Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“I tried to enter his dreams. He had no dreams. He slept like someone napping. I don’t mean fitfully; I don’t mean lightly; maybe I don’t even mean uncomfortably, but with just that hibernant, abeyant doze one sees on the faces of sleepers in railway carriages or in the awry angled heads of passed-out drunks. My uncle could have been an uncle in parlors after family feasts, or paralyzed, all his features — eyes, mouth, nose, forehead, cheeks, chin — in some leaden, unresisting mandragoran acedia, even his bones in coma, not piled so much as stashed unarchitecturally as firewood. Quite simply there was no one home, and his face had about it some lifeless, awful quality of nonuse, like clothes, say, in the closets of the dead.

“I entered his head through his nostrils, thinking my rubbery passage there might act like some chemical reagent, but I know dreamless sleep when I see it. He was as nerveless there as toenail, his body lulled as hair.

“I became bolder, even naughty. I entered his head through his anus, his ears, the littorals of his sex — all the watched passes and zebra-gated, checkpoint vulnerables of his ticklish borders. I would have done as well to have entered his head through his hat.

“Once inside I moved about as freely as a man in his own rooms, but with as little sense of voyage, journey. I probed his brain like a caver, but the cave was featureless, dead, the bland limestones and indigenous geologies ordinary as cellar. There was neither grief nor joy, his unconscious recessive as his hunger.

“I slipped outside again with the intention of reconnoitering his room, more cop than nephew, more scientist than mourner. I looked for — what? A Bible perhaps, open at some telling passage of consolation or bleak denunciation, or perhaps at one of those two psalms in my uncle’s repertoire that might indicate the words meant more to him than just a formula for the disposition of bodies.

“There was no Bible.

“I looked for framed photographs of my cousins, posed, frozen, idealized Sunday bested, their young lives solemnized and potentiated by their severe clothes and managed expressions, neither openly smiling nor hardened in some scam seriousness but posed nevertheless, genuinely posed, to give off their own real considered sense of who they were, all they intended to be. Or loose snapshots, deceptive candids, my cousins tricked out in life as they worked by the forge or were snapped in repose, horseplay, seated at table or dancing the jig.

“There were no framed photographs, there were no loose candids.

“I looked for memento. Not locks of hair or the stuffed toys of their childhood — I knew there wouldn’t be any — but their heights sketched with a pencil mark on the doorways and walls, or a window hairline cracked by one of them in roughhouse. For diary, journal, a note passed at school. For their lucky coins and stamp collections. For anything beside the way which had once engaged them and which now, in death, might be allowed to stand for the obscure talismanics of their father’s engagement.

“There was nothing.

“Ah, thought the astral detective, then doesn’t the persistent absence of such stuff suggest their willful repudiation? Wouldn’t Joe have gone the other way altogether, sweep away, get rid of, jettison forever all trace, spoor, vestige and relic of his all-gone family, doing the conscientious spring cleaning of death?

“No evidence warranted the assumption. In their rooms, their furniture and lives, if not just as they had left them, seemed to have been put in a more logical order, arranged, even enhanced. I had last visited three years earlier. Aunt Elizabeth was still alive. I remember Susan had remarked that she had no place to store her things. There was a chiffonier in Redford’s room. Redford himself volunteered to let Susan have the piece. Elizabeth seconded, adding that she had always thought the bureau too feminine for her eldest son anyway. Joe, however, had objected to its removal, pointing out that the blond finish matched the color of the bed he had built. Susan’s furniture was dark. He said that when he had time he would build her a chest of drawers of her own, one that would go with what she already had. She didn’t want to wait, she said, and, since Redford didn’t mind giving up the chiffonier, her father soon agreed. It was a heavy piece to move and I recall being drafted to help in the rearrangement of the furniture.

“Now the big chest of drawers was back in Redford’s room again, no new piece having replaced it in Susan’s.

“Such arrangements seemed universal throughout. Spreads and curtains which had been distributed with no thought to decor now complemented the beds they lay across, were assimilate with the windows from which they hung. This was not the grieved archeologist’s loving reconstruction nor even the sensitive curator’s historical placements. This — this was show business!

“But nothing in the house gave any clue to my uncle’s state of mind. Nothing about his look in sleep did. (I was with him until just before dawn. He didn’t even turn over.) Even his body — which lay on top of the sheets — seemed neutral, gently in idle like a good car at a stoplight. He could have been his own easy effigy lying on his bed like a dead pope on a sarcophagus.

“And what was his sleeping body like? What secret language did it speak? None. It was mute. (He didn’t snore, his breath was regular, even, neither shallow nor deep.) He looked like a man floating in heavily salted water. And, undressed — he was a blacksmith, a man who may even have conducted heat — naked, oddly unfit, powerful of course but with the power off plumb, like a klansman’s or bear’s or vaudeville deputy’s. His body saddened me — even his beard did, its poor dumb brush cut, the misguided bristles of rectitude and economy like primary growth on some elemental sea thing — but told me nothing.

“In a week I returned. Nothing had changed. If he hadn’t been wearing pajamas I wouldn’t have known he’d ever awakened. He was dreamless as ever. I made three more visitations. He was always dreamless, his sleep undramatic as a doll’s.

“Because it was love which brought me back, some recidivist exercise of honor and homage to an uncle blacksmith whose two women and three boys had once represented a kind of full house, anyway luck, anyway moral force, the view from the rocker, the view from the hearth, some sung song of engagement and dignity and pride, my opinion of the man not unlike my cousins’, not unlike those country peers and cronies whose spit sizzled like some tempering principle on all his blacksmith’s machinery of heat. Because only love could have made me do it, my appetite for the parlor tricks of magic and sorcery having long since been brought down, leveled and flattened, of no more interest to me, now that I could do them, than the charms of money, say, to a tired sheik. (Because I don’t know how God does it, don’t understand what’s in it for Him, why his limitless power and the limitless demands on it don’t bore Him to death.) And if you’re not God it drains you, really takes it out of you, runs down your health, grinds your teeth, there really being such a thing as beginner’s luck, those lively gushers of commencement like the hefty, undepleted reserves of sperm in a fifteen-year-old boy. I had no such energy, and each trip, each paranormal, theurgic transport told heavily on my — well, what have you? — blood, bone, skin, bowel, urine and saliva. I would return each time after my nocturnal sojourns to a body whose blood seemed to have thickened and cooled. I cut my hand, bled. Fat bubbled in globules there like oil slicks in soup. My bones burned. My skin rashed. My bowels loosened. My urine hardened, painfully scraped the walls of my urethra. My saliva congealed. I had to pick it from between my teeth with floss. What if I caught a draft? Exposed, sloped as a flier gone down on a glacier, my lungs would have shipped the pneumonic poisons like locks filling. (I shut the windows before I went to sleep, pulled the shades — this was high summer — closed the doors, arranged myself between quilts and comforters.) What if I became overheated? I would have expired of all the miasmas and malarials of Michigan concentrated in the bedroom. (And without even delirium to comfort me, my mind fled with my spirit.)