Authors: Jonathan Lethem
Even better, he'd like it if he could send the Plath Sheep itself to the door of the Dire One's writing room.
Here's your tragic mute Black Bolt, you bastard!
Touch its somber muzzle, dry its moist obsidian eyes, runny with sleep goo. Try to talk it down from the parapet, if you have the courage of your ostensibly rosy convictions. Explain to the Sylvia Plath Sheep why life is worth living. Or, failing that, let the sheep convince you to follow it up to the brink, and go. You and the sheep, pal, take a fall.
There was a knock on the door.
The Dystopianist went to the door and opened it. Standing in the corridor was a sheep. The Dystopianist checked his watch—nine forty-five. He wasn't sure why it mattered to him what time it was, but it did. He found it reassuring. The day still stretched before him; he'd have plenty of time to resume work after this interruption. He still heard the children's voices leaking in through the front window from the street below. The children arriving now were late for school. There were always hundreds who were late. He wondered if the sheep had waited with the children for the crossing guard to wave it on. He wondered if the sheep had crossed at the green, or recklessly dared the traffic to kill it.
He'd persuaded himself that the sheep was voiceless. So it was a shock when it spoke. “May I come in?” said the sheep.
“Yeah, sure,” said the Dystopianist, fumbling his words. Should he offer the sheep the couch, or a drink of something? The sheep stepped into the apartment, just far enough to allow the door to be closed behind it, then stood quietly working its nifty little jaw back and forth, and blinking. Its eyes were not watery at all.
“So,” said the sheep, nodding its head at the Dystopianist's desk, the mass of yellow legal pads, the sharpened pencils bunched in their holder, the typewriter. “This is where the magic happens.” The sheep's tone was wearily sarcastic.
“It isn't usually
magic
,” said the Dystopianist, then immediately regretted the remark.
“Oh, I wouldn't say that,” said the sheep, apparently unruffled. “You've got a few things to answer for.”
“Is that what this is?” said the Dystopianist. “Some kind of reckoning?”
“Reckoning?” The sheep blinked as though confused. “Who said anything about a reckoning?”
“Never mind,” said the Dystopianist. He didn't want to put words into the sheep's mouth. Not now. He'd let it represent itself, and try to be patient.
But the sheep didn't speak, only moved in tiny, faltering steps on the carpet, advancing very slightly into the room. The Dystopianist wondered if the sheep might be scouting for sharp corners on the furniture, for chances to do itself harm by butting with great force against his fixtures.
“Are you—very depressed?” asked the Dystopianist.
The sheep considered the question for a moment. “I've had better days, let's put it that way.”
Finishing the thought, it stared up at him, eyes still dry. The Dystopianist met its gaze, then broke away. A terrible thought occurred to him: the sheep might be expecting
him
to relieve it of its life.
The silence was ponderous. The Dystopianist considered another possibility. Might his rival have come to him in disguised form?
He cleared his throat before speaking. “You're not, ah, the Dire One, by any chance?” The Dystopianist was going to be awfully embarrassed if the sheep didn't know what he was talking about.
The sheep made a solemn, wheezing sound, like
Hurrrrhh
. Then it said, “I'm
dire
all right. But I'm hardly the only one.”
“Who?” blurted the Dystopianist.
“Take a look in the mirror, friend.”
“What's your point?” The Dystopianist was sore now. If the sheep thought he was going to be manipulated into suicide it had
another think coming
.
“Just this: How many sheep have to die to assuage your childish resentments?” Now the sheep assumed an odd false tone, bluff like that of a commercial pitchman:
“They laughed when I sat down at the Dystopiano! But when I began to play
—
”
“Very funny.”
“We try, we try. Look, could you at least offer me a dish of water or something? I had to take the stairs—couldn't reach the button for the elevator.”
Silenced, the Dystopianist hurried into the kitchen and filled a shallow bowl with water from the tap. Then, thinking twice, he poured it back into the sink and replaced it with mineral water from the bottle in the door of his refrigerator. When he set it out the sheep lapped gratefully, steadily, seeming to the Dystopianist an animal at last.
“Okay.” It licked its lips. “That's it, Doctor Doom. I'm out of here. Sorry for the intrusion, next time I'll call. I just wanted, you know—a look at you.”
The Dystopianist couldn't keep from saying, “You don't want to die?”
“Not today,” was the sheep's simple reply. The Dystopianist stepped carefully around the sheep to open the door, and the sheep trotted out. The Dystopianist trailed it into the corridor and summoned the elevator. When the cab arrived and the door opened the Dystopianist leaned in and punched the button for the lobby.
