Night Soil Read online

  “This was your f-father’s uncle. Anthony. He lived in Texas, which is why you never met him.”

  I never met my great-uncle Anthony—never heard of him for that matter—because my mother had had nothing to do with any family member since she moved out of the President’s House a decade and a half ago. I wished I had a book with me so I could turn a page, pretend to be reading, but the only thing on the bedside table was a bottle of Bigeloil, a horse rub that one of my dermatologists thought might make my birthmark more pliable by dilating the capillaries under the skin, and I grabbed the bottle and squeezed about half of it onto my left arm and began rubbing it in with my right hand.

  “Apparently there was some money. Quite a—Judas, please don’t do that, you’re going to get stains all over the bed. Quite a bit of money. Apparently.”

  The truth is my mother had had nothing to do with any family member, hers or mine—by which I mean, she’d had nothing to do with my “f-father”—since the day, a few weeks before she fled the President’s House, she discovered she was pregnant with me. I rubbed my arm harder. A side effect of the Bigeloil was that it deepened the color in my birthmark, and my left arm, normally more rosé than true port, now glowed unctuous burgundy.

  “And, well, as next of—Judas. Please. That quilt was sewn by your great-great-great-great-grandmother. As next of kin, the money goes to you.”

  And. Well.

  And well it seemed to me that my “f-father” was closer kin to his own uncle than I, but I thought that if I continued to rub my arm, which throbbed purple like a tourniqueted limb, sprayed oily froth all over the quilt (which had not, in fact, been sewn by my great-great-great-great-grandmother, but by one of her slaves), my mother would—f-finally—explain this too. And well I knew that anyone who couldn’t see my left arm, could see only my right arm sliding back and forth, would think I was jerking off (and that I was hung like a stallion!), even though the action reminded me of my mother’s hands as she rolled out her clay, and at the thought of that I rubbed even harder, and the bedframe began to creak beneath my scabbed ass.

  And. Well.

  And, well, the next thing my mother said was, “You don’t want that one, Mr. Ling, Judas pooped in it when he was five,” and a moment later the apartment was filled with the sound of breaking ceramic. “Oh dear,” my mother said as I ran for the safety of my broom. “That’s really gonna cost you.”

  After she became famous my mother developed the habit of deflecting questions she didn’t want to answer by claiming that “she only knew what she knew” (or, well, “I only know what I know,” because, although Dixie Stammers had many eccentricities, referring to herself in the third person wasn’t one of them). She knew, for example, that for thousands of years of early human development visual art approximated the role that writing later came to play (hence her love of ) and that some forms of writing developed out of visual, that is to say, mimetic representations of the world. But she also believed that both the numeral “1” and the letter “I” were stripped-down pictograms of stick-figure drawings of the self (which, just in case you’re as suggestible as my mother, they’re not). She maintained to her dying day that the colony of monk parakeets in the gardens behind Stammers Hall had come to these parts as the local version of the canary in a coal mine (to be fair to her, no one knows where the parakeets came from, but the canaries in Marcus Stammers’s coal mine were in fact canaries) and though she reluctantly came to accept that Thomas Crapper didn’t invent the flush toilet, she never fully relinquished her belief that the plumber’s surname lent itself to the euphemism by which it is referred. Nor was she convinced that the “&” symbol wasn’t invented by André-Marie Ampère (“Ampère’s ‘and’”) or that bloomers weren’t named for the temperance suffragette Amelia Jenks Bloomer. Yet another thing my mother apparently didn’t know, and that I didn’t know either, until that phone call from Texas, was that my father had had an uncle, a wealthy uncle apparently, named Anthony DeVine—oh, and that my father was dead. She didn’t know that either. But she knew to answer the phone the day my uncle’s lawyer called to say that he—he being my uncle, but also my father—had died.

