After a day or two in my apartment, I realized she was starving. She couldn’t eat anything; anything the least bit solid seemed to cut right through her. I concocted one gruel after another that she wouldn’t eat because it hurt too much, and no amount of badgering on my part could force her. When she wasn’t sleeping she was bent in pain, a terrified look in her eyes, and when she did finally fall asleep, the pain woke her up. “What’s wrong with me?” she cried. For days this went on, and I got it into my head that one last No from those first days at the Seacastle, one last No that had been hiding up inside her that she had never released, was devouring her from the inside out. …
Finally, though, after time, the general sense of crisis began to pass. Finally the rains stopped as unequivocally as they had begun; down the hall Ventura appeared to survive, at least for the time being, the creamy blood frothing in his veins. Perhaps there was nothing left of Viv for the No to consume, and so it was the No that starved, wasting away; perhaps a predatory doubt inside her had evolved into a winged resolution that was suddenly poised to take flight. After a week of my pabulum she slowly graduated to hot cereal, mashed potatoes, rice and bread and ice cream. Still exhausted she slept all day and night, and in the new sunlight through the window she looked about six or seven years old. Viv always hated it when people told her she sometimes looked like a little girl; but sitting in the corner of my bedroom watching her sleep, I was surprised by a momentary desire to have a daughter someday, if only she would look just like Viv. Then one afternoon she sat right up in my bed from out of her sleep, as if from out of a dream. “I have to go to Holland,” she announced. It was the first fully coherent sentence she had said in a week.
“Holland?” I stood by the bed looking down at her, and put my hands in my pockets, not sure what else to do with them. If I were to have put them on her, it might have been mistaken as an attempt to restrain or suppress something. My heart sagged like a ceiling full of rain.
“To build the other Memoryscope,” she explained.
“Why Holland?”
“Because that’s where the one here is pointed.”
“How do you know?”
“I dreamed it,” she said. I nodded. We could pull out a map and check; but what was the point? I had no doubt that any map would say Holland as certainly as her dream did. “So I have to go to Holland,” she said, “to build another one, pointing back.”
I sat down on the bed beside her.
“Come with me,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“It seems,” she said, “like you should know.”
“Yes, it does.”
“But you don’t. So you can’t.”
“Not yet, anyway. Something’s not finished here for me.”
“What?”
“Well,” I tried to smile, “that’s what I don’t know.”
“So how long do you have to stay here before it’s finished?” and then, irritated, she answered herself, “I know, you don’t know that either. You don’t know anything.”
“I don’t want to lose you,” was all I could think to say.
She asked, “Do you believe, after all your disastrous romances, that you’re capable of loving deeply?”
“Yes. Maybe more,” I answered, though I didn’t want to have to explain that, because I wasn’t sure I could.
She seemed unconvinced. “I need your undying passion, like you had for Sally and Lauren.”
“You make me happy.”
“That’s not the same as undying passion,” she said, and I couldn’t think fast enough to explain that while my passion for Sally or Lauren might have been undying, the man who felt those particular passions had died, and that while I bore him a resemblance, I was different, and that the passion I felt for Viv was a new kind of undying passion, of a new man, and that it was better because she was better, because I trusted her in a way I could never trust anyone else. I remembered a night she had come to me, long ago, in our early days when I was at my most mute and we weren’t really getting along; it was late one night, and early in the morning Viv had to catch a train out of town—a business trip or family visit, I don’t remember, or maybe one of those little Viv impulses that was going to take her wherever she happened to wind up, Butte or Madagascar or Holland. On this night I had one of my headaches, and she sat in the dark stroking my brow till I fell asleep. There are a few things I know I’ll remember at the end of my life. Some of them may be things I would as soon forget, things so small they should have been forgotten a long time ago, but so sharp they can’t be; others are things like Viv exhausted, sitting in the dark for hours on end stroking my brow until I fell asleep. She probably doesn’t think twice about it now. She’s probably forgotten it completely. But I think about it all the time, every time my head feels like it’s splitting down the middle: it is the soothing touch of trust and forgiveness; and if any other woman has ever touched me like that, and in retrospect I can imagine one or two might have, I was neither smart nor old nor unselfish enough to recognize it. Thinking back on it, it makes me ashamed to have ever suggested that a woman wouldn’t die for love.
