“Just got here in time.”
“I was fixing to drink it all, but I could let you have a couple cc’s maybe.”
“Hey! cheer up there, runt o’ the litter. Guess what?”
“Do I have to?”
“Maybe this time we’ve caught us a good hand for a change.”
Kit blasted the cork across the room, knocking askew a sepia photographic portrait of Böpfli and Spazzoletta, posed beside a hydropathic pump. He drank the overflow and handed the bottle over. “Your idea of a good hand.”
“It’s your ol’ benefactor Scarsdale Vibe.”
Kit was instantly on rectal alert. His hands ached and he began to sweat. “Seems he’s over here in Europe,” Reef went on, “lookin to buy some of that Fine Art, all up and down the continent doin what the millionaires do. And at the moment, in fact, he’s right in the neighborhood, headin for Venice Italy—”
“Foley mentioned it already. Wasn’t good news then, ain’t now.”
“Depends, don’t it. Fate is handin this one right to us, Kit, there might never be a better time.”
“For . . .”
Reef peered at his kid brother, as if into a shadowy room. “Still too early to fold. Hand ain’t been called yet.”
Kit went over to the window and looked at weather racing up the lake to collide with the mountains. His policy of juvenile optimism no matter what was beginning to annoy even him, besides not working anymore anyway. “And who,” in sudden great weariness, “’s running with Vibe these days? Besides Foley, that is.”
“Could be one or two other Pinks in the brush, we’d sure have to keep an eye out.”
“So we’re going to find him and kill him, is that the plan?”
Reef pretended to squint upward at his brother through an imaginary telescope. “Well you sure are a bloodthirsty customer for being so short ‘n’ all.”
“Then—we don’t kill him? Reefer? What do we do?” Since the last time he’d been face-to-face with Scarsdale Vibe, at the Pearl Street offices, Kit had little trouble imagining himself aiming and firing with a steady hand and a composed spirit. It had come to this anyway. This far.
Reef on the other hand looked to be all passion and no plan. “Rifle at long range, sure, but face-to-face’d be better, say we took more of a, don’t know, Italian approach? How are you with a dirk? I can back you up—glue on some false mustachios—pretend to be a waiter or something, maybe, maybe bring him a glass of poison Champagne—”
“Reef, we, um, better think this one through?” Was Reef figuring somehow on Kit, the scientific one, to come up with a plan?
“Too bad we can’t talk to Pa.”
“According to some of Yashmeen’s friends—”
“Oh not you too, I got to listen to this stuff day and night from ’Pert and that bunch, little of it goes a long way, brother.”
“They do séances?” Kit reached for the packet of smokes on the table between them and lit one up. “And you never tried to contact Pa? Just curious.”
“Nothin but some fad thing for them. They do rope me in time to time, don’t mind, ’specially if it’s next to some interestin young lady, never can tell what hand-holdin in the dark can lead to—but I don’t talk about Pa, or us, or Colorado, none of that. They think I’m from your part of the country, Harvard and so forth.”
“Yale.”
“You bet, but, now, you’re worryin me here a little, Kit, supposed to be this hardcased man of science?”
Kit shrugged inside an envelope of smoke. “Don’t know how scientific it is, but lately there’s this ‘Psychical Research’—laboratories, experiments and so forth.”
“And ain’t it just the bunk.”
“So were wireless waves, and not all that long ago. Roentgen rays, whatever rays are coming next. Seems every day somebody’s discovering another new piece of the spectrum, out there beyond visible light, or a new extension of the mind beyond conscious thought, and maybe someplace far away the two domains are even connected up.”
Reef shook his head as if embarrassed. “They build a wireless telephone that we can talk to Pa on it, you’ll let me know, won’t you.”
As it turned out, that evening, as dusk crept over the rooms and suites, something like this very piece of equipment was about to materialize on their earthly plane, in the person of Madame Natalia Eskimoff. The kindly ecstatica, luminous from hiking up in the mountains, grasped right away their melancholy, if not their longer-term plans for revenge. She leaned against the walnut hotel bar still in her excursion suit, sipping at some ancient Scotch from a heavy tumbler of Bohemian crystal engraved with unreadable Böpfli-Spazzoletta heraldry, regarding the brothers amiably but with her own parameters for patience. “I do hope you’re not after mumbo jumbo in the dark,” she said, “glowing giant amœbas that leave sticky residues. White-faced children in nightclothes who glide room to room, whose feet don’t touch the floor.”
