Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  “The others are mere exercises by comparison,” Michaelis heard his former enemy declare.

  Nor was he the only man to utter such sentiments as the crowd, Michaelis in its midst, flowed into the great salon, past one fine painting after another, each one ignored or subjected to abuse and invective from the onlookers.

  When they had gathered and opened a space around the painter and his portrait, it was William who read out the inscription: “Self-Portrait in Absolute Ebony.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” Reigler demanded of his companion.

  “Astounding!” several agreed.

  “Utter genius!” oner man declared. “Who would have dreamed of outlining the cape in Lamp Black?”

  “And the cape itself…remarkable!”

  “Of course, of course! The cape! The cape!”

  The President was speaking into Michaelis’s ear during the hubbub.

  “When the canvas was first brought in, we feared it had been damaged during the carting. Two tiny spots of white in the lower center of the cape seemed to mar the edge of the cape. Fortunately, within seconds, they were gone. They vanished as we looked on.”

  Michaelis did not appear to hear the words. Instead he seemed entranced, his eyes completely filled by what he beheld: the portrait, exactly as he had finished it a week and a half before, with the cape painted in Absolute Ebony.

  “Why, I feel as though I could put my hand right into the pigment, there at the cape.” Riegler reached toward it.

  “No!” Michaelis shouted. “Don’t touch it!”

  “He meant it no harm,” William said.

  “Don’t touch the canvas,” Michaelis repeated more softly, but with as much anxiety in his voice. “Don’t go too near it. Not ever! Not if you care for your sanity.”

  “As though it were a window cut into some other dimension,” he could hear another man saying. “One of utter blackness, naturally.”

  “Why, even the room appears smaller at this end,” yet another viewer observed. “As though it were made smaller by the portrait.”

  “There’s never been a painting like it,” several agreed.

  Michaelis turned away, grasping William’s arm.

  “We must go,” he whispered.

  “Go? Where?”

  “To Boston. Tonight, immediately. The first packet that sails.”

  “But surely you’re jesting. after a triumph like…” Then, seeing his friend’s face, he changed his words to say, “The packet doesn’t leave until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I must gather a few necessities tonight. Now. You will help me,” the artist said, quietly, drawing William away from the others, still gathered in wonder about the portrait.

  “I’m delighted, of course, to help you leave,” William said, “since that was the purpose of my mission to you here in Rome. But why such haste? We were to celebrate tonight, surely? And to leave Rome now, at the height of your sucess?”

  William had to repeat his question, then repeat it again.

  Although Michaelis stared at him from only inches away, he could not hear his countryman’s words. All he could hear was a soft, viscous lapping sound, then the awful familiarity of a barely audible whimpering that spoke of an unfillable abyss that would reach out slowly, inexorably, and draw him in, deep into the maw of absolute ebony.

  Room Nine

  The hotel was prepossessing enough in that red-brick overstuffed Victorian manner. If, that is, one discounted its somewhat confined appearance sandwiched between a round-cornered, recently erected, multistory strip of shopfronts and an enormous concrete slab car park undergoing what seemed to be perpetual reconstruction.

  He’d entered that latter labyrinth to leave off the hire car, secured inexpensively if incorrectly at the vast, impersonal Midlands airport where he’d alit from a cramped aisle seat in an economy aircraft after an eleven-hour-and-forty-minute flight.

  The period since then had been distinguished by his attempts to follow printed-out Internet directions so irregular that a logician would conclude the country’s road plan to be at best provisional: Street names, when actually posted, had a curious habit of altering without warning, from one corner to another. Numbering, naturally enough, observed the same Lewis Carroll process, retrogressing from, say, 398 to 12 with stunning amorality.

  Still one more confounding element was the suddenness, extent, depth, and finally the interminability of a low-lying mist that set in and hovered between the rental vehicle’s bonnet and the streetlighting’s upper metal. That a cloudless, starry, black night rose all above those lights provided the further impression that he somehow was motoring through a particularly uninspired museum diorama, perhaps one titled “Mediocre British Manufacturing City of Certain Age and Decreptitude.”

