The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  We make idle chitchat about our current lives, our current projects: I fill a card or two with a synopsis of Dawn of the Osage, pointing out that perhaps it is a kind of prehistory of the Stick Around country, and thus an ultimate fulfillment of Ingraham’s old wish that I write about Stick Around, which, as it turns out, he himself has resumed doing in full force, even to the extent of writing about some of the Osages who were there when the white men, the first Ingledews, arrived. Ingraham and I, two craftsmen trading shop talk as the afternoon wanes, exchange information and observations on the customs and beliefs of the Osages. I consider inviting him up to see my Halfmoon digs, which he has never seen. I consider inviting him to have supper there with me. Finally, choosing my words carefully, upon a fresh new card, I do, and when he expresses delight in his acceptance, I write, What can I fix you for supper? I am mindful of using fix in the colloquial, Bodarkadian sense.

  He removes from the pocket of his windbreaker some sheets of paper, unfolds them, consults them. “Let’s see,” he says, and begins quoting: “…that lovely suite of rooms on the top floor of the Moonbeam Hotel, with my own futuristic kitchen, where I could whip up one of those chicken dishes that grace the pages of Cathlin’s Quick Chick Cookbook…”

  I recognize what he is reading; two hours or so earlier this afternoon my cat Morris quoted the entire document to me as part of his narrative of my life in Pittsburgh. You still have my obituary! I write.

  “No, this is only a Xerox. The original I have donated to Special Collections at the university, along with a few other souvenirs of my association with the famous V. Kelian. Well, could your futuristic kitchen perhaps handle a Svanetian version of chicken and dumplings?”

  I laugh and write, I’ll try.

  He hands the sheets of paper to me, as if making me a present of them. “Notice the date, if you will,” he suggests.

  During Morris’s quoting of the document, I already noticed the date, April 24, 2021, and I have already for one sweet moment sighed and reflected to myself, Well, at least I have almost thirty more years to live. But when Morris (or Dan, if you please) quoted my obituary back to me, I had observed that today, April 22, is just the day before the day of the month I’m supposed to die, and that has not helped my frame of mind. As if reading my thoughts, Ingraham observes, “There are so many things in your obituary that ‘came true.’ The Moonbeam is the Halfmoon, of course. And you do have a twelve-year-old houseboy, I presume.”

  I shake my head. Not anymore, I scribble, not for the last five years.

  “Do you mean he’s seventeen now?”

  No, I mean I haven’t had a servant for five years.

  “Despite your enormous wealth?” he asks, and I feel the question is rhetorical and deserves no answer. “Well, do you still drink too much vodka? Do you take twelve-mile hikes each day? Are you writing a book about the mushrooms of the Bodarks?”

  To each of these questions I shake my head. Don’t try to frighten me further, I write. There is much in this obituary that was purely fanciful and will not come true.

  “I notice you’re not even smoking anymore,” he observes. “Are you by any chance writing a memoir called Louder, Engram!?”

  As I was when Morris quoted it, I am amazed that I actually used that title in that long-ago imaginary obituary, and I scan the pages he has given me, in search of it, and sure enough, there it is: So who are the suspects? I’m a writer, after all, and I can’t give away endings, and this isn’t the ending. You haven’t heard the last of me. But my devoted readers who are familiar with my memoirs, Louder, Engram! will recall that I spent some years in my early twenties incarcerated…

  “And how about this?” Ingraham’s long finger points to another place in the obituary, where I wrote, Do you think I might have been done in by some person driven mad by envy of my riches? (Even Professor Ingraham himself?) Then why didn’t he or she murder me thirty-five years ago, when my first novel, Geordie Lad, catapulted me to fame?

  I hold out my hand for a fresh card upon which to write, and he gives it to me, and I write, If you are going to kill me, why didn’t you do it when Georgie Boy was such a success?

  “I was tempted, then,” he says, smiling, “but this obituary made me a suspect, didn’t it?”

  I scribble hurriedly, Let’s not joke, dear friend and mentor. Often these days I am overcome with a premonition of an early death.

