Excerpt
I Am Clarence
Clarence and IIt amazes me that Clarence and I have gone on so long. Always searching. Hand in hand, or he hopping zigzag behind me as I walk. My eyes are in the treetops. They live in the half dead leaves, or in an ancient rag tied to a bare twig, way at the top. There are also broken balloons—pink, red, who died inside out, squeezed at the neck, suddenly hissing.
Clarence hugs the thin trunks as we walk. Or he bends over in jerky movements to study a fly. It is a giant horsefly atop a mountain of stool. He cannot see very well (so they say, and I acquiesce), consequently his head gets too close. Puzzled, he lifts the fingers he has been leaning on. Forgetting to balance himself, he falls in some twisted position. (They told me, once, he wouldn’t walk. He lay on his back for a long time like the lame elephant with one foot in the air; the withered limb beneath.) I untangle his legs. Bending, I wipe stool from his nose and from the thick lenses of his glasses; glasses refracting trees, endless sky, creases in my face. Lenses which insist, cover, assist, betray Clarence’s eyes.
What he sees. Ophthalmologists are confused, suspicious, or certain. I listen to their speculations: peripheral cataracts, intra-ocular pressure, vascular abnormalities, exudates in the vitreous, cobble patterns on the retina.
And everything is the result of an unknown systemic disease, a bizarre internal malformation like midgets with shrunken wombs, or hands without fingers. Me—my chromosomes, my life in him. Does it matter? He used to laugh when the clowns came close to him, twisting their red mouths, or when the elephant swung him up high.
I listen to their speculations. I hear. I do not hear. My eyes are fixating branches as new lenses are ground; plus and minus fused together by optometric genius. Does it matter how precise the correction—he cannot say what he sees.
Is the physiological eye sufficient for their explanations? They know the eye. I know. Even I do not know what Clarence sees. Nor am I interested in the chaotic hieroglyphs of his brain waves.
(Dimension is lost, sometimes, even to me. Faces, walls, and windows are flat like cardboard deceptions.)
“His hearing is perfect,” said the young intern. And I hung silver bells above his crib. That was long ago, not now. But sometimes I forget the sequence of events. The burglar gates were put up for our own protection, I believe.
Classified as “blind, for all practical purposes,” I swear he sees the iridescent wing of an ordinary horsefly. Strangely, the fly remains stationary. Is it because Clarence’s touch is as light as its own fibrous wing? Or are his insect legs hopelessly embedded in dung.
Down one thousand streets we walk, Clarence and I. Unconscious of time, I wear red, or orange, sometimes yellow. Because it is so hard to continue. I can sense when Clarence has ceased to follow. Automatically I stand still wherever I happen to be. By the time I move a second backward, he is marching forward again.
He touches my arm as I light a cigarette. Then he sniffs the smoke, laughs, and runs ahead. Gradually I catch up with him, and once more he is behind me. I am puffing smoke into the sky. He is examining a dirty newspaper, a leaf, a dead pigeon. He touches the sidewalk with his palm. (His friend Carl used to cry because the sidewalk burned. But Clarence likes the heat.)
What does it matter if he sees nothing, is mute, and falls writhing to the ground?
I smile as we enter the Diagnostic Clinic. A faceless lady accepts a jar of his first morning urine. Neatly I have typed: clarence, first morning urine, and the date. In this I have improved, knowing the day, month, year, and finding directions easily. (In the institution I did not know names or dates. Now it has changed; I remember things most of the time, but I know I can forget.) There are things I cannot find or understand.
It is not the first time. We are always searching. Even if there are no answers in the end.
They take a part of him and study it. His blood smeared over one million slides, feces separated into constituent elements, enigmatic drops extracted from his glands. I watch. I have permitted it to happen; everything. (It could have been prevented, I think.)
Is there a magician to decipher each fragment and compound them?
His heart is perfect, but they insist. Taking a scribbled scroll from the electrocardiograph technician, we go upstairs. (They know us here. I do not even wonder what they think. I used to. Nor do I get headaches and take him home trembling.) He had wiggled his feet distorting the rhythm of the lines. But no one is concerned. Endless, limitless as things are, what is another distortion? For example, Ferdinand offered me a green ring. On certain days I am sure of it.
