Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

  “You know, I hadn’t thought about doing publicity in America,” Ted told them. “You can call me that rare bear, but I would just as soon hibernate in the springtime and the summer.”

  Epidemic spasms. The subgroups of the party stepped away from each other, the shock momentarily isolating everyone in the room.

  “Dilatoriness in a poet is one thing,” Sir Karel Hornsby, his primary editor, said, his vocal cords squeaking out for the oil can, “dormancy is quite another.”

  Anxious titters throughout the room. Oh, so it was like that, was it? And to think of how he had snubbed a firm and proximal offer from an alternate publishing company and that ambassador of all things funereal Etienne de Born, and had accorded Faber the right of first refusal for everything that Sylvia had left in the coffers.

  The only sound now was the reflux of their herringbone chests expanding. He wondered if Karel had been in the War, the original War, War One, the offstage War that had lineated the Western world and also lineated the more coarse and melancholy aspects of Ted’s own nature through his relationship with his father. Karel was the sort of man whom his father would have been proud to serve beside, blunt and wry. Dad would often tell that story about the great guns summoning a shower of coal cinders from the sky. The leaf-sized flakes that kissed the eyes with glaucoma and caused an inky and blistering condition that the medics called “black tongue.” Dad standing in line to untwine his tongue from the roof of his mouth and have it painted by the same ointment brush that hundreds of comrades had savored, pretty much duplicating the experience of the field brothel.

  The ashes in Ted’s mouth had forestalled him from writing out the poetry that had been clotting in his gut. He had the fire, but he hadn’t the fuel to sustain it. And why hadn’t he the fuel? How had he come to find himself in the position of having to paraphrase himself as he had in his recent poems? Because Sylvia had eaten all his words and had disgorged them before he could arrive home to table. And this was a meal that he had begun in his hearth before Sylvia had even thought to strike a match.

  Critics conceded Ted no merit for forthrightly rushing Sylvia’s final words into print. One clever arbiter had commented, “The same man that executed now executes.”

  Like Romeo she had turned and she had discoursed at the tomb’s door. She had spoken with the scolding and icy detachment of one already dead. More stage director than editor, Ted, presented with the rather random captain’s log of her final notebook, had little choice but to impose the purposeful order of a journey; to turn the dream horse out and ride it till its death.

  People did not understand all that Sylvia had to live for. There were the children, her reputation, and her husband’s reputation. There was decency and craft left in the world, wasn’t there? There was constraint and accountability, no? There was a house full of sedative capsules on hand if she had really wished to make clean work of it. There was no need for her dramatics. There wasn’t any need for her to poison her own circulatory well in the same chamber in which she had cooked their dinners. There was no need for him to see her that way on that mortuary tray with her dark falcon’s hood so strikingly monastic like some crazed penitent extending her self-punishment to an unspeakable extreme. Yes, unspeakable. Suddenly, there were no more words.

  The momentum that Sylvia had let loose had by no means ceased its motion. It was pushing him bodily to America, a land that had once, in the blackberry winter of their love, beckoned them both effortlessly. America? Again? Now? Now, when his children were asking his mother about theirs and Mom could only plead virtual ignorance concerning Sylvia? And now, when he had another child, a little girl named Shura, in an alternate circumstance, who refused to venture either a “Mommy” or a “Daddy,” or any word whatsoever so far as he knew, although she’d passed her second birthday, and she was as watchful and partisan as a cat in the corner?

  Now, before his children knew the facts. Now, while he had the inclination less to see America than to speak to it. Now, while he was still unwilling to play a nonspeaking role in a false legend. Now, a necessary reunion with truth. Now, a reunion with self. Now, while he had the nerve.

  3.

