Dirty Ol' Baby
(opening chapter of a novel in progress by Ad Homan)
On the third day of rain, Lenny Lence began to hear voices.
He had been lying in bed with the flu, drinking chamomile tea and orange juice, popping massive herbal pills that smelled like dirt, and trying desperately to read something. He was exhausted, yet whenever he drifted off for a moment, thecoughing fits began and the end of his life seemed to be approaching at a terrifying rate. The first few coughs felt good, like something was getting cleared out of him. But then the tickling in his throat didn't stop. He just kept coughing; it felt as if the muscles in his chest were being torn apart and the lungs were trying to get out of the terrible, sick prison of the body called Lence. There was a faint taste of blood in his mouth. But it wasn't only Lence's body that was ill. Lence had been suffering from this flu since before the rain had come. How long will this last? Am I going to die? What if this is something worse than the flu? Lence had not been getting the rest he needed. The rain wouldn't stop, and neither would the coughing, the production of yellow phlegm that seemed to come from his brain, nor the sense of imminent death. Lenny Lence had lost his wits. But like I said, it was the third day of rain, and he began to hear voices. Lenny Lence was half asleep. He heard the rain. It seemed to swell for an instant, like it was becoming more intense. There were so many droplets, and he could hear them so clearly. He thought that if he could hear each one individually, then maybe, maybe maybe he would (God help me please, I'll do anything for you!) be able to sleep. But it is much more complicated, I think, thought Lence, this is the worst moment in my life.
Sorry, I have to interrupt this before I even get to the point where the voices came to Lenny Lence. Its just that, at the very moment I am describing, this brief experience in the life of one man, an interesting man, but nevertheless a singular man, at the same very moment that Lence thought that said moment was the very worst one in his life, a lot of people were experiencing the very worst moments of their lives: a group of middle-aged women in a small town in southeastern Europe had just finished the grueling work of digging a muddy trench before which they were kneeling. They were watching as a company of soldiers on the other side of the ditch executed each of their children and grandchildren. The soldiers kicked the bloody lifeless bodies into the trench. The women watched and saw how still the bodies were. They knew they were next. None of the women could actually decide whether this moment was the worst one in their lives yet. It was also unclear whether they felt that they were better off getting killed right then and there. But it took several minutes for the soldiers to get back to their business and kill the women. The women had lost their wits to such an extent that the actual moment of taking a bullet in the head wasn't that bad. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that the few minutes before they were executed were the worst moments in their lives. Now, the reason it took the soldiers so much time to gun down the women after shooting their children was that one of them had decided that it was the worst moment in his life. He had just fired a 9mm bullet into the side of a fifteen year-old girl's head. He had pressed the gun up to her ear and at the instant he pulled the trigger, she had touched his knee with her hand. She hadn't grabbed him, she didn't seem desperate at all, she just touched the knee. And the touch of that young feminine hand on his knee reminded him of something from his adolescence but he had pulled the trigger and now there was blood and brain tissue to wipe off of his glasses. He tried to remember but saw her body drop and half of the girls face was gone. Just gone. And there were bits of skull and brain everywhere and the blood was like sticky sauce all over everything. He holstered the pistol, wiped the lenses with a dirty scarf, put them back on and looked across the trench. It bothered him, he thought about what the girls touch had reminded him of and squinted through the lenses, which were still filthy, smeared with the girl's fluids and the dried snot from his scarf. And he noticed one of the women on the other side of the trench staring at him and shaking. Slowly a high-pitched wail emerged from the woman. The soldier knew that he had just ended her daughter's life. This is what made it the worst moment of his life, or so he thought, and he told his lieutenant that he had done enough killing for the day.
