by Jacob Rubin
On those mornings when I expected a newspaper article, I’d open the door to find the West News rolled on the black doormat. Feigning a light curiosity, I’d page through before turning to the Politics section. There I would happen upon the headline, reading the article in a gulp before cutting it out and adding it to the scrapbook.
ACTOR BERNINI ENDORSES SENATOR STENGEL
Former senator Rory Stengel addressed a mixed and boisterous crowd of seven hundred supporters today on the steps of the Old Municipal Tower, marking his third such appearance in Fantasma Falls this month as he, along with his opponents, make their final preparations for the statewide presidential primary on the 21st. While Mr. Stengel has failed to gain a foothold in Fantasma Falls, let alone nationally, his candidacy was bolstered today by the appearance and public support of actor Giovanni Bernini, famous for his role as spy Harry Knott in the films Everyman and No Man’s Land.
Political endorsements from entertainers are nothing new, of course, in this heated primary season. What distinguished this appearance from others was Mr. Bernini’s decision to appear as the character Harry Knott, the fictitious spy the actor plays onscreen. Mr. Bernini took to the podium this afternoon in a suit identical to the one worn by Harry Knott, delivering a twenty-minute address praising Mr. Stengel’s right-wing positions in a manner indistinguishable from that of the character.
These eccentricities did not appear to faze the energized crowd, however. When this reporter canvassed them after the addresses, many confirmed they had attended solely to see the movie actor. “I’d vote for him if I could,” said Carl DeWee, a high school senior. “Have you seen his movies? Now he’s taking it into real life.” Said Timothy Michaels, a retired engineer, “He hunts pinkos in the pictures, and he’ll do it right here, too.”
Opponents may well seize upon this appearance as evidence of the former senator’s reactionary positions. Given the robust turnout at today’s rally, however, it seems a trade the candidate is willing to make. “Mr. Bernini is going to continue to stump with us,” a spokesman from the campaign confirmed. “We’re delighted to have him.”
I campaigned with Rory Stengel for six months, rarely interacting with him backstage and then hugging him or gripping his hand and hoisting it with mine once on it. In this proximity, I learned the strategies. The sanctity of eye contact, for instance. How eruptive a grin can be. Above all, the key was to have said things so many times that when you were delivering the line, whether solemnly or casually, whether to a cigar-chewing reporter or tongue-tied voter, you weren’t ever thinking about the words, but about some essential, misdirected thing—the way you touched a man’s shoulder, for instance, or seemed to smile unthinkingly to yourself—in the way a magician talks always but never about the palmed ace or hidden thrumming dove.
By the time Stengel was defeated in the election, I had stolen what I could from him. Little time passed, perhaps a month, before my appearances recommenced at political rallies and in convention halls up and down the state, at which events I delivered speeches deviating little from the message I preached with Stengel, the primacy of patriotism, mainly, and the specter of communism. “I am a patriot in the stories I tell and in the life I live,” I must have said a thousand times, becoming the master of certain phrases and mottoes, whose syllables I’d run up and down, like melodies. We traveled in a motorcade from event to event, winding our way as far north as Red Rock Shoals.
By that time there had developed a cult of admirers, zealots who attended rallies in my suit and bolo tie and cowboy boots, waving placards and vicious signs. These men seemed to grow in number with each new appearance, and security men often mistook Bernard for one of their lot, checking his passage or giving him a skeptical once-over. “Committed, huh?” a burly organizer once asked him. Bernard answered, “Why, sir, I’m committed to any cause that will awaken this country to the real.” After making it past this guard, I expected Bernard to wink, but he looked solemn, if anything, strutting ahead with the bellicose energy of a football player taking the field. During the rallies, I would sometimes spot him in the crowd itself, waving a sign or joining a chant as if electrified, genuinely, by the policies I described. “Meet the most natural politician this country’s ever produced,” he said when showing me off.
