The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  Again, as with the cops, the feeling of unreality, the slipping into the forms established by fiction. Shortly after I graduated from college, that being still the era of the draft, and not being the resistant type, I yielded to the inevitable and volunteered myself (virtually alone among my graduating class I believe) as a draftee. They made me into a medic rather than an infantryman, and I ended up in the Twelfth Evac Hospital in Cu Chi, in South Vietnam. Unlike my S.S. grandfather, I was an entirely undistinguished soldier, being what was then known as a rear-area-motherfucker, or white mouse, but I did see an ammo dump spectacularly explode after being hit by an enemy rocket, and I recall all the witnesses thereto, in order to validate the experience, repeatedly using the phrase “it was just like the movies.” Thus, although life is by and large unthrilling, when we do find ourselves in the sort of situation upon which thrillers dote we cannot really experience it, because our imaginations are occupied by the familiar tropes of popular fiction. And the result of this is a kind of dull bafflement, and the sense that whatever it is cannot really be happening. We actually think that phrase: this can’t be happening to me.

  Back at the office, I obtained the safe-deposit box key from the place where Ms. Maldonado keeps it, having waited for her to be away from her desk. I retreived the Bulstrode envelope and took it back to my office. Ms. Maldonado looked at me inquiringly when I returned her key, but I did not offer to explain, nor did she ask. I said I wanted to be undisturbed until further notice and locked my office door.

  I am no expert, but the papers from the envelope looked genuinely old. Of course, they would, if forgeries, but clearly someone believed in their validity, assuming Bulstrode had been tortured to reveal their whereabouts. There were two separate series of papers, both clearly in English, although using a style of handwriting I could not easily read, except for the shortest of words. One was marked up in what looked like soft pencil.

  I put the papers into a fresh manila envelope and shredded the old one, after which I returned them to the bank. Then back to business for the rest of the afternoon. The next day, my diary tells me, I had lunch with Mickey Haas. We do, or did this, on average once a month or so, with him usually making the call, as he did this time as well. He suggested Sorrentino’s near my place, and I said I would send Omar to pick him up. This is our usual practice when he comes downtown. Sorrentino’s is one of a large number of nearly interchangeable Italianoid restaurants that dot the side streets of midtown on the East Side of Manhattan, and which live by serving somewhat overpriced lunches to people like me. The more prosperous denizens of this great mass of Manhattan office space each have a favorite Sorrentino’s; it is much like being at home, but with no domestic stress. They all smell the same, they all have a maître d’ who knows you, and what you like to eat and drink, and at lunch they all seat at least two interesting-looking women upon which the solitary middle-aged diner can rest his eyes and exercise his imagination.

  Marco (the maître d’ who knows me in particular) seated me in my usual table in the right rear and brought me, unbidden, a bottle of his private rosso di Montalcino, a bottle of San P., and a plate of anchovy bruschetta for nibbles while I waited. After about half a glass of the delicious wine, Mickey walked in. He has gained a good deal of mass over the years, as I have, although I am afraid that his consists almost entirely of fat cells. His chin has clearly doubled, where mine retains something of its former line. His hair, however, is still thick and curling, unlike mine, and his mien confident. On this occasion I recall that he appeared uncharacteristically haggard, or maybe haunted would be a better word. The skin under his eyes was bruised looking, and the eyes were bloodshot and pinched. He was not exactly twitching, but there was something wrong. I’ve known the man for years and he was not right.

  We shook, he sat down and immediately poured himself a glass of wine, of which he drank half in one go. I asked him whether anything was wrong and he stared at me. Wrong? I just had a colleague murdered, he said, and asked me hadn’t I heard and I told him I had.

  Reading this over, I just decided that from now on I’m going to concoct dialogue, like journalists seem to do with impunity nowadays, because it is a pain in the ass to paraphrase what people say. The fellow who invented the quotation mark was no fool; if only he had established the copyright! Thus:

  I asked, “When did you hear about it?”

