Coyote V. Acme (7 page)

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Authors: Ian Frazier

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11.
(Hookers and former hookers please see additional questionnaire sheets mailed under separate cover.)
12.
(All respondents) Please state any and all previously existing conditions which may cause you to turn into somebody, or vice versa.
III. GENERAL
1.
Are you now or have you ever been a general?
2.
If
yes
, in which country (see above, section II-4)?
This is not a bill. Please do not include payment. If application is accepted, you will be informed by mail, at which time a new contract will be issued to you. All information contained in application will be treated confidentially by employees and assigns of insurer. When required, confidential information may also be supplied to its affiliates, reinsurers, contractors, and other interested parties, not exclusive of secret sworn enemies who have hated or feared applicant from childhood. Insurer declares itself not liable in cases of data theft, file removal, or unspecified acts of malice. Information will not otherwise be disclosed except as required by plot or supermarket tabloid.
S
unset. The moors. A strong gale blowing.
CATHY: Oh, hold me, Heathcliff. Only in your arms am I truly happy. When Edgar Linton holds me I feel so cold.
HEATHCLIFF: Your husband can never love you, Cathy. He will never see how cruel and fine and free you are.
CATHY: Edgar Linton's spirit is to mine as a small bedchamber washbasin to a great, deep millpond. The difference between us makes me tremble! Also, there's his … his collection of novelty nutcrackers.
HEATHCLIFF: Linton, a collector? (
Wild, anguished laugh
) I should have expected it.
CATHY: He keeps them somewhere. In the tool cellar, I believe.
HEATHCLIFF: Ha! And I suppose they are all hand-carved.
CATHY: I believe so. You will have to ask him.
HEATHCLIFF: And hand-painted.
CATHY: Possibly. I hardly listen when he speaks of them.
HEATHCLIFF: From Tahiti, no doubt, and Guinea, and of sandalwood from the Leeward Islands.
CATHY: Again, I would not know. He has such a very great many.
HEATHCLIFF: I would think nothing of holding you this way even in the presence of Linton himself and all his damned novelty items!
(
They kiss.
)
 
 
“Hello, I'm Edgar Linton. Most of you know of the marital difficulties between my wife and myself. Others—more than a few, I hope—may recognize my name from certain monographs published in
The Cots-wolds Hobbyist
and elsewhere. Catherine, bless her (for I love her still, despite everything), never understood my nutcrackers. I do not begrudge her that, nor that she called my life's hobby ‘tedious'! To her, of course, it was. To me, it was a joy shot through with bright threads of exotica and adventure, mine to pursue in my own home through the wonders of parcel post.
“I did not, and do not, keep them in any ‘tool cellar.' I don't know where she got that. The bulk of my collection is stored in a converted tack room below the conservatory, suitably cool and dry, fitted on three sides with sliding shelves in mahogany cases. To oversimplify rather drastically, all nutcrackers can be divided into two categories: those made of wood, and those made of other materials, such as stone, metal, or ivory. The larger number by far are of wood, hardwoods
such as teak and walnut being preferred, inasmuch as you cannot crack a nut with soft woods like cypress or pine. Swelling and warping cause wooden parts—screw or lever mechanisms, often artfully, artfully carved—to jam. For this reason, low-moisture storage rooms are required.
“Now, as to the objects themselves. This one here is a favorite. You simply grasp the ankles like so, insert any nut you like (except perhaps a Brazil nut), and—You see? Rather neat. Or, again, you have this model, in which you grasp the back part, here, and the front part, here, insert the nut, turn in opposite directions, and crack. Seen from a distance, both of these make quite striking statuettes, if you prop them against something to keep them from falling over. This next one, as you see, is jointed at both the knees and middle, so that it can accommodate two or more nuts and shatter all at a go when you press upon the topknot.
“Here is one that Catherine particularly disliked. Something about the accuracy of the detail, I suppose, or the expression of the features. I was disappointed, of course, but I had grown used to her reactions. She set her jaw and turned away, forgetting for the moment to disguise that slight double chin I so adored. I knew she was only tolerating me, that every moment she spent viewing my collection her thoughts were with him to whom she was longing to fly. Really, she never gave the nutcrackers much of a show. The cleverness of this one's hinge, the way it duplicates an anatomical part, was lost on her. (What is even more saddening
is that I am absolutely positive she would have loved this or any of the others if only she'd relaxed a bit.) She stood and listened for as long as she could bear, then muttered an excuse and hurried upstairs. Soon I heard from the room above me the faint sounds of her departure. I could imagine the passion of their meeting, her caresses more intense for the tiresome half hour I had made her endure. I filled the lamp with coal oil, the costlier, smokeless kind, and prepared for an evening of cataloguing.
“During these troubles I continued to be grateful for the kind solace and understanding of Dr. and Mrs. Hiram Ennis, of Philadelphia, U.S.A. Fellow-collectors will remember the Ennises well, although they are unknown to wider fame. Hiram and Marguerite, your devotion reminds me that the friends one makes collecting nutcrackers are friends indeed. Further, I would like to thank nutcracker fanciers Mr. Ulrich Link, of Ulm, Germany; Mr. Philip Clausing, of Austria; Mme. Berthe Olivet and her son Bertrand, of Paris; the Misses Buckingham, of Devon; and Mr. Frank McEachern, of the American firm of McEachern Nuts & Savories, Inc. Faithful friends, all! You must have known, or suspected, what was going on between Catherine and me and—him. I deeply appreciate the tact which kept all reference to my situation out of our newsletter.”
 
