The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  Simion dropped his skates and turned on his heel to leave, the flyer clenched in one white-knuckled hand. Andrew caught him by the wrist, forgetting that Simion disliked anyone doing that; Simion shook him off in an impersonal way, as if freeing his sleeve from a briar bush. “All right, all right, let’s get it over with, let’s have it over,” he said to no one in particular. Offering admonishment that Simion did not hear, Andy followed, but Simion drew ahead as if he meant to leave him behind.

  “Wait!” said Andy, accelerating his pace to a trot. He caught up with difficulty and danced ahead of him. “What? What?” What he got was a sort of shoo-fly gesture and no answer; he saw that working motion of the eyelashes that meant a struggle with tears. “What?”

  Simion paled with shame, then shut down; he seemed to become instantly some prisoner in a cart, being transported in shackles, with no defense but a sere drawn face and a pair of icy eyes. It was like watching a pond freeze in two minutes.

  “Let’s get right down to brass tacks so you can shake me off without compunction if that’s what you want to do. I’ve told you about that crazy father of mine—he publishes demented tracts, and he’s a person you’d certainly not want to sit down to dinner with, and he’d frighten you if you met him in the dark. He used to make me help him set the type for these goddamned tracts, and now it seems that someone’s found out about them somehow. Go ahead if you mean to do it and have it over with.” He delivered this with a formidable cold glare, then started walking again.

  “Ah—yes—tracts. I drop all my friends who’re guilty of setting type for tracts.”

  “Shut up.”

  “That was a joke. Remember, I’ve explained carefully what those are. Look under humor in the encyclopedia. No, wait up, that was a joke too! Simion, I don’t give a damn what your father does, and if he made you set type for him, that’s no fault of yours! I see no reason for you to improve their evil fun by walking into this mess.”

  With excessive civility: “Well, what is the course of action you suggest?”

  “None. I suggest ignoring them and making this affair fall flat for him and whoever’s in on it with him. Please,” said Andy.

  “I have no intention of spending three of my four years here with Peter’s foot in my face,” Simion answered. “You can come with me or not, I’m going.”

  It was at this point, then, that John Ezra reached over the intervening four hundred fifty miles and touched Simion as painfully as he’d done at arm’s length. Not with his horny fist, but with those odious tracts that put that miser’s gold under his floorboards. John Ezra had already sent Simion a packet of the newer ones, for which the new schoolmaster rather than Simion had done the proofing and set the type. Simion had snickered happily at the ample misspellings, fed the lot to the fire, and given them no more thought. In no way would he have anticipated what happened next in regard to those elegant publications, but the fact was that John Ezra had bestowed upon Yale College a large packet of particularly fiery and gory pamphlets; the librarian, a refined man, had shuddered with distaste and chucked them into the trash. Peter, however, had been in the habit of going through the librarian’s trash ever since discovering that he scissored out interesting nudes from art books and threw them away before shelving the purified volumes. Instead of naked Burne-Jones people, this time Peter found John Ezra’s tracts. Joyfully, Peter noted the address in Haliburton, West Virginia. He quickly confirmed that this address was one and the same as Simion’s home address. And Peter was not slow to perceive the entertainment value of his find, or to put it to use.

  Andrew followed Simion into the posh North College and up the stairs, feeling the shriveling dread in his chest. He heard the noise of many boys crammed into one room several doors down. It occurred to him that Simion was still wearing that strange suit that he’d had made for himself out of coating material; he’d donned it for their country jaunt. Simion was peculiarly dense about why people found that suit odd or amusing or both, and when asked tended to explain seriously about how cold he nearly always was. Of course he would be wearing it on what was apt to be the worst of all possible occasions. Andrew had the urge to yank him bodily away from Peter’s threshold and drag him home by main force, but he didn’t do it in time. For a brief moment, sickeningly aware of the packed human heat, the feral sweat, he and Simion stood unnoticed on the threshold of Peter’s room. Then someone on the periphery of the crammed room saw them, and the rest turned almost as a body. And then they laughed.

