by Martin Seay
She and Claudio retreat to the entryway, Claudio clasping hands and murmuring thanks as Cynthia passes him his jacket. Stanley gets up, catches Claudio in the hallway, hands him some folded bills. For the movie, he says.
Claudio palms them with a guilty look that quickly passes. You will be here when I return? he says.
Here, or at the squat.
You should stay here, Claudio says. I like it here.
Synnøve is clearing the dishes; Welles moves through the livingroom—still eating from the plate in his hand—to put an LP on the turntable. Cynthia glides over to the two of them in turn, planting kisses behind their ears. Claudio and I had better trilly, she says. Don’t wait up for us.
Take it slow, Stanley tells Claudio as he steps outside. Keep your eyes peeled.
We will not go to the Fox, Claudio says with an irritated backward glance. We will go to a nice place.
The door closes. Stanley watches them through the window as they chase a couple of cats off the lawn. He feels a funny prickle in his sinuses, a sore tremble in his throat. He wonders what his goddamn problem is all of a sudden.
Music crashes from the hi-fi: a crazy choir chanting in some weird language while woodwinds and tympani toot and boom behind them. Welles leans into the entryway, shouting over the racket: Synnøve and I will do the washing-up, he says. You should go upstairs and poke through my library. Borrow something you think you might like. I’ll be up in a minute with a couple of beers. Does that sound good?
On the narrow staircase Stanley feels dizzy, slows down. He rarely drinks, doesn’t much care for the drowsy off-balance feeling he gets. He lifts his feet, plants them again. His pulse throbs in his wounded leg.
As he comes to the top the air changes, becoming dry and close and old. There’s a strong odor of pipesmoke, and another smell beneath it: paper, fabric, glue, the invisible insects that eat such things. Even before Stanley finds the switch on the table lamp, he feels the books. With every step he takes across the creaking floor the whole house seems to shift, the contents of the cases to strain against each other on their shelves.
In the weak yellow lamplight, Welles’s offer becomes ridiculous: Stanley could search this room for hours and find nothing to interest him. Books on economics and nuclear energy and the history of Italy, books about metallurgy and glassmaking and electronics, books in other languages. A lot of them remind Stanley of The Mirror Thief, but not of anything that he likes about it. After a few minutes of browsing he loses interest, shifts his focus to the room itself.
The study takes up nearly half the floor. On the west wall a french door between two curtained windows opens onto the moonlit deck. In the middle of the opposite wall there’s a heavy black portal with a regular deadbolt plus a massive external sliding bolt, like something out of a medieval fortress. Curious, Stanley throws the big bolt—the loud hi-fi downstairs swallows the noise—and tugs on the knob, but the door is locked. He puts the slider back the way he found it, transfers his attention to Welles’s desk.
It’s immense: polished teak, ornately carved. Several peculiar paperweights—a bronze pelican, a clear glass hemisphere with colors swirled inside it, a jagged hunk of metal that looks like part of an exploded shell—are clustered at the lower right corner, probably to catch rollaway pens and pencils, since that’s the way the floor slopes. A few sheets of rose-white paper sit on the blotter, crowded with handwriting, steeply slanted and illegible. Next to them is a letter, still in its ripped-open envelope, from someone in a hospital in Washington, D.C. Stanley pays these little mind. With one ear cocked toward the stairs he begins to open the drawers, to scan their contents.
They all have fancy brass locks, but none is locked. The first one he opens—the long shallow one in the middle—contains a pistol: a .45 automatic, 1911 model. Stanley guesses it’s got a round already chambered, but opts not touch it to learn for sure. Seated in the swivel chair behind the desk, Welles could get to it in a hurry. Two drawers down on the right Stanley finds a second pistol, a Wehrmacht P38. If Welles keeps this stuff stashed in his study, what’s hidden in his sock-drawer? A greasegun, maybe. Or a bazooka. The guy probably drives to work in a tank.
