Fact: certain unlucky persons exist as living justifications of those phobias peculiar to mothers. Barry Dingle is such a person. His childhood, his whole life stands darkly informed by Mrs. Dingle's failure ever to be incorrect. Examples range through the history of the man. The tiniest pre-dinner treat does spoil little Barry's appetite. The briefest exposure of his unrubbered Hush Puppies to rain or snow ensures, with mathematical reliability, disease. The dullest of sharp things wounds, the safest of playground games injures, the scantiest inattention to oral hygiene sees the dark time-lapse sprout of an instant caries.
      The Barry Dingle who dislikes drinking milk, avoids it at all costs, does fail to grow up big and strong like his sister, a field-hockey prodigy.
      Also a fact: certain persons, especially mothers, come in time to resemble more and more closely their automobiles. Mrs. Dingle is outdated, rust-chassis'd, loud, disposed to the emission of fumes; she is wide and rides low and has a poor turning radius; but she is ideally suited for the transport of much baggage, and her mileage is phenomenal.
      Picture her, then, entreating the child Barry Dingle never, never ever, to cross his little eyes. She believes, with the complete conviction of the phobic mother, that the child who crosses his eyes Stays That Way. She cajoles, enjoins; the indoctrination's movement is as broad and slow and irresistible as the Dingles' station wagon. The orientation of his eyes becomes for the little Dingle an object of black fascination. He dreams, in the night's dark part, of his eyes crossing by accident, their paths never again to diverge. He avoids sighting on any but the stablest objects. He resists the natural urge of the child to look down at his own nose. With Mrs. Dingle riding herd on their mutual neurosis, Dingle treasures the clean binocularity of his sight like a never-miss aggie. He makes it through fifteen years of exquisite temptation without so much as a retinal wobble.
      Fact to be feared: the rebelliousness of fearful youth, no matter how momentary, can itself be a fearful thing. On 15 June 1961, Troy, New York, enraged by the imposition of a domestic sanction soon lost to memory, Barry Dingle stands before his mother in the warm checker-tiled Dingle kitchen and gives in to the terrifying, wonderful temptation of the ultimate transgression against natural and maternal law. The cross is delicious; his eyes roll toward each other with the sweet release of catharsis long delayed. Two Mrs. Dingles scream and raise four arms skyward, pleading for intercession against the inevitable....
      Cross-eyed Barry is shunted from specialist to specialist. As Mrs. Dingle tearfully predicts, they are powerless to help. For six binary, true-and-false-filled months Dingle veers, bumbles, bumps his way through the doubled system of pecatum and punishment he has wrought. Finally, December, Buffalo, an optician at technology's cutting edge fits Dingle with an elaborate pair of glasses -- thick angled lenses that catch and reorganize the disordered doubleness of things into a unity that fuses at a focused point several yards in front of Barry's own ruined apparatus. Relief is purchased, at a cost: the glasses work, unify, but objects for a bespectacled Barry now appear always twice as far away as they in fact are. Smaller, more distant. So that for twenty years Dingle has chosen minute by minute between doubleness and distance, between there being, for him, exactly twice or exactly half as much as there really is.
      The point here being that a key ingredient of Myrnaloy's allure for Barry Dingle, and an irreducible constant in the sensuous half-equation whose sum is the immoderate love that even now makes its move for control of Barry Dingle's present and future, is the fact that Myrnaloy must always remain either fundamentally distant from Dingle, or else doubled, and so unreal, for him. Meaning that the 'real' Myrnaloy Trask is for Dingle not even a possibility: he is in the (not unenviable?) position of a man able to want without the disturbing option of ever truly being able to have. Hence a classic, almost classically static romanticism as fundament, primal element, precondition for the very experience of being B. Dingle.