 
Dr. and Mrs. Ennis were on a collecting tour of the Southwest, and could not be reached. Mr. Frank
McEachern submitted the following, on stationery with the company letterhead:
“Ed Linton has the best collection of nutcrackers in the world. In fact, it is so far superior nothing else comes close. His holdings in Modern Calisthenics pieces alone are better than most museums'. I have offered Ed prices five times list and more for'crackers to add to our collection here at our main office, but he always refuses. He loves his hobby too much to profit from it. In a sense, Ed
is
nutcracker collecting. I've never met the wife. Of course, I don't know this other fellow she was mixed up with, but I can assure you that Ed's worth a hundred of him, whoever he is. Once—I couldn't help myself—I even wrote Mrs. Linton a letter and said so, in the plainest terms.”
 
Mrs. Edgar Linton
Thrushcross Grange, etc.
England
Personal and Confidential
Dear Mrs. Linton,
Although I feel it is hardly my place, under the circumstances, to speak of such things as pertain to intimacies between a husband and wife, and although I do not know you at all well—indeed, have never met you—yet I feel more than compelled to write to you, not, as I say, without certain doubts and reservations. Your husband is a fine man. Do you think you might use your influence to persuade him to part with a few of his nutcrackers,
namely, the ones that look like ladies in gymnastic costume?
 
 
Cathy replied by return post.
“I informed Mr. McEachern that if he ever attempted to write to me again, I would alert officials of the Board of Customs. Edgar, the coward! That he should waste his youth, and mine, corresponding with these types—Oh, Heathcliff, if you only knew how I suffered! But you were gone, and I was left for long, empty days with him and his whatnots. How I hated them, except for the ones—oh, you know, the ones with the little huntsman. I am sure you recall them. I asked Edgar if I could set them on the spinet. With the little huntsman with the musket? A sort of spring device catapulted the nut from the musket into the hole in the hollow tree, where there was a movable squirrel, or several. Aside from those, Edgar's collection excited in me the strongest loathing. Those, and the ones in the shape of pug dogs. And the little banty roosters. My darling, my truer soul, my second spirit! You grew up wild as a bramble on the common, you never had such curios for your distraction. How they would have fallen to pieces under your rough fingers, how you would have strewn filbert shells everywhere, caring not for those who might be barefoot but of tenderer hide than yours, in which number I must include myself.”
 
