The Night Ocean

by Paul La Farge

  On our second day in Mexico City, a psychologist from Fairfield asked us to play a game, in which we wrote on a slip of paper the name of a household object with which we identified. “It can be any ordinary thing you might find around the house,” the psychologist said. “How about a wife?” one of the Americans asked. The psychologist raised a heavy professional eyebrow. “Do you identify with your wife, Mr. Davis?” “Just kidding, Doc.” I wrote AN URN and folded my slip neatly in half. In the second part of the game, we each had to say something about our object to our Mexican counterpart, and he had to guess what it was. “I hold ashes,” I said. My partner beamed. “Ashtray!” “No.” Ten minutes later he gave up, and I unfolded my paper. “Urn . . . What is that?” His object was a dish towel. I got it in two guesses and felt bad for him, but not as bad as I felt myself. I told my partner that I was going out for some aspirin, and found a bus that went to the Colonia Roma. I made my way to Mexico City College, on the Calle San Luis Potosí. It was in an ordinary commercial building that looked like the back office for something that was sold elsewhere. There were iron bars on the ground-floor windows. I located the anthropology department, where an indifferent secretary told me I was in luck: Professor Barlow was in that day. She told me where to find him.

  Barlow’s office overlooked the college’s interior courtyard, where students sat at tables under gaudy striped umbrellas; but the office itself was gloomy and cramped. Earthenware pots stood on the bookshelves; a serape was tacked over the window like a curtain. Everything was dusty and mixed up: pens in the ashtray, a crumpled napkin on the bookshelf, stacks of paper on the rug. Robert Barlow sat at his desk, looking at a fountain pen as though he were trying to hypnotize himself. I had expected him to have an extraordinary presence, like the old magus Joseph Curwen in Ward, but, in fact, he looked like a rather prim professor. He had a broad forehead, a narrow chin, and protruding ears. His wire-rimmed glasses were big around and very thick, and they magnified his brown eyes. He had a sparse little mustache. “Can I help you?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly deep. “Professor Barlow? Just wanted to say hello.” I came in, my hand outstretched. “Leo Spinks. I used to edit a magazine called Pickman’s Vault.” Barlow stared at me. “L. C. Spinks?” he said, after a while. “That’s right,” I said. Belatedly, he shook my hand. “You don’t look at all the way I pictured you,” Barlow said. “What are you doing in Mexico City?” I told him. Barlow found it amusing. “It’s true,” he said. “I bought a gas stove last year, but my cook won’t use it. She won’t use the tin pots I bought, either. She says they make the food taste bad.” “Do they?” I asked. “I wouldn’t know,” Barlow said. “I’ve never eaten anything out of them.” He smiled. “I wish you luck, but this is a very conservative country. In some ways.” “What brought you here?” I asked. “Anthropology,” Barlow said. “I seem to be enchanted by the stories the Aztecs left behind.” “The Culhua Mexica,” I said. “Yes,” Barlow said. “Are you an anthropologist, too?” “I just sell stoves,” I said. “Well,” Barlow said, “it’s nice to meet you, L. C. Spinks. I’ll have to look at home and see if I have any copies of your magazine.” He held out his hand and I shook it again. “It’s nice to meet you, too, R. H. Barlow,” I said, not letting go of his hand. Barlow looked at me and I looked back. “How long are you here?” he asked. “Until tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “Why don’t you come to dinner tonight,” Barlow said. “I have some Lovecraftiana that might interest you.” He wrote the directions to his house on the back of one of my business cards. “Come around eight.” I thanked him and went out, exulting. It would be easy to get Barlow to tell me what he and Lovecraft had done in Florida, I thought, and I would use that story to destroy Lovecraft’s reputation once and for all. In the courtyard, the students were

  14.

  Spinks made a sound, a rattling. I’d worked enough emergency room shifts to be alarmed. “Are you all right?” I asked. He clutched his chest with one hand and the table with the other. “Are you having a heart attack?” I looked for a phone and realized I had mine in my pocket. I called 911, and while I talked to the operator, I tried to look in Spinks’s mouth, to see if his airway was blocked. I felt his neck for his pulse, which was strong and even. So, not a heart attack. Something respiratory. I thumped his back. I tried to get around behind him, to squeeze his diaphragm, only, what could he have choked on? Neither of us had eaten in hours. When the paramedics arrived, I was sitting on the floor, with Spinks slumped in my lap. “Breathe,” I was saying, fairly uselessly. The paramedics got him up on a stretcher and put him on oxygen. One of them asked if I wanted to ride in the ambulance. I said no. Who was I to Spinks? Not kin. Not even a friend. The paramedic shrugged and they wheeled Spinks out. The ambulance was lit up on Waubeek Street; they loaded in the stretcher and it wailed off.