      Additional fact: Mrs. Dingle predicts, long ago, over vermouth, that love will someday make Barry Dingle hideously, hideously unhappy. This too is come. Dingle is, as it were, beside himself, in a state of utter emotional flux whereby up and down, good and bad are as indistinguishable as right and left. Here, though, it is necessary to distinguish between the happiness of Barry Dingle and the happiness of his interior homunculoid love. Barry Dingle's immoderate love is itself happy as a clam. It thrives, grows, gets off on the existence of a telos at once right next door and horizon-distant, at once really one and apparently two -- in short, of a love-object invested with all the flected ambiguity that makes Romance itself possible.
      But one last fact: Barry Dingle's love is nonetheless a human love. With the illogic that defines all autonomous but entombed emotional humunculoids, Dingle's immoderate love is possessed of a desire for the attainment of the very love-object whose fundamental unattainability is that love's animating breath and bread. It is by nature dissatisfied; and that dissatisfaction is, via the hermeneutic circle of love's illogic, its life and mission. It needs Barry Dingle to appropriate, possess, use and encompass Myrnaloy Trask. It harbors in its doll's heart a desire for a strong new Dingle shell, the outward instantiation of an immoderate inner force. It envisions Dingle capturing Myrnaloy's heart and fashioning inside her a demure-calved homunculoid of her own, a love for Barry Dingle that will, in the union of Dingle and Trask, merge with the homunculoids themselves and render them complete (i.e., no longer animate, inside). A genuinely human emotional armillary, Dingle's immoderate love's life strains ever forward toward the death that love's life loves.
      Think of it this way, Dingle, says Dingle's love as Dingle inventories herbal teas on a May afternoon, 1983. Think of your love as being by nature an incomplete, questing thing. I was born in you half a love. My end is the unity I am by definition denied.
      Dingle is silent over ginseng and camomile.
      The homunculoid taps its foot patiently. The point, it says, is that I've got a nature to be true to, just like you. I'm compelled by this nature to spend my time, therefore our time, questing and striving for my other half. This is so, no matter how much you buck and snort. Think of me as a chivalric knight, you as my dragon. And obversely. Each other's torments, but also our salvations.
      Salvations? Dingle says. Dragons?
      You give birth to a love in Myrnaloy Trask; she forms her own half-a-love homunculoid, curved, gentle, round-faced, doll's eyes that open with the pull of a heartstring, concave where I am convex. You do such a thing; Myrnaloy gives birth; her half-a-love and I get together; I leave you in peace. Everybody's a winner. Verstehen-Sie?
      And the toe-problem? whispers Dingle, biting a cracked lip.
      Your toes are once again your own psyche's own, says Dingle's love, making its presence felt with a playful twinge in one red Dingle digit.
      The fact of the May '83 matter here is that Dingle's love, as of some six weeks past, has decided to play psychic hardball. It has moved to consolidate its authority over Barry Dingle by focusing its attention and influence on Dingle's most vulnerable parts. Here these parts are due south of even the most sensitive dangling chinks in most men's armor. They are the tortured ingrown toenails of Barry Dingle. (Possibly worth noting here that Mrs. Dingle was and is a fanatic on the subject of foot care.) Barry Dingle's love is using the curved culcates of Dingle's nails, together with the tender genital/emotional complex that birthed the immoderate homunculoid in the first place, to force an intrinsically passive Dingle toward some decisive romantic action.
      Love has turned the order of Barry Dingle's life into flux; Dingle is now at war with himself; divided; schismed; finally wounded, behind the lines.
      Yes cross-eyed Barry, thirty-five, perennial wearer of leather sandals, bell-bottoms, and Central American ponchos, high of forehead, long of incisor, thick of spectacle, is in possession of 2 (two) feet presently in torment from the negative-reinforcement regimen of his immoderate love. Since adolescence (specific moment of origin coincident with that of the optical transgression), the toes have detracted from Dingle's quality of life: corticate yellow nails curving in of themselves, sinking into the tender meat of his red toes, the toes taking turns at self-harm, swelling, shining with erumpent infection, to say nothing of pain. Dingle, of routine, takes all possible preventive steps. He trims the nails daily, paring them straight across, leaving perfect planks of protruding cartilage into the corners of which each morning he tucks tiny cotton pellets soaked in camphor and oil of clove. Sandals, affording the toes movement, oxygen, freedom from pressure, are worn at all times. In cold seasons Dingle even forfeits the privilege ever of being taken seriously as a person: he wears sandals with socks.
