by James Lasdun
But I continued moving toward the phone.
I was within a few feet of it, resigning myself to my own weakness in the weary way one does at the point of giving in to a vice, when a colorful, chattering group of people arrived on the platform. All but one were students, sporting an array of clownish hats and the exaggeratedly baggy clothes that had briefly gone out of style, only to return with a vengeance.
The other figure, short and stocky in a black winter coat, was none other than Bruno Jackson.
Seeing me, he smiled warmly and strolled over, his young posse following loudly behind him.
I had had little contact with him this semester, but he was always friendly when we ran into each other. I felt that he hadn’t given up hope of recruiting me as an ally. The fact that we were both English seemed to mean something to him. Though he had been in the States several years longer than I had, and seemed in many ways thoroughly Americanised (his accent had warped into an ugly transatlantic hybrid that made me feel protective about the purity of my own), he retained an interest in British popular culture, which he seemed to assume I shared. I remember listening to him talk volubly about a new cable show featuring British darts tournaments, and trying politely to match his enthusiasm, while all I really felt was the familiar melancholy that most things English seemed to arouse in me ever since I’d first arrived in the States as an Abramowitz Fellow at Columbia University. Now of course there was a more serious difference between us. I don’t know if he realised I was on the Sexual Harassment Committee, but from my point of view the fact that I was made a friendship with him out of the question.
His cheery approach right now was particularly disconcerting. Given the discussion concerning him at the meeting I’d just attended, I felt that it would compromise me to be seen fraternising with him, especially with this entourage of students milling at close quarters all around him. I was also afraid that I would be setting myself up to look treacherous if I were friendly to him now, only to be sitting in judgment on him in a few weeks’ time.
‘Going into the city, Lawrence?’ he asked, helping himself to a cigarette from a packet that a girl – a sophomore I recognised from one of my own classes – had just taken from her embroidered backpack.
‘Yes.’
‘Us too.’
I smiled, saying nothing.
The students seemed to grow subdued in my presence. Naturally I was curious to know what they were doing traveling to New York with their instructor – an unusual if not actually illicit occurrence. But I was worried that if I asked, it might appear subsequently as though I had been looking for incriminating information.
‘Where in the city do you live?’ Bruno asked me.
When I told him the East Village, his tawny green eyes lit up.
‘That’s where we’re headed too.’
‘Oh.’ I noticed that the skirt of his long coat divided at the back in a strangely baroque fashion, with two long swallow-tails of thick black wool hanging from a raised lip of rectangular material.
‘We’re going to a play, Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, an adaptation of a Kafka story we’re reading. Do you know it?’
‘No.’
‘Oh wow!’ one of the students said, a short, plump girl in a Peruvian wool cap. ‘You have to read it!’
Another student, a boy with a hatchet face and shifty, narrow eyes, began to tell me the story:
‘It’s about this lonely old guy who goes home to his apartment one night to find these two balls bouncing around the place all by themselves. It’s hilarious …’
The train came, and I felt compelled to sit with Bruno and his students. The Peruvian-hatted girl took out a camcorder and pointed it through the scratched window. An oily, ice-graveled creek ran along the tracks, full of half-swallowed car-wrecks and dumped appliances.
‘Hello Tomorrow …’ sang another girl – a blonde waif.
‘C’mon man, it’s beautiful!’ the shifty-eyed boy said.
They turned the camera on Bruno, who blew it a kiss, then on me. I gave a polite smile.
‘How’s Carol?’ Bruno asked. I’d forgotten his prior acquaintance with my wife – the two of them had met several years back, at the Getty Institute.
‘She’s fine.’ I wasn’t about to tell him we were separated.
‘Why don’t you come to the play? Bring her along.
’ I thanked him, but said we couldn’t.
He grinned back at the camcorder: ‘Professor Miller’s snubbing us.’
The students laughed.
