You, Reader! Here’s a real “grabber” of an opening line:
I murdered my mother for a thousand reasons, but mostly for her taste in books.
All month up in my maid’s chamber I’ve been studying Sell Your Story Today! by R. Lester Aldredge (Crown Books, 1974) and know how important these opening paragraphs are: “One must not lose the reader’s patience with unnecessary exposition, especially in the first two pages.”
All right… Perhaps, then:
Yeah, sure, I murdered my mother—but believe me, if you had known my mother, you would have murdered her, too. (Rim-shot, please!)
Or even:
I murdered my mother because she never loved me.
Boo-hoo. Got your sympathy—or at least attention—yet? Doubtful. There must be ten thousand other true-to-life stories being written at this very moment, and there’s no reason for me to go on, though for some reason, you see, I am going on. Look—there’s—another—word! And another! It’s much easier than some people make it out to be, this writing business. I should have tried it long ago.
Hey, you—Reader! Don’t walk away yet; it’s not as bad as all that, but if you promise to sit back and listen to me for just a short while, I promise to give you an interesting story, ready to be sold today to the highest bidder (yeah, right) in return. Well, “interesting” is not the exactly same as “good” or “pleasing,” is it? However, just because I’m a murderer doesn’t mean I’m not entirely trustworthy. Because I am, you know. Trustworthy, I mean. Though a murderer, too.
Now that we’ve made the acquaintance, let me tell you a few things about myself. We’ll get to you later—scout’s honor.
Where do I begin? All the great writers ask themselves that on the first page while they throw their first hesitant darts toward your head or heart; they used to be all around me, by the way—those Great Writers—all four walls closing in on me like one of those torture rooms you see in movies, spikes on all sides moving in on the Hero. In my case, each of those spikes was a little paperback god, bought cheap and fourth-hand in this little college town, bought when they were already well-aged, stiff in the spine, cracking in their forwards and afterwords, already losing their leaves. Once I started reading an ancient Norton’s on the way home from Schmook’s Books, only to find I’d left a trail behind me, all the way up the forty rickety steps to our teetering front porch, of the pages I’d dropped along the way—any undergraduate passing by would have gotten a pretty good sense of early to medieval English literature, from Beowulf to “The Pardoner’s Tale,” merely by tracing my route.
Mother, of course, hated these books. All books, in fact. As naturally she would, being a long-tenured professor in the English department here in this coldest, wettest corner of the Midwest. (Don’t bother looking for it on the map; it’s most often cut off in the margin.) The only book she ever gave to me was one on toilet-training when I was three, as if I could have read all of it even then. (It was a bore, nothing on the more coprophagic passages in Bataille.) As for reading nursery rhymes or fairy tales aloud to me, she’d already shed her Feminine Mystique like a frilly negligee, conscious that such a bedtime ritual was too much an embodiment of the heterosexist male patriarchal power system—the female tucking the offspring in bed while the male labored late at the office—and so she left me to the “edutainment” of Play-Skool mobiles and other plastic devices guaranteed to improve hand-eye coordination or invoke infantile insanity, while she studied her Benjamin or Barthes. And so you see me today, the clumsiest morloch on the Buildings and Grounds Crew, the one as hunched as Quasimodo over a faulty lawn sprinkler system, twisted up in the serpentine hose like Laocoon.
No doubt the Reader summoned by R. Lester Aldredge is already impressed by my literary allusions. You see, despite my mother’s efforts, I didn’t grow up as ignorant as she had wished, her revenge against all men, especially my father, whoever he was. Oafish yes, undereducated yes, in the formal sense, but not stupid—not so stupid, Mother! I learned to read while still in training pants by looking through the current Chronicle of Higher Education on her desk, a journal she used to read religiously, the way others read obituaries, with a mixture of humility and schadenfreude. Soon enough I was reading the discarded novels (always big, doorstopper books by very serious men or featherweight, intimate books by inconsequential women, never the other way ’round) which her colleagues had forced upon her when they still believed in such things. I was forbidden to have an account at the miniscule town library—too much of the bourgeois-leaning Seuss and Sendak and Silverstein there—but by the time I was seven I knew what was worth my quarters at Schmook’s Books. By ten it was already getting difficult to walk to my bed, though I always kept all authors in neat stacks, scrupulously segregated by nationality, era, and subject matter. School, when I managed to stay awake in class, taught me next to nothing. Much like Shelley’s monster, I became a somewhat over-opinionated autodidact, wishing I were much smarter but conscious that I was not quite stupid—and Mother, not being stupid herself, knew this, too. “Fat” and “lazy” and “psychotic” were far easier epithets to hurl my way (weren’t they, Mother?), even if I knew while still a child that she lanced me only to drain her own moral suppurations. Please excuse my extreme metaphors, but it wasn’t nature made me this way. You might have turned out even worse, Reader.
Sometimes our cozily coniferous neighborhood, which is the highest ridge here above the lake and dotted with the former summer retreats of small businessmen from Bismarck to Duluth, would resound with our screams, as if every night were Walpurgisnacht. Mostly, my protests were less articulate than painfully strident. Or failing words, purely physical, and so I grew up with never a complete set of dishes in the house. Listen, Old Mother Grendel, I longed to expound more eloquently, had I but the agility, you’re cannibalizing me with your recriminations and accusations, your hexes and hoaxes, your banshee shrieks and witchdoctor oaths. You barnacle-encrusted old grampus, you, you cloven-tongued krampus, you hideous Hecate of the campus, may all the infections that the sun sucks up make you inch by inch a disease. Why did you ever curse me with my birth? Why didn’t you just noose me on a rusted coat-hanger before I was born or strangle me in my bassinet, if I am such a pain to you? You put rocks in my boots, roll spiny urchins across my path, call forth serpents to entwine and envenom me. Begone!
Mother would often end arguments by throwing my books down the stairs at me. Down they came like a hard rain of words: the Brontes, the Rosettis, the Bensons, the Sitwells, the Waughs, the Amises, the rest of English literature, 1820 to 1980. I knew what they represented to her; she was one of those academics whose narrowing circle of authors they consider acceptable was tightening by the year, until even Shakespeare’s time was sure to come. To speak his name would be like invoking an ancient god who nevertheless might do severe violence to one’s person, and yet she dared the heavens. “Romeo and Juliet?” she would ask the Pernod at one of her summer soirees. “A terrible, awful, inept play. Nothing but a Harlequin Romance without the harlequins and too much romance.” Her weak jokes might elicit a titter or two from amongst the untenured and adjunct. “Then there’s Joyce, of course… What do I think of Ulysses?” She had that way some politicians have of both posing and answering their own questions. “It’s one long onanistic exercise, isn’t it, and then the climax doesn’t even come until the very last word.” She would swat a mosquito or deerfly for emphasis. “Paradise Lost, you say? Never was bored enough to read it!”

