By Len Messineo
Len Messineo has been published in Shenandoah, Tampa Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The New Novel Review, The Sun, and other magazines. He is a previous recipient of the Hugh Luke Award and his stories have twice been nominated for inclusion in the Pushcart Prize anthology. He teaches at Writers & Books of Rochester, and his short fiction is occasionally featured on PBS affiliate WXXI’s “Salmagundi.” Two of his one-act plays have also been performed at the Geva Theatre.
In “The Doctor of Chaos,” English professor Decker must abandon his fiery radical poems to churn out bland literary prestige in pursuit of tenure. When the household robot controls every aspect of his life, can he take a stand for creativity and individuality? Len's deadpan voice belies the wild absurdity he hurls toward his hapless protagonist.
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“It isn’t enough that they took away my cheroots, my Heineken, my jays that allow me to get properly stoned so I can write great poetry?” Decker disentangles himself from Norma, slips on his shorts, picks his way over the heap of sticks that used to be their bed. “Now it’s a ménage a trois with this chromium John Wayne.”
“Stop complaining, Decker.” A scowl of frustration darkens Norma’s comely features. She gathers a sheet around herself and goes off to the commode.
The barrel-chested robot, the creature that instigated all of Decker’s troubles, rises from the rubble on long spindly legs, brushing itself off with ball bearing-jointed hands large as badminton rackets.
All is not well. Not since these metal golems came on the scene. They landed in a huge nautilus shell-shaped vessel in Highland Park, right next to the guano-besmirched statue of Frederick Douglass. Their ship had its most inward convolutions in another dimension. They kept coming and coming, all shiny and four abreast, lock-step, rata-tat-tat, like those parades you used to see in the media, the May 1 celebration in Red Square, the Russian Army passing in review.
They had none of the grotesqueness so popular in our horror movies, towering monsters resembling an entomologist’s bad dream, proboscises oozing a bilious substance that ate through human flesh the way battery acid eats through a good pair of jeans. These bins-of-bolts were even pleasingly buff, if rather retro, like those futuristic robots you used to find on the covers of mid-twentieth-century Popular Science magazines.
The Pentagon threw everything it had at them: corrosive acids, flame throwers, laser beams, armor-penetrating munitions. Couldn’t even ding their shiny surface. Intelligence, CIA, FBI, NSA, tried to recruit them, train them, as they had dolphins and pigmy whales, to carry high-grade nuclear devices across enemy lines. The creatures were intractable: Imagine trying to train your cockapoo to play chess. They just looked at you with what could only be described as moronic bemusement.
And who can forget those heart-rending scenes: our own smock-attired David Glamov, tireless proponent of extraterrestrial life, star of the long-running series Galaxy, practically tripping on the heels of one of the robots while holding a digital recorder to its mouth, Glamov utterly indifferent that the Cretan had accidentally put its fist through a two-meter refractory telescope, Glamov’s cheeks hollowed, his lips extended in some phonemic exercise that had him looking like a cat puking up fur balls.
Decker and Norma’s refrigerator-size galoot swaggers from the walk-in closet to the dresser, a swivel-hipped gait that has earned him the title “Duke.” He lays out the clothes Norma and Decker will be wearing tonight when Decker reads at the Language and Literature Conference and receives a Heinz Award for his poetry—lays them out with a fastidiousness that belies the wrecker’s ball damage he’s done to their bed. Decker whacks Duke along the side of his head with a pillow. “You’ve destroyed our nuptial bower, you keg of nails!”
Decker knows he’s anthropomorphizing the golem, but can’t help hoping those flickering cathode-red eyes are registering repentance, that Duke is going to say, in his best cattle drive voice, “Aw shucks, pardner, didn’t know my own strength.”
Though unfeeling, the golems wanted only to help. Within moments of their arrival, they were directing traffic, operating mining equipment in dangerous places, putting on pots of coffee, disarming missiles, driving the kids to soccer practice, zapping life-threatening asteroids, cleaning out the old paint cans in the garage. Precise to a fault, punishingly logical, they liked the orderly, the mechanical: clockworks and calendars, hydroelectric plants, drum and bugle corps, cube sugar, things well oiled. They’d dote on the way lawnmowers purred. When the Lake Shore Unlimited roared through town, goodbye chores for the day.