  His long finger slides down the page I hold in my hand until it comes to the penultimate paragraph: I’m not going to tell you, yet, who killed me. But I can say this much: Bolshakov is actually at large. He is out there, even in the vicinity of the Moonbeam Hotel…

  “He is, isn’t he?” Ingraham says, and I wonder how he knows. When I nod, Ingraham’s face softens in sympathy or concern and he says, “I shouldn’t be showing you this document at a time like this, if you are preoccupied with an early death. But your last three books, I couldn’t help noticing, have an obsession with death.”

  Oh? I write. Have you read my last three books?

  “I have read everything you have written, dear Kat,” he confesses. “Even your stories in Playboy.”

  I am greatly flattered, especially in view of his disinclination to read anything that has been printed. And I confess, on a new card, Then it won’t bother me to admit that I’ve read everything of yours, even the termite novel and your latest, Oratorio in the Arboretum.

  “Which came out the same season as your Original Flavor but sold a fraction of the copies yours did,” he observes with a covetous leer. “That title of yours, by the way, I took to be an allusion to your return to the ‘flavor’ of Georgie Boy after your experimentation with so many different flavors. And also a return to your exploration of the ways that death is transcended.”

  Yes, I write, admitting it, I stopped just short of stealing your device of using the future tense in the end. I was dying to use the future tense, but that it is your own personal device, with which you have ended all your books.

  “I am happy you noticed,” he says, making a slight bow. “But that shouldn’t have stopped you. I don’t own the patent on the future tense.”

  But the reader would know I purloined it from you.

  “What reader?” he demands. “Your millions of readers have never heard of me. If you use the future tense, probably any reader of any of my books would think I purloined it from you.”

  All right, then. I will use the future tense.

  “You will,” he concedes.

  Then here we are together, I write, using the present tense for the last time, in the Halfmoon Spring gazebo, one of my favorite places in Arcaty, just a stone’s throw from the public library, and probably we are sitting at the same spot where once sat Osage Indians. Perhaps someday the town fathers of Arcaty will affix a bronze plaque to this bench: HERE SAT INGRAHAM AND V. KELIAN TALKING ABOUT DEATH AND INDIANS AND THE WRITING OF NOVELS.

  Ingraham will read this and laugh, but then he will say, “Allow me to make a minor correction in tense. The plaque will read: HERE WILL SIT V. KELIAN AND INGRAHAM FOREVER TALK? ING ABOUT DEATH AND INDIANS AND THE WRITING OF NOVELS.”

  “That will do,” I will say aloud, and he will hear me. “And that way, neither of us will ever die.”

  25

  I

  Ingraham will also sit beside me in the Crystal Room during the séance, which, true to the stuff of memoirs rather than novels, will not be even noteworthy, let alone suspenseful or climactic. I will wish myself able to report that it was uncomfortably fraught with peril or surprise or at least revelation, but in fact I will be reminded that the last time Ingraham and I sat together in this room was the day of his speech to bow comparing drinking and writing, which was much more entertaining than this séance will have been. Veronica, the medium, will seem almost drunk herself, but we will determine that it is some sort of self-induced trance, not intoxication, and I will comment on a card to Ingraham that perhaps there is not only a link between drinking and writing but
also a link between the truly creative state and the state of spiritualistic trance: the writer summons entities who materialize from the Other Side of imagination and become temporary “presences.”

  But no ghosts will walk. Or even, although we will be invited by Veronica to listen carefully, talk. The audience of perhaps three hundred crowding the Crystal Room will observe an expectant silence for a half hour’s worth of Veronica’s “trance talk,” her lubricious attempt to contact her “guide,” or spirit from the Other Side, and, when that fails, her attempt to turn the meeting over to her “control,” the spirit on the Other Side apparently in charge of granting permissions to the departed souls who wish to make contact with us the living. After a while, when nothing extraordinary occurs and the audience begins to grow restless, Veronica will mumble an excuse to the effect that there may be “hostile, disbelieving” persons present who have been preventing the contact from taking place. (I will reflect, and even attempt to remark on a card to Ingraham, that since I have been using the future tense, which gives the user considerable control over events, I have been unconsciously preventing anything significant from happening. Ingraham will read my card with a wry smile; he will think carefully about that, and he will whisper to me, “That will very well conceivably be the case.”)

