telemachy

by Cooper Clarence

Telemachus Bonneville was unaccustomed to shopping for himself at the market, and within moments of walking through the automatic doors into that air conditioned temple to comestibles, his inexperience began to show.

“You there, drudge—squire me to the eggs!”

The sales clerk jumped, his paper apron flapping, and looked behind him.

“You! Yes, you.” Telemachus thrust a fat, ink-stained finger toward the pimply youth. “You are employed by this establishment to assist me, are you not? Well, I am a consumer, and I require consumables—beginning with chicken’s eggs. Lead on, my time is of value and this task stoppers the font of my creative genius. Already I feel the force of its waters beginning to slacken, and fugues as-yet unwritten slipping into obscurity.”

The clerk scrunched up his face in a most vulgar manner, and Telemachus was reminded forcibly of Clarisa. At home, he was the constant object of just such ill-bred expressions from the charwoman. There, because of the presence of Mother, he had no choice but to accept it—but here, about town, he would show these ignoramuses how a Bonneville man handled impudence in the lower classes.

“The eggs!” Telemachus roared. “Unshrivel your face and lead me to them, or I shall call out the constabulary!”

“They at the back, man,” said the clerk, waving his hand in the general direction. “End of aisle eight, by the milk and stuff.” He turned away and busied himself, or pretended to, with a display of canned tuna fish.

Telemachus squinted off in the direction indicated. A baffling array of various food products loomed up before him, shelf upon shelf of cans, bags, boxes, and bottles towering overhead. Somewhere in the confusion, he knew, lay his prize. Squaring his shoulders, he steeled himself for the trials to come and marched off, eyes searching for indicators of aisle eight.

“Don’t you want a basket or nothing?”

Telemachus froze. Here was an obstacle he had not foreseen—already this morning he was dangerously over-budget on exertions, and now he was expected to haul his own dry goods? He had assumed that a lackey would be available to do the heavy lifting for him, but this one made no move to accompany him, nor even, it would seem, to hand him the requisite basket.

To live is to war with trolls, as the great Ibsen writes. Telemachus lifted the topmost basket from the stack beside the clerk and trundled off down an aisle labeled ‘Mexican and Oriental,’ and he felt much as he thought Cabeza de Vaca or even Marco Polo himself must have felt on their quests through the Americas and Far East. True, where they sought for land and wealth and natives to bash over the head, his goal was of humbler stock—and yet the threats were the same: loss of reputation, loss of wealth, disfigurement, death.

He would not forgive Mother for forcing him to this extremity.

As he walked, the bright packaging flanking him on either side called out to him, snatching his attention away from his goal. Mother had handed him four wrinkly ones and a handful of coins and told him if he came home without eggs she would “geld him, like daddy used to do with unruly horses on the farm, back when the Bonneville name meant something. Oh, how ashamed daddy would be now, to see the low state his progeny had fallen to! The farm sold for a pittance, his only daughter living like a rat in a rented tenement, and atop it all a great useless lump of a grandson! Gelding would be a kindness!” Mother was always saying things like that when she breached the surface of her medicated fog. He didn’t think she’d actually do it, but just in case he’d hidden the kitchen knives before he left, and steered himself clear of the Tornadoez chips display now, even though they had his favorite Mayonnaize Meltdown flavor in the party-sized bag.

The way was far, and had the store’s designers not thoughtfully included chillers in some aisles, he might even have begun to sweat. As it was, he arrived footsore and aching. Several times along the way he’d banged his knee against the basket swinging at his side, and although it was empty and he didn’t think it had done much permanent damage, still it stung. And so it was with a shudder of relief that he lurched to a halt before the brightly lit altar to edible avian gametes.

He himself did not eat eggs, as the notion of consuming cooked and coagulated ovum put him off his appetite, a risk he preferred never to run. Plus, they wreaked havoc with his gastrointestinal tract. As such, and unusually when it came to a food product, his knowledge of the different sorts and brands was limited, and confronting the array of options before him—styrofoam, plastic, or cardboard; six-, twelve-, or eighteen-pack; organic, natural, free-range, cage-free, or something called “Eggables” which came in a pourable gallon-sized bucket—he realized he had no idea which one he was after.

