Shakespeare of the Apes
LOWERY WAKES; IT IS SUNDAY MORNING. Breakfast sounds come from below, but he does not immediately arise. He lies beneath the tousled muslin sheet lackadaisically listening to the faint clatter of cookware, to tap water being drawn, to the muffled sound of Nora’s footsteps on the tiled kitchen floor. The bedroom is awash with bright summer sunshine, redolent with morning’s grass-green breath.
* * *
The walls of my prison cell are the texture of time. The door is a checkerboard of nights and days. Opposite the door, a little window looks out upon Tomorrow, but it is too high for me to see through. The furniture consists of a solitary chair and a small table. Upon the table lies a ream of writing paper; next to it, a quill pen protrudes from an inkwell that has long since gone dry—
* * *
He smells coffee. There will be eggs, Western style, and toast and bacon. He kicks back the sheet, swings his feet to the floor and feels with his toes for the slippers he stepped out of the night before. Felt-shod, he pads into the bathroom where he relieves his distended bladder and washes his face and hands. He combs back into place the straggly wisps of dark-brown hair that crawled down over his domical forehead during his dreams, checks to see whether he needs a shave. He doesn’t quite, but he will very soon; he must trim his minimustache too. It is his only physical affectation and lends him an appropriate academic air.
In fauve dressing gown, he descends the carpeted stairs, walks through the large living-dining room and enters the coffee-scented kitchen. His orange juice glows in a little frosted glass that stands upon the Formica breakfast counter; he dispatches it in three neat swallows. Behind him, Nora says, “Mom and Dad’ll be here right after mass.”
Lowery makes no comment. Nora, who attended five o’clock Saturday mass, drops two slices of bread into the automatic toaster. The counter is set for two; she dishes out bacon and eggs and pours coffee. At thirty-eight, she is not nearly as drab as her disheveled hair and shapeless housecoat proclaim. Her movements reveal a natural litheness, a pleasing fullness of hip and thigh. Her hair, after the dishes are done and put away, will be combed to her shoulders in dark and breathless undulations, the waterfall tresses parting to reveal her narrow bit comely face, her eyes a wild-flower blue beneath plucked black cornices of brows.
* * *
—In choosing her for my mate, I could have done far worse. It is true she is but little less insensitive, but little less materialistic than the other members of her tribe; but she is durable, even more so than her genetic coevals. The females of my native chrono-land are worn out before they are thirty. This is all right—then. But here in the past it is comme il faut to live with the vase long after the flowers have withered and died; thus, it is well for the vase to be sturdy.
I must include this profound observation in the text of the novel I shall never write—
* * *
Scene 2. The house faces east. In its shrinking backyard shadow, stillform dew-diamonds glisten on the grass. Standing on the awninged patio, wearing walking shorts and gripping a ten-pound bag of briquettes, Lowery surveys his demesne. Not far from the patio a Schwedler’s maple stands. To Lowery’s right, a rear door provides ancillary access to the adjoining garage that houses his Bonneville. Between the Schwedler and the patio rises the outdoor fireplace he built last summer with his own two hands. It is remarkably like the one in the back yard next door that his neighbor, Hungry Jack (the epithet is Lowery’s own), built with his own two hands.
Lowery cannot start the sacred fire this early in the day, but he can and does pour forth the sacred briquettes. Several years ago on the heels of a sweltering summer, in response to some masochistic quirk, he directed his English class to write a composition entitled “How My Father Spends His Sundays.” His masochism was amply appeased: Ninety percent of the fathers were of the same sacerdotal stamp as he and conducted similar carbonaceous ceremonies.
There is no need for him to mow his lawn—he mowed it yesterday. But the grass girdling the base of the Schwedler and that flanking the footing of the patio escaped the rotary blade and is both straggly and unsightly. Dutifully, he gets his trimming shears from the garage and sets to work.
Next door, his neighbor, Hungry Jack, starts up his red riding mower; the Sunday silence, unnatural to begin with, absconds. Jack handles the mower as though it is a big bulldozer, sitting top-heavily on the little toy seat. One of his seven sons comes of the house, rubbing his eyes. He begins running after the little red bulldozer. “Dad! Can I drive it? Can I?”
“No!” Jack roars above the ROAR. “Get back inside and finish your cereal!”
Jack waves to Lowery as he makes the first pass. Lowery waves back, looking up from the base of the Schwedler. Seven sons . . .
* * *
—Unlike the Parnassian Block which the Quadripartite psycho-surgeons interposed between my personal unconscious and my endopsychic sphere, the subsequent electrosurgical excision by the Quadripartite techmeds of my vas deferens was a routine rather than a punitive measure. Prochronisms occasioned by cellular retro-dissemination and reassembly create only insignificant disturbances in the time flow and can safely be ignored (consider, for instance, how many CRR’s are involved in installing just one political prisoner in a past cell); however, a single prochronism introduced into the evolutionary pattern of the species is capable of creating a turbulence powerful enough to divert the flow into an alternate channel. Obviously, then, no dictatorship in its right collective mind would, in imprisoning a political enemy in the past, risk his impregnating a female who preceded him on the evolutionary ladder, to say nothing of his accidentally making enceinte one of his own genetic ancestors.
I would not in any case have wanted seven sons. I do not even want one—
* * *
“Vic,”—Nora’s voice from the kitchen—“the Sunday paper’s here.”
Lowery finishes trimming ’round the base of Acer platanoides Schwedleri, postpones manicuring the patio footing and re-enters the house. After pouring himself a second cup of coffee, he retires with it to the living room where the Sunday Journal awaits him on the end table beside his fauteuil. Scene 3. The Journal is gaily wrapped in comics; he discards them, sits down and feasts upon the same intellectual viands that by now have been delivered to Jack’s doorstep, and Tom’s and Dick’s and Harry’s farther up the street.
After updating himself on venality, corruption, rape, murder, mayhem, and the weather, he turns to the book reviews. The Journal devotes an entire page to them. There is a new novel by Nabokov, another trilogy by Barth. In a little box near the middle of the page is a humorous anecdote about Mark Twain. Since first giving its literary reins a shake, the Journal has published at least a thousand boxed anecdotes, half of them about the same literary figure. Lowery, who has read most of them, abandons this one in disgust before he is halfway through the first sentence.
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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