Circuits

By Michael Brodsky

This startling novel is the concentrated peak of Brodsky’s dynamic and unique vision. With a shifting group of characters—Mazel Tov Jones, Neddie and Eddie, Vladimir and Mr. and Mrs. Stein, Brodsky explores the thought process of a protagonist who is accused of a murder but is never sure of his crime or his accusers. Brodsky’s character becomes a model for all humans trying to find a self-identity, reduced to the simple yet tragic dilemma of trying to communicate with fellow men. Stripped of excess plot and locale, this novel expands on the visions of Beckett and Kafka, but with a uniquely American voice.

Circuits will surprise and engage the serious reader at a level that few contemporary writers attempt to reach. Brodsky lives up to Ezra Pound’s famous challenge—Make it new—and pushes fiction and the novel to new limits with spirit and vigor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books We Live by
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781628480894

Michael Brodsky

Michael Brodsky is a New York writer, born and bred. The first of his many published works of fiction – including novels and collections of shorter prose – was Detour, for which he received the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Citation of PEN. He has also written plays, a number of which have been performed Off-Off-Broadway.

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Table of Contents

Circuits

About the Author

CIRCUITS

. . . resolution enough to pursue her own will in spite of her brother, but not enough to refrain from unreasonable regrets at that brother’s unreasonable anger. . .

Jane Austen, Emma

Now? There’s no now for us suitors.

Dickens, Bleak House

I looked right and left, up and down, though less danger there, bought the ticket. The fates smiled: not a face in sight. No sign of traffic, snow falling.

Just before taking the ticket in my hands I asked myself how what was peddled here could satisfy my cravings. The movie theater's dark constituted the elusive ministering curve to which I must make tangent, as too many times before, the straight line of my need, even more elusive.

A day of mourning came to birth. I had been carrying this birth around since breakfast. But only now, as I crossed the threshold from hard wet pavement to carpet, did I begin to take it into account. This taking account must mean I was a little beyond it. Stepping into the folds of the carpet I induced the soundtrack in the background. The soundtrack coursed through me, filling me with panic and at the same time collaborating with the folds to still that panic. Only for a minute. Stilled I had been insidiously lulled from the kind of resistance, however halfhearted, however headlong, demanded of me by snowstorms and hard pavements. This resistance, panic’s basal tone, enabled me to avoid ever being surprised by, jolted into, panic.

Mirrors on either side. Less than ever did I require two carbon copies of my signature of attrition on the depthless parchment from which this movie theater had been constructed at breakneck speed.

I wanted to escape the carpet, the mirrors and the ticket. I wanted to retrieve thoughts that would not obediently depict the details of rooms now uninhabitable. I handed my ticket to the girl inside. A nice girl, nicer than nice. I had expected the woman outside to scream.

Where are you going. The price of admission is A and you shelled out B. The nice girl frowned. I knew my movements would be rickety with the eyes of that frown on my retreat. More than ever did I need thoughts but thoughts that did not confine me to, in, the present, the eternal present of the incessantly imminent past. The only need I knew I had was for thoughts, of a particular tonal value.

From within the auditorium came laughter, single, incising. As it approached (the closed door opened) I receded, less from the laughter than from my own ragged surface absorbing it. The darkness grew as I penetrated it. I did not see the usher’s face.

The lights rose weakly for intermission. Next to me a man coughed, leisurely. He was unashamed of his cough. He turned around, undaunted and undiminished by the fibery humanness resident in that cough’s every crevice. He was unashamed of orifices and of the secretions that ogle them. Suddenly I was lord of his profile.

Here was somebody proud of his house sounds. His house sounds were a detail I did not want, a detail my thoughts could not work. This detail stood in the way of those I seemed mightily to crave, such as the ticket taker’s frown now lodged like a shard in my flesh. How exorcise the demon of the frown, the demon in the frown, compelling the upsurge of gesture after gesture. The overriding virulence of these gestures lay in their refusal to reach my surface. They included the frown, a scowl in response to the frown, an arm extended zenith wards to protest the schism engendered by the frown.

