and odd movements and frightening voices and a woman standing on top of a horse and an elephant, finally, the feature, sitting in a car. Put your hands together, said the announcer, a dwarf on stilts, for Kisses the Driving Elephant, who was, in fact, driving, so to speak, an appropriately enormous convertible, using her trunk to turn the wheel.
Eventually, Kisses drove her car into a small pyramid of very short clowns.
Which hadn’t been meant to happen and hadn’t been all that funny.
In various parts of the world, at various times, they have used elephants to execute people. One way was the elephant would rear back and you would be tied to something and then it would come down on your head. Brave people, it was said, wouldn’t close their eyes. Those elephants were painted with all kinds of patterns. I forget who told me about that. But at any rate I used to imagine it sometimes—lying there, eyes open, being brave, with the painted elephant rearing back.
I don’t think any of the very short clowns were badly hurt. Kisses, certainly, was not hurt, and she kept driving, around and around.
It was of this Kisses the Driving Elephant, at any rate, that I thought, and of elephants in general, and of those painted elephants, as they applied, for perhaps the sixth or seventh time, of great big elephants and of jeering onlookers, one of their kisses to the back of my neck.
Insofar as I was able to think.
Then they made me ingest the onions, the stewed apples, and the meat.
I wished they would not make me eat the stewed apples.
They had been our stewed apples—for the shelves, in our jar, etc.
Chew, I was reminded by someone close to my head.
I chewed.
It was very sweet. Sweeter than just the fact of the stewed apples.
Honey sweet.
I had seen all this process, from a small remove, on that previous occasion, the latter portion of which, involving the bag and the rocks, I have already mentioned. But that had all transpired in an almost empty room, empty except for a small blue appliance that sizzled and sucked away at an outlet in one corner. The process went on long enough for me to notice that the walls, which I had taken for white, were really a very pale green, another effective—I knew something about the subject—technique. The woman with the cigar, my boss, had not conducted that exercise. The tall, thin woman plus one or two others had. My job, at the first, had been to stand at the door, which I did until all of them had left and it became my job to sit in the room and watch him. Part of my stupidity, you will note, consisted in having been a party to this previous process, and having, nonetheless, taken the course it has been part of the purpose of this narrative to describe. But I had been in the condition I had been in when I had chosen my course of action. In picking me for the assignment, the boss hadn’t counted on what might become the ramifications of my having fallen in love.
Or perhaps she had.
Preposterous causality.
But at any rate, I was still in that condition.
I am still in that condition.
Where is she? I asked, my mouth full of hot objects and I don’t know what kind of unpleasant tasting meat.
This time I did get some kind of response.
It was the stapler.
Each time its two ends came together there was that fine, crisp clunk.
That was the way John found me, having, as he put it, made his arrangement with them.
We came to an understanding, he told me a little later when I was back on my feet again.
Yeah? I said. An arrangement? I said.
Way for them to reimburse me for breakages.
Which surprised me a little. After all, with the exception of the incident involving my former downstairs neighbor, and one involving one of the waiters from the night of our turkey dinner, as well as another just before his arrival involving a young man on a motor scooter who had, as he had put it, injusticed him, he had all but given that up.
Just temporary, he said.
A little arrangement, I said.
Eventually, Kisses drove her car into a small pyramid of very short clowns.
Which hadn’t been meant to happen and hadn’t been all that funny.
In various parts of the world, at various times, they have used elephants to execute people. One way was the elephant would rear back and you would be tied to something and then it would come down on your head. Brave people, it was said, wouldn’t close their eyes. Those elephants were painted with all kinds of patterns. I forget who told me about that. But at any rate I used to imagine it sometimes—lying there, eyes open, being brave, with the painted elephant rearing back.
I don’t think any of the very short clowns were badly hurt. Kisses, certainly, was not hurt, and she kept driving, around and around.
It was of this Kisses the Driving Elephant, at any rate, that I thought, and of elephants in general, and of those painted elephants, as they applied, for perhaps the sixth or seventh time, of great big elephants and of jeering onlookers, one of their kisses to the back of my neck.
Insofar as I was able to think.
Then they made me ingest the onions, the stewed apples, and the meat.
I wished they would not make me eat the stewed apples.
They had been our stewed apples—for the shelves, in our jar, etc.
Chew, I was reminded by someone close to my head.
I chewed.
It was very sweet. Sweeter than just the fact of the stewed apples.
Honey sweet.
I had seen all this process, from a small remove, on that previous occasion, the latter portion of which, involving the bag and the rocks, I have already mentioned. But that had all transpired in an almost empty room, empty except for a small blue appliance that sizzled and sucked away at an outlet in one corner. The process went on long enough for me to notice that the walls, which I had taken for white, were really a very pale green, another effective—I knew something about the subject—technique. The woman with the cigar, my boss, had not conducted that exercise. The tall, thin woman plus one or two others had. My job, at the first, had been to stand at the door, which I did until all of them had left and it became my job to sit in the room and watch him. Part of my stupidity, you will note, consisted in having been a party to this previous process, and having, nonetheless, taken the course it has been part of the purpose of this narrative to describe. But I had been in the condition I had been in when I had chosen my course of action. In picking me for the assignment, the boss hadn’t counted on what might become the ramifications of my having fallen in love.
Or perhaps she had.
Preposterous causality.
But at any rate, I was still in that condition.
I am still in that condition.
Where is she? I asked, my mouth full of hot objects and I don’t know what kind of unpleasant tasting meat.
This time I did get some kind of response.
It was the stapler.
Each time its two ends came together there was that fine, crisp clunk.
That was the way John found me, having, as he put it, made his arrangement with them.
We came to an understanding, he told me a little later when I was back on my feet again.
Yeah? I said. An arrangement? I said.
Way for them to reimburse me for breakages.
Which surprised me a little. After all, with the exception of the incident involving my former downstairs neighbor, and one involving one of the waiters from the night of our turkey dinner, as well as another just before his arrival involving a young man on a motor scooter who had, as he had put it, injusticed him, he had all but given that up.
Just temporary, he said.
A little arrangement, I said.
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