John Skaife's Topiary

Wet Swimming

 

"If we're going to talk about the world," I said to the beaver who was bobbing about in the water beside me: "We're going to have to talk about the shift that was like the Copernican shift or the Darwinian shift, except that no-one was in control of it." I was hanging onto the anchored plywood raft that was out in the bay. "It was the time in the nineteenth century when the West went from being God-centred to ego-centred. All our current malaise comes from there."

The beaver was looking at me like he understood me, for he seemed to be nodding in agreement. I was about to give my examples when he opened his mouth unnaturally wide, more like a shark than a beaver, dove down a little and bit me around the crotch, from navel to tailbone. I have to admit it hurt a lot. The beaver closed its jaws and pulled away, tearing off my lower viscera. I looked down and I saw that, because of the gap between his front teeth, the long stretch of the inner organs that connected my bladder and my glans. I understood my irreversible mutilation as a critique.

 

[food break]

 

My Dog

 

I was talking to my dog today; my big shaggy dog.

I said to the dog: "Read anything interesting in the paper today?"

The dog didn't respond.

I said: "That was kind of a joke. Dinah Washington told that joke, or something like it. I know you can't read. But really, what's on your mind?"

The dog didn't respond.

"Oh, right, you can't talk. But why not give me a woof?"

The dog didn't respond.

"Cat got your tongue? Sorry, bad joke. Do you want to go for a walk?"

The dog didn't respond.

"Yeah, I agree. I'm not in the mood for walking. Same old, same old. Hey, look, the fluorescent orange ball!"

I tossed it across the room. The dog didn't respond.

"You seem down in the dumps. Has some other dog spurned your affections? Are you suffering from heartbreak?"

The dog didn't respond.

"Oh, right. Where could you mingle? The dog park's full of spayed neuters. Not much action, Jackson!" (That's not the dog's name, by the way.)

The dog didn't respond.

"Is this an existential thing you're pulling on me?"

The dog didn't respond.

"Is this a comment on modernity?"

The dog didn't respond.

 

[food break]

 

The Black Cat (1843)

 

Two weekends ago, I decided to stop making plastic models. I was sick of the London Bus, and I hadn't worked on it for perhaps two months. So, I threw out everything except for the vital tools I would need if I took up the hobby again.

Four weekends ago, we happened to be outside a craft shop named Midoco. Hanging in the window was a paper cat kit. I remembered enjoying making paper models. Now that I was in my second childhood, it seemed the right way to go.

So, two weekends ago, I went back to Midoco, and I bought a Black Cat model. Currently, I'm about three-quarters of the way through. I still have the legs and tail to go. It's made of thick and somewhat sparkly black paper. It's about eight times the size of a real cat.

Every polygon of its construction is either a triangle or a quadrilateral. It's going to be about eighteen inches tall and twenty-seven inches long.

So, that's it for the old hobby. It was fun while it lasted, but the idea of it all: the air-brushing! the organization of it! I've embarked on something NEW.

 

[food break]

 

Aart the Aardvark

 

She is not dumb. She's seen too much to summarize. I cannot help but to assume that the person to whom I am writing this will accept as an hypothesis that it was all Aart's fault.

Sure, Aart looked good, as far as aardvarks go. I hadn't had any small-town action since midsummer. I made him catch his eye.

Aart remained Aart. He suavely whispered: "Are you thinking of the bingo palace I'm thinking of?"

She (who is not dumb and who has seen too much to summarize) replied: "I like bingo."

I here will not explain the game of bingo.

This table here gets a cut: they skim seven or eight percent off.

And yet Aart and she made a bundle. Who knew it would be possible to stand under a cloud of money?

I have to say it's not easy to be some kind of reflector-of-reality, which is supposed to be my job. My Augustine and my Aquinas did not consider themselves to be reflectors-of-reality.

And this essay is going out, belatedly, to Bobby Gutsell, who is dead, and who is now an angel.

I have to make up for the numbers here. 199. 200.

 

[food break]

 

Turkey

 

Some mornings I walk around the barn-yard, big as can be, and wondering: "What would it be like to be one of the other ones? What if I was a horse, what would I be thinking? I'd probably be thinking I had to get moving, since the horse can't stop running around."

And elsewhere I look at the chickens. Imagine having to go inside every time it rained, only because you're so stupid you can't help but look up and get water in your lungs and drown right then and there. Every week or so the lady comes to rescue one of them from this stupid fate. The bird probably gets to stay inside, for protection's sake.