“Thanks,” said the sheep. “It's the little things that count.”
The Dystopianist tried to think of a proper farewell, but couldn't before the elevator door shut. The sheep was facing the rear of the elevator cab, another instance of its poor grasp of etiquette.
Still, the sheep's visit wasn't the worst the Dystopianist could imagine. It could have attacked him, or tried to gore itself on his kitchen knives. The Dystopianist was still proud of the Plath Sheep, and rather glad to have met it, even if the Plath Sheep wasn't proud of him. Besides, the entire episode had only cost the Dystopianist an hour or so of his time. He was back at work, eagerly scribbling out implications, extrapolations, another illustrious downfall, well before the yelping children reoccupied the schoolyard at lunchtime.
Super Goat Man
W
HEN
S
UPER
G
OAT
M
AN MOVED INTO THE
commune on our street I was ten years old. Though I liked superheroes, I wasn't familiar with Super Goat Man. His presence didn't mean anything, particularly, to myself or to the other kids in the neighborhood. For us, as we ran and screamed and played secret games on the sidewalk, Super Goat Man was only another of the men who sat on stoops in sleeveless undershirts on hot summer days, watching the slow progress of life on the block. The two little fleshy horns on his forehead didn't make him especially interesting. We weren't struck by his fall from grace, out of the world of comic-book heroes, among which he had been at best a minor star, to land here in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, in a single room in what was basically a dorm for college dropouts, a hippie group shelter, any more than we were by the tufts of extra hair at his throat and behind his ears. We had eyes only for Spider-Man or Batman in those days, superheroes in two dimensions, with lunch boxes and television shows and theme songs. Super Goat Man had none of those.
It was our dads who cared. They were unmistakably drawn to the strange figure who'd moved to the block, as though for them he represented some lost possibility in their own lives. My father in particular seemed fascinated with Super Goat Man, though he covered this interest by acting as though it were on my behalf. One day toward the end of that summer he and I walked to Montague Street, to visit the comics shop there. This was a tiny storefront filled with long white boxes, crates full of carefully archived comics, protected by plastic bags and cardboard backing. The boxes contained ancient runs of back issues of titles I'd heard of, as well as thousands of other comics featuring characters I'd never encountered. The shop was presided over by a nervous young pedant with long hair and a beard, a collector-type himself, an old man in spirit who distrusted children in his store, as he ought to have. He assisted my father in finding what he sought, deep in the alphabetical archive—a five-issue run of
The Remarkable Super Goat Man
, from Electric Comics. These were the only comics in which Super Goat Man had appeared. There were just five issues because after five the title had been forever canceled. My father seemed satisfied with what he'd found. We paid for the five issues and left.
I didn't know how to explain to my father that Electric wasn't one of the major comics publishers. The stories the comics contained, when we inspected them together, were both ludicrous and boring. Super Goat Man's five issues showed him rescuing old ladies from swerving trucks and kittens from lightning-struck trees, and battling dull villains like Vest Man and False Dave. The drawings were amateurish, cut-rate, antiquated. I couldn't have articulated these judgments then, of course. I only knew I disliked the comics, found them embarrassing, for myself, for Super Goat Man, and for my dad. They languished in my room, unread, and were eventually cleaned up—I mean, thrown out—by my mom.
For the next few years Super Goat Man was less than a minor curiosity to me. I didn't waste thought on him. The younger men and women who lived in the commune took him for granted, as anyone should, so far as I knew. We kids would see him in their company, moving furniture up the stoop and into the house, discarded dressers and couches and lamps they'd found on the street, or taping posters on lampposts announcing demonstrations against nuclear power or in favor of day-care centers, or weeding in the commune's pathetic front yard, which was intended as a vegetable garden but was choked not only with uninvited growth but with discarded ice-cream wrappers and soda bottles—we kids used the commune's yard as a dumping ground. It didn't occur to me that Super Goat Man was much older, really, than the commune's other occupants, that in fact they might be closer to my age than to his. However childish their behavior, the hippies all seemed as dull and remote as grown-ups to me.
It was the summer when I was thirteen that my parents allowed me to accompany them to one of the commune's potluck dinners. The noise and vibrancy of that house's sporadic celebrations were impossible to ignore on our street, and I knew my parents had attended a few earlier parties—warily, I imagined. The inhabitants of the commune were always trying to sweep their neighbors into dubious causes, and it might be a mistake to be seduced by frivolity into some sticky association. But my parents liked fun too. And had too little of it. Their best running jokes concerned the dullness of their friends' dinner parties. This midsummer evening they brought me along to see inside the life of the scandalous, anomalous house.
