Of course, he knows this is not literally so. He is not out of touch with reality. He knows she cannot be thinking of him. For one thing, she would not be able to see him in the dark; for another, they have never met; and for another, even if they had …
Nevertheless.
All that, it seems to him, is beside the point. There are more ways in heaven and earth, Nelson knows, than are dreamed of, etcetera, more ways for kindred spirits to touch, to commune, to send and receive, whatever. Night after night, in her green nightgown, the woman leans on her windowsill, haloed by the bedroom lamp behind her, and Nelson watches from behind a tree in the park.
The painting is called Beata Beatrix which means, so the website informs, the Blessed Beatrice; or Beatrice the Blessed; or Beatrice Beatified. This third possible translation seems to Nelson the most accurate because the woman is a source of mysterious power. He writes in his diary: I have been granted a Visitation. The entry does not seem adequate. On the large wall-calendar above his desk, he marks the date with a star. Beneath the symbol, he writes in small neat script: The Annunciation. He is of Catholic stock, and religious calendars adorned the walls of his childhood home. March, Feast of the Annunciation, remains his favourite. In March, the Angel Gabriel, radiant beneath his huge wings, reveals to the Virgin Mary her destiny. Year after year, the March calendar image is the Fra Angelico, fifteenth century: the angel and the awestruck girl, the sense of occasion, the intimation that something momentous has occurred.
Nelson loves the extravagant lapis lazuli blue of Mary’s robe.
Now, he realises, green can be equally potent. He orders a print of Beata Beatrix, framed and matted, and hangs it on the back of the bookcase divider, facing his bed.
It is the first thing he sees when he wakes in the morning and the last thing he sees at night. After his park vigil he lies on the bed and props himself up on the pillow. The city lights beyond his window cast a golden wash on the green gown and on the woman’s red hair. She looks exactly as she looks from the park. Her eyes and lips offer blessing and a drowsy numbness overwhelms Nelson, as though of hemlock I had drunk, he murmurs aloud. He has begun to read poetry and falls asleep dreaming Keats. In insubstantial air, he inscribes lines both above and below the portrait. Being too happy, he writes with his index finger, in thine happiness.
The lines flutter about his pillow like little birds.
He has researched the portrait online.
Apparently the painting is famous, and the Beatrice referred to by its title is famous, and apparently the painter – though long dead – was also famous and was a great admirer of Keats and was awash in grief and guilt when he painted his beautiful dead wife whom he had so often betrayed.
Nelson works from home, which is his studio apartment on the twelfth floor of a high-rise in the city. He has a title: Public Relations Associate. He has a business card. The card attests to his affiliation with Wholesome Food & Beverage whose motto is: We taste so good, you don’t notice we’re good for you. A year ago he was a software designer for the very company that pushed Wholesome’s stock through the roof. He is, in fact, the creator of Wholesome’s interactive website, and corporate champagne has been fizzed and spilled in his honor. A YouTube video shows Paul, the CEO of Nelson’s former company – ExecuTech – proposing the toast: To the brainiac who kicked our client’s stock through the goal posts, and our stock along with it. To winning the World Cup of Interactive Graphic Ads for our team.
A great deal of champagne was drunk. There was heavy-metal music and dancing. There was a drum beat so insistent, so primitive, that the seismic detectors in the building howled like wolves. Paul himself was seen to dance on the desktops with a woman who was not his wife and who did not work for the company. They were quite something to behold, Paul and this woman, fancy-footing between laptops and printers, first position, second position, Kama Sutra tangles of the limbs. The woman wore a long silky green thing that clung like plastic wrap. From time to time, couples disappeared into the photocopying room which had a lettered sign on the door: Sophie, our office administrator, is available for reproduction only between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. on weekday afternoons.
Nelson watched as Paul floated down from a desktop (from Nelson’s desktop) like a man hung by guy ropes from a glider. Office thermals and the inevitable air currents – strictly hierarchical – took Paul to the photocopying room. ‘That would be scanned,’ Nelson said bitterly to someone, but his listener, none too familiar with Shakespeare, did not get it. The woman was coiled around Paul like a shimmering emerald snake, her red hair tumbling over her shoulders.
