The Other Ninety-Eight
“A cat [is] . . . a hundred percent cat . . . A person . . . is two percent himself.”
- Walker Percy, The Second Coming
I.
Henry enters the four-way intersection and brakes at the stop sign. A car with its left blinker flashing enters on the road to his left and halts. As Henry proceeds straight, a small part of him wonders if the driver will wait or make his turn and collide.
For some time Henry has been feeling insubstantial, like an apparition who cannot be seen or heard by mortals and is walked through. It’s not that he thinks poorly of himself, as he feels he is compassionate, reasonably intelligent, and focuses on things that matter. So what’s the problem?
To make matters worse, he’s been seeing things lately. Something is following him. Henry has not actually seen it, only indications of its presence.
The driver waits as Henry passes through the intersection. Ah, physics. When all else fails you can count on physics. He’ll always be at least a lump of matter. He feels relieved, not at avoiding an accident but from a sense of reaffirmation. But did the driver stop because of his presence, or that of his car? He can settle the issue by crossing the intersection as a pedestrian, but he dismisses the thought.
He heads for his suburb’s depressed outskirts, making a sharp left onto a narrow, crumbling asphalt road with no name. It runs along desolate storebacks, past overflowing dumpsters and exterior off-gray concrete walls discolored with white efflorescence streaming below exhaust vents. A few miles later it widens, passing a landfill, home to cast-offs once as good as you or I but now discharging the piercing smell of ammonia mingled with that of rotten eggs and perishment.
In a few minutes he is in the slums. On his left are the backs of three decaying eight-story apartment buildings, offset maybe two hundred yards from the road. One runs parallel to the street and is joined on either side by another, perpendicular to it and extending toward the byway. Their brownstone rears are pitted with holes where chunks of mortar have loosened and fallen.
Something inside the horseshoe catches Henry’s attention. There, in that defeated Berlin likeness, on a peninsula bordered by brick and concrete rubble, a boy not more than eight plays solo handball against the back of the tenement. Supple but uncoordinated, the child approaches the rebounds with clumsy steps, missing as often as not, grinning an eyetooth smile as he swings at the ball.
Perhaps that’s the trick. You have to keep your eye on the ball. But how do you do that?
He returns to the main boulevard, eagerly seeking direction from all traffic signals. It is Sunday, the thoroughfare barren, but the lights instruct him nonetheless.
Stop.
Go.
Caution.
Now, stop.
They tell him how to live.
Back at his motel, Henry puts on his running shoes for a sunset jog through the adjacent field. Smog above, slush below, he tries to navigate in the failing light of a 25-watt world. After about forty-five minutes his sinuses become congested, and he occasionally gasps for air. At every instant a part of him has to focus on continuing the effort, not stopping.
He is being followed again.
He sees evidence of his pursuer for an instant: long enough to believe he’s seen it, briefly enough to have doubts. It looks like a peacock-sized shadow, yet is no shadow at all because its outline changes minutely but continuously. He swings his head swiftly to find no object casting it, and when he turns just as quickly back the apparition is gone.
Every shadow implies the presence of an object projecting it; he is unwilling to abandon belief in physical law; it is his remaining toehold in reality. Thus it follows he will one day turn swiftly enough to see his tracker. The problem is it appears unpredictably.
Is it possible to be followed intermittently?
A friend has to miss the evening’s performance of Cats and gives his ticket to Henry. Traffic into the megalopolis is initially light, but now nearing downtown he stalls in congestion on a three-lane road sloping downward into an underpass. Enormous graffiti-covered granite ramparts rise almost perpendicularly on both sides. Poison sumac plants tower over a rock field near their base and gray-white mottled pigeons forage in the discarded soda cups and assorted trash trapped in the tall weeds that spring up amongst them.
He is wedged in the rightmost lane between the wall and his next-lane neighbor. There is no margin for error. He cannot afford car trouble. If some lunatic with a machine gun goes on a firing spree, Henry will simply have to die.
He sits numbly, breathing lightly of the exhaust fumes, waiting for gridlock to resolve itself. Turning in his seat, he sees the impasse extends far behind him, looping onto the ramp he descended to get here.
