Suddenly, my depression turned into excitement. Underneath our measured conversation a complex meeting had begun. It was up to me to keep it going. But giving him the entire manuscript was not the way. It would be better to give him a working outline of it. If that intrigued him, I would give him the original material section by section. This way we could test one another.
On the following afternoon I left a hundred-page condensation of my book in his mailbox with a note that asked him to phone me after he read it. If he had any questions, I would be glad to discuss them whenever he wanted. In the days that followed I felt a strange and pervasive well-being, as if a connection existed between us that would help confirm my work and finally show me a way to live the life my theories promised. That this was an irrational response I fully realized. It was plausible he was telling the truth about the events in the church and that I was projecting unwarranted hopes upon him. And yet . . . our meeting continued to haunt me. Some angel of guidance seemed to say that our connection would grow stronger.
On the day following our meeting I began to inquire about him, only to discover how elusive he was. Just one art gallery, a little place near the waterfront, had heard of his work—though the owner, a crusty old Scotsman named Sandor McNab, said his paintings “showed an eerie kind of genius.” At the museums no one knew his name. And around Sts. Peter and Paul’s he remained an enigmatic figure. Father Zimbardo, with whom I talked twice more, said that he had been a good example for the boys of the parish but that no one at the church knew him well. At the Greenwich Press he was totally unknown, though Casey Sills, our chief editor, remembered that a writer named Armen Cross had once tried to do an article about an eccentric local artist named Atabet. That was little help, however, for Armen Cross had done an article on me for a New York magazine and in it had delivered a damning critique of my research that had taken me months to get over. I would have to be desperate for information before turning to him. Only John Levy, a friend, knew Atabet personally. Levy was legendary in San Francisco for his discovery and support of budding artists and philosophers, and for his judgment about problematic characters. Atabet had intrigued him from the day they had met. “Your instinct is right,” he said. “He’s got something else going besides his painting. I feel it every time we talk. But it’s hard to say what it is exactly. All I know is that there’s a power there . . . if I were you I’d pursue it. Have you heard the rumors about his paintings, that they move on the canvas? Sandor McNab told me about them.”
“That his paintings move? It must be an Op Art effect.”
“Well, I don’t know. I own one, and by God, I think it does move. It’s definitely changed color. But it’s his presence that impresses me most. His presence and the lift he gives me. Stay with it. And don’t worry about the other people, especially Armen Cross. He wouldn’t recognize Jesus!”
Our conversation restored my morale. The doubts and blank looks I found almost everywhere else seemed inconsequential in the face of this one sympathetic judgment.
But six days passed without a call or letter, and the hopes our meeting had aroused began to fade. The anxiety and frightening imagery of recent weeks returned with new intensity. On June 23rd, the seventh day after our meeting, I went up to his place to find him.
No one answered when I rang his bell, and I knocked at the Echeverrias’ door. An old lady answered and said in broken English that he had gone up to Sonoma with the Echeverrias to see some relatives. He wouldn’t be back for a couple of days.
I walked back to the Press in a daze. That he hadn’t phoned me proved he didn’t like the book. Irrational though the feeling might be, I felt totally betrayed. Casey Sills was my chief associate and editor at the Greenwich Press, and since my divorce I had depended upon her for emotional help in every kind of crisis. All week we had talked about Atabet. She stuck her head in the door and made a quick appraisal. Yes, I needed help, she said—giving my book to a reader always caused some kind of trauma.
She pulled up a chair by my desk and started to tease me about this infatuation with a stranger. As I tried to account for my feelings her wrinkled face gathered into a frown. “Darwin,” she sighed. “It’s time you found someone who knows how to cook and make a bed. Why don’t you go down to Puerto Vallarta or Acapulco and find her? I’ll take care of things for a couple of weeks.”
“Mexico?” I groaned. “Yes, maybe you’re right. Maybe this whole thing is crazy.”
“It’s been so foggy,” she shivered. “You know you get depressed every summer when the weather’s like this.”
I pictured a beach in Zihautanejo—a beach and a woman I sometimes dreamt about. “Casey, you should’ve been a doctor,” I sighed. “That’s probably just what I need!”
“Look,” she said. “Call up the airline now! And after you do that I’ll tell you my problems—with that goddamned Thurston manuscript.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Do you actually think anyone will buy it? Haven’t we had enough books lately on levitation and human salamanders? I mean every bookstore in town is flooded with this occult junk.”
The book in question was entitled The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism. It had been written by a Jesuit named Thurston in the 1930s and had been out of print for years. I had discovered it while writing my own book.
“Let me take another look,” I said. “Maybe this whole obsession of mine is nuts.”
“No, it’s not. It’s the way you’re living. You’ve got to find a woman and learn to eat right. And then publish the god-damned thing. It’s all this dithering, all this waiting around . . .” She waved her hand impatiently. “All this waiting around for Godot, or Jacob Atabet.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Let me think it over. If it seems right in the morning, I’ll go down to Zihautanejo. But you say you’ve never heard of him? I find that hard to believe.”
“No, I haven’t. Never. And I haven’t seen any of his paintings. Darwin, forget it! The guy sounds awfully suspicious.”
