Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

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

  The falling snow lights and occludes their way. They walk under trees, but the snow finds its way through the needles and cones, and the path—or the semblance of path—becomes less and less, and Colin won’t worry. Why should he? Why should it make a difference to him—losing her to the limestone barrens today or an airport tomorrow?

  They walk, they shamble. The pain in her feet and face evolves, turns quiet, turns warm in the way ice burns, and Erica thinks of a leaflet she read on the plane from St. John’s about Erikson’s unplanned discovery of this terrifying island, of a paradise of wild wheat and grapevines.

  A miracle of unmiraculous matter-of-factness is fixed to a post in the snow.

  TRAILHEAD 20 KM.

  The cell phone’s greenish light and the water and wind in Erica’s eyes give the sign a subaqueous look. The zero is warped. Some wishing wells are full of disappointing, abandoned objects. Others are full of money.

  “What, twenty kilometers?! Well, too bad, because I’m too tired. I can’t do it.” Saskia sits on a rock in the manner of collapsing on a sofa to fall asleep watching a movie.

  “I don’t think we have that choice,” says Erica. “Twenty is only a few hours. Kilometers go by faster than miles.”

  “Too bad. I can’t. Oh, no, no offense, but you are no longer to be trusted.” The patches on Saskia’s face are green in the phone’s light. “I should’ve gotten those bunion cushions. It’s all about padding.”

  “Don’t be nonsensical,” Erica says. “You can’t stay here by yourself. We’ll rest for a minute and then keep on walking. Slow walking is fine, but stopping is not.” She blows on her fingers. “Look at your boots. You’re much better off than I am.”

  “Too bad. Unlike you, I’m prepared. It’s just like you to say I’m better off. Do you know how my feet hurt? Do you know how tired and hungry I am? Jesus Christ, stop pacing, it’s exhausting me. Stop pacing,” Saskia says.

  Erica squats beside Saskia, Saskia hunkering, face in her hands.

  “Please come with me,” says Erica, placing a hand on this suddenly utterly inhuman woman’s shoulder. Such obstinate stiffness, such alien wood. “Let’s go. You can’t stay here alone,” but she says this now less to another person than to her future memory of this, to be certain later that she did her best. “Let’s go or you’ll regret it.”

  “I’m too tired.”

  “You have to.”

  “Well, I can’t.”

  “Don’t sit for too long then, OK? And no matter what, don’t go to sleep. If you sleep, you’ll die.”

  A larger wind, an accidental bit of theater, comes with “die” and blows both women’s hair into one mass.

  “Don’t tell me when to sleep. I’ve been through labor. Twice! And one without an epidural. Michael was the one who almost fainted. They had to take him out. I’ll be right by this sign. Tell Michael, get here right away. I won’t tolerate any delays. The hotel has a helicopter.”

  “Sure,” says Erica. “When I get nearer to the car, I’m sure I’ll have reception. I’ll call the hotel and the rangers.” She starts down the trail, but has taken no more than five strides when—

  “It’s weird, I just remembered a joke. I normally can’t think of any … what does a nurse give you when you go into labor?” Saskia’s voice trails in the dark, already geographically misplaced. “A free Brazilian. Ha ha ha!”

  A twenty-kilometer trek. She reaches the trailhead in less than an hour, skins her finger deicing the car with a stick and drives and skids and strikes no dogs, and after all the hours of theater, paperwork, and tea and thawing ears and hands and toes, in the morning, at the station, she must be told by a ranger, then a hotel manager, and finally a policewoman, that someone, “probably a kid,” has been adding these zeroes with permanent marker … and Erica flies away and never tells anyone she “once lost a friend in Newfoundland,” as she imagines the dead woman would, had their fates been reversed.

  For a long time, there is no effect at all, then, slowly, it begins—not a haunting by snow or limestone or pines, not by thoughts of a woman found blue-skinned and shining like glass the next morning—but a haunting that increases imperceptibly, at first too close to nothingness to be more than a tickle of unhappiness while reading tax forms, menus, 1-800 numbers. So it is—she realizes one morning looking at a figure in a magazine, 24,000,000, the approximate number of schizophrenics worldwide—the zeroes themselves. These simple hoops from childhood have become the smallest portals to some kind of outer void, or inner void. They’re everywhere. She’s fifty and lonely. Years lived, years left, light-years, code. Euros traded per dollar per second. Giga-, tera-, exabytes per second. Meters, moles, candelas.

