STEVEN, KNOWN AS CLAUDE, ORIGINALLY SAMUEL

STEVEN, KNOWN AS CLAUDE, ORIGINALLY SAMUEL

I have not left the house in three weeks.  Not even to get the mail.  I had the mail stopped.  And the newspaper.  Did that on the phone.  It’s not because I’m afraid.  I have nothing to fear.  No one comes and goes, except a delivery man.  I’m a bachelor.  No children.  I told friends to stay away.  I told them that I wasn’t sick, they didn’t have to worry.  I just wanted to be left to myself.  They’d hear from me, I told them, when I wanted to come out again.  I don’t have to worry about their being offended.  They’re all sycophants, they’re all my friends because of the money.  They’re not friends.  They’re bought and paid for, they’re gifts I gave to myself, to amuse me, to keep me from being bored.  Well, I’m bored--with them.  Tired of them.  I’m sick of them. 

     There it goes.  The stereo.  I have it set on a timer.  Made it myself.  I can do things like that.  Every day at this hour it plays and I sit and listen.  But not today.  I don’t really care about it.  It was just something to do.  I’m no Ferdinand under a cork tree.  I’m no Ferdinand.  Sometimes I stand and listen, look out the window, and feelings, associations, come, unbidden.  But this is really hypocritical.  This is me.  It’s punishment.  I don’t know why I do it.  Catharsis?  No.  Nothing there to purge.  Nothing I need to purge.  Perhaps music, symphonic music, insinuates itself the way it does because it is made by many people at once sharing the feeling; it’s harmony, for God’s sake, and I get all nostalgic, not so much for the music but for the fact that it exists.  I care about that.   But I really don’t care.

     I have no worries.  All my worries are imaginary.  I know that.  Basic needs, hah!  This house is huge, sixty-two rooms.  Patios, swimming pool, tennis courts, whirlpools, saunas, it has it all.  The Florida intercoastal, between Ft. Lauderdale and Miami.  All pink brick.  Solid slate roof.  Built like a bomb shelter.  Boat docks, yachts, speedboats, pleasure crafts of all sorts--it’s all here.  And this is only one of my residences.  There’s one in Manhattan.  There’s another in Beverly Hills.  Another in Chicago.  And then there are the European residences.  Geneva, Rome, Paris--but why am I telling you this?  You know.  You know.  Am I bragging?  That’s a bad habit.  I know.  I know.  Who cares.  If I want to brag, I’ll brag.

     The truth of the matter is, I’m sick of it all.  Not that I want to give anything up.  I won’t do that.  I’ll never do that.  Nevertheless, I’m sick of it all.  I hate to give anything away.  I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a philanthropist.  One time I subscribed to this newspaper, a monthly, called The Chronicle of American Philanthropy.  I wanted to see what rich people did to earn a reputation as a philanthropist.  I read that rag every issue all the way through.  Months on end!  It was disgusting.  It was like pornography.  That was bragging!  Oh, I’m good.  I’m an altruist.  I care for the needs of others.  Most of those people who make sure their philanthropy is reported in that rag could make a difference in the world by paying higher wages to their employees.  Mention that, though, and it’s “Sayonara, McNamara.”  You’re suddenly proscribed.  They’re phonies all right.  Who cares?  I don’t care, because I don’t have employees.  I fired all the house staff.  All of them--all over.  Everything’s shut down.  I pay no wages anymore.  All my money now accumulates.  Imagine that!  I’m getting richer. 

     Why?  I never did a thing to earn it.  My grandfather and father did it all.  They amassed incredible wealth.  Between them probably more wealth than fifty people could spend in their entire lifetimes, if they did nothing but spend.  Who cares.  I never worked a day in my life.  I went to Harvard.  I got two degrees from that school.  Never learned a thing, even when doing the Master’s degree.  Money protects one even from one’s stupidities.  Not that I was stupid.  But why study and learn if dollars could do the thing for me.  At Harvard they didn’t object.  If it was all right with them, why shouldn’t it be all right with me?  It was.  That’s that.

