Still Life With Woodpecker Read Online Free PDF Page B

express backspacer, skip tabulation, improved umlaut maker, and misspell alarm, well, to face that degree of mechanical sophistication in the midnight of your sanctum is to know a brand of fear.
    First of all, it hums, purrs like a seductive housecat, fairly trembles upon the table; it seems eager—too goddamned eager—to get to work. Hey! Relax, fella. I’m thinking. Don’t push me.
    Then there’s its color: blue. Not matte black; mysterious, deep, absorbent, accepting, noncommittal, priestly black like typewriters of old, but a harsh, chill, modern blue that causes it to affect, even by candlelight, the suspecting, censorious glare of the customs inspector or efficiency engineer. It appears to be looking over my shoulder even as I am looking over its.
    All right, those toadstool spores I inadvertently snorted while cleaning out my refrigerator may be magnifying sensation, but this is not the first time that intimidation by typewriter has caused me to consider the pen. Pencils are out of the question, their marks are impermanent. Of course, fountain pens leak; ballpoints have no style, and, moreover, always run away from home. The peacock quill appeals to me, the woodpecker quill even more so, but the last are hard to come by and the first scratchy and slow.
    Perhaps what a novelist needs is a different sort of writing implement. Say, a Remington built of balsa wood, its parts glued together like a boyhood model; delicate, graceful, submissive, as ready to soar as an ace.
    Better, a carved typewriter, hewn from a single block of sacred cypress; decorated with mineral pigments, berry juice, and mud; its keys living mushrooms, its ribbon the long iridescent tongue of a lizard. An animal typewriter, silent until touched, then filling the page with growls and squeals and squawks, yowls and bleats and snorts, brayings and chatterings and dry rattlings from the underbrush; a typewriter that could type real kisses, ooze semen and sweat.
    Or—a typewriter constructed of tiny seashells by a retired merchant sailor, built inside a bottle so that it can be worked only by the little finger of the left hand of a right-handed person. A left-handed typewriter for a left-handed task. (You’re aware, I assume, of the scientific discovery that our universe lives side by side with a parallel universe. The two universes, identical in many respects, are opposite in electrical charge and magnetic property: the “anti-universe,” so called, is in effect a mirror image, a reverse copy. Well, certain amino acids are left-handed, some are their reflection, right-handed. But the proteins in living organisms are always left-handed. The right-handed amino acids are impossible to digest and can be harmful to life. It’s smart not to eat anything you find in a mirror. As for those novels that claim to “mirror” reality … may a word to the wise be sufficient.
    (Toward the wind-down of the Second World War, an American flyer parachuted from his burning plane to land in an isolated village near Japan’s Inland Sea. The villagers, devout Buddhists far removed from the hot arena of events and the Shinto/fascistic/industrial philosophies that had spawned the events, took in the broken pilot and nursed him. They kept him concealed and alive for several months, but eventually he died.
    (Since Buddhists have reverence for all life, they also respect the proprieties of death. The villagers wished to award the dead foreigner his entitled burial, but the only funereal customs with which they were familiar were Buddhist, and those, of course, would have been inappropriate.
    (Having packed the corpse in pond ice, they set out to make inquiries about Christian burial procedures, all very discreetly so as not to arouse the suspicion of the authorities. Their luck was small.
    (At last, someone smuggled into the village a Japanese translation of an English language book that promised to provide the information they sought. The book was called Finnegans Wake