The Captive Condition (6 page)

“I would also urge you, Mr. Campion, to abandon your thesis in favor of a new one. The simple fact of the matter is that in order to be taken seriously as a candidate for a master's degree, you must show your scholarly chops by reading something more substantial than de Maupassant, something more penetrating and insightful. Starting now I want you to focus on Flaubert. I think so, yes. We can credit Flaubert for having changed the direction of literary fiction as we know it today. You have aspirations to be a man of
belles-lettres, oui
? And
Madame Bovary
can offer practical instruction if not outright inspiration. After all, you can't be a
flaneur
your entire life, can you?”

I rolled my eyes at his slavish imitation of a French Canadian accent, full of Quebecois allophones and affrications. Despite his WASPy name, he insisted that his family came from old French stock—“My people helped settle Montreal with the Jesuit missionaries”—and claimed that his grandparents hailed from an abandoned logging town somewhere in the Quebec wilderness. “Fierce separatists,” he boldly lied, “cunning saboteurs on the lam for their terrorist activities.”

As our brief meeting came to an end, Kingsley must have sensed my profound disappointment. I was drawn to tales of the grotesque and fantastic, not to those obscure and tumescent tomes about the influence of naturalism on modern literature that evangelizing professors so revered. I told him so, and before escorting me to the door he offered a small compromise by graciously granting me an incomplete for the semester.

“Provided,” he said with a sharp, impatient mouth, “you submit a draft of your new thesis on the first day of the fall term. The
first
day, Mr. Campion, and no later.”

In addition to my abysmal grades, I was now nearly broke. Without a roommate to split the expenses, I watched with mounting panic as the funds in my bank account didn't merely dwindle little by little but vanished into a bottomless black hole of bills. I worried that I might even have to sell the car I'd recently purchased, an unreliable clunker with a dirty carburetor and a clean title. My prospects for the immediate future looked bleak. I needed to find a job without delay, and in desperation I applied for a summer position at the Department of Plant Operations, known on campus as the Bloated Tick.

Every semester, in long and detailed letters to the editor of the college newspaper, the professors complained bitterly about the Bloated Tick's employees, who, according to the college handbook, were responsible for “providing students, faculty, and visitors with an aesthetically pleasing and well-maintained environment.” Because they feared upsetting “the ticks,” the professors never signed their names to these letters and always delivered them to the newspaper office under cover of darkness. Disgruntled ticks were known to seek revenge in ways only service employees can. They could, for instance, start a lawnmower in front of a classroom window just as an important lecture or exam was about to get under way, and if especially “ticked off” they might smear a foul mixture of dog feces and grass clippings on the door handles and windshields of targeted cars in the faculty parking lot.

After their shift ended, the men often lingered outside the garage doors and scoped out the desolate sections of campus, patrolling the streets, peeking in car windows, sniffing out misery and heartbreak. With unsettling intensity they stared at the neo-Georgian buildings that lined the quad, but they never entered the buildings, nor did they speak to the lovely young women or comment on their long legs and ample breasts. In particular they liked the formal dances held in the opulent Town & Gown Ballroom and gawked at the twinkle lights strung across the entrance that formed a dazzling fractal of endlessly repeating arcs and loops. From the wide bed of their pickup truck, they listened to the steady thump and drone of music and observed the fashionable couples sneaking outside to share a cigarette, to take a quick swig from a flask, to steal a breathless moment beneath the elms. The thick and swampy air was a marvel of fabricated sin, and the men laughed at the couples as they lost themselves in the irrationality of love, how their fingers unclasped hooks and fumbled with buttons and zippers. The men waited until the right moment, the supreme moment, and then flew out of the gloom. On those rare occasions when they hadn't drunk themselves blind, the ticks said, “Beg your pardon. Didn't mean to interrupt. Continue what you were doing.” But if they were drunk—and usually they were plenty drunk—they invited the startled couples to take a ride down to the river, where the ticks yearned to stuff them headfirst into a tire swing and violate their “sweet virgin asses.” With caution the couples stepped away, as if from a pack of snarling coyotes, and hurried back inside.

