Dumb-Show

By Fawn Parker

A satirical campus novel, Dumb-Show shrewdly confronts the cultural politics of masculinity through a narrative that twists the structure of Henry IV. A controversial Canadian professor of political science at a Toronto university rises to power when his political views divide the student body. Two siblings, one a student at the university, develop isolated personal relationships with the professor, and find themselves spiralling to infamy alongside him. Parker's second novel shadows the rise and fall of a corrupt king, observes a young and lazy boy's attempt to make a name for himself, and, tearing a hole in the hyper-masculine power narrative, interrogates a woman's internal search to power. Expanding from the brutal introspection first seen in Parker's Set-Point, Dumb-Show takes brilliant aim at personal power relations, leaving no player unscathed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arbeiter Ring Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781927886571

Fawn Parker

Fawn Parker is a Giller-nominated author of five books including the forthcoming Hi, it's me (McClelland & Stewart 2024). Her story "Feed Machine" was nominated for the 2020 McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and her story "Wunderhorse II" was anthologized in André Forget's After Realism (Véhicule, 2022). Fawn is a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick and her work is represented by Ron Eckel at CookeMcDermid Agency.

Book preview

Cover: Dumb-Show by Fawn Parker

DUMB-SHOW

Fawn Parker

ARP Books | Winnipeg

Copyright © 2021 Fawn Parker

ARP Books (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)

205-70 Arthur Street

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Treaty 1 Territory and Historic Métis Nation Homeland Canada R3B 1G7

arpbooks.org

Cover artwork and design by Bret Parenteau.

Interior layout by Relish New Brand Experience.

Printed and bound in Canada by Imprimerie Gauvin on certified FSC ® paper.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

This book is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty.

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ARP Books acknowledges the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program of Manitoba Culture, Heritage, and Tourism.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Dumb-show / Fawn Parker.

Names: Parker, Fawn, 1994- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210277955 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210277963 | ISBN 9781927886564 (softcover) | ISBN 9781927886571 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PS8631.A7535 D86 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

For my mother

The best of subjects to the best of kings.

—Voltaire, La Henriade

Well, while I'm here I'll

do the work —

and what's the work?

To ease the pain of living.

Everything else, drunken

dumbshow.

—Allen Ginsberg, Memory Gardens

PROLOGUE

Pluralis Majestatis

PART I

Mirrors for Princes

PART II

Soft Inheritance

PART III

Muse of Fire

Epilogue

Politike Power

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

Pluralis Majestatis

Spring, mid-1980s

I

What had been a surrogate womb for the burgeoning academics had, upon entering at off-hours on this Friday evening, become a stockyard. Professor Allen Carson’s stomach rumbled for dinner, cinched by an embossed moose and maple printed belt; something with a semblance of Canadian patriotism. His well-tailored suit couldn’t help but reveal an oddness to his shape. He was soft-shouldered and modest-looking, with a redness about the cheeks. The way he hunched over a podium or desk seemed like an apology for his height. His legs, however, were short enough to have better belonged to another man, and gave him an unusual symmetry between upper and lower body. He cleared phlegm from the back of his throat, the noise masking another rumble of protest from within. Somewhere in the city, his wife, his home life, had been suspended.

The three men had all begun to perspire: one due to the late-spring temperature of the humanities building, the other two due to present circumstance. Immediately Barry Martin recognized the title of his most recently submitted essay on the top of a small pile of papers on Professor Carson’s desk. He was one, maybe two feet from Leonard Balaban, a member of his cohort and—as per a decision made in the first semester of their masters’ degrees—his primary rival. Both stood before Carson’s desk where Carson himself sat with his usual sorry posture, anxiously moving his hands.

May I say, said Barry, before we begin. I have since realized the wrongness of my actions. I have experienced, ah, continue to experience great shame.

Leonard Balaban, astounded, turned to Barry, then to Professor Carson, who had not spoken since inviting them in.

But, continued Barry, I stand by the, ah, motive behind my actions. I see my underlying motives as being honourable still.