We talked a few minutes more and she urged me to have a nap and sauna. I went down the stairs to the street. As usual, the sidewalk was filled with bodies laid waste by drugs and malnutrition. On this bleak afternoon, Grant Avenue was a pageant of a vision gone sour.
But that night I decided there would be no peace or pleasure in Mexico. I would wait out Atabet’s silence for another few days. Entries from my diary that night and the following morning give a sense of my mood.
June 23
Eight days now since giving him the book. Cannot concentrate on work at all. Talked to Casey. She still doesn’t recall him, though they both have lived in this neighborhood for over 20 years. Talked about artists and writers she has known: Duncan, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the artistic movements that have come and gone in San Francisco. Morris Sills killed himself, she says, because “there was no discipline under his religious vision.” Said she saw the same kind of spiritual rise and collapse all during the Summer of Love. San Francisco is still full of the casualties.
Kept thinking all day about Armen Cross’s statement: “Your book proves there’s no such thing as a completely provable metaphysical system. You have written a philosophical equivalent of Godel’s Theorem!”
Will Atabet think the “metaphysical” part is too abstract?—or beside the point? When we talked about the book I didn‘t want to mention it.
June 24
Last night a terrible dream: a scene underwater and an image of a beating heart. A raw and bloody heart. Reminded me of his paintings somehow. I went out on the streets and ran for an hour.
And what does my book finally prove? That a new vision of human nature and destiny is emerging?—one that was not possible until this moment in time? It is a poor version of a good story, I think, finally a very dull song in praise of God’s evolution. In his cynical way, Armen Cross is right: such a system must be incomplete. Human speech cannot hope to express all the connections the loom of the brain
will spin. The whole project might be hopeless. ”Life is a conspiracy against any foreclosure on our larger destiny.” Systems of belief last a while, serve a purpose, are undone. Still . . . they give us clues. Will Atabet see that?
Thought of Mesmer’s animal magnetism. Is there some kind of magnetic fluid? The presence I felt in his place must have come directly from him. I seem helpless now in meditation. The old imagery is coming on with a vengeance.
But on the 25th my patience was finally rewarded. A letter from Atabet arrived at the Press. It said that he was reading the outline slowly, that he would be in Sonoma for two or three more days, and that he would call me as soon as he returned to the city. It was too early for him to say much about my ideas except that they were “having an impact.” Then in a postscript, he said he was showing the outline to some friends of his who shared our interests. There was something in the tone of the letter that made me think my ideas had impressed him more than he wanted to say. The excitement I had felt from our meeting came flooding back.
But that night I woke at the edge of a panic. There had been a dream of a face trying to whisper a secret. As I woke I got out of bed. If I waited another instant the secret would undo me.
Have you ever had a sense that you might disappear?—a feeling that if you didn’t assert yourself violently your entire existence would vanish? It had happened to me before, and I had learned one way to deal with it. Though it was three o’clock in the morning, I got dressed and ran through the streets until I felt exhausted. It was half past four before I felt enough self-possession to come inside.
For the third night that week this fear had erupted in a dream. More and more, sleep was becoming a place I could not rest in.
5
A SHIPHORN SOUNDED in the distance. It sounded again, as if it were farther away, and an answer came from the horn on Alcatraz Island. I stood at the edge of the pier waiting for this conversation of ships to continue, but there was only the lapping of water in the darkness below.
The sidewalk was deserted, but in the distance there were voices and the sounds of a ship being loaded. “Let her down,” someone cried, and I could hear the banging of metal.
I hurried to see what was happening and turned into a well-lighted pier. A freighter with a peeling red hull towered above me, its superstructure lost in the darkness above. On the wharf a group of longshoremen was attaching a pile of boxes to a line that came down from a crane. “Swing it!” yelled a man from the ship, and the boxes jerked into the air, swinging out of sight past the edge of the deck. “Stand clear!” someone shouted and a hook banged down on the pier beside me. One of the workers, a burly unshaven man in his fifties, told me to go back to the sidewalk.
I backed away slowly. There was something familiar about this scene, something I’d dreamed perhaps. As the hook was attached I remembered what would happen. Jumping back to the sidewalk I missed being hit by the pile of boxes.
Now another hook was coming down and I knew there was more in the dream to remember. “Get it on target!” someone yelled. “For Christ’s sake, kid, get away.” The hook came whistling past me and hit the side of the shed. As it did an image burst forth: the image of a heart falling out of a body, squirting blood and water . . .
“Get that fucking guy out of here!” the burly man was shouting. “Get him out of here before he gets killed!” Two longshoremen were walking toward me and I slowly backed into the street. As they came closer I started to run. Blocks away the lights of Edith’s bar were shining.
I came in panting from the run. There was only one other man in the place. “Darwin!” Edith said, looking up. “Come on in!”
As I approached she studied my face. This was the second time this week I had come here alone after midnight, and on both previous occasions I had been in a state like this. “A Scotch?” she asked as I pulled a stool up to the bar. I told her to make it a double.
She brought the drink and watched me drink it down. “That new friend of yours,” she asked. “What did he think of your book?”
