J. B. Thompson

“I am large, I contain multitudes’,” says Titmarsh on the latest Zoom call. He is not wearing his mask. He is alone. He is not small.

“You’re going to say you knew Whitman, time-traveler, channeller that you are. Or that you were Whitman.”

“No, and not Bob Dylan either — new album coming out — but I am concerned about our friend Johannes de Silentio.”

“Who?”

“You know, our quiet friend, the writer, the either/or guy. He’s home alone, self-isolating, and he’s depressed.”

“Oh, yeah. He’d been engaged and they broke it off. Last I spoke to him he said there’s really nothing to write. His words were growing fewer.”

“Like Sam Beckett.”

“Don’t get me started.”

“‘Subtracting rather than adding.'”

“You’re doing it.”

“He wanted a gravestone in any colour, as long as it was grey.”

“Ok. Back to our friend. You didn’t know Beckett?”

“No. Johannes. Yes.”

“He is namable, not the unnamable: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on.'”

Titmarsh smiles, not a rare occurrence, always enjoyable. The smile drifts away. “I am very much hoping he goes on. I am worried, I really am. He is not alone, he should know that. He is not alone in his aloneness. He has us, you — ears, tail, teeth — and me.” Titmarsh waves a banana skin. “And he has the species, the lonely species. The species that may live in houses and cars with locked doors, in towers, the species that doesn’t just drop over, especially now. But is still the old pack animal, the old group get-together beast, even if it privileges cars and highways over what in Latin America they call the zocalo, accent on the zoc.”

“Not locolo?” The Authorial Rabbit has his moments, in his own mind.

“Their public squares, where everyone comes out and walks around to greet and talk and share their humanity.”

“We have to spur him to Zoom.”

“Not his thing, apparently. Some of us prefer the aloneness, ostensibly.”

Titmarsh is eating the banana. His words, not exactly few, are nonetheless garbled. At one point, Zoom freezes. The screen contains Titmarsh, cheeks and eyes bulging. “I wouldn’t say Johannes prefers it. He needs company, but he adopts aloneness, loneliness as a kind of offering, of propitiation. It’s the guilt.”

“What does he have to be guilty about?”

“Nothing. Or no more than normal. Less, really, because he doesn’t get out to do bad things. He was taught it.”

“By whom?”

“I don’t want to go around blaming parents. But that was part of it. His father. And his culture. Nowadays, of course, there is no guilt amongst certain of his father’s co-religionists. That’s been smoothly engineered away. For the growth economy. The only guilt is is not making enough money, not having enough stuff. But back then, in his father’s day, and when Johannes was growing up . . . ”

“Should people be talking more now? Are they?” I break in, causing a gap in the Zoom audio.

“What?”

“Talking. Are we afraid to talk?”

“Ah.”

I am hungering for something orange.

Titmarsh swallows. “In an era of conspiracy theories, we must be brave enough to call them out.”

“Why do they arise? Why would someone suggest that COVID-19 was created by a worldwide cabal to destroy America?”

“You remember the Protocols of Zion. These noxious horrors are tools for the illegitimate accumulation of power. For the bullies to have their day. The other-country bullies. The corporate bullies. The regular guy bullies. They are always there, like mould or weasels, even in the good times. The human mind, some human minds, are born or made cruel. In times of crisis, their black creative acts provide easy narratives that give them juice and resonate with our fear. They wade in to enjoy the cringing.”

“The lemmings over the cliff.”

“It can happen. And we all so want to find a scapegoat to blame. All of us once in a while. It has happened before. It is happening now. The consequences can be catastrophic.”

“What is a lemming?”

“A small Arctic rodent. Their population drastically declines every four years or so. They don’t hibernate (read lock-down) and they are not the best food gatherers.”

I’m not hungry any more. “Let’s email and phone Johannes. Barrage him with attention, in a sensitive way. Remind him he has friends. Suggest a Zoom, even if only a short one.”

“Good plan.”