Daniel Uncapher
I met Susan Westfield the day I arrived in America. She lived on the third floor of a brownstone in Prospect Park with a clowder of cats she called duchesses, though all of them were boys.
She offered me the duchesses’ room, a windowless nook between the bathroom and the kitchen taken over by food bowls and litterboxes. I’d never experienced a litterbox before and the smell was unconscionable, but in the spirit of new beginnings I moved in right away. In return Susan asked only for a security deposit, utility deposit, and three months’ rent.
“I have many wonderful things,” I said, pushing aside my books and pulling out my treasure: a fossilized shark tooth, a scarf of Tyrian purple, and an aluminum cube. I handed Susan the cube; she snatched it from me and threw it into a litter box. She picked up my reading copy of Catullus instead and snapped the gold chain from its binding.
“Here’s your deposit,” she said, shaking the chain in my face. “If you don’t have cash by tomorrow you’re back on the boat.”
That night I organized my things and thought about my future. It was a good thing I brought that Catullus, I thought. The Queen Mother had warned me against bringing my books; “You’re going to a dangerous place,” she’d said. “Don’t lose your head in books.” I fell asleep reading Catullus and dreaming of home, and in my dreams I lost my head.
I woke up to a duchess peeing on my sleeve, Susan watching silently from the doorway.
“It’s tomorrow,” she said.
“I’ll level with you,” I said. “I don’t have any money. But I have all these books, if you know anyone who reads…”
She took up my Catullus again. “It’s a reading copy,” I said. She held it over her head, flipping through the vellum leaves in the dim light of the windowless room.
“Where’d you get this?”
“The Queen Mother, of course.”
Susan clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. She had beautiful well-rounded teeth, I thought, that must chew very well.
“Yeah, I know some people,” she said. “I’ll go see them now. Stay here and eat some cereal or something. Feed the duchesses and clean their litter boxes.”
She disappeared with my Catullus and I regretted my decision. I should’ve given her something dull, I thought, something didactic like Sidrak and Bokkus or Goethe. That dull Goethe, I thought; I should’ve given her Goethe.
When Susan returned that night she was practically smiling. She’d sold the book, she said, writing a number on a piece of paper and handing it to me. “Here’s your cut,” she said. “After eBay’s, Paypal’s, and mine, of course.”
It was a significant figure that amounted to a full year’s rent, so I told her to keep it. She ripped it to pieces. “Good,” she said. “Now about those other books…”
The sale of my Catullus garnered no small deal of attention. The poems in my little volume had been apparently lost, and its so-called discovery shook the community. A professor at the Institute published a monograph declaring the work an obvious forgery and listing 98 discrepancies between it and real Catullus. It was called the 98 Discrepancies and it caused a sensation, which moved me to tears.
When the professor came to interview me she asked for the provenance, and I said, “The Queen Mother.” She stormed out yelling about the antiquities trade and the immigration and customs enforcement agency, a real mouthful; I prostrated myself before Susan and begged for forgiveness, but she told me to relax and called the controversy money in the bank. All the attention impressed me; what an enlightened place America must be, I thought, to put such a high value on books!
Susan brought me another academic, a mop-headed goat with round wooden glasses that slipped down the hook of his nose and caught on his nostrils. I’d never seen such insipid glasses in my life, and I distrusted him at once.
“Meet Menkis,” she said. “He’s a Fellow at the Institute and a book lover, like you.”
“Hello,” said Menkis. “I’ve seen your Catullus in the news. I’m a classicist, you know, and a rather serious book collector.”
I laughed in his face. A book collector? What an audacious thing to say!
But Menkis held his ground, pushing his wooden glasses up his hooked nose and reciting:
I will face-fuck you and ass-rape you, catcher Aurelius and catamite Furius,
You who think because my poems are sensitive that I have no shame.
“He’s a genius,” said Susan. “He’ll help you get the most value for your books. You’ll need to sell them if you want to furnish your apartment, you know, if you want to get some art on the walls. If you’re going to pretend to be poor and degenerate you can at least put some art on the walls for the rest of us.”
So I took her at her word and hired Menkis to find me some art. We took an Uber to a glassy building downtown where a woman named Iza ran a gallery called Louse; on the way Menkis caught me staring out my window of the car and asked, “What do you think of the city? You’re not in Basutoland anymore.”
“Bhazagraland,” I corrected him. “I think it’s a mess, and I find it hard to keep my sense of direction straight.”
