Jesse Ball’s novels are odd. In The Way Through Doors, for example, the various storylines layer so deeply I lose track of which is the core line. In The Curfew, my favorite, a puppet show serves as a vehicle for telling the characters’ history, but it continues into the present, revealing events the puppeteers have no way of knowing. When reading Ball, then, I have learned to delight in being lost, trusting that my disorientation is part of the point.
This method assisted me again when I read Ball’s latest novel, Census, where the setting freezes my expectations. In this world—where the census taker marks those he’s counted with a tattoo on the second rib; where his wife matriculated from a school that only turns out clowns; where the towns extend along concentric rings, each named with a letter in the alphabet—I’m unsure what could happen next.
But the unfamiliar does not dominate this story. It’s no sci-fi novel, no reenchanted world. I recognize plenty. And most clearly with this story, I recognize the census taker’s son.
The son is not a child, though he’s completely dependent upon his father for survival. He has Down syndrome, and his role fits a certain archetype—can we call it the wise fool? Like Melville’s Pip, David Foster Wallace’s Mario, and August Wilson’s Gabrielle, the son possesses a kind of spiritual insight, a sensitivity of heart that overshadows any of the intellectually capable characters around him, but he lacks the capacity to convey that insight to his fellows. Lear’s fool strikes me as the quintessence of the archetype: his wit is apparent only to the audience; to his king he is a fool.
Is this archetype a result of wishful thinking, a hope that those with intellectual deficiencies have been compensated? I don’t think so. The son’s behavior in Census is consistent with every person I’ve met with the same condition: a heart that eclipses intellect, a lightness possible only in one who lives “without regret,” parents who have bent their lives “around him like a shield.” The archetype, I am therefore convinced, springs from reality, and its importance is underscored by the Gospels, where it is said the last will be first and the first last.
But the Gospels’ concept is more than a declaration of value. It is an indicator of judgment. I am thinking of that moment Jesus says, “Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” The extended passage, found in Matthew 25, is an evocative reminder that to care for the least of these is to care for Christ, and to deny them care is to deny Christ. “For I was hungry and you gave me food,” or “I was hungry and you gave me no food,” the parable explains, and the hearers were unaware they’d done so because they’d seen only the hungry, the naked, the sick, the prisoner. And so Jesus ends the story by declaring that some “will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” In the Gospels, then, it clearly matters whether we care about this archetypal “last,” for our treatment of him reveals the difference between the righteous and the unrighteous.
***
This talk of judgment likely rings strangely in our day. We usually broach the subject obliquely, maybe by referencing who is on the right side of history, but the idea of judgement is the framework that helps me make sense of Ball’s novel, offering me a path through it.
This narrator has after all embarked on a census. By definition a census is an accounting, though in Ball’s hands what is being accounted is an enigma. The narrator—not a career census worker but a recently retired surgeon—abdicates the typical work of the census. Instead, he tries “to discover what was worthy of note,” recognizing “there is a way in which each person wants to be known.”
Our narrator has brought along the works of a woman called Mutter, who is obsessed with cormorants. The cormorant’s powerful hunting is related to the census worker, who is a kind of observer and hunter: “It must be a terrible thing, she writes, to be a fish, and know that a cormorant has observed you. . . . There is no distance a fish can go, she writes, that will save it. From the moment at which it is noticed, the fish is permitted a sort of grace that will be concluded, excruciatingly, with the bayonet of the beak.”
Early on, the narrator admits the “census is in some way an observation,” the work of a cormorant. He wonders what the beak might be and what the quality of the grace could be. Meanwhile, however, he and his son conduct their work, counting not at each successive house but stopping where they choose.
They progress through towns fairly quickly, meeting an array of people and hearing their stories, recording them for the census. The son plays checkers with a farmer, makes fast friends with children, and even conducts a census interview himself, writing inarticulate lines on the form, which his father mails in with the rest.