Right before Viv left for Holland came K’s most recent correspondence. Now, you understand I don’t necessarily cop to everything K has to say; she has only seen the secret room, after all, and the literary one I suppose, so her perspective must be considered accordingly. But after copping to everything else, I don’t have much reason to conceal anything anymore: “S, I fell into a river of thought about you this morning, and this is the current I fell into. … Your sense of love is overwhelming and imprisoning. You contrive both release and relief from it, which then makes you feel guilty. Then you suffer for your guilt, but it’s preferable to the suffering of a great love. You are powerless in the throes of a great love so you’re compelled to assert yourself in various ways, eventually gaining your freedom. The price of freedom is guilt. The price of love is guilt. The pain of separation is preferable to the stress of obsession. You’re possessed and obsessed until you break away—so, from feeling powerless and resentful, you gain a sense of mastery and control through domination and bondage. But conversely it’s her love that dominates and binds you. Love courses through you with such intensity (you may laugh) that you rebel against it, and against the feeling of being controlled by something or someone else. In one way or another you are going to free yourself, in order to feel that you’re not powerless. So you’ll force yourself on her and derive satisfaction from it, and when you try to subdue her, you’re trying to subdue that which subdues you; but you are really the one you’re subduing. … Pretty good for a Saturday morning, don’t you think?”
God, I can’t stand it.
I can’t stand that she had to go. After she told me she was going, she was angry, I think; I was not; and she was angry, I think, because I was not, not to mention that I wasn’t going with her and couldn’t offer a good reason why, even as I could have offered a hundred good reasons why I should. We didn’t talk about it after that. We didn’t talk about anything. In the void of our talk I thought furiously, to formulate a reason that we could talk about, but I couldn’t think of any that counted. Over the next couple of weeks, as she prepared to go, the sun hurtled toward L.A., to fill the hole in the sky where the rain used to be. The city became a swamp. Buildings buckled and roads turned to glue. Fauna grew from the Hamblin floors and walls; toadstools erupted from the cracks of my baseboards and lichen layered the ceiling. A radiant red moss covered my windowsills and strange mounds rose beneath my carpet. I weeded the kitchen and pruned the bathroom, and hacked my way to the refrigerator with a knife. Sometime during the night before she left, I finally got angry but I didn’t know at what; I had been getting angry a lot lately without knowing why. Nothing had broken the silence between Viv and me through all the recent weeks, or through the night before her departure; and even after I got angry it could not break through the silenc
e of the drive to Union Station to catch her train to St. Louis, where she would then catch a plane to Europe. Even walking to the train there was nothing I could think to say that was worth breaking the silence for: the small talk in my head only felt like it would trivialize everything we felt and everything we held back. I kept wishing she would tell me again I wasn’t such a bad guy after all. On the train we found her compartment and I helped her with the luggage; she was still a bit weak. And then, all I could finally say was, “God, I can’t stand it,” and she looked at me with the hope there was more. And there was more, and I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t just now, just yet.
She threw her arms around my neck. She pulled her face to mine, and put her little mouth to my ear. “I’m still so hungry for you,” was the last thing she whispered, before she disappeared like a ghost of the Seacastle, who had stepped from the shadows just long enough to show me not who I was but who I could be, before she stepped back.
The day after Viv left, Shale called with the news that Freud N. Johnson had finally fired him.
