Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  The patient knows nothing of this at the time, nor does he realize he has wet his underwear and trousers.

  Internal bleeding. Brackish-black blood.

  You never know. Until you know.

  2.

  “‘Evangeline.’”

  It is a beautiful name, an archaic name. He knew a girl with this name long ago in grade school, the daughter of a local minister who’d died, or moved away—all he can recall of Evangeline is the girl’s curly red-gold hair, silver barrettes in the hair, and the girl’s profile, the curve of her cheek. L_____ had sat behind her in fifth grade and also in sixth grade, an accident of the alphabet.

  He does not think that the silvery-haired woman is Evangeline—for the minister’s daughter would be much older than this woman. (She would be L_____’s age. Would L_____ be interested in a woman in her early forties?) That Evangeline’s life would be much different than the life L_____ can imagine for the silvery-haired woman. And perhaps she is not even alive now.

  So often L_____ finds himself thinking that persons of his generation, his age, whom he has not seen in some time, are probably not even alive now.

  She tells him, We are all forgetting each other, constantly. Life is a shimmering stream. The light plays on the stream through the trees for just a measured distance, then it is gone—but the stream continues. We bask in the sunshine, then the sunshine is gone. But when the sunshine is gone, we are gone. So we don’t feel the loss. We don’t feel pain.

  Doomed love. Unrequited love.

  L_____ recalls having read an appalling news item years ago.

  “Sinkholes” in a township in the Chautauqua Mountains, not far from Cattaraugus. Scudder Mills, a mining town. The local product was gypsum. A man, a homeowner, stepped into his backyard on the morning after a severe rainstorm and, in bright sunshine, the earth beneath his feet fell away.

  A gaping hole beneath, thirty feet, possibly fifty feet, the man fell, helpless to save himself, and was smothered, horribly—calling, screaming for help—but there was no help.

  Earth filled his mouth, and he was silenced.

  This horror happened in Scudder Mills when L_____ was a boy. In all, there were several sinkholes in the mining town, but no one else was trapped in this way and no one else died. At Lake Cattaraugus everyone talked of it. At home, at school. He tastes something sour and deathly in his mouth, recalling.

  Scudder Mills had been abandoned, the mining town declared a disaster area. L_____ had forgotten about it until now.

  Thinking how doomed love is a sinkhole. He will fall, and fall, and never come to the bottom of the sinkhole. And if he cries for help, no one will hear. There is no one.

  “Not possible. No.”

  L_____ has made a discovery in S_______’s manuscript. Or, rather, in one of the variants of S_______’s manuscript, written several years before S_______’s death.

  It is shocking to him but seems unmistakable: The distinguished scholar-critic-historian S_______, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for forty years, seems to have plagiarized a part of a chapter on medieval “saints’ lives” from a scholarly article available online through Google Scholar. The plagiarism is almost verbatim, though S_______ made of several paragraphs one single-length paragraph and substituted arcane words for plainer words—exsiccation, thrawart, immergence, adnate.

  L_____ tells himself that S_______ intended to delete these passages at a later time; at least a skilled writer like S_______ would recast them more thoroughly, so that their origins in the work of another scholar would not be so obvious. (L_____ has checked: There is no footnote attributing the source.) L_____ decides that the wisest strategy for him is simply to delete the passages as if they’d never existed. (S_______’s editor has these files also, but L_____ doubts that S_______’s editor will ever read through the massive manuscript, still less detect plagiarized passages.) It is urgent for L_____ to protect S_______, at least S_______’s reputation.

  Problem is, deleting passages means that L_____ will have to provide a transition of some kind. He fears that he will be incapable of doing this, replicating S_______’s elegant prose. And he can’t help but wonder if S_______ has plagiarized elsewhere in the manuscript.

  His work as an indentured servant for the dead man will never end. He sees that now.

  Another, even more shocking discovery after L_____ has been away from the manuscript for forty-eight hours, and returns to take up another, later section: Mixed in with S_______’s scholarly writing is a kind of journal, or diary. It is a very different kind of writing altogether and (L_____ thinks) it must have been inserted in the manuscript by mistake.