Finally, after much study, anthropologists, AI experts, and engineers declared them harmless. They’re our benefactors, our guardians, our shiny chromium angels. They’re with us for the long haul.
So’re body lice, Decker had thought.
“This isn’t what I wanted,” Decker screams, trying to make himself heard over the hiss of Norma’s shower. “Sex with a starter gun and stopwatch. This tin horn cowpoke chafing my rump with his stirrups, shouting giddy-up!”
Decker slips into Norma’s big terrycloth robe, sniffs at the sleeve, Norma’s intoxicating perfume. How he longs for a cheroot. “At least fix the goddamn bed, Tin Man.”
Duke does a hop and a skip that mimics perfectly the Tin Man’s jaunt up the Yellow Brick Road.
Since Norma decided to have a baby, Duke, his antennae attuned to her ovulation cycle, has been chauffeuring Decker to and from his classes at the University of Rochester where he now teaches, often interrupting him mid-class. “Come, Decker person,” the Cretan would chirrup, a voice sounding like Wayne Newton on laughing gas. They’d careen down River Road and then Plymouth Avenue in Decker’s rusted old Volvo at death-defying speeds, running stop signs, making two-wheeled turns. At Decker and Norma’s modest townhouse in Corn Hill, Duke would practically heave Decker topside of Norma, sometimes hurling himself into the fracas, jumping up and down enthusiastically. Decker and Norma’s coupling had come to have all the excitement of a head-on collision.
Now, Decker paces through the living room clutching a sheaf of paper, the poems he will read tonight. He dims the Tiffany lamp, puts on some Haydn. The glow of his plasma-monitored computer casts its periwinkle reflection on the ceiling-high windows. Rochester’s skyline glitters on the other side of the glass.
They’ve settled into a modestly bourgeois life now, Norma’s dream. Decker can’t help remembering better times. Norma clinging absently to the headboard after their love-making, shuddering, staring upward through half-closed eyes. Norma on one of her plateaus that usually lasted the space of one of his cheroots before she came down. Norma reading his untamed poetry, her bush still glistening, her tawny legs folded under her. She took their love-making seriously then, at least as seriously as he took his poetry. She was his daemon and his muse, his Beatrice and his Penelope. Only she could tame him, quench the fire in his belly.
They’d made love in Pensacola during Hurricane Jane, at Venice Beach during an earthquake 5.3 on the Richter scale, shutters slamming, glass shattering, fissures forming on ceiling and walls, dust and plaster falling around them. They’d not missed a stroke. Free spirits then, they’d set up households in thrift store-furnished flats in university towns wherever Decker could obtain a temporary teaching assignment. Decker would write. Norma would involve herself with local politics or work at the women’s shelter. Decker longed for those radical days, flouting convention, getting high, the fiery sexual bouts, playing Peck’s bad boy in the English department, until his contract ran out or, more likely, he was asked to leave. Decker lived for his verse, its insolence, its trenchant raging voice. He wrote then on a Remington portable, its staccato key action like a Gatling gun. It spit out poetry the way a bar room brawler spits out teeth.
Then the Guardians came. The standards changed. His publications in the literary rags grew few and far between. At the occasional poetry reading, faculty and students nodded their heads with polite but frigid stares. Norma’s passions cooled. This was about the time she began pestering him. “I don’t think I can go on like this, Decker,” she’d say. “I want a home bigger than a walk-in closet, children, before it’s too late.” And this was about the time Decker met his nemesis, the formidable Dr. Ernest Kornblatt, amateur pugilist, foremost scholar on the poetry of Lucy Clifton, chairman of the English department at the University of Rochester.
“Hit me!” Kornblatt said.
They were at Kornblatt’s garden party in Bushnell’s Basin, playing croquet on his neatly manicured lawn. The Guardians glided around them, incongruously wearing aprons and waitress caps, carrying trays of punch and party sandwiches. Kornblatt had blasted Decker’s ball into a grove of white birch. The snickering Kornblatt followed behind him. “Added three inches to my arms and legs,” he boasted. “Four to my chest. Pushing fifty and I have the body of a twenty-year-old. Look at that six-pack stomach, hard as bronze.” He lifted his jersey around his chest, flexed his muscles. “Go ahead. Hit me!”