     I live in this house alone now.  It’s like a little universe.  There are twenty-nine bedrooms.  So far I have slept in twenty-one of them.  Eight to go.  Each night I use a different room so I don’t have to straighten anything up.  What will I do one week and one night from now?  Hah!  You expect I’ll come out then, I’ll say it’s all over!  I’ll say, Amigo, buena vista!  Not on your life.  This is not a game.  I’m serious.  No more.  Out no more!  One week and one night from now--I give myself that long to remain idle.  Then what?  Then I start searching for the laundry room.  Do you know I don’t know where the laundry room is?  I have no idea.  Why should I?  I’ve never been concerned with it before.  But it’s here.  I know it is.  When I find it, and it’s only a matter of time till I do, I’ll begin washing.  Wash, wash, wash.  I’ll wash all those sheets.  Every goddamned one of them.  Then I’ll iron them.  Every goddamned one of them.  Fold them.  Carry them to their bedrooms.  Make up all twenty-nine beds.  Why?  You want to know, so I’ll tell you.  Because it will be something to do.  Why not keep a person here to do it for me?  Because I can’t stand people anymore.  I can’t stand people.  I’m afraid I’ll kill someone.  That’s why I’m here.  I’m saving lives.  I know I’ll kill.  I know it. 

     Why? you say. Why?  You have a right to ask that question.  But I have no obligation to answer it.  I am not guilty of killing anyone.  My conscience is clear.  I have committed no crime.  You can’t compel me to answer.  And I won’t.  It’s not a crime to take measures to prevent oneself from committing a crime.  Besides, I hate people, you too.  I hate you.  Why would I tell you anything?

     Look.  It’s late afternoon.  Pelicans sitting on the docks.  See them?  Pelicans.  Deep neck pouches to hold tons of fishes in.  Just like some women I know.  But let me not get into that.  What I feel about pelicans and women is not for you.  Not for anybody, but certainly not for you, anyway, ole creep.  I hate you.  But look at those  pelicans--“Look at them birds, Nancy-Lou, ain’t they cute as pie?”  They waddle when they walk, but they’re graceful in the air and in the water.  They have such huge wingspans.  Sometimes I stand here and watch them circle over the intercoastal, their wings stretched out and still as kites.  Round and round.  They look primitive.  They look like soaring hyphens joining the past to the present.  And I don’t mean the human past, such a thinness of time and messiness of being.  I mean the world’s past.  Nothing messy about pelicans.  I like them because they aren’t human.  Even if they remind me of some women I have known.  That’s not their fault.

     I’ve been everywhere, all over the world.  I like it here just fine.  I chose this house because, well, because, I don’t know.  I’d have to think about it.  Any of the others would have done just as well.  I was in Hong Kong.  You remember the virus there?  How they slaughtered all those chickens?  Millions of them.  I saw it on the television.  Millions of chickens, shoveled up in those huge frontloader scoops and burned.  Millions.  It made me sick.  A chicken holocaust.  A sacrifice.  The capacious gods must have been stuffed.  “Hold on there, you devotees!  Enough’s enough.  Not another drumstick.  Can’t hold it.”  Why not Rome?  Why not Paris?  Why not anywhere else?  This house and its properties sit on this sprit of land surrounded by water.  No one can get here without a boat.  It has a certain modicum of privacy.  And I don’t have to pay for it.  No guards at the gates.  No employees.  No urge to kill.     

     Rome and Paris.  The gods once lived in those cities.  They have real temples, churches.  They are serious places.  They have histories.  Pasts.  Layers of life.  They’d call to me.  Also, they have people who know and understand.  They’d cure me.  I don’t want to be cured.  Here, be sure of it, nobody knows anything.  No past.  No history.  No layers.  Life is pure epidermis here.  Mere suds.  Why, I probably have the deepest history of anyone here abouts, because my grandfather built this place.  And there ain’t no chickens.  Plenty of lobster.  Caviar.  Fillet mignon.  Prawns.  No chickens.  We spurn that kind of stuff.  By we, I mean the people who nest on these sprits of land, shoving out the wildlife.  We, the philanthropists!  Remember Ross Perot taking that hit because he blasted the coral reefs round his island to make a passage for his boat?  That’s who we are.  That’s why I’m here.  I feel comfortable here. People know and respect money.  They worship it.  They worship me.  I hate them all. 