  Chloroform is the most pragmatic. Swift, clean, leaves no (visible) trace and he knows where to purchase it without being questioned …

  And,

  Swiftly and deftly the chloroform-soaked cloth is pressed over her mouth, nose. She fights him bravely, desperately. He will see her eyelids flutter. He will see the light go out in her eyes. But she will not have seen his face …

  L_____ is appalled by what he reads. But he is excited as well.

  He has discovered approximately forty pages of prose charting the stalking and murder of an unidentified woman. The prose is intense, intimate, obscenely poetic. It is possible that S_______ was writing a darkly erotic novel or a quasi journal tracking the obsession/disintegration of a personality resembling his own, but not himself; but in all of his career S_______ had never published fiction, so far as L_____ knew.

  What is particularly upsetting to L_____ is that the “erotic” material is in a section of the manuscript that S_______’s editor was supposed to have read. Yet clearly he had not .

  L_____ will have to delete these pages also. He won’t allow himself to keep reading but will delete without reading.

  He must protect the elder writer, who cannot protect himself.

  All must be hidden! Erased.

  No one must know.

  He flees the house. He is scarcely able to breathe; the air has turned thick and porous.

  It is the brackish odor of the rotting lake. Dead things in hot sunshine. Ripe, rank smells. He is terrified that the body is partly exposed, there in the marsh. An outflung arm, a satiny-smooth pale leg. It has occurred to him too late, turkey vultures will circle in the sky. The ungainly wide-winged black-feathered scavengers will draw attention, out in the marshes …

  Then he realizes that none of this has happened yet—“We are safe.”

  He shudders with relief. Tears streak his cheeks; he has not cried like this in years.

  * * *

  He has not glimpsed the silvery-haired woman in many days.

  He has deleted the offensive passages in S_______’s manuscript—the plagiarized material and the obscene material.

  He has concentrated on another part of A Biography of Biographies. He is determined to salvage what he can of the remainder of his life.

  He has even succumbed to an invitation from family friends, to come to dinner one night the following week. He will bring the older couple a bottle of good red wine and a bouquet of flowers from his mother’s garden—white carnations, daisies, roses growing wild behind the house.

  His hand will be shaken vigorously by his host. He will be hugged, kissed by his hostess.

  We have missed you here in Cattaraugus!

  Have you returned to us for good?

  He shudders at the prospect. Yet, he will prevail.

  He will manage not to show surprise at how old the couple has become, whom he has not seen in fifteen years; as they willmanage not to show surprise at how old L_____ has become, whom they have not seen in fifteen years.

  Several mornings in succession he is wakened by the sound of a woman or a girl sobbing.

  “Hello? Is someone there?”—quickly he rises from bed
to investigate, his heart pounding in dread.

  Of course it is no one, nothing. The wind in the trees surrounding the house. Strange muffled cries of birds in the eaves.

  He listens. The mysterious sound has faded.

  Through the day at wayward times he thinks he hears this sound but doesn’t allow himself to be distracted. He concentrates on his work. He has begun the index. This is a daunting task but it signals the beginning of the end of the project, and about this L_____ feels hopeful!

  And then, to his chagrin, L_____ discovers more of the offensive material he’d believed he had deleted.

  Chloroform makes of the most resistant body a very bride. The struggling hands, the clawing nails, the convulsive flailings of the limbs—all surrender within seconds …

  In exasperation L_____ deletes this. How disgusting! He is left shaken, bewildered. He is plagued by the (absurd yet appalling) possibility that offensive material of this nature will remain in S_______’s manuscript, hidden in the file, to be (horribly, irremediably) printed and published in book form, embedded in the chaste scholarly prose of A Biography of Biographies. What a scandal, if this should happen!

