The Poet Finds Himself At The Mercy Of Dias The Mechanic

The Bin Of Discards Awaits Us All

Chapter 11

By the fifth day of his incarceration, the poet had mustered enough energy to stray from the corner of his cot. He either stared vacantly through the triple-glazed, cross-barred windows looking out on the Chapel Hill campus or with disbelief at the small magnifying mirror above the wash stand where Howdy Doody grinned back at him.

Few events should have had so unsettling an effect on the poet, for he was an avowed absurdist and often maintained that the human condition was simply an elaborate Punch and Judy show without end. Each puppet stumbled onstage to be beaten and kicked and spat upon before being yanked from the production with no explanation, retired from the company with no compensation, and stripped even of its costume.

Viewed in this light, man’s immortality resulted only in basest ignominy, since each marionette, regardless of responsibility or station, was destined for the salvage bin backstage. From this cramped and dirty hopper, a few overworked and underpaid dollsmiths scavenged jaws and knees with which to maintain the ever-popular clerks and doctors and engineers. Sometimes a call came to test a new prototype, but it was the dollmaker’s lot to keep the regular cast in working order. A tedious and unrewarding task.

When there wasn’t enough human damage to keep them busy, these poor boys told one another off-color jokes and vented their job dissatisfaction by creating of all manner of grotesques, some of which were discovered by the stage manager who, for inexplicable reasons, often chose to shove these hideous creatures before the audience to suffer the cruel bufooneries of everyday human life.

It made no difference how one lived, to what ideals one remained true, or how one died. The bin awaited every man. The poet invariably closed any discussion of religion with this belabored metaphor, claiming he believed only in reanimation.

Next, he usually held that poetry stands alone as the most solitary of arts, a position he presumed to support with the equally specious argument that poetry is the most frequently enjoyed and practiced of art forms among shut-ins, a classification he conveniently forgets includes paranoids, rapists, and saints.

“Our prisons are crammed with potential literary lights begging for someone to screw them into appropriate sockets,” he wrote in Sequestered Poets’ Quarterly, a copy of which is presently illuminated on the author’s microfiche projector, “and so are our hospitals, even our schools.”

But if constraint and isolation give birth to verse, why then has the poet not even attempted to scratch a curse on the bell-tower walls during the past five days, choosing instead to squat in a corner of his cot, like some prisoner of war?

True, he was boggled, and boggling is so recently developed a method of dealing with recalcitrance even Materex has no description of its effects or consequences. Most boggling victims, however, agree with Cindy Gnomoure’s description. “Being boggled,” she said, “is like having your veins polished with S.O.S. and your brain hosed out with Pabst.”

***

The duration of boggling’s effects, however indescribable, varies greatly from one patient to the next. A dose seldom seems to last more than a few minutes on Wayne, for instance. Wayne has been boggled eleven times, more than any other Palace resident, but the most he ever says upon coming around is: “Jack would have loved this.” Cindy Gnomoure, on the other hand, was incapacitated for nearly a month.

The poet’s boggling wore off in three or four hours, according to Materex, so it is difficult to understand how it took more than five days before he began attempting to express what boggling really means.

The poet professes a deep admiration, by the way, for the works of Franz Kafka, a writer on whom he wrote his master’s thesis, a conventional piece of proper scholarship distinguished only by its clever title: Kafka and the Existential Verb-Adverb Combination of Despair. Yet he gives no indication he understands the obvious similarities between his predicament and that of a Gregor Samsa or Mr. K.

Kafka claimed that he was not human. He had never intended for his writings to reach the audience into whose hands they ultimately fell. And he died young. Those who wish to learn more about this fascinating man and his unsettling vision can find additional information in the Hall of Records, under “Lobotomies of the Heart.”

Here is another interesting observation about the poet: some critics argue the poet is primarily obsessed with conflict, particularly in those poems which argue that each human being is prey to two brains, not the left vs. right side brains most people have heard of, but a new brain versus an old one. The old brain keeps the body breathing, circulates its blood, dreams its most bestial dreams and is a very small brain with the medulla oblongata at its core. The new brain is quite large and provides the body with its ability to envision and feel, to sense and think.

Dr. Weywood Doodad’s Distinctly Different Faces is a study of 200,000 modern American writers whose labors attempt to suppress their schizophrenic tendencies (there are no contemporary writers, given the restrictions imposed by the current ice age). In this book, Dr. Doodad lists more than 4,500 poems in which the poet employs the phrase “the face in the mirror” as a device to alienate his persona from himself, thereby allowing him to wax lyrical and philosophical on the subject of man’s two brains. She describes his typical poem as one “sincerely distressed by Nature’s inability to provide mankind with a world black-and-white enough to command his respect.”

Although Dr. Doodad praises the poet for being highly readable, and at the risk of appearing less than objectively omniscient in relating this grim history, the author suggests the poet wasn’t really a poet at all. He had never pierced the fabric of our transience and arrived in rapture at the heart of some immortal form. He had never even given birth to an original thought prior to his imprisonment in the Morehead-Patterson bell tower on the University of North Carolina campus.

