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Michael Brodsky

AFTER THE FAMOUS party at which Dov Grey and Gwenda had deployed their dirty laundry before such luminaries as Bette Kaye, Stu Pott was treated to a grand tour of the factory. Seeing Stu wriggle Dov Grey remarked: "At first I too felt especially awkward, especially vulnerable, amid so much material." Stu turned away: especially painful having such a sentiment, unknown to him prior to this moment, brought home. "Come on, out with it," he pursued, smiling at a receptionist returning from a late lunch. "It's just that if I had to be purchasing all these raw materials, crucial, I am the first to infer, to the production of ***, I wouldn't be able to help feeling each item, each--" "Raw," Dov noted modestly; "--raw stood in the way of escape, of a moving on, should that need or that craving come upon me." Dov looked a bit blank as if this was not at all what he had been expecting, much less encouraging. "I need to purchase them. I need to acquire them," he recited, too truculently for Stu's taste. This was not the Dov deduced at the party. That Doy never was ruffled nor offended, transmogrifying every thrust into a well-nigh deliriously ironic counterthrust that hardly qualified, so sweet was the delivery, as thrust at all. "Of course, of course," Stu gasped, ever the complaisant page, "you can't help acquiring. For each acquisition Must signal and epitaph a spasm of hope, hopeful self-expansion in behalf of the company's future, which is of course indistinguishable at this stage of the game from your own." "Each acquisition is a necessary acquisition all in the name of an even more necessary commitment." Stu grappled with terror over Dov's tone. Was it one of dogmatic tendentious correction? Was there room for more than one interpretation? whether or not it was a correction Stu now felt the need to correct the correction. "Even if every . . . raw may contribute to your sustenance, I mean, your self- expansion, now or at some future date impossible to predict, impossible, that is, with the equipment presently at our, I mean your, disposal, isn't there nevertheless a possibility that whatever you end up producing will be dwarfed by these raw materials, or rather, by their residues continuing to take up space?" With what might even be construed as emphasis on total absence of rancor Dov said, "The raws are used but never used up. Therefore no residues." Then a marked shift in inflection: "But residues or no residues what am I supposed to do--deny their existence?" Taking him abruptly by the arm, Dov Grey led Stu Pott past the adjacent alcove outpouching into a cubicle saddled with a single unwashed window presently overpopulated with a few low-flying black-bellied clouds, a small cabinet, a larger cabinet of darker grey, a coatstand, and a radiator. The alarmingly rapid climb of dusk shadow up the high-rises across the way invested the scimitarlike illumination of those mullions still unin fected by the wave with a brilliance all out of proportion to their actual capacity to dazzle. A foot protruded from a phone booth.
     In a whisper: "So you understand. You know, then, how hard it is to exist among these raws, which alarmingly give off the whiff of finished products though never mine. But I run a factory and how can a factory run without raws? Can a high-rise go higher minus its mullions? can any self-respecting phone booth draw a profit without a protruding leg--sorry, foot--to advertise its pissy discomforts? I hate my raws, inexhaustible, self-reconstituting without a hint from me or my foremen, pitting themselves against productions to come, dooming them in advance. At the same time I want to drink in their vital substance at once, to incorporate and metabolize them towards something intrinsic and inherent so they are no longer looming up against me as they are now--this very moment!--so I am no longer tormented and, worse, incapacitated, by my previable separation from their likes. Their very substance, apart from whatever I may or may not produce in the way of ***, must become part of my own before I can begin to think of synthesizing what will perforce stand opposed to that substance. I am tortured by their separate existence apart and against. Even if I know these raws ultimately will be tributary to my own products albeit in a manner not always traceable. Yet the minute I've met the challenge of acquiring them, vital to my self-expansion, that is, expansion of the ***, I feel weighted down, dwarfed, blocked, obstructed by BOTH their competitive expansion [they seem to bloom most blatantly in my domain!], their achieved towering yet ever agglomerating coming-to-be, AND their fragility. After all they now are also mine and as mine--even if nowhere near ultimate transmogrification into what is truly mine--must be shielded from those hostile forces hired to impinge on the chest cage of all raw materials whatever their source. So I must make common cause with these demons."