  Nevertheless, once he was within the warmth and relative newness of the hotel’s most external lobby, his three oversized pieces of luggage almost completely in hand by then, he paused.

  The typical foyer gave almost immediately on the right to an atypically attenuated gallery of a bar, with uneven tiled floor and an unpolished timberland of painted-black spindly tables and chairs of the cheapest assortment. Opposing them was the by no means contemporary, utterly undistinguished, long-uncleaned, dark wood stand-up bar, its uppermost regions plastered about with blazing company adverts, all of it redolent of beer, whiskey, and wine.

  The second he peered in, a fusillade of lascivious, mixed-gender laughter erupted from out of an unseen section of the public room, so he quickly withdrew, only to focus abruptly upon a figure seated nearby in a straight-back rattan chair, a figure so ubiquitous and unmoving that at first he’d deemed it part of the background.

  An elderly fellow, Mid-Eastern, Parsi perhaps, given the ethnic-appearing hat shaped somewhat like a bottle cap, dust speckled of course, wrinkled by antiquity and immutable usage. Beneath what might be a very old and dingy gray lambswool coat, the stick-like teak-colored personage seemed to sport tiny mementoes of his unspecified homeland in the shabby edges of a once-bronze-toned, silver-thread-embroidered vest and an achromatic shirt and collar of exotic fabric, all indubitably hoary and begrimed. His narrow head was so sculptured and noble in that UNESCO poster mode, his face so grim and unmoving and unquestionably toothless, and the old thing was muttering something in such a low consistent voice, that he could not possibly be understood unless one moved directly beside what was certain to be his noxious exhalation.

  So he turned instead to the hotel desk, such as it was, a timid affair, squashed into one end of the aforementioned bar and separated from it by only the merest of particle boards. An effulgent violet cloth notebook, like that an eight-year-old girl would use as a photo scrapbook, lay ajar as the hotel register.

  He knew this, as it was immediately thrust toward him by an amber-skinned, all but kohl-eyed youth, effeminately pretty in a graphic novel way, wearing a matching if more metallic, purple blouson, who never once ceased speaking quietly—he presumed amorously—into a mobile phone held against one ear as the clerk juggled a melange of items.

  In the light of the hung-high competing monitor screens above—one an unchanging perspective of the front steps, the other a television tuned to a silent talking heads information show—the young hotel-keep’s skin and especially his improbably tinted (hennaed?) hair cast off glints of apple green, lilac, and mauve.

  After a sufficient amount of time evading the letter thrust, rethrust, and repositioned for greatest effect upon the registration desk, the young houri on the mobile phone excused himself from his all-important caller to ask if he wanted to check in.

  “The university booked for me,” he responded. “It’s paid for in advance.”

  Despite these facts, he still must show his passport as well as a “valid credit card,” which he found slightly galling and undoubtedly an abuse. Funds were tight enough as it was: He didn’t need to have to constantly monitor some bank company trying to clear off frivolous charges being made from this desk.


  “Room thirteen. You enter past the bar,” he was instructed, with a fluid wave in the general direction of where the laughter had squirted out at him before.

  The key dropped in front of him, he all signed in, he still waited, as the unending barely audible mobile phone chatter went on. The heaviness of his bags had been obvious enough when he entered to require assistance. He waited until he had to actually interrupt the interminable conversation yet again: “Someone to help me up. The bags are so…”

  Prettily unmotivated, the lad oozed from behind the desk and went directly for the smallest and lightest bag, which our friend, seeing his intent, quickly took up himself, forcing the youth to irritatedly lift another, heavier piece of the remaining two.

  The lad pranced ahead through the bar, hips closely encased in boisterously bleached denims, swaying provocatively through the nearby doorway. Leading the way, he ignored the table of revelers—two middle-aged salesman with whiskey-wrinkled countenances, and an oddly unlined tart, once pretty and young, still dressed and coiffed in the style of Julie Christie in her high days of the Seventies.

