Blast | May 05, 2023

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.  In Avee Chaudhuri’s anarchic satire, the members of a suburban HOA go head to head with a highly erratic stand-in member over whether to invest in tennis courts or an amphitheater for live opera.

 

Metzinger’s Proxy

by Avee Chaudhuri

 

Metzinger was well known for his garish parties, wandering hands, and morbid halitosis, but he practically lived out of the Beijing Sheraton half the year. We believe he advised the Chinese government in currency manipulation. Metzinger’s wife (née Chowdhury) had their three young children to care for, so her brother was chosen late in the summer to replace Metzinger on the HOA executive board. He was visiting at the time, a professor of music and art history on sabbatical, and we assumed that as a tenured academic he would surely observe protocol. This proved to be a grave miscalculation that has cost some of us dearly.

Metzinger’s Proxy was once a fixture of the neighborhood bar. He drank everything except anise-flavored liqueurs. “They were invented to aid digestion, but my daily intake of water and fiber is peerless. I have no need of them. My shit is already highly fibrous, like the roots of the soft-wooded magnolia,” he told the barmaid one evening. She was amused, for some reason. A neighborhood stargazing event had been canceled on account of rain, so we were all in the bar drinking wine and comparing telescopes: make, model, probable expense. It’s what we do in the upper-middle class. Metzinger’s Proxy ignored us. He watched baseball and did the crossword.

He was hermetic too about the way he exercised. He took these long walks from the Tooze Road bridge to the Wilsonville water treatment plant, a distance of about five miles, during the warmest part of the afternoon. If we passed him in our cars and waved, he would respond with the Nazi salute.

“Strange for a man of his complexion,” Mrs. Carmer observed once, and some of us had to gently tell her that he was being ironic. Mrs. Carmer was appalled.

“I am the picture of male anorexia,” Metzinger’s Proxy explained to the barmaid another night. “Do you think this magnificent body built itself?” he asked while patting his considerable belly. She laughed, and it was impossible to ignore. She never laughed at our jokes. In fact, we’d never heard such effortless laughter.

By strict medical definition, however, Metzinger’s Proxy really was an anorexic. If he did not walk five miles in the afternoon, he would deny himself food and drink that evening. If he took his usual walk, he would eat a modest evening meal and drink enough until he was “sufficiently drunk.” This was a nebulous term with no exact meaning. For instance, was he “sufficiently drunk” on the Fourth of July, when he marched haphazardly in the neighborhood parade dressed as Susan B. Anthony? He wore a designer jumpsuit with stunning décolletage. “This is what Susie would wear if living today. This jumpsuit would be commensurate to her politics of personal liberation. I’m on the edge of glory,” he said, slurring his words as he tried to explain his choice of clothing to his irate sister. She tore off his scarlet wig and stormed away with her children.

***

Metzinger’s Proxy habitually showed up late to HOA meetings and always reeked of tobacco, whiskey, motor oil, and canned sardines. He sat in the back and voted reliably with the majority so that he could return to the bar without unnecessary delay. Prem Chatterjee once jokingly referred to him as a “parliamentarian.”

The agenda for late October was fairly straightforward. The neighborhood pool needed new filters. Wisteria in the undeveloped plots was becoming invasive. St. Moritz Loop would be cordoned off on Halloween night to allow for greater egress of trick-or-treaters. Construction on the tennis courts would begin next spring, after the thaw. The environmental impact report anticipated a minimal amount of interference, within acceptable thresholds, to the neighborhood’s soil drainage and water table. The planning of the tennis courts, to be arranged in a hexagonal pattern around a center garden pavilion, had been led by Prem Chatterjee. That night’s final vote was widely thought of as a formality. To mark the occasion, Chatterjee wore a Nehru jacket which he had custom-ordered from a tailor in Karachi. Metzinger’s Proxy walked in late as expected, but rather than take his usual seat in the back of the room, he demanded to be heard.

“Will you let me speak?” Metzinger’s proxy implored. “This is America, goddammit!” he continued. As proxy to an HOA executive board member, he had every right to address us. We told him as much, and he seemed genuinely disappointed by our civility.