The mere mention of a six-pack made the alcohol-starved Decker shudder.
“The Guardians,” Kornblatt said, reverently.
It made perfect sense that Kornblatt loved the Guardians so much. They managed his department, prepared his lectures, liposuctioned his love handles, and replaced his hip joint with a bionic one so he could send Decker’s ball even farther into the thickets whenever they played croquet at Kornblatt’s garden parties. Which was often, given his reduced workload.
“You’re pathetic,” Kornblatt added. “I can’t think of anyone who needs the Guardians more than you.”
Decker hated the Guardians. The Guardians did not like Kerouac, truancy, Ornette Coleman, or Nick Tahou’s famous Garbage Plate. All the things Decker loved. They were especially contemptuous of Decker’s free verse. He’d seen them at his readings. This was before his lyrical riffs fell into disfavor. These creatures, normally as animated as a patient in a vegetative state, had suddenly hurled their arms about like windmills, making burping, farting noises.
“Go ahead, hit me!” Kornblatt said, slapping his stomach. “Hard as you can.”
Decker made clucking noises he hoped Kornblatt would construe as admiration. Decker hated Kornblatt even more than he hated the Guardians. Decker wanted to deliver a blow to Kornblatt’s newly capped teeth with his mallet.
Norma wouldn’t like that. “Ask him to renew your contract,” she’d said. “Beg, if necessary.”
“You’re a coward, Decker,” Kornblatt continued. “You haven’t an iota of discipline. You’re flabby, weak, unruly as that mumbo jumbo you write. I honestly don’t understand what Norma sees in you.”
That’s when Kornblatt issued the challenge, at his garden party, amid the sleepy sibilance of crickets in the late summer heat. “Get your poems published in ten juried publications, prestigious ones, I’ll put you on a tenure track. And none of those samizdat we-publish-the-toilet-paper-scribblings-of-prisoners-of-conscience publications.
“But I warn you,” he added. “I’m feeling lovey-dovey. If you insist on hanging around, I might just steal your girlfriend.”
Decker seethed with anger. He vowed he’d best this superannuated don-head. He’d climb Mount Parnassus and prostrate himself before Dame Poetry. He’d even enlist the help of the Guardians. He’d make Kornblatt choke on his bile.
Now, a year later, as he paces, Norma’s robe cinched tightly around his waist, reading through his sheaf of poems, he realizes how wrong he’s been. His work is lifeless as sun-swollen road kill.
“This isn’t what I bargained for, Norma,” he shouts. “This prohibitionist rapping my knuckles with a ruler every time I reach for a brew, or light up a cheroot.”
Norma doesn’t hear him. She’s still in the bathroom, primping. For whom? Kornblatt?
Initially, Decker’s Guardian, Duke, had almost fainted away at the chaos in which Decker thrived: a workspace that Norma characterized as a rats’ nest, “with all due respect to the rats.” Pyramids of cast-off clothes, butt-filled beer cans and ashtrays, coffee cups, and wadded paper surrounded him. The pungent aroma of cigars vied with his unwashed ripeness. Folded in a half lotus in only his boxer shorts, clouds of smoke wafting about him, his portable Remington leaning on his shins, Decker banged out verse, paper swirling around him like dandruff. This was the climate in which Decker worked best.
Duke changed all that. He ordered and arranged Decker’s personal effects, poetry, clothing, and books into folders and shelves and drawers: alphabetically, numerically, by phylum, species, atomic weight. Decker couldn’t find anything.
Duke took away Decker’s typewriter, replacing it with a computer that was nothing more than a glowing cube. It had no keyboard. Decker sat at this console, helpless. It spit out odes, sestinas, sonatas, while Decker’s unoccupied fingers twitched helplessly.
Each morning, the cube spat out marching orders for the day: a breakfast of … lesson plans for … poetry writing from … dean’s conference at … lunch with…. The only relief from the routine was those unscheduled love bouts with Norma when Duke sensed an egg dropping into her chute.
But even those became less frequent.
Norma insisted they see a doctor.
