“Hey Danny. Birdman, this is the States,” Johnny said.
“One has been put in charge of public safety,” the birdman said, scratching his thick feathered armpit. “One took risks. Have not commented greatly on your last whoosie as of yet, but from the few comes the – debt! Ha.” He did a little time step with his clompy Fryes.
“Could somebody arrest this man for felony stuffed shirt?” Johnny asked the passing paraders, one of whom raised a two-foot-high glass with red liquid in it, sucking the holiday brain-paralysing spirit through a curved straw.
“Shrovlem probeled,” the drinker said, “bring him in,” and wove down the concrete.
“One shall make the people free even if one has to kill every last one of them,” the birdman orated, returning to his baritone preaching. His eyes went away to the high mountains bleached pale ochre in the bright sun, his head looked to the planes lifting up with no identification, and to the planes drifting down inside the valley’s impossibly blue dome. “Got a dollar, white collar?” he said to a man tootling by in a motorized chair, legless with not even a blanket to cover his lap and underwear. He wore a red and white trucker’s hat with “Save The Painforest” on it. He did indeed stop and hand up a dollar bill to the birdman’s tub.
The birdman moved in to Johnny’s personal space, whispering from his shorter height to Johnny’s neck. “One hears from sources that the big-shot writer Johnny Coma is prepared to blurb the bird’s new book, shhh, top eyes-only intel. Down the back-channel pike word has it that Johnny Coma, we are confident, will be recommending very soon in time the passage of the bird’s book to the biggest of the New York firms. Shhh. Harper Strauss, keep it under your rug.”
It was hard to tell, in the modern times of image anxiety and the vast deserts of life left to go after a life of working, who was a heebie-jeebie pest, who was a panicked desperate, who was a focused stalker, who wanted to write a novel, who wanted to write a novelist.
“My dear avian ass,” Johnny said, stepping to the side, fanning the air. The bird suit smelled of old mouldy storage. “In order to blurb a book, there has to be a book. Why are you here in Vegas?”
“I came to the high mountains.”
“We’re in a valley.”
“I was misinformed.”
The birdman ran out to the traffic on the boulevard, speaking to the cars as they zoomed and braked. The prismatic light bounced off the white cars, and all cars were reflecting surfaces in this town of mirrors.
“The people shall be made secure, above all efforts, this one promises. If one must and so forth to bring freedom, as inferred by x or y degrees in the most recent intelligence partners on various issues, ahem.” Like the keynote bird who had a small seizure mid-speech, consider Mister Daniel Coma, late of everywhere in the world and peace treaty conferences, winching himself back up to the vague coherences of his brain.
“Ah, yes, here one is. We in the West…” A circle of holidaymakers had formed. Some took pictures of the birdman with their cellphones. Some dropped coin in his retro Flamingo money tub. Inside the mouldy down, his eyes lit up. “Got an Abe, babe? Anything works.” Stabbing a man on stilts in his wooden leg. “Any coin? Spare Rolex? Anything helps. The bird lied for democracy, and look at democracy now.” The birdman scratched his feathered breast. A large moth flew out and landed on Johnny’s nose. “Scrim, scram; lightness!”
“It’s not too late to contend,” Johnny said.
“Call Ma, she’s waiting. She wants that 1,263 dollars back.”
“Danny, Ma’s dead.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“She’s buried at Mount Sinai.”
“In terms of future challenges. On the chance there was some prospect of who knows, I put her mobile in her coffin, just in case her no-good son Jonathon cares to call.”
“You put Ma’s cellphone in her grave? She didn’t know how to operate it when she was alive.”
“We have had technical support from the usual quarters. Spare a loonie for the counterterrorism cause?”
The desert at noon shone like the protagonist it had been, before the people. There was a glint in the birdman’s cloudy eyes. “I know you. Montevideo. The Columbia Palace. Yes! IMF Anders. The Electrician. Old sod, how’s she been keeping?”
Fugue states, then the clarity. Then, in the dry, the mental fog sweeps in.
“Danny. It’s me. Johnny. Jonathon, your younger brother. It was Vivienne in Montevideo. I’ve never been in Uruguay. Please. Do me a personal favour. Say her name. Twenty-five years, you still won’t utter my wife’s name. Vivienne.”
