive
foreigners burned the noisy bozos' grandparents fifty-eight years
ago--and as famously as I was sure they'd get along with the
night-raiding, misery-sowing, sadistic bully-biker storm-troopers--I
deemed it best to steer no custom in the direction of the train
station kibbutzniks today. Therefore, self-concealment, at the moment,
became a priority, before the acid-starved convoy could overtake
me, whether from uphill or down.
Now, when you clamber up a hill in the suburbs of the burg which
our author has famously and cruelly renamed "Boom Town II,"
you cannot but remain aware, at the epidermal level, of the vast
pyroclastic vulcanism writhing a few inches beneath the soles of
your feet. Besides engendering the temblors and tsunamis for which
this quadrant of the North Pacific is notorious, this buried ferment
sends up a tenacious mineral vapor that seems almost consciously
to clutch and suck at your Achilles tendons. It retards not only
forward progress but the sort of sideward mobility required when
diving for cover--which, as the stuck-pig Suzuki squeals grew
louder, was what I considered doing, on feet enmeshed in translucent
tar. But something I recalled reading in BLACK CLASS CUR, the China
volume of Dr. Bradley's planet-girdling Pentateuch, or maybe dreaming
the night after reading it, told me that struggle was pointless
under such mucous conditions, and would only make things worse,
as in quicksand.
So, barely aware of doing so, and unable in any case to explain
how it was done, I calmly willed the earthly bonds on my feet to
loosen, just a skosh, just enough to strain credulity to a degree
acceptable in a literary work of this genre (whatever that may turn
out to be); and, like my hero Sam Edwine in his rollicking, psilocybin-fueled
Oaxacan jungle adventure (see ACTING ALONE, our blessed Deuteronomy),
I allowed the perverse gradient of the road to settle me into the
downhill shadows of the soft shoulder, like a surfer shooting the
curl.
There, deep in mongoose territory, I waited for the kamikaze punks
to whine past from whichever direction their scale-model plastic
Harley knockoffs were dragging them. Meanwhile, my hold on gravity
evaporating as quickly as an adrenalin spike, I found myself sinking
deeper and deeper into pulsating jungle mulch, getting moistened
up to the crotch, then pits, then beard, by rivulets of cloying
dew that filtered and drained like saccharine tea between acid rain-dwarfed
banana trees, up-slope.
And on they came, the salamanders--not from below, which would
have been odd enough, but from above, rolling in procession down
the incline ahead of me. At that point I could hardly imagine what
business these beings could possibly have had on Horeb's sacred
summit. Huddling there in the writhing mire, I was just on the verge
of persuading my mind's eye to picture my author and them in the
same frame. I hadn't yet begun extrapolating a cause for their association
(was he sending them on infernal errands? Under what compulsion?),
when, suddenly, as if in reaction to the sheer incongruity of that
attempted mental juxtaposition--and as a psychosomatic manifestation,
no doubt, of the violent jealousy it caused me (I, his Boswell,
had traveled this far only to be preempted by un-Englished scum)--a
nearly complete disorientation slammed like a leaden lid over my
head.
It hovered and buzzed in particular around my inner ear on one side--I
couldn't have specified right or left even at the time: something
like a whole-body, planet-upending, universe-encompassing dose of
Jonathan Swift's own Meuniere's Syndrome, vertigo and tintinitis
in precise proportions, exacerbated in no small degree by what I
can only call visitations from the other world--I mean the
one on paper that parallels and surpasses this one, and must forever
be closed to juvenile delinquents of any category. Like the "snot
green sea" that inundates tourists' awareness when they visit
a certain stone tower on a sandy cove near Dublin, imagery from
the Bradleyan oeuvre obtruded upon and usurped what I used fondly
to call "my own thoughts."
The acne brigade hadn't yet completely passed. Peeking between puckered
bamboo shoots at nostril level, I could see the derriere garde,
the inferior bozos, if such can be imagined, who hadn't managed,
or bothered, to complete the transformation. They appeared to be
compounded of unformed stools and styrofoam smoke, in spite of obvious
labors to camouflage their semi-solid state under hair and lips
dyed the color of old earwax on a Q-tip. Their exhaust stuck out
behind them in furry swirls, like cat tails, and, rather than rolling,
their wheels half crept, something like weasel paws. I couldn't
see the avant garde, but I could hear strange splashes way down
at sea level, and squeals.
Conscious that the unwheeled noisemakers, the ones with fur, would
at any minute descend on me like piranhas on a dog-paddling tapir
and set to work defleshing my skeleton, I decided that I really
ought to run screaming out into the middle of the road, even if
it meant giving a group-heart attack to these straggler-bozos.
To that end, I fought with the mud-vacuum that encased my lower
self. As soon as one foot was freed, another problem struck close
to home. Indigo-bellied lizards, also eager to avoid nourishing
the ravening Rikki Tikkis, crawled off specific Bradleyan pages,
assumed scaly skin, scrambled up inside my trouser leg, and fixed
themselves to my poor perineum by means of crusty suction-cup toes--or,
at any event, I had been led to anticipate such treatment by reading
certain maniacally despairing fiction which gnaws at its author's
exiled condition like a rat at connective tissue, and teems with
as many tiny bloodsuckers as Grunewald's Temptation of Saint Anthony
(a horrifying detail of which serves as the cover of KILLING BRYCE,
the abovementioned Genesis of our new Torah).
I think I ran the rest of the way. Or maybe the shudders with which
my sympathetic nervous system obliged me were violent enough to
bounce me to the summit like a basketball in reverse. "Nature,"
to mangle once again you-know-who's words, "is too evident
in this town. They need an even bigger lake of asphalt."
* * * *
As if in an attempt to fulfill that request, the very top of his
mountain has been blasted off to make room for something unnatural.
The trauma is rectilinear, but only in the vaguest way, as the edges
have been blurred by volunteer vegetation. It's hard to give it
a name in the moisture-thickened darkness, but the project obviously
went bust, time gone by, or was aborted due to tired tribal blood.
Meanwhile, giant tiger-striped spiders have grabbed the opportunity
offered by rioting plant life. Hoping to profit from mongoose-horror
in vulnerable ground-dwelling creatures like me, they shit high-tensile
webs everywhere, thick as deep-sea fishing line, which pluck and
ping like koto strings against my marauding shins, raising an alarm,
announcing my approach to the author of all this crawling damnation.
Enter Cye Johan, to a flourish of untuned ukuleles.
I've been hoping to sneak up on him instead of vice-versa, as that
would leave me the option of changing my mind and fleeing in terror,
or maybe just shambling off in embarrassment. Instead I dive into
the blackness and resign myself to dying of old age while hiding
behind something very odd. At first grope, it can only be described
as the improvisation of a plumber with a few dozen cast-iron pipes,
a monkey wrench, some time off, and an easily satisfied creative
urge. No mammoth Prospero yet in evidence, I use the dead time to
consider this clanking skeleton. At my touch, various layers of
enamel slough off the pipes in lead-rich chips, a different shade
of pastel for each receding year of the strangely familiar assemblage's
existence, till the bare metal shows through, tortured and orangish-brown
among the weeds. My hiding place turns out to be an antique set
of tricky bars, or a jungle gym, or whatever kiddies call these
places of social resort. Little Cye just got here, and has already
been put in his place.
Here's a context that clarifies and shapes the shadows beyond, and
I can now situate myself, by the light of a moon that's making one
final effort to look alive before the bully looms up and laughs
her to nothingness. I've come to rest at the edge of the faintest
recollection of a schoolyard, an abandoned country kindergarten
just recognizable in ruins hanging off the opposite cliff. The tiny
hillbilly matriculators meant to chatter and brachiate upon my sad
tricky bars must have been carried off by malignant nature spirits
during recess. Or maybe they've just grown up and begun, if not
completed, the process of dying off unspawned. Even during the Pax
Japonica, sukiyaki-deluxe heyday of the eighties, it's likely this
whole RFD route boasted nary a pre-menopausal wife that hadn't been
mail-ordered from the Philippines, and precious few of them. Here's
a people long gutted. (And I'm not referring to the extra span of
small intestine their senile physiologists have bizarrely hallucinated
inside them, a proud peculiarity of the race, to supply the void.)
A ring of pulverized grass and atomized gravel is tromped around
this flattened peak. Something enormous has been making an habitual,
if not compulsive, circuit of the ragged rim. A rogue water buffalo,
surely, has taken possession of this poor mountain, which can't
be responding well to such rough treatment. Like the humans who
failed to homestead it, Horeb East verges on dissolution even at
the best of times. Loosely compounded of wild banana rot and pyroclastic
sludge, softened by typhoons, undermined by its own constant seismicity,
this hill is prone, like all its neighbors, to the geomorphological
equivalent of a nervous breakdown: the catastrophic mudslides which
several times each year deform the profile of this whole quadrant
of the Pacific Rim. An even briefly definitive topographical map
of apocalyptic Boom Town II has never been drawn up, before or after
the summer of 1945, as far as my most assiduous researches in that
area have revealed.
Suspended like a mini-marshmallow on top of a poorly-set jello mold,
I'm scared to breathe, move, blink, or think jostling thoughts--unlike
the creature which approaches now. I can hear it huff through the
pre-dawn inkiness, fart and mumble, spit strangely numerous times,
also snort through nostrils "the glory of which is terrible
as he paws and rejoices in his strength." Inexorable as a Mack
truck in low gear, it's circling around to the point nearest to
where I cower behind baby-blue and pink playtime equipment. He's
about to heave into my physical sight, finally, for the first time.
I can't help it. After what seems like eighteen lifetimes lugging
around a heart and guts crammed with thousands of Bradleyan sentences,
I can only find in my head two paltry phrases, and they don't even
belong to him: paired prissinesses, a matched set, worthy of Scribner's
nanciest scrote-nibbler, which "the present reviewer" once published in Exquisite Corpse (http://www.corpse.org/issue_3/secret_agents/johan.html).
