Meredith Quartermain: I, Bartleby

Mén talking. One, jaw dropped to ground. The other, listening. Implacable. Sometimes they hug and smile beside a suitcase on wheels and a waiting car. Sometimes they compare books or condos or iPads or revolutionary philosophies. They face each other at parties, searching for talk whether it’s hockey or stocks or their firms that could be getting more work but are doing all right. Faces facing. Antennae to matter, drinks in hand, bellies sometimes bigger than heads but heads are where they live — large heads on sticks, one stick with bigger feet than the other. On terra firma. Firmament. Chain of being. Their heads like windows — double-sashed panes squaring eyes, squaring mouth, squaring suits in square buildings squared in streets. But they are not men with an accent — they are a door — their paned faces the swinging louvres you push through to whisky, studs, and holsters. A frame of men. Between them, a door. You could be photographed there or you could photograph your shadow going through. Mén and door. You brush along silent man’s back, stroke the sides of his upper pane, slide along the lower pane to his spine, then jut round front and bottom of talking man’s glass, trace the crossbar of his sash, sweep across the tip of his head and down his spine to flick out his feet, and you find one man has more window, another more stick.

Swashbucklers clash on sash window laid sideways shimmering back whiteness of sky, white as teeth over jawbone. Howdy, says jaw, curving a path to the teeth door under a roof of crossed swords — god-hefted hilts — blades striding scissor legs over windows of sky. Father sword legs — what’s he say for himself — this striding gesture whose memory, said Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, made the very soil of Chinese life — whose silhouette waved bloodstained flags on silk roads where intellect can only grope? Let my character speak, he insists, let me stroke my noble legibility, brushing my father and my father’s father and my father’s father’s father and his father and his father’s father — men of swords, men of staked ground. Men who said, My women. My children and only my children. My house is my castle, and I, the most generous of I’s, am the king of the tallest house, the one who makes black black and white white white. Here you will find the right house, the scientific house, the fit house, the real house, the perfect house, the clean house, the just house. No dithering, no gropes, no failures, no singing drunks, no brambles, no bastards, no animals without jobs, no houses without architects, no eyes without heads, no heads without homes, no trees without fences, no words without logic. Who would not want the city of fathers?

Interlocking wishbones saunter up a wall, a junk with crossbars for sails. Four oars propel her bow: four children, four splashes of milk, four portholes to her hold. The crossbars paint a lacquered screen with six small squares of Reason, behind which her wishbones tangle lovers. Her six-slotted weir catches splashing trout, her wishbones build a chaise longue or a loom for weaving tents. Her night arms hug the moon, tossing seeds to a well near the four labours of birthing. Her village has six seats of council in three walls: Reason, Rectitude, Justice. On the Wall of Reason, Queen Thamiris fights King Cyrus. On the Wall of Rectitude, Judith beheads Holofernes. On the Wall of Justice, Euphrosyna writes.

Her father, the wealthy Paphnutius, tried to marry her off but she, dressed as a man, fled to a monastery and amazed the abbot with her/his prayers and devotion. Day after day, rain or shine, the barefoot Brother Smaragdus sat on folding stool in the cloister, knife in one hand, pen in the other, copying texts from book to parchment folded over a wooden tent. Knife hand trimmed the quill, then pinned parchment to the steep slope. Pen hand picked up ink, rested on knife hand, and painted beautiful shapes of words. With the other monks, Brother Smaragdus practised how to read aloud the strapped and brass-knuckled tomes. So devout was Smaragdus that at night he/she would continue by candlelight, alone in his cell, tracing the lines of minims and interpuncts and bathing his thoughts in science.

Day after day Paphnutius asked his servants and bailiffs, Where has my daughter gone? How could she have left me? Why would God give me a daughter in answer to the abbot’s prayers only to allow her to run away and leave me alone? Go to the abbot, the servants said. The abbot said the whole monastery would pray for her. Brother Smaragdus and all the other monks prayed for a very long time. No news of his daughter came to Paphnutius who again, distraught, consulted the abbot. I’m sure she’s well, the abbot said, otherwise God would have sent some sign. Speak to one among us who is so full of wisdom that all those who talk with him are deeply comforted. And the abbot led Paphnutius to Brother Smaragdus.

Paphnutius didn’t recognize the face — years of toil had sculpted and lined it. Smaragdus hid his tears. Your daughter’s in a good place, he said, You’ll see her again, and she’ll bring you great joy. Paphnutius left in peace, but he came back often; only Brother Smaragdus could calm his worries. One day he found Brother Smaragdus dying. What happened to your promises, Paphnutius cried, but the brother’s spirit had already fled. Paphnutius fell upon his friend sobbing for the consoler now lost to him. Then he found in Smaragdus’s hand a letter saying, I am your daughter, and here at last is my body for you to bury.

Tutu ballerina riveted to rake handle, with interlocking wishbones for partner — two sisters sally out like Don and Sancho. Or knight errant Vincent Kirouac, on the road again, riding his mare Coeur-de-Lion from Rivière-du-Loup to Vancouver, crusading in pointed helmet for friendship and honour. Or the woman who crusaded for frogs and newts till the Ministry of Transport built a tunnel under the Tofino highway. Or the rambling Scottish man who preferred not to wear clothes, who, naked, disturbed the peace, and naked remained in contempt of court, and was imprisoned two years, naked, then released, and naked again, disturbing the peace again, was arrested, naked, and imprisoned in solitary where he prefers to be naked. Rakehandle and Wishbones wander in no man’s land of womanhood, their trail of crumbs through rampant undergrowth eaten by crows. I shall not let it matter, Rakehandle pirouettes through the forest. Nor I, Wishbones chassés elbows and knees, poised on her sister’s toe and tutu, We have this interlockingness, these angular fields, between us. Let’s find a gingerbread house. Let’s eat a chimney and soak in a chocolate bath, and push a king into a plough. Let’s say it’s epidemic. Like apple blossoms and fog. Liquid as light waves, sporadic as galaxies, rhizomatic as tongues. Let’s say the king bakes to a hopscotch with a glazing of pincushion and strawberry frills. Let’s forget to eat him. Forget to have been forgotten as forest. Forget to have been forgetting. I shall not let it matter, Rakehandle pirouettes. Nor I, Wishbones chassés.