BALTHAZAR'S COMMODITIES (fiction)

Balthazar is a character I made up so I can talk about things like what is real, what is simply fabulized, what is fiction and what is fact.  Is there such a thing as fact? If you believe in a fiction will it become real?  Like the puppet or the rabbit that becomes real?  Or were they already real and simply revealed.

Balthazar was a SW tribal member but built more like a Plains Indian, tall and rangy like a basketball player.  Dark, not quite black.  But he wasn’t into sports.  He was peaceful, but you didn’t push him around.  He liked to sit in the back of the local churches, any of them, but never when there were people present.  He just liked to sit with the lights off, wrapped in silence.

When Balthazar was fourteen he had become a favorite of a missionary in his home town who seduced/adopted him and took him along when the cleric was transferred to China because of questions in the US.  The missionary was genuinely fond of the boy, treated him well, and provided an infinite number of books to read that were not at all religious but possibly could be interpreted as erotically spiritual.  When the missionary was killed — don’t ask how or why — Balthazar joined the military and succeeded very well because he spoke several languages and could attune himself to the most impenetrable of those who went masked, both white and Asian. Few Blacks masked.  One told him that the best reaction to tragedy was hilarity.  He was quoting.  But the young man rarely laughed, often smiled.  That was more seductive.  Curiosity is seductive.

After service in Vietnam — or maybe it was Korea — he landed in San Francisco during the Great Culture Revolution that set so many men free from near slavery in offices.  He became a famous sex worker, using some of the tricks he learned in the Asian countries where the understandings about human eroticism were quite different.  When the plague came, he went north to the Canadian border where there had always been bordellos scattered east/west along the boundary, mostly female workers to entertain those resource workers who were not good at cards or pool.  Most of those women were voluntary, knew no other life.  Some married local and stayed.

Balthazar bought a huge commodities warehouse, timber-built, from the very early time of paternal government.  After days of scrubbing the insides, all of which he did alone, he put Persian rugs on the floors, hung French chandeliers from the rafters, and unfolded Chinese screens with gold-leaf bamboo and elegantly depicted cranes.  He did not paint or plaster or paper.

His reputation spread and some clients came in small chartered airplanes to the grass landing strip not far away.  Their pilots had to watch the weather closely, even in summer.  There was no chance that anyone could come in a Lear Jet and anyway people on that socioeconomic level were already so pandered to that the only thing they could feel was a jolt in the stock market.

One day a famous mathematician came.  He wasn’t really famous except for other mathematicians.  His life was measured by blackboard equations until one day they replaced all his blackboards with white boards and took away his chalk.  He hated the fiber pens which always ran out and came in too many colors and didn’t squeak like chalk.  The smell of the ink was too strong.  Chalk didn’t smell.  Ink made marks on his clothes that could not be removed. It was as though the world changed.  It had.  He became very disturbed and upset, needing some kind of intervention.

So he came to this commodity warehouse of a sensualist to help him find a half of himself that he’d lost. He had to ask for help to guide him to the commodity warehouse, which was unchanged from the time of its first use in the 19th century, except that it had been built in a cottonwood grove once by a river which fortunately had changed course so that it didn’t flood the building.  But there was still enough moisture for many tall bushes to cluster around the old hulk, disguising it and erasing all paths and roads.

Balthazar was a Scheherazadian.  He worked narratively, but first he prepared tea for the two of them.  The herbs were local but off the mountain slopes nearby.  They lulled the math man into sleep.  Balthazar slipped out to the grove and cut an armload of honeysuckle, just then in bloom.  He brought it in to stand in a huge Egyptian pot, scenting the shadowy space.  The man was still asleep but he began to mutter.  He dreamt.

“When I was but a child, still in one of those small beds that was not quite a crib and not quite a bed, my window was open.  Honeysuckle grew there.  Hummingbirds came and probed the blooms with their bills, drawing out nectar and shedding pollen.  It was sex.  I thought they were the most beautiful and arousing things I had ever seen. Then I realized I was hearing something very high and fierce.  It was them!  They were fighting, jealous.”

Balthazar knew how to make the sounds of warlike hummingbirds, shimmering and screeching but barely perceptible.  He made those sounds and entered the dream.

“I swore I would never be like that, that I would never let sex and hunger and passion get to me, put me in danger, deceive me.”

There comes a point in the story when possibilities diverge.  This is, of course, all made up and none of it exists at all.  In one version, Balthazar carries a syringe of sweet release into the dream and kills the math man.  The needle is the hummingbird’s beak.  It could be made into an image, embroidered on a pillow.  People think of the birds as precious, jeweled, vulnerable, peaceful.  They are not any of those things.