  I went back into the house and turned off the lights. I thought: the cat. I opened the kitchen window partway, filled the cat’s food dish, and set out a bowl of water. Then I had to pee. I remembered that Spinks had used a bathroom in the hall, and it wasn’t hard to find: first door on the right. A big room, practically the kitchen’s twin, with a curtained window looking out on the backyard and a deep porcelain tub. A silver grab bar ran around the tub and continued to the toilet. There was a white wicker hamper, and a rank of prescription bottles on a shelf above the sink. I was going to see what medications Spinks was taking, but then I noticed something else: a black ring binder, which had been stuffed into the hamper. So it goes in the homes of the old, I thought. I lifted the binder from its nest of towels, and I was going to return it—to where?—when it occurred to me that it might not be there by accident. I looked inside. The binder contained a sheaf of printed-out pages; at the top of the first page, in blue ballpoint, Spinks had written MY LIFE. It was the story he had been telling me. I was baffled, indignant, amused. Spinks must have wanted to give me the impression that he was speaking from memory, but no one’s memory was that good, certainly not at Spinks’s age. So he’d hidden his notes in a location that he could visit frequently, without arousing my suspicion. Poor vain Spinks, I thought. What if he never came back from the hospital? A stranger would go through his things, and I would never hear the rest of the story. I decided to borrow the binder. I left Spinks’s house with it tucked under my arm, and called the hospital, and they told me that Spinks was in stable condition. For an hour, I walked aimlessly around Parry Sound. I took the sunset cruise and saw several dozen of Georgian Bay’s thirty thousand islands, dotted with houses where Canadian vacationers could play at being the only people in the world. I ate dinner in the same riverside restaurant and drank three glasses of sauvignon blanc. Finally, I went back to my room and read Spinks’s notes.

  Without Spinks’s voice to animate it, the story was abrupt, like a film in jerky fast-forward:

  December 21, 1950. Dinner at B.’s villa in Azcapotzalco. Chicken with beans and rice, all cooked over charcoal. A bottle of Burgundy which B. brought back from Paris. He was there in 1948 to study Mexican mss. in the Bibliothèque Nationale. A gloomy place, he says. He has come to think that any place devoted to books is necessarily gloomy. After dinner B. shows me the notebook in which HPL composed “The Shadow Out of Time.” HPL’s handwriting is small, spidery, thick with deletions and amendments. It’s thrilling: as if I’ve followed a river back to its vine-tangled source. Or its heart of darkness.

  Lovecraft’s story concerns an economics professor, Peaslee, whose body is possessed by the mind of a member of the Great Race of Yith, a creature from the distant past. After five years, the Yithian departs, and Peaslee embarks on an expedition to Australia, where he discovers a mysterious underground city . . .

  Drawn in against my will. Realize: This is how transmigration works. Words take you over. And you may inhabit others in the form of words. First time I have seen it so clearly. I put down the notebook in a hurry.

  What did Spinks mean? I wondered. Did he believe that books are soul
s, that writers live on in the bodies of their readers? It seemed like a very Lovecraftian idea of reading, to say the least. But on the other hand, I couldn’t feel that he was entirely wrong.

  Casually, I ask B. about his friendship with HPL. He tells me some things I already know, and repeats the line from his memoir: HPL was a closet Quetzalcoatl. What does that mean? I ask. B. gives me a look. It’s a long story, he says. Then he tells it. Says he loved Howard but Howard did not love him back. B. has 3 ideas re: HPL. (1) HPL did love him but was too shy and fearful to express it; (2) HPL diverted his love into his work; (3) HPL was incapable of love. B. has believed each of them at one time or other. He thinks they may all be correct. People are full of contradictions, he says. Asks if I have read Alfred Kroeber.