“Your sperm count is adequate enough,” the fertility specialist declared. “It’s like they’re shy adolescents, their flagella all limp, afraid to ask a girl to dance.” The doctor took a bite of a ripe peach, looked at Decker pityingly. “I’ve been seeing more and more of this. Motility problems, testosterone on strike, sinking libidos, men with honkers big as Dolly Parton.”
But as much as Decker abhorred his latest oeuvre, he was getting published in some of the top journals, picked up in anthologies, and then a collection of his own, Pierian Spring, laudatory blurbs on the back of the book jacket.
The editor had suggested a title from Pope, after the abundance of Alexandrian lines. Decker voted for Painted Child of Dirt. They overruled him, choosing Pierian Spring from what is perhaps the most banal line of all English poetry: “Drink deeply of the Pierian Spring, or not at all.”
Pierian Spring, strangely, was chosen as the most notable work of the year by The American Poetry Review. Invitations to submit followed, readings at other schools, a summer residence at Sarah Lawrence. He was encouraged to apply for a Guggenheim. He was featured in Parallax, the very issue that celebrated the Guardians as angelic creatures, heralding a new Eden, causing the trains to run on time.
Far from delighting in the nectar of success, he felt shame. He had recurring dreams in which he addressed large crowds in soiled underwear, made his stage entrance in huge theaters, only to discover he did not know his lines.
He looked to Norma for assurance. “But I love your poetry, Decker,” she’d say, while she applied face cream or painted her nails, the enthusiasm so absent, he felt like he was pulling a ringed string from her back. “I love your poetry … zzzzt. I love your poetry … zzzzt.”
In Kornblatt’s office, Decker read the review from The Nebulous Quarterly. “Mr. Decker’s poems are elegant in their spareness, nuanced with a delicate, almost liturgical, formality …”
“What does that mean?” he asked Kornblatt. Surely, Kornblatt, with his high pedigreed degrees, would know.
“Nothing succeeds like success, kid,” Kornblatt said, smiling at him cryptically. As Decker looked over Kornblatt’s huge desk, a sprawling piece of real estate so barren that Decker felt waves of agoraphobia steal over him, he suddenly realized that Kornblatt didn’t know either.
And then Kornblatt was off topic, blathering about his most recent coup: finally being invited into the Sicherheitsnadel Club. “To get into the Sicherheitsnadel Club, someone has to die!” The Sicherheitsnadel’s oak and leather ambiance, the Sicherheitsnadel’s delicious cuisine, the Sicherheitsnadel’s dancing six nights a week. Kornblatt smiled; his wattle shook delightedly.
Screw Sicherheitsnadel, Decker thought. What about my poetry? Too metered, the way it goose-steps across the page …?
“Studying the tango,” Kornblatt continued. “In Argentina, the tango is a way of life. Like existentialism in France. By the way, you wouldn’t mind if I took Norma as my guest, would you?
“Mein führer wants to take you dancing,” Decker said that night when he got home.
Surprisingly, Norma did not protest. “I’m so bored, Deck,” she said. “And you have your poetry.”
Of late, Norma was absent from home more often than not. But where was she? All of her activities—the women’s shelter, advocacy groups, governance commissions—had disappeared, rendered irrelevant by the Guardians. Who dared beat his wife anymore? Practice malfeasance? The Guardians were running things, every position from mayor to crossing guard. Everything running like clockwork, rata-tat-tat.
Decker tried to beat back his suspicion. Was it an accident that he had heard both Kornblatt and Norma tout the virtues of Clifton Springs, mud baths, and Ayurvedic medicine? Hadn’t Norma at a recent party mentioned their going to a movie Decker had never seen, a restaurant he’d never been to? Were they now, Kornblatt and Norma, to become dance partners in the tango, a dance Decker knew to be sluttish, the venue of Argentine whorehouses?
Decker blushed to think of it. How jealous he’d become, how possessive. What had become of his liberal ideals, his large-hearted tolerance? That live-for-the-moment-and-the-devil-take-the-hindermost élan? Was he now becoming a prude? Like the Guardians?
Decker sucked in a deep breath. That very night, he proposed marriage.
Norma looked at Decker hard. “Aren’t you romantic!”
