JOHN HAGGERTY’S work has appeared in dozens of magazines, such as Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly, New Orleans Review, and Santa Monica Review. He has also received awards and honors from Bridport Prize, the CRAFT Elements contest, the Nimrod Literary Awards, No Contest, Pinch Literary Award in Fiction, and Wabash Prize in Fiction, among others. He is the founding editor of The Forge Literary Magazine. Read more at john-haggerty.com.
The general’s nose is a problem. It is robust. Rampant. Untamable. Red, puffy, mottled, blotchy. Grotesque, I whisper to myself in my stinking, mildewed tent. As the official camp portraitist, it is perhaps my biggest problem, though I have quite a few. No, I am wrong. The general’s woman is my biggest problem.
I live in a mud pit a short way away from the main camp. The soldiers placed me here, they said, so that I would have room to create my masterpieces, to unleash my genius, to commune freely with the muse. My role is to document all aspects of the upcoming invasion, a glorious military adventure that will crush our enemies to freedom and allow the general—and by extension the rest of us—to approach the realm of the gods.
I have reason to be skeptical of the motives behind the location of my tent. It is more likely that they think that I walk around with the black gravity of death weighting every step and they want to stay as far away from me as they can, a sentiment that I would share if I were someone other than myself. Sometimes I climb up to the edge of my pit and gaze out at the moldy mass of tents and the fog of sooty smoke that is our camp, our glorious concentration of military might. The land of the living, I whisper to myself, though it doesn’t really look like that at all.
An unforeseen consequence of my isolated location is that it allows the general’s woman to visit me. I am not entirely happy about this because her visits are terrifying. The stress has a number of unpleasant physical manifestations. Feces flow from me freely and with abandon. My head feels as if someone were sawing it straight down the middle. Perhaps sawing is not the right word. It’s a slower process than that if not less painful. It is more like my skull is being bisected in glacial, geological, epochal time. There is grating and grinding and the sensation of a slow, erosive consumption of bone.
I have asked the general’s woman if she might amuse herself elsewhere. “Go away,” I hiss at her. “Leave me alone. You’re going to get me killed.” I don’t actually hiss. The hissing would require a level of courage that I don’t possess. In fact, I have yet to speak to her at all, so perhaps she can’t be faulted for misreading the nature of our relationship.
The general’s woman spends a lot of time in my tent. This means that I spend a lot of time just outside my tent. Being discovered standing just outside my tent with the general’s woman inside would be a very bad thing, of course, but being discovered inside my tent with the general’s woman would be even worse. Thus, I spend much of my day trembling in my disintegrating cot, ears straining for the sound of approaching footsteps, at the faintest stirring of which I launch myself outward into the ankle-deep mud of my pit, averting my eyes as the general’s woman slips inside.
It is a strange and unpleasant situation. Still, she talks to me as if we are engaged in a completely normal conversation.
“Being the general’s woman,” she said one day, “is a well-known obstacle to long-term health. It’s almost as bad as being the general’s portraitist,” she says, her voice only slightly muffled by the rotting fabric of the tent. “Some might argue that we should stay as far away from each other as possible. But we have so much in common. We share the general, of course, and my terror of death, and your terror of death. It is a triple bond. How could we not be drawn to one another? That was an art joke, I think. I am increasingly unable to determine if what I say are jokes or not. Do you have this problem?”
Yes, I think. I do indeed.
The soldiers also visit me from time to time. They are concerned about my obvious lack of progress, as well as my overall artistic vision. They present themselves in various shades of gray and green, covered, like everything else in the camp, with muck and algae. It never stops raining here.
“We would just like to see,” one of them says, the apparent leader of the group. His beard is more mud than beard. “If you can’t capture the magnificence of our invasion, we will have to find someone who can.”
“I’ve had a tremendous breakthrough with the mud,” I tell them. That part is true. For several weeks I had trouble reproducing the precise color of the filth that surrounds us. It’s a tint uniquely distressing to the eyes, a shade that makes you desperate to look away, except that there is no place to look away to, just more mud. Nonetheless, I’ve discovered that a particular combination of cadmium yellow, blue and red, along with significant amounts of black has allowed me to render the mud in a very convincing way.
The soldier with the beard snarls at me. “Mud!” he says. “There is nothing heroic about mud.”
“I see it as crucial to the artistic imperative of this particular military operation,” I say hopefully. “We rise from the mud. We transcend the mud in our inevitable ascent to glory. And just as the mud coheres, blends, cleaves inevitably, indivisibly to everything it touches, in that same way we grow together as one to liberate...” I motion vaguely at the greasy, heaving ocean beyond. For reasons unclear to me, we never mention the name of the enemy “...from their chains.”