“These tennis courts are a gaudy and bourgeois waste of money! We should build an amphitheater instead and stage the world’s great operas. We will invite the greatest divas to Wilsonville and billet them in our homes, in our beds, and should they not invite us to stay for the night and submit our bodies to their advancing limbs and teeth, then we will sleep under the stars, triumphant in our chastity, knowing we are the purest of impresarios. Incorruptible to the last!!”

He was literally screaming, his arms flailing, ambulating back and forth eagerly and knocking over chairs and tables as a professor might in a crowded lecture hall while discussing Hegel—the owl of Minerva only flies at dusk, after all, when it is “sufficiently drunk.” But this was a completely serious idea he had concocted. Metzinger’s Proxy calmed down and shared his plans with us via a series of photographic slides. He had worked out exact calculations of how to convert the money borrowed for the tennis courts and apply it to the construction of an amphitheater. Many of the same building materials in the same quantities could be used, for instance rebar and concrete, and the same decorative red masonry. He showed us architectural blueprints drawn up by a firm in Tokyo, and he had even commissioned his own environmental impact report, which concluded that there would be no disruption of the neighborhood’s ecology and that in fact local species of bird would benefit from building nests in the eaves of the amphitheater. The amphitheater would have a restorative effect on the local avian population. Sweating profusely now, his shirt soaked completely through, he explained to us his idea of recording a Live at Villebois Estates series and selling it to local public radio. This would allow us to amortize our debt far quicker than if we built tennis courts for leisure.

“And every goddamn neighborhood in a five-mile radius has tennis courts! This is your feeble idea of an amenity!” Metzinger’s Proxy shouted directly at Prem Chatterjee, pointing at him. It felt rather personal.

While his ideas were somewhat appealing and certainly held immense cultural value, he was far too drunk and obscure, making passing references to what Nietzsche had to say about opera in his unpublished notebooks, which Metzinger’s Proxy had been granted access to at the University of Turin on account of his “scholarly renown.” It was arrogant of him, and many of us had already started taking tennis lessons, which were not inexpensive. But believing he had presented his case successfully, Metzinger’s Proxy sat down smugly and took a swig from his hip flask. He then called for an immediate vote on building an amphitheater and naming him its creative director, with discretionary spending powers fully independent of the HOA, the Wilsonville City Council, or any legislative body in the free world.

In what turned out to be a historic vote, its very last, the HOA Executive Board summarily rejected the plans for an amphitheater, ratified the tennis courts, and formally censured Metzinger’s Proxy for exceeding his allotted five minutes of speaking time.

“Sic semper tyrannis,” said Metzinger’s Proxy. As he got up to leave, he stared Chatterjee down with messianic rage and then belched very loudly, filling the room with the ominous smell of sardines and beer.

***

Metzinger’s Proxy disappeared from public life thereafter. He still took his walks, but he refused to drink in the neighborhood bar or even acknowledge us. We anticipated some kind of protest, that he would chain himself to a bulldozer in time for the six o’clock news, or alert a nearby cell of eco-terrorists, but no one thought he would resort to blackmail. The seventeen-page letter was sent by certified mail to Ted Faulkner, HOA president and treasurer.

Apparently, Frank Newsome routinely masturbated in public, while watching young mothers breastfeed or teenagers fitting condoms by moonlight. Frank had been eluding the police for years, getting away on a Vespa scooter hidden among the old growth, according to the letter from Metzinger’s Proxy. Miss Barnaby, card carrying member of the Family Research Council, a delegate to the Republican National Convention, a known bigot, had been born John Surrey Phillips in Vancouver, British Columbia. Dr. Tran, our respected local veterinarian, was perpetually stoned on ketamine, a type of horse tranquilizer. Jack De Silva was sleeping with his son’s cello teacher.

He also had herpes. He also was guilty of insider training. In 1987, Ted Faulkner had fatally poisoned his wife when she threatened to sell his model trains to a collector from East Germany. Faulkner claimed it was an act of unflagging patriotism, but we knew better. With his clean hedges and immaculate gutters, Ted Faulkner epitomized puerile, sexless rage.