Or the story could go another way.  The little plane could return, the math man get into it and transfer to a bigger plane that took him to a middle Eurasian country with a name that ended in “stan,” fighting for its life.  He could use his math skills for . . . designing bombs? Helping them to draw laundered money out of what was supposed to be protected for oligarchs by doctoring statistics and bookkeeping?  Or would he fall in love but always have at hand a blackboard and some chalk? Give the local children boxes of colored chalk so they could draw hummingbirds and honeysuckle on the rubble?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++==

So now I’m going to tear up this story the way I usually do without sharing it with others.  If you’re one of those people who want to pretend it’s magic, there’s the first problem, right there.

The thing about being taken in and then transported to China by a lover of adolescent boys who is a priest is not unprecedented — not even unlikely, the way things are going.  The chances of him supplying “erotically spiritual books” is not likely though such books exist, some classic because sex and the senses are always close to the spiritual unless some Puritan has been messing around.  This is especially true on the Eastern and Southern sides of Eurasia.  It is not unlikely that a priest with this kind of indiscretion would be killed or simply missing.

Connecting sexwork to the great culture shift of SF is not entirely virtuous, since it was all over the continent of North America and more, but didn’t have to be covert in SF.  Then it was made indelible by AIDS.  Nevertheless there was an achievement of “critical mass” that pushed into dramatic life and death a number of affinity groups that put sex first, which was easier if one had a penis.  They’re pretty fascinating organs anyway, but when they become so crucial to identity they are, shall we say, engorged.  This should not be made trivial, only a plot point.

Bringing the story to the place up here where I am could be seen as lazy or using what I know.  I’m playing with the “commodity warehouse” which was simply where the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop found its home for a little while.  The setting was that of the original Tribal Council building.  However, the inside decore is from the studio of a famous artist who shall remain anonymous.  It’s supposed to be more gay than girly. 

This story is far TOO “girly” (tea??) and curtsies too much to the nicer patches of Freudian theory, which has to do with the probs of adults beginning with some kind of screen theory that happened in childhood.  My internal mockery of this is in the hummingbirds and the honeysuckle, which are simply cute, though they are real enough.  They ARE sexual, but not many people are obsessed with them.

The end possible fates of the client simply arise from having to finish the story.  Such attempts to resolve one’s life issue (having to change) then having another transformative effect is silly.  On the other hand, there may have been other forces, like political awareness or sentimentality about children or maturing.  And other purposes on the part of the author, who is sometimes reluctant to bring everyone down because then they won’t read the next story.  Thus, I will put aside that old faithful Freudian thanatos, though it begins to seem useful.  Maybe even meaningful.  Maybe I’ll try again later.

BALTHAZAR (Fiction for a Sad Rainy Day)

Balthazar is not a real person.  I just made him up so I could write a dialogue, or think about one, anyway.  I intend him to be opposite to me but somehow overlapping like a Venn diagram.  I made him up because unlike me who spends time pondering about “sex” — at least what this culture calls “sex” which is pretty narrow and predetermined — Balthazar doesn’t think about it at all.  He just does it. He enacts thought with his body.

This is mostly fiction, made up, but other parts are real.  All writers draw from life, because what choice do we have?  Yet we two were not like that woman who has become famous for stories she found in old newspapers, sitting at tables with one short leg in the moldy basements of historical societies and small town libraries.  They reflect the interests of people who know little about the world outside their own, a defensive strategy in a world that has gone back to the danger of world wars with money meaning more than guns.  Why kill people when you can entrap them into systems that are more profitable?

Maybe you know about Edward Said’s book called “Orientalism,” which intrigued a lot of people.

“Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author developed the idea of "Orientalism" to define the West's historically patronizing representations of "The East"—the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said argued that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power., 

“According to Said, in the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab elites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized the romanticized "Arab Culture" created by French, British and, later, American Orientalists; the examples include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a time, and a place into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land.”   (Wiki)

I try to apply the ideas to the autochthonous people of the rez.  (Not all of them.)  Actually, a lot of people (like my family) think of all people of color as belonging to this category — dark, mysterious, and probably dangerous.  To be avoided.  But I was attracted.  

