4.7 The Top Hat: A Parable (Alexander Decides to Leave Boston)

1.

There was a fox that lived on the edge of a dark wood where the brush was so thick that burrowing animals lived in it, one above the other, without the least inconvenience. The fox lived within sight of a tailor’s cottage, and every afternoon the tailor’s wife baked savory meat pies with slit tops and left them on the forest-facing sill to cool. The fox, who was very lean and very greedy, spent many evenings sitting on a tree stump, staring at the pies and trying to concoct a plan to snatch them down and gobble them up himself.

The tailor had three sons, all of them as fat and pink as pigs and each one stupider than the next. The tailor was so prosperous that his sons could spend their days idle. They passed many hours in torpor, staring out the window, where they often saw the fox staring right back. They soon contrived to make the fox their special pet. They brought him scraps of meat and greasy bread and bullied him into learning simple tricks. The fox became quite adept at turning somersaults, and whenever he saw the tailor’s sons through a window he would turn a somersault and wait for them to throw him a tip of sausage or a crust of cheese. Another trick he learned that delighted them particularly was standing upright and walking like a man.

One day, when the tailor was out performing a fitting in town and his wife was at market, the sons became careless and invited the fox into their father’s home. They played at the fox’s being their fourth brother, and made a cap for him out of a dishrag and a cloak out of an old checked tablecloth. They held the fox over a basin of water, that he could see his own reflection, and indeed with his pointed ears covered up he looked very much like a man.

The tailor was one of the most skilled in the land, and his clientele included many of the courtiers and ministers of the Capital, if not the princes themselves. The tailor himself was a humble man and chose for the time being to continue to work at his old cottage, even as such an arrangement became more and more inconvenient. He dreaded the inevitable day he would have to open a shop in the Capital. The tailor’s sons, however, were very prideful, and they led the fox into their father’s musty workroom, which was stacked chin-height with finery of all kinds—topcoats, top hats, fine wool slacks, shirts of Egyptian cotton, and satin vests. The sons puffed out their chests, making themselves even larger than usual, and asked the fox if he was impressed. In truth he was.

Being clever, the fox shed his dishrag hat and tablecloth cloak and stood nuzzling the clothing. The sons, seeing now a new game to play, grabbed hold of the fox and dressed him in the most well-made, stylish outfit in their father’s workroom. They brought the fox their mother’s looking glass so he could admire himself. The fox looked quite handsome in his new clothing, and when the sons had their backs turned he slipped out through a window.

2.

Soon the fox was renting an opulently appointed if small room overlooking a pleasure garden on the river that ran through the Capital. During the day he would do sums at his desk—a simple occupation that made him very wealthy. At night he would watch the fireworks displays over the palace, which was visible from his window. In idle hours he studied the habits and manners of humans, either by watching passers-by through his window or by reading books. Sometimes he would take long walks around the city, past the tidy alleys, bright shops, majestic spires, and expansive squares with their brass statues. Always he wore his top hat, even when he was sitting at a meal. If any human saw his pointed ears, they would realize his true nature and expel him.

While he enjoyed the pleasures of the Capital, he was in many ways not entirely content. He often thought about his home in the woods, particularly his dear friends, a wild boar and a brown bear whom he would never see again. Never again would they entrap a family of hares together and devour them whole while sunning themselves. Furthermore, after coming to the city he developed certain symptoms. His vision would go bleary for no reason he could discern, and he had a constant metallic taste in his mouth. So as not to offend others, he took to chewing parsley. He was often dizzy, and would spend entire days in bed.

3.

One of his lovers was named Isabel. She was the daughter of an industrialist. She had long brown ringlets and a fair, round face. She was the very picture of elegance during daylight, but once night fell she would become sentimental, and in a certain way he despised her. She would beg him to take off his top-hat, so that she could run her fingers through his hair when they made love, but he would rebuff these requests quite brutally. Something about the possibility thrilled him, however, and he had a secret wish that one day she would snatch the hat off, so as to assuage for a moment the anger and contempt that he had felt so unshakably since his move to the Capital.

Once, as they walked together after church through a park, he had a very strong spell of nausea and had to sit for several minutes on a stone bench to collect himself. Isabel sat beside him and caressed him, asking him what was the trouble. He told her of the symptoms he had developed since his move to the city—the dizziness, the metallic taste, and the bouts of confusion. She nodded as if she understood.

That evening she presented him with a tonic that she said would cure his symptoms, which according to her were the result of an affliction relatively common to foreigners living in the Capital. He took the tonic from her, but when she left the room he dumped it out of a window.

4.