If you’ve read this far, Reader, you might be wondering how a murderer such as I, with a past such as my own, goes about everyday life, accepting menial dockets every morning from the jolly foreman of the buildings and grounds crew (who for some reason feels sorry for me and so has kept me on despite my ineptitude), dutifully going about my business, removing old blackboards, replacing fuses, resetting thermostats; or raking leaves, shoveling walks, mowing lawns, season in and season out. That’s the easy part. The hard part is being alone in my little room like this, trying to force my mother into the prison of the past. It is hard so much of the time to remember that she is dead, can’t hurt me now, they say, but harder still to realize I will never see her again. Part of me wants to keep on imagining her body, her face, and most of all her words, though I can’t exactly say why. Is this self-inflicted torture as much a comfort as a hurt? R. Lester Aldredge might ask me to consider. Sometimes I just want to simplify everything by killing myself, too.
Again, if only I could have cursed her when she still lived, cursed her with all the splendor and spleen of the Bard or one of those French guys, Molière or Jarry… But mostly I was only as foul as the accepted boarding school vocabulary allowed me, and besides, there was nothing I could say which would not be an echo of some damnation she had once called upon my head. She was angry, I knew, not just at me, but at the whole world, and especially at being stuck in the middle of this remote archipelago dangling from the northernmost point of the conterminous United States, frozen eight months a year and the air too full of needling insects to step outside the other four. Stuck at a college which never even cared if she ever produced a follow-up to the book which sealed her tenure—Against Poetry: Firing the Canon, From Poe to Pound. (She was always all over the map.) A college where the departments are so small everyone hates everyone else, the way any species kept in too close quarters, given time, will gnaw each other to bits. A species of academic which has lost its sense of wonder but whose wits are sharpened like fangs and nerves are splintered like glass. It was the only world I had ever known, this isolated island nine miles in circumference, and this feudal fiefdom called College of the Isles.
We lived together, mother and son, in this crumbling school rental on this shabby little hillside, for twenty-three years, and for twenty years before that in various equally dismal quarters nearby or, before I remember, in other college towns. I know what that makes me look like—you’ve seen other creeps like me: the pimply, pasty ones who live deep down in their parents’ rec rooms, last renovated during the Ford administration; the ones who keep rereading A Confederacy of Dunces or Infinite Jest (never been tempted by either myself) in the media room of the town library; the ones who have every Star Wars figurine all the way back to the first movie still in their original containers; the ones who hang out at the Comic Books and Baseball Cards shop, schlurping on a Super Schlurp from the nearest Casey’s or Stewart’s. To you, I’m unwashed, unshaven, unkempt, blemished, balding, bad-breathed, bloated, big-bellied, fusty, farty, froggy… and unlaced, absent-mindedly unbuttoned, shirt awry, pants slipping down my hairy backside, of simian scratch and brontosaurus step. You would avoid me down at the “Anime and Cult” end of the video store, wouldn’t you, Reader? But that’s not really me—I never go to the one movie theater in town and I’ve never learned to “surf” the Internet, ready to be harpooned by an FBI agent posing as a thirteen-year-old. So how dare you presume; I’m typing this on the antediluvian Remington in my room, not some portable television set tricked up with buttons and dials like a science project. (If you see real italics, not underlining, someone else put them here.) How I love the smell of this well-oiled machine, its little silver gears and levers inside that do mysterious things, the black wings of its carapace which lift up like a scarab’s, the cool ceramic keys with their careworn letters (even if a few keys are missing, and I must pound the broken stems), the ribbons I can still get at the last stationery store in the county, the moist ribbons with their yeasty smell that empurple my hands as I toil today in the vineyards of prose! For years, I’ve used it only for endless lists of my books, updated and revised quarterly, painstakingly annotated. And today I sit before my black idol again. From here, I can see a nest of new pink goblin-eyed blue-jays within the dark interior labyrinth of the balsam I look straight upon. It’s a normal sunny day off from work and I’m not such an abnormal guy.

Sell Your Story Today! counsels me to give a little more background. Here’s some: She—my mother—had me when she was seventeen or eighteen, a breech birth, my big clumsy feet first, and it felt like she was being “ripped right in two, like a carcass in a charnel house” as she always so poetically put it. There was no family there for her to witness or confirm this for me, as she was an orphan. Boo-hoo again. She’d been all alone throughout the pregnancy. She hated me before I was even born. She named me Caliban. She was, of course, already an English major.
So now you know why the third party to this story—my accomplice in crime, as it were—is named “Ariel,” and that really is her name, though you’d never believe me. You might sooner believe that she was a nimble-footed, nubile nymph of the quad, wouldn’t you, the first girl I’d ever had back to my book-lined room, a girl who might actually listen to my theories of time and the universe—but I’m jumping the smoking gun. She, Ariel, was mistaken about me, that you will surely believe, and yet I can’t say we haven’t enjoyed a certain intellectual rapport. She had wished my mother dead, too, if only in that petulant schoolgirlish way all college students three credits away from graduation who have plagiarized a sorority sister’s term paper might wish someone who suspected them soundly dead. But I digress. (That’s something I’ve always longed to say in company—at a book-signing at the campus store, say, surrounded by wine-soaked acolytes—“But I digress.” Doesn’t it just sound so worldly?)