The characteristic Balthazar and I shared most was resistance to attachment, both of us but for quite different reasons.  Mine was to preserve objectivity as I had been taught in seminary, to distance the intensely emotional so as to consider it accurately.  His was to walk through the experience, add it to the others, and emerge from the other side, knowingly.  My stance which in seminary we had called “standing outside the theological circle” — knowing but not believing — made him curious.  He wished to believe, but had not found anything worth commitment.  In truth, neither did I.  

I’m not sure we understood what “believe” meant. Most people seem to understand it as some kind of leap of faith, but we were thinking more along the lines of testing experience, endless and contingent on the nature and state of the believer.  Some interpret “believing” as a kind of dependence but we loathed dependence as just another entrapment.

So — sex, religion, and I suppose the next big category we shared might be called scientific knowledge, knowing everything and understanding it all.  Cosmic, molecular, atomic, “deep time”, “thick history” — the new understanding, a total renewal of “reading” without print that includes the isotopes of rocks, the magnetic capacities of bird brains, and what living things still manage to float in the ocean between scraps of plastic.

This new vision did not include a big parent in the sky who might or might not save us, but rather gave us the legitimacy of our own selves, soulless, wingless, harpless, but part of everything else, crucial to the minute unfolding of time that accrued to existence.

For a while Balthazar had been an opera singer, a tenor in small venues, vibrant but undisciplined, which is forbidden in opera since the plot lines hold the melodrama.  So for a while he ran a boy band where they were undisciplined as well as melodramatic, if not operatic.  That was more fun, he said, but everyone accused him of the major sin of the moment, which was sex with boys, though women having sex with important men soon became a more popular thing to condemn.  I suspect he actually did “sex work” as a definable occupation but we never talked about it.  How could we?  I knew nothing that wasn’t in a book.  (Not novels.)

My literary life, which I disguised by living on a rez, was of near-lascivious interest to him and that was a pleasure to me because I could explore so many things without being put down for not really understanding Wittgenstein.  In fact, we share contempt for PhD darlings who are mostly of interest to young men because young women didn’t care and stayed away, the same as they avoided the seedy bars where those arrogant nobodies hid out, thinking they were accepted by the working class and engaging in what some call “splitting hairs”.  By now the working men are in nice homes with four foot wide TV sets.  They don’t talk much.

So now we come to another interest: death.  There’s a famous literary book called “The Sense of an Ending.” by Frank Kermode. Forget the novel and the movie that used the same title.  I need to reread it, esp. since a new epilogue has been added and it has such timely relevance, but the Oxford publishing wing is shut down temporarily because of the Pandemic.  “Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burrows, Kermode shows how they have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.”  The entry from the Oxford Press misspells “Burroughs.”  Education has died.  At least standardized spelling.

Balthazar doesn’t carry his books around — reads them and discards them.  I keep them on endless shelves, higgledy-piggeldy, sideways in front of properly organized categories or sideways because they are too tall for the place on the shelf though they fit with the shorter others.  That’s the trouble with concrete real stuff — it doesn’t always fit.

I’ll tell you more if there’s another rainy sad day.  He takes a pill or a potion on such a day.  I just get acid-minded.  I was raised in the rain.  It made Ireland acid. When I was little I read a fairy tale about an old Irish couple who lived in a vinegar cruet and when it broke, they took their door with them.  I wonder if I could find it again. It was disguised history.

THE LADY ANTHRO (FICTION)

IN THE OLD DAYS

The boxes she was sorting were out of order, not like the sort of archeology dig where the layers dated according to when the evidence was laid down in sediments, so that she picked up papers and objects from the box that drove her memories back and forth across time.  One moment she was “just a kid,” though she and society considered her an adult with a finished degree and a certain amount of experience, and the next moment she was at the first major crossroads for a woman: would she marry and have babies or would she . . . what? 

The Egyptologist’s wife, who had no career but was highly educated, explained how marrying a man who would spend his life in the field meant that there would be no children because there would be little medical care and many dangers.  She could, of course, have stayed “home” or even near her parents -- a lonely, possibly infantilizing life.  “If I stayed near my parents, I stayed their daughter.  If I went with my husband, I stayed his wife.  Of course, I could simply turn away to another man, but I loved this one.  And I loved Egypt as much as he did.”

On the reservation in those days local women found their men to be come-and-go, but organized their lives around the children anyway.  Money was the problem, but they didn’t need as much as if they weren’t indigenous.  The small service jobs circulated among them.  When men came back from welding pipelines or fighting fires, maybe returning to the same women and maybe not, the women moved the money among them.

