T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

From The Life:

It is now known that Una Moss was not the mother of the Inventor’s peculiarly deformed son. In fact, as Sissler and Teebe have shown in The Brewing Storm , their perceptive study of his last years, the Inventor and Miss Moss were never sexually intimate. The reason is simple: the Great Man was impotent.

The son remains a problem.

The Inventor stands in the rain, surrounded by marble monuments: angels, christs, bleeding hearts. Una and the boy at his side. Their overcoats. Bowed heads. The smell of mold, the open hole. The man in black reading from a book.

It is Schlaver’s funeral. Cardiac arrest. The Inventor lingers after the others have gone, the rain slanting down, and watches the attendants as they slap the muddy earth on the coffin, scrape it into the corners, tamp the reddish mound that rises above the grass like bread in a pan. He stands there for a long while, the eyes black, elbow tucked, fist under chin. Suddenly he turns and hurries back to the limousine. Una and the boy are there, the windows fogged. He snaps open his notebook and begins scrawling equations across the page.

Three days later Schlaver is leaning back in an armchair at the Westchester house, surrounded by reporters, lights, TV cameras. He is in his bathrobe, looking much as he did before death. The medical world is astounded. The press calls it a hoax. The Inventor stands in the shadows, grinning.

From The Life:

There were threatening phone calls. Windows were broken. The house egged. The boy came home from school, blood on the seat of his pants. His tail had been clipped. In the shower room. It had been a pink tail, almost translucent, curled in three tight coils like an angleworm, or the breath of a serpent.

The interviewer clears his throat, blows his nose in a checked handkerchief, fiddles with the controls of the portable tape recorder. Una sits cross-legged on the carpet, barefoot, a ring on each toe. She is lining up dominoes on the coffee table, standing them on end in a winding file. The Inventor is in his armchair; he is wearing a flannel shirt, sipping sherry. “And which of your myriad inventions,” says the interviewer, “gives you the greatest personal satisfaction?” The Inventor looks down at the carpet, his fingers massaging the Furball in his lap. The wheels of the recorder whir, faint as the whine of a mosquito. “Those to come,” he says. “Those that exist ab ovo , that represent possibility, moments of chemical reaction, epiphanies great and small. You must see of course that invention makes metaphor a reality, fixes—” but then he is interrupted by the clack of tumbling dominoes, regular as a second hand, beating like a train rushing over a bad spot in the rail. Una looks up, smiling, serene, her lips fat as things stung. The final domino totters. “Yes,” says the Inventor. “Where were we?”

A Jewish star has been burned on his lawn. The Inventor is puzzled. He is not Jewish.

From The Life:

The great work which had brooded so long on the Great Man’s horizon came like Apocalypse. The world’s ears stung. The work was met with cries of outrage, despair, resentment. Never, said his critics, have the hopes, the illusions, the dignity of mankind been so deflated in a single callous swipe. Fact, brutal undeniable naked fact, ate like a canker at all our hearts, they said. Who will reclothe our illusions? they asked. His friends hung their heads and feebly praised his candor. Others persisted in calling it a canard. It was no canard. How he had done it no one could begin to imagine. But there were the formulas for the experts to wonder at, and there, for all the world to see, were the slides. The color slides of God dead.

1) God, his great white beard, gauzy dressing gown, one arm frozen at half-mast. Supine. His mouth agape. Nebular backdrop.

2) A top view. God stretching below the lens like a colossus, purple mountains’ majesty, from sea to shining sea. Cloud foaming over his brow, hissing up from beneath his arms, legs, crotch.

3) The closeup. Eye sockets black, nostrils collapsed, the stained hairs of the beard, lips gone, naked hideous teeth.

Night. Insects scraping their hind legs together, things stirring in the grass. Then the first cries, the flare of the torches. The earthquaking roar of the crowd. His neighbors are in the street, garden rakes and edgers poking over their massed heads, Yorkies and Schnauzers yanking them forward at the ends of leashes. Linked arm in arm, chanting “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” they come on, wrenching the great iron gates from their hinges, crushing through the beds of peonies, the banks of shrubbery, their faces savage and misaligned in the glare of the torches. Then the crash of the windows like a fever, the jeers of the women and children, husky brays of the men. And then the flames licking at the redwood planking, fluttering through the windows to chew at the drapes and carpets. The flash of Molotovs, the thunder of the little red cans of gasoline from a hundred lawn mowers. “Yaaaar!” howls the canaille at the first concussion. “Yaaaar!”

He is there. In the upper window. Una, Schlaver and the boy struggling to reach him from the fire escape. The flames, licking up twenty, thirty feet, framing the window like jagged teeth. The granite forehead, wisp of a beard, black eyes swimming behind the bottle lenses. Suddenly a cloud of smoke, dark as burning rubber, swells up and obscures the window. The crowd roars. When the smoke passes, the window is empty. Una’s scream. Then the groan of the beams, the house collapsing in on itself with a rush of air, the neon cinders shooting high against the black and the stars, like the tails of a thousand Chinese rockets.

(1976)

* The’ oaks and willows shadowing the home of Helmut Holtz, his first tutor, have attained heights in excess of three hundred feet, and continue to grow at an annual rate of nine feet, three and three quarters inches.

† In Finland, for example, a 10.3 annual per capita consumption of the Furballs (pat. trade name) is indicated. At Reykjavik they are sold on the street corner. An American Porno Queen posed nude in a sea of Furballs for a still-controversial spread in a men’s publication. And the Soviet Premier has forgone bedclothes for them. His explanation: “Can you make to purr the electric blanket?”

* A Cincinnati man, J. Leonard Whist, was prosecuted for possession of a controlled substance, intent to do great bodily harm, and bigamy, when police found that he had married four times, desiccated each of his wives, and reconstituted them as the whim took him.

He was in his early fifties, between jobs, his wife dead ten years. When he saw the position advertised in the Wellington paper it struck him as highly romantic, and he was immediately attracted to it.

LIGHTHOUSEKEEPER. Stephen Island. References.

Inquire T. H. Penn, Maritime Authority.

He took it. Sold his furniture, paid the last of the rent, filled two duffel bags with socks and sweaters and his bird-watcher’s guide, and hired a cart. Just as he was leaving, a neighbor approached him with something in her arms: pointed ears, yellow eyes. Take it, she said. For company. He slipped the kitten into the breast of his pea coat, waved, and started off down the road.

Stephen Island is an eruption of sparsely wooden rock seventeen miles northwest of Wellington. It is uninhabited. At night the constellations wheel over its quarter-mile radius like mythical beasts.

The man was to be relieved for two weeks every six months. He planted a garden, read, fished, smoked by the sea. The cat grew to adolescence. One afternoon it came to him with a peculiar bird clenched in its teeth. The man took the bird away, puzzled over it, and finally sent it to the national museum at Wellington for identification. Three weeks later a reply came. He had discovered a new species: the Stephen Island wren. In the interim the cat had brought him fourteen more specimens of the odd little buff and white bird. The man never saw one of the birds alive. After a while the cat stopped bringing them.