‘She’s going to regret that,’ Sophie, the office administrator, whispered to Nelson. ‘Paul’s an animal, especially when he’s been drinking.’
Paul has animal magnetism, Nelson certainly concurs with that. He doesn’t hate Paul or blame him. It is more that his loneliness feels so acute in Paul’s presence. ‘He only has to lift his little finger,’ he said, ‘and women come running.’
‘Then they run in the other direction,’ Sophie told him. ‘Or try to. Paul likes to beat around the bush, so to speak.’
‘What do you mean?’
Sophie raised her eyebrows. ‘I thought I’d been a bit too blunt.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’
‘Nelson, you’re sweet.’ Sophie stroked his hair as though he were a child. She found his innocence endearing. ‘To be even blunter. Paul doesn’t like to let anyone go and things can get ugly.’
Nelson stared at her.
‘Believe me, I know,’ Sophie said. ‘That’s why I start a new job on Monday. Haven’t told anyone yet and I’m not telling anyone where I’m going, not even you, Nelson, because Paul is a stalker.’ She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Wish me luck. And thanks for always being so nice to me.’
‘Wait,’ Nelson said.
‘Can’t wait. This is my chance to disappear.’ She nodded toward the photocopying room. ‘You might want to knock on that door in ten minutes or so. Just in case …’
She vanished behind the elevator doors.
Things got a little wild after that.
There is no question that being a mere public relations associate for a former client is a step down from award-winning software designer, but Nelson is grateful. One small step back from the abyss is the way he sees it. He cannot actually remember what happened after a certain point at the ExecuTech celebration, though when he finally reached home, driven by someone in uniform in a car equipped with flashing lights – he does not know if this was days or weeks later – the suit and shirt and tie and even the underpants he had worn to the party were waiting in a neatly boxed UPS parcel.
Every day he stares at the clothes in the parcel – he has never put them away; he has never even taken them from the box – and he does not regret his lack of recall.
He is not sure where the in-between was – a hospital? a clinic? – but he does remember (at least, he thinks he remembers) the visits from Paul, which seemed to be constant, though of course he does not trust himself on this matter.
‘We’ve been pushing you too hard,’ Paul says and says and says, every time Nelson wakes up. (But perhaps Nelson simply replays this scene compulsively? Perhaps it only happened once? He has the mindset of a mathematician and a composer of algorhythms; data recovery is his thing; he is a sceptic by instinct; on image manipulation, he is the acclaimed wizard; he trusts nothing.) ‘Jeez, man,’ Paul says. ‘I had no idea.’
‘We don’t want to lose you,’ Paul keeps saying. ‘Hell, man, you’re brilliant, you’re off the charts, but you’re too intense. We only just stopped you, you know. You got any idea what that sort of publicity would have done?’
Nelson squints, concentrating, trying not to recall.
‘You would have put us under, that’s what. You would have put us under even faster than you booted us up. Jesus, Nelson, have you any idea? And we only just stopped you, only just.’
Nel
son raises his eyebrows. Only just stopped me from what? his eyebrows ask.
‘We stopped you from jumping off the balcony, twentieth floor, for God’s sake. Don’t tell me you don’t remember, because I won’t believe bullshit like that.’
Nelson does not believe he would ever do that. ‘No,’ he says, or tries to say. ‘I would never do that.’
‘You believed you could fly.’ Paul flings his arms in the air and waves them like wings. He mimics a falsetto voice: ‘I can fly! I can fly!’
‘You’re lying.’ Nelson has a fleeting image of the glass surface of a photocopying machine but he cannot hang onto it. It swoops out of his line of sight. There is something he cannot recall. ‘I would never do that.’
‘Jesus, Nelson, spare me the crap. There’s no way you don’t know what you did. Why the hell else would you be in here and doped to the gills? I can’t even understand what you’re saying.’
