Wakefield by Andrei Codrescu Page B

his body and become pure talk, just a stream of words funneling like a twister out of a djinni bottle. In that case he might escape entirely, and the Devil would be left holding nothing but a wrinkled skin surrounded by a voice coming out of nowhere and everywhere. He may be wrong about this, but just in case, he lets his gaze drift over the heads of the assembled and shoots a quiverful of rays into the room, causing particular movies to unroll in each and every head. For good measure, he casts around a few itches as well.
    Wakefield is saying, “Children know intuitively that we exist in a world that is born of and lives by repetition. Life itself proceeds by replication,” but the audience is seeing black-and-white film images of scenes from their lives. An artificial intelligence specialist sees his father kneeling beside a bed, slowly pulling up a woman’s stocking as she holds her leg out to him. A marketing analyst squeezes in anger the teddy bear that his older brother has just made wet with some unspeakable substance. A virtual reality designer drops the chalice at her first communion and sees big drops of red wine stand in relief on her white patent-leather shoes. A Russian engineer watches a pancake being slowly rolled up by a mean boy from his school as his beloved Pioneer neckerchief disappears inside of it. At the same time, the marketing analyst experiences an unbearable itch between two toes on his left foot and has to scratch it or die. He takes off his shoe and scratches away. The AI specialist feels something lodged between two back teeth and cannot wait another moment to dislodge it, whatever it is. Meat? He’ll never eat meat again. The virtual reality designer wishes now that she’d never gone home with that Russian guy from the disco: her crotch is burning but it’s a different sort of itch. She slips her right hand between her legs as discreetly as she can. Farkash sinks lower in his seat: he sees himself perched on the steep-pitched red roof of his family house in the village; his mother is calling him in to wash before dinner. An insect is crawling in his armpit, making it tickle dreadfully; he can barely keep his balance. Farkash rakes at the offending pit.
    And so on, until everyone in the room is caught in a silent film of embarrassment or in the throes of physical discomforts that call for instant remedy. The room shifts, sways, rustles. Good show, laughs El Diablo, I should be a filmmaker. Then he remembers. He is. Not just one filmmaker, but many. The movie guides list hundreds of his works.
    Is Wakefield disturbed by all the fidgeting? Yes and no. You can’t expect to make a deal with the Devil and not be interrupted. This may be His Interruptiousness’s very nature. The long, uninterrupted peace of paradise was shattered for good by Lucifer. Nothing’s been completed since. Not a thought, not a speech. Of course, Wakefield isn’t aware that the Devil is actually in the room, but it’s safe to attribute all fuckups to Satan. That way one has deniability. Wakefield is determined to ignore the distractions of his audience. He’s inspired by the certainty that he really truly doesn’t know where he’s going, so why stop now? His listeners can fidget all they want and take from him what they will. Besides, being interrupted gives you a chance to think. He decides he likes being interrupted, he needs to be interrupted. He perseveres.
    â€œSo children, who are just discovering language, and poets, who can’t get over it, have a marvelous tool for confounding themselves and others. My friend Ivan Zamyatin says that language is a splendid alien, shipwrecked on our planet, who was captured by apes and hacked to bits. The English bit is from its neck.”
    Maggie imagines the shipwrecked alien, silicon-based perhaps, strewn about like a dismembered mannequin. Two Saxons and a Gaul break his neck into chunks like a loaf of bread and eat it.