Marguerite W. Sullivan: How He Came to Belong

<<|| [21.10.11] Marguerite W. Sullivan: How He Came to Belong ||>>

He had given up on people, given up on seeing them clearly, on letting them be themselves—he could not see them without interjecting into their selves a gruesome exaggeratedness, a kind of impossible character, or proclivity to act a certain way, all of which was conducted with a curious lack of precision and could not really be explained except to say that he could never take the people he met at face value, could not any longer resist the urge to dig down and handle all their inner workings with his own fingers, often this meant they resisted his excavations, acting in hidden and inconsequential ways, so that he always came away with an unbathed feeling, an unclean quiver in his being, which forced him to retreat, having to take himself, as he saw it, out of the play, so destructive was his presence to every scene.

Maguerite Sullivan
And he had moved into the woods with an axe, a frying pan, books in boxes, a pair of skates, and other provisions he associated with survival, and lived entombed in the utter sanctity of the woods, living a new speechlessness, in which, however, the words of his being circulated in the brain much like frightened mice squeaking on a wheel, and yet the speechlessness moved him, and yet the tirade inside his blood led him into reckless behavior such as throwing himself into icy water or sleeping outside the dwelling door only to bang his head in fits of dreams or poking his finger into the purple nether of a flame to scrape against the luck of his endurance. Scouting out evidence of previous tenants took up most of his time. He unearthed a tiny chain, as from a pocket watch, he guessed, also a braid of hair though clearly inhuman, a single shoe with laces removed, rifle shells, predictably. Of all the things in the world only these, which couldn't help but disappoint him. The stories that grew up around these incidentals worked away at him like untoward rumors. The stench of some man sitting over a fire and withering slowly in the flickering of day into night filled the room, but was it himself or someone already vanished?

After several months, the trees commanded his expulsion; the unnatural fact of his presence could not be further explained or catered to. In the midst of the natural world his unraveling speech was seen as a freakish burden, the scurry of his legs and the lumpishness of his demeanor were an out and out detraction of the peaceable environment. At length the elements heckled him, the animals affronted him. He pocketed some acorns and took with him the chain and the shoe, as though he could become a man who might cherish these things. He shredded many of the books, pasting pages to the brown walls with wet ash, circling stray words like the madman that wanted to be him, a word or two spelling some forgone recklessness of his imposture. The skates he left upright beneath a charcoal drawing of his stick body, a cartoon of timeless appeal. But all this was gesture only, bowls of senseless actions in which he had become mired in the world without words.

Marguerite Sullivan

As he returned to the town, the nearest and also the one in which he had frittered away the days of his youth in bubble blowing and tire slashing, he could see his boyish slouch precede him down the quiet street as he entered from the old cowpath and he laughed to think that much was the same, much was the same, all the words he'd held to and the sumptuous meals he'd eaten and the chambers of progress he'd sought had resulted in the emptiest manifestation of evolution, little beyond a certain swelling of his limbs. Not being able to withstand the geography any differently, he joined once again the circle of chanting folk in the town and beheld each face with true awe, the awe of the forgotten man who finds it miraculous, for instance, that people continue to wander around saying innocuous things and blossoming in their bellies like over-fertilized flowers. In his belly the scarcity of the woods rumbled while around him raged this brilliance and comfort and magnificence (the houses!) and a certain inviolable sense of mass which could easily be read in the houses themselves but also in the book bags and parking meters and endless accoutrements piling past all of which tamped the landscape down, down, down until it sagged and sickened beneath the weight. And as he sat cross-legged to seek the higher good with the townsfolk, chanting the bald syllables and freeing the caged pigeons of the self with ticklish abandon and pinpointing the truth of the matter as though hunting for teeth in fetid broth, he smiled to himself, knowing he belonged, like a plank in the fence running the length of eyesight, running speechless to the horizon, now belonged as much as any, as right as any, a melon hatched, a car to pasture, as he inhaled deeply the animal perfume of the girl beside him, and examined her, thinking she was little different from his greenest memory, little different from the coming end, her smile descended from the frozen gleam of the carousel horse rounding corners rounding corners in a wild and shrinking circumscription.