  She told me once that she didn’t know his name, and then she told me that she did know but wasn’t going to tell me. She told me he wasn’t an Academy man and then told me he’d insisted she get an abortion, which the way she said it (it would be “wrong” to add “another consciousness” to a world overfilled with beings so “alienated from the real” that the only way they could cope with its destruction was by “diffusing it in spectacle”) made him sound exactly like an Academy man. She told me she only knew what she knew, and that I really, really, really didn’t want to know the few things she could tell me—and then, biting back a smirk, she said, who knows, I was a dirty little boy, maybe I did want to know. She told me he was the most beautiful boy she ever laid eyes on, and then she told me they only had sex one time—though for a long time before that, she told me, they did everything but (“B-U-one T but, Judas. Get your mind out of the sewer. Although speaking of: Have you moved your bowels today?”). The most beautiful until you, she said then. Until you. She told me there were 1013 cells in the human body, and that if you started with the two cells she and my father contributed it took a mere sixty-seven rounds of division to produce all the cells needed for a fully formed, fully functional future citizen of the republic, and that every time she made a pot she was trying to get back to the perfect kernel that had been the end of my father—the end of her—and the beginning of me. My mother’s pots were the most important thing in her life. To be compared to one was her way of giving you a kiss—an open-mouthed, bare-breasted, bottomless kiss, her tongue snaking down your throat and her hand sneaking down to guide your penis inside her—which is to say that, yes, having my mother compare me to her pots felt like a violation of Oedipal magnitude, as if she’d not just propositioned me but actually climbed on top of me, hair pulled to her off shoulder like a porn star’s so the camera wouldn’t miss one gory detail. (In fact the two cells necessary for conception merge to create a single-celled zygote, so there was one more round of mitosis than she thought, one more backward step in the path she was trying to retrace at her potting table. But that was just one more thing my mother didn’t know. No wonder she was never satisfied with me. Or, as she put it: “Stammerers have been marrying their cousins for five generations. No doubt that’s the reason we’re all the way we are.”)

  Which point, however jokingly she made it, ignored the obvious: like a purebred dog suffering from hip dysplasia or a designer strain of wheat that can no longer resist even the most common rusts and smuts, I was proof that conscious attempts to manipulate heredity tend to exacerbate hidden flaws that come to catastrophic fruition just when you think the lineage has been perfected. The most visible manifestations of this phenomenon are biological, obviously—those poor Habsburgs and their jaws!—but to the Academy way of thinking it’s every bit as true of culture as it is of the bodies who produce it. The masters cite epochal moments in history to validate their position: the transformation of the Roman Republic into a proto-fascist monarchy at precisely the moment it believed itself to be at the peak of its creative power; or the wholesale slaughter, by Spanish conquistadors fresh from driving the Moors out of Iberia, of untold millions of Native Americans, and the squandering of the plundered riches of same on vainglorious wars against the Turk, which, far from unifying Europe behind the imaginary banners of race and religion or even geography, merely laid the groundwork for the First World War, an unimaginable conflagration that, in light of the rest of the 20th century, seems less aberration than inevitability. All of these arguments, however, were superfluous in our house, where my mother’s efforts to atone for the mistake of making me resulted in the creation of a set of artifacts so monstrous that, in the words of one critic, “they violate every notion of what it means to be human,” and that, far from saving me, or her, or us, or
the Stammers name, destroyed us all, which process began in earnest not when my mother sold her first pot, nor even when she conceived me, but when I received my father’s uncle’s inheritance.

  It was, in other words, all my fault.

