But I too have my admirers. One dark-suited bore asks me if hypnosis can help him stop drinking; another inquires if I can show him and his partners the way to undiscovered realms of wealth. I hand them each a business card with a cloud-gray pearl finish, on which is printed a non-existent phone number and a phony address in a real city. As for the name: Cosimo Fanzago. What else would one expect from a performing mesmerist extraordinaire. I have other cards with names like Gaudenzio Ferrari and Johnny Tiepolo printed on them. Nobody’s caught on yet. But am I not as much an artist as they were?
And while I am being accosted by people who need cures or aids for their worldliness, I am watching you, dear somnambule. Watching you waltz about this remarkable room. It is not like the other rooms in this great house. Someone really let Fancy have its wild way in here. It harkens back to a time, centuries ago, when your somnambulating predecessors did their sleepwalking act for high society. You fit in so well with this room of leftover rococo. It’s a delight to see you make your way about the irregular circumference of this room, where the wall undulates in gentle peaks and hollows, its surface sinewed with a maze of chinoiserie. The serpentine pattern makes it difficult to distinguish the wall’s recesses from its protrusions. Some of the guests shift their weight wallwards and find themselves leaning on air, stumbling sideways like comedians from an old movie. But you, my perfect sleepwalker, have no trouble; you lean at the right times and in the right places. And your eyes play beautifully to whatever camera focuses on you; indeed, you take so many of your cues from others that one might suspect you of having no life of your own. Let’s sincerely hope not!
Now I watch as you are encouraged to be seated in an elegant chair of blinding brocade, its delicate arms the texture of cartilage and its color like some powdery disc in a woman’s cosmetics case. Your high heels make subtle points in the intricate scheme of the carpet, puncturing its arabesque flights of imagination. Now I watch as our host draws you over to the bar he has hospitably set up in this cornerless room. He waves his hand and indicates to you the many bottleshapes to choose from, shapes both normale and baroque. The baroquely shaped bottles are doing more interesting things with light and shadow than their normal brothers, and you select one of these with a gesture of robotic finesse. He pours two drinks while you watch, and while you watch I am watching you watch. Guiding you to another part of the room, he shows you a tableful of delicate figurines, each one caught in a paralyzed stance of some ancient dance. He places one of them in your hand, and you pass it back and forth before your unfocused eyes, as if trying to awaken yourself with this distraction of movement. But you never will, not without my help.
Now he directs you to a part of the room where there is soft music and dancing. But there are no windows in this room, only tall smoky mirrors, and as you pass from one end to the other you are caught between foggy looking-glasses facing their twins, creating endless files of somnambules in a false infinity beyond the walls. Then you dance with our host, though while he is gazing straightforwardly at you, you are gazing abstractly at the ceiling. O, that ceiling! In epic contrast to the capricious volutions of the rest of the room—designs tendriled to tenebrosity—the ceiling is a dark, chalky blue without a hint of flourish. In its purity it suggests a bottomless pool or an infinite sky wiped clean of stars. You are dancing in eternity, my quadrillioning mannequin. And the dance is indeed a long one, for another wants to cut in on our gracious host and become your partner. Then another. And another. They all want to embrace you; they are all taken in by your frigid elegance, your postures and poses like frozen roses. I am only waiting until everyone has had bodily contact with your powers of animal magnetism.
And while I watch and wait, I notice that we have an unexpected spectator looking down on us from above. Beyond the wide archway at the end of the room is a staircase leading to the second floor; and up there he is sitting, trying to glimpse all the grown-ups, his pajama-clad legs dangling between the Doric posts of the balustrade. I can tell he prefers the classic decor elsewhere predominating in this house. With moderate stealth I leave the main floor audience behind and pay a visit to the balcony, which I quite ignored during my performance earlier.