Worse than their improprieties on campus, the ticks were occasionally accused of stealing prescription medication from the local pharmacy; of crushing pills into a fine powder and snorting long lines on the dashboards of stolen cars; of fighting in the bistro, in the cabaret, in the town square, in emergency rooms where they sought treatment for their broken noses, busted jaws, chipped incisors; of hallucinating on a fierce cocktail of moonshine and formaldehyde; of running wild through the streets and cornering victims, men and women both, in lonely alleyways and pinning them against urine-splattered walls, pawing at their pants, giggling as their victims pleaded for mercy.

Where they went at night—to a government-subsidized apartment complex, a trailer park, a campground, a highway underpass, an abandoned warehouse on the square—the men did not say, but there were whispers around town that they lived on a sailboat illegally tied to a set of crooked pylons below the falls where the wide sweep of river was deep and calm. As darkness shot across the sky they drove their pickup to the valley and took turns ferrying each other out to the vessel on a rowboat. This story struck some townspeople as odd since the ticks, by their own admission, were not men of the water, of the lakes and rivers and streams, but keepers of livestock and reapers of grain, the wayward children of subsistence farmers with only a tangential connection to the modern age, a fatalistic people who would have adopted Stoicism as their one true faith had someone preached it to them from the pulpit. Indigent and unwanted, driven by hunger and poverty from misty knobs and swampy hollows, the men regularly traversed the rutted roads looking for employment, listening for the sound of growling tractors, following the long, strangling coils of yellow dust that unfurled high above the empty plains.

When they arrived in Normandy Falls, they found the sailboat in an abandoned barn in the valley. Concealed under a blue tarpaulin on a trailer, the thirty-foot sloop seemed to be waiting there for them. The boat was in a sorry state, its small, sinister galley and four narrow berths infested with spiders and termites. In the evenings, after snaring a wild turkey near the fens, the men clambered aboard to clean and breast the bird and prepare their meal. The warped and dry-rotted planks of the deck groaned under their feet and threatened to split in two, and all through that summer they tried to restore the boat to its former glory, painting it an exotic crimson color, a festive shade of tropical fruit, pomegranate maybe or red jaina that had been crushed into a paste and slapped unevenly on the boards. Across the transom, in big black script, they stenciled the name
Be Knot Afraid
next to a crude drawing of a mooring rope tied in a bowline; they cut and beveled new boards to replace the ones ripped violently from the gunwale and cockpit; they swapped the old ropes in the snake pit for new cables scavenged from junkyards; they patched the torn jib and mainsail; they worked with such industry and purpose that they started to resemble biblical patriarchs, hunched and bearded and slightly daft, as if trying to stave off an insidious, dictatorial voice that boomed and echoed in their brains.

Life had treated the men unfairly, but now in the lunchroom at the Bloated Tick they began to formulate a plan. Like fugitives who against all conceivable odds have found a way to elude their pursuers, they turned to their supervisor and said, “We'll cruise down the river and out to the lake. We'll sit on the bow, catch walleye and yellow perch and smallmouth bass for supper, gut and clean the fish, toss the fillets in a batter of stale breadcrumbs, grill them over open flames and eat them with a side of sweet corn picked from the fields—wild onions, radishes, carrots. And then we'll wash down this feast with jars of moonshine. Sure, and if we work fast enough we can have her seaworthy for her maiden voyage before the blizzards barricade us indoors this winter. Imagine it. Drifting out there on the open water, why, she'll look just like a ghost ship.”

