The Alphabet Cage

by Huntley Gibson Paton

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3

conclusion

The rest of the night was chaos. The workshop always throws a party for visiting authors after their readings, and Stansloski was no exception. Under no circumstances did I wish to attend, but Samantha insisted. I agreed when they threatened to go without me. The party was at poor Sharpley’s house, a fine old Tudor decorated appropriately for a man of his station, with a library that would have impressed me had I not created my own far-superior one.

Sharpley, thin, silver-haired and sporting a blue cardigan, kept a worrisome eye on his guest, lurking always a few feet away from the maniac, hoping that he kept his cigarette ashes in the sink and not on the floor, probably fearing he would steal the silverware. Attendance was sparse compared to similar events I’ve attended. Few people seemed willing to engage the Anti-Christ in conversation.

Samantha and Kurt were two of the few. Samantha told Stansloski that she, for one, had certainly bought and read a number of his books, and found them all brilliant. Kurt echoed her sentiments as if he were an echo. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept drinking like a fool.

Then Stansloski said, “This place is a dump.” He looked over to the cowering Blake Sharpley and yelled, “What a dump!”

Sharpley disappeared around the corner, and I did not see him again. I myself considered crawling into one of the kitchen cabinets and hiding out with the pots and pans until this nightmare passed, but Samantha ruined any chance of my escaping.

“This is pretty boring, you’re right,” she told the monstrous author. “You know, we should go over to Stanley’s.”

“Now there’s an idea,” Kurt said. “You should see this place, Mr. Stansloski. It’s amazing!”

“Yes,” Samantha said. “More books than I have ever seen in my life.”

“Who’s Stanley?” the maniac roared. “Which one of these butt-kissers is Stanley?”

He looked at me, and his eyes locked in. I nearly choked on a cheese puff. “Hellooo,” he said. “Could you tell me which person in this house is named Stanley?”

* * *

“So tell me,” the Anti-Christ said to Kurt. “Are you two intimate? With each other I mean?” He was sitting on my couch with a quart of beer in his hand, and he motioned to Samantha. “Do you two share your fleshy gifts with one another?”

“No, no,” Samantha said, laughing. “We’re only friends.”

Kurt nodded in agreement.

“Hmm,” he said. “Interesting. Who then?” He looked at me. I sat quietly in a chair behind my laptop. “I know you aren’t doing it,” he said. “You don’t have the huevos. What’s the matter? Can’t you talk?”

I couldn’t, no. I was mortified with the whole situation. It was as if they had drawn a pentagram on my floor and chanted an evil prayer, and this foul man had appeared grinning in my living room with a smelly puff of brimstone.

“What do you think of all these books,” Kurt asked, taking my prized illustrated set of Dante’s Divine Comedy from one of the shelves. “Have you ever seen so many damned books before?”

“Stanley is somewhat of a celebrity on this campus,” Samantha told him. “Because of all these books.”

“Does he have any of my books?” Stansloski asked.

“I’m sure,” she said. “You’ve read everything by him, haven’t you Stanley?”

“Where are all my books in this hole?” Stansloski asked me.

The words stuck in my throat. I managed a shrug.

“He doesn’t have any,” the author said with disgust. “He can’t even sit through a fiction reading without losing his liquor.”

“Oh, he has your books, believe me,” Kurt said emphatically. When I did not affirm this, he said, less emphatically, “Surely he does.” Then, looking at me, his voice cracking slightly with desperation, his illusions dying, he asked, “Don’t you at least have Death Tractor?’”

“No,” I admitted. I looked down because I knew, at last, that I had lost them.

“I don’t want to see any of the other trash, then,” Stansloski said. He had his arm around Samantha’s shoulder. He pulled her closer to him. “You know,” he said to her in a female voice, “whoever you are, I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.” He bent in to kiss her on the lips.

She laughed and let him do it, then, laughing again, said, “That’s enough of that.”

“What?” Stansloski said, indignant. “Why?”

“I’m going to the fridge for another beer,” Kurt said. “Anyone want anything?”

