The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt Page B

last. I can’t tell you how many times we get there and Flora’s spilled grape juice and Simon’s spit up and I’m slimy. I have clean clothes for them in the car.”
    That same day, Flora introduced me to Moki. As she told me about him, she swayed back and forth, pushed out her bottom lip, puckered both lips, rolled her head, and breathed heavily between phrases.
    “He was bad today. Too loud. Too loud. And bouncy.”
    “Bouncy?19;s sp1D;
    Flora grinned at me, her eyes lit with excitement. “He bounced on the house. And then he flied.”
    “Can he fly?”
    She nodded eagerly. “But he can’t go fast. He flied slow like this.” She demonstrated by moving her legs and arms as if she were swimming in the air.
    She came very close to me and said, “He jumped on the ceiling and in the window and on a car!”
    “Wow,” I said.
    She gabbled on about him, her mother smiling. They had to wait for Moki because he dawdled. Moki loved chocolate chip cookies, bananas, and lemonade, and he had beautiful long blond hair. He was strong, too, and could lift heavy objects, “even trucks!”
    Moki lived. After they had left, I meditated for a moment on the imaginary and the real, on wish fulfillment, on fantasy, on stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The fictive is an enormous territory, it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends. We chart delusions through collective agreement. The man who believes he’s emitting toxic rays while nobody around him seems to be the least bit affected can be safely said to be suffering from one pathology or another and put away in a locked ward. But let us say that same man’s fantasy is so vivid, it affects his neighbor, who then begins to suffer from headaches and vomiting spells, and a contagious hysteria ensues, the whole town retching—isn’t there some AMBIGUITY here? The vomit is real. I thought of the crazed women flailing and wounding themselves in the churchyard of St. Medard, their gruesome deliriums and convulsions, their hideous pleasures, their glorious subversion of EVERYTHING. And what did I think in my madness? I thought that Boris, in concert with “them,” stood against me, and this was, in fact, delusion, and yet, wasn’t it also a howl against the way things are for me, a cri de coeur to be truly SEEN, not buried in the clichés and mirages of other people’s desires, buried up to my neck like poor Winnie. Beckett knew. Haven’t they distorted me with my collusion? Ibsen’s Nora dances the tarantella, but it has gotten out of hand. It is too fierce. Abigail hides her vacuum cleaner that sucks up the town. It is too fierce. I can see in my father’s eyebrows that it is not right, in my mother’s mouth that it is inappropriate, in Boris’s frown that I am too loud—too forceful. I am too fierce. I am Moki. I am bouncing on the house, but I cannot fly.
    *   *   *
     
I do believe that on March 23, 1998, the only person who saw Sidney was you.
     
      Boris
    *   *  & fi*
     
    When I read it, I smiled. Of course, he would know the date. His brain is a goddamned calendar. I was glad he remembered that I had pounced on the unzippered door to the little soldier himself, standing at attention the instant I gave the command. Oh Sidney, what have you gone and done now? Why AWOL now, old friend? You were never too bright, of course. Like all your brethren, you’ve served as little more than a moronic tool of your owner’s alligator brain. But still, I cannot help wondering, wherefore now, old pal of mine?
    *   *   *
     
    Soon, you are saying, we shall come to a pass or a fork in the road. There will be ACTION. There will be more than the personification of a very dear, aging penis, more than Mia’s extravagant tangents onto this or that, more than presences and Nobodies and Imaginary Friends, or dead people or Pauses or men offstage, for heaven’s sake, and one of these old ladies or