  The Admiral

  Paul West

  For all his outward primness, the Admiral had never been squeamish about Sundays; so far as he was concerned Sunday was just another day of the week and anything had the right to desecrate it, whether family uproars with trays and goblets thrown, little children drowned in shallow streams on their way home from communication with the deity, or old friends all of a sudden insisting that he never again address them by nickname. This Sunday, however, a mere seventeenth of September, his telephone rang at dawn to inform him that the Russians had crossed the Polish frontier between Polotsk and Kamenets-Podolski at four in the morning; he was hardly surprised, having for some time expected them to make a move, egged on as they had been by Ribbentrop, and other lugubrious brains, to come and get their share of Polish spoils; but he had been unable to go back to sleep, and he just lay there palping his heavy face with his small hands. To him it felt brittle and light, ready to be blown away or pecked to bits by the next bird.

  Born on the first day of the year fifty-eight years ago, he loved to describe his knowing state secrets, political ruses, bogus alliances, and other ploys of warcraft, to say From the very first, as if he and he alone had such things as primacy, or prescience, at heart; he knew, almost as if by divine right, the initial causes of whatever happened militarily, both at home and abroad. Sitting in the innermost of German espionage’s concentric circles, he prided himself on being crisp, acute, and wise until midafternoon at least, which explained his regimen of pills: pills to get him to sleep on time, and pills to get him alert before his counterintelligence staff was quite awake, and then he dazzled them with stances so absolute and cogent that he seemed a consummate specimen of the human ability to make up one’s mind. That was when the Admiral truly loved himself, pronouncing with unbrookable finality “The British Empire has to go” or “One is a serviceman and must obey.” As the day wore on, though, he began to qualify what he said, and the ice-brick exactness of his early-morning dicta became eroded; by lunchtime he was a muddling dog lover again, vaguely aware that his mind had, for a few short hours, been visited by the ghost of immaculate reasoning sent by Plato from his cave. So, while this visitation lasted, he trounced others mentally, but grew to loathe the inferior Admiral who surfaced with the soup at lunch, wondering into the vapor why (he was not that old) his mind could not always be crystalline and deft. The power was always there, of course: He could do what he wanted, but he could not be sure it was what he would have wanted to do while he was superlatively lucid, with that cleansed, amiably cool sensation reaching from his buttocks to somewhere beneath his liver.

  On this particular Sunday, during coffee and biscuits at 11:15 or so, the telephone rang again, this time bringing personal bad news for the family, news he already knew, but put off sharing during the hectic week, preferring that it be formally divulged, delivered just as he expected, by a tearful phone call from his sister Anna. Somewhere near Radom, deep in that accursed Poland, his nephew, Rudolf Buck, had been killed in action. “At least, my dear,” he told An
na, “it is a piece of bad news that will not have to come again. He is a hero, God be thanked. He is at peace, a peace we cannot even guess at. You will never have to be afraid for him again. At least, his suffering is over. Ours has just begun.”

  Rubbing crumbs of powdered shortbread from his mouth, but somewhat upward, against his septum, he shook his head miserably at Erika, his wife, who never knew what to say to him anyway: Far from the rhythms of his mind, to which she had made only an average effort to attune herself, she filled the distance between them with sarcasm, except when, as now, she said nothing at all, knowing that in his piggish, cumbersome way he would make the best of things, as he always did, defusing bad news with a quotation from Frederick the Second, tempering the good news with a sly reference to the disasters the morrow would bring, and adjusting to the in-between times when the phone rang and rang, delivering information of only medium interest, with the additive shrug of a hobbyist, glad of a few new stamps for his collection, even gladder that any old thing was happening rather than nothing, and in the innermost cells of his heart relieved (like so many Germans) that a Führer had come along to break the monotony.

