Dusklands Read online

  Now is also the time to mention the length of gristle that hangs from the end of my iron spine and effects my sad connection with Marilyn. Alas, Marilyn has never succeeded in freeing me from my rigors. Though like the diligent partners in the marriage manuals we attend to each other’s whispers, moans, and groans, though I plough like the hero and Marilyn froth like the heroine, the truth is that the bliss of which the books speak has eluded us. The fault is not mine. I do my duty. Whereas I cannot escape the suspicion that my wife is disengaged. Before the arrival of my seed her pouch yawns and falls back, leaving my betrayed representative gripped at its base, flailing its head in vain inside an immense cavern, at the very moment when above all else it craves to be rocked through its tantrum in a soft, firm, infinitely trustworthy grip. The word which at such moments flashes its tail across the heavens of my never quite extinguished consciousness is evacuation: my seed drips like urine into the futile sewers of Marilyn’s reproductive ducts.

  Marilyn (to whip myself up for a while longer against Marilyn, though it is not good for me) upholds a fixed-quantum theory of love: if I have love to spend on other objects such love must be stolen from her. Thus she has grown more and more jealous of my work on the Vietnam Project as I have deepened myself further and further in it. She wishes dull jobs on me in order that I should find relief in her. She feels herself empty and wishes to be filled, yet her emptiness is such that every entry into her she feels as invasion and possession. Hence her desperate look. (I have an intuitive understanding of women though I feel no sympathy for them.) My life with Marilyn has become a continual battle to keep my poise of mind against her hysterical assaults and the pressure of my enemy body. I must have poise of mind to do my creative work. I must have peace, love, nourishment, and sunlight; those precious mornings when my body relaxes and my mind soars must not be laid to waste by whining and shouting between Marilyn and her child. Ever since I asserted my inviolability, that poor Martin has stood in as my whipping-boy, enduring the lash of his mother’s tongue for waking her up, for wanting his breakfast, for wanting to be dressed, till storms of fury burst in my faroff head and with red sheets of apoplexy blinding my vision I bellow for silence. Then it is all over: the ropes begin to knot around my body, the primitive, muscular face within my face begins to close off all avenues to the outside world, it is time for me to pack my bag and pick my way through the dogshit on the sidewalk toward another iron day.

  I carry my papers and photographs about with me in one of those oldfashioned briefcases which the Essen auto-workers nowadays use as lunch pails. If I do not keep this bulky, fatuous load with me Marilyn pores through my manuscript trying to find out what I am up to. Marilyn is a disturbed and unhappy woman. I let her see nothing because I know that she discusses me with other people and because she is in my estimation not equipped to understand correctly the insights into man’s soul that I have evolved since I began to think about Vietnam. Marilyn is eager, but for her own sake only, that I should have a prosperous career. She is alarmed to see me leave the high road of orthodox S-R propaganda and strike out a path of my own. She is a conformist who hoped to marry in me her conformist twin. But I have never in my heart been a conformist. I have always just been biding my time. Marilyn’s great fear is that I will drag her out of the suburbs into the wilderness. She thinks that every deviation leads into the wilderness. This is because she has a false conception of America. She cannot believe that America is big enough to contain its deviants. But America is bigger than all of us: I acknowledged that long before I began to say my say to Coetzee—America will swallow me, digest me, dissolve me in the tides of its blood. Marilyn need have no fear: she will always have a home. Nor, in the true myth of America, is it I who am the deviant but the cynic Coetzee together with all those who no longer feel the authentic American destiny crackling within them and stiffening their marrow. Only the strong can hold course through history’s doldrums. It is possible that Coetzee may survive the 1970’s; but simple natures like Marilyn’s will rot without a core of belief.