     "So," said Stu, looking around the cubicle for a human presence, "they are, these . . . raws, BOTH part of your substance, an inward extension, as it were, to be protected at all cost from all that may encroach AND an alien adversative presence already jeering at the littleness of the substance to be generated from their juices." Stu surprised himself with the virulence of his lucidity. It was somebody else, mavbe the *** themselves, talking.
     "I get pleasure from my intercourse with these materials," said Dov, with a certain slimy sweetness, as if Stu's extreme position was making them too conspicuous to the powers that be. "Yet all the time I must be surpassing them, going far beyond each and every, as well as well over and above the unanimous organic whole they comprise ifonly in my eyes For in actual fact each is a discrete and separate entity"--uncontrollablc laughter--"as much at war with every other as I, as my ***. But I refuse to see each entrenched in its own loneliness, perched, as it were, atop the genesis of that loneliness. Instead I hallucinate an amalgam against which hopelessly I strive to compete. Insist on deciphering a single--total--message and conflating its innumerable components, digestible moments, to an overwhelming, lucid, and impregnable threat. I am also terrified others do not see them as raws. For others they are finished products. But for my exalted purposes they are raws and nothing but and to be modified pursuant to the exigencies of a particular vision--sorry, of a particular market singlehandedly created by me."
     As if to complete the elegiacness of the gesture--Stu was fingering one of the radiator's many spines--Dov Grey said: "Yes, sometimes I too seek to fuse with my raws, and precisely because they are foreign to soil the fusion is ecstatic and total, if shortlived. But I have a destiny to fulfill, as you do, young man, and since neither ecstatic fusion nor the ensuing narcosis can last forever there are always interstices to be had through which I fall back to a sense of that destiny's time about to run our compliments of the raws--my betrayers. For they sucked me towards fusion with their completed splendor, which was, when all is said and done, not my completeness, much less my splendor. I must seek my own in opposition to the sum of splendors scattered by those raws with which it is always hopeless to strive to fuse, fusion embodying the supreme form of flight from construction of a destiny. But in the presence of so many how can I hope to produce my very own, which will be counterpoised not to one or two but to an undenumerable plethora gyrated towards intimidating immensities." Dov was sobbing, that is to say, making all the motions proper to a sobbing though his eyes were dry.
     Stu Pott did not know how to answer. But at this moment he cared not if he did or did not answer. Something in the factory smell perturbing he wanted to get out into the so-called fresh air. Vastly mistaken he had been about old Dov Grey, perhaps it had been the nagging presence of Gwenda casting him in so palmary a haiflight. With Gwenda come and gone he was just Dov T. Grey, landgrubber and would-be mastermind. Making an excuse, something about an upset stomach, he ran towards the main exit. In the open air however, the open air quickly lost most of its anticipated charm. In short, far from Dov and the *** Stu wanted nothing so much as to be once more among and between. He remembered having left several versions of his resume in the front office, went back in dreading another encounter. He was made to understand by the guard on duty that as the receptionist was now foraging on an upper floor he would have to use the elevator if he intended to retrieve whatever paperwork had been left in her hands. The guard eyed him askance, so he felt even more than in the presence of Dov that he did not, would never, exist except in the part of him interpellated by the guard--by the factory--seeking proof once again of its own baneful authority, that is, its insatiability and not just with respect to raws-into-***. The longer he stayed here the more he would be interpellated for collision with ironclad structures rendered ironclad precisely through Dov's Grey-eminence decision to abstain from setting their mechanism in motion. If he stayed on--came aboard, as the eminence had put it--then he must resign himself to being called to account only in so far as he threatened, in other words, gave meaning to the prohibitions embodied by those structures (in whose mythy mechanism, once activated, he would be less engulfed then routinely left for dead). The elevator man he caught grimacing, or rather attempting to transform every inchoate grimace into a neutral little tic. Though maybe what he, Stu Pott, perceived to be a wrenched effort at transformation was nothing but the tic's native trajectory living its life several spheres apart from the substrate's will.
     Too much chat with Dov Grey was creating unwarranted expectation of a world in incessant transformation. Better to count on a totality of the most stultifying geneses whereby nothing, not even by the wildest stretch of whatever faculty was most susceptible to such pranks, could be perceived as changing character sufficiently to demand a change of name.
