by Doon Arbus
The caretaker summons the courage to tear himself away from this crisis of identities and enters the study. A cloying perfume, the last vestige of the invasion, taints the air, mingling with the smell of stale cigar. He makes a cursory survey of the room. Everything remains more or less as he had arranged it that morning in anticipation of his visitors, but since they had — admittedly by invitation — not merely looked but also touched, objects have shifted slightly or been moved, if only by a fraction of an inch, from their intended positions, and to the eye of the connoisseur this amounts to a state of chaos: he might as well have been contemplating a room turned upside down.
He removes from under his arm the shoes he has been carrying and places them near the hearth beside Dr. Morgan’s embroidered velvet slippers, into which he gingerly insinuates his naked feet. Being some two sizes too large, his feet protrude out the back, squashing down the heels with every step as he shuffles across the carpet to the center casement window behind Morgan’s desk. He turns the handle and — after a bit of effort against the resistance built up for nearly a quarter century that has calcified a desire to remain sealed shut — succeeds in pushing open the reluctant window, admitting a gust of damp night city air along with a small winged creature that circles the room, whining like a miniature helicopter, and then secretes itself behind a book on one of the upper shelves. The room inhales with a gasp, as if it had been holding its breath all these years, thirsting for the relief of a little contamination.
Following this daring act of sacrilege, the caretaker retrieves the stub of his purloined cigar from the ashtray, mouths the tip experimentally before managing to get it lit again, coughs twice, and takes a seat at the desk. Hidden in plain sight among the casually arrayed papers in front of him is a large unsealed, unaddressed manila envelope from which he removes several sheets of pale blue notepaper, yellowing slightly at the edges, and monogrammed — like the breast pocket of the chartreuse shirt he is wearing — with a flamboyant M, embraced on either side by the subservient initials C and A. The top sheet of paper — two thirds of it consumed by the large, loopy script Morgan had set about developing late in life on the advice of his personal graphologist to accentuate certain desirable characteristics latent in his nature — is dated August 29, 1987, and begins as follows:
To my dear wife, to my loyal friends, faithful enemies, and whomever else it may concern,
I am not, as you must know, a superstitious man, but suddenly this afternoon, realizing to my profound astonishment that I have just become the same age my father was the day he died (and despite the fact that I fully intend to do my very best to outlast all of you, if not actually to live forever) as I contemplate the prospect of yet another challenging trip abroad in a few months’ time the pernicious desire
The caretaker takes up the reading glasses lying poised beside the open dictionary and, fitting them onto the bridge of his nose, waggles his head about as he adjusts to the sudden improvement in his vision. He reads on.
the pernicious desire to take stock grows increasingly difficult to suppress. Birthdays will do that to a man sometimes, divert the healthiest of minds down a maze of philosophical blind alleys. Memories invade my dreams. (Or is it the reverse?) Ghosts point fingers.
Here, abruptly, the writing ends. The caretaker takes another tentative puff on the cigar, leans back in his chair, and looks over the top of the rimless glasses, as if contemplating a troublesome spot near the corner of the ceiling. Then, suddenly, in a quick, decisive motion, he snatches up the letter, crumples it into a ball and tosses it toward the middle of the room. This action reveals another, similar sheet of stationery, bearing the identical date. Many of the words are different; the gist, however, is the same.
My dearest Helen,
You have never asked for explanations and I owe you none. We have lived too long in peace through silences, our long judicious silences, and peacefully apart. Why spoil it now merely to put down things you probably already know and might prefer to pretend you didn’t. But tonight for the first time I feel my age (or someone’s age) as a terminal affliction. Am I really now the same age my father was the year he died? Not that I’m a superstitious man (as you know all too well having reserved that part of the equation for yourself) but in the end, whether it be this year, next year, or decades from now, one must eventually surrender the exhilarating burden of a secret life to the ravages of posthumous reputation. At that point, others take charge. Thanks to your proximity, at least in a strictly legal sense, they will surely come to you. They will besiege you with questions to which you have no answers. You will need to be prepared. Be ready to lie and, most of all, to believe in what you say.