“There was no daylight. We did not have daylight. We didn’t know who these people were. Simply guerrillas.” Danny Birdman came to Johnny’s neck and smelled it. A big smile, unrelated to happiness or joy spread on his face.
“Now, there’s a laugh.” Johnny stepped back. “I pampered my older brother; I treated the first in command like a baby. I let you run your damn potential into smoking burnout. Vivi? My Vivienne? She went on her own tick to the places you were sent. She stayed in bedbug hotels. She prowled the streets. You lived behind gates, watching the photos Vivi took click by on your plasma screens.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the feathered bird said, clomping a feathered tap step. “One simply could not get out ahead of the moving parts.”
“What is this?” Johnny picked at Danny’s feather suit. A piece of turquoise, an earring stud was stuck in the feathers. Johnny stuck it back in. “You used to be quoted in the articles as ‘a source with close knowledge of the situation.’ But my wife, whose name you will not speak, was the photographer in fatigues in with the fighters. Say ‘Vivienne.’ Say her name and we could begin to forgive you. You might even start that novel you’ve been talking about since Moses hiked the tablets up Mount Sinai.”
“Stop picking on me. I have gout. We have to walk the terror stream back.”
“If I had picked on you more, told you that you write like crap, you might be a man today in trimmer syllables. Hey, look, you want to come with me to Death Valley? We could make it a family outing.”
The birdman clomped up and down in front of Johnny, swinging his ski pole and his feathered arm in a combo of a Peppermint Twist and a latter-day geezer b-boy breakdance. “Bim bam, flim flam, schism shizzle shim Joe Louis, what a man.” Punching the air. “Boxing, boxeo, the bird is the word, the bird is a champion contender, to the max. Max Schmeling. Bop! Debt Valley!”
The desert street paraders in visible acts of magical thinking wore the costumes of humid heat their winter minds told them to wear when they travelled to sunshine. Up and down the boulevard they paraded in faux Hawaiian shirts done up in nausea yellows and halucious blues on top of board shorts designed for those who surfed desks, their souvenir Ts saying they were with stupid, their bare sockless legs in squishy pink clogs. The boom was booming, but advisories cautioned: never negotiate a mortgage with a man who wears Jell-O on his feet. The winter Santa Ana winds blew a hard zero degrees Fahrenheit at three per cent humidity. Here and there, with the wisdom of a sartorial satori, a stroller wore outerwear of nubbly sheep, long-sleeved. This was the high-res desert.
The Birdman of Paris spoke: “My younger brother, John Coma, perhaps generally speaking has some renown. Applause please! But one is unaware of the – who is she?”
“Vivienne? Say her name. Vivienne was ten times more known than me. You were too busy lighting the cigarillos of Madame Nhu to be curious about Vivienne. She knew the Nhus, Danny. She took Madame Nhu’s picture. It’s in one of her books.”
“The Nhus! Yes!” The bird brightened in his fugue state. “Big news! Daniel Coma will be blurbed in his new novel by bestselling author Johnny Coma!” Danny was back retailing fake facts about Johnny Coma to Johnny Coma’s face. Johnny wasn’t buying retail.
“Do you want to come with us to the desert or not.”
“One is in the desert, right now,” the birdman said. “Hey, buddy,” reaching his tu
b out to a red polka-dotted do-rag man in full leather and a dark beard. “Hey. The bird is in charge of national security, got any spare change to help a poor agency out? Pennies do.”
“You tell ’em,” the man in leather said, high-fiving the red ski pole, dropping a dollar bill in the plastic tub. “Tell old man Cheney I said hi.”
“One will pass it along to one’s Dick. Yes, yes. One can see, my dear boy,” Danny said to Johnny, this time using a rather more mid-Atlantic tone, somewhere in flight between Houses of Parliament, “the people, to some degree, can be persuaded. A small swim in a river. A small electrical appliance. One had to work without daylight. The mission was blindfolded.”
Consider the birdman, late of Washington, DC, and parts invaded, once a government fixer, now a feathered Strip beggar recently escaped from a loony birdhouse. A man who, in the asylum, declared himself the Son of God, though he was, in fact, the son of Murray.
Johnny Coma, novelist, just back from Baghdad, from one desert to another at the same latitude, Iraq to Nevada, Johnny had flown west on the desert belt to another winter crystal. And here was Johnny’s only sibling, the once formidable negotiator of all things, the fixer for the Americans, Dan Coma. Come to Death Valley. There was a reckoning due.