For an instant he becomes light-headed, disoriented, helpless. He can’t remember who he is, what he is doing here. Then deja vu overwhelms him. How can both be true? Is he delirious?
His brain goes into overdrive. Neurons fire across synapses as his corpus callosum blazes new connections.
He’s been stalled on this road before, eight months earlier. Though it hadn’t penetrated his consciousness then, now he knows: his zero complex began at that moment.
He senses its cause and tries to find the words. He tries to name the beast.
People everywhere, squeezed together: in that car, a recovering alcoholic, turned to Jesus; over there, a depressed mother, empty nest syndrome, youngest gone to college. Terra’s teeming billions, each regarding themselves a special case.
The conventional wisdom regards him unique and it is true, but overstated. Millions are similar enough; it’s hair-splitting. None of his feelings are unique to him; thousands have felt them, or feelings very close.
His best friend Dave, his mother, and his Uncle George are all intimate parts of his life, yet they mean nothing to almost everyone. His mother could die tomorrow and none would know or knowing, be able to care. Countless redundant lives would steamroll forward, unaffected.
But the same things are true of squirrels. This is not the central point. This is not the beast.
The truth is overwhelming and humiliating, so we invent ways to deny it: a husband or wife to put us at the center of the world, the object of affection and attention. Or perhaps a position as a CEO, to give us the illusion of power.
We care. Squirrels don’t. Why does anonymity affect us so?
Something tingles in the back of his mind, something he can’t reach.
“Pigeon,” he mutters presently, then focuses on one stirring in the weeds to his right. In a few moments it flies out, up and away into the blue sky.
“Grass,” he murmurs, looking back to where it had been.
“Henry.” He leans toward the rear view mirror for a few seconds, then stares forward into space.
II.
In the city, Henry checks his car into a parking garage and has an early dinner of tortellini at Alfredo’s. After dessert he leaves the restaurant and glances at his watch. It is only four-thirty.
The show doesn’t start until eight and even Happy Hour at Danceteria is half an hour away. He wanders the sidewalk in search of a destination. Lost in thought, confused about where to go, he rambles into the path of two determined businessmen.
“‘Scuse me,” one of them declares, obviously irritated, using the palm of his hand against Henry’s shoulder to nudge him aside. The other laughs.
He moves over to the curb and takes note of the passersby. They are people with full lives. He admires their purposeful strides. It makes him feel weak, very exposed, what no one should ever be: at your service. A slate to be written on.
Come eight o’clock Henry is intoxicated by everything in the club: the pounding beat of the band, the drinks, the smoky haze swirling through flashing colored lights, the provocative dancing of exotic women of various races. Thursday afternoon Happy Hour has seduced him, leaving an insatiable craving for stimulation.
You have the power
you have the touch
wired love rocket
your heat’s too much
Later, much later, he’s forgotten about the play and is in a strange bedroom. They are both blurry-eyed and high, pulsating to the beat they can still hear in their heads.
He holds her face in his hands and kisses her lips, which swell slightly, becoming redder and more sensitive. Running his index finger lightly along her lower lip he brushes her silky black hair aside and begins kissing her on the side of the neck. She sighs, and after a few moments works his way up to her earlobe, taking it in his mouth and tugging it gently. He runs kisses down her neck as he unbuttons her blouse. She is breathing deeply now, more rapidly, and feels hotter to the touch. Pain and worry are banished and they are both suffused in pleasure. We are creatures of the senses, he thinks.
He awakens in a stupor but without a hangover. His left cheek is squashed against the mattress. Too tired to move, mouth agape, his fisheye opens onto a hairbrush on a dresser. Hairbrush, hairbrush, hairbrush. He can’t conceive of it without the word, the signifier. Language determines him.
Hairbrush. Whose hairbrush? It isn’t his. His doesn’t look like that. Find out more.
