Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

Norman watched her move between the playroom and the TV room. She had a way of running her hand through her hair. She was quoting figures — the extent of the losses was astounding. Norman obligingly pretended to write it down.

Joanne was, she told him in all sincerity, absolutely for law and order. She was interested in the process of transparency. She wondered if the Lehman Brothers would eventually testify, then made a face when Norman said nothing.

She knew the Lehman Brothers were dead! Was Norman even listening to her?

She wanted his opinion on whether a certain senator wore boxers or not. She liked sincerity in a man more than anything else. As she talked, she crossed her arms. She was talking and simultaneously looking between the TV, Norman and Grace playing in her room, while in the kitchen, Randolph pushed his food bowl across the floor with his nose.

It went this way, Norman guarded in his criticism in a way he might not have been with Kenneth. In intertwining with her distracting influence, in allowing her into The New Existence , he believed Joanne was drawing him closer to a feeling of empathy and understanding, leading to a flattening of life’s ambitions and hopes, connecting him with the velvet hammer of assumed and perhaps welcomed responsibility.

What he wanted at a deep level was to flush irony from his vocabulary, to tear down that essential wall that kept him from actually living life. He was looking elsewhere for inspiration without being fully cognizant of doing so, where the stated goal was not actually the stated goal, and that, in the margin of anxiety, perhaps genius would find root and surface.

There was, of course, the practical care and keeping of Grace that Joanne could provide. It wasn’t all about his own mania, his own interest. Grace survived as the singular event that could not be undone. What he tried to convince himself, in the distancing of Kenneth’s absence, in the silence of days, then weeks, and now months, was that Grace represented the watershed of a personal commitment toward ideas of hope and humanity, toward ideals that outlasted the flame of passion or intimacy. She was exerting a needed influence on his life, changing him for the better, normalizing him.

What Joanne Hoffmann was teaching him, what he was seeing when he stared into her image in the hallway mirror, was the power of the accumulation of small actions, an atomized life.

He noted Joanne’s attentiveness when she dressed Grace, matching socks and color-coordinating outfits. He would come upon them in the kitchen, Joanne cutting food into bite-sized bits, steamed broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts, and spinach to be eaten before there was even a mention of dessert. Joanne inflexible in her resolve, her arms folded in stand-offs that could last a half-hour. At times Joanne sent Grace to her room to think about ‘making good choices’ ( gc ), when Norman would have simply given in, not out of love, but expediency.

He wanted to put Joanne on the spot about her own apparent bad choices ( bc ), but managed to quell the cynical reflex. He was beginning to see how, through the act of talking and an associated pantomime of actions, a child might eventually navigate the world.

He wrote it all down in its exact details, revising and adding to his new formulary for life’s grand equation. Was this, in fact, how you raised a child? He thought of Romulus and Remus. Raised by wolves, they had founded the city of Rome. He considered the question under the working title — What if Joanne Hoffmann had raised Romulus and Remus?

And he could catalog a series of other distractions. Joanne said that Grace would need to be kitted out with a new coat and boots for the walks she, Joanne, and Randolph took along the lake, so Norman was obliged to turn from his own preoccupations to notice the bare outline of defoliated trees, to see that winter had already settled upon them.

Since the purchase, there was the added equation — Joanne and Grace’s pre-walk routine. Grace demanding that she be allowed to change out of her Princess Jasmine underwear into Princess Aurora underwear, or Belle underwear, the demand made with such petulance that the formula was skewed by a tantrum ( t ), as Grace thrashed her legs on the floor like something out of The Exorcist . A tantrum ( t ), could rise exponentially, denoted by ( t)X .

The tantrums and the socio-political reality beneath them — the polyester underwear purchased at Walmart — shot to hell his stand against globalization and child labor exploitation. It was, he reflected in his most sanguine moment, part of the new poverty. This was economic life under The New Existence , in which princess underwear could be bought for the price of a Big Mac.

He had his working formulae, seeking what he called the elusive dark matter of the human condition. He felt himself on the far reaches of a profound understanding, where there might be no single solution, where each case might be the exception, a concept that had at its center a dark nihilism.

This was life in The New Existence , and it didn’t end with the morning routine.

Norman began to face the 24/7 reality of childcare. After the reprieve of the morning walk there was another change of clothes, a smock for finger painting, the mounting pile of laundry, all part of the monotonous sinkhole of commitment a child’s life entailed if you decided against daycare, or didn’t simply hand a child over to Sesame Street and SpongeBob SquarePants .

In this he better understood his mother’s choices. Hers had been the new era of delegated responsibility, where a life no longer had to end with marriage, and the rearing of children didn’t have to be a soul-killing proposition.

But, of course, it was never that easy. He was, as he had described in the opening of Confessions of a Latchkey Kid , ‘Formula Fed!’ with its double-entendre in that spirited age of dehydrated foods and pills, where nobody wanted to suffer the recourse of slaving over a stove.

How it had changed, that sixties lightness of existence, a calculated minimalism that might be ascribed to a processor, to the functionality and purpose of something, and not the thing itself, not its beauty. He was thinking of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans.

Something had changed in the interim. Why were chefs now so popular, why was the kitchen part of a new eroticism, and why were there so many goddamn cookbooks on the market?

He now bore witness to it. The mid-morning snack, the organic lunch with the sugar allowance noted, the small juice box and the wholegrain animal crackers, the calorie-counted dinner, and, at the evening’s end, his concentration broken in the midst of reviewing the day’s work by the quack of a rubber duck, the splash of the ritual bath, so that he was forced to get up and close the door.

For the longest time, life had thrown up nothing but a quiet stasis of days. He had forsaken the tempestuous shouting and making up of a sexual relationship for The New Existence . There were agreed terms of civility and order to maintain with Joanne Hoffmann.

At one point, Joanne called Norman into the hallway. He compliantly appeared. She was in the process of putting a sticker on the top of each of Grace’s winter boots. Each kitten had its paws raised. Joanne explained how when the kittens’ paws aligned correctly, they completed a heart. Then Joanne made Norman do it.

Joanne swept her hair off her face and lit a joint, observing as Norman dutifully brought the kittens together. In so doing, Norman gained an insightful awareness into how, even in the teaching of the simplest of tasks, the act of communication required one to take into account the other’s temperament and self-awareness, so Grace learned not so much her right from her left, but a strategy to complete the task.