They spend a few seconds digesting this, and hope arises tachycardially in my chest.
“No mud!” the bearded soldier snarls, thrusting his feral face within inches of mine. “Let us see the nose.”
It is a perilous moment.
The general is a brave and honorable man. We know this because he has killed, or at least caused to have killed, many, many, many people. He is also svelte and elegant. Or perhaps just streamlined in a particularly pugnacious way—a trim and conical head swelling smoothly downward to a capacious waist, tapering again below the hips. Like a torpedo or a bomb, he gives the appearance of having been optimized for a more efficient delivery of a destructive payload. One might not even hear him coming, but only sense, in the final instant, that deep silence that precedes a sudden, shattering doom.
Still, the depiction of his nose has proven to be a serious impediment to an appreciation of his many other aesthetic qualities.
“Can you draw noses?” they asked, the men who hired me. “You need to be good with noses. It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this.”
I am a bad artist but I assured them that I could draw noses. In retrospect, I can see that this was unwise.
“No nose!” I shout to the soldiers, mustering my best, emaciated artistic fury. “You are not ready for the nose! You are not worthy of the nose!”
The men shrink back from me, momentarily intimidated. The bearded soldier kicks at the mud as if defiling the bones of our enemies’ ancestors. They mumble to each other for a few moments and then begin to wander off, having suddenly remembered important, invasion-centric duties. Before he departs, the bearded man gives me a baleful stare as if to tell me that my victory is temporary at best.
“In their defense,” comes the muffled voice of the general’s woman from inside my tent, “they do have a point. What are you going to do about that nose?”
The soldiers have assured me that the general’s woman is the most beautiful person in the world. “Raven hair, flashing eyes,” one of them whispers to me. “No, her hair is the color of gold,” another says. “Her eyes are blue like a mountain lake.” These disputes usually devolve into large brawls which leave battered and unconscious men strewn about the camp.
To me her appearance remains a mystery. I understand this to be ridiculous, but I have developed the heartfelt belief that if I never look at the general’s woman, or learn her name, and then discover a technique that will allow me to present a grotesque nose in an acceptable way, I will never die. I cling to these thoughts with a choking desperation.
“An interesting thing about the nose,” the general’s woman continues, “is that back in the capitol it was somehow not so...noticeable. By which, of course, I mean loathsome and disgusting. It was still very large, of course, and discolored in ways suggesting some sort of deep internal corruption, like a leather sack full of decomposing rodents. But the overall aura of the man was such that we overlooked it. He was so heroic, we all thought. So charismatically vicious. But now, here, in this dreary place, it seems that we have been reduced to our essences. This is not, I think you will agree, esteemed portraitist, a good thing to have happen to anyone. Who among us could stand alone on the inner contents of our soul?”
I sometimes stroke the fabric of the tent when the general’s woman is inside it. My fingers return from the experience gritty and green, a combination of dried mud and algae. I spend much of my time masturbating furiously and obsessively. Not while the general’s woman is in my tent, of course. That would be suicide. And not really at all. I should say instead that I think obsessively about masturbating furiously, but that is as far as I’m able to proceed with things. The precarity of my situation, my constant fear, has unmanned me. One day I will be the sort of man who masturbates without cease. I look forward to it with great anticipation.
“I’ve asked about you,” she said one day, from inside my tent as I nervously scanned the horizons of my mud pit for wandering soldiers. “I still have friends back in the capitol. They do love to gossip, but I think you were a disappointment to them.”
This is not surprising to me. I am a disappointment to most.
“I was, I admit, hoping that you were the focus of some sort of tragedy—perhaps a cyclonically violent love affair replete with duels and disgrace. At the very least some sort of young and tragic death. Alas, you seem to have simply wound up here.”
Against my wishes, this makes me mentally retrace the path that led to this pit in the mud. I was failing as a painter. I had a woman, but she was a much better artist than I was and left me for yet another man who lacked my depths of incompetence. I made this joke to her. That his ineptitude was shallow, while mine was unplumbably deep. She didn’t find it as amusing as I had hoped she would.
“You’re not a bad painter,” she said. “You’re just a cowardly painter. There’s a big difference.” That I have placed myself in this situation through a lack of courage is an irony I think that the general’s woman would enjoy.
“Which made me, in turn, think about how I got here,” the general’s woman continues. I have had a particularly bad day flinging my timid abilities at the nose and had hoped that she wouldn’t stretch my nerves any farther. But my heart also felt a brief convulsion of joy when I detected the light squelching of her approach.