It resulted in an altercation among the soldiers, which is why it took them a few moments to get back to the job of blowing the heads off of the women and getting the old men of the town to bury them. Our soldier having the supposedly worst moment of his life had lost his case and ended up shooting the mother of the girl. Two years later all of this will be over, he will emigrate to New York and sell running shoes on Broadway. He will learn to paint. Life will be better. How could it be worse than senselessly executing civilians? He will return to his apartment in the Bronx after work one evening when someone grabs him, covers his head with a sack and pulls him into an alley. He will be sodomized with a metal object (the police report later refers to a heavy-gage industrial file) for two and a half hours and left for dead. But he will survive. And it is safe to say that the rest of his long life will contain no worse moments.
It is also safe to say that this was not the worst moment in Lenny Lence's life. But then again, it is safe to say a lot of things: it is safe to say practically everything.
And everything is what Lence thought he was hearing. The rain had become louder, and he had heard the drops unbelievably distinctly. First those pounding down on the air conditioner that he still hadn't removed from his window even though it was November already, then the ones hitting the trees. He thought about the complexity of it all, about the surfaces onto which the drops were falling, the pattern of spaces either getting hit or not getting hit; then he thought about the time, the simultaneity of certain drops, the rhythms of others. He was thinking hard. Lence had a doctorate in mathematics and was working on a second one in physics, so it is safe to say that if he was thinking hard, he was thinking thoughts that most of us couldn't even begin to imagine.
It was like music. That was what we would understand from what he concluded. And this is what rain always sounds like. Except different, since the complexity could never be repeated identically. There were so many factors to account for. If the trees grew, for instance, the surfaces hit by the rain would never be identical. The music was wonderful, though, and Lence began to sleep.
This is where the voices came, saying everything. Many, many different words in many, many languages replaced the sound of the raindrop music. The voices were calm but there were so many of them, all at once. Lence woke up with a start and heard only rain. He thought he had been dreaming. But it is safe to say that this had not been a dream, and it was not the last time Lenny Lence would hear voices.
When Lence woke up his eyes felt clear and his throat was no longer killing him and from his bed he looked up out of the window and he saw the blue skies and could tell it was a crisp autumn day and that he was no longer sick. Everything was silent. No rain, no music, no voices. He stretched and stood up and walked to the kitchen and made tea and listened to the news on the radio and drank tea and ate a grapefruit and took a shower and got dressed and put on his shoes, then his scarf and coat, and walked out the door and locked it and descended the stairs and went out the front door and looked down the street and saw on which side the sun was shining and crossed the street and walked down the street. It was a day like any other day, and if I have to describe this slice of his life in any greater detail I think the superfluous information will make me puke. But what is important is that Lenny Lence felt like he had been cured, he felt clean and refreshed, and he knew nothing more about the rain and the music it had made and the voices that had said everything, all at once. It is safe to say that Lenny Lence thought he could get on with his life.
A week went by with marvelous weather and then it rained again and the voices returned as you might have predicted since I said that it would happen and there has to be something special about Lence otherwise I would not be talking about him since he would be neither interesting nor important. As far as that goes, the narrative of our soldiers crimes would be more interesting and the story of the unearthing of the mass graves of civilians would be more important. After all, in the very same week in which Lenny Lence was having a grand time enjoying the autumn weather in New York, in which he felt healthy and energetic, in which he worked in his laboratory and read the paper and watched television, drank tea and coffee, cooked food for a girl he was falling in love with, laughed at a joke his best friend told him, laughed so hard he almost choked, got a haircut, bought groceries at a greenmarket, and