Creeping up the triple-tiered and white-carpeted stairway, I sit down on the floor beside the child. “Did you see my little show with the lady?” I ask him. He shakes his head horizontally, his mouth as tight as an unopened tulip. “Can you see the lady now? You know the one I mean.” I take a shiny chrome-plated pen from the inside pocket of my coat and point down toward the room where the party is going on. At this distance the features of my sequined siren cannot be seen in any great detail. “Well, can you see her?” His head bobs on the vertical. Then I whisper: “And what do you think?” His two lips open and casually reply: “She…she’s yucky.” I breathe easier now. From this height she does indeed appear merely “yucky,” but you can never know what the sharp sight of children may perceive. And it is certainly not my intention tonight to make any child’s eyes roll the wrong way.
“Now listen closely to everything I say,” I say in a very soft but not condescending tone, making sure the child’s attention is held by my voice and by the gleaming pen on which his eyes are now focused. He is a good subject for a child, who usually have wandering eyes and minds. He agrees with me that he is feeling rather sleepy now, that bedtime is imminent. “And when you go back to your room, you will fall right to sleep and have wonderful dreams. You will not awaken until morning, no matter what sounds you hear outside your door. Understand?” He nods; he is a great nodder, this one. “Very good. And for being such an agreeable subject, I’m going to make you a present of this beautiful pen of sterling silver, which you will keep with you always as a reminder that nothing is what it seems to be. Do you know what I’m talking about?” His head moves slowly and gently up and down with the chilling appearance of deep wisdom. “All right, then. But before you go back to your room, I want you to tell me if there’s a back stairway by which I may leave.” His finger points down the hall and to the left. “Thank you, young man. Thank you very much. Now off to bed and to your wonderful dreams.” He disappears into the Piranesian darkness at the end of the hallway.
For a moment I stand staring down into that merry room below, where the laughing and the dancing have reached their zenith. My fickle somnambule herself seems to be caught up in the party’s web, and has forgotten all about her master. She’s left me on the sidelines, a many-tendriled, mazy wallflower. But I’m not jealous; I can understand why they’ve taken you away from me. They simply can’t help themselves, now can they? I told them how beautiful and perfect you were, and they can’t resist you, my love.
Unfortunately they failed to appreciate the best part of you, preferring to lose themselves in the labyrinth of your grosser illusions. Didn’t I show our well-behaved audience an angelized version of you? And you saw their reaction. They were bored and just sat in their seats like a bunch of stiffs. Of course, what can you expect? They wanted the death stuff, the pain stuff. All that flashy junk. They wanted cartwheels of agonized passion; somersaults into fires of doom; nosedives, if you will, into the frenzied pageant of vulnerable flesh. They wanted a tangible thrill.
And now that their own miniature pageant seems to have reached its peak, I think the time is right to awaken this mob from its hypnotic slumber and thrill the daylights out of them. It is time for the chime.
There is indeed a back stairway just where the boy indicated, one which leads me to a back hallway, back rooms, and finally a back door. And all these backways lead me to a vast yard where a garden is silhouetted beneath the moon and a small wood sways in the distance. A thick lawn pads my footsteps as I work my way around to the fine facade of this house.
I am standing on the front porch now, just behind its tall columns and beneath a lamp hanging at the end of a long brazen chain. I pause for a moment, savoring each voluptuous second. The serene constellations above wink knowingly. But not even these eyes are de
ep enough to outgaze me, to deceive the deceiver, illude the illusionist. To tell the truth, I am a very bad mesmeric subject, unable to be drawn in by Hypnos’ Heaven. For I know how easily one can be led past those shimmering gates, only to have a trap door spring open once you are inside. Then down you go! I would rather be the attendant loitering outside Mesmer’s Maze than its deluded victim bumbling about within.
It is said that death is a great awakening, an emergence from the trance of life. Ha, I have to laugh. Death is the consummation of mortality and—to let out a big secret—only heightens mortal susceptibilities. Of course, it takes a great master to pry open a pair of postmortem eyes once they are sewn tightly closed by Mr. D. And even afterward there is so little these creatures are good for. As conversationalists they are incredibly vacant; the things they tell you are no more than sweet nullities. But there is not much else you can do with them, they are so hideous and smell to high heaven. So mostly we just talk. Sometimes, however, I recruit them for my show, if I can manage to get their awkward forms out of the mausoleum, hospital, morgue, medical school, or funeral emporium I have deviously insinuated my way into. But there is one great problem: You just can’t make them beautiful. One is not a sorcerer!