Before I say anything more about Ariel allow me first another attempt to describe my mother—age before beauty, as they say. When I happen upon my reflection I don’t see that maggot-white, bespectacled, blubber-lipped behemoth you’ve already imagined, but my dear departed mother. We really did look quite alike, if you put me in a sort of Susan Sontag fright wig (a negative version, with a lock of black in a field of gray), with Camille Paglia scare-the-boys makeup, and a sort of Simone de Beauvoir-goes-wild-at-Banana Republic-wardrobe, including seriously lesbian sandals on the most enormous aircraft-carrier feet a woman ever possessed. The Devil knows why men ever found her attractive, but they apparently did on occasion—hence myself, hence the series of visiting lecturers I was instructed to call “uncle” before I greeted them with a bite on the ankles. I suppose she had that old Gorgon trick to fall back on, boiling men over with her stare before she pecked their hearts out like a harpy (and, yes, I know I’m conflating mythology a bit here—but it’s my story, sold or not, damn it). She really was at her worst, though, during her celebrated Sapphic period, when I was in my teens and that kind of behavior was still daring; she eviscerated a coed or two and devoured the gamier meat of the local Lambda Society before deciding that she’d made her point about feminist theory and moved on to a bearded Baudrillard scholar from Oberlin or Aberdeen. Over the years the uncles came farther and farther apart, and she probably hadn’t had a man for ten years when she died. And the occasional man was the only thing that ever calmed her down and shut her up.
Reader! R. Lester Aldredge! You can’t leave me now—I’m not really that much of a reactionary; I’m old enough to remember BJK-Riggs way back in my childhood and Reagan before he was on a stamp and when Liberals ruled the earth. I hate women, it is true, but I hate them all—straight, bent, or just plain twisted—fairly and with total equality and so would you if you had my mother. Had had my mother. Besides, if you are reading this, you’re probably one of those lefty types who never forgot how to read and no doubt feels it your blessed duty to enquire into the criminal minds of the promising young writers of today. Otherwise, you’d be downloading porn or watching Pox News, wouldn’t you?
And besides, if it comes to that, I don’t care much for men, either. Except my father, Whoever. I just feel sorry for him.
If every year is a century to a child, then my personal quattrocento came when I was still a mere forty pounds overweight, had most of my hair—albeit, oily as an otter’s—and, incredibly enough, skin entirely unscathed, as smooth and pretty as an Elle cover. (The acne would consume me soon enough, once I realized skinny girls really had been sniggering at my much ampler breasts for years.) Summers between boarding school—it was a different one every year, since classroom fistfights and cafeteria fires seemed to pursue me in those days—I was forced to wait hand and hoof on my dear mother, shaking the Ritz crumbs from her bed-sheets, dusting her Selectric, scraping her bulgur and pilaf from the dishes, sucking up the dust and debris she left everywhere in her titanic wake. Once or twice a summer she would host a garden party—a backyard party, really, because she never had time to plant a garden in that pine-shaded, sun-scarred patch of soil—and I was forced to balance the tray of bad gin and warm tonic water with a pitcher of homemade sangria, a recipe she was supposedly famous for up and down Professors’ Row. “Don’t quake so, Cal!” she’d bellow, and I’d slosh even more down my shirtfront.
Ah hah, you’re saying to yourself, Reader—at last a scene! That’s what I came here for. Here’s where sales are made, right? Sorry, summary’s really more my style, but I’ll try…
At last, when I’d spilled half a liter in some little out-of-his-element assistant provost’s lap, Ma Ubu hauled herself up from the webbing of her lawn chair (leaving a latticed imprint on her wide back between the shoulder straps) and roared at me, “I’m so sorry, Henry, but you know, he’s at that shaky stage, a compulsive masturbator. Isn’t that right, Cal? Cock-a-diddle-do, eh?”
I stood there stammering while she dived into his lap with a woefully inadequate cocktail napkin. “You’ll have to excuse the little bastard,” she was saying, rather less than soberly, even for her. “It’s all Doctor Spock’s fault, the way I coddled him.” All the other ends and odds of the summer population of College of the Isles gawked at us both equally—mother with her head practically in the assistant provost’s loins and me with, I noticed too late, my fly half-zipped. They were all there—the assistant professors too poor or too under-funded to be off doing research in Bloomsbury or Montmartre, a pitiful recent graduate or two still within my mother’s evil thrall, a token Indian scholar from one of the adjoining reservations, the proprietor of Schmook’s Books (who already knew me so well he might as well be writing this story), and a smattering of hirsute secretaries and tonsured librarians—none married and all given up hope. Luc Ferrier, too: Mother’s closest friend on campus, probably her only true friend anywhere, one-third of the Romance Languages Department and half its Drama Department, “that old pederast,” as she affectionately called him.
Luc, bless him, tried to come to my rescue. “Could you go fetch me that bottle of good vodka your belle dame sans merci keeps hidden in her cellars?” he asked in an accent that pretended to be more authentic French than the French-Canadian it really was, thus allowing me an exit into the house and out of the public eye. Even then I was always grateful to Luc for tempering my mother’s worst tantrums, though I knew from her how he maintained a “fairy ring,” hosting after-performance parties for thespian revels, and was always pleased to rent a houseboy’s room to any youth comely and stupid enough to stumble into his circle. Still, I liked him as much as I ever liked anyone; at fourteen I’d already read his sole book, that study on Prosper Mérimée which had secured his position here (what was its title? The More the Mérimée?), and seen its dedication and forgiven him for that. Somehow I knew kind Luc wouldn’t mind missing his prized screwdriver while I threw myself on my bed to—well, never to cry.
Not much of a scene, I admit. But that was nearly three decades ago, and how could I possibly be getting the details right? The humiliation, however, lingers like a skunk you left squashed down the highway twenty miles back. It must have been that very year, to give myself an escape from her tirades and tantrums, when I first concocted my scheme of adding a little Nyquil or Nytol to her Pernod, stuff already so strong she never noticed the altered taste. Mother never failed to have a shot of the brew before our habitually late dinners, and as soon as she had finished the cutlets or fish-sticks I’d served her, she would stumble to her bedroom, far down the hall and around a corner from mine. She would sleep soundly, waking just in time to go teach her eleven o’clock class, and then proclaim to her insomniacal colleagues at faculty meetings that she always slept like a dormouse because she herself had “nothing to be feeling she’d forgotten to carefully credit in a footnote.” As if she were really writing anything at all, ever!