He saw before him the wall surrounding the Capital. Each door he opened led to a hall and more doors at the end of the halls. The walls were covered in dingy brown tapestries, and the light was so dim that he could not make out the figures depicted. These tapestries muffled his footfalls, and through them he heard what sounded like whispers. The fox walked on all fours, like a beast. He was clumsy after so much time upright, but he knew that he must practice, as once he returned to his wood he would have to walk on all fours again and forevermore. But he never did return to the wood: after what seemed to be hours, he opened a door and found himself stepping into sunlight. He was still in the Capital, except now on the west side, closer to the Opera House.

5.

The fox sat at a cabaret with Isabel and he spied a gentleman and a lady sitting at the bar. The man was wearing a top hat, even as he was sitting, and his companion had her hair in an intricate, slightly outmoded style that hid her ears. Isabel had been smearing pâté on a hunk of bread and talking about the city’s mayor, who had again made a spectacle of himself at a ball the night before. She stopped talking and followed the fox’s line of vision. He stood resolutely. Isabel touched his coat and said, “You must not speak to them.”

The fox walked toward the bar and, bowing, introduced himself to the couple. The woman became interested in her drink, at which she stared quite impassively. The man cleared his throat and did not meet the fox’s eye. The fox asked them if they were foreign to the country. The woman said, “Please, don’t bother us, and don’t make trouble for us,” so the fox withdrew and returned to his table.

He sat, morose, remembering his old friend the boar, with whom he had as a kit gone on campaigns searching for a legendary crevasse in the heart of the woods. Even if he could quit the Capital, he would never be able to face the boar again. He thought also about his mother, whom a hunter had killed when the fox was very young and of whom he had few memories. Isabel was talking as if to someone behind her: “Please know there is nothing you could tell me that would change my love for you.”

The fox felt as if he were one of the balloons given to children on festival days and that he had just been released, floating upward and away.

6.

Once it happened, as if in a dream, that he saw the tailor’s sons in the Capital. They had grown by now into strapping men, walking with their bellies puffed out wearing fancy cummerbunds, each son’s a different color. They were cramming themselves into a carriage as the fox walked by. The fox pulled his top hat, which he still wore constantly, over his eyes so they would not recognize him as he kept pace behind. The carriage clattered slowly up and down the streets and finally stopped in front of the palace. The sons squeezed out and walked three abreast toward the gilt gates of the palace, where a dozen guards wearing plumed caps stood at attention.

The fox made to follow them, but then he spied a hole in the ground with a staircase leading down into it, as if into a basement with earthen walls. But the staircase led down as far as the fox could see, never reaching a room. Very slowly the fox walked down into the ground, watching the palace as he did so. The palace seemed to grow taller and taller, and the people around him appeared more and more monstrous, and the fox walked toward the whispers, down, down, down, until he was in complete darkness, and the walls became more narrow and the ceiling lower. He could feel the heat of the earth, and he could hear no longer the noises of the city, just the soft scratches of the insects of the ground and the thudding of his own small heart.

4.6 Alexander Visits Texas

1.

Once I was staying at a motel somewhere in Texas (even then I didn’t know the town’s name) and I woke up with a man standing at the foot of my bed, telling me that the police might be coming but I didn’t need to worry about it. When the police come I should just be cool. Scant specifics were provided, and I was too exhausted and grumpy to ask for clarification. After a short vague panic I resigned myself to whatever fate I would meet and put a pillow over my head so he wouldn’t bother me anymore. That was years ago.

2. 

My phone rings and I wander into a bedroom. Maria-Elisa seems upset and isn’t making very much sense. She says the police might be there when I come back.

3.

The perpetrator is crouched on the stoop, peering through the window and shouting something like, “Give me the fucking key” when I roll up with Mithun. I get out and mosey past like I’m on my way elsewhere. When I’m out of sight of the man, Mithun pulls up next to me and rolls down the window. I look over my shoulder and saunter to the window, resting my elbows on the edge. He offers to drive around with me a bit until the coast is clear. I decline.

Maria-Elisa cracks open the side door and I slip in before she slams it shut and pulls the bolt. She shoves me into her bedroom, closing the door behind us. I’m juggling two six packs. She’s like, “Hide that shit.” I stuff one into a hamper and cover it with a sweatshirt. I push the other one behind the hamper, partially under a nightstand or cabinet.

4.

Basically out of nowhere, the woman looks me in the eye and says, “Your friend is very handsome.” She’s referring to me. She’s sitting on an armchair upholstered in a reddish tapestry depicting unicorns. I’m slouching on a loveseat across from her, wearing a teal nylon taffeta windbreaker I bought at Brooklyn Flea for $3. The appropriate response to compliments of that kind from strangers is “Thank you,” which is what I say. “He’s really handsome,” she says, still staring me in the eye. I’m like, “Gosh, thanks.” She says, “You’re really handsome. Look at you. You’re really cute.” I laugh and say, “Wow, thanks.” I don’t look at her eight-year-old. I basically don’t look at anyone.