  “My secretary called me in Austin,” he said. “I’d just given my paper at the morning session, and of course, I had my cell off and as soon as I turned it on there was Karen’s message. I flew back right away.” He drank off his glass and poured another. “Can I have a real drink? I’m turning into an alcoholic behind this.”

  I gestured to Paul, our waiter, who was there in an instant. Mickey ordered a gimlet.

  “And then when I got back, chaos, needless to say. The university was going ballistic, with the implication from my chairman, that asshole, that somehow it was my fault for obtaining the appointment for someone of dubious moral status.”

  “Was he?”

  Mickey flushed at this and snapped back, “The point is that he was also one of the great Shakespeare scholars of his generation. Our generation. And his only crime was that he was duped by a swindler, which could have happened to any one of the people who now condemn him, including my fucking chairman. Do you know this story?”

  I assured him that I had perused the available material on the Web.

  “Right, a fucking catastrophe. But that wasn’t what the police were interested in. They had the nerve to imply that he was living, how did they delicately put it? An irregular lifestyle. By which they meant to imply that he was queer, and that his being queer had something to do with his death.” He drank down the remains of his gimlet. Paul floated over and asked if he wanted a refill and also presented him with a menu nearly the size of a subway billboard. He glanced at it without interest, which confirmed my earlier impression that he was seriously distraught: Mickey loves food; he loves to eat it, and talk about it, and cook it, and recall it.

  “What are you having?” he asked.

  “What am I having, Paul?” I inquired of the waiter. It has been years since I ordered anything off the menu here.

  “Carciofialla giudia, gnocchi alla romana, osso buco. The osso buco is very good today.”

  Mickey handed back the menu. “I’ll have that too.”

  When Paul left, Mickey continued, “They had some theory he got involved in rough trade. I mean the police imagination, right? They see Brit and gay and it’s some rent boy he hired to tie him up and it went too far.”

  “Not possible?”

  “Well of course anything’s possible, but I happen to know that Andy had a discreet long-term relationship with a fellow don at Oxford. His tastes did not run that way.”

  “He might have changed. One never can tell.”

  “One can, in this case. Jake, I have known the man for over twenty years.” He took a drink from his second gimlet. “I mean it’d be like finding out you were chasing boys.”

  “Or you,” I said, and after a moment we both laughed.

  He said, “Oh, God, we shouldn’t be laughing. The poor bastard! Only I’m damn glad I was a thousand miles away when it happened. The cops were looking at me with uncomfortable interest, sniffing me for the telltale signs of perverted inversion.”

  “The cops were Murray and Fernandez?”

  He stared at me, his smile gone. “Yeah, how did you know?”

  “They came to see me, to see if I could shed light.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because he was my client. He came to me with some story about a manuscript he’d turned up. I assumed that you sent him.”

  Mickey gaped at me. Paul appeared and laid down our Jewish artichokes. When we were alone again, Mickey leaned toward me and, with lowered voice, said, “I didn’t send him. No, wait a second-he did ask me once if I knew an intellectual property lawyer and I said my best friend was one, a
nd mentioned your name. I asked him why he was interested and he told me he’d come across some manuscripts that might be publishable and wanted to know their status under law. And he actually came to see you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He told me he had a manuscript that revealed the whereabouts of an unknown Shakespeare manuscript…” I was beginning to relate what I had told Bulstrode when Mickey swallowed a half of an artichoke heart and coughed violently and had to wash it down with San Pellegrino before he could speak.

  “No, no, he had a manuscript that mentioned Shakespeare. Or so he claimed. I never saw the thing myself. Because of what happened with Pascoe, he was more than a little paranoid. He made a trip to England about that time-it was last summer-and when he came back he was, I don’t know, not himself. Nervous. Irritable. He refused to talk about what he had, except that it was a completely unknown mention of William Shakespeare in a genuine contemporary manuscript. He didn’t tell me where he’d found it, by the way. I bet that’s some story!”