Night had fallen by the time I reached my block down between B and C. It had been a crack block when Carol and I had moved there a few years ago – vials all over the sidewalk like mutant hailstones; stocky, stud-collared dealers in the doorways with canine versions of themselves grimacing on leather-and-chain leashes; a false bodega with an unchanging display of soap powders gathering dust in the window and a steady stream of human wreckage staggering in and out through the door … All gone now; swept clean by a mayor who seemed (so it occurs to me now) to have modeled himself on Angelo in Measure for Measure, cleaning up the stews of Vienna. I studied that play for O-level English and it has stuck in my mind like no other book has since. Our natures do pursue, like rats that ravin down their proper bane, a thirsty evil, and when we drink we die: Claudio waiting to have his head chopped off for getting a girl pregnant. The bodega was now a cybercafe´; the shooting gallery on the corner was a wheatgrass juicery, and the crackhouse opposite had been turned into a health and fitness center.
As I climbed the stairs to my apartment – a sixth-floor walk-up – I thought how unpleasant this utterly lonely life was becoming. The few friends I’d made in New York had all been scattered by the job centrifuge that rules over American lives, or else been driven out to the suburbs by the advent of children. A part of me regretted not having been able to accept Bruno’s invitation. It would have been out of the question, naturally, but I couldn’t help a faint wistful pang at the thought of them all sitting happily together, watching the play.
Having nothing better to do, I decided to read the story it was based on. Carefully avoiding looking at the answering machine on the window-ledge (as long as I didn’t know for sure that Carol hadn’t called, I could legitimately tell myself that she might have), I went to my bookshelf and took down my edition of Kafka’s Short Works, where I found the story.
It was a very strange story, but almost stranger than the story itself, with its two fantastical blue-veined balls following Blumfeld around his apartment, was the fact that, contrary to what I had told Bruno, I evidently had read it. And not only read it, but taught it too, as it was all marked up in little underlinings and scribbles in my handwriting. Even so, not one word of it seemed familiar to me now. Nothing!
It’s not quite pointless after all to live in secret as an unnoticed bachelor, I read, now that someone, no matter who, has penetrated this secret and sent him these two strange balls … How could I have forgotten something so strikingly bizarre? A complete mental evacuation must have taken place. I simply didn’t recognise a word of it. To get rid of the balls, Blumfeld plays a trick on them – climbing backwards into the wardrobe so that they have to bounce in there too: And when Blumfeld, having by now pulled the door almost to, jumps out of it with an enormous leap such as he has not made for years, slams the door, and turns the key, the balls are imprisoned. Relieved, wiping the sweat from his brow, Blumfeld leaves the apartment. It is remarkable how little he worries about the balls now that he is separated from them …
Abruptly, before I had finished the story, a small, pulsating silver spot appeared in the corner of my field of vision.
I hadn’t experienced this phenomenon since I was twelve or thirteen, but I recognised it immediately, and put the book down with a feeling of alarm.
The spot began to grow, as I had feared it would, flickering and pulsating across my vision like a swarm of angry insects. I stood in the middle of my living room, looking helples
sly through the window as this apparition gradually blocked out the ailanthus tree in the courtyard and the lit windows of the apartments opposite. After a while all I could see were a few peripheral slivers of the ceiling and walls surrounding me. And then for a minute or two I became completely blind.
I stood, trying to remain calm, listening to the suddenly pronounced sounds of the night – monkey-yelping police sirens, the ventilator humming on the roof of the pizza kitchen across the courtyard. Above me my upstairs neighbor, Mr Kurwen, turned on a TV, then walked heavily across his apartment to turn on a second TV. A toilet flushed next door. Then, as rapidly as it had come, the occlusion faded. And right on cue, as the last traces vanished, my head began to throb with an ache so intense I cried aloud with pain.
I had had these migraines for a period as a boy: the same silvery swarm spreading until it blinded me, then vanishing, leaving behind a headache of excruciating ferocity that continued unabated for five or six hours. After all other medications failed, my mother had taken me to a homeopathic doctor, an old Finn in a peculiar-smelling room, surrounded by dishes of felspar and a sticky substance he told me was crushed red ants. He gave me five tiny pills, instructing me to take one a night, five nights in a row. I hadn’t had a migraine since then – not until now.
