Forty-Six Views of My Fuji
Merridawn Duckler
The knobs on the doors are missing so we can’t get into the bathroom. Father sighs and hands me a screwdriver, his handsome face solemn as he speaks into the phone about going on Rounds. I think of Rounds as a fat man who strolls with my father down the corridors of the hospital, peeping into tented rooms. Only one phone works. The rest had their mouthpieces unscrewed. It doesn’t matter; I’m seven, no one calls me. But I do have to go to the bathroom. I take the screwdriver to where my sister Heidi is waiting to admire herself in the mirror and where Pearl, our nanny, is waiting to clean the sink. One twin, Alysia, is just waiting. She loves a queue. Geordie stands patiently at the end of the line. He wears a little sailor suit. In his room are door knobs, the bathroom door handle, the phone mouthpiece and the screwdriver handle. At four he goes around the house, unscrewing everything. But what can he do? He has to go to the bathroom, too.
Heidi was the first to speak to mother in the hospital after she had the twins. Heidi says, “We wanted two girls!” That was the plan; the first girl for her, the second one for me. She made me shake on it, binding forever. With Mother gone, her powers go unchecked. Mother wants to know how I feel about new sister, new brother but it scarcely seems the time for chit-chat. I have awesome responsibilities now. I whisper warily into the intact receiver: “Mummy, when are you coming home?”
We are allowed to hold the babies if we sit on chairs. Father goes back to the car for more groceries, and Heidi gets off the chair, cuddling Alysia, tiny as a little pink Pacific shrimp. But lifting Geordie is like trying to lift a wading pool. I drag him by the armpits to the toy box and offer him a block. An agreement is an agreement. Alysia is Heidi’s baby. Geordie is mine.
Apocryphally (the only kind of history the family trusts) Dad woke Geordie up every morning yelling, He trod the ling like a buck in spring and he looked like a lance at rest. That’s his name: Geordie Lance Duckler.
His hair is slick across his forehead, dark as a brushstroke. At six, in a white sports coat, he looks like an exiled Cuban bandleader. He rotates his hips, next to his sisters, dancing in front of the big mirror in the dining room. The three sisters are mimicking all the dance moves they saw in performance that evening. They give the solo to the one, the only one, the brother. He’s a celebrity. Not a bad dancer, either. When he dances, he dreams. We all try and guess about what ... what? Mother thinks he dreams he is not the only one of his kind.
The boy wears a poncho. That’s pretty scary at Wilson High School in 1974. People can die from wearing a poncho to high school. Mother put it on him; personally, she loves a nice, dramatic cape. They’re practical: It can be a coat, a scarf, a skirt; in an emergency, a parachute. It’s fun! Except not on our brother, our only brother, or Alysia his twin, who also goes to Wilson. We learned to wear capes at a Unitarian Family Camp we attended on the Hood Canal. It’s possible to wear anything there; for example the girl who wore a dress made from paper, that white guy in a dashiki and the seriously disingenuous yoga instructor in a loincloth turned the wrong way.
It’s all about how you feel. That’s what the Unitarians teach. The one who said, It’s all about how you feel went home to Seattle to befriend the guy who’s writing a best-seller about everything he learned in kindergarten. We could invite him to walk the halls of Wilson, kindly explaining self-empowerment to greasers and hoods if school didn’t start in four minutes. We’re always late. Mother takes her time, picking out an outfit, putting on make-up. She always looks great, as she turns to say goodbye to us, all except for Geordie, who has already started to run.
In high school Geordie and I read about the Buddhists because they know about suffering. He likes Alan Watts. I like Allen Ginsberg. If we run across each other at home, trying to get to the bathroom before Heidi ties it up, we always mutter to each other, You’re either on the bus or off the bus. It’s a quote from one of the 100 sages, Ken Kesey.
About this we agree: You’re either on the bus or off the bus. But I’m not really sure what “on the bus” is for him or “off the bus” is for me. I’ll know when we get there. I’ll see Geordie and feel safe. It is cool now, because Geordie is on the bus, cracking a joke.
Poetry runs through the family. I try to write it. Geordie memorizes the work of others. He says for some reason, all his adult life, he wakes up yelling a poem. Once we went to the same college. I never saw him on campus. Just before he transferred out, I sent him a note from my P.O. Box. His were always the funniest. His wit is so fast, it’s calligraphic. He writes back: Thanks for the poems, sis but you forgot the “I” in Geordie.
Mom calls me in college. “He needs to stop getting all these degrees and settle down. If he memorized his lessons the way he memorizes everything else, he could be a doctor, he could be a lawyer. He could be a judge—he would make such a good judge. The problem is that name. It’s too childish. From now on Georde not Geordie.”
Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.
I don’t know who wrote it but I’ve seen that poem 46 times, copied by Geordie, on a wall. He illustrates it with whimsical drawings of cheery monsters with ominous, chalk-white teeth. It is possible to write on the walls because Mom had them painted with blackboard paint. The only thing, says Mom, is that I just love those drawings and what if we have to move?