“Come along, Daniel. We’ll talk writing. We’ll be brothers. I’ll tell you all about how to control your fans.” Johnny whispered into the mouldy shoulder. “Get your wife to answer all your fan mail. It’s magic – that way the glory hounds are left with nada. Their correspondence was with Vivienne posing as me. Misdirection, Danny, misdirection.”
Like all good magicians, while telling the mark how misdirection worked the conjurer was misdirecting him. Flatter the man. Use the way men come to writers to talk away the day, believing writers to be priests, psychiatrists or social workers. But writers are deadpan professional thieves.
Johnny put his arm around the smelly feathers. “Fine. I was ready to talk scribbling with you but fine. Beg money from strangers. We’re going to Death Valley in the morning. We’re at the Flamingo.” He walked away.
“I could come,” the birdman shouted after Johnny. Johnny kept walking through fun valley. The sky was filled with planes above, a few of them civilian.
“I’ll go to Death Valley,” he said to the air.
6
VAN GOGH IN HIROSHIMA
AT THE FIRST of the Flamingo’s many blue pools, two figures lay on chaises, bundled in coats, faces up to the sun. Vivienne Pink with her pink leather jacket up to her neck and Val Gold, spy, housemate back in Toronto, with his old Irish sheep sweater were the only ones at the pool.
Val pulled out two postcards from his grey jacket. One the head of Picasso, the other the head of Van Gogh. “Look, this is all you need to know.” He tapped the head of Picasso. “Okay, this is Pablo the Spaniard’s self-portrait. He paints himself – I mean, I love this, don’t get me wrong, but look how he portrays himself – like the primitive art he loved then. He looks African, he looks like a totem, his features erased to a mask. He looks like something iconic you would find in wood, in the Nile region, from prehistory. The open shirt, a blouse really, come on, Picasso’s shirt looks like the one in that pic you favour, Vivi, of Walt Whitman, isn’t it? The informal guy.”
“Do not call me Vivi. That is my husband’s name for me,” Vivienne said.
“Oh, listen to her, look at this one, ‘husband.’”
“If you were married, you would have less time to put a microscope to the names married people use for each other, Val.” But she liked what he was saying about Picasso. Val was light years ahead of her in piercing the images. She made them; he could construct their hidden glory.
Val tapped the eyebrows of the Picasso self-portrait. “Look at these eyebrows, he made them long, a line, an entire frame for the face. Picasso got eyebrows, that’s for sure, babe.”
Vivienne did not like that he was calling her babe either. It was one of their frequent intimate moments, but while she sensed that Val felt it to be love, or the hint that he, The Other Man, might have a chance to step up and be the First in Command, she invariably and exclusively felt it to be a lovely pal-to-pal tutorial. She picked Val’s brain and Val felt it to be love. To her it was a platonic thing.
“Look at Picasso’s hand,” Val said, tapping the crude fist. “The over-blouse in white, the V-neck showing his clavicle, the crude facial features, the high hairline, the hand. Picasso made himself look like a South Seas idol. Look, it’s all greys and whites and black. It’s severe, it’s ridiculously modern.”
He put the Picasso self-portrait down and held up the Van Gogh. The paint, even in a reproduction, caught the prismatic desert light around the pool and shone as if the original gloss was evident in the flat card. “Look now at this one,” Val said, not tapping but running his finger up and down on Van Gogh’s hair. “Look: orange, red, green, the bristling hair of a man, a quiet fire, like Amsterdam. Look at the moustache, the beard. The two portraits could not be more different. I remember seeing this at the Van Gogh Museum; you really can’t get it until you have seen how alive Van Gogh’s paint is. The paint, not the painting. The paint makes the painting but the paint has a life of its own. He painted himself painting, and the man, look,” running his palm on the card, “is so focused, so at rest, so in his thing, look at his arm. Picasso painted himself as a found object. Van Gogh painted himself as a man at work.”
Vivienne had her eyes closed. Val had tutored her in all things art. She could see the Van Gogh behind her closed eyes as he spoke: “Vincent in the self-portrait has his thumb through the wooden palette hole, and the palette and his arm look one and the same. The first time I saw this, I thought, Van Gogh made a palette prosthetic, he made a warrior’s new arm, made up of wood with paint globs on it. A wounded veteran could use his wooden limb as his paint source.”