“You get used to it,” said Menkis. “It’s not your sense of direction you lose.”
We met Iza at Louse, a magnificent space set into the side of a skyscraper, and I explained my position. She had a paternal understanding of art that cut straight through my confusion. “Art comes in many shapes and sizes in this country,” she explained. “A shape and size for every budget and taste.”
“To be honest,” I said, “I find the whole thing a bit colorful. Too many shapes and sizes, and no continuity.”
Menkis grabbed my ear and pointed to the biggest painting in the room. “Art is the purchase of ideas,” he said. “You’re an ideas man, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” I said. “I have my own idea.”
I shared it with him and he hugged me. He brought Iza into the hug; she cupped my groin and called me ballsy. “You’re so smart,” she said, and I trusted her entirely.
Menkis took us out to a bar called the Academy to celebrate over drinks. “It’s a good plan,” he said. “It won’t be cheap, but it’ll be good, a real sensation. Naturally I’ll be your agent and Iza will curate the thing. We’ll help you get the best rates from the best artists in the world.”
But when Iza arrived the next day with a dozen of the city’s most esteemed artists packed into the back of a white van, they had nothing but negative things to say about my apartment, and I dismissed them all at once, but Susan canceled my orders. “Don’t be so sensitive. Sit down and work this out.”
So we all sat down. They had all sorts of questions. I was in no position to supply any answers, so I took a wax crayon and sketched what I had in mind in the back of one of my children’s books, the Mayan one. “I want a fresco in the style of the Bhazagraland School as illustrated here,” I said, tearing out the sketch and pinning it to the bedroom wall.
An artist stood up. “What’s this all about, Menkis? Where’s our advance?”
“Sit down,” said Menkis, grinding his teeth. He cupped his hands around my ears and whispered to me, tingling my spine. “They’re growing restless. Where’s the goods?”
I gave him my Goethe. He flipped through it and gave it back. “What the hell is this? I could get this from the store. Don’t get stingy on me.”
“Fine,” I said. He accepted my Sidrak and Bokkus instead, selling it to a diplomat in Chinatown and returning to me with a full list of terms:
“Look, we can’t dally on like this forever. There’s a process to things in this part of the world. There’s a certain way capital is supposed to flow. As your consultant I’ve taken the liberty of forming a corporation for you. Naturally I’ll be the chief executive officer, but you’ll sit on the board, along with Susan and Iza. Dividends, divestments, discretionary funds, A shares, B shares—etc., etc. In addition to your living stipend, you’ll receive a monthly allowance out of the capital gains of the reinvested profits from the book sales. My brother-in-law in Panama City will handle it. That’s Panama City, Florida, of course. He cuts up illuminated manuscripts and sells the leaves to tourists. You’d hate him. He’s the smart one in the family. I’m the sentimental one.”
“Fine, fine,” I said, my attention turned now to the artists, who proved to be as fickle and obstinate as the worst of Susan’s duchesses. They didn’t seem to want to cooperate at all; in fact, they seemed deliberately uncooperative. The trouble escalated on the second week when the artists hired out teams of laborers to do what they called grunt work. It was an exploitation, I complained, and it multiplied itself when the laborers divided their own work up amongst interns and grad students. I looked an intern in the eyes and told him how much I was paying his boss’s boss, but all the young man could talk about was the ladder of industry. These aren’t artists at all, I realized with despair—they’re capitalists!
Capitalism had its casualties. An errant easel crushed the first duchess, an old man with no goodwill left in the world, and the second drowned in a bucket of paint of its own accord, so blue you could see it through the black trash bag used to bury it. The rest of the cats weren’t disturbed by the loss, but Susan threatened to deport me, screaming in my face until Menkis and Iza dragged her by her ankles into her bedroom and closed the door.
When Susan emerged at noon the next day she didn’t mention the duchesses at all. Instead she touched my hair and offered unsolicited advice. “Iza only wants your money, and Menkis only wants your books. I’m the only one you can trust, and I love our project. I love what we’re doing here, and I want to see it carried through. It’s like you’re building a window,” she said, sending pictures to her friends. “A window to another world.”
A window, I thought: as if that were the case!
Not long after Menkis moved in, converting the kitchen into a library and staying up all night reading my books. He had an unusual interest in the children’s books, especially the Mayan one, which I found distasteful. I tried to get him to take an interest in something more on his level, like the Goethe, but he didn’t go for it. Not so easily duped, I admit. I was glad to have him around. Susan’s friends sold the pictures to a gossip magazine, and a crowd of locals gathered around the stoop. I asked Menkis to take care of the problem, and he assured me that it was good publicity, but for a small sum he could at least try to guide the narrative. I trusted his good advice.
