American Genius: A Comedy Read online

  A defiant quiet surrounds us, it or solitude penetrates me severely. I don't know where to set Contesa's admissions and entreaties, since I heard what I should never have heard and can't accept, I did hear her, and, for this reason alone, I should run away. But I don't, I can't, my legs are leaden, my head and skin throb, and I'm stunned and humbled by seeing and hearing what I don't believe.

  The Magician waves his hands in the air, directs his gaze at the table with an aspect both friendly and stern, but he makes me nervous and tired. I close my eyes, I open my eyes, Contesa's eyes are closed, she doesn't stir, I close my eyes. The unique quiet mutes my incredulity, its constant eeriness has substance. The roof becomes alive, a giant animal, my chair arouses me, the round walnut table creaks with suspense, the brash wind hurls itself against the antique windows. The room is agitated by the racket and rustling, by hawks nesting on the roof, where Birdman must have crawled to rescue a wounded tree sparrow, where nocturnal cats chase each other.

  The Magician performs another ceremonial incantation and requests us once more to unburden ourselves.

  -Speak as you wish, freely, at will. If the spirits want to, they will show up. You will feel their presence. Stay as still as you can and absorb the darkness. Open yourselves and unburden your heart.

  I cringe and feel glad, too. I see something like a cloud or smoke issue from his mouth.

  The Turkish poet chants drowsily in Turkish, his sounds pleasing and harmonious, until he switches to a halting English, and, with his head wrapped in his hands and his eyes shut, makes a confession: "I want to be in serenity, because once a long time ago, I did very wrong thing to a friend. Now that friend he is dead, and I would give him my true feeling, if he would come now to me. I am sorry, more sorry each day I live. I can say this. I admit. When I look to the sky, I am seeing your face. I tell you this, I took your friend for me, your final lover, with lust, I did sex, and I told him what I knew bad about you, and it was not true. He came to me, we lay, but you never knew it. I am in shame. If you come to me, I plead your forgiveness. I want to speak to you."

  He yawns, and his face relaxes.

  My brain-damaged mother often talks in her sleep to her dead husband in complete sentences, holding a conversation in which she asks him questions and responds to answers that only she hears, while her voice remains steady and low, and, though unsated, fatigued in sleepless sleep, she awaits answers that may imperil her contentment.

  The Turkish poet drops his head, like a supplicant or penitent, and there's muttering in the tremulous semi-dark. "But even so," he protests, in a low, guttural monotone, "I can believe truly for more sex in everything." With his head down, he slaps the table. "More sex in everything" raised, apparently, for my benefit, since he's inexplicably insisted on this point to me before, but not in such a strange context. The young married man's voice comes in a cry from across the room, he must be far from me or the table: "You're all crazy, this is nuts, but Arthur's right, I'm here, and I'm sitting in this crazy room with you. But so's the devil, he's in this room, you know, he must be. He's in me, I'm evil, and that's my perverted wisdom." I hear a bizarre, intermittent cackling and chortling from him, but others say he ranted about ravishing infidelities and an insatiable hunger for stray women, even on his marriage day, when he had sex with his best man's girlfriend behind a boathouse. Two years later, his best man died in a boating accident, in a motorboat stored in the adulterous boathouse, and it is to him he addresses himself, begging him to return so he can ask forgiveness. Between the scratchy noises or static, I believe I hear him calling a name over and over, until the young married man sobs, I hear him, I do, I know it's not me. Contesa and Moira awaken or sleepwalk over to him, to wherever he's gone, to comfort him.

  -The devil's here? Come on.

  That's Spike.

  -No one said this would be easy, a voice says.

  That's Henry, I'm pretty sure.

  -That's right.

  Arthur is agreeing with him.

  I press my eyes closed more tightly and assure myself it's not bizarre, just uncanny, when raging fires and words written in scarlet ink cross my eyes, the Reverend Samuel Willard's account of Elizabeth Knapp, a Salem girl possessed by the devil: The devil has oftentimes appeared to her, presenting the treaty of a covenant, that he urged upon her constant temptations to murder her parents, her neighbors, our children, especially the youngest, tempting her to throw it in the fire.