Again the letter stops unfinished and this one, too, the caretaker discards in the same manner as the first before reaching for the dried-up fountain pen and refilling it at the inkstand. An unblemished sheet of stationery is now confronting him. He scrutinizes it as if he were reading an invisible message intended for his eyes alone. Rotating his left wrist like an athlete limbering up for some strenuous activity, he begins to write, producing a large voluptuous A followed seamlessly by a few additional flourishes, forming the word August. This proves to be as liberating as if he had suddenly awakened from a spell — or fallen prey to one. All hesitation ceases. The fluency of Morgan’s imperious penmanship takes over:
My one and only Helen (and anyone else who cares, or with whom you choose to share what I’m about to tell),
Not to make too much of the occasion, but on this my 66th birthday, being temporarily afflicted to the point of near incapacity by that old turbulence in the gut (a clash between eagerness and dread, no doubt) which always accompanies the prospect of revisiting the familiar distant place where I must soon once more be going, it may be timely to address the looming question of posterity. After all, it seems I have a reputation to uphold. Or, preferably perhaps, one to destroy. In either case, I fear a great responsibility may one day fall upon your narrow shoulders.
Looking back, which as you know I am always loath to do, and assuming I have what’s called a conscience and that it happened to need clearing up, I could hazard the confessional mode and begin by saying I was responsible for as many as three deaths. That would of necessity include the suicide, although to presume to hold oneself accountable for such an independent solitary act seems an unforgivable affront to the sublime autonomy of the perpetrator and is nothing but sheer megalomania. On the other hand, I did know the boy, there’s no denying that, and merely knowing him all those many years ago, given who I am, may be enough to implicate me in his story if that turned out to be the version he preferred. From time to time of an evening when the work was done we would fall into conversation and explore at length the usual important subjects which were certain to have included thoughts on death because after all, what meaning does life have without it. But that was only words. As to the rest, it is impossible to say at this distance which of us may have been the victim and which of us the predatory innocent. We both survived.
The accident was another matter. That was long before you, back in those dear dark days when, although certainly no minor, I was nonetheless still young enough to be presumed relatively innocent in the eyes of the law and since, contrary to what would have been my preference, an accident of birth had saddled me with all the additional advantages of race and class and gender, not to mention certain innate talents,
He has come to the bottom of the page. He turns it over and continues on the other side. The words inscribed on the front show through the thin blue paper ever so faintly, reversed, illegible, like prescient ghosts as he writes over them.
the random acts of carelessness I happened to commit were usually passed off as mere indiscretions and almost automatically granted absolution. [Such are the indulgences that fail to build character, although an excess of what passes for good fortune isn’t really much of an alibi.]
Up until that night, which wa
s the last time I got behind the wheel of a car, I would have rated myself a pretty decent driver despite a susceptibility to distraction as I navigated my thoughts or my immediate surroundings. At any rate, there was a lot of rain. The neighborhood was unfamiliar. The roads were dark and treacherous. Visibility was poor. The report said so. When some fluttery agitated white thing suddenly shot out of nowhere some hundred feet ahead, looking like a flock of startled birds battering at each other with their wings, there was nothing to be done. Given the speed of the car, the speed of the moving creature and the rapidly shrinking distance between us, contact was inevitable. Besides, before the car could stop, the woman stopped, stood there drenched in her flimsy bathrobe in the road and turned in my direction. Just before impact, my headlights showed her face to me. She was smiling eerily like someone greeting an unexpected but very welcome visitor whom she hadn’t dared to hope to see again. The woman was no stranger. We had been almost friends at school. Logically, of course, the headlights must have been blinding. Still, I can’t help but think she somehow knew that it was me who was about to hit her. She looked content. Maybe she was happy to have found just anyone to do it for her. By the time I managed to reach her after the collision as she lay there crumpled in the road, her left arm outstretched at an impossible angle reaching for something and her face burrowed into the asphalt, a dark stain was oozing out across the dirty wet white cloth beneath her. Of course my mind grasped the horror, but what I saw — there is no euphemistic way to put it — what I saw was beautiful. I mean hopelessly, undeniably, mesmerizingly beautiful. Those are the facts. I can’t help it. No point pretending otherwise. That is who I am.
