Lost in the Funhouse (6 page)

Andrea sniffed and lit a cigarette. “Long as he grows up to be a saint like his Uncle Konrad, huh Rosa. Saints we can use in this family.”

The conversation turned to other matters, but thenceforward I was called Saint Ambrose, in jest, as often as
Honig
, and Ambrose by degrees became my name. Yet years were to pass before anyone troubled to have me christened or to correct my birth certificate, whereon my surname was preceded by a blank. And seldom was I ever to be called anything but
Honig
, Honeybee (after my ambiguous birthmark), or other nicknames.

As toward one’s face, one’s body, one’s self, one feels complexly toward the name he’s called by, which too one had no hand in choosing. It was to be my fate to wonder at that moniker, relish and revile it, ignore it, stare it out of countenance into hieroglyph and gibber, and come finally if not to embrace at least to accept it with the cold neutrality of self-recognition, whose expression is a thin-lipped smile. Vanity frets about his name, Pride vaunts it, Knowledge retches at its sound, Understanding sighs; all live outside it, knowing well that I and my sign are neither one nor quite two.

Yet only give it voice: whisper “Ambrose,” as at rare times certain people have—see what-all leaves off to answer! Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose! Regard that beast, ungraspable, most queer, pricked up in my soul’s crannies!

You who     listen     give me life     in a manner of speaking.

I won’t hold you responsible.

My first words weren’t my first words. I wish I’d begun differently.

Among other things I haven’t a proper name. The one I bear’s misleading, if not false. I didn’t choose it either.

I don’t recall asking to be conceived! Neither did my parents come to think of it. Even so. Score to be settled. Children are vengeance.

I seem to’ve known myself from the beginning without knowing I knew; no news is good news; perhaps I’m mistaken.

Now that I reflect I’m not enjoying this life: my link with the world.

My situation appears to me as follows: I speak in a curious, detached manner, and don’t necessarily hear myself. I’m grateful for small mercies. Whether anyone follows me I can’t tell.

Are you there? If so I’m blind and deaf to you, or you are me, or both’re both. One may be imaginary; I’ve had stranger ideas. I hope I’m a fiction without real hope. Where there’s a voice there’s a speaker.

I see I see myself as a halt narrative: first person, tiresome. Pronoun sans ante or precedent, warrant or respite. Surrogate
for the substantive; contentless form, interestless principle; blind eye blinking at nothing. Who am I. A little
crise d’identité
for you.

I must compose myself.

Look, I’m writing. No, listen, I’m nothing but talk; I won’t last long. The odds against my conception were splendid; against my birth excellent; against my continuance favorable. Are yet. On the other hand, if my sort are permitted a certain age and growth, God help us, our life expectancy’s been known to increase at an obscene rate instead of petering out. Let me squeak on long enough, I just might live forever: a word to the wise.

My beginning was comparatively interesting, believe it or not. Exposition. I was spawned not long since in an American state and born in no better. Grew in no worse. Persist in a representative. Prohibition, Depression, Radicalism, Decadence, and what have you. An eye sir for an eye. It’s alleged, now, that Mother was a mere passing fancy who didn’t pass quickly enough; there’s evidence also that she was a mere novel device, just in style, soon to become a commonplace, to which Dad resorted one day when he found himself by himself with pointless pen. In either case she was mere, Mom; at any event Dad dallied. He has me to explain. Bear in mind, I suppose he told her. A child is not its parents, but sum of their conjoinèd shames. A figure of speech. Their manner of speaking. No wonder I’m heterodoxical.

Nothing lasts longer than a mood. Dad’s infatuation passed; I remained. He understood, about time, that anything conceived in so unnatural and fugitive a fashion was apt to be freakish, even monstrous—and an advertisement of his folly. His second thought therefore was to destroy me before I spoke a word. He knew how these things work; he went by the book. To expose ourselves publicly is frowned upon; therefore we do it to one another in private. He me, I him: one was bound to be the case. What fathers can’t forgive is that their offspring receive and sow broadcast their shortcomings. From my conception to the present moment Dad’s tried to turn me off; not ardently, not consistently, not successfully so far; but persistently, persistently,
with at least half a heart. How do I know. I’m his bloody mirror!

