The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  We will find ourselves with equal pieces: each having one rook, one bishop, one knight. Steadily we will remove these from each other until I am left with a bishop, he with a rook, which is trying to protect a pawn seeking queendom, but futilely, because of my bishop’s aim on her. Ingraham will look at his watch yet again. “I’m really going to catch hell from my wife,” he will say. We will be in the seventy-third move of our endgame.

  I will resign myself (not resigning the game, which is almost stalemated) to Ingraham’s eventual departure. The future tense will be able to keep him for only so long. I will be tempted to ask for his cards and to write upon them a final message of some sort, a proper word of thanks, perhaps, a good-bye, a farewell, a reminder of our responsibilities to each other in sworn brotherhood, some acceptable ending for him, who hates endings and cannot write them.

  But at the moment I will begin to write upon the card, the long-expected knock will come at my door. At the instant of the sound, the firm, determined rapping. I will know who it is. Instead of writing what I will have intended on the card, I will write, There is someone at the door. I know it is Bolshakov.

  Ingraham will jerk his head around nervously, as if attempting to hear the sound of the knocking. “How do you know?” he will ask, as if suspecting me of having arranged it. In a way, I will reflect, I will have arranged it, for I will have been handling the future tense, will I have not?

  All these years, of course, I have been expecting him.

  “Well, let me get it,” he will offer boldly. “It may just be some drunk tourist or a reporter.”

  He will go to the door. Afraid, I will not follow, but I will know that Ingraham cannot handle any conversation with Bolshakov. I will have to do that myself. I will listen. I will hear the two men’s voices. I will not hear their words. Ingraham’s voice will raise in both volume and pitch, as if he is arguing with the man.

  The man will be armed, of course. When I see dear Ingraham walking backward, coming back into the room one step behind the other, I will know that a Beretta automatic with a long silencer screwed into its barrel is aiming at his stomach. I will see the silencer moving laterally past the door, and then the Beretta itself, and then the hand holding it. And then the trench coat.

  II

  “Na Bodarks udivitelno khorosho, Yekaterina,” he will say to me in Russian, as if making pleasant conversation: “It is wonderful in the Bodarks.” “Chudnaya gostinitsa” (“A wonderful hotel”). He will look around himself as if admiring my apartment, and he will seem almost unmindful of the weapon he will be brandishing, and he will go on making chitchat, pleasantries about the setting, the weather, the spring night. Although I have told myself a thousand times that he will appear one day, I will still find that I am not totally prepared for it: my adrenaline will be roaring, my heart thumping against my breast, my head reeling. He has aged, I will notice: his hair will be much grayer, his face not quite so babyish, his shoulders stooped. Even his trench coat, I will observe, will no longer be the neat, clean thing he always wore; it will distinctly remind me of the grungy trench coat Ingraham himself once wore: seedy, grimy, threadbare, a complete lack of neatness that Bolshakov should never bring himself to permit.

  It will have been years since last I heard Russian, and, though it is a language that I know by heart, I will refuse to speak it. In English, I will ask him kindly to speak English.

  He will incline his head toward Ingraham and say, still in Russian, “I do not wish to be understood.”

  “He can’t understand you anyway,” I will point out, in English. “He’s deaf.”

  My mentor and my tormentor will stare at each other, the former defiantly, warily, and contemptuously, the latter with careful observation; and then the latter will address the former, speaking English for the first time: “Ah, yes. I did not recognize you. The professor from Pittsburgh. He of the bodark plates. Do you know how long it took me to figure out the reference of Bodark?”

  “If you want him to know what you’re saying, you’re going to have to write it down,” I will tell him.

