'There's a danger in dwelling on small emotional ... bladders which can be easily infected, though the major key is some kidney complication.'
STOP. REWIND. ERASE.
With a brief titter, Bogus records: 'I resolve to be more careful how I pee.'
It's well past midnight when Bogus sees a light go on in Fitch's house, and Mr Fitch minces down a hallway in broad-striped pajamas. His bladder, Trumper thinks. But Fitch appears on the front porch, gray-faced from the nearest street light. Fitch can't leave his lawn alone! He's worried that a leaf has crashed in the night!
But Mr Fitch just stands on his porch, his face lifted, his mind beyond his lawn. Before he goes back inside, he looks up at the lighted window, where Bogus sits frozen. Then they wave to each other, and Fitch stealthily sidles into his eerie hallway and kills the light.
These night encounters. Bogus remembers Colm, sprouting a new tooth at Great Boar's Head. Colm was always a miserable teether; he kept Biggie and Bogus's mother up half the night. Once, when Bogus relieved them, he slipped off for a walk on to the beach, passing each dark cottage until he smelled the pot in front of Elsbeth Malkas's porch. Elsbeth is turning her parents on! A childhood friend, he had grown up with her (once, in her hammock). Now she is a lady college instructor, referred to as 'the poetess' at Bennington, where she returned to teach, three years after graduating.
'It's incestuous, really,' she once told Biggie.
And Biggie had said, 'I wouldn't know anything about it, really.'
The mark of a child's acceptance these days, Trumper thought, is to be so successful that you can turn your parents on. He tried to imagine his own luck with that. In doctoral robes, he delivers the commencement address, then forces a joint on his father!
Bogus crept up to see this generational wonder, but the Malkases' house was dark and Elsbeth, spotting Trumper's crouching silhouette against the lighter background of the sea, sat up in her porch hammock. Elsbeth Malkas had a chunky, oily body, nude and damp in her hammock gasping grass.
From the safe distance of a ledge beyond the porch, Bogus discussed Colm's habit of breaking new teeth in the night. There was a moment, later, when he could have discreetly left - when she went into the house to get her diaphragm. But the old-fashioned charm of this device touched him; he imagined the diaphragm crammed with erasers, pencils and postage stamps - tools of this poetess, who needed a deskful of receptacles - and he was too fascinated to leave.
He wondered, vaguely, if he would catch from Elsbeth what he'd caught from her long ago. But in the hammock he only expressed his disappointment that the diaphragm had been inserted while Elsbeth was inside her house. 'Why did you want to see it?' she asked.
He couldn't very well mention the erasers, pencils and postage stamps, or even perhaps a torn, tiny scrap of an unfinished poem. After all, with a poetess, one might make fertile her very words.
But he had never liked Elsbeth's poetry, and afterward he walked almost a mile along the beach before he plunged in the ocean, to make sure she wouldn't hear his splash and feel insulted.
Bogus i
nforms the tape recorder: 'I resolve to go a fair bit out of my way to be polite.'
Some dawn light falls on Fitch's manicured lawn, and Bogus sees the old man pad restlessly out on his porch again, just looking. What future is there for me, Trumper thinks, if Fitch, at his age, is still an insomniac?
5
A Dream to Me Now
I AM NOT an insomniac any more. Tulpen has seen to that. She knows better than to leave me to my own devices. We go to bed at a reasonable hour, we make love, we sleep. If she catches me awake, we make love again. Despite lots of water, I sleep very well. It's in the daytime that I look for things to do.
I used to be very busy. Yes, I was a graduate student, getting my PhD in comparative literature. My thesis chairman and my father were in agreement about specialization. Once, when Colm was sick, my father wouldn't write him a prescription. 'Is a urologist a pediatrician?' Well, who could argue? 'See a pediatrician. You're in graduate school, aren't you? Surely you know the importance of specialization.'
Indeed I knew it. My thesis chairman, Dr Wolfram Holster, admitted that he'd never been exposed to such specialization as mine.
I had a rare thesis topic, I confess. My thesis was going to be an original translation to Akthelt and Gunnel, a ballad in Old Low Norse; in fact, it was going to be the only translation. Old Low Norse is not well known. It's referred to, scornfully, in some satirical poems in Old East Norse and Old West Norse. Old East Norse is a dead language, North Germanic, which grew into Icelandic and Faroese. Old West Norse is also dead, and also North Germanic. It grew into Swedish and Danish. Norwegian evolved out of something between Old East Norse and Old West Norse. But the deadest of them all, old Old Low Norse, came to nothing. In fact, it's such a crude dialect that only one thing ever was actually written in it: Akthelt and Gunnel.
I was going to include in my translation a sort of etymological dictionary of Old Low Norse. That means a dictionary of the origins of Old Low Norse. Dr Holster was very interested in such a dictionary; he felt it would be of some etymological use. That was why he approved the thesis topic; he actually thought Akthelt and Gunnel was junk, though he was hard pressed to prove it. Dr Holster didn't know any Old Low Norse at all.
At first, I found the dictionary part very hard. Old Low Norse is pretty damn old, and the origins are rather obscure. It was actually easier to look ahead, at Swedish and Danish and Norwegian, to see what those Old Low Norse words would become. Mainly, I discovered, they were just bad pronunciations of Old West Norse and Old East Norse.
Then I found a way to make the dictionary part easy. Since no one knew anything about Old Low Norse, I could make things up. I made up a lot of origins. This made the translation of Akthelt and Gunnel easier too. I started making up a lot of words. It's very hard to tell real Old Low Norse from made-up Old Low Norse.
Dr Wolfram Holster never knew the difference.
But I had some difficulty finishing the thesis. I would like to say that I stopped out of reverence for the main characters. It was a very personal love story and no one knew what it meant. I would like to say that I stopped because I felt Akthelt and Gunnel should be allowed to keep their privacy. But anyone who knows me at all would say that was a shameless lie. They would say I stopped simply because I hated Akthelt and Gunnel, or because I was bored, or because I was lazy, or because I had made up so much phony Old Low Norse that I could no longer keep the story straight.
There are elements of truth in what they would say, but it's also true that I was deeply moved by Akthelt and Gunnel. To be sure, it is an awful ballad. It's impossible to imagine anyone singing it for example; for one thing, it's much too long. Also, I once characterized its metrics and rhyme scheme as 'multiple and flexible'. Actually, it has no rhyme scheme; it tries to rhyme when it can. And metrics were simply not known to its anonymous Old Low Norse author. (I imagine that author, by the way, as a peasant housewife.)
There is a false assumption usually made about the ballads of this period: that since the subjects were always kings and queens and princes and princesses, the authors were always royalty too. But peasants wrote about those kings and queens. The royalty was not alone in thinking that kings and queens were somehow better; part of being a peasant was thinking that kings and queens were better. I suspect that a fair portion of the population still thinks that way.