ASSEMBLAGE
Thirteen More Stories
by
S. P. Elledge
for Jonathan, forever
Table of Contents
1. August, Night, Approaching Storm
2. Memories of the Minotaur
3. Coleslaw
4. The Work in Progress
5. Jesus and His Brother
6. June's Child
7. Buck Bartlett: At Home! At Work! At Play!
8. An American Sadhu
9. The Pin Man
10. Recognizing the Stranger
11. Sycorax and Caliban
12. Madame Moitessier's Portrait
13. Radiance
AUGUST, NIGHT, APPROACHING STORM
For this is when we know the darkness best, when fear is the white moth hovering above your open mouth as you sleep, when you awaken after midnight to the pelting of beetles against the screen doors, forty minutes before the storm. The house has been filling with an almost sexual thunder; fever penetrates to the secret bone beneath flesh. These silent rooms haunt you like the rooms of a hotel where you feel the presence of all those who have come before. You await the advance of the storm, feeling the summer night press against the windows. In the distance, the sky blisters with heat lightning, and you wonder at your senseless dread of bicycling boys in the empty streets below. Insects dizzy with flight circle the yellow porch bulb; they fall on their backs down the steps, whirring like lost kites. Are you waiting for the sky to break, for fire from the heavens, for a mystery to be revealed at any moment? We all wait for these things and don't realize it.
Somewhere, possibly in a dream half-remembered, a voice was saying, "I am walking on air, I am walking on air…" The night is holding its breath. A telephone rings—once—and you fight the gasp.
You walk through the gardens where lovers on their benches have separated and are gone. Perhaps they, too, are remembering the high-ceilinged rooms of childhood, an abandoned book in the rain, a doll dropped down an empty well—the sad simple things you have carried with you forever. And you have also waited without knowing for the stranger in the arbor at nightfall, to feel fingers circling the throat, a hot palm sealing the cry. When we are alone at the edge of the day, all things become possible: the abduction, the killing storm, the door which opens slowly, soundlessly on its own. The face of each watch and clock is becalmed, though still you want to hear yourself scream, again and again. The trees are charged with the drone of cicadas expecting wind and wet; but lift up your hand, show your palm so pale—still no rain. In anticipation of greater miracles, why all this longing for things intangible, unnamable?
In the darkness windows hang suspended in space, defined by blue cathode glow, where the mute lips of television actors repeat someone else's name—not yours. You walk, you breathe, you hum that maddening fugue you composed in your sleep. Down the sidewalks in the stilled heat: a telephone rings unanswered in an attic room, a radio plays for dreamers; beneath the streetlights the air is aflame, and clouds simmer white-hot above. There is the fear of forgetting this night, this hour, and the still greater fear of remembering everything.
At corners you wait for autos which do not pass, yet you remain wary of that blue-black coupe which mirrors the moon (or your wan white face?) and slides silent into distance, the perfect horror, leaving your skin chilled and your mouth dry and fists clenched tighter still. You walk and breathe and return to a bed so cool, so empty, thinking: rain rain rain. Afraid of voices which speak in the dark. Of the face white as the moon at your window. Again sensing that terror wafting close on white wings, praying not to close your eyes. When you do close them, your eyes are still watching, still waiting.
Across the deepest and farthest reaches of dreamless sleep arises that wasteland blackened with dying fires and ash-heaps and barbed wire; burned and scratched and bleeding, you pass through smoke and cinders at that anxious hour when the storm is fast overtaking you, when the death's-head moth enters the night-blooming cactus. The rain, you know, will be a hard fall, it will burn. You must seek shelter in that adobe town which describes itself from desert with shadows and wind, where the old blind shaman seizes the iguana's arrow throat and says, "When the sun goes down here, señor, all the women become jaguars."
MEMORIES OF THE MINOTAUR
"There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them."
Albert Camus, 1939
"I bet you think this song is about you, don't you?"
Carly Simon, 1972
1. Being an introduction of sorts to educate and enlighten the reader.
We have never really met, the mythical Minotaur and I. Not officially met, at least. And yet we are sworn enemies: I, the faceless hero of my own tale, the tale we resume telling with every bruised and exhausted sunrise that struggles over our prison walls—and he, that miserable mutant, bastard semi-demigod, the famous and fabulous monster we must pity as much as fear.
Oh, call me the great Theseus of the warring nations if you like, but that's truly not how I picture myself. I wasn't the one dictating to the poet or posing for the urns. Only in the military did I pretend to be a killer, a conqueror, or a liberator. The ancient scrolls are no better or reliable than gossip columns. For one thing, I have always been a coward, a nobody, too, though never fallen in combat; perhaps the most crippling thing to happen to me was a severe case of undulant fever. My—or his—helpless Ariadne, the half-deranged half-sister I supposedly abandoned but never met, either, simply could not have existed the way she does in opera or oils, or if she did, she never offered so much as a yarn to me. Why I was sent here only the gods could say—and contrary to popular belief in Edith Hamilton, I've never known anyone who's spoken to a god. You might even say I no longer believe in gods at all, for I've been here so long I no longer believe the opening installments of my own story. When I try to remember what life was before I entered this abysmal labyrinth it's like trying to remember what life was before birth. Certainly something happened or was happening, but it's impossible to say what or how. For me now, here alone is life, now and always. Not even the philosopher could convince me that I can convince myself that I do indeed exist outside these crabbed, harried lines I scrawl devout as a penitent in my little Moleskine notebooks.
Still, I have imagined certain things with such clarity and detail that they sometimes seem like actual memories, like real snapshots fallen from a fictional being's wallet. They belong to a future concordance, assembled tear-and-patch no doubt by scholars who would not be able to identify me in a police line-up but who will say they knew exactly what I fantasized when I lay naked and alone in my bunk or what I ordered at the Double-Axe Bar the day I turned twenty-one. But it is only you, my Moleskine, faithful blackskin companion and only possible reader, to whom I devote these perhaps falsified, perhaps sincerely recovered yet imaginatively embellished recollections. Will you carry these humble notations far from me and into the future while I retreat even further into the past?