This judgment may appear unnecessarily harsh, but what other explanation can be made for the poet’s behavior? No, his puppet-show religion was just so much folderol. He had never read Kafka, nor had he arrived on his own at his critically-acclaimed primary obsession.

He was simply widely read, not well nor wisely. He was a poet because everyone had to be something. He had failed at or grown bored with what few jobs his education had marginally prepared him. He had no marketable skills. The one knack he did possess was his ability to “pick up on things,” a favorite preglacial phrase among newsmen, overeaters, politicians, racketeers, and shoplifters.

The author has obviously put his preglacial profession in terrible company, but he has already admitted his lack of illusions about the value of journalism. Still, he strives for objective perfection in this grim history. Therefore, he must say the poet’s capacity for imagination and wit was no greater than the person’s on the next stool was. Yet the poet expressed only disdain for everyone. He abhorred “the system” and blamed it for dehumanizing both art and society, forcing people to work at meaningless jobs to pay for food, clothing, and lodging they could better grow, make, or build themselves.

But the poet did none of these things himself. What little he ate was purchased at the bar. What little he wore was stolen from thrift shops. He spent a quarter of his nights in sanitized motel rooms, sometimes paying as much for five hours sleep on a vibrating bed as many families did for an entire month’s rent.

In fact, the poet’s job was more meaningless than most, since his paychecks usually came from the government for demonstrating the fine points of oral interpretation to the deaf, telling twenty-to-lifers the pen is mightier than the sword, discussing timbre with garden clubs, or lecturing on the ineluctable modality of the visible in the snake house at Riverbanks Zoo. No one knows when the need for art had died or how it expired, but apparently it had — long before the CIA began investigating the weather — and the economy was left with hundreds of obsolete job classifications which it put to use getting people to perform meaningless tasks…

***

On the morning of the sixth day of his detainment, the poet was doubled-over in front of his mirror, his arms so tightly wrapped around his rib-cage; he seemed to be wearing a straight-jacket. He was gasping for breath.

At first, it appeared these antics arose from hunger (although he drank the beer and coffee Dias had left after administering discipline, the three-piece dinner had begun to reek), his recent boggling (Samantha Mint and Hedley Dewtie seemed at first to have recovered in a few minutes, but later both of them slipped into comas and are currently stored in cryogenics), or both. But then the analysis of his tears revealed they were not overly saline.

In fact, the poet’s eyes sparkled, and his gasps were simply incredibly exhilarating spasms of laughter. He had been trying describe what it felt like to be boggled, but all he came up with was “strictly sleep city,” a choice of words so inept and childish, especially issuing from the polished aluminum lips of Howdy Doody — that the poet collapsed in hilarity. He was still laughing when Dias the Mechanic climbed into the loft three hours later.

“Dias!” the poet cackled. “It’s wonderful to see you. You’ve come at the most opportune time. I’ve just seen the funniest thing!”

***

The poet grew curious at the growing eagerness with which he greeted Dias’s daily visits. He actually looked forward to seeing Deadeye’s scrunched-up spastic body climb into the bell tower, although he never made the mistake of calling Dias the Mechanic Deadeye again. He became so intrigued with the voice of Sir Lawrence Olivier issuing from a mouth that looked better suited to chewing a cud that he found the urge to write and asked Dias for paper and a pen.

“Later,” Dias said.

“But I have the idea now,” the poet stressed.

“Have you learned your lesson yet?”

“What lesson?” the poet asked.

“Never answer a question with a question.” Dias said. “It’s most improper.”

***

There is no plausible explanation in the Hall of Records for the poet’s capture and imprisonment in Chapel Hill. In fact, there is no explanation at all. The Life Protector has refused to discuss the matter, and Materex claims all information concerning the poet has been classified.

The poet’s mask is identical to those fastened to the faces of the other Palace inhabitants — except for the Life Protector who alternates between likenesses of Rootie Kazootie and Andy Devine. Perhaps the poet’s masking was to establish precedent. His mask does bear the serial number 000001, and there was talk of placing the poet and his mask on permanent display in the Hall of Records. This was before Gottlieb Goforth, whose life and times, along with Cindy Gnomoure’s, are momentarily lost in the bustle of Palace events, stole the mask.

***

By the seventh day, the poet had concluded his situation was not the result of some practical joke, he was not dreaming, nor had he been drugged. No, the poet was convinced, this was something else. This meant something, really meant something, he told himself, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

That was when he started having the heart attack dream. Here are the poet’s own words to describe what it was like:

“I don’t know how long I’ve had it. I may have been born with it for all I know, but it starts right here, like a lump under my ribs, and I’ll roll over on my side thinking it’s a cramp, and then my arm goes numb. I realize I’m thinking I’m in agony, and then I am in agony. I’m scared. My whole body is on fire, my stomach sliding around inside like an eel. I’m going to vomit, so I jerk myself up and sit on the edge of the bed with my legs like this, my head down, holding onto the edge of the mattress like it’s the only thing I’ve got any connection to. I’m breathing deeply, but real fast, panting almost. I can’t catch my breath.