  He was guided through the quite long bar, where he was certain the trio were staring at him, ready to comment the second he was out of sight, through a doorway and up two sets of steps, down a stair. There a key attached to a plastic ring was flung into his hand, his third bag was released with a thud onto the wooden floor, and the young Middle Easterner was gone as entirely as though he’d never been there.

  A struggle with the key ensued, while he remarked to himself how unseemly warm it was in the hallway. At the same time as the door finally opened to a small and dingy room, he turned to the nearby central heating grill and splayed his hand to test the temperature. Nonexistent, he discovered. Cool. Wherever the heat was coming from, and it was now almost chokingly warm in the narrow hallway, it wasn’t from that grate.

  A step into the room confirmed two unpleasant facts: The room was even more stifling than the corridor, and one reason might have been that whatever windows it possessed—two of them, single-paned, head high above the narrow single bed—opened not onto the street, but onto yet another hallway.

  When he stepped out of the room a minute later to see exactly where they did open onto, he was surprised to walk directly into a wall. No ingress in that direction. And none in the other direction either, as that gave way to a stairway with tiny windowpanes.

  He stood only a few seconds reflecting. He’d been hired for an indeterminate amount of time by the university. He hadn’t expected grand accommodations. But this ghastly room, small, dingy, and worse, with no possible ventilation, was an abhorrence. He couldn’t stay in it a single night, never mind weeks, possibly months, of nights.

  Unwilling to drag his luggage back down again, he left them in the room, locked it, and went back down the stairs and past the bar—and the Dickensian-looking trio—to the front desk, where unsurpisingly the exotic youth was primping into a small mirror folded out onto the desk while still nattering into his mobile.

  “That room won’t do at all. It’s hot in there. Too hot. And that room has no windows onto the street for ventilation. I’m certain you weren’t told to put me into such poor accommodations.”

  The kohl-encircled eyes rose briefly from their adoring perusal of themselves, and the young hotel-keep turned to the back wall of the registration area where he himself could see dozens of hooks patterned onto a board of tiny squares—with only one single pink-plastic-ringed key hanging. The clerk lifted the key delicately—or was it distastefully?—off its hook and swung it mesmerically before his eyes. “Room nine is the only other room available.”

  He grasped at the key. “I’ll take a look.”

  “You enter past the bar,” the clerk said, indifferently returned to poring over the fold-up mirror in search of any overlooked fatal flaw.

  Past the trio of loungers and bar again, up the two landings, past room thirteen, around another corner where a closed door stood two feet off the ground, locked, and completely unexplained, and from there on to another, one step down dropped, corridor and to a single door reading “9.”

  Even though the hallway had been stifling, the room itself was cool. Its single tiny mullioned window looked out onto an air shaft between the hotel and a blank concrete wall of the large car park where he’d earlier left the hired Vauxhall. The room was ridiculously tiny. Smaller than the not-very-large bathroom in his flat at home. There was barely room for a single cot of a bed, at the feet of which the window began, with one tiny space barely adequate to place his largest bag. Opposite that loomed a built-in closet, with it seemed enough shelves and hanger space to hold his meager wardrobe. Between that and the corridor door, nearly hidden, lurked a minuscule desk and chair.

  One had to move the chair to open the closet. One had to close the closet door and move the chair to open the bathroom door. That too was tiny. A small, ugly, once dusky-pink painted room, its height greater than any other dimension, with a light brown tiled shower built in under an overhang, so it resembled nothing so much as a dark glass coffin, next to a sink barely large enough to place a sponge flat into, and opposite, a dullish pink toilet. But like the room itself, the bathroom was blissfully cool, even though windowless.

  “It’s small but it will do until something larger comes up,” he told the uncaring desk clerk some five minutes later, after yet another trek around corridors and down stairs and again past the unsavory triumvirate at the bar, by now, he was sure, quite sick of seeing him. “At least it’s cool, and opens to the outside.”

