Cats and Dogs
I told her that I was a machine, a gadget, this thing that counts. She smacked her lips and sighed. A fucking what? She said, a fucking gadget? I sighed, knowing full well that I could expect nothing more of her, nothing but fucks and whatnots and how comes. I killed a dog, two, I said. With a gadget, I said, with my bare hands and a gadget. She looked at me through the gloss of her eyes, child’s eyes, and smiled. You kill dogs, she said, really? Dogs? With a gadget and my bare hands, I said, nothing more. Why not cats, she said, cats are good for nothing? Because cats aren’t dogs, I said. I know that, she said, her eyes, child’s eyes, flicking like moths circling a lamp used for camping and fixing the underside of cars. What kinds of dogs, she said? Any, I said. I don’t differentiate one to the other. With your bare hands, she said, that must be fucking crazy. It is, I said, very fucking crazy in deed. Is there much blood, she said? Lots, I said, too much in fact. Cats would bleed less, she said, her lips curling into her teeth, small child’s teeth. That’s where the gadget comes in, I said. The gadget, she said? Yes the gadget, I said, that’s when the gadget comes in. Remember, I said, I said I was a machine, a gadget, this thing that counts. So, she said, what does counting have to do with killing dogs? Because, I said, if I weren’t to count and recount I’d forget how many I’d killed. That must get confusing, she said, all that counting and remembering to count. It does, I said, it certainly does. Then why do it, count, she said? Because if I didn’t, I said, I’d forget what I was doing, loose my concentration, forget I was killing a dog and kill a cat, mistaking a cat for a dog, I said. That’s fucking crazy, she said. I know, I said, fucking crazy as a loon. Maybe crazier, she said. Maybe, I said, maybe even crazier.
This short dramatic exchange is an example of how someone with a Turing brain thinks and imagines he or she thinks. It just that simple, really, nothing confusing or incongruent about it. Yes, quite absurd in deed, but aren’t most things we take for granted or don’t bat an eyelash at absurd in the end, or the beginning for that matter? If we concede that we are machines, that cogs and wheels and hip replacements and sockets will surly run out, requiring new and much improved cogs and wheels and sockets, we will be much the better for it. What, then, is so absurd about a Turing brain and neurotransmissions that go haywire and syntactical reconnections and bruised hips and joints rubbed clean through to milky bone that stop working, stop moving and doing their jobs, being parts of the greater whole being the machine, the machine itself? We eat and shit like machines, we fuck and walk like machines, we even pretend we’re machines that we’re not, other machines, with other desires and wants and cogs and wheels and joints gone bad and rubbed clean through to milky white bone. This is not absurd, but de rigor, the reason we have and are machines to begin with, to end with and learn to live and be happy with. Nothing seems less absurd, less incongruent of machines, of us, the machine, the other machines that we are not but think or wish we were. I am a Turing machine, plain and simple. She does not understand and perhaps never will, even though I repeat and go over things ad infinitum. She cannot be edified, as edification is for fools, not idiots, second scoutmasters or chess savants.
She had junk yellow skin and a dog with a one leg that it dragged behind it. She had no time for the dog, and fed it on birdseed and apple cores she found in the garbage behind the Lebanese grocers, to keep it from whelping and waking the neighbors, she said. The dog had whole patches of fur missing, chewed out in hunger or just fallen out from malnutrition. The dog ate whatever it could sniff out, in back alleyways and under parked cars and in the garbage behind the grocer’s when he wasn’t out back smoking and yelling at his wife. The dog ate other dog’s shit and lapped its tongue against the drainage pipes under the porch where the next door neighbor’s kids cowered when their father drank more than his share. The dog knew no better, nor did she. He would have been better off living with the neighbors or with the Hutterites in one of their incest colonies. Our geology professor would have shot its head off with a thirty-three odd mistaking it for an elk or some other half-dead ungulate with one leg dragging behind it. Dead dog is not to my liking, so I would be hard pressed to eat one, even were I skeletal with hunger. Yes, it’s quite true, I killed a dog, two dogs, but the thought of eating one never once entered my mind, never. Starving Chinese children, so I was told, would eat a dead dog without blinking an eye. Not knowing any starving Chinese children I could care less what they ate. Now the dog is a different matter, he I would give the scraps off my plate, never once blinking an eye or thinking myself generous. A Chinese dog, too, were I to have one or knew a friend who did. Perhaps this is the reasoning of someone that killed a dog, two dogs, and now finds himself feeling bad for having done so. As I have never killed a person, or two, I have no frame of reference to work from, none I can recall nor would want to if I had. When her dog died, caught up under the wheels of a swerving car, I went digging in the garbage behind the grocers and put a crust of day old bread under the porch where he used to lap the water from the rust of the drainage pipes. The next door neighbor’s kids kept a watch on it for me, reminding me not to tell their father where they were, cowering and lighting matches. Children are like that, though I never was, or remember ever having been if I had. I have been a machine, a Turing machine, as far back as I can remember, which is further than I care to. She never could understand that, nor could I expect her to. Junk sickness does that to a person, makes them forgetful and out of sorts with the world.
