Joseph Wazac grades papers in the brown living room in front of the T.V's flashing, listening to Bach. His lover left him three weeks ago. He was an artist who called himself Zig and was tired of the browning bricks of their apartment building and of the cabbage smell which permeated their kitchen. Zig went to Missouri. He wanted to photograph the clouds with black and white film so he could understand the light and the space behind them and the rolling texture on their surface. He wanted to read in the clouds secrets about all space and light and wind.

Jospeh is alone now and even though he loves the smell of cabbage, he hasn't made it once since Zig left. His mother was the one who taught him how to make the cabbage, how much salt and vinegar is appropriate. How long to boil it for. He is sorry to see that part of her go and feels her absence in the kitchen's new smell of leftover Chinese food.

He teaches Mediaeval history but loves Bach so he lets himself listen to the music and only half way reads the paper on feudal farm methods. He reads, At certain intervals the soil was redistributed by drawing or by lots... and thinks about how music is really about arranging silences, dividing them up with chords and he feels lost in the spaces between the notes and he is glad for this the soil was redistributed, by drawing or by lot...but even in the spaces between the notes he smells the stale Chinese food that reminds him that his mother and Zig are both gone.

Joseph squints at the T.V whose volume is turned down. He is watching The Buffalo Girls Cum Out Tonite on his VCR. He rented it from BIG BARNEY'S X!X!X! VIDEO! BONANZA!! which is down the street from his apartment, on the way to the University. It was the first time he had ever been in an adult video store so he was embarrassed and careful not to make eye contact with the only other person in the store, the balding clerk behind the counter who picked absently at a cyst on his nose. Joseph assumed this was Barney. He picked the movie because the title reminded him of the only song he could play on the violin. Buffalo girls won't you come out tonight and dance by the light of the moon, he sang to himself. The image of two great plains buffaloes in the middle of joyful and dusty compulation flashed through his mind. He laughed and thought of Zig. The arc of Zig's back and the line of Zig's neck had been haunting his masturbations and making him feel lonely.

He feels lonely but again imagines buffaloes mounting each other in a flat, endless basin, underneath a clear night. Looking at the movie now, Joseph wonders if you can rent movies of buffaloes having sex. They're an endangered species. Do they have laws against that? He looks back at the paper he's grading. At certain intervals the soil was redistributed by drawing... He is listening to the Concerto for four Pianos but his ear is not fine enough to tell that there are more than two. This does not bother him. The tape is on one of the fast movements and he feels the piano chords spiral with ordered exuberance so that in his mind he is running the dizzying circle of notes and silences and he feels joy heave up throughout the chords and up through his ribs as his heart expands to keep up.

Joseph's mother played the violin for the Chicago orchestra. She was tall with wide shoulders and broad hips. She had blonde hair and big teeth and a strong, gurgling laugh. When she was ten she immigrated from Poland but she retained her accent all of her life. Because she never tried to soften her accent and was never flustered by the baker's or the grocer's making her repeat her order, because her teeth and jaw were strong and square, and because her laughing was so loud it scared the neighbor's dog, everyone trusted her strength. Listening to this music he can understand the thunder of her laugh and would laugh himself if he didn't have to have these damn papers graded. At certain intervals the soil was...

He looks up from his paper and watches the television. The Buffalo Girls Cum Out Tonite is about an undercover narcotics officer in Buffalo. At the moment he is trapped on an elevator with three female drug dealers. They all are wearing heavy make up and black high heal shoes but the sight Joseph is most intrigued with is the narcotics officer. The thick barrel of his torso is contorted around two of the women so the audience can see the hairs on his back. In this scene, his penis, which looks like an oblong potato, is hidden from view and Joseph is a little relieved because he gets squeamish. The movie is on a continuous loop of repeat play, though, because he is comforted --if not aroused-- by the image of the hairy fat man. Zig and the man have a similar build. It is good to come home from lecturing and see an image that is simultaneously distasteful and reminiscent of an old lover.