  “I don’t want him to know what I’m saying. I do not care. But I want him to observe what I am going to do.” He will snap open the physician’s gladstone bag that he is carrying, and he will bring out of it a length of rope or strong cord. Carefully, keeping his weapon trained upon Ingraham and me, he will seize one of the ladder-backed Mount Judea folk chairs that are placed against my foyer walls, and he will set it up facing my conversation pit, and he will say to Ingraham, “Please sit,” and he will gesture for him to be seated in the chair. Ingraham will not comply, perhaps because he hasn’t heard. Our adversary will demonstrate the pistol and its silencer, popping off a round that will puncture my precious Magritte painting, leaving a hole in the crescent moon. Ingraham, who as an art historian will have, earlier this evening, expressed enormous admiration for that painting, will wince as if he himself has been shot, and he will glare at the intruder with loathing. “SIT!” he will be told again, loudly enough for him to hear. He will sit, and Bolshakov will bind his hands behind him to the slats of the chair.

  The chair will face the conversation pit. “Now, Yekaterina,” he will say, “you will make yourself comfortable upon those cushions, first removing all of your garments.”

  I will shake my head. “You may as well shoot me now,” I will tell him. “I do not intend to participate in whatever diabolical ‘foreplay’ you have contrived to amuse yourself before the killing.”

  He will laugh, or he will make that sound all too painfully familiar to me, as if something were caught in his throat while he is making an effort at expressing mirth or sadistic glee. “You seem to have prepared yourself for your punishment,” he will remark. “You seem to have expected that my retribution would catch up with you.” He will open the gladstone bag again and draw out a prepared hypodermic syringe. “But I assure you that the ‘foreplay’ I have in mind for you will not only stimulate your novelist’s insatiable lust for the outlandish, the fantastic, but it will also, after all these years, prepare you to accept yourself as you really are before the moment of your death. Let me have your arm.”

  “Shoot me!” I will snap at him. “Not with the needle! With the gun! Kill me and get it over with!”

  “This mild drug”—he will hold up the hand with the needle—“will only remove some of your inhibitions. It will not knock you out, nor even”—that demoniac coughing chuckle again—“nor even make you my slave. Your arm.” And he will seize my arm and jab in the needle before I can hit him. Before his face feels the full brunt of the backhanded slap that I will throw at him, he will have injected the contents of the syringe into my arm. “There!” he will exclaim, stepping back from me and rubbing the smart from the slap I have given him on his face. “That didn’t hurt either of us. Now why don’t you accept my suggestion and make yourself comfortable? Please remove everything you are wearing.” Whatever the drug he will have given me, it will quickly be taking effect. I will no longer have the will to struggle against him. “Melancholy man!” I will whine at him. “You are the personification of evil!” But I will find myself unbuttoning my dress and stepping out of it. I will find myself divesting myself of all my garments, just as he will have bade me, until I am standing revealed bare to both men. I will be able to detect in the gaze of Ingraham, who has never seen me naked before, a certain admiration for my body, an art historian’s appreciation of classical nudity.

  “No,” Bolshakov will say. “Despite how you tried so desperately to render me in your novel, I am not evil. You should have allowed your readers to see me neither as an evil man nor as a genius, but as someone who for all my prejudices was simply trying to do my best but who happened—in your case—to be wrong.” Once again the man will fish around in his bulging doctor’s kit and he will bring out, this time, an artificial penis, a convincingly lifelike instrument of flesh-colored rubber attached to cloth straps. He will lay his pistol aside on a cushion of the conversation
pit, substituting his focus from one erect device to the other, and I will no longer have the will or the inclination even to think about attempting to seize the pistol and turn it on him. I will only wonder, momentarily, if Bolshakov’s sinister career as a psychiatrist and flagrant womanizer has left him impotent, and if he will be required to use this dildo in order to rape me. “Now I intend an experiment,” he will intone didactically, not unmindful of his captive audience, Ingraham, “to demonstrate that one of my theories, at least, was correct. You will recall how I attempted so unsuccessfully, as part of your therapy, to help you understand that in reality, as opposed to the unreality or surreality of your fabricated world, you are only a little girl wanting to grow up and acquire a penis. Remember how I tried to use the matryoshka dolls to show you? You are that smallest, innermost of the diminishing dolls, the little girl, wanting to break outward and assume the form of the boy doll. I cannot give you the form and shape of the boy, but I am going to give you the possession of this penis.”