I was discussing the fictional portrait of Japan's Crown Princess
in his roman-a-clef, THE CURVED JEWELS. I had particularly in mind
the poor woman's puzzled appraisal, in the moving eleventh chapter,
of Hirohito's grandson's procreative member (which is this Divine
Nation's spiritual fons et origo, the current incarnation thereof,
and strictly speaking shouldn't be treated any more flippantly than,
say, Jesus' flaccid corpus is bandied about within Christendom).
The passage runs as follows:
"That part of the Prince had looked, to this virgin, like a
formaldehyded specimen of the backwater vermin which her in-laws
constantly fondled and talked about and identified themselves with
in the world's eyes. Such bloodless things, spineless, pale and
soggy, were all they knew, for marine biology was the field of endeavor
the Imperial Family had fastened onto, in a halfhearted effort to
justify their existence. She was dying to know if Caucasoid equipment
also looked like something you wouldn't want to step on at low tide..."
With reference to the author's choosing to reside in the land which
has deified that "formaldehyded specimen," and in consideration
of his occasional but legendary run-ins with extreme rightists eager
to defend that divinity with violence, I felt emboldened, on those
famous electronic pages of Exquisite Corpse, to suggest that Dr.
Bradley might suffer from a "megalomaniacal urge for public
self-annihilation" and an "unwholesome Christ complex...which
the present reviewer finds a bit unsettling."
"...megalomaniacal"? "...unwholesome"? Can anyone
blame "the present reviewer" if he finds his own pedantry
"a bit unsettling" at the moment? If you were "unsettled"
as "the present reviewer," wouldn't you prefer to stay
put among the tricky bars, sheepish as a porpoise drowning in a
tuna net, idiot grin fixed on your bottlenose kisser?
Now's the moment he chooses to blast out of the (for him) knee-deep
mist--on hooves, from the feel of it. My intellect has been
forewarned about his dimensions--behemoth Sam Edwine is obviously
a self-portrait. But nothing could prepare an autonomic nervous
system, nothing could steel the reptilian subcortex of a mere human
brain, for Tom Bradley's elemental appearance on a dark and deserted
mountaintop. This is a huge biped, and hairy. I've seen hairier,
but never a huger, not in person, neither horizontally nor vertically.
He's a regular one-man Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, Boom Town
II Chapter, and he rolls right past me, oblivious as a legion of
bosozokus. Even while assuring myself that I'll nail my author next
time around with a tough set of proper interview questions, I know
very well that it will take more than one lap before I can persuade
myself not to choke. Instead of acting like a man, or even a journalist,
I dig in and play the voyeur. Have I climbed this far only to let
Tom Bradley get away?
Clockwise, counterclockwise, I am unable to say in which direction
he forsakes me, because the leaden lid of disorientation has slammed
down on my head once again and twisted everything. I've caught an
extra-literary dose of dyslexia. When the clouds part briefly overhead
I try to read the constellations, but Ursa Major and, it seems,
Orion, too, appear as in a mirror, reversed. Two of the only unchanging
items in the whole catalog of mankind's visual experience are catty-whompus.
It's as unlikely a sight as even a dyslexic could expect see in
several hundred million lifetimes, and inspires small confidence
in my own state of mind. I do see some planets, of course, just
about where you'd expect most of them to be; but Mars hangs down
way too close, like a bare light bulb in a shitty Japanese one-room
apartment. My giant author has to duck to get under it, and even
so bumps his red head. The two of them melt together into one inflamed
bilobular pumpkin.
I see this happen, and have small trouble believing it. Compared
to his other accomplishments, merging his head with Mars is trivial.
He is, after all, Tom Bradley, the novelist who, according to rumor,
has imposed himself on this Mount of God for nearly twenty years,
whom the diminutive natives have no doubt been ogling from afar
like a circus freak during that endless period, yet whose own attention
they've distracted to a preternaturally slight degree. (My textual
analysis reveals that he knows fewer than five words of their language,
and three of those are hairy-carey, okie-dokie and hunky-dory.)
Meanwhile, in an award-winning feature-length screenplay, in scarcely
believable numbers of stories and essays (more than seventy have
appeared under his name in the past four years: see the Media Page
of http://tombradley.org), and in the final novels of THE SAM EDWINE
PENTATEUCH, where he exhausted the subject once and for all, Tom
Bradley, the walking, stomping paradox, wrote with more perception
and truth about this country than anybody in existence, now or formerly.
So, if it's no longer a fit subject for a real writer, why does
he stick around this bleak archipelago, especially now that it's
plummeting into race extinction, that terminal withering of the
will to press on which has always signaled a nation's utter moral
exhaustion? Even mighty Greek Thebes wound up with cattle lowing
and grazing on its citadel; so what pitiable weasel-squeaks can
our author expect to hear from the gutters of a twice-doomed toy-town
like this? Assuming he hasn't died of earlyish old age himself by
that time, will Dr. Bradley yet be lingering here in another ten
or fifteen years, when his honorable hosts are flat on their bellies,
gazing enviously up the asshole of the Philippines and sending their
own dwindling granddaughters to Manila as sex slaves instead of
vice-versa? In loitering like a crow on this carcass, is our author "indulging his intellectual masochism"? (Such was the
accusation leveled at him during a wild online debate at David Horowitz's
fanatical neo-con/Zionist Front Page Magazine, after they were gutsy
enough to publish the eviscerating essay, "Ethnic Narcissism
and Infertility in Japan"--featured, like so much of Dr.
Bradley's astonishing nonfiction, in the million-hit-per-month,
Webby Award-winning Arts and Letters Daily.)
I'm not the only one hanging around here who's intimidated by the
double threat of such a reputation and physique. Also hesitating
self-consciously, holding back with craven diffidence worthy of
me, is our local yellow main sequence star. That particular wimp
fidgets behind a nearby peak, pinching his dick and sending on ahead
a couple of expendable junior beams, pale and wan (respectively).
So far, peeking between bamboo stalks, they have only been bold
enough to scout out the atmosphere several yards over our heads.
That's how intimidatingly phosphorescent-orange my author's patriarch-whiskers
are, even in shadow, and how glaring the flushed Celtic skin stretched
across his balding dome. (Why do I feel on shakier ground referring
to his head and mine in the same paragraph than perpetrating a pathetic
fallacy on a couple of defenseless sunbeams?)
The good doctor and I remain twilit under a low ceiling of day.
Hawks sailing almost within reach (for him) are now pointed out
in light. Each of their complex markings looks sharp as a hieroglyph
on a freshly excavated graven image. One swoops down upon the inferior
plane of existence that I, at any rate, am forced to call home,
and latches onto a bit of breakfast among things that mongooses
consider beneath eating. Before he's able to resume cruising altitude,
huge obsidian ravens consolidate from the residual nighttime and
harass this hawk, three against one, recapitulating their rascally
behavior in KARA-KUN: "...flapping and pecking alongside until
the hawk drops its football-sized rat... [the ravens] are more than
aerodynamically capable of retrieving the tidbit in mid-air, but
prefer to let it fall down and mature awhile in the languishing
stinkweeds."
While my attention is diverted, less by nature than the mirror he
has held up to it, Dr. Bradley completes a second orbit without
incident--of the physical sort, at any rate. But does he peer,
for a nanosecond, into the vapors that still encase me? And does
he nail an affectless but sociopathically intense glance right into
the pit of my left eyeball, as though in acknowledgement of something
that, if it possessed even a single atom's worth of significance,
could almost be called my presence? It's clear that he attaches
no particular importance to what he sees, if I can be said to have
registered on his retina at all. It feels like being appraised by
a hawk's lidless orb, and dismissed as unappetizing, therefore non-existent.
Have I just been neutralized by a more-than, or other-than, human
consciousness? Not a question calculated to settle the nerves. It's
best just to pretend the glance never happened, like so much that
ostensibly takes place here on the more inscrutable side of the
International Date Line. Maybe Dr. Bradley has no idea anyone waits
in ambush on this defunct playground.
Flitting about on the hilltop next door, clearly incapable of registering
anything like my own pudency, is a colossal Sakyamuni, exoteric
adipose edition. Its jadedness has been gussied up with molded-concrete
blobs of representational flesh and sluttish silk, and accessorized
by the broadest affectation of a tranny-style headdress I've ever
seen, with iron reinforcing rods poking through at the worst possible
places. The whole cetacean abortion is spray-painted metallic yellow
and sprinkled with tasteless Kandy-Kolored tangerine flakes straight
out of another scintillating Tom. This god (as I suppose it must
be called) touts for a stupa, an off-white dome with a well-placed
cowlick, which Sakyamuni straddles primly enough. Like thousands
of others throughout Hirohito Land, this stupa is stuffed with the
third-hand and shopworn residue of a certain Nepalese, who, we are
asked to believe, was dragged across the waterless Tarim Basin,
then shunted mongoose-wise across the Tsushima Strait, yet could
still muster enough sheerly incarnated testosterone to shed many
thousands of bushels of reliquary-quality facial hair.
That's a whole bunch more than the greatest and butchest of American
novelists ever could manage, even the extra-fuzzy one presently
under consideration. But, even though he's bested in quantity, I
prefer the quality of my own guru's whiskers. I haven't yet gotten
a good up-close look at them through this lingering steam; but his
authorial portraits, online and on paper, explode in all directions
with fibers of an angel color hardly approximable by any subcontinental
type, pure Aryan warrior-caste or not.