Iza gave an interview with the local newspaper at Menkis’ behest, calling the project a transformative experience. She moved into Susan’s bedroom to be closer to the work site. I was barred from entering, of course, and as my own bedroom was brimming with interns and Menkis claimed the couch, I slept outside on the stoop with the paparazzi and onlookers. I fell asleep one such night reading Lucretius, and when I woke up the book was gone. Menkis took the incident personally, blaming me for what he called my mendacious naiveté and demanding that I surrender the rest of my literature to the corporation at once. I denied the request, saying that I had to run the idea by the board first—by which I meant Susan, toward whom Menkis adopted an openly hostile attitude.
“She’s a gold digger,” he warned me. “A cat lady. You can’t see it, all you can see is a clever white Catholic, but she’s a blatant adventurer. Did she tell you she’s a literalist? Did she tell you that? She’s in love with Iza, and Iza wants to destroy you. They’re schemers. They scheme.”
Susan confirmed these suspicions when she asked me, apropos of nothing and with Iza at her side, “What the hell is Bhazagraland?” She’d been googling it, she said, and come up totally empty-handed.
I’d never heard such contentious language from Susan before and didn’t know how to respond to her inquiry, ugly questions about the gross domestic product of my country, how many water sheds we have, what time zone we use.
“Bhazagraland isn’t even on the internet!”
“Of course not,” I said. “There are an infinite number of things not on the internet.”
“Look here, you alien. Bhazagra isn’t even a real word. You pronounce it differently every time!”
I resorted to one of Menkis’ tricks and told Susan to calm down. It was a mistake, and even Menkis, who observed the whole exchange from the couch, seemed surprised by my aggression. Susan cried eviction and returned to her bedroom with Iza.
Menkis gazed at me over the couch, smiled coyly and said, “See? She’s been googling you since the day you arrived.”
For the artists it was business as usual. An intern named Keith brought his dog to work, and soon everyone brought animals with them. The dogs chased the duchesses and ate their food, which I had to replace. I relied on Menkis to deal with these kinds of things for me.
“Menkis! Get rid of these philistine dogs!”
Susan envied my relationship with Menkis. When Menkis did nothing about the dogs, she called in a professional dogcatcher and had them taken care of. It showed good initiative. We celebrated over a meal of cornflakes with cold milk and sugar, Susan’s ritual dish—pure white sugar by the heaping spoonful, and Susan let me have as much as I wanted.
“Iza and Menkis are staying in Harlem tonight,” she said, taking my hand. “That means there’s a vacancy…”
In bed she introduced me to a catalogue of new experiences, and by midnight I was practically comfortable. I felt so sure of myself that I admitted to Susan I was something of a book collector myself, and that my collection back home filled one thousand bookcases with one thousand shelves.
My words moved her; “I’d like to start my own book collection,” she said, staring at the ceiling. I curled up around her, my limbs flung across her naked body. She asked me about my collection and I told her, and I fell asleep naming books.
Menkis found us lying together in the morning and addressed us with renewed hostility. That evening he openly disobeyed me, taking my books and putting them in alphabetical order.
“Menkis! Stop alphabetizing my books! Why should a Caesar sit next to Catullus?”
It wasn’t the Caesar he was interested in, though, or the Goethe. In fact, the only person who had taken an interest in the Goethe was Iza, who kept it on top of the toilet. The one thing Menkis cared about was the Mayan picture book, which became a principal source of tension. As I couldn’t find a single Mayan in town who could actually get some enjoyment out of it, I decided to confound Menkis for good and threw it down the trash chute.
When he found out what happened, he repeated the words immigration and customs enforcement agency, and I prostrated myself before him, admitting what I’d done. He called in a favor with the sanitation department and had every garbage truck in the West Side seized, the garbage chutes hand-sorted and the bags searched. He diverted the artists for the task, and they worked for two days straight, by which time the smell of garbage permeated the entire neighborhood, morale had fallen, and the locals were starting to get restless.
Of course, they never found the book. These people are clueless!
