Free Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan Page B

what?”
    He shuffled out into the dining room and opened a locked glass cabinet door. He came back cradling a little three-legged pot and set it down gently on the chopping block between us. It was exquisitely painted and strewn with infinitesimal cracks. A figure of a dog-faced dragon lay coiled on the lid, protecting a green pearl. Lytle spun the object to a particular angle, where the face was darker, slightly orange-tinged. “If you’ll look, the glaze is singed,” he said. “From the blast, I presume, or the fires.” He held it upside down. Its maker’s mark was legible on the bottom, or would have been to one who read Japanese. “This pot,” he said, “was recovered from the Hiroshima site.” A classmate of his from Vanderbilt, one of the Fugitives, had gone on to become an officer in the Marine Corps and gave it to him after the war. “When I’m dead I want you to have it,” he said.
    I didn’t bother refusing, just thanked him, since I knew he wouldn’t remember in the morning, or, for that matter, in half an hour. But he did remember. He left it to me.
    Ten years later in New York City my adopted stray cat, Holly Kitty, pushed it off a high shelf I didn’t think she could reach, and it shattered. I sat up most of the night gluing the slivers back into place.
    *   *   *
     
    Lytle’s dementia began to progress more quickly. I hope it’s not cruel to note that at times the effects could be funny. He insisted on calling the K-Y Jelly we used to lubricate his colostomy tube Kye Jelly. Finally he got confused about what it was for and appeared in my doorway one day with his toothbrush and a squeezed-out tube of the stuff. “Put Kye on the list, boy,” he said. “We’re out.”
    Evenings he’d mostly sit alone and rehash forty-year-old fights with dead literary enemies, performing both sides as though in a one-man play, at times yelling wildly, pounding his cane. Allen Tate, his brother turned nemesis, was by far the most frequent opponent, but it seemed in these rages that anyone he’d ever known could change into the serpent, fall prey to an obsession with power. Particularly disorienting was when the original version of the mock battle had been between him and me. Him and the boy. Several times, in reality, we did clash. Stood face-to-face shouting. I called him a mean old bastard, something like that; he told me I’d betrayed my gift. Later, from downstairs, I heard him say to the boy, “You think you’re not a slave?”
    One day I came in from somewhere. Polly, his sister, was staying upstairs. I loved Miss Polly’s visits, everyone did. She made rum cakes you could eat yourself to death on like a goldfish. There were homemade pickles and biscuits from scratch when she came. A tiny woman with glasses so thick they magnified her eyes, her knuckles were cubed with arthritis. Who knew what she thought, or if she thought, about all the nights she’d shared with her brother and his interesting artist friends. (Once, in a rented house somewhere, she’d been forced by sleeping arrangements to lie awake in bed all night between fat old Ford Madox Ford and his mistress.) She shook her head over how the iron skillet, which their family had been seasoning in slow ovens since the Depression, would suffer at my hands. I had trouble remembering not to put it through the dishwasher. Over meals, under the chandelier with the “saltcellar” and the “salad oil,” as Lytle raved about the master I might become, if only I didn’t fall prey to this, that, or the other hubristic snare, she’d simply grin and say, “Oh, Brutha, how exciting .”
    On the afternoon in question I was coming through the security gate, entering “the grounds,” as cottagers called the Assembly, and Polly passed me going the opposite way in her minuscule blue car. There was instantly something off, because she didn’t stop completely. She rolled down the window and spoke to me but continued to idle past, going at