Nelson speaks slowly and carefully. He tries to admit that he can be a bit obsessive, maybe tunnel-focused, when he is working on something but not … His tongue feels clumsy to him, like a very old horse that has broken free of the reins but no longer remembers how to gallop. He concentrates on forming each word. ‘I would never do that. Never. I don’t believe you.’
‘I have no idea what you’re trying to say, Nelson, but believe me, you would’ve been a splat on the sidewalk by now if we hadn’t grabbed you.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
The words come out more or less clearly, and Paul is startled. He rakes his fingers through his hair and butts his forehead against the wall of the room, over and over, though gently. ‘Nelson, I don’t even know if you’re sane.’ He slaps his own forehead with the flat of his palm. ‘And I’m trying to keep you on? What’s wrong with me?’
Nelson is asking himself the same question. What is wrong with Paul?
‘You’d had way too much champagne,’ Paul says. ‘That’s for sure. And God alone knows what else you were on. I tried to get that info from your medical records but your doctor says that’s privileged garbage, blah blah blah. Very convenient.’ Paul rattles Nelson’s bed rails in irritation. ‘You should have told us you were getting other offers.’
Nelson frowns, trying to remember. He raises his eyebrows, a question.
‘Oh please,’ Paul says. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’ He fans through envelopes on the table beside Nelson’s bed. ‘You want me to open these for you?’
Nelson shakes his head, no.
Paul thumps the end of the mattress with a fist but makes an effort. ‘The pathetic truth is, even if you’re a nutcase, which you are, we still want to keep you, you’re that good. We’re holding open your slot on the Nerd Squad. It’s there whenever you want it, whenever you’re well enough, whenever they let you go.’
Nelson reaches for the notepad beside his bed. Thank you, he writes.
‘You had any other visitors, by the way?’
Yes, Nelson writes.
‘Shit! Don’t tell me Wholesome …?’
Nelson nods.
‘Motherfuckers! You know they’re sharks, don’t you? You do know that, right? You know they are the most fucking hypocritical hustlers in the entire—’
Nelson writes: They said I could work from home.
Paul kicks the stand that holds the IV drip, and a long coil of tubing breaks away from Nelson’s wrist and writhes in the air. ‘Even thinking of settling for a client, jeez, Nelson … Where’s your loyalty?’
All day long, Nelson reads emails, hundreds of emails, from customers who buy the products of Wholesome Food & Beverage Company Ltd. He answers these emails diplomatically and courteously, within the strict guidelines prescribed.
I am so grossed out, a woman named Jill Willoughby from Macon, Georgia, writes. I bought a vacuum-pack of one dozen of your chocolate cupcakes for my little girl’s birthday party, and one of the girls found a fingernail in her cake! Believe me, if you’d seen the way those children shrieked and gagged, you’d understand what sort of bad publicity your disgracefully defective product is generating. I’m willing to bet that not one of those girls will ever again, for the rest of her life, take a single bite from a cupcake that is not home-made.
Dear Ms Willoughby, Nelson types in his email response. On behalf of Wholesome Food and Beverage, I want to thank you for your valuable communication. You can scarcely imagine how grateful we are that this appalling lapse in our vigilant hygiene standards has been brought to our attention.
It is owing to the sense of civic responsibility of customers like you that we are able to crack down on these rare lapses in our rigorous monitoring system.
We hope you will accept our gift of five-dozen vacuum-packed cupcakes as recompense for your inconvenience. We are also sending balloons and sparklers for your birthday girl.
Nelson keeps on his desktop a folder of replies that he’d love to send, is often tempted to send, that he sometimes actually types into the response space while letting his cursor hover above ‘reply’. Then his eye falls on the UPS box of his folded party clothing and he clicks ‘delete’ instead of ‘send’. He does not want to jeopardise his toehold on peace. He is grateful for flexitime and home-based work, although he is required, one day per month, to report to the regional office for actual meetings with a manager and with his fellow PR associates at Wholesome Foods. On the night before these meetings, Nelson does not sleep and he does not go out. On every other night, he walks to the park and keeps vigil.