On the wall behind the desk hangs a framed map. Stanley figures it for a map, anyway: it shows a club-shaped island city the way it might look from a plane flying by, though not directly overhead. The perspective strikes Stanley as strange, because the style of the map makes him think it was made a long time before there were any such things as airplanes—like whoever drew it had to close his eyes and project himself into space, and then to hold the picture of the city in his head while he nailed down the streets and canals and houses on paper. Remembering all he could. Imagining the rest.
Welles is on the stairs, singing in a deep buttery voice as he climbs. O Fortuna, he chants, velut luna statu variabilis. Semper crescis aut decrescis, vita detestabilis—
Stanley keeps his eyes on the framed map, hunting out details: domes and belltowers, plazas and sailing ships. A couple of smaller outlying islands are labeled; their names are almost familiar. IVDECA, one says. MVRAN, reads another.
Welles’s voice. Recognize it? he says.
Sure. It’s the city in your book.
That’s right. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been there?
Stanley squints, leans closer. His nose nearly touches the paper. I don’t think so, he says. Where is it?
It’s in Italy. On the Adriatic Sea. If you had been there, I suspect you would remember.
Italy, Stanley says. That’s in Europe. Right?
Yes. Europe. Correct.
No, Stanley says. I never been to Europe.
Welles steps forward, puts a cold bottle in Stanley’s hand: a Goebel. You should go when you can, Welles says. You would find it intriguing. If nothing else, my modest lecture on local history of two nights ago would accrue broader resonance. The city—the original, I mean—is built on the water. Directly on it. There is no earth to speak of, not really. It sits in the midst of a lagoon. Do you know what a lagoon is?
Sure. My dad was at Eniwetok.
Then of course you do. Our word lagoon comes from the Latin root lacuna, which refers to a gap, an absence, an interruption. Which may explain why this city throughout the years has become a locus of such diverse and vigorous species of desire. It has deliberately situated itself in a void.
Stanley steps back from the wall. A beer is about the last thing he wants right now, but he sips the Goebel anyway. It’s a nice place you got here, he says.
Thank you. At this point, I suppose, Synnøve and I can afford to move up in the world, as they say. But this feels like home. Along the waterfront, we are left to our own peculiar devices. And frankly I can’t abide the thought of moving all these books.
Stanley nods toward the bolted door. What’s in there? he asks.
That, Welles says. He takes a long sip of beer. That is Cynthia’s room, he says.
Stanley looks at Welles with upraised eyebrows. Then he takes a long stagy glance at the sliding bolt, and looks at Welles again. You scared maybe she’ll get loose while you’re sleeping? he says.
Welles forces a laugh. Ah ha ha! he says. It looks a bit eccentric, I know. Often I have wondered why the previous occupants saw fit to install such a door. The realtor claimed total ignorance. I used to imagine all sorts of things. A bootlegger’s storeroom. A white-slave dungeon. The asylum of some grown idiot son. All plausible in this neighborhood. Nowadays I hardly think of it at all. Shall we have a seat on the lanai?
The what?
The lanai, Welles says, opening the french door to the deck. I was afraid that we’d have rain again tonight, but for now it looks to be lovely. We’ll come back in if we get chilled, of course.
Outside there’s a stumpy wooden table ringed by folding canvas chairs, the kind of chairs that Claudio’s screen magazines always show movie-stars and famous directors sitting in. The deck doesn’t afford a view of much except the side of the neighboring
house, but Stanley still has a sense of the ocean’s closeness. An armada of small dense clouds sweeps across the dusk-blue sky, and the moon hangs among them like a bruised apple, its perfect circle on the wane.
Welles gives Stanley the chair with the best west-facing vista. Stanley doesn’t want it—it’ll put Welles in silhouette; he’d rather to be able to read his face—but he takes it anyway, because it seems rude to decline. So, Welles says, getting comfortable in the creaking chair. You have some questions for me.
Yeah, Stanley says.
They sit in silence for a while. The hi-fi downstairs must have played through the LP’s side. Overhead, the buzz of an airplane grows and fades.
Well, Welles says, there’s no rush. Take whatever time you—
I want to know about magic, Stanley says.
All right. What can I tell you?
You can tell me how to do it. How to get it to work.