In truth, the content of my speeches mattered little to me. No, what mattered was the performance, of which these addresses were but a small part (and the meaning of them hardly relevant at all). How I walked onstage, waving to the peopled bleachers, the style in which I descended stairs—these mattered as much as my rhetoric or tone of voice, and to test these gestures I began to use the mirror every morning.
Previously I had used it sparingly: to verify, say, a look I’d caught on the traffic-scanning face of a jaywalker. I think I saw it as a cheat. But after we announced that I was running for governor, I began to rely on the mirror, to practice in front of it in the morning, usually after reading an article about me, in order to solidify certain details. How I looked flipping the page on the dais, for instance, or sighing.
As I soon discovered, however, the bedroom mirror wasn’t big enough. I made the request to Frankie and Lou, and it was taken care of: a larger, multipaneled mirror replaced the length of the wall opposite my bed, so I could examine the full sweep of a gesture. Even this was insufficient, though, and, upon my request, was expanded again. Wrapping around the bed, a semicircular mirror came to be installed, but this, too, disappointed me—seemed to emphasize the lack of mirror elsewhere—and I eventually told Frankie and Lou that I wanted the entire room mirrored, three hundred sixty degrees, and the ceilings, too.
The Chateau Ravine staff, who already considered me a permanent resident (informally referring to the property as the Knott Suite), was happy to oblige. It was achieved with surprising speed, but my first night in the mirrored room, I could barely sleep, kicking the sheets, the innumerable Giovannis spitting it all back so that I had to shut my eyes, the bursting feeling coming again. I vowed to call Mama first thing in the morning, to book a flight back to Sea View, when at some hour sunlight nosed the edge of the curtains, which I parted, flooding the room in angles, and I understood the mirrors were no mistake at all but a miracle.
For there are innumerable points of view, of course. A man might choose to see you from a variety of locations in the stands, and it was best to learn how you might appear to him standing wherever he was. Soon I had props brought in from the lot: a dais, a set of stairs, a small desk on wheels. At my request, Julie Dark joined me in that chamber, part of my effort to be comprehensive. Once she was a tall Swede with a lightly cruel sense of humor. Another a woman with black bangs who kept stroking my cheek with her finger. And yet I soon found that sex itself was too homely an act to bear to watch in the mirrored room, and I asked Julie to simulate more practical positions, such as shaking my hand or asking me a question at close range, with that upraised, auditor’s tilt of the head.
So when our advertisements began to appear on the radio and on television, I was not in the least surprised by how I sounded or looked. When I posed at the desk, I knew how I appeared to the camera crew, sitting upright, as I was, my hands clasped to connote both firmness and fairness. When I rubbed the hair of the towheaded kid at the library of the kindergarten, I knew how my slight, seemingly unconscious grin must have charmed the long-skirted teacher, was in fact watching myself as I did it. I perceived how immersed and engaged I must’ve seemed reading The Forgotten Cat, an illustrated book, better than any of the actual onlookers did in that school library. Better than that prim teacher, who rested her hands above her knees when bending to scold her students. Better than Frankie or Lou standing against the yellow wall. Better than Max, who sat in an undersized wooden chair, biting his nail with the impatience that ruled him more and more. Better even than Bernard, whose grin seemed the tic of an actor whose films I’d seen too many times.
The mailbox at the end of my block gulp
ed down the letter. I regretted the action instantly, with the kind of trembling regret that occasions a vital risk. The library made me think of her, but it was more than that. I could perform for every soul in the world, and it wouldn’t count unless she saw it.
I sent a brief note with clippings. She responded that week.
Yes, I’ve followed this, of course. You know how I feel about this Bernard, you know quite well, and I never thought you one for politics. But I need to see you, Giovanni. I will be quiet as a mouse.