Picture with me then a phantom ship in my dreams, or if you like, my memory: a swift sleek Attic galley, I am sure it should be—and then mounting waves, thunderheads, a vengeful squall, yellow bluffs, red sands, rough land, months and years of walking deserts and plateaus and scrublands and riversides, until... Well, was it a shipwreck? Or was the shipwreck no more real than my birth? If you were to wander as long and hungry as I have, you too might question if this stone in my hand were black quartz or a cockatrice's egg or, alas, merely sand I dribble onto the hard ground.
2. A further study of one's private mythology, fully illustrated.
In my aloneness I have invented many memories to comfort and entertain myself; I begin with a few from youth and its melancholic hours of study and solitary torments of the flesh. First I should tell you that I had been adopted at a late age from the orphanage and then only because I showed promise as a rhetorician. My new mother hated me, my father spoiled me, I was the center of constant squabbles, but I suppose I can save all that for other stories. Soon enough the solution was to pack me off to boarding school. There, I was admired only by teachers, and then only begrudgingly. The Minotaur and I were in the same year, so it would seem, at this gymnasium, me always snub-nose to parchment, he reclining like a senator at a brothel among the benches, chewing his cud, spitting with irritation when the lecturer asked a question concerning the shortest distance to the moon or the history of the antediluvian and chthonic races. He took no notice of me, of course, this idol of schoolboys, soon the most powerful quarterback of the intramural battlefield. The teachers and I despised him for the way he mocked the odes, for his easy way with the handsomest of youths, the indolent charm in his gait and insolent twitch of his tail, for how he would saunter across campus with a jug of ouzo from his rich parents and a dirty poem he'd plagiarized under his arm and all the world to spear on his nascent horns. Most of all we hated him because he ignored us: the ugly, ungainly, or old.
Austerius, Junior (as he was placed in the ledgers and yearbooks) or just plain Aussie (no one dared call him anything but then) would taunt the pubescent underclassmen, when he noticed them, by acting the bull at a bullfight, charging them from around corners or sneaking after them across a paddock like the punch-line in a pastoral anecdote. They would shriek and run, those unctuous sissies on the junior varsity would hoot and applaud, and he'd accept the tiara of buttercups tossed over his forelock in a game with secret and suggestive rules of order. I remembered when "Aussie" was somewhat younger but no less cunning or agile and how I had once even torn his photographs from the school paper and pasted them upon my wall, where my many certificates of scholarly excellence should have hung. (All came down as soon as I saw how spectacularly he flunked that year's exams and still advanced with the rest of us.) No one had ever dared to question his heritage, though we all knew his very wealthy, very blue-blooded parents had separated at his birth and his mother was the object of several cruel stories whispered among us smaller but cleverer boys. He had been a late transfer to our dormitory, probably expelled from a larger and more prestigious academy for colorful crimes the rest of us could only long to commit in our prayers.
Once I was assigned bucket-boy at a wrestling meet. I suppose I was being punished for something, though it is hard to imagine what I, a punctually perfect student with the highest marks, could have done to incur such a fate–nevertheless, there I was, slopping and mopping and moping. It was long after the last grapple and I thought everyone had gone home, but as I was collecting the last of the towels I saw his steam-obscured form sitting on a bench at the end of the shower-room, bulky head bowed over his large hands and large knuckles, which he'd apparently scraped during some scuffle in the game. He was fumbling with a makeshift bandage torn from a towel. If you l-like, I stuttered, daring to come closer and kneeling before him with a bottle of some miracle emollient, I c-could... Suddenly he was looming over me, sweat-dripping and naked as Hermes but for a simple strap. If you like! he bellowed at me, seeing me for the first time in our lives and seizing me by the shoulders with just the tips of his fingers, as if I were nothing more than an undersized rasher of bacon. You'd like that wouldn't you? he said with an enormous laugh which echoed against the tiles and porcelain, and thrust his loins (how well I can still picture the red "Titan" logo on the waistband of his supporter) to within an inch of my trembling lips. I remember too the stained white corrugated fabric of his pouch and the smell like the smell of cattle too long in the stable and how he shoved my face downward, but I was instantly sick from the stench and he was so disgusted with my amateur performance that he'd already been long gone by the time I dared once more to look up from the puddled floor.
None of this could be true, of course, for as you remember we've never met. I invent these memories just to keep myself sound and sober, perhaps, in an effort to find my right place in what we'll for sanity's sake call history. In the interest of accuracy I shall henceforth remain diligent to every nuance of time and its deceptions. That faint brush on my bare shoulder might be just a monarch's saffron wing and then again maybe it is his fiery snort as he approaches…
3. Herewith until further delay a summary description of the labyrinth itself.
This vast Daedelian construct is not at all what it seems: once upon a time I scaled a granite-crowned peak that thrust like a gray fist far above the endless plain I'd been traversing for endless months and looked down like a god upon the landscape far, far below, arranged and executed exactly like those unnatural views seen from the clerestory windows and minarets of an Old Master's painting; you know the ones–the sunstruck Tuscany of a Fra Filippo Lippi, the faded forests in the Lombard da Fabriano's frescoes, the aquamarine summits and rocky crenellations seen beyond the Gioconda's hushed Florentine balcony. Below me, meandering throughout the hills and valleys, I could see the myriad broken paths I had followed or been lost upon in my search for a village, an oasis, a seaport, anywhere I could escape from my aloneness and my fate. But there were no signs of campfires or smokestacks from my lookout, just this topographical conundrum of dead-ends and false starts, narrow canyon trails that lead only to the edge of storm-rattled chasms, old roads that lope across fields for days in one direction and then lug you along like a stubborn pachyderm toward another, to no place and nowhere. So, you see, it is a maze, but an ingenious one because it is for all practical purposes invisible to the eye and not at all as obvious as those to be found in a book of optical illusions and a thousand times more complex than any to be found in the heart of a classical garden or where nave and transept intersect in a basilica. Even if I were unwinding a scarlet twine through the twists and turns to find my way back to the half-remembered shipwreck, it would be hopelessly tangled by now. "Lost" is not a strong enough word, for "lost" implies the existence of a home–and home I was no longer certain existed, if it ever had. Though I had already been in this land for eons and was prepared for any disappointment, the sights laid out below my granite crag filled me with unutterable despair, assuring me that it would be a very unlikely mathematical possibility, if not to say a far too convenient and coincidental plot maneuver, if the Minotaur and I ever were to meet, or even to pass within several leagues of each other in this wide and wretchedly barren countryside.