Vivienne opened her eyes. Val put one postcard on each of his legs, his charcoal pants providing a good background. The Picasso on his left thigh, the Van Gogh on his right. “Vivi, you see, Pablo came from the sunny south, he was a Málaga boy. He goes up to Barcelona, he’s fifteen, sixteen, all the sunny places formed him. But Vince baby was from the dark north. And he ends up being all about the sunny south. Pablito left the sun and Vince came to it. Vince was consumed by light. Take The Pigeons.”
“Do not start with Picasso’s Pigeons this morning, honey,” Vivienne said. “No Los Pichones.”
The honey came out of her mouth in love and habit. It was not, however, the love Val wanted. The love he wanted he would not chance to take. The love he wanted was a life with Vivienne as her husband. Still, Vivienne habitually honeyed him.
“They reminded me of you and me; we could coo in a pigeon keep, what say?”
“Please,” she said.
“Okay,” Val said. “But… Van Gogh’s stars have emotion. Picasso is warmer than people say. He is my compass, you know that, darling Vivi.”
Stop calling me Vivi, she thought, but she did not say it. She liked Val’s poolside tutorials. He went on. “But Vince is like some angel down in the engine room, some V8 angel engine. I don’t know. But then Pablo comes up with these intentions, he will try anything. Vivi. Listen, you yourself do not know most of the time what your heart’s intention is. What your art’s intention is. Your stated intention might not be what is going on, subterraneanally. Think about it.”
This was why Vivienne cherished Val, why she needed Val in her art oasis. If Johnny had had such marvellous insights into Van Gogh, the truth is he would never have relaxed in a chaise by a pool and entertained his wife’s closed eyes as she half-slept with his thoughts, no way, nooo way. Johnny? He would have hied his insights up the elevator to the room and secreted them into his cardboard Moleskine notebook to use in a novel. And that was how it was. Val did not feel the need to put his thoughts into words other than those spoken. Val had no pressing need to put his words into a shaped product to sell to strangers for money, he had a pressing need to ch
arm Vivienne, to compete for her graces. “You never told me any of this before,” she said. “Go on. Tell me.”
“He wanted Japan,” he said, fired up by the nearness of her. “V, listen. Van Gogh’s intention was – Japan. Not the south of France. You have to know that about a man. What is his intention? It is not what it seems, even what the evidence seems to tell; the evidence is not always the best storyteller. What is your desire, Vivi? Van Gogh’s desire was Japan. He wrote to his brother Theo and asked why not go to the equivalent of Japan – the south of France. If Vincent had lived he might have scraped together the gelt to get a cheapo trip, actual Van Gogh in actual Tokyo. For all we know, Van Gogh would have gone to Nagasaki to paint the atomic victims. He might have been protean, my Vivi, to their proteus faces; he might never have cut off his own ear, seeing theirs radiated into their cheekbones.
“Van Gogh would have been ninety-two when they dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima if he had lived. He might have been an atomic mutant child portraitist with easy travel. Arles and Saint-Rémy were not his intention. He hoped, as he travelled down south, that in Provence he would find the light of Japan he had seen in the great Japanese painters. I remember when I fell in love with that woman with the white cap, and Gauguin’s chair, and the courtesan; I did not know why until I went back to Hiroshima that time. It was the light, something about the greens. The acid sparks he infused into those greens, the woodblock air, setting the items forward. He made paint bracing. It was poetry, not decoration. Yes. I think maybe that is it, honey.” Val was being easy and companionable. Like old times. But their old times had been so short and so long ago, and they had been feeding off of them for way too long, even when the well ran dry. Now, in a small miracle, the well seemed to have a moment of fresh water, the way it can feel some days with old friends.
She took Val’s hand. He went on: “If there had been planes when Van Gogh was painting and Van Gogh had gone to Japan, we might have had Starry Night over Nagasaki, he might have done paintings of the atomic victims. He might have shown the neck of a radiated man. He might have done Night Café in Tokyo, or American Sailor in Yokosuka. Maybe instead of Woman in a Kimono, he would have painted a woman suffering full-body burns in Kumamoto. Maybe Van Gogh, instead of giving us rain over a bridge and the small people walking on it, might have painted the exodus after radiation over the bridge in the fallout rain.”
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