A creature hovers and tickles and flitters in the hollow of our
enlightened neighbor's Chunnel-sized left nostril, flirting with
a Buddha sneeze that could blow Nagasaki to hell again. It's a tiny
bird, much littler than the dog-fighting scavenger-hawks and carrion-ravens
that squawk and screech over our mountain, but it's easy to hear
his voice clear across the gorge that separates saggy Sakyamuni
from Dr. Bradley. The little frizzy-feathered birdy does his morning
air-gargle, a sunshine-welcoming warble routine hundreds of times
more complex and eloquent than anything I've yet heard from a moonlit
mongoose. The tweets and chirps are prestissimo, a series of split-second
phrases lasting without rest or repeat, for three whole minutes
that could perhaps have been more profitably allocated among the
day's first crop of earthworms. It's like listening to a sylph with
Olympic lung capacity discourse idly on Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle and laugh hysterically at the same time, by means of Rahsaan
Roland Kirk's circular breathing technique. Birds of this sort (which
have an English name, I'll bet) are said by unsentimental native
ornithologists to have a Darwinistic purpose for making such beauty
way up there: they are supposed to be cruising for prospective fuck-buddies,
i.e., mounting a formalized mating display in the name of species
propagation--which is the only other permissible behavior for
organisms in a rational universe besides procuring food by whatever
undignified means necessary, such as skyjacking half-dead rats.
If that's so, their tribe has gone out of its way to select for
suppler throat muscles and sharper ears than any loved or unloved
soprano saxophonist's I'm aware of.
But who's to say a tidy nest lined with a dozen buckshot-sized eggs
is necessarily the end towards which this particular miniature brown
Sidney Bechet is working? Why does everything have to be done to
impress the broads? Certain old pilgrims have worked off tribal
debt, and have shed those unsightly metempsychotic pounds through
regular exercise. Do we require the heavy-handed burlesque of a
morbidly obese Buddha to remind us that not every spirit is encased
in karmic pudge? Some have earned the choice of fending for themselves,
if they happen to feel like it.
Not to overextend the avian pathetic fallacy, but what if that ecstatic
warbler is choosing to come on like, say, for example, an unfeathered
biped who consecrates his life to expressing himself beautifully,
when, for all the red-hot action he gets in return, he can do no
more than posit an audience--maybe not even hoping, but just
willfully hallucinating them, huddled unseen and mute in the mist
around his ankles, dazzled to paralysis by his song, consumed from
afar with chaste adoration for him, and only him, as opposed to
some prospective new and improved junior version of him that can
be parturated, possessed and duly pussy-whipped?
Without having come across this notion in any of his works, and
therefore confident, as the World's Foremost Bradley Expert, that
he has never published it, I am nevertheless positive, one hundred
percent doubt-free, that it constitutes one of the reasons why our
author behaves so much like the songbirds with whom he exchanges
mutual greetings each morning. Furthermore, I can somehow intuit,
just from pondering the expression on his face, grinning or glowering,
in those authorial portraits, that he himself is unaware of this
reason, except as a persistent, life-informing physical sensation
of near-perpetual, intense and almost perfect delight, for which
I will envy him till the day I curl up and rot and die.
I tell you that Dr. Bradley has devoted his existence to writing,
number one, because it's fun (I mean the big complicated fun that
none of us can ever hope to imagine, except during infinitesimally
brief and rare moments in nature), and, number two, because he intends
for every center of consciousness, everywhere, in all planes and
conditions (not just terrestrial female Homo sapiens in breeding
prime) to love him, forever, starting as soon as possible, though
he's prepared to wait thousands of centuries after he's dead, or
even longer if it turns out to be necessary. That's the ambition
he cherishes. Talk about an ability to defer gratification.
I may not be able to answer the most basic questions about his quotidian
love- and work-life (e.g., is Dr. Bradley married? Is he bisexual?
Is he sexual? How does he get food? Does he eat food? Is he aware
that the laundromat formerly connected to the stomach cancer hospice
at the base of his hill is now open to the public and would love
to serve his personal grooming and hygiene needs?); but I've been
clear to the bottom of all his books and back several times, and
am as sure of these two motivations as I am of my own artistic sterility
and terminal uxoriousness.
Then again, I could be mistaken, couldn't I? For all I know, he
might not be self-expressing at all, but rather selflessly working
off some kind of tribal karmic sludge--though, like most ethnic
Europeans, my own spiritual intuitions remain as yet too church-blunted
even to hazard a guess as to how his solitary behavior could serve
such an esoteric function. The big question, for me in any case,
remains unanswered: what in the name of God is he doing here? If
his soul be untrammeled as that little warbling birdy's, why doesn't
he fly off this mound of semi-soft shit, and put an end to the too-long
exile which rankles him so?
(Our occasionally inhuman writer is humanized by his homesickness.
I find this muted but constant anguish evoked most affectingly in
the Harper Collins/3am Award-winning story, "Even the Dog Won't
Touch Me." Sam Edwine and his saintly wife Polly--an exclaustrated
nun of the Popish confession who "divorced Christ to join him"
in what The Journal of Evolutionary Psychology has called "their
glorious and tender hierogamy"--are shown to be the New
Adam and the New Eve. Though expelled, they "carry the garden
with them," Eden being, in this case, a battered Samsonite
that stays perpetually half-packed as the couple takes its solitary
way through the Far East Asiatic wilderness.)
Speaking of the East, my fellow shy Bradley fan-boy over there seems
to be just as befuddled by all this as I am. He still hasn't waxed
any braver, the wussy. Now he's starting to twitch behind his nearby
peak. He bounces on one leg while continuing to pinch his dick with
increasing urgency. One spastic yellow dribble spills down to sea
level, staining the dockside stoops of the storefront language schools
and the teenage hand-job hostess bars--as if any amount of
UV radiation could disinfect those wallows of corruption. A stronger
wavelength, tried and true, is indicated.
Nagasaki Bay heaves into view, out there beyond the cliff-edge Dr.
Bradley is now skirting. This deepwater inlet of the East China
Sea has always been the back door to Nippon, through which undesirables
have slunk in an uninterrupted string, like mucus supped from a
cuspidor. Today it's TEFL trash; yesteryear it was droves of pound
cake-pushing Portuguese and Papist proselytizers. We have the latter
to thank for the glamorous Twenty-Six Nagasaki Martyrs, townies
all, who got spiritually colonized to that grotesque degree guaranteed
to earn the veneration of the diseased Romish mentality. Consecrated
beings, they self-consciously allowed themselves and their children
to be impaled on spears rather than place their feet briefly on
a pair of shellacked laths with a diapered manikin thumb-tacked
on. In the blood of these slavering masochists, Tom Bradley's adopted
town was christened the "Catholic nerve center of Japan."
(Guess which other Japanese town called "Boom" serves
the same purpose for protestants, just by random coincidence, of
course--unless ecumenical Ialdabaoth was in a particularly
vicious mood one summer week almost sixty years ago.)
You could trade that whole gaggle of Nagasaki martyrs for one Tom
Bradley and be much safer up here. You could throw a regular weenie
roast with all twenty-six lightweights mincing and milling about,
so particular about where they place their dainty tootsies, traumatizing
no tremulous mud membrane. By contrast, consider my ponderous hero.
Only a miracle prevents him from bringing this whole edifice down
like hairy Samson. Any other pair of human feet would be cracking
under the stress of his trot, arches falling, toes curling backwards
in ultimate rigors. But he's my road-surfing instructor, my guru
in the skill of loosening gravity's shackles, and appears to be
functioning under no special stress. He floats along, legs, torso
and head registering no reaction to the violent action of his feet.
You could say that, from the anklebones down, Dr. Bradley is coming
on like the twenty-seventh Nagasaki martyr, the one they never tell
you about, who did the Frug, the Watusi, the Mashed Potato and the
Cool Jerk up and down a whole trunk-load of Papist gewgaws, till
they had to shove a spear up his ass just to calm him down.
Daylight creeps up from the greasy surface of Nagasaki Bay. It sidles
along the docks like a Turkish merchant seaman with unparaphrasable
B.O. and offputting mannerisms that you can't quite put a name to.
It heads uphill to Japan's second most popular tourist destination.
Raised a bit higher than the sloughs of despond I visited in the
first section of this essay, overlooking the bay from a terrace
covered in cherry trees, world-famous Glover Garden is one fabulously
pricey piece of real estate, whose rightful inheritance my author
just might not altogether inconceivably have been "butt-fucked
out of," as he says, with a modicum of indelicacy, whenever
the question comes up in interviews. (Who's the last guy in town
you'd ever suspect of being old blood?)
It happens to be the former palatial Raj-style digs of his maternal
great-great-great-great-etc. uncle, Tom Glover: none other than
the "Scottish Samurai," the gun-running, ecosystem-destroying,
sex-slave-disemboweling, emperor-enthroning asshole whom Giacomo
Puccini honeyed over in the three-hankie opera, "Madame Butterfly."
The natives call him the "Founder of Modern Japan," echoing
Der Fuhrer's pronouncement in MEIN KAMPF, volume I, chapter II:
"The real foundations of contemporary Japanese life are the
achievements of the Aryan peoples--" except Tom Glover,
like his present namesake (not to say incarnation) was rubicund
carrot-topped Celt, all the way back to the Druids, without a doubt.
If Dr. Bradley is pleased to say something is so, and if the notion
yields him some nice transitions between paragraphs, then by all
means, so be it. Who's going to check, anyway, besides some pedantic
local historian, probably ex-TEFL trash himself, who managed to
wangle a neighborhood junior college gig by flattering the locals'
self-importance with half-assed "research" into their
past? It is, therefore, a solid, indisputable historical fact that
a cabal of grasping half-caste rival cousins ganged up and butt-fucked
our favorite novelist out of a proper cherry blossom-carpeted veranda
from which imperiously to sip the finest green breakfast tea and
survey his domains on a bay so rich in familial history.
