Clarence Major - My Amputations

He woke in a furious sweat. Leaped out of bed. The signing of that contract? hadn't he begun the long surrender of the Self? in signing that MRF agreement — to God knows what — in the name Ellis hadn't he in effect ended his own potential? He would go on, wouldn't he: vanishing and resurfacing alternately till he achieved his identity or disappeared forever. Then the dream cleared. He'd been trapped on a tribal set. Surrounded by strangers, he was told to pee into a clay pot. He hesitated. Was there some deep authority in hesitation? No. It was simply that the Self did not vanish quite so fast if one paused before… Passively, he pissed in the pot. A scientist in a handsome lion's skin took the pot into sunlight and examined the liquid. In ten minutes he returned with his report. “This man, rough, and in need of revision, better focus, cutting, pasting, more action and less telling, is faced with a monumental decision. In his urine the sign of his desperation is clear.” The village chief stood and placed a firm hand on Mason's shoulder. “My son, you are about to discover how to pull it all together. Do not—” but here the dreamer gives up the…

Who formulates the questions? It's noon and Mason's at Restaurant Europa. His table is on the sidewalk. The wine is simple Domestica. The moussaka is two or three days old — made with stale potatoes. Better to have ordered the shish kebob or lamb and potatoes? Hardly. He is stuck with his bad decision. He sits, drinking too fast, and watches the old prostitutes hustling on the mall: this is a particularly sleezy area — Omonia Square — where drunks or young boys can — and do — pick up fat, run-down whores for two to three hundred drachmas. It is lunch time and the whores are not having much luck. Mason watches their pacing with something like interest. Their bodies are swollen like the bellies of toads. He cannot level a question against their presence. Their comic and frantic movements — back and forth — give him no usable clue. Across the mall at another restaurant sit five Greek men drinking beer. By one they are singing Greek songs and toasting each other with more suds. Mason broods. Then pays seven hundred drachmas for his awful lunch. He wanders about the streets. He is not feeling drunk or spaced when he realizes that his shoulder bag has been snatched. He's walking along Stadiou toward the Sintagma when these two kids hit him and a third one grabs his bag. Mason responds like Bat Man: kicking and punching in reflex time. The one with the bag is running. Mason takes off after him. Bumping into side-walkers, peddlers, hawkers. He leaps over a table (where a man's having after-lunch coffee) to avoid a cluster of people at a narrow point. The kid's tiny and fast: he's taking the street and the side — even leaping cars. Mason's losing ground. He feels his age. Then he sees the boy run into a woman: she falls, the kid falls. A crowd gathers. Mason's bag is on the ground in the scramble. When he gets there — elbowing his way through — he dives for his bag. Gets it. The woman is shouting in American English at the boy. She calls him a little snot, an asshole, a rude son-of-a-bitch. She is helped up by two Greek men. A woman hands her her purse. She bangs the boy over the head with it. The boy is looking for a way to exit through the thicket of bodies. She whacks him again. Mason grabs him. A cop pushes his way through the crowd. Mason explains what has happened. The cop takes the boy by the ear and marches him away. Everybody laughs. Then Mason realizes that the American woman is Yellow Eyes.

She had a Greek name: Melina Karamanlis. They went to a cafe just a block away on Georgiou; ordered Dymphe, a decent Volos blanc sec. She told him she remembered him from the rooftop restaurant. As it turned out she knew his name. It gave him a funny feeling about her. She was a journalist, a film critic, here visiting her sister, Sophia Papadopoulos who was married to Nikos. Sophia was American too; Nikos, no. Melina was interested in the avant garde theatre and had come to this work through friends in New York. He had mixed feelings about her pretty smile. She was pretty: very. Although she presently lived and worked in Albuquerque — and liked it — she was a born New Yorker. She had the accent down. Gestures too. She seemed delighted to meet a fiction writer whose work she'd read. “Normally,” she said, “I read Joyce Carol Oates, ye know, but I'm happy to say, I'm also interested in what other people are doing.” Impulsively and cheerily she invited him to dinner at her sister's. He hesitated. She tickled his funnybone: “I promise you I won't do the cooking: my brother-in-law is a genius in the kitchen. You'll get a sample of real Greek home-cooking.” She was obviously impressed to learn he was here to lecture next week at the university. She'd bring all the relatives she could round up. He didn't especially like her joke. Just before she left Melina said the boy who angered her so by knocking her down might actually turn out to be a blessing in disguise and a catalyst. Mason didn't respond and didn't know how to translate that. He was expected at seven-thirty that night. She gave him the address. The taxi driver would know. She then took his hand and shook it. She swished off leaving a whiff of Mycenean Rose — if there's such a thing. Why'd he get himself into these jams? Did he really expect to find any part of the puzzle there tonight? Or was he just looking for an angle on another piece of leg? He now felt keenly alone: on the way back he smoked his last coffin nail, courtesy R.J. Reynolds. Made a mental note to replenish. He parked the Ford in the underground lot beneath the hotel. Went up. In the lobby there was a Neolithic female figure with winged-arms lifted as though conducting lobby traffic. Holy red mullet! He gave her a close inspection. Something deadly in her stance. He couldn't quite put his finger on what it was though. Anyway, all through dinner he'd found difficulty refraining from staring at Nikos'eye-patch: around its edge there seemed to be a rim of light: it was like being on a dark street and gazing at the closed window to a lighted room. Nikos and Sophia were a handsome couple! She was jaunty and talkative. The chicken and rice with garlic sauce earned an A-plus. Conversation was mundane: ranging from Onassis and Jackie, Maria Callas, the island Skorpios to Jason's state of mind as he was about to set forth from Volos in search of the Golden Fleece.

