Cook, Kevin

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MANUSCRIPTS 5.METAPHOR FLUSHERKevin CookWhen a man dies in another life, and hewas a very evil man, he getsreincarnated as a writer. That is the way the fates have of getting back atus. There is a fine red line between seeing the obvious that the rest neversee ("You see, Watson, but you do not observe. ") and seeing whatprobably isn't even there. Writer as interpreter between common manand mad man. Itmay be that the worst torture in the world is sitting at atypewriter with empty fingers. Sitting there with the thing buzzing inyour face, rows of secretive letters daring you to string out the ones thatmake a good story, or a great novel. The odds against hitting the rightcombination for a great novel are about the same as the odds againsthitting the trifecta in a race with twenty-six horses. A hundred thousandtimes in a row. Torture will make you mad, given world enough andtime.They do it anyway, though, dozens and thousands of them, with thesmell of the whole day in their shirts, snapping .at the letters, knowingdown deep in their fingers every time they go off the trail of the magiccombination, staying there in front of the slot machine, pouring in theirround silver souls and dehydrating just a little bit more when what comesback out is nothing.I knew the man you've been wondering about, the one they sayalmost won the Nobel Prize for Literature. They were going to give it tohim until they found out what he had done, and then they went back andfixed everything so it looked like he had never even been considered. Orso the story goes. But he was considered. I could prove it, given timeenough and freedom.Nobel invented dynamite, did you know that? That's the reason heset up the Nobel Prizes, to make up for his invention's killing thousandsof people, blowing the dust and pebbles up around and through theirbodies, leaving little clods of dirt hanging in the air in front of their wide-opened eyes. He wanted to salve his conscience, so he could die (ofnatural causes; he was not blown up) without feeling guilty. Does thatmake up for making dynamite?6 MANUSCRIPTSBut should he have to make up for it? Somebody would have in-vented it anyway, and he never actualIy personalIy hurt anybody, as faras I know. He never blew anybody's legs off six feet away from theirstumps. Maybe he's responsible, and maybe he's not. Maybe God'sresponsible. He made Nobel. Maybe He's responsible for alI the bloodyburned disasters that ever happened-for Auschwitz and Dachau, forHiroshima and the Crucifixion. And he never even bothered to set up aprize fund.Anyway-in any case-be that as it may-I knew the man whoknew how to hit the trifecta on the typewriter. He's in a home now. Well,a hospital. It isn't anybody's home. The man is not myself. True or false?Oh Jesus they are coming again. They're coming to take me away.Ha ha. I can hide beside the radiator. But no, they can smell me out, myarm is burning against the steaming metal. Two big alI-white men withno faces. They don't really want to short out my mind, they would just assoon sit and read magazines or go play with the young girls in their wardwho can't move to get away, but they are told it's time for electroshocktherapy so they come for me and put me on the hard bed with the metaland rough-brown-cloth skulIcap that goes arou nd my head and the tightsnares that go around my wrists and feet so that I can't move anythingexcept the muscles in my stomach which twitch and try to run awaybecause they know what is coming.No. No no please Jesus Christ don't TURN IT ONJESUS CHRIST LOOK AT HIM DANCECOME ON HEMINGWAY FRY FRY AGAINGOD DAMN THAT STINKSHOW MUCH LONGER WE GOTWhen I am away because it hurts so much, because there is adentist's drilI spinning in my eyes and in my genitals and there is boilingmercury being poured into my head and they have sawed open my sku 11and are holding my brain against a red-hot stove, alI of those things atonce but much worse (I am not a genius, at least not any more, but even ifJ were I could not telI you how the pain is when they send electricity intoyour brain and roast what you are thinking, and you die but stay aliveand never know how different you are afterward. But try to imagineMANUSCRIPTS 7whatever it was in your life that made you pray to die, and then try toimagine that every cell in your body wants to die, all of them in symphonythat way, and Isuppose that will have to dol, when I am away because myhead is too full of screaming for anything else to be in there, sometimes Lsee colors humming out in space like long beautiful fishes miles deep inthe sea. Sometimes while they are destroying my brain and I can't reachmy typewriter, I think up stories and things that have happened in mylife and sort of intertwine them, like I'm doing right now. I hope thescreaming doesn't stop, because I am here creating and when it stops Iwill have to go back and hurt and my body will try to heal, like a littlefetus that just keeps on breathing and feeding while the blade is on itsway