The Puttermesser Papers (9 page)

Puttermesser asked, “When you woke into life what did you feel?”

“I felt like an embryo,” the golem wrote.

“What did you know?”

“I knew why I was created,” the golem wrote.

“Why were you created?”

“So that my mother should become what she was intended to become,” the golem wrote.

“Bring me that sack of stuff you were fooling around with in the office,” Puttermesser ordered, but the golem had already scampered off to the bedroom closet to rummage among her boxes and bags of new clothes.

So Puttermesser set aside her books about the history and nature of the genus golem and settled down to contemplate all the pages the golem had typed for two days in Puttermesser's sorrowful cubicle, shared with Cracow—the cubicle of her demotion, denigration, disgrace—in the Taxation Section of the Bureau of Summary Sessions of the Department of Receipts and Disbursements of the City of New York.

What the golem had composed was a
PLAN
. Puttermesser recognized everything in it. It was as if she had encountered this
PLAN
before—its very language. It was as if, in the instant it had occurred to her to make the golem, she had read the
PLAN
in some old scroll. Ah, here was a stale and restless truth: that she did not recollect the actual fabrication of the golem, that she had helplessly, without volition, come upon Xanthippe in her bed as if the golem were some transient mirage, an aggressive imagining, or else a mere forward apparition—this had, with a wearisome persistence, been teasing at the edge of Puttermesser's medulla oblongata all along, ever since the first mulling of it on her desolate walk to the Y. It was like a pitcher that will neither fill nor pour out. But it was now as plain as solid earth itself that the golem was no apparition. Apparitions do not, in hideous public jargon, type up exhaustive practical documents concerning civic reform! Puttermesser knew what she knew—it unraveled before her in the distance, the
PLAN
, approaching, approaching, until it crowded her forebrain with its importuning force: how she had set Rappoport's
Times
, record of multiple chaos and urban misfortune, down on the floor beside the bed, where the
Theaetetus
already lay. How, with a speed born of fever and agitation, she had whirled from window sill to window sill, cracking open clay plant pots as though they were eggs, and scooping up the germinative yolks of spilling earth. How she had fetched it all up in her two palms and dumped it into the bathtub. How only a half-turn of the tap stirred earth to the consistency of mud—and how there then began the blissful shudder of Puttermesser's wild hands, the
molding and the shaping, the caressing and the smoothing, the kneading and the fingering, the straightening and the rounding, but quickly, quickly, with detail itself (God is in the details) unachieved, blurred, completion deferred, the authentic pleasure of the precise final form of nostril and eyelid and especially mouth left for afterward. Into the hole of the unfinished face of clay Puttermesser pressed a tag of paper, torn from the blank upper margin of Rappoport's
Times
, on which she had written in her own spittle two oracular syllables. The syllables adhered and were as legible as if inscribed in light. Then Puttermesser raised up out of the tub the imponderous damp relentless clay of a young girl—a lifeless forked creature in the semblance of a girl—and smelled the smell of mud, and put her down in her own bed to dry. The small jar to that small weight loosened crumbs of earth wherever a limb was joined to the trunk, and where the neck was joined, and where the ears had their fragile connecting stems. The crumbs sprinkled down. They crept under Puttermesser's fingernails.

And all this Puttermesser performed (aha, now it beat in hindbrain and in forebrain, she saw it, she knew it again!) because of agitation and fever: because of the wilderness inside Rappoport's
Times
. Why should the despoiled misgoverned miscreant City not shine at dawn like washed stones? Tablets of civilization, engraved with ontological notations in an ancient tongue. Puttermesser craved. Her craving was to cleanse the wilderness; her craving was to excise every black instance of injustice; her craving was to erase outrage. In the middle of her craving—out of the blue—she formulated the
PLAN
.

She was thumbing it now, it was in her hands:

PLAN

FOR THE

RESUSCITATION
,

REFORMATION
,

REINVIGORATION

& REDEMPTION

OF THE

CITY OF NEW YORK

“Where did you get this?” Puttermesser demanded.

“I am your amanuensis,” the golem wrote. “I express you. I copy and record you. Now it is time for you to accomplish your thought.”

“Everyone has funny thoughts,” Puttermesser croaked; an uneasiness heated her. She was afraid of the last page.

“No reality greater than thought,” the golem wrote.

“Lay off the Middle Finnish. I want to hear the truth about all this. Where'd this stuff come from? You
couldn't
copy it, I never put any of it down.”

The golem wrote: “Two urges seeded you. I am one, this is the other. A thought must claim an instrument. When you conceived your urge, simultaneously you conceived me.”

“Not simultaneously,” Puttermesser objected; perhaps the golem could not be trusted with chronology. She breathed outside history. Puttermesser reimagined the electric moment exactly: the
PLAN
swimming like an inner cosmos into being, the mere solid golem an afterthought.

“No matter; I will serve your brain. I am your offspring, you are my mother. I am the execution of the grandeur of your principles. Grand design is my business. Leave visionary restoration to me.” After which the golem put the ballpoint pen in her mouth and patiently sucked.