I went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed in darkness. The pain concentrated itself in the center of my forehead. It felt as though something were in there trying to get out – using now a hammer, now a pick-axe, now an electric drill. Above me Mr Kurwen’s two TVs came booming down through the flimsy sheetrock walls. This had been going on since his wife had died a few months earlier. I’d gone up there to complain once, at midnight. Mr Kurwen had opened the door, glaring impenitently. His round, white-stubbled moon of a face had something odd about it – a glass eye, I’d realised after a moment; brighter and bluer than its brother. Several lapdogs yapped in the dark behind him, where the two TVs threw lurid bouquets of color on opposing walls. ‘My wife just died of cancer and you’re telling me to turn down the TV?’ was all he had said.
Between the cacophony up there and the pounding under my forehead, I felt as if I were being slowly compressed in a room with contracting walls. What had been in the Finn’s little pills? I wondered. With the confused logic of the afflicted, I tried to think what substance might have a homeopathic relationship with this particular form of pain. Caffeine, I decided: too much coffee sometimes gave me a headache. I got up, grabbed my coat, and went out. Soft, wet grains of sleet were falling thickly, clinging like icy burrs. I’d intended to go to the Polish coffee shop two blocks away, but under the circumstances I went straight into the cybercafe´ instead – my first visit – and ordered a triple espresso.
The place was full of well-heeled-looking kids in neat black sweaters and slacks. Of the two or three definable new generations that had come up since my own, this one made me the most anxious. In their presence I felt for the first time the obscure sense of disgrace that comes with age. Their smooth, pin-pupilled faces were splashed blue-gray from the screens; their slim, angular limbs moving elegantly between keyboard, mouse, beverage, palm-pilot; clicking away as if they and these appurtenances had coevolved over many millennia. Some of them wore discreet brushed-steel headsets, adding to the general entomological appearance. As I drank my coffee, watching a group of them mill out through the door like a detachment of plutocratic ants, something caught my eye. Among the mosaic of flyers pinned to a bulletin board in the corner was a poster for a play. Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, it read, by Franz Kafka.
In smaller print, under the bleary image of a man inside a closet, were the words: adapted for the stage by Bogomil Trumilcik.
Trumilcik! Seeing the name again I felt a faint inward shift or lurch, as of a distant gear engaging. The fleeting unease I had felt at the train station returned to me, and this time – taking it, as it were, by surprise – I saw what should have been obvious to me in the first place: that the disappearance of the coin from the bronze bowl could only mean that my recent awakening to the fact of Trumilcik had prompted a reciprocal awakening in him to the fact of me. Furthermore, I couldn’t help feeling that his removal of the coin (assuming I was right in attributing that action to him) had something aggressive about it, or at least aggressively defensive, as though he either wished to threaten me or else perceived me as a threat. At any rate, this unexpected reappearance of his name before me seemed, in my inflamed state, like a summons to action of my own.
I stood up and paid. The coffee was flittering and sparking in my head, adding an effect of lightning to the dry thunder already pounding there. Outside, I headed north and east, away from the gentrified blocks, to the Alphabet City I knew of old, with its charred tenements and smouldering graffiti. Even here, though, you felt the touch of the new order prevailing in City Hall. Women used to stand on the corners where the cross-streets met Avenue C: junkies with micro-skirts over their skeletal thighs; crack-addicted mothers from the East River projects, tottering around on high heels, eyes aglitter. Gone now, like the bawds in Vienna after Angelo’s proclamation against vice. The only things glittering there these days were the freshly refurbished payphones, tricked out in their new Bell Atlantic decals, silver coils and bellies gleaming in the streetlights. I gave them a wide berth, plunging on through the thick sleet still splashing down like icy paint, till I came to the theater, a modest-looking establishment in the basement of what appeared to be a derelict synagogue.
