Primordial: An Abstraction

47

“That’s my father.”

The librarian points at something behind me. I glance over my shoulder.

There’s a big poster. It occupies most of the wall.

On it is a rooster.

The rooster has a red mane and a red beard and cold eyes and a sharp beak and matted feathers and weird feet.

I eyeball the librarian. “Is that a photograph or an illustration? It looks real.”

The librarian squints at the poster, makes a frog face, and shakes his head.

I say, “Rooster is slang for male chicken, you know. And slang for rooster is cockerel, but that’s a Britishism. Rooster, on the other hand, is an Americanism. I don’t see any balls on that cock either. Must be a capon. That’s a slang term for castrated rooster, which is to say, castrated cockerel, by which I mean, male chicken who has had his privates yanked off.”

The librarian taps his desk, tentatively, pensively, with a finger. “Are you calling my father a rooster?”

“Rooster?” I think about it. “Do you mean that rooster?”

Confused, the librarian has a nervous breakdown.

He tears off all of his clothes and runs through the stacks and up the stairs and down the stairs and he finds an ax somewhere and knocks over some bookcases and chops up some tables in a Quiet Area and then he gets tired and just kind of curls up and moans for awhile and the police come and leap upon him and put him in a straightjacket and drag him kicking and screaming out of the library.

On Monday, he punches in at 7:59 a.m.