 
Heathcliff:
“Fiends of hell torment me at the memory! I recall the dull afternoon, the spinet dusty with disuse, and—ah!—Cathy's smooth and round hand holding that damned kickshaw of Linton's, although I should mention that the weapon the wretched huntsman in question aimed at the squirrel-infested stump was a crossbow, unmistakably, and nothing like a musket. I nearly took my blackthorn stick and smashed the thing to atoms, and the rest of the nutcracker menagerie in its belowstairs den or wherever it might be. I know he also had a few that went everywhere with him in the boot of his carriage, which he would haul out in one village or another and show to the populace, for what purpose I cannot tell, and those I wished to hurl beneath his wheels and scatter in splinters across the paving stones. Cathy, my Cathy! I hear the wild music of her voice, I see her graceful form as she operates that gadget, shelling nutmeats as the twilight descends, piling up far more than any ten people could eat.
“Write to me, ye ardor-starved hobbyists, Squire McEachern and your crew, and I'll commit your inky pages to my parlor fire, and warm my slippers with 'em. I crack nuts with my own strong back teeth, nothing more, or by stomping down with my bootheels, or hard in the crook of my right arm, if need be, and scoff at your mechanistical go-devils.”
 
 
EPILOGUE:
Nutcracker fanciers did indeed take Mr. Heathcliff up on his challenge, and wrote to him in such numbers
as to strain the local postal service. Rather than burning all the letters, Mr. Heathcliff read one or two at idle moments, then scratched a few brief responses, and thus began a lively correspondence with Mr. Ulrich Link, of Ulm, Germany, which went from enmity, to growing respect, and finally to warm friendship, which continues today.
Cathy died, but not seriously. Edgar Linton made the (for him) unprecedented decision to allow a portion of his collection to tour the Continent and the eastern United States, with stops in all the major cities. From the revenues received, he was able to purchase some unusual cigar trimmers seized from a tobacconist for nonpayment of tariff. After a reasonable period of mourning, he began to look for a companion whose interests more closely matched his own.
S
ummary: In May, the American Prosperity Foundation, Inc., an office-based sampling organization, chose from a preselected group a smaller group, which it believed was unusually significant. Then professionals took that subset and divided it even further. At issue was whether an issue was an issue or a non-issue. On certain issues/non-issues, disagreement was so small as to be statistically negligible. For example:
ISSUE
NON-ISSUE
My taxes
Your taxes
So far, so good. Other i/non-i inquiries, while less clear-cut, nevertheless fell within an acceptable margin of certainty—where acceptable certainty was taken to be a percentage greater than sixty-six, or slightly more than America's ninety-three million television households.
I
NON-I
The Russian Suicide
Death Chair
Regular chairs
So far, so good. However, what were researchers to do in cases like the following?
I (NON-I)
NON-I(I)
“She's the Sheriff”
“Turner & Hooch”
If the first was designated an issue, although possibly not, in the judgment of many respondents, and the second was definitely not an issue except insofar as the first one was (albeit to a lesser degree), what then? The question seemed to lop the entire procedure off at the knees, and progress stalled.
Enter Nils Garrickson, a twenty-five-year-old wunderkind trained in the emerging science of cybernetics.
Unfortunately, he was fired, leaving us right back at square one. Then they brought in somebody else, Tom somebody. He also got fired. Then they brought in Marcie, who was more or less kicked upstairs from Accounting. What she did, first off, was to go through all the non-issues and take a whole new look just at them. She found, to her surprise, that many did not strictly qualify as non-issues at all, but included a sprinkling of pseudo-issues, sub-issues, secondary issues, meta-issues, and dead issues, as well as one or two real serious issues that had somehow been misfiled. Now we were getting somewhere. Printouts of the new, culled list of non-issues were issued to every department head. Marcie's managerial style
was hands-on, direct, and at times confrontational. Part Welsh, part Greek, with a slight mustache and a big, strapping form, she got the most from her smaller male associates. First off, she established a standard of “i/non-i-ness,” based on the following model:
I
NON-I
Golf junkets
Miniature-golf junkets
Later quantifying the standard by means of a simple algebraic formula (included in work sheet), she received the Nobel Prize.
At the time, my department was working on an issue for which we had not yet found a corresponding non-issue:
I
NON-I
Sex in the
workplace
?
I had run through all the non-i tables without success, and Marcie was becoming impatient. One Easter I stayed over just to get some hours to myself on the computer. Monday morning rolled around and I hadn't had a chance to go home and shower. Suddenly it hit me! I ran into Marcie's office. She was watering her plants. She'd just arrived. Puzzled, she looked up as I scrawled on her blackboard:
I
NON-I
Sex in the
workplace
Sex in the
fireplace
Marcie plugged the coördinates into her formula—and, sure enough, they checked out. We examined our figures again and again to make absolutely certain. Overjoyed, we reviewed my data sheets to see if they contained any discoveries that might be patentable, and we found plenty.
From then on, everything seemed to happen at once. Funding poured in. People had been waiting for a system that could reliably provide non-issues for any issues that came up, and vice versa. Now we had that system in place, with an exclusive seventeen-year license worldwide. In short order, we were able to engineer the following i/non-i couplings:
I
NON-I
Scofflaw diplomats
Diplomats in general
Gangsta rap
Gangsta gift wrap
The B-1 bomber
The B-flat bomber
Young Elvis, old Elvis
Old Elvis, dead Elvis
Each of these produced revenues for the foundation well in excess of thirty-five hundred dollars. Everyone began to look forward to going to work in the mornings.
Staffers took each other out to lunch and splurged on health insurance. Every day, it seemed like, someone was coming up with a new “eureka” and shooting off a Roman candle in the commissary.
 