At moments like these, he’d found that confidence and determination often carried the day. So, with a harumph of decision, he closed his eyes, thrust out his hand, and groped for the display.

On this initial effort he swung on air. He leaned forward and tried again, and this time he connected, but his fingers failed to find purchase and he felt and heard the carton tumble off the shelf. A third attempt produced the same result, but on the fourth he triumphed. Opening his eyes, he saw that he held one of the brown cardboard cartons, a reasonably sized package of twelve, with the words “cage-free happy” and a cartoon chicken wearing an inexplicably toothy grin on the top. He dropped it in his basket and, stepping gingerly around the puddle of smashed egg coagulate on the ground, he beat his retreat.

“You should be ashamed of yourself and your store and all you represent,” he said to an aproned clerk shelving yogurts. “There is a catastrophic disaster of a mess disfiguring your aisle and hampering access to the eggs and egg products. I myself, despite my superior reflexes and physical dexterity, just nearly slipped and smashed my skull into a dozen pieces. I implore you: rectify it before some unfortunate citizen harms himself.”

The clerk goggled speechlessly up at him. Clearly the man was a clinical idiot. Perhaps this market hired them that way on purpose, in an effort to improve their lot in life? Noble, he thought, though a tad misguided. He turned on his heel and zeppelined away, congratulating himself on his success. On the whole this had been a better outing than he’d anticipated. He could once again feel inspiration flowing through him, counterpoints and canons rising endlessly and spiraling out from the top of his head into infinity. Perhaps he would write a piece inspired by his unexpected triumph—an Oviparous Ode, if you will. Perhaps mother was right, and he really did ought to get out more often.

“Six-fifty,” said the drudge at the register, the same one Telemachus had so justly scolded upon entering the store. The man avoided eye contact and Telemachus did the same as he dug out his bills and the change and slapped the whole handful on the counter. He was happy to observe detente and did not wish to rekindle hostilities now, so close to the end of his quest. It would only distract him from his efforts to mentally record the monumental orchestration now thundering between his ears.

The clerk poked through the small pile of coins, mouthing numbers to himself. “Ain’t enough, man. You’re two bucks short.”

Telemachus was already halfway to the door, and on the cusp of reconciling the half-dozen threads of music wending their way across his neurons, when the man’s voice intruded and shattered his concentration, scattering his fugues like frightened geese. Furious, he turned on the spot.

“Ingrate! That’s impossible.”

“Naw—see? Look, count it yourself. You got only four forty-seven here. You’re actually two bucks and three pennies short.”

Telemachus squinted at the money on the counter. “Filthy lucre,” he muttered under his breath. Why had mother done this to him? Did she not know the price of a carton of eggs? Had she not bought dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them over the years? Maybe all this was a ruse, an elaborate plot to torture him through novel means. Even in her absence he could find no peace.

Well, he must recover as best he could. With a stentorian inhalation of air through his nostrils, he inflated himself to his full size and tilted back his head in a forced attempt at joviality. He must allow this clerk to think they were allied, humiliating as it would be for himself.

“Well old boy, you seem to have the right of it. I guess the old lady changed my shorts,” he said, taking a wild stab at some slang he had heard during the commercial segment of his radio program a few nights earlier.

The clerk stared at him blankly.

“You’ll just have to put it on my account,” Telemachus continued. “Mother will see to it the next time. The name is ‘Bonneville,’ that’s B-O-N-N-E-V—”

“We don’t do that here, guy. Pony up.”

Telemachus frowned.

“I would be delighted, would simply love to, my…uh…guy,” he fumbled, “but I simply don’t have the money on me.”

“No money?” said the clerk. Telemachus was pleased to note that the man was at last catching up to the situation. “No eggs.”