Barry’s motive had begun as an inkling. Airtime was being distributed unevenly within the graduate classroom; the weaker students were being called upon doubly as often as the A-averages. Then the A’s, Barry’s at least, started to lose their rightful plus. Some had even been decorated with the stabbing blade of a minus. He had always seen the plus sign as a sort of asterisk. The entire text of the work streamed down the pages, like a footnote to the thickly-marked red Sharpie ‘A.’ A signpost of excellence. The abridged version being: A.

Leonard: Professor Carson.

Alright, perhaps not honourable, ah, perhaps that isn’t the word here. Perhaps we might say, here Barry straightens his back, my minimum scholarly duty.

Barry Martin and Leonard Balaban may have been considered opposite in stature. Where Barry was sinewy, quick-moving, prematurely aged with a constant turbulence across his face, arguably brought on by both the tonal patterns of tenure-track vocalizations, and his style of dress—Leonard stood heavily in his place, rarely flinching and always in preparation to speak. This weight about him betrayed his hedonistic pleasure in the academy. It betrayed a nihilism too, and Barry suspected Leonard would stand by and watch the whole thing burn; that he might even light the match.

For, Barry began again, it is not that he is not intelligent! If that were the case I would let him be. It’s his complete disregard for the university’s well-being. He hoards his thinking. He sits in lecture like he’s watching television. To think, this complete absence of engagement will one day lead to a career in teaching?

Professor Carson held up a hand, turning the essay to face both men. I take issue with this in two ways, as is perhaps easily inferred.

This invitation to speak, to confess or defend, neither student took up.

Mr. Martin, you seem to have come to the realization that what you have done is in direct opposition to the ideals of this institution and all it stands for. This is plagiarism and there are no two ways about it. But, Mr. Balaban, evidently you have been complicit in this act.

Your use of the word evidently, Professor, implies you have evidence of this, said Leonard.

Am I incorrect? Has Mr. Martin here studied you so closely in lecture as to create a perfect facsimile of a piece of your writing? We are late in the semester here, gentlemen. You two especially are not easily confused.

I am afraid you are incorrect, sir, yes.

Mr. Martin, am I incorrect?

Leonard: May I defend my own honour, sir.

Barry: You are incorrect.

Leonard: I have spoken to Barry on a number of occasions, at great length. This is where I imagine he has sourced the material in the paper. The experiment, I do not understand. The paper, I have not seen.

Barry: What I was trying to display is the bias upon which you distribute grades. Had I entered this semester with a completely feigned ignorance of any semblance of understanding of the course material, I could then, I could in a measured way increase my competence up to my real abilities and get, oh it would have to be something higher than the highest awarded grade. By coming in here with a base understanding of how to use my own logic and reasoning and how to, to even, read a text, I have condemned myself to mid-level grades. An ‘A’ doesn’t signify good work alone. It is awarded for a certain engagement with the material, a fearlessness in challenging what is not right, a commitment to upholding, of being! One of the fundamental pillars of academic integrity.

Mr. Martin, have you not disobeyed one of the fundamental pillars of academic integrity?

Barry hung his head, muttered an affirmative sound.

And what happens to those who disobey the fundamental pillars of academic integrity?

We eat the bitter bread of banishment, sir.

Very good, said Carson. Mr. Martin, who is someone you would like to make proud?

My father, sir.

Very good. I imagine there are better ways than this, Carson gestured to the paper, to accomplish such a thing.

I would like to please the people, said Leonard. All people. Excluding my father.

Carson momentarily exited his role, laughed, then returned. How do you propose this issue gets settled?

I, said Barry, will prepare a presentation explaining my positioning at length, by next lecture. Perhaps Balaban will do the same.

So, said Carson. A debate.

Yes, said Barry.

Yes, said Leonard.

II

Through droves of chattering backpacked undergraduates entering and exiting the humanities building, where his office was tucked into the south-west corner of the eighth floor, Barry wove his way toward a student juggling pins for money collected in an upturned Toronto Blue Jays cap. In a near-miss, one pin wobbled off course and came careening toward Barry causing him to drop his briefcase and vacuum flask of coffee, both of which remained closed. He was relieved by this diversion of disaster, and like an insect scuttled to the ground to collect his items. Overhead, bodies continued to flow past.