Unjustly dispossessed though he may be, Dr. Bradley nevertheless
subjects himself each morning to the lung-lacerating exhalations
of Nagasaki Bay--and I can't quite yet imagine why, as I spend
my own morning doing the same. Even from clear up here, it's a smelly
toilet, one part dioxin to two parts methyl mercury chloride--thanks
to dear old "Unker" Tom, who "singlehandedly industrialized
this once gorgeous country, turning it into the toxic wasteland
it currently is," according to the scorched-earth essay, "Bloodsucker
of Nagasaki" (http://www.identitytheory.com/writing/bradley1.html),
written by this dead prick's great-great-great-whatever nephew,
which you'd better read if you think pride of propinquity had anything
to do with these clashing relatives winding up in the same town.
On the other hand, if you're looking for the answer to my perennial
question, i.e., what in God's name is our man doing here?--let's
just say it's a bit early for jumping to the conclusion that mere
coincidence has drawn both terrible Toms together in space, if not
time. Tom the Younger might not make much of a Nagasaki Martyr,
but he could be seen as a Nagasaki Penitent. That hypothesis would
clear up part of our perplexity. What might have fetched him here
is--well, we could call it an intense awareness of the Scottish
Samurai's military-industrial exploits, and a certain unhappy identification
on Dr. Bradley's part with his voracious ancestor. As so often happens
with insurmountable points of shame, this could have been inverted
into a matter of pride. If so, I suspect another atom bomb will
be needed to knock this Moses off his Horeb. (Pyongyang's working
on that.)
Until the next flash of eye-melting light, he will remain here,
steadfast, spinning on this turd-colored jello mold, toward whatever
expiatory end that may serve--something sort of piously ritualistic,
I suppose, like non-orgasmic self-flagellation. Not yet comprehending
the exact nature of the atonement our outsized Nagasaki Penitent
essays here, we might nevertheless assume, on a provisional basis,
the following: that as long as Japan's dwindling economic and deoxyribonucleic
momentum continues to falter on, he won't forsake his self-appointed
post, not until every trace of his Unker's hard work and discipline
and self-motivation and entrepreneurial industriousness and venturesomely
capitalistic go-getterism has fallen to pieces; not until Dr. Bradley's
religio-magical spinning has somehow sent the Kirin Chemical Beer
Works, the mines, the railways, the slip-docks, Mitsubishi Heavy
Industries, and Glover Garden itself, all straight to the murky
bottom of the bay. And, considering the headlong speed at which
Nipponese "civilization" is declining, these and other
submersions will certainly happen, with or without the aid of religion
or magic, well within the stingiest actuarial estimate of what's
left of Tom Bradley's life, including years deducted for obesity
and excessive height (although he should get at least two decades'
worth of points for cardiovascular fitness).
And, in that halcyon time to come, "...this muggy waste, un-Glovered
at last, will revert to the fishing village it was before my tribal
curse descended: a place where the natives can once again develop
personalities (will they be able to remember how?); where they can
get out the old martyr-impaling spears and have a weenie roast,
TEFL trash as the main course, and just forget about forcing themselves
to pretend to encompass the impossible task of learning my beautiful
language (masticating it to ugly shit in the effort); where they
can have time and leisure and silence to play with their children,
and chat with them in their own inchoate but, I suppose, adequate
idiom; and make more children, at least to the extent their exhausted
bloodlines permit; and sleep eight hours a day, and work no more
than that, with a two-day weekend at least; and stop their screaming
and their crass imitation American-style boosterism and huckstering--"
(the latter so poignantly depicted in the essay, "The Nagasaki
Literary Scene," now on offer for syndication at Featurewell.com;
second electronic and all other rights available--editors act
now) "--and heal the hole inside them."
Then, and only then, our man's amends will be made, hereditary debt
worked off, and Tom Bradley can die, alone, spent, in peace, in
the dark, draped over tricky bars, etc., etc., okay, fine, I got
it. Apocalyptic this and Sacrificial Lamb that.
As a second, less obvious, not to say mawkish, alternative--since
we're talking ex-cathedra anyway--we also might classify his
morning constitutional among the Works of Mercy, though not strictly
"corporeal" in the catechistic sense. To clarify this
proposition, let's consult the man himself--I mean his words,
spoken live. Let's squat awhile longer among the tricky bars and
listen to what he gasps and rants as he jogs.
For posterity's sake, he happens to hold, in a hand huge, glowing
and white as any pagan's chryselephantine hallucination, a Sony
micro-cassette tape recorder, which he employs to play himself back
every few phrases. One is reminded of Frau Forster's older brother,
filling a notebook with aphorisms and constant emendations thereof,
while wandering along the brisk Alpine foothills. But our philosopher
has reached his summit, and is doing a liturgical dance, having
changed the linear hiker's notebook for a whirling mechanism on
which to spool and unspool mantras received and given. Here is a
prayer wheel far trimmer and more serviceable than the Nepalese-style
clunker, about the size of a carny thrill-ride, being swished about
by Miss Queerbait Tangerine-Flake Buddha next door. When its reverse
button is pushed, Dr. Bradley's compact appliance makes the sounds
of words inhaled and taken back, difficult to distinguish from the
circularly breathed chirps and tweets of Sakyamuni's feathery booger
across the gorge.
I can eavesdrop most effectively on what he replays when he's tracing
my particular arc of the grand cycle on his gigantic all-weather
radial tire-soled sandals, retreads sloughed in arcs from still
other wheels, satellites within orbits in various states of decay.
Here are the first, and almost the last, words I have ever heard
my interview subject say (he sounds even more like Orson Welles
in the flesh than on RealPlayer):
"The dragon's mustache mirrors mine. A commissioned portrait
of the one I inherited, it originally occupied the upper lip of
my blood Unker, my spitting image, the Bloodsucker, who founded,
along with countless other dark satanic mills on the brim of our
bay, the so-called brewery that excretes the piss that fills the
cans upon which the golden-mustachioed dragon struts, less avatar
than advert.
"One mark of his death-dodging pride is this transplantation
of his facial hair onto the flying snake's muzzle, thus claiming
and bruiting abroad for himself the status of adept, or magus--he
put the Naga in -saki. This is not implausible if we assume he took
the left path. Look around you. His prideful works were more than
human, yet less than a generation after their completion from the
ground up, they were cast down, with the requisite confounding of
tongues--hence the TEFL trash infestation. His stomping grounds
were consumed in flames of retributive Nemesis.
"All the political damage he did, more than 10,000 normal men's
worth, did not satisfy him. It wasn't enough that he riled up the
pithecoid samurai; not sufficient that he put the nibbling Mongoose
Family on the throne, resulting in all of Greater East Asia being
flooded in blood. I'm sure he found wreaking mischief among these
easy marks about as challenging as shaking insects in a Mason jar
to see if they'll fight. But I notice he didn't feel quite up to
attempting such incitement among vigorous occidental tribes and
nations. Then again, on a literary level, neither does his nephew,
the habitual East Asian expatriate, who, likewise unable to make
his mark in the real world, hides out on the wrong side of the International
Date Line, instead of engaging his own civilization head-on..."
(Tom Bradley's fans, demurring at such self-effacement, disarming
though it may be, will point out that the first two mighty volumes
of the SAM EDWINE PENTATEUCH are set squarely nowhere else than
America, and have engaged some of the best heads of that civilization.
No less a personage than Stanley Elkin found ACTING ALONE to have "an incredible energy level," and R.V. Cassill said, "The
contemporaries of Michelangelo found it useful to employ the term
'terribilita' to characterize some of the expressions of his genius,
and I will quote it here to sum up the shocking impact of this work
as a whole. I read it in a state of fascination, admiration, awe,
anxiety, and outrage." Stephen Goodwin opined that he'd be
"be hard pressed to think of any writer who has Bradley's stamina,
his range, his learning, his felicity," and the great Gordon
Weaver spoke of the "flawless surface of [Tom Bradley's] stylistic
facility," and his "ability to walk the edge of a tone
that is simultaneously irreverent and profoundly serious." It's clear that Bradley's tower reaches at least as high as Glover's.
But its staircase spirals in the opposite direction, and will bring
down no heavenly wrath and destruction. Quite the reverse. As for
confounding of tongues, the books themselves lay any such linguistic
anxiety to rest.)
The good doctor continues:
"Like sorcerer-Pope Sixtus V recapitulating himself with pathological
rapidity as the fearsome Ahkoond of Swat, sidestepping what should
have been six or seven thousand years in the devachanic antechamber,
my vampire Unker jumped the normal metensomatotic rails to have
another crack at what he calls life, but what I call festering.
He required a second gross container for his gluttonous spirit,
but couldn't fasten his soul-fangs on a lineal descendant. His only
son, also Tom (Madame Butterfly's unsuccessfully aborted and ill-reared
bastard), strangled the family dogs and hanged his septuagenarian
self just because an atom bomb was dropped on him, the pussy. A
good illustration of the ill-advisability of miscegenation with
the exhausted races, and--"
Its reverse button pushed by what I can only imagine to be a forearm-sized
thumb, the Sony micro-cassette recorder makes a peremptory chirp--
"Don't say 'miscegenation,' you moron. And 'pussy'? Have you
completely given up on ever getting back to America? Shit. Where
was I? Oh yeah--
"Tom Glover craves to take further and bigger bites out of
this lugubrious landscape. But a big enough bite was taken thirty-four
years after his first death. That's my opinion, and I deserve to
be consulted--"
Our author suddenly switches his battery-operated mechanism to the
other hand, clenches it tighter against his mustache and, in a whisper
never intended for my profane ears, says, "After all, it's
my carcass up for grabs."
At least that's what I think he said. Before he can hear me cry, "Huh? What--?" our fallen local aristocrat swings
around again on the occult circle which he has woven thrice into
the volcanic mush underfoot, and passes me by a third time--and
you know how any times it must happen in fairy tales and dirty jokes.
He makes more revelations into the Sony's microphone--
"It was Old Man Glover's death, and he duly died it, and he's
trying to cheat it through me. But he has made a fatal mistake:
he chose a body half-compounded of unmitigated Bradley, Jack Mormon
renegade-style, whose nature is to cooperate with nobody and nothing.
