Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

Ned decided to follow Gruen at a distance. Joris had told him that Gruen would go occasionally to stand meditatively by the gorge, alone, every day.

Gruen stopped at a high point upstream from the death site. He stood there. Ned halted. It was solemn. He liked Gruen for this. And then, startlingly, Gruen reared back and spat as hard as he could into the air above the stream. It was a jarring thing. Ned walked halfway to Gruen and shouted at him, “What was that ?”

Gruen turned and was awkward for a moment. Ned joined him. Gruen said, “I was seeing if I could spit across.”

“Thank God,” Ned said.

Gruen said, “I’ve been wondering about it. The answer is I can’t.” Ned thought, Casually spitting in public used to be a male prerogative, sort of … it could go on Douglas’s list of deprivations that men were experiencing. A campaign against spitting in the street had been conducted in his junior high, and he remembered one of the campaign posters: If You Expectorate Don’t Expect To Rate.

Gruen was looking much healthier. On impulse, Ned embraced him. “Have you seen Nina?” Ned asked him.

“I have,” Gruen said, and patted himself on the back of his neck. Ned was not understanding Gruen’s gesture. “Do you know she trimmed me up?” Gruen asked.

Will she never cease? Ned thought.

What had happened was that Gruen had found her in an amiable conversation with Hume touching on the problem with his ankle, which was improving, and his hairstyle, which she said she loved but that could stand improvement. So they had all gone together to the house and secured barbering tools and she had been good enough to give each of them a trim. Gruen said, “Man, she razed those humps off his head and I got scared but he seemed to like the results.”

Ned asked, “Do you know where she is now?”

“I don’t, but she’s having a rendezvous with that French guy someplace, who by the way tied up the bathroom for half an hour. She’s very busy. She’s got a bunch of papers she wants to show you. Where she went to find the French guy, I don’t know.”

“Thank you, my friend,” Ned said.

He found her in the physic garden. Her back was to him. He beheld her for a couple of minutes. The sentence I stand here lonely as a turnstile came to him and was unwelcome and he shook it away. It was the pickup line Douglas had used to get Claire’s attention in the Figaro, in the dim past. Nina was standing on the curb of the uninhabited fish pond, slumped, dejected seeming. “Don’t jump,” he said.

When he and Nina had parted earlier, she’d said You’re being fairly abominable. And then she’d said, Oh you’re all so busy playing into one another’s hands. She’d been irritated, but not seriously. She was glad to see him. She was carrying a clutch of papers.

“I gave Hume a haircut,” she said. “Wait till you see him. It’s much better.”

There was a park bench available. He stamped down the weedy overgrowth surrounding it and tested the seat for dryness. Nina looked tired. She sat down, relieved. He sat next to her.

“I’m liking him,” she said.

Ned said, “I can see that. Joris has been telling me more about him. Even when he gets into trouble there’s something original about it, it sounds like to me, although original is probably the wrong word. I don’t mean to excuse anything. When Hume was being harassed by an older girl at school he decided to follow her around saying I moan, Naomi . And when the principal yelled at him to leave Naomi alone Hume shouted back Rail, liar! and defended himself by saying he’d just been practicing creating palindromes. The principal had kind of liked Hume before and had said it was clever when the boy introduced the word tomorning into classroom discourse, Hume’s point being that it was exactly like tonight and today, so it stood to reason it was a real word. Now, what have you got there?”

She selected a sheet of paper from her collection and handed it to Ned, saying, “This was bookmarking a section in the Study Guide to DSM-IV , the part on Borderline Personality Disorder. These other papers were in the book too.”

He began reading and he grimaced and she said, “I know.”

What he was looking at was a photocopy of a second-grade English composition of Hume’s. The text was crudely typed. On a letterhead cover sheet, the principal of Tremper Consolidated had written, in a forceful hand:

Please look over the herewith:

The names of the lunchroom staff

are not fictitious. One name has been

misspelled, where Hume has written

“Venerable” for “Venable.” I have of

course passed it to the nurse, but I am

eager to have your comments or those

of any colleagues at Mental Health you

think might shed light. I sent

you material on this pupil last year

and you were most helpful. One

other thing I should mention is

that it has been reported to me

that Hume was organizing a raffle

whose 25 cent ticket would allow

the winner to go behind a bush with

one of the female pupils in order to

watch her urinate, but there were

denials by the girl, so no evidence.

Looking to hear,

Jack Ryder

Principal

Tremper Consolidated

Hume’s composition was entitled THE GREATEST OF ALL LUNCHTIMES AT TREMPER SCHOOL.

Oh my a hord gathered! Dork

girls screamed. Ken the mastermind

of the cretens cried out something

or other. There are mostly boy cretens

but a few girls are too. More hords

came, like lackeys and vermin. Mrs.

Venerable opened the doors. She

has one shrinked arm and one regular arm.

Another hord came in from soccer

practicing. They were mostly varlets

with some poltroons and lackwits

strewed in. The head cook Mrs.

Murdock stated “Our vegetable

today is lovely fresh skunk cabbage.”

So the atheletes began cheering,

because they loved the breakfast

of scrambled snake eggs of that

very morn. “Oh please don’t forget

the stink weed salad, if you please,”

said Mrs. Murdock, who also had a

job as a murderer and stabbed peoples

eyes out with frozen carrots and killed

peoples pets by feeding them left overs

she sneaked into other peoples houses

with.

Ned said, “I’m working on my assignment, you know, but what is my philosophy, Nina? My philosophy is No Hitting. I don’t have time for a philosophy.”

“Ned please don’t tear yourself up. You’re a fine person! You keep forgetting that. Do you want to know something I told Ma when I first met you, when we first started dating? I said, Even his id is nice.”

“Well, that’s pretty beside the point. Anyway, thinking about Douglas’s philosophy is a laugh. At one point we were all supposed to hate Immanuel Kant because he singlehandedly sold out the Enlightenment. I remember the whole thing. He authorizes religion to be in charge of any question where certainty is impossible. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone 1793. Do you know what stromata means? It’s Greek for rag rug, and that’s what Douglas called his philosophy.”

“You’re overreacting to this task for some reason.”

“Okay. Now I’m not.” He resumed reading.

The cooks have a trick langwich.

They can talk like humans but they

can also talk to each other by their

behinds.

WE ARE TALL! the atheletes said.

“Some of you are” the girls screamed.

Nina said, “That’s only the first page.”

Ned said, “That’s enough. But does it get worse? Don’t tell me if it does. I blame a lot of this on Douglas. It took him a long time to take fatherhood seriously, I think. When we were in school he said if he had children and one was a daughter he was going to name her Groucha or Tendril. And a boy was going to be Dagwood. He was presumably kidding. And how hard would it be for Hume to pick up that Douglas loved him to be outrageous? I know I told you about the time Hume invented his own personal practical joke, the one where he dipped all the points of the sharpened pencils on Douglas’s desk in Elmer’s Glue. Douglas put it in a fax, he was so proud of it.”