The Novel
The novel plunges into the luminous blue
of calving icebergs then
vaults across heaving
green waves
laced with froth to the wind-scoured
hulk of a treeless beachhead
that could be Greenland
or any other cold place of granite shield
and tired grass.
The eye scans this chilled indifferent landscape
noting moraines of frost-shattered rim rock
and glacial ribbons
striped like brindled camouflage
for three meditative pages
before the entrance
of a human voice,
and then it is only through the exchange
of an I for an eye
that we understand we are inside
the head of somebody, the voice of somebody,
a somebody
who lives cast away in this cold land
and is contemplating this arctic scene
through a window.
In beautifully cadenced sentences
his retreating gaze settles
on his own reflected image in the cold glass.
He blurs his eyes to smear it.
He does not want to see his face.
Something has
happened to it, though we don’t know quite what.
He dissolves the image in the way
he used to dissolve
streetlights and overhanging leaves
lying sprawled
in the back of his parents’ station wagon
coming home late from another party.
He crinkled his eyes
–there!—just right—and the streetlights streamed
threads of light
and he could see the brushstrokes
that seemed to underscore everything in the world.
But now
even after he blurs
his vision he can still see the bony eminence
of his misshapen brow
and we come to understand
that he is no longer normal and has been sent away.
At this point you blur your eyes in this same way
turning the page of text
into a shimmering gray
field and then you abruptly close the book
and look at the plain blue cover
as if you might discover something there.
You’ve had the press
of an oncoming piss underlying things for maybe
ten minutes but have been too lazy to get up
and this has somehow translated
into an uncomfortable
sense of impending pressure
that has intermingled
with the novel, titled A Question of Scale, by one
M.C. Bazhali,
which came highly recommended.
When you settle back in after relieving yourself,
and after gulping a quick glass of water
nearly identical in volume
to the amount just voided,
you turn back to your page
and shortly thereafter discover
our hero is a giant.
Yes, a giant.
Something happened
that caused him to begin growing again at thirty-three.
It is apparently very painful.
A synthetic hormone
used to accelerate agricultural output
has spun into his bones
after leaching into the food supply
and after nearly tripling in size
he has been relocated
by governmental authorities to this godforsaken rock.
The London Review of Books made no mention
of such shenanigans
and though you feel compelled
to raise a skeptical eyebrow as a matter of taste,
thus far the deft writing has carried you along
and there is something admittedly
delicious
about delving into a book that contains actual giants.
There is a lovely flashback
to a day when his jacket fit tight across the shoulders
and he wondered if it had shrunk in the wash.
Then it was his trousers
and a colleague asking him
if he was somehow taller.
“You seem tall today,” he said,
shrugging at the absurdity of the words
as they chuckled together
and our hero fixed himself a cup of mint tea
in the faculty lounge of the school
where the two men taught mathematics.
Just the day before,
over lunch, they had discussed
a problem the other teacher had given his students
as a lark, on the last exam:
“Define mathematics.”
They laughed as the other teacher recounted
the tortured syntax of a few convoluted definitions
generated by the desperate students,
and then our hero asked,
How would you define it?
And the other man
paused, then said:
The search for patterns.
The search for patterns, our hero repeated admiringly,
That’s good.
Over the span of twenty pages
these quiet moments from the man’s past
are interspersed with his present
where a slow but steady trickle of information
allows us to piece together these facts:
the affliction, while rare, is still
spreading and has struck over seven hundred men
who now live in a loose colony of prefab huts
on the shores of this unnamed place –
is it Patagonia, Newfoundland,
the Kamchatka Peninsula? –
the men range from seven
to nine meters tall, beyond which the condition
becomes fatal,
and they are forced to cover one another
under cairns of rock.
The permafrost does not permit burial, states Bazhali.
He grants the line its own paragraph, and who are we
to argue?
In spite of your initial skepticism, the novel
has begun gaining a certain gravity,
a certain heft
that allows you to feel its presence even as you drift
elsewhere into the surrounding day,
noticing the sinuous
movement of grey squirrels through the trees or how
quickly your tea seemed to cool
once you opened the book.
Our hero never mentions his name and only rarely
mentions a wife and son.
He compares the pain
of abandoning them to a shard
of bone
lodged in a joint-hinge.
He offers his tale in a series of quiet vignettes
quite at odds with this new world
where men receive supplies
from air drops and occasionally discover
a cache offshore, the crates held together
by nylon webbing and buoyed up
with blaze orange floats.
These pragmatic, somewhat technical details seem
to tether the book, you decide,
coming to appreciate, by page forty-seven,
these touches you thought somewhat overdone at first.
These sea offerings are left silently in the night,
ever since one of the men waded out,
gripped the gunwales of a naval vessel with both hands,
and threatened to tip it like a canoe.
Our hero reckons
this was mostly a gesture of frustrated bravado,
but when all was said and done,
the bullhorn’s crackling commands
were ignored,
a threshold crossed,
the order to open
fire came, followed by a description
of his huge body dragged from the sea.