went out to see the newest Woody Allen movie with the same girl he had cooked for at that very same time, our soldier executed over two hundred civilians before realizing what the touch on his knee had reminded him of. And I cannot do justice to what it must feel like to know you are about to die, to watch others die, to dig your child's grave, by giving any further statistics about how many moments were the worst moments in how many mothers' lives. Let us just say, safely, that a lot would have to happen to Lenny Lence in order to make him either interesting or important. I can even tell you right now that Lence's death will be gruesome and incomprehensible, that he will feel a lot of pain, that it will take weeks, and that I will be partially responsible for it. It is also possible that Lence will be connected to the worst moment in that soldiers life, and that the touch on the knee will enter his consciousness somehow, otherwise I would not know about it. So much is possible, so much is happening, so much has already occurred, and there is so much more to tell. It is all so improbable the way things came together. So very unlikely. It isn't bad or good, it just came together the way it did, and somehow I was put into the position of being able to see the connections and how fragile they were and still are, yet I feel far too inadequate to explain the reason behind it it is not like some big marionette theater with a master puppeteer carefully working the strings from above. No one was really in control of anything, yet it was not a question of fate. It is one of those complexes of moments and interrelated elements, all improbable and contingent rather than necessary Lenny Lence would be able to grasp it, it would be a piece of cake for him. But Lenny Lence is dead, dead, dead. I hate the story to which I have been privy, in which I have slowly become entrapped. The only way out is to tell the story one more time, to try and get it right this time, since it would otherwise be far too easy to judge or condemn those who played a role, whether realizing it or not. How much do you really want to know? How much do you know about me, how much do you need this? If I can tell this story once through and get all the facts right and put it in the right order so that one person who wasnt involved can understand... if I can manage, and if you can understand, then it seems like the whole chain of chain of events might snap and dissolve into the totality of everything that has happened and it will be over. Life will go on with its simultaneities and rhythms and it will be possible once more to know that so much is going on which I cannot possibly know.
Sometimes it becomes impossible to shut out the information, the noise. Whether its the neighbors TV or the traffic on the street, the constant chatter of fellow citizens, the inane conversation next to you on the subway. For Lenny Lence, it was becoming impossible to shut out the rain. It just happened, the way rain always seems to just happen to those who dont pay attention to the weather reports. One day you're walking in the sun and the next thing you know, everything is wet, all the people going about their business suddenly raise their arms above their heads and run for cover. At the moment the umbrellas pop up, even the most polite citizen of the most polite society becomes a selfish bastard in the desire to stay dry. This was what Madeleine Kurtz thought and that is why she always refused to use an umbrella. Maddie Kurtz would arrive at work soaking wet and proud of it. She would enter a restaurant drenched to the bone and say, table for two, non-smoking. She would take a long walk and act as if nothing was happening when a violent storm rolled over her. Her German boyfriend would tell her that she was going to get sick, but Maddie never ever even sneezed. She never had a stuffed-up nose, never a cough, never a fever, never a headache. She did have intense abdominal pain due to an increasingly dangerous ulcer. She never drank alcohol, had tried coffee once but found it unpleasant, never smoked, refused medication for her single physiological ailment. Maddie Kurtz would be described with the word intense so often that if you added up the number of times and knew that she will live until she is 34 then it would come out on average to be something like this: she was called intense to her face or behind her back, on the phone or in intra-office email 1.7 times per hour for the duration of her 34 year life. It infuriated her since she believed herself to be a laid-back, down-to-earth, relaxed, and quiet person. Still, it is safe to say that Madeleine Kurtz, even when she wasnt soaking wet, was a holy terror.