Those were two patterns and there were more but she paid very little attention to them.  Beginning in spring she lived like a happy animal, or her body did, responding to weather, food, and the cycle of the day/night while her head spun with ideas, wove ideas, made a fabric of ideas, patterned by the steady flow of people who came to see Joe.  It wasn’t quite like a campus academic life, this reservation boundary-delineated concentration on what people did and how they did it, what their essential nature was, their material culture, what they thought their tribal past had been like.  

The local people went on with their lives, not bothering to think about what all these outsiders were imagining.  The sun shone most days, the wind blew dust most days, and some days were different, maybe stormy and sometimes almost blank.  Plants went through their cycles so that some days the prairie was blue with lupine and other days they were yellow with arrowleaf balsamroot.  But since the people were not dependent on digging for roots and rhizomes, they no longer paid attention.  They smiled at her childlike gathering of bouquets, put in Mason jars for lack of vases.  (The jars were tinted blue-green in those days and had wire bails to hold the lids on tight.)  

In recent years she learned not to do that because so many of her bouquets were blooming weeds that she was inadvertently spreading.  She was never an arranger and always intended to sketch them, but didn’t.  What she did was look them up in guide books, carefully reading the whole entries about how they were grouped, their common and Latin names, what else was happening when they bloomed, like which birds were sitting on their nestlings.

She walked.  The force logic of glacier-scraping and deposition was easy to see on the rock outcroppings, though most people would have looked at the mountains on the horizon instead.  The town’s settlement, beginning in a small comfortable place and then spreading out over the low hills and marshy flood plains of small streams, had less logic though it was traced in yards, not necessarily square, only sometimes fenced.  A lot of draining and filling was necessary.

In evenings she read unless there was company at Joe’s where she would go to make coffee, serve packaged cookies, and listen to the constant flow of talk through theories and stories.  There was no alcohol served if the indigenous people were there, but if there were none, Joe provided brandy.  A few alcoholic scholars and writers managed to find the supply and covertly put a bit in their coffee.   They talked about what the old people did, what first contact must have been like, how the people dealt with then new threats like incarceration and diseases like trachoma which made them blind.  How much the old men loved silk scarves around their necks or even over their heads to shield their ears from the wind and how much the women still loved small metal objects like thimbles and buttonhooks, though not all of them sewed and no shoes have buttons these days.  

She thought about how, now that there was no need for the constant on-going handwork -- the braiding, beading, rubbing, twisting that used to be on every lap -- people didn’t quite know whether to gesture in a kind of quasi-signtalk or use hands to pet the children and animals that always crowded around.  Those little comfort-seekers climbed into her lap, too, and she accepted them.  But that was when they were in the local homes, the cabins and shacks that were partly supplied by the government, partly built in prosperous times, and partly improvised.  When they were in Joe’s place, either his public space or his private rooms, she wrote notes into small spiral-bound books.

Now, as she unpacked the boxes, she would turn up little sketches of weeds and pages of notes, as varied as the Moccasin Flat houses, according to the circumstances.  Dr. So-and-so says that the difference between Blackfeet patterns, whether painted or beaded, and Cree patterns was that Blackfeet were geometric, which he felt indicated some sort of pre-mathematics and which he tried to relate to the desert Abrahamic people’s invention of geometry and so on; while Cree tended to make plant-like patterns, including flowers, which indicated to Dr. S-and-S that they were concrete in their thinking and could not abstract in a more intellectual way.  He was a great devotee of modern art.  He was “tribalist” in his prejudices.

Reading this in the present, she noted in an aside to herself that Dr. S-and-S was analyzing to a level that verged on fantasy, first in composing his values (mathematical linearity as a sign of intelligence and superiority) and second in his memory of the materials he was supposed to be describing.  When she looked at the photos of beading she saw a lot of individuality, a lot of responding to circumstances -- that and the givens of materials.  If the beaders tended to lean to blue and orange patterns, maybe it was because the store had stocked a lot of those bead colors.  She thought about how sophisticated clothing fashions, haute couture, went in cycles, responding to what had been all the rage last season by turning away from it, and taking up something fresh.  So if green beads suddenly appealed to the eye, it was only natural that they suggested stems and leaves, which asked for red flowers.  But the tribes all, sooner or later, went back to that blue.

She found sketches of beading patterns, the best records made with colored pencils but some merely drawn and then labeled with the names of the colors.  That was the real beginning of her own art, nothing at all like the oil-on-canvas work she did now, but still the consciousness of color and shape and somehow, the resistance to linearity, the love of surprise.

MONTANA STORYTELLING BOY

(This was typed off years ago.  I saved it because it's a tough story, but in some way among some people, it's very modern.)