The house was already full, many bearded and jeweled and scruffy, reeking of patchouli and musk, others, like my parents, dressed in their hippest collarless shirts and paisley blouses, wearing their fattest beads and bracelets. The offerings, nearly all casseroles brimming with exotic gray proteins, beans and tofu and eggplant and more I couldn't name, were lined on a long side table, mostly ignored. This was a version of cocktail hour, with beer drunk from the bottle and well-rolled marijuana cigarettes. I didn't see whether my parents indulged in the latter. My mother accepted a glass of orange juice, surely spiked. I meant not to pay them any attention, so I moved for the stairs. There were partiers leaning on the banister at the first landing, and evidence of music playing in upstairs rooms, so I didn't doubt the whole house was open to wandering.
There was no music coming from the garden-facing room on the second floor, but the door was open and three figures were visible inside, seated on cushions on a mattress on the floor. A young couple, and Super Goat Man. From his bare hairy feet on the mattress, I guessed it was his room I'd entered. The walls were sparse apart from a low bookcase, on which I spotted, laid crosswise in the row of upright spines, Norman Mailer's
Armies of the Night
, Sergei Eisenstein's
Film Form
/
The Film Sense
, and Thomas Pynchon's
V
. The three titles stuck in my head; I would later attempt to read each of the three at college, succeeding only with the Mailer. Beside the bookcase was a desk heaped with papers, and behind it a few black-and-white postcards had been thumbtacked to the wall. These looked less like a considered decoration than as if they'd been pinned up impulsively by a sitter at the desk. One of the postcard images I recognized as Charlie Parker, clutching a saxophone with his meaty hands. The jazzman was an idol of my father's, perhaps a symbol of his vanished youth.
The young man on the mattress was holding a book:
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
, by Carl Jung. Super Goat Man had evidently just pressed it on him, and had likely been extolling its virtues when I walked into the room.
“Hello,” said the young woman, her voice warm. I must have been staring, from my place in the middle of the room.
“You're Everett, aren't you?” said Super Goat Man, before I could speak.
“How'd you know my name?”
“You live on the block,” said Super Goat Man. “I've seen you running around.”
“I think we'll head down, Super Goat Man,” said the young man abruptly, tucking the book under his arm as he got up from the mattress. “Get something to eat before it's too late.”
“I want to hit the dance floor,” said the young woman.
“See you down there,” said Super Goat Man. With that the young couple were gone.
“You checking out the house?” said Super Goat Man to me once we were alone. “Casing the joint?”
“I'm looking for my friend,” I lied.
“I think some kids are hanging out in the backyard.”
“No, she went upstairs.” I wanted him to think I had a girlfriend.
“Okay, cool,” said Super Goat Man. He smiled. I suppose he was waiting for me to leave, but he didn't give any sign that I was bothering him by staying.
“Why do you live here?” I asked.
“These are my friends,” he said. “They helped me out when I lost my job.”
“You're not a superhero anymore, are you?”
Super Goat Man shrugged. “Some people felt I was being too outspoken about the war. Anyway, I wanted to accomplish things on a more local level.”
“Why don't you have a secret identity?”
“I wasn't that kind of superhero.”
“But what was your name, before?”
“Ralph Gersten.”
“What did Ralph Gersten do?”
“He was a college teacher, for a couple of years.”
“So why aren't you Ralph Gersten now?”
“Sometime around when they shot Kennedy I just realized Ralph Gersten wasn't who I was. He was a part of an old life I was holding on to. So I became Super Goat Man. I've come to understand that this is who I am, for better or worse.”
This was a bit much for me to assimilate, so I changed the subject. “Do you smoke pot?”
“Sometimes.”
“Were Mr. and Mrs. Gersten sad when you gave up your secret identity?”
“Who?”
“Your parents.”
Super Goat Man smiled. “They weren't my real parents. I was adopted.”
Suddenly I was done. “I'm going downstairs, Super Goat Man.”
“Okay, Everett,” he said. “See you down there, probably.”
I made my way downstairs, and lurked in the commune's muddy and ill-lit backyard, milling with the other teenagers and children stranded there by the throngs of frolickers—for the party was now overflowing its bounds, and we were free to steal beers from the counter and carry on our own tentative party, our own fumbling flirtations. I had no girlfriend, but I did play spin the bottle that night, crouched on the ground beneath a fig tree.
