The Way Through Doors (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jesse Ball

  a Treatise on Fiddle Playing as a Tool for Governance of Happenstance

  There are three ways to play the fiddle if one has as his goal the governing of minds. The first way, learned from the rubbing of tree limbs the one upon the other, and from the sitting of rocks quietly on beds of moss, and from the rocking of streams on curving banks, produces notes that lull. In this way, playing thus, one can creep up on a person and render him or her quiescent. THE second way is to climb a lone mountain. First, to find a lone mountain, and then to climb it. Then, to sit upon it and watch the manner in which the various clouds that pass in conversation debate points and make their tiny coups and failures. Their language is the language of distraction. This is the language that the fiddle uses when it wants to rid a person of their own causal thought and make a vacant cloth upon which to paint the letters it intends. THE THIRD style of fiddle playing is that of the places that have never seen a drop of rain. These shelters, deep within rock faces, or hollows away beneath the earth, or simply plots of ground shielded always by the thick trees that stand above, have a sort of knowledge based upon ignorance that is always the gravest and greatest knowledge. For the total knowledge, the knowledge of all that may be in the world, is the knowledge of one’s death and the world’s continuing. That knowledge does not give. It takes away, removing from one peace of mind and fealty of thought. No, the greatest gift is in partiality. And so, from these trees we gain the power to speak lies, to say things that are not true and place them delicately into the minds of those we would conquer.

  Selah took this note and put it into his pocket.

  —I’m definitely going to put that in my World’s Fair, he said.

  —You should, said the guess artist. I wonder if it’s true.

  —I myself have no doubts, said Selah.

  The guess artist broke the second fiddle. Out of it, this:

  THE QUESTION OF MORA

  —What an odd drawing, said the guess artist. It makes me think of long Russian afternoons during which no one speaks, not because they are tired, but because they are all very quietly angry at one another.

  —It reminds me of that too, said the municipal inspector.

  Just then the municipal inspector heard a noise above. He made for the stairs, the guess artist behind him. Up the stairs they flew, and into the first room. No one was there. The municipal inspector looked about. The room was a simple one: a bed, a table, a chair, a lamp, a window. On one wall, a sconce with a candle. Not even a mirror. But, ah, he thought. There is a closet.

  The guess artist slipped past him and threw open the door to the closet.

  Within, an odd sight greeted their eyes. A half-naked woman, her skirt pulled up to her waist and her blouse pulled down, was rocking in the embrace of a coarse-looking man similarly unclothed. They looked displeased at having been disturbed.

  —Who are you? asked Selah. What are you doing here?

  The woman and man did not stop what they were doing, or respond. Their noises were both grueling and unkempt. Selah looked away.

  —I asked you what you were doing here, said Selah again.

  The coarse-looking man whispered something in the ear of the woman. She giggled. He reached out of the closet, still rocking the girl back and forth, and took the door boldly out of the guess artist’s hand. Turning to look at Selah, he spat once upon the ground and then slammed shut the closet. Immediately then, a sort of moaning began.

  —How awful, said the guess artist.

  —Have you ever seen such…? asked Selah.

  —Not in a hundred years of Sundays, said the guess artist.

  They checked the other closets on the upper floor, but there wasn’t much to be found other than:

  LIST of THINGS they FOUND

  1. a Colt Navy revolver from 1851, loaded, with holster

  2. a child’s boomerang

  3. a mask from commedia dell’arte

  4. a mechanical bird

  5. a box with something wriggling inside of it

  6. a spyglass

  Selah went to the window in the tiny room where the spyglass had been found. In the distance the rolling hills continued. Here and there a homestead or farmhouse might be seen, with perhaps a trail of smoke rising.

  He put the spyglass to his eye.

  —Mora! he said.

  For in the spyglass he saw the inn, and through a window of the inn he saw Mora standing with a stunningly beautiful woman who could only be Ilsa Marionette, Loren Darius’s wife.

  —There you are, he said.

  He watched her moving about the room, twisting and turning, speaking with her back to him, and going sometimes to the window.

  She is looking for me upon the road, thought Selah. Mora! he wanted to cry out, I’m here in the inn. But it was no use. He set the spyglass down a moment and looked out again at the landscape. Then he picked it up and looked through again. This time it only magnified the distant hills. He shook it.

  The guess artist was standing in the door watching him.

  —I found this, he said, holding up the pistol.

  —Give it here, said Selah.

  He belted the pistol on. It was rather heavy.

  —Do you know how to use one of those things? asked the guess artist.

  —Can I hit a target a hundred feet off? asked Selah in reply. No. Can I point it at someone’s head and say something desperate, inevitable, and disastrous? Yes. Can I shoot a horse with a broken leg in order to put it out of its misery? No. Can I shoot a man in the leg in order to cause him misery? Yes.

  —I thought as much, said the guess artist. Also, there was this.

  He put a box onto the table. It was wriggling.