Years later I might very well have told Miranda all this, while she smiled but refused to take my sweaty hand, allowing me instead to walk her once again from her office in the humanities building to her communist sympathizer’s moped in the employees’ parking lot. Miranda? Now, that is a pseudonym, most doubtful Reader, to protect someone I once loved. Protect her from I know not what, for I like to imagine her dead now, a suicide at twenty-nine, having given up her life to poetry in a garage apartment somewhere far to the sunny south, in Minneapolis. Yes—she’s writing the last line of a sonnet, but can’t find the rhyme, can’t find the rhyme, can’t find the rhyme, tick tock… then finds a razor instead—and gives up as romantically as Chatterton. We used to talk a lot about poetry, Miranda and I. She believed it should be revolutionary within the strictest, most conservative forms. Once upon a time I might have even typed her an uneven haiku or two on my gap-toothed machine. This was years before Ariel, so Ariel would understand. Mother had used her always formidable clout to get me into the college’s copy center just in time for my thirtieth birthday, my very first job that lasted more than a month, and Miranda would often drop off the instructors’ hefty “student packets” there for me to duplicate—lovingly duplicate, oh gentle spirit Miranda, for you, Miranda! We’d laugh together about the selections each quarter; the clumsy subtitles alone were enough to throw us into cascades of merriment: “The Golden Bowl: Toilet Habits in Late James”? “Pansies in the Lavender Twilight: Ernest, Scott, and Djuna Meet at the Pissoir”? “Following the Ga(ys)ze—Vita Sackville-West’s Dialectical Discovery of Vaginal Space.”? And so forth; in those days, Queer and Gender Studies was still something trendily “transgressive” at College of the Isles. Miranda had gone to a much better school, she all but told me, and she knew some day her poetry would elevate her above these third-rate scholars and pseudo-intellectuals all around us.
And so I began following her about campus, odd half-hours when she hoped we wouldn’t be seen sharing our burgeoning private jokes. Miranda was the kind of girl always called “mousy” by her so-called betters, but she was more of a sleek, slender sort of mole; nearly blind behind her tinted lenses; preferring the cool, dark corridors to the bright sun of the quad; dressed in suede jackets that could pass for moleskin; a voice like a squeak (do moles squeak?); but un-mole-like, she walked with gazelle-like gait—or was she merely trying to outpace me as I led her like a knight errant to her waiting chariot? Mother noticed changes me in the few months I knew Miranda—she told me I was “nearly intelligible” now when I answered the phone and remarked that I’d finally learned to align buttons above and below the meridian, and once even asked if I’d been rolling “like a bullock in a field of buttercups.” It must have been the deodorant I’d finally dared to buy with my humble wages.
Soon enough, Mother discovered me before the vending machines in the basement where the copy center is located, discussing Edna St. Vincent Millay and Mayakovski with Miranda, while debating salty or sweet or healthy. I know Mother must have heard words like “imagist” and “proletatiat” and “lapidary” before she wisely took a right toward the ladies’ room. Miranda, her back turned to both me and Mother, peering into the wonderland behind the glass, while my hand tentatively fluttered on her shoulder-blade, noticed not a thing as Mother shot me the most withering Medusian glance she could muster before she disappeared. She’d long warned me about consorting with either faculty, staff, or students; so it was not much of a surprise when I saw her in her office later that day (I’d come to deliver photocopies to the floor above her), with Miranda meek and small and mole-ish, hardly a leader of the Red Guard, before Mother’s Brobdingnagian desk, like a student who’d been summoned to discuss a failing grade. My mother, who’d yet to see me, was spelling out the word “g-o-n-o-r-r-h-e-a” as if to a child and waving a handful of STD pamphlets from Student Health before Miranda’s bowed head. If someone as large as I am could be said to be capable of drifting away silently as a breeze, then I did indeed rise up the stairs like smoke and curl into a far corner to curse once more that monster my Mother.
At home later that evening, when I’d finally crept back from the bookstore with only slightly foxed copies of Dafoe’s Crusoe and Plato’s Republic in my backpack, I found an ashtray filled with generic condoms atop the table on the landing and a sampling of feminine hygiene products I wouldn’t comprehend on my bed. Mother was off at an all-white student production of The Blacks with Luc; so I hurled the sprays, jars, and condoms into her room and smashed a vial of her favorite perfume (Eau de Medea or whatever) against her dresser mirror for good effect. Within a week or two Miranda had quit her job, I heard too late, so I can only assume she moved to Minneapolis to join a commie punk cell there. She had been talking about doing that ever since I met her, after all; she’d finally had a poem accepted at a literary magazine there and was certain such was the route to fame—and the greater good of the world, of course. I never heard from her again after that moment at the vending machine, thus I can only surmise she is dead and her poetry has been lost, as so many great works of art are, like this story will be, inevitably, to indifferent history.
The new century had already come upon us before I met another girl I’d dare to speak to and who was brazen enough to initiate a conversation: Ariel, of course, who was unafraid of anyone, professor or plebeian, man or monstrous woman. Neither rodents nor insectivores come to mind when one pictures Ariel: borzois, perhaps, and swans and butterflies and other things elegant and swift. The other girls in her sorority, the only sorority in town, were afraid of her, and I was, too, but actually she was the one who accosted me while I lingered outside Luc Ferrier’s lecture on Genet and Anhouil, supplementing my Modern Library education as I often did while pretending to be fixing a hall-light or plastering a hole. She must have been watching me for some time as I kneeled perplexed over a frayed coaxial cable running along the corridor of our completely wired campus (just see the brochures or watch the promotional DVD sent out to prospective freshmen: “College of the Isles on the Cutting Edge!”). At some point I heard Ariel tapping her long encrimsoned nails against her enormous and perfect rows of well-bleached teeth. (I remember Luc was speaking in that plaintive, elegiac way he has, as if every address is valedictory: “We see in France at this time theater’s precarious balance between the nihilism of the Dadaists and the encroaching existentialist and brute sexuality of… ” Luc is very old-fashioned and always reads from notes he must have typed thirty years ago. He’s probably never even heard of Queer Studies.) “He’s so gay,” she whispered, quickly adding, “I don’t mean gay stupid, I mean—you’re gay, too, right? It’s all cool.” She was wearing velveteen hot-pants and had her frizzy, gingery hair in an afro the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I was a small boy a little bit smitten with Angela Davis and Christie Love. Whether she is vanilla or chocolate or some delicious kind of twist I never have been able to tell.
“Well, actually—” I began, before she hushed me, finger to her glittered lips. “The man speaks,” she said, twisting her long neckleted neck to see around the doorway and into the classroom. We both listened for a while as Luc touched lightly upon Cocteau and Juliette Greco. Then, abruptly: “Let’s like get lost. So what if I’m ditching that slut I was supposed to rush. I’ve got better things to do, like file my nails. Smoke?” and she offered me a cigarette from a well-crumpled pack of low-tars she withdrew from the waistband of her lacy thong, which was just visible above her hot-pants when she leaned over, and below the tattoo of a unicorn swinging on a rainbow, square in the center of that bare area of a woman’s back just where things start to get interesting. We retreated to the college’s solitary designated smoking area, a secluded courtyard between the two gothic wings of the humanities building. There, we sat on rusted cast-iron, eyeing each other as we smoked or pretended to smoke.