She appeared to me. First she was a fat carping jovial bitch, then a slender fragile voiceless waif netting me simply with the Botticellian line of her helplessness. Perhaps it was the man who coughed provoking these transformations, and her incarnations a function of his cough’s ever so subtly varying inflection. When the cough disapproved she was joyless and broadly smirking, never satisfied, never satisfying. And when the cough became a salvo of robust little phlegm-lined implosions then I was able to succumb wholeheartedly to the wholehearted charms of her slender. . . foaming at all orifices. So I yielded to her charms always as one under his jurisdiction and beneath his notice.

Was snow still falling. Was the woman in the booth still at her station. We constituted a group: the woman in the booth, the good man coughing, the ticket taker, and I, closed in upon ourselves under some still to be identified binary operation affirming, even stretching, our capacity to subsist in fleetingly hazardous combinations.

The good man coughed again. Was it a signal. If I kept my calm, the way a toothless fishwife keeps, with exemplary piety, her own counsel, would all this very conspicuous abstention necessarily pave the way toward the mammoth reparation latent in the cough. Would he indemnify me for the numberless indignities suffered at the hands, at the very crotch, of being. Maybe he, as emissary of this respectable little group of four, would allow me to speak up at last, to address myself to the monstrousness of that last act. Would he allow me to smuggle myself out of the hinterlands of the act with self-indictment so unstinting as to abolish all imputation of monstrousness.

I wanted, oh so badly, to confess. Then I told myself that whether or not I confessed, the monstrous crime would be all too clearly sketched in the stratagems I elaborated to ward off discovery. Taking out a knife, the knife, I sank its blade into my seat. Here was one such stratagem. Yet all the while I felt as if I was less carrying it out than tracing its possibility on my horizon in order to ponderingly assess its effectiveness. But something in the new inflection of the cough told me I was too much inside the stratagem, or inside the need for the stratagem, to be able to assess it from a distance.

As the film began I leaned over and looked his prosperity straight in the eye. I tried, at the same time, to distract myself from the fermentation of the screen’s pores but that fermentation far too quickly penetrated every crevice of my craving to escape it. The fermentation suffocated until I permitted it to remind me of other fermentations. That, for example, of the shadow of the leaves of the plant on the sill in the room where. I fled this remembering which forced me to coincide with myself, as one being among many beings, object among objects.

I needed a refuge. Refuge could only be a detail, a thought about a detail. The bulb on the back of the chair before me, for example. But what thought could I have regarding this detail. There was nothing, so far as I could see, to think. As detail, the bulb was a far cry from those which had always suggested far too much for thought, except as inexhaustible process, to recuperate. The surfaces of those details had always partaken of an irrepressible loquacity to be quelled by no catalogue however exhaustive. To stare at the bulb could hardly be confused with the supremely fertile because endless excruciation of inventorying, for example, the shiver of willow shag in the long latency of spring sunshine. The point of inventory was to be never- ending. Affirming the continued existence of an intact inexhaustible target never-ending inventory at the same time affirmed my continued existence as a being forever on the increase, and, as an expanding sum of thoughts acquired, fast approaching—at least for the duration of their uninterrupted mirthless acquisition—the dimensionlessness, the unlocalizability, the undiagnosability, of all of being.

Yet I wanted to believe that by staring at the bulb—and confusing that staring with an acceptance of my separation from the bulb, object separated from object, thing from thing—I could cure myself of the need to be more than an object among objects—to be nothing less than all of being. For the bulb was clearly not a willow shag capable of inducing inventory without end, layer upon layer of data mounting in opposition to, as approximation of, being’s all. The bulb, this bulb, was a bulb and nothing but. It lived in relation to what surrounded it. It succumbed, without regret, to union in separation, separation in union, with its neighbors. It ceded to the latent incision of one contour by contiguous others. The bulb’s contour incised others and was itself incised. Unfolded before my very eyes was the incision, the knife thrust, of one contour into another.