  —What do you think is in there? asked the municipal inspector.

  —I have an idea or two, said the guess artist. Should we open it?

  —We’d better not, said Selah. Anyway, there are more fiddles downstairs.

  The two returned to the common room. They piled up all the fiddles in one place and pulled up chairs. The guess artist broke the first fiddle that was to hand across his knee. A photograph was in it. The guess artist held it up, examined it, and then passed it to Selah. The picture was of Selah, clad in his municipal inspector garb, holding on his arm a very pretty girl.

  —That’s Sif, said the municipal inspector. She’s a girl I know.

  On the back of the photograph there was some writing. It said:

  If you don’t think of me at least once each day, then I will disappear entirely and no one will ever see me again.

  Sif

  —Do you think it’s true? Selah asked the guess artist.

  —It’s just a threat. Nothing to worry over.

  The guess artist broke open the next fiddle. This note was covered in sheet music.

  Selah picked up one of the unbroken fiddles. Many bows were lying about, one for each fiddle. He took one.

  —Hold that music up, he said to the guess artist.

  The guess artist held up the music.

  —Do you play violin? asked the guess artist.

  —Sometimes, said Selah. But badly.

  Yet somehow this fiddle would not allow poor playing. Selah drew the bow over the strings, and the little melody that was writ upon the note sprang forth with a shimmering beauty. It was a simple little tune, but quite fine. Selah played it several times. On the third time, one of the fiddles at the bottom of the pile burst open. Selah put down the one he was holding, pushed the other fiddles aside, and found the broken one. An envelope was inside. Within that, there was a folded newspaper article, a thick one. It was yellowed around the edges.

  He held it up.

  —This is the one, he said.

  On the envelope it said:

  For the Lucky Fool who Comes This Way Unknowingly

  The guess artist nodded and took it from him. He began to read out loud:

  KLEIN EXHIBIT AT THE METROPOLITAN

  Mora Klein was one of the true phenomena of twentieth-cen
tury art. Born in obscurity on the North Face, in Barrow, Alaska, in the 1970s, she made her first mark at the age of four, when it was discovered that she could draw a straight line. As it was the first documented case of a human having the ability to draw a straight line, she gained instant fame. The little girl would be brought by her parents into scientific laboratories and given the most perfect and expensive styli that could then be found or produced, and she would be given paper of the finest and most perfect grade. Upon this paper she would draw a simple line, stretching from one side to the other. Yet the straightness of the line was astounding! Even with the most powerful microscopes and the most advanced measuring equipment, no deviation could be found in her lines. Even the best machines at that time (and indeed since) deviate. But not Mora Klein.

  Scientists thus spent a great deal of time studying her nervous system and the muscles of her arm and hand. But they could not come up with an explanation short of dissecting the little girl on the spot. And many, in fact, in the scientific community were in favor of such a course. If the girl had not received the media attention that she had, it is likely that such a thing would have come to pass.

  In any case, Mora continued to grow and draw straight lines. She did not follow her first feat with another for eighteen years. Then, at the age of twenty-two, she made a drawing. It was her first drawing. Prior to that she had only ever drawn lines and done handwriting. It had never occurred to her to do a drawing. She has stated in interviews that she had attempted very carefully in her handwriting to make each writing of her letters change slightly so that it would appear as the handwriting of others, where the shape of letters deviates wildly from occasion to occasion. Yet in her drawing, she brooked no such deviation. She drew the drawing for the first time upon a canvas with a large stylus and a bottle of ink. Instantly it was taken up by the art community.

  However, a week later, when Mora drew her second drawing, it was no different from the first. It was, in fact, exactly the same as the first in every way. The drawings were immediately subject to intense scientific analysis. No two things in the world had ever been so precisely alike. They were shortly thereafter bought up by the government for a pittance.

  This didn’t bother Mora. She continued to produce her drawings. They continued to be precisely the same, and the art community took them up with a glad fanfare. Someone else, a toady of hers, would number the drawings delicately at the bottom to indicate the date upon which they had been done.

  Her fame grew. Her drawings sat upon the walls of the Metropolitan Museum, of the MoMA, of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Modern, the Musée d’Orsay, the National Gallery, the Museo Nacional del Prado, the Smithsonian. Her fortune too was made, for after the sale of just a few she had made enough money to last her the rest of her life.

  But Mora was a young woman. She had never really attended college, instead having been tutored privately by professors interested in her peculiar circumstances. This was an arrangement made for her by The New School in New York City. She lived in a flat on the Lower East Side, and finished a B.A. in Political Mythology in two years.

  At the time of this article, a retrospective of her work, MORA KLEIN, the Architect of Similitude, is being shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tickets are $12 in addition to the ordinary donation fee. The museum’s hours are: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. The Metropolitan Museum is closed on Monday.

  —Hmm, said Selah. So that’s what she does. No wonder I like her so much.

  Wrapped up with the newspaper article there was a reel of 16mm film.