“I know a lot of faggots back in the hood,” she said, “not that I mean anything bad by that—it’s just what you all call each other in the clubs, right?” I knew enough by then not to disabuse her of certain facts about myself, but smiled vacantly, as if I felt a real buzz from the acrid tobacco smoke. What could this girl possibly be talking to the geekiest geek on campus for, someone biologically old enough to be her father? She wasn’t wearing a bra, and in the deepening afternoon looked strangely older herself, almost middle-aged in a voluptuous kind of way—Madame Recamier on an iron bench instead of a velvet-upholstered divan. For the second time in my life I was in love, and I suddenly saw Miranda as the ratty-haired little mouse she had been. Here instead was the Black Aphrodite, the Blonde Venus, all six-foot-two of her in platform soles. And she was talking to me as if I were just any other guy!
“You’re the son of Professor ____ , aren’t you?” and here I leave a blank for you, dutiful Reader, in my own studiously old-fashioned way, just so you don’t try to google any of us who may stand to be incriminated. “She’s a real ball-buster, isn’t she? Man, I feel sorry for you.” Ariel rolled her glittery eyes (matched her lips) and laughed almost diabolically. It was late September and chill, and I thought I could feel tiny drops of her warm spittle on my cheeks.
I hardly knew what to say. How could she know this, or even care? Why I had never noticed her over the years while she must have been doing her research on me seems unimaginable now. Right then, I must have choked on my low-tar. “She’s having us watch all this shit all the time,” Ariel went on. “As if I haven’t seen all those Matrix movies a dozen times before. And those creepy ‘graphic novels,’ as she calls them. ‘Looks like comic books,’ I say, and she gets all weird on me. Damn, I’m already a senior and sometimes I just want to read a fucking book, you know?”
I saw then that we were soul-mates. “She’s just being Post-Literary,” I managed to say through a nimbus of blue smoke. “It was the only way for her to go after rehashing Derrida and Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. That or Mult-Culti, and she didn’t have the stomach for all that third-world stuff. It might as well be written in another language, she says. But I like Mrabet and Tutuola a lot. How come they never teach those guys? You know Amos Tutuola? My Life in the Bush of Ghosts?” I knew my forehead must be as red as a rash and furtively checked my fly to ensure my jeans were fully buttoned.
“Yeah, sure,” she said apropos to nothing, as her cigarette reached its end and a cold wind announcing the end of the season reached even our cloister. “Whatever. I could have gone to Stanford or Tufts or something, you know, I’m smart enough outside of my grades. But my parents are cheap and don’t trust me at a bigger school. Tell me, what is someone like me doing stuck on this goddamn pet-turtle island?” And at that she had disappeared, just like a light gone out, and I was alone in the chirping dusk.

The deeper into this story I go, the more I write and the longer it gets, the more I realize I must leave out. So much damaged footage left on the cutting-room floor, so many wasted pages filling my basket and my brain. Goddamn, as Ariel taught me to say with regularity. So many subtleties and complexities I wish I could delineate and unravel—but couldn’t in ten stories, or a whole novel, or several novels. Mr. Aldredge says to cut, cut, cut, and cut some more, as if writing were all a process of bloodletting. Which I suppose it is, now I’m starting to see how it’s done. Mother is laughing at me somewhere. The mirror of memory is cracked and dusty, a lunar world of smoke and ectoplasm and shadows. I could kill myself. The sound of my typewriter keys is like kettledrums and artillery fire, and I am driving myself either deaf or mad.

All right. Some more time, please, to clear my throat and my head. Ahem. That’s it… Follow me now, Reader, down another wormhole in time, because I want to tell you about when my father—yes my very own father—came to town to read from his unexpected bestseller, Full Fathom Five. Linger about these pages for just a while longer; I’m still trying to get the hang of this storytelling thing, even if I have read countless stories and myths and legends and fables and parables and parodies over the years—especially those years just after I left those discredited or condemned problem-child boarding schools for good and for the sanctuary of my room, without a diploma or a clue, trying to retreat from the world and especially my Argus-eyed Mother. Father’s book isn’t really called that—I just like the sense of my father drowned, sea-changed, bones turned to coral, eyes pearly… so I’ll call him Richard Strange. And that bestseller I mentioned? Not even a proper literary novel, but that two-headed hybrid, a “literary” mystery, a genre that even Mother overlooked in her rush to get to the New Age of Illiteracy. This book is the last of its series, all of them with titles drawn from Shakespeare, and being the last, it brought a little autumnal fame to its author, who’d already signed a contract to visit little godforsaken College of the Isles before he made it to the cover of the Times Literary Supplement and could triple his reading fees.
The detective in this series is a popular magician of the debonair Harry Blackstone variety who charms the ladies and almost incidentally solves murders on the side. The conceit is that, although ostensibly just a stage trickster who has studied the secret handbooks especially well, he really is in league with the powers of the deep and like a Warlock of Endor can summon daemons at will. Right—it sounds hokey to me, as well, but then I find Raymond Chandler’s gumshoes and gun-molls as hard to follow as all the Russian patronyms in War and Peace.
Mr. Strange was an old friend of Mother’s from college days, I somehow discovered—maybe Luc Ferrier had recently told me in the backyard when he’d had too many screwdrivers and was only hoping to leave me so stunned he could hurry off to that ephebe in his attic. That really surprised me; I hadn’t figured she’d ever had any friends in school, and by the time I was thirty I’d given up guessing or begging and had decided I was the result of either rape or an artificial insemination she’d later regretted. So as soon as I told Ariel about Richard Strange—by the first snow we’d become close friends, of a sort, in the halls and courtyards and on the walkways, though I was careful to maintain my guise as a rather bearish homosexual, so as not to frighten her—she took one last deep breath from her cigarette, crossing her artificially eyelashed eyes to watch it glow, and told me that this man was obviously my father.