The day I received this note I gave an address at a soon-to-be-shuttered oil derrick on the outskirts of Palm Haven, a desert town an hour outside of the city. The men wore hard hats and blackened gloves, their expressions yoked together by rage. My voice echoed among the black machinery, the brown-red hills of the desert visible beyond the derrick chuckling with its work like a railroad car. The whole time I was speaking, I was wishing Mama were there, but, no, it wasn’t that—it was that I had mistakenly felt her presence, I understood only then. When I raised clasped hands with Senator Stengel, for instance, or leaned in to hear a voter’s nervously muttered name, always I felt she was there, her eyes hovering above the events, and only then, at the mouth of the desert, understood that she was not and had never been.
When I returned to the trailer, Lou said I had a visitor. Bernard encouraged these callers as part of our effort to win votes. By then I relied on a playbook of phrases and questions. Depending on what was first said, the conversation, like a game of chess, could branch out to a limited number of topics.
“Guy says he’s an old friend,” Lou told me.
At that, a tall, rakish figure entered the trailer. He used a cane, wielded for the purposes of style, it was clear. His long face passed in and out of the trailer’s slatted shadows, and as he approached, I found that my heart was beating quickly. When he got closer, I saw he was tall and lean, wearing a canary-yellow suit. Soon he settled into the chair. There was a crease, a dissonant ring in his eyes, his features gaunt and time-bitten. I had no old friends.
“Hey, pal,” he said and stuck out his hand. “Don’t recognize a buddy?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Look at you. Damn, just look at you.” He smiled. “Big-time politico and all that.” He added, “Jesse Unheim. From Sea View.”
“Jesse Unheim,” I said. This was a technique Bernard used: saying a person’s name. I felt myself relax. I was going to relish dismissing him.
“Remember the principal’s office? Always you and me stuck down there all but banging our heads for sheer never-ending boredom. God, those were times. Whole time I’m thinking, why they got me down here with this freak. No offense. I mean, now look at you. Heard the speech today. I’m thinking, gee whiz, look at this guy.”
“How can I help you?”
“Well, I live out here. Acting a little. Like you. I mean, not like you. Trying to. Anyhoo, one day I flip open the paper and what do I see? Giovanni Bernini’s giving a big speech right in Palm Haven, my neck of the woods. And I thought, well, how about I pay him a little visit. Have us a parley. I mean, jeez, bud. Haven’t seen you in, what, fifteen years?”
“Long time,” I said.
“Too long, too long.” He scratched his nose with a slightly opened mouth. “So, listen, your mom and I, you mighta heard, had a bit of a dispute. I know you’re a busy guy, but this thing—it wasn’t quite finished.”
“I did hear about that,” I said. “As I understand it, you left town before the jury came to a decision.”
“Well, my lawyer was on loan, you see, from some interested parties out here. And I could chew your ear off and so on, but my point is—” He exhaled. “See, I just need a little something. A piece. And you and your mom won’t hear a peep from me no more.”
“Do you think it’s my obligation to give it to you?”
“No, no, I don’t mean it that way at all. See, your mom, well, she’s the one who split up that dough, right? What was rightfully mine. Now, I saw you coming into town and I figure to myself, why not make this simple for all parties involved. Payment won’t be felt on your end one bit. I’m talking about eight grand.”
“You can talk about it all you want. Just don’t do it anywhere near me.” I nodded to Frankie and Lou. Soon enough they got him in a grip, hoisting him up like professional movers. It was right out of a Harry Knott film.
“Hey, hey, c’mon.” He seemed to be in his natural state, getting thrown out. “Your dad wouldn’t approve of this, I’ll tell you that.”
“What?” Too quick. “My father?”
Looking at each other and then at me, Frankie and Lou understood to release him. Unheim, once seated, made a gloating expression. “Thought that might perk you up.” He propped his right foot on his left knee. How he used to sit in detention. “Might a big wheel such as yourself rate it a tale worth paying for?”
“I see you have more to say.” It was like being on set: you had to deliver each line slower than you thought. “I don’t have my book with me. But you have my word that if you give me accurate information about my father, I will pay you eight thousand dollars.”
He nodded, frowned. “See, he was in Dun Harbor when I was coming up. Helped me get in with some of the guys there. He talked about it—how the old lady threw him out after his first bid.