However it may be or was, I still knew that I would never fulfill my destiny if I did not meet and kill the Minotaur, the bully who had terrorized the corridors of my youth, the scourge of this land, exiled here like myself, a brother to me, the very reason my tale must be recorded–for without him, my opposite and my desire, there was no reason to exist, was there–is there? I know I must slit his throat with the blade I have fashioned myself from naked obsidian, slit his throat and behead him and take the dripping obscenity back to my people and my kingdom. No, there is no question of failure–it is only a matter of finding him before he finds me.
4. In which is encountered an incidence of cowardice, humbly related.
After all I have told you, you would mock me if you heard I might once have been able to extinguish my enemy and my rival as easily as you might squash a bluebottle, and yet it is true. Despite the phenomenal odds, the inhospitable circumstances, I did come across him once... and I failed my own self–and you as well, my faithful hearer, these pages that quaff my ink as indiscriminately as an undergraduate does his tankard. Well, murder might not have been as easy as all that, I have assured myself later–I was within arm's-length of him, it is true, but he is hardly as small and defenseless as a fly and I have surrendered my apocryphal strength to frost and famine. This all happened toward the end of another uneventful day when the sun had played tricks on me–first feinting to the east, then diving toward the west, in a ruse designed to confuse any chance I had of orienting myself to the sea–near the close of another tiresome day I had been scaling an escarpment above a copse of cypresses, when I saw not twenty feet below me, in a sun-splashed break in the foliage, my friend the Minotaur. He lay prone on a grassy sward with dotted pattern of dandelions, very much as cattle will do on a hot day under a spreading oak. His gargantuan head was inclined to one side, great eyes closed, tongue lolling, great velvety nostrils quivering with each intake of breath. His horns, I saw again, were as long as Minoan pottery attests, black as ebony and also burnished with reflections from the setting sun. His spectacularly muscular shoulders, so developed to support his heavy bovine head, were those of a man but as broad and powerful as any ox, and below them his shoulder blades were as wide as a galleon's deck-planks. His limbs, too, were mighty enough to conjure metaphors concerning trees and architecture. But his buttocks–callipygian, awe-inspiring, stupendous marvels of nature and the designs of conniving deities–those were keystones, as it were, upholding this languid monument of fleshly perfection. In other words, even Praxiteles couldn't have bested this creation.
Gazing upon him thus, with more reverence than ever could I have mustered had I been one of those freshmen he would lead to his couch, I felt the sharpened stone cut into my palm and slip from my fingers. All thoughts of bloodlust and revenge left my consciousness, blinded as I was by this new and more brilliant sun. But it was not exactly his masculine beauty alone which had quelled my murderous desires; it was also the feminine play of light upon his cinnabar-colored hair, the coquettish way that evasive light teased and tipped each shaft with a highlight of bronze, and the exquisite trail of shining hairs which led from the architrave of his shoulders, down his serpentine vertebrae to the delta of his coccyx, where the brilliant shadows lost themselves in the mystery of his nethermost region. In his sleep his tasseled tail still switched an occasional gnat. And then in his sleep he turned over! As a ship might heave upon a surging tide, his enormous body shifted and repositioned itself until his massive marmoreal chest faced me and an eventide sun now as much voyeur as myself. For there at last was revealed, unashamed and lustrously illuminated, his prize bull's balls and pizzle–for it was not only his head and tail, I saw now, that was that of a beast. Evidently, too, he was dreaming of someone appetizing (a single seed-pearl glittered on the apex of that porphyritic flesh)–and here I flatter myself to think it could have been me he dreamt of, for after all I was the only other resident of this land, was I not? Who else, then, could be a more immediate object of my Minotaur's passion? (His dimwitted half-sister? I think not!) In his sleep, in his dreams, he grew yet more concupiscently virile and full, and I would say that I might have swooned if I were more the Grundyian sort–in truth, from my perch in the glowering sky, I admit I may have taken matters in my own hands and consummated the act he might not have been able to complete in his own dumb slumber. Now can you blame me alone for not doing soon enough what the oracle said I must do to complete this timeworn tale? I stumbled humiliated into the darkness before his big sad bovine eyes even opened.
4a. An epistolary renunciation of most of the above, effusive and sadly after the manner of a madman.
My Sweetest Ari,
I can still pretend that some miraculous day you might discover this footnote to the chapters of my life here on these sands, if by some unforeseen tragedy you should be deposited upon this inland island, too, and these black books survive wind and wuthering to speak again to a receptive ear. Meeting you here this way may not be as unlikely as it might sound; plot any two people's lives with lines and graphs charted in time and space and you'd be astonished at the mazy web that is drawn. I imagine the reception out here is terrible, were we to have our Nokias again, and so I beg your favor in taking the trouble to read instead these humble words, when I know that not even People or Us could hold your attention for long in days gone past. Come closer. That's a good girl, adjust your tinted contacts, because even without them I hope to make your brown eyes blue.