Her life was a scream that no one heard, not a plea for help, but an acknowledgment that she existed. Like Odysseus’s we lash ourselves to life’s mast, ears stopped with wax, deafened to another’s horrors of molestation and misfortune. A non-reused needle reused sharpened on a match striker, spiked with burrs and flails. Scrimshaw arms torn to shreds by one more non-reusable reused needle hooked into hard callus skin. Where the crook of the elbow meets the forearm, skin marled and scabbed over. Arms like crochet itched red when the scratching wouldn’t stop. Like nylons scalloped with runs and tears. No one heard her scream, not a living soul. A dog or a small child cowering under a porch, perhaps, lighting curds of week old bread on fire, but no one else. Her mother’s blindness brought on by hysteria and the fear of living on mother’s allowance and bingo. Children are not to be heard or seen, but must learn to pull the covers up over their heads, to ward off childish fears and older brothers. Her own daughter slept on the crib of her chest until she was two years old, and after that, whenever childish fears crept in or the outside door rattled in the wind.
The bookbinder binds women’s feet in a room behind the shop, with boxing twine and an assortment of perfumed laces and ribbons for those wanting something less austere. He spoke no Chinese, Mandarin or Asian dialect, but by gesturing with his hands was able to tell a client when to hold out her foot or retract it back into her shoe. He had a cupboard-full of ropes and twines, and stitching threads used for hemming up cuffs or the frayed edges of a well-worn dress. He wrapped and husked their feet, twilling ribbons and bits of string and twine cinched into knots and bolos. He folded skin, rubbed sore and red, into neat little foot packages, some no bigger than a baby’s foot or a bird’s wing, some so crimped and folded over that the skin looked like it’d been scaled in hot water. The women who came seeking his services were of a general sort; some with plumed hats and others with tattered clothing and sow’s ear purses and without stockings or proper shoes. None of them had puncture holes or blue and yellow arms, or bingo stubs and crinkled bleached hair. None of them had starving dogs at home cowering under the porch, tails scabbed over with sores and other dog’s shit.
None of them knew little girls with sound boxes strapped to their chests, or clubfooted scoutmasters and rectory parasites with collared proof of God’s will and purpose. Or poor blinded French girls with one blue and one brown eye, or a girlfriend named Ginette who sucked tears dry, or the second in command who knew so little about knots and had mint gyps and crumbs in the seams of his too fat mouth. They knew none of these, nor would have wanted to if they could have. It is I, the machine with cogs and creaky wheels and playing cards clipped in the wick of my spokes, only I that know or have chosen to know. Bookbinders don’t bind women’s feet, nor do they use hand signals to direct stubborn ill-informed toes and callused heals. Some of this I have made up, with glue and Popsicle sticks, other things I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. Something’s make sense while others don’t. Something’s are for real; others are make-believe, figments of my imagination, nothing more. I am nothing more than my thoughts and those thoughts yet to be thought. I am not pure thought, or thoughts thought without a thinker, I am the thought of thinking, a thought thought thoughtlessly and with little regard for your point of view or thought thoughts. I am all of these, yet I am none of these. I am that which is and that which is not, that which will never be regardless of my childish protestations. I am nothing, and prefer it that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment