PORTION

Joy Williams

ARTHUR HAD BEEN going to the asylum to visit a friend he had betrayed who foolishly had become quite undone. The young man had once been mesmerizingly attractive and desperate but was now slack, slothful, and weepy. He had also fallen into the habit of repeating the vatic phrase When you think of chocolate think of Sparrow, which Arthur felt to be a particularly annoying British affectation. They had never favored chocolate as a couple. Chocolate had never been a feature of their relationship.

It was during one of these utterly unsatisfying visits that he caught the Governor’s eye, or his presence did not escape the notice of the Governor, Arthur was no longer sure.

When you think of chocolate think of Sparrow, the addled and former lover was intoning desperately when the Governor with smooth assurance escorted him to a corner of the hobby room where jigsaw puzzles in much mended cardboard boxes were stacked, their lists of missing pieces printed neatly on the lids to forestall distress, disappointment, or rage as the case might be.

PART(S) OF:

Cloud          4

Paw          2

Big Wave          7

Little Wave          9

The Governor then returned to Arthur and held his hand.

“Let me ask you something, let me ask you something,” the Governor whispered, “that phrase ‘I’m going to send a letter to the Governor . . .’ how did that start? Someone going to the crapper says, ‘I’m going to send a message to the Governor.’”

“I don’t know,” Arthur whispered. “I’ve never heard it.”

“Why are you whispering? People say it all the time. Vulgar. Folks are vulgar. The problem with people who say they love nature is that they’re crazy. You know the last leader of this nation’s largest environmental organization—the one who holds an alligator over his head and screams From My Cold Dead Hands—he’s got Alzheimer’s. Doesn’t know his dick from a fountain pen. . . .”

He looked at Arthur merrily, then shrugged. “That was the head of the National Rifle Association, holding a flintlock rifle over his head. I’m speaking phatically here. Just establishing tolerance for our mutual presence. Chitchat. I’m trying to get a feeling for you. Friend or foe? Phatic talk serves to prolong the moment before the possibility of communication. No other purpose to it. Now, you might be curious about my term as Governor. This is a sore subject with me. I didn’t complete my term. Wolf took out a state trooper stationed outside the kitchen where I was having breakfast. It was the morning of the shortest day of the year and I was being served breakfast, at my request, by a young woman in a white nightie with candles in her hair. The wolf, Darling Bea, jumped the trooper. What was the fellow to do, shoot the Governor’s wolf? He went down like the man he imagined himself to be, without a cry. It was unfortunately the public’s first glimpse into the style of my administration. Had to whisk her off in protective custody. She’s with monks now. God knows what they’re trying to teach her. They promised me they wouldn’t punish her until she understood. They assured me of that. I asked them pointedly. Still, I know men dissemble and deceive other men. I know men. I had brothers. I was the youngest. They hung me on the doorknob by the back of my underwear. They went out, they came back in. I laughed with them, this is how you survive. All dead now, those boys. But enough gloom. Tell me, what’s the state of the state? Has my legacy of infrastructure endured? Subsidence continuing to be a problem? How is the road?

“The road . . .” Arthur began. What a peculiar word . . .

“Agriculture’s in decline too, I suppose. I’ve heard that farmers are turning their fields into mazes to make a buck. Disaster fields all the vogue too. Farmers are sly ones, they press any advantage. Lives freely taken, people dropping out of the sky on their worthless fields. Plane crashed, everyone amazed, disbelieving, horrified. How could this happen! Then someone figures out that a human disaster of a certain magnitude makes the area sacrosanct and eligible for public funding and tax deferral. Or a lesser magnitude will do if the circumstances have an innovative resonance. Once the fields are cleaned up farmers can start charging. Enforced donations to keep order, keep it nice, maintain it as contemplative space. This is what I would tell my environmental friends who have never considered me their ally, I’m afraid. Take a page from the farmer’s book: Only way left for them to preserve land. Presence of a rare moth won’t do it. Those little flower-faced owls no bigger than your fist, forget it. Not a rumor of one of the last of the big cats. Certainly not a rumor of one of the last of the big cats. Has to have a human angle. And they can’t be choosy. Land may not be ecologically ideal but they should claim it early on, swoop in soonest before teddy bears and bouquets start piling up, stake it out as a pioneer space with all due respect, of course, but quick on the heels of death’s untimely unfair undiscriminating mass transit operation. Then if beast or bird does manage to make its way there they will be seen as acceptable symbols of hope and healing and will be tolerated by those seeking comfort.”

The Governor paused.

“But I can get by without the environmentalists. Does the environmental vote even exist anymore? I’m now recollecting that those people took a hit when they protested the draining of the Everglades when that airbus went down and all those passengers plus crew vanished into the muck. Their ‘Let them be a part of the great Everglades which has no counterpart anywhere on earth’ didn’t sit well with the next of kin. Just made them mad. Environmentalists flat-footed around most people. First part of the statement was okay, should have left it at that. Second part was where they went astray. The next of kin felt it as their lost loved ones that had no counterpart on earth and not some nasty melancholy swamp. So they sucked each rag and bone out, divvied it up for proper burial and drained the place right down to the pandemonium rock. Now there’s a Legoland in the works there. Going to be a Taj Mahal totally made out of Legos. The actual Taj is a mausoleum, that’s how they got the concept approved.”

When the Governor laughed he hissed a little.

“Ever made it to India?” he inquired. “Had an opportunity to converse with a Hindu?”

Arthur looked at him sleepily.

“Too late now,” the Governor went on. “Cultures everywhere being suppressed by mass civilization, by agnostic humanism. There’s a hatred of what’s considered the picturesque. The annihilation of the picturesque is quite acceptable. Assimilation is no longer the vogue. You might ask why I am addressing you. Your sweet inquiry breaks my heart. Whole goddamned state breaks my heart. It should be put on a ventilator. I made mistakes before, I admit. Built too many roads. Liked clever argument, was fond of peculiar grammars, but I was no one’s creature. I made my way sucking no one’s toes. Now I have amends to make, wrongs to right, wealth to spend, and I can’t do it because I’m here you see.”

“Yes,” Arthur ventured. “You are.”

“I have a proposition for you,” the Governor said.

But a black-smocked orderly appeared and announced lunch, another odd word . . . lunch, road. Who came up with these things . . . and the Governor was led away.

■ ■

He had been christened Arthur Barrow and had been a clever imaginative lazy youth. Before the arrangement with the Governor in the activities room of the asylum, before he had signed the contract, he had made a harmless and modest living by bilking everyone he met but now, little more than a year later, he felt himself the bilkee, and by a dead man, cornered rather like a noble cougar, treed by petty dogs. The arrangement was that he, Arthur, would take on the Governor’s life when the Governor felt no longer qualified to do so which, the man had the remaining marble to realize, was a shade past imminent. For a considerable amount of money and the interesting contents of several footlockers, Arthur would assume the Governor’s guilts and strive to make amends for his unfortunate decisions when in office. Those roads. He had directed ten miles of new asphalt to be laid down for every woman and child in the state, not including parking lots and private driveways.

They even discussed the Governor’s—rather Arthur’s—final gesture in this fallen world. Arthur suggested that when the time came, after the money was gone and, of course, all reparations had been made, he would go into one of those thousand-acre car and bulldozer dealerships and immolate himself in the showroom. Strip to a snowy white diaper—the Governor liked that detail as he was both fond of ceremony and vain about his sinewy limbs—and combust, but the Governor argued that the days were past when an event like that would give anyone pause, to say nothing of bestirring further consciousness.

“You ever see one of those gummy bears on fire?” he said. “One of those candies? You’d go up like that. Mean no more to people than that.”

“Death as protest might have lost her bump,” Arthur agreed.

“Such an exit opens no doors,” the Governor said. “But it might be the best we can do. The important thing is not to wait too long. You don’t want to die of pneumonia. That’s what they call the old person’s friend. Some friend. Like having a three-hundred-pound officer of the law sitting on your chest advising you that it’s not in your best interest to draw that next breath.” “The leaving will be in as magisterial a way as possible,” Arthur promised.

The scam seemed innocent enough. What was the harm?

The Governor imagined all the other inmates in the dreary facility to be the dim-bulbed legislators he had known though with larger heads, but Arthur, he believed, had the potential to be himself, that is, the Governor. Arthur began visiting him regularly and the details of their accordance were hammered out. After this was done to the Governor’s satisfaction, the Governor seemed to lose all interest in him, devoting his days to protecting the piano, which existed, marginally, in the hobby room along with the tower of puzzles. The Governor had taken it upon himself to not let anyone near the beat-up out-of-tune old thing, believing like the innocent young Nietzsche thrust into a brothel that of all the beings there it was only the piano that still possessed a soul.