So on the third day of rain, while Lenny Lence was sick with the flu and about to hear voices in the rain for the first time, while our soldier was rolling a limp corpse of a fifteen-year-old girl into a muddy trench several thousand miles away, while the mother of that girl was gripped with feelings far more intense than anything that can safely be said, while I watched and somehow could not move or think I wasn't absorbing the information, the events occurring before me as a series of gruesome images of senseless violence, but rather, everything that happened was penetrating me, it raced through me, slicing and burning itself into my passive body at that moment, Maddie Kurtz was spending the morning reading screenplays at a friends apartment in Astoria, Queens. She looked up from a manuscript, removed her cat-eye reading glasses, and looked out the window, saw the rusty and grubby water towers and sloppily tarred rooftops of Queens and the faintly visible purity of the Manhattan skyline. What a view. The rain made it feel cozy to sit in a warm living room. It is safe to say that she was content and that it was one of very few moments of contentment that she had experienced that week. A guy in Atlantic City realized, at the same moment Maddie Kurtz removed her reading glasses, that he had just won a game of blackjack, the one-thousand-fifty-first game of his life, the first game he had ever, ever won, blackjack or otherwise. He won $10 on a $5 bet at a $5 minimum table. He was an investment banker nearing his retirement, and it is safe to say that he had millions of dollars in liquid assets. Yet the moment he realized he had won, after being such a loser all his life, was a moment of pure contentment. And it is safe to say that he never played blackjack again, that in several weeks he will retire and start a new hobby. He will learn about art and buy expensive sculptures and paintings at fancy auction houses and travel around the world and meet artists and give them five-figure checks and make them happy and feel good about it, but he will never, ever be as content as when he won $10 at that blackjack table. And at the moment he won, in that same second of the greatest contentment of his life, when Maddie Kurtz up in Astoria, Queens, in her friends living room was just touching her glasses to remove them, our soldier several thousand miles away was reluctantly yet efficiently following his lieutenant's order and was raising a pistol to the wailing head of the woman whose beautiful innocent child he had killed several minutes earlier, and I was watching it happen, it was happening at me. I was sprawled flat on the rooftop of a nearby house facing the action and I knew I could not turn away since any noise I made on the old shingles might draw attention to me, and I had already decided several weeks before as I got off the helicopter and realized what a shitty mess I had gotten myself into, what a stupid risk I had taken for my career, how expendable I was to everyone but myself: I was not going to die here in this hell-hole. I had made the decision and it kept me now from turning my body and giving myself away. But something else was keeping me from closing my eyes, and they hurt like someone was rubbing sand and salt in them, and everything that happened in front of me was pushing itself into my body through my eyes like a dry, rusty razor. I saw the girl touch the soldier's knee and saw how fragile she was and saw that he saw as well and saw that it was too late. I saw him see the mother and saw her see him and heard the same scream he heard but it went through me as the one moment I would never forget whereas he was remembering something else, something which he had forgotten, something which had not been a violation into him, into his memory, something gentle and of a purity that was completely alien to the moment the rest of us there were living. I could not shut my eyes for fear that I would lose track of where I was, of the continuity of images and events to shut my eyes would have meant letting it go, accepting it. But I must not give you the impression that I had a choice. No, no, no: my eyes were wide open and I had about as much choice at that moment as the girls mother did. She had nothing to do but wail, and I had nothing to do but watch. My camera-man, meanwhile, lying next to me on that roof, had turned the camera away from the scene. He had been scared, had been as hyper-conscious as I was, but now he could only think about the diarrhea in his pants. About the fact that he had done it and he could not believe that he had actually done it; his pants were full of disgusting shit and there was no way back, no way to reverse the flow of events. His only clean clothes were in the hotel room which we would next see in two days. He felt like a dirty baby, he was a dirty old baby with no attentive parents to clean his diapers up after his poopie. Embarrassed and terrified and ashamed, he made promises to God, silly promises of what he would donate back home if no one ever found out about this, and he could only think about what he might use to wipe up the liquidy noxious shit; I watched the soldier trying to get the brain tissue off of his lenses, put his glasses back on, and squint at the screaming woman he would soon kill. Maddie Kurtz's eyes scanned across the lines of text, she raised her head, removed her glasses, and looked out into the rain and the double skylines. She looked around her friends living room and thought about what great taste he had. The place, which she used as a quiet place when he was out of town, was decorated with North African artifacts. The furniture was rich and comfortable. The floors were impeccably clean, the moldings were immaculate. She looked at the walls of the living room, the faint saffron color, and had no way of realizing that a forty-four by twenty-eight inch square of that wall would in several years be the temporary home to one of the most terrifying and significant works of art ever to exist. No, she had no way of knowing about this at the moment, but in due time, she would know, she would experience a painting, the production of which was, it is safe to say, the worst moment in the history of art. I'm not exaggerating. How do I know this to be a fact? I don't. But the painting that would one day hang on the wall, the wall next to the window through which Maddie Kurtz was looking when I thought I was witnessing the greatest horror I would ever witness, that painting would impart to anyone; anyone with an understanding for what it means for everything to go terribly wrong a greater understanding of how things can be worse than anyone, regardless of the terror lingering in the deepest memories, can possibly imagine. I will come back to the painting, I will name it, I will trace its coming into being, will show you how it arrived in Maddie Kurtz's friend's apartment in Astoria, Queens, how it effected the lives of those who set eyes on it for more than a moment, how it was the product of a man who could only fail, who could not possibly produce even a simple work of nice, kitschy dilettantism, how at a particular moment, this particular man, even if he thought it was an accident, could produce only one particular thing: the perfect instance of the antithesis of art. I promise to come back to it, though my words will never impart the kind of disruption, the havoc that this painting has caused.