But perhaps one is a mental prestidigitator, an unusually adept whammy artist. One may make an audience think them beautiful, mistake them for spellbinding, snake-eyed charmers. One can do this at least, and loves to.
Even now I hear them still laughing, still dancing, still making a fuss over my charismatic doll of the dead. We showed them what you might be, O Seraphita, now let’s show them what you really are. I have only to press this glowing little button of a doorbell to sound the chime which will awaken them, to send the toll rolling throughout the house. Then they’ll see. They’ll see the sepulchral wounds: your eyes recessed in their sockets, sunken into mouths—those labyrinthine pits! They’ll wake up and find their nice dancing clothes all clotted with putrescent goo. And wait’ll they get a sniff of that stiff. They will be amazed.
EYE OF THE LYNX
No architectural go-betweens divided the doorway—a side entrance off a block of diverse but connected buildings—from the sidewalk. The sidewalk itself was conjugally flush with the curb that bordered a street which in turn radiated off a boulevard of routine clamor, and all of this was enveloped by December’s musty darkness. Sidewalk doorway, doorway sidewalk. I don’t want to make too much of the matter, except to say that this peculiarity, if it was one, made an impression on me: there was no physical introduction to the doorway, surely not in the form of a little elevated slab of cement, certainly not even a single stair of stone. No structure of any kind prefaced the door. And it was recessed into the building itself with such deliberate shallowness that it almost looked painted directly onto the wall. I looked over at the traffic light above the intersection; it was amber going on red. I looked back at the door. The sidewalk seemed to slip right under it, urging one to step inside. So I did, after noting that the wall around the doorway was done up, somewhat ineptly, like a castle tower flanked by toothy merlons.
Inside I was immediately greeted by a reception committee of girls very professionally lounging in what looked like old church pews along an old wall. The narrow vestibule in which I found myself scintillated with a reddish haze that seemed not so much light as electric vapor. In the far upper corner of this entranceway a closed circuit camera was bearing down on us all, and I wondered how the camera’s eye would translate that redly dyed room into the bluish hues of a security monitor. Not that it was any of my business. We might all be electronically meshed into a crazy purpurean tapestry, and that would have been just fine.
A fair-haired girl in denim slacks and leather jacket stood up and approached me. In the present light her blandness was actually more a murky tomato soup or greasy ketchup than fresh strawberry. She delivered a mechanical statement that began “Welcome to the House of Chains,” and went on and on, spelling out various services and specific terms and finally concluding with a legal disclaimer of some carefully phrased sort. “Yes, yes,” I said. “I’ve read the ads, the ones set in that spikey Gothic type, the ones that look like a page out of an old German bible. I’ve come to the right place, haven’t I?”
“Sure you have,” I thought to myself. “Sure you have,” echoed the blonde with blood-dyed hair. “What will it be tonight?” I inwardly asked me. “What will it be tonight?” she asked aloud. “Do you see anything you like?” we both asked me at the same time. From my expression and casual glances somewhere beyond the claustrophobic space of that tiny foyer, she could see right away that I didn’t see anything, or at least that I wanted her to think I didn’t. We were on the same infra-red wavelength.
We stood there for a moment while she took a long delicious sip from a can of iced tea, pretending with half-closed eyes that it was the best thing she’d ever washed her insides with. Then she pushed a button next to an intercom on the wall behind her and turned her head to whisper some words, though still keeping those violent eyes hooked on mine.