  L_____ can’t trust S_______’s editor, certainly. He can’t trust the publisher’s copy editors and proofreaders, who are strangers to him; the fact is, L_____ will have to trust himself, to make sure that all remnants of the offensive material, and of the plagiarized material, have been detected and deleted from the manuscript file.

  Yet he is terribly worried: Can he trust himself?

  “Hello? Is someone there?”—he hears the sound of sobbing, somewhere close by.

  He has just emerged from a wine store, where he has bought a bottle of wine to bring to his parents’ old friends that evening. Out of restlessness he’s been walking, and, happening to see the wine store (it has a familiar name but seems to be in an unfamiliar setting), he’d decided to make the purchase now, rather than later, though it means carrying the wine bottle back up the long hill to Road’s End Lane. Now in the parking lot beside the wine store he hears, he thinks he hears, the sound of sobbing, but when he turns to look he sees no one, nothing.

  L_____ is perplexed but not especially frightened. For this is not happening inside his head as he has (sometimes) feared when he hears the sound in the early morning, in his house. It is not at all unlikely that a woman, a girl, a young boy, might be sitting inside a vehicle in the parking lot, sobbing. And that L_____ has happened to overhear.

  But there are only a few vehicles parked in the lot, and no one is visible inside any of them.

  He listens closely. The sobbing seems to have faded.

  He walks on. He is feeling hopeful. The bottle has an attractive label: It is a Chilean chardonnay, new to him. He will enjoy himself that evening, he is determined. It has been too long since L_____ has spent time with friends. He needs to engage in conversation, he needs to laugh. He needs to forget about S_______ and he needs to forget about E____. He will deflect questions that seem to him too private, too personal—about his health, his circumstances, the precise nature of the work he has brought with him to Cattaraugus—but he will do this in a discreet way; he will try to be gracious.

  Are you returned to us?

  We have been waiting for you—for years …

  He has left the wine-store parking lot and will return to Road’s End Lane. But by a circuitous route.

  Already it is late afternoon—past five o’clock.Hemust return home, he must shower and cleanse himself thoroughly before going out to dinner. He has a fear of offending the nostrils of others, who know nothing of his secret and must not guess it.

  He is walking in a neighborhood in Cattaraugus that is not familiar to him. As a boy he’d bicycled along some of these streets—narrow, hilly, potholed streets—past shabby row houses and vacant lots, and yet all seems different to him. No one is out on the sidewalks, no one is in the streets. He has taken a wrong turn, it seems, though no turn in Cattaraugus will take L_____ far out of his way, it is such a small town; and if there is danger, he is armed with the bottle of chardonnay.

  He finds himself crossing a pedestrian bridge. It is a very old bridge—miniature maple trees, no more than an inch high, are growing in the cracks between planks and in the plank railings!

  To his left, just visible through a maze of wood-frame houses and scrubby foliage, is a stretch of slate-colored Lake Cattaraugus. To his right is the sprawling New York Central railroad yard, desolate at this hour. Beneath the bridge is a marshy area, an inlet of the lake that has become shallow and mucky and infested with buzzing insects.

  Ahead he sees a young woman at the bridge railing, leaning her elbows on the railing as if she is very tired. Her long, tangled hair falls forward, hiding her face, which seems to him an aggrieved face, though he cannot see it clearly.

  It is this woman who has been sobbing—(is it?). L_____ stops dead in his tracks at the sight of her.

  He will recall afterward he’d had no choice but to approach her to ask if anything is wrong.

  “Excuse me—? Hello?”

  The young woman doesn’t seem to have heard L_____. Already she has turned distractedly away, she is walking away, a stricken creature, wounded, wincing with pain (he thinks); she does not want him to see her face.

  Is she crying? Is she ashamed that she is crying? He sees that she is wiping at her face with both hands as she hurries away.

  He thinks—But I have no choice!

  The woman is wraithlike, very thin. She seems scarcely to be walking or running but rather gliding. She wears a long, dark skirt of some flimsy material like muslin. She wears a shawl wrapped about her shoulders. He can’t see her face and so has no idea how old she is but her movements suggest that she is young, lithe. Her hair is a shimmer of hues—blonde, ash blonde, wheat, silver—that flies about her head as if galvanized by electricity.

