His Raven by Steven Felicelli |
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Mice. Three white, three field. An Irish Setter. A wombat and live butterflies. A hutch of rabbits (perpetually pullulating). A saluki (though where he found a saluki . . .) and two tall tanks indyed with a fauvist fauna of tropical fish. One of each species of lemur. A bulldog who ate from the bowl (clearly marked) beside the Setter’s. Two fat tabbies. (The butterflies died young, so he got new butterflies.) A family of chimps.
More butterflies and a few brown moths. Fireflies, hummingbirds, an owl. A Saint Bernard (who ate with the chimps). Geese and teal. A cockatoo. A cock and two hens. A sperm whale (died in the tub, but he kept it). A baby giraffe. A vole. Two wolverines. Innumerable stray squirrels and chipmunks. Gazelle and whatever the plural of moose is (three and three respectively).
It was simply too many animals for a small, studio apartment. So he let them go. (You can imagine how it broke his heart.) So he let the rest of them go. He had to. If the acquisition of the animals (one by one and few by few) were enacted upon a stage, it would have resembled Ionesco’s The New Tenant—though one wonders how The New Tenant could have been enacted upon a stage or even if it was ever meant to be enacted -- animals like so much furniture. There were more animals than living space in this 450 sq. ft. apartment. It was something of a logical contretemps (to say nothing of the olfactory implications). So he let them go.
Me, he kept. I didn’t take up any extension of space. Perched on his shoulders.
Spoke into his ears. Remember the chimps?
It was of some consolation to him. Words reified his memory. I’d crow like the cock or cluck like the squirrels or click and groan in imitation of the burbled death rattle of the sperm whale and he’d just laugh and shake his head and say nothing like an idiot child and I’d say,"Why are you laughing like an idiot child?" Though I knew it was because he’d forgotten the sounds animals made.
He forgot what the animals were called. I’d say, Remember the chimps? and I may as well have been saying, Remember the point of infinite density from which the entire universe recoiled? for all he laughed and shook his head. And then he stopped talking altogether.
His friends were alarmed by this. Why have you stopped talking altogether? And while I felt the pressure to respond for him, I demurred. I didn’t like his friends. They had no appreciation of my gift. (Try to have a conversation about Heidegger or the The Byzantine Empire with his friends and you’ll see what I mean.) So I’d try to change the subject. It seems they’ve discovered life in the hells of hydrothermia where no sunlight penetrates to sea fumaroles—and they’d say, Shut up, you! We weren’t talking to you. We don’t give a flying fuck about the sunlight or what’s at the bottom of the sea! See? See! And so I led him away without a word and for good. (It broke his heart, but he was better off without them.)
And then difficulties developed in the workplace. (An aphasiac copywriter is bound to have difficulties in the workplace.) I had to cover for him. Started wearing his collared shirts and neckties. Wrote copy. Submitted it in his name. The hell is this? the man to whom I’d submitted the apocryphal copy would say and I would, in turn, inform him, words, and he’d say, you better shut that smart-mouth bird’s . . . mouth, and I would commend his insults, which he’d take as further insults, but I haven’t cultivated this elevated sense of language to write insipid jingles for troglodytes like yourself and while I’m pretty sure he’d had only a vague notion of what a troglodyte was, he was nonetheless incensed and informed his erstwhile employee that he should feel fortutate this troglodyte hadn’t socked him in the jaw!
The loss of income was a source of dismay to his fiancee. (their first quarrel since harping on his illogical menagerie) She insisted he find employment elsewhere.
I didn’t want him to find employment elsewhere and so in the hopes of waylaying his mental energies, I began reciting poetry to him from the moment he woke in the morning to the moment he let his dreams come. Eliot, Blake, Neruda, Emily Dickinson, etc. It cured his aphasia (though his tongue was still locked in his jaw). I administered the lotos fruit of poems for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He was my full fed goat. Had never even gotten around to finishing his curriculum vitae. Needless to say, the fiancee left a Dear John on the back of a phone bill.
And then there was the falling out with his father. You’ll blame me, but try to understand. He was family, yes, I could have held my peace and pretended to take some interest in baseball, automobiles, the mortgage, etc., but when he belittled the poor boy’s resolve to be a broke-dick poet all his life, and insisted he get a job, well, I wasn’t going through that again and so I told his father just how vacuous and inconsequential a life I thought the old man had lived to that point -- when beneath me, I felt the shoulder fly forward as if the boy’d been struck a blow in the chest, and I knew I shouldn’t have said that, but had no intention of taking it back and how could I have known the old man was a few months from a cardiac arrest, as he turned tail and shuffled out of the small, studio apartment like a hurt child.
The financial windfall of his father’s inheritance kept us in birdseed and new books for quite a while and I would read him poetry in the morning and in the afternoons I’d translate his dumb shows into literary fiction and in the evenings we listened to Mahler and Satie and we’d doze off dreaming of Midsummer in the dead of winter and Siberian prison camps in August and the universe expanded in word rather than outward, recomposed itself into a fantastical realm of Supreme Fictions as all the matter beyond our shoulder began to recede like the white slivers that wane toward a new moon, until one day, his mien darkened in the middle of a Duino Elegy and in a confounded grimace seemed to say, I’m hungry, as if this were a preposterous turn of events and I hadn’t the heart to tell him the money was running out and then, as if in a logical progression, his eyes shone and lonely, as if to be so were somehow enigmatic and I tried not to take this as a personal affront, but I could see the world outside our shoulder coming into view again like the moon rising into a rearview mirror and I couldn’t help but feel responsible for this irremediable exile and isolation and so I asked him, a la Ariel to his Prospero (or vice-versa) if there was anything I could do to make it up to him -- some final valedictory gesture to the dearly departed?
He pondered this. He thought hard. He considered it for a whole autumn and part of a winter and one late afternoon he looked up from the flyleaf of a collection of so-called confessional poems, took pen in hand, motioned for me to perch on his wrist and mouthed the word,
Apologize.
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Steven Felicelli has written four quasi-novels: Leaving Lascaux (a mock history of Western Art), The Second Person (a book length suicide note - will be published by Six Gallery Press sometime in '07), a word made flesh is seldom (series of letters to a long dead Emily Dickinson), and The Shut In (autobiography of a text). He has also written several plays, short stories, treatises, and loads of truly awful poetry. He is 36 years old (though he has the body and disposition of a man twice his age). He lives on a street called Art Hill in St. Louis, Missouri where he writes, reads, thinks deep thoughts and would use big words in casual conversation if he had somebody to talk to. This past Tuesday he pissed himself because he was so preoccupied by a quantum conundrum (the idea of an "advanced wave" traveling backward in time) that he actually forgot to unzip his fly and take "it" out. Nor was it the first time he's done that.