in.There are books in the Library of Congress that have never beentouched since some gray-suited, skinny, bespectacled librarian first putthem on the shelves. There are ancient newspapers on microfilm, ob-scure magazine articles; people's letters to each other, wills, memorandafrom people who thought they were writing to themselves or to con-fid ants. Nothing will ever be completely forgotten from this century on,nothing lost.I was a good researcher, and I spent years in the Library (never oncesaw a congressman), smelling first the crackling yellow musty smell ofold paper and later the buzzing white ozone smell of soft Iluorescentlights. A lot of times I would follow long threads that offered them-selves, threads that didn't have anything to do with a story or a book. Ifound out things that no one else knows. Maybe about you. You're in theLibrary of Congress, there under the weight of tons ofshiny microfilm,the weight of all the little transparent bodies of everybody else.Everything is there, all in black and white, unprotected by the glossymythicisrn of history. Check into your illusions, your ideals; check outyour great men. They were all hated for one reason and another, and theywere pretty good reasons. One of' Jefferson's slaves died one morning in1772, beaten to death by the massah. Lincoln got a man off in a rape caseto pay back a political favor. Mary Baker Eddy had a stash of aspirinhidden away in that big white bonnet of hers. True or false? The Popeisn't Catholic. Malcom X loved watermelon and Amos 'n Andy, andMartin Luther King cheated on his wife and was shot to death by a manunder orders from 1. Edgar Hoover, who had tried to have Castropoisoned for John Kennedy, who was being treated for a social diseasewhen he was killed and whose brother swam away from a girl drowni ng ina river. Trueor false? When I was a little boy I poured ammonia into my8 MANUSCRIPTSlittle black dog's eyes and then he was blind. That's in the Librarysomewhere.Some of that is true. Or, I should say, all of it is true, probably, but Iha ven't proved it all yet.Do you think that if they sent raw telephone cables all through theLibrary of Congress and let them dance around burning things andshearing the words away from their places and going down the shelvesincinerating all the ideas, that when the Librarian of Congress cameback he could ever find anything left that made.sense?Once when I was a writer I would sit for hours at the keyboard. I hada blue electric portable, a "Sterling Automatic 12." I would startworking, describing all the things that were going on in some parallelplane that I was helping to make, and look up at the digital clock on mydesk ten minutes later. Only the clock would say it was three hours later,and the rest of the world went along with the clock. That was time travel.If you're a writer you can travel in time. I have always thought that if Iwere a better one maybe I could start late one night and when I wouldlook up at the clock it would be the end of time. I would get up. Themuscles in my calves would be stiff, and moths would have eaten away at.my clothes until the moths had all finally died. I would go over to mywindow and there would be only the darkness of the deepest space,because I had been working when God had taken everything back andHe had missed me. Then I would go back to my typewriter, but I wouldhave a mental block. I would type a long series of periods, tiny pictures ofthe empty universe, until the bones in my hands wore down and then Iwould have to type the periods with my nose until it wore down, and thenI guess I would just have to lie there with my face down among the keys,smelling that inky humming smell forever and ever amen.I was a very serious writer, seriously grim, and I would becomefrustrated and histrionic when the words I wrote couldn't describe thepictures in my mind. I got something of a reputation for the way Idisposed of the bad stuff. Didn't throw it in the wastebasket like you'resupposed to; I threw it in the toilet, saying that it was shit and that waswhere it belonged. The Roto-Rooter bills were high, but the reportersand reviewers (especially one that came out from the Times Review ofBooks) thought it added to my image as the tough-minded, elementalrealist (the one from the Times kept calling me a "naturalist." I felt like Ishould have been out in a safari suit looking through my binoculars atelephants). I was going to win the Dynamite Prize for Literature. Trueor false?MANUSCRIPTS 9True.When I was twenty and the girl I loved suddenly noticed that Iwasn't at all what she was in the market for, I went into my room andwrote stories that leaked out the black acids inside of me.When I was twenty-two and the girl I loved suddenly married thearchitect she had been engaged to all.along, I went into my room andwrote poetry. Try something else this time. When all the bad poems wereflushed out of my veins and arteries, I came back out.When I was forty and the girl I loved suddenly died in a completelyridiculous traffic accident, I went into my