Douthat; or: The Enfanta -o-----
Mark Edmund Doten
Salamanders from the window well I took and put in the bucket. To bucket, from window well: the salamanders. Can you understand? A large white plastic bucket, and window-well salamanders, by the fistful. Wriggling black things, each with eight yellow dots—huge dots up and down their rubbery hides, precisely eight or sometimes nine dots apiece.
First: salamanders in a window well.
Then: salamanders in a bucket.
(A bucket filled three-quarters with hosewater.)
The bucket stood on thick, mown grass under the eaves at the house’s west side, killing it (the grass) (the grass what the bucket killed).
Maybe it once held pickles, now it was hosewater and salamanders.
I don't know what the bucket once held, though.
I just need you to understand: Even as a child of four or five, I thought it might have held pickles.
And: Even at age four or five I knew I couldn't—could never in my heart—know if it’d been a pickle bucket.
Perhaps it was pickled eggs. It was either pickles or pickled eggs, I thought, but such a way of thinking is only admissible in support of the principle fact. Viz., what the bucket had once held tells us this alone: How far the bucket had come, as substance. A gleaming white bucket, with no clue to its former utility.
My ideal white bucket, that’s what it was, nothing more or less.
What was on it was a warning label, the outline of a toddler drowning headfirst in a bucket, or rather, in the outline of a bucket (a smaller bucket, and the upside down toddler inside it, printed in black on the white plastic bucket), after tumbling in.
No toddler tumbled into my bucket.
No toddler ever came near my bucket. Only salamanders, the ones I threw in.
Next door lived the Enfanta -o-----.
She knew, I thought.
Perhaps it was pickled eggs, and I thought she knew.
My salamanders swam circuits in the strong white bucket—fistfuls of them in complex, interlocking and variable circuits, as the summer evenings deepened. They (the salamanders) so peaceable, even at their most frenzied.
I thought that Mrs. -o----- just might—that she might and did know (her child, the Enfanta -o-----, the most loved and most hated child in New Haven, CT) whether it was pickled eggs, or pickles. Whether it was one or the other the bucket had held.
I think today of the black suit. Of silver bracelets and platinum tennis bracelets, bangles of white gold, black pumps, black hair tied back, the whole apparatus weaving.
I think today of the eyes.
The screen door slammed, and with each step the cardinal points of her body wove through and past each other, wrists, ankles, interleaving, all but the head, the face on the head.
Then she rested her hands on the porch railing, and all was still. Mrs. -o----- noble—imperious, but so, so kind.
Our gazes would meet, Mrs. -o----- in her yard, and I in mine, and in twilight’s first electric drift and falling off she would offer—to me alone, for ten or twelve minutes—as objects of intellection, her eyes.
Outsize black orbs snipped or stabbed or torn (depending on that day’s secret life-factors—the life-factors of Mrs. -o-----, which for her were not constitutive of a secret life but a real and actual life: for instance, her interactions that day with Mr. -o----- and also her interactions with the Enfanta -o-----, so that I grouped her secret life into four categories: interactions with Mr. -o-----, just the two of them; interactions with the Enfanta -o-----, just the two of them; the interactions of all three together; and also those airless moments when Mrs. -o-----, alone in a windowless attic, dropped back into a ladder-back chair, half-stitched sampler athwart fingertips that quivered—though it’s also true that whole sections and cross-sections of our real and actual lives, we keep like secrets from ourselves), orbs cut from the tallow of her face, or slashed, or burned out, depending on light-factors—the attenuated glare of the sun as it eased to the windbreak pines, also the back-porch floodlight, the intensity of which was greater, not less, as the summer wore on, and the moon, the moon.
Beyond or apart from these lacerations or punctures or full-thickness burns, a stillness in the black orbs.
Lacerations to the wax of the face, not to the gleaming black orbs.
Burns, punctures, incisions, acting only on the face-wax, you see—never the orbs!
I dropped salamanders in the bucket—fistfuls.
My bucket held two dozen salamanders, three dozen salamanders at times paddling in strange frantic interlocking loops.
In the mess and frenzy of the salamander bucket—the feet and claws and gaping mouths (imagine the surface tension, the conflicting and complimentary surface tensions, the menisci within the gasping jaw-apparatuses, and the menisci outside or apart from the jaw-apparatuses, and the encircling concave meniscus where hosewater touched the bucket’s wall)—there was a calm.
Do you understand true calm?
The salamanders, as individuals, calm and vacant in the eyes—calm even in their thrashing. But also—this the main thing—the salamanders calm as totality. The roiling surface of the water, the claws and mouths—this totality of salamanders—all of this, in the final analysis, a stillness, a calm, that was mathematical, natural and roiling.
The orbs of Mrs. -o-----, the stillness there of a different order altogether. Mrs. -o-----’s a stillness that countermanded the stillness of the salamander bucket—that is my point.
An oppositional stillness—two stillnesses pulsed out into the green humidity, and there did battle.
The stillness of the salamander bucket pulsed westward, from my yard to Mrs. -o-----’s. And the stillness of those black orbs pulsed eastward, from Mrs. -o-----’s yard to mine, her carriage upright, face unmoving, bracelets frozen at wrist and ankle—a gleam, not a glint, you understand? steady like that—our mown lawns shading electrically deeper.