  There will be only one incident worth reporting. Toward the end, Morris will wander into the Crystal Room, as he will often have done throughout his long life, and he will glance around him as if to wonder why there are people packing the place wall-to-wall, and then he will saunter slowly, hampered by his arthritis, toward the podium where Veronica sits. I will find that my breathing has stopped in anticipation, because I will have convinced myself by this time that Morris indeed is inhabited by some presence from the Other Side. Veronica will glance down at him with obvious discomfiture; spiritualists are always uneasy in the presence of cats. He will stare up at her for a long moment, with that penetrating, solemn, all-wise gaze that most cats possess to some degree and Morris possesses in abundance. I will strain my ears to catch any repetition of the sounds that Morris made to me all that afternoon. But he will be as mute as ever. Then he will turn his gaze from her to me and will seem to look at me sadly, or with longing. He will then exit slowly through the door to the kitchen. The audience, either amused by the presence of a pet at a serious séance or convinced that Morris was the only materialization during the event, will laugh, and the laughter will signal the end of the session.

  Afterward, the photographers, the television cameramen, the reporters will surround me and Ingraham, and they will insist I confess my identity. But I will not. “This is a far cry from the Mezzaluna, don’t you think?” one of them will pester, but I will shrug my shoulders, and I will take Ingraham’s arm and lead him quickly out of the Crystal Room, with the media people in hot pursuit, and when we reach the elevator Ingraham will have the sense and the heft to bar any of them from getting on with us.

  At my door, Ingraham will give me a quick, light kiss on the cheek and he will say, “I’d better hit the road, to get back to Fateville.”

  I will have a card ready for him, which I will already have written while in the Crystal Room: Do Did you by any chance see anybody in here the Crystal Room who resembled Bolshakov?

  “I’m sorry,” Ingraham will say, “but unfortunately my mental image of Bolshakov has been contaminated by having seen the movie of Georgie Boy more than once. Bolshakov to me no longer resembles the Bolshakov of the book, or the man I met briefly in Pittsburgh, or even that innocent Dr. MacLean we met that one morning in the Crystal Room, but rather the actor Sert Reichert, with his sinister eyes, the evil widow’s peak in his slicked-down hairline, and his nasty leer. Did Bolshakov look anything at all like Sert Reichert?”

  I will shake my head. Then I will seize Ingraham by both his arms as if to draw him to me, and I will exaggerate the movements of my lips the better for him to read them: “Stay with me!”

  “Pardon?” He will not have heard me.

  Since he will not be able to hear me anyway, I will feel free to babble whatever comes into my head: “Spend the night with me! Sleep with me if you wish! Nestle your grown man’s tallywhacker into the folds of my little girl’s gillyclicker that has never had a grown man before!”

  He will offer me his ballpoint and cards. “Could you write any of this down?”

  I will shake my head, and I will go on babbling. “When you were twelve you lusted after grown women and it has haunted all of your books! Let us pretend for one night that you are twelve again! I will take away your virginity!”

  “I’m sorry, Kat. Why are you doing this? You know I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

  “Read my lips! I cannot be alone tonight! It has been years since last I had a boy! Be a boy again for me tonight! Let me undress you! Let me show you what to do with your thingie!”

  Even if he hasn’t caught a word, he will have sensed the distress and the longing and the loneliness in my tone, and he will usher me through my door and will close the door behind us. “I think you may be needing a stiff one,” he will say.

  “Yes! Yes! Let me make it stiff for us!”

  But he will be at my bar, mixing drinks. That kind of stiffness: straight vodka for me and, despite his having been on the wagon for many years, an uncustomary bourbon for himself. “Look what you’re doing to me,” he will observe, offering a toast. “But cheers anyhow.”

  I will gulp my vodka and, emboldened, will write on a card, You have always wanted me, haven’t you?