“Bring it all in,” Stansloski said.

I was powerless. I opened my laptop, clicked on a new e-mail template using the Hotmail account of one fictitious Esmerelda Emerson, addressed it to my father’s work account, and began typing furiously:

Dear Mustard Information People: Please send me a refund for one (1) disgraceful jar of yellow mustard. I don’t remember where I bought it but I can assure you that it is below par. It tastes of cockroach dung and reeks of sulfuric acid. Has someone farted in my mustard jar? I can assure you that I will sue like mad if...

“Hey, librarian,” Stansloski said, “that’s buggin’ me.”

I looked up and saw him finishing a quart of beer. To Samantha, he said, “Darlin, would you like to see my Charles Atlas imitation?”

“Who’s Charles Atlas?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.

“Before your time,” Stansloski said. “And dead as Moses. But also the seminal male of the last century. Dynamic tension, baybeee. Dynamic tension!”

Samantha laughed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Charles Atlas had the body of a Greek god, and he did it without weights. His method was dynamic tension,” and to illustrate he stood up, made fists and flexed.

“Impressive!” Samantha said.

“Every kid who had a comic book knew the Charles Atlas ads,” the lunatic said. “The beach bully kicks sand in your face, you need the Charles Atlas course. Even Rocky Marciano took his course.”

“Who?”

“Atlas told you to work out in the nude,” he said. “His pictures in the course materials all showed him nude. Or maybe he was wearing a thong. I forget.”

Stansloski pulled off his shirt and flexed again, a hideous mass of flab and gray body hair. Samantha shrieked with laughter.

I grimaced and kept typing:

If I find out any monkey business has been going on at the mustard factory. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Why, just last week my neighbor Wanda had to take her son to the emergency room because spicy mustard gave the poor child explosive diarrhea. You people should be imprisoned

My hands were torn from the keyboard. It was Stansloski, gripping my wrists like Hercules.

“What the hell is wrong with you, wimp boy?” he said. “Can’t you see I’m trying to concentrate?”

He was nude. On the couch, Samantha sat with her knees up against her chest, her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were laughing at me.

“If you want to watch, it’s fine with me,” the lunatic said. “Maybe you can learn something. But keep the damned racket down.” At this, he turned to Samantha and began flexing in a series of poses. She clapped and exclaimed, “My herooooo!”

I half walked, half ran into the kitchen, looking for Kurt. He wasn’t there. I found him in my bedroom, passed out on the floor between stacks of Doctorow and Oates, cigarette hanging from his lips and burning a hole in my rug. I stomped the cigarette and shook him, fearing he had died from inhaling nylon fumes. He wouldn’t wake up, but he was breathing.

I myself was hyperventilating. I sat on the floor next to Kurt, and put a blanket over my head. I was resigned to staying in my room until I heard Stansloski leave my apartment. I would buy ten deadbolts and weld them to my door. I would go to the bookstore and deface all of his books, if he had in fact written any, and I was beginning to wonder, really wonder, about that.

Was this all some sort of elaborate joke, the university’s way of saying good riddance to Stanley? I would pray that Kurt and Samantha had no memory of this evening. I would give Samantha her beautiful hair back, glue it into place if she wished.

No sooner was the blanket over my sad head than I heard the books begin to fall.

* * *

Stansloski sang a song as he mowed my books down with his arm. “Meet the new boss!” he squawked. “Same as the old boss!” He was still nude and his officious love muscle waggled back and forth in time with his sweeping vandalism.

Samantha was hopping up and down on the couch, clapping and laughing. “Woooooo,” she said, watching books fly.

The madman threw Moby Dick on the floor and mashed the pages with his bare heel.

I don’t remember if I grabbed him or yelled at him. Perhaps both, but perhaps neither. There was really nothing I needed to do to provoke him. He was destroying my collection, but it was me he wanted to destroy most of all. He stopped what he was doing and took hold of me. My precious books lay pillaged and torn beneath our feet.

There was a knock on the door.

