After James

by Michael Helm

  Pasolini. Dominic had once told me to read “The Religion of My Time” but I saw nothing much in it, at least in translation. I’d seen a few of his films and forgotten them. It was the facts of his life that I remembered. Before the future antifascist was born, his father had captured the fifteen-year-old who’d attempted to assassinate Mussolini, and the kid was lynched on the spot. As a soldier in the Second World War, Pasolini was taken prisoner by the Germans but escaped disguised as a peasant. Later he lost a teaching job and his place in a regional Communist party to charges of public indecency and corrupting youth, a charge (maybe warranted) against poets from Socrates onward, and he moved with his mother to Rome. In time he became Pasolini, neorealist; proponent of “contamination,” the conjoining of the sacred and profane; atheist lover of Christ the revolutionary; defender of the proletariat, though his films spoke only to the educated elite. He kept getting hauled off to court, a true provocateur. (Like Socrates. And—why did I know this stuff?—even more like Apollinaire, another poet, novelist, dramatist, intellectual of a sort, who was born in Rome, moved to France, caused trouble, and was once accused by police of stealing the Mona Lisa ((begun in Italy, finished in France)). As Pasolini had been a soldier in the Second World War, Apollinaire was a combatant in the first. A year before Mussolini received almost exactly the same wound, an exploding shell drove shrapnel into Apollinaire’s forehead, though he survived. In that same year, 1916, he published Le poète assassiné. The Poet Assassinated.)

  These goddamn cha-chas. My father thought my memory was a curse.

  The Pantheon wasn’t far. There was time to walk there. I set out, in hopes that I’d misread the entry, and decided I could live a satisfactory life never knowing whom I had chased that afternoon, as long as it was a long life. I pictured this life as a clean line extending before me the length of the street and to the horizon, which I couldn’t, in fact, see, falling into the earth’s curve along a bending plane true to some mathematically sound aspect of space and gravity. It was drawing me, the clarity of this line, drawing me along the streets, down Marzio to the Obelisk of Montecitorio, with its bronze ball and spike, a sundial, which I must have seen on my first visit, though I recalled it not at all, and along to Via dei Pastini, where I took a hard right and had to imagine the line doing so as well, to the Piazza della Rotonda and the thing itself, the Pantheon. The great assertion of balance, of classical proportions, of the very shape my mind would normally assume after one of its spells. The line ran straight through the high doors.

  I crossed the crowded piazza and passed through the grand portico, into the murmuring geometries of the ancient space. Of course it was full of tourists wearing knapsacks, taking pictures with cellphones, as it had been when I’d first visited, and I longed now as I had then to experience the place in silence. All was echo. The babble sharpened my unease that I was about to meet Voth, or maybe that, amid all of these people, I might miss him and have to face the threatened consequences. I looked for the shirt, the collar, the general impression his face had made. I reasoned that, to be seen, he would stand in the least crowded area of the floor. The humanity was thickest around Raphael’s tomb. I looked elsewhere, kept my eyes on those not in groups and not staring up fixed by the two panels of the dome illuminated by what seemed especially intense sunlight coming through the oculus, and for a moment I myself was unable to look away from the brilliant plate of light. From nowhere came to mind lines from the cryptic anti-Semite Ezra Pound: “But that the child/walk in peace in her basilica,/The light there almost solid.” The child was the daughter he had fathered with his lover and more or less abandoned to poverty. Pound had ended up like Bobby Fischer, raving against Jews and his president. But I could feel that the light surpassed the hate and madness, surpassed all poison. The light was sound.

  Who here, if anyone, was alone and looking nowhere, or searching the crowd as I was? There were two or three dozen seated on the long wooden pews, their backs to me. At first I missed him. Then, scanning again, I realized he must be the man with his arms outstretched along the back of a bench. His shoulders pushed his shirt up into folds that obscured the collar, but this was him, surely. In one hand he held a paper or pamphlet.

  Before I could approach he was standing and in motion, his back still to me as he stepped into the throng. I kept my eyes on him and began forward. He had channelled into a slow counterclockwise flow. I reckoned I could intercept him and started away upon the angle. Though still at a distance, he was almost in profile when I plowed over the little boy. I felt him against my hip and then looked down just as he bounced to the floor on his bottom. He wore short pants, brown, and an odd cloth cap that made him seem older than the five- or six-year-old he was. We were looking at each other with equal surprise when his face began to crumple into what obviously would become in moments a wail. And yet when I squatted down to him and said I was sorry, the sound of my voice seemed to stop him. Maybe he didn’t speak English and found the experience of being addressed nonsensically too interesting to eclipse. In any case, when I smiled, he assented to do so, too. It wasn’t clear to whom he belonged. I helped him to his feet and now he was looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw that he was staring up at the circle of light on the dome. “Beautiful,” I said. And he said, in some Germanic tongue, what sounded like “Gott in heaven.” Then, with no note of hurt or embarrassment, he toddled off toward Raphael and stood at the legs of a young couple who must have assumed he’d been by their side the whole time. The woman dropped her hand and felt for his head and hat absently, her eyes steady on a gesturing tour guide.

