"Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while."
--Nathaniel West
***
I was out last night. I woke up in Danny's room and he was angry with me. I could tell. He was sleeping in his baseball cap end he wouldn't say anything. I tried to ask trim what was wrong and he said, "you know." I don't remember much about last night. Maybe I did something to hurt him. I ask him to talk to me and he tells me to go away.
Leaving his room I step on a pen and almost fall. Slipping sideways and sideways and not knowing whether or not I was going to fall, I scream at Danny that he is wrong. But I don't fall. Walking home through the rain, the air around me is dank and rotting. It is supposed to be spring, but everything is dead brown wet.
In the lobby of my building sits that old fat woman who's always sitting in the lobby of my building. Always smoking, smoking, sucking on those little sticks of death and all the time looking fatter and healthier. She tells me I look tired and I should get some sleep.
"Don't even answer the bell," she says "Just sleep."
"Oh, I will," I say. "Bye. Have a nice day. Bye now."
She has the basic human urge, the feminine urge, to hold things together. The dust on the floor must be vacuumed up. Tired children must sleep. I picture her balancing her check book every day, even on days when she hasn't written any checks.
On the stairs the strap of my bag breaks and everything falls to the floor, pens, and combs, and papers. I pick them up, angry, frantic, panting, and trying to get away.
Once inside the apartment I drop my bag on the floor. Here, it can lie where it falls. Inside these walls is my own world where straps break and dust sits on the floor for months. No fat old woman smoking cigarettes can come here to order and arrange.
When I hang up my coat, it slides easily off the hanger. When I put my quarters into a vending machine nothing comes out. So naturally I live in a messy apartment. The only thing kept somewhat neat are my books. Some of them I have just because I like their titles. One is called The Nightmare of Reason. Another one is called La Machine Infernale. On the back of the book it says that man is not born free. That he is born blind and that the gods control his destiny. This is given as a fact.
I remember once reading that man has a tropism for order, while the physical world has a tropism for disorder end entropy. I believe that. Things seem to want to break, to fly apart, to spin away, to separate, to waft and slip off easily bit by bit into nonexistence, while humankind desperately tries to keep things ordered and in their proper places.
I myself live at 322 Crescent St. Apt. 104, but yesterday the mail was not delivered. The mailman was attacked by a dog and had to have seven stitches. Thanks to Dr. Goring, the mailman feels better already. Without the doctor, he might have gotten rabies. The car which is not treated rusts, pianos get out of tune, the streets will fill up with snow.
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I don't especially like snowplows or Rusty Jones. The floor of my room becomes covered with clothes. I oversleep and forget to go to work. I should be going to work now, but I am too tired after last night. I lie down on my bed, ready to fall into that welcome, sometime undrugged blackness. There is no need to unplug the phone. It hasn't been plugged in for days. Half sleeping, I return to the state of being little. Little and sturdy, running around on the beach with Davy and Max, taking small branches off trees to use swords, and forcing Lila to eat sand. "Why do I always have to be the prisoner?" she would wail. "Evie's a girl, too, and she's littler and she never has to be prisoner." I would jump on her, and seam my fist into her stomach again and again, until her world fell apart blow by blow. Afterwards her teary face would fill me with a dull pain and I would build her world back up by stealing ice cream from the freezer for her and giving her all my best toys to play with. |
"Come to the country," she always says. "Country air will surely do you good."
"Oh, Lila, no" is the only answer I can give. She is still the same Lila who fixed Barbie's hair, while I went through the directions on my chemistry set faithfully doing all the NEVERS and the DON'TS in the hopes of blowing the house sky high. The explosion would blow me right up to Mars, where there was no school or bedtime or dishes to be done.
That plan never worked out. Nothing ever has. Now Lila's married to Dr. Winston Alexander and has a career and I'm on my fourth waitressing job in almost as many months and I heard Danny's mother telling a friend, "We worry about Danny going around with her. She's the type of person who breaks things just for the sake of hearing the crash and seeing you jump."
Danny comes into my bedroom. "You should lock the door when you sleep, " he says.
I laugh. I would like to see someone try to attack me. I would rip them apart, decimate them.
"You're mean to me when you're drunk," says Danny.
"What did I say?" I ask.
"Just forget it, I'm not mad."
"Not angry," I say. "you're not angry."
"Not mad, either," he says and I push a pile of clothes off the bed so that he can lie down with me. Keys and change fall with a pinging metallic sound. I put my arms around him. He is big and sturdy and for the time being everything is all right.
Hours later I am drunk. Danny is holding my hand, but he's talking to someone else. People are sitting at my kitchen table. A girl I've never seen before is saying. "You have to stop, Nathan. You just have to stop. Or she'll never function normally again."
In the corner, two people are whispering fiercely and intently. Everyone else is laughing or yelling about ordinary things or raising glasses to their mouths. Someone calls "Evie...Evie.." but I do not answer. When I do speak, I feel that my words should take the form not of a mere, a simple, a banal utterance, but a message. For the moment I keep quiet, busily trying to come up with a message. The messages which run through my mind are not the ones I want. JESUS SAVES. Or GET YOUR MONEY BACK. Or A STITCH IN TIME SAVES NINE.