Apparently she tried the same tack with Chris a few months back, when Maria was standing right there. For Maria, that had been the last straw.

5.

The woman wanders into another room as if lost in thought. There is a half-full beer on a table that has cartoony art (including a winking Sailor Moon) drawn on it in with magic marker. She regards the beer, picks it up, and slurps it down in three gulps, as if she were at a bar and all her friends were getting up to leave.

Her husband has stopped hollering by now, but we’re keeping the house in lock-down until the police arrive. I nurse fantasies of a sudden panic as he smashes a window.

6.

Maria-Elisa has a small pink device that looks something like a computer charger. It has a node you stick to an object, and that object becomes a resonant speaker. We got the coffee table to play KTRU. “Isn’t that cool!” she says. “You could stick it to anything!” She hands it to the kid, who is obviously charmed in an oblique, lackluster way. The entire night, this is the closest I see him to being pleased. He reminds me of a student cautiously enjoying a classroom demonstration. He tries to stick the node to a beer bottle cap, but that doesn’t work very well. Maria hands him something, possibly a lamp.

The other experiment we have is a tall hexagonal glass that Maria-Elisa fills with a mixture of milk and dish soap. The idea is that drops of food coloring will swirl, which they do. We affix the speaker to the glass and turn on some bass-heavy music, but the vibration doesn’t have a substantial effect on the green drops of food coloring, which fan out a bit and stop.

The mother has collapsed on an armchair and is swinging from defiant to maudlin and back, over and over and over. Just as the kid is about to get distracted, she starts up again. “It’s my fucking house!” she mutters. “I’m going. I’m going. It’s my fucking house! I gotta go.” She’ll lean forward and brace her hands on the chair’s arms. Then we’d have to talk her out of it. “I really just don’t think that’s a very good idea. Come on, the police should be here any minute. Hey, what if we stick it to a pot!”

7.

Maria and Chris start singing “Happy Birthday,” but neither really commits. I join in sheepishly toward the end, so ashamed I could melt. It falls completely flat. Maria saves the day by breaking into a rousing joke. “You look like a gorilla and smell like one too!” Both the kid and the mother think this is funny—the woman starts to reminisce in very vague terms.

The police finally arrive, two or so hours after the first call was placed. A lady cop asks questions and points the flashlight beam at the woman’s face. The woman is plastered and not making much sense. The cop directs questions to the child, who is standing next to his mother in the doorway. We discover that it’s not the kid’s actual birthday. His family celebrates it in January because on the date of his actual birthday his father left them. It’s also up to him to describe the dispute: the husband bullied and shoved his wife outside and pushed her into a car; she knocked her head on the bumper.

The cop tells the woman to stay in the house and lock the doors. There is no sign of the husband outside: the police will search. The woman goes out anyway, and the lady cop shouts at her to go back inside and lock the door. When the door is closed, the woman calls the cop a bitch.

Later, Maria is livid. Apparently this is a thing: when the police arrive for a domestic disturbance call and find a drunk victim, they are much less accommodating. “I told her! I told her! Why’d we let her have that goddamn beer?”

8.

The entire night is spent negotiating the line between bearing witness and exploitative voyeurism (a line you might be negotiating now, as you read this). I’m taking mental notes constantly; this might make it in the novel. I spend a couple hours practicing a low-affect, dead-eyed, non-agentive bearing.

9.

The kid goes berserk and shoves his mother into a table. She is so drunk by now as to be totally useless. He’s screaming things like, “Mama, you’re drunk,” and “Do you WANT him to hurt you?!” We’re like, “What the fuck,” but don’t intervene. He keeps pushing her, bracing himself at an angle and keeping his head low. He doesn’t mean to knock her over, just to keep her away from the door. She’s sloppy and stumbles, jostling the beer bottles and almost knocking them over, but not quite. The kid is hysterical. Maria and I walk into another room.

10.

She’s finally passed out on the sofa. The kid, who is awake, cuddles with her. We’re outside smoking and standing with our weight on one leg. A Technicolor, life-sized papier-mâché monstrosity called “Hair Fantasy” is leaning against the side stoop. It was brought home from an art installation. I had run out to meet Mark when he rolled up, intending to explain the situation to him (which I did). As we stand around by Hair Fantasy, he imitates me to comic effect: catching his breath as if he is about to begin talking, then staring into middle space, then catching his breath as if he is about to begin talking, then staring into middle space, maybe five times in quick succession.

11.