“I was a reasonably good actress,” she said. “No. I was a reasonably successful actress. My heaving bosom—that’s what seems to have attracted the most attention. At least that was what was mentioned most often in my reviews. So, of course, I began to emphasize this in my performances. Soon, my bosom heaved like a gale-torn sea. I had a few heaving, triumphant months of fame, and was lucky enough to catch the general’s eye. I was being exhibited at a society party and suddenly there he was, the great man himself, standing in front of me in all of his proboscitorial splendor. He grunted something to me—I have no idea what—but his meaning was clear. Sacrifices, as we know, must be made for the greater good. For the nation. I looked around and the whole room seemed as if it were shrinking away from me, as if seen from a fast-moving train. And now here I am.”
She doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. I wonder if she has fallen asleep, and what desperate course of action I might be forced to employ if this were the case.
“It seems as if there is very little left of him, now,” she says, almost regretfully. “I believe that he has had a crisis of confidence. He spends most of his time on his cot, his nose protruding out of the blankets like the tip of a particularly filthy iceberg. He has put all of his faith into you. The power of art or some such twaddle. I don’t have the courage to tell him the truth. There’s no power in art, it’s all just heaving bosoms and poorly executed noses.”
One day the men bring me a bone. A human femur, they tell me. They lay it in front of my tent, which, of course, I am standing outside of. It is long and white, contrasting brilliantly with the mud. We squint down at it.
“Delicate,” the soldier with the beard says. “The bone structure. Artistic.” The other men nod and murmur in agreement. I don’t share their familiarity with the interiors of the human body, and am oddly grateful that they share their knowledge so freely.
“A man of clear talent,” another man says.
“The previous artist,” the bearded soldier says sagely, “he was a finely-drawn man. Sensitive.”
He looks up at the gray-green sky, contemplating the infinite. “Couldn’t do noses either,” he says, with enormous sadness. He motions at the bone. “Did you notice the scratches?” The bone is lightly scored along its length. “Sharks,” he says. “Or a knife. Either way, the muscle peeled right off. See?” He prods the bone helpfully with his mud-caked boot. We all nod. Peeled right off. We can at least agree on that much.
“You’re making friends,” the general’s woman says from inside my tent after they leave. “I’m so proud of you.”
Go away I almost scream at her. This is completely insane. But I don’t, of course, because that would probably also get me killed. And there was something small inside me that told me that I wouldn’t have said it even if I could speak to her. Perhaps I want to die. Perhaps we both do.
“I’ve been thinking about our triple bond,” the general’s woman says. “Do you know what else has a triple bond? Carbon and nitrogen. They cling to each other with great fervor. Of course, triple-bonded carbon and nitrogen make up cyanide, or so I’m told. And cyanide is fabulously poisonous. The guarantee of an excruciating death within minutes.”
I consider telling her about my masturbation problem. This, I think, is another irony that the general’s woman would savor, that having the most beautiful woman in the world in my tent has rendered me in a state where a beautiful woman in my tent is of no carnal use to me. At times like these, I feel words jumbled on my tongue, clamoring for escape.
“Speaking of which,” she continues, “how are things going, art-wise?” I hear the scrape of canvas and wood as she goes through my possessions. I imagine that under different circumstances, this could have erotic possibilities. She stops at one canvas.
“Oh,” she says. A long silence follows.
“It wasn’t my ambition to be a camp whore,” she says, having apparently regained the strength to speak. “Though that’s probably not the right term for it. Perhaps ‘kept woman’ is a better phrase, rich as it is with intimations of all of the things I have been kept from, and the things that have been kept from me. Which sounds very stupid and self-pitying, now that I say it out loud. It’s as much my fault as anyone’s, this state of affairs. I just sort of drifted my way here. It’s easy to do that, don’t you think, to just drift along?” she continues. “I floated along in the shark-filled sea of men’s desires, and told myself that it was enough, that I didn’t need anything more. I didn’t try very hard at being an actress. I didn’t try very hard at love. I just let myself drop into the current and be carried, with the occasional affectionate shark nip...here.”
I fling the tent door open and clutch this woman to my chest. I gaze full on her face as she whispers her name to me. There is a boat secreted just up the coast. We steal there by night, breathless with a mixture of fear and exaltation. Placing her in the bow, I shove us off into the greasy sea. The clouds part and a brilliant moon shines down upon us, illuminating a single, large canvas wedged between us. Yes, the general’s woman says. It is perfect. Yes, yes, yes.
Volume 15.1, Winter 25
John Haggerty