If the Glovemeister was half as clever as the Nipponese make him
out to be, he'd have lit upon a less congenitally perverse set of
inlaws. We Bradleys told the bloody desert dictator Brigham Young
to get fucked, right up in his face. Did Unker Tom think I'd hesitate
to tell him the same in deference to my mom's maiden name? It's
good for opening bank accounts, but that doesn't make it the password
to my temple of the Holy Spirit."
(If I, Cye Johan, were the type of scribbling academic hack to insert
footnotes, I might grab this opportune moment to distract you, and
me, from the frankly distressing glimpse we've just gotten into
our author's, shall we say, state of mind. I would provide a little
solid, non-metaphysical historical background here, just to assure
us of our footing, if not his. I'd take us back to the dry, ghost-free,
wide-open spaces of the Far West, and point out that Dr. Bradley's
agnatic line paid the full price, plus tax, for telling Brigham
Young to "get fucked, right up in his face." I'd refer
you to the masterful autobiographical essay, "Suspensions of
Disbelief," yet another example of our man's death-dealing
nonfiction to be highlighted in Arts & Letters Daily. Its arguments
organized in paragraphs crystalline and inevitable as Eighteenth-Century
counterpoint, this essay, like all his others, would stand up as
evidence of our author's sanity in any court of law. So much for
forensic psychology.
(For more on his paternal ancestors' courageous flippancy toward
the Mormon cult, see, passim, the aforementioned Genesis of our
Pentateuch, KILLING BRYCE, which, according to the promo copy, "shows
the disintegration of a family of Jack Mormons who get scattered
across two continents like bits of rock salt sprayed from the muzzle
of a shotgun." No fewer than seven well-shaped novels intertwine
in this 300,000-word epic, bouncing off one another, each told from
inside a different character's mind, seven centers of consciousness
generating their own idioms and idiosyncratic styles, prompting
rumors of seven distinct corporeal authors having passed the manuscript
to and fro--or, indeed, gossip about a certain benign schizophrenia
on the author's part.
(Based on personal experience, of this very morning in fact, I subscribe
to the latter suspicion, with reservations regarding the qualifier.
And can you blame me? I mean, this big crazy fuck thinks a dead
Scotchman is crawling around inside him--and judging from his
dimensions, I'd say there's room for at least six more. I should
have stayed home--Osaka, in my hideous TEFL-trash case--and
just done a normal book review, full of nice, easy sentences like
this: "For all its bulk and problematical etiology, KILLING
BRYCE's greatest virtue is its tight structure. There are few technical
feats in fiction that come anywhere near. By comparison, WAR AND
PEACE deserves Henry James' dismissive epithet, 'primitive.'" Back to text.)
Dr. Bradley is saying, "...and not only do I defy the mustachioed
dragon, but I am allowing, no, teasing, inviting and encouraging
the avuncular eidolon to pursue me, till it gets exhausted and stumbles
off the track that I have stomped so deliberately close to this
raggedy rim, and falls off the cliff to join the swinish legions
at the bottom of the bay he poisoned. I'm determined to have been
neither driven nor lured here to continue Tom Glover's career of
insatiable rapacity. Rather than be the beneficiary of astral nepotism,
I choose to occupy his place on my own terms..."
The voice now swells to even greater than normal Orson Wellesian
stentoriousness, frightening the ravens overhead--
"For I am the Human Exhaust Fan, the Great Whirling Air Exchange
System of Boom Town II."
(Well, that's one way to encourage yourself to do your aerobics
every day. His resting pulse rate's probably the same as his age:
extremely low fifties. A tree's going to have to fall on this guy
and stun him first, then Pyongyang can have a crack at him. Or maybe
the "exhaust fan" is just another of the fart jokes with
which he's inordinately fond of puffing up his widely anthologized
"flash fiction"--a form whose extreme concision isn't
normally associated with puffing or padding. But such is the ludic
virtuosity of the master: he can conjure a universe in twenty-five
words, and fritter away the remaining seventy-five teasing us like
a feather up a nostril. I'm sure that's what this Uncle Soul-Vampire
business is about. He's just tickling me, waiting for me to sneeze
and reveal my peeking presence, so he can roar, "Gotcha!" and make me shit my pants. Big laffs.)
Tom Bradley has taken possession of this aerie, a natural fortress
commanding coastal access to a downtown no less mountainous than
its suburbs. From up here he enjoys an air traffic controller's-eye-view
of the inlets and outlets carved by immemorial lava among the maze
of volcanic hills upon which Boom Town II is built. (History's stupider
choice for a nuclear strike, Nagasaki makes Rome look like Topeka.)
He is in a position to help unravel these tousled braids of topography
on behalf of whomever or whatever might be wandering down there
in a state of disorientation.
As if in commemoration of the morning when they broiled under a
much brighter sun, the snaking inner-city gorges still, in certain
slants of dawn's early light, seem to flow with gamma particles
and molten humans in their myriads. It's said that sudden murder
of particular violence and treachery can knock astral monads off
the Circle of Necessity's treadmill, resulting in unquiet dead,
doomed for a certain term to walk the night, and so forth. In this
case, the certain term has lasted nearly sixty years. The poor Nagasaki-jin,
like their brethren the Hiroshimites before them, were sucker-punched,
black-jacked, cudgeled on the noggin harder than anybody since the
sage Aurva gave the fire missile to King Sagara in the Vishnu Purana.
Their hard-won coats of matter annihilated instantaneously, stripped
and disorganized so suddenly, the atomic dead got lost in the labyrinth.
For about three human generations, these pulverized pilgrims have
been buffeted around the gutters and alleyways, not even allowed
to linger on pools that stand in drains, unable to curl once, nor
yet so much as halfway, around their houses to sleep, as the latter
are no less vaporous than they. With the post-war proliferation
of motor vehicles, they're sucked without stint into the radiators
and shat out the exhaust manifolds of numberless speeding Mazdas
and Toyotas, often pureed through several internal combustion systems
in rapid succession, so suicidal are the tailgating tendencies of
their postmodern townsmen. They've been smutched and rendered insensate
by constant adulteration with unburnt diesel fuel and other airborne
hydrocarbon solids.
Tape machine chirping, our author skirts the bit of rim, opposite
the bay, that overlooks Ground Zero, nestled snugly between a reductive
Palatine and a bathetic Esquiline. Right about now, during the hours
just before, during and after dawn, the road traffic down there
is sparse as it gets in this insomniac land, and a cleansing geothermal
mist begins briefly to gather and rise. The air isn't quite so thickly
streaked with static electric-blue bolts of frantic, hopeless nervous
energy generated by a post-war citizenry exhausted as Mexicans,
but not allowed to relax and snooze away their last few gasps as
a race. At this time of day, Dr. Bradley's golden hours, the nuked
souls come the closest they ever get to being alive, in the sense
of possessing some rudimentary approximation of will, and at least
a hint of self-locomotive power, like amoebas in a dilute acid bath
with only two thirds of their flagella rendered immotile. They're
susceptible to being summoned, or seduced in certain depraved cases.
Swirling and shrieking like tiny songbirds with their pinfeathers
singed off, they're more likely to hear and respond to Dr. Bradley's
voice on the micro-tape, his words played backwards, which is inhalation.
The recorder, held near his face, chirps and beckons the semi-senseless
beings up the hill to the neighborhood of his nostrils, like a muezzin
luring the faithful to the twin portals of the sanctuary of his
respiratory system and the microcosm it constitutes.
The doctor snorts astral monads. He aspirates them in their singularity,
as uncompounded atoms. And at some point during the process of metabolic
gas exchange that takes place in our genius' serviceable alveoli,
they can latch onto waste molecules of carbon dioxide excreted from
his own mortal coil.
Each night and morning, as far as I am able to gather, he goes round
and round, rescuing defunct Nips in this heterodox manner. Just
as I briefly intuited a bit earlier in this essay, he does indeed
seem to be "working off some kind of tribal karmic sludge"--that
portion left behind by Unker Tom, who's responsible for bringing
down the greatest disservice yet done to any other town but one
in the post-Mahabharatic age: he founded Mitsubishi Heavy Industries,
the target of America's famous Big Boy.
The doctor allows his Unker's victims a period of devachanic rest,
immeasurably long from their point of view, but only lasting a half-lap
on this track, as manifested on our phenomenological plane. The
particulate wretches are blessed with an apparent sempiternity inside
Tom Bradley to compose themselves, to gather up as much useful consciousness
as possible, along with whatever matter he can spare them, with
which to seed their new embodiments. I fear he's allowing his infinitesimal
nurslings to erode the delicate lining of his bronchial tubes. Physicians,
who tend to be rationalists even in Japan these latter days, would
say our jogger guarantees himself a world-class case of emphysema
by stubbornly insisting on doing his morning workout not in a civic
gymnasium with a proper air-filtration system, but outdoors, where
there's pollution--thanks, again, to the Glovemeister. But
amends are being made, as the victims are coddled, recruited, not
to say transmogrified (just yet), by way of an occult ritual to
which I am not privy, prayer wheel whirled, charms mumbled.
Bizarre conditions call for freakish measures; a man of normal dimensions
couldn't do this chore. Poison Tom Glover supplied his own antidote
in his enormous Celtic genes, which his distantly descended nephew
has inherited and supplemented with equine Anglo-Saxon Bradleyness,
and religious observation of this cardiovascular regimen, exhibiting
self-discipline uncharacteristic of a scion of fallen aristocracy,
which would tend to support his vocation's genuineness.
He expels the hopeful, naked little beings on a jet-blast as cyclonic
as his triple-sized lungs and trampoline-taut diaphragm can blow.
He launches them on sturdy vehicles of carbon dioxide as far out
into Nagasaki Bay as he superhumanly can, to give them a boost,
over and beyond the lethal Styx of the avuncular docks and out into
the open sea, where they might come to rest and start fresh among
the corals and jellyfish and polyps.