  He will affix the penis to my groin, attaching the straps behind my buttocks. Despite the numbing of the drug he will have given me, I will find myself enormously amused by the sight of the erect “member” that I will have acquired. Or will it not be amusement so much as delight? Will I discover that I want this prick?

  “Now,” he will say, slowly unfastening the belt of his trousers, “here comes the part that you will like most. I am sure that in your most intense and private fantasies, over the years, you have dwelt often upon this daydream, and now you can do it! You are going to fuck me. You are going to penetrate me with your penis to your full and complete satisfaction, and perhaps even mine, if I am successful in pretending for your sake that I am female. And then, once you have finished fucking me, you are going to fuck your friend, the professor there.”

  While Bolshakov is undressing himself, I will glance at Ingraham, who of course will have no awareness of these things that Bolshakov has been saying and so will not understand what he will soon be required to watch and eventually to do. But Ingraham will know that something awful or incredible is about to happen, and he will look at me sadly, or with longing. I will recognize or recall the look: it will be the very same look that was the last look I had from my cat and friend, Morris.

  Almost as if my thought of him will make him materialize again (and I will, after all, be exerting, despite the drug, continued control of the future tense), Morris will enter through his Cat-Port. The aged and feeble cat will stand there surveying this strange scene: the two men in his mistress’s apartment, the one man bound to a chair, the other stepping out of boxer shorts patterned with red hearts. Bolshakov, if he will have noticed the cat at all, will pay him no mind. Morris will stand for only another moment, appearing to study the scene, and then he will exit, in the direction of the music room.

  The naked Bolshakov will stretch himself out supine upon the cushions of the conversation pit, hiking up his knees and holding out his arms to me. “I am yours, dear boy,” he will say to me. “Or would you rather have me turn over on my stomach?”

  Mingled in my mind with powerlessness to disobey him will still be caginess, craft: perhaps if I obey him and follow through on this perverted charade, he will be sufficiently diverted not to notice that I am reaching for the pistol lying upon the near cushion. But then I will marvel at this conflict in myself: Would I rather use the penis than the pistol upon him? I will attempt to examine this conflict, to think about it.

  “Wait,” he will say. “I have forgotten something.” He will again go to his doctor’s bag and will bring out a tube of lubricating jelly, and he will smear it almost lovingly upon my penis, as if the penis is indeed part of me. “Now,” he will say, lying back down. “Quickly. Fuck me!” I will tell myself that it is the drug, not my own will, that is making me do his bidding. I will find myself between his legs, attempting to insert the artificial penis. He will have to guide me with his hand.

  At the moment of my entrance, the apartment will flood with the booming baritone of long-dead Nelson Eddy:

  Ah! sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee!

  Whence will come this song? I will recall that I indeed possess in my vast collection of music an old 33? lp of the Victor Herbert operetta Naughty Marietta, but I would have been hard pressed to locate the album myself in the cabinets filled with records and compact discs. How could Morris possibly have found it, dragged it out, placed it upon the turntable, and started the machine running? Or will there have been some human other than we three in the apartment? My mind will be momentarily stunned out of its drugged submission.

  Even Ingraham, deaf though he is, will recognize the music, and he will lend his atrocious off-key accompaniment to the lyrics of the unknown Rida Johnson Young:

  Ah! I know at last the secret of it all!

  All the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning…

  “What is this?!” Bolshakov will demand, staring at Ingraham as if Ingraham were lip-synching Nelson Eddy’s dulcet tones. “SILENCE!” Bolshakov will yell at Ingraham, and then, realizing that Ingraham cannot be producing the full orchestral accompaniment in waltz time, he will hastily withdraw his rectum from my dildo and scramble to his feet, picking up his pistol. “Who turned on the music?!” he will demand of me.

  The burning hopes, the joy and idle tears that

  fall…!