A burlish inmate finally had enough of the Governor’s behavior and attacked him, banging his head with the piano’s scarred lid, crushing his skull actually beneath the lid. The smirking spineless attendants were affording themselves sundaes in the adjacent ice cream parlor and were slow to react. By all accounts—Arthur had not been present—the murderer then sat down to play, and quite brilliantly, before he was wrestled away from the trembling instrument.

So the Governor died. By piano.

He had once confided to Arthur that he did not wish to play the piano, he believed himself to be the piano. Glenn Gould said that players want to be either the music or the piano, they hate being middlemen. As a child the unparalleled performer had begun an opera about nuclear destruction. In act I everything dies. In act II a superior breed of frog emerges.

Another nut, Arthur thought. Not that he didn’t think frogs were underrated in this life.

Arthur wished he were an unparalleled performer but he was not and the opportunities afforded by the Governor’s faith in him were, he had to admit, unrealized. He had not taken on the other man’s guilts nor had he reflected much on expiation. But after pretty much racing through the Governor’s assets and down to the surprises of the last trunk, he had been thinking more and more about the clause imposing substantial penalties for early withdrawal—or had it been serious penalties? But the contract couldn’t be valid, the man was insane: He hadn’t even been a governor.

He had no idea what he’d been. He’d certainly accumulated a great deal of money. Which was gone. Arthur was subsisting on the generosity of some do-gooder encampment in a beetle-compromised wood. His benefactors were a faintly perceived lot, last of a breed really, at odds with the more generally accepted belief that compassion was nothing more than self-cannibalization. The more an individual doesn’t care the freer he becomes. This was the current thinking.

When he’d first arrived he’d had the companionship of rats, like Paul in prison, but the rats, never a playful lot, had long abandoned him. For a while there were the occasional mice, white ones trying to clamber out of the toilet, but they too vanished after the nearby research facility tightened up their disposal practices.

His small cabin was comfortable enough though it seemed to be shrinking, the walls creaking closer, the glass of the single window moaning in its frame, which was riddled by the tireless efforts of those beetles. And the rain, pounding upon the roof, was relentless. He remembered when rain fell so prettily and the smell without exaggeration was divine. But that was a while ago—fourteen months ago—goodness, the Governor was still in the bin. Fourteen months ago rain had changed its nature.

He mused on the number fourteen. Some philosopher—the name failed to present itself—maintained that it was impossible for fourteen minutes to pass. Something about it corresponding to infinity. This philosopher was greatly influenced by an earlier philosopher whom he had misunderstood completely, which is how all great discoveries are made, through misunderstanding.

A bovid plastic duck with a nasty expression floated in the bathtub. It was one of the Governor’s effects that Arthur sometimes fancied. He tended to avoid taking baths in the daytime, not only because he considered it bad form but because it was then that the grout between the tiles looked unequivocally filthy. Still, he was spending long hours in the tub lately, thinking about this and that, sipping from a bottle of Hirsch Selection rye, reflecting on the fabled concept of a continually stocked honor bar, the rows of shining bottles that trusted you would do the right thing. He’d come across only two of these marvels in his life and he had advantaged himself of them shamelessly both times.

He placed a fetid washcloth over his head.

Arthur used to think that we all feel so strange and nothing is right because there are more people alive today than all the people who ever lived but then he learned that those who are alive today comprise less than 6 percent of all the people who ever lived. Or something like that. Which is an even better explanation as to why we all feel so strange and nothing is right.