  I night have recited this to everyone, I'm not sure if I'm speaking or when I'm speaking what I'm saying. In my head, I'm awake, aware of everything, the way I am when I'm breathing nitrous oxide, inhaling its sweet sickness, on the chair of my earnest periodontist, who keeps the radio tuned to public stations, whose programs become confused with my thoughts, so I may be speaking aloud to the host and his guests, but then I don't care, because waves of pleasure slap inside my body, during which my periodontist often asks me to open my mouth wider, but I believe my mouth is open wide.

  -My skin is so dry, you can write on it. I need to shed it.

  -Like a snake.

  That's Spike speaking, after me. Maybe I told her human beings shed their skin completely every twenty-eight days. No one Spike loves is dead, and she doesn't know what she's doing here, except hanging out, so she proposes in a singsong voice to implore Einstein to return, which strikes her, a young mathematician, as ridiculously comic and tragic, so she can barely sit still, jumps away from the table, and races out of the room through the wooden, double doors, only to return, because she doesn't know where she is otherwise or what to do, and she may anyway be asleep. I don't know how much time has passed, when the Count rouses himself. I'm sure my eyes are open, I see him as plain as day tuck his Breguet into his coat pocket, satisfied it won't be pickpocketed again, then watch him as he gathers himself together to address the Magician, Contesa, or his lost wife, sometime before I rouse myself and say whatever they tell me I did, about which I have intermittent and vague recollections. The Magician hasn't talked yet with his mother, though she's the dead person he wanted to contact, the motive for the seance-which is no longer a seance to me; I don't know what it is, except an extension of so-called reality into so-called hyperreality or unreality, though in my head nothing is unreal, I don't know what unreal is. Dizzily, I try to catch hold of it, it slides away, splitting into pieces.

  The Count murmurs and rises, even more angular than I recall, in shadow he's a portrait by El Greco, and he flings and jiggles his arms, maybe pushing off something, a spirit, but that's unlikely, since it wouldn't have mass. The Count's voice sounds dreamy, even though he appears to be lecturing someone, partly because he's standing at attention as if behind a lectern, but his eyes are shut and there are many pauses between his words: My rare horological artifacts. French and English, I bow to their artistry. Serviceable clocks, to be blunt, ugh, grandfathers, grandmothers, wall units. Comme it faut. American Blind Watch, yes, ingenious. Big numbers for the vision impaired. Ingenious.

  He swings his arms again and yawns.

  -Let me say this about the devil: He exists. Made his acquaintance, many years ago in the South. My family, in my town. I ran as far as I could. RUN. I told you to run. You. Not to leave me. Run from me, and now you're . . . A barn door face. You said it. I don't know where. No answer is an answer ... My darling, when I leave this world and join you, to be with you again, wherever you are, would you ... Oh, please, let me leave this necropolis.

  Perfectly still, not shuffling and shifting, we're waiting for the end or hanging on to dear life, expecting to hear another outburst about what the dead have in store for us.

  The Count drops to his seat, breathless, as if he had been running, and his head also drops, like Contesa's, and rests on the table, where soon he falls asleep or slides into elsewhere. I'm witness and participant, spilling from one to the other, I can't tell inside from outside, I mean, I can't control my utterances or guide my thoughts.

  -Helen, Helen. Listen to me, you're sa
fe here.

  It's the Magician's mellow voice.

  -No, I'm not.

  -Helen, it's your turn.

  -No, it's not. It's ...

  I point to our Felice and our Kafka, but they are fast asleep or dead to the practical world.

  -This is not what I believe at all. What's happening is unacceptable to me.

  -Be yourself, the Magician says. Use your intuition.

  -I hate that stuff. I think I'm dead.

  -Maybe you are.

  -That's all right then.

  -Stop fighting.

  I'm always fighting, I shake myself, I may not be dead, but I don't want to withdraw from this ghost theater in which I'm a spectacle to myself and where I must shuck off disbelief to reap any benefit, though benefit is unlikely. I will disbelief, and this is when the events occur for which I was definitely present and also not. I let my body slacken, knowing my father preferred me to sit up straight, while mentally urging him near me and invoking his spirit, thinking my posture shouldn't matter anymore to him.

  -I want to ... I'd like my father to talk to me. And my dead friends, I really want to hear their voices again.