In P.R. circles Madame Eskimoff’s séances were known, you’d say notorious, for their impertinence. “As if the presences one encounters are so fragile they will get offended, or sulk, if the question is too direct. Bozhe moi! these people are dead! How much more rude does it get?”
They found a room, closed the drapes against the insupportable night, the waxing gibbous moon and the mountain heights almost as bright, inaccessible as the country of death, stars revealed now and then through snow blown in long veils off the peaks, miles of continental wreckage sweeping, frozen, neutral ground, uninhabited, uninhabitable, forever. Madame Eskimoff turned down the lights. The sitters included Kit, Reef, Yashmeen, and Ruperta, there to supervise the politics of who sat next to whom.
“I’m going upcountry, going to be harder to keep in touch, other things to do, further away though when you all get here we’ll be together again, hope you’re takin care of all them chores I used to seein’s it’s less important to me now, less and less, and there never was much I could do to help anyway. . . .”
The voice emerging from the darkly painted lips of Madame Eskimoff, slurred, effortful, as if brought upward against the paralysis of dream, spoke Webb’s words but bore little resemblance to what either brother could remember of Webb’s voice. They listened for the stogie-smoker’s hoarseness, the ridgerunner’s twang, but what they heard was European, more like the cross-border inflections that reps and drummers and spies on that continent pick up after years there out in the field. The concluding silence, when it came, was sharp as a cry. Color returned to Madame Eskimoff’s face, tears collected in her eyes. But when she surfaced, she had no memory of sorrow, or indeed any emotion.
“It wasn’t even Pa’s voice,” Reef in an angry whisper. “I tell you, Kit, it’s just a con game.”
“That was the voice of her control,” Yashmeen pointed out. “Also a go-between, but working from the other side. We use mediums, mediums use controls.”
“No disrespect,” Reef murmured, “but speakin as a old bunco man myself, that’s just the kind of dodge I’d use if I didn’t know what the deceased sounded like but wanted folks to think it was him talkin. . . .” He was surprised to see Madame Eskimoff nodding and smiling, as if in gratitude.
“Fraud is the element in which we all fly, isn’t it,” she said, “it bears us aloft, there isn’t one of us hasn’t been up on fraud, one time or another, before some damned beak of the materialistic—‘Ha! I saw that, what’s that going on with the toe of your shoe there?’ Insufferably smug guardians of the daylit world, no idea of how easy it is to detect that sort of mischief, usually from mediums who cannot manage a trance. Some never will. It requires great capacity for surrender, and a willingness to forgo any memory of what went on during it.”
“Well, and that’s mighty convenient too, don’t you think?”
“I do indeed, and when I hear doubts like yours, what I usually suggest is that the doubter try it for himself.”
“What you just did? Thanks but I’m not a very supernatural type of fella—”
&
nbsp; “You can never be sure, the gift shows up in the strangest people.” She gently took Reef’s wrist and led him back to the table.
“It ain’t so much going into it,” he was trying to explain, “it’s ’at comin out again.”
“You’ll do fine.”
“I mean I’d hate to get, uh . . .”
“Stuck.”
“There you go.” Yashmeen and a flâneur of Ruperta’s acquaintance named Algie arranged a quick foursome, as if it was going to be a bridge game. No sooner had the sitters joined hands than Reef was under, like that, off in some sub-ecstasy. Next thing anybody knew, he was singing, operatically, in the tenor register and the Italian language, though Kit knew for a fact that Reef was tone-deaf, couldn’t get through “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” without changing key. After a while whoever the control was arrived at a high C and held it long enough to send Sanatorium staff running off to find medical assistance.
“I seen others who died in bed,” Webb began to speak, really Webb this time, “in easy reach of all they built and loved, surrounded at the end by the children, the grandchildren, friends, folks from town that nobody knew their names, but that wasn’t in the cards for me, not in that flat-broke world it was given us to work and suffer in, those were just not the choices.
