THREE LETTERS TO THE PRESIDENT
Paul Maliszewski
August 27, 2001
Dear Sir,
After work today I came home and wanted nothing more than to lie on my back and spend some quality time looking at the ceiling. The only trouble was the ceiling was doing this thing where it appears to be breathing. This happens from time to time.
So picture me on the floor there, you know, in my front room, staring up at the ceiling. I was clutching my pillow to my chest, because, frankly, there are times that feels like the best thing to do. That was when I noticed that the ceiling was expanding out toward me and then retracting back away from me, just gently exhaling and inhaling like so, as if it were the stomach of some albino giant.
There are a very few things in this world that a man wants to experience less after seven-point-five hours of operating a forklift weighed down with various cheaply-manufactured ceramic goods than the realization that his ceiling is breathing. Ceilings are supposed to do many things and, throughout history and in many civilizations, ceilings have served a noble and utilitarian purpose. This is true. And yes, often those ceilings served their purpose without receiving a bit of thanks. But correct me if I’m wrong here, sir, breathing is not the traditional purpose of a ceiling.
What I did is I did what anyone in my place would do. I shut my eyes tight and then opened them again. The ceiling was still breathing. I shut them again, for longer. When I opened them, the ceiling was breathing, perhaps a bit harder even, if you must know. I shut my eyes a third time and I shook my head. I shook it from side to side. I shook it vigorously, until I thought I’d made myself sick, or dizzy. But even that did no good. The ceiling would not cease with its breathing. That is when I shut my eyes a final and fourth time and, without quite knowing why, I began to hum the tune of a song that my mother sang to my brother and me when we were but youngsters.
In this song, there is a man and a woman. The man and the woman lived in a cottage by a lake. The man and the woman were happy. They had everything they needed. Then a stray dog came into their lives. The stray, like most, was mangy and timid and wary and difficult to approach. Sometimes the stray dog hung around their cottage. Sometimes they happened to meet up with the stray dog while they were out walking along the shore of the lake. Sometimes, at night, while they slept, a brushing sound along the walls of the house awoke them. It was the stray dog running by, no doubt chasing something in the darkness.
In the second verse, the man and the woman discuss what they should do with the stray dog. Should they feed it? Should they bring it inside? What about when it gets cold? It will certainly get very cold soon. Does the stray dog have a name? And will the stray dog object too strenuously if they give it a new name? After some deliberation the man and the woman jointly decided to invite the stray dog into their cottage. Well, the stray dog came right in. The stray dog ate dinner and then slept for three days straight. While the dog was sleeping, the man and the woman named him Stray Dog, to be always reminded of how he came into their lives.
While their lives were plenty good before, with Stray Dog now afoot and rarely far from their sides and almost never out of sight, the man and the woman agreed their lives were even better. What had seemed beyond the reach of improvement had, in fact, been made considerably better.
Next comes the song’s penultimate verse. The man awoke one morning and said to the woman, “Let’s have a great feast tonight to celebrate our lives.” The woman liked this idea very much. The man and the woman set off down the road with Stray Dog. They were going to the market, where they intended to purchase bread and fresh vegetables and several fish.
It was at the market that another man saw Stray Dog and, for some odd reason, started calling it Ducky. “Come here, Ducky boy,” the second man said. Stray Dog leapt up into the second man’s arms. Stray Dog licked the man’s face and wagged his tail left and right.
Stray Dog’s owners didn’t know quite what to do. “What’s going on?” the man asked.
The woman said, “Give us back our dog.”
The second man explained that he thought Ducky was lost for good, but now Ducky was found, and he felt so happy, so very happy, and wasn’t that amazing, how animals can go away and then come back, and how, besides that, they remember you?
The man said, “I think there’s some mistake here. You see, that dog came to our cottage and has been living with us.”
The woman said, “We’ve cared for that dog for going on several months now. He’s become like our family. Stray Dog’s ours now.”
The second man hemmed and hawed, and the man and the woman put up a valiant defense. Finally, they decided to resolve their differences by asking the dog where he wanted to go. They did this by calling to the dog in his two names and observing how he reacted.
Well, long story short, the contest was over almost before it started. While Stray Dog wavered a bit each time the man and the woman called to him—”Stray Dog, come here, Stray Dog”—it was when the second man called out for Ducky that they saw how animated and alive a dog could become at the sound of a human voice.
At the song’s conclusion, the man and the woman are back in their cottage. While their life together was always good, and while they had no difficulty recalling the goodness of that pre-Stray Dog life, something had happened, something to almost sour the very air they breathed. Please understand, the song says, they were not unhappy, the man and the woman, not exactly anyway, and they did not go their separate ways. They merely pictured their life with Stray Dog and did so not without certain regrets. The woman found it hard to look at the man for very long without turning to stare out the nearest window. And the man? The man often left the kitchen table and stepped over to the screen door, where he stood and let the breeze flatten his clothes against his body. Doo wah diddy. Doo wah diddy. Doo wah. Doo wah.
Keep up the good work, sir.
Sincerely,
Harvey Strub
February 18, 2002
Dear Sir,
I have not, I realize, mentioned even a word about my father.
As you might have guessed by now, there is a good reason for this. It is a hidden reason, and I am of the mind that there’s a hidden reason for most everything, from how water pools in puddles on the ground to the manner in which squirrels clean their faces to the way clouds scoot across the sky, hightension wires sag over great distances, and those high-tension towers shift ever so slightly in stormy weather. The trick here is that the hidden reason will sometimes remain hidden. I have seen the high-tension towers shift. I have seen them shift enough to set the wires quivering over their entire length.