  “You mean somebody just mentioning Shakespeare in a manuscript, that would make it valuable per se?”

  He stopped mopping sauce with his bread: another gape here and an incredulous laugh.

  “Valuable? Christ, yes! Cosmically important. Epochally significant. I thought I explained this to you any number of times, but obviously not enough.”

  “Then once more, please.”

  Mickey cleared his throat and held his fork up like a classroom pointer. “Okay. Aside from his work, the single greatest literary achievement by an individual human being in all of history, William Shakespeare left practically no physical trace in the world. You can just about write down everything we know for sure about him on a wallet card. He was born, christened, got married, had three kids, wrote a will, signed a few legal documents, composed an epitaph, and died. The only physical evidence of his existence besides those records and his grave is a suspect sample of what looks like his handwriting on a manuscript of a play called The Book of Sir Thomas More. Not a single letter, or inscription, not a book with his name in it. Okay, the guy was a luminary of the London theater for nearly twenty years, so there are a whole bunch of references to him, but they’re pretty thin soup. The first one is an attack on someone called ‘Shake-scene’ by an asshole called Robert Greene, and an apology for printing it by a guy named Chettle. Francis Mere wrote a book called Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury, which would have been justly forgotten except that he mentions Shakespeare as the best English dramatist. He’s mentioned by William Camden, the headmaster of Westminster, and by Webster in the preface to The White Devil, and there’s a mention by Beaumont in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. And there’s a bunch of legal stuff, contracts, lawsuits, leases, plus various theater references, plus, of course, the central fact of the First Folio. His pals thought enough of him to publish all his plays in one book after he died, and name him as author. That’s basically it-what is that, a couple dozen or so substantive contemporary references. And on this has been built an absolutely enormous scholarship, mining the plays and poems for suggestions about the man, completely speculative, of course, because we just don’t know. It drives us crazy because the guy was smoke. I mean there’s nothing there.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Yes, but we know shitloads more about Leonardo, just to name an obvious example, and he lived a century earlier. For the sake of comparison-just one example-we have an actual letter from Edmund Spenser to Walter Raleigh explaining some of the allegories in The Faerie Queene. We know a lot about Ben Jonson. Michelangelo-there are nearly five hundred of his letters surviving, notebooks, fucking menus, and from Shakespeare, the greatest writer of all time, and an important theatrical entrepreneur besides, not a single letter. And the problem is that the vacuum sucks fake stuff in. There was a vast Shakespeare forgery industry back in the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries, and there’s even some today, which is how Bulstrode got caught. Not to mention the cottage industry represented by the so-called authorship question: we haven’t got anything from him except the work, ergo someone else did the work-Southampton, Bacon, extraterrestrials… I mean I can’t express to you how intense the desire is to find out stuff about the son of a bitch. If Bulstrode actually did find a contemporary manuscript that mentions Shakespeare, especially if it contained substantive information-why it would absolutely resurrect him in the field.”

  When Mickey talks about his work he drops twenty years and resembles more than he usually does now the youth I met in that scabby apartment on 113th Street. I confess that I can’t imagine such a transformation in my case, should I wish to expatiate on the intricacies of, say, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He loves his profession, and I admire him for it. And am a little envious too, I suppose. But now, as he mentioned Bulstrode, his eyes clouded. And was that moisture? It was hard to tell in the friendly gloom of the restaurant.

  “Well,” he resumed, “not anymore, obviously. I would have given a lot to take a look at those papers though. God knows what happened to them.”

  Here I thought he looked at me in a somewhat disingenuous fashion. All decent lawyers are close-mouthed about their clients’ affairs, nor does mere death spring open their lips, but they are casual gossips compared to us IP lawyers. So I did not rise to the bait, if bait there was, but asked, “Is there something wrong?”

  He said, “You mean besides Bulstrode getting killed? Isn’t that enough?”