He was quite calm about it, which is not quite to say passive. As usual, he seemed most concerned about how to prepare the staff for the news; he had already told both Dr. Billy and Ventura, and asked that I not say anything to anyone else for twenty-four hours, until the firing became effective. “I know,” he concluded, “that this doesn’t come at an easy time for you. I don’t want you to do anything stupid. There’s absolutely nothing you have to prove to me.” Of course, I muttered. I hung up the phone and typed up my resignation. I waited for Ventura to call, which he did, and then Dr. Billy; both asked what I was going to do, just to make sure, I guess.
I didn’t presume anything of anyone else. I was close to broke, but my circumstances were no more dire than others’: Dr. Billy’s dead millionaire money ran out some time ago, and he hadn’t been able to get his latest documentary about sex addicts in Anchorage off the ground. No one had more at stake than Ventura, who confided he was deeply in debt. As Ventura suspected might happen, Freud N. Johnson did offer him the editorship of the newspaper; thus he was confronted with a choice between destitution and not only security but something that I think had always represented to him a secret dream, to run the paper he had started. I don’t think Ventura had ever given up on that dream. He always thought it was really his newspaper and, in a way, he had always been right. Now the tone of his voice was both funereal and charged, or whatever pitch suits the man who has to decide between having everything and having nothing, and finds for vague, almost inexplicably moral reasons that what should be the easiest decision in the world is the hardest.
By that evening the rumors were rampant. Around midnight the noir blonde from the advertising department called almost giddy with excitement; I finally hung up on her, because she was just enjoying the whole thing too damn much. The next morning it became official, and I got ready to head down to the newspaper. More than just wanting to get it over with, I also didn’t want anyone to think I had wavered, and I suppose it’s possible, though I honestly don’t think so, that I didn’t want to waver on my own account either. The Hamblin was in full bloom this morning, the sun blasting in through the hole in the hallway ceiling where the rain had collapsed; exotic vines wound up out of the elevator shaft. Ventura was strolling up and down the hallway lost in thought, his hands in his pockets. I told him I was heading down to the newspaper. It wasn’t until then I was completely sure what his decision was; he said Dr. Billy was on his way over and I should wait and they would go with me. Billy had phoned this morning, Ventura said, “wanting to know if we would be quitting if you weren’t.” Obviously I didn’t have an answer for that. Half an hour later Dr. Billy showed up, and for a while we stood around looking at each other in the hallway before Ventura said, “Let’s go.” The newspaper office was in a tizzy by the time we got there. The official word was now definitely out. I didn’t feel like talking to a lot of people about it, holding their hands and repeating ad nauseam my little speech about how everyone had to make his or her own decision. I certainly wasn’t going to try and rouse the rabble. I wanted to get in and get out. The three of us confronted Freud N. Johnson in his office with our resignations. His face went a distinctly sick shade of pale when we walked in. He sat behind a huge gleaming black desk that appeared to have been chosen both to assert his importance and protect him from moments just like this one, and on top of this mammoth desk was absolutely nothing but a digital clock and a video entitled How to Fire People. After a while he couldn’t bear sitting any longer, so he stood up. We didn’t beat about the bush. I had no illusions about the impact of my own leaving; of the three of us I knew I’d be the least missed. Dr. Billy was a much bigger blow, to both the paper and the staff, not only because of his popularity but because his departure dramatically contradicted what some might have misperceived as a survivalist’s amorality about office politics. It was Ventura’s loss, however, that the paper would find especially devastating, not to mention extremely inconvenient for Freud N. Johnson to try and explain, since the paper was not only losing a prospective editor but its most famous and mythic figure. So now Johnson was too shocked to say much, and while it surprised me at the time, in retrospect it’s entirely predictable that his main concern was not trying to talk us out of quitting, or making sure others didn’t quit, but preempting whatever bad publicity might come out of the whole thing. He tried a bit of strong-arming that was frankly beyond him. If there was any trouble about all this, he warned, he would put out any number of stories about Shale: embezzlement perhaps—his mind was whirring like a little wheel with a rodent inside, racing in place—or harassing female employees.
