“All right,” he said. His tone gained about fifty pounds and drooped heavily. “Enough of this. If you’re going to be stubborn …” He opened the door. “Get Brand,” he bellowed. Under the sonic stress his face divided itself into a series of jowls, one fading into the other. It was as if the fat were a disguise, but what it hid was also fat. In any case the sense of role-playing was gone and with it any hint of the benign.
When Brand entered he seemed to have caught the mood, long-distance. “Let’s get to it,” he said. “Sit down.”
Startled, I did. Rath half-turned away, his hands fidgeting in his pockets.
“Did you and Gilliatt have a plan?” Brand asked.
“What?”
“Yes,” he said, as if I’d answered his question. “Be cooperative. We mean no harm. You’ve had military service?”
“Yes.”
Rath joined in. “You are a championship ice skater?”
“No …”
“But you do well on the ice. Don’t you?”
That one was apparently rhetorical because Brand butted in with, “You were married on the eighth of September?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know it’s not permissible for a Director of the Academy to subscribe to theories like astrology?”
“I don’t.”
“Have you memorized the names of all the Jews who come here?” Rath re-entered. “Goldberg,” he said, “Feldman, Schwartz, Finkelstein, Smythe …”
“Smythe?”
“They change their names.”
“I could never memorize names and dates in school,” I said. I must have hoped to lighten the atmosphere.
“Couldn’t you?” Brand said.
“How are your childhood memories? What about the secret fellowship you belonged to?”
“It wasn’t secret. Just private.”
“Then you did join?”
“It wasn’t something you joined. It was just there.”
“Were you married on November the eighth?”
“September the eighth.”
“Have you ever taken clandestine dancing lessons?”
“Let me explain …”
“Didn’t you used to recite certain Hebrew prayers when you were alone and frightened of the dark, and then tell people you didn’t believe in God?”
“Yes …”
“Aha!”
“I was nine years old.”
“Ten!”
“Well—yes, ten.”
“You’ve been having an affair with a guide named Barbara.”
“That’s my affair.”
“Cynically, without regard for her feelings.”
“Now look—”
“Tell us about your dreams. Are they in color? Are there musical accompaniments?”
“I don’t dream often.”
“You’re right,” Brand stuck in. “It’s not safe.”
“At crucial moments do you ever find yourself speaking backward. As if forward language wasn’t enough to express what you mean?”
“That was years ago—an experiment.”
“That us give don’t.”
“Who’s running the day’s activities while you’re lying around here having fun?”
“Gilliatt and the staff. I’ve organized—”
“Your prick,” Rath said.
“What?”
“Your prick. How big is it?”
“Big enough.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” I said with grim, flat stupidity.
“Did you ever see your dad’s? Now there was a prick.”
“We’d test you now, but it’s not fair. It’s bigger because you have to pee.” Rath bent down over me. His flabby face smelled shaving-lotion-sweet.
“Hey,” he said, “he’s drunk.”
“Hell, he’s drunk.”
“That’s right. Drunk!”
“Can you beat it. He’s drunk! As a skunk!”
“Not true,” I said, trying to control my words more carefully than usually. “I am not drunk.”
“Walker, have you been stealing liquor from mad husbands of ex-wives?”
“Confiscating,” I said. “And he’s not her husband.”
“You’re an actor, right?”
“I was an actor.”
“Then let’s hear something. How about Troilus and Cressida?”
“I never played it.”
“No Troilus?”
“Sorry.”
“Just some of the first act?”
“No!”
“Then sing us some lieder. Fauré. Revien, reviens …”
“Where do you stand on the Romantic question? Do you believe love is intimately connected with death?”
Brand giggled. “The French call it le petit mort.”
“Don’t joke about le mort,” Rath said to him.
“I suppose that’s something only Germans understand, is that it?” Brand sniffed his artificial breath.
“Stick to what you know,” Rath said. “Administration. Let me do the advance planning.”
“The hell I will. You plan so well there’ll be nobody left …”
Somehow I found the strength and presence of mind to slip from my chair. I left them in the deepening swamp of their verbal tussle—two behemoths snatching life and death back and forth from each other’s pudgy paws.
9
“MAX,” I YELLED, AND ran toward him.
He turned and, seeing me, waited. He was laughing by the time I stumbled in the snow and almost fell at his feet.
“What happened?” I said. “Gilliatt said you saw Barbara.”
“I saw her.” He was still laughing.
“What the hell is so funny?”
“That girl is all right,” he said. He stopped laughing abruptly.
“What girl?” For a crazy moment I thought he meant Jewel.
“Barbara,” he said. “Don’t you worry about that babe. She’s all right.”
“Where is she?”
“Can’t tell. Wouldn’t be fair.” He was exhilarated. His scarf was tied around his neck, skier-style, and his color was high. “I’ll tell you this, though. She knows what to do. She knows when something is finished.”
“What’s she up to? Suicide? I’ll know soon enough—you may as well tell me.”
“In exchange for my suggesting it to her, she’s going to let me film the whole thing.”