Now, as a valued member of a group of four, I was ready to live on the surface of the detail I had singled out. Suddenly I had no intention of recruiting a thought by which I could acquire through incising—that is to say uttering—, incise through acquiring, this detail, this mere and especial bulb, as its contour went about incising the contour of contiguous things. I suddenly had no intention of seizing on the bulb as an occasion for thought, for escape into thought—thought as the acquisition of an incision, caught and claimed, and once claimed capable of restoring me to myself as more, much more, than merely myself. I thought of the body, the incised body. I shuddered. Surely I had come to the end of all incision, of all acquisition of incision—incision as the highroad to, pretext for, acquisition of myself as more than myself, as nothing less than prefiguration of being’s all. I turned away from the bulb for as much as I wished to respect its surface, its unincisable, unutterable surface—as much as I wished to respect its lucid separateness from me, from all things—I was nevertheless racked by the old hunger to. . .think the bulb, to acquire a thought about the bulb which would, at least for the duration of that thought’s acquiring, swell my dimensions beyond those of a festering finitude.

I felt the old hunger to be more than an object, a thing, in being. As an object among objects, thing among things, I was subject, at all times and in all my places, even the most recondite, to the impingement of those other objects, other things. As all of being I could escape impingement—impingement of the incised body, for example. When, armed with a thought unhampered by length, width or depth, one feels oneself swelling to the same dimensionlessness, there is suddenly no longer any danger of impingement from without. There is no longer any without. One is within and without.

I turned back to the bulb. It had become a bulb out of time, out of space. It was getting bigger and bigger, swelling to the dimensionlessness of being’s all—the dimensionlessness that was rightfully mine. Having eluded encapsulation in a thought, the bulb was clearly getting too big for its breeches. The bulb was taunting me with its newfound insusceptibility to annexation in a thought, a thought of my devising. It seemed a good idea to set this thing, this object, this lowly contoured shard, in a story, as an element among elements. Connected to what came before and to what must come after, the bulb’s excruciating potency would surely be drained off.

Knowing it embedded for good and for its own good in a story, I could stand back from the bulb—as I had never been able to stand back from her, the incised one, the one incised—with a hunger mastered through respect for distance. I waited for the story—anybody’s story but my own—to make itself known. For, truth to be told, the wan light of the bulb was becoming too much to bear. It was too much a typical, representative, quintessential light. My well-being required that the bulb be no more, no less, than itself. My well-being required its recruitment as a part, incomplete in itself yet distinctly aware of its own lack, to a whole unfolding in time. Out loud I implored. The bulb is not a whole. But once I had spoken the bulb stared back with the warlike affirmativeness of a whole. If only something were to be sure to come, come after, to rescue me from this fulgurating wholeness, I would be willing to be afflicted with the wholeness, for as long as it lasted, for as long as it was not yet ceded to absorption by, in, its successor.

A hand. A hand moving toward the bulb. The bulb touched, stroked. The hand removed. Here were the rudiments of a story. Here was the hitherto omnipotent bulb about to be sacrificed to the story’s flow as a succession of fragments each equally framed in its lack. But here was the bulb staring back at me, not in the pride of its wholeness but now in the pride of its lack. There was an irresistible vibrancy, an undeniable blatant provocation, in the directness with which it proclaimed its lack. The bulb was now more frightening as part of a whole. As part of a whole, the bulb continued to taunt me. It dared, compelled me to attempt the completion of its story. Still confronted with the bulb I was now obliged—doomed-to tell its story, which was nothing less than . . . than . . . my story. In my story the incised one figured primarily, perhaps exclusively. So the elaboration of the bulb’s story as my story was, at least for the time being, out of the question.

I tried now to keep a respectful distance from everything in the movie theater. I tried to wean myself from the need to incise, extract, acquire, utter, achieve connectedness. I rested. I kept myself at a distance. I resisted solicitation. I saw no evil. But I only ended up playing at being one who keeps itself at a distance, one who abstains from the labor of recruiting details as the raw material to fuel a flight from self. Consecrated ostensibly to mammoth abstention from acquisition of these details, I ended up acquiring instead a dutifully deft impersonation of one who abstains for his own good. There was no way, then, I could rehabilitate myself within the precincts of the movie theater. My old ploys were refunded to me in one form or another.

The man who had coughed now sat down beside me. He sang the syllables of his yawn as only women do. He disincarnated his yawn into something as aromatic as the spray that masks the smell of shit. He divested himself of this yawn as if it were a wrap. Divesting himself of the yawn might be bringing him closer to me. Such speculation distracted me from the real problem of fleeing one who was all too obviously a policeman. I remained absolutely still, convinced of being at last in the vicinity of an equation. I foresaw my projection onto a grid, already partitioned for the computation of my trespass.

