Soft Creeping, Words on Words

Soft Creeping, Words on Words Philip Baruth University ofVermont He was a giant scholar. I knew Blerus only in that way: a firm, yet modulated presence, dabbling his fingers in this controversy or that, but overwhelming each in turn. Catching other writers like little smelt between his fingers and eating them by their heads first as he walked through the larger, neater countryside of his own ideas. A gigantic force in prose. The opponents he beheaded always came back and clung, bleeding and blind, to his coattails. They would keep at it, until he paused in his progress and swept back his hand and scattered them again. He might publish under any number of names, make a junta of himself. And all of this was shot through with the contented sadism of a child. He could have made those stubborn torsos lie still, had he wanted to. I had never seen him even on a book jacket. So I didn't recognize the head that I saw borne along by the moving walkway in the Miami airport. Just the head: the body supporting it was so stunted that only a glimpse of sloping back showed between the chin and the thin black handrail. I was walking next to the walkway, watching whole populations pass on my left. Like garments touring a dry cleaner's rack, those people, endlessly individual, mildly interesting, never seeming to be one's own. I didn't recognize his head although I remember it coming at me quickly, a bored look spread over a bony nose, pale lips, a high fragile forehead. He shot by me in an instant. There was no way to know that it was the head of Martin Blerus, being propelled to the conference on Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Key West. The end of the walkway was too far in the distance for me to have seen him leave the comfort of those motors and return to a normal state of affairs: walking with effort, back rounded and turned by scoliosis, his head not quite four and a half feet off the floor. Whitish-blond hair only at the temples and behind the crown, tending to ringlets like a schoolboy's. Quick, overlarge eyes. Dragging and bumping a wheeled set of luggage. A scholar of Pope. Some would say the scholar ofPope. He would say that. I was in a fog of exhaustion by the time I reached Key West, and had my motel key in my hand. The management had placed all of the conference attendees in adjoining rooms on the sixth floor. They had made a little neighborhood for us, a little warren. As the elevator doors came apart, I saw other tired men and women entering 10Rocky Mountain Review rooms with briefcases and books and the fresh marks of glasses at their noses. There was the odd sense of seeing oneself duplicated, of wanting to move to see ifthe image would move. I have no idea what time it was when their three voices woke me up, my watch was facing away from me on the desk. I lay in the darkness, feeling the starched thinness of the coverlet stretched over me, no comfort to it. And their voices were annoyingly clear through the wall at my head, as if they were crouching in the darkness behind me. Loudest was a bass, excessively vibrant voice, the voice of a man who cultivates his lower register, a would-be announcer, or minister. He was trying to convince someone in the hall of something, half-murmuring, then rising into a solid, bell-like tone. "We're such weaklings," he was saying, "always this, this agreement to disagree. No one standing up and calling someone a liar. Like today after dinner, with those two Georgetown people, I kept waiting for someone to slap me for what I said about Jonathan Swift. No one flinched. No one knew. No one cared a lick." A woman's voice came up, not very interested, a little fatigued, a little drunk: "Which thing that you said, Robert? You realize that you should probably have been slapped for the better part of what you...