      Now for naught: B. Dingle is literally staggering under the incurving influence of his immoderate love for Myrnaloy Trask. The love, from its central facility in Dingle's clean red heart, now commutes daily south to an annex in Dingle's clawlike nails, from which annex it makes its presence, wishes and directives acutely known. The campaign is insidiously subtle, the pain carefully gauged to impel cooperation without ever quite causing incapacitation. Barry Dingle's love begins moving against his feet in April 1983. By June, Dingle knows something must be done. Myrnaloy Trask must somehow be appropriated, Dingle's cherry-colored homunculoid completed, sated, silenced. The love has worn Dingle down -- two years of flux and now two months of rampant ingrowth: his tortured feet, his keening heart the disorder and disruption of the neutral Dingle equation are driving Dingle quietly toward breakdown and tilted stasis.
      Cf he has become unable to concentrate at work. He becomes lax, his employees demoralized, intransigent, carbohydrated. The owner of the whole The Whole Thing chain pays a personal visit, 2 June, to the Northampton franchise. He takes a significant look at Dingle's blackly circled cross-eyes, his well-chewed lip, his obscenely swollen feet. The owner straightens his suede vest and fingers his Scientology medallion. He advises Dingle in no uncertain terms that he, the owner, knows that things here at the Northampton facility are on the decline. That sales have been slipping, that freshness is on occasion being compromised, that TWT's employees, not to mention Northampton's health-rabid customers, are losing a focus for their nutritional vision. Even the bran, he says pointedly, though not without a smile at his own wit, lately isn't moving like it should. He asks Dingle what he'd do, in the owner's place, here. Dingle's love, from deep inside him, puts in its own two cent's worth -- an electric thrill of pediatric pain. A pale Dingle removes his glasses, sets his jaw. He reassures the twin images of the owner. Things will turn around. The store will soon be back on its feet. Seven years of careful management; passionate devotion to the marketing of health; the dingy Good Things no competition: he waxes briefly eloquent, an aggressive sincerity that surprises the owner and distracts even the bloated TWT employees from their game of rummy. The owner eventually nods, acquiesces, checks his sundial and makes for the glass doors, leaving in his cinnamon-scented wake a system of insinuations that both reaffirm and cast doubt on his faith in Barry Dingle. The store is silent; a halted bus motor can be heard at the traffic light.
      For two unprecedented sick-days Dingle stays home, brooding, his feet in hot salt water and eucalyptus. Nigel, the assistant manager, temporarily assumes The Whole Thing's helm. Dingle communes with his love. With himself.
      The result of which is the prenominate realization that something must change, coupled with a robust new determination really, truly, finally to act. After two days (date now 6 June 1983), Dingle leaves his bath, returns to TWT's many windows, and resolves, with a coldly febrile set to his tall forehead, to set his unsteady sights on the distant Trask and to bring her, by fair means or otherwise, swimming into his romantic ken. His homunculoid love smells the metal smell of strength in Dingle's blood, and approves it. It loosens the grip of Dingle's own nails just a bit. It encourages Dingle, exhorts, plays interior good-cop bad-cop, says it discerns in him a nascent newness, a courage,
      Courage! says Dingle's homunculoid love,
defining the term in Gothic script on Dingle's heart as a willingness to bring the comfortably distant into a unified proximity, to risk stasis as completion. The words pump against the fishwhite skin of Dingle's shallow chest and appear on his body in faint pink calligraphy. Dingle reads himself double in the night's salty bath. Touches the blurred words.

For more sections of "Order and Flux in Northampton," click here.