When he had arrived trolleying the last of the Governor’s footlockers it had harbored a full case of rye and though he thought he’d been provident, only one bottle remained. He promised himself that he would put off its retrieval as long as possible. For one reason it was the last and for another it was wedged between a bag of filthy pink candy imprinted with an unflattering image of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (worth something to someone, he was sure) and Darling Bea’s immense hand-tooled leather collar with the coral inlays. Arthur felt fortunate that he’d never made the acquaintance of old Bea. He was sure he would have been judged unfavorably as her master’s ancillary, maybe even devoured. He could visualize with unsettling vividity Bea in some freezing Franciscan kennel, mangy and enraged, eyes green as peridot, plotting night and day her return. He saw ice in her water bowl, on her muzzle, between the pads of her gigantic paws, ICE, the very subject of a massive book which was the only other occupant of that wretched trunk, Hans Horbiger’s 1913 Glazial-Kosmogonie. Another total nutcase, Horbiger had written a pseudoscience classic—lengthy, ponderous in style, and utterly without value—in which he argued that the most important material in the universe was ice. It was the cosmic answer. Arthur could understand the Governor’s interest in this theory for it suggested the irrelevance of Florida. Thus all the disastrous decisions the Governor thought he’d made on that unfortunate state’s behalf had been irrelevant as well.

The rye was gone, the bottle empty. He had deceived himself in believing there was another, for holding his breath, closing his eyes, he had reached into the depths of that trunk several days ago, braving the touch of Bea’s frightfully disorienting and cold collar, and removed it. This had been that. Nothing more to take there was.

In the asylum one of the Governor’s fellow travelers had remarked that all he wanted from life was a competent portion.

A competent portion.

Marvelous! I’m going to remember that! Arthur had exclaimed.

Sweet old guy in a shiny soiled seersucker suit, always talking about eating companions. Arthur thought he’d meant an eating club, recalling the black tie dinners and dances at glorious Harvard where he claimed to have matriculated, until he was informed by the Governor that “eating companions” were well-known etheric world entities that invisibly attach themselves to one’s body and suck from it all vital force, and the pitiable wasting fellow in seersucker had them in spades.

Arthur became aware that the plastic duck was listing near his groin. There was something wrong with it, it wasn’t balanced properly. Just kept circling his groin as though it were a drain. He swatted it away.

He felt old. He was old. The last fourteen months had aged everything excessively. It had something to do with the rain, the rabid rain. Or was it the birdless dawns? He no longer had communion with the Governor. His dreams weren’t even the Governor’s anymore. Truck-sized butterflies, radiant women, sustained applause—repetitive but pleasant. He missed them.

The Governor didn’t want to be in here, of that he was certain. But he didn’t want to be out there either. There was where people who couldn’t imagine the earth without them plundered on, unconcerned as to the probationary nature of their exertions. And even with the apocalyptically hammering rain that would drive anyone off the rails, there were billions and billions of them.

Gee, he was tired.

He thought sentimentally of his grandmother and sniffled a little. She used to say that a robin singing close to a window meant sorrow was on the way. She was Welsh and gloomy as they come. But his mother had been part of the Blessed Assurance crowd, the visualizing the world without you crowd. I left and the birds stayed singing. Down in the lovely valley, down by the glittering brook. It was supposed to put a joyful steel in your spine. I left and the birds stayed singing, his mother would say, her mouth trembling. And now it was his turn. But the birds no longer sang, there were no birds.

Arthur gripped the slippery curved sides of the tub and began the process of hauling himself out. The image of a pale, struggling, and determined mouse came easily to mind.

He carefully patted himself dry and put on a silk bathrobe of excellent quality from the Governor’s extravagant years.

The rain screeched. He had seen one of the do-gooders try to catch it in a bucket and it had thickened like an eel and snaked away.

He shivered.

He was ready, but he was a little hungry. Just one more thing. One little bit of something. He went into the tiny kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There should be one more serving of integrity-raised beef in there. There were many who didn’t care about the integrity of their food overmuch but he was not one of them. He thought the Governor would approve even though the man had limited himself to rice balls and water in the weeks before the piano incident. But there was no last portion of integrity-raised beef in the refrigerator, no calf raised to prime by loving kindergartners, petted a hundred times a day by tiny hands, fed flowers and clover, surrendered in the final moments by the most loyal and trusted and affectionate of caregivers, the ones who had named it and taught it to know that name as its own. No Tunnel of Death, no blood-slick and reeking duckboards. No inept stickers or angry leggers, no prodders or stunners. No knocking gun going kachunk kachunk kachunk. Just a last embrace in a lush and sunny field, the little children’s piping voices. Not a whiff or inkling in the air for it.

The last of Geryon, raised by Mrs. Ricky Hormel’s advanced kindergarten class of Hopewell, New Jersey, was not in the freezer. He must have finished it off sometime back and just forgotten.