I folded my big bearish arms across my chest and examined her, reclining there so calculatedly languid in the darkest corner of Java Jive, the student union’s calculatedly hip coffee shop. Of course, by this time I knew she had ulterior motives for wanting to have some leverage against my mother; she had already told me how suspicious her teacher, my mother, had been about that last paper she’d handed in, an analysis of hermaphroditic themes in Japanese manga. The fact that Ariel had indeed printed a copy of the report from her national sorority’s well-known cache of digitally archived papers was secondary; it was insulting to be suspected by a instructor like that, as if she couldn’t have written a paper every bit as good, had she had the time between parties and “hookups.” And she had been counting on graduating only two years later than she should have, that midwinter. She feared it would be only a matter of time before Mother tracked down a duplicate of the paper which had been used at another school. I frowned and took the book back from her to reexamine in the subterranean light.
The man with the curious mustache in the dust jacket photo didn’t look anything like me, though I suppose Mother’s genes would crowd out any lowly man’s. He was as frail-looking as a Denton Welch grown old, the somewhat blurred headshot more like one snapped in the solarium of an old-world sanitarium than one commissioned by a publisher with all the money of an oil conglomerate behind it. In the photo, he was distinctly not smiling. Naturally, I was intrigued, and Ariel was determined to lay a trap.
“You could get him for child support,” she said, “same as my sister did when her bitch of a husband walked out on her.” She impaled her cigarette butt on a stiletto heel and stabbed at the gravel of the courtyard, shivering either with rage or from the fact that it was five below freezing and she was wearing fishnets.
“Not to overstate the obvious, but I’m not exactly a child,” I said, putting down Father’s book, which I’d borrowed from the library.
“Still, you’re entitled to some of all that bling blang, even if he did disown you for being gay. Man, this would make a great book in itself.” Then she started in on an elaborate scheme involving her easy seduction of my Father, my hiding in a hotel closet, and even my mother, the local sheriff, a reporter from The Los Angeles Times, and Dominic Dunne.
I wanted to clarify a few issues with her, thought better of it, and told Ariel I’d see her at the reading that night but not to call anyone. She stomped back to her sorority house unimpressed by my attitude of calm fortitude, but not before promising to sit in the back of the theater with me, anyway—and to bring an Uzi if she could fit one into her purse.

Wait before you write one more paragraph, I can hear the author of Sell Your Story Today! say, with editorial pipe clenched firmly between molars, let’s pause for a bit here in your narrative, such as it is. You’ve told us a lot about your supposedly dreadful mother, you’ve described her, but we still haven’t really seen her enough. You must develop her character! But, observant Reader, though she may be as round as I, she is very flat as characters go. She doesn’t change. She was the same to me at four as at forty. Then, she blamed me for stealing her time; later she blamed me for ruining her life. What was she to do, a woman still in her prime at less than sixty, with a slug of a son who never left her space to think or write or just be? We lived together like two wolverines in cages next to each other, trying to pretend the other doesn’t exist but still kept watchfully awake all night by the snoring and the stench. I suppose I could have left that drafty old Victorian shack, run off to a glorious new life somewhere else—but if so, what would I do, where would I live, who could I blame for my many failures?
A few weeks before the reading, Momzilla had glanced into the greasy windows of the coffee shop while on her way to a seminar on supposed campus transgender “issues” (never problems—issues) and saw me discussing writing and sex with Ariel in a corner; and I had seen Ariel in my Mother’s office a few weeks before that, leaning over Mother’s desk with breasts and nipples barely restrained by either sports bra or halter top, as Mother pretended to be engrossed in the grade book. I had shambled off down the hall, unseen but probably heard. It was nearly December now. “Stay away from that girl,” Mother hissed at me while I scrambled her morning eggs. “Despite the way she dresses, she is a serious student and furthermore, a Lesbian,” and I knew by the way she said it she was mentally capitalizing the word Lesbian. Mother took the skillet from my trembling hands and scraped the eggs onto her plate, leaving less than a third for me.
“For a lesbian, she does pretty well with the wrestling team,” I said, familiar with Ariel’s boasting about her exceptional physical feats. Just trying to be popular. “Besides, she only wants to talk about books, since most of the other kids, even her sorority sisters, won’t talk to her about anything but guys and clothes.”
“I could have you fired,” Mother said, absently drowning her eggs in Tabasco sauce. “In fact, I think you should be fired.” She was speaking now with her mouth full, and though I might have heard the words wrong, I’m sure I got the gist. It took her a whole glass of water before she was able to speak again: “You’re getting awfully close to being a child-molester, you know.”
I smashed my own plate upon the linoleum, hungry as I was. “You’re afraid that I might ever interest anyone, aren’t you?” I said, my mouth still full of egg. “You want to keep me a sideshow attraction, just to be pitied or laughed at by everyone. It makes people feel you’re doing something noble, like you’re raising a mongoloid, microcephalic, thalidomide retard. Poor you! No wonder you always drove all the men in your life away. My father probably left you the minute he left your bed!”
Hold it there: I admit I didn’t say all that at once, though I’d said nearly as much many times before. This morning, however, with my job in jeopardy—not that I ever wanted one, although it made me just a bit less dependent on Mother—and, furthermore, my relationship with Ariel in real danger, I must have said enough to drive her from the kitchen, into the hall, and out of the house.
As I watched Mother from the kitchen window, trundling down the front steps and huff and puff off into the piney blue distance, I remembered a child clinging to the side of her desk and asking why he hadn’t a father like the other kids at daycare. I remember her swatting that child with the reflexes of a boxer and saying that daddy was nothing but a meteorologist (a word I hadn’t read yet), never predicting anything but stormy weather. At other times he was a gravedigger who only dug graves for bad little boys or an exterminator who led cockroaches like the Pied Piper into people’s houses. She could laugh like a whole theater. Well, she hit the child with a newspaper or magazine, not her fists, and I suppose she was only trying to keep it all a private game only two can play, but I was never any good at crosswords or acrostics or literary theories or anything else that involved much obliquity.