At this inspired piece of nonsense, the Gonk's red-rimmed eyes suddenly widened in disbelief. As the longtime director of the Department of Plant Operations, he'd listened to hundreds of plots and schemes over the years, each one more outrageous than the last, and now at his nefarious crew of drunken maniacs he laughed and said, “I have this theory that you are all brothers bound not by blood but by the same malevolent, nameless spirit. I think you men came into the world all at once, not like a litter of adorable pups, no, more like a twenty-four-armed, twenty-four-legged roving centipede, a thing blind with rage and hunger, eager for the sustenance of a mother's teat. But I know women, pride myself on my knowledge of them, and I contend that any sane mother, after she laid eyes on you twelve, would have put an end to your lives, pinched your noses, clamped a hand over your squalling mouths.”

“Well, that ain't such a nice thing to say,” the men complained.

“Nope, it isn't nice,” agreed the Gonk, “but neither are you. Not very nice at all.”

The ticks were used to tangling with their fellow thieves, stalkers, addicts, anarchists, arsonists, but of all the unsavory characters they'd encountered during their travels it was the Gonk whom they feared and respected most. A clever and forthright man who harbored deep suspicions of colleges large and small, the Gonk despised the professors, with their adherence to social hierarchies and their pathological compulsion for strict, administrative procedures, prompting him to describe the entire system of higher education as an unwieldy Sodom of bureaucracy.

“One big mind fuck,” as he succinctly put it.

A native of the valley and its dark forest, the Gonk was the last known descendant of a proud and ancient bloodline destined for extinction. He was also among the last of that great American generation of serious bone breakers—humble laborers who once toiled in the now shuttered mills and factories upriver, bruised and broken-boned brawlers knocking back beers in smoky saloons, slouched and slow-witted reapers of rotten luck staring blankly at the insubstantial specters on their flickering television screens. Now that he'd reached his fifty-first year, with its accompanying phantom pains, creaking knees, inflamed joints, and obligatory backaches, he felt like a brain trapped inside an antiquated machine that was in serious danger of being hauled away and melted down for scrap, and now he feared, because he had no progeny, that his storied family name would drift into obscurity and soon be expunged from the town's collective memory.

On a rainy morning in late May, I met with him in the lunchroom of a low brick building at the edge of campus. The entire interview lasted less than five minutes. I sat in a folding chair at a table that looked like it hadn't been cleaned in weeks, the surface crusted with mustard and ketchup and dusted with cigarette ashes. The Gonk stood in the doorway, a broad-shouldered, swag-bellied figure in denim with welding goggles strapped to his creased forehead. He lit a cigarette and turned his hard gray eyes on me.

“What's that?” He pointed to the book I'd brought along.

Like a grinning idiot, I answered, “You never know when you'll have a little downtime.”

The fluorescent light cast a harsh shadow across his face, accentuating the deep and permanent lines of exasperation on his forehead. Without asking permission he snatched
The Odyssey
from my hands and opened it to a dog-eared page. He held it close to his pitted nose and read the words in the same plodding monotone as Professor Kingsley.

“ ‘Cyclops, you ask my honorable name? Remember the gift you promised me, and I shall tell you. My name is Nobody: mother, father, and friends, everyone calls me Nobody.' ” The Gonk lifted his leg and farted with impunity. He scratched his leathery neck and tossed the book on the lunchroom table. “Christ almighty, kid, what are they teaching you at this college? Don't they have any practical courses? Accounting? Nursing? Hairdressing? Culinary school?” With his tattooed arms crossed and one foot drumming the floor, he looked me up and down and said, “Okay, Nobody, you're hired. But better not let me catch you reading that shit on the job, or else Nobody is my meat, got it? Consider this your probationary period. I'll be watching you. Watching you real good.”