I suppose you're expecting me to tell you I still love you, even now that I speak to you from the other side of life, but that I cannot do. How can I know what love is? I gave you up, threw you over, left an innocent girl wounded and deceived and so very alone, and perhaps for that reason I am punished by those on high to inhabit this wasteland until my demise at your brother's hands. This is my fate, as certain as if it were set in galleys and published far and wide. I plead for your forgiveness though I know hope is the final, worst vanity. Look back and appraise the past, please—like so many newlyweds, you must admit we hardly knew each other's middle names before we found ourselves sharing the same bed. You were so pretty then (still are?) I hadn't thought of what happens between the first kiss and the last sigh. I was little more than a child myself. What were you to make of me—and what were we to make of our lives? I could never comprehend that a mind like yours could be as convoluted as a triton's shell, as riddled with winding passages and chambers, whorls and coils, and as empty. At my age, how was I to know that your half-brother got all his brains from his father's side of the family? That I needed someone who could tell a hexameter from a handsaw? I longed to thread my careful words through those hollows of your head with the power of poetry or song, and to reach some hidden part of you that could tremble like malleus to incus to stapes with equal passion, but you know precisely what you hear in return when you press your ear to a seashell. And besides, there was that matter of how we put those puzzle-pieces together in between the sheets; from the first run-through nothing seemed to fit or feel right, at least by me…
Scheming already, I told you that inevitably I would be conscripted, that indeed I could be stolen away by the government at any time, that even my nine-stone of flesh was fine for the fodder; I told you a lot of other lies—but the truth is I enlisted to escape. You know the senseless wars we were fighting then and are still no doubt fighting. Let me think of how to phrase and not just to parse the truth: I ran away and I did not miss you! I liked the navy; being surrounded by hearty men made a real man out of me at last, and I learned the love of brother for brother. Muscle and sweat, the stink of the latrine and the heaven of a hammock, drunkenness and profanity and all the masculine wonders of the world, these too I learned to love in the navy. For the first time in my life I felt whole, away from the books which had made a weakling of me and the music which had seduced and sickened me. You would like me better this way! I no longer want to write, except in these inconsequential diaries, and I may no longer need to compete. I am certain that if you are reading this now you have already found perchance at least fleeting happiness in life. Somehow by now I know you will have married again; it would not be too late for you, as it was for me. You were only seventeen…
Albeit, albeit—sometimes I wish you were still waiting, perched upon that precipice leaning over the sea when I'd told you I'd gone to buy cigarettes, up there in your microkini and as enigmatic behind your Foster Grants as an Antonioni actress, always pale and always beautiful… In battle, I'd wished I had a creased Polaroid to show my mates on deck, to say, "Now there's your home-front!" Sometimes I wish you were still waiting up there, feeling unloved and unwanted, yes, feeling that briar twisting and twisting around your heart, because I want or wanted you to hurt just as much as… he… hurt… me.
Ari, my lovely Ariadne, you never were born, your legendary beauty never will command pearls or perfume; you will pose for no paparazzi; you are not this year's model or any other's—but I can dream you up on these pages just as I dream up my own past, can't I? Don't forget me.
Signed, Most Affectionately,
T.
5. Following, a series of dramatic tableaux, in the grand vaudevillian tradition.
Among my disorganized memories, that towering cabinet of curios with rusted locks and spidery cubbyholes and warped drawers that nevertheless can spring open with no warning, I raise my old friend Austerius from the half-forgotten mementos now and then: I see him in light as murky and mottled as that of a ferrotype, yet unmistakable even in those dated clothes and slanted tarboosh. In this dusty souvenir, for example, I find him here, in an upscale bookseller's atrium, under harsh halogen light and serenaded by distant and invisible choirs more Mantovani than Monteverdi. It has been not too many years since we both graduated from the barstools and bordellos of higher learning, though I have oddly enough neither seen nor heard anything of him since we were nearly ripened boys. (I will not go here into my tragicomic misadventures as an AWOL art student, a sensitive songwriter, a slam-poetaster, and that series of other failures which invariably devolves into one becoming an angry writer of letters to the editor.) Today I have come here merely to browse those bestsellers written by authors either better or luckier than myself (you be the judge) and perhaps to pluck up an impressionable young four-eyed something-or-other among the aisles, but not–I repeat, not–to join the youths and maidens who just happen to be standing in line over there for the Minotaur to sign what would be the first of his innumerable books.
Nevertheless, there he is–slim virginal volumes stacked before him and restacked periodically by a simpering nymph who presses her décolletage into his Hong Kong-tailored shoulder, their expensive scents mingling and wafting even where I stand far to the side, among the ruined and remaindered. The Minotaur's Montblanc descends like a dive-bomber upon the flyleaves with a lusty swoop and a swirl and I can hear the lovely lasses ask him if it is/isn't true that he thinks true love isn't/is terribly passé and the somewhat more diffident but even lovelier lads beg to have this début intimately autographed "for a friend," though I am sure they are all wondering: bull or bullock? Patron by patron the Minotaur wears a look of amused enervation upon his face, or as much of a look of amused enervation as such a brute might be able to accomplish, and the comely shop assistant lights him a seriously Churchillian cigar and I slam the worstseller I am not really reading back down into the bin.
