John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse

Nothing lasts longer than a mood. Dad’s infatuation passed; I remained. He understood, about time, that anything conceived in so unnatural and fugitive a fashion was apt to be freakish, even monstrous — and an advertisement of his folly. His second thought therefore was to destroy me before I spoke a word. He knew how these things work; he went by the book. To expose ourselves publicly is frowned upon; therefore we do it to one another in private. He me, I him: one was bound to be the case. What fathers can’t forgive is that their offspring receive and sow broadcast their shortcomings. From my conception to the present moment Dad’s tried to turn me off; not ardently, not consistently, not successfully so far; but persistently, persistently, with at least half a heart. How do I know. I’m his bloody mirror!

Which is to say, upon reflection I reverse and distort him. For I suspect that my true father’s sentiments are the contrary of murderous. That one only imagines he begot me; mightn’t he be deceived and deadly jealous? In his heart of hearts he wonders whether I mayn’t after all be the get of a nobler spirit, taken by beauty past his grasp. Or else, what comes to the same thing, to me, I’ve a pair of dads, to match my pair of moms. How account for my contradictions except as the vices of their versus? Beneath self-contempt, I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.

I continue the tale of my forebears. Thus my exposure; thus my escape. This cursed me, turned me out; that, curse him, saved me; right hand slipped me through left’s fingers. Unless on a third hand I somehow preserved myself. Unless unless: the mercy-killing was successful. Buzzards let us say made brunch of me betimes but couldn’t stomach my voice, which persists like the Nauseous Danaid. We … monstrosities are easilier achieved than got rid of.

In sum I’m not what either parent or I had in mind. One hoped I’d be astonishing, forceful, triumphant — heroical in other words. One dead. I myself conventional. I turn out I. Not every kid thrown to the wolves ends a hero: for each survivor, a mountain of beast-baits; for every Oedipus, a city of feebs.

So much for my dramatic exposition: seems not to’ve worked. Here I am, Dad: Your creature! Your caricature!

Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What’s less, I’ve been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn’t true. I’m not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don’t think … I know what I’m talking about.

Well, well, being well into my life as it’s been called I see well how it’ll end, unless in some meaningless surprise. If anything dramatic were going to happen to make me successfuller … agreeabler … endurabler … it should’ve happened by now, we will agree. A change for the better still isn’t unthinkable; miracles can be cited. But the odds against a wireless deus ex machina aren’t encouraging.

Here, a confession: Early on I too aspired to immortality. Assumed I’d be beautiful, powerful, loving, loved. At least commonplace. Anyhow human. Even the revelation of my several defects — absence of presence to name one — didn’t fetch me right to despair: crippledness affords its own heroisms, does it not; heroes are typically gimpish, are they not. But your crippled hero’s one thing, a bloody hero after all; your heroic cripple another, etcetcetcetcet. Being an ideal’s warpèd image, my fancy’s own twist figure, is what undoes me.

I wonder if I repeat myself. One-track minds may lead to their origins. Perhaps I’m still in utero, hung up in my delivery; my exposition and the rest merely foreshadow what’s to come, the argument for an interrupted pregnancy.

Womb, coffin, can — in any case, from my viewless viewpoint I see no point in going further. Since Dad among his other failings failed to end me when he should’ve, I’ll turn myself off if I can this instant.

Can’t. Then if anyone hears me, speaking from here inside like a sunk submariner, and has the means to my end, I pray him do us both a kindness.

Didn’t. Very well, my ace in the hole: Father, have mercy, I dare you! Wretched old fabricator, where’s your shame? Put an end to this, for pity’s sake! Now! Now!

So. My last trump, and I blew it. Not much in the way of a climax; more a climacteric. I’m not the dramatic sort. May the end come quietly, then, without my knowing it. In the course of any breath. In the heart of any word. This one. This one.

Perhaps I’ll have a posthumous cautionary value, like gibbeted corpses, pickled freaks. Self-preservation, it seems, may smell of formaldehyde.

A proper ending wouldn’t spin out so.

I suppose I might have managed things to better effect, in spite of the old boy. Too late now.

Basket case. Waste.

Shark up some memorable last words at least. There seems to be time.

Nonsense, I’ll mutter to the end, one word after another, string the rascals out, mad or not, heard or not, my last words will be my last words

Which was better would be hard to say. In the days when his father let out all five grades at once, Ambrose worried that he mightn’t see Peter in time or that Peter mightn’t stick up for him the way a brother ought. Sheldon Hurley, who’d been in reform school once, liked to come up to him just as friendly and say “Well if it ain’t my old pal Amby!” and give him a great whack in the back. “How was school today, Amby old boy?” he’d ask and give him another whack in the back, and Ambrose was obliged to return “How was school for you?” Whereupon Sheldon Hurley would cry “Just swell, old pal!” and whack the wind near out of him. Or Sandy Cooper would very possibly sic his Chesapeake Bay dog on him — but if he joked with Sandy Cooper correctly, especially if he could get a certain particular word into it, Sandy Cooper often laughed and forgot to sic Doc on him.

More humiliating were the torments of Wimpy James and Ramona Peters: that former was only in third grade, but he came from the Barracks down by the creek where the oyster-boats moored; his nose was wet, his teeth were black, one knew what his mother was; and he would make a fourth-grader cry. As for Ramona, Peter and the fellows teased her for a secret reason. All Ambrose knew was that she was a most awful tomboy whose pleasure was to run up behind and shove you so hard your head would snap back, and down you’d go breathless in the schoolyard clover. Her hair was almost as white as the Arnie twins’s; when the health nurse had inspected all the kids’ hair, Ramona was one of the ones that were sent home.

Between Sheldon Hurley and Sandy Cooper and Wimpy James and Ramona Peters there had been so much picking on the younger ones that his father said one night at supper: “I swear to God, I’m the principal of a zoo!” So now the grades were let out by twos, ten minutes apart, and Ambrose had only to fear that Wimpy, who could seldom be mollified by wit or otherwise got next to, might be laying for him in the hollyhocks off the playground. If he wasn’t, there would be no tears, but the blocks between East Dorset School and home were still by no means terrorless. Just past the alley in the second block was a place he had named Scylla and Charybdis after reading through The Book of Knowledge: on one side of the street was a Spitz dog that snarled from his house and flung himself at any passing kid, and even Peter said the little chain was going to break one day, and then look out. While across the street was the yard of Crazy Alice, who had not hurt anybody yet. Large of pore and lip, tangly of hair and mind, she wore men’s shoes and flowered chick-linen; played with dolls in her backyard; laughed when the kids would stop to razz her. But Ambrose’s mother declared that Alice had her spells and was sent to the Asylum out by Shoal Creek, and Ambrose himself had seen her once down at the rivershore loping along in her way and talking to herself a blue-streak.