He rolls his neck a half-turn until his head rests on the back of his skull rather than his cheek. Pausing a few seconds from the effort, he opens his other eyelid and rolls his eyes right, then left and back again. This is not his house. Whose is it? Last night. A bar. Drinks. Barbara. He remembers her name, even a little about her. But it isn’t enough. Nouns demand signifieds. He finishes the neck roll and sees the woman next to him.
It is 4 AM and a work day, and she probably does not have the benefit of several vacation days as Henry does, so he rises quietly, dresses, and leaves a short note that he’ll call that night. He doesn’t know what he will say, but he knows he has to call.
If only presto! he could be back upstate, but unfortunately he will be alone with his thoughts for several hours during the return trip. Why did he sleep with her? Lust alone? What is he trying to prove?
He barely knows Barbara, but from his perspective she is fixed. No matter how unfathomable her personality, she makes decisions. No matter how mysterious or tortuous these decisions, others can not really know her by her anguish. They, as she, are creatures of the senses. They know her by the observable results of her decisions. They know her by the tracks she leaves.
Even a rabid dog that scurries in a circle biting its tail appears defined.
Consequently he has a signified for Barbara, Dave, his mother, others.
As for Henry, he can know his anguish. He makes all his decisions. He doesn’t know what to do with Henry. He varies continuously and from the ultimate to the slightest. He is perpetually reinvented because he can’t conceive of himself.
The scent is hot. He’s on its trail again.
There is something relevant, one of his first thoughts upon awakening, a gift from the unconscious: Language determines him.
Yes, and undermines him.
Barbara, grass, pigeon: all present and accounted for.
He can smell it now. He is just outside its lair. Find the words, make the connection: Our lack of the signified for ourselves condemns us to a ghostly existence of psychological impotence.
Our mere reflection won’t do. It is too important to us and must manifest our essence. No wonder anonymity affects us so. It confirms our worst fear. Human language forces subconscious awareness of what we are missing.
Quietly closing Barbara’s apartment door he emerges into the hallway, past its smells of trapped food, past the small lobby intercom buzzer panel and its white-on-black laminated stickers of current resident names crookedly pasted over faded surnames of former occupants, and out into the city, fragile and worrisome in its complexity.
Forty miles outside of the capital, he pulls over to the road shoulder, closes his eyes, and falls back on the headrest, weary.
“Any trouble?”
The voice electrifies him. He hadn’t noticed anyone in the area. A farmer walked over from the adjacent field.
“Oh. No. But thank you for asking.“
“Don’t have a flat or anythin’?”
“No, no car trouble. I’m just a little tired.“
“There’s a rest stop ‘bout ten miles down.”
“Yes. Thank you. I saw the sign. I just need ta’ close my eyes for a few minutes, that’s all.”
The man eyes him suspiciously. “They have coffee ta’ wake ya’ up.”
“Thank you, but all I need’s a little shuteye.”
The figure doesn’t move. There is a tomb-like silence reminiscent of court before the verdict is read.
“I’m sorry if I interrupted what you were doing. Please just ignore me. A little rest and I’ll be gone.”
The suspendered overseer won’t budge. A weathered face with inset hawkeyes inspects Henry and his car. The only sound is the rustle of leaves in the aurora breeze.
“I-”
“Rest stop’s ‘bout ten miles down.”
Henry grabs for the ignition key, but when he looks down the road, his vision blurs. Too many drinks, too little sleep.
“Sir, I—”
“Get your ass down rest stop.”
He can’t go forward and he can’t stay. It is too much.
“I’m sitting here. I’m just goddamned sitting here, you got that? I don’t want trouble, but if you do you came to the right place. I’ll take ya’ on, right now. My ass ain’t goin’ nowhere but sittin’ goddamned here!”
The instant he finishes Henry feels he’s been listening to someone else. The farmer hurls him a filthy look tinged with fear and marches back to his field.
Henry puts his forehead in his hands, sighs, and runs his fingers back through his hair and down his neck. He rests his head on the steering wheel and stares vacantly at the floor, listening to his own breathing.
Finally raising it, the corner of his eye glimpses something in the vehicle’s side mirror — his umbral stalker, or is he going mad?