Welles is quiet. Then he chuckles. The sound is smug, patronizing—and fake, too. You’re asking the wrong fellow, I’m afraid, he says.
Whaddya mean?
I don’t know anything about magic, Stanley. I learned a few card tricks in the Army, but I’ve forgotten even those. I’m sorry.
Stanley shifts his beer from hand to hand. Crivano knows about magic, he says. You wrote about him. So you must know something.
Welles seems to think about the question for a while, but Stanley can tell he’s not really thinking. It courts banality to make the point, I suppose, Welles says. But I am hardly Crivano.
Like hell you’re not. C’mon, Mister Welles. I’m not talking here about the real, historic Crivano. I ain’t interested in that. I’m talking about your guy.
Welles opens his mouth to reply, then closes it again. He leans forward in his seat, puts his beer on the table, steeples his fingers across his lips. He seems irritated, but also—somewhere deeper—nervous. Stanley takes long breaths. He’s closing in, but this next turn will be tough to make.
Is that really what you wanted to ask me? Welles says. You want to become a magus. An alchemist. A magician. Is that right?
That’s pretty much it, yeah.
I can’t tell you how to do that, Stanley.
Stanley nods, sips his beer. I don’t believe you, he says.
Welles is blinking fast, trying to work himself up, to maintain his front. This is fantasy, Stanley, he sputters. I mean, come now. You are not a child. These are not things that happen in the world. They exist in our imaginations.
Bullshit, Stanley says.
Stanley.
Bullshit. That is bullshit. I’m sorry, Mister Welles, excuse me, but it is. I know. I have read your goddamn book many, many times, and I know what is real and what is not real, and I know that that is bullshit. I know magic ain’t about sawing ladies in half, or telling the future, or changing Coca-Cola into 7-Up. I know it’s about seeing a pattern in everything. I want you to show me how.
Welles stares at him. There’s a flat warning in his eyes, one Stanley hasn’t seen since those first moments when they met on the beach. Here at last is the Welles he’s wanted to talk to: the Welles with barred doors in his house, the Welles who keeps guns in his desk-drawers.
Their eyes remain locked for what seems like a long time. Then, without blinking, Welles flops back in his deckchair and sighs heavily. He puts his hands behind his head, interlacing their fingers. You have my apologies, he says. Indeed, you are not a child. Childhood’s end arrives when we realize that the world is unacceptable. Am I right? It’s unacceptable! It’s corrupt! It is a vale of sorrows, a kitchen full of smoke, a perpetual travail. What can we do? We can capitulate. We can give up our expectations, and accept what is the case. Or, we can fight. We can resist. Here, I think, is where the desire to create originates: from this great visceral disgust with the world, and with the experience of living in it. I’m not speaking of a desire to reform or reshape the world, mind you. I’m talking about the desire to negate it entirely, to replace it with something better, more suited to ourselves. In recognizing this desire, of course, we find ourselves in the company of our two friends, the poet and the magus.
Welles stands, lifts his beer from the tabletop, walks to the deck’s wooden railing to gaze toward the sea. When I was a young man, he says, I admit I entertained the notion that the poet and the magus are somehow unified by this refusal. That they are, in fact, identical. I thought that a poem, properly made, can become a magic spell, and can transform the world. I have matured somewhat, and I now see that I was mistaken. The poet changes nothing. He creates palatable alternate worlds, and he invites others to take refuge in them. From such vantage we can sometimes look upon our own base and quotidian existence and see it with a clearer eye, but this is accidental, and beside the point. The poet’s trade is illusion. I am a poet.
Why not be a magician, then?
Because it doesn’t work, Stanley. It’s a pointless waste of time. Worse! It’s like the child who ties a blanket around his neck and jumps through a window, convinced by his television that he can fly. It’s choosing to live in a poem that has become invisible to you as a poem. It’s not magic, it’s madness.
I don’t accept that.
At your age, Welles says, I suppose you probably shouldn’t. At my age it’s hard enough. Listen, I don’t wish to seem glib, or disrespectful, or to suggest that your question isn’t a good one. I have given this a great deal of thought—I still do—and that is my honest answer. The world simply does not work that way.