Which is to say, upon reflection I reverse and distort him. For I suspect that my true father’s sentiments are the contrary of murderous. That one only imagines he begot me; mightn’t he be deceived and deadly jealous? In his heart of hearts he wonders whether I mayn’t after all be the get of a nobler spirit, taken by beauty past his grasp. Or else, what comes to the same thing, to me, I’ve a pair of dads, to match my pair of moms. How account for my contradictions except as the vices of their versus? Beneath self-contempt, I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers
ergo me;
have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.

I continue the tale of my forebears. Thus my exposure; thus my escape. This cursed me, turned me out; that, curse him, saved me; right hand slipped me through left’s fingers. Unless on a third hand I somehow preserved myself. Unless unless: the mercy-killing was successful. Buzzards let us say made brunch of me betimes but couldn’t stomach my voice, which persists like the Nauseous Danaid. We … monstrosities are easilier achieved than got rid of.

In sum I’m not what either parent or I had in mind. One hoped I’d be astonishing, forceful, triumphant—heroical in other words. One dead. I myself conventional. I turn out I. Not every kid thrown to the wolves ends a hero: for each survivor, a mountain of beast-baits; for every Oedipus, a city of feebs.

So much for my dramatic exposition: seems not to’ve worked. Here I am, Dad: Your creature! Your caricature!

Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What’s less, I’ve been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn’t true. I’m not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don’t think … I know what I’m talking about.

Well, well, being well into my life as it’s been called I see well how it’ll end, unless in some meaningless surprise. If anything dramatic were going to happen to make me successfuller … agreeabler … endurabler … it should’ve happened by now, we will agree. A change for the better still isn’t unthinkable; miracles can be cited. But the odds against a wireless
deus ex machina
aren’t encouraging.

Here, a confession: Early on I too aspired to immortality. Assumed I’d be beautiful, powerful, loving, loved. At least commonplace. Anyhow human. Even the revelation of my several defects—absence of presence to name one—didn’t fetch me right to despair: crippledness affords its own heroisms, does it not; heroes are typically gimpish, are they not. But your crippled hero’s one thing, a bloody hero after all; your heroic cripple another, etcetcetcetcet. Being an ideal’s warpèd image, my fancy’s own twist figure, is what undoes me.

I wonder if I repeat myself. One-track minds may lead to their origins. Perhaps I’m still in utero, hung up in my delivery; my exposition and the rest merely foreshadow what’s to come, the argument for an interrupted pregnancy.

Womb, coffin, can—in any case, from my viewless viewpoint I see no point in going further. Since Dad among his other failings failed to end me when he should’ve, I’ll turn myself off if I can this instant.

Can’t.
Then if anyone hears me, speaking from here inside like a sunk submariner, and has the means to my end, I pray him do us both a kindness.

Didn’t. Very well, my ace in the hole:
Father, have mercy, I dare you! Wretched old fabricator, where’s your shame? Put an end to this, for pity’s sake! Now! Now!

So. My last trump, and I blew it. Not much in the way of a climax; more a climacteric. I’m not the dramatic sort. May the end come quietly, then, without my knowing it. In the course of any breath. In the heart of any word. This one. This one.

Perhaps I’ll have a posthumous cautionary value, like gibbeted corpses, pickled freaks. Self-preservation, it seems, may smell of formaldehyde.

A proper ending wouldn’t spin out so.

I suppose I might have managed things to better effect, in spite of the old boy. Too late now.

Basket case. Waste.

Shark up some memorable last words at least. There seems to be time.

Nonsense, I’ll mutter to the end, one word after another, string the rascals out, mad or not, heard or not, my last words will be my last words

Which was better would be hard to say. In the days when his father let out all five grades at once, Ambrose worried that he mightn’t see Peter in time or that Peter mightn’t stick up for him the way a brother ought. Sheldon Hurley, who’d been in reform school once, liked to come up to him just as friendly and say “Well if it ain’t my old pal Amby!” and give him a great whack in the back. “How was school today, Amby old boy?” he’d ask and give him another whack in the back, and Ambrose was obliged to return “How was school for you?” Whereupon Sheldon Hurley would cry “Just swell, old pal!” and whack the wind near out of him. Or Sandy Cooper would very possibly sic his Chesapeake Bay dog on him—but if he joked with Sandy Cooper correctly, especially if he could get a certain particular word into it, Sandy Cooper often laughed and forgot to sic Doc on him.