An artist named Ypres called me a Nigerian scam artist and talked of a class-action lawsuit. Keith the intern called me an undercover Saudi prince on public radio and accused me of killing his dog, but Menkis ended the matter that day with a cash settlement. According to one anonymous source, I had a hand in 9/11 and, what’s worse, a cat fetish. To top it off, the papers routinely accused me of hailing from Basutoland. From Basutoland, I!
I told Menkis to fire the lot of them and cancel the project entirely, but he and Susan intervened on the artists’ behalf. You’re an economy now, they said. You have responsibilities.
But it was Iza who cornered me in the bathroom and advocated on my behalf. She alone supported the firing, and in the glow of her warm support I suddenly realized how beautiful she was, her straight black hair parted right down the middle.
“Susan and Menkis are conspiring against you,” she said. “They talk about it in their sleep. Susan hates Menkis and Menkis hates everything. You’ve got to get out of here while you still can. I’m leaving soon—getting out of the business entirely, in fact.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I’m not all there myself,” she said. “So take your Goethe and get away from here. If you can’t do that then at least get rid of Menkis. Maybe look into a new apartment. Greenwich Village. Chelsea.”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “But you can keep the Goethe.”
With Iza on my mind I fired all of the artists as soon as Menkis was out of earshot. Consequently, an artist named Bo Georg sold a biography of me to the blogs accusing me of drug use, human trafficking, and maintaining a personal harem, and Keith the intern supported as a witness. In an interview with VICE he dubbed the apartment Little Bhazagraland and described it as the joint efforts of a performance piece and an Islamist cell. He wasn’t sure that the CIA didn’t have something to do with it, either—the Institute. The story ran all over the city, billing me as both a cultural treasure and a shameless sex crime, and Susan was thrilled.
The crowd of onlookers outside my door swelled with tourists from all over the world. Susan took a renewed interest in my privacy, cordoning off my nook and installing a ticket booth. When I fired the artists they simply moved down the hall a few feet and started selling pictures of me to the tourists. Every few nights someone would sell a new scoop to a podcast or talk show and Susan would watch or listen to the news over a bowl of cereal and cold milk in the morning.
I watched the sunrise over her shoulder as she ate and decided maybe they were right after all, and that if I wanted to get along in this country I should give in and buy some regular art. So I gave Iza my Dun Scotus and asked her for as many paintings as it could buy me. She looked at me with a sigh and disappeared, and when I saw Menkis with my Dun Scotus at the kitchen table the next day I demanded to know what happened to Iza and my big acquisition.
“Iza is in a mental hospital,” he said. “She went in raving about Goethe and they committed her. I had nothing to do with it.”
There could be no mistaking it now: Menkis and I were at odds. He said that I wasn’t a serious collector, and when that failed to ruffle me he called me a book dealer. I warned him to watch his tone, and he threated to take the 15% they offered for an interview.
I cleared the kitchen table with my arm and leaned in front of him. 15% of what?
“Now just calm down,” he said. “That’s a fair percentage. They only offered Susan 10%.”
My aggression melted and my heart sank. I asked him why he was plotting about percentages with Susan; he looked into my eyes and said, “Don’t you get it yet? She’s a book collector, too!”
A tourist tripped on one of the duchesses and was taken away in a stretcher. Musky men in yellow helmets built a metal railing around the room with a sign that read Little Bhazagraland: Limited Liability Installation. A stack of high-gloss brochures printed and distributed by the Chicago Speculative History Society appeared underneath. I took the whole stack and deposited it into the trash chute; the brochures reappeared soon after. The artists had been reinvesting their growing profits into their storefronts, selling hotdogs and beer and even printing plastic busts of my face. From these, of course, I took a percentage.
One night Susan came home with a handsome analyst named Pavel to talk monetization. They locked themselves in Susan’s bedroom and talked percentages for eight hours straight. Menkis put an arm around me and pulled me close.
“She’s a common tramp,” he said. “A trollop, a tart. She’s using you, and that makes you a cuckold.” He clucked his tongue. “Cuck.”
“Menkis,” I said, “I won’t endure one more word of abuse from you.”
“Have I struck a nerve, then?”
I left Little Bhazagraland and went for a walk through the park. Crowds of people followed me everywhere I went with their cameras high in the air, lights in all direction. I stopped to get a piece of gum from a gum machine and someone cried out, “Go back to Africa!” I thought I saw Iza in the crowd but it was just another fascist with beautiful dark hair, and when bottles started to break on the pavement I returned in haste to the apartment, where as if out of thin air I found Pavel the paid analyst conferring not only with my Susan, but with treacherous Menkis, too. They had my Caesar spread wide open on the kitchen table under the white hot light of a tungsten lamp, and they were taking pictures, Susan forcing the pages apart while Pavel snapped invasive, revealing shots.
