Quipu (2 page)

Ray opens his briefcase without undue clatter and removes the original-fiction paperback anthology.
THE AUTHOR IS DEAD! A Collection of Postmodern Transgressions
. Ah me oh my. The more things change, the more things change. “You wouldn’t like it.”

After a stewing silence, a kitten yelps.

“Sorry,” Ray says “it’s just that it’s shockingly sexist.”

“No doubt. You kept me awake half the night choking back your rage.”

“I like his style of humor.”

“Your rotten cronies. You stick up for each other. You’d vote for Stalin if he was a member of the Nitting Circle.”

“You see, the thing is, you don’t actually have to
vote
for Stalin, they come and—”

“In fact, Joseph’s quite nice when he’s not being gloomy.”

“His treatment of women characters is quite beyond the pale.”

“Well why were you laughing? Not that you have to explain that to
me.”

“Marjory, you’ve got to try to, you know, what was it Pope said, divide the sense from the thought. I mean,
you
do, look at the sort of stuff you’re reading all the time. Jesus, Dostoevski was a loony fascist.”

Plates and cutlery rattle efficiently. “I don’t find Dostoevski remotely comic, let alone at half past one in the morning. He’s never raised a laugh from me.”

“No,” Ray says. He slips the paperback into its proper alphabetical place, giving the pending shelf a miss. The living room floor squeaks in annoyance as he crosses the room to the television set and bends to switch it on. “No, I’m sure he never has.”

“Jane,” said my mother, “you simply cannot marry a dog. It is out of the question.”

I continued to unfold my trousseau, putting the linen neatly to one side and the silk undies to the other. With determined patience I said, ‘I will brook no obstacle in this matter. I shall not be opposed.”

Mother wrung her hands. Framed against the handsome proportions of the bedroom window, she stared into the afternoon’s glow. “You always were a dreadfully wilful child, Boojum.”

“Boring, Mother. Boring. Really.” Some of the linen was the gift of my father’s new or current wife or spouse; we had not yet, in fact, established my step-parent’s gender, due to the postal strike.

“It’s all very well for you to take that attitude, my girl. The fact remains that it is we who must live with the neighbors.”

I began to grow angry. “Damn the neighbors, Mother. If I cared what the Fosters deemed proper I should still be wearing a veil.”

“You are being hysterical, dear,” Mother told me in an etiolated tone. “You know as well as I that you have never worn a veil in your life.”

“A figure of speech.” She can be perfectly exasperating.

“Nor a yashmak,” she said, ploughing on heedless of my raised eyes and muttered imprecations, determined to have her say, “nor a garden hat. And I cannot imagine that this terrier gentleman—”

“Kelpie, Fiona. Do try.”

“—that this kelpie fellow is without a degree of social sensitivity of his own. Don’t deny it; I know you, my girl, we might differ on some things but I trust your instincts to that extent. This dog of yours will feel uncomfortable in our circles. You will recall that he expressed an interest in Mr. Percy’s peahens only to be misunderstood. How did you feel about that contretemps?”

Glacially I told her, “It is our intention to emigrate to Australia.”

Mother uttered a ferocious bray. “I see. He’s found an opening on a sheep station, then?”

“That’s not even remotely funny.” I closed the lid of the lacquered chinoiserie glory box, and crossed the room to the mirror. My hair had lost some of its gloss. I found part of a dry leaf tucked in above my ear and quickly crushed it between thumb and index finger, letting the fragments sift to the carpet. Try as one might, running through the woods is a dusty business in late September. “There is scarcely any call on a sheep station for a theoretical nuclear physicist.”

“God forbid I should belittle his mathematical skills. In regard to this grotesque proposal, Jane, it’s clear enough to me that Towser has calculated to a nicety—”

Seething, I let my brush fall to the floor and turned on her, cheeks so flushed I could feel their heat. “His name is Spot, Mother. As you know. I will
not
have—” My breast heaved; all the words whirled in my brain. “As you know because he has been often enough in our parlor, because we have conducted this tedious argument or others like it sufficiently often and with such a plethora of redundancy that I am heartily sick of it.” I looked around blindly for the brush, took up instead a silver-backed comb. Mother held her tongue but I was not appeased. I watched her reflection. “Bitch,” I muttered.

She gave a satirical snort, and left the room. I could have kicked myself.

1983: there’s a lot of it going around

Something pale brown and bent juts from the front slot of the letterbox. Joseph Williams has no trouble seeing that this is so, even with the foreshortened view available to him from his heavily curtained bedroom window. The postman has jammed the damn thing into a space meant for decorous Edwardian dinner invitations, if that’s the way Edwardians went about getting fed.

It takes him some minutes to shove the drapes back into place, groan, trudge to the door, locate himself in the passage, all that detail stuff that gets you to the front gate. (All right: he’s a little under five ten, at one time a moderately impressive height but now merely average, dwarfed by the monsters of nutrition strutting every day from the primary school playgrounds where they molest one another sexually in lieu of attending to their lessons; yes, yes, he’s got dark receding hair that he continues to wear longer than most women’s, another marker of psychophysical anachronism; close, blue eyes weakened by reading, if his father was correct all those years ago; the faint trace of surgical correction in childhood of a hare-lip that he believes is a blindingly visible eye-sore instantly repulsive to all women, and is convinced of this beyond the most rational or impassioned persuasion, just as he is certain that it is taken by his coevals as evidence of mental retardation). Joseph is in a condition of terminal ennui.

The pale brown thing in the letterbox is
SMART GENES
, a scurrilous and brilliant mimeographed magazine. But Joseph, in his sloth, has never been on the British editor’s mailing list, a case unlikely to have altered. Presumably Brian Wagner, who is a stalwart list member, has decided
SMART GENES
would cheer Joseph up. It has certainly done so in the past.