     I’ll give away not a dime.  I’d rather burn it, melt it, stack it on the space shuttle and fire it into space.  But I’ll give away not a dime.  Not to the most needy mother whose son is burning with fever and who doesn’t have enough to buy aspirin.  That ill-dressed, skinny woman, knobbing her way to the drug store, where she checks all the bottles of aspirin, looking especially for the cheapest store  brand--ninety-nine cents for a bottle of fifty.  Pretty cheap.  But she has only seventy-five cents.  I’m standing there, looking at her in the aisle, waiting for her to pocket that bottle.  I’m going to have her arrested.  Have the kid taken from her.  Let her suffer.  In heaven, god would do the same.  He’d watch to make sure she didn’t steal, and even the thought of it would prompt him to punish her.  Send her to some place of torment.  But I won’t part with that quarter.  Not on her life.

     That sounds miserly, you say.  It’s not.  It’s absolutely just.  It’s the right thing.  Isn’t that what we teach our selves everyday?  Money is morality.  The more you have the more moral you are, and the less, the less.  Oh, don’t claim it’s not so.  You’d be lying.  Just as you lie about everything else.  You tell yourself it’s not so out of some false sense of scruple about how you live.  But the logic of your living is simple, because, basically, that’s all you can handle.  Think of it.  Simple.  Imagine a conflict, any conflict--pile it on--between that skinny mother, the one with the seventy-five cents, and Ross Perot.  Make it all a case of terrible abuse of that scraggy, dead-haired, unclean thing.  Pile it on.  Who wins?  See?  That’s why I’m here instead of at Rome or Paris.  The logic of life is so much simpler here.  Why cry over that woman?  Where are the philanthropists?  If they don’t care, why should I?  They’re the philanthropists!  They don’t care because she’s not worth caring about.  That woman’s a non-entity.  Nothing comes from helping such people.  They’re the vermin that give Americans such a bad reputation.  See why I won’t go out?  I won’t.  Not anymore.  I might meet that woman. 

     Oh, I can tell lots of stories.  I can tell stories.  Stories about the peccadilloes of prominent people.  Interesting stories.  You’d like to hear them.  About all sorts of things normal people would regard as depravities.  Fun stories.  All types.  About things that would appeal to the most lurid imaginations, the most lustful, the most twisted.  There was a time when I went slumming, when slumming was everything, when all that interested me was slumming.  There are plenty of slummers out there.  You can’t imagine.  People you admire, too.  People whose faces you see all the time in the magazines and newspapers.  If you only knew.  But why bother.  You already know all about it.  Jaded.  We’re all jaded.  Besides, that’s not my game.  That phase of my life is over. 

     Something happened that made me get serious.  That made me sit up and say, Enough!  Enough!  You want to know what that was, I know you do.  But I’m not talking about it.  I hate you.  Why should I satisfy your interests?  I have no concern whatever for your interests.  You’re a voyeur, anyway, the worst kind.  I know you. 

     Let’s consider a hypothetical:  A man alienates himself from the world (that’s me), a world he considers absurd (that’s our world), because “normal” society has ceased to be normal, because everything in it is negative (at least he considers it negative, not having found much reason to think otherwise).  He (the alienated man) suffers from a soul-scarring anxiety (really, not just figuratively).  Why?  He doesn’t believe in the soul.  Experience never really teaches us anything.  All that Freudian crap notwithstanding.  The scars are forms of self-pity, that’s all, which every one of us who has them could mend could we only stand up like men.  But we don’t.  We can’t.  We’re not men.  What we are are these obsessions.  Suddenly he, the alienated man, catches a glimpse of the end.  He sees himself dead, decomposing, perhaps in some meadow in the rain in late spring.  Wildflowers around, bees, a fox pads by, sniffs, looks at the corpse, and scurries off.  It all seems so lovely, but there he is, decomposing.  His eyesockets are empty, hair lying in the grass, his shirt  open, and the skin underneath is white, rancid, crawling with maggots. He notices that there is dirt under the fingernails.  He wonders why?  What was he doing before the end came?  The thought distracts him, and he wants to be distracted.  That’s when it hits.  That’s what his life has been about.  Distraction.  And he’s still doing it, even now, staring at his own corpse.  What the hell does it all mean?  Put a meaning to it.  That’s the hypothetical.  What does it mean?  It means absolutely nothing. 