“It’s the way you look in a certain light,” Decker said, his voice almost inaudible over the P.A. calling for a price check in hardware. They were in the garden section of Home Depot.
“Ernest is right about you. You cannot help but act impulsively. And your instincts are almost always wrong.”
“So it’s ‘Ernest’ now!”
“I bet you don’t even have a ring.”
Decker pressed his case all the way home, with little success.
“What about all those years you scoffed at the very idea?” Norma continued. “Marriage is for Southern Baptists, for the petite bourgeoisie.”
Decker made a sweeping gesture encompassing their townhouse fussed out in a huge velour sectional, Tiffany lamps, Edward Hopper prints, the stack of unpaid bills in the roll-top desk. “What could be more bourgeois?”
“How can we have a relationship if you will not trust me?”
So Ernest Kornblatt and Norma went dancing, at the Sicherheitsnadel Club, and Decker cranked out second-rate poetry and sulked.
Decker, left alone, paced back and forth. “What shall I do? Can you crash a club with a hundred-year-old tradition? Where would I get a blazer with the lodge heraldry? What if they ask me to pronounce ‘Sicherheitsnadel?’ I don’t know a tango from ice tongs.”
Duke clumped briskly into the room. “Come, Decker person, I will teach you to dance.” Duke rolled up the rug, put on tango music, held out his arms.
Decker held back. “How is it you know how to dance, tin man?”
Duke’s cathode-red eyes brightened. “Download. Library of Congress. Everything from Argentine tango to zoot suit swing.”
Duke, a formidable partner, drilled him that evening and every spare moment thereafter. Duke, as difficult to maneuver as a tractor-trailer, demanded Decker get it right. Before long, Decker was swirling Duke through living and dining room, executing the barrida, the enrosque, the ochos, all the while Duke lectured him on the nuanced philosophy of Argentine tango. “One must abhor caution, longevity… Learn to fall as a child, the loved one will catch you, if not, better to die… Life is the illness, dissipation the cure…”
And while Decker dipped, dragged, and twirled Duke about, while the bandoneon sighed and the clarinet keened, he asked Duke, “Why is it you never interrupt my classes anymore? Why do you not carry me off the way you used to, careening carelessly through the side streets, hurling me upon Norma?”
Duke stiffened.
“What has happened, Duke? Is Norma not ovulating anymore?”
“I got a headache,” Duke whined, turned and walked off.
If Norma wanted romance, Decker decided, he would give her romance. On the anniversary of their first meeting, he bought game bird, put an Ástor Piazzolla CD on the stereo, linen on the table, lit candles, bought a classy wine. He made the down payment on an engagement ring as big as a goiter.
That was the night Norma didn’t come home.
Not a week later, Duke came upon Decker in the living room, Decker travailing over his wretched poetry, raking his fingers through his hair.
“Dance with me, Decker-person,” Duke said. Duke was wearing one of Norma’s scarves, thick with her perfume. His eyes flickered and dimmed—flirtatiously, Decker thought.
Duke’s quirkiness of late was not altogether singular and Decker was changing his mind about the Guardians. Their indomitable logic, their studied detachment, fissured and fell away when confronted with emotionally charged situations: the momentous, the unexpected, the surreal.
There were rumors: Guardians hooked on daytime soaps, overcome with lethargy, useless to anyone for days; stealing the family car, slamming into abutments at high speed, like crash dummies; sopping up whole gallons of Rocky Road ice cream until they were sticky with goo.
Then there were undocumented reports that a whole pod of Guardians lay dead near the Water Street Music Hall, scene of a reading by the Rochester’s Poets for Anarchy, performing with the music group, Stiffy Harry and the Vibrators.
“Come, dance with me,” Duke said, assuming the excruciatingly correct posture.
“I don’t want to dance with you, Duke,” Decker said. “I don’t ever want to dance with anyone but Norma.”
Duke had stomped down his anvil-like foot petulantly, splintering their parquet floor, then marched out of the room.
Now, as they prepare for the awards ceremony, Decker watches Norma as she preens in front of the mirror. She has rejected the modest frock Duke chose for her, wearing instead a strapless black sheath gown with a ravish-me slit up the side.