  Robert

  They came south in galleys of iron, crossing the river from their land of charcoal and slag. They had grown up (or failed to) playing in cindery ruins. They believed that all the education they needed lay within the perimeters of a simple rhyme scheme, all the world for a song. They had read their own names from off the abounding cereal shelves—they’d spent furtive late nights learning the litany of excess in the Gothic food markets that never closed. They were whipped sometimes for spray-painting their catechism in runes across the sides of buildings. They called themselves “Alpha-Bit,” “Cocoa Puff,” or “Yum-Yum.” These children were sweet-tempered, they were lethal, and they were doomed.

  They had pretty much shrugged off civilization. They lived for sunshine and plunder alone. Anthropologists of the future will absolve them in the course of their analysis, concluding that their rapaciousness was entirely in keeping with the tenor of the times. Civil rights icons died, the professors will conclude, for these children’s dignity, thus consigning their educations to a vacuum. These kids showed up on the Deuce in sweat suits, hooded parkas, and goalie jerseys, the netted hems of which trailed down about their bumper sneakers like a bride’s trousseau. They walked a dozen or so abreast. They came upon us, swaying and bopping like a guerrilla chorus line. At first, we couldn’t understand what they were trying to say. Their dialects were too bass-heavy. Their elaborate handshakes alone took five full minutes to perform. Initially, they were left to stand alone on street corners, talking to themselves and flapping their fingers about as though imitating trapped cockatoos. Eventually, they managed to get the idea across that they were selling something. They had in their possession tiny black vials containing the paint chips from the megalithic Indian burial markers, up where they had come from. If we smoked their sacred flakes, all boundaries between the terrestrial and the celestial spheres would fall away with the rapidity of an accelerated sunrise. They offered up an Iroquoian hookah pipe. “This here’s the stuff Richard Pryor pyroed on,” the kids said.

  The first of us to try it snapped his neck to the side as though hung. When he came to after several moments of heavy panting, he whispered “Mama” and promptly wet his pants, and this proved to be enough of a testimonial to get a line to form down the block. Word got around rapidly. A fountain of infancy was now for sale, come one and all. Things weren’t so much different after that as they were enhanced. There was more money about. More cops, guns, whores, murders, suicides, newspaper editorials, outstanding warrants, life-threatening pathologies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, vermin, and interlocutors from Utah who went around asking everyone if they had seen a thirteen-year-old in Danskins named Verna.

  I found that I could no longer perform the interpretative dance of the kitchen cook line. My reaction time had become Talmudic. Chefs who nightly cursed me in the flurry of dinner-hour skirmishes now took me gently aside. They sat me down, genuinely grieving because they knew as I did that there was no safety net below this life, and no path of rebound once one sank beneath it, and they proceeded to turn drama critic on me. They would inform me in paternal terms of the glowing notices that they were going to give out if I could only get some other prospective employer even partially interested in my severely eroded culinary skills.

  I had mortgaged the remaining years of my life in back rent to Blind Isaac. He was no longer affiliated with Joey the Purse since Joey had died of cancer in federal custody. Isaac possessed all the power and all the trappings now of a border chieftain from an alternate century. His escort of Punjabis directed the flow of commodities and maintained order in the Saint James lobby, handing out numbers, estimating when the audience with the boss would likely take place, and shooing everyone out of the antechamber so that Isaac could take his nap or his lunch break in some semblance of peace. I expected, what with all the
politicking and whatnot that he was engaged in, that he might overlook the fact that I very rarely paid my rental fee.

  Isaac got me a job in a destitute neighborhood downtown, still known at the time as Washington Market. A prodigious wholesaler by that name that was once on West Street had shut down in the early 1960s, coinciding with the adjournment of the West Side dockyards, a port that had long predated American independence. Old dockhands would tell you that it had been “the mouth of all America” for as long as anyone could remember. The neighborhood was mostly given over to warehouses in the 1980s. Lower-order bikers were now the clientele in the longshoremen’s bars that remained, neon havens in the pitch dark. Six nights a week, I loaded and unloaded semis under the supervision of uniformed sentinels. They were licensed to carry firearms and exhibited a degree of egocentricity on par with their concentration camp counterparts. The trucks that rolled in and out had the word ATMAN emblazoned on their sides, along with the logo of a mariner’s compass. I did remember that Sabbath had mentioned a certain Atman Foundation, but she had been dead for many years and even her ghost had by then shed its complexity and nuance, owing greatly, I must confess, to the living death of my heroin addiction. I had narrowed in mind and body in anticipation of my own tight-fitting grave. In my mind, Sabbath now possessed the one-dimensionality of the Madonna. I worshiped her accordingly.