He read from his novel-in-progress: “… Florence Soukhanov watched him from the ground…. He was shinnying up a flagpole at sunrise in this strange gawdawful mid-western town near the bus stop…. Her view: he was a bug in orange light…. What is he trying to see? … What'd he hope to see?… Soukhanov felt a little embarrassed waiting down there for him…. At the top he looked in all directions: with grinding, plodding attention, he applied his vision…. After twenty-eight minutes of focusing he came down…. Soukhanov wanted to know what he saw. ‘Goldfinches and flunkies clustered at a distance.’ He caught his galloping breath by its throat. ‘I saw seven-thirty light through wet trees. I strained. I was disappointed. Originally I went up to try to catch sight of The Impostor's tracks. I got interested in other forms of deception. I tried to detect the real from the unreal…. I wanted a view of all the connections: forced or otherwise…. I saw The Impostor traveling in foreign countries: he discovered there was nobody in the foreground: everybody except he knew how to talk…. He went to public baths under skies juxtaposed with the complicated architecture of clouds pretending to be maternity wards or white guys in blackface…. Everything from up there was deception…. I felt assigned to the crazyhouse of Black Letters: oddball'… ” He stopped. Then told them he wanted to try the whole thing all over again — from a different angle. They were confused enough to care. He started again: “‘I was disappointed. It wasn't so much that I was trying to track down The Impostor — although I tried to spot him, too —… I wanted a view of all the connections, forced and otherwise. Ya know? What can you make of a ringing church bell, a bra in a puddle of water by a yellow school bus filled with tiny faces, in a bloody parking lot — behind the parish? or a guy who looked like you-know-who grabbing his bloody chest, torn open by history… or those slugs down on the poolside: I knew they didn't add up or connect. But out beyond the horizon I dug farm workers in disguises working fields and there was a tree shading a cabin — I'm sure The Impostor hid there — and maybe the dude stroking his sideburns or the straw boss hidden under his straw hat was he. It was like viewing one of those vast romantic landscapes on which many tiny communities can be seen in hectic activity. There was even a gunfight between a very dramatic stud and a law-and-order man. The stud or stuntman vomited ketchup and died theatrically — on a hillside. I knew he wasn't The Impostor: his action was, well, too unenterprising. The hoers, diggers, planters, though, might have been real moneybags, pepless pimps, bellringers, addicts, fans of his. I couldn't tell. Crazy? No, I'm okay. Even the sheepherder herding a flock on the hillside where the gunfight took place, was not exactly who he pretended to be: he looked California but was Jersey under his front…. A forest growing dark; just from tires lifting along a road; a figure stepped from a cabin and rang a cowbell; beyond, in the brush and undergrowth, a fire blazed; Kenneth Patchen herding seahorses; hooded lynchers riding out-of-sight of his anger; and there was a cubistic arrangement of The Impostor — as Moca — galloping on a silly donkey with sword raised; and Celt — just an illusion? — juggling an impressive circle of frosty infant bodies…. I saw a lot — a lot was confusing: The Impostor trying on a cowboy hat in the jungles of Mali; I saw myself holding The Impostor by the throat, trying to force him to confess his betrayal of my purity, my Truth, my place as a Human Being; saw him dancing with snakemen around the victims of “justice” in a valley before a cave-entrance; the smell of human flesh reached me up there; saw him go among a group that looked like university students and I'm sure he told them lies — as though it were sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight when every serious Black writer had to be Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or Eldridge Cleaver before such groups. Lies? Which lies? Later lies. Up there, my dear Florence, I smelled Art farted on; my tongue got caught on the inside of my own lower and upper borders. My gums ached. I tried to gauge myself for shock — disruption. The flag was not up its pole: I was. I felt insecure up there but mine was composed of deceptive fat, loose skin, crooked noses, dirty ears: all so difficult to touch — certainly not sensuous or sexual. My hard-frown-of-concentration on attempting to come down that pole, finally, was like the downward pressure of an airplane beginning to descend in an emergency landing…. ’”