It’s perverse, how the search leads where it isn’t. Places like the slums. Or strange bedrooms.
The news is full of stories: a man who stabs another late at night merely because something he said “dissed me.”
Or a jilted lover who kills her partner: “If I couldn’t have him, no one would.”
These things never happen to squirrels.
And there’s impostor syndrome. Fear of public speaking. Elite invitation-only clubs to make us feel special. Endless distortions. It is a matter of degree: everyone is insecure, even bullies, and the supremely confident. Especially them.
Why this need for validation, for affirmation?
Perhaps being the planet’s most adaptable animal comes at a cost: sacrificing singularity of identity, along with the consequent fragility.
Henry knows human evolutionary change is ongoing. There is lactase persistence, for instance.
At that point he reaches the limit of his relevant knowledge. He does not know the first psycho-physio mutation manifested in 1907, and the poor soul committed suicide.
Nor is he aware that, in its blind way, nature recognized a need to compensate for the deformed behaviours spawned by insecurity in this technologically powerful species, so random scattered transmogrifications followed the first one in Mumbai, to Hackensack, Mombasa, and across the globe. Those men and women saw it through, and their experience was so encompassing they retained no memory of it. And now for eight months Henry’s zero complex has been preparing him for a transmutation. Humility is its seedbed and sine qua non.
He feels a presence and everything becomes vivid. The air seems to crackle, transfigured by some agency, an emerging sphere of influence.
Henry looks out the car windshield and sees the shadow. Pivoting in his seat to see what is casting it, he finds nothing there, and when he turns back the shadow persists.
He gets out of the car.
It is no shadow at all. It is the entity itself, crystallizing under strain, inhabiting the extremes when he is pushed to his limits and most needs to contact his self, a creature of the brink.
He stands before it, immobile and unblinking, saturated in its resonating hum which recalls the inside of a seashell and the exalted, rarefied, autonomous world that suggests.
“Gaze upon me.”
“No.”
But he is compelled. It is fluctuating shades of black and very shiny, a reflection of its surroundings. Its border is indistinct.
“No, no.”
It confirms his worst fear. If it’s capable of being anything, is it anything at all, like a person who doesn’t have one particular face?
It swoops down in a long arc to consume his head. Henry can’t move. He doesn’t have enough weight to act. It fills the universe and Henry’s inner noise thunders. The endless, pointless, maddening reverberations grow deafening. He becomes crammed with himself.
Core
dwellers
inherited and formative
subsumed
by a
protean
child of necessity
mirroring
its
many parents
In the final moments it is everything he can see, and at last he dumbly awakens to what has eluded him: its small nucleus, dull black and well-defined.
It is bounded after all: several precious limitations, fixed during infancy, even conception, forevermore. Personality traits forged at birth, blessedly circumscribing his adaptability, allowing him some handle on his self.
Now he knows this, but more: he absorbs it, possesses it, has access to it, internalizes it, because he has seen it; he has perceived, and because he is a creature of the senses, it becomes his.
He has made the leap, now conscious but not self-conscious. His awareness of himself is the same as his awareness of anything else.
It shrinks mercurially, sucked up the arc it has descended. The ringing collapses too, diminishing to a sigh. Henry has never known such a hush. He can see the entity now in perspective: out there with the other fauna, sharing the same sky as the blackbird that glides high above it.
“Henry,” he says.
III.
A light breeze runs through his scalp, tickling the back of his neck. He isn’t so tired after all. This is a good day to grab his fishing gear and enjoy the still waters of Lake Placid. Then tonight he’ll call Barbara. They collided like billiard balls but now he will be able to see her, rid of the baggage of surplus psychic needs.
At home he packs his bait and tackle in the trunk, slips through the crossroads, and glides along route 73, meandering through mountain passes and river valleys flanked by tranquil ponds. A golden strip of grass slices across a pasture, glistening with the artless spectrum of the morning sun against the dew. Yes, the fish will be biting today, and tomorrow he will visit Saratoga for some music under the stars.
He hears a siren wailing in back of him. He smiles.
In his zeal, he ran the red light.