Night Soil by Dale Peck

Author:Dale Peck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2018-06-28T15:43:55+00:00

from — nothing

take — nothing

make — nothing

Marcus’s valet records the hoarse rasp of the master chanting these words in his bedroom, alone at first, then gradually joined by his Ansar “til the chamber door fairly shook with the Quire” (which, as siccable statements go, is kind of brilliant). A century later 444 voices were still chanting those words every day at matins and complines—in Latin, natch, so they didn’t sound quite so creepy. What they do sound like is Parmenides’s “nihil fit ex nihilo,” and while it’s possible Marcus knew the phrase (he pulled “maieutic” out of his ass, after all, though he also got “noviciate” wrong), it’s hard to imagine it was any more significant to him than those quaint Shakespearean idioms (“what the dickens?” “dead as a doornail,” “in a pickle”) that most people think originated with their country aunt or funny uncle. But how Marcus had arrived at these particular words and what he meant by them were never revealed. After his faculty left he passed the rest of the day “in speechless reverie, chuckling at unheard trifles, [and] plucking invisible moths from the air.” On the morning of the 29th his valet was unable to awaken him, and after lying unmoving for four days, his face “as serene as St. Sebastian’s,” he sighed once, “like Heracles at the conclusion of his Twelfth Labor” (the observations are those of his eldest grandson, Hugh, who hadn’t been invited to the “Unveiling,” although he had been granted the title of second president of Lake Academy), and then, as all men do, even great ones, even devils, he died.

Well. Most people think of childhood as a continual present, unfettered by complex memories, unconcerned with a nonexistent future, when it’s more accurate to say that kids live in a continual past. I mean the immediate past, of course, not the “weight of heritage” or whatever you want to call the things I’ve been writing about here, but in my case the two were indistinguishable. From my first word to my first poo to my first day at school, every milestone occurred in an atmosphere steeped in Marcus’s legacy and shadowed by my mother’s genius, so that learning how to be a person was, for all intents and purposes, learning how to be a Stammers. But children don’t learn like adults. They absorb information in a fugue state in which knowledge isn’t so much memorized as embodied in words and actions repeated over and over. It would be a mistake, however, to think of these repetitions as recreations of the instantiating experience. They are instead the same experience, time dragged forward with no regard for clocks or calendars. And unlike adults, whose more developed memories resignify even the most routine activity (usually by getting bored), children suffer no diminution of return. The thousandth game of fort-da is as pleasurable as the first, but only if the re-enactment is perfect. A single deviation provokes a temper tantrum; too many and the game loses its appeal.

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