The Life of Hope (34 page)

Whatever you say. Anyway, that human sexual intercourse is some hard work. We fishies have an easier time of it. The female lays the eggs, I cruise over, slow and easy-like, and zap ’em with the milt. Easy. Mind you, it’s not an awful lot of fun, but it is easy!

How’s come all you ever want to talk about is sex?

I’ll talk about other things. Like, for instance, perhaps it would interest you to know that the water dropped about 6 degrees Centigrade overnight.

It doesn’t.

Oh. Well, what do you suggest we talk about?

Let me ask you about something. There’s a book called
The Fish
 …

I read it.

What the hell do you mean, you read it?

I didn’t actually
read
it. Isaiah read it to me.

The whole book?

While he was writing it. I was kind of his technical adviser. You know that scene where the Fish dies? I had a lot of input there. The way Isaiah had it, the Fish just ate the poison and plotzed. But it wouldn’t have happened that way. We fishies, boy, we put up a struggle.

It was a pretty good scene.

I take that as a compliment, coming as it does from a published writer.

Who says I’m a writer?

Whitecrow.

Oh. So, in Isaiah’s book, the Fish devours a number of penises.

Right.

Any truth to that?

Ah, I think you’re missing the symbolism.

Don’t give this symbolism shit.

You are asking if it is a literal truth that I have in my time devoured a human penis?

Right.

The answer to that question would be in the negative.

You’re being evasive here, Mossback.

Hey, know what? I’m beginning to understand this tit business. Your girlfriend, boy, she’s got great tits!

Don’t change the subject.

I didn’t.

Have you ever eaten any portion of the human anatomy?

Eaten as in ingested, no. I chewed on something once, then spat it out.

What was it?

“Paulie?”

Your girlfriend wants for you to wake up.

What did you chew on?

“Paulie, it’s time to go to the hospital.”

We’ll be talking to you, chum.

“Let’s see if maybe
this
will wake you up.”

This too is educational. We fishies don’t do that.

Mona pumped life back into my body.

The year of our Lord, 1881, was the year the Dutch came, not to join Hope and the Perfectionists, rather to farm the land. Abram Skinner had advertised in many European newspapers, a large box with “FARMERS WANTED” printed under the banner of “A & A Tobacco,” the two letters joined together by a leaf of the plant, but it only seemed to create interest in Holland. The Dekeysers came first, a huge clan, twenty adults and scores of children, all of them large, chunky people, blond and looking somehow addled, smiling at everything and communicating with little grunts and hand motions.

The patriarch, Karl, was the exception. He was large and chunky, true, larger and chunkier than any of them, but Karl was a grim man, frowning at the family’s clownishness, occasionally looking up toward the sky with an arrogant sneer, silently cursing the Lord and His Creation. Karl claimed most of the land around the Phalanstery, and over the next couple of years he built toward it, eventually engulfing all of the Perfectionist buildings with a number of ramshackle residences. Having done that, Karl wrote home, and soon other Dutchmen arrived, cousins and friends of the Dekeyser brood, Van Hoosens, Bontjes and Hoöckers. They worked the tobacco fields with enthusiasm, as if oblivious of the fact that most of the fruit of their labor was going into Abram’s, and therefore the Perfectionists’, pockets; for whom they had little affection, not to mention even less understanding.

Having surrounded the community, the Dutch began to infiltrate it. Mr. Opdycke was instrumental in this, hiring most of the immigrant girls and women to work for the fishing-gear company. Next Karl Dekeyser, despite being obviously as hardy
and strong as an ox, claimed that he was too old to farm, and installed himself as the local butcher. He made his shop on Joseph Avenue—that is, he opened his butcher’s shop, and suddenly it became clear that a main street existed. George Quinton constructed a sign reading “JOSEPH AVE” and pounded it into the ground.

On television, people in hospitals are always hooked up to I.V. bottles and such-like things, tubes running into their noses and through their veins in a manner that would have made Dr. Frankenstein proud. What was most alarming about Jonathon was that there wasn’t a life-support system in sight, the closest pouch of liquid food being hooked up to some old fart three beds away. I resisted the temptation to rip it out and plug it into Whitecrow so that his eyes would open, moonlike and wise.

Mona and I stood hand in hand by his bedside. For a long time, maybe even several minutes, we simply gazed down upon him. Whitecrow was, I noticed, a wasted and ancient geezer. He looked no more substantial than a feather. But what could one expect from a man who subsisted on a diet of cigarettes, whiskey and dreams? If I had been a detective, investigating the obviously aggravated assault, I would have been dismayed, because Whitecrow’s physical scrawniness didn’t eliminate much of the general population from the suspect list, not even midgets, Girl Guides and pussycats. Of course, whoever beat up Jonathon was a vicious and brutal creature, but at that moment, as pissed off as I was at the world, I still wouldn’t have eliminated midgets, Girl Guides or pussycats.

“Jon-Jon?” whispered Mona.

The other thing you see on television is people covered head
to toe in bandages. Jonathon didn’t have any of that shit either, I guess because his outside wasn’t that badly damaged. It was ripped in a few places and discolored in some others, but otherwise Jonathon was externally normal. Inside Whitecrow was another story. All of Whitecrow’s inner stuff was busted and dysfunctional. The doctors would have felt silly putting on bandages, so they didn’t. They left Whitecrow as he was, naked except for his cotton hospital gown.

“Hey, Jonathon,” whispered Mona.

Mona had said to me (as we entered through the front door—there were words carved into the stonework above the portal; they were in Latin, which made me suspicious—maybe they translated as “Hey, buddy, don’t expect too much, okay?”), “I hate hospitals.” People always say, “I hate hospitals,” and I think it must be one of those misguided reflex phrases, like saying, “Pardon me,” when a fat lady mows you down on the sidewalk.
I
don’t hate hospitals. God is there, invisible in surgical greens, making the rounds, flustered and always behind schedule.

“Come on, Whitecrow, ya big faker!” Mona badgered desperately. “Wake up.”

Slowly Jonathon’s eyes opened. They were hollow.

“How you doing, guy?” I asked.

“Not great,” Whitecrow admitted.

“This hospital ain’t so bad,” Mona said, pointing at the various walls and light fixtures with great animation. “Hey, Jonathon, you could get a TV in here! That’d be okay, eh? Just lie aroun’ an’ watch the boob tube all day, the life of Riley, ya know what I mean? I’ll talk to the guy. The television guy.” Mona went abruptly quiet and stared down at her feet.

“A television,” said Whitecrow with some effort, “would be nice.”

“The life of Riley,” Mona agreed.

“Paul,” said Jonathon, “how are you?”

“Fine. Good.”

“Talked to Ol’ Mossback lately?”

“Mmmm, yeah.”

“Really? When?”

“Just today.”

Mona shot me an odd look.

“How is he?” asked Whitecrow.

“Oh,” I shrugged, “you know Ol’ Mossback.”

Jonathon nodded laboriously. “Yes. I know Ol’ Mossback.”

“I’m missing sumpin’,” Mona said. “Why the fuck are we talking about a fish?”

“Whether we live by the seaside, or by the lakes and rivers, or on the prairie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes,” Whitecrow quoted.

That sounded familiar. “Who said that?” I asked.

Whitecrow moved his head and shoulders microscopically, the tiniest hint of his once grand and aristocratic shrug. “Oh,” he answered, “just some asshole.”

“Jon-Jon,” asked Mona, “who the fuck done this to you?”

“Could have been anybody,” said Jonathon. “I never saw it coming.”

“Why the fuck did they done this to you?” persisted Mona.

Jonathon shrugged more forcefully, which was a painful mistake. All of the broken junk inside him shifted, settling differently. “How should I know?” he gasped.

“Like, whoever did it is dogfood,” announced Mona. “An’ I’m gonna find out, too, I swear I am, and when I do, so help me …” Mona was at a loss for words, which is to the credit of the English language.

“Mona,” said Jonathon, “it hurts when I shrug philosophically, so please don’t make me do it.”

“I’m just sayin’.” Mona rammed her enormous hands into her back pockets defiantly.

“Paul,” said Whitecrow, “how goes the research?”

“Pretty good.”

“Who killed J. B. Hope?”