“I’m going to do you a favor,” Stansloski told me. “I’m going to rid you of all this so that you can come to life and stop cowering.” He stomped up and down on the books, tore more down from the walls, knocked large piles from their tables.

“Please stop!” I pleaded.

“I want you to slug me,” he said. “I want you to kick my ass.”

Oh, I wanted to. But he was terrifying in his nakedness. He tore large clumps of pages from the spines. He wadded them up and threw them at me.

The knocking on my door became louder.

“The police are here!” I wailed.

“Live a little, kid,” he said. “Look at me. I got the scars of life all over me. I look like a bag of trash, I’ve lived so much! But you! Lily-white! Come on, live a little!”

Then he croaked some Don Quixote at me, speaking in a mocking, ghoulish tone: “From so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”

He grabbed my hands and held them to his face. “I don’t see anything on you. Come on and live. Deck me. Paste me one, for God’s sake. Why don’t you come live with me for a while? I’ll let you live.”

“Stanley,” my father’s voice bellowed from behind the door. “I’ve wrecked my car, Stanley! Stanley, let me in. Is your mother in there?”

Stansloski ran amok. “I’ll show you how to do it!”

Samantha, laughing and laughing, stumbled over the growing pile of ruined pages and unlocked the door. My father came in, disheveled, drunk.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

“Indeed!” Samantha said, slurring her words. “You speak profoundly, sir!”

Father just looked at her, bewildered.

Then there was an evil sound, and I knew what it was even before I turned toward it. I had been hearing this sound all evening long, from urinal to urinal, except now, it hosed out of the monster onto the defenseless pages of my Literature.

“My God,” my father said. “What’s going on here? What is that man doing?”

Stanley Dunaway fled.

* * *

What can I say about my escape? It was aimless. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I was headed in the general direction of downtown. The wind harassed me, leaves skittering and swirling around me like an army of Lilliputians. I was out of my mind with anguish.

I ran to a convenience store and stuck my head in the door, but, having no idea why, screamed and ran away. A police officer saw me and started his car. In desperation I came upon a tavern and I ran inside. There, in a booth with three other women, sat my mother, grasping a tall beer glass and necking with one of her companions. I fell on my knees at her feet, clutched her fat legs to my breast, and I wept, I wept.

I couldn’t understand why she began beating me on the head with her beer glass.

* * *

An officer now comes to my cell and opens the door. He tells me to go with him. He says he’s got someone he wants me to meet.

“You’ll like this,” he says.

Perhaps, I muse hopefully, the lesbian has dropped the charges against me, and now wants only an apology. I can make her understand that I didn’t mean to impose on her, that I meant her no harm.

But instead the officer brings me to a room where my father sits, dressed in orange, just like me. We gaze at each other shamefacedly.

“Is this your father?” the officer asks.

“Biologically speaking,” I say.

“Does he own a yellow Tesla?”

“Mustard,” I say.

“Come again?”

“The color. Of the Tesla.”

The cop smirks, turns to my father. “This is your son?”

My father says, “Yes. Are you hurt, Stanley?”

“Family night at the drunk tank,” the cop says. “Very nice. Grandma and little sister arriving soon?” He shakes his head, tells us we have five minutes, and leaves.

“Son,” my father says. “I saw what that bastard did to your apartment. I’m so sorry. Where did you get all those books? I tried to follow you.”

I can’t think of a thing to say.

“I never thought my son would see me dressed like this,” he says. I notice for the first time that his hair is thinning. He starts crying. “Something terrible has happened, Stanley. Something very bad.” He reaches over and touches my hand. He has the shakes, the cold, clammy heebie-jeebies. “Let me explain.”

I tell him, “There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”

“What?” my father asks.

“Homer,” I say.

“Pardon?”

Orange fabric chafes. I tug hopelessly at the seams. “I’ll let you live,” the maniac said. And so, I do. But that is not what I asked for. From the beginning, once upon a time, I said it always in my heart, my innocent heart: Tell me a story.

Ah, now. That sad answer.