As they travel, we learn what having this son has been like, how for his wife “having our son made her like people less in general, I know it made me like them less.” This dislike has arisen from people’s treatment of their son: “How can it be, that they are all so cruel to him? How can this enormous conspiracy exist—where everyone has agreed ahead of time that it is completely all right to be hurtful to these harmless people who hurt no one?”
And thus those who are not cruel stand in stark contrast. “It is true, though . . . that it made it easier to find the people who are worthwhile, as they were and are in no way troubled by him, and would enter into an immediate camaraderie.” In this way the man became a judge long before his census work, “pushing away people we thought brutal, and gathering to ourselves those we thought kind and subtle.” And yet it is difficult to guess who these people are, as “such people with innate gentleness and sensitivity are often compelled to hide or disguise it.”
Ball plays with typesetting in other books and does so here, labeling the chapters with the names of towns. When you reach E, the capital E covers the entire recto page and the new chapter begins on the verso. These chapter breaks arrive with a somewhat even pacing but shorten as the man and his son grow more urgent to reach the end. They are urgent because the narrator’s heart will fail at any moment; it is this realization that has prompted him to retire and set out on the census work to begin with, “to prolong what life we had by seeing every last thing we could possibly put our eyes upon.” As they approach the outer limits of the country, the city of Z, they must rush to place his son on a train that will take him back, where a neighbor has promised to watch over him. Thus, when the father’s heart begins its final failure, when he’s “on his last legs,” they must drive through the towns without stopping, and we turn through S, T, U, V, W, X, Y & Z one after another. To leaf through the book, one might call this a gimmick—nine pages without prose, only blacked out pages and large letters. It risks being the work of Wallace’s James Incandenza: “Technically gorgeous . . . but oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness . . . no emotional movement toward an audience.”[1] Yet while the risk is real, as a contrast to oddly hollow work, Ball’s oddities actually create the emotional movement. When I reach this point in the narrative, having attached myself to these census workers, my page turning stops my breath. The quicker we move to Z, the quicker this father and son must separate, and I don’t want to separate them. I don’t want these towns to pass, these pages to turn. But what else is there to do?
***
One of my great frustrations when I speak with those we might call the “least of these” is my inability to grasp what they are saying to me. Be it a man on the street wearing rags and speaking through four teeth or the girl with Down syndrome I hold the door for at school, I am constantly not hearing them, constantly asking them to repeat themselves. People do the same to my son because he is only four, but I always understand him, as I am with him so much. This surely condemns me at some level, for if I were with the least of these, would I not grow to understand them? Yet my frustration is not unique. This inability to be understood marks the life of one who has Down syndrome or autism. It is what makes the archetype.
And it is part of why the end of Census is so moving. The father places his son on the train, and, as he watches him leave, he considers his son’s future. He imagines an ultimate beauty for him, a reunion, perhaps with his wife, perhaps even with himself. Its beauty will arise from knowledge, the kind of knowledge they have tried to collect in the census: “No one knows anyone like this—so well will they be acquainted, so deeply.”
In this glad meeting, his son will tell of his journey and his story will be “the true census.” In one sense, it is the true census for his being fully known, just as he tried to know those around him in their census. He is, after all, the one “whose eyes have seen all, whose heart has felt all,” and now, in this place, “he will speak of it to them.” But in another sense, I see this son completing his own census in this meeting. He is the one who has exposed the hearts of those who met him, who exposed the brutal and the kind, and saw and felt it all. He is the cormorant, yet no one in his presence understands they have been observed. And now, in this place, “all he says will be understood as it never has been.”
***
This is beautiful in ways I cannot quite express, which seems fitting. For those like me, those accustomed to being understood, Jesse Ball’s small novel, dedicated to his brother, who had Down syndrome, acts as a reminder about accounting and judgment. If we believe that consequences exist for righteousness or wickedness, here is a warning: there are census workers among us, cormorants who have observed us, and whether we will be snatched in their beaks will be revealed by what we have done for them, the least of these.
[1] Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. Back Bay, 1996. 740.
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