Here, in a hidden recess I have only lately re-accessed by secret key, might be produced another scenario from out of the terrible, tenebrous past: It is some years later and I have grown used to the magazine covers and theatrical adaptations and awards appearances and reviews that might glow in the dark. "Precious," I say to the few friends I can maintain, or "pretentious" or, perhaps when I'm in the bitchiest of moods, "predictable, contrived, and pernicious." Via world satellite, whenever he holds steady for some infotainment steadycam, he grins and I wince and volley the remote. When that sonorous voice comes sinuous and insinuative over the radiogram, advertising an aphrodisiac or just himself, I whimper and immediately kill the speaker. Where his billboards loom I flee like a villager from an erupting Vesuvius. "Poseur!" I yelp to anyone within earshot. Inevitably, when he fronts his "post-rock" band (behind an antique mini-moog, in clockwork codpiece and snapping a riding crop like an irate Griffith or de Mille), I add, "cliché," "derivative," and with great finality, as if slamming shut the Lindisfarne Gospels themselves, "also unlistenable." I watch from afar with the rest of the world as the goddesses and groupies come and go, whistling a bolero, as it were, queuing for any quick fook or foodle they can get. The final straw: a positively pornographic foldout in the bachelors' design magazine of choice–his airy cliffside Gehry above the Aegean. Is it any wonder I want to erase him from history, to destroy him so completely it will be as if her never existed? But I promised a real moving picture, and here it is, as permanently blazoned in my mind as an instructive vignette in colored glass in a chapel window:
I have stayed up too late in the overpriced, over-starred hotel's lounge, in a touristified foreign capital where I am new and just as unknown as anywhere else I've traveled in search of love or inspiration or maybe just something as prosaic and humbling as an overseas correspondent's job interview. Perhaps the city is Wahran, perhaps it is Ottawa; probably it is neither. There is no one in this room or this entire province, I have slowly come to realize, who would even care to learn to spell my name, and I am exhausted from a round of museums and galleries (where the best of this place's culture was looted long ago) and bistros and boutiques whose exchange rates have nearly brought me to the point of begging or worse. In the smoke and gloom, made blearier by too much brandy-and-Benedictine on an empty stomach, I see the old familiar form hunched over a fancy Utrecht sketchpad, coarsely replicating the angles of a few lingering habitués from the turret he commands in the darkest corner. (Obviously he would soon take the art world by storm, as he had all else.) By this time he has affected the fashionably minuscule Menshevik spectacles and the glistening pomade in his fashionably retro-Presleyian pompadour. His clothes are as always as meticulously bespoke as he is meretriciously well-spoken. Just seeing how perfectly and artificially assembled he is, I should know better than to go any further. Drink however has made me bold as the legend I never was, and so I approach his little table on sailor's legs and thrust my shot-glass toward him. "Hey! You! Minotaur!" I shout at him above the roar of the air-conditioning vents. "You pretend you don't remember me, don't you?"
Heavy lids unshutter to assess me, this drunken fool bobbing three feet before him, spilling warm liquor down his already soiled trouser-front. He gives what I assume is a negative shake of his trendy asymmetrical Vandyke and hunches back over his charcoal and one-hundred percent recycled cotton-rag paper. I remain where I am, feeling as if I am swaying on a tightrope far above him and the rest of the mocking onlookers below, and dare to seize his nearest horn (where has my drink gone?) both to balance myself and to look him straight in the eyes. That is the frame you must freeze in your mind, your memory, as I have. His eyes, I see for the first time, are not those of an animal's, but very human, very vulnerable, pale polished blue moonstones–and a bit bloodshot themselves. But his muzzle and teeth are those of a beast's, and they snarl with contempt as only a beast could. He holds my gaze and speaks at last, in a thrice-removed accent he's picked up from others of his phony continent-hopping literati: "Pardon me, sir, I do not know you. We have never met. And I advise you to depart me before I call security." With that, he thrusts me away from him with a toss of his horns and I go somersaulting back against the sticky carpeting, back onto the wet pavement outside, back into the mildewed sheets of my insomniacal bed in a much cheaper hotel in a much less brochure-friendly neighborhood of that Michelin fraud of a foreign city...
Tear out that last page! None of that ever happened, I confess, you who would be my Father Confessor. Couldn't, wouldn't happen like that, except perhaps under another proscenium in another world's theater. Would chance have ever been so slickly stage-managed? Dialogue have been so obviously scripted? Forgive me. And turn now from this imaginary zoetrope's dizzying window and look through my myopic stereopticon instead: a far more static scene, certainly, but with truer perspective.
I am up late again–here you can mouth that luscious but somehow lurid word, lucubration, with its echo of a more common midnight vice–up late not at my desk but in my bed, laptop on a board across my knees, like Marat in his bath, rewriting once again the epic sonnet-cycle that will surely change the world. As would have my epic novel, had I ever completed it, or my epic short-story collection, had it ever found a publisher. Have I mentioned that all of them are dedicated to an Ariadne who never existed but is the only person who could ever love me? The Givenchy-gowned ghost I used always to meet and lose again at cocktail parties and cotillions? What you need to know about my immediate surroundings is minimal, and mostly aural because it is darkest night: the familial purr of the warm laptop, a refrigerator too close at hand that rumbles like the subway car a thousand feet below, an echo chamber of a courtyard outside with its chorus of tomcats, the couple next door battering our adjoining wall either in love or anger, and underneath it all the soprano ostinato of a car-alarm which has been sounding since the dawn of time. My outmoded LCD screen gleams with cold fire in the darkness, awaiting its tutelary genius to kindle the flame, but my dictionary's all dried up and I feel wordless as a basenji. At such times as this, I do what only seems natural: my hand lingers over the tremulous keyboard, I feel the anxious electrons dance in my fingertips, I taste my own bitter tongue, squint my eyes moleishly, then feel myself pulled into the nefarious netherworld of the universally omniscient everlastingly ubiquitous interweb. Like one who has been hexed, I am led to the Minotaur's website in just four magic clicks, though I swear that was not my destination tonight at all; I was only going to check the weather in Knossos.