BURY ME NOT

This story was in something I read yesterday, maybe even the newspaper but it's about something that happened a hundred years ago.  It was told by a man who was very old but remembered being on a trail ride bringing cattle up from Texas.  Many of the hands were just boys: pushouts, throwaways, runaways, and so on.  The storyteller had left his family with permission -- searching for adventure.  it was a life with a lot of exposure, not much sleep, hard work in the saddle all day, and monotonous food but a lot of it.  That's the way people ate in those days anyway: beans, biscuits and beef.  Lucky to have so much fresh beef.

A boy became ill on the trip.  He had come West because he had tuberculosis (the AIDS of the time) and the doctor had told him he'd have a chance to heal up if he could get where it was high and dry.  But he didn't heal.  He fell out of his saddle.

The trail boss took him into town and got him a hotel room.  The town doc looked and said he would die soon.  The trail boss went back to the herd and said, "Someone has got to stay with this boy while he dies."  And he looked right at the man, then only a boy, while telling the story.  So that he was the boy who went to the hotel room and the sick boy couldn't sleep unless the well boy lay down beside him and let the sick boy put his head on the storyteller's arm.  So he did that.

In a day or so the sick boy began to hemorrhage from his lungs badly.  The storyteller said he got newspapers and put them all over the bed and the floor next to the bed because there was so much blood it was on everything.  Then an unknown man from the town came and said the storytelling boy had not slept for days and was in danger, so the man would watch for a while.  So the storytelling boy went into the next room and slept until the man from town came and said, "It won't be long now."

The dying boy asked the storytelling boy to lie down with him so he could put his head on the storyteller's arm again.  So that's what they did.  In a few hours the boy died.  The man from town put his own coat and hat on the storytelling boy so he would look older and sent him out with a dollar to get himself a drink.

That was the whole story.  It happened in Montana.

POETRY BOY (fiction)

This is a repeat.  I'm told that I get thousands of hits from China, so maybe they'll like it.  But it's a work of imagination, even fantasy.

Zi was smarter than most boys.  All his female relatives told him so.  They fixed his favorite foods and sang him to sleep, but even in his sleep he could hear their voices among themselves.  Sometimes the gruff voices and loud laughter of the men would sound like thunder.

And then came war.  Might have been a guerrilla war, might have just been a local skirmish, might have been between nations.  Zi was too little to know.  All he knew was that his village blew up around him.  His home, his neighbors, and his family -- both the males and the females.

He didn’t know how it was that he survived.  He was cut and bruised but his padded jacket had helped protect him when the house collapsed.  He wandered and starved and had strange dreams.  A pariah dog came with him part of the time.  It was good at finding little pools of water or Zi might not have survived.  Some of the water tasted funny.  

Then men came, big men with loud voices and terrifying machinery.  They surrounded him.  They laughed at him and teased him.  They took his clothes off and tugged at his little penis.  They opened their own clothes and made him suck on them. He never would have,  but they made him.  Afterwards someone gave him a bowl of rice.  He put his clothes back on.  They shot the dog.  When they went to leave, one of them grabbed the back collar of his padded jacket and hoisted him into the truck.

Later they passed by a place where there were many boys and they tossed him out the back of the truck, barely slowing down.  He landed hard and another boy, slightly older, came out to see if he was hurt.  He was bruised but not broken.  The older boy helped him into the place which was a kind of orphanage or school or mission.  The adults wiped off his face with a wet cloth and gave him hot tea.  He stayed there.  At night he slept tight against the older boy and held on to him because it felt safer.

A very old man was teaching them to write with a brush, beginning at the top and going down to the bottom in lines.  The writing was like little pictures and Zi began to understand what they meant.  He loved to sit beside the old man and lean on him a little while the old man made the tip of the brush dance down the scroll of paper.  In the mornings, first thing, he would carry hot tea to the old man.  There was not always enough food, but there was always hot tea.

Then one morning the old man didn’t wake up.  He couldn’t be roused.  He was dead.  Zi took the old man’s brushes and ink block and hid them.  The older boy had lost interest in him by now.  He was interested in girls and finally he and one girl became partners and they left together.

Now the war washed back over them and unpaid soldiers were raiding everywhere to keep themselves alive.  Word came back that the older boy and his girl partner had been killed, left on their faces in a ditch.  Then the soldiers came to the place where Zi was, killed the adults and some of the children -- even little ones -- and set fire to the building.   Zi took the brushes and ink block from their hiding place and left without anything else but his clothes.