  —We have to watch this somehow, said Selah.

  —But how? asked the guess artist. There aren’t any projectors here.

  Selah sat, thinking. The common room was very quiet. All around the floor were pieces of broken fiddles. The guess artist took something out of his pocket and wound it up. He let it go and it fluttered around the room before landing on the table in front of them. It was a mechanical bird.

  —Cooo, it said.

  —Where did you get that? asked Selah.

  —Upstairs, said the guess artist.

  —Cooo, said the mechanical bird again.

  It flew up around the room once more, banged against the window, flew about, and landed on Selah’s shoulder.

  —Anger is the artifice of the weak, it muttered into his ear. Only in cold quiet can a man do the true evil that is in his nature.

  Selah slapped the bird off his shoulder. It bounced off a wall and was smashed to bits. Immediately the room was full of mechanical birds that flew about, their wings fluttering in the air. They were all muttering, all muttering about the same thing.

  The guess artist took shelter beneath a table. But the municipal inspector stood up to better hear what was being said. He could make it out just barely, through their muttering repetitions and interventions.

  —A man was building a bridge. It was the longest bridge he himself had ever seen, though perhaps it was not so long a bridge as might have been.

  Another said,

  —A bridge was in the midst of a man. It was a wild and unknown bridge and it despised everyone who passed across it. The man was a recreant miscreant with a deviant bent who lent himself easily to foul causes.

  —Recreant deviant miscreant! called out another bird.

  —What’s going on up there? asked the guess artist.

  —They’re telling a story, said Selah.

  Just then a bird flying incredibly fast fetched up against Selah’s head. He fell over onto the ground and lost consciousness. All the birds landed en masse around him and gathered close by his ears, continuing their muttering. The guess artist was afraid to come out for fear of what might happen, as the house had begun to shift and groan.

  —We must be what was inside the wriggling box, he said quietly.

  —I think I saw an old cinema a few buildings back, said Selah.

  They ran away back down the staircase and out the door into the street. Sure enough, from the spot where a stone was thrown to, another stone might be thrown and strike a theater. The street was still empty. Into the theater. The theater was unlocked. The theater was empty. It was dark, and there were, as far as they could tell, no lights.

  Selah found a ladder and clambered up. The guess artist made himself comfortable in some middle row, slightly left of center. The seats were of wood, but finely molded.

  Up in the projection room, Selah threaded the film. There was a crank with many gears to turn it at a constant speed. Selah set himself to cranking. But there was no light. Behind him on the wall he saw a plate and a hook. He unhooked the plate and it slid away, revealing an aperture. Through it, tremendously focused light shot straight at the projector, and through the projector onto the far wall. Selah threw himself into the cranking, and upon the screen…

  …an avenue could be seen wandering from left to right. It was full of people, walking as of an afternoon. In the foreground a man and woman were talking. Their voices could be heard easily, with or without sound.

  The man was the pamphleteer. The woman was Sif.

  —The restaurant is just here, around the corner, said Sif.

  She was wearing an odd sort of dress called a clavier. It was very popular during the year 1918. Since then it has seen little use. Nonetheless, it was a fine outfit, and she looked a hell of a knockout. Especially since she was vexed, and therefore not a little ferocious, and in old movies, being vexed and ferocious always adds a certain degree of attraction to the countenance of a woman.

  —I’m sorry I was late, said the pamphleteer. I was one of the riders on the Pony Express and I was waylaid by Indians.

  —That is obviously a lie, said Sif. Anyway, if you really had been waylaid by Indians or Native Americans, and taken back to their village and allowed to live there in their midst as one of them, the fact of the matter is that you probably would not have come back. Statistical evidence p
roves that most of the whites who were brought into the Native American way of life did not want to return to the settlers’ villages. Whereas Native American prisoners in the colonies took every opportunity to escape or even kill themselves.

  —Hmm, said the pamphleteer. That’s something to consider.

  They had reached the restaurant. It said TUNISIAN IMPORTS on the front. They went inside. There were stacks of presumably Tunisian goods of every kind, some in barrels, others in glass bottles, others in short casks. There were no tables or chairs. A man was sitting on a stool behind a counter. He had a cigar box full of cash and an abacus.

  —We’re here, said Sif. Reservation for Aloud. Sif Aloud. Table for two.

  —This way, mademoiselle, said the man.

  In the back of the store, through a door behind the counter, was a small room with a single table and two chairs. There were candles lit on the table. The sound of a classical guitar being played somewhat inadequately was coming quietly from somewhere above.

  They sat.

  —Do you remember the first time we met? asked Sif.

  —I’m not sure, said the pamphleteer. Was it on the docks when the city was being evacuated?

  —No, said Sif. That must have been some other girl.

  —I’m sure it was you, said the pamphleteer. You weren’t wearing any underthings, and we went into the shadow of the trees and…

  Sif blushed and gave him an angry look.