     Approaching the reception area with its frosted glass partitions he could hear the blare of the weather forecast for the New York Bay area--How determine when a raw material was authentically raw or not, even to the slightest degree, already processed?--delivered in a nakedly genial male voice that, matter-of-factly unlocalizible in that empty space, made him shiver or want to shiver, he wasn't sure which. Voice created and enhanced a sense of encroachment as if a corpse must be nearby. Very much a voice not being listened to, either because it would never dream of coexisting with a listener or only with one definitively dead. So why was he feeling blissful amid the calvary of his suddenly oddly gainful unemployment? The voice was going on to establish even more minutely time, place, circumambience, in a word, venue. The voice--summoning forth a transparency of curtains blown halfway out of a window open wide on the bluest of skies--was holding forth for the sole purpose of emphasizing the uselessness of all this information to . . . a corpse? Only as he got closer and closer, though could he strictly speaking get any closer, and the voice rose in response to intensification of the curtain blowing invoked by its period, he knew it was no longer a question of what might or might not be useful to him, Stu Pott. The report was not for him. Though later on there would surely be retrospective scrambling for just such useless details as were being squandered at this very moment on a total absence of context, the frenzy of scrambling in direct proportion to the cruciality of the quarry sought. In spite of himself he went on listening, as if to a house of worship caving in on itself. He looked down from the window in her--the receptionist's--Miss Redmount's--office. From his angle of approach the intersection below [in the vicinity of a trapezoidal square wielding as its sceptre a contourless hunk hewn in homage to some bygone crook] before each went its separate way of two clotted thoroughfares stank of the peeling covers of an album commemorating little old New York.
     He was thrust out of the album by an awareness, astonishment at the lag before awareness, that the voice had surrendered to an immaculately boned version of some rollicking tune of earliest youth. Alone in the vast Redmount barn he would have liked to listen undiverted to the tune-in-itself as commentary on the tenuity of youthful dreams; mournful registration as celebration of the gap between then and now. But the particular rendition was itself so attenuated, so woefully bland [the jauntiness so much a secondary sexual character of that intrinsic blandness]--was itself so forthright a presentation of unctuous, invincible blandness, that there was no getting past the ever-expanding attenuatedness of the rendition itself to the secret attenuatedness that ought, ooze of time passing, to have been forming crystallike and unseen at the very heart of the heart of what was being rendered.
     Before he could determined whether or not he had indeed undergone a transformation from then to now or was still very much his own raw material, chaff of inconsequence, he noted the back of a head, a woman's head. Before he could determine whether or not he wanted to determine whether she was living or dead he had turned on his heels, forgetting the valuable portfolio outlining his accomplishments he had come to retrieve. On the public bus uptown it was that horrifying moment just before authentic dusk goes on duty in the urban precinct. Sitting on the left, closer to sunset, he noted how the vehicle's ceiling scrolls of fluorescence as well as lights from stores grazing its right flank were flung out into the almost-night, that is, their reflection deep into the window was superimposed upon the almost-light. Would Dov hire him? After all, he chortled madly, didn't the present observation qualify as a ***, at least of sorts?
     With the bus halted to collect yet another passenger Stu Pott took note, as if this was the farewell ***, of yet another lamp, threatening to fall from its post gnarled as a stray cat and attempting nonetheless to feed at about the same height those leaves intertwined with its fate though already jaundiced with autumn some few remaining choicest scraps of blear. Hard to determine the primary source of illumination, or rather, jaundice: autumn or dusky blear. Which is not to say there were not lamps poised to reach out towards nothing, arched so as to culminate nowhere, positioned, say, between two outthrusting boughs on adjacent boles yet incapable of shedding any light on either, continuing therefore? to blink and mist out of impotent selfpitying rage. Stu took advantage of this moment of bliss, euphoria even, ascribable to any number of . . . raws to wonder why life was so unbearable, why it was always a question of never getting too comfortable and bracing oneself thereby for the next twist of the knife. But shouldn't this query have reared its hyacinthine locks much later, after he had been a considerable time in the firm and plausibly drained of all faith in humanity and hope for the future? There was nothing in his youthy bloom to justify so precocious, so procacious! so premature, a spasm.