When he got in, she was in his office, in his chair. She was also inside a secondhand copy of Homage to Catalonia, sprawled on some floor at some house party in a slinky taupe dress with her hair all around her head like Medusa’s serpents. Barry didn’t like the particular photograph and its implied recklessness, though he felt titillated by the fact she’d sent it, and enjoyed carrying it proudly yet secretly around campus within whatever he was reading.

Barry wilted against the closed office door, arms at his sides like a cut marionette. The first-year art therapy student swiveled in his desk chair, back and forth. Some of her things were wildly strewn around the room: textbooks, plastic hair clips, a tooled leather purse with a turn clasp and a painted bouquet of flowers. The clasp had originated a private nickname, Tussie-Mussie, after the many flower-printed items in her wardrobe, solidifying what had then only been the suspicion of a spark of sexual attention from the graduate student. She’d previously assured herself of his disinterest, for he had his own office, had been accepted for doctoral candidacy, and perhaps most importantly, was among the youngest in his cohort to have a wife.

Stress, said Barry. Little bit of stress. He worked at his lower back with three fingers.

She had the eyes of a Kit-Cat clock, following him from one side of the office to the other, while he dialed a number and wedged the phone receiver between his ear and shoulder.

Stressful day, he said. I’ve got two days. Two days to prepare and then I’ll, ah, I’ll destroy.

The art therapy student could hear the dial tone, which undercut the quiet tension of the moment. Barry looked in her direction, but his eyes were out of focus; he was inside the call.

Hang on a moment, he said, then repeated it, more grimly the second time. He motioned with his head for her to exit the room. He motioned again, in reverse, to suggest she might, once the phone call had finished, come back into the room.

She did as instructed. Across from Barry’s office was a women’s bathroom with two stalls. The art therapy student closed herself into a stall and peed, then waited with her dress bunched up in her lap and her underwear around her calves for the patent shoes in the other stall to walk off to the sink, and exit the room. The art therapy student then walked with some difficulty to the sink herself, underwear still down and dress still up, and used her hands and tap water to wash herself, down there.

From outside the office Barry’s voice could be heard, sort of, saying, I’ve had a hard day, or, it’s hard to say, or something.

After a pause: Yes, he said. You too.

Barry put the phone back in its base, cutting off the beeping he hadn’t taken notice of until it ended. He stood up straight and went, Ooogmph. His lower-back settled into a new position with a prickly burn.

The art therapy student seemed to have gone, perhaps after having listened in and heard something that made her feel envious about his marriage, or alienated, Barry speculated. Barry considered whether he had said anything incriminating. Surely not.

Out from behind his open door jumped the student, shouting, Boo!

Barry nearly leapt out of his clothes. Thus startled, he laughed, then his face emptied. Don’t you ever do that again, he said.

She laughed, play-shoving him.

You mustn’t behave in such childish ways, he scolded. It’s unbecoming.

She held her face stiff in its smile from before as if to prove to him that his words meant nothing to her. Something small changed in the shape of her eyes.

I’m sorry, Tussie-Mussie, he said. I’m giving you a hard time.

Her smile returned.

On his back on the floor of his office he squinted against a pot light shining a white and artificial sunlight behind her cherub-like head, flickering as she moved forward and back over him. The tension in his pelvis spilled out of him into the condom inside of her and he released a double-jointed, Ah, at the pleasure and at the pinch in his back.

III

Things went as usual. Students filed in, Carson was already hunched over his podium. Barry took his place, one row back from the front and one semester away from convocation. This was a performance of modesty. Sure he could sit in the front, wouldn’t mind one bit. But one must exercise some restraint. So, row two, and staring holes into Carson.

Leonard Balaban arrived late, with no evidence about him of notes or anything else for that matter. Inside his big turtle shell of a leather jacket, he shuffled to a seat by the door, making no acknowledgement of Barry. Barry vibrated in his own seat. He had so little patience for lecture today, sitting as he did on the precipice of greatness. He had been preparing for this for a long, long time.