For a brief moment Telemachus considered pelting the obstinate plebe with the eggs and making his getaway, but then he remembered the kitchen knives and how it was entirely possible Mother had ferreted them out by now. No, this conflict would be settled by words spoken, not shots fired.

“Your logic is unassailable, sir. I admit it. However, upon consideration you will realize that it is not quite relevant to our current impasse. As you can clearly see, I do have some money—so, how about this: Some money, some eggs?”

The clerk scowled but Telemachus ignored him and flipped open the cardboard clamshell to expose its contents. The eggs inside, smooth and brown and round, had an odd sensuality to them. He would have to explore that later, but there was no time for it now. Reaching in, he scooped up four of the eggs and deposited them on the counter, where they rolled merrily toward the edge, wobbling on their oblong curves like drunks staggering back to their cars at the end of a long night. The clerk, seeing yolked shoes and a sticky floor in his imminent future, tried to herd them back from the edge with his hands. While he was thus distracted, Telemachus snapped shut the egg container, slipped it under his arm, and strode briskly—but without running, a Bonneville man never runs—for the door.

“Hey! Hey come back here with those eggs, man! Thief! Grab him, someone grab him! That goddamn blimp stole those eggs!”

“It’s a fair trade, you mongrel!” Telemachus shouted over his shoulder. Melodies thundered in his head, crisscrossing like dueling sabers. They were beautiful and terrible and he exulted in their power.

“And your establishment reeks!” he added as the automatic door whooshed shut in his wake. Gratuitous, he knew, but also true.

 *****

The apartment was dark, the curtains drawn to block out the light of the sun. A heavy scent of lilac hung in the air, not quite entirely suffocating the sweet-sour odor of sickness beneath, and Telemachus retched as he plowed through the hall and into the kitchen beyond.

“Mother!” he called. “I have returned!”

Itchy silence greeted him. He scowled and laid the eggs on the counter.

“Mother?” he tried again, entering the living room. Shadows draped the furniture like dust covers. Motes hung in the air, suspended like specks of silver in the gray glow of the television which was on but muted. A game show played, a woman in a sparkly sheath of a dress waved her hands at a grid of letters and blank spaces while in the background the lobotomized masses grinned like chimps. The couch across from the television held a dent in the center that was currently unoccupied. The shiny dark spot on the cushion above it, where Mother’s hair products had soaked in over years and decades, winked reflected light at him.

The door to the apartment’s single bedroom was closed. Telemachus pressed his ear to it and held his breath, but not a sound escaped the room beyond. He rapped fat knuckles against the wood.

“Mother! Mother, are you in there? I’m back!”

No reply. Perhaps she was in the bathroom. Telemachus shrugged and lumbered away from the door, crossing to the other end of the living room to where a yellow sheet with a pattern of pink roses hung suspended from the ceiling, sealing off his own living quarters from the rest of the apartment. It had been a trying day, and he felt he deserved some rest from his Herculean labors. He would lie down, just for a minute or two. Then he would work. He simply must try to transcribe some of the music stampeding through his head, to capture it before it slipped away entirely. But first, rest.

Behind the curtain was all that was his in the world: a narrow iron bed piled high with disordered cushions and blankets and quilts; a bureau with half the drawers pulled out and clothing, mostly gigantic pairs of tentlike underwear and oversized and overdesigned hawaiian shirts in bright yellows and oranges and blues, spilling out onto the floor; and an old-fashioned school desk, sized for a child, with the chair built in. Under the desk sat a filing box overflowing with papers—his life’s work, his great composition, on which he worked day and night.

On this day, however, he went for the bed. He glowered down at its slovenly state. Normally, Mother was not permitted in his quarters except for the daily domestic ritual of cleaning and ordering his things. His music was, of course, off limits, but his bed and his clothes should have been put to rights while he was out laboring. How could he be expected to live and work in these conditions? A disordered space reflected a disordered mind, and disorder could only stunt his creativity. He would have words with Mother, he decided.