  The episode had taken less than a minute but when I turned to look for Voth he had disappeared. I paused on each face but he was nowhere. I let the crowd move around me in its circles and eddies and was suddenly overcome with inspiration or light-headedness. In the second-row pew I found the paper he’d been holding. It was the information flyer from the Keats House, with the young poet’s likeness badly hand-drawn on the cover. Inside was printed Keats’s last letter, written as he was dying to his friend Charles Brown. “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.” He writes of finding it emotionally difficult to read or write. “Yet I ride the little horse,—and, at my worst, even in Quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life.” I pictured him in his bed, writing, dying, punning for his life.

  My hip retained the sense memory where it had knocked up against the little boy. I could handle a few blind-side collisions, I reasoned. In this one I’d lost track of Voth, or whoever he was, but it was the little boy, now gone, whose absence I felt. It hit me, under that beautiful light, with something like shock.

  —

  Now and then we find ourselves in story. Events, some of them causally connected, begin to seem inevitable. Their presentation becomes distinct. Maybe a theme emerges. But because life is not literature, we drop out of the story before it ends.

  The next morning I sat in my patio chair, sipping coffee, scanning the intersection of small streets for Voth. It seemed obvious from the perspective of a new day that the man hadn’t actually been following me. Suppose he was alarmed when he saw me following him and so evaded me on the Spanish Steps. Suppose it was a coincidence, hardly inexplicable, that I’d seen him in two tourist destinations on the same afternoon. The idea of his having been a significant stranger struck me now as ridiculous. Would the face keep repeating if I was looking for it? In memory, the passing faces, like the patios, all looked much the same.

  My phone buzzed on the iron table. Amanda’s text: “hope you’ve read the letter. now see Streams, posted last night @ 3 Shts. Drnt just called to say the dream in the poem is his daughter’s.” Half a minute later she sent a second text: “meet me tonight at the fountain of piazza di santa maria. trastevere. 8:10.”

  I called up Three Sheets and read the new poem.

  Streams

  One afternoon
, more than a year

  ago now, the physical world

  opened in that familiar

  astonishment for what I knew

  even then would be the last time.

  Growing old is not a diminishment

  but a closer knowledge of streams,

  then the returns

  of moments now undressed.

  Afterward she talked of a dream

  she’d had of a city Marseille

  and not Marseille. A skulking dog

  she followed in a port slum street.

  They always know more than they’re saying,

  she said, meaning dogs, but only a

  little more. She said for striking

  you cannot beat

  the eyes of a certain North African man.

  I said I’d never been to Marseille

  or North Africa. So many

  places I would never see I

  once assumed I would. What

  I didn’t say put a vast watershed

  between us and sounded like

  four feet in stride

  on stone and the

  panting hanging panting

  moving there.

  Thematically the poem was clearly in the same category—older-man-feels-loss-of-power (physical/sexual) or OMFLOPPS, as I called it—though obviously not of the quality as certain sonnets of Donne and Shakespeare and many poems through the periods, including instances well-known in Eliot and the Yeats of “Sailing to Byzantium” (“That is no country for old men” and so on, “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick” and so on), but—

  I was becoming the dullest of creatures.

  Durant thought the dream of the dog was his daughter’s. He’d hired me for my reading, but writing up responses to the poems had induced in me the same kinds of misperceptions that afflicted him. I couldn’t even read a line in a guest book now without feeling it was directed at me. My only honourable course was to finish my report, tell him that Amanda had told me about his daughter, out of concern for him, and that I rejected his thesis, tell him of Voth and the mistake I’d made to think I’d been followed, a mistake brought on by having made myself suggestible, even a tad paranoid, and then leave the job. That would mean leaving Rome, and Amanda.

  I spent the afternoon working. I gave readings of certain poems, outlined recurring themes and seeming recurring characters, then pointed out exceptions, reversals of the usual use of “I” and “you.” I laid out the various tested theses about topical lines, titles, influences and allusions, image patterns. A separate section formed on poems that simply defeated me, that I had no idea how to read. Among these were some of my favourites, maybe oddly, but they dopplered past my sense-making faculties. Because he’d featured in my recent hours, I quoted Keats, from another of his letters: “O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!” What I really felt, but couldn’t say, was that in writing the report I was leaving the real things out, like those thin readers I’d complained about online. The truth was that every second poem at Three Sheets, even ones I thought weren’t good, induced a pinch of heartsickness I didn’t understand but recognized physically as the sensation of pain touching belief, the raw incomprehensions of feeling that Durant sensed I valued, and for which he valued my judgment. I ended the report by saying that I saw no hard evidence of his daughter in the poems. “You asked if I’d ever heard the expression ‘The sun winks and we play blind.’ You and she once shared the line. But even what we imagine to be our most private expressions are not, in fact, exclusive to us. They’re out there, and if we really need to, we’ll find them. What we do with the finding depends on our need to believe, to believe in a thesis, a god, a truth, a longed-for possibility. I’m sorry, August, but it’s my considered opinion that the poems at Three Sheets have nothing to do with your missing daughter.”

