You’d think it might be quite relaxing, having (effectively) no will, and no body anyway through which to exercise it. Many administrative and executive matters, it’s true, are taken right out of your hands. Yet there is always the countervailing desire to put yourself forward, to take your stand as the valuable exception. Don’t just go along. Never just go along. Small may not be beautiful. But big is crazy.
I don’t want to sound too flame-eyed and low-blink-rate about it—and, all right, I know I’m a real simp in many areas—but I’d say I was way ahead of Tod on this basic question of human difference. Tod has a sensing mechanism that guides his responses to all identifiable subspecies. His feeling tone jolts into specialized attitudes and readinesses: one for Hispanics, one for Asians, one for Arabs, one for Amerindians, one for blacks, one for Jews. And he has a secondary repertoire of alerted hostility toward pimps, hookers, junkies, the insane, the clubfooted, the hairlipped, the homosexual male, and the very old. (Here, incidentally, is my take on the homosexual male. It may be relevant. The homosexual male is fine—is pretty good news, in fact, on the whole—so long as he knows he’s homosexual. It’s when he is, and thinks he isn’t: then there’s confusion. Then there’s danger. The way Tod feels about men, about women, about children: there is confusion. There is danger. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not fingering Tod for a fruit, not exactly. I’m just saying that things might be less confused, and less dangerous, if he could soberly entertain the idea of being homosexual. That’s what I’m saying.)
All these distinctions I’ve had to learn up on. Originally at least I had no preselected feelings about anybody, one way or the other (except about doctors: now where did that come from?). When I meet people, I wait for a pulse from their inner being, which tells me things like—how much fear, how much hate, how much peace, how much forgiveness. I suppose I really am the soulful type. Visualize the body I don’t have, and see this: a sentimentalized fetus, with faithful smile.
There’s a graduate student at AMS who’s Japanese, over from Osaka on a six-month exchange deal, companionable enough at first, of course, but becoming increasingly glazed and remote. He’s lucky he wasn’t here a few years ago, when we really hated the Japanese. His name is Mikio, funny-looking kid, with his heavy cargo of otherness: his light-holding hair, his coated eyeballs and their meniscus of severe understanding. During his lunch break, in the AMS commissary, Mikio will sit buckled over a book. I’ve watched him, from a distance. He reads the way I read—or would read, if I ever got the chance. He turns the pages from right to left. He begins at the beginning and ends at the end. This makes a quirky sense to me—but Mikio and I are definitely in the minority here. And how can we two be right? It would make so many others wrong. Water moves upward. It seeks the highest level. What did you expect? Smoke falls. Things are created in the violence of fire. But that’s all right. Gravity still pins us to the planet.
Many coworkers—Tod included—razz him about it and everything, but Mikio is free to do this, to read in his own way. Observant Jews, I’ve noticed, read this way too. People are free, then, they are generally free, then, are they? Well they don’t look free. Tipping, staggering, with croaked or choking voices, blundering backward along lines seemingly already crossed, already mapped. Oh, the disgusted look on women’s faces as they step backward through a doorway, out of the rain. Never watching where they are going, the people move through something prearranged, armed with lies. They’re always looking forward to going places they’ve just come back from, or regretting doing things they haven’t yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye. Lords of lies and trash—all kings of crap and trash. Signs say No Littering—but who to? We wouldn’t dream of it. Government does that, at night, with trucks; or uniformed men come sadly at morning with their trolleys, dispensing our rubbish, and shit for the dogs.