Down the stairs, through a bruised-looking metal door, was a neon-lit lobby with an empty chair at a table bearing programs and a roll of tickets. Off this was a self-closing double-door. I put my ear to it, but it had been soundproofed and I could hear only muffled, incomprehensible voices. I would have opened it, but I didn’t want to risk being seen by Bruno and his friends, and having to explain myself later on.
A fresh cannonade of pain burst in my head: the caffeine didn’t seem to be working. As I stood there, wondering what to do, a man appeared, dressed in a shabby black suit. He was about my age, with odd, pasty skin, and white hands. He lit a cigarette and looked at me with a secretive expression that I took for distrust.
‘What do you want?’
‘Well, I –’
‘The show’s half over.’
I decided to come straight to the point:
‘I was actually trying to find out about Bogomil Trumilcik.’
The man eyed me, puffing at his cigarette.
‘What did you want to know?’
‘Well … Where he is, for one thing.’
‘Are you a friend of his?’
I looked at him. I dislike lying and am very bad at it, and even though a white lie might have helped me at that moment, I couldn’t bring myself to tell one.
‘More a colleague,’ I said, ‘or ex-colleague. I teach at Arthur Clay.’
‘Uh huh.’ Again something secretive, almost sly, in the man’s expression. I had a vague feeling I might have seen him somewhere before.
‘Well he’s in Bulgaria,’ he said with an air of finality.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I mean are you sure he isn’t in New York?’
‘Why would he be in New York?’ Evidently I had given him an excuse to take offense and stonewall me. I changed my tack.
‘Can I ask how you came across his adaptation?’
‘Of the story? I have no idea. You’d have to ask the director.’
‘Ah. I was thinking you might be the director.’ I said this more in an attempt to flush something – anything – out of him before I left than because I really had been thinking any such thing.
‘Me? No. I’m Blumfeld.’
I realised then that the pastiness on his skin was makeup. Even so, I was thrown: I’d pictured the Blumfeld of the original story as a much older man. He glanced at a clock above the entrance.
‘I have to go back on in a moment.’ He flashed me a grin.
‘Just t
ime for a quick smoke before the girls find my balls.’
Mildly exasperated, my head hurting more than ever, I turned to go.
‘May I take a program?’
‘Please. Help yourself.’
I took one of the programs.
‘Are you by any chance suffering from migraine?’ the man asked as I moved off.
The question stopped me in my tracks.
‘How did you know?’
‘Your eyelids are all puffed up and your lips are almost white. My brother had migraines as a kid. I know the symptoms. Here, if you’ll allow me …’
To my surprise, he put his hands on my temples, pressing both thumbs into the center of my forehead, extremely hard. For a moment I thought my skull was about to split. Then suddenly, magically, the pain lifted. As it did, an unexpected wave of emotion passed through me, as though some sweet intimacy, dreamlike in its utter mysteriousness, had just occurred between us.
I thanked him, amazed. He shrugged, smiling pleasantly.
‘I’ll try to get word to Trumilcik that you’re looking for him,’ he said. ‘Now I have to run.’
‘Thank you. My name’s Lawrence Miller,’ I called after him. He gave an indistinct sound as he disappeared.
Outside, I felt light-headed, almost elated. I moved quickly. I didn’t want to go home. The pain might have vanished but the caffeine was still racing around inside me. Thinking over my conversation with Blumfeld, I realised his evasiveness on the subject of Trumilcik had done nothing to dispel my impression that the man was still in New York; if anything, it had reinforced it. I realised I had even begun to form a tentative image of Trumilcik’s circumstances – one that was no doubt influenced by a certain low-grade but persistent destitution-anxiety I myself had been afflicted by since coming to New York. I pictured him hanging on defiantly to some marginal, semi-illegal existence in the city; lodged in an obscure outer neighborhood and making covert nocturnal visits to his old office at Arthur Clay, to work or read his books. The thought of him still here excited me curiously, presenting itself as the sense of a door still open. And as though lit by that opening, another doorway presented itself in my mind, one that I hadn’t noticed before, or at least hadn’t thought of as a doorway.