     For the first time, in the midst of Fifty-seventh and Sixth, Stu shivered pleasurably at the prospect of working himself to the bone for Dov Grey, of having every morning to spread the thighs of his soul, enticing to their doom challenges of all sexes. Advancing towards him were three lawyers or three accountants or three dentists or three television producers outshouting each other beatifically in an effort to reconstitute--and maximal merriment in tandem--some fatuous incident they had just lived through. Stu did not know if he envied them or was simply relieved that life, as he figured it from outside the kennel, was being delivered right to his doorstep, proleptically--prophylactically, so to speak--in the form of this expendable encounter--in order that he might be spared pursuit of same. Watching them almost fuse as each strove to shout higher than the others his particular version Stu twinged with regret at not belonging to such a brotherhood but also with relief. He had minutes before been in danger of succumbing to the magic of such a fate and here it was prosectomized before him into vital components far less than magical. Over and done with and not by him, even better, good riddance. The rains had cleared and the sky was starry. If this was what life was all about they could have it, he hadn't missed a thing.
     While Stu Port was incubating the future the future was already upon him: After their conversation that afternoon Dov took his day home to Gwenda and asked her point-blank whether or not he should hire the young buck. "What's he like," she murmured, stroking his testicles, for they were stretched out in bed.
     But when, in response, he described Stu Gwenda was suddenly rife with demurral. When he ventured to call Stu young, which seemed indisputable, Gwenda suggested that he was not quite so unfledged as his sighs and simpers made out. When Dov rehearsed his party-time rapture she attested to "rather glaring" lapses of attentiveness, which did not bode well for his future as a ***-man. Until it became clear as pitch she was interested in not so much resolving the issue of whether or not Stu Pott ought to be recruited as reassuring herself of some still undiminished capacity for reaction against prior reactions proving never would she, Gwenda, be debased to occupying another's space at the same time and thereby losing Gwenda completely.
     What she shot forth were not feelings but feelers regarding what sort of eruptions might best enable her to maintain hegemony over the status quo in a future apparently destined to be blighted with a rapid turnover of Stus Pott.
     Even if largely straitjacketed by Gwenda's displeasure, Dov knew he wanted Stu on the team, knew he was overwhelmingly drawn to the lad, although there was no denying the insidious onset of dread for in the vicinity, predictably, of Gwenda upflowing eager certainty that Pott was vital, tributary, to his well-being and that of the *** could only be reconstituted as unlocalizably exterior obstruction to some well-being deeper than any he might fathom, as exploitation of that well-being well beyond concrete manifestation because absurdly, narrowly, indissolubly linked to her sudden shifts of mood.
     Stu should be the acid test of an ability to function at last without Gwenda's enceinte and despite her protestational pacing of its battlements. Here was a case where forever alert to his being duped by another she was bearing down on inherent organic craving as purest example of same. Decision became no easier when she contracted to speak glowingly of the "youngster," not yet a windfall, remembering how he had asked, under the hat check's sardonic stare, if they wanted him to flag down a taxi. For this access of vigor bespoke little more than the ease with which it could be shunted into the old rut of denegation, was, in short, but the sign the rest-stop, of its obverse, never long in coming. For now she was muttering about how frustrated he had appeared at the party, clearly furious at not being paid sufficient court, particularly by older men of a certain stripe, wanting to be elsewhere, doing something else besides listening, so what and no matter if to one, Dov Grey! with at last something momentous to teach. Continuing to heed, Dov had the stunned sensation of undergoing unquenchable venom still in quest of a plausible target. "Yes, the way he strutted about. I could tell he didn't like what he was doing." No way not to Dov-allegorize her insinuation. A meaning machine ever on the alert for the truth beneath appearances which truth invariably reduced to somebody's--in other words, everybody's--petty frustration over the rift between his/her desire and his/her accomplishment, exercising a craft that untrammeled by intelligence was able going fia beyond intelligence to rejoin the most slovenly childishness in its privileged domain, Gwenda made sure Dov always ended up concluding she meant, where such pettiness and frustration were concerned, to mean him.