  There is no doubt that Marilyn would have liked to believe in me. But she has found honest belief impossible ever since she decided that my moral balance was being tipped by my work on Vietnam. My human sympathies have been coarsened, she thinks, and I have become addicted to violent and perverse fantasies. So much have I learned on those sentimental nights when she weeps on my shoulder and bares her heart. I kiss her brow and croon comfort. I urge her to cheer up. I am my old self, I tell her, my same old loving self, she must only trust me. My voice drones on, she sleeps. This soothing medicine is good for a day or two of sudden embraces, tiptoeing, warm meals, confidences. Marilyn is a trusting soul with no one to trust. She lives in the hope that what her friends call my psychic brutalization will end with the end of the war and the Vietnam Project, that reinsertion into civilization will tame and eventually humanize me. This novelettish reading of my plight amuses me: I might even one day play out the role of ruined and reconstructed boy, did I not suspect the guiding hands of Marilyn’s sly counsellors. Books have begun to roll out, I know, about the suburban sadists and cataleptic dropouts with Vietnamese skeletons in their cupboards. But the truth is that like huffy Henry I never did hack anyone up: I often reckon, in the dawn, them up: nobody is ever missing. Nor, if I were to commit myself body and soul to some fiction or other, would I choose any fiction but my own. I am still the captain of my soul.

  Marilyn and her friends believe that everyone who approaches the innermost mechanism of the war suffers a vision of horror which depraves him utterly. (I articulate Marilyn and her friends better than they do themselves. This is because I understand them as they do not understand me.) During the past year relations between my own and other human bodies have changed in ways which I shall recount in detail at the correct time and place. Marilyn connects these changes with the twenty-four pictures of human bodies that I am now forced to carry around with me all day in my briefcase. She believes I have a secret, a cancer of shameful knowledge. She attributes it to me for her own consolation, for to believe in secrets is to believe the cheery doctrine that hidden in the labyrinth of the memory lies an explanation for the haphazard present. She would not believe disclaimers, nor would her friends. They flex their talons: be it ever so deeply rooted, they promise her, we will dig it out. I dismiss them. I would explain it all to Marilyn were she not so full of their low dogged poison. There are no secrets, I would tell her, everything is on the surface and visible in mere behavior, to those who have eyes to see. When you find that you can no longer kiss me, I would say, you talk in signs, telling me that I am dead meat which you are revolted to take in your mouth. When for my part I convulse your body with my little battery-driven probe, I am only finding a franker way to touch my own centers of power than through the unsatisfying genital connection. (She cries when I do it but I know that she loves it. People are all the same.) I have no secrets from you, I say, nor you any from me.

  But the daytime Marilyn is remorseless in her urge to unveil the mysteries. Every Wednesday she installs a pregnant black teenager in the house and goes to San Diego for therapy and shopping. I do not disapprove and gladly pay. If she will return to being a smiling honey-blonde with long brown legs, I do not mind by what unsound route she gets there. I am weary of this mental patient with hair in rats’-tails sprawling around my home, sighing, clasping her hands, sleeping round the clock. I pay my money and hope for results. At present, however, the Wednesday agon of coming to terms with herself deprives her of all appeal: the silent tears, the red nose, the cheesy flesh anesthetize my most powerful erections and leave me plying grimly at her with only the dimmest epidermal sheath.

  Yet Wednesdays, I find, are the days when I need Marilyn most. I come home purposely early to release Marcia and wait behind the curtains for Marilyn’s Volkswagen. When she opens the door, hubby stands ready to help with the parcels and gets a smile from which a shaft of cynical insight is not absent. Marilyn w
ants above all else to fall down and sleep forever; instead she has me fussing at her skirts like a spaniel. Do I catch the whiff of a strange man on her? Unhappy young wives who drive off to a day of unspecified appointments are often conducting extra-marital liaisons. I know the world. I am curious to know the truth, very curious. What could another man see in this tired, beaten woman? As an exercise I watch her through a strange man’s eyes. New perspectives excite me. My eyes, no doubt, glow. But Marilyn is tired: she smiles and brushes off my caresses: the day is sticky, she must shower, did I pay Marcia? I am mature and forbearing. I watch her shower. Under the water her movements are gawky, youthful.

  One can grow addicted to anything, anything at all. I am addicted to driving long distances, the longer the better, though it exhausts me. I find masticating a disgusting process, yet I eat incessantly. (I am a thin man, as you will have guessed: my body voids all nutriment half-digested.) I am plainly addicted to my marriage, and addiction is in the end a surer bond than love. If Marilyn is unfaithful she is so much the dearer to me, for if strangers prize her she must be valuable, and I am reassured. Every faithless afternoon flows into a reservoir of intimate memory within this neurotic housebody, and I who by the most resolute and fevered acts of the imagination have so far failed to share their savor have promised myself that one day I will broach that dam.