His website is a labyrinth of links and false links, dead links and slow links and hidden links, all of which inevitably only link back to the hypnotic homepage itself. Like a bird bound within an invisible but intricately, ingeniously designed cage, I am forced to make calling-card stops at his publisher, his publicist, his press agent, his personal assistant, and even his personal trainer, but keep landing home again. Mouse over his portfolio of headshots available for use by booking agents and lifestyle editors and bookstore managers, scroll down for a sampling of the Flash animation and Java code he does "to relax" in his spare time, cursor back to find audio-video-textual downloads to enjoy on your iPod or iBook, gratis. Here, too, is his digital forum, open to pseudonymous sycophants and anonymous "trolls" alike: more pages of maddeningly mystifying chatter than a dozen Compton-Burnetts. His webcam is date-stamped six months prior, frozen in time (a hairy shoulder, a joystick, perhaps the radiant tip of a horn all I can make out in the tiny window), but his blog is current with details, if you are as adept at reading between the lines as I am, of whom he has recently bedded and whom he's bedding now and whom he will no doubt bed before long. (Like as not these reports are updated by some long-suffering ghostwriter.) The red carpets he has stamped upon! The runways and catwalks he has stalked! The film festivals and Lollapaloozas! The absolute crap! He names no names but makes it clear whom exactly he slanders by obliquely mentioning their latest browlift or multileveled option or divorce. Despite myself I am impressed; he's quite egalitarian in his tastes and doesn't mind an occasional has-been, wannabe, or never-was. His canned observations are witty and concise and inventive and charmingly self-deprecating, and I hate him now more than ever. "Remember, I'm always just around the corner," a banner at the bottom of each page reminds us–and with a double-left-click on a thunderbolt trademark, I am far from home, homepage, and the present tense, damned to wander forever this madman's mapface. Hark, here is Helios astride his shining juggernaut, sundering the tender morning mists once again!
6. Herein a further exploration of the labyrinth, including an important discovery.
The randomly scattered ironical poppies amidst disconsolate lavender fields one could only call Flaubertian, nostalgic Chekhovian orchards long past their prime, Kafkaesque ramps and ramparts which reach toward unreachable heights or sickening abysses, sun-drenched vineyards abandoned by Calvino, gardens overburdened with Shakespeare's myriad flowers, endless deserts even Cervantes would find too repetitive, dismal Hawthornian glades haunted by wraiths and demons in wimples and snoods who are not really there: it shouldn't have taken me so long to realize that the Minotaur's labyrinth was actually a library–for aren't all libraries labyrinths? (Stop thinking what you're thinking, my smart-alecky Moleskine; I refuse to sully that blind Argentine curator's good name here.) To continue: And what more awful prison than a library, trapped in other people's invented worlds on one side, hemmed in on the other by too much scholarship and erudition, choked by the book-dust and helpless before a bastillian fortress of information–cyclopedias and glossaries and compendia and indices and codices and thesauri and lexicons and almanacs and atlases and all manner of crumbling archives documenting prehistory, history, and even histories to come, knowledge that will confine you and incapacitate you and corrupt forever. By my infernal librarian's double scimitar, I vowed to read my way out from this hell, and thereby to outwit him with my learning, to write sentences more daring and opulently informed and spellbinding than those he ground out sausage-like to the delight of half-witted critics everywhere. Know your world and you shall conquer it. Take the bull by the horns, eh? I will burn this library like Alexandria's Erostratus before it witnesses my own demise.
I am getting ahead of myself, though. My somewhat nitpicky p'tit ??? carnet noir informs me that the abovementioned is just an overextended if not gaseously bloated literary device, alas. The landscape is a library of sorts, it is true, as all landscapes are, but the only books I have found dropped in my path are his works, starting with that slender collection of collegiate poetry (which somehow gained him instant success); continuing with the hastily assembled juvenilia; the autobiographical first novel; the ambitious second; the tour-de-force of a trilogy; more novels and yet more novels, long-listed then short-listed then Whitbreaded and Bookered then Pulitzered to death ("After the Nobel," I once heard you quoted, surely only half in jest, "it will all be coasting"); the selected stories; the one-acts and five-acts; the matching pastel-jacketed volumes which could only be housed on the "belles lettres" shelves; the elegantly spare penseés; the profligate diaries; the revised reprints; the philosophy of, the art of, the wit and wisdom of... and so on and on as he taunted me with his illimitable talent, bound together and kept apart as we were in this mad maze of overly picturesque mountains and coolly deceptive valleys, fells and fens, savannahs and swamps, mesas and moraines....
Did I once say this country resembled those faraway vistas in quattrocento paintings? Could I have also compared its lonesome barrens to a surreal Tanguy or the long view toward the haunted horizon as one in a de Chirico, or even claimed its jungles were dreamt by the Douanier Rousseau? Assign those latter-day comparisons to a later epoch and allow me presently to amend another layer or two of varnish to my Renaissance pentimento, for these days when I look out across this land from a breathless summit I've obtained with creaking knees and callused feet, I see something more like one of those fantastic creations of Arcimbaldo; you remember, nobility's portraits composed of fruits and flowers and vegetables–a zucchini a nose, a cauliflower an ear, daisies for eyes, and so forth. Seeing what I today saw in the world spread below me neat as a blueprint, it strikes me the way the discovery of perspective must have amazed the Medici, and with but a little of that anamorphosis Leonardo employed, I could make out the carven headlands with their hornlike twin peaks, the blue buttes shouldering their way into the stony backbone of the sierra, a valley like an immense groin, another range of cloud-grazed hills majestic as the thighs and legs of my compatriot the Minotaur. He is the labyrinth itself, you see, and so I have never met him because he has always been here with me; he is all around me, he is in all things, the enemy of life, the eater of time, boredom and inertia, death.