  Spinks had come to destroy Lovecraft, but now he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He had to remind himself that Belsen had not been a dream. There was evil in the world. Without hinting at the purpose that had brought him to Barlow’s villa, he repeated

  what Loveman told me re: cyanogen. B. admits that HPL said some terrible things. B. won’t defend him. Thinks HPL was human, and that, compared to some people, he did little harm. I say it still seems unjust that he should be so admired. B. says yes, but remember, Howard isn’t here to enjoy it. His fans are enjoying it, I say. Shouldn’t someone tell them the truth? B. says he felt the same way after Howard died. When Wandrei and Sam Loveman spread lies about me, he says, I fully intended to sue them for defamation of character. Then it occurred to me that, although I might be able to hurt them, and I might even enjoy doing so, hurting them would not restore what I had lost. Howard was dead and his friends would never welcome me again. I wanted justice, but what I needed was company.

  So: San Francisco, Berkeley, the poets, Kroeber, and, finally, Mexico City. Slowly, Barlow’s hunger for justice had waned. He’d even forgiven Derleth, and had sent him all of Howard’s manuscripts, except this one, which he kept as an indulgence.

  You’re not angry? I ask. I’m furious, B. says, but not about that. He says Mexico City College is run by villains who either don’t care whether the students are learning anything, or don’t want them to know anything that was not known in 1911. This even though many of the students were in the war and know in their scars and bones that the old way of doing things is a ruin. Worse, two of B.’s students are blackmailing him. If he doesn’t pay they will expose him as a homosexual. I’ll lose my job, B. says, and what then? Who will hire me in manly Mexico, or in America the fearful? But if I do pay I condone their vileness. I ask why he is telling me this. B: Because I can trust you. Anyway, what did I just say? People are full of inconsistencies and contradictions. It’s no wonder history is so hard to piece together.

  December 22, morning. We take the bottle of cognac down to the courtyard. Tile floor, canvas folding chairs. The blue-green air smells of woodsmoke. B. says he is thinking of leaving Mexico City. The Rockefeller Foundation has offered him a job studying Mayan inscriptions in the Yucatán. He giggles. Imagine the look on the Dean’s face when I quit! B. is less impressive in the courtyard than he was upstairs, maybe because he’s drunk. Still I admire his courage in telling me so much. How can I think about revenge, still? Why can’t I be more like B.? I start to cry. B.: What’s wrong? Me: I have no idea how to live. B.: A question to which I, too, have given much thought. Me: So, what’s the answer? B.: Maybe this. He rises from his chair, kisses me on the mouth. There, he says. Now we’ve both got what we wanted. I am perplexed. B. clearly doesn’t think I wanted to kiss him. Does he know why I came? If so why did he tell me about HPL? I want to ask about this but am afraid. B. is much braver than I am, I think.

  The sun comes up and it gets hot in the courtyard. B. gets up, gathers some papers, begins to work. Never enough time, he says. I take a picture of him, shirtless, editing a poem. I don’t want to leave. Fear that when the night’s spell is broken there will be absolutely nothing left. But in the taxi, on the way to the hotel, I feel that a new life is beginning. I think of Doris.

  On the flight back to New York, Spinks flirted with a stewardess. As soon as he’d got his bag through customs, he took the train to Lynbrook and caught a taxi at the station.

  Lynbrook, the Friday before Christmas. Everything white and all the identical houses strung with identical lights. Doris’s house too. I ring the bell and Tom Owens opens.

  He insisted that Spinks stay for dinner. He wanted to meet more of Doris’s friends, he said. So they had an awkward meal, macaroni and salad, Doris keeping all the Christmas food in reserve.

  Sherry, wine, Scotch. All of us hopelessly drunk by the end of it, emphasize hopeless. At the end of the night Owens tells me in confidence that he is thinking of moving out. Can you imagine what it’s like, living seven days a week with that? he asks, indicating blackboards, buttons, boxes of leaflets, heaps of typing paper, ashtrays, books, banners, thumbtacks, and bits of tape, and not a single dish removed from the drainboard. I say it sounds terrible. Go on! Owens says. You’re not much of a liar, Spinks. But think twice before you get involved.

  On Boxing Day, Spinks called Doris from work.

  I tell her I want to run away with her. D. says, Finally! What do you mean, finally? I ask. Leo, D. says, you were supposed to ask me eleven years ago.