A fatigue seeped into Puttermesser; a tedium. It struck her that the golem was looking sly. She noticed that the seams along the armholes in the golem's purple blouse had begun to open. Growth. Enlargement. Swelling. Despite distraction Puttermesser read on. The
PLAN
, though it had originated in her own mind, nevertheless smacked of Marmel's lingo, Turtelman's patois. It appeared to derive, in truth, from the Form-language of Polly the Destroyer. A starkness penetrated Puttermesser; the dead words themselves depressed her. Her wrists shook. Was it not possible to dream a dream of City without falling into the mouth of the Destroyer? Behold the conservation of residential property through the exclusion of depreciating factors. Compute twelve hundred and fifty zoning codes. Note physical aspects. Social aspects. Retail and wholesale business. Manufacturing. Shipping. Single and multiple residences. Cultural institutions. Parks, public buildings, amusements, schools, universities, community objectives, rapidity and feasibility of transportation via streets and transit lines. Health, traffic, safety, public assembly conveniences. Sanitation. Prevention of slums. Transformation of slums. Eradication of poverty. Morality and obedience to law. Ordinances. Trust and pension funds. Treasury, public works, water. Public library. Police. Inspection. Councils and commissions. Welfare.
Trustees. Revenue forecasting. Remote teleprocessing systems, computerized key-entry, restructuring of assessment districts, liens, senior-citizen rent-increase exemptions, delinquency centralization, corporate billings!

“My God,” Puttermesser said.

“My mother has mastered and swallowed all of it,” the golem wrote. “All of it is inside my mother's intelligence.”

“I only meant—” Weak, Puttermesser wondered what it was she had meant. “Gardens and sunlight. Washed stones. Tablets. No; tables. Picnic tables.”

Xanthippe stood nodding. The slyness powered her eyes. “My mother will become Mayor,” she wrote.

The golem took the stack of typed sheets from Puttermesser's unquiet hands and held out the last page:

BY ORDER OF

RUTH PUTTERMESSER
,

MAYOR

OF THE

CITY OF NEW YORK

“Drivel. Now you've gone too far.
I
never thought of that.”

“Sleep on it,” the golem wrote.

“That's
your
idea. You're the one who put that one in.”

“Creator and created,” the golem wrote, “merge,” scribbling this with a shrug; the shrug made the ripped seams in her purple blouse open a little more.

The Honorable Malachy Mavet

Mayor

City Hall

Dear Mayor Mavett:

It is not respectful of a citizen's conception of the Mayor's office as “responsive” that you ignore my letter about possible spoils and other abuses. Still less is it respectful of me as a living human being and as a (former, now dismissed) Civil Servant. Shame! Shame!

Very sincerely yours,

THE HONORABLE RUTH

PUTTERMESSER

This letter too remained locked inside Puttermesser's head. The signature was experimental—just to see what it looked like.

“No use, no use,” the golem wrote on her notepad. “Mayor Puttermesser, by contrast, will answer all letters.”

VI. MAYOR PUTTERMESSER

A
ND SO
P
UTTERMESSER BECOMES
Mayor of New York. The “and so” encloses much—but not so much as one might think. It is only a way of hastening Puttermesser's blatant destiny, of avoiding—never mind that God is in the details!—a more furrowed account of how the golem, each day imperceptibly enlarging, goes about gathering signatures for a citizens' petition. The golem is above all a realist; Puttermesser will run as an independent. There is not the minutest hope that the county leaders of either the Democratic or the Republican party will designate, as preferred candidate for Mayor of the City of New York, Ruth Puttermesser, Esq., a currently unemployed attorney put out in the street, so to speak, by Commissioner Alvin Turtelman of the Department of Receipts and Disbursements, in conjunction and in consultation with First Bursary Officer Adam Marmel. The golem is Puttermesser's campaign manager. She has burst out of all her new clothes, and has finally taken to extra-large men's denim overalls bought in the Army-Navy store on the corner of Suffolk and Delancey. The golem's complexion has coarsened a little. It is somehow redder, and the freckles on her forehead, when gazed at by an immobile eye, appear to have the configuration of a handful of letters from a generally unrecognizable alphabet:

Puttermesser has not failed to take note of how these letters,
aleph, mem
, and
tav
, in their primal North Semitic form, read from right to left, have extruded themselves with greater clarity just below the golem's hairline. Puttermesser attributes this to pressure of the skin as the golem gains in height and thickness. She orders the golem to cut bangs. Though she is periodically alarmed at what a large girl Xanthippe is growing into, otherwise Puttermesser is pleased by her creation. Xanthippe is cheerful and efficient, an industrious worker. She continues to be a zealous cook. She remains unsure about time (occasionally she forgets that Wednesday intrudes between Tuesday and Thursday, and she has not quite puzzled out the order of all the months, though she has it splendidly fixed that November will embrace what has now become the sun of Puttermesser's firmament—Election Day); she is sometimes cocky; often intrepid; now and then surly; mainly she smiles and smiles. She can charm a signature out of anyone. At her own suggestion she wears around her neck a card that reads
DEAF-MUTE
, and with this card dangling on her bosom, in overalls, she scrambles up and down tenement steps as far away as Bensonhurst and Canarsie, in and out of elevators of East Side and West Side apartment buildings. She churns through offices, high schools and universities (she has visited Fordham, LIU, Pace, NYU, Baruch College, Columbia; she has solicited the teaching staffs of Dalton, Lincoln, Brearley, John Dewey, Julia Richman, Yeshiva of Flatbush, Fieldston, Ramaz, as well Puttermesser's own
alma mater, Hunter High), supermarkets, cut-rate drugstores, subway stations, the Port Authority bus terminal. Wherever there are signers to be found, the golem appears with her ballpoint pen.

The petition is completed. The golem has collected fourteen thousand five hundred and sixty-two more signatures than the law calls for.

All this must be recorded as lightly and swiftly as possible; a dry patch to be gotten through, perhaps via a doze or a skip. For Puttermesser herself it is much more wretched than a mere dry patch. She suffers. Her physiological responses are: a coldness in the temples, blurring of the eyes, increased periodontic difficulties. She is afflicted with frequent diarrhea. Her spine throbs. At night she weeps. But she keeps on. Xanthippe gives her no peace, urges her to rephrase her speeches with an ear for the lively, insists that she sport distinctive hats, glossy lipstick, even contact lenses (Puttermesser, edging into middle age, already owns reading glasses).