Decades, centuries intrude here. Only after long, long ages, after iron turned to bronze and bronze turned to gold and then that gold was transmuted hard and lusterless into the incipient senility of the new stone age, when we were both much older and humbler than when we had entered this godless land, did it occur to me one early blue evening as I leaned against the colossus of a beech-tree and scanned the bucolic sheep-decorated horizon-line Constable might have borrowed from Capability Brown, only then did it occur to me in my welcome weariness that these books were strewn like place-markers and sign-posts not to dazzle me with their worldly profundity, but to enable me to know the lapidary contours of his mind–yes, of course, at last, and therefore, to understand him, to understand and know him, my Minotaur, my comrade Austerius, and so, I suppose, to sympathize, even to love. His poems, I must admit, have grown like classic ruins more beautiful with the decades. They have learned to sing and soar with a nearly divine afflatus. Flattering myself, I kneeled beneath the tree and asked the flocks: Could they have all been addressed to me? Was I akin to that sloe-eyed lady of the sonnets? To sweet "W. H." himself? (Or was this the mere solipsism of old age, more pathetic than that of any adolescent?) Had I still been young, I might have cried, I might have promised to beg his forgiveness for pursuing him with even more murderous intent than he pursued me. Instead I took out my Moleskine and began these notes I faithfully record here, starting first with the following arguments I must now make:
7. Argumenta: several and diverse reasons why the Minotaur could never exist. Concise.
Let us examine the myth at last: that albino steer from the Sea of Crete who impregnated Queen Pasiphäe was sent by Poseidon—or was the prize Poseidon himself? If so, Poseidon would know why he himself couldn't have been sacrificed by an awestruck Austerius the Senior, and so the Minotaur might not have been born a monster, but a handsome half-god Poseidon might have been happy to call son and Ariadne a truly charming brother. And the queen might not be thought kinky but blessed, even if her husband seethed.
Be that as it may, in constructing the labyrinth, how did the workmen avoid becoming lost in it themselves? We cannot expect simple slaves from Tripoli to navigate such an architect's perplexing floor-plans. Nor could we expect that no matter how complex and deep the prison, the citizens could sleep easily at night, completely assured their bogeyman would never, ever escape. Considering the creature's terrible strength coupled with its human intelligence, how then was the Minotaur placed within the heart of his prison? Did the seismic thunder under the palace's floors, like a stampede of hooves in Hades, remind the king and queen too much of their guilt and thwarted desires to ever forgive the gods? Would then the queen still have loved her son despite it all? Did she ever go in the middle of the night to visit him and perhaps hold out a sugar-cube in her palm? How do we know the Minotaur even cared to eat the seven maidens and seven youths he was fed every nine years? Would there not have been better uses for them? What sustained him between these feasts? What saved him from the utter loneliness, the ennui, the monotony? Was he then driven insane—or always insane? I suspect what has come down to us in the mouths of storytellers were once all lies one could say the "hero" Theseus used to propagate, just to make himself look good. Now, only after many trials, am I ready to admit this.
But mostly the Minotaur couldn't have existed because no one was around to take notes and "word of mouth" or the "oral tradition" is no more than a very prolonged and very tedious game of "Chinese whispers." You just can't trust what has come from the likes of Homer or Herodotus and those other wise-guys; they were first and foremost courtyard entertainers, after all, before history had a name for itself and fiction found its proper masks. The literary forgeries of Septimius telling us of the glories of Minos were more real than the "real thing" because the real things were lost, never seen at all except in shattered sarcophagi or in miniature toreadors of ivory or terra cotta. A story that is never witnessed cannot be said to have really happened; a memory that is false has all the weight of one that is true. When my notebooks are full and there are no more pages herein to flatter, then my own story ceases, as well. It will be just as if I need no longer breathe or ever breathed.
He couldn't have existed because he never knew or cared to know that I existed.
8. Incidents possibly transposed from a nightmare: perhaps believing our hero is another, the Minotaur Himself speaks. A phantasie in waltz time.
Oh yes, I remember my hare-brained sister speaking all those nights on her diabolical cell-phone; she'd pace the tiled and carpeted floors of our parents' villa, now loud now softer now loud again as she roamed though the torchlit parlors and along the loggias, up and down the many Piranesian stairways of that place, across the courtyards and porches, from wine-cellar to maids' quarters, from gatehouse to carriage-house (palaces are of course labyrinths, too), that silvery rhinestone-studded beetle pressed to her peony-petal cheek, talking talking talking to someone, the same person every night, I was dead-certain—and I was consumed with equal parts rage and curiosity—for I knew it must be only one person, a man, and who was he? How could I find and kill him? From my terrace-side bedchamber I listened for her footfall and prattle, the echo of her coloratura against the ivy-smothered garden walls. In desperation, in frustration I would throw down my ink-blackened calamus or Firbank's latest, trying to decipher where the next day's assignation might be or what color panties she told her listener she was wearing. (Aldehyde green, aniline mauve, Herr Fuchs's finest fuchsia… ) Our parents, reconciled after years apart, watched late-night cable movies in their tower room, oblivious of this drama in their midst. Why would she barely give me a grimace and a grunt at the breakfast buffet and nothing kinder than a sneer on the patio when she passed me, while her secret boyfriend, the one our parents forbid her to have or to see, she could speak whole Vedas of inanities to? Yet I knew there were only words to bind her to this illicit lover of hers, for her days were spent as cloistered as a novitiate's, guarded by gigantic imported Nubians even I could never manage to bribe.
And all along it was you! At what debutante ball or ice-cream social did you two meet, under cover of muslin-and-crinoline propriety, her duenna undone by champagne and a sweaty frug? Had I guessed which one was you I would have broken your pretty little neck. She looked like Brigitte Bardot at her buxom best then, when she sang for Serge, and likewise Ari should never have settled for anyone less resplendent than myself. How I wanted her! No one had a waist as whip-thin as hers, no one wore silken kilts cinched in so tight or Gaultier brassieres so pointy they could gouge out an unwanted suitor's eyes. We don't have the same father, I told her once at one of these events, it's all right to be seen dancing close, and she smacked my snout hard with a lacquered fan. The travesty of seeing all those ephebes swarming around that girl, looking as kid-glove soft and gilt-edged as separate bound annuals of the social register, all uncut and equally indistinguishable! I never met you, indeed, but I knew your type, the type she liked: soft boys better with words than their hands, mama's boys who would want to dress her up in gowns by Adrian and hats by Edith Head, boys who were not like me. Who were not me. A year later, after the elopement and your abandonment (what was the matter? gone all nelly in bed?) she married again, quick as that, to the alcoholic preacher from Attica. Finished at last with my precocious degree, summa cum laude, I had left home for good by then, off to places where they appreciated monstrous talents such as mine all the more and the money was good and you could pick your vices and victims as easily as grapes off a vine. I told myself I had forgotten her.