“I start to scream. I run to the window and start to scream, but I can’t get enough air, and so I’m thinking: ‘Somebody help me. Please. I’m dying, help me. Please. They’re throwing me in the bin,’ and then I realize how ridiculous that sounds. If I’m really dying, there’s nothing anyone can do about it. That’s the impressive thing about death.

“So the only thing my screaming would mean is I’m begging for someone to come help me die, but I don’t want to die, so I don’t scream. I just sit there until I lay back down, and usually I end up slipping into sleep by tricking myself into thinking I’m already dead. Go ahead and laugh. I know it’s funny. I laugh about it all the time when it isn’t happening.

“But it got to where it was happening all the time. I was either dying or sleeping, and it was snowing, so it had to be January or February, which meant I’d been locked up for half a year with a fucking aluminum mask of Howdy Doody bolted over my face, which meant maybe I was already in the bin, which meant maybe I really was dead, which meant…”

***

On the eleventh day of his imprisonment, the poet changed his name. Until then, the routine continued in its monotony. Dias the Mechanic entered the bell tower, put the small tray of supplies on the washstand near the poet’s cot, and said: “How are we feeling today? Are you all right?”

“No,” the poet replied. “I’m never all right. I’m going bananas. Bring me something to read, Dias. Something to write with. A pen and paper, for Christ sake, just bring me a pen and paper.”

“We’re sorry,” Dias inevitably replied, “but your application has been forwarded to the appropriate authorities for consideration. We regret to inform you your request has been denied for reasons of national security.”

On the eleventh day, however, when Dias entered and said: “Are you all right?” the poet replied: “Why yes, Dias. I am Alright. Nevar Alright, famed Chilean poet, unjustly held by your government without charge, without benefit of attorney, having been denied even the single phone call your government flaunts as a basic human right before the World Court, a right you accord your basest criminals.

“Yet I, Nevar Alright, harmless foreign versifier, am denied not only that phone call but also pen and paper with which I might put my thoughts in order, the better to prepare my defense to your charges, in anticipation that such charges must be forthcoming.”

If Dias the Mechanic was amazed by this outburst, he never showed it, choosing instead to repeat: “Your application has been duly relayed and considered, and we regret to inform you your request has been denied for…”

***

The poet’s second name change came on the nineteenth day of his captivity, the first day during which he refused to budge from his cot. He lay on his back staring at the white slat ceiling, thinking: “Maybe I’m not going to die. Maybe I’m never going to die. There is no answer in this white slat in a white ceiling, but if there is any answer at all, I will find its question in this white slat in a white ceiling,” one hand under his head, the other stroking Howdy Doody’s polished aluminum cheeks.

“Are you still all right?” Dias asked, looking down on the poet, whose dark eyes stared out of the slits in Howdy Doody’s face, riveted on the meaningless white slat ceiling.

“I never said I was all right,” the poet said. “I had merely taken a name. Everybody has one. They’re cheap. I chose Nevar Alright for its romance, but the taste for such exotic dishes has fled me. I lay here because this is where I have been placed. I have never been all right. I may never have been right about anything, but I have never been entirely wrong either. I may never have been right at all,” he said, “but I know when I’ve been wronged, Dias. But enough of that. Henceforth call me Victim, Mr. Mechanic. Master Victim,” a name he discovered while solving the crossword puzzle in the previous edition of The Charlotte Observer. His new name was the solution to 3 down: “Polio baby to butler?”

“You must eat,” said Dias.

“Sure,” said the poet. “That’s what they all say. Fuck them,” he said, still staring at the white slat ceiling, his eyes betraying an apathy no other eyes could fathom, he thought, for his eyes fathomed nothing, for nothing was all there was to fathom, so the poet said: “You know what I say? I say a fathom is six feet. A rhinoceros has four feet. Four feet are fewer than six feet. A rhinoceros is not a fathom, although it is considerably more than a yard.”

“Why did you say that?” Dias asked.

“Who cares? I have nothing else to say,” the poet responded. “I am not hungry, so buzz off. Leave me with my liquids. Leave me with my terrible thoughts.”

***

Once the poet was sure Dias was gone, he struggled out of his cot and staggered to the mirror. He had not eaten since his capture. Lately, he had begun hoarding the beer, stacking the cans neatly against the wall under his cot. His sole sustenance had come from a daily thermos of coffee which, while it did contain cream and sugar, could not keep even a poet alive.

As he stood in front of the mirror, the poet began once again to laugh, thoroughly delighted by his own madly dark eyes peering through the cheerful slits in Howdy Doody’s polished aluminum face. “There are no questions in the white slat in the white ceiling,” the poet crowed. “None of this means anything.”

—30—

Epilog In Media Res

It occurs to me that some straggler might want to read all of Trout’s Tale in its God-given order, assuming I live long enough to publish all of it. I guess I could start another stack and publish it in order there, but where’s the fun in that?

Instead, what I’ve currently decided to do is add this epilog as an index to previous posts in the order in which they were not written, but in the most recent order they have appeared in the Hall of Records. Links will become active as new URLs are generated.

Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.

Trout’s Tale thus far…

Frontal Matter And Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33