And what did those eyes tell me? They told me of her life as she lived it in fantasy: a Gothic tale of a baroness deprived of her title and inheritance by a big man with bushy eyebrows, which he sometimes sprinkles with glitter. (She once dreamed that he did.) And now this high-born lady spends much of her time haunting second-hand shops, trying to reclaim her aristocratic accoutrements and various articles of her wardrobe which were dispersed at auction by the glitter-browed man who came out of the forest one spring when she was away visiting a Carmelite nunnery. So far she’s done pretty well for herself, managing to assemble many items that for her are charged with sentiment. Her collection includes several dresses in her favorite shade of monastic black. Each of them tapers in severely under the bustline, while belling-out below the waist. A bib-like bodice buttons in her ribs, ascending to her neck where a strip of dark velvet is seized by a pearl brooch. At her wrist: a frail chain from which dangles a heart-shaped locket, a whirlpooling lock of golden hair inside. She wears gloves, of course, long and powdery pale. And tortuous hats from a mad milliner, with dependent veils like the fine cloth screen in a confessional, delicate flags of mourning repentance. But she prefers her enveloping hoods, the ones that gather with innumerable folds at the shoulders of heavy capes lined in satin that shines like a black sun. Capes with deep pockets and generous inner pouches for secreting precious souvenirs, capes with silk strings that tie about her neck, capes with weighted hems which nonetheless flutter weightlessly in midnight gusts. She loves them dearly.
Just so is she attired when the glitter-browed villain peers in her apartment window, accursing the casement and her dreams. What can she do but shrink with terror? Soon she is only doll-size in dark doll’s costume. Nevertheless, quivering bones and feverish blood are the stuffings of this doll, its entrails tickled by fear’s funereal plume. It flies to a corner of the room and cringes within enormous shadows, sometimes dreaming there throughout the night—of carriage wheels rioting in a lavender mist or a pearly fog, of nacreous fires twitching beyond the margins of country roads, of cliffs and stars. Then she awakes and pops a mint into her mouth from an unraveled roll on the nightstand, afterwards smoking half a cigarette before crawling out of bed and grimacing in the light of late afternoon.
“C’mon,” she said after releasing the button of the intercom. “I think I can help you.”
“But I thought you couldn’t leave the reception area,” I explained, almost apologetically. “Of course, if I’d known…”
“C’mon,” she repeated with both hands in her jacket pockets. And her loud heels led me out of that room where every face wore a fake blush.
We walked through a pair of swinging doors which met in the middle and were bound like books, imitation leather tightly stretched across their broad boards and thick spines. Title page:
House of Chains: A Romance in Red Decorated with Diverse Woodcuts
Page one: Deep into December, as the w
inds of winter howled beyond the walls, two children, one blond and the other dark, found themselves in the heart of a great castle in the heart of a gloomy forest. The central chamber of the castle, as is a heart’s wont, glowed with a warm red light, though the surrounding masonry was of damp gray stone. A great many people of the court capered about, traveling aloft or below by means of sundry stairways, ingressing and egressing through the queerly shaped portals of shadowed corridors (which seemed everywhere), and thronging here and there as in the curious bazaars of oriental scenes. Uncouth voices and harsh music fell upon the children’s ears.
Decoration opposite opening page: Two children, one blond and the other not; passing through a tunnel of tangled forest which looks as if it’s about to descend and devour them both. The girl, open mouthed, is pointing with her left hand while holding onto her brother with the right; the boy, all eyes, seems to be gazing in every direction at once, amazed at the pair’s wondrous incarceration.
“Can I get the ninety-eight cent tour,” I asked my hostess. “I’m from out of town. We don’t have anything like this where I come from. I’m paying for this, right?”
Half of her mouth found it possible to smirk. “Sure,” she said, drawing out the word well past its normal duration. She moved in a couple of false directions before guiding me toward some metal steps which clanged as we descended into a blur of crimson shadows. The vicious vapor followed us downstairs, of course, tagging along like an insanely devoted familiar.
Surprisingly enough, there was a window in the vaguely institutional basement of the House of Chains (I was beginning to enjoy that name), but it was composed of empty panes looking out upon a phony landscape. Pictured were vast regions of volcanic desolation towered over by prehistoric mountains which poked into a dead-end darkness. The scene was illuminated by a low-watt bulb. I felt a bit like a child peeking into a department store model of Santa’s workshop, but I can’t say it didn’t create a mood.
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