Now the hidden reason, he is wily. The hidden reason will sometimes hang out behind a big rock—I am speaking metaphorically now—and, while hiding, fashion a plausible reason out of bits of wire, straw, leaves, and pieces of cloth. The storm that caused the towers to shift and the wires to quiver also caused mature trees to come uprooted, tearing up chunks of the land as large around as full-sized pick-up trucks.
Now the plausible reason is often fairly seductive, alluring in its simplicity and blinding in its beauty. The storm came up fast and caught me by surprise. It was the summer, July, maybe August—this was last year—and I was outside walking.
The hidden reason, what he does is he paints a face on the plausible reason using smudges of colored mud. He paints with his thumb as he lacks any sort of conventional brush. When he’s done, and satisfied with what he’s wrought, he shoves the plausible reason out from behind the rock. The hidden reason sits back then and rests, content. He twiddles his thumbs, absently whistles the melody of something currently on the radio, and then stops to pick at some piece of soft dough stuck between his teeth. The plausible reason is his decoy, and he is safe, at least for a time. The plausible reason meanwhile stumbles, barely able to stand upright, let alone walk. You or me or anybody for that matter, upon seeing the plausible reason for the first time, upon seeing this thing, this crude robot, this half-assed creation with the herky-jerky arms and the unsteady legs, rush over to it, seize it in our arms, and don’t let go. The plausible reason is, after all, the source of our unhappiness discovered at long last, the cause of our troubles finally laid bare, we believe.
I am avoiding the point here and doing a poor job of it.
My father used to punish my brother and me with remarkable severity. Our punishment involved kneeling for hours and beatings with his belt. The kneeling took place on the tile floor in the entryway or the linoleum floor in the kitchen or the floor of the garage, which was concrete and thus cool to the touch and gritty with sawdust, specks of metal, and so forth. It was important, while kneeling, to kneel properly, with our toes pointed toward the ground and all our weight placed on our knees. We were not supposed to rest on the backs of our legs, though we did and were often caught, which resulted in more kneeling.
My beatings took place in my bedroom. When I was in trouble, my father sent me there to wait for him. My brother got beat in his. “Go to your rooms,” he said. And we went. “Wait for me,” he said. And we waited, until which time my father bent me over my bed, pulled down my pants, and struck me a few times. When he was done and once I had pulled up my pants, my father’s eyes filled with tears, the most ridiculous, blobby tears. “Your father loves you,” he said. “You know that, right?” I said that I did know that, yes. “Then give your father a hug,” he said. And so I hugged him, grabbing him tightly and trying to squeeze all the air from my lungs. With that my father went next door, to my brother’s room, administered another beating, stated the fact of his love, and received, in turn, a second crushing hug.
While I was out in that storm, one thought occurred me: everybody who thinks of angels thinks of angels as tiny things, as if they are fragile as fleas and made of light. You hear speculative talk, for example, of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The answer varies from religion to religion and believer to believer, but the answer is always an enormous number, with a perplexing number of zeroes. As the rain came down and as I stood beneath a high-tension tower and tried to make my way up the hillside and back home, I heard frogs calling to each other in their frog language and I thought, What if angels are, in fact, mighty? What if they are gigantic, at least as tall as this high-tension tower, each of an angel’s toes as large as my apartment building, each angel’s halo encircling an entire Durham and its suburbs, each angel’s sword—because the angels I was imagining just then were each armed with swords—broad as a freeway is wide and capable of smiting entire populations? It was a powerful thought, by which I mean I forgot it immediately, or as soon as I climbed part way up the hill only to slip halfway back down again.
Keep up the good work, sir.
Sincerely,
Harvey Strub
March 18, 2002
Dear Sir,
I fell asleep at work today. I was driving my forklift over by the back corner of the lot, moving crates of birdbaths from one place to this other place, when I decided that what I needed was a nap. All the warehouse’s birdbaths come packed with curly pieces of yellow straw to prevent breakage, scratches, cracks, and the like. Every time I picked a crate up, bits of the straw came loose and blew away, getting stuck in the fence.
You were not in the dream I had. I was alone in this one.
There were three metal boxes in my dream, all connected, and I was walking in between them. The first box and the last box were enclosed save small entryways. The middle box, connecting the first enclosed box to the last enclosed box, was open to the air. I was walking in the middle box, trying to get from the first box to the last.
A tremendous wind was blowing between the boxes. There were powerful gusts. There was a loud, continuous howling. I lost my footing and then got knocked to my knees. I stood up again, but only with great effort on my part.
The wind blew all sorts of junk at me, including leaves, bits of flowers, soda bottles, trash can lids, and dogs
I say I was trying to get from the first box to the last box, but, really, I don’t know that for certain. The dream began with me caught in the middle box and ended, some minutes later, with my having advanced only a few steps from where I started, if that. My point is that it’s entirely possible that I was actually supposed to get back into the first box. It’s possible that I had expended all my energy for nothing.
But I didn’t know better. How could I know better? What I did is I continued to press in the direction I thought was most likely a forward one. As I struggled to walk, shielding my eyes with my hands, another, grimmer possibility occurred to me: maybe I was not supposed to get to either box. Maybe I was just supposed to endure the wind and all the junk the wind blew at me. Perhaps, I thought, even if I somehow manage to get to either of the boxes I will discover that the entryways are too small to admit my body. Perhaps I am, in the end, stuck exactly where I am.
Keep up the good work, sir.
Sincerely,
Harvey Strub