The Bloated Tick turned out to be a hideous hive of hourly humiliations and daily indignities, an indestructible organism that sucked the lifeblood from its employees and drained them of energy and ambition, mainly because the men had to attend to those menial but unavoidable tasks that fell upon all plant operations workers at every college and university across the country. Each morning we straggled through the garage doors with our lunch boxes, thermoses, and cigarettes, and for the next eight hours we cleaned and treated the Olympic-sized swimming pool at the recreation center, mowed hundreds of acres of grass, bundled and burned fallen tree limbs and branches, repaired overflowing toilets and examined the dizzying labyrinth of sewers beneath the campus for possible blockages. Eager for a cheap thrill, my coworkers pried open manhole covers and pushed me down rickety ladders. “Always fun to send our new tunnel rat into the pit!” Like everyone else in this world, I'd taken a lot of shit over the years from a lot of different people, but now for the first time in my life I had to decide, in a literal rather than figurative sense, how far into the sewer I was willing to crawl. For these labors I was paid a couple of dollars over the minimum, ditchdiggers' wages, dirt money.

In the summer, as I toiled in the dizzy blaze of heat, trimming shrubs and bushes, pulling weeds, spreading mulch in flowerbeds, planting flats of celosia and marigolds around the stately bell tower, I spied Professor Kingsley walking through campus with Emily Ryan. I didn't know who she was at the time—I would find all of that out soon enough—but I certainly knew Kingsley, knew his sheepish grin, recognized his nervous, shifting eyes, cringed at the sound of his pompous voice, and I could tell even from a distance that he was embarrassed to be seen with Mrs. Ryan. Once, as a kind of academic exercise and as part of the research for my unfinished thesis, I followed them into the art gallery. After all, it's not every day that a student sees his former adviser strolling the quad with an attractive woman. Pretending to search for the nearest drinking fountain, feeling like a part-time student and full-time troll, I stepped inside the lobby and slipped behind a cluster of phony ficus trees, where I observed the professor and Mrs. Ryan wandering through the galleries where there was an exhibition of famous stolen paintings.

“Vermeer. Van Gogh. Picasso. Monet. Gauguin.”

Emily struggled to read each placard next to the poorly executed copies of original masterworks, and Kingsley tried to suppress a smug smile of superiority. As an educated man, and one married to an art enthusiast, he knew the power of proper pronunciation, especially in a cultural backwater like Normandy Falls, where a nasally drawl and a healthy dose of double negatives had become status symbols, the means by which someone like Emily could broadcast that she possessed knowledge of a kind for which there were no degrees. To his credit Kingsley knew all about the disruptive effects of an improperly placed editorial intrusion and wisely kept his trap shut.

“
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
by Rembrandt van Rijn,” Emily said with a frown. “This looks so familiar—”

She took a step forward to scrutinize a small fishing boat buffeted by gale-force winds, the bow lifted by a massive swell toward parting black clouds. The panicked crew appealed to a serene passenger and begged him for calm seas and a safe harbor.

One of the girls screamed—it was only a matter of time before Madeline and Sophie began to test their voices for an echo in the open space—and the startled curator politely asked them to leave the gallery. I dashed out the door before Kingsley could spot me, but those crafty ticks had prepared an ambush, and as I galloped down the steps I heard their high-pitched cackles of derision. “Stop ogling the professor's wench!” they shouted. “Yeah, don't play dumb. You know what we're talking about. We've seen you watching her, drooling, fantasizing. Don't deny it.”

Giraffeneck, Cockburn, Mudflap, Jittery, Frosty, Monkey, Leper, Sliver—they all crowded around and laughed in my face, dousing me in spittle. At the Department of Plant Services every employee had a nickname, typically an allusion to some calamity that had left its owner physically and psychologically scarred, and though I wasn't entirely certain about the legitimacy of some—Peter, Skip, Ralph, Randy—I could guess the truth about most, and in a vaguely masochistic way I hoped to earn my own nickname, one that like Molière, Voltaire, Twain, Orwell could serve as a clever and timeless nom de plume if I ever managed to finish my novel.

“Can't have a nickname till he initiates you. Has he initiated you yet?” Whenever the men asked this question, as they often did, they slapped their hands on the lunchroom table and convulsed with mad laughter. A few laughed so hard they nearly fell out of their chairs. “No? Well, he's just waiting for the right opportunity, that's all. I wouldn't worry about it. You'll get your new name, sure as shit. You must become one of us, you understand. Because the Gonk doesn't tolerate interlopers in this town.”