  There was lots of downtime in the loading job. We waited, half a dozen graying black men and I, in a corrugated-tin shack on the grounds of the storehouse complex. The team of uniformed guards, when not summoning thunder from the metal wall of our shanty to tell us that another truck needed to be unloaded, rambled about on their Byzantine security routes the night long. They crossed catwalks. They counted crates in subcellars. They radioed in, in their cryptographic vernacular, that nothing was in any way amiss. I and the elder statesmen would sit upon the slats of the tin house, listening as the wind played up our little domicile’s hollowness.

  I was reading Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. The golden reliquary of Charlemagne upon the cover drew attention within the confines of our break-area bungalow. Sitting as we were at the very toe of Manhattan, the men understandably wished to know why the face of a medieval warrior king had been chosen for the cover of a popular volume regarding civilization. I didn’t know how to answer that. “Charlemagne conquered and Christianized a major portion of the world,” I told the men.

  “What’s so damn civilized about that?” they wished to know.

  We were working directly in the shadow of the World Trade Center towers, the reflective alloy exteriors of which caused the Hudson River to swim four hundred meters in the sky. We all knew that these towers, created in the image of two mainframe computers, and the others that would follow, would obsolesce human intelligence, human diligence, and human dignity as we knew them within our very lifetimes. Tradespeople who were employed for years on the building project foreswore the finished turrets, claiming that they had been forced, like the builders of the Pyramids, to toil for the benefit of false gods. That’s when it dawned upon me that civilization was committing suicide.

  I might be out there still, but for the fact that one extremely heavy shipment coincided with the worst winter blizzard that we had had in many years. We worked through the white sleet, barely able to see, hear, or speak to each other through the shrieking of the white wind and the roar of the turbines. Before the night was over, I took to coughing and grew feverish. I was shivering too violently to pick up and carry a crate. I went into the tin house to recuperate, but the howling of the metallic siding brought me to the brink of a mental breakdown. When I went out to rejoin the crew, I found that they had taken up a collection. These men had next to nothing, but in a pinch, they were willing to divide what they did not have. In bills and silver, they handed me roughly six dollars. They told me to take a taxi to the hospital. They would punch my card in and out until I was able to work again.

  I pocketed the money—there is room for both gratitude and larceny in the continent of the human heart—and resolved to walk to the emergency room. Visibility was something of an ordeal, but I kept moving, head down and hands sunken into my sleeves, navigating by way of half hunch and funny feeling, and eventually I found myself in a familiar part of Greenwich Village. The storm had declared what amounted to almost a moratorium on sudden illness and unexpected injury that evening, and I was speed-processed through the preliminary interview and the X-rays, and rapidly informed that I had an advanced case of bacterial pneumonia and arterial fibrillations accrued from a body temperature of 104 degrees. I had to undergo a week or so of hospitalization and treatment with intravenous drugs. They asked me if I had an HMO. I had heard the expression, but never in explanative terms, and I assumed that like the abridgments HIV and AIDS, HMO must be the identifying letters of some sexually transmitted disease that I wasn’t quite up to speed on. Startled and defensive, I told the emergency room’s attending head nurse—a big, round lady with a hairy nevus on her face and the same permanently doubting expression that the nuns at Trinity High had habitually worn— that I had not had sex in at least three or four years.

  “Are you bragging?” she asked.