My impatient Reader waits. I shall now step back into the narrative stream and try not to slip again into murkier currents… Humanities Department readings at the College of the Isles are notorious failures: the unknown poets and debut novelists the meager honorarium manages to entice this far north rarely draw more than a half-dozen or so very earnest students, a wayward staff member who also happens to Want to Write (such as the late Miranda), and at most two or three faculty members, one of whom must make the feeble introduction. Even the students in creative writing classes, so Luc—who is more faithful than anyone else—tells me, give the readings a wide berth, as if the premature failure of the young man or woman behind the podium were contagious. The locale is always the tiny theater of sorts beneath the eaves of the east wing, once just a rehearsal space for the Drama Department, before they fundraised themselves into larger quarters. The venue is an airless, ill-lit storage area that is gradually being filled with the technological mistakes—computers, fax machines, printers—once so expensive and now too worthless to pay to have hauled to the dump. For years, the English department has debated giving up on this space and this series, but it was endowed so long ago no one has the heart to just let the poor thing die the same natural death as do little magazines and “great books” clubs. I go once in a long while, hoping to see where these books I buy for a dollar a pound originate, but am always disappointed by how young these readers are, or if not so young, how they speak their own words as if afraid of them. (Luc admits he often attends only hoping to meet someone comme ça to discuss Gide and maybe other things, over cordials at his place.) Oddly enough, despite Richard Strange’s recent quasi-fame, this evening’s audience was still nearly as threadbare as usual, although a little grayer and a little slower to settle into their folding chairs between the boxes of last year’s modems and scanners. Mystery fans who’d only haphazardly followed the author’s career, I suspected. Although we were getting close to winter break, the theater was warm enough to grow orchids. There was not much oxygen at this altitude and there was a smell like decades-old mimeograph ink in the air. Meanwhile, the windows shuddered incessantly from the icy storm whipping branches outside.
Ariel and I had come in last, and although we sat far in the rear, our backs up against VHS and Beta abominations, it didn’t take me long to see that Luc was absent, while Mother was present, big as life in a chair with her faithful inflatable hemorrhoid ring under her colossal buttocks. Somehow even though I knew what I knew, I hadn’t expected her to come, hadn’t thought she’d have either the nerve or the energy. She was sitting next to my good friend, Mr. Schmook, and to my horror I saw that his arm was resting on the back of her chair—it’s just resting casually, I assured myself, though it looked a little too territorial. Thankfully, Mother didn’t turned around to see me and had no idea I’d be here, since I’d told her I’d be doing some overtime tending furnaces. The room was also dark enough, perhaps, to disguise the fact that I was here with that dark spirit, Ariel. Reader, listen on…
At last, that silence which seems to come from nowhere but always announces the person of note even before he or she is noticed. He was both older and more childlike than I had conjectured from his book jacket, this Richard Strange, my Father. There was something of the distant past in his antique Vandyke and herringbone suit, though ultimately indefinable, and something else quite elfin in his stature and stance. A youngish assistant professor who taught a course on the mystery novel was giving the usual overly effusive introduction, obviously gleaned from the press kit: innovative, underappreciated, perseverance, distinguished, emeritus, belated were the only words I remember. I knew already the cities and dates, all available on the inside flyleaf of FFF. This introduction, like even the feeblest, went on for a little longer than was necessary. The writer twitched and he twittered thanks and he tapped his finger up and down his tie as if playing a little flageolet. For anyone reading this from the big city, he was obviously just another one of those busy, fussy, harried men you’d hardly notice scurrying past you on the way to a lieder recital or a sculpture unveiling, someone if not exactly in the arts, of the arts. To me, he was extraordinary. I instantly liked having a father like this; some minor, troubled character out of Woolf or Forster; someone who might soon be writing (with calligraphic exuberance, no doubt) long letters to me concerning the Epicureans vs. the Stoics or The Mauve Decade or why only fools and frauds believe in the Earl of Oxford. Ariel whispered to me to stop shifting in my seat.
“Doubtless,” he said in a voice that might have been eighty years old or merely a precocious eight, “many of you assembled here late this afternoon because you hoped to hear me read from my last—and in this case, I do mean last—novel. Much as you may want to hear the latest spellbinding spell-breaking of my master magician, the ratiocinator Seb Sebastiano, I want to speak to you instead of the Death of the Author.” Here I detected a far-off grumble of thunder, as any old or would-be new fans braced themselves for a lecture rather than an entertainment. Mr. Strange made a high gargling sound, something like the cry of a lost bird, and moved on: “Not in the post-structuralist, anti-literate, deconstruction-worker sense of things, however much they may have informed this highly educated audience. Though I must say that had my books been written by a committee of the collective unconscious, or by society at large, as I think you say they have, I would have expected them to have been a bit more remunerative. No, I’m talking about the Death of an Author, actually. Myself. And not here and now, not on this stage, but soon enough, my doctors say, soon enough.” Here Ariel squeezed my hand—she was touching me!—and I felt rhinestone cutting into my flesh. She meant well. Father paused, made that gargly sound, took his time pouring from a golden carafe, sipped the water as if it were an elixir of life, was revitalized by it, and twittered on: “And with me, with everyone who dies, as you know, a library is extinguished. Alexander was not the first nor last; even illiterates have their small hidden stacks. In my case, real books in real tattered jackets will linger on for a while, maybe for decades or even centuries; but eventually they, too, those slim repositories of all my intelligence and all my memories, will be gone, too, crumbled into dust or burnt on some pyre by a generation who no longer even recognizes these objects of yellowed paper and faded ink, earthy things, wormy things, things that smell as good as fresh Gorgonzola when they are new and as bad as rotten corpses when they aren’t.” He smiled then like a little boy who has been fitted with the shiniest dentures money can buy. “Well, words stink, don’t they? That’s why we prefer them all clean and sterile on an LCD screen, even me. Thank goodness I will be dead before we have vanquished them entirely to the ether, or beamed from one brain to the next without the intermediary of publisher or bookseller.”
Don’t be self-consciously “literary,” admonishes Sell Your Story Today!, and avoid distancing your reader with arcane knowledge or quotations, but here, I swear, is where my father, the so-called Richard Strange, eventually plucked actual fruit from Prospero’s epilogue; you can choose to believe me or think I just put this in for effect—I don’t care:

“… I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper then did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my books, blah blah …
My charms are all o’er-thrown,
And in this bare island, by your spell,
Blah blah blah blah blah,
My ending is despair …
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.”