Something happened between your leaving her and my leaving it all, however, and I might as well spill my glistening guts now. Metaphorically, that is. The second marriage wasn't as quick as all that; there was a sultry estivation there when we, demi-siblings, found ourselves living within the same high stone walls once again, before that holy man she met at the local wine-shop laid his healing hands on her. Our parents were off taking in the Orient, incidentally, if that matters, and the servants I had dispatched so no one else could trip my snare… Do you know what it is like to see a hummingbird after the first frost, long after her family and friends have all bought first-class tickets south to some more tropic poolside? How such a bird will flutter in circles and beat itself against the hot-house's plate-glass windows until her heart that beat two-hundred times a minute, beats one-hundred-seventy-five, then ninety, then thirty… Well, that's how Ari was that last summer between my semesters at university, when she stopped hearing from you and she was at last drained of all tears and sank into that sleepless sleep naturalists call "daily torpor," rousing herself only for tortured moonlit somnambulations, my voice at her keyhole acting like a fakir's flute upon a cobra. It is true that I preyed upon her weakness, made her believe you had never loved her and she had never really loved you, but then I really did think I might yet be able to shock her out of her stupor. I pretended I was doing this out of kindness, like a good doctor. I would cure her by ousting you from her system. So, you might as well know, I eventually subdued her and her hummingbird heart, worked my way into her bed with such skill it would never seem like rape. Still, I suppose it was. Still, I was well-used to having my way and didn't know the meaning of remorse. Still—you want to know what she told me that one night I had her pinioned against her headboard? That she thought you had married her just because you were really in love, at a comfortable distance, with me! I roared so hard she had to pummel and scratch my chest before she ran all boo-hoo-hoo from the house. It came as no surprise to me that very soon after, as so many people do, she would turn to religion and the mysterious rites of a man who could promise her more than either of us ever could: the opportunity to see and converse with the divine. No surprise, for, you see, when I am lying there on sheets turned cold after my latest conquest, I too often wish I could look someone like my father up in heaven in the face and say, "This is all your fault!"
9. Penultima. A valedictory, a destruction, a warning.
When I was new here, when I was still new to the world myself, without so much as peach-fuzz on my cheek or a cloud in my eye, I wrote these violent words down so I should never forget them. Now every hatch-mark seems false. Goodbye, then; I should drown my books. I should burn them as an offering to some gentler god I haven't heard of yet. Instead I shall now happily tear the delicately lined leaves from this my last Moleskine and, making a paper airplane of each one, sail them into the brisk austral wind that even here, far from Crete, perpetually blows up hot and arid from lands off the map and toward the middle of earth and the Cyclades, toward those peaceful city-states I once loved, toward a childhood I no longer remember, toward home and oblivion.
9a. Envoi.
Curse all wars. Curse sacrifice to fatherland and noblesse oblige. Curse the Athenians and Minoans alike. Curse flags, weapons, and every treaty, broken or not. Curse all architects and oracles. Curse the myth-maker, the bookseller, and the blind public. Curse The Children's Illustrated Tales from the Greeks. Curse the Phalarian bull and its many martyrs. Curse Sir Arthur Evans for what was better left unexcavated. Curse The Bull from the Sea and all its inaccuracies. Curse Fellini's Satyricon. Curse Ariadne auf Naxos, curse Picasso, curse Señor Cortázar, and curse Señor Jorge Luis, too. Curse, curse, curse God and all gods.
Alas, we shall never meet, my eternal rival and impossible lover the Minotaur and I.
COLESLAW
Things are of course not always as they seem: the two very blonde girls in matching sleeveless polo shirts and fixed with identical pouts were not twins; that man who looked nothing like them with his coarse black hair and Mediterranean complexion actually was their natural father, not even an uncle and certainly not a kidnapper; and this quaint Bavarian inn with its exposed rafters and tankards of pewter or pottery lining the mantel was no more real than the fireplace with its electric yule log. Das Eatenhaus was wedged between Y-Pay-Mor Shoes and Slipped Discs Records at the Carl Sandburg Mall in a far western suburb of Chicago–so those were not authentic fräuleins, either, but local teenagers working summer jobs. What, however, was unmistakable and not open to misinterpretation was that the man and his two young daughters were having a miserable time.
The girls, sisters eleven and twelve years old, were silent as they picked at their food, but that does not mean much communication was lost between the two. Like twins, they had a nearly psychic bond; a nudge could tell a story, a glance could speak volumes, as people say. Each infinitesimal move their father made, whether it was the way he might lower his aviator glasses or the sound he made while clearing his throat, a covert warning or implied approval, was immediately semaphored to and decoded by his daughters–all of this done of course without a word, but with no loss of subtlety. For instance, the way he slid his empty chinette plate away from him now, so that it just touched the edges of both their plates, was a powerful message neither girl could ignore: Hurry up and finish, you know we promised Sheilagh we wouldn't take all damn day. Tracy's right eye in this case met Tammy's left–a familiar, mutual, instantaneous gesture that said it all–their hatred for their father, their utter contempt for his tactics, their loathing of this food–and yet nothing was revealed to the outside world, not even to their father, who now belched gently and dabbed at the corners of his Mediterranean moustache with his oversized handkerchief. And why, a second glance added, can't he use a napkin like everyone else and why is he always so awful and disgusting when Sheilagh isn't around?
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