“For some guys, really, it ain’t the money at all. It’s like the thing food does to a bitch. Lifting someone’s wheels. Juicing a candy bar. ‘They a-call to me,’ he used to say. Smart enough, but he was one of those guys—only one kind of luck, right? First, it was the horse he got caught smuggling in. That’s what lost him the gig with the longshoremen. After that, he got wrapped up in an insurance scam at the dock with guys he used to work with. Arson. He torched the office and old storage house like he was supposed to, but two teens were having a time down there, and they got torched with it. Sentenced to thirty years at Dun Harbor.”
“The prison?” That dismal building. I pictured a visiting room lined with picnic tables. A handcuffed figure in a tux shuffling through the door.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Stole some fucker’s cigs, apparently, fifteen years in. Got his throat cut. I brought you up once. Told him about some of the shit you got into, about detention. He said, ‘He even worse than me.’” This bad Italian accent stolen from radio ads for spaghetti sauce—that was as close as I would get to my father’s voice. “Check or cash,” Unheim said. “Either way.”
I made sure not to rush it. “If you think my mother owes you money, you ought to take it up with her. As for me, I think your story’s worth about as much as the teller.”
Lou and Frankie lifted him again.
“Big head now, I got it. I heard you had to sleep with a muzzle on, that true? You fucking cunt. I heard your mom wore earplugs around you, so she couldn’t hear you, cunt.” Dragged outside, he continued to yell, his boot heels scraping the ground.
• • •
Inside Nathan Sharp’s ballroom the fifty guests inspected me over duck and Bordeaux. These fund-raisers required little of me except to seem amused by the donors’ jokes or improved by their advice. From the swamps in the southeast and the windy states to the north they had been drawn to this mansion. I stepped out for a smoke and saw their shiny cars in a ring. Behind them the ocean rumbled in the starless night.
Fantasma Falls was a misnomer. There were no known falls yet found in a terrain marked for miles by desert, coastline, and canyon. According to one version, the title was the outright invention of Rutger Smitt, a paper baron, landowner, and amateur versifier from the previous century. Smitt, it was said, scoured the Dictionary of Geographic Terms, concocting the most alluring names he could to ease the settling of a land considered mean if not downright uninhabitable. Something of a pioneer in the field of branding, he was rumored to have coined the name Joy Beach, a waterless dump twenty miles north of the city, an
d Hallowed Hills, a stretch of accursed flatland to the east. Others, though, insisted the name preceded Smitt’s arrival and could be traced back to the slaughtered native population, who twice a year had visited a magical falls where ghosts were believed to take the shapes of men in order to reenact the scenes of their death. A committed minority held firmly to this latter view and were known to go on long hikes and walkabouts in the summer, searching for these still-undiscovered falls.
After dinner we retired to Nathan’s den, where Bernard had me do a show. A southerner bravely raised his hand. Next, a real-estate magnate named Gerald Picaso. The laughter stoked in that smoky, paneled room, decorated with the murdered heads of bears and moose, grew like a blaze, the faces of clannish men gathered around it, grinning and covetous. “This one’s ours!” a fat man said to much applause.
After dinner, Max pulled me aside, into an alcove decorated with paintings of flamingos.
“Do you believe any of it?”
“What’s that?” I said.
“All these speeches you give.”
“I don’t care what I do.”
“You know your mom and I talk. She doesn’t like this one bit. Not one bit!”
Soon after my encounter with Jesse Unheim I had Frankie and Lou look into Jesse’s claims about my father. A few days later, Bernard appeared in my room to confirm that a prisoner 8BA94 named Giovanni Bernini had, indeed, been murdered fifteen years into a thirty-five-year bid for arson and manslaughter at Dun Harbor Correctional.
“How do you feel?” he’d asked.
“Why, do you care?”
“Don’t be sore with me.”
“All right. I won’t be sore.”
“Another instance of her misguided way of protecting you. Ask me, this is a confirmation that what we’ve been doing has been right all along.”