     Anxiety.  Soul-scarring anxiety.  What has happened here is that he has suddenly discovered his own innate cowardice.  In part the discovery interests him.  He is that, at least.  A coward.  A coward is not nothing.  A coward is at least something.  So much meaning has been discovered.  But it doesn’t pacify.  He wants an identity, but not any identity, not that one.  In life, his identity was made for him by purely extrinsic circumstances--money, unlimited sources of it, whatever.  It defined him.  It gave him an identity.  But it was really not a human identity.  Not one he ever really felt as human, anyway.  How many of us have human identities?   He wondered if, once, long ago, people had human identities.  So, he stares at the corpse, and gradually he becomes disoriented.  Everything he believed seems unbelievable any more, like, “How could I have believed that?” in a tone of dismay.   What follows is this feeling of grief.  A pang, without relief.  A void.  All at once. 

     We get used to everything.  Nothing lasts.  We adjust.  But, you know, one never gets over it.  The void stays.  It poisons everything.  One looks around and realizes everybody feels it, everyone knows about it.  No one speaks about it.  Instead, they speak of God.  They go to church.  They pray.  And inside is the void.  A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief.  But things get worse.  Oh, they get much worse.  This is just the beginning. 

     The alienated man discovers, by his hypothetical, that he is a single, finite, disconnected atom, a social atom, but nevertheless single and alone.  All that he once looked upon as his self, himself, has been replaced by the void.  Yakity yakity yak.  Words come spilling off his lips, but they are not his words.  “Look at them birds, there, Nancy-Lou!”  Those round eyes and that laughable face!--but the words and the tone of voice and the feeling do not belong to her.  He looks about him and wonders if there is a cure for this condition.  He knows ostensibly happy people, young people especially, who plan to get married, who do get married.  Have children.  That must be a cure, he thinks.  That’s the traditional cure for his burden, his anxiety.  Tradition is not meaningless.  It exists for a reason.  That must be the reason.  But this is all unexplored territory.  He can be forgiven if his anxiety increases, if the scars actually smoke a little, being heated by the terrors.  Cowards die many deaths.  We know that.  He knows that.  He proposes.  The woman accepts.  Why should she not?  He’s worth millions.  Disillusionment sets in immediately.  Does she love him?  Does he love her?  Of course, of course. 

     She is mature.  She is knowing.  She is as worldly as he is.  She is just like him.  Life is a series of distractions for them both.  She is a distraction.  Oh, she is a distraction!  He wanted, needed, to cut to the quick,  but she had no idea what the quick was.  She thought he meant sex.  So, she gave him what she thought he wanted.  What happens when a man like our alienated man, seeking, not happiness--since he was sated on that--but the unreasonable silence of the world and finds only the antagonism of a woman?  Imagine it.  Oh, the vilifications!  The brutality!  The spite!  It takes his breath away.

     He remembers that scanky woman, the one in the drug store, about to pocket the bottle of aspirin.  Could it be that a simple act of compassion?--but no.  It was a failed experiment.  Was he just too clumsy?  No.  It was simply human nature.  He doesn’t even want to recall that disaster.  He, the alienated man, became convinced of what the world has always known but refused to acknowledge, with the possible exception of a few mad monks perched on a hilltop in Llasa: mankind is unworthy, dirty, randy, rowdy, greedy, unpredictable, capable of the worst crimes against itself, and is a worshipper not of God but of violence, most comfortable with itself when it is wearing a cartridge belt across its breast. 

     We have sacrificed much in our lives for bread and illusions--money and distractions.  No more deceptions!  No more self-deceptions, whatever that may mean.  I am very comfortable here.  I have no needs anymore that I cannot satisfy right here.  Sometimes I stand in front of a mirror, the one in the main dinning room, and shout at myself.  I shout that I am not insane.  I am, in fact, very sane.  Why, the proof of that is the extent to which I have cut myself off from the senses.  No more alcohol, no more pot, no more sex, no more movies, no more...well, I still listen to music.  That’s the ultimate proof, listening to music.  No more cigars, no more cuisine--just what I make for myself.  All sensations are inducements to believe in the illusions by which we pacify our grief.  They are--distractions!  Our best means to self-deception. No more deceptions.

Seclusion is the only way.  I have a delivery man come once a week with all I need for that week.  I hide when he comes.  So I can’t see him.  I go to the back door, at precisely fifteen minutes after noon, and take in the boxes.  I see no one.