I almost rise up from my tricky bars in protest against this sudden
dip into debased exoteric superstition (there is no phylic regression
in proper esoteric Buddhism)--"But," says Dr. Bradley,
as though he wants me to stay put for the time being, "look
whose shadow I'm working in." He gestures to saggy Sakyamuni,
as if his Sony micro-cassette recorder had an eye as well as an
ear and a larynx, and all three were hooked up to various orifices
in my head.
It's only the Nagasaki-jin incinerated during that vast epoch which
transpired within the second minute after the eleventh hour of the
morning of August ninth, 1945, that concern him: somewhere between
thirty-nine and seventy-five thousand of them, depending on which
of several estimates you buy. Dr. Edwine has chosen to err on the
side of generosity, and has pledged himself to service the full
load. He accepts no responsibility for casualties after the fact,
collateral damage, so to speak, such as his own dog-strangling cousin
Tom (a favorite Christian name in this clan). Radiation sickness,
liver cancer, the suicidal despair of the vanquished, etc., allow
you ample time to pack and get tickets, and if you wind up an astral
vagabond, it's your own god-damned fault.
As for those immediate blast victims too solidly mired in desire
when alive, therefore incapable, in death, of riding on gaseous
wings across the bay with their former fellow townsmen-gentry such
as Nagasaki's wartime military bureaucrats, Nanking rapists on R
and R, methamphetamine-maddened twelve-year-old kamikaze trainees
bivouacked at the local airstrip, and General Tojo's Thought Police,
who were kicking down paper doors and burning books right up to
the moment of detonation; not to mention the various sundry civilian
undesirables whom you'll find living and dying under a glutinous
layer of demerit in all places and times: small businessmen, thugs,
monastics, naughty toddlers, physicians of most specialties, people
associated in any way with those sewers of lowbrow invidiousness
called junior colleges, neighborhood gossips, mediocre artists,
smokers, masturbators, malcontent rickshaw boys, just to name a
few--these are the ones whose spirits, due to extra layers
of ethical avoirdupois, are too coarse for aspiration and osmosis.
They get stuck in Tom Bradley's sinus passages.
It depends on how misanthropic you are, or pretend to be, what percentage
of the 39-75,000 holocaustees you're ready to envision lodged among
his nostril hairs and upper mucous membranes. They, and not Utah
cloddishness, are the reason why Dr. Bradley is constantly snorting
back letting fly. Lukewarm, they are spewed out as loogs and lungers.
No sooner do these moral inferiors with their weighty load of sin
splat on the ground than, in a puff of steam, they rise, either
to become or to possess the bodies of low, loathsome and noxious
life forms, like mongooses and bosozokus. They proceed to waste
an incarnation terrorizing the suburbanites and staid burghers with
their night cries. And that explains the noises which made me so
nervous on the way up here. It was these discombobulated fuckers
who finally got fitted with coats of skin to replace those melted
off their skeletons by "Harry Truman's gift of Hell"--to
borrow a phrase from our author's profoundly moving contribution
to the otherwise cutesy-pootsy McSweeney's Journal.
But even teen bikers' obnoxiousness is not without limits. Eventually
(never soon enough to suit most sentient beings in the neighborhood),
they grow tired of buzzing the stomach cancer hospice in the wee
hours. In deep disgust with themselves, they begin to yearn for
annihilation. This is more like the bottom of an endocrine cycle
than a moral insight. They end, according to procedure established
by New Testament precedent, skittering down to dissolve and rid
themselves in the noxious Kama Loka called scenic Nagasaki Bay,
overlooked by lovely Glover Garden. No wonder the derriere garde
of what I took for bozo stragglers looked imperfectly materialized.
Their name is legion, like the two thousand swine in the synoptic
gospels, which ran violently down a steep place and were "choked
in the sea" (not drowned, but choked: the Gloverian water is
so foul there's no time for a proper drowning before the throat
revolts unto death with brainstem-ripping seizures and gags).
Has Tom Bradley gone insane, or is he just working on a new novel?
I suppose the two alternatives are not mutually exclusive. He's
the unchainable lunatic who cries at night and cuts himself with
stones among the tombs. He is exorcising Boom Town II, of course,
but himself as well. Someday soon a skittering snarl at the bay's
greasy brink will be heard to have a definite Scotch brogue to it.
It will be followed by a particularly furious gagging and choking,
and an ample splash, as of a morbidly obese and splenetic quadruped,
and my author will no longer be so noticeably insane.
In the meantime, Tom Bradley, who might appear upon superficial
reading to be a misanthropic, sarcastic, mean old fuck, turns out
to be pure and self-sacrificing. He's worked out a way to do his
Bodhisattvic bit without getting too personally involved and taking
on the nurture of fully embodied disciples, which, if his reputation
as a teacher has any foundation in fact, would be anathema to his
very DNA--and don't think for a moment this renders my current
suppliant position any less untenable than it already is. (See his
Salon.com articles on the vexed question of pedagogy, "Turning
Japanese" and "Bathtub Revolutionary," both published
in the days before that magazine's contemptible degeneration.)
But why would he break precedent and use Rikki Tikkis and teen bikers
as disposal agents instead of pigs, as Our Lord did in the country
of the Gadarenes? I suspect it's in fond consideration of the wild
boar-meat restaurant downtown whose kitchen he's been known to shut
down singlehandedly after a series of especially taxing, peckish-making
jogs up here, when he needs to take on extra protein to reline the
double matrix inside his ribcage. Embosomed with the portly man's
womanish dugs, he's like that ambiguous entity who "...over
the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings." He's feeling broody over what's incubating in the dark, damp womb
of his loving lungs.
(Note to my American readers: if you want to find out how you, too,
can learn to manage those guilt feelings associated with the atomic
devastation of the Land of Zen and sukiyaki and Pokey Mon and small-boned,
sexually promiscuous young women with baby-mouse voices, now's the
time to consume the good doctor's Nthposition essay, "My Public
Ministry Among the Heathen," also featured Arts & Letters
Daily, which blogs the absolute cream of the intellectual web, Monday
through Saturday.)
And he rants something frightening which I have been told never
to repeat as long as I live, especially if I want to live a long
time. While embarrassed to admit the warning came via dream, I'm
nevertheless skeptical, or maybe self-destructive, enough to throw
you a hint. It's about another invisible fluttering intelligence
of a different sort altogether, the kind you'd never want anywhere
near your lungs under the best of circumstances. Not formerly human
at all, it's to be counted among the sprites which were here first,
hovering over the sea foam before Nippon itself coagulated from
a few blobs of tectonic lava-or so, at least, an uncharacteristic
and unaccountable burst of intuition leads me to extrapolate from
what I hear being magnetized onto Dr. Bradley's micro-tape.
Philo the Jew must have been right: the air is indeed full of spirits.
There seems to be a scarcely imaginable number of varieties and
ranks and orders--undines, sylphs, gnomes, you name it. The
unseen universe resembles nothing so much as one of those promotional
scuba diving videos which the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan's Tourism
Ministry shoots at the Gulf of Aqaba. Dr. Bradley rants about one
particular species, which are intelligent as trained sea mammals,
or pretty nearly, and are eager to run errands and perform chores
for any powerful human personality, as humanity is the condition
that they, like no small number of the so-called angels and gods
themselves, aspire to.
Our novelist appears to believe that, through the agency of one
of these inhalable phocidae, he has bestowed a whopping dose of
terminal lung cancer on some unhappy local slob. He excoriates,
or maybe congratulates, himself for having sent an especially plump
and ravenous specimen to lodge and fasten like a coal miner or bull
crab in the unnamed victim's bronchia and set about the task, apparently
spiritual, but by no means intellectually taxing, of chomping down
normal epithelial cells and shitting out malignant ones. In most
cases no such effect could be achieved by any other means than the
sort of left-handed black occultism that would be karmically fatal
to anyone who employed it on purpose. But Dr. Bradley assures himself
(along with any unseen listeners) that his role in this slow, smelly
murder resembles an air traffic controller's more than a sorcerer's.
The demon has been summoned in blameless unconsciousness on our
man's part. He offers his own strictly maintained ignorance of formal
conjury as proof of his innocence.
To claim the ability of analyzing in detail one's own unconscious
mind's machinations without the benefit of several pricey decades
on a trained alienist's couch would be paradoxical, not to say self-deceptive,
in anyone but a major novelist. The latter rare category of human
possesses that overdeveloped sense of self-objectivity which makes
such an operation possible. Nobody else's head is so detachable
from his heart. In this way the Dostoevskis, Nabokovs and Bradleys
of this world enjoy a position of great privilege: they're capable
of crime without culpability.
He provides neither name nor demographics for whoever's being murdered
from the inside out in such a remote and unactionable manner, and
I can't imagine who it would be. The only sort of person who inspires
that kind of hate, at least in my experience, is a boss. But who
could be the boss of this man? I pity anyone with the temerity to
set himself up as such. A tumor would be the easiest way out of
that predicament. I quake to consider what politicians, hypocrites,
ignoramuses and Latter-Day Saints have suffered in his essays and
books--and nearly die, myself, when I try to imagine all that
fury focused on a single human lung. The age-old mystery of spontaneous
human combustion might just have been solved.
In spite of the blasphemous, not to say homicidal and psychotic,
tenor of what's erupting from this behemoth stranger's mouth, I
am very nearly persuaded at this moment to climb down from my tricky
bars and register my presence, come what may. I'm motivated less
by the desire to preserve this problematic personality for posterity
in an unpublishable interview than by certain hissings and gnawing
sounds that have started up in the wild poinsettias behind me. The
hellions are saying offputting things in their broad bestial vocabulary.