Then, near midnight, I went back inside. The living room was jammed with bodies—dancers on a parquet floor that had been revealed when the vast braided rug had been curled up against the base of the mantel. Colored Christmas lights were bunched in the corner, and some of them blinked to create a gently eerie strobe. I smelled sweat and smoke. Feeling perverse and thrilled by the kisses I'd exchanged in the mud beneath the tree, I meandered into the web of celebrants.
Super Goat Man was there. He was dancing with my mother. She was as I'd never seen her, braceleted wrists crossed above her head, swaying to the reggae—I think it was the sound track to
The Harder They Come
. Super Goat Man was more dressed-up than he'd been in his room upstairs. He wore a felt brocade vest and striped pants. He danced in tiny little steps, almost as though losing and regaining his balance, his arms loose at his sides, fingers snapping. Mostly he moved his head to the beat, shaking it back and forth as if saying
no-no-no, no-no-no
. He shook his head at my mother's dancing, as if he couldn't approve of the way she was moving, but couldn't quit paying attention either.
My father? He was seated on the rolled-up rug, his back against the mantel, elbows on his knees, dangling with forefinger and thumb a nearly empty paper cup of red wine. Like me, he was watching my mom and Super Goat Man. It didn't look as if it bothered him at all.
M
Y JUNIOR
year at Corcoran College, in Corcoran, New Hampshire, Super Goat Man was brought in to fill the Walt Whitman Chair in the Humanities. This was 1981, the dawn of Reagan. The chair was required to offer one course; Super Goat Man's was listed in the catalogue as Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life 1955–1975. The reading included Frantz Fanon, Roland Barthes, and Timothy Leary. It was typical of Corcoran that it would choose that particular moment to recuperate a figure associated with sixties protest, to enshrine what had once been at the vigorous center of the culture in the harmless pantheon of academia. It was Super Goat Man's first teaching job since the fifties. The commune on our street had shut down at some point in my high-school years, and I don't know where Super Goat Man had been in the intervening time. I certainly hadn't thought about him since departing for college.
He'd gained a little weight, but was otherwise unchanged. I first spotted him moving across the Commons lawn on a September afternoon, one with the scent of fallen and fermenting crab apples on the breeze. It was one of those rare, sweet days on either side of the long New Hampshire winter, when a school year was either falsely fresh before its plunge into bleak December, or exhausted and ready to give way to summer. Super Goat Man wore a forest green corduroy suit and a wide salmon tie, but his feet were still bare. A couple of Corcoran girls trailed alongside him. He had a book open as he walked—perhaps he was reading them a poem.
The college had assigned Super Goat Man one of the dormitory apartments—a suite of rooms built into Sweeney House, one of the student residences. That is to say, he lived on the edge of the vast commons lawn, and we students felt his watchful presence much as I had in Cobble Hill, on our street. I didn't take Super Goat Man's class, which was mostly full of freshmen, and of those renegade history and rhetoric majors who'd been seduced by French strains of philosophy and literary theory. I fancied myself a classics scholar then—though I'd soon divert into a major in history—and wasn't curious about contemporary political theory, even if I'd believed Super Goat Man to be a superior teacher, which I didn't. I wasn't certain he had nothing to offer the Corcoran students, but whatever it might be it wasn't summed up by the title of his class.
I did, however, participate in one of the late-night salons in the living room of Sweeney House. Super Goat Man had begun appearing there casually, showing up after a few students had occupied the couches, and had lit a fire or opened a bottle of red wine. Increasingly his presence was relied upon; soon it was a given that he was the center of an unnamed tradition. Though Corcoran College was then in the throes of a wave of glamorous eighties-style binge parties, and cocaine had begun to infiltrate our sanctum in the New Hampshire woods as if we were all denizens of Andy Warhol's Factory, the Sweeney House salons were a throwback to another, earlier temperature of college socializing. Bearded art students who disdained dancing in favor of bull sessions, Woolfian-Plathian girls in long antique dresses, and lonely gay virgins of both genders—these were the types who found their way to Sweeney to sit at Super Goat Man's feet. There were also, from what I observed, a handful of quiet superhero comic-book fans who revered Super Goat Man in that capacity and were covertly basking in his aura, ashamed to ask the sorts of questions I'd peppered him with in his room in the communal house, so long ago.