Prem Chatterjee was guilty of war crimes in Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan. He led extermination squads against his own people. To his credit, Chatterjee did not make a long, involved display of denying his crimes, unlike Frank Newsome, who refuses to this day to admit he is the Wilsonville Masturbator. Newsome even made a show of offering us money for any information that could lead the police to a meaningful arrest. “It’s simply indecent,” Frank kept saying. Remarkably, Chatterjee showed no remorse whatsoever. “I was responsible for the eradication of the so-called intellectuals, enemies of the state. I want you all to know I was not simply ‘following orders.’ I volunteered.” His candor was refreshing. And yes, while a UN High Commission has characterized the Pakistani Civil War as a veritable genocide, it occurred literally decades ago, and we had Metzinger’s Proxy to deal with and Prem Chatterjee, the so-called Butcher of Dhaka, seemed like a more than capable field commander to lead us in this brutal yet vital endeavor. Jack De Silva drew a lazy parallel between our forefathers and their slaughter of American Indians and taking of their land for the sake of progress, and that was that: Chatterjee was forgiven and anointed in the same specious breath.

“He expects us to act at a deliberate pace, and he may not yet have a contingency plan. He imagines we’re a menagerie of slow-moving, suburban bureaucrats,” Chatterjee said, “But we must attack. Now!” We grabbed whatever implements were available: golf clubs, kitchen shears. Ted Faulkner wanted to gas up his Black + Decker polesaw, but there was no time. We piled into the bed of Jack De Silva’s fishing truck and went looking for Metzinger’s Proxy. It was the time of day when he went for his walk, and we found him on the Tooze Road bridge, which spans a wetlands preserve. We jumped out of the truck and tried to waylay him, but Metzinger’s Proxy easily fought us off—some kind of karate he must have picked up on his travels—and then he brandished a high-velocity water gun and a butane torch. “This is Everclear, you fucking cucks,” said Metzinger’s Proxy.

Chatterjee laughed. “Ah yes, an improvised flamethrower. I’ve seen enough of those. All of Europe is an armed camp. But you have limited fuel, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll burn your palms off. Acrylic glass is so unstable when cast into the barrel of a child’s toy gun, don’t you think?” We were impressed with Chatterjee’s knowledge of the situation.

Without warning, Metzinger’s Proxy jumped off the bridge and dove gracefully, with perfect Olympian form, into the vernal pools below. It was a distance of some twenty feet. He must have surfaced on the far side of the preserve, several hundred yards away. It was extraordinary. Chatterjee jumped in right after Metzinger’s Proxy but came up seconds later, flailing and desperate for air. We had to fish him out. Chatterjee wrung out his clothes right there on the bridge and hung them on the railing to dry. He stared out over the preserve and smoked cigarettes in his stoic, martial nudity like an angry baseball manager during a rain delay of the World Series.

“The Carrom board is set. But whose fingers are more calloused and more prepared for this game of Banana Tree?” Chatterjee mused. He was being incoherent, and his refusal to leave the bridge or accept a warm blanket also concerned us. After Chatterjee had smoked a pack and a half of Marlboro Reds, we finally convinced him to return to Miss Barnaby’s house, where we drew him a warm bath and poured him a snifter of brandy. We still had not discussed the specific demands laid out by Metzinger’s Proxy. He wanted his amphitheater, of course. He also wanted our resignations and a restructuring of the HOA that would protect his amphitheater from any kind of popular referendum on its scale, operation, or existence.

“What he is asking for amounts to enshrining tyranny,” Chatterjee said. He looked ridiculous in one of Miss Barnaby’s silk kimonos, with his wiry white hair and exposed knees, scarred from a recent arthroscopy, but he was right. And by this point, between equipment and lessons for ourselves and our children and the cost of dressing ourselves in the latest attire being worn at Roland-Garros and the All England Club, we were all deeply invested in the idea of tennis. There was also the matter of our reputations.

