John Barth - Letters

The familiar parlor was in filthy case: goat droppings on the floor and furniture; upholstery torn and chewed upon; soiled plates and glasses, some broken. Clinks came from the kitchen: you Froze, then Inquired Cheerily whether anyone was home? Considered Retreating to the car, but Observed that the Family Gruff had returned to the dooryard. Picked up a knocked-over straight chair to precede you like a lion tamer’s through the house.

More debris. Goat shit. Flies. And, sitting at a battered kitchen table in the dirty sunlight, Marsha Blank: naked, frowzled. Paralyzed? So you Could Almost Fancy, with a Rush of Anxious Joy. But on the table, along with a cup of moldy yogurt, were phials, a tiny hypodermic syringe, and her left arm. You Sat in your Chair, beside her. It was not morphine. Her hair was a mess. Her breasts just touched the tabletop; on the right one a housefly circumambulated. Marsha was only half comatose: she regarded you, well, blankly, and nodded or at least bobbed her head for a considerable while.

Time passed. The light changed in the room. You Sort Of Inspected her: no manacles or other bonds in evidence; no apparent lacerations or contusions, just a few bug bites and, on the arm, red needle marks. A trickly sound; you Looked; the woman was pissing in her seat. You Returned to yours and presently Inquired, Was she all right?

Through the afternoon the dope wore off. At some point you Surveyed the other rooms, most of them empty except of litter. But one bedroom was more or less furnished, with a curious five-sided bed on which was piled what looked to be computer printout: long sheets of numbers, chewed at here and there by goats and, it appeared, slept on. Creases, rips, stains. Still no sign of Bray. Marsha wandered up and sat on a corner of the bed, legs apart, blinking now. She seemed to have wiped herself. You Had Not Seen a reasonably attractive unclothed female body for some while.

What kind of dope was it, Horner? You Still Don’t Know. Bray has it in both pill and powder form, the latter water-soluble and mainlined like heroin, which it isn’t. Marsha called it Honey Dust, and was hooked on it: a fix in the late forenoon, after morning chores, spaced her as aforedescribed until midafternoon; by dinnertime she’d be reasonably herself again, enough so at least to prepare a simple meal. But there are residual effects, which two weeks of enforced abstinence and therapy have since diminished but not altogether removed, and which you Fear will be restored by today’s mail. Formerly fastidious, she was now unsanitary and heedless of her appearance. Formerly assertive, sharp-edged, she was now passive, vacant. As she boiled eggs for your Dinner this first evening, for example, padding barefoot about the kitchen in one of Bray’s capes (open at the front), the buck wandered in to check the menu. Don’t mind him, she advised you, and herself ignored his persistent snuffling at her backside, through and under the cape. But when, growing more aggressive, he thrust his bearded snout between her thighs from in front, she said Ouch I’m sore there and conked him mildly with a ladle.

Having Established that Bray had been in Maryland for a week and was not expected back for another, you Took Heart, Ate A Boiled Egg, Asked More Questions, which Marsha more or less answered. As best you can Reconstruct The Events, she went down to Maryland from the Farm in late June or early July, either in her capacity as secretary to M. Casteene, or to visit her daughter by Ambrose Mensch, or both. Falling in with Reg Prinz’s film company in Cambridge on July 4, she met or remet Jerome Bray and with him formed some project of revenge upon her former husband (against whom she still harbors a grudge) and upon Bibi Golden, who it seems had vigorously spurned Bray’s advances and gone off somewhere with Mensch. The details of their joint grievance and joint plan of retaliation are unclear and, you Gather, no longer important: to discuss them, however, Marsha had permitted Bray to drive her back to her Cambridge motel at the end of that evening and buy her a nightcap in its bar.

Her insistence that what ensued was voluntary on her part is, in your Opinion, the insistence of a victim still in thrall to her victimizer: it Seems Clear to you that she was doped and raped that night and kept in some degree of narcosis thereafter until her need for the chemical, and its debilitation of her will, made her sexual and other compliance “voluntary.” All indictable offenses, you have Indignantly Pointed Out. Marsha shrugs her shoulders. Once installed on his farm, she went naked except on cool nights or when working outdoors among briars and thistles. She prepared the meals, tended the goats, did general chores — all perfunctorily, as has been seen. No further mention was made of their original project.

It is obvious that Bray abused her sexually: a week after his departure her vulva was still sore, and even now, a full month since, your Infrequent Copulation causes her discomfort. But she remains indifferent to that abuse, even uncertain of its details. Every forenoon, you Gather, from July 5 through 13, she would “do her Honey Dust” and “zonk out,” to find herself some hours later upstairs in that bed with a sore cunt, leaking semen on that printout paper. Sometimes she slept there at night as well, sometimes not (she had a double mattress of her own on the floor in another room), but except at the noon hour Bray never touched her sexually or otherwise mistreated her — aside from his ongoing crime upon her spirit!

Was she free to leave? Matter of semantics: her chemically induced complaisance, her indifference, was entire. You Imagine that the question never came up until you Raised it, next day.

By when, ☌☿☉, Apollo-11 on course toward Earth, John Dillinger shot near movie house in Port Huron, Mich., Senator Kennedy attends funeral of Mary Jo Kopechne, Napoleon’s only son dies in Vienna, you Had a Fair Understanding of her condition. That first night you Attempted To Express your Feelings for her, and Mistaking her dozing off for real rejection, you Did Not Share her couch, but Went Upstairs to that double mattress. When she wandered in during the night you Believed she was coming to you, but her mild Oh Hi There disabused you of that belief. She had forgotten you Were In The House. Experimentally, you Mounted her: she ouched in the same declaratory tone as earlier to that goat, whom you Do Not Doubt she’d have received as indifferently. You Of Course Withdrew, not at her request. Then in the morning you Announced, rather than Suggesting or Begging Leave, that you were Returning With Her to Fort Erie. She went on, naked, about her business, which included a trip out to the barn “to check LILYVAC.”

Despite your Leeriness of the livestock, you Went Along, to See What She Meant by that phrase. Your Life since 1953 has not Kept you Abreast of the technology of automatic computers and artificial intelligence; therefore you Cannot Say For Sure, what however is your Judgment, that the extraordinary object in the barn of Comalot Farm is no usual, perhaps not even a genuine, automatic computer. Indisputably it contains what Appeared to you to be components from Eisenhower-era electronic machines, as its name suggests: dusty banks of vacuum tubes, fins and fans for cooling them, bright-colored resistors, capacitors, condensers, wires a-plenty, glows, clicks, hums. But Looking More Closely through the pigeon shit and cobwebs, you Observed that at least some of what you’d Taken for metal or plastic was a scaly, waxy stuff, unidentifiable but vaguely repulsive; some of those wires were more like heavy beeswaxed cord, or dried tendons. There were in fact a great many bees and wasps about; you Feared for naked Marsha, and Began To Wonder whether the circumambient drone was electronic at all.