I still don't know if he's seen me or not. I hope not, because it
would place a strong negative construction on his next action, which
is to hawk up a stringy, glossy, eggnog-colored loogy and aim it
right for my left eye. I duck, hear a plop in the poinsettias, followed
by a sizzle and hiss, as of a small release of steam, then a rustle,
then--
"Rik-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk..."
The horror skitters up my spine: that awful sensation we sometimes
feel when truffle-tusks are rooting between our buttocks for kundalini
esculents. I grab my ass and, whooping like a goose, scamper out
into the path of the bus. I freeze in the headlights glaring from
the top of his face. The first twelve-and-a-third of the thirty-three
words, total, that I, Cye Johan, interviewer, authorial profiler,
literary stalker-groupie, will ever, for as long as I live, speak
to my idol are as follows:
"Denis and Tran featured my review of THE CURVED JEWELS in
Arts and Letters D--"
He grabs me. Can you imagine how childish it makes you feel to be
looking into a face big as your whole head plus your neck and torso
all the way down to the belly button and back again? It's like being
shot back to early elementary school days and collared by Dad, who's
about to kick the damnation out of you, just on general principles.
He drags me to the cliff edge, terrifying this simple scribbler
not so much with the prospect of being flung off (nor of loosening
the wild banana rot underfoot and bringing down, under our combined
weight-three-fourths of which is easily his-this whole side of the
jello mold called Horeb East), as by the not-so-quasi-homoerotic
surrender that the touch of his hand on my elbow elicits. Honestly,
I had no idea his work had affected me in such a deep way.
He gives me a look unaccompanied by words, but explicit as if he'd
shouted straight into the side of my head, "How much of that
did you hear?"
Instead of replying to the question, all I can think of to do with
my mouth is to ask another--the very one, in fact, that the
natives put to me every day of my own expatriated life, to which
my reply must always be a sheepish affirmative. Under the present
circumstances, it's the stupidest question of all history, whose
answer, an emphatic negative, will already be known by anyone even
briefly exposed to the slightest breath of this man's reputation
(and that's a considerable number: of the approximately one million
items his name googles, without quotation marks, Tom Bradley the
novelist is always the first two, and usually the third and fourth,
before Tom Bradley the Mayor, Tom Bradley the baseball player, Tom
Bradley the International Terminal, Tom Bradley the Civic Center,
Tom Bradley the dead Negro sharecropper's son, Tom Bradley the Kiwi
kiddy book writer, et al. Add any literary term or obscenity and
he's got the first two or three whole pages covered).
In the face of such utter distinguishedness, I hear myself simper,
through a rickshaw boy's buck teeth, gutturalizing around an Adam's
apple protuberant as the prow on a mackerel boat, "A-a-a-ah,
so, Bladderly-san, you speakie za Chappy-knees, yes-no?"
His reply, delivered without pause or consideration, sounds recited
by rote and is addressed more to himself than any mere intruder
whose full material existence he hasn't bothered to ascertain (indeed,
he looks through me, like Prospero through Ariel, as though idly
entertaining the possibility that I'm one of his carcinogenic sprites
reporting for duty):
"I mouth a half-dozen phonemes," he says, "but couldn't
tell you how they build a sentence. I've heard rumors that they
tend to postpone the predicate, as our Teutonic brethren do."
Those two sentences comprise the totality of what this century's
Dr. Johnson has ever said to his Boswell. The only words he has
enunciated when conscious of being in my earshot are layered into
a perfectly balanced brace of gemlike periods, both rounded and
complete. Have they been pre-crafted and rehearsed? For the benefit
of what audience? Or do major novelists think and speak extempore
in these polished terms? Can I claim them as my exclusive acquisitions?
Here, in any case, is the sole exile I've met on these islands who
can say more than three of his native words in a row without dropping
in a Japism--including, I am humiliated to admit, me.
I've long suspected my racial, national and tribal identity of being
more or less shorn; but now my eyes are opened to my true deracinated
condition as never before, just by sustaining a single absentminded
glance from this banished Utahn. He has not trodden New World soil
for nearly a quarter of a century, and probably never will again
in this particular existence, yet remains more American than I could
be if I went straight back home tomorrow and started eating dirt
with both fists. I feel diminished and darkened, and made to squint.
I'm a full-blooded Asiatic by comparison. Damned here for barely
two years so far, I've already allowed much more of the locality
to seep into my skull and infect my soul than has Tom Bradley, destined
to be cremated here.
Now would be the time, not to excuse, but perhaps to attempt to
explain poor little Cye Johan's presence in this miserable country.
Yes, here's the opportunity to expose this scribbler and finally
disburden his load of shame onto your lap: his domesticated pet
barbarian condition, his status as collaborator and traitor in this
particular fizzled-out culture war. Little Cye's got himself a full-time
job as token Caucasoid in an Osaka junior college, complete with
automatic tenure, thanks to his mastery of Yamato groveling techniques.
He's been shrugging and bowing and cringing so long that his spine
has sunken into itself, his body become short. At an animalistic
level, he loathes himself because more than one of his native students
have managed to outstrip him vertically--and they lord their
superior centimeters over him with about as much mercy as you'd
expect from the descendants of the folks whom China scorned as "island
dwarves" for forty centuries: "...the climax of two generations
of adequate nutrition under American auspices," to quote little
Cye's favorite NBA-sized author, "these kids are about, finally,
to achieve their full genetic potential." Cye is here to witness
and meekly applaud, from below, the physiological fulfillment of
the race, which comes, ironically, on the eve of its self-extinction.
While waiting for that to happen, Cye-baby has married a Jappess
because, as that big, tall, fictional racist bully, Sam Edwine,
would cruelly say, he can't handle fully-developed women. Maybe
Cye's just a faggot who got scared away from civilization by AIDS
and hightailed it to a place where, with no manly charms, skills,
or even impulses, he can have his pick of any number of non-male
(hence more likely to be HIV-free) fuck-buddies, unencumbered with
breasts, hips, body hair, or personalities, who, bent over and viewed
from behind, cannot be distinguished from pliant boys. And his catamite
wife, his butt-boy spouse, comes equipped with J-kids, and a J-house
financed with low-interest J-loan (throw in a lengthy barrage of
pure bourgeois J-money talk here, that couldn't contrast more sickeningly
with everything noble and Bradleyan above and below). Cye's got
J-legal residency, which brings the promise of a comfy J-pension
and, when the time comes, a J-death, with J spilling out his ears
and J oozing from his pores in the form of more cringing body language.
Even his final throes will be sheepish and apologetic: watch my
big white outlander's nose turn strangely blue as I gasp my last.
It's easy to see why, immediately after allowing me my precious
lifetime budget of exactly thirty Bradley words, our author dismisses
the ludicrous likes of me from his awareness. He continues his stomp
as though just the two of us have never privately shared an awakening
peak, among the world's very first on this particular day in literary
history. It is clear that I've ceased to enjoy even the attenuated
existence I had while his attention was semi-fixed on me. Now I
might as well never have been born, except to write this whatever-it's-going-to-be.
I'm left with nothing but boundless vacant space, that vacuum wake
which vast people leave behind them. When someone of this significance
turns his back on you, Limbo gapes. In despair, I run after Sam
(make that Tom) like a baby boy dogging big Daddy on legs of inferior
length, trying to buck himself up and choke out further syllables
of baby-talk.
Without bothering to turn around, the doctor waves that orange-shaggy
arm across the cliff and down the slope, toward his Unker's toilet
bay. He's too--what shall I call it, kind?--to say it
outright; but I get the drift. I had no more business climbing up
here than the callow youth in ZANONI had poking his nose into Mejnour's
forbidden chamber (almost fatally--his soul was nearly eaten
alive), where he saw--
"...shapes, somewhat resembling in outline those of the human
form, gliding slowly and with regular revolutions through the cloud.
They appeared bloodless; their bodies were transparent, and contracted
or expanded like the folds of a serpent..."
Like Clarence Glyndon, I don't belong on the high places. So Tom
Bradley, the serpent's nephew, ambiguously throws or magicks me
back down to my proper milieu.
* * * *
I found myself in a strange condition, mostly blind, feeling two-thirds
drunk, though not necessarily with alcohol or any other compound
in the repertoire of modern chemists. It wasn't easy to know where
I was. Besides the green vinyl stool wedged between my hams, what
clued me that I'd been deposited in some kind of tavern was this
drinking song, rendered by various coarse and vulgar falsettos,
squawking more or less to the tune of Mary Wells' 1964 Motown smash-hit, "My Guy":
I'll cling to my guy
like shit to a blanket.
If he proffers up his prong,
I will briskly wank it...
Though my eyes couldn't yet quite make out the vocalizers, there
was something familiar about their senseless intonations, every
line ending with a question mark, no vowels but schwas. Most of
them were not really pledging fealty to my guy, or anyone else's,
but were just mumbling and following along without comprehension,
having gotten the words phonetically, because their intellects were
ill-equipped to negotiate grammatical constructions at the level
of sophistication favored by the major Motown lyricists of yesteryear.
It was comforting to know that I'd not been precipitated to some
even more emphatically nether realm, such as the methyl mercury
hell of Nagasaki Bay, but had landed in familiar territory--Home
Sweet Home, in fact. Father knows best. He had expelled me back
to the hand-job hostess bar by the seawall, where I could swill
and grunt with my peers, and share the meager contents of my undersized
skull in simple declarative monosyllables tempered with lots of
vocalized pauses. Dr. Bradley was making a statement: "These
TEFL trash, and not the natives you daily fellate, are your folk."
Leading the chorus was someone familiar-sounding: none other than
the storefront language school manager, our ever-coughing Englishman,
who seemed still to be in the middle of the same parasitic lap dance
which I've depicted him receiving in the very first section of this
succinct book review of mine. His face remained concealed behind
that slip of Manila flesh both darling and decrepit, belonging,
at least rightfully, to the tiny prepubescent Filipina sex-slave,
who had her own racial demerit to work off. It would have been better
for the sad child if she'd squatted, instead, on Ground Zero fifty-eight
years ago. At least now she'd have the attention of a heavy breather
who could do her some spiritual good.
