Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Dom I may as well add (lest it be subtracted) that, as Dr. Cadbury had told me to one day when he was puffing up the stairs perhaps unsuccessfully trying to get away from me, I read Herodotus; and I found at the end of Book One what a certain general-mother-queen did to dead Cyrus because he’d tricked her own son captive and shamed him into suicide: after the action in which Cyrus was killed and his army decimated, she “ordered a search to be made amongst the Persian dead for the body of Cyrus; and when it was found she flung his severed head into a skin which she had filled with human blood…” and though I tried I couldn’t see that this bit had anything to do with my own naming, though my mother once said she wouldn’t mind having another chance to name a child.

No doubt these are questions from which my own two-and-a-half-year-old Emma keeping an eye on a TV ad for spray-Disneyvectors will not suffer. Nor Al, his first week on the Barataria , reading Herodotus in the fo’c’sle head but nagged by a Seaman First who’s swabbing tiles around the very toilet Al is on and tells Al to hurry it up but when Al kicks the dank mop-strings aside that have fallen too close and looks up deadly alert, the boy backs down and, nodding at the book, says Did Al have two years college, and Al says And when I get out I’ll have two more while you ig norant mothers are getting your hash marks. Can my nineteen-year-old Ted see that that the smooth sequence of carnage in Herodotus is not for heaven’s sake some underground pacifist tract? No more than I for a long secret time could simply stand well-armed with my mercenary insight that Marathon at once must come but must wait, that in the grand casual handiwork of Herodotus the continuing narrative of Persian power and its knell was likewise a strangely coördinate field of tantalizingly stable custom and magnetic trajectories, of the delicately bruised myrrh the Egyptian embalmer uses and the living hand of Euphorion’s son at the lasting instant before it was chopped off holding a Persian stern — and stop stop stop weighing the relative relevance to me of the twin events my father singled out as he powdered himself, namely the birth of Cyrus the Great, and the death. And then my father died and all I had to go on were the words he’d already spoken. “But like, how obvious can you get?” asks Darla Fasinelli before she goes on with unexpected intimacy of observation to reveal despite herself that perhaps your defenestration was not just a publicity jump. Talk about advertisements for yourself! what’s more crudely obvious than the sign Darla’s people hung out of their ninth-floor administrative office that Pacific day until a dark-sleeved arm that I still think may have been yours Dom reached out and yanked it loose:

THIS SPACE FORENT

What do I do if your phone rings?

Still no herring steamer, the lowering dusk seems to hold it back. Chewing barely seared steak we looked out to the north promontory. “Robby’s always doubting me, if you really want to know,” said Bob.

Al’s Annette, a desomniac like me, wakes and for what seems a long and is a terrible time sees in the early light not fresh-laundered baby pajamas and kid’s overalls draped airing over a Boston rocker but two empty bodies.

Ev periodically sleeps on her stomach to nip her incipient double chin.

Emma stops sucking, sets down her bottle on the long butcher block, and with a comfortable gasp asks the question she has been preparing perhaps all night but certainly since her conversation with Ev yesterday — she and I breakfast before Ev and Ted, it’s early, it’s raining against the pane, I must wash the windows someday: “Daddy was baby?”

Elsewhere with all the time in the world because I am with her, I hold her up sitting on my hand like some mechanical lift, to press the button for the west elevator, which the little articulator’s plastic-bulbed clock-face just above the button tells us is already rising past the floor just below ours.

“Quid est matrimonium?…,” Al might enjoy quoting to Bob from a letter Gray wrote to his sometime friend Walpole; “Est coniunctio nunc copulativa, nunc disjunctiva.”

Quare means “why” and “therefore.” Perpetua Pound blinked respectfully when I went beyond my tutorial threshold and failed to excite her with what struck me then as a queer duplicity between interrogative and relative: Why? Therefore . Question and answer command a field of hazardous puzzles from (say) Lower Silurian to Lurid Iranian, from Taconic dives to submerged coronal engagements.

Now because the Medulla Oblongata, or Spinal Bulb, part of that three-point arc called the Vectoral Muscle, is incidentally the center of winking, I tried to link Tracy’s tears of shyness with some anatomic dystrophy in her that I might be able to unearth — perhaps even vectoral, though I suspected that since she wasn’t an only child and so probably lacked a vectoral muscle any such link would be in fact with mine.

The angle made by the Land Rover’s windshield and hood was still visible, but not the man. Bob changed the subject. “Robby’s right: what did happen with you and Tracy?”

That March weekend, after she said Al had made a pass the touching moistness — or you, Dom, would say (though of late you used this cool new clarity without conviction) the measurable moistness — around her eyes may have been mere loss. I said to her, “Right. Maybe I’m too tough. Tougher than you.”

But I seemed to myself not to believe what I’d said. But now I see some inverse bravura made me apparently lie the truth .

All confessions are fantasies, though no less truthful. The man who will tell you he raped tells you so not simply to express guilt but to gild it to a local bloody shine; he’s proud, and not secretly, of that force-fed laying-on of hands that he calls rape but that may have been just the successful palpation of her deep, just reluctance.

“You never want to kiss me unless it leads to something,” Tracy lied.

Bob wound up and hurled a gristley red wedge of beef neither of us could manage, and a gull materialized out of the half-light and reached the meat as it hit the water. Above this near-point, running lights were now two miles off. “It’s about time,” said Bob.

Al hates leftovers, cold or hot, even for lunch.

Bob grabbed my boomerang just as Hugh shouted to us from the top of the steps leading to the main part of the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian way. Did Bob see Freddy and Hugh coming into view before he grabbed my boomerang? In the anthrochron of friendship those are big questions, though in the field of probabilities — which is trying to engross my already smudging parabolas and my dystrophic dialectic of anthronoiacly keeping apart Al and Bob — these misgiving questions spread into tacit maturity. Bob fended me off and ran toward Hugh and Freddy, but then Freddy said to me, “Guess who’s keeping tabs on you?” and Hugh said knowingly, “They all have claws, every goddamn one of them.” Freddy meant that Tracy had begged him to come and see what we were doing on the bridge. We all started picking on Hugh and somehow my boomerang ended up that night on Bob’s wall.

At the Pounds’ next day Bob’s father said chucking boomerangs off the Bridge was like dropping something out of a window — violated a municipal ordinance, didn’t it? Rear Admiral Worth twitched a small smile and said gently that of course it was worse than that. Bob’s father laughed, kept coming back to the achievement Petty had described, and laughed some more and said to Admiral Worth that Bob was co-captain of lacrosse. Admiral Worth said he hoped Bob hadn’t been aiming for the Navy Yard, and Petty took him up and said Hey wait, Bob had aimed for the Statue, not the other way, and in the teeth of a stiff wind up there among the cables. Russell Pound entered the room with two old-fashioned glasses and called across to me Did my father have any clue who’d walked off with the typewriter.