  “Room nine,” the clerk said, altering his registration book, then turned unconcernedly back to the unending fascination of his complexion.

  “But as I’m staying for a time, I’ll need a larger room,” he insisted, he was certain unlistened to and unheeded.

  The old ethnic fellow was muttering more loudly as he passed, so he turned to see the old stick of a thing who was now almost vibrating with a kind of inner excitement.

  “What is it, old-timer? What’s got your motor going?” he asked, he thought kindly enough, taking notice when no one else about seemed to.

  And listened to the fossil mutter words that he would later—from hearing them so daily—make out to be “Something not quite right, you know!”

  “More than something,” he would respond to the same uttered mantra daily in the weeks to come. “More than just some one thing is not quite right around here!”

  *

  Called into Dr. Blethworthy’s office, he sat, regarding the report he’d made, which faced away from him and toward the American Studies department head, standing, facing a window that gave onto one of the university’s less insalubrious commons. His chief for the past three weeks, Edwin Blethworthy was a tall, well-built fellow, even a rather handsome fellow, despite his high color, who dressed himself and in general spoke and acted with the casual impudence of someone of equal rank in, say, Wisconsin or Nebraska. Upon them first meeting, Blethworthy had made some half-joking remark about the length, extent, and even the “substantial depths” of his own personal American experiences as a cultural exchange student, summer student, then assistant professor in “the States.” All of it totaling, as far as he could make out, but a few years at most; yet more than sufficient to make Blethworthy rather a personage at the university here. One with powers and perquisites either he or one of his minions were always bringing forth whenever the merest suspicion of a hint of criticism was in the slightest danger of arising.

  “Let us review,” Blethworthy now spoke into the window panes he faced, “your task here, young sir, these past few weeks.”

  “My task, as I understood it, was to read the text being used for the final year of American Studies courses, and to compare it to a newer text covering the same material which it has been suggested might replace it.”

  “And then?” Blethworthy urged.

  “And then to evaluate the one over the other based on various criteria… Isn’t that precisely
what I’ve done…here?” He lightly tapped the report on the desk. “I thought that’s exactly what I’d done,” he concluded.

  Blethworthy covered his handsome face with one large, fluid hand, then spun around and seemingly in a single movement placed his body in his chair across the wide desk, where among other papers and books, the report in its pale blue plastic cover now glittered, a touch cruelly.

  “What you’ve done, young sir,” and here one of Blethworthy’s large, masculine, yet somehow extremely elastic hands shot out and covered his own hands laid on the desktop in a light, slightly caressing grasp, “is…excellent! If…altogether…preliminary.”

  “How could it be…preliminary? I covered every chapter and…”

  “Preliminary…since you could hardly be expected to do all that work, all that judging, all that reading, all that thinking, not to mention all that evaluation in a mere three weeks and one day.”

  “Yet I did,” he protested.

  “You did so…preliminarily,” Blethworthy corrected, caressing his hand with such fervor that he became somewhat uncomfortable and wondered if he dared slip out of the grasp. “It’s a three-fortnight task. At the least. Four fortnights makes more sense to me, before you could possibly have all the material in hand.”

  Eight weeks? Eight weeks on such a simple task? Blethworthy had to be kidding. He’d done it in three, three and a half weeks already at a half dozen universities already. Not these texts precisely, of course, but others awfully similar, since they were all awfully similar. He had evaluated American Studies courses in Reykjavik, in Mayaguez, in Riyadh, in Bangalore, in Darwin, even in Vancouver. The material was, one must face it, limited. The “takes” that textbook authors adapted were a mixture of the couth and un, of the trenchant and the bland, of the factual and the speculative. One, for example, might spend pages decrying the folly of “The Vietnam Adventure.” Another barely mention it in the context of the “The Counterculture Wars” or “The Sixties Rebellion.”