“You try that,” Dr. Billy said, stepping up to Johnson around the desk and pressing his nose inches from the other man’s, “and I will come back, and find you, and get you.”
“Wh-Wh-What?” Johnson croaked.
“I said,” Dr. Billy repeated very calmly, “that if you try that, I will get you.” I don’t know exactly what he meant, and I’d bet almost anything Dr. Billy didn’t know either. But that didn’t matter. None of us had ever seen Dr. Billy do anything like this, and it was a little frightening, every bit of his affability falling away to reveal a livid core—to which the color of Freud N. Johnson’s face went from ill to cadaverous. If I had tried to threaten Johnson in this way, it wasn’t likely anyone would have taken it very seriously, including Johnson, and if Ventura had done it, well, Ventura was crazy enough that while everyone would have taken it seriously, no one would have been shocked by it. Moreover, Ventura was taller than Johnson, and I was taller yet, and it would have been different for Johnson to be threatened by a taller man: it might have allowed him the luxury of seeing himself as a sympathetic figure, being bullied. But Dr. Billy was looking right into Johnson’s eyes and Johnson was looking right into his, and in this moment Johnson was having one of the few true epiphanies of his life, one of the few true moments of clarity where he actually understood something profound, which was that Dr. Billy O’Forte could be a foot shorter and he would always be a big man, and Freud N. Johnson could be a foot taller and he would always be a little man. And that realization was almost too much for him; I wouldn’t have been surprised at that moment if he’d run howling from his office out into the street and thrown himself in front of a truck, if only he had the self-respect to do it. Instead he cowered and fell back into his chair, far below Dr. Billy’s gaze, at a height that suited him all the better, and said, “I want you to know I respect you for feeling that way. I want to thank you for telling me that, and I want you to know how much I respect that you said it.” The next day he would call Dr. Billy again, just to make sure Dr. Billy understood how much Freud N. Johnson respected Dr. Billy for having told him that he would come and get him.
To their credit, in the next twenty-four hours two other writers quit as well. They included an English woman who had just passed up a couple of other job offers the previous month, including a teaching
position and a big-time gig at a newspaper in Chicago; and a guy who had just closed out his house with his wife and packed everything they owned off to Washington, D.C., contingent on an arrangement with the newspaper that he would continue to write from the East Coast as a staff writer. Without thinking about it ten seconds he quit anyway, he and his wife last seen driving off into uncertainty, neither prospects nor steady income anywhere in sight. I suppose in these situations you can always figure there will be people who, with the least leeway possible, will take a principled position anyway. Back at the suite, the messages came in on my phone machine over the next forty-eight hours. There was one from the noir blonde, apologizing for the conversation the night before, and as the news filtered out—like I’ve said, people three thousand miles away find out what’s going on in L.A. before anyone here does—writers and journalists from other newspapers and magazines called to get the story. Those were the tedious messages, which I nonetheless returned. Much better were the outbursts from others on the paper’s staff, a rare few of which were mature and consoling and regretful, most of which were frantic and resentful. “You’ve abandoned us,” angrily sobbed one woman. Seethed another, “You’re so lucky you could quit.” There apparently seemed to be a general feeling among the staff that those of us who quit didn’t really need these jobs, but worked at the paper as some sort of hobby. Over the coming days my machine recorded many more wails of woe about how terrible it was to have to still work at the paper, as well as expressions of alarm when it came to light that Shale had actually saved the jobs of a number of people that office gossip had it he was trying to get fired. I have to admit I had quite a good time with all these messages. I drove around the city playing them over and over on my car stereo, a long symphony of collective sniveling so rapturously shameless it verged on the transcendent. There was a genius about it, really, the way the kids had managed to turn themselves into the martyrs and still collect their paychecks. It seemed rather dim of Ventura and Dr. Billy and me that we hadn’t thought of it.
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