I wondered as the movie began—it had begun, in fact, long before but for me it began at that moment—how I had allowed myself to be sequestered without feeling that I stank in the least of collusion. I had never emerged from my sludge long enough to tabulate my visibility to interested parties. Wallowing, as I had been all that morning, had absorbed all of being into its slothful tenacity. As all of being wallowing obliged no stepping out of its sludge to rebuff impingement from without. There could be no impingement from without. With wallowing all of being there was no impinging without The wallowing, the torpid turning from streetcorner to streetcorner, had been secreted by the direness of my plight. Once inebriated by its own momentum, or lack of same, this wallowing was consistently failing to comply with the exigencies of that plight. And so here was the policeman, profiting from the failure.

Flight from this policeman would require a leap out of the wallowing. Yet having burrowed so deeply within the wallowing I saw nothing but the wallowing. When will you handcuff me. No reply, screen the color of snow saturated with piss. When will you handcuff me. Question now in the form of a statement, silencing all ancillary voices to which his kind must under no circumstances gain access. Now he replied. I don’t know. Why prolong the agony. With me beside you you’re safe. You’ll never be safer. Why prolong the agony of this interim safety. Because I want to see the film. I did not reply. I wanted to afflict with a silence corrosive enough to dissolve handcuffs. He yawned, but this time like a man. The yawn was yoked to and completed by a heave, a rale, a quick shrug, which rescued him from the sludge of my silence into which he had no intention of sinking. Finally I said, Once I’m safe I combat the safety. Ineptitude always imminent promptly transforms me into one no longer safe. My attempts to rid myself of the endproducts of that ineptitude give me away. I’m thirsty, he said, alert to and unashamed of his needs. My thirst is never anything but the inability to satisfy my thirst. How’s that? he asked, looking straight ahead with the simulated inattentiveness of one who has just heard what interests extremely, too self-revealingly, laceratingly. Admitting my thirst, my need to drink, I have to go out and satisfy it. It becomes need, this thirst, as soon as I recognize the insuperable obstacles lying in the way of its satisfaction. What is it, this need, before you become aware of the obstacles Of no importance. He did not seem to hear. He studied the air as if my lineaments were traced thereupon. He regarded the efforts of those lineaments to coincide with themselves with the revulsion of a child, still on the fringe of being, for its elders unambiguous placement warts and all-in the very heart of being. This revulsion is of course mistaken, all too benignly, for childhood’s fabled timidity before what the blemished blubbering jaw, jutting paunch, platitudinous grin and eerily sentient nostril stamen proclaim of sagacity and unabashed vigor. You revolt against your own exploration, he said. Where. In the abyss you know too well. You revenge yourself on the imperative to explore by making the target-in this case sensation yoked to need—a dead end. The need becomes nothing more than the contingencies—the obstacle course—to which it gives rise. So the word, thirst, returns to you unharmed. And you are by extension unharmed. Unharmed and unused. You who fear so much depletion. He sat back, no longer tracing lineaments. Needs are dead ends. I talk about them all the time. I’m sure you do. In fact when I find myself talking about these dead ends, when I find myself once again and at last in the midst of the contingencies that make for such dead-end talk I am positively ecstatic. The ecstasy is greater the second, fourth, ninetieth time. There must also be more alarm the second, eighth, thirty thousandth time. How so. The return of the thought the third, twelfth, eighty-fourth time at the same time refunds you to yourself. You mistake the excruciation of renewed self-coincidence—in other words, finiteness as depletion—for ecstasy at the continuation of your existence confirmed by the return of the same thought.

I felt thirstier than ever. I had a need not only to drink but to piss. I found my way easily to the toilet, pleased that I was to be trusted if only at the end of my leash. Leaving the auditorium I heard the music of the next feature s credit sequence. I heard a clock strike somewhere out in the snow. I asked myself, pissing with a curiously weightless panic as if the piss was coursing through not out of me, as if I were an embodied piss-streaked dream refusing to end. Was he from the local police station or the prison house. Beside him in the stall, I moved my foot to avoid the spray. How describe his gaze as he pissed: beyond all its modifications it was cocked yet languid. I zipped myself up quickly,