Marguerite W. Sullivan's work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Georgia Review, Conjunctions Web, NOON, Anemone Sidecar, elimae, and RHINO, among others. Her story collection is entitled Piecemeal. Currently she writes a novel in Vermont.

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He had given up on people, given up on seeing them clearly, on letting them be themselves—he could not see them without interjecting into their selves a gruesome exaggeratedness, a kind of impossible character, or proclivity to act a certain way, all of which was conducted with a curious lack of precision and could not really be explained except to say that he could never take the people he met at face value, could not any longer resist the urge to dig down and handle all their inner workings with his own fingers, often this meant they resisted his excavations, acting in hidden and inconsequential ways, so that he always came away with an unbathed feeling, an unclean quiver in his being, which forced him to retreat, having to take himself, as he saw it, out of the play, so destructive was his presence to every scene.
	And he had moved into the woods with an axe, a frying pan, books in boxes, a pair of skates, and other provisions he associated with survival, and lived entombed in the utter sanctity of the woods, living a new speechlessness, in which, however, the words of his being circulated in the brain much like frightened mice squeaking on a wheel, and yet the speechlessness moved him, and yet the tirade inside his blood led him into reckless behavior such as throwing himself into icy water or sleeping outside the dwelling door only to bang his head in fits of dreams or poking his finger into the purple nether of a flame to scrape against the luck of his endurance. Scouting out evidence of previous tenants took up most of his time. He unearthed a tiny chain, as from a pocket watch, he guessed, also a braid of hair though clearly inhuman, a single shoe with laces removed, rifle shells, predictably. Of all the things in the world only these, which couldn't help but disappoint him. The stories that grew up around these incidentals worked away at him like untoward rumors. The stench of some man sitting over a fire and withering slowly in the flickering of day into night filled the room, but was it himself or someone already vanished?
After several months, the trees commanded his expulsion; the unnatural fact of his presence could not be further explained or catered to. In the midst of the natural world his unraveling speech was seen as a freakish burden, the scurry of his legs and the lumpishness of his demeanor were an out and out detraction of the peaceable environment. At length the elements heckled him, the animals affronted him. He pocketed some acorns and took with him the chain and the shoe, as though he could become a man who might cherish these things. He shredded many of the books, pasting pages to the brown walls with wet ash, circling stray words like the madman that wanted to be him, a word or two spelling some forgone recklessness of his imposture. The skates he left upright beneath a charcoal drawing of his stick body, a cartoon of timeless appeal. But all this was gesture only, bowls of senseless actions in which he had become mired in the world without words.
As he returned to the town, the nearest and also the one in which he had frittered away the days of his youth in bubble blowing and tire slashing, he could see his boyish slouch precede him down the quiet street as he entered from the old cowpath and he laughed to think that much was the same, much was the same, all the words he'd held to and the sumptuous meals he'd eaten and the chambers of progress he'd sought had resulted in the emptiest manifestation of evolution, little beyond a certain swelling of his limbs. Not being able to withstand the geography any differently, he joined once again the circle of chanting folk in the town and beheld each face with true awe, the awe of the forgotten man who finds it miraculous, for instance, that people continue to wander around saying innocuous things and blossoming in their bellies like over-fertilized flowers. In his belly the scarcity of the woods rumbled while around him raged this brilliance and comfort and magnificence (the houses!) and a certain inviolable sense of mass which could easily be read in the houses themselves but also in the book bags and parking meters and endless accoutrements piling past all of which tamped the landscape down, down, down until it sagged and sickened beneath the weight. And as he sat cross-legged to seek the higher good with the townsfolk, chanting the bald syllables and freeing the caged pigeons of the self with ticklish abandon and pinpointing the truth of the matter as though hunting for teeth in fetid broth, he smiled to himself, knowing he belonged, like a plank in the fence running the length of eyesight, running speechless to the horizon, now belonged as much as any, as right as any, a melon hatched, a car to pasture, as he inhaled deeply the animal perfume of the girl beside him, and examined her, thinking she was little different from his greenest memory, little different from the coming end, her smile descended from the frozen gleam of the carousel horse rounding corners rounding corners in a wild and shrinking circumscription.