But he still feels a little strange looking at the man's privates and so as the genitals reveal themselves on the television screen, Jospeph stares down at his paper. At certain intervals the soil... Outside it is raining and Joseph realizes that's its dark inside. The brown carpeting and the fake wood walls absorb all light. He turns on the lamp next to him. It is yellow and makes him feel warm haunched over his paper. The soil was redistributed...Jospeh wonders if clouds photograph differently when they are releasing rain. Are the dents of shadows the same? Does the water that collect on the lens blur the view. Joseph wonders how you can prevent something like that from happening. Joseph has never been to Missouri. He doesn't know exaclty what it looks like but he thinks flat. Prairie or corn fields or something. You can see the clouds fine in Illinois. They have corn fields in Illinois don't they? Maybe wheat. Joseph realizes that he is hungry and wants toast. He goes into the heart of his apartment's new smell of old Chinese and he wants to boil cabbage. Opening the refrigerator door he remembers why this is impossible; he only has paper containers filled with left over take-out, one jar of ketchup, three eggs, half a loaf of bread, and some border-line margarine.

Surrounded by the steady pulse of Bach he thinks about his mother stewing cabbage in copper based pans. She pinched in salt and added vinegar but not too much--not to make sauerkraut like those insufferable humorless Germans. "Wagner was German," she said, "and all he do is pound and pound and pound and have fat women scream." She stirs in some more salt. "But for Chopin no fat women scream and the pound--the sound of it-- is beautiful. Don't marry a German girl. There is never laughing with them. Marry a Polish girl." By the time he was fourteen, when he discovered that he would never marry any girl, his mother had ceased to be herself.

The loss hits him in his throat. The music is slower now and he feels like his foot is caught in the piano's sighing so he is dangling into the windy silences that circle around each other, compelled by the patterns of mathematics and a memory of crying. He puts his hand on his throat, swallows, and takes the toast out of the toaster. He has to grade his papers on feudal farming techniques.

He sits on the couch and picks up the first paper on the pile. At certain intervals the soil was redistributed by drawing or by lots among the members of a clan ...It's the beginning of winter, the end of November and Joseph recognizes the warm smell of the heater rise up through the brown carpeting. Joseph thinks of and misses summer. Three summers ago he met Zig. Joseph was small and quiet and Zig was large and loud, with thick hands. But they both loved the sound of traffic from the overpass by the apartment. They both loved the sound of children yelling in August, throwing water balloons at each other. They loved the fat splash of the waterballoons and the way the ground looked littered with scraps of yellow and red rubber. Joseph loved Zig the way he loved all of these things and in the face of a never ending sentence about soil redistribution he feels again like he is going to cry. But he doesn't. At certain intervals the soil was redistributed by drawing or by lots among the members of a clan.

Joseph reads the sentence out loud to help his concentration. He likes the sound of his voice and is conscious of his mouth's shaping the air. His mother always talked to herself, in Polish and in English, in front of the mirror and in front of Joseph. But her talking to herself slowly transformed into shouting and wailing and her sentences became tangled and incoherent. She started to leave food on the bathroom sink and in the medicine cabinet. Peanuts and slices of cheese. When Joseph was thirteen he spent a lot of time in the bathroom examining his arm pit and pubic hair and checking his chest hopefully. During one of these sessions, when his pants were down and his head was bent to his groin, his mother came in. His face flushed with embarrassment. He yanked up his pants and slipped from the sudden motion, crashing onto the toilet and then onto the floor. There on the floor he saw his mother looking at the mirror, muttering softly, and touching the reflection. She didn't seem to be seeing herself in the mirror. "Da, Babka fine. Chicofsky Chicofsky Chicofsky. Dadada." She put a small container of maple syrup underneath the mirror, on the edge of the sink and the wall. "Da, you get hungry."

Schizophrenia, he whispers. Joseph rubs his throat and closes his eyes. The television flashes through his eyelids. His stomach feels odd; he must want more than toast. The music around him isn't going to swallow him now. It is a soft even throb. He opens his eyes and sees the narcotics officer, now in a hot tub. Luckily he is halfway underwater and his crotch is covered by bubbling water and four drug dealing prostitutes. All Joseph can see is the tanned dome of his stomach that is strikingly like Zig's. I am better than clouds, he thinks to himself. He hates Missouri. He hates redistributed dirt.

He is tired of the sound of pianos and would like to hear the thin singing of violins. His mother made the violin cry and whelp and whine like a person. Three months ago he took Zig to see her in the elegant sanitarium in the suburbs. The nurse who brought them to her room had no color in her face or hair or dress. She had a soft voice and seemed like a ghost. The nurse opened the door to a potato colored room. Joseph's mother sat on her bed. "Joseph my Joseph you bring a friend? Who are you? Who are you my Joseph's friend?" She looked at Zig.