  The question was, where to go? And Spinks thought, why not go back to Mexico City? He could introduce Doris to Barlow. They were two of the most remarkable people he’d ever met. He bought tickets on Aeromexico, for the sixteenth of January, figuring that Doris needed time to get things in order.

  January 15, 1951. I call Barlow to tell him we’re coming. His brother answers. Who is this, he wants to know. Who is this? I ask. After some more of that he tells me that Robert is dead, almost certainly a suicide. No funeral to attend—thanks for asking! Ashes interred in a city park. And me, still with two tickets for the 16th.

  15.

  Spinks and Doris went to Mexico City. They stayed six nights in the Hotel del Prado; they visited Chapultepec Castle and the Zócalo and the ruins of Tenochtitlán. They made love, finally, but mostly they argued. Doris walked faster than Spinks did. She was always leading him around, always asking men for a light, always flirting with them, or so it seemed to Spinks. She wanted to sketch strangers, which Spinks thought was very rude.

  Finally D. asks me, Leo, have we come here to be free, or not? And I say, yes, we have, but not like this. Then like what? D. asks.

  Spinks didn’t know. Barlow’s suicide had cast a shadow on his thoughts. He wanted to know how someone so wise could have done something so rash. While Doris went to the National Museum by herself, he returned to Azcapotzalco and met Barlow’s secretary, Lieutenant Castañeda, who was busy typing up a report of the circumstances of Barlow’s death. Spinks also met the gentlemanly Don Pablo, who had come to collect some books he had loaned Barlow years earlier. Neither of them was surprised by how Barlow’s story had ended.

  No one asks how could he have done it? They grieve but in their sorrow I hear resignation. Confirmation from Rosa, the cook, who hasn’t left yet, probably in the hope of collecting further wages. El señor Barlow, I ask, in my bad Spanish, ¿Cómo fue? ¿Triste? Well, I get my meaning across. Rosa nods. Triste, sí. I go back up to Barlow’s study, to ask Castañeda something (what?) but he is not there. B.’s papers have been sorted into piles: college work here, scholarship there, miscellaneous correspondence on the sofa. It takes only a moment to find the letters HPL wrote to B. I put them in my briefcase and go out.

  While Doris went by herself to the opera, Spinks went to see Barlow’s friend George Smisor.* He brought a bottle of good mescal, and they talked late into the night. The picture Smisor gave him was of a man who had always known that he would kill himself.

  Smisor says B. worked too much. He never let himself rest. But on reflection S. not sure whether that was cause or effect. If S. knew he would die at 40, he might work harder too! Although not as hard as B. did. The truth
is that B. accomplished more in his short life than most people do in longer ones.

  As to the root cause of Barlow’s melancholy, Smisor could only speculate. His homosexuality had something to do with it, but Smisor believed there was another, deeper cause. A long-ago hurt? A loss of love, a lack? Lovecraft, Spinks thought. What would Barlow have become if Howard had lived a little longer and loved him back? What if Barlow had at least been allowed to keep his place at the head of Howard’s estate, and not had it stolen from him by Wandrei and Derleth—could he have lived?

  I wonder if what B. told me re: justice was wrong. After all look what happened to B. Maybe the answer is to fight.

  Spinks and Doris were certainly fighting. Mexico City was no good for them. Spinks wanted to try their luck in Oaxaca, where there were more painters and fewer people to paint. Doris wanted to go home. Running away wasn’t the answer, she said. She pretended that she had never thought it was the answer. She missed Margot, her friends, her committees. If they were going to have a life together they would have to make it in New York. So, on January 24, they flew home. Spinks returned to East Fourth Street, and Doris went to Lynbrook. Tom had moved out; he’d taken all the liquor, the car, and the portrait he’d done of her in Florida. “What he wants that for, I don’t know,” Doris said. She had Margot back, and when Spinks went out there one Friday evening, she would hardly talk to him. Did Margot want a snack? Did she want Mommy to read her a book? Spinks stood uselessly in the living room, holding a bouquet of winter roses. He had an intimation of how Tom must have felt. He went out and hauled some bundles of old newspapers from the garage to the curb. He and Doris and Margot ate leftovers, then Doris put Margot to bed, and Spinks rubbed Doris’s shoulders. They made love in what had been Doris’s marriage bed, and was now a palimpsest, a bed of many beds, stuffed with ghosts and the ghosts of hopes. Spinks stayed until Monday morning.