  Reading it, he will smile. “Of course I have.”

  I will write, Do you want me now?

  “Don’t tease me, Kat. You know you can’t violate your own predilections.”

  I could try! I will write. Anything to get him to stay the night with me.

  “I’m a married man,” he will say, “not one of your boys.”

  I will sigh. I will think, and I will think, and I will think, desperately trying for some way to get him to stay. I will write, Okay, if we are fated never to be lovers, then we must be sister and brother, and you must swear brotherhood. We must have the Svanetian ceremony of sworn kinship.

  He will glance at his watch. “How long will this take?”

  A little while, I will write, and I will calculate how long I will be able to keep him with the ceremony. I will need several cards to explain the ceremony to him: it is really very simple, but it is solemn; it requires the pledging of oaths to each other, and, most importantly, it requires that we mingle our blood: we must make tiny cuts in the little fingers of our right hands and hold those cuts together tightly while our blood mingles and we say our words.

  “I’m an old hand at pricking my little finger,” he will say, “because as a diabetic I have to monitor my blood sugar regularly. But I don’t know about mingling our blood. Have you been tested for HIV? I don’t want to die of AIDS.”

  I have had no sex for five years! I will write, and I will finish off my glass and add, Except what I can give myself!

  We will swear brotherhood and sisterhood, there in my conversation pit, performing the simple ceremony, using a single-edged razor blade, mingling our blood, taking the vows. “That wasn’t so bad,” he will observe when we have finished and are wrapping little Band-Aids on our pinkies.

  I will write, Now we are brother and sister. We must always be willing to receive each other at any time. I must be willing to lend you money whenever you need it, in whatever amount. I must never cheat you, nor deceive you. If either one of us dies, the other must either arrange the funeral or speak the obsequies. I want you to bury me at Stick Around.

  He will be taken aback. “But the Stick Around cemetery is strictly for natives. Not even Eli Willard is buried there. Not even Daniel Lyam Montross is buried there.”

  I don’t need the cemetery, I will write. Bury me in the woods near mushrooms, near Daniel, anywhere. You must promise. Promise me.

  He will laugh, but nervously. “You’ll probabl
y outlive me. But if you don’t, I’ll see to it you get yourself buried at Stick Around.” As an afterthought, he’ll add, “Do you still want to have us play Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto?”

  I will be charmed that he has remembered. But it was, after all, in my obituary. I will nod my head. Then, at a loss for a way of keeping him longer, especially because he has not been inclined to refill his drink, I will lead him and his unfinished drink to the chess nook and show him my superlative Bombay inlaid mother-of-pearl chess table, with its Dieppe pieces in position, waiting but thoroughly covered with the dust of years, the years that have gone since last Billy and I attempted to play there.

  “A game, huh?” Ingraham will say. He will glance at his watch once more and say, “I really shouldn’t, but I can’t resist.” He will sit himself down there at the black side, although I will have been prepared to offer him the white side.

  We will play. I will be badly out of practice; and his practice, he will explain, will have been limited to playing his own computer, a program called Chessmaster 2100, a sort of masturbation. He has not played a human for years. But the computer will have kept his sense of the game alive, whereas my own will have atrophied. Aloud, because he will not be able to hear me anyway, I will curse myself for my mistakes: castling too soon, forcing him to kill off both our queens. Steadily he will take my pawns, leaving me at a material disadvantage, and then he will have two horses to my one. Thinking of these horses, I will remember the old Bodark custom of ride-and-tie, and how Ingraham and I once upon a time did it. I will realize that I am doomed on this board. Neither of us will drink much; his one glass of bourbon, my one of vodka, will get us through the game.

  But the game will drag on. I will be glad for that, in a way. It will keep him with me. I will be able to see where the game is leading: into a stalemate, if I am not careful. I will be able to see where the night is going: into my bed, if I can arrange it and steel myself. I will be able—for I will be controlling the future tense, will I not?—to know what will inevitably happen to prevent me from ever knowing the experience of sex with a grown man: the ultimate, inexorable, foregone arrival of the Visitor.