“You can’t do that,” I said. “Listen. I have Security Police I can call in if I have to.”
“You don’t understand anything, Walker. Do you know that? Do you know how much you don’t understand?”
“I’m warning you, Max.”
“Where’s my flask?” he said. He looked at me mock-wisely. It seemed I could not control even madmen any more.
As a matter of fact, the first thing I’d done outside was to drain the rest of the liquid from Max’s flask and hurl it far out into the snow. Then I opened my fly, right there in the anarchic afternoon, and pissed against the wall of the Administration Building in steaming relief.
I remember you, I said to myself amid the ecstatic smoking flow. The middleman. And here between Brand’s anti-Suicide Academy and Rath’s suicide manufacture plan you stand, once again, firm as a cloud.
I finished the zipper business just in time as a guide led a group of guests toward the movie theater at my right. Carefully, I stood in such a way as to hide the give-away patch of yellowed snow from their sight. I remember you, I thought in shame, but not this way. The once-proud Director splashing his urine in drunken protest.
You perverse bastard. All you’ve ever wanted is an answer—to make dialogues instead of monologues. And when you get two straight answers you’re destroyed. You’re like the suicides who come here with their fake dialogues, the second voice dubbed in by self-pity. Which led me by the direct process of thought to the unresolved question of Barbara. Perhaps I had been through enough on this extraordinary day that I would find an eloque
nt tongue and convince her subtly, brilliantly, of the place of the innocent child in a world of guilty self-destroyers. I would be a Cicero of rationalizers, a Demosthenes of suffering half-logic. Together she and I would lead the next child-chosen happily into silence.
“Max!” I said, surprising myself with my own words, “it’s time now. You can tell me. Did you sleep with Jewel while she was still my wife?”
“You poor bastard, that’s what you get for living in the jungle of yes and no. Get out of it, man. Didn’t I tell you. When I was dead back there in Doctor Pollikoff’s office, I found out there is no yes and no after death. And the way it is afterward, that’s how it has to be before you die. It stands to reason, man. Yes, I slept with her while she was still tied to you in holiest bonds of mattress-mony.”
I made a convulsive move toward him.
“And no, I didn’t touch her until she was completely free of you. Until I couldn’t smell your sweat on her in the night. Wolf, you are badly hung-up on possession.”
“Can the avant-garde clichés, will you, Max?” I said.
“Nothing’s worth having unless it’s worth destroying.”
“Is that why you let Jewel have a neat, bloody abortion?”
“Why do you believe her?”
“I was born under Capricorn. Capricorns are gullible.”
“It’s going to be a pleasure,” he said, “to see you finished here.”
“You’re counting on a lot.”
“I’m counting on what I can count on.”
“Barbara’s sick. We have a number of these breakdowns every year. Occupational hazard. Do you know,” I added, “that there are those here, in authority, who think you’re a spy?”
“But you know I’m not.”
“Do I?”
“Because you know who the real spy is.”
My anxiety suddenly shifted back to its real center.
“Where’s Jewel?” I asked.
“The concept
Of a totally controlled
Environment leads
To the peak
Of Hazards—hap
Or otherwise.”
Oh, God, I thought, I’ve triggered him again. “Where’s Jewel?” I persisted.
“Choosing me
She chose a madness
She could handle—
Instead of her own.
Don’t tamper
With that kind
Of choice.”
“Where’s Jewel?” I insisted. If I could bring him to a peak of collapse again as I had that morning, perhaps I could break the back of the Barbara business.
As if sensing this he told me, humoring me, as if I were the madman. I fled from him and the absent Barbara and their plans to film my defeat.
10
JUST SOUTH OF THE Sick Rock I encountered a black omen: Gilliatt.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said. “Don’t you ever check back with your office?” He brandished a portfolio at me. I would not, of course, tell him how the day was crumbling about me.
“It’s five o’clock,” he said. “You have to sign the daily estimate sheets.”
“I’ll do it here, on the Rock. Did you find poor Barbara?” The qualifying word was inadvertent; Gilliatt did not miss it.
“Poor Barbara is still missing,” he said. “Though your Mister Cardillo claims to have seen her. Sign both copies, please. How was the Board of Management?”
“How would I know?”
“Didn’t Rath and Brand interrogate you?”
“In a way.”
“That was the Board of Management meeting.”
I refused to show him my confusion and dismay. He gazed at me wisely, as if assaying my reserves of control, measuring how far I was from a break. It was an acquired Academy skill.
“I don’t think you won this time,” I said.
“Maybe. But perhaps you lost anyway.”
“Hell of a place to sign papers,” I grumbled.
“I know—the modern Jew’s traditional dislike of the outdoors.” It was comforting to meet again the familiar, clearly directed hostility. My strength seemed to return.
“Simply the Jew’s traditional sense of order,” I said. “‘Unto all things a time and a place.’ Signing papers: indoors—”
“And ice skating: outdoors?”