The pigs can't understand what I'm always banging on about. "Be happy," they tell me: "because it's not going to last forever. Something bad might happen to you, and soon."

I laugh at them, gobble-gobble-gobble. They're pretty stupid, I think.

And now I receive an invitation from the lady. I'm being invited to dinner, tomorrow night. She said she would dress me in the morning. I'm so lucky. We'll all be giving thanks for what we are about to receive, she says.

 

[food break]

 

The rats had a merry old time throughout the city. Many rats got up early in the morning to scurry through breakfast then get in the cars or other means of conveyance to where they were employed. They would fight and bite to make themselves important. Whatever were they doing with their assumed powers? Who knew? All anyone with any intellect could see they were always fighting and biting like mad.

Satisfied by a good day of aggression, they would head out for the evening, and be catered to by rats of a lesser class than themselves. There were the rats who made the food, the ones who served them, and the ones who entertained them. It's quite astonishing the appetite of rats for food and diversion. It's like it was all they lived for.

But there were other rats who didn't have these entertainments. They would go to dens and they would grouse about the unfairness of it all, and their misery.

Meanwhile, the smaller rats--much smaller, weighing some 170th of the bigger rats--were watching, waiting for the time when they would gain control. Of the city, of the province, of the state, and of the world.

 

[food break]

 

The Ogre

 

I was standing in the kitchen, eating a Chicken McNugget. It was very hot, and very tasty. Bill came downstairs and into the kitchen. I was waving my hand at my mouth dramatically.

"Hot?" he asked.

"Myup," I replied.

"You can actually burn yourself on one of those. Do you have some time to help with a jigsaw puzzle?"

He let me upstairs to the living room. The puzzle, of an ogre, was about half-done. For about ninety minutes we worked on it, but we made little progress. It was the ogre's fur that was the sticking point. Every time we had a piece which I thought should go somewhere, it just didn't fit right. It was like all the pieces were slightly too small or badly-shaped.

We went back down to the kitchen. The McNuggets were still there, so I picked one up and bit into it. It was very hot. After waving at my mouth for a while, I managed to say: "I figured out hot to always have hot McNuggets."

"How's that?"

"Only eat them in dreams, where they're very hot."

"I don't think your reasoning holds water."

"Yeah, I'm probably wrong. Well, anyway."

 

[food break]

 

On Humans

 

Cook's star-date 4882.7. We are in stasis. No-one upstairs can think of anything to do. There's been no distress calls. There's been no instructions from HQ. They're all bored upstairs. So, what does Yeoman Tuttle do? She comes down to me to ask for the preparation of a special recipe.

"Could you synthesize something for me, some small things, and make a soup out of them?"

Our synthesizer could make almost anything. Animal vegetable mineral you name it.

I said, which was the truth: "I got some chronology stuff going on with Professor Mince, but I guess I got time."

"Good! I would like you to make a soup of synthesized aborted foetuses. Do you think you can do that?"

"With carrots and onions and so on?"

"Yes, and sage."

I synthesized some abortions, three dozen, and set the pot on simmer. They looked odd somehow, these pink little humans no bigger than shrimp, curled up simmering in fetal positions.

Professor Mince came down with his globe. He said: "We've got the dates entirely wrong. It's not star-date 4882.7 after all. We're in a warp!"

I turned back to my foetus soup. Somehow, a frog was in there.

 

[food break]

 

That Girl From 1990

 

She was very much like Sonic Youth, or at least what we heard of them up here. She had big chestnut hair, and sweet lips, and a body she thought might have been a little fat and so she covered it up in black bottoms and tops.

We were a bad couple. We both drank too much, and often. She had a boyfriend, whose name started with L, and whom I never met.

I had a blindness. Despite how she told me, at, I think, was the Pilot Tavern: "I'm a virgin, but I've done everything else," I didn't pick up on what she was intimating, or ... who knows what our minds were doing forty years ago?

I'm not a virtuous person. I'm heartless, mostly. Maybe I could have gone along with what she wanted me to do, and that was to save her. However, I've never understood sexual signals.

After the Pilot, we for whatever reason got to sitting at the northeast corner of Yonge and Avenue. She was saying something interesting, but I replied: "All I want to do is to kiss you."

Cheryl Lancastle kissed me then, very much so, sweet lips.

 

[food break]

 

Electrocuting an Elephant, by Alva Edison

 

The local village had been terrorized off-and-on by a marauding elephant. He seemed to become aroused to an insanity some four or five times a year, and many natives had been killed. They knew he was going to return, and soon, and so they turned to me, the greatest inventor of the age, to put down the beast in whatever method I thought would be most efficient.