  And so it would be finished. I’d give him the report in the morning. I’d collect my fee and arrange to ship out.

  I left the apartment before Durant returned and arrived thirty-five minutes early for my date, as I humoured myself to think of it. At the edge of the piazza I sat trying to put all thoughts out of mind by contemplating the real things there before me. What mattered was matter. I watched the day’s last light as it played on the stone and flesh. How had one emerged from the other? What a miracle that a human should stand up from the very mud of creation. Scientists had a term for it—abiogenesis—which I’d come across one day when looking up the word hylozoism (the idea that all matter possesses life). Maybe we’re all seeking out other matter as if to find the home from which we’ve been made lost by creation itself, all displaced—and here’s the irony built into everything—by that First Seer, Metaphor Maker, that First Poet, who said, Let there be light. And breezes, mud. And patios with white awnings, tourists with knapsacks and purses, water in half-litre carafes, the clock tower and clock reading 8:06 beneath the Madonna and Child on the campanile, greyblack cobblestones, and Amanda. Let there be Amanda. And there she was.

  “I’m tired of walking,” she said. “But I’m more tired of bars. Would you object to coming to my apartment?”

  “As long as you have designs on me.”

  She smiled, tolerantly.

  We headed uphill to a house across from what might have been a school (it might have been anything, like most buildings in Rome. Where were the hardware stores?). As she unselfconsciously led the way in a black summer dress, she said that Carlo kept offering her apartments in one or another of his buildings, but she liked her little place, and anyway found Carlo “an old creepster.” On the top floor was her single room. The walls were yellow and umber. A small upright bookshelf, full of books, marked the living area. She said she had no wine or beer, which I took as a hopeful sign that maybe she didn’t often have visitors. A love seat faced the only window and that’s where we sat, angled toward each other, glancing now and then at the early night sky.

  I gave her back Durant’s letter.

  “What did you think of his R Code theory?” She started right in. I could feel, or imagined I could feel, the heat from her legs.

  “I think he hopes to find his daughter. The hope has made him inventive unto a little nuts. People in distress see as they need to.”

  “But now the new poem. He told me he took his daughter to Marseilles when she was young and she befriended a street dog. For years the dog showed up in her dreams. Now there’s the dog in Marseilles in a dream in a poem. You can see why he finds it significant.”

  “It’s just a fragment, something familiar. I could watch the nightly news and see ten fragments of my own life if I looked for them.”

  “And you don’t sense anything else in the poems?”

  “Well, reading them the way I’ve been asked to did toss me into a spiral yesterday. For a while I thought someone was following me.”

  An expression of specific concern came over her, as if she’d been worried I might be followed. I told her about Voth, and the warning I’d decided I imagined, the threat I’d read into a line in a guest register. She looked more anguished than surprised.

  “James. You need to trust me. You have to stop reading the site. Don’t visit it again. Ever.” She held her hands to her face, then threw them down and said, softly, “Ouf.”

  “What aren’t you saying?”

  “You’ll think I’m as inventive unto nuts as he is.” Her hair, loose, no longer pulled back by sunglasses, so the widow’s peak was gone, accented her face differently. It was as if I’d brushed grass from a stone and found an ancient goddess looking back at me. No, what an inane image. She seemed older, more deeply beautiful, less striking than she had earlier, less successfully serious, a little weary from need and intent. “Do you read science fiction?”

  “No.” I’d had some luck with speculative novels but more often whenever I’d tried to read the so-called classics of the genre, I’d been unable to draw my eyes across the page. The silly made-up names, the plastic dialogue, the
alternate histories and magical technologies that seem to describe where things are actually going!

  “Do you know Stanisław Lem? His novel Solaris?”

  “I’ve seen the movie. American, not Russian.”

  With a look of self-amazement, she said that Three Sheets was something like the planet in Solaris. Anyone who tried to penetrate it began to see their own lives communicated back with terrifying veracity.

  “It isn’t that readers project personal meanings onto the poems,” she said, “or not just that. It’s that the site really does seem to know them.”

  I wanted to stop her from saying anything more, to protect us, but I couldn’t respond.

  “It will happen to you, too.”

  “I’ve been reading Three Sheets for months and haven’t caught a glimpse of my life.”

  “Well, I’ve seen mine.” She looked out the window at the sky getting darker. “I see Marcus.”

  If she pressed the point any further I would have a hard time, in trying to avoid saying she was delusional, not telling her that because of her brother’s death she was simply in a state of high vulnerability, like Durant, and so prone to misperceptions. It was understandable, I’d say, though of course it wasn’t, not really.

  “This stranger following you, that was inevitable. Have you read the Three Sheets chat rooms lately? The talk is getting really concerning. Someone worked up a profile of the Poet, more or less like yours, that he’s middle-aged male, likely white North American, maybe living in Rome, and people began hunting through the postings. Now August has been named and there’s a theory that he’s the Poet. Your follower is probably just the first one to track him to Rome. Before long we’ll end up meeting some pretty desperate people unless we cut loose from him.”