The Gonk's name alone remained a total mystery to me, and the men, unwilling to give up the secret just yet, were circumspect with their answers when I questioned them.

“Oh, he probably got that name when he was born. The doctor took one look at that face and called him the Gonk.”

Some said the name had its roots in sound, in music, in an accidental drumbeat, a stick clattering against an empty can; it reminded the men of the oddball stuff I played on the radio, dissonant, cacophonous, atonal symphonies and string quartets, Bartók, Schönberg, Penderecki, composers who saw the world as a series of bleak, sonic landscapes. Others claimed it wasn't a name at all but a verb, as when, for instance, the men, who were continually running out of cigarettes, gonked a smoke from one another. A few of the ticks wished to gonk the ladies who frequented the bowling alley and demolition derby. Indeed, a number of them
had
gonked these women, sometimes on a regular basis and to no good end, fiery strumpets of Welsh and Irish extraction in late middle age with hard faces, underslung jaws, and huge, dangling breasts. At the Department of Plant Operations the rates of venereal disease had reached epidemic proportions, and it made me wonder why my colleagues bothered with women at all.

“Oh, we're not particular. We like them in all shapes and sizes, but for the Gonk there is one favorite girl. But of course favorites have to fall.” They hooted and barked and stomped their boots against the floor. “Moonshine and women, son. One of them is a vice. But it seems the Gonk hasn't figured out which one it is. Most men, when they reach a certain age, buy themselves a dog for companionship. Not the Gonk. Oh, no. Fifty years old and he's still chasing after the pussycats.”

They loved this bit of phony folk wisdom and played the redneck card to the hilt, stretching out the word “dog” until it sounded like
daaaawwwg,
landing the
g
with a hard glottal stop.

For weeks they tantalized me with their riddle. Some said the name came from the Gonk's imbecilic mispronunciation of the word “Glock.” While a Luddite in most respects, the Gonk was an avid gun enthusiast who owned, in addition to a Civil War musket he proudly displayed on the wall of his new backwoods cottage, a first-generation Glock 17 and a brand-new Glock
36.
He had guns for shooting empty beer cans off the crooked fence posts around his property, guns for picking off the rabbits and chipmunks that invaded his yard at night, guns for hunting the twelve-point bucks rutting in the valley, guns for firing into the starry sky at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, guns for a hundred secret purposes. He owned night-vision goggles and exploding bullets and glimmering bayonets. He was a veritable one-man arsenal well prepared for the long overdue revolution and the apocalypse that would follow soon after.

Besides firearms, the Gonk had taken a keen interest in the solitary pleasures of studying genealogies and reading histories of the town, and though he disliked the idea of disclosing personal information, he applied for a library card at the college and ordered stacks of books. Sometimes he requested mystery novels and studied their plots, which like the streets of town were straight, perpendicular, Euclidean in their logic and predictability, cobbled together with prefabricated blocks of prose, a black-and-white world that was precisely structured, carefully framed, and inhabited by characters as flat as the surrounding countryside. In those stories death was a farce, an amusing way to pass the time, but the Gonk, who was building something grandiose and dangerous in his mind, read these novels the same way he might read books on carpentry and electrical wiring—with a craftsman's keen eye for detail and with the implicit understanding that he was bound to run into unexpected problems somewhere down the road.

He persisted with this enterprise because he understood the meaning and consequences of failure and because he didn't want the whole town to think him entirely strange or crazy or just plain stupid, though in truth they thought all of those things and things far worse. The professors, whenever they saw him browsing the shelves in the college library, secured their wallets and purses, worried that his conniving coworkers might be lurking nearby. They needn't have worried. The men of the Bloated Tick had no use for books. Many of them were functionally illiterate and signed their names with pentacles and hexagrams and occult crosses meant to signify their belief in the world's end.

“One thing's for sure,” they told me. “The Gonk bought that cottage in the woods for a reason. And he reads them books for a reason, too.”