After the first instances with the tight jacket,
the short trousers,
and his colleague’s comment, the aches
sharpened into real pain
and he went to his doctor
who took one look at him and contacted a specialist
named Yamaguchi,
a serene woman whose bedside manner
was so reassuring it took nearly two days
before our hero realized he was being detained.
He is still in touch with Yamaguchi. In fact,
it seems possible these vignettes
are something our hero has agreed to compose
as a sort of journal for her research,
this woman who sends the man
specially earmarked pharmaceuticals
and gives other signs suggesting unique consideration.
This is not a relationship you are sure you can trust,
and though you are not certain when this faint note
of paranoia
began to creep into the proceedings,
it is something
you feel has been generated from within the book itself
and is not a haphazard whim or projection.
By page seventy two,
things have moved from shadow to light,
these men are doing what they can
to maintain the rule of law
and create a kind and orderly society.
They wish to be given lambs and sheep,
to make their lives both more sustainable
and more meaningful.
It seems a reasonable request. Caring for a thing
gives order to the world.
For a flickering moment,
you indulge in visions of Cyclopes
on unspoiled shores, their caves holding casks
of cream and wheels of cheese before the arrival
of Odysseus. The evocation of the myth
is pleasant enough
that you wonder if perhaps Bazhali
has got you right where he wants you.
Because, of course, the authorities are resistant
to this idea of sheep. They dither endlessly, citing
concerns about contagion,
and when a sea-gift of crates
arrives at night and our hero wades out,
sodden as a muskrat,
to wrap the bristly tow-line around one wrist,
nobody expects there to be
air-holes in one of the crates.
But there they are, on page eighty-seven,
even when you scan back and re-read.
When the latch is undone and the crate hinges open,
we discover not sheep
but a boy,
a normal-sized
boy stowed-away among the sacks of rice.
He is pale,
tinged with blue, very still. For a moment
it is unclear whether he is still alive
and then his arm shivers in a tremor
and our hero clutches the boy to his chest and gallops
home. Yes, home. It strikes you this is the first
time the word has been used in the novel,
which has now taken an abrupt left turn
across two lanes of traffic. Once again,
you reminisce that there was no mention of this
in the review.
Perhaps it is time to acknowledge
the sneaking feeling
that has crept into your mind
and is now shifting and scuttling about like
a rodent in a cupboard:
Could there somehow be two books
named A Question of Scale, by M.C. Bazhali?
On a whim you flip to check the copyright:
First published in Great Britain in 1958
This is impossible. The review made clear the book
was contemporary. Something is
definitely amiss. The thought
that this is an elaborate pratical joke
crosses your mind.
But there is a boy
in danger of hypothermia
and so you turn back to find our hero stoking the fire
and wrapping the boy in blanket
after blanket
until he is
pink as rhubarb and out of danger.
Our hero’s fear now
is how the boy will react
once he awakes and discovers
he is in the lair of a giant.
You wince
at the word lair.
It is a little purple, a little overcooked.
This adds to your concerns
about the book’s provenance
as our hero pauses to contemplate the rise
and fall of the boy’s breath,
sheepishly informing us
that he at first mistook the boy for his son,
but it is not his son
and now he admits that he knew this all along
while reflecting
that his own boy would be much older now.
In spite of the overt sentimentality, this
tugs at you,
this wanting so hard to believe a thing was true.
It is almost as if the memory his son
has visited him from the past.
You look again to the cover of the book,
turning it in your hands,
wishing you had kept the dust jacket
so that you could study the photograph of the author,
scrutinizing the lines around his eyes,
trying to determine
if they were etched by sadness or laughter.
Perhaps Bazhali’s face would reveal something useful,
a glint in his eyes, a wry gaze
framed by incongruous tortoise-shell glasses.
When you look up,
you realize rather unexpectedly
that the day is gone.
It has slipped into the subtle blues
of dusk, which might explain
some of the yearning you feel.
It is this aching hope, you suddenly realize,
that has underscored the entire afternoon.
A lost afternoon, as you think of it now.
A drink would not be a bad idea.
Perhaps
some whiskey poured over a single cube of ice.
The burn of it might come in handy
should you let the book fall open once again.
You pause to visualize a giant outside your window,
reflecting how easy it would be for him
to clean your gutters.
He would merely need to drag a single
fingertip along the channel
dredging out the black paste of matted leaves
that collects there without fail every November.
The book rests in your lap, a smooth solid thing.
If you open it
to go elsewhere once again,
a make-shift campfire awaits you,
and within its flickering light
you will discover the boy’s wound,
stitched up neat as a raspberry,
just below his ribcage.
Bazhali will note
that it is located on his right side
and appears to be healing well. Your fingers
will reach for the spot on your own ribcage,
the soft valley below the bones
where the outlines of a pale birthmark
rest beneath your shirt,
as it has since you were a child
cringing from the tread
of your father on the floorboards,
a child who read books that were not palpably good,
books that led him into strange new worlds,
one after another,
brought home in loose stacks from the library,
and if a giant had swept you into his arms
and galloped into a vast and wild land,
you would have turned into his shagginess
and clung to it
with a white-knuckled grip
as if the clinging itself would save you.