Why do all the available messages try to order, to define, to correct, to regulate? A message isn't a formula or a principle, it's something that just has to be said because it has to be known. The idea of the message has been misused, perverted, prostituted. Somehow people, with their maniacal need for precision and understanding, have made the message a means of bringing together rather than of tearing apart.
Banging my fist on the table, yell, "The faithful are sick." Everyone stares at me. I am very drunk. I want to say that when I was little, I got a chocolate rabbit one Easter. When I bit its ear, I discovered that it was hollow.
People do the stupidest, the most erratic, the bumpiest things. There is a definition in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for french fry.
***
The first time I met Danny, he told me that time is nothing more than a universal progression toward disorder and that once all particles are evenly distributed, entropy will be at a maximum and there will be no such thing as time. Entropy, he told me, is the ultimate measure of disorder.
Since then, he has told me nothing that I do not already know. Still, I like his solidity, his surety, his baseball cap. He is in school, he plays rugby, he throws himself whole-heartedly at other people's bodies. When he is drunk, he picks fights. Even drunk, he stands solidly. Sober, he walks firmly, one foot before the other, while I am forever wafting and sliding to the side. He knocks other people down. That is why I need him to hold me up.
Danny turns from me in his sleep. I poke him, but he pushes me away. I throw pennies off my balcony in high wide arcs. I like the way they scatter randomly across the lawn.
There are still people in my kitchen, so I go to see what they are doing They are people being people, forgetting that life is a bitter brittle process of waiting to die. Sex and food and illness and ideas round life out, but it ultimately sinks back. I am always sinking and sinking, slowly sliding to the side. When I stand up, I fall sideways and sideways and I knock the table over. Glasses fall and break everywhere. People gasp and yell," Evie!" They bore me. Now someone is cleaning up the glass.
"Leave it alone," I say.
"Oh, Evie.."
Sometimes I surprise myself.
Lying on my bed I need to make a connection. Danny still will not wake up. I pick up the phone and call Lila. When she gets on, I start telling the things which seem important to me at this particular time and in this particular place.
"Destiny, fate, ruin, death, judgment," I scream.
"You're drunk," she informs me.
I read to her from the dictionary: "doodad: a small article whose common name is unknown or forgotten."
She asks me if I am all right and I tell her that I am sorry for making her eat sand.
"It was more Davy and Max than you," she says.
"Bull," I say. "It was more me.
"You're right," she says and laughs. I laugh, too.
"Now get some sleep," she says. There is a painful rushing in my head and my throat fills with rage. She is always trying to appease me and then get away. No doubt she feels that she has successfully placated a drunken friend and can finally THANK THE ALMIGHTY LORD go back to sleep.
"Why don't you help me?" I scream.
She sighs. I know what she is thinking, oh god, now I'll be up for another half hour at least.
"Sorry to bother you," I say and as I hang up I hear her faint voice calling out my name. In her kitchen, all her spices are alphabetized. Her daughter and son were born in the correct order, two years apart almost to the day. She goes to church every Sunday, even though she is a busy woman with a job and two children and could use that time to catch up on sleep. Therefore, she will try to call me back. When she discovers that I have taken the phone off the hook, she will not come over. She worries, but really the problems we have had. Dr. Winston Alexander will say, "After all, Lila, there is only so much you can be expected to do."
***
I fall back asleep. Sleep spreads me out somehow. Sleeping, I become clear and pure and I approach the truth more easily. Most nights I dream of arranging broken bits of glass on a smooth white stone. The patterns are never satisfactory and so I rearrange and rearrange them. I try to spread the bits of glass evenly, randomly, but I cut my hands on them and somehow they form neatly regimented patterns of their own.
Tonight I dream not of glass and stone, but of a big old house filled with things. I walk from room to room, looking at tool boxes, broken chairs, upended coat racks. In one room, flags are hanging everywhere, and there are mannequins in military uniform standing against the walls. I like the house, but in the dream I become restless and bored.
Out of frustration, I awake.
***
When we were little, we had a tame bird. He would eat from our hands and fly all over the house. One day he flew into a window and died. Lila, Davy, and Max cried. I cried, too, but when we laid him in the earth I was filled with joy and a sense of freedom. I wanted to run in the sun and put my feet into fresh brown mud. I ran crazily and swung from branches, while the others said a prayer. "That child does not behave as she should," said my father, while my mother stared at me, pained and disapproving.
In the shower, I think about work. Today I cannot stand to go. If I lose my job, I can look for an new one tomorrow. I am far too tired to blow my hair dry, but I run out of my building. I run faster and faster, ragged and gasping all the way to MacDonald's where I eat fries and try to see into other people's lives.