I was trying hard to determine how Mother was taking all this as her former lover, the father of her only son, rambled on. She had a most expressive back in most circumstances—giving a cold shoulder was her specialty, after all—but she remained stiff and upright as a trouser press, and her thick platinum-gray hair with its one raven lock was similarly mute. Even when the applause came—belatedly, somewhat muffled due to lack of enthusiasm, the small crowd, or just the acoustics—she seemed to be as immobile as a mummy, though I suppose her pudgy little hands were going patty-cake. By then, Ariel had already lit a cigarette and was dragging me out of there and down the five flights of stairs, off into the storm. “You go deal with the oedipal stuff some other time,” she told me, pushing me down the path. “That old man creeps the hell out of me. No wonder you’re a pervert. I can’t deal with this all now. I don’t want to think of dying before your mother kills me. Text me tonight, when I stop spazzing.” All of her jewelry, besides her teeth, was clattering in the cold. Her low-tar winked in the dark before the freezing rain quickly extinguished it. We parted by the now-frozen fountain dedicated to islanders lost in the Mesopotamian wars, and I hulked behind some bushes to avoid being seen by my mother, who I now saw rolling like a juggernaut down the sidewalk behind me. I have to admit that, like Ariel, I was feeling a bit drawn and quartered.
Father, I’d heard, would be staying like all guests of the college in Timbers, the dilapidated post-and-beam dormitory now so lacking in amenities it was used as barracks by all but the most important visitors to campus. The inn had no WiFi, no satellite, no cable, no private baths, and needless to say no Nautilus machines, so naturally it was perfect for ensuring visitors felt humbled; Father, I somehow knew, would love it. He was apparently already in his room—one incandescent square signaled a presence within the dark facade—by the time I’d summoned the courage to go down the cold, silent corridor and knock on his door.
“Room service!” I barked, having long practiced the line—though my voice was so choked, the words came out more like “rum server.” The old man opened the door so suddenly I was still raising my fist to knock again, and nearly punched him in the nose. “But I didn’t call for—” he started to say, before taking in my bulk, half parka, half belly. And since I was sweating profusely under my parka, I must have stunk like a weasel, if weasels can sweat. In the dismal hall light no one could have seen much, but he appeared to be in striped commedia dell’arte pajamas of the type and fit only a toddler or clown might wear; they flowed over his arms and legs, and he had on beaded Indian moccasins like those sold on the duty-free reservations around here. “May I help you?” he said, realizing I didn’t look much like room service, while stepping back a good meter.
I must have looked even more miserable than usual—soaked through, nose running, glasses frosted over so I could barely see, my galoshes caked with half-frozen mud. Without thinking, I spun and sat down heavily (well, how else could I sit?) on one of the guest room’s twin camp beds—the one which hadn’t yet been disturbed. “Really, this is highly unexpected,” this man, Richard Strange, said, though apparently more amused now than disturbed. Then he gave me a longer, less angular inspection through his own glasses, and I noticed he’d already removed his teeth and had a glass of flaming copper in his hand. “Didn’t I see you at my reading earlier?” he asked. “In the back row, next to some Amazon with honeyed hair.”
After regaining my breath and my sense of balance, I threw myself back on the narrow bed and tried to focus, though my glasses were still misty and the room resembled the interior of an igloo which was rapidly melting, melting to reveal a bead-board ceiling, a bureau with blank accusatory mirror, a writing desk, a raggedy rag rug, and lastly, this figure in mocs and rajah’s pj’s two to three sizes too large. “Are you all right, son?” this man who was my father asked as I lay there, whirling, as if I too had already drunk from that firewater.
“I know who you are,” I said at last from my deathbed.
“Really? I’ve always wanted to know the answer to that question, as well. Tell me, who am I?” He was now reaching a hand through the fog, holding out a glass of the brandy or grog to me, and without thinking I took it and swallowed it down in one gulp, although the Reader should already know that I never drink. Leave Mother to run the gamut from apéritifs to dinner sangria to post-prandials.
Setting the empty glass on the floor, I belched solemnly and answered: “I can’t say for sure. But I know all about you when you were at Madison.”
“Madison? Wisconsin? America? That was a long, long time ago. You must have read that on my book flaps… Madison—it rained or snowed all the time. Oh, dear—Madison!”
Now I was speaking steadily and more clearly, the fog and mist having lifted and revealing again this little man now opposite me on the other twin bed, like a small child waiting to be tucked in. “You knew a girl there, once. A very young girl, just a freshman.”
“And I suppose you’re now going to say I had carnal relations with this fairy and produced you, her vengeful son.”
Something in his practiced manner unnerved me. I tore off my perspiring galoshes and parka like Hercules tearing off that poisoned skin, to create a distraction and give me time to think. But the little boy—I mean, old man—was telling me: “I’ve been accused often enough, though more often when I was a younger fellow. You see, I once did play the prodigal son, and I’ve had my share of retributions. Deputy policemen, certified letters, a little bribery, all that. Tell me, what was your mother’s name?”
I told him.
He thought for a while as I stood there and then said with a sudden gesture of pleasure, a sigh and a thrust of his arms, “Oh, that girl! I remember that girl very well, indeed. So that’s still her name. In fact, I was just thinking of her; she was in my survey of the Romantic Poets—did she ever tell you that? Thought not. After she won the prize, after her book of girlish verse was published, after you were born, I daresay, she never wrote poetry again.” With that, he handed me another, taller tumbler of amber fire and once again I drank it so fast I tasted nothing.
“My mother wrote poetry?” I was flabbergasted, and it’s a rare thing—to be truly flabbergasted. Makes one burp rather loudly.
“I’m not surprised she never told you. The book only got one review, and that one was very negative, indeed. Written by a former friend, to add insult. More tenderhearted poets have killed themselves over kinder reviews. No wonder she’s turned against books in her later years—oh, yes, I admit I saw her curriculum on a door in the English office today—it’s very sad, because she did have talent. I wonder if you inherited any?”
“I’ve never written a thing,” I said, and it’s pretty much the truth.
“Oh, well. Albeit I must amend myself—she was no fairy even then, though she’s always had something of Titania in her. Still, your mother had, possibly still has, a certain attraction, a way of taking men over—and you know men always like that. In another life she would have been a barkeep or shot off Clyde Barrow’s head… Oh, dear—she must have made an awful mother.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” I said a little too testily. “So you’re not denying you’re my father?”
The little Pierrot before me almost spilled his drink down his tunic, he laughed so hard. At that moment I wanted to hit him—or smother him with a pillow—but to do so, I know, would have been unnecessary, because it was patently obvious this frail octogenarian before me would be expiring soon enough on his own. He needn’t have even told his audience about the tumor and heart problems for anyone to guess. “Dear boy,” he said once he had positioned his glass and, exhaling all the air out of his tired old lungs, propped himself against his bedstead like a manikin or marionette with no means to support itself, to continue: “Dear, dear boy. Belie