But what this reason may have been the men did not know and would not hazard to guess, nor did they attempt to interpret the strange things he mumbled as he drew up his plans. They simply accepted the fact that they would never know anything more than what the Gonk wanted them to know.

During that interminable summer the ticks butchered and burned the grass, cutting it too short and spilling big bags of fertilizer on the quad so the campus resembled a barren wasteland with an occasional oasis of dogwoods and sycamores instead of cactuses and tumbleweeds. The Gonk did not always pardon their brainless behavior, but in his more generous moods, whenever he had the rare desire for camaraderie, he invited the men back to the cottage to play poker at a makeshift table of particleboard and sawhorses and to sample the moonshine he made in the antiquated still that hissed and rumbled in the stone cellar.

The still came with the cottage, part of the deal when he purchased the place from Colette Collins. In his estimation the old woman was an indisputable genius and the still her bona fide masterpiece. Sequestered for decades in that vaulted cave, scrupulously avoiding contact with humanity, never seeking recognition, waiting for the black hour of death to arrive, Colette Collins built the enormous still from durable pieces of fine copper and pliable tin. Using only a clawhammer and tongs and her prescient inner eye, she moved nimbly around the still and crafted a series of well-wrought scenes on the boiler walls. Below the vapor cone, circling the uppermost portion of the still like an elaborate garland, she fashioned a deep shaded valley, a powerful girdling river, a vast churning lake, a lonesome village and its unruly multitude. There was a funeral and an epic conflagration and a sailboat tossed asunder by heavy seas. On one side of the boiler a young woman hid in the hayloft of an abandoned barn; on another an immense ship awaited rescue, its mighty hull trapped in a frozen lake under a sky crowded with constellations.

“The boneyard comes with the cottage, too,” said the old woman.

It was a warm day in early June when she handed over the keys, the sky an intense and burning blue, and she gazed wistfully at the crumbling monuments in the adjacent cemetery. Despite the decayed grandeur of her exterior, Colette Collins seemed as old-school tough as the Gonk.

“There isn't much in the way of maintenance, if that worries you,” she said. “Mow the grass before it gets completely out of hand and spray the weeds. Put the headstones back in place whenever a storm blows through the valley or if a pack of those frat boys comes loping down the road late at night. They always scatter after I fire a warning shot from my Winchester, but I find I can't keep up with their nonsense anymore.”

Between small sips of grain alcohol from a mason jar and two quick drags on a cigarette already reduced to a wobbling pillar of ash, she assured the Gonk he had no obligation to provide guided tours should anyone show up unannounced, not that he would have to worry too much about unexpected visitors since the covered bridge spanning the river had been washed away in a flash flood in spring so now there was no direct connection with the main highway except the narrow road that snaked through woods and fields until it reached the cottage of unmortared stone sitting atop a low hill silent and inviolable like an ancient oracle awaiting a wizened seer to read the signs and make grim pronouncements.

“In the fall,” she said, her voice occasionally cracking from infrequent use, “a few graduate students may come along and try to decipher the engravings on the headstones. I like to think they feel obligated to check on the eccentric octogenarian living alone in the woods, what with all the squalid meth labs dotting these hills and the desperate junkies willing to murder you for a dollar, but mainly I think they come to purchase my shine and hear a few of my crazy stories.” She tapped the jar with a crooked index finger and winked. “Ah, looks like you could stand for another taste of the creature yourself.”

The Gonk, who had a fondness for homemade potions, accepted her offer; it made him weak in the knees, hot and sinewy and cathartic beyond all reason, like sex after many months of celibacy, something he knew a bit about, especially after his wife left him for his nemesis at the bistro and didn't bother to send him the terms of the divorce until several weeks later, only after she made certain the uninhibited sucking and fucking had a real shot at long-term success. In the months that followed, he conditioned himself through rigorous practice and discipline to abstain from any activity that might compromise his goal, but now he allowed himself a celebratory drink or two.