“No point makin excuses. I could’ve done ’er different. Not driven you all away. Figured how to honor those who labor down under the earth, strangers to the sun, and still keep us all together. Somebody must’ve been smart enough to manage that one. I could’ve worked it out. Not as if I was alone, there was help, there even was money.
“But I sold my anger too cheap, didn’t understand how precious it was, how I was wasting it, letting it leak away, yelling at the wrong people, May, the kids, swore each time I wouldn’t, never cared to pray but started praying for that, knew I had to keep it under some lid, save it at least for the damned owners, but then Lake sneaks off into town, lies about it, one of the boys throws me a look, some days that’s all it needs is a look, and I’m screamin again, and they’re that much further away, and I don’t know how to call back any of it. . . .”
It could have been a heart-to-heart in some friendly saloon. But the one thing his sons wanted, they wouldn’t get tonight. They wanted to hear Webb say, with the omnidirectional confidence of the dead, that seeing Scarsdale Vibe had hired his killers, the least the brothers could do at this point was to go find him and ventilate the son of a bitch.
Afterward, as expected, Reef couldn’t remember a thing. Madame Eskimoff and Yashmeen went off to the Turkish baths, and Algie headed for the billiard room. Kit sat down at the table and looked across it at his brother. “I didn’t do anything real embarrassin, did I?” Reef wanted to know.
“It was him, Reef. His voice, hell you even looked like him.”
“Could’ve been the light.”
“I sure don’t know what to believe.”
“Take a picture next time. Whenever that is.” Reef oddly unsure of himself. He gazed resentfully at his hat. “Look at me. This hat. What am I doing here with these people? I thought I made my choice back in New Orleans. Thought it was Anarchism from here on in all the way till they couldn’t afford to have me around ’cause it’s the type of persuasion only has one outcome don’t it. Kit.” It almost sounded like a call for help. “I don’t even know who I fuckin am anymore.”
IN THE DREAM they are all together at a social of some kind, it is unnamed but familiar high country, spruce and aspens, water running everywhere, creeks, ponds, fountains, more food than a church supper, cooks in those tall cooks’ hats carving and dishing it out, barbecued ribs and baked beans, ice-cream cones and sweet-potato pies, presentable girls, many of them distant relatives, each face all but unbearably distinct, familiar though never met before, fiddles and guitars and an accordion and people dancing, and off at the edge of it Kit sees his father alone at a wood picnic table with a pack of cards, playing poker solitaire. He notices at the time the cards are not only marked with numbers, they somehow are numbers, some real, some imaginary, some complex and even transcendent, Webb setting them each time in a five-by-five matrix whose eigenvalue situation is not so straightforward, but in parallel to this Kit is still about six years old, and goes running over to Webb. “You all right, Papa?”
“Real dandy, Christopher. Everthin all right with you?”
“I thought you looked, looked like you were feeling lonely?”
“Just ’cause I’m sittin here alone? Sakes, alone ain’t lonely. Ain’t the same thing at all. They didn’t teach you that yet in school? Here.” The boy comes in close and stands awhile in Webb’s one-arm embrace, while Webb continues to lay down the cards, making remarks—“Well look at this,” or “Now what do I do here?” and Kit’s trying to identify characteristic polynomials, at the same time nestling close to his father as he can get. “There’s worse than being lonely, son,” Webb tells him after a while. “And you don’t die of it, and sometimes you even need it.” But just as Kit’s about to ask what you need it for, something out in the great never-sleeping hydropathic, a sneeze, a dropped omelette pan, a swamper whistling, woke him up.
Kit coalesced slowly into the dark institutional hour when guests deferred to all day lay shelved, numbered, irrelevant. Confused for a moment, thinking he was somehow in jail, that the sounds of the place going about its slow digestive life were all voices and flows and mechanical repetitions he was forbidden to hear in daytime, he stared mouth-upward at nothing, hope, or maybe only the vis inertiœ which had kept him till now in motion, draining away—approaching a terrible certainty he couldn’t immediately name but which he knew he had to live under the weight of now.
