When I asked my mother where the scrambled eggs I was eating came from, she told me that they were originally supposed to be baby chickens. I looked at the little yellow and white shapes, and thought I could make out the little creatures, each one an inch or so across. I pressed them between two pieces of toast, so I didn’t have to watch them protest while I ate. My mother served me eggy sandwiches for a long time.
My brothers and I had many toys, scattered over a large house. Who owned these toys, and where they were each meant to reside, was well-established among the three of us, but not to Martha, the cleaning woman who came twice per week. Within those rooms was an intricate network of extraterrestrial cities, secret powers dependent on the intersection of brands (the foot-long blue Tonka pickup truck had a sacred relationship with the plastic Pillsbury Doughboy), and indicators of the latest cliffhangers (a Lego city was left sitting on the edge of the dining room table, not out of carelessness, but as a metaphor for a political crisis faced by its citizens).
As boys went, we did not make a lot of messes that had to be cleaned up with mops and sprays. Martha’s job with regard to our toys was not to clean, but to organize. (But, as noted, the toys were already organized.)
Since Martha was not able to tell which toys belonged to whom (especially since the nature of the toy world dictated that a particular spaceship or stuffed animal might easily end up either in the six , eight, or twelve year-old’s room at any given time), she would arbitrarily rearrange our toys in a way that made more sense to the adult eye. We’d come home from school to find sworn enemies cuddling with one another, elaborate tableaus dismantled in ways that clearly contradicted the laws of Muppet time travel and Hot Wheels super-gravity.
We gave this phenomenon a name: The Martha Monster. Martha was a force of nature, an uncertainty principle, a reminder against all toys not to get haughty. Like the characters in Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake (which would not be written for many years), our avatars would sometimes find themselves forced to relive the dramas that had already defined them.
Because some of the toys and scenarios never actually intersected, or did so in ways that varied depending on context, we divided the imaginary multiverse into clearly defined arbitrary universes, called “shows.” Some of these shows had ritualistic opening sequences that had to be invoked before the show could begin. For example, in the “Underwater” show, in which the house filled to the ceiling with water, a knob had to be pressed on my brother Dan’s dresser, causing each of us to transform into powerful, undrownable water-creatures.
After Martha disrupted one of these realities, it was, in the modern parlance, “rebooted.” Vanquished villains were restored to life, and given the opportunity for redemption. My brothers’ roles in the shaping of the various worlds were updated to match their increasing maturity. (My own powers were unlimited, and stayed that way.)
One aspect of the toy multiverse that concerned me greatly was the origin of life. How to account for it? After Christmas and holidays, there would suddenly be new creatures dwelling among the old. In fact, these presents were bound to be the center of attention for a while, so their integration into the existing milieu had to be fast and intuitive. This problem troubled me greatly. Had these new creatures been “born”? Did they have parents? To what extent must the existing multiverse absorb the corporate-generated mythological baggage that motivated the child in question to ask for it?
I experimented with different creation scenarios. Some of my brothers’ new toys had to be brought before Wiki, my own favorite toy. (Wiki, who was a sort of upright, wheel-driven bird made of Legos, was named after a robot on Jason Of Star Command.) I also experimented with toy-on-toy copulation, although this felt like a hollow ritual not sufficiently connected to the thing being made so as to be worthwhile.
The original Wiki (W1K1). Mine was cooler.
Where did new toys come from? I could answer the question literally, but not mythically. What was the creation story? I felt myself slipping into adulthood, the problem of origins unsolved, my multiverse still calling out to be completed, even as it faded from view.
When I was in my early teens, my friend Gene and I would spend the night at each other’s houses, and we would go on “missions.” These missions mostly consisted of sneaking downstairs and cooking ourselves omelets without waking up our parents. We would prepare for these missions by donning dark clothes, as if we might end up in a situation where we’d be in the same room with our parents, but they somehow wouldn’t see us.
I don’t remember making any food besides omelets, over many missions. The omelet was breakfast, and we were eating it in the middle of the night. A rebellious inversion. What’s more, Gene and I, two kids who weren’t expected to do much cooking, then or later, were inverting the whole pyramid of responsibility. The adults were asleep, but we were awake. They were supposed to cook for us, but we were cooking for ourselves. Omelets were for breakfast, but we were having them late at night. As acts of rebellion and subterfuge went, ours were pretty benign. But they worked for us.
We were inverting the whole pyramid of responsibility.
In his Celebration Of Life lecture series, comparative anthropologist Joseph Campbell talks about how human beings continue to gestate long after birth. Unlike most other animals, being born and then spending a few months at home, watching our parents do what they do, is not enough to prepare us for life. We either stay under our parents’ care until we’re 18, or we’re pretty much fucked.
However, there is a parallel in nature to the extended gestation after birth that human children experience. Little incubators, fragile and begging to be cracked open, from the outside if not the inside. This is the period, after birth, during which the young animal is not expected to do anything more than develop.