den and tore apart mytypewriter until there was blood and ink all over my hands because thewriting never helped, and then I wrote a novel in longhand, and then Iwent back to my wife, whose face was too serene.I was about to be a Laureate. I was a very good researcher, and gotmy hands on some things no one should have let me see, but I was, afterall, a medium-sized celebrity. In a short story that was only publishedbecause my editor was certain that everything in it was just cleverspeculation, I told a tale about some people who used a thick blue liquidto kill some other people, and there was a man in the story who knew allabout how you went about making the blue liquid, and the knowledgewas too much for him to seal up inside, so he told it all, down to the lastdetail, to a sympathetic character. He told it down to the last molecule.The last atom. Now you remember it. A very effective story. They didn'tcome for me until seven hundred and eighteen people in Jerusalem weresprayed with the thick blue liquid and spat up blood and bile and acidand then parts of the linings oftheir stomachs, and some hours later theyspat up much of their insides and the skin on their faces dripped downand stuck to their teeth and I did a long and very effective description ofthe process in the story so I won't repeat it here and as you can see I was agood researcher.Did you know any of those people? Surely they weren't relatives, orfriends. I'm sorry. And they say there were a few more scattered in-cidents before they got their. hands on the raw materials. I'm so sorry. 1would cry and never stop if it would do any good. I am crying now andmay never stop and it won't do any good. I am here how, and that won'tdo any good. I am here because they say (they are the men and womenwith no faces who work here. On me.) that I lost my mind. They aretrying very hard to find it.10 MANUSCRIPTS/Metaphor flusherGoing to the fairLittle key crusherTruth is your affairTry to write a prayerEmpty empty airIt was the truth. It seemed a whimsy to put it in there, to see ifanybody was paying attention, to see if the secret agents would come torough me up and find out how I knew. I thought maybe it wasn't evencorrect.No. That's false. They tried to hide it, to shuffle tons of sheets ofpaper over their Auschwitz, because the landofthefreeandthehomeofthebrave could not be diseased enough to consider such things. But shehad considered them. She had painted her fingernails blue with the stuffand then scratched at the faces of her laboratory animals, some of whomwere whimpering prayers at the time. Some of whom had their upper lipsmelt into their open mouths. I had followed a thread, a peripheral strandthat led way, way down into the truth. Nothing is hidden from a goodenough researcher with time enough and freedom.The truth. Shall make you free. Could have thrown it in the toilet.No, false. It would have burst the pipes, seeped up out of the ground,spun in the air until it congealed into a glowing green glass eye thatwatched me in the dark. Shall make you mad. If I left money for a prize,would they forgive me? False. It was the truth. I was insane. I sat andwrestled with my hands for two months, and somehow the truth slippedout of them like a firefly you think is held tightly in the darkness, and Ipretended it was whimsy. The truth the truth the truth I ran it down butit was too big for me and then it killed me and escaped. True'?If God is truth, eternal truth, then God is a blue liquid shotthrough with tiny green specks that look out at you like little glowingglassy eyes, that will turn a person into a running plasticky sore that hasto swallow itselfin gulps as it gasps for its last breath.Don't pull me back. All the bloody colors in the sea whirl down intothe drain at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.MANUSCRIPTS 11No. At least not SO FASTSTILL HOPPIN HE'S STILL HOPPINEYES ARE BLEEDIN YELLOW LOOKOKA Y IT'S OFF NOWPICK HIM UPCAREFUL HE'S HOTOh can't you let me be what am I nowHours.Later. True or false?When they take the live wire and electrocute my brain it goes inthere and takes those waves, those peaks and valleys that show whether Iam thinking or not, and shakes and bakes them, turns them upside downand inside out so that they can never find again the pattern they camefrom. I know they do it all the time, in mental prisons all over theland-ofthefreeandthehomeofthebrave, but rape with a live wire a thousandtimes is still rape.But there is something wayway down there underneath all the rest,hiding, that is me. The truth of me. Something just barely apart from theshockwaves. They have cut it, bled it, raped it. Not killed it yet. But itsmells the lightning bolts as they shriek down into all the most privatecomers, feeling for it. It is a wet and matted tiny frightened fox, and soonit will be flushed out of the dark warm woods to run away, the fatefullightning's naked prey.

Metaphor Flusher

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Metaphor Flusher

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