  I announce this abruptly.

  -But I know it can't happen.

  I need to concentrate on one dead person, my father, instead other faces crystallize with wispy features and deathly poor complexions, they zoom in and out, stagger by, now my dead friends' faces, their deaths cavorting in a murderers' row, where arbitrary mortality judges and sickens me. I open my eyes and with horror notice the other sitters' critical expressions, so I might be on a jury, I'm litigious, American, I like to watch vicious trials, I'm probably a judge. My breathing quickens, then slows, quickens, then regulates itself, so I forget it, but my sweater scratches me like crazy, I could suffocate inside my skin, I need air, melancholiacs are helped by a change in air. I command myself to smash the decayed faces thrust in front of mine.

  -Dad, visit me, come on, it's my wish, tell me about being dead. Come close, I will it. I can't do this. Dad, visit me, stand beside me. I can't ... this is stupid.

  Green, moldy bodies in morgues, inflamed, bloated, white faces, mutilated corpses, half-blown-away bodies, maggot-ridden, in blue uniform, Gettysburg, lynched black bodies hanging from a despicable tree. Terrible death, I fear you, I have to get out of here, it's sane fear, I answer it, I'm a coward, I should stay, I want to hear them again. My head splits in two.

  Did I speak this aloud or is it internal?

  I don't think I'm talking in my darkness. I can't halt these alien sensations. I place my hands over my eyes and press hard, scrunching my eyes closed again, so that their veins radiate bloody patterns, garishly colored shapes, pale ashes, the papers I burned this afternoon maybe, everything recognizable is ablaze, like my family's Eames chairs. I can't hold onto an image, so I tell myself, in a stately manner, Mark this now, fire burns complacent things, and in a flash it occurs to me why I take things apart, and I want to remember the reason but can't. Another gust of arctic air makes me shiver, there's nothing to think about, I open my eyes, it's all gone, I shut them again.

  I hear my name, "Helen, Helen," so I turn toward the Magician, who stares at me and directs me, "Follow my hands," which I do, I can see his hands waving in front of his face, but suddenly his head belongs to my friend who disappeared. I can hardly breathe. Then the Magician's head enlarges, his eyes expand, enormous like universes, much larger than my mad cat's just before he gouged my left calf, and I follow his agile hands, how they weave in the air, like weavers' hands at looms, my head drops onto my chest and rolls around, or from side to side, oddly enough I recall this because while my head feels detached and airy, I'm still holding on, so a question about consciousness wings by, about how markedly it can differ from self-consciousness, when it emerges from a consciousness aligned to a self, then questions disappear. I'm not con cerned about fainting, I worry I'm dying, even if my skin still itches, my arms, chest, legs, and maybe my dead friends or their ghosts leave messages on my back.

  Against my will-I have no will-while the Magician mumbles something, my skull empties, and the inside of my head becomes dense. I enter a deeper trance, or I might still be in a hypnogogic state, but I do believe the Magician may have hypnotized or entranced me, because from now on what I am certain of is negligible, what I remember is beyond description in ordinary terms.

  I'm near the ocean, because I hear waves, I ask someone, my father, or my friend taken by AIDS, the question I'd asked my mother as a child: Is life worth it, even though you die? She said then, Yes, because you have happiness when you're alive, you have a lot of good times before you die. I didn't accept what she said then. I don't get an answer now. I breathe in the green ocean, fall headlong into a whitecapped wave, let it consume me, I'd been hungry for its endlessness, the hot sand, the summer wind's raw perfume, the innocent exhaustion after swimming. I take off my itchy sweater and walk unsteadily toward the windows, calling desperately for a birdman, and then Moira, who is apparently clearheaded, throws my sweater over my head, puts my arms through the sleeves, and leads me back to my chair. Moira whispers in my ear, "Did you know my name `Moira' means destiny?"