     But what’s in the boxes?  You want to know that.  You’re looking for some subtle yet purposive subversion of my life plan, of my ban, of my monkish withdrawal.  I know you.  You don’t trust anybody.  You have the lowest opinion of mankind.  You’re a sadist and a pessimist, an atheist and a skeptic, a realist and a cynic.  You think maybe I indulge.  And by indulging I deny the principle of my self-incarceration.  Hah!  Hah Hah!  The boxes contain hashbrowns.  Only hashbrowns.  No ketchup.  No salt.  No pepper.  Hashbrowns.  That’s all.  That’s what I have eaten every day for the last three weeks.  That and nothing more.

     By living like this I remove all possibility of deception.  I live wholly within the truth.  Plainly.  Why do I want to do that?  Because I committed no crime.  I broke no rules.  I lived as anyone with means would live, explored what there was to explore, sampled what there was to sample, laughed when there was occasion to laugh.  But here I am explaining.  I said I wouldn’t do that.  Especially to you, who I hate.  Tonight I sleep in the twenty-second bedroom.  Imagine that!  The twenty-second!  I maintain my alienation thus.  No familiar smells, colors, furniture, window dressings.  Everything is alien, different.  It suits me.  Why do you care?  Why do you keep asking about it?

     One day, the alienated man, let’s call him Steven, was leaving a restaurant with several friends.  He was in Ft. Lauderdale, it was a fine evening, late spring, much like now, and he had much on his mind, for he was recovering from the debacle of his marriage.  His friends had spent the evening with him to help him cope, being good listeners, steering conversation away from the painful.  He was grateful.  Upon leaving, they were to gather at the home of another for late night drinks and more conversation.  It was a typical evening.  They had gotten into their separate cars and were driving off.  That’s when Steven noticed something.  He stopped to investigate, to watch; perhaps, he thought, to learn something.  He never arrived for drinks at the home of his friend.

     He saw a couple, a man and a woman, about his own age, walking down the street.  He thought they were tourists from the north by the way they were dressed, all summery.  They were arguing, for the man was making stern expressions, rejecting what the woman was saying.  Steven pulled to the side of the parking lot to observe.  The couple had stopped and he could hear them shouting at each other.  Finally, the man struck the woman and walked away, leaving her there holding her face in her two hands.  She appeared to be sobbing.  Steven watched to see if she would run after him.  But the woman had sobbed into her hands long enough for the man to walk out of sight, so that when she looked up for him, she saw he was gone.  She stood there pathetically, looking about, uncertain where to go or what to do.

     So Steven got out of his car and went to her and asked if she needed help, saying that he had seen what had happened.  She thanked him and asked for a ride to the condo where she was staying.  When they arrived, she asked if he wanted to come in, saying she had some kryptonite.  He didn’t know what kryptonite was so he said, no, maybe he shouldn’t.  But she insisted, so he went in with her.  When he saw what it was, he rolled up his sleeve.  They sat together, dreamily.  Later, he left.  Feeling out of sorts, he went home.   Went to bed.  Next day, she showed up at the house.  How she knew him he didn’t know.  But he let her in.  She looked like hell.  He still had his people running the house, so he gave orders for them to prepare a meal, show her to a bedroom, get her cleaned up and dressed properly. 

     The woman was grateful.  She wanted help.  So he offered.  She wanted to please him, but he was distant.  She told him that he had helped her, and after two weeks she left.  He never saw her again.  He never tried to. 

     In time, that woman came to haunt him.  He knew why.  But there was nothing he could do.  He thought about her until she became an obsession, a new obsession, his latest.  But it was no use.  They, the couple, she and the man, were up to no good.  He had offered, and she took, for a while, a way out.  Then he withdrew it by being distant, just as soon as what she was became personal.  That guy, the one who struck her on the sidewalk, probably found her again.  What became of her he would never know.  It haunted him.  Even now, he, Steven, the alienated man, closes his eyes and recalls her face, recalls the expression of trust, of care, of returning health, of returning independence; recalls the eyes, the clarity of them.  He recalls, too, the dawning in those eyes and in the expression of her face of knowledge of him, of the meaning of his distance, of the void, the unreasonable silence of the world that hollowed him like a spoon and left him empty.  Then there was the concern.  That look in her eyes of concern.  Then the alarm.  Then the attempts at help.  And the persistence in the face of rebuff.  Then, gradually, the return to her face of the look of defeat, the fatalism, and, finally, her absence.  So much to bear.  So little to bear it with.