It was then that I remembered Tesla's diabolical device. If I could build a replica using local materials, I could show the people of the Indus Valley the workings of advanced technology, or at least the wicked half of it.

The invention was up and working by the time the beast returned. We poured water into a pool into what they believed to be the elephant's path. (As it turned out, they were correct.)

The sounds of crashing trees and bellowing were getting nearer. I put the two nodes into the water, and turned the voltage to the maximum.

The elephant lumbered into sight and, enraged, leaped, right into the pool. The beast burned for some time before I shut off the power.

I have no qualms.

 

[food break]

 

Hawks and Doves

 

Two strata of bird society: the hawks and the doves. The hawks, over time, had managed to get into a lot of history books, but the doves got into different kinds of books: softer, and more gentle, say.

The doves came up with all sorts of arguments about how this was deeply unfair. (The reasoning was specious, but that was lost in the higher air of the hawks, who kind of liked being a little dovish.)

The situation was changed; the admittance rules were eased so that at least a few doves could join up with the hawks. It wasn't a terrible solution.

Some doves noticed that the doves in the Hawk class were outnumbered some twenty-fold by the hawks. This didn't seem right at all!

Greater representation in the Hawks! they cried. We demand it!

Efforts in the Hawk class, no doubt influenced by the doves in their midst, brought the dove numbers up to thirty percent.

Unfortunately, in a neighbouring kingdom of birds, nothing of the sort had happened. Those other ones attacked, and attacked mercilessly, causing the entire kingdom to collapse.

That's the way it goes, I guess. This could even be a parable.

 

[food break]

 

Of Mice and Mouse

 

There lived once a mouse who lived in a nice house, with his nice spouse who looked enticing in a blouse. The house he'd bought on advice, it was a nice price: "They're usually priced at twice or thrice!" He and his spouse in their house seldom groused (which is precisely a vice) for they'd taken advice that twice sufficed: "If a mouse is concise, they seldom entice vice; being a louse of a mouse is twice a vice, and this is my device."

The mouse and his spouse (in her nice enticing blouse) sufficed on rice, precisely on diced ice, for that's concise and precise to a mouse in a nice house. Sometimes the rice for lice and that wasn't nice! Or some louse would enter the house and get in the spice (that happened twice or thrice) and the mouse and his spouse would grouse, but it sufficed if you deloused with ice to the louse, the house would be nice on advice. The lice could be doused and excised from the rice using ice. Thus these mice excise the louse and the lice.

Their names were Klaus Gneiss and Clarice Gneiss, née Althouse.

 

[food break]

 

Notes on: Horses

 

1. Mike Oldfield: On Horseback. It showed up on a compilation I bought a while ago, and I thought: I know this song. Turned out I had the LP on which it had appeared back in the 1970s.

2. Apocalypse Now: Ride of the Valkyries plays when the village is attacked. The missing middle of the argument is that the squad is a calvary unit; they are on flying horses; the Valkyries rode flying horses; the squad are Valkyries.

3. There's a story in the 1001 Nights about a horse running. A monkey, I believe, asks him what he's running from. The horse replies: "I'm running from Man!" The monkey asks: "Who's Man?" The horse: "A terrible foe to all that's living!" "So, how big is this 'Man'?" "About a third my size." "So, why not beat him down?" "I can't! You see, Man has cunning!"

4. Nietzsche, or so the story goes, went mad because he saw someone beating a horse in a street.

5. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has a terrible dream about a horse being beaten. It's a terrible dream.

6. We all love horses. They mean more than they say they mean.

 

[food break]

 

Piscamania!

 

We landed on this planet eight months ago. After crossing a hundred miles of desert, we reached an oasis, with plants growing up across a plain. A couple days later, we saw horses approaching, but we couldn't figure out immediately who was on them. When they'd gotten closer, we could see: the riders were fish!

They were large fish, more like trout than mackerel. They chased us down and took us to their village, which was naturally near a brook.

When they weren't swimming, they were watching us, trying to understand us. What did they want to know? They asked one another questions, in English no less. How had they ever learned my language?

A power struggle between the trout and the tuna-fish was underway. The tuna were obviously the aristocrats, while the trout were of the warrior class. We were caught in the middle.

Accidentally, I revealed I spoke English like them. All the fish grunted as one, and knew not what to do with me.

I escaped, miraculously, and I tried to make my way back to my spacecraft. It was then that I came across it.

The ruins of SeaWorld.

And I cried with salty sobs.