     Not the time, then, to reveal how immediately he had been taken by the mien, the stance, of this particular supplicant. From the very first minute Stu had struck him as the purest, most ephebelike of contenders. Had there in fact been a vacancy before this godlike stance made it overwhelmingly flagrant? He had been so overcome with the supplicant's raw need, had so identified and fused with that need his own space of judgment was left unoccupied. No one, therefore, to receive the supplicant. Someone to bleed for but not to receive the supplicant. So with nobody in the space of judgment--with all of him oozed into the opposing space, that of the supplicant--how know he had chosen wisely? Spreading her thighs and placing his hand between, Gwenda remarked: "Impossible to talk to you. His eagerness, need, call it whatever you like, wish to acquire that of which he hasn't the slightest conception--and I don't mean simply; baldly, the ***--has become yours. Too excruciating to witness that raw need cavort in supplication from a distance so you elected to be him, be it--the raw need. And you end up--go put some cold water on your neck--more excruciatedly, bloodily victimized by your self-confessed illegitimate exercise of power in determining his fate than he could ever be." No turning back. Dov decreed he had no choice but to speak his stirrings, not unlike love. "And at the same time I see myself--always from his point of view--as scandalously peripheral--I see our * ** as peripheral, I mean, to his dingy little life--as reduced all said and done to some dingy little solicitation of the margin of his consciousness of the brilliant future awaiting him out there." "In his presence you are unmanned," Gwenda noted calmly. With commensurate calm she removed his lifeless paw from the center of her body: "Fuck the little sod." Dov [aside]: "His indifference, bafflement, contempt, fear, impatience are infinitely more potent somehow than my nisus of conviction that the *** are impregnably great." "Our ***," she murmured dozing, or pretending to doze so that her reminder might seem less invested with coercion. "Near him--for all that he is the supplicant--I remain consigned to the periphery of that amalgam of indifference, bafflement, cowardice, philistine fidelity to imminent far more generous offers. I am a news item sketching the direst catastrophes stalled on the margin of his sensorium. And I feel apologetic for embodying catastrophe at a time when he requires only sweetness and light." Hours later--as he was fingering Gwenda the way she needed to be--Dov for the life of him couldn't recall the swelling moments of their debate hastening towards resolution. Collapsing spent he could only conclude they didn't matter in themselves, were interchangeable with countless others. What mattered was their having dutifully consecrated a liberal slab of brute duration to a decision achieved long before, and it was to this particular slab that by tacit mutual agreement they intended to point whenever for their future peace of mind it became necessary to localize and isolate the circumstances beyond their control resulting in Stu's engagement.
     "What is he like?" she murmured, stroking his testicles, but with a new mansuetude, even whimsy, most becoming in the morning light. "Seems like a nice boy," she hastened to conjecture, eager to prolong the effect--of mild openness to risk, even of too great trustingness. "Malleable--might function well in Breaking and Entering but not in Recrements." Then, more matter-of-factly: "How many presently under Chip O'Chop in Recrements?" He calculated and as he went about calculating, at least going through the motions of one calculating, she looked at him with not adoration but something close to adoration. It grew, this beast of something close, until it had no choice but to shed, half-excretion, half-secretion, a tiny codetta of amused contempt. "'Bout twenty," he replied, with a trifling smugness that suggested he was about to swallow a voluptuary sprig of bittersweet chocolate shot through with silky almonds.