“He can’t survive forever on his own,” Chatterjee said. Metzinger’s Proxy had not returned to his sister’s house since the skirmish on the bridge. No one had seen him, but he left Chatterjee a voicemail referring to him an “assclown”—it sounded like he was at a nightclub, as there was booming music and laughter in the background. There were no local hotel rooms booked with his credit card. His sister seemed to think he was at a conference in Minneapolis, but she also relayed that her brother was fond of camping and had spent the better part of five years living in state parks so he could save money while going through an acrimonious and expensive divorce.

We were surprised, of course. By all previous appearances, Metzinger’s Proxy was a bon vivant in a glamorous state of physical decline, in spite of his long walks in the afternoon. A game of bocce exhausted him, and he had to retire to the shade with a bottle of chardonnay for a full hour in order to stop perspiring. And he got winded from yelling at the television in the bar. Once, when the Mariners gave up a six-run lead in the ninth inning, it very nearly destroyed him. Someone had thought to call the paramedics, who put him on oxygen. We could not imagine Metzinger’s Proxy as an intrepid outdoorsman, and we were still stunned by his daring escape on the bridge. “Grace under pressure,” was all Chatterjee had to say. We attempted to sleep that night in our plush beds, in our heated, stately homes that looked out over cropped lawns and rose gardens, heated swimming pools and pavilions under which our daughters entertained first loves and whatnot, but a restful sleep was simply not possible. There was a full moon, and somewhere in the hills Metzinger’s Proxy was upwind with our terrible secrets, braising rabbits in whiskey, drinking said whiskey and dancing around a well-managed fire.

***

Except for one or two trails laid out in asphalt and tended regularly by the City of Wilsonville, we had very little knowledge of the surrounding countryside. Our attempts to find Metzinger’s Proxy were futile. He had been at large for nearly a month. By this time, we were also losing confidence in Chatterjee’s erratic generalship. He wanted to understand the enemy. He was convinced Metzinger’s Proxy felt desire and grief and shame and that, like the rest of us, he could be studied for his essential vulnerabilities. It was unpleasant to watch and be around, his increasing gauntness, the incessant smoking, but Chatterjee became obsessed with Metzinger’s Proxy. What were his exact motives? What had brought him here? Why had he persisted? And between the two of them, who would history forgive?

Chatterjee demanded a full psychological profile of Metzinger’s Proxy, complete with sexual history. This proved to be an enormous undertaking and we put together a phone bank in Miss Barnaby’s living room and set up a rota. Information was compiled and cross-referenced on the old SABRE system, originally designed in the 1950s to manage airline reservations. We interviewed immediate family, high school friends, college roommates, professors, colleagues, creditors, drinking buddies, of which there were probably thousands (we managed to interview about two hundred), and his ex-wife, who spoke his full ‘

“Christian” name in a terrifying orgasmic drawl. She was somewhere on the European continent, filming an advertisement for Campari, and even though the phone connection was lousy, the lust and anger in her voice were palpable.

We quickly ruled out the Oedipus complex or any sort of childhood trauma. Metzinger’s Proxy was raised in a loving household a few miles away in Lake Oswego. His intellectual gifts were nurtured as a child, and he was afforded a healthy degree of independence. We thought it was possible that Metzinger’s Proxy was suffering some kind of midlife crisis. He was about the right age for it, in his late forties, though who could really tell with all the drinking? He also never wore sunscreen. The amphitheater might have represented his triumph over death, his graven immortality, was one theory offered. But upon further research it was discovered that Metzinger’s Proxy had built dozens of amphitheaters all over the world, in the depths of faraway jungles and on remote plateaus in contested equatorial nations. In order to get an amphitheater built in Chicago, he had revealed corruption in organized labor. At the behest of his lover, Ri Sol-Ju, the First Lady of North Korea, Metzinger’s Proxy had supervised the construction of a marble-faced opera house in Pyongyang. It was quite the achievement. Why then build here in Wilsonville? We now had to consider the possibility that we were more challenging and intractable, pettier and somehow more repressive than a colloquium of warlords, river chieftains, and machine politicians.