But after, after. He flung himself at the bed, which sagged and squealed beneath his bulk. The sheer percussive force of his fall had catapulted one of his pillows, his favorite fringed neck bolster, in fact, from the bed, and he reached down and hauled it back up and slid it into place between the bottom of his cranium and his shoulders.

Ahh, yes, that was the spot. He closed his eyes and folded his hands atop the rounded butte of his midriff. He breathed deeply and felt he had never been so tired, not even after the day he’d spent eight straight hours attempting to resolve a paradox in the third voice of the central ricercar in his Telemachian Sacrifice No. 1, and that quandary had caused him so much distress that he’d snapped three of his prized composing quills and given himself both gas and a nosebleed, not to mention the cluster migraine that had lasted until the following morning. He released a long, low, rumbling fart that caused the whole bed to vibrate. This was a different sort of tired, a bone-deep exhaustion that…that…

Telemachus awoke with a snort an unknown amount of time later. He lay on his side, a strand of spittle dangling from the corner of his mouth, and as he sat up he wiped it off with the back of his wrist. His stomach grumbled, a sound like a kodiak bear waking from hibernation to find a luckless camper within easy reach, and he realized he must have slept longer than he’d meant to: with him, hunger was the most reliable timepiece, and it told him now that it was time for dinner.

He cocked an ear to listen, but heard nothing except the sound of automobiles speeding by on the street below. Escaping his bed with a maneuver like an elephant seal floundering off the rocks and into the water, he arose and shouldered through his privacy curtain into the living room. The kitchen was dark and empty.

Mother’s door remained closed.

A curious tingling sensation down his spine made him shiver. Slowly, treading on numbed feet and moving like a diver on the bottom of the ocean, he made his way toward the door. The knob felt icy cold in his grip. In his head, all the music had fallen silent.

The smell of lilac backhanded him across the olfactory glands and he staggered back a pace. Mother’s room was a black pit, an airless and sightless hole that gave him a sudden sensation of vertigo, as though he wasn’t standing in front of the door but instead hanging above it, suspended on invisible and delicate strings that might give way at any moment and allow him to plummet endlessly down, down, and down.

Shaking himself, he banished the sensation and stepped into the room. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a humped grayness deforming the shape of the bed, and recognized it for what it must be. He approached. The light from the open door was just enough for him to make out Mother’s hooked nose and sagging cheeks, her parchment-thin skin crisscrossed by a thousand fine wrinkles, her lips pressed together like two pieces of fencewire. In the halflight she looked carved from stone—or molded from dust, just waiting for a stiff wind to blow her away.

She lay still and silent. Leaning carefully down, like a hot air balloon coming in for a low-level pass, he hovered his ear above her nose and listened. Nothing. He concentrated on the hump of quilt over her chest, looking for something, anything, a telltale rise and fall however slow, but all was still as a black and white photo.

A shudder passed through him and he retreated. Blindly, numbly, he staggered backward until the backs of his knees collided with something soft. He sat, not knowing or caring what his prodigious backside might crush, and landed with a heavy whump in Mother’s slipper chair. A cloud of dust rose around him; combined with the lilac already in the air it overwhelmed him and he reared back and released a mighty sneeze.

The sound shook the room and propelled both Telemachus and the slipper chair several inches backward, but it was nothing to the noise Mother made as she burst awake and sat bolt upright in bed. Somewhere between a squawk and a screech, a whistle and a wail, it made all the hairs stand up on the back of her son’s neck. For that matter, it made Telemachus himself shoot up out of the seat—too quickly, in fact, for all the blood rushed out of his head and he swooned, teetered, and fell like axed timber, landing with a boom to lay like a shattered column on the floor. The dust cloud he raised made him sneeze, and sneeze again, and the force of them ramrodded consciousness back into his brain.