There was loss of consciousness. Injuries on both sides.
The caretaker takes another sheet of stationery, puts a number 3 in the top left corner and without hesitation continues writing. As he sits hunched over Morgan’s desk, the damp evening air sneaks in the open window, disturbing the hair at the back of his neck like a neglected lover, greedy for attention.
Only hers were fatal, according to the autopsy that is, which determined, in addition to the cause of death, not simply that there were opiates in her system, but that she was also six weeks pregnant. My previous acquaintance with the victim naturally aroused the suspicion of the authorities and complicated matters. I don’t blame them. Had I been drinking (which thanks to some undeserved stroke of luck I hadn’t, because that would have been entirely normal for me at the time) the consequences would undoubtedly have been a lot more serious. As it was, after weighing all the circumstances, the investigation ultimately concluded I was not culpable. One tragic accident. Two dead. In the end, thanks in part to the intervention of my father (with whom I was still on speaking terms) and his powers of persuasion, the record was effectively expunged.
I suppose for the ordinary person, questions of guilt might be expected to arise, but guilt is merely hubris in disguise and exists only to provide the impotent with some pathetic illusion of power, something to hide behind and beg forgiveness for and, in that way, obtain permission to forget. No wonder adolescents wallow in it. For those of us who have befriended chaos and accept how little blame or credit we have any right to claim for what becomes of others (and maybe even of ourselves), guilt is one of the many luxuries we need to have the courage to renounce.
But enough of narrative. Enough of specious explanations. Enough philosophy. Besides, I have undoubtedly done worse. Death is not the only way to wreck a life, as you could probably attest. So much for remorse. And now consider this: what if everything I just confessed never really even happened?
The caretaker, pen at the ready, awaiting further instructions, finds himself once more at a loss for words. Decades of apprenticeship lurk in the wings eager to reward him. He has of course read the journals, all forty-two of them, once straight through from beginning to end over six days during the first phase of his employment, bathing himself in the idiosyncrasies of their syntax until he almost began to mistake it for his own; and then again — in what has cumulatively amounted to a second time — governed by the self-imposed rigorous bedtime ritual that entailed not merely reading each entry, not merely mouthing its words aloud as if he were reciting a catechism, but copying them out, one by one into a set of corresponding journals, reliving the other life as he transcribed it, and inadvertently mimicking in the process the continuous evolution of Morgan’s penmanship. There are two sets of journals now, identical in content, virtually identical in appearance, the existence of each a challenge to the authenticity of the other. Only one has been allowed to remain behind in the guise of the original, locked away inside the cabinet with the leaded glass doors, while its twin, slated for destruction, languishes in a shallow grave at the back of a vacant lot some half a dozen miles away awaiting the inevitability of the unwitting bulldozers that will pulverize its pages and mulch its words into extinction in the sacred name of progress.
Dozens of such unmarked burial plots now punctuate the city, harboring their precious contraband. Several stolen treasures reside in individual sealed containers fathoms deep beneath the indifferent river, which is always moving on; some occupy small crevices in old stone walls while others decay complacently behind the loosened tiles of public urinals or under mounds of garbage in the great municipal dump. The dead letter office in accordance with its duty retains, among the countless other items of undeliverable mail, three unclaimed packages, each wrapped in butcher paper and bearing the handwritten address of somewhere that does not exist, without any indication of where it might have come from. Certain objects lie hidden in plain sight: an engraved gold wedding band lost amid the contents of a thrift shop’s overcrowded jewelry case, a rusty tire iron in the husk of an abandoned burned-out car, an ancient Egyptian coin embedded in a patch of sidewalk. By means of these surreptitious installations, their subversive curator — in a series of unsanctioned expeditions conducted in his free time at odd hours of the day or night over the course of the past decade — has staked his claim. The Morgan seeds are sown. Chance will now be left to govern their fate and determine which, if any, shall find a worthy savior who will help it to bear fruit.