At long last the woman’s sister rolls up on a three-wheel bicycle. She shakes the woman awake and bullies her quite viciously before sending her home. The sister takes the kid to spend the night at her place.

Rid of them, we booze until past 3am. This has been all told a two to three hour ordeal. I fall asleep on the couch, wearing my lumberjack PJs that were a gift from a friend’s mother. It’s still dark when a knock on the door wakes me. I’m naked from the waist up, so I pull my windbreaker on and zip it up to the clavicle. The woman is standing outside and seems sober. “Is my son in there?” I gather my mental energies and say, very slowly, “He was taken by your sister last night and is staying with her.” She thanks me and walks away. I bolt the door and shed the jacket, careful not to knock against the table as I shuffle around my luggage to the sofa.

The next morning I wake up at 8 or 8:30 and can’t get back to sleep. I empty beer bottles into the sink four at a time and put the empties into a brown grocery bag for recycling. I do some of the dishes as well.

12.

That night, Maria and I are in an apartment by Rice, visiting with an old friend and some of her friends. We basically tell the whole story to three people, who are all sitting on a sofa across from us. When we are finished, one of the listeners takes a poll: what ethnicity or, like, race did they think this woman was? The way Maria and I had told it, it had been ambiguous. He points to his friend.

“I was thinking Hispanic.”

“White.”

“Okay, see, I thought she was black. So which was it?”

Maria gives a clever answer, and everybody laughs. We go play Settlers of Catan, and my team wins.

13.

The next night J_____ is over. She tells us about a composition written by a Rice professor (“like the whitest guy ever”) that she once had to perform. The first movement was called “Prayer,” or something. The second was called “Holocaust.” The last was called “Klezmer,” and at the very end all the musicians were supposed to clap their hands and say, in unison, “Opa” or some equally Eastern-European-sounding exclamation (I can’t for the life of me remember what the exact word was).

“I literally almost walked out,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “I was so pissed.”

4.5 Alexander Briefly Visits Alabama (2)

I. WANDERER

I come above ground and hail a cab. The cabbie keeps assuring me I’ll probably be fine until I tell him my actual flight time. Then he keeps apologizing for not running red lights. It becomes embarrassing. I overtip him and miss my flight.

The travel day ends up lasting 12 hours, divided between Boston, DFW, and finally Mobile. I do about 200 mathematical problem solving GMAT questions in a workbook. Completing the math section of standardized tests is what God put me on this earth to do. I use a thick black porous-point pen and score better than the book’s previous owner, God bless her.

My brother picks me up and we drive to a Waffle House. I order a waffle and some hash browns. At one point a young woman sitting at another booth turns around and says something like, “I’m sure everything will all work out.” She is earnest but seems unhinged, which explains her breathless attempt to reach out to us. At any rate, her sentiments are not welcome, and we let her know. This is the first time I’ve been in Alabama in a year and a half.

II. SWEATER PARTY

When I’m meeting old friends I haven’t kept in touch with very well, I always brace myself for the possibility that they despise me now. Partially I worry that in hindsight they will realize how awful I really am. Partially I worry that I might be a hateful reminder of their own fundamental isolation and mortality. Partially I worry that some sort of fox and the hound shit has gone down and we have to hate each other now, and I just haven’t realized it yet. Partially I’m misinterpreting their inevitably diminished interest in me as hostile. Partially I am projecting my own egotistical insecurities, in a warped form, onto those around me. What other reasons can you think of for this reaction? Leave a comment or tweet your responses to @acromp with hashtag #whoevencares. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE >>>

III. SOMETIMES EVEN NOW WHEN I’M FEELING LONELY AND BEAT

Apparently once in biology class I waltzed around with an embalmed cat singing “What’s New, Pussycat.”

IV. AMERICA

I sit on a couch and eat a homemade ice cream cookie. On the television is a game show. Contestants who are unable to provide the correct answer are dropped through a trap door.

V. THE LAST DIVINE PRINCIPLE LESSON: THE STORY OF A LITTLE HALF-ALSATIAN

I swing into the now-vacant lot and get out of the car and walk to a back corner. The ground is weedy and there is no sign of the old buildings, not even the foundation. Just as I remember, the chainlink fence at the back has flimsy pink and white slats threaded through it at the diagonal. It divides the property from the woods. The lot seems small for how large I remember Headquarters being. An abandoned trailer used to be in the woods behind the property. As a child I went one Sunday to explore. The floor of this trailer was covered in cheap broken toys in a way that still makes me think of the doll on the cover of Stephen King’s Desperation. I would go now to see if the trailer is still there, but I don’t have the heart to. I get back into the car and drive as far south as I can go without dropping into the sea.

Literally, to Dauphin Island.