I said that he hadn’t got back from Sonoma.
“Well, I know he’ll like it,” she said. “He sounds like the right kind of guy.” She was a stocky, square-faced woman, and in the barlight her dyed hair had a glint of bronze. “But your complexion.” She reached over to touch me. “In this light you look green.”
The whiskey warmed my throat and chest, and a wave of reassurance passed through me. What luck, I thought, that she was here to talk to. “I had a close call, watching them load a ship down there.” I nodded toward the pier which we could see through the windows behind her. “It scared the hell out of me.”
“A close call?” she asked. “What were you doing?”
“I was watching them load a freighter. A cable broke and a pile of crates almost landed on my head!” I swallowed the last of the whiskey. “It came close to killing me.”
“You been working late again?” She frowned. “How’re things going at the Press?”
“They’re fine. Just fine. It’s that goddamned book that’s the problem.” For months I had come here, and we had talked about my project for hours. Without her, I thought, some of those nights would have been impossible to get through.
She turned to refill the glass. The other customer had turned on the record machine and a melancholy blues was playing, a music like this lonely night. It brought a welcome sadness, a heavy sweetness that deepened my sense of relief. “Edith,” I said, “you don’t know how good it is to know you’re here.”
“What did you say?” she asked from the end of the bar. “You need a refill already?”
“No. I just said thanks. That’s all. Just thanks.”
She gave me a questioning look, then waved the statement away with a tough little gesture.
The fog was clearing and I could see the lights of Treasure Island through the pilings of the pier outside the bar. They danced toward me on the water like fragile golden walkways. Like walkways to another world. By squinting I could bring them all the way in through the window. For a moment I held the illusion. These golden filaments, I thought, could not be seen with my ordinary focus. There were a dozen ways to practice seeing. As I relaxed my gaze, the jagged silhouette of the pier made a vivid contrast to the shimmering vista beyond it.
Half the pier’s floorings sagged into the water. For years there had been plans to replace it. I let my chin rest in my hand. Trails of light now were dancing around the old broken beams. Dancing and beckoning. Like the rotting pier, I thought, there was a part of me waiting to fall while in the distance a new light was streaming . . . .
As the thought crossed my mind, something moved in the shadows. Like a heavy-winged bird, it fluttered up past the window. “Edith,” I said. “Do pelicans roost in those pilings?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “At least I’ve never seen one.”
As she said it the thing moved again, but this time it looked like a man—a hunched figure coming toward the window. “Somebody’s hiding outside!” I whispered, coming around the bar to look out. “Somebody’s trying to look in the window!” She came up beside me and we both peered into the dark. But there was nothing alongside the building. “Oh for goodness sake!” she scolded. “It was probably a bird!” I went back to my stool and took another drink of Scotch. It might have been a drunk, I thought, looking for a place to sleep.
The lights from Treasure Island rippled on the water, and I let my focus settle there. Something about them was calling me out in the night. Then a shadow moved past the window, and for an instant a face appeared. Had someone glanced in and ducked down? I stood to get a better angle, but no one was crouched near the building. It was impossible that someone could have run out of sight so fast. Or had it been an illusion?—some kind of telepathic message? The thought came with a thrill. Had it been a call from Atabet telling me to come to his place?
I swallowed all the whiskey in the glass. Yes, it had been a message. He wanted me to come to hi
s place right now. Waving thanks to Edith, I went outside and ran down the street toward the stairway that led up the hill. This was the day he was due to get back—maybe he had been trying to phone. I went up the steep incline two steps at a time, with a growing conviction that he wanted to see me.
At the top of Telegraph Hill I stopped. Coit Tower rose above me, its tip enveloped in a halo of blue mist. Its crown of golden arches was suspended some seventy-five or one hundred feet above. Or maybe it was over a thousand. For a moment I stood there, held fast by this sudden perception. There was no telling how high the tower reached.
“Hey Darwin, is that you?” He called down from the edge of the roof.
“Yes, it’s me. I’ve got to see you!”
A moment later he appeared at the picket gate. “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered. “Is anything wrong?” A startling change had come into his face. For a moment we stood there in silence. “Yes?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
In the shock I felt, I couldn’t find an answer. Whether from the whiskey or the muted light, his face seemed grotesquely misshapen.
“Well, come on in,” he said impatiently.
As we climbed the stairs I felt myself shaking, and mumbled apologies. “I was going to call you tomorrow,” he said as he locked the roof gate behind us.
The only light in the kitchen came from a fire in the hearth. We stood facing each other beside it. “So tell me what’s happening,” he said. “You don’t look in very good shape.”
In the wavering shadows now, he had an uncanny beauty—my impression on the landing had been completely transformed. “I’m all right,” I said weakly. “But it’s been kind of crazy. I’ve had the weirdest things happening . . .” In the flickering light his aspect was changing again. Now he seemed shaped like a flame, burning in the distance. “I’ve had too much whiskey,” I sat down in a chair. “Three double shots. God, I’m sorry, but I thought you’d sent me a message. I must be drunker than I thought.”
Jacob Atabet Page 4