  “Sometimes it just comes on by itself,” I will tell him. “Would you like to see my music system?” I will make the suggestion in hopes that in the acceptance of it Bolshakov will allow me to discover for myself if indeed it is a rheumatoid tomcat who has turned on the music system.

  Ingraham, despite whatever fear and anxiety he himself will be feeling (and surely Bolshakov will intend to shoot him ultimately as well), will go on attempting unsuccessfully to harmonize his terrible bass with the great baritone:

  For ’tis love, and love alone, the world is seeking!

  Ingraham’s customarily dour face will be so jubilant that I will think that perhaps Ingraham, in the face of his mortality, has finally himself at last penetrated the sweet mystery of life, whatever that is.

  Both naked, Bolshakov and I will step into the music room, where we will find, as I will have expected, that no cat has placed any record upon the Ortofon’s turntable. Indeed, there will be no record on the turntable, nor any sign that the amplifier is actually turned on, nor any actual electronic activity at all in the Harman Kardon mechanisms of the room. But out of the corner of my eye I will notice an old yellow feline dragging himself stealthily out of the room, toward the chair in which Ingraham is bound. And still the music will wash over us:

  ’Tis the answer, ’tis the end and all of living!

  For it is love alone that rules for aye!

  Sadly, Bolshakov will remark, “The same appalling sounds came from my automobile’s radio when I was attempting, those years long gone, to follow you out of Pittsburgh.”

  “There are ghosts in this hotel, you know,” I will comment.

  “Yes, I suffered to sit through your Mezzaluna,” he will say, “but there was no ghostly music in your play.” He will pause to admire my elaborate Harman Kardon stereophonic system and to run his hands over the walnut wood cabinets of the components. “If we must have musical accompaniment for our lovemaking, let us have something that we can listen to.”

  I will be aware that in the other room, the cat is standing on its hind legs behind Ingraham’s chair, attempting to reach the cords that bind Ingraham’s hands. “What would you like?” I will ask him. “My collection is enormous.”

  “How about Ravel’s Bolero?” he will request.

  A trite suggestion, but I will put it on for him, deliberately dawdling while searching for it, finding it, and putting it on the turntable, in order to give Morris more time to do whatever it is that he will be trying to do.

  Then, as the exotic, pounding strains of the Bolero succeed in drowning out the Victor Herbert, Bolshakov and I will ret
urn to the conversation pit to pick up where we have left off. Morris will no longer be anywhere around. I will wonder if he has given up whatever attempt he will have been making to free Ingraham.

  Bolshakov, taking notice of haggard Ingraham, will request of me, “Tell him, on one of your cards, to watch carefully what you are about to do to me, because his turn will come next.”

  I will perhaps be playing my last card to Ingraham, which will say, He really wants to get fucked, and he thinks that I will fuck you next. Has Morris freed four hands? Simply nod your head if he has. I will hold this card so that Ingraham can read it, and he will smile and give his head the slightest nod.

  Then Bolshakov will lay aside his pistol once more and recline in expectation of my mounting him.

  I will mount him.

  Oh, there will have been so many times when Travis or Billy, no less than Islamber or Dzhordzha or Kenny or one of the many others, lay supine beneath me while I rode upon him from above. But it will have been, always, them inside of me. Now it will be me inside of him.

  And my only profound regret will be that perhaps I shall never live to describe the whole experience, even in the future tense.

  But the American master of the future tense, Ingraham, will have left the chair where he was bound and will be heading for the cushion where lies the pistol of Bolshakov.

  He will reach the pistol, and he will seize it!

  Beloved Ingraham, my sworn brother, will point the pistol at Bolshakov and say, “All right, this disgusting spectacle has continued long enough.”

  “I tied you!” Bolshakov will screech. “How did you get loose?”

  One time Ingraham confessed to me that often when he cannot hear someone he successfully guesses what among the infinite possibilities the person has actually spoken. This will be one of those times. “Nelson Eddy untied me,” Ingraham will say. “Now get up and put on your clothes. Kat, you phone for the police—or the sheriff or whoever this town has.”