     Actually, Dov's stab at smugness disguised a shyness bordering on mortification as Gwenda, gazing, persisted both in half-meditating what suddenly had become his boyish brilliance in stumbling on so fetching an adjunct to the family business as Pott--a boyish brilliance much enhanced by that shyness--and in half-inducing, prolonging, reckless immersion in a completely new perspective on her lover and its issue of strange new feelings, to which she willingly succumbed insofar as they bodied forth the promise of authentic mystery, total loss of glandular control, transformation into distant then of oppressive now. Even more reckless inasmuch as there was no third to scowl at such wretched preoccupation with their wretched little family business except that from time to time each became that third, scowling without knowing he or she was in fact scowling down this . . . house of cards. Or, as Gwenda later explained it to her sister Trendy [wife and, depending on the time of day, concubine to the aforementioned Hinkie-Winkle], to have their sexual life once more--that is, that night--the night little Stu insinuated himself into its nooks and crannies, jogs and ambries, orlops and oubliettes--they had had no choice but to meet his slithering half-way and erect him as the body--in other words, the third party--in question. You mean, Trendy simpered, the dummy variable you wrote me about last year, around the time of Hinkie's promotion--Thanksgiving. Halloween, Gwenda corrected savagely: at any rate, yes, the dummy variable, the alternative self, the alternative Dov, that is at the same time here--in our sexual life, I mean--and not here. Little sis remarked--a bit self-righteously, Gwenda thought, though she adored nobody more than her little old sis Trendy--something to the effect that she and H-W, on the other hand, had absolutely no need for such prostheses. I leave all that to Krafft and Ebbing, she tittered wholesomely. Rather, Gwenda retorted [though she tried to make said retort sound like melismatic musing], we eroticize our common concerted annihilation of that other self, that other Dove, though too late did she realize this rider in no way modified the thrust of the just-proclaimed law of their impoverished fusings. So, Trendy concluded, this Stu is now the figurehead you try to capsize in your thrustings and thrashings. Sadly Gwenda concurred: This other self will most definitely have to be erected from time to time to motor its own demolItion which demolition is the supreme and essential propulsion needed to get us through our fucking. Hinkly-Winkly and I, Trendy began again but Gwenda [who after so incriminatory a divulgement of boudoir inanition was in no mood for contrastive attestations] cut her off at the pass with, Sometimes I think the alternative self, the alternative Dove, this . . . Stu person, exists purely to be annihilated so as through its annihilation to propel our propulsion through the act of fucking. Cruelly-kind, Trendy interpreted: You mean he doesn't exist after all as a target of Dov desire. Through its good auspices, Gwenda continued [bypassing the kindness], our fucking becomes a kind of taunting of that alternative self. What I mean is [Trendy was beginning to yawn stepwise-dainty now that she had already achieved her objective in entering into any conversation, namely, establishment of a good fortune far greater than that of her interlocutress], as he penetrates me, then thrusts inside, he always feels he is cruelly rejecting this third party, at once anti-Dov and composite therefore imaginary lover compiled from bits and pieces of all his recruitment interviews [The department of human and quasi human resources over there is decked out like a waterfront dive if you ask me, Trendy murmured huskily], achieved or missed, and so our intimacy, if that is what it turns out to be, becomes cruel and callous and cruelty and callousness [always towards this immemorial third]-once it is done saddening and immobilizing the thrashing and the thrusting--Dov's thrashing and thrusting--becomes the motor--the swinge--the nisus--to get us old-timers thrashing and thrusting through the thrashing and thrusting. And so [almost inaudible, at least to Trendy, at her end of the line of so much inter-city static] never ceases to remind us our relation is but an adultery enacted in its shadow. Administering a final mithridate-yawn to the expiring patient-situation, Trendy whined: And where is he while all this is going on. I mean, she exploded, is he right there in bed with the two of you. No, no, no, Gwenda, with a certain unmistakable and grating hauteur, replied now that she had at last been given a chance to focus on the complexity rather than on the AMA-level pathology of the whole operation, he's just an image. We invoke him and his doings in our lovetalk. Our little language of the engorged privates, if you will [tittering here, capped, by a bodywide belch]. From the belch, Dov--for it is still Dov's moment--Dov and Gwenda's, to be exact--only much later, or maybe not so much later, will it be clarified, that is, scoured that is, brutally violated, as Trendy and Gwenda's--moment . . . of inter-penetrating sisterly communion--backed off towards the wardrobe not quite blocking the toilet seat from view, "Chip O'Chop is no longer with us," Dov finally admitted, or realized. "Chip O'Chap's the new foreman." "Oh, what's he like." "Fiftyish, balding, good boy, resembles Hu Fu." "I remember Fu," she conceded in a tone akin to a shrug of contemptuous dismissal, particularly glacial now she was once again intoxicated by the novelty of a gesture far grander: turning on the TV by remote control.

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