Welles peers down at his backyard. His elbows are locked; his hands are widely spaced on the wooden rail. The thick outline of his body looks like some kind of glyph.
But what if it’s like you said the other night? Stanley whispers. What if all this—
He moves his beerbottle in a wide circle, indicating every solid thing surrounding him. Welles’s back is still turned; he doesn’t see.
—what if it isn’t real? What if it’s just a reflection of something else? What if there’s another world?
Welles doesn’t answer at first. He sags forward a little, like he’s tired. Can you think of any reason, he says, to believe that that might be the case?
It feels right, Stanley says. It feels possible.
It does, doesn’t it? But then it would. Of course it would. I will say this: if you choose to believe it, then you are in very distinguished company. After all, that was the charge that Plato levied against us poets, wasn’t it? That we are pretenders of wisdom, copiers of copies. Perhaps we are. Who can say? Perhaps we’re wasting our time on fancies, while the real conquest of the invisible world is being carried out by modern-day alchemists, wearing the white smocks of atomic scientists and aerospace engineers. Perhaps we’re being sentimental: we cannot bear very much reality. We say we long for it, but when it finally emerges and fails to present us with our own pretty reflections, we recoil. We retreat to our islands in the river, and we pine away like the Lady of Shalott.
Have you ever killed anybody, Mister Welles?
Stanley catches his breath, blinks in surprise. He hadn’t intended to ask the question, wasn’t even thinking it. Was he?
At the edge of the deck, Welles is motionless and silent. Almost invisibly, the stiffness has moved from his elbows to his back. Stanley’s breathing fast, scared at first that he’s said a bad thing—and then he’s just scared, he’s not sure of what. Somewhere below a treefrog has started to chirp. Now Stanley can hear dozens of them, all over the neighborhood, that he hadn’t noticed before.
No, Welles says. No, I have not.
Stanley has a fast out-of-control feeling, like he’s going to vomit. I have, he says.
Welles is half-turned, still facing away. You have, he says. I see.
Probably a lot of guys would tell you something like that just to impress you, Stanley hears himself say. And maybe that’s partly why I’m telling you. But what I’m saying is true. When I was thirt—
His voice catches and breaks. He clears
his throat, starts again.
When I was thirteen, he says, this Puerto Rican kid tried to stab me. And I broke his arm with an iron pipe, and I took his knife away, and I cut his throat.
Stanley’s face is hot; his cheeks are dripping. He has no idea where this is coming from. All of a sudden it’s like he’s been carrying another person inside him without knowing it: some pansy little kid, curled in his guts like a worm in a fruit.
Welles has turned around to look at him; he’s inching closer across the deck, with the moon in his hair. You had no choice, he says. You were defending yourself.
Sure, Stanley says. I guess. I guess anybody who ever kills anybody thinks he’s defending himself from something. Last year I threw a guy off a roof. That’s the two I know about. There’s other guys I hurt real bad in fights who maybe died and I don’t know. Last year I was on this burglary where this cop got shot, so according to the law I killed him too. That’s mostly the reason I had to leave New York.
Welles steps over the little table, then sits on it, facing Stanley. Stanley doesn’t look up. Why do you want me to know these things? Welles says. Why are you telling me this?
You probably think, Stanley says, that I’m just a smart kid who liked your book, and who maybe got some funny ideas from it. I don’t blame you for thinking that. In your shoes, it’s what I’d think, too. But what I want you to understand, I guess, is that I have seen and done some pretty fucked-up stuff in my life, excuse me, and I have been through a hell of a lot to get out here, and there are some questions that I would really like to get some answers to, Mister Welles. Now, maybe you don’t know the answers. Or maybe you knew ’em once, and then you forgot. But I been thinking a lot about something you said the other night, about how a book can know more than whoever wrote it. Because I think your book knows, Mister Welles. I think it knows that this kind of magic is really possible.
Welles looks at him for a long time, leaning close. For a while Stanley thinks Welles is going to touch him, put a hand on his leg, and he wonders how he’ll handle that. Then Welles speaks.