Supporting the weight of his forehead with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand pressed against his temple, the caretaker is studying the page before him, as if hoping to lure from its remaining empty space the blessing of another sentence. History is my religion. I have given it my life, he writes, then with a single line through the middle of the ten words, crosses it out and begins again:
In the wake of any absence, nagging questions will naturally arise. A sudden void aches to be filled. If Nature abhors a vacuum, human nature contrives to find it unendurable, so I believe I do not flatter myself overmuch to presume that sooner or later they will seek you out, the maggots we politely call the writers, the biographers, the critics, journalists, theorists and historians and whatever else they may purport to be, selectively amassing information in support of some predetermined point of view they have already sanctioned as the truth. They will come to you because, in spite of all the people I have known and even loved (recklessly, after my fashion) and the ones who have loved me (occasionally the same people, seldom at the same time) so few real friends remain. You are the best that’s left to tell the tales; you have the best credentials.
Posterity is looming up ahead, ready to assume whatever shape it’s given. You might ask why we should care, we nonbelievers, for whom the end of us might just as well constitute the end of everything. But vanity is made of hardy stuff. Long after the heart quits its incessant pumping, after the blood stops flowing, allowing gravity to have its way, after the brain has managed to forget all it once knew and can forget no more, when the postmortem seizures finally subside and give up simulating life, still the old insatiable helpless homeless ego lingers on in the ether, guarding its exposed flanks against the impending facile summings-up.
So I write to ask you — beg you, if I must — to save m
e. No, not me exactly, for I’ll no longer really matter then, but everything I gave my life to along with the empty shell of the idea of me that bears my name. It will of course take cunning. It will take discipline. You must be willing to relinquish your lifelong infatuation with those curious illusions you mistake for facts and are continually defending against the skeptics. Whatever you may know of me, or think you have surmised, keep to yourself. Allow the thing to flourish while it can, like a precious hothouse plant inside the airless vault of your memory. When they come to pry open your sealed lips with their ingratiating smiles and disarmingly blunt questions, offering you as a bribe whatever they can summon in the way of charm and earnest, witty conversational gambits, seasoned every now and then with unsolicited disclosures to induce you to respond in kind, don’t put up a fight. Feed them everything they want until they choke on it. What they spit out is what the world will swallow.
Of course, as they will surely tell you, they only want to get the story right, but evil is the inevitable firstborn child of that sanctimonious monster known as good intentions and I am no one’s story. So let me be instead the rapist they are looking for, the murderer, the plagiarist, the thief, the fraud. Collaborate. Help them to explain me into nonexistence. Help them make me disappear. Save me by condemnation, obfuscation, misdirection. Lie about me. Indict me. Contradict me. Libel me. Defame me. Slander me. Stigmatize me. Save me from the consuming world. Let me be. Let falsehood be my shroud.
And when at last you weary of deceit and can invent no longer, you have permission to withdraw and abandon them to their agonies of thwarted curiosity. Let them interrogate Stuff for answers if, confusing the accumulation of information with understanding, they think they must know more. It may not be the lurid confession they were hoping for, the secret diary or memoir, or that ever so subtly self-justifying concoction, the autobiography, with its tangle of false leads and failed promises, but everything I am is in there undisguised, apparent to anyone who really wants to see. True, I am nothing but the hapless author of the book; I’m not its subject. And yet that is precisely why, as the servant of a better master than myself, I lie before the reader naked on its pages.