More humiliating were the torments of Wimpy James and Ramona Peters: that former was only in third grade, but he came from the Barracks down by the creek where the oyster-boats moored; his nose was wet, his teeth were black, one knew what his mother was; and he would make a fourth-grader cry. As for Ramona, Peter and the fellows teased her for a secret reason. All Ambrose knew was that she was a most awful tomboy whose pleasure was to run up behind and shove you
so hard your head would snap back, and down you’d go breathless in the schoolyard clover. Her hair was almost as white as the Arnie twins’s; when the health nurse had inspected all the kids’ hair, Ramona was one of the ones that were sent home.

Between Sheldon Hurley and Sandy Cooper and Wimpy James and Ramona Peters there had been so much picking on the younger ones that his father said one night at supper: “I swear to God, I’m the principal of a zoo!” So now the grades were let out by twos, ten minutes apart, and Ambrose had only to fear that Wimpy, who could seldom be mollified by wit or otherwise got next to, might be laying for him in the hollyhocks off the playground. If he wasn’t, there would be no tears, but the blocks between East Dorset School and home were still by no means terrorless. Just past the alley in the second block was a place he had named Scylla and Charybdis after reading through
The Book of Knowledge:
on one side of the street was a Spitz dog that snarled from his house and flung himself at any passing kid, and even Peter said the little chain was going to break one day, and then look out. While across the street was the yard of Crazy Alice, who had not hurt anybody yet. Large of pore and lip, tangly of hair and mind, she wore men’s shoes and flowered chick-linen; played with dolls in her backyard; laughed when the kids would stop to razz her. But Ambrose’s mother declared that Alice had her spells and was sent to the Asylum out by Shoal Creek, and Ambrose himself had seen her once down at the rivershore loping along in her way and talking to herself a blue-streak.

What was more, the Arnie twins were in fourth grade with him, though half again his age and twice his size; like Crazy Alice they inspired him with no great fear if Peter was along, but when he was alone it was another story. The Arnie twins lived God knew where: pale as two ghosts they shuffled through the alleys of East Dorset day and night, poking in people’s trashcans. Their eyes were the faintest blue, red about the rims; their hair was a pile of white curls, unwashed, unbarbered; they wore what people gave them—men’s vests over BVD
shirts, double-breasted suit coats out at elbows, shiny trousers of mismatching stripe, the legs rolled up and crotch half to their knees—and ghostlike too they rarely spoke, in class or out. Many a warm night when Ambrose had finished supper and homework, had his bath, gone to bed, he’d hear a clank in the alley and rise up on one elbow to look: like as not, if it wasn’t the black dogs that ran loose at night and howled to one another from ward to ward, it would be the Arnie twins exploring garbage. Their white curls shone in the moonlight, and on the breeze that moved off the creek he could hear them murmur to each other over hambones, coffee grounds, nested halves of eggshells. Next morning they’d be beside him in class, and he who may have voyaged in dreams to Bangkok or Bozcaada would wonder where those two had prowled in fact, and what-all murmured.

“The truth of the matter is,” he said to his mother on an April day, “you’ve raised your son for a sissy.”

That initial phrase, like the word
facts
, was a favorite; they used it quite a lot on the afternoon radio serials, and it struck him as open-handed and mature. The case with
facts
was different: his mother and Uncle Karl would smile when they mentioned “the facts of life,” and he could elicit that same smile from them by employing the term himself. It had been amusing when Mr. Erdmann borrowed their
Cyclopedia of Facts
and Aunt Rosa had said “It’s time Willy Erdmann was learning a fact or two”; but when a few days later Ambrose had spied a magazine called
Facts About Your Diet
in a drugstore rack, and hardly able to contain his mirth had pointed it out to his mother, she had said “Mm hm” and bade him have done with his Dixie-cup before it was too late to stop at the pie-woman’s.