  “You look like you’re carrying more than that, pal,” I said. “I’ve been noticing it the last couple of times too. You’re not sick or anything?”

  “No, aside from the fact that I’m fat as a hog and get no exercise, I’m a horse. Arteries like shotguns according to my doc. No, what you’re observing is the physical stigmata of the current market.”

  Here I should mention that Mickey and I have different attitudes toward investment. My pile is with a mutual fund started in 1927 that has never paid much more or much less than 7 percent per annum. Mickey calls this irresponsible conservatism, or did when the market was roaring some years ago. He is a hedge fund guy, and he used to regale me with tales of his fantastic returns; no longer. I said, “Well, you still have the industrial fasteners,” at which he barked a laugh.

  “Yeah, if I didn’t have to share them with the two dozen cousins. My family suffers from an excess of heirs.”

  I sensed he wished not to pursue this subject so I said, “Speaking of which, do you know if the late professor had any heirs? I take it there were no children.”

  “There’s a niece: Madeleine or something like that. Picture on his desk. His late sister’s kid, and he doted on her. I expect she’ll inherit whatever he had. Or the longtime companion.”

  “Has she been notified?”

  “Yeah. She’s coming down this week.”

  “From England?”

  “No, from Toronto. The sister emigrated years ago, married a Canadian, had the one kid. Ah, here’s our gnocchi. You know, I think I’m getting my appetite back.”

  As we dug into the meltingly tender dumplings, I said, “So the manuscript doesn’t actually lead any further-it’s not a clue to something even bigger?”

  Through gnocchi Mickey responded, “Bigger than a contemporary reference to Shakespeare? I can’t imagine what that would be. Did he tell you that?”

  “He suggested that his manuscript mentioned another manuscript actually by Shakespeare.”

  “Oh, right! Pure fantasy would be my guess. As I said, Andrew was utterly desperate to get back in the game. With good reason. When the will is cleared up and what’s-her-name has possession, we’ll take a look at it and see if it’s anything. Although, given the man’s desperation to recoup his career, I rather think it’ll be nothing much.”

  We spoke no more of Bulstrode during this meal (in which Mickey actually did get his appetite back and joked about the garbage they had to eat in Texas) or his mysterious manuscript, or even more mysterious demise.

  As far a
s I recall, that is, since the above is a complete fabrication. I have eaten those dishes and drunk such wine at Sorrentino’s, perhaps with Mickey Haas in attendance, and there is a Marco and a Paul, but I am in no position to attest that we ate those things on that day, many months ago. I can hardly recall what I had for lunch last Tuesday, nor can anyone else. I did garner some facts about Shakespeare, but whether on that occasion or later, I could not say. I recall that he was upset, and I recall that it was the first occasion at which I learned of the existence of that young woman. Miranda, not Madeleine, as it happens. Aside from that it is fiction, but even as I wrote it, it became the truth, because in point of fact we have virtually no real memories. We make it all up. Proust made it up, Boswell made it up, Pepys…I have actually a great deal of sympathy for the increasingly common sort of person, often one with a high position, who is caught fabricating. You mean I didn’t go to Harvard Med School? I did not have sex with that woman… It’s not the collapse of morality (for I think there has never been truth based on memory) but rather the triumph of intellectual property, that blizzard of invented realities-artificial lives, Photoshopped photos, ghosted novels, lip-synched rock bands, fabricated reality shows, American foreign policy-through which we daily slog. Everyone, from the president on down, is a novelist now.

  I suppose we can blame Shakespeare himself for starting it, because he made up people who were more real, though false, than the people one knew. Dick Bracegirdle understood this, which was why he set out to smash Shakespeare and all his works. I took a history course at Columbia-Haas will recall it too, because I took it on his recommendation-a man named Charlton taught it. It was English medieval history, and although I have expunged the Domesday Book and all the kings and queens from my mind, I recall very well his take on history in general. He said there are three kinds of history. The first is what really happened, and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened, and that is 90 percent of the history in books.