  “Heil Hitler,” said the Admiral with a cagey wince as he brushed past her on his way to the open French windows, meaning it was all Hitler’s fault, yet it brought less honor to Germany than it did grief to his sister, and it was a part of the ongoing ruckus that the Fatherland needed to persuade itself that it still existed after the humiliating Peace of Versailles, which had made it the wholly defeated, utterly responsible nation. “And,” he said out on the lawn, “heil Rudolf too,” making a mental note to have Rust, his blind masseur, loosen up the cords in the back of his neck, after which Rust would gambol on the floor with the wirehaired dachshunds, Seppel and Sabine, growling and yelping as well as they, and freed briefly of the obligation to pass for human in a world, a society anyway, that would have put him down long ago had the Admiral not given him a job.

  He is having another of his days, his wife told herself as she watched the Admiral’s back recede. Wilhelm the Cantankerer. How did I, a cultivated woman, ever manage to tie myself up with a man who shudders at the mention of illness, who backs away from anyone taller than he as if they had the plague, who rattles with pills, is more superstitious than a peasant, will only shed one imaginary complaint in order to contract one even worse, and, God help me, needs twelve hours of sleep, thirteen if the preceding day has inflicted too many small-eared visitors upon him. He looks well enough until you see how much less than average height he is: almost a dwarf, not quite 1.6 meters tall, although what he calls his “mariner’s tan” and his white hair deflect the eye from his body to his face, that sundial on the unreadable pedestal of his intentions. Death to him is a breach of decorum, something his masseur must shovel up or brush under the rug along with the rest of the filth. So long as his eyebrows remain bushy, as if they could really hide what terrible things happen in front of his eyes, he can stand anything, and he just happens to be in charge of German intelligence worldwide, which is like giving an ostrich the entire Sahara to play with. If only he wouldn’t lisp and, even in those nice gray suits with the metallic sheen, pat the place where he wears the Iron Cross when in uniform.

  “What are you doing?” she called after him in a voice thinned shrill by exasperation.

  “Getting out of your way,” he said, as if he had been waiting his cue to answer with something unsubtly wounding. “I am going out-thide.” Outside her knowing and watch. He could always tell her the truth, quite harmless, this time, that he was going to walk a mildly irritating knot out of his thigh, but deception was a delicacy to be practiced, and savored, not only when it involved the demolition of whole nations, but on small homely occasions as well, for its own sake, jewel-perfect in any light.

  That un-Admiral-like lisp, Erika thought. He isn’t far away at all, just lurking behind the corner of the door, which means he walks away large as life and then sneaks back, to see if I am talking to myself.

  “And on Tuesday,” she heard him call, whether spies were listening or no, “I will be off to Poland again. I amgoing to Lvov with Yary, Piekenrock, and Lahousen, to see what we can do for those godforsaken Ukrainian refugees.”

  He lisped, she was certain of it, only when he wanted to, in order to catch her off guard, distracting her from what he said by making her mix motherly sympathy with baleful amusement, a role into which he delighted to compel her, converting her into an ogress while he played at being a child.

  In the end, as always, there was only one he could tell—Motte (Moth), his all-white (like her master’s hair) Arab mare. Only Motte could assimilate without levity or disgust the full gamut of what the Head of the Abwehr felt from day to day, having to put the world to rights from a cramped, gloomy office behind a metal grille. The balcony with a view of the Landwehr Canal did not help much (canals were stagnant), nor did his few personal belongings: all those books (mere recombinations of the dictionary, he had begun to feel), the model of the light cruiser Dresden (it only made him long for the old days, like the time the real Dresden, only survivor of the Falkland Islands naval battle in 1915, had dodged the Royal Navy for months and had finally found haven off the Pacific Island of Más a Tierra, exactly where Robinson Crusoe had been marooned). Nor did the trio of three bronze monkeys from Japan, supposed to embody the code of the top-flight intelligence officer—“see all, hear all, say nothing.” No, canals, books, model ships, and bronze monkeys only reminded him of the career he almost never had, when the official report on the lieutenant who became an admiral said he was too irritable, too high-strung, too much of a man of opposites, unpredictable and in manner hypersensitive; the nose was big and long, and the jaw was dour, but his brow receded above the soldierly sharp angles of his oval face, and they said he could not be counted on, being both down-to-earth like his mercantile and entrepreneurish forebears, and, like his mother, an ascetic dreamer as quick into a volatile dither as out of it, leaving the world about her in a daze.