“Menkis! What are you doing!”
He pursed his lips in disapproval. “Close the door and calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down,” I cried. “Stop this at once!”
“Don’t stop,” he told the photographer, glaring at the exposed pages. “Keep going—don’t stop.” Even Susan was caught in the madness, one hand on the pages and the other down the front of her pants. “We’ve found a buyer,” Menkis explained, licking his teeth. “The Hobby Lobby heir. He’s an evangelist – a nut. You won’t believe what he’s paying us. He wants to cut it open and look for lost Gospels.”
“Well it’s not for sale,” I said.
Everyone laughed. “You don’t mean that,” said Menkis, and he was right. In fact, I was quite short on money. The corporation was under pressure from multiple audits and lawsuits at once, and the board had voted five times in a row for salary increases.
I blinked back tears and pointed at Menkis. “You’re a fraud,” I said. “Everything is percentages with you, debits and credits and figures. Well, I’ve had enough of it; you’re fired. You’re fired, Menkis, and I want you out of my life.”
To my surprise he left, and he took every last one of my books on the way out, even the Goethe. I hired Pavel at short notice to track them down and return them, but the pockfaced analyst fled upstate and wrote an illustrated tell-all for the children’s arm of Farrar, Straus and Giroux about the experience. So I hired Georg the sell-out to murder the both of them, but when he defected to the Catskills I abandoned my vendetta and focused entirely on rebuilding my relationship with Susan.
For once I felt good: without Menkis or Iza around I’d have Susan all to myself. It would be just like the beginning, the days of gold chains and Catullus, before everything became complicated.
But the consequences of Menkis’ betrayal reached even Susan. She went to bed that night with a terrible headache, and when she woke up in the morning she’d forgotten everything. I held her hands across the kitchen table and told her everything, but she denied all of it, from the year’s rent I’d paid to the night of passions that we’d shared; and then she complained of another headache and went back to bed.
Before she closed the door she reminded me that the month’s rent was due tomorrow. That was a miscalculation, of course, but the more patiently I tried to explain her mistake the angrier she got with me. “I’ll ask Menkis for help,” I said. “He’s always waxing romantic about contract law.”
But Menkis didn’t answer my calls, so I put on a coat and walked to the Academy. The bartender said I just missed him; I stayed for a few drinks, and when I got back to the apartment not only was Menkis waiting for me, but he was in bed with my Susan, whose headache had passed.
Susan did one good turn for me before calling the immigration and customs enforcement agency and telling them I was an illegal: she bought me a ticket to Bhazagraland on a Fedex charter out of Memphis, Tennessee, where she and Menkis had just been secretly married.
“It’s for the best,” said Menkis, whose abrupt acquisition of my book collection had made him the most esteemed dealer in the city, if not the world.
Susan smiled and kissed his brow. “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” she said. “That’s what Menkis always says, you know.”
I blinked at them in disbelief. “Only Bhazagraland Air is allowed in Bhazagraland airspace.”
“Who do you think you’re booked with?”
“How did you manage that without a Bhazagraland Bank debit card?”
“Menkis, darling,” said Susan, nuzzling her nose in his short neck.
“And how did he do it,” I asked; “how did he find out about the Bhazagraland Bank debit card?”
“I read it in a book once,” said Menkis, bored to tears with the both of us.
Susan swooned. “They’re all he ever reads anymore,” she said.
Menkis excused himself to meet with his press agent, leaving Susan and I alone for the last time. I wiped a tear from my eye and, feeling sentimental, wrapped my hands around her throat in that soft, constricting way she took my own.
“Stop,” she said, biting her lip. “The police are on their way.”
And then she asked me to leave, because Menkis would be back in a few hours to eat the dim sum that she’d poisoned to inherit his seat on the board. She’d already hired Keith the intern to ghostwrite a book about the whole experience, which she intended to sell to Random House for a tidy sum as soon as the headlines broke then get the hell out of Brooklyn.
I didn’t understand a word except leave, so I left.
Poor Catullus, you must stop being silly,
And count as lost what you see is lost.
Daniel Uncapher is a writer from North Mississippi whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Baltimore Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Posit, and others. He holds an MFA from Notre Dame, where he won the 2018 Nicholas Sparks Prize.