Free Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan Page A

barn was completely empty, and the doors on the other side stood wide open, too, so that the car passed straight through the barn and back out into the sunlight, by which time the passengers were already laughing and honking and waving their arms at the miracle of their own survival, and Lytle was somehow able, through his prose, to replicate this swift and almost alchemical transformation from horror to joy. I don’t know why I didn’t copy out the sentence—embarrassment at my own spying, I guess. He never wrote any more. But for me it was the key to the year I lived with him. What he could still do, in his weakness, I couldn’t do. I started listening harder, even when he bored me.
    His hair was sparse and mercury silver. He wore a tweed jacket every day and, around his neck, a gold-handled toothpick hewn from a raccoon’s sharpened penis bone. I put his glasses onto my own face once and my hands, held just at arm’s length, became big beige blobs. There was a thing on his forehead, a cyst, I assume, that had gotten out of control. It was about the size and shape of a bisected Ping-Pong ball. His doctor had offered to remove it several times, but Lytle treated it as a conversation piece. “Vanity has no claim on me,” he said. He wore a gray fedora with a bluebird’s feather in the band. The skin on his face was strangely young-seeming. Tight and translucent. But the rest of his body was extraterrestrial. Once a week I helped him bathe. God alone knew for how long the moles and things on his back had been left to evolve unseen. His skin was doughy. Not saggy or lumpy, not in that sense—he was hale—but fragile-feeling. He had no hair anywhere below. His toenails were of horn. After the bath he lay naked between fresh sheets, needing to feel completely dry before he dressed. All Lytles, he said, had nervous temperaments.
    I found him exotic; it may be accurate to say that I found him beautiful. The manner in which I related to him was essentially anthropological. Taking offense, for instance, to his more or less daily outbursts of racism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, class snobbery, and what I can only describe as medieval nostalgia, seemed as absurd as debating these things with a caveman. Shut up and ask him what the cave art means. The self-service and even cynicism of that reasoning are not hard to dissect at a distance of years, but I can’t pretend to regret it, or that I wish I had walked away.
    There was something else, something less contemptible, a voice in my head that warned it would be unfair to lecture a man with faculties so diminished. I could never be sure what he was saying, as in stating, and what he was simply no longer able to keep from slipping out of his id and through his mouth. I used to walk by his wedding picture, which hung next to the cupboard—the high forehead, the square jaw, the jug ears—and think as I passed it, “If you wanted to contend with him, you’d have to contend with that man.” Otherwise it was cheating.
    I came to love him. Not in the way he wanted, maybe, but not in a way that was stinting. Mon vieux . I was twenty and believed that nothing as strange was liable to happen to me again. I was a baby. One night we were up drinking late in the kitchen and I asked him if he thought there was any hope. Like that: “Is there any hope?” He answered me quite solemnly. He told me that in the hallways at Versailles, there hung a faint, ever-so-faint smell of human excrement, “because as the chambermaids hurried along a tiny bit would always splash from the pots.” Many years later I realized that he was half-remembering a detail from the court of Louis XV, namely that the latrines were so few and so poorly placed at the palace, the marquesses used to steal away and relieve themselves on stairwells and behind the beautiful furniture, but that night I had no idea what he meant, and still don’t entirely.
    “Have I shown you my incense burner?” he asked.
    “Your