Geordie has degrees in Paleontology, Journalism, Biology and Law. He likes Ice Age mammals, science books, justice and taking the knobs off the universe to find out how it works.
My other brother Garrick, Geordie and I go to a strip club called The Boom Boom Room. Geordie is wearing a big coat, just like the B-boys that run this clip joint, his arms flapping. It’s pretty cold out. Maybe it’s Christmas. There certainly are a lot of twinkling lights. I’m having a Manhattan. Garrick keeps sipping from it and making a face ugh, brrr. But in our family, if you love someone, you always drink their drink, eat their food. Geordie doesn’t drink alcohol. He never developed the taste. He does like to dance, though. In a minute, he’s going to jump on stage, out of sheer happiness, and dance with that girl.
He trod the ling like a buck in spring and he looked like a thin metal tube or pipe through which a stream of oxygen is directed at a heated metal surface in order to pierce it at rest? See, it just doesn’t work to change the names of things.
The Buddhists, we keep reading them, though we will never be them, Geordie and I. As for the visual arts, he likes pictures of animals, but I get a taste for landscape, unshared by anyone else in my family. Alone, I contemplate a mountain in snow, from a distance, obscured by mist and ignored by the vintner. That print never stops moving, a testament of long love. Hokusai. He moved almost as many times as he had years to live. Every time he joined a new art school, he changed his name. Every time I start a new enterprise I change my perfume. Today, I am wearing Cartier’s Le Baiser Du Dragon.
Geordie wrote his doctoral thesis on dire wolves because he likes the Ice Age mammals. One theory is that God drew them, as a child. Support for this theory comes from the fact that like a child’s drawing hung on a refrigerator, Ice Age mammals are inappropriately sized and audaciously scary, with funny faces and whimsical attributes. Later, God grew up, became more sober and made some nice, functional animals. But the old ones still live in Geordie’s heart who, by the way, is a complete atheist.
He likes cars. He likes touch football. He likes French fries. He likes courage. It seems unlikely but he enjoyed Nicole Kidman in “Moulin Rouge.” Who would believe that? Of course, he loves movies. We live for them. It’s an inherited trait. Father courted Mother at the movies. They’d sit for 10 minutes then Father would say: O.K., time to go. You’re kidding, says young Mother, the woman before twins, why do we have to go? I figured out the movie, says Father, young, before all those babies, now we can leave and go to another one. Father had taken the knob off the plot, so to speak ... next movie. Mom was 17, always a knock-out. She folded her arms. I came to this movie and I’m staying. Dad sat back down. No women, no poem.
Journalism Geordie picked up one summer in Oregon. The Paleontology degree came from California. Geordie lived there when he was first married. More than 3,000 fossils from dire wolves, his area of expertise, lie preserved in the La Brea Tar Pits of Los Angeles. One night he’d been handling skeletons surrounded by bones. They were tens of thousands of years old, having survived in the tar and in the amber of men’s minds. He started to feel strange. He looked at his hands. He’d been handling the bones without protective gloves, eyewear, anything. He became convinced he had contracted a case of Dire Wolf Fever. He dragged himself to the bathroom. He was hallucinating. He saw the dire wolves themselves, their red eyes glowing without compunction for the pure of heart. Time was like cellophane through which they studied him, with an atheistic hunger. And, today, here he is, over there, eating French fries. He couldn’t be more cheerful. Maybe later, he and Garrick will go to the movies and after that, viva la femme.
Going to the movies by bus, everyone wants to sit by him, because he might say something funny.
Hokusai knew everything abut Fuji. Hokusai knew nothing about Fuji. Hokusai thought only of mountains. Hokusai never thought about mountains. He was there at the beginning. He was absent at the beginning. He was the epitome of respect. He did nothing but make jokes. The artist got up every day and painted the mountain; he regarded the mountain, believed in the mountain but that story about the mountain coming to Hokusai and knocking on his door and saying that even if it was a celebrity, it deserved some privacy, so knock it off? That story is apocryphal.
Everyone in the family has felt the kiss of a wolf or dragon and some of them even contracted a fever from it.
Hokusai has a drink recipe, like a Manhattan, except with lychee. To this he attributes his longevity. He says anyone can enjoy perfect health, by drinking a sake cup of this concoction, each morning and every night. In a recipe, as in a painting, proportions matter. Unfortunately these have not come down to us. Furthermore, what are the proportions of my love? I am short by 23. Still, I have an offering. Take the knobs off the doors and the doors off the walls and remove all the walls and put up paintings. Create one painting for every year of your life, beginning with a portrait of the face of your parents before you were born. Nothing is constant except flaws and how people, perfect from a great distance, grow more and more so, as we struggle to bring them into view.
This is no memorial. Geordie is Geordie. Or Georde. Right this minute he sits in his office, under the white face of Mt. Hood , the second-most climbed mountain in the world. The first is Fuji . The mountain can’t answer a phone so Geordie does. It’s someone frantic, as if they were being chased. Calm down. He can fix it, he’s a lawyer. He specializes in Animal Law. If someone is having a problem with a dire wolf, I promise you, there is no better artist of the solution in the entire floating world.