Enumerating

Aimee Bender's terminal world

by Camille Dodero

AN INVISIBLE SIGN OF MY OWN. By Aimee Bender. Doubleday, 262 pages, $22.95.

In the world according to Aimee Bender, we are all terminal cases. Take pensive Ben, the moribund focus of Bender's "The Rememberer" (from her 1998 short-story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt), whose Mr. Limpet-like bout with "reverse evolution" sees him regress from human to sea turtle to salamander. Or married Mary from Bender's short story "What You Left in the Ditch," who loses that lovin' feeling for her husband after he returns home from a war missing his lips. Or laconic Mona, the 20-year-old narrator of Bender's first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own, who's so consumed by quitting ("I am in love with stopping," she professes in the first chapter) that she'll stop anything -- piano playing, running, even sex -- the moment it crackles with passion. If you're wondering whether Bender skimmed the mutated gene pools of Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos or Twilight Zone: The Movie for her characters' chromosomes, you're right about one thing: she celebrates deformities as much as she lionizes terminal cases. And in An Invisible Sign of My Own, deformity and terminality are one and the same.

Mona Gray, an emotionally mewed-up Rapunzel, started practicing the "fine art" of quitting at the sprightly age of 10, when her lively, ebullient father fell victim to some weird, undiagnosable illness. Ten years later, her wan dad hasn't died, exactly, but his essence has withered. And his invalidism has condemned Mona's mother to a hapless fate straight outta Waiting for Guffman: she runs their small, nameless town's tourist office yet hasn't crossed the burg's borders in more than 10 years.

Meanwhile, the one thing Mona can't swear off is math. Prime numbers, geometric proofs, and quadratic equations serve as her mental health, distracting her from her father's murky malady and enabling her to reclaim the stability that's eluded her since his decline. So when her numerophilia lands her a job as an elementary-school math teacher, her first stab at spreading her affectation for numeration is to assign the mathematical equivalent of "Show and Tell" (it's called "Numbers and Materials") to her second-graders. Sounds simple: a kiddie trots in an object that resembles a digit, the class uses that number to practice subtraction, and everyone's temporarily occupied. Well, with the hospital-habitating daughter of an eye-cancer patient and the son of an amputee in the fold, the materials proffered are things like an IV tube (it's supposed to be a "0"), a piece of meat (shaped like a "5"), and a severed arm (the number "1").

As with most of Bender's stories, An Invisible Sign of My Own's provocative first sentence grabs you by the neck like a noose and then drops you: "On my twentieth birthday, I bought myself an ax." Scribbled by a pop-ghoulie-writer (i.e., King or Koontz), such a declaration would bleed like a staged beheading. But here it's deadpanned, plainly stated like a black-and-white panel from an Edward Gorey storyboard. (Mona procured the ax because it looked like a 7.)

Bender also shares Gorey's ability to sketch an unassuming face onto blatantly bizarre, somewhat sanguinary circumstances -- while making them darkly funny. As when class participation during a lesson on "Greater Than and Less Than" has Mona's chalkboard wearing "BLOODY MURDER>War>Sick>Car Crash" and a student squealing, "Bloody Murder wins first place!" Or when one of Mona's science-teaching colleagues (and an eventual love interest) has his learners publicly pretending to suffer from scurvy, croup, and cancer because "It helps them understand the symptoms for our Health segment." Or when that same instructor's experiment in controlled plant growth has half the class speaking "kindly" to houseplants and the other half sputtering profanities -- that is, "until Mimi Lunelle's mother found her daughter telling the bathroom fern it was a shame on the family's name and to fucking go to bed thirsty."

By society's standards, Mona is weird. She hangs the ax on her classroom wall, she stuffs soap in her mouth to suppress tingles of sensuality, and she knocks on wood in the same sly way adults pick their noses. But so is everyone else in this Sesame Street episode as scripted by Harmony Korine. "Growing up, I knew those skin-disease photographs by heart," Mona remembers after visiting a student's terminally ill parent. "Every time the page opened to a person covered in warts, arms so swollen they looked like overstuffed furniture, dot-to-dot faces, breasts lost among larger hives, genital catastrophes, each time I looked I felt the same rush. My friends screamed and ran from the room, but I stayed put. Brought my lips to the page."

Okay, Mona's very weird. But by the literary standards of John Irving's The World According to Garp or even Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, she's an allegorical anti-heroine, a masterfully exaggerated case of compulsion and confusion poised to accentuate humanity's eccentricities. She's an endearingly innocent product of a long line of terminal cases -- which, in turn, makes her a terminal case. And in Bender's world, so are we.