 
Then, one afternoon just before quitting time—we'd been getting along so well, and our system was working so beautifully!—Marcie fired me. The first thought that ran through my mind was, Never sleep with someone from the office! Of course, I hadn't slept with anyone, but that was small comfort now. As she turned to leave my cubicle and stepped into the hall, someone fired her. Then the guy who fired her heard his phone ringing and, when he picked it up, learned he had been fired. I cleaned out my desk and fired some people and went home, only to find a message on my machine from Personnel telling me I'd been rehired. But that turned out to be an error: the next day I received official notification that I'd been fired.
Naturally, the stage was now set for Nils Garrickson, Part Two. He was calling himself Nilsa and was taking a whole new approach. Apparently he/she had obtained some funds for a business to warehouse closed issues which technicians would then attempt to reopen. NilsCo offered me a flat daily rate, no benefits, everything off the books. Some of the issues I was working with were so closed that I was forced to resort to procedures which were bad science, even dangerous. Once or twice I managed to turn a closed
issue into a fuzzy issue, but that was about it. After a few months, I quit.
 
 
I sat at home collecting unemployment and waiting for my phone to ring. Meanwhile, the world moved farther away from the old i/non-i classical polarities in which I had been trained. Some would say that it had never conformed to our model to begin with, and perhaps they would be right. The rare piecework assignments I picked up almost never involved a good textbook non-issue—just issues that someone wanted me to skirt or talk around.
Now, as I look back over my career, I realize that issues versus non-issues, as an issue, is something of a false issue. We all get caught up in discussion of the issues, and we try to use reason, and it's such a waste. Our country is being destroyed. Focussing on our differences blinds us to an evil that threatens everything we've worked for and cherish. In addition, we must try to develop a new mode that defines issues less in terms of what they are not (or are). This can sound more complicated than it really is, if only we break it down, which can be done easily by someone with the proper theoretical tools.

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