There have been only four issues of
SMART GENES
to date; this is the fifth. Weakly, Joseph strips off the re-direction notice (with, of course, Brian Wagner’s address on it, scratched out, the cheap sod, to save extra postage) and smiles mildly at the cover. It depicts the late Sir Cyril Burt, notorious for his tampering with the evidence that led to the creation of Britain’s lamentable 11+ school streaming, a bone through his nose, regarding a copy of
SMART GENES
with bead-browed caution and drawn pistol. The gag line informs Joseph that it is the first apotropaic quipu Sir Cyril has ever seen.

joseph is better informed than Sir Cyril

For twenty years Joseph Williams has doted on quipu, apotropaic and otherwise. The selection, typical enough, of such a demented word as “apotropaic” (which denotes the turning away of some threatened evil, usually by staring it boldly in the eye) is one cause of his word-drunk infatuation. In this, if in little else, he resembles his fellow hikes Ray Finlay (who’d never admit it) and Brian Wagner (who’d confess to any crime).

what it is that joseph knows

Leafing through the Twiltone A4 pages for some explicit clue to Wagner’s intention, the hot bushfire-smoked air rasping his antrums, he is able to take for granted that “quipu,” in this case, does not refer to ancient Inca records made by putting knots in variously colored ropes but to personal magazines written, published and distributed amongst themselves by hikes, that “hike” is a shortened form of “high IQ” (which is to say, “high Intelligence Quotient”), that “intelligence” is a concept at once problematic, politically sensitive, racially dodgy and all that keeps him from slashing his throat, given his certified possession of quite a lot of it, whatever it might be. What’s more, Joseph is well abreast of the fact that quipu are less often concerned these days with IQ norming protocols as such, though some residual fascination for the topic continues to persist as a kind of subtext or deep grammar in the confessions, games, slanging matches, jokes and meditations that comprise the contents of contemporary quipu.

It goes entirely without saying that Joseph takes it for granted that truly clever dick quipu are replete with neologisms such as “quipu,” “Nitting Circle,” “clever dick” and the like; that the magazines are almost always produced by roneo from typed stencils, or by some similar low-cost reproduction process, and collated, stapled, addressed and distributed by the editor and his or her friends, in limited editions of between five and five hundred copies; that money rarely changes hands, such quipu being themselves a kind of unweighted basket of fungible commodity futures or whatever it is that bourgeois economists use these days instead of good old-fashioned cash; in fact, the amount of tacit knowledge (Michael Polanyi’s useful phrase) that Joseph possesses in this respect is awesome. All of it is called upon via Chomskyan grammar decoding protocols as lethargically he flips the pale brown pages, noticing finally (having missed it the first time through) that Wagner has marked two passages with a light Colortone Fine Liner felt tip pen.

The paragraphs enter Joseph’s consciousness like jolts from an ECT electrode. Though they are processed principally by his left hemisphere, which specializes in interpreting linguistic and logical material, they leave their mark in his right: that quivering hemisphere hungry for song, splashes of vivid hue in artful forms, love and hate in inchoate gusts.

“Jesus Christ,” Joseph mutters in the hot terrible summer daylight of 1983. “More Crushing Blows!”

if you’re not confused, you just don’t understand the situation

A decade earlier, one of the bitter lows of his life, when Joseph himself was publishing
Mogadon Blues
from Flat 11, 1121 Drummond St, his wretched friend Mike Murphy was finding True Love and falling from its grace like a demonstration of some faulty perpetual motion machine. Murphy was the first of the local high IQ belly openers, if Joseph’s truly crude childhood indiscretions in 1961 can be laid aside as an aberration without issue. Murphy told the quipu world his woes, showed them all his poor tattered heart, regaled the bright community with haunting and comical tales of the Crushing Blows dealt by fate, God, raw accident, the vulgarity of others, his own perfect ineptitude. If he was not desperately smitten by his best friend’s wife, it was a haughty waitress in a Carlton takeaway food bar. When the neighbors developed a passion for Argentinian dance and gave vent to their discovery at three in the morning, Mike Murphy’s reason would totter and the wistful bleats of pain dash from his fingers into the wires and springs of his old Remington, slashing wax from stencils; ink would pour and roll, paper whine from the duplicator. More Crushing Blows! The authentic pain of a sensibility trained by the Leavisites of Melbourne University’s English department, trained to concert pitch, here, on the quipu page, in editorials, answering critics and well-wishers, Crushing Blows rendered into concrete poetry, the words sent teeming forth into every English-speaking country of the world (and some where German or Polish was milk tongue! Murphy’s agony and hunger surpassing lexical boundaries!), provoking a decade of shameless display.

Yet here it is, 1983, and the same old crap is afflicting not just Joseph, in Melbourne, Australia (late summer and ghastly drought and sheep turning up their poor parched twisted little toes and half the beauty spots of Victoria and South Australia ablaze or powdered to white ash and black), not just Joseph Williams and Australia, but bloody Gareth Jones as well, of Britain, who, by a kind of seasonal circadian lag, has had this to say in the pages of
SMART GENES 5
:

Exhausted Joseph’s right hemisphere is buzzing with angry resonance. Wagner, you bastard, I will not be mocked.

It is an outrageous declaration, banal or not. Joseph has never quite come to this point in his many outbursts and lamentations, and if Mike Murphy approached it in the mid-seventies no one was taken in. So much candor has the effect of a scarcely visible hare-lip scar; it is a sure sign of feeble-mindedness. The sun bashes down. Joseph Williams totters back inside the house, where, while it is not cool, at least the glare’s less horrendously bright, and drops the quipu to the linoed floor. An incurious cat noses it briefly before settling to lick a furry perineum.