  She falls asleep folded in her own arms. I lie thrilling beside her, sensitive to the subtlest emanations from her skin, fighting a delicious battle to hold the rush of words (“Tell me, tell me . . .”) that spoken prematurely break the sensual spell. It is most of all on Wednesday nights that I have to own to myself that without Marilyn I would have no reason to go on; and thereby surely begin to know what it must be like to love. Toward sleeping creatures in general I am capable of the most uncomplicated gushes of tenderness. Over sleeping children I can weep with joy. I sometimes think that I might climb to the highest pitches of ecstasy if only Marilyn would sleep through the sexual business. There are surely ways of achieving that.

  But I cannot believe that the pleasure Marilyn gets from other men is real. She is by character a masturbator who needs steady mechanical friction to generate on the inner walls of her eyes those fantasies of enslavement which eventually squeeze a groan and shudder out of her. If she goes with strangers it can only be to escape the embarrassments of solitary meals or to prolong the wistful conviviality of sensitivity gatherings where ruined couples and wooden boys touch fingertips trying to revive their dying fires. Casual sex means to Marilyn four cold feet, foreplay by rote, fingers among her dry wattles, blushes and charity in the dark, the familiar flood of disgrace. At armslength they smile tranquilly, all passion spent, longing for the certainties of the domestic hearth and praying never to see each other again. “Did you come?”—“No, but it was lovely”. Draining the bitter cup, biting the bullet.

  She keeps no record of these adventures save in undying memory. Her diary is clean, nothing in her purse is not explicable. Her guilt must be inferred from involuntary signs: a brash doorway posture, unreal absorption in chores, a candid return of my candid gaze. I am not, I would say, tormented by doubt or jealousy or much disturbed by the thought that I may be in error in attributing a secondary life to her. We are all more or less guilty; the offense is less significant than the sin; and I know my wife well, having contributed much to her making. If I must point to evidence that my suspicions are not extravagant, I point to the black leather writing case on the highest shelf of her wardrobe, the innermost pocket of which used to contain only a photograph of me, with the liquid brown eyes and full, wavering mouth common to all specialists in persuasion, but in which there blossomed in late February a nude pose of Marilyn herself. She reclines on a black satin Playboy sheet, her legs crossed (the razor spots come out clearly), her pubic beard on display, her neck and shoulders locked on the camera in an amateur’s bold rictus of concentration. I squirm not only for her rectitude but for the bad art of the photographer. “Help me!” squeaks the picture, a frozen girl caught in a frozen moment by a freezing eye. Contrast the great fashion models with their message of impersonal mockery: Meat for your Master. I emerge from the pages of Vogue trembling with powerlessness.

  The photographs I carry with me in my briefcase belong to the Vietnam report. Some will be incorporated into the final text. On mornings when my spirits have been low and nothing has come, I have always had the stabilizing knowledge that, unfolded from their wrappings and exposed, these pictures could be relied on to give my imagination the slight electric impulse that is all it needs to set it free again. I respond to pictures as I do not to print. Strange that I am not in the picture-faking side of propaganda.

  Only one of my pictures is openly sexual. It shows Clifford Loman, 6’ 2”; 220 lb., onetime linebacker for the University of Houston, now a sergeant in the 1st Air Cavalry, copulating with a Vietnamese woman. The woman is tiny and slim, possibly even a child, though one is usually wrong about the ages of Vietnamese. Loman shows off his strength: arching backward with his hands on his buttocks he lifts the woman on his erect penis. Perhaps he even walks with her, for her hands are thrown out as if she is trying to keep her balance. He smiles broadly; she turns a sleepy, foolish face on the unknown photographer. Behind them a blank television screen winks back the flash of the bulb. I have given the picture the provisional title “Father Makes Merry with Children” and assigned it a place in Section 7.

  I am, by the way, having a series of very good mornings, and the essay, usually a vast lumbering planet in my head, has been spinning itself smoothly out. I rise before dawn and tiptoe to my desk. The birds are not yet yammering outside, Marilyn and the child are sunk in oblivion. I say a grace, holding the finished chapters to my exulting breast, then lay them back in their little casket and without looking at yesterday’s words begin to write. New words flow. The frozen sea inside me thaws and cracks. I am the warm, industrious genius of the household weaving my protective fabrications.