  Peter’s little gabled room smelled oppressively of potpourri and cigarettes and sweet alcohol, and lengths of print India gauze had been tacked laboriously to the walls; the whole was a spirited combination of china shop and brothel parlor. The promised refreshments had been arranged dashingly on a table with flowers and good linen. On the walls, the awful tracts had been tacked up like watercolors. The eye went straight to them: smeary medieval black on white, they clashed violently with their jolly, cluttery surroundings. Having absorbed the shock of something so ugly, Andrew considered also their wretched primitivism. Yet they conveyed the artist’s hatefulness very well, his horror of the body and interest in its pain. In one, a half dozen screaming naked people were being cooked in an outsized pot by a horned and grinning imp; another group was in a snake pit, with vipers fastening to their ears and shoulders. In all, the Damned wore no clothes, and their breasts and genitals had been crudely but deliberately drawn; the women’s breasts were dangling bags, but every nipple was distinct. Then Andy took in Simion’s recognition of these tracts that had followed him like a relentless disease, and watched him look around at those who’d come to gape at these artifacts. Horrified, trapped, knocked entirely off his axis, he stood dead still.

  Peter, looking hot enough to pant like a spaniel, grinned. He and Gibbs and Topher, attired in evening dress, beamed their horrid welcome. Peter enclosed Andy and Simion in the full malign beacon of his smirk. Then he spread his white-gloved palms and in his richest and fruitiest voice intoned, “Oh, my guest of honor! Come in, come in, sirs!”

  “Really, Peter,” said Andrew, “I thought Professor Klionarios was trying to cultivate your artistic tastes. There are such things as insuperable obstacles, though, and I suppose he’s come up against them.”

  “What’re you talking about, insuperable obstacles? There are no insuperable obstacles as far as I’m concerned. You see, I’ve found out that Simion’s alliance with Professor Klionarios is not his first association with Art,” said Peter. “I was interested to learn that, in fact, Simion’s reverend father is in the art line, and I’m sure we’re all interested to learn that, am I correct?”

  “You bet your butt,” said Topher. He hefted one of the costly bottles, took a self-consciously gross slurp of champagne, and grinned with all his healthy white teeth at Simion. “I always did want to know why Little Mister Priss here considers himself as good as his betters, but I guess I know now. With a father like that, who wouldn’t be proud?”

  Peter acknowledged the laughs that this drew, daintily poured himself a glass, and returned to his art lecture. “Reverend Satterwhite appears to be continuing the tradition of Grünewald and those other disgusting Germans who apparently—how shall I put it?—felt their sap rise at the thought of inflicting bodily pain, so they painted crucifixions and martyrdoms and other occasions for people’s guts to fall out. These paintings scared the simple folk silly in the old days. Now you can get the same good healthy scare for only five cents apiece, or thirty for a dollar. Observe. We have boiling in oil, hanging, squassation… I don’t know what the fancy word is for cutting off women’s tits, but here you can see how it’s done in Satterwhite Hell.” In case any of them didn’t, he pointed at the appropriate tract. “Simion’s dear mama must have posed for that one, is that right, Simion?”

  “My mother’s dead,” said Simion hoarsely.

  “No wonder. The poor lady probably died of ill usage early on. She probably had a worse time modeling for your father than yo
u do when you take off your clothes for Professor Klionarios.”

  “I don’t do that,” said Simion before Andy could urge him not to dignify that statement with a response.

  “No? You got some nice new clothes for Christmas. Didn’t you sell your raggy little arse for them, or did some angel somewhere take pity on you?”

  “They’re Andy’s old clothes,” Simion said faintly.

  “Ah. That sheds some new light on the situation. How kind of Andy to donate his old clothes for the benefit of the rural poor. But that masterwork you’re wearing now, you didn’t inherit that from Andy?”

  “He wanted something heavy because he’s always cold!” Topher contributed in a revolting falsetto.

  “That’s enough!” said Andrew.