  The bequest came, after it was liquidated, and after lawyers’ fees, brokers’ fees, and taxes, to a little less than $400,000, which my mother spent months making sure I wouldn’t have access to until I turned twenty-one, before turning around and asking what I would do with my windfall, if I could spend it right now. I was caught off guard by her question, but I knew the answer before she’d finished asking it, because even as she was speaking I was looking around our apartment and seeing just how futile my efforts had been—how organization creates its own disorder, cleaning its own decay. We’d lived above the Browns for almost fourteen years. During that time myriad objects had trickled steadily into the apartment but nothing had left—nothing besides vegetable rinds and empty bottles and $8 million worth of pottery. Now I saw the narrow trails winding their way through shapeless, unidentifiable mounds; saw the gaps where my scrub brush had dislodged dozens of filaments from the parquet; saw couches and chairs whose cushions were so abraded by the fabric brush of our ancient Electrolux that the dyed strands of the weft had been worn away, leaving only the coarse white strings of the warp; saw the archipelago of patches where I’d scoured paper and paint off the walls, in some places plaster too, exposing chalky lath like layers of shale; saw the wisps of dust that, like the fine coating of hair on early hominids, fringed the ninety-six rosewood saints lined up on a ridiculously high shelf I’d never been able to reach; saw my mother’s smock hanging from its peg like toilet tissue from a tree the morning after Halloween, the fabric whiter than snow and almost as insubstantial, having been nearly disintegrated by its daily dousing in lye; saw, finally, the doorless sleeping cabinet that housed my bed, which couldn’t conceal my desire, let alone contain it, and I said:

  “I want the hell out of this dump.”

  Over the previous few years I’d developed the habit of turning my right ear toward people so I could hear them better. I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time, and most people, I’m sure, thought I was simply shielding them from the mottled left side of my face, which infuriated me, especially since I could feel them take advantage of my averted gaze to stare. My mother was as guilty of this as any stranger. Now, when I jerked my face back toward her, her mouth dropped open in a gasp and she looked away, only to gasp again, one wrinkled hand, prematurely aged by her work and her penitent baths, flying to her mouth and trying vainly to stuff the breath back into her body. Her eyes darted about as mine had, though what they noticed is anyone’s guess. Maybe she saw how the apartment, all things considered, had accommodated us so well for so long; but I think she saw how, in fact, it was we who had adjusted our movements to our cramped shoebox, by inches and degrees, by hunched shoulders and tunnel vision and a shuffling one-foot-in-front-of-the-other gait like the Cherokee trudging onto the Trail of Tears after they were forced from these parts in the 1830s. As her eyes took in the smallness of the setting and the vastness of the effect it had had on us, she finally realized that it was we who sheltered our home rather than it sheltering us, and a look of profound longing settled on her face, or perhaps was revealed there, as though something—a mask, a birthmark, or maybe just her porcelain skin—had been peeled away, revealing the skeleton of loss. You understand that the desideratum is not a condition one associated with Dixie Stammers, who had the uncanny ability to bring into existence exactly what she wanted, be it a lover or a fortune or a sixty-fifth or -sixth or -seventh perfect pot—anything but a son whose harlequin skin made him jester to her attempt to rebel against her heritage—and for a moment I thought she was going to refuse me, even cast me out. But she clapped her chapped hands together and said:

  “I know just the place!”

  And that’s how acclaimed potter Dixie Stammers and her parti-colored, preposterously named, but otherwise unexceptional son, Judas, townies born and bred, with no more affinity for nature than pigeons or socialites, ended up living on 216 acres of scrub bisected by the serpentine shallows of the White Woman Creek, in a three-story brick building that purported to have started out as a lumber mill despite the fact that it stood half a mile from the streambed. It stood equally far from the Post Road, half hidden behind a sandy hill held together by a thicket of stunted sassafras and cedar, which lent more credence to the story that the building had in fact been a whorehouse, although the more probable truth is that it had simply been a warehouse, or maybe just a fancy barn.