Something in the weakness of Carson’s chin lent him an energy antithetical to that of Barry’s father, who was brutish and unrestrained. Yes, Barry had cited his father when questioned by Carson with respect to who he wanted to impress—it was complicated. He felt that the slow aggression of the academic carving of his place in history was more admirable than the literal, physical aggression of a man like his father. Barry’s father for example spoke only when spoken to, and once spoken to became quite hostile. Yeah, and what of it, he liked to say. A server might say, Are we enjoying our meal? and Barry’s father: Yeah, and….

He once arrived home late for dinner with blood on his mustard-coloured work jumpsuit, right down the front of it like it’d spilled out of a mug or something, and ghost-white and dead-silent he had calmly gone through the motions of the meal until asked directly by Barry’s mother, how was your day, at which point he’d responded, Oh, bad day.

Later, through various walls of the house, Barry had collected shreds of hushed and heated conversations, and wove together some semblance of truth, contrasted against the lies on which the roof over his head was propped. Deep down inside he knew that a man’s job was to provide, to stoically turn his cheek, and to be honest, because an honest man never had to scuttle like a bug. You’ll never find an honest man with a smoking gun, his mother, the liar, had once told him. Being a man was a powerful thing, if one allowed it to be. If not, being a man was incredibly shameful.

What had happened was that Barry’s father had gone down to the basement offices where Barry’s mother worked as a typist for a clinical psychologist, and once his mother had left and the psychologist was closing things up his father had walked in through the waiting room and knocked on the door to the psychologist’s office and when the psychologist opened the door his father had punched him multiple times, from various angles, in the face.

What had happened previously, Barry had discovered, was that something immoral was going on between his mother and the clinical psychologist. How he’d discovered it was by searching through the drawers of his mother’s secretary desk in the upstairs hallway and finding two Polaroid photographs of the two of them together. In one of them they were seated at a picnic table, laughing, with foil-wrapped sandwiches and a bottle of wine, and in the other, presumably taken from the perspective of the clinical psychologist, Barry’s mother was undressed, supine on the floor, and being penetrated, presumably by the psychologist, in a room Barry recognized as the psychologist’s basement office.

Barry had been searching through the drawers for evidence of his score on an IQ test conducted by the clinical psychologist, who had posed as a certified testing professional. His mother had taken him to what she referred to as an institute, but what was in reality her new office, to have his IQ tested after a series of behavioural blips (as his sixth grade teacher called them) which Barry had defended as being caused by persistent and aggressive boredom. He had been led into a small office at the front end of the basement of the building where he had been introduced to a man named the doctor whose office was all brown and particle board and taped-up boxes. Barry’s mother had stayed in the waiting room, similarly minimally furnished, with leather-upholstered metal chairs arranged around a dirty yellow shag rug. Barry had wondered if his mother could hear him from out in the waiting room, with the office door shut, and so had spoken very politely to the doctor and hadn’t challenged him, since he had a handful of times before been scolded by his mother for provoking authority. You’re intelligent, Barry, she’d once said, but you’re not an adult.

After the test, which had taken under fifteen minutes, the doctor had dismissed Barry back to the waiting room where his mother sat reading a copy of National Geographic she’d brought in her purse. The results would be in later that week, the doctor had told Barry’s mother, and they’d exchanged similar shit-eating smiles, and in Barry’s memory each time he replayed the moment he misremembered it with some sinister embellishment, for example, the doctor winked or the mother got shy and adjusted her hair.

Barry was told the following week that he had ranked in the genius percentile, which had sent him into a frenzy of existential loneliness that led first to extensive research into elective lobotomization—one case involved a patient appearing to show little to no emotional distress post-lobotomy however appearing also to always be deep in thought and unable to explain, until one day he threw himself in front of a New York city metro train, the terror having been undetectably active inside of him all along—and second into a deep depression during which time he visited and revisited several ways to quietly and painlessly end his own life.

Anyway, in searching for the results and finding the Polaroids, his genius-percentile brain was able to put two and two together, or one and one, and realize that the test was bunk, and that his mother was acting pretty bunk as well. What would’ve really been good, he’d thought, would be to bring back an average result, and pinch the ego a little. However he never told her that he knew; having learned about the test, the office, and the affair, at twelve years of age, he adopted a stoic silence and slipped mournfully out of childhood and into the oversized suit of a man.