It sounded like a nursery rhyme or riddle. Surely Jonathon knew as much as I did, so for a while I just chewed on my lip, wondering what he was up to, and then I said, none too declaratory, “George Quinton?”

Jonathon smiled.

“Am I missing something?” I asked.

Jonathon nodded, just once, up and down.

“What?”

“It’s simple. Look at your notes. Look at the experiments in complex marriage.”

I tried to recall them as best I could. The first experiment had been Hope with Polyphilia. Then, Hope-Abigal Skinner, Abram with Polly. Next, Hope-Mary C. De-la-Noy, Adam-Polly, Mr. O. and Abigal. Then Hope and Cairine McDiarmid …

It was all too complex. I massaged my brow. “There’s something there that’s important?”

Jonathon Whitecrow shook his head. “It’s like you said before: there’s something missing.”

Then I saw.

Karl Dekeyser was by nature an impertubious man, owing to his turgid Christian upbringing. But when Gretel came home, the very offspring of his loins, and recounted the licentiality with which she had been treated by Hope (an occurrence of concupiscent obscenity not fit for the eyes of the casually interested; readers of a more scientific and/or scholastic bent should see
¹
.), Karl was consumated with furor.

Karl Dekeyser went to his neighbors and lit within them the flame that burns eternal in the heart of Man, the flame disdowsed by proximation to Hope and his debauchious minions, the flame kindled by most precious sabbatarianistic communion with Our Father Who Art, Etc. Indeed, was not the flame of righteousity and indignability fanned within the breasts of some (so-called) Perfectionists?

Such is the Power of the Lord!!

For among those who escorted Hope toward his punishment—Hope, animalistic purveyor of all that is sullied, for instance, FORNICATION with the distaff mounted uppermost—was Hope’s son, made of his own flesh and blood, young, handsome, noble, dashing, fair Isaiah!

What transpirated by the side of Lake Look Out is not shrouded in obfucious limnings, although many spurious mistellings have arisen due to bibacity and/or ghoulashness. The truth was freely recounted to mineself by Karl Dekeyser, who said thusly, “I fed him to the fishes.” Yea, the justice he meted was brute yet aptful: for Karl VIVISECTED from Joseph Hope (his butcher’s knife swift & merciful) the third finger of his left hand. Here we see the symbology of the moralousness; this digit, traditionally bounded by the golden band, represents Holy Matrimony, and this was the precious institute that
Hope had ceaselessly salubated. So Karl Dekeyser seperated Hope from this finger, and with disdainity tossed the finger toward the water—the very self-same water from which his daughter Gretel had emerged only to be deflorated!

(Scientific interuptum: The veraciousness of the transpirality need not be reproached, for what profits it thirty-eight men that they be mendacious to an individuality? Therefore, let it be publicly scriven that a FISH of prodigious proportion rose from the lake and took the disembodied digit into its mouth. Many reportages have it that Hope was more alarmed by the sight of this creature than by his own mutiliation; at any rate …

End of scientific interuptum.)

Hope turned and fled. Hope fled to the one place he thought would offer sancuarity; the home of George and Martha Quinton (who eschewed the married name “HOPE”, as well she should!)

George Quinton was cut from differentiated cloth than were the other “Perfectionists”. He was a man of thoughtful eloquence, and he had seen the EVILNESS of Hope’s impurious thought; therefore he had seperated himself (and his sister Martha, a fair dainty wisp of a woman) from the others, moving out of the so-called “Phalanx” and living in solitudiousness. It was to this place that THE LECHER ran, though it was fully two miles away; and his fearfulness gave him extrahuman strength, for he ever widened the ullage ’twixt him and those in pursuit.

George Quinton was occupied at that moment with the slaughtering of a pig; for this reason he was outside and possessed of an axe when Hope appeared before him.

As is public knowledge, George Quinton would not speak in his own defense when tried for Hope’s murder, leaving us only the availableness of conjested thought. Many have it that what inspired George was the blessed instinct of mercifulness, that he wished to end Hope’s horrible suffering. Others (mineself included) have it that only through LETHAL CHOPPING could Hope’s OBSCENOUS DISSIPATORY EVIL be FINALLY and IRREVOCABLY brought to an end and BANISHED from the FACE OF THE EARTH!