  L_____ doesn’t quicken his pace, he will not overtake the woman. If the woman needs help, if she needs protection, L_____ will be close behind her, but he does not want to frighten her.

  He keeps a fixed distance between them: thirty feet perhaps.

  “I am here if you need me. I am always here. That is all.”

  L_____ follows the woman across a street of badly broken pavement. He follows her into a vacant lot behind a block of brownstone row houses, which look as if they have been scorched by flame. Here there is underbrush, discarded and rotted lumber, broken glass sparkling in the late afternoon sun. Broken clay pots—why so many? And empty bottles, gutted tin cans. L_____ has become confused, for what is this fetid place? Where is the young woman leading him?

  “Hey. You.”

  Out of the rubble an angry man approaches L_____. He is fast and springy on the balls of his feet. He is belligerent and menacing as a pit bull.

  L_____ is taken totally by surprise. Naively he glances over his shoulder to see if the angry man is addressing someone behind him but it is L_____ at whom the angry man is staring with stark, protuberant eyes. It is L_____ at whom he is speaking in disgust.

  “I said you! What d’you want?”—the flush-faced man, a decade younger than L_____, not taller than L_____ but thicker bodied, obviously stronger, is bearing down upon L_____ with a look of fury.

  L_____ would turn away and flee. But L_____ doesn’t want to retreat in the face of the other’s irrational anger for (he is thinking) that will violate his integrity; also, he dares not turn his back on such anger.

  The angry man spits at him: “You sick fuck! What the fuck d’you think you’re doing following her?!”

  Now it is clear. It is clearer. The man is in alliance with the unhappy young woman.

  L_____ would explain that he meant no harm, he was only seeing if the woman needed help, he did not mean to upset her, he is sorry if he has been misunderstood; but the angry man isn’t interested in anything L_____ has to say.
He has stepped boldly close to L_____, and he continues cursing L_____. To his chagrin L_____ sees that the young woman has taken a position behind the man, as if L_____ presents such a threat to her that she has to hide behind the angry man; at the same time, the woman has become defiant herself, flushed with indignation. Her face is radiant not with tears but with intense emotion.

  This is certainly not Evangeline: L_____ sees now.

  She is no one he has seen before. She has small, crushed-together features but she is not at all delicate boned. Her hair has a coarse, metallic sheen. The shirt or blouse she wears has a low neckline, her bony upper chest is exposed, her pallid skin. In an incensed and infantile voice she tells the angry man that this is the person who has been following her, scaring her. “The son of a bitch is always following me. This is him!”

  Before L_____ can protect himself, the angry man rushes at him and strikes him in the face. It is a powerful, stunning blow—L_____ feels his left eye socket crack.

  He staggers backward. The angry man has wrenched the wine bottle out of L_____’s hand, and threatens to strike him with it.

  “Hey! Don’t break this for Christ’s sake”—deftly the young woman detaches the wine bottle from her companion’s fingers.

  L_____ would retreat but the angry man won’t allow him. L_____ dares not turn his back for fear he will be murdered. He tries to defend his bleeding face as a child might, with his elbows, uplifted arms, bending at the waist, cowering, but the angry man continues to pursue him, not so hurriedly now, almost randomly striking him with sharp blows, his chest, his shoulder, his left temple. L_____ can barely see; both his eyes have been struck, his vision blotched by pinpoint hemorrhages.

  “No—please—don’t”—L_____ tries to protest but his mouth has been wounded. His teeth are loose and bleeding. His lower lip has been savagely slashed. He would stagger away in desperation—he would crawl away—but the angry man refuses to let him. The wrath of this stranger seems to be building, like that of a vengeful god. The more he punishes his victim, the more furious he is with his victim. L_____’s very blood on his hands, splattering his clothing, is a goad to him, a provocation.