He hadn’t told his father. He never discovered how his father knew, but could you really blame him for what he’d done to the doctor? Perhaps he hadn’t been so bad, Barry thought, and a pang of missing his dad—daddy, pops—came over him, and an anger surged toward his mother, still in his childhood home, now playing house with the doctor.

Barry was shaken out of his head by the concluding remarks of the lecture. Carson had closed, skipping the debate, making no mention of it. Students filed out of the room. When Leonard Balaban stood to leave, Barry intercepted.

What’s going on here, said Barry. What about…

Leonard shrugged.

Wait, Barry gestured at Professor Carson. Sir, there was to be a debate.

The professor finished tidying papers into stacks on his desk. Ah, he said. It all seems a bit ridiculous, does it not?

Barry was dumbfounded. What? he said. What?

To be taking class time to showcase two of the university’s irreverent shitdisturbers.

Sir, said Barry.

Leonard was smirking, enjoying himself.

I’m giving you both a discontinued grade. It’ll be neutral on your transcripts.

Sir, Barry said again.

Balaban, I’d better not see you in this department next semester. Stick to your major. Martin, retake this class and try again.

The room went dark, or it felt that way to Barry.

PART I

Mirrors for Princes

Late Summer, 2019

Geoffrey Dubé

447 Belsize Road, Toronto

geoffrey.dubé@XXXX.XXXXXX.XX

(647)XXX-XXXX

Doctor-Professor Barry Martin

Queen City University

19 Queen’s Court

[e-mail]

Application de novo re: my letter from 4 August 2019

I realize, sir, that you are becoming exponentially busier as we near our final moments to dress in white attire.

Tiger Woods once said in an interview with Business Week:

If you are given a chance to be a role model, I think you should always take it because you can influence a person’s life in a positive light, and that’s what I want to do. That’s what it’s all about.

I consider this quote to be a source of inspiration for myself, and perhaps it may now be for you as well.

Both my Masters of Arts in Political Science (forthcoming) and my Honours Bachelor in Philosophy and Psychology (double major) were earned at Queen City University, which as far as I am concerned is the most important university in Canada—nay—the world. And I am not a betting man—neigh—get it?—but I believe with considerable confidence that my experience would be an asset to the university’s doctoral program in the field of English literature. Speaking of assets, I must request from you that you might consider writing a letter of recommendation to be attached to my application, and, if you are wondering, Didn’t Mr. Dubé (that’s what you call me) already make this request? to which the answer would be a resounding yes. However, I am sending this new note to inform you that I, in error, previously opened an application to the PhD in psychology, when I have realized it is much more appropriate for me to apply to the English department, and, additionally, to request that you might act as my mentor, albeit perhaps out of your element.

Let’s consider this quotation attributed to Isaac Newton (though the metaphor was first expressed by Bernard of Chartres, one should note): If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

What I see when I look at you, Dr. Martin, is two broad flat shoulders on which I will one day place my New Balance trainers. Though admittedly at that time I would hope to be wearing something a little more—excuse my break from formality in favour of an apt colloquialism—‘profesh.’ You understand: shoulders, giants, passing of the relay baton. And like a barnacle on a whale (might I add that the epibiont is by nature harmless to its host), our mutualistic relationship will hoist us toward the glass ceiling of academia… and beyond!

Please find attached my CV, undergraduate and graduate transcripts, a letter outlining the explanation(s) behind my poor grades and overall weak GPA, and a recent headshot, should you require a moment of, Oh—that guy!

Yours, again,

Signature

Geoffrey Dubé

Geoffrey Dubé

447 Belsize Road, Toronto

geoffrey.Dubé@XXXX.XXXXXX.XX

(647)XXX-XXXX

Doctor-Professor Barry Martin

Queen City University

19 Queen’s Court

[e-mail]

Addendum to letter sent on 15 August 2019

Dr. Martin, again,

It has come to my attention that in my letter requesting your refereeship and official mentorship I suggested that the relationship between the whale and the barnacle is one of mutualism, when in fact it is commensal. Do note however that commensalism implies an unaffectedness on the part