“It’s not like I’m sleeping with him,” she says, anointing her wrists, behind her ears, the gentle slope of her breasts with perfume. “Although I might as well for all the excitement you cause me!”
“You think mein führer could do better with the Industrial Revolution in bed with him?”
Norma might as well have been in the next county for how much attention she is paying him. Duke, by comparison, is aflutter, worrying Decker’s tie straight, brushing out his herringbone jacket, tugging at it so it hangs just right.
Decker riffs through his opening remarks, a leaf of poems, his Pierian Waters, making last-minute emendations, deciding which he’ll read first. He despairs. His work seems to him hopelessly jejune, aesthetic as aspirin.
At the Wilson Commons, Decker checks the placement of the mike, checks the light at the podium, lays out his work. The podium faces out from the tubular-framed glass wall which reveals Rochester’s glowing nimbus, the twinkle of lights on the Xerox Tower, the Hyatt Regency, the Douglass Anthony Bridge. A clear night: a sliver of moon hangs midway in the sky.
Decker feels nervous. He does not like this feeling. The old Decker never felt nervous. Contemptuous, perhaps. But not this, this feeling like he is about to commit an unforgiveable act of banality.
Throughout the hall, confreres and guests, faculty members, are finishing their meals, sipping coffee, murmuring to one another. Even the Guardians seem buff tonight, as if someone had taken silver polish to them.
The house lights dim. The Dean of Humanities raps a spoon against his glass; the audience quiets. He begins the introduction, “My esteemed colleague … redefines the art form … raise the level of the state of poetry … one reviewer said… another characterized…”
The Guardians, tea towels draped over their arms, glide silently through the aisles, carrying coffee refills, tangerine lemon sherbets, cream puffs.
Decker steps into the spot, clears his throat. The audience hushes. He makes a few perfunctory remarks, a modest quip, starts with Pierian Spring’s title poem.
“Along 90 West, the Forsythia are in bloom, the Genesee—”
He looks out into the audience, sees Kornblatt nattering to Norma, his neck craned like a vulture over her cleavage.
“—the Genesee runs muddy this time of year, time measured in seconds, seasons, eons—”
Now Kornblatt is whispering something into Norma’s ear. Her shoulders shake with suppressed laughter.
“—a time from that shrouded bank passing swiftly, hardly noticed, rafted as we are—”
Decker pauses. The audience waits.
What am I doing here? Decker thinks. He is flushed, angry, shamed. He longs for a bracing shot of tequila, a flaming cheroot. His poem jitters out of focus, as if he were reading inside a plummeting plane.
In the gallery, a rustle of voices, worrying, concerned. Not Norma. Norma leans into Kornblatt, pats his hand.
Something tears at Decker’s insides. He feels like a person who’s taken a bullet in the chest. He looks up, and then he’s off the script. He can’t contain himself. The dam bursts. He extemporizes. His voice rises, oracular, operatic. Words gush out of him, plumes of blood, glowing red-hot lava, a fiery effulgence, a torrent that inundates, overwhelms, engulfs all in its path. There is no order, no discipline, no sense. He’s in free fall. Words ooze from his pores. He convulses, vomits, pees poetry.
Duke, nearest to the stage, feints towards him, then staggers back as if he’s hit a wall. Trays are crashing around them, the Guardians suffering seizures, their heads twirling about like whirl-a-gigs, slamming into one another, playing patty-cake, dancing the watusi, doing cartwheels, miming lifting their skirts like coquettes, making farting noises like sheet metal being torn, freezing, going limp, falling like rag dolls, their cathode-red eyes flickering out.
Mayhem erupts in the Commons. Hissing and booing. Thunderous foot stomping. They are throwing things: programs, cream puffs, chocolate truffles.
But there is also applause, faint at first. Then tear-wrenching laughter. Some grab at one another, tease hair, punch, kick. Arms, legs, flay out. Some are ripping off each other’s clothes, writhing against one another.
Now Norma is on her feet, arms akimbo, that wait-until-I-get-you-home look on her face. She is marching towards him, her eyes smoldering with anger, and … yes, unrepentant, insatiable lust.
Decker winks at her. A self-satisfied grin crosses his features. He loosens his tie, reaches into his jacket, takes out a cheroot, fires it up, takes a long, satisfying drag.
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