This manuscript was being passed from hand to semi-literate hand
without my having given anyone permission to see the thing--which,
furthermore, Coleridge- and Burroughs-wise, I had no recollection
of writing in the first place.
"What kind of author profile is this?" I heard the Limey
bark. "Give us his daily behavior, the details of his wage-earning
life, if any. Quotidian panem, that sort of thing. You haven't shown
him eating or drinking something--we like that, don't we, boys?"
"Um, yeah, you bet, boss?"
"For, like, sure, Nigel?"
"What kind of journalist is this Cye Johan?" coughed the
boss (I should have known his name would be Nigel). "Too good
for reality?" Then he bothered to glance at me long enough
to ascertain that I was among the so-called living, and added, into
my face, "You might do us the favor of mentioning, for example,
certain well-known bits of common knowledge. Such as, did you know,
this bloke lives in a bleeding car?" When I failed to react,
Nigel decided to feign the sort of breathless, titillated confidentiality
which constitutes the main contribution of his countrymen to America's
current journalistic scene. He shifted to one of those stage whispers
that give you tintinitis at fifty paces, and said, "Not only
that, my dear, but he--"
As my eyes and head slowly cleared, I listened to him go on and
on, hacking up blackish lungers the while, which the Filipina dabbed
away with a wet cocktail napkin and a strange air of smug satisfaction.
He enumerated the kind of snickering and no doubt true things which
I did not want, and you won't be able, to hear. Maybe it's just
the air of authority which a Brit accent, any Brit accent, lends
to the spoken word--but my heart began with sore reluctance
to acknowledge these lurid weaknesses in my ideal man of letters.
I saw streaks of more than human frailty in him, such as a certain
obsessive-compulsive morbidity which should have been obvious at
the time, but was by no means evident to my starry eyes on the mountain,
where Dr. Bradley was in his demigodly mode. Soon enough, on my
green vinyl barstool, under Nigel's barrage, I began to blush, to
think that suggestible Cye had almost allowed himself to be convinced
that damned souls could be recycled, if not redeemed, through someone's
respiratory system.
Between bringing up hefty clumps of Southampton alveoli, Nigel said, "You silly bitch." For good measure, he added, with the
kind of offhanded but utter scorn that can be registered only by
people who've been living smashed together, nuts to butts, for thousands
of years, "What a ridiculous idea. Snorting astral monads,
indeed. Not even the sky-clad Jains imagine that."
He gave his lap-slave a kind of eyebrow-cock, as a cue that she
was to laugh derisively. Though on duty, she disobeyed, and chose
instead to stare at me carefully as possible through the smoke and
the red particulate mist that hung around her master in place of
a less unwholesome aura.
Nigel did air one bit of gossip which I chose to acknowledge here,
because it has already given me one nice transition between paragraphs
and promises to yield numerous more in the future. Just as I predicted
in my Exquisite Corpse rave about THE CURVED JEWELS, Tom Bradley
evidently did, a while back, wind up getting into a fight with a
bunch of Yakuza hireling-thugs. They were allegedly sicced on him
by Hirohito-worshiping extreme rightists outraged over his portrayal
of that dead god's grandson's penis as resembling "something
you wouldn't want to step on at low tide" (as referenced above),
and they got lucky enough to kill him, almost. It's not clear how
many of them he sent to Kama Loka. The local "imperial"
university's med school (which is supposed to be his last known
place of employment; he's said to have taught conversational skills
to their freshman dentistry majors--but I declare that idle
bullshit) took him in, patched him up, and he woke up in the very
vivisection chamber made famous on the front page of tombradley.org.
Some say that shock is what made him wind up weird as he is today-but
I hesitate to ascribe such feelings of delicacy or squeamishness
to my man. If he'd been born at the time, the good doctor could
have witnessed firsthand the removal of our Gary Cooper-look-alike
bomber pilots' living lungs, followed by the eating of their livers,
sushi-style, at festive banquets under the proud Rising-Sun banner,
and gotten off with half as many bad dreams as I'll take from this
one-day visit to Gloverland.
Nigel happened to agree with me on this point. He ascribed Dr. Bradley's
current eccentricity to another sort of trauma entirely. Winding
himself up for the sort of actual sentence production that enthralled
his American employees as surely as a line of spit glistening on
a concrete floor hypnotizes broody hens, he declared, "Your
man has been driven mad by neglect. Poor old bugger is a walking
rebuke to the Yank literary establishment, is what he is. What's
with your Jews over there? At least our Jews gave Auberon and Martin
a fighting chance to rise up from obscurity. That such an artist
should have to live in a place like this, among sods like us, eking
out a living in one of the most degrading ways imaginable--fuck
me, isn't that what drove your own Ezra Pound crazy? Seeing the
best minds of his particular generation waste their vitality behind
the cunting Berlitz podium? No wonder he scampers about in the night
air, all frantic, the sad, windy cunt. He'll catch his death of
pneu--"
The last word was cut off by the expected pathological symptom.
I took advantage of Nigel's incapacitation to speak up and express
my sincere doubt that Dr. Bradley ever lived by teaching, contrary
to the legends, the gossip, the novels, the essays, the promo copy,
and everything else on and off the record. And the TEFL trash backed
me up, bravely contradicting their boss (on whose lap the Filipina
baby was now dozing like a puppy just come in from being injured
in the gutter):
"Are you, like, kidding, Nigel?"
"The big dude a instructor? In a classroom?"
"He couldn't, you know, get work? Not with all the Japan-basher,
um, stuff he has wrote?"
Nigel exploded: "He did these paltry shits a huge favor writing
about them. He's the all-American high school quarterback with the
golden heart, who danced a slow one at the prom with the wallflower
wog who don't talkie za Amellican so goot. But is she grateful,
the slag? I should think not. He's been unofficially declared an
enemy of the state. I'm surprised he hasn't been deported or accidented
away by some hit and run tail-gater. I've heard that his visa hasn't
been renewed. He's rotted here longer than most of you wankers have
sucked air, and is still on a one-year renewal. He's enduring exile
within exile."
The lap dancer awakened from her junkie nod-off, and, in distressingly
good English, said, "Our Sweet old Tommy's just like a restless
ghost. He's got unfinished business that he can't get done, but
tries over and over again, anyway. He shunts and shuffles from one
Boom Town to the other and back again."
"Know what?" said her master. "Nobody cares what
you think. Roll us a joint, you silly cow." At the first glimpse
of cigarette papers, Nigel commenced depositing a blackish-red film
of tracheal tissue on the walls and beers and people all around.
"It's Hiroshima he's published novels about, not us,"
murmured the Filipina in a defiant little voice as she licked a
gummed edge. "But I think he was just looking for Nagasaki
in Hiroshima
The extent to which I was willing to disclose what I had learned
to these profane ears was only to say, "He has a particular
connection to this town."
I've seen something impossible of attainment for the usual matter-mired
pilgrim, and am in danger of winding up sad as Kevin Klein's Bottom
the Weaver on the morning after, but without the considerable consolation
of Michelle Pfeiffer's scent and angel hairs lingering and clinging
about my person in a golden fairy mist. I do have a few bristles
which sloughed off onto me at the moment of contact, beastly-coarse,
but seraph-hued, which I am saving in a lid baggie to show any of
you, if you're ever in Osaka between now and, say, 2050, and remember
to look me up. It won't be too hard to find me in the ghost town.
I'll be the one burrowed in like a fox among Jerusalem's rubble.
Meanwhile, confident that the voices of this hole in the seawall
will never be heard outside its confines, I, Cye Johan, who am turning
out to be Dr. Bradley's full-blown biographer, hereby, for all eternity,
suppress all but one more of Nigel's whispered factoids about my
subject. I've got no problems with him "living in a bleeding
car," because my imagination could never place the creator
of Sam Edwine between four stationary walls, anyway. So I will now,
before your very eyes, cause Tom Bradley to live on wheels, just
as the Limey said.
As a matter of fact, I have just decided to recollect that I did
pass a ratty van on my way up the good doctor's mountain, somewhere
between the mongooses and the bosozokus. I noticed it because it
was covered in dents and scratches--still rarities, for the
time being, even in nose-diving Nippon. Maybe he's sticking around
just so he can play the trend-setter when these anal-retentives
are forced by their own penury to transport their humiliated selves
in rusty jalopies.
Sunken lopsidedly into its suspensions, this old van, to whose existence
I am prepared to swear in the presence of a notary public, was clearly
accustomed to bearing a heavy load on the drivers' side, but, perhaps
sadly, none on the other. Like me, does he have an anorexically
skinny wife? And scrawny kids? How can I be said to have profiled
and interviewed a man when the most fundamental questions are left
up in the air? Religious perusals of his works, print and electronic,
yield exactly counterbalancing contradictory suspicions. I'm not
even sure if the big fellow is a hetero. I could have asked Nigel,
but was unable, as the word "profanation" loomed before
my mind's eye like a red sign nailed to a cinder-brick wall.
I like this idea better and better the more I think about it. Living
in a car is quite an accomplishment. It shows a practical-minded
resourcefulness that you wouldn't expect in a literary figure, especially
in this overpoliced state. Not that Japanese police do any crime
solving to speak of, just peeping, aided by "neighborhood association"
housewives--which leads to the question of where he could stop
and sleep. I'll work on that. Maybe I will create the greatest of
all Japanese implausibilities: an unpopulated stretch of land large
enough to park a motor vehicle upon without paying dearly for the
privilege.
And, having accomplished that, I will wedge our novelist in his
van, probably stretching him out on the diagonal. I'll let him rest
from his labors, and snore as far into the broad daylight as his
big dark heart desires. Then I'll skulk back to my origami house,
raw-fish wife and disemboweling job.
He learned me his language. Should I curse him for it?
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