There was one theory that advanced further than most. It concerned the excessive style in which Metzinger’s Proxy had been deflowered at the age of seventeen, in the women’s locker room of a local boathouse. Irma was the name of his paramour, and he loved her, by all accounts, but she moved East to attend Juilliard while Metzinger’s Proxy remained in Oregon to study at Reed College. Irma became a chanteuse in New York City, a successful lounge singer.

“This amphitheater is for Irma, his first love, a way to bring her back to Oregon,” Jack DeSilva declared. DeSilva was a romantic at heart. By now, Miss Barnaby’s living room had come to resemble the offices of a national newspaper. Files and containers of Chinese food were strewn everywhere, and we’d become cigarette smokers like Chatterjee.

“We need confirmation!” Chatterjee barked. So we called Irma, but she was not very helpful.

“I’m gay,” she told us. Of all her old friends, Metzinger’s Proxy had been the most accepting. He’d even officiated her marriage to a Dutch national and later donated his sperm so Irma and her wife could have a child. Their son was fourteen now and regularly corresponded with Metzinger’s Proxy. It was not a matter of unrequited love that had driven him to all this.

Chatterjee’s shoulders slumped, and he reached wearily for his brandy. At this point in the day, we had been working eighteen hours straight, manning the phones and inputting data. Dr. Tran returned from the helipad, took off her aviator shades, and stated that there were no sightings of Metzinger’s Proxy in the nearby bush, or any signs of human activity.

“This is bullshit,” said Ted Faulkner. “This is a goddamn waste of time.”

“All men live with a purpose. We must discover his secret,” Chatterjee said.

“Listen, Prem, listen. Some men just want to watch the world burn,” Faulkner replied.

Chatterjee took off his left shoe and struck Ted Faulkner across the face, causing him to topple backward onto Miss Barnaby’s glass coffee table. Then Chatterjee started beating Faulkner relentlessly, ignoring the broken glass everywhere. “We will not deal in platitudes! We will not deal in lines from popular films!” Chatterjee shouted. Only a few seconds elapsed before we pulled Chatterjee off Faulkner, but Ted was already dead. Mrs. Applegate—Julia—said she could have sworn that Metzinger’s Proxy had been watching through the window, half-naked and wearing a crown of twigs and possibly bird shit.

***

When completed, the Array rose one hundred feet into the air and boasted ultramodern speakers arranged horizontally on either side of a main vertical axis, the upward terminus of which housed a small room where the state-of-the-art receiver was stored, along with a library of albums, two refurbished record players, an armchair, tea kettle, and hot plate. The room was accessible by a simple elevator, a moving platform roughly the size of a plank. We had imagined and then constructed a set of pulleys, eschewing the idea of a one-hundred-foot ladder, though we counted at least a few mountaineering hobbyists among our company.

Opera, mostly Rossini, played day and night from the Array, which stood on the site of the proposed tennis courts. We worked in shifts, switching out records when needed, cataloguing what had been played that evening and scouring the Internet for rare pressings that would please Metzinger’s Proxy. The tennis courts, “Chatterjee’s Pavilion” as they were to be known, had been officially decommissioned. Chatterjee has been imprisoned just for manslaughter after the coroner decided that the primary cause of Ted Faulkner’s death had been a stroke. He had high blood pressure which he neglected.

We agreed to all of the demands set forth by Metzinger’s Proxy. The HOA charter has been rewritten so that all meaningful authority is invested in him or his anointed proxy, and the executive board has been dissolved. The problem we now face is making contact with Metzinger’s Proxy. He has no known cell phone number or mailing address. Emails sent to his faculty account at the University of Prague are met with a curt reply: “Away for now, fanning embers.” His sister does not keep up with his movements much. In fact, she and the rest of her family, including Metzinger himself, recently returned from Beijing for a few months, seeming to be ignorant of the situation. They know that Ted Faulkner is dead and that Prem Chatterjee was arrested and tried for the crime. The official line is that Ted Faulkner made a bigoted remark and Chatterjee had to defend his honor. Chatterjee howled when we told him he had to turn himself in and that we wouldn’t help him dump Ted’s body in the wetlands preserve, that it had all gone too far. We threatened to contact The Hague and report his wartime activities so he would go quietly. It was the best decision the rest of us could make. Chatterjee dislikes platitudes, so it would be insulting at this juncture to say that to hunt monsters one must become a monster or that to understand lunacy (or genius) one has to live in a desert of his own making, without friends, without an entourage, without Chinese food and without an endless supply of cigarettes and brandy procured with HOA funds. Chatterjee was both decadent and corrupt, and it’s unsurprising that he failed in his pursuit of Metzinger’s Proxy.