Maddie Kurtz, Maddie Kurtz, Maddie Kurtz. She was having such a nice day. She picked up the phone and called Peter. He answered and it was his accent that cracked her up as it always did when she was having one of these rare good moments. Usually it frustrated her and she wished he would get over himself and not push it. She had heard him imitate Americans and knew that he could speak with absolutely no accent if he wanted to. Instead it seemed that he took pleasure in screwing up the verb tenses and pronouncing V like W, which didnt make any sense, given German phonetics. It was a scandal. Some sort of silly conspiracy on the part of all these teutonic invaders of Manhattan. And somehow she had ended up with him, and somehow he could tolerate her. He was a lucky man. He managed to do everything in his life in a half-assed, nonchalant, and sloppy way and yet it all worked out for him, at least most of the time, in the best possible way. He had everything and deserved none of it, at least from the perspective of a work ethic. Yet I am tempted to say that he deserved his successes more than most since he seemed to appreciate his luck, perhaps even to worship it. He also worshipped Maddie, which isn't surprising, yet he put no effort into keeping her by his side. Again, he was lucky lucky that he was reminiscent of someone from her past, although she was not aware of this; lucky that she had truly loved this other person, and that her love had now been transferred onto him. He was also lucky not to have been injured by Maddie, for her aggression against others, particularly colleagues from her office, often resulted in accidents which were absurd but not superficial. Once she had hissed at her secretary George after he had said something which hadn't pleased her, and as she hissed she flicked the tip of a pencil in frustration, the point broke off and flew straight into his eye, straight into the pupil of his eye, in fact, and he had needed surgery. Like I said, it had been an accident, a silly little mistake with a serious consequence. Over the last year or so, Maddie Kurtz had also broken someone's ankle by rolling over it in her chair (he was a cover illustrator who for some reason insisted on sitting on the floor at staff meetings), had scalded someone's nose with a laser printer cartridge, and had managed to slice the back of her supervisors neck open with a Japanese letter opener (18 stitches), all by accident. It is safe to say that Peter was lucky. He was lucky and he knew it, lucky to be in one piece and lucky to be getting a call from Maddie Kurtz and lucky that he didn't know much about anything else. He was lucky not to be my camera man with shit in his pants who would be dead within the hour and lucky not to be Lennie Lence, not to be the fifteen-year-old girl in the trench her mother dug, not to be the mother. He was even lucky not to be me. He was lucky to hear Maddie Kurtz's voice sounding sweet for once as she looked at a blank space on that saffron wall. And I'm afraid to say that this confluence of luck, Peter's wonderful fortune of not being so many different people in so many different places at this very moment, was the height of Peters serendipity. Things were going to get very, very bad for Peter Harald Daub, all kinds of things that never would have occurred if Maddie had just read another page before taking off her glasses, looking out the window, looking at the room, and calling him. But for the moment, it is safe to say that Peter was very, very lucky that he knew nothing of the way the rest of all this was going to collapse onto him in precisely three years and two days as a result of this phone call. "Here Daub," he said into his cell phone. "Gootsatchoo callt."
copyright 1999 ad homan