“Boy!” Mother called over the lip of the bed. “Boy, can you hear me?” A teaspoon, taken from the cup on Mother’s bedside table and pressed into service as an emergency signalling device, sailed through the air and struck Telemachus a ringing blow between the eyes. “Are you alive down there?” A book, a hardcover edition of Almond Runtykin’s Jesus at Dawn, Jesus at Dinner with especially sharp corners, followed after and hit him in the hand before clattering to the floor.

“Ow!” Telemachus said. “Mother, desist! I’m alive, but not for long beneath this barrage.”

He winced and rubbed the spot on his forehead where the spoon had hit him. No blood, but maybe there was internal damage. Who knew what kinds of negative effects the trauma would have on his ability to work? Not to mention his hand, which throbbed terribly. Perhaps the doctors would have to amputate. He’d need to learn to write left-handed.

“If you’re alive, what’re you doing lying on the floor? Get your lazy bones up and help your poor mother, instead of scaring the wits out of her. And give me back my book,” she added, as though it had been he who’d thrown it. “If you made me lose my place, why, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

Telemachus rolled over onto his stomach and, with his good hand braced on the bed, heaved himself up to his knees. He paused for breath, then scooped up the book and rose to his feet.

“Here, Mother, here’s your book,” he said, and handed it to her with his thumb stuck at random between the pages. “I even saved your spot for you, see?”

Mother took the book and squinted at him in the half light.

“You look terrible,” she said. “Look at you, all dust and dishevelment. That’s what comes from rolling about on the floor like the base animals. What made you go and do a thing like that, hmm? You silly boy. It’s a good thing you still have your mother to notice these things and take care of you.”

“Yes, Mother. That’s true, Mother.”

“I know it’s true,” she snapped. “I said it, didn’t I? Now, what time is it? Isn’t it about time for lunch?”

Telemachus didn’t know the time, but he knew the hour for lunch had departed long since. His stomach gurgled like a clogged drainpipe. By that measure it was nearly time for dinner.

With a heave and a grunt Mother swung her legs off the bed and placed her feet squarely on the floor. Despite the heat of the day, they were encased in thick, fuzzy wool socks. Mother could not abide cold feet.

“Come on, boy—let’s get you fed.” She padded out of her room and into the kitchen on her socked feet, Telemachus following behind like a zeppelin trailing a wisp of cloud. “Did you go to the market like I told you?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“And you got the eggs?”

“Yes, Mother. Despite considerable difficulty, and with much effort on my part, I retrieved them.” He knew they were only eggs, and that his trip to the store had been nothing at all, not really—yet Telemachus felt a blossom of pride in his chest at the thought of his adventure. He, Telemachus, had gone out into the world and braved its hazards and come back with food to put on the table. Was this what the pioneers of old felt when returning home after a successful hunt, with dust on their boots and blood on their hands and a deer for their families? He supposed it must be. Why, if it came with a feeling like this, he might even be willing to suffer additional trips to—

“What on God’s green earth is this?” Mother asked, neatly slicing his train of thought. In her clawed hands she held the brown box of eggs.

“This, Mother, is a container for the storage of eggs. You have to look inside. See?” He reached over and popped open the lid, which sprang back to reveal its contents. It was so sad, he reflected, when the ravages of age overmastered the mental faculties of the older generation. To regard a simple carton of eggs, with which she had dealt all the days of her life, and not even to recognize it—truly, a tragedy on a Wagnerian scale. In an upwelling of sympathy and familial feeling, he gently patted her withered hand, trying to put into it some of the sudden and unexpected emotion he felt.

With a violent jerk, Mother slapped his hand away.

“I know they’re eggs, you great gallumphing half-wit! But what’d you go and get these ones for? Can’t you see they’re brown? And look, there’s only eight of the dang things in here! What happened to the rest?”

Telemachus beat a retreat to a position of relative safety on the other side of the kitchen counter and cradled his smitten hand against his chest. Gathering the shreds of his dignity, he squared his shoulders and gave a dramatic sniff.