  “Oh, but I don’t think so, Sir Frog,” said Peter, wearing the expression that Doriskos thought of as Neronian. “I must admit, I have never seen anything quite like the pretensions of you two. You, Monsieur New Orleans Froggie who thinks a little old money and a passel of stale affectations make you God, or at least Lord Byron. And you, Mr. Educated Hick from Haliburton, coming up here with your rags and your fifth-hand books to tell the rest of us how to lead our lives, I don’t know how we ever did without you, for the life of me I don’t. That elegant parent of yours must miss you sorely—did you pose for this, by the way?” And Peter indicated with one kid-gloved finger a tract titled The Child’s Guide.

  On its cover was a picture, no cruder than any of the others in execution but by far the most heinous in content and feeling. It showed a poor abandoned little child, pitiful as Blake’s chimney sweep, who seemed to be wailing in abject terror. And for cause, for flames bloomed in shoulder-high flares all around him, blocking his path on all sides, and the earth under his bare feet smoked, and the sky above him was a black inferno. Even so crudely drawn, the child looked much as Andrew imagined that Simion might have looked at five or six, at least to someone who loathed him. Andrew could tell that he saw the resemblance and that it struck him to the heart.

  “That’s the product of a demented mind, and you have a sick mind too, or you wouldn’t be making a joke out of this kind of obscenity,” said Andrew. He felt Simion stagger against him and thought with horror that he might actually faint here among these wolves.

  “Well?” asked Peter. “Well, what’s the word? You’ll sic Reverend Brimstone Tract here on me if I carouse too loudly in your precious suite? You and Andy going to beat us all bloody? Well? I’m waiting for your answer, Simion. I always wait with bated breath for everything you have to say. Do enlighten me once again. Will God secure your revenge, maybe?”

  “No. Not God. Me.”

  “You what?”

  “Think of me when we’re forty, and see how I’m living then,” said Simion. He then turned and simply walked out; strangely enough, no one tried to detain him.

  “And what does the exclusive Mr. Carpallon think of our little exhibition?” asked Peter sweetly, once he’d followed Simion out of sight with his eyes. Andrew had watched him too, transfixed by his dignity.

  “The exclusive Mr. Carpallon,” said Andy, “thinks that you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit. Canaille, rich white trash, chicken shit, Peter, that’s what you are, and if Whistler himself painted you, it’d still be a picture of rich white trash, trash that came from trash and devolves to trash, and acts like trash in the meantime. Nocturne with Chicken Shit. And those things on your wall don’t change what Simion is.” He turned to go and was grabbed by Topher.

  “Who d’you think you’re calling white trash, eh?”

  “Well, certainly you and you and you—I don’t know everybody’s name here, but being here gawping at these things is an awfully good justification for inclusion under the general white trash rubric, don’t you think?”

  Topher scowled, possibly trying to figure out what rubric meant. Peter stepped from behind him, champagne glass in hand.

  “And what might your interest in this situation be? Beyond, perhaps, some newfound affinity for poor white trash? I mean poor white trash in its sweet original state, pur et simple?”

  “I grant you, he has a horrid father who writes tracts, and you don’t,” said Andrew. “And he hasn’t a cent to his name, and you have, even though it probably came from blackbirding and piracy in your family’s not-so-old days. But can your money buy you what you want? Can it buy you out of what you are?” He thought he saw that sting go home; Peter did not flinch outwardly, but Andrew felt the flinch. It was a time to act without pity, with all the cold, righteous hatred he felt; he saw his chance to wield his words like a rapier, not to hack and slash but to leave the skin of the cheek dangling with one ballet-like spring. “Money alone doesn’t make a man a gentleman, nor does birth, or you would have nothing to worry about.”

  “What do I supposedly have to worry about?”

  “You could have any amount of money and you’d still wake up in your own skin; that’s a bad enough thing to have to worry about, certainly it sounds quite terrible to me. You can’t go out to a shop and stock up on brains and grace. The way you’re ugly and common goes further than skin-deep, Peter. The way you’re ugly and common goes all the way to the bone, Christopher Holloway. And, speaking of white trash, I could tell all your guests about a certain party I heard of, involving three prime exemplars of that species, a great deal of wine—”

  “See here, you Frog—” Topher started in.