My parents’ house is big and white and was built for my mother, by her father, so that she could raise a family there (my father was allowed to come too). As if it were an egg that hatched me, it contains artifacts related to my origins, such as the many Japanese artworks acquired during my parents’ stay in Japan, during which I was born.
I actually went to Japan for a month when I was 17, and stayed with friends of my parents. They don’t eat eggs for breakfast. There was miso soup, and hot rice, and fish. Growing up a picky eater in Kansas in the 70s and rarely having had truly fresh saltwater fish, I was convinced that I hated all seafood, and generally refused to try it, even in Japan, where I was probably encountering actual fresh seafood for the first time in my life. My hosts took me to a huge sushi bar, with a long conveyor belt that ran from a hole in the kitchen all the way around the room. Salmon, eel, and roe passed me by. From the hole in the kitchen emerged a bundle of rice with a cooked egg on top, standing out in high contrast against the blood reds and oranges. I held my breath as it approached, hoping that everyone in line before me would turn it down.
During my first summer of graduate school in California, I met Ellen on the plane as I flew home to Kansas City. Near the end of the flight, she emerged from another part of the plane, slipped into the empty seat next to mine, told me she was scared of landings, and took my hand in hers. This story is true, but when I told it to my friends, they didn’t believe it, which made it better. An origin story that no one believes is a myth, and that gives it a new level of truth.
During the three weeks that we dated, Ellen told me another origin story. When she was conceived, her mother was still in high school. Ellen’s mother had told her own parents about the pregnancy, and they had arranged an abortion. But one night, sitting alone in her room, Ellen’s mother decided not to go through with it. To commemorate the choice (and, perhaps, to trap herself into it), she drew her future daughter an illustrated story about the pregnancy and her triumphant decision to carry it to term. This little yarn-bound book was passed on to Ellen as planned, and she showed it to me, and I read it.
I tried to tell Ellen a story of my own. We sat in my parents’ luxurious two-story living room with nine lights in the ceiling, and lush green carpeting. I talked about the movie I was writing for school. It felt good to be telling a story in that space again, the same huge room that had played the role of oceans and outer space and, once, a black hole, when I was a kid. And here, again, I had a doting audience. I started to give her the pitch for my screenplay, a medieval coming-of-age fantasy. She tried to listen, but as soon as I said “dragons,” her large green eyes glazed over. I changed tactics, and started telling her about the politics of the school, my insane thesis adviser, my plight as a sensitive artist in a commercial world.
She chortled and fell back into my mother’s voluptuous white couch.
“Boys like you don’t have plights,” she said. “Only dramas.”
A week later, we broke up. Three weeks after that, she was calling me every day, and I wasn’t answering.
I retreated into a book that had been sitting on my bedroom shelf since I was in high school, unread: The Wild Palms, by William Faulkner. In the story, a man and a woman go out into the forest and live a poor but idyllic life. Eventually, the man is so enraptured with the breadth of his own free time and his lack of connection to society or responsibility that he decides to fashion a calendar based purely on the woman’s menstrual cycle. The second month lasts much longer than it should. He feels reality tugging at the edges of his created fantasy. As I read the story, I felt myself having the same experience.
The next time the phone rang, I picked it up.
“Did something happen?” I asked Ellen.
“Wouldn’t that be crazy?” she asked.
I felt a rush of gratitude for her use of the subjunctive. Wouldn’t it? Hypothetical, imaginary, unreal.
A Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother administers the Gom Jabbar test to he who might become the Kwisatz Haderach, in David Lynch's adaptation of Dune.
“Buy me lunch,” she said.
We met at a diner. I got there late, and she had already ordered. I tried looking at the menu while she watched me, but I gave up. I put the menu down.
She looked at me blankly. Her green eyes were huge. They grew and took over her face, which I realized was just a sort of casing for these gigantic white ovals. And each oval had a round portal in it, green like my mother’s lush carpet, and inside that a hole that led to another universe. Behind that portal, I could see her mother, and all the women of her line, all the way back to the beginning, back to the primal magical creature who had set it up, had set up this very event, here in this diner.
I thought of the Bene Gesserit, that society of women in Dune who carefully seduce men, one generation after the other, leading to the creation, someday, of their ultimate goal: a man with female intuition, the Kwitzach Haderach. It suddenly occurred to me that the Kwitzach Haderach was a cruel practical joke, executed by Frank Herbert, a middle-aged family man, against a legion of awkward boy readers who would have been willing to swallow even the most ridiculous conceit if it allowed them to believe that someday they might understand girls.
Ellen’s food came. Scrambled eggs. I sat there numbly, watching her turn them over with her fork.
“Want some?” she asked.
It occurred to me that today was Wednesday. Back at my parents’ house, Martha was coming. She would be rearranging things. When I returned, reality might have shifted. Things might be in a different order. Relationships between disparate creatures might have taken on a different nature. Cleaner. More organized.
———
punk chicken photo by Shauna Schoenborn
w1k1 photo taken from TV Acres
Dune image taken from Fantasy Mundo