The Enfanta -o-----, as they called him—his parents called him that and so did everyone else (though at four or five it may have been only his parents that called him that, and I took it for everyone), always the Enfanta -o-----, never his first name (which is -o--)—the Enfanta -o----- the most loved child in New Haven, and also the most hated.
His parents loved and hated him in equal amounts.
His mother dandled him for hours in the house, then strapped him into his stroller and rolled it out, through the screen door beside the picture window, and onto the back porch. She left him outside, strapped in and unsupervised, for hours.
Before she rolled him out, Mrs. -o----- would slide the door open—slowly, time for me to pass back through two gates—first their gate, then our gate—then she’d step out, alone, carriage regal, to offer her orbs—offer them for my delectation.
Seated beside my bucket on the red tackle box, I saw it all.
Face wax victim to grinding compression or sun damage, yet the eyes pure and still.
The orbs immobilized more absolutely than face and carriage.
Carriage and face themselves possessed of and by an immobility of the highest order.
She held herself above the waist—the black suit jacket, and the pale head that topped it—calmly but with the greatest conviction, as eschatological placards are sometimes held.
One always finds such an eschatological placard frozen amid the others—among the dozens and hundreds of placards tensed and raging. Oh, yes, that is where one always finds it. At the wild rallies of end-timers—these rallies which have been with us always, but which threaten us now more than ever—one finds a placard at the perimeter, if you know how to look: a calm and inwardly burning female specter holding aloft her dynamically frozen placard—without which all would dissolve. This lady specter the driving immobile force around which the lunatics, enraptured with the flashing work of their own hands, the beads and tagboard they drive skyward, articulate their rook-like shrieks.
The stillness of her eyes (the eyes of Mrs. -o-----) greater than that of the placard (the lone female placard), is what I’m trying to say—trying to make you understand.
This stillness burning forth with a simpler and more powerful flame.
The Enfanta -o----- now grown, if that’s the word, now seated on the highest court in the land, and presiding over that court.
Mrs. -o----- seated beside and behind the Enfanta, in breach of all protocol.
(But she draws no rebuke.)
Mr. -o----- is dead.
Those summer evenings long dead, and never their like to come again.
I am in my Piper Cub. I am above you, and on the move.
A Piper J3 Cub—this is what I’ve flown these weeks, a vitrine strapped above and another below, paired vitrines essential to my purpose, buckled to the fuselage.
In the weeks and months I’ve been flying—airborne without respite—my purpose has evolved. Before I embarked on my mission, I strapped on two vitrines.
I didn’t understand: why vitrines?
I understood only: vitrines, yes.
To achieve flight without damaging or destroying the lower vitrine—a high-order challenge.
(My secret method?—weather balloons, cables, carabineers, I’ll say that.)
(Also: ballast bags, putty, catchclaws and box cutters, blue or black electrical tape.)
The Enfanta leapt from a clerkship in Foggy Bottom to a vacancy in our highest court—and not just any vacancy. Over the heads of hundreds and thousands waiting their turn, the Enfanta -o----- made his dizzying leap, and at age 28 he was declared chief justice of the highest court in the land.
They said it couldn’t be done, and yet he did it.
New Haven, CT, then Cambridge, MA, then Foggy Bottom, then his epoch-making leap.
Not only vitrines strapped to the Piper Cub, but jugs, too. A Piper Cub’s fuel tank not sufficient—not capacious enough for my purposes (a purpose obscure when I set out, I knew only that he (the Enfanta -o-----) had to be stopped)—therefore: jugs. Eight thousand nine hundred eighty eight jugs, and I stoppered each one with paraffin, then jabbed through a single drinking straw, or two, or three, depending on the position of this jug in my network of jugs, jet fuel pumped tankward through an elaboration of straws—yes, tens of thousands of drinking straws knit a vast capillary network around my Piper J3 Cub.
Within each jug there are also two pipes, one smaller than the other, and a copper plate, and when I roll the plane, the fuel is discharged.
When more fuel is needed, I simply up the Piper Cub’s velocity, thus increasing the dynamic pressure on the straws, as expressed by the following equation: q = \tfrac12\, \rho\, v^{2}, and I roll the plane.
The jugs then hum in satisfaction.
(Jugs on the fuselage, jugs on the rudder.)
Some evenings Mrs. -o----- and I, by unspoken agreement, approached the fence.
Mrs. -o----- silhouetted in the floodlight, tennis bracelet jingling, footfall hushed by the velveteen pump, wrists, tailored fabric, twined and weaving,
So I wrapped my fingers trough the chain-link fence.
She did likewise.
She always said the same words, and always in the same order: "You are welcome to come into my yard anytime you like. You are welcome in the yard, and if you see flies on the Enfanta -o-----, you can brush them off. I would consider it a personal kindness if you would brush away the flies, the ones on the face, and, even more especially, those at the nose and mouth, and the ones at the eyes, as well as the ears—” here she would laugh in an offhanded, almost tender fashion (a tenderness for me, and an offhandedness for him, for the Enfanta) “but,” she said, “of course understand you needn’t brush away any flies—I don't want you to imagine that! It would also be a kindness to leave the flies, you see."
(Jugs on the left wing, jugs on the right wing.)
(Jugs on the struts, jugs on the spinner.)
(Jugs on the landing gear—or rather: in the place of landing gear.)
Mr. -o----- must have been quite handsome. I’m sure of that. But I don’t remember Mr. -o-----.
The red tackle box. My bucket, but also the red tackle box beside it—it was red, a true red.