He must have wanted all along to be the one son Webb could believe in—no matter what kind of trouble Reef might be rambling around out there looking to get into, or how pro- or anti-Union Frank’s engineering ambitions might turn out to be, Kit had always thought he would be there for his father no matter what, if only because there was nothing in the way of it, nothing he could see. But then just like that there he was, out of the house and down in the meanest part of the U.S., and before he could even remember who he was, Webb was gone. If he could only’ve been surer of Kit, maybe when the awful hour came to claim him, he could have fought back by just enough extra will to survive after all. Restricted now to séances and dreams, he could no longer say this to Kit in so many words but must use the stripped and dismal metonymies of the dead.
Just because Webb hadn’t denounced him tonight didn’t mean Kit was off the hook. He had betrayed his father, that wouldn’t change—collaborated with his father’s murderers, lived the rich-kid life they were paying him to live, and now that that was over, he understood that whatever he might want to use for an excuse, it couldn’t be his youth anymore, or what might be left of his compromised innocence. He had turned against Webb the night he got back from Colorado Springs with Foley’s proposition, and had made no effort to make it right, till it was too late to do anything right.
He lay there, sick and hollow with shame. How had this happened? What used to be home was five thousand miles away now and another couple-three straight up and down, and the only one back there who mattered anymore was Mayva, the dwindling, resolute figure at the depot, in the wind and the immense sunlight, the weight of all the shining metal under the earth balanced against her and what she wanted, which God knows had always been little enough. “Your Pa spent most of his life down there. . . . All he gave them, for what he got back . . . their bought-and-sold vermin, and there’s still traces of his blood all up and down this country, still crying out, that’s if blood was known to cry out, o’ course—”
It might have been comforting to think of himself as one of Yashmeen’s holy wanderers, but he knew the closest he’d ever got to a religion was Vectors, and that too was already receding down a widening interval of spacetime, and he didn’t know how to get back to it any more than Colorado. Vectorism, in which Kit once thought he had
glimpsed transcendence, a coexisting world of imaginaries, the “spirit realm” that Yale legend Lee De Forest once imagined he was journeying through, had not shown Kit, after all, a way to escape the world governed by real numbers. His father had been murdered by men whose allegiance, loudly and often as they might invoke Jesus Christ and his kingdom, was to that real axis and nothing beyond it. Kit had sold himself a bill of goods, come to believe that Göttingen would be another step onward in some journey into a purer condition, conveniently forgetting that it was still all on the Vibe ticket, paid for out of the very account whose ledger he most wished to close and void, the spineless ledger of a life once unmarked but over such a short time broken, so broken up into debits and credits and too many details left unwritten. And Göttingen, open to trespass by all manner of enemies, was no longer a refuge, nor would Vectors ever have been Kit’s salvation.
Someplace out ahead in the fog of futurity, between here and Venice, was Scarsdale Vibe. The convergence Kit had avoided even defining still waited its hour. The man had been allowed to go on with his dishonorable work too long without a payback. All Kit had anymore. All there was to hold on to. All he had.
As light began to seep in around the edges of the window blinds, Kit fell asleep again and dreamed of a bullet en route to the heart of an enemy, traveling for many years and many miles, hitting something now and then and ricocheting off at a different angle but continuing its journey as if conscious of where it must go, and he understood that this zigzagging around through four-dimensional space-time might be expressed as a vector in five dimensions. Whatever the number of n dimensions it inhabited, an observer would need one extra, n + 1, to see it and connect the end points to make a single resultant.
While Kit struggled through the cheerless and unproductive time of night known to Chinese of his acquaintance as the Hour of the Rat, and Reef was off being entertained in some steamy hydropathic swimming tank with an undetermined number of erotomaniac tourist ladies, Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin was wrapping up an all-night frolic with Yashmeen, most of which regrettably had been passed in negotiation—there was to be no question of sweet equality or even symmetry. As this process of counter-feinting, flirtation, and deception carried its own low-intensity erotic energy, it did not apparently collapse into the bothersome chore it too often becomes for men and women, so the long evening wasn’t a total loss. Yashmeen had been granted ten minutes’ reprieve from worrying about her uncertain future, and Ruperta’s jealousy, a beast with an exotic dietary, had been fed. The women were in fact surprised to find a sky full of morning light outside the curtains, the sun about to clear the peaks, a sailboat or two already out on the lake.
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