  “Take your hairy hand off me, sir,” Andy said. No one at Yale had actually seen Andy angry until then—at any rate, Topher took his hand off. “Gentlemen!” said Andrew, calling upon his elocution training to throw his voice out to them all. “If you want entertainment, these tracts have their limitations—I suggest that you ask your hosts about that far more exciting party. A party involving a great deal of wine, a handful of money, and another of butter!”

  “He took money not to talk about that!” cried Gibbs, nonplussed.

  “I didn’t,” said Andrew, with a sweet, dangerous smile.

  “I’ll farking kill you if you don’t shut your Frog mouth and get out of here!” said Topher, who feared—quite accurately—that Andrew meant to explain his tantalizing statement, and began advancing upon him with raised fist.

  “Willingly,” said Andrew with an exaggerated shudder. He caught Topher’s eye in such a manner as to suggest that he’d publish his knowledge in headlines a yard high if Topher took another step toward him; Topher didn’t. Andy then shouldered through the crowd in the corridor, meaning to catch Simion up. He derived a faint taste of satisfaction from the questions he heard in his wake—“What party, Pierre?” “What’s this about money and wine and butter?” Perhaps Peter would find it necessary to distract their minds from this all-too-interesting question by letting them drink up all his liquor. “Well, I hope they drink every drop and smash up your room anyway,” Andy thought in his hasty descent.

  When he scanned the quadrangle, though, it was winter-bare: only a few people, not the right one. Simion had already managed to disappear. The best thing, Andrew decided, would be to get to South Middle as fast as he could. However, by malign chance perfectly congruent with how the rest of the day had gone, he was greeted and stopped by Professor DeForest, who’d had to reschedule the week’s singing lessons. When they had settled this business and Professor DeForest had scribbled the new dates into his little pocket diary, Andrew took off for South Middle at a dead run. But he was too late. He found the door of number 34 standing open. Some of Simion’s possessions were gone—the bedcovers, the contents of the desk drawers; a few of the books had been removed from the shelves. Andrew could guess what had happened: He must have hustled it all into a cab, ordered the driver to hurry in a dead and peremptory voice, and gone—but where?

  By suppertime, Andrew had combed the libraries, made a clandestine check of the Apthorpe stable, and looked in every other conceivable likely place. He was forced to acknowledge that he’d been given the slip and could not hand
le this emergency on his own. After painful thought, he decided to go to Klionarios’s house and knocked hard and urgently on the door, and was let inside to tell his story.

  “It was the most horrible thing I ever saw anyone do to anyone else. It was aimed straight for the heart. Oh, I tried to persuade him not to go there, but it was like talking to a storm! And now I can’t find him anywhere! I went back to South Middle, and some of his things were gone.”

  “Where will he go, though? He could have come here,” said Doriskos.

  “He won’t speak voluntarily about what happened today to anyone whose opinion he values. That means to you in especial,” said Andrew. “Or didn’t you know that?”

  Doriskos paused, in nervous thoughtfulness. “I suppose one might have guessed…in his place, I might have done the same. Oh, but it’s so cold outside! Where on earth would he go?”

  “Somewhere that they wouldn’t know him, somewhere cheap…do you know anything about hotels here?”

  After a confused consultation with Kiril, Andrew and Klionarios ended up taking a hired carriage to comb the town’s taverns and hotels, since neither of them knew much about such establishments or how to get there. Doriskos amused Andrew by his studied selection of the roughest-looking cab driver at the stand, one he fancied likely to know where low places were, cheap doss-houses and hostels. In this driver’s odorous and drafty carriage, they checked first at the town’s hotels, then the lower echelons of lodging houses and taverns that put up sailors. With no self-consciousness and no apparent perception of the peculiarity of the situation, Doriskos in his black cashmere greatcoat got out at each place and earnestly described Simion to the desk clerk. Something had drawn him tight as a bow, and he showed none of his usual shyness in these transactions; tonight’s incarnation was a terribly concerned and persistent adult who compelled the complete attention of those whom he queried and who would not call off his search until all resources were exhausted.