  I have only to beware to guard my ears against the rival voices that Marilyn releases from the radio sometimes between 7:00 and 8:00 (I respond to the voice too as I do not to print). It is the bomb tonnage and target recitals in particular that I have no defense against. Not the information itself—it is not in my nature to be disturbed by the names of places I will never see—but the plump, incontrovertible voice of the master of statistics himself calls up in me a tempest of resentment probably unique to the mass democracies, which sucks a whirlpool of blood and bile into my head and renders me unfit for consecutive thought. Radio information, I ought to know from practise, is pure authority. It is no coincidence that the two voices we use to project it are the voices of the two masters of the interrogation chamber—the sergeant-uncle who confides he has taken a liking to you, he would not like to see you hurt, talk, it is no disgrace, everyone talks in the end; and the cold, handsome captain with the clipboard. Print, on the other hand, is sadism, and properly evokes terror. The message of the newspaper is: “I can say anything and not be moved. Watch as I permute my 52 affectless signs”. Print is the hard master with the whip, print-reading a weeping search for signs of mercy. Writer is as much abased before him as reader. The pornographer is the doomed upstart hero who aspires to such delirium of ecstasy that the surface of the print will crack beneath his words. We write our violent novelties on the walls of lavatories to bring the walls down. This is the secret reason, the mere hidden reason. Obscuring the hidden reason, unseen to us, is the true reason: that we write on lavatory walls to abase ourselves before them. Pornography is an abasement before the page, such abasement as to convulse the very page. Print-reading is a slave habit. I discovered this truth, as I discovered all the truths in my Vietnam report, by introspection. Vietnam, like everything else, is inside me, and in Vietnam, with a little diligence, a little patience, all truths about man’s nature. When I joined the Project I was offered a familiarization tour of Vietnam. I refused, and was permitted to refus
e. We creative people are allowed our whims. The truth of my Vietnam formulations already begins to shimmer, as you can see, through the neat ranks of script. When these are transposed into print their authority will be binding.

  There remains the matter of getting past Coetzee. In my darker moments I fear that when battle breaks out between the two of us I will not win. His mind does not work like mine. His sympathy has ceased to flow. I would do almost anything for his respect. I know I am a disappointment to him, that he no longer believes in me. And when no one believes in you, how hard it is to believe in yourself! On evenings when the sober edge of reality is sharpest, when my assembled props feel most like notions out of books (my home, for example, out of a La Jolla décor catalog, my wife out of a novel that waits fatefully for me in a library in provincial America), I find my hand creeping toward the briefcase at the foot of my desk as toward the bed of my existence but also, I will admit, as toward an encounter full of delicious shame. I uncover my photographs and leaf through them again. I tremble and sweat, my blood pounds, I am unstrung and fit this night only for shallow, bilious sleep. Surely, I whisper to myself, if they arouse me like this I am a man and these images of phantoms a subject fit for men!

  My second picture is of two Special Forces sergeants named (I read from their chests) Berry and Wilson. Berry and Wilson squat on their heels and smile, partly for the camera but mostly out of the glowing wellbeing of their strong young bodies. Behind them we see scrub, then a wall of trees. Propped on the ground before him Wilson holds the severed head of a man. Berry has two, which he holds by the hair. The heads are Vietnamese, taken from corpses or near-corpses. They are trophies: the Annamese tiger having been exterminated, there remain only men and certain hardy lesser mammals. They look stony, as severed heads always seem to do. For those of us who have entertained the fearful suspicion that the features of the dead slip and slide and are kept in place for the mourners only by discreet little cottonwool wads, it is heartening to see that, marmoreally severe, these faces are as well-defined as the faces of sleepers, and the mouths decently shut. They have died well. (Nevertheless, I find something ridiculous about a severed head. One’s heartstrings may be tugged by photographs of weeping women come to claim the bodies of their slain; a handcart bearing a coffin or even a man-size plastic bag may have its elemental dignity; but can one say the same of a mother with her son’s head in a sack, carrying it off like a small purchase from the supermarket? I giggle.)