of me? Murder in the kitchen! Dachau farmyards! We are grooming beings to eat! Does God love the world? What a monstrous system of nourishment! All of us animal tribes at eternal war! What have we won? Humans, the dietary Nazis! Death at the center of nourishment! Who will apologize to the cows? It’s not our fault, we didn’t think this whole thing up. These kidneys are kidneys. This is not chicken, this is a chicken. Think of the death camps in the basement of a hotel. Blood on the pillows! Matter impaled on toothbrushes! All animals eating, not for pleasure, not for gold, not for power, but merely to be. For whose eternal Pleasure? Tomorrow I begin my fast. I resign. But I can’t resign with a full stomach. And does fasting please or offend Thee? You might construe it as pride or cowardice. I have memorized my bathroom forever. Edith kept it very clean, but I have been less fastidious. Is it fair to ask the intended to scrub the electric chair? I’m using old newspapers, I’ll buy rolls when I deserve them. I’ve promised the toilet much attention if it will be good to me, I’ll unblock it. But why should I humiliate myself now? You don’t polish windows in a car wreck. When my body starts, the old routines will start, I promise. Help! Give me a hint. For five days, except for that first half-hour of failure, I cannot enter the bathroom. My teeth and hair are dirty. I can’t begin to shave, to mock myself with a little deposit of hair. I would stink at an autopsy. Nobody wants to eat me, I’m sure. What’s it like outside? Is there an outside? I am the sealed, dead, impervious museum of my appetite. This is the brutal solitude of constipation, this is the way the world is lost. One is ready to stake everything on a river, a nude bath before Catherine Tekakwitha, and no promises.
Into the world of names with us. F. said: Of all the laws which bind us to the past, the names of things are the most severe. If what I sit in is my grandfather’s chair, and what I look out of is my grandfather’s window-then I’m deep in his world. F. said: Names preserve the dignity of Appearance. F. said: Science begins in coarse naming, a willingness to disregard the particular shape and destiny of each red life, and call them all Rose. To a more brutal, more active eye, all flowers look alike, like Negroes and Chinamen. F. never shut up. His voice has got into my ear like a trapped fly, incessantly buzzing. His style is colonizing me. His will provides me with his room downtown, the factory he bought, his treehouse, his soap collection, his papers. And I don’t like the discharge from my pecker. Too much, F.! I’ve got to hold on to myself. Next thing you know my ears will be transparent. F., why do I suddenly miss you so intensely? There are certain restaurants I can never go to again. But do I have to be your monument? Were we friends, after all? I remember the day you finally bought the factory, eight hundred thousand dollars, and I walked with you on those uneven wood floors, floors which as a boy you had swept so often. I believe you were actually weeping. It was the middle of the night and half the lights were gone. We walked between the rows of sewing machines, cutting tables, defunct steam pressers. There is nothing more quiet than a still factory. Every now and then we kicked a tangle of wire hangers, or brushed a rack where they hung, thick as vines, and a curious tinkling resounded, like a hundred bored men playing in their pockets, a curiously violent sound, as if the men were waiting among the grotesque shadows cast by the abandoned machines, men waiting for salaries, goons for the word to smash F.’s shut-down. I was vaguely frightened. Factories, like parks, are public places, and it was an offense to the democratic mind to see F. so deeply moved by his ownership. F. picked up an old heavy steam iron which was connected to a metal frame above by a thick spring. He swung it away from the table, dropped it, laughed while it bounced up and down like a dangerous yo-yo, shadows striping the dirty walls like a wild chalk eraser on a blackboard. Suddenly F. threw a switch, the lights flickered, and the central power belt which drove the sewing machines began to roll. F. began to orate. He loved to talk against mechanical noise.
-Larry! he cried, moving down the empty benches. Larry! Ben! Dave! I know you can hear me! Ben! I haven’t forgotten your hunched back! Sol! I’ve done what I promised! Little Margerie! You can eat your tattered slippers now! Jews, Jews, Jews! Thanks!
-F., this is disgusting.
-Every generation must thank its Jews, F. said, leaping away from me. And its Indians. The Indians must be thanked for building our bridges and skyscrapers. The world is made of races, you better learn that, my friend. People are different! Roses are different from each other! Larry! It’s me, F., boy goy, whose blond hair you ofttimes ruffled. I’ve done what I promised you in the dark stock room so many afternoons ago. It’s mine! It’s ours! I’m dancing on the scraps! I’ve turned it into a playground! I’m here with a friend!
When he had calmed down F. took my hand and led me to the stock room. Great empty spools and cardboard cylinders threw their precise shadows in the half light, temple columns. The respectable animal smell of wool still clung to the air. I sensed a layer of oil forming on my nose. Back on the factory floor the power belt still turned and a few spikeless machines pumped. F. and I stood very close.
-So you think I am disgusting, F. said.
-I would never believe you capable of such cheap sentimentality. Talking to little Jewish ghosts!
-I was playing as once I promised I would.
-You were slobbering.
-Isn’t this a beautiful place? Isn’t it peaceful? We’re standing in the future. Soon rich men will build places like this on their estates and visit them by moonlight. History has shown us how men love to muse and loaf and make love in places formerly the scene of much violent activity.
-What are you going to do with it?
-Come in, now and then. Sweep a little. Screw on the shiny tables. Play with the machines.
-You could have been a millionaire. The financial page talked about the brilliance of your manipulations. I must confess that this coup of yours lends a lot of weight to all the shit you’ve been spouting over the years.
-Vanity! cried F. I had to see if I could pull it off. I had to see if there was any comfort in it. In spite of what I knew! Larry didn’t expect it of me, it wasn’t binding. My boyhood promise was an alibi! Please don’t let this evening influence anything I’ve said to you.
-Don’t cry, F.
-Forgive me. I wanted to taste revenge. I wanted to be an American. I wanted to tie my life up with a visit. That isn’t what Larry meant.
My arm struck a rack of hangers as I seized F.’s shoulders. The jangling of coins was not so loud, what with the smaller room and the noise of the machinery beyond, and the thugs retreated as we stood in a forlorn embrace.
Catherine Tekakwitha in the shadows of the long house. Edith crouching in the stuffy room, covered with grease. F. pushing a broom through his new factory. Catherine Tekakwitha can’t go outside at noon. When she did get out she was swaddled in a blanket, a hobbling mummy. So she passed her girlhood, far from the sun and the noise of hunting, a constant witness to the tired Indians eating and fucking one another, and a picture of pure Mistress Mary rattling in her head louder than all the dancer’s instruments, shy as the deer she had heard about. What voices did she hear, louder than groans, sweeter than snoring? How well she must have learned the ground rules. She did not know how the hunter rode down his prey but she knew how he sprawled with a full belly, burping later at love. She saw all the preparations and all the conclusions, without the perspective set against a mountain. She saw the coupling but she didn’t hear the songs hummed in the forest and the little gifts made of grass. Confronted with this assault of human machinery, she must have developed elaborate and bright notions of heaven-and a hatred for finite shit. Still, it is a mystery how one loses the world. Dumque crescebat aetate, crescebat et prudentia, says P. Cholenec in 1715. Is it pain? Why didn’t her vision turn Rabelaisian? Tekakwitha was the name she was given, but the exact meaning of the word is not known. She who puts things in order, is the interpretation of l’abbé Marcoux, the old missionary at Caughnawaga.