In between Wholesome emails and the mandatory management meetings and the vigils, Nelson designs computer games. They are labyrinthine. He posts his games on strategic sites and is famous – anonymously so – for his signature invitation, his mating call: Will you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly, and thousands of people do and are addicted. Chat rooms multiply, bloggers blog. Players (they do not call themselves flies, but flyers) are lured and obsessed and trapped. The mysterious Spider Game is all the rage.
Who is Spider? the eTabloids ask. Can this cyber-maze be solved?
Beata Beatrix is at the hub of the web, but no one has reached her so far.
Paul keeps calling and leaving messages on Nelson’s voicemail. He keeps pressing the buzzer in the lobby now that Nelson has been discharged and works from home. Nelson ignores these intrusions, but Paul is persistent and clever. He bribes the doorman with a bottle of Scotch. He raps with staccato impatience on Nelson’s door.
Through the peephole, Nelson sees him distorted and monstrous.
‘We want you back,’ Paul says, when Nelson unhooks the security chain. He looks around the studio apartment with distaste. ‘You could work from here, you know, if that’s what you want. Do you really want this? Or we can give you a corner office.’
There is a trick that Nelson has mastered. When discords buzz, he closes his eyes and pictures the pale woman at her window. Her hair is like a zone of tawny fire and when he breathes in, warmth fills him. He senses that there is a halo around him, but he suspects that Paul cannot see it.
Paul paces and waves his arms. ‘We could make arrangements. We could double what we were paying you, you were undervalued, that’s clear. It was dumb dumb dumb of us, but believe me, ExecuTech wants you back. You’re worth your weight in the proverbial f-ing gold and we know that now.’
‘Thank you,’ Nelson says.
‘At least you can talk again. I’ll pay you triple what Wholesome is paying you.’
‘Thank you. But they are paying me more than enough.’
Paul makes a sound like a roar. He punches a wall. His presence is splintering the calm that emanates, right through the bookcase divider, from Beata Beatrix herself. Nelson wishes that Paul would leave.
‘Paying you more than enough? What the fuck does that mean?’
Nelson closes his eyes. He summons up the tree in the park.
‘Quadruple,’ Paul says. ‘Okay, you win, name your price.’ He paces and touches things as he passes: the lamp from Goodw
ill, the desk from an attic, the book on Pre-Raphaelite art that Nelson has recently bought, The Collected Poems of Keats, the boxes of books, other boxes. ‘What’s this?’ Paul feels entitled to open a UPS box, any box, regardless of recipient name on the label. ‘Jesus, man, are these the clothes …? This is creepy.’ He eyeballs Nelson who concentrates on the blessed Beatrice and closes his eyes. He focuses on a cyber-block, on creating a wall for Paul to slam into. He is not sure he could survive Paul’s invasion of the space behind the bookcase divider. ‘You know what this shows, don’t you, Nelson? For God’s sake, look at me when I’m talking to you.’
Nelson opens his eyes. Unblinking, he meets Paul’s gaze.
‘Not like that, dammit,’ Paul says. ‘Why haven’t you put these away? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, since the answer’s so obvious and so creepy. You know what you want.’
‘I do,’ Nelson says quietly. ‘I do know what I want, and I already have it.’
‘Believe me, you don’t. Oh man, you are so sick and the cure is so simple, but you can’t face what you really want.’
Every night, in fact, Nelson faces what he wants. From the back of the bookcase divider, she fixes him with her enigmatic gaze. ‘I’ve got what I want,’ he repeats.
‘What’ve you got? Agoraphobia? Is that what you want? Being trapped like a rat in this shithole?’
‘I am not agoraphobic,’ Nelson says. ‘I just prefer my apartment and my computer but I do go out.’
‘No you don’t. I’ve had someone keeping watch every day.’
‘I walk at night.’
‘Nelson,’ Paul says, with patient exasperation. ‘You need to get laid. Believe me, that’s what you want. Do you think we don’t know why you freaked out? Why you pranced around the party buck naked as the day you were born? You need to get laid. You need a woman.’
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