He walked.  He had no plan.  He had no destination.  

When he had gone as far as he could make himself go, he sat down under a tree near a little stream where he could wet his ink block.  He took off all his clothes because for lack of paper he thought he would write on  himself.  So he did.  Long lines of little picture-words down his arms, down his legs, down his shoulders to his hips -- he could not write on his back.  Then he lay down and waited to die.

But a different set of soldiers came by and stopped for water.  These soldiers were on the winning side and they had food.  They saw the boy but thought he was dead and in fact he was unconscious.  But one man could read the boy’s story down his arms and down his legs and from his shoulders to his hips wherever the boy could reach.  In fact, this man was a poet.  He thought that the  boy was a living poem.  From then on the boy’s fortunes changed entirely.

WALKIN' AND TALKIN' (Fiction)

The two female clinical psychologists had sat up talking so late the previous night that they decided to clear their heads by walking.  Nothing drastic — no competitive hiking, no trails through the hills, just a pleasant stroll through an ordinary neighborhood with few distractions and not much traffic.

“Do you have any professional insights about transference?”

“Well, I suppose everyone’s understanding of transference is inevitably guided by one’s own emotional attachments.  One can’t exactly be cold and theoretical about them because that would kill all empathy.”  They slowed to step over a place where roots had buckled the sidewalk.

“And yet, empathy — which is directly feeling what the other person is feeling — CAN’T be like one’s own experience.  The whole idea of empathy is that one can actually feel in one’s own heart what is so strongly and differently felt by someone else, sometimes to their pain or harm or why would they deliberately come to an office and ask for help?”

Two boys went whizzing past them on their bikes, charging down the sidewalk so fast they almost knocked the women over with their pure slipstream momentum.  The women laughed, stepping aside just in time.

“It sounds as though you have a specific case in mind.”

“Yes, and it’s not quite like an office practice where the person comes knowing what the terms are.  This is a social relationship, but not really a very close one.  It’s nothing like dating.  There’s a surgeon I know professionally, a bit older, very respected.  He’s trying to pull me into his orbit.”

“What does that mean, his “orbit”?  Sounds planetary.”

They had to pause on the corner for a delivery truck before they could cross the street.  

“He’s between wives and wants me to be a kind of surrogate, a person to escort to events who will make it appear that he has an active relationship but without actually having one.”

“So this is not what the youngsters are calling ‘friends with benefits.’?”

“No, and I don’t think he’s gay either.  But I think he had a lot of therapy in his adolescence — he’s hinted as much — and he may have transferred that to me, though his therapist was male — this was years ago when ALL therapists were male.  It feels more like Asperger’s, which would not have been a diagnosis then.  It wasn’t named until 1944 but not really understood very well for many more years.”

“I suppose it was confused with post traumatic stress syndrome from the war.”

Their attention was grabbed by a passing ambulance with lights flashing and siren going.  Emergencies hit both of them in the gut and it took a moment to settle into conversation again.

“Since then, in the Fifties, there’s been such emphasis on being brainy, having professional status, and dividing up the genders so the men are steely and the women are cushions.  It’s hard to separate the cultural from the personal.”

“So give me some specifics.  Why can’t you just say you’re not interested and let him find someone else.”

“Because he’s begun to gaslight me.”

“WHAT??”

“He made a play for me a few years ago and I had the conventional reaction, but I probably explained too much.  It was when I started to work with delinquent boys.  I think that’s what stirred him up.  On the one hand he seemed to think I shouldn’t do that, that I would be contaminated somehow, that their stigma would rub off on me.  That I was not sane to help them.  On the other hand he seemed to think I knew something magic about those kids and that he wanted to know what it was.  That I was withholding it.”

They walked several blocks without speaking.  Dogs barked at them from yards.  There was a little girl sitting on her front steps, but when they came near, she went inside and closed the door hard.

“He’s begun to hint that I have a romantic interest in the boys.”

“Do you think he’s a pedophile?”

“Possibly, but I don’t think so.  I don’t think he’s a person who has desire at all.  I think that’s the mystery to him.  But he’s not a patient and I know nothing about his background.  If I were guessing, I’d say he had distant parents who related to him only if he were a high achiever and gave him no emotional contact.  He’s almost like a person raised in an orphanage, but always makes it a point in conversation to emphasize how important his father was.”

“What did he do?”

“I think some kind of executive in a corporation.  Not an academic, not political.  The kind of person who is high enough up to watch his back and worry about respectability.  I think this surgeon has thoroughly internalized that.  He’s very concerned about how he dresses and what he eats or drinks.  He would never sit around in his underwear swilling beer.”

