(xiv)


A dildo, a dollar
A blue-collar scholar
Why did you peak too soon?
You once were half a Wunderkind
But now you’re a buffoon.


I sit upon a wooden chair, and practice my beatific smile. Perhaps I smile because I have hit upon some silly cosmic truth. More likely I smile because I am too tired to scowl properly. While I am smiling seems an important question. I file it for future consideration, at some time when I can think straight. Betimes, in the absence of a reason to change my expression, I smile.

The chair is an old-fashioned desk model. It swivels and tilts at inopportune moments, threatening the delicate balance of my crossed feet upon a metal stool. I watch my feet, to make sure that they are not slipping. I notice I am wearing sneakers. I like my sneakers, because they are half in holes and show off my red socks. The red socks go well with the blue jeans, and these in company with the pallor of my complexion show me a patriot.

I am pleased with this combination. I hum a few bars of the Star-Spangled Banner, and then resume my contemplation.

Each monk has his cell. Mine is a janitor’s closet, cement-walled, windowless, furnished simply with the apparatus of my trade. One might ask more of a cloister, but I do not.

There is a large and foully dirty sink. A mangy red hose {the color of an ancient rubber band} has been clamped over the faucet, to facilitate the filling of buckets, the cleaning of mops. Next to the sink are the mops, leaned upright agaisnt the wall, and next the mops, the brooms. There is a large industrial vacuum cleaner, the Hydrovac. It seems a kind of movie robot, a can on wheels, with a hose emerging from the barrel in the front: proboscis. This instrument is indispensable. In the corner there are buffing pads: the brown, the black, the off-red. Next to these are five-gallon drums containing waxes and wax-removers: thesis, antithesis.

Shelves cover a wall and a half. Supplies have been distributed upon these quite nearly at random, in keeping with the erratic fancies of those odd moments when I have bestirred myslef to replenish them. There are rolls of toilet paper (the Waldorf Convenience Roll, fit, I would judge, to scrape hair and tissue from the buttocks of Hercules, let alone poor soft mortals such as I found myself to be), bundles of paper towels, cans of cleanser (Old Dutch, Bab-O), jugs of ammonia, bleach, Wescodyne (featuring Polyethooxypolypropoxypolyethooxyethanol-iodine), boxes of trash bags and of light bulbs and of chalk, and plastic spray bottles containing mop oil, assorted window-cleaning potions, and strange red and violet fluids with which I dare not experiment.

Above the door there is a large box of telephone circuitry. Now and then it stirs, usually to produce a mysterious periodic click. For some reason this is not maddening.

As a personal touch, I have indulged the worldly urge to interior decoration: I have moved in a coffee pot, and put a poster to the inside of the door, which I habitually close in after me when I retire to practice these Custodial Mysteries. It is a portrait of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematicians. I think of him as a kind of patron saint. I have no candle to light, and so I light a cigarette.

Exhaling, I address the portrait. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodian?” I ask.

Carl smiles, but will make no reply. In fact I require none. The question is rhetorical. No one watches over me. No one at all.

I come to work at five each morning. After two hours I am done, and I sit down for coffee. Then I go to the library, to replenish my working stock. Then I sit down in the closet and read for six hours. I may take a break; this depends upon my mood. A little after one I anoint my brooms with mop oil, turn the lights out, and go home.

It is a simple life. I find that I like it. For this I get twenty-five dollars a day, and free toilet paper.

Some days, of course, I am tired.

I study the portrait. How self-satisfied the old man seems: the German gentleman, black-capped, white-haired, huge of nose; the most powerful intellect of the nineteenth century, the equal of Newton. In part, I know, this is illusion: for this was also the son of an illiterate stone-mason, a man who had fallen into depression at the height of his career, and contemplated suicide.

Someone knocks upon the door and asks for a roll of toilet paper. I give him two.

Carl and I regard one another. Had he died young, would the invention of differential geometry have been delayed for half a century? Or would Riemann have done it all himself? Could there have been a general theory of relativity then?

It seems important somehow. I think about it and I smile. In an hour or two it will be time to go.