  There’d been money before my great-uncle died, of course—my mother had sold more than sixty pots by then. But to her way of thinking that money had been given to her under the delusion that her pots were somehow worth more than what they were, what they could do, which was hold a few dozen cookies or a couple liters of water or leave a nasty bruise if someone beaned you with one. Even if you filled them with silver or gold or beluga caviar they wouldn’t be worth what people had paid for them, and I think that on some level she believed the money would disappear, would evaporate or be reclaimed when her buyers realized that, after all, her pots really were just pots. (She turned out to be right in one sense, although completely wrong in another.) And of course there’d been money before she started selling them. Marcus Stammers’s fortune never quite reached the standards of the most famous nineteenth-century robber barons but, after personally chiseling a cool million in gold from the Magic Mountain (as the peak later renamed the Palatine was then called), then exhausting the substantially more extensive copper deposits beneath the gold, an enormous seam of stone coal had revealed itself. The coal was buried deep in the mountains, under the gold, under the copper, and under hundreds of feet of particularly hard feldspathic sandstone, which is why it took so long to discover it, and it was the profits from this final enterprise that endowed both Lake Academy and the Magic Mountains Conservancy and left enough for Marcus’s children and their families to live on, if not in splendor—he donated the grand stone mansion he’d built in the 1840s to the Academy, but he also built the plantation-style President’s House so his descendants wouldn’t end up on the street—then at least as local gentility. The Stammers heirs had none of their forefather’s luck with money or reproducing, and one civil plus two world wars wiped out all of them save the great-great-great-grandson whose money and genes, both rather depleted, found their way to my mother, and then to me. Though most of the assets were tied up in various trusts, annuities, long-term T-bond hoody-hahs and various other complicated financial instruments made all the more byzantine by the passage of a century, the interest and dividends and whatnot were still enough to provide a reasonable living for a single mother and her only child, even if the one had a ridiculously profligate potting hobby and the other required shockingly expensive, screamingly painful dermatological treatments, most of which weren’t covered by insurance because they were deemed “cosmetic.” “Paper breeds paper,” my mother told me more than once as she took a stack of checks the bank had mailed her back to the bank, where she deposited them so they could earn her still more interest. “Cash breeds cash and debt breeds debt. Whether it’s dollar bills and stock certificates or credit cards and property liens it’s all paper, and it reproduces like a virus.”

  If I said that, in hindsight, the move seemed inevitable—seemed, just months after we arrived, to have been what both me and my mother had been waiting for, if for very different reasons—I’d be violating one of the central tenets of Academy philosophy. History (or history as it’s taught elsewhere than the Academy) accustoms us to the reassuring notion that our future makes the past inevitable, so much so that we forget life is lived in a blind present, in previous eras as in our own. Academy historians (and at the Academy all teachers are historians, whether their field is mathematics, political economy, or physical culture) continually remind their novices that nothing’s in
evitable until it’s happened, which point is so crucial to the Academy worldview that complines conclude with a request for the sun’s return the following day, or the serenity of spirit to accept it if it doesn’t. To view the past as somehow intentionally producing this moment is to deny that our forebears possessed free will or were susceptible to the universal machinations of chance. In an alternate future my mother and I still live above the Browns’ bakery in an apartment so filled with detritus that we have to burrow our way through like termites. In another she never left the Academy and neither did I; we still live in the four-pillared President’s House on the top of the hill and I still hide my skin beneath flowing black robes and mortarboard. In yet another she heeded my father’s advice and never had me, and in still another she was born a man, was steeped in Academy doctrine and took her—“his”—place as its fifth president rather than sneaking into the odd class and learning just enough to reject something she never really understood. Not one of these alternatives was obviated until a woman named Kennedy Albright stabbed my great-uncle Anthony DeVine in the throat with the stem of a wine glass (I know: dramatic); until a freelance critic and occasional contributor to Art in America decided she couldn’t hold out for Dunkin’ Donuts at the airport and stopped in at the Browns’ bakery; until teenaged castaway Dixie Stammers ignored the pleadings of her lover and carried her baby to term; until, the year before that, Dixie, unexpectedly orphaned, decided to leave the Academy founded by her great-great-great-great-grandfather to its own fate; until a spermatozoon carrying Marcus Stammers’s great-great-great-grandson’s X chromosome, and bearing a mutation on the RASA1 gene (judging from the occasional nevus that shows up in family portraits, the mutation was most likely carried on the Stammers line), outswam its competitors and fertilized the ovum hanging out in Elisa DeVine Stammers’s fallopian tube. Thus Dixie Stammers; thus the unlikely but incontrovertible origin of my abomination.