The listener laughed.  “Back in the day people cared about such things!  And could actually define it!”

A woman in an apron and a straw hat waved from her yard. Digging in her flower borders, she had made a pile of pulled weeds beside her on the grass.

Now the listener turned the conversation back to her friend in a new line of inquiry.  “There’s really only one way to solve this and that’s to see what the counter-transference might be.  You can’t control him, but why does he bother YOU?”

They passed a barbershop, complete with the spiral-striped pole, and both the barber and the man getting a haircut waved at them cheerfully.  The bright interior of the shop was gleaming with mirrors and bottles of mysterious liquids.  But the protective sheet that hid the man from the neck down was bright red!  His feet stuck out the bottom: he was wearing sneakers.

“It would be so easy for him to spread hints about me in a way that would destroy my reputation and get my insurance canceled, if not invite law enforcement to take a look.  So much of our work depends upon how people understand what we are doing, but the culture doesn’t keep up with us.”

“There’s got to be more.”

A little string of birds flew overhead and lined themselves up on the telephone wires, or were they power lines?  How does one tell the difference?

“Those boys.  They suffer so much.”

“It’s transferring to you.  You are suffering with them?”

“Some days I’m enraged at the way society destroys its own future.”

“It’s more than that.”

“I suppose it’s something almost like PTSD.  I wake in the night hallucinating that the starvation, the beatings, the sexual assault, are happening to me . . .   and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

They had come to a Starbucks.  Exchanging glances, and then a hug, they went in for what they jokingly equated to drugs: caffeine and sugar.  But so trendy, so upscale.  They could afford it.  One said — it doesn’t matter which one, “We’ve got to find a way to be more political.  This is systemic.”

When they had their fancy coffees, they took them to an outside table.  "See, the real trouble is that one can't defend one's patients -- known, loved, and understood -- without revealing them.  But to reveal them is to expose them to destruction."

"Does that include surgeons with no hearts?"  They laughed a little too hard.

THE TRUNK: (fiction)

The old-fashioned trunk wasn’t delivered until months after her former student’s  death.  He was a gifted writer.  She had been his English teacher but that was a long time ago.  She was retired now.  She had known about the trunk, even wondered about it, but hadn’t expected it. 

She let the trunk just sit in the garage for a while, though the garage was not the modern kind with drywall, a near-room, but rather an ancient lean-to built to shelter a Model T.   Out there she sometimes sorted papers, alongside her little woodstove, meant mostly for disposing of windfall branches from her yard trees, but handy for flammable things she wanted to discard.  As she grew older, there were more of those.  It always gave her a pleasantly tribal feeling to be by a fire, though she was only a standard old white childless woman, a whitebread type.  Over-educated.  Never married.  Full of notions and the confidences of children, even if they were adolescent.  Make that “because.” 

So she knew whose trunk this was but was partly constrained by knowing that there are some things she really did NOT want to know and partly by not knowing what she was meant to do with it.  She was well-aware that the writing was molten lava.  It was almost remarkable that the trunk didn’t burst into flames.  This had been a student who wrote all the time and who had finally become very famous, the toast of the town, and then was thrown down, mocked and humiliated.  Not because he pretended to be an Indian — he WAS an Indian.  His offence was pretending to be white — “passing,” Blacks called it.  It had nothing to do with writing -- it was politics, "hate" politics.

At some point his writing had not been his anymore, but had become a football used by others who were barely literate.  Not because of the beauty, skill, accuracy or sheer energy of his writing.  Few ever read the famous books, which were famous because a lot of copies were sold, going up the best-seller lists, making a lot of money for the small group of industry employees at the publishing house.  The writer made the smallest percentage because “expenses” were billed to his advance account.  That included the high salary of the publisher.

What percentage of the books were actually read?  5% she would guess and call it generous.  Nice covers though: horses and powwows, feathers and “peace pipes” — none of which were in the books.  Once he was established as being indigenous, he was assaulted from all sides for supposedly destroying his own heritage by ignoring his culture, promoting assimilation, being an "apple."

He went back to the rez, moved in with his old auntie (who was actually a great-aunt since his mother’s generation was the one when rez women had begun to drink) and then he himself began to drink.  But he didn’t stop writing.  He just stopped writing for anyone but himself.  The paper piled up in his trunk, neatly tied with ribbon and stacked in chronological order.  At least that’s what she’d heard, and when she finally opened the trunk it turned out to be true.  The ribbon was typewriter ribbon, the kind divided between black and red.  That was a comment.  There’s no such thing as white typewriter ribbon, though later typewriters had correction tape.