  Hearing the word from her mouth shocks me, and I jump back, exclaiming, "No, I had no idea, I didn't know." Moira's face transforms, it contorts grievously, and, if that is destiny, it's an ogre, so I slap her. I suppose I never really liked Moira, though her oddness and inquisitiveness attracted me from the first. Moira smiles and transforms into my young wild cat, but I'm in a chair, looking down on myself from above, an outof-body experience, and in it I feel estranged from the world, but long for it, wanting to return and to live forever. In scarlet ink, fluttering on my eyelids, "Live the life you have imagined," but soon I perceive the closeness of the ogre, destiny, snarling like my mad, dead cat, but destiny can't be put to sleep, the way he was, it doesn't go away, and, worse, death wouldn't. Death stops everything. It's unfair, but not unjust, since everyone suffers its democratic tyranny. Things flow along, whole and disintegrated, I have at least two minds, so I exhort one, maybe aloud, "Don't stop, don't stop. I wish ... I wish ..."

  Then my father appeared, I think he did and I also think he didn't, and my best friend killed in a car crash showed up, with her young, toothy grin, "You haven't changed," I exclaimed, and there my brother stood, dead the way I thought. "Everyone wishes to speak to the dead." I heard that again. My father wore his dark brown trunks, I saw him swimming behind the breakers, far from shore, swimming farther and farther away, until he disappeared.

  The Count produced fearsome yowls, I reclaimed my body and wondered if he were possessed by the devil, but didn't accept that could make sense. The Count enunciated disconnected words and phrases"tiny second hand, poison ivy, Descartes, lacquer and jade, the antichrist"-with many long pauses, as if completing his sentences in an interior monologue. I waited for more revelation, but if it came, I missed it. The Magician hushed him and snapped his fingers, and the Count's seizure, if it was, halted miraculously, and then the Magician sang or chanted, I don't remember the lyrics, though I usually have extremely good recall of conversations and dialogue, but none of his words stayed with me. Yet with them, we woke up from our sleep or trances, conscious of leaving one peculiar world for another. And so, the sitting reached its end, the way everything does, and, slowly, one after another in an orderly single file, we walked from the Rotunda Room, all but the Count, who, after his outburst or seizure, vanished. No one said a word. It was a few minutes past 1 a.m., so only an hour had passed, but it seemed, as they say, an eternity.

  The storm had also passed, and remote, brilliant stars littered the sky. In my room, I stripped, my skin was exceptionally dry, the largest organ of the body stretched to its limit, I slathered on creams and worried about the scaly spot on my leg. Not surprisingly death, or mortality, hung about after the seance, especially when the pressure around my heart turned into sharper pain, heartburn, or an event, as cardiologists call an unde
termined episode, and, since my father died of heart disease, I worried, but the pain left in no time, and anyway I'm not prone to hypochondria.

  I slept fitfully, awoke twice, walked to the bathroom, hardly concerned about waking the two disconsolate women, since they might occupy other beds, and the third time I awoke, I gazed at the Fabric Monolith, at its hidden potential, its unleashed energy, and imagined I'd unfurl it one day, but only in my imagination. If my bed were covered in Egyptian 600 denier all-cotton sheets, I'd sleep better, but the seance, whatever it is or was, carried novelty's unruliness and disturbed my rest; the sleep of orphan children, the sleep manual reports, is "made more restless when they leave the institution to see a motion picture in the evening," so it exhorts readers to "make their mind as blank as that of a wartime flapper," the Great War, that is, the manual came out in America in 1937, when rationalization, bureaucratization, the New Deal were the rage, like liquor, hard-boiled novels, Communism. With age, it's said you need less sleep, though my mother, who's very old, needs her sleep and often drops off in a serviceable reclining chair, covered in light brown naugahyde, in her living room, watching a movie on TV, but not when she is reading, which she does with near-perfect eyesight and in a state of total concentration, her head craned to the book on her lap, its covers lovingly cradled in her small, white hands. She has a little arthritis, but it's not disfiguring and doesn't keep her from knitting, though as her neurological condition deteriorates, her once-skilled fingers lose their way and trip, she drops a stitch, a line, then complains that it's the fault of the wool-too thin, she says-but it's not. Soon, knitting wearies her, but her skin glows, translucent and smooth, free of wrinkles, though not as plump and lush as her older sister's, who used Jergen's Lotion only, and whom she envied and outlived, but my mother's greatest rival was her husband's mother, whose ancestors emigrated from Egypt, whose green oval eyes and beauty captured him, and whose impetuous, incessant demands he always met. Now my mother envies only youth and worries that her brain will fail her completely and she will not know herself.