David Wallace - Broom of the System

“Shoo, love of mine,” LaVache said.

The girl turned and fled. Her shoes clicked on the cement, fading.

Lenore looked at her brother. More grass squeaked in his hands. The sprinklers suddenly all went off, stopped hissing, the water sucked back inside itself, in the pipes, down in the fields. The fields looked great. They shone fire in the red light, deepened to twinkle in the glossy black of the gym shadows. “So then here I guess I’m supposed to ask what you think the two together might be supposed to mean,” Lenore said.

LaVache laughed like a seal. His head lolled. “Gramma would be disappointed in her minion,” he said. “They obviously… mean whatever you want them to mean. Whatever you want to use them for. Ms. Beadsman…,” he pretended to hold a microphone under Lenore’s nose, “… how would you like the drawings to function? Audience, please just hold off on that input…” The Antichrist made tick-tock noises with his tongue. “Function,” he said. “The extreme unction of function. Function. From the Latin ‘func,’ meaning foul-smelling due to persistent overuse. She has crawled off. She is either dead, or functioning furiously. Speaking of functioning furiously, you might help me up, here, for a moment, please.”

Lenore helped her brother up. He limped behind a bush at the side of the hill. Lenore heard sounds of him going to the bathroom into the dry bush.

“I have an idea,” the Antichrist’s voice came over the bush to Lenore. “Let’s do the natural Beadsman thing. Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend just for fun that Lenore hasn’t expired, that Mrs. Yingst hasn’t chopped her up and fed her to Vlad the Impaler, that Gramma actually does give a hoot about your being potentially worried, and might actually be trying to use that worry in some nefarious way.” He came back over, slowly, keeping his balance on the incline. “Now, under this game-scenario, how might we wish to see the drawings as functioning, here?” He settled back down with Lenore’s help, looked at her. “The sliding-man drawing, under this scenario, might say, hey, ho, watch how you go. Perceive how you — we — perceive Lenore’s being… ‘missing.’ Don’t just look at it; think about how to look at it. Maybe it… means the opposite of what you think it does, of the way it… looks.” LaVache was having leg trouble, on the hump of the hill. Lenore helped him get more comfortable. She held the baby food labels in her hand.

LaVache continued, “See, maybe Lenore isn’t gone at all. Maybe you’re who’s gone, when all is said and done. Maybe… this one I particularly like… maybe Dad’s gone, spiralled into the industrial void. Maybe he’s taken us with him. Maybe Lenore’s found. Maybe instead of her sliding away from you, you’ve slid away from her. Or climbed away from her. Maybe it’s all a sliding-and-climbing game! Chutes and Ladders, risen from the dead!” The Antichrist was having trouble talking, because his mouth was all dry from the joint. He got the last of Clint Wood’s fee from his drawer and lit it.

“Hmmm,” Lenore was saying.

“Except don’t think about yourself, in this game, at all,” said the Antichrist. “Because in this game, the way we’re playing, the barber drawing means don’t think about yourself, in the context of the game, or your head explodes into art deco. Just think about other people, if you want to play. Which means that family-members have to be treated as explicitly Other, which I must say I find attractively refreshing.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Lenore said.

The Antichrist exhaled. “Let’s pretend just for fun that it’s the late seventies, and Lenore is in her blue period, and is still keeping exclusively to her study, and snapping at anyone who comes near, including poor old Grampa, who was getting ready to die, and being generally pathetic…”

“Get on with it. My bottom hurts.”

“And anyway, in this game-context, that Lenore is still Skeptical as hell, or at least strenuously adopting the pose, and ostensibly convinced that all she is is the act of her thinking, à la the French-man, although Lenore would say all she is is the act of speaking and telling, but that’s so bullshitty it makes my tongue hurt, and anyway luckily unnecessary, and so we say that all she is is the act of her thinking; that’s the only thing she can be sure of, is just her being her thinking.”

“Is this real, or are you saying all this because you’re flapped?” asked Lenore.

“Please hush,” LaVache said. “I’m hard at play. So all Lenore is is her act of thought, nothing else can be ‘assumed.’ ” He lay back and looked at the reddening sky, the joint resting in a carved initial in the leg. “So she’s her thinking. And, as we know, all thinking requires an object, something to think of or about. And the only things that can be thought about are the things that are not that act of thought, that are Other, right? You can’t think of your own act of thinking-of, any more than a blade can cut itself, right? Unless you’re the guy who’s significantly lowering Nervous Roy Keller’s quality of life, but I refuse to think about that until the leg demands that I do so. So, we can’t think ourselves, if all we are is the act of thinking. So we’re like the barber. The barber, if I recall, shaves all and only those who don’t shave themselves. Here Lenore thinks we think all and only those things which do not think themselves, which aren’t the act of our thought, which are Other.”

“Hell of a game,” Lenore muttered.

“But then we remember that all we are is our act of thought, in the game, for Lenore,” LaVache said, fast, now, and slightly slurry. “So if we think about ourselves with respect to the game, we’re thinking about our thinking. And we decided the one thing we couldn’t think about was our thinking, because the object has to be Other. We can think only the things that can’t think themselves. So if we think ourselves, see for instance conceiving ourselves as thought, we can’t ourselves be the object of our thinking. Q.E.D.”

Lenore cleared her throat.

“But if we can’t think ourselves,” the Antichrist continued to the sky, trying to lick his lips, “that means we, ourselves, are things that can’t think themselves, and so are the proper objects for our thought; we fulfill the game’s condition, we are ourselves Other. So if we can think ourselves, we can’t; and if we can‘t, we can. KA-BLAM,” LaVache gestured broadly. “There go the old crania.”

“Dumb game,” said Lenore. “I can think of myself any time I want. Here, watch.” Lenore thought of herself sitting in the Spaniard home in Cleveland Heights, eating a frozen pea.

“Dumb objection, especially from you,” the Antichrist said to the sky. “ ‘Cause do you really think of yourself? What do you think of yourself as? Shall I recall some of our more interesting and to me more than a little disturbing conversations of the last two years? If you don’t think of yourself as real, then you’re cheating, you’re not playing fair, you’re chute-hopping, you’re not thinking of yourself.”

“Who says I don’t think of myself as real?” Lenore said, looking past the Antichrist at the bush he’d gone to the bathroom in.

“I’d be inclined to say you say so, from your general attitude, unless that little guy with the big mustache and the movable chairs has conked you on the head or something,” said the Antichrist. “It’s my clinical opinion that you, in a perfectly natural defensive reaction to your circumstances, have decided you’re not real — of course with Gramma’s help.” LaVache looked at her. “Why is this all so, you ask?”

“I haven’t asked anything, you might have noticed.”