  Yet, he told himself out there in the sunlight, tapping his shoe on the dry grass of the lawn, I prevailed, I am here. I once escaped from internment on the island of Quiriquina; I had not joined the navy to rot on a Chilean island, or to ride the horses provided for the officers while our men laid roads or tinkered to improve the water pipes; up into the rough ground I went, and then down a path to the beach, where for twenty pesos a fisherman rowed me away. I would not mind that beach again, or that escape, arriving quietly in Concepción en route for Argentina, with only the snow-thick Andes in between.

  For the Admiral it was a cheerful enough daydream.

  The best memory of all, though, was his parents’ villa, whose grounds he toured in a little goat cart with his brother and sister, past the tennis court and the stables to the choked magnificence of the kitchen garden: a witty child who astounded his father with boned-up allusions to something as far-fetched as the history of geography and who, when his mother peered at him severely, just before scolding him for going too far with his madcap dry humor, would say, “Mother, Mother, there are X-rays coming out of your eyes!” Even now, in his Admiral’s uniform or the plain gray suits that blatantly understated his importance, he was still the smart-mouthed young enigma whom a carriage delivered at the Duisburg Gymnasium every morning and took away each noon, an aloof and haughty boy who eventually did so well in the university entrance examination he was excused the oral. For his teachers and schoolmates he came alive only when the annual outing took them all on more or less military expeditions into the gently slanting woodlands along the edge of the Ruhr, and there he became a leader and an organizer, leading boldly across the distance his taciturnity had set up, and j
oking as if all along they had been caught up in the same surge of quick-change conversation. And then, in Greece, he discovered the sea, and a monument to a Greek admiral of the nineteenth century, Constantine Kanaris, whom he thereafter idolized and made into his seafaring holy ghost.

  Now, he was still aloof although given to fits of organizing genius, but he had come to see himself in an excess of gracious candor as a bit of an eccentric; his wife had told him so, and not without reason after seeing him, usually at weekends, trudge out to the apple tree with the screwed-up bundle of his pajamas, handwashed at the basin by his own hands with expensive toilet soap. Then he faced the tree as if taking position in some parade, re-wrung the pajamas, unfurled the jacket and let the wind billow into it once or twice, shook loose the legs until he could see the ground beneath through each, and deployed the laundry on the lower branches, attaching it with bulldog clips, taking enormous care not to scar the bark. Sometimes he did the same with a shirt or his underwear, almost as if washing away a contamination that others must not touch, but really, as he saw it, just to do something small, public, and humdrum after hours upon sequestered hours of rearranging Europe or even the world. If he had time, and on weekends he often did, he would stand and watch the laundry dry, appraising its float and twirl, glad to see the dark patches of wet or wet’s ephemeral transparency disappear (depending on the fabric’s color). Deep down he missed messing about in boats and fiddling with sails, and this way he could sail on the lawn. But he wondered if the whole thing wasn’t also the result of one terrible sleepless night when he had perspired in the dead of winter, and had washed the pajamas through to keep Erika from asking questions. If ever in doubt about his own motives, he attributed everything to the secretiveness for which he knew he was renowned. In winter, though, or when there was rain, he let things go, just to thwart the pattern, somehow pitting the variability of weather against his reasons for doing what he did; sooner or later, what he thought were his reasons, and what others knew were his reasons, just didn’t apply. His life and his mind were more complex than that, and whole chunks of his being just did not pick up where other chunks left off. A dislocated man, even in his own eyes, he had no wish to be made whole, to be irrevocably connected up in all his joints, and, when he did other things just as unusual, he enjoyed telling himself that anyone spying on him would think them rather symbolic, whereas they were nothing of the kind. Tapping beetles off his roses into a jam jar with a screwtop lid, and then shaking them violently to stun them (motions of the cocktail shaker with his short, slight arms) might have seemed omnipotence gone mad, or a substitute for control of the world at large, but he simply liked to hear the beetles rattle against the lid, some of them still coupled in rut. The jar stood for days on a rustic table by the apple tree, but from time to time he let in air and tossed in a bit of leaf, at least until the jar became too smeared with droppings, and too clouded with vapor, so he then set it out in the garbage for someone else to play with.