"I'm Zig."

"Twig--my Joseph you have a Twig. Twig you look very nice." The ghost nurse left. Joseph's mother turned to Joseph and looked him in the eye. "I love Joseph my Joseph my son. They trying to kill me." Joseph looked at the ceiling. His mother looked at Zig. "Twig--you twig of my Joseph-- you help me?"

Zig was unnerved; Joseph could see his jaw's flicker as he stared at the ground. "Who?" Zig asked.

Joseph's mother began a long stream of Polish with no intonation. She stared past both men, then looked at them. Her voice became louder. "You not to listen...You not to understand..." Her face tightened and reddened like a radish. "You no understand??" She began another stream of Polish, but this time its volume and harsh syllables seemed to fill up the room, pushing against the potato colored walls and plexiglass window.

Joseph knew that the colorless nurse would come with tranquilizers. He was embarrassed for Zig and he didn't want his mother to sleep yet so he reached over to his mother's shoulder and began tapping out a four count beat. She started rocking to this and the stream stopped. "I show you they try to kill me. Look what they want me to rub on me."

Joseph continued tapping out the beat on his mother's shoulder. She pointed to a bar of soap in the corner of the room. Zig went over and picked it up. He sniffed it and then winced. "This smells like shit," he said. He handed it to Joseph.

The soap was the color of old pancake batter and was greasy in his hand. Joseph remembers the greasy feeling, like toast that had been buttered and then left out for the night. In the sanitarium room, Joseph knew from this that his mother, in addition to living in a universe of thunderous, unintelligible voices, was living in a hospital where she could never become clean. The soap smelled like germless hallways and lard. He imagined blood warm showers that never gave off steam. Still tapping out a four count beat, Joseph bent and smelled his mother's hair. It smelled like salt and old sweat.

Zig said, "Mrs. Wazac, we'll get you some nicer soap."

"Twig and Joseph are good--you good boys," she said.

Joseph feels as though he has just eaten the bland anti-bacterial soap. He imagines and can almost taste the track of grease it would leave down his esophagus. He feels sick. The circling pulse of the music makes him feel sicker. He remembers Zig buying the exotic health food shampoo. The following Sunday they returned to the sanitarium, sneaking in the shampoo and an old coke bottle filled with water. After they collect Joseph's mother from her room, the three slipped down the germless hallways, past the plexiglass windows, past the ghost nurse who was trying to fix the waterfountain. They crowded into the janitor's closet that Zig discovered on their last visit. Joseph's mother leaned her head over the gray bucket and said "Da da... is good. is good" as Zig poured the water down her hair. Joseph rubbed the shampoo in. To him, her wet hair smelled like a jungle--like oranges and gardenias and grass--but Zig had told him that they were using Papaya Shampoo, formulated to condition with hydroxoproteins. Jason's mother said "Da, da... is good. is good" over and over again.

The nurse who had no colors was still working on the water fountain and didn't notice them walking back to the room. The mother dried off her hair with a thick, green towel. Burying her face in the papaya smelling towel, she began gurgling. Zig looked nervous but Joseph smiled the way he smiles when waterballoons splat because he loved his mother's laugh and did not know that the thin muscles of her heart were straining past endurance--stretching to the point of breaking. Zig's eyes widened. Her laughing was shaking her ribs, she was lying on her back, on her bed, smelling the wet towel, shaking with the deafening thunder of her laughter. The ghost nurse opened the door but was powerless against the sound of the laughing. She fluttered uselessly in a corner.

The soil was redistributed... Joseph throws the fluttering papers aside and snaps off the flashing image of the naked narcotics officer. Remembering his mother, he feels her laughter press in on him from everywhere. It becomes hard for him to breathe. He remembers the sharp, sudden last gasp of his mother. She stopped breathing, her heart stopped stretching. The ghost nurse's fluttering became useful. She ran over and threw off the papaya smelling towel as if his mother had drowned in it. Zig and Joseph both knew that she had drowned in her own voice.

Joseph breathes thickly. He turns the music off so he can hear his own breathing. He gets up and opens the window so his lungs can suck in the rainy air. He leans out the window and breathes harder. He squints up at the gray churning clouds and wonders what's behind them.