“Tangerine,” says Clarence, surprising the diagnostician. Occasionally he does find a word if his want is precise—if he can, if the word is one of the few he has selected. (No one knows how. Even I.) “Tangerine” is one of Clarence’s words. And he has kept it. He loses most of them; even his favorites. He lost “Mommy” a while ago. Maybe it was a few years. Not that it has any significance.
(I think of his delicate fingertips separating each section and then peeling off the peculiar whitish latticework. He likes to make it smooth, pulling this stringy substance from the fruit.)
His other words are: “bird,” “feathers,” “elephant,” “hat,” “Carl,” and “Josephine.” That is all.
I open my traveling bag and give him a tangerine. He rolls it along the floor. It stops between the swollen ankles of an elderly lady who is waiting in the Hypertension Clinic. She bends. Fascinated by the silken texture of her wrinkled hand enveloping the tangerine, he has forgotten. He places her hand against his cheek and closes his eyes.
“A seizure,” says the diagnostician, looking back at Clarence, whose eyes are closed in ecstasy.
It goes on like that. He follows us from floor to floor, studying Clarence. Accompanied, sometimes, by a psychiatrist, speech pathologist, neurologist, or intern. “To leave no stone unturned,” is the rationale. But what? Is there some conclusion that Clarence and I are waiting for. Why? Have I not created him as he is? I smile and speak coherently reporting everything. (Everything?)
After Clarence’s skull has been X-rayed and more appointments have been made, we go through the hospital tunnel. It curves endlessly, tiled white, mysterious below the street. Nurses, doctors in white laugh, moving toward us. We glimpse fragments of their faces. (There is no green, no tree, but barren ground.) Men pass us, wheeling carts of filthy sheets, trays, cartons, unknown implements, prosthetic hooks.
A boy, covered with a sheet, stares at the harsh ceiling light. Then he disappears. Seated in wheelchairs, with sinister smiles, some are breathing with bottles of fluid going from chair extensions into their veins. (How has it come to this?)
It ends when we go into the coffee shop on level E behind Atran Laboratory.
Unexpectedly he begins to cry. If only I could understand. Is it Carl, or Ferdinand, or the lame elephant parading before him? I understand. Sometimes I think I do. Or is it only me?
I take out a tangerine and we roll it back and forth to each other over the cold table. Table spotted with tears. Time dead. Nothing but tangerine skin. I to him. Him to me. Fluorescent blue and distant clatter.
(It has happened like this before. Our solitude interrupted by a zookeeper, clown, derelict, madman, fool. Men; cardboard, flat, unknown. “Can I help?” The same thing. When Pierre found Clarence’s hat, when Seymour took us to the beach. A hundred strangers have stopped at our tables. Has Clarence ever seen them. Not even I am certain. The year could be 1960, 1967, or tomorrow.)
I continue rolling the tangerine, not wanting to be anywhere else, or to answer. Who? He is taking apart blood, finding disorder in chromosomes. Night and day peering at the cells; erythrocytes, leukocytes, thrombocytes, he tabulates, scribbles, inventing new combinations, organizations of rings or chains. “I am a hematologist.”
“He has had tests, and things are being questioned.”
Inexplicably three of us are rolling the tangerine. (Each is the same.) His eyes invade everything. Soon he will win my confidence. The exact prescription of Clarence’s present orthopedic shoes will be revealed. I will tell of the oddities of his growth, his unwillingness to associate objects with words. And his inability to learn as man is supposed to learn. Nor will the peculiarities of Clarence’s eyes be forgotten.
I look at him, thinking I see a clown or violinist. When I am tired I cannot distinguish things. Hematologist, I tell myself.
He wants to know everything. I comply. We converse as he looks warmly, probingly, into the microscopic pupils of my eyes. I smile, a phantom. (I have never left the mirror where I saw his head come forth.) I never leave anything. It is all there, in circles, as I smile.