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A raggy old woman sits alone. "Who are you?" she cries. "Who are you? You're back is broken. I despise you. Admit it you've been whipped." This strikes her as funny and she laughs and laughs, a hollow scratchy laugh with no ring of joy in it. "Crazy as a loon," says a fat man sitting near me. "Just as crazy as a loon." He turns to his wife and orders her to get him another cup of coffee. While she's gone his daughter spills her shake. "God damn it, Laura," the fat man yells. The raggy woman laughs even harder until her laugh turns into a choking cough. "God damn it." says the fat man again. "God damn loony bin. Clean up that god damn mess," he says, bulging his eyes and grimacing at his wife. "Can't you be more careful, Laura?" asks the wife. Laura sticks out her tongue. |
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"Show respect for your mother unless you want to get smacked a good one," says the fat man. Laura frowns and takes some ineffectual swipes at the spilled shake. Her mother takes over and cleans up the mess quickly and efficiently.
The fat man gets up to leave and Laura follows him out The wife stands for a moment alone at the table, her head bent and her eyes closed. Then she sways slightly to one side and follows her family out the door.
I stare at my fries, cold now. The way of being in the world makes me ache. An unevenly distributed mass of particles is nothing more than a conductor of pain. I'd like to tell the fat man's wife about the joys of spreading oneself evenly out in bed, of throwing pennies in arcs through the air, of running in the rain until your heart bursts through your chest and then running farther still.
If I could talk to her, I would tell her, "Look: if a piano gets out of tune, leave it out of tune. Let the lipstick mix with the jewelry on your dressing table. If there is mildew on the shower curtain, there is mildew on the shower curtain. You don't have to order others. In reality, you do not even have to order yourself."
At maximum entropy, everything is disordered. There are no differences.
There is movement but no order. Random-ness is the confused unorganized state existing before the creation of distinct forms. Order can only come later. I like the idea of entropy.
Later at home, I draw my own face. It looks much more pure than I do. The more I shade it and the darker it gets, the purer it seems. Self portraits are inherently suspect. They can only be taken at face value. Testimony is only testimony, sometimes it has no more value than the net worth of the observer.
Still, I like the picture. It is mine and of my creation so it makes no demands on me.
***
When the phone rings, it is Lila. She wants to know if I am all right . She tells me that tomorrow is Sunday. She and Dr. Winston Alexander would like me to go to church with them. They believe in God, they believe in going to church.
"We'll have brunch," she says, as if that will entice me.
I hesitate, thinking in the way I thought during my one semester of college. I think: there is a struggle between freedom and authority, there is a confrontation between God and man. God, it scares me to be taken seriously. If I go to church, will I stop flinging myself in wide arcs of unrestraint? Of course I cannot go.
"I can't go," I say. "I have a cock fight to go to."
I am tired of talking with her now. With rare exceptions, I continue a dialogue with myself. Dialogue with others is a downward spiral; sometimes I cannot stand it.
"Lila," I say to her, "Do you know about the staircase of life? At the top of the stairs they talk of art and of politics. Sinking lower, they speak of movies and of travel. Lower still, they tell stories of their husbands and their children and downward to the cute new guy at work. Lower still, they say that they ate too much for lunch, until at the very bottom they exclaim, 'Oh, my neck just popped.'
"Reduced to their lowest common denominator," I tell her, "they would be silent."
"You talk like this to upset me," says Lila. "If you don't want to go to church tomorrow, you'll come to the country next weekend."
Her voice is calculated to placate, calm, and soothe me.
"Perhaps," I say, to placate, calm, and soothe her in turn.
"It's settled," she says and in the background, Dr. Winston Alexander is calling her name.
I have no intention of going to the country. The studied country houseness of Lila's country house bothers me. There are checkered curtains and wooden plaques that say "Home Sweet Home." Lila likes to have things orderly, even at the expense of truth.
Sometimes I try to go along with her, but I never succeed the way she does. It has always been that way. At school they said, Lila's progress is excellent, but Evie threw a building block.
"Why did you do that, Evie?" they asked. "Why?" But I could only silently turn my face away.
"If only she'd be a little sorry," said one.
"If only she'd behave," said another.
"The problems we've had with Evie," they all said together.
If only they would ask me now, I could tell them that I threw the block at Beth Grey because I hated the way she would let people take things away from her without a fight, would go to the comer to sit and cry, would surrender herself softly and sadly to each and every adversary.
But no one ever gave me the chance to explain. Once, years later, I came home from school and my father told me that overnight the pipes had broken. |
"I didn't do it," I screamed and his face became washed with tenderness. He came around the table and put his arms around me. I
"I know you didn't, Evie," he said. "Not everything that goes wrong in this house is your fault." His voice cracked and he kissed my forehead. |
The next night, when I came home four hours late, he screamed "Why do you do these things to us?" I
"Don't you care?" my mother wailed. "Don't you even care at all?"
***
Memories drive me back into my own bed, into the sanctuary of sleep, the relentless building up, breaking down and repatterning of dreams. Later I will up and get drunk. Later I will talk at Danny and he will talk at me. Failing to connect, we will throw ourselves into each other's arms. I will call Lila. I will look in the paper for jobs.
But for the time being, I spread myself out evenly into sleep. Entropy measures the ultimate state of inner uniformity. The only thing wrong with entropy is that it has been given a name.