“The rest, Mother, I was forced to abandon at the store in the hands of one of the most loathsome individuals with whom I have ever had the misfortune of associating. And frankly, Mother, it is you—not I—who is to blame for this unfortunate, nay, cataclysmic, outcome, for I never asked to take up the mantle of household steward, which so ill suits me. Not to mention that it was from you that I received the money for this errand, which was not nearly enough.”

Mother’s eyes had gone flat and dull as Telemachus got deeper and deeper into his little monologue, but at the word ‘money’ a sharp light came back into them.

“Where’s my change, boy?” she asked him, her voice calm but with an undercurrent of sharp danger that Telemachus missed.

“Change? Why, haven’t I just told you, Mother? There was no change. Far from it—I barely escaped with my hide, that odious greengrocer tried to strip it from my back to cover my—I should say your—debts!”

“No change,” she mused, ignoring his outrage. “I send you to the store with five bucks and you come back with eight measly eggs. And no change.”

“Four dollars and forty-seven cents,” Telemachus corrected. “I counted it.”

Mother said nothing to this, only repeated to herself, under her breath, “No change. No change. Boy comes back with eight eggs and a tall tale and no change.”

“I resent that implication, Mother! My tale is as short as they come, and contains nothing but the raw, unvarnished truth of the matter. Furthermore, I think that you owe me an apology after all this business. It wouldn’t be too much to say that—”

“You babbling, blithering nincompoop!” Mother sprang at him, her colorless hair flying crazily in all directions, her nightdress flapping around her ankles. Her hands clamped around Telemachus’s upper arms, the thin fingers pressing divots in his flesh. “Your father was a donkey, and you’re a donkey too! A useless donkey, an utter ass! Why, here I am at home, sick as a dog, and you can’t even be trusted to go out to the dang market to buy eggs! What are you good for, anyway? You don’t work, you don’t make money, you don’t help your mother—all you do is sit behind that curtain and scribble nonsense on bits and scraps of paper! What good is that? Nothing!” She shook him back and forth all the while, and for a skinny old stewpot chicken she managed surprisingly well, jerking him so violently his teeth clicked together.

“Mother, unhand me!” ejaculated Telemachus. He shook himself like a bear and dislodged Mother’s talons from his arms. “How dare you disparage my compositions! I perform labors you couldn’t begin to fathom. One day those little scraps of paper will be worth millions! Billions, even! Musicians the world over will be gouging out one another’s eyes to get the chance to perform my works.”

“Millions? Billions? Bah! Right now they’re not worth squat, boy, not worth the price of toilet paper. As for your work—Ha! I’ve seen broken buckets work harder than you do.”

“That is a ridiculous statement, and I won’t respond to it.”

“Perhaps. At least a bucket, even a broken one, holds water.” Telemachus began to protest, but Mother cut him off. “Quiet now, boy, and you listen to me. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.” She tugged at a stringy hair that sprang lonesomely from the point of her chin. “Go on and fetch me a piece of paper and a pen. Oh! And a couple of bobby pins from out my sewing kit. Not the good ones, hear? No need to waste a good bobby pin.”

 *****

Ten minutes later, Telemachus appeared at the street door of their ramshackle apartment building, wearing a pained look on his face and muttering under his breath. Pinned to the front of his billowing, flower-pattern shirt was a hand-written note:

Dear Sir/Madame—This is my idiot son, Telemachus Bonneville.

He is a thirty-seven year old nitwit and useless donkey. He would

like to apologize for his earlier base conduct in your store, and

return these ridiculous eggs he came home with on accident.

Please do not let him return home without the proper sort of eggs,

which he now knows what to look for.

Best regards, Charlotte Mimsey Bonneville

“Nitwit,” Telemachus quoted to himself as he plodded off down the sidewalk in the direction of the market. “Useless donkey.” It was unbelievable, the lengths the universe would go to destroy him and humiliate him in the eyes of his critics.

He would not forgive Mother for forcing him to this extremity.

BIO: Cooper Clarence is a New England-based librarian and writer. He loves reading, the great outdoors, and fighting the good fight. 'Telemachy' is his first published story.