Gilliatt knew. On this day of days everyone knew everything except, it seemed, myself. “I’ve set up interviews,” he proceeded easily, “for Barbara’s replacement. Eight to nine tomorrow morning.” Tomorrow. The improbable cool comfort of the word.
“If we find her—”
“Or if we don’t! Legal has the replacement papers.”
“All right. How do the day’s choices seem to be stacking up?”
He stuffed the papers back into his portfolio. “Hard to say yet. It’s not been a typical day. See you at dinner.”
When he had gone about fifty yards I called out after him, “Gilliatt!” He turned, an oddly balletic turn, black calligraphy against paper-white snow.
“Who’s the spy, Gilliatt, you or me?” It was too far to be sure but I thought he grinned.
“Don’t you know either?” he called back. His blackness receded.
11
I FOUND JEWEL AT the edge of the frigid sea. It was a ten-minute walk past the Sick Rock down through a half-mile of well-tended formal gardens and into a wilder section of the Academy grounds. The way down, down, the way out: I didn’t know but I was moving toward whatever it was I was moving toward. Yesses and noes also moved within me canceling each other out, giving the lie to Max but no comfort to me as I moved. Landscape changes gave some comfort; the skeletal formality of sculptured bushes and long, shadowed allées fading to sea-scape and scrubby clumps of grass with peculiar shapes. The air was still; clouds were gathering to announce the ascension of twilight over day covering the other white circle, leaving only the proper sovereign circle that gave light and no warmth.
I walked with whatever rhythm the soft snow underfoot allowed. Was there a center of balance for me to discover? Could I discover it by rhythmically walking toward Jewel? Had I been losing it all this bitter day while helping Jewel to find hers?
Why was I going to see her when so much else was painfully suspended? Because, like any creator, I wanted to see if what I had created was alive and might go on living. If I had betrayed my vocation, at least let it be for the intended cause.
In my cold fever, whether due to the heightening of my fears or to alcohol, I saw the landscape as a calligraphic wonder. The thinning line of trees casting elongated shadows on the snow, like a prayer book in a foreign language, but which one knew by legend to hold a famous and beautiful verse; the long line of uneven rocks scattered in a shaky hand, stretching from grass’s end to the shore. First larger then smaller, light-burnished colors then blackened gleaming shades all straggled with seaweed, strophe and anti-strophe, unfinished statement of stone and sand. And the flights of sandpipers hurled at the sibilance of shore-froth hissing them back then enticing them to return to the edge, fragments of alien texts, sacred letters whose meaning had been forgotten, old feathered prophecies, creations of inspired astrologists of earlier generations. In the midst of these winter hieroglyphs I found Jewel, calm as stone, clearly resolved to live, or at least not to die this day.
I told her, then, of my reading the landscape the way I had read the sky when I was a child. Stuck with logos from the start, that was me. The world as untranslatable language. Her laughter lingered in the declining light as we walked the beach. Why had she come there? After teaching me to dance she had remembered herself as the young Princess of Malibu Beach … dogs chasing driftwood … the long waves; everything at the Academy points backward, both in positive and negative form. Memory is the characteristic art form of those who have just decided to die and those who have just decided to live. How it all flies back to you when your guard is down: the wet slippery evenings on the basketball court, knowing you were staying too
late and fearing home reprisals, but full of the sweat and stink and the delicious lonely feel of the echoing wood floorboards, the great distances of the yellow-lit court. Or the first eating of non-kosher food (the kashruth was one of the few laws the Fellowship took absolutely straight:) succulent pork and the strangeness of moist clams. When I was caught, there was the horror of having to endure the minyan chanting in my own living room a ritual that until that day had been my favorite of the many chants invented by the Fellowship. (I told Jewel, as we walked, my arm around her shoulders, my frozen nose trying to breathe a hint of her perfume.)
It consisted of the cantor saying: Who is he?
And the minyan would answer in unison: He is the one who has sullied his mouth with unclean things.
Who is he?
He is the one who until today was the pride of his father and of the Fellowship of Jews. And on and on, usually leading to a happy ending, improvised, as was all of it, on the spot.
Who is he?
He is the one who will return to the righteous ways and find more pleasure in purity than in uncleanness.
Thus, myself, moving along the sea’s edge, moving with Jewel buried in the crook of my arm, moving from past to present, from the hot suns of Florida and Malibu Beach to the cold sun of the Academy.
Who is he?
He is the one who stands guard over the sacred snow and sees his own face melting away in it.
Who is he?
He is the one who struggles out of bed in the cold dawn to wash dishes for those whose appetites have faded to the vanishing point.
Who is he?
He is the one who memorizes his lines and then believes they are his own.
Who is he?
He is the one who swallows the past but cannot digest the present.
Who is he?
He is the one who reads the ocean’s waves like an ancient but remembered language.
Who is he?
He is the one who smells the gathered leaves burning in the park’s basket and disputes with his memories.
Who is he?
He is the one whose morning erection and evening prayer are both erased by the sun at noon.
Who is he?
He is the one who remembers the combs in his mother’s hair sandy with Sunday excursions though she died when he was two.
Suicide Academy Page 13