LUDIC LOG

He has been speaking, or rather he has been talking but they call it a "speaking engagement" and not a "talking engagement". Speaking usually denotes a kind of intellectual give-and-take that was not present at the Small Businessmen's Association awards dinner; he had been talking at them, but not speaking with them. Even after, mingling with dozens of small fat men and their made-up wives, in all of whose eyes he saw an ugly double of himself, there was nothing of discourse in the conversation: on both sides were mere hungry naked declarations of need, varying only in their degrees of politeness. They needed this or that favor, inside track, tax deferment; he needed their vote. Some arrangement could be reached, yes, yes, they understand each other. And they did. Horribly serpentine understanding, the understanding that two scavengers share feasting over a ripening corpse.

He lights a cigarette and fumbles with a small stack of index cards like an incompetent croupier. It is late and very, very hot, and the tie is chafing his neck, a neck already so huge, so thick and ropy with an odd jutting bend like an Arabian stallion, that now, with a slight reddening from the tight collar and the fissures of sweat cracking the surface of his skin, it looks quite terrible. The tie had to be worn, though. The tie has become something of a trademark, an identifying symbol, and he is far too politically astute not to know what that is worth. He places his cigarette in the ashtray and slides the tie off, his fingers thick blunt weapons scrabbling at the tormenting collar. He stares at the neckwear, becoming absorbed with it in the distant detached way one can get with objects, staring at them with an unbreakable fixation and yet not really seeing them at all. Red white and blue tie with an arty flag pattern, wavy stripes and sketchy stars. Fortieth birthday gift from his children. He loves the tie and wears it so much that it has become his calling card. He wraps it around his free hand, twisting and twining it into a poultice, a phylactery. His attention is so focused on it that he has begun, noticably to anyone but himself, to drift into the next lane. The blank interest in his face vanishes, and the great shell-shaped head erupts animatedly into a pink wet rage. He moans, a low sad bovine bellow, and pummels the instrument panel of the car so severely that he smashes the plastic casing and cracks the reset knob of the odometer off completely.

Something sick is happening inside Bennett Sharman's head, and this is not to say that something is happening in that mysterious abstraction, the "mind". Something malignant is going on in everybody's mind at any given moment; it is the ability to shy these disturbing thoughts to less frequently accessed parts of the consciousness that distinguishes the woman who rang up your purchases at the video store from the guy who raped and killed your wife while you were at the video store. And it is true, Bennett Sharman's mind is very, very ill. Of late he has had a great deal of trouble distinguishing what we for the sake of simplicity call fantasy from what we for the sake of convenience call reality. He has begun to feel sensations and emotions that are so foreign to him, so alien to what he has come to know as himself, that they frighten him; and because he is the kind of man who never learned to deal appropriately with fear, he is angry and aggressive an increasing amount of the time.

Although he has never raised his hand in anger against another human being (his stint in the Marine Corps was as a recruitment officer in a strip mall in suburban New Jersey), he is having more and more difficulty telling the difference between people and objects. He is afraid that soon he will stop hitting his desk and his car and his phone and start hitting his wife and his children and his employees. This fear, of course, just makes him even angrier, and another unfortunate byproduct of his upbringing is that he considers it cowardly and effete to bring such thoughts and feelings to the attention of one's family, friends or (worst of all) a mental health professional. So all is not well in that delightful neverland, the "mind".

But it is the brain where the real problems are developing, where the true sickness is manifest. Bennett Sharman has something on his brain, the word for which is itself a sickness, a growth, a creeping scaly thing that turns a normal adult conversation into a wake: tumor. From a Latin word meaning "to swell"; Bennett Sharman's brain is swelling. He does not know it's there; of course; he is not fond of doctors and doesn't feel sick, at least in a physical sense. But it is there nonetheless, and its ideology closely mirrors his own: expansion, change for the sake of change, growth for the sake of growth, the destruction of what is weak and the unlimited growth of what is strong. The universe of Bennett Sharman's brain is growing too small to hold all the events that are unfolding within it.

Is it this rotting, hungry thing that makes him the way he is? Do we forgive his racism, his classism, his hateful politics on the (does it hurt even to even read it?) cancer? He wants to lock up the homeless, to quarantine Arabs, to ensure that even the soiled, tossed-off scraps the government gives the poor are taken away. How much of that is mind, how much brain, how much spirit? He has been conservative since he knew what the word meant; he has felt as if he were becoming mentally unbalanced for several years; and he has had a malignant brain tumor for four and one half months. On which of these strong influences can we blame his bad behavior, and on which his good? If he were a more liberal person, would we forgive his madness and pray for a cure for his sickness? Does the fact that he dotes on his family and gives generously to children's charities make his sickness more tragic, or does the fact that he would see poor women who have abortions jailed make his insanity less terrifying? These questions must be asked, but none of them are as important as the question of what he is doing right now.

His car drifts like the Marie Celeste across the multiple lanes of the Eisenhower Expressway. He regards the other cars he sees in the same way he regards the television when he's having a telephone conversation: there they are, distracting but easily ignored; they exist but need not be paid attention to. Sometimes someone will honk at him, and he will get angry, and perhaps scream angrily or pound his white, bloodless fist into the empty passenger seat, but soon both the honking and the anger are gone like details of a dream. So far, he has been able to confine his focusless rage to times when he is alone; he is very-much-in-control, and like many people in positions of power, he thinks that his situation will never change and feels no need to alter his life to accommodate an something that may never come to pass. He is running for a senatorial seat, and he will win. When he sits in that chair, when he heads those committees, these little moments of detachment, these frightening abandonments of the world he thinks of as real, will be easily ghettoized to private moments like this, and Senator Bennett Sharman will be okay.

But now he is alone, now is one of those private moments, and now he is cut off: from out of nowhere, looming like death, like a wall someone covertly built across the freeway, a gray van moves into his line of sight. He panics for a second-long infinity: suddenly he cannot remember what to do when you're cut off, and all the controls in his car look like unknown alien things whose workings he cannot begin to fathom. At what he must consider the last second, he brakes, having risked that it was the brake he mashed down and not the accelerator, and burns a little more particulate rubber into the atmosphere. Cutoff cutoff cutoff cutoff screams through his head like a psychopathic mantra, and he sits in the middle of the freeway, idling.

The license number of the van is burned into his brain, the film to which the angry-father cry of cutoff is the soundtrack. He has a thought of the kind that usually goes away when he has time to calm down and think about it, but this time it doesn't.