She took one manuscript from the bottom and another from the top — the oldest and the most recent.  The oldest, which was hard to get out of the bottom, was the most grammatical, but also the most conventional.  The newest was almost unreadable, stamped with rings of coffee and booze, but it was hair-raising to read — once it was deciphered — and deciphered was literally the word because he had developed a code system of his own, mostly abbreviations of the phrases he used like refrains from a song.  Some she recognized as being from actual songs but mostly she didn’t.  They were too tied to a culture she didn’t know — not Indians, but rural, saloon-music, blue enough to make a hound moan with sympathy.

Beyond that, his old auntie had been a Blackfeet speaker and he had begun to pick up vocabulary from her.  Some of her words stood for things that non-Indians didn’t know.  There ARE dictionaries of the roots and grammar, but it’s a difficult language to learn.  Blackfeet, like all the North American indigenous languages, was oral, NOT written, and included sounds not represented in an English alphabet. The spoken words were inflected like Chinese so that by changing the emPHAsis a bit, they meant something else.  It was also cumulative like German, so that one word was several combined.  

Then there was the element of signtalk, which added gestures to words and phrases so as to made them clear and complete.  And, of course, it’s tough to recognize sarcasms and kidding without knowing the actual life among the people.  And since the tribe was bi-national, the spelling of words was different on one side of the border than on the other.

More than anything else, language arises from the ecology, the land and relationship to it, and to achieve an understanding of that, one had to live there a long time.  The academics that produced dictionaries usually left in winter, so they never learned the words for intense blizzard or paralyzing cold, let alone the euphoria of a Chinook wind in January.

Ask Gyasi Ross -- he knows

Giving this trunk to a youngster of the tribe who had writing skills would have made more sense.  But none of them spoke Blackfeet, much less wrote it, and none of them that she knew of wanted to write anything but white man’s best sellers.  They had caught the greed disease.  As soon as they made enough money, they would move to the city.  She didn’t dare say that to anyone, but she thought it.  None of them was mature enough yet to focus and stick with the task.

The early manuscripts told about hard winters and idyllic summers with an indulgent and competent grandfather.  They didn’t have much, but what they had was well-managed and anyway, in those days if you had family you had everything.  Part of the reason the youngsters thought like white people was that their indigenous families had disappeared, broken.  Even the land was broken, fractured deep underground, scythed by windmills high above ground.

She had been sitting still long enough to be cold, so she roused to put more sticks in the stove.  The most recent manuscript was written after his old auntie had died.  It was incoherent, hallucinatory, and yet full of intense poetry, metaphors of reach and power.  Much of the writing was accusatory, paranoid, and yet it could not be refuted — it was true — and it could not be explained.  Nor could it be cured.  It would cure itself or the tribe, the species, the life of the planet, would simply implode and be no more — not even someone to care about it.  Many people were already gone.  Even places were gone.

There she sat, in an old wicker chair with a faded and torn cushion she couldn’t bear to toss into the stove because she loved the bright pattern of the fabric so much and had already kept it so long.  She held the two manuscripts, a beginning and an ending, and what was she going to do about it?  Join the hordes of young lemmings with glittering eyes who didn’t realize they were running hard in a hamster wheel meant to preserve the domains of publishers?  There were no more commentators to warn them, no more reviewers who weren’t burnt out or bought out, no more in-house advocate editors because they had all been laid off to become agents scratching at the edges.  There were no more authorities; no one was in charge.

But what was the difference between these valuable, hair-raising and often beautiful writings and some rare flower — just as transient.  Surely there had been writings in the past, just as remarkable, that had simply vanished — possibly unread.   First of all, you can’t publish a trunkful of paper.  It would take a lot of winnowing and organizing.  

Suppose she could write a grant that would pay for the printing and binding of some of these pieces.  Then she would need another one to pay for publicity, distribution and book reps who visited stores — that was the real meaning of publishing.  People thought it was an honor, a certification, a diploma, only received by the worthy.  But it was no such thing.  It was just ink on paper.  Meant to make a profit. 

Maybe she should just chuck it all into the woodstove.  Maybe she should go get her own writing and chuck that in, too.  But she didn’t.  It was like having some ghastly disease and hoping that a cure would be invented soon enough to save this body of work.  But even if some reckless publisher took it on, who would read it?  Who was teaching people how to read?