The minutiae and detritus of our lives, the bathing of children and small dogs and searching for lost cats who do not wish to be found, the stropping of blades and hewing of weeds have all taken on a light, unencumbered quality. We move and speak as if in a dream. We hope he is pleased with our efforts, Metzinger’s Proxy, whose exact location and tenor toward us remains unknown. Here in Wilsonville, in our little corner of it, anyway, the opera plays to soothe us as needed and to bring us out of ourselves. We had become cloistered by meager dreams of tennis, of second homes and successful, financially literate children who would have good jobs one day, but to what end? They’d have been miserable too. Our children, we now realize, had become unsympathetic under years of our misrule.

I was once responsible for recording the minutes of the HOA Executive Board meetings, a position entrusted to me by Mrs. Applegate—Julia, sweet Julie. Julie whose husband I may murder one moonless night with a spade or dagger or even a shard of glass, Julie who pleads with me, not in these words exactly, to take her away, yet we remain faithfully married to our spouses while somehow always insisting on each other’s company: walks in the park, trips to the library, and doubles tennis, naturally. Julie has a powerful forehand and a reliable second serve. When sitting in the Array at night, as the needle drops on an obscure Soviet recording of The Thieving Magpie, I often think about the possibility of another life somewhere near the sea, Tijuana for instance. I can’t stop thinking about Tijuana, what life could be like there, the anonymity and freedom, the tequila. To smell the ocean again would be a hell of a thing. I believe that kind of climate could restore a man to, if not greatness, if not the superlative condition of his youth, then some enduring form of sanity. If I don’t light out for Mexico, I don’t know that I could stay here and live productively, in this little hell Julia Applegate and I have made together.

A passing observer might say we’ve all grown a bit feral, which I suppose is an understandable misapprehension of these events. It’s true that we’ve stopped spraying for dandelions and no longer treat the community swimming pool with chlorine. Women go around braless, and men have stopped shaving their beards. Children have been told to stop taking their Ritalin and are permitted wine at dinner, so long as they’ve spent the day being mindful in some capacity. It is better this way, though we still contend occasionally with Chatterjee’s ghost—he hanged himself in prison during the finals at Wimbledon. He bemoans the absence of tennis courts, but he is hardly a tenacious or frightening figment. He is usually naked and smoking cigarettes, hoarding the brandy and crab Rangoon. A barking dog is often enough to startle him away.

Metzinger’s proxy is fabled to return. His sister, rather carelessly, and only when confronted at the supermarket, revealed finally a few details of his whereabouts. Yes, he’d spent a few weeks in the surrounding bush but then grew restless and bored and decided to purchase outright a superyacht (North Korea has been very good to him) with the intention of circumnavigating the world.  It includes a full bar, a bowling alley, and a jukebox that plays only opera and Miles Davis. A bastion of learning and irreverence, traveling at twenty nautical miles per hour. Metzinger’s Proxy is alive and well and surely haggling for figs and cheese now in some Mediterranean port. Later he’ll give a tour of his ship to a trio of Spanish beauties that will end with a coy offer to spike their vanilla ice cream with Campari or Amaretto. The sun must be out. Beachcombers are likely in a state of awe at this vessel, this singular flotilla which has moved into their vision with the ease and temerity of a cloud.

***

Avee Chaudhuri teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he is finishing up a PhD in English Literature. He is a fan of opera and the band Yeah Yeah Yeahs.