  She explained that my lack of health insurance prohibited the hospital from treating me. Where I needed to be was within the walls of a teaching institution with a fat endowment and liberal-minded protocols. She knew just such a place, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital on 168th Street, only a mere 154 blocks to north. She handed me a note of referral and my chest photostats, and she advised me to drink fluids and stay in bed as much as possible if I didn’t make it uptown to Columbia Presbyterian.

  I might have taken the subway uptown, but months of paregoric had me starving for a shot of real dope. I would save on the token and hoard my sympathy money for a taste of what I felt that I needed even more than good health. I remember that the distance between the Village and Midtown’s Columbus Circle, upon the rim of Central Park, was a jaunt compared to the journey that would follow, although I was very weak and the blue-and-white Manhattan night seemed to throb between hues, as of oceanic light, and the scourging wind had me admitting my sins to the sky.

  If the neighborhood of Washington Market reminded one of a dockside quay, doubly so did the long promenade of Central Park West, although the river was nowhere near. The uninterrupted space of the park loomed to the right as one walked north, and the balustrades, flying buttresses, and other baroque details of some of the finest prewar buildings in the city hung there to the left. The alternate scenery instigated that seaside ambience of vistas rolling by as one walked along the conveyor belt of the surf. The lodgers of the cardboard wigwams, like dolmen buoys in the snow, came walking across the translucent pasture toward me, leaving their tracks behind them.

  I entered Columbia Presbyterian, a great gleaming oasis amid the rickety ward of Washington Heights. I submitted my referral, my X-rays, and my fallacious Social Security number. I readily admitted my drug addiction. I told them I needed, foremost, a dose of some morphine correlative to see me through until morning. I undressed and lay down upon a gurney. I signed a sheath of legalese statements attesting to my liability for all charges accrued during my stay at the hospital. I extended my arm while they attached the IV vines. The clear bag of saline that they fostered into my bloodstream was slurped dry within half an hour. They provided me with a new bag and I drained that one as well. I had stretched things a bit too far, telling the attending intern in the emergency room that I had been coughing blood for days. The staff conferred and the consensus was that I might be tubercular and contagious. Thus, they had to station me in a polyurethane-canopied palanquin in full view of the theater of the ER while they waited for a private room to be vacated upstairs. They fed me white tablets to stave off my withdrawal symptoms. They had to wear plastic duck masks when they examined me. “Still snowing when you came in?” my intern asked.

  They kicked me upstairs after two days. A private room had been made available
. I asked the orderly who had arrived with a wheelchair and an attitude if the person who had occupied the room before me had died. I had to rephrase the query three times though the vent of my duck mask before he understood what I was saying.

  “Or else got better,” he answered blankly.

  Within the internal medicine wing, the operatic histrionics of the emergency room were replaced by the polished interplay of the madrigal form, those secular hymns of reprieve and reproach. IM nurses, less manic but, in their own way, more indurated than their burned-out trauma unit counterparts, set the atmospheric tone with their patient and brooding offhandedness, the coolness of their touch, the soundlessness of their footsteps, the suavity of their exchanges, the softness of their speech, and the equivocality of their replies to all stated queries. These nurses could not afford the physician’s bluff mien and drollery. They were the ones left with the burden of upholding dignity in the environs. They were not the ones who pronounced death; they were rather the ones who witnessed death in all its facets. They bathed it, fed it, facilitated it, obstructed it, forestalled it, accepted it, but never second-guessed it. They personified mercy itself, but mercy from a stoic stream. These nurses would arrive in the dark of my benighted room and pause for a moment at the frosting bay window to absorb the luminescent fresco of the George Washington Bridge before applying the vise of the sphygmomanometer and the teardrop-tasting thermometer. One and all, they had long ago discovered that their true allegiance was to physiology. The interlocking engines that sustain us would themselves, with the irrefutable wisdom of fate, determine their own endgame. To artificially prolong the workings of a physiological system, past hope and common sense, was a much greater affront to the medical mind than was death itself.