Mao II Part 12

"How does he know I'm here, or why I'm here, or who I am?"

"After the first series of threatening calls," Charlie said.

"I thought I was the unannounced presence. But you told George I was here. And now this colonel with a brush mustache."

"I had to report the names of all the people invited to the conference. Because of the phone calls. The police needed a list. And I told George actually the day before because I thought it would help. Anything that helps."

"Why does the colonel want me to go home?"

"He says he has information that you may be in danger. He hinted that you would be worth a great deal more to the group in Beirut than the hostage they're now holding. The feeling is he's too obscure."

Bill laughed.

"The whole thing is so hard to believe I almost don't believe it."

"But of course we do believe it. We have to. It doesn't break any laws of logic or nature. It's unbelievable only in the shallowest sense. Only shallow people insist on disbelief. You and I know better. We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there's no longer a moral or spatial distinction between thinking and acting."

"Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you're beginning to sound like me."

They walked in silence. Then Charlie said something about the loveliness of the day. They chose their topics carefully, showing a deft indirectness. They needed some s.p.a.ce in which to let the subject cool.

Then Bill said, "How do they plan to get me into a hostage situation?"

"Oh I don't know. Lure you eastward somehow. The colonel was vague here."

"We don't blame him, do we?"

"Not a bit. He said the explosive was Semtex H. A controlled amount. They could have brought down the building if they'd wanted to."

"The colonel must have enjoyed dropping that name."

"The material comes from Czechoslovakia."

"Did you know that?"

"No, I didn't."

"See how stupid we are."

"Where are you staying, Bill? We really have to know."

"I'm sure the colonel knows. Just go ahead and arrange the conference. I came here to read some poems and that's what I'm going to do."

"n.o.body wants to be intimidated. But the fact is," Charlie said.

"I'm going back to my hotel. I'll call you at noon tomorrow. Get a new location and let's do what we came here to do."

"I think we ought to have dinner, the two of us. We'll talk about something else completely."

"I wonder what that might be."

"I want this book, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

People stood gathered in a rambling white s.p.a.ce set on several levels under ducts and sprinklers and track lights, chatting over silver c.o.c.ktails. The walls were hung with works of living Russians, mainly large color-brave canvases, supernation paintings, ambitious and statement-making.

Brita moved through the crowd, edging sideways, drink held high, and she felt the interplay of glances, the way eyes consume their food, taking in faces, a.s.ses, tapestry jackets, raw-silk shirts, the way bodies slant involuntarily toward a well-known figure in the room, the way people carry on one dialogue and listen to another, the way every energy is directed somewhere else, some brightness nearby, the whole shape and state and history of this little hour of truth. There seemed to be some imaginary point of major interest, a shifting middle cl.u.s.ter of conversation, although every person in the room retained an awareness of the street beyond the plate-gla.s.s windows. They were here, in a way, for the people in the street. They knew exactly how they appeared to those who were walking or driving by, to standees on crammed buses. They appeared to float outside the world. They were only art browsers but they appeared privileged and inviolate, transcendent souls lighted against the falling night. They shared a stillness, a way of looking sharply etched. This gave the incidental scene a claim to permanence, as if they believed they might still be here a thousand nights from now, weightless and unperspiring, stirring the small awe of pa.s.sersby.

It took her a while to reach the picture that had attracted her. A silk screen on canvas measuring roughly five feet by six feet. It was called Gorby I and showed the Soviet President's head and boxed-off shoulders set against a background of Byzantine gold, patchy strokes, expressive and age-textured. His skin was the ruddy flush of TV makeup and he had an overlay of blond hair, red lipstick and turquoise eye shadow. His suit and tie were deep black. Brita wondered if this piece might be even more Warholish than it was supposed to be, beyond parody, homage, comment and appropriation. There were six thousand Warhol experts living within a few square miles of this gallery and all the things had been said and all the arguments made but she thought that possibly in this one picture she could detect a maximum statement about the dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the public figure, about how it is possible to fuse images, Mikhail Gorbachev's and Marilyn Monroe's, and to steal auras, Gold Marilyn's and Dead-White Andy's, and maybe six other things as well. Anyway it wasn't funny. She'd taken the trouble to cross the room and look closely at this funny painted layered photo-icon and it wasn't funny at all. Maybe because of the undertaker's suit that Gorby wore. And the sense that these were play-death cosmetics, the caked face-powder and lemon-yellow hair color. And the very echo of Marilyn and all the death glamour that ran through Andy's work. Brita had photographed him years ago and now one of her pictures hung in a show a few blocks down Madison Avenue. Andy's image on canvas, Masonite, velvet, paper-and-acetate, Andy in metallic paint, silk-screen ink, pencil, polymer, gold leaf, Andy in wood, metal, vinyl, cotton-and-polyester, painted bronze, Andy on postcards and paper bags, in photomosaics, multiple exposures, dye transfers, Polaroid prints. Andy's shooting scar, Andy's factory, Andy tourist-posing in Beijing before the giant portrait of Mao in the main square. He'd said to her, "The secret of being me is that I'm only half here." He was all here now, reprocessed through painted chains of being, peering out over the crowd from a pair of burnished Russian eyes.

Brita heard someone say her name. She turned and saw a young woman in a denim jacket slow-mouthing the word Hi.

"I heard the message on your machine about how you might be here around seven or eight or so."

"That was meant for my dinner date."

"Remember me?"

"Karen, isn't it?"

"What am I doing here, right?"

"I think I'm afraid to ask."

"I'm here to look for Bill," she said.

He lay in bed open-eyed in the dark. There were intestinal moans from his left side, where gas makes a hairpin turn at the splenic flexure. He felt a ma.s.s of phlegm wobbling in his throat but he didn't want to get out of bed to expel it, so he swallowed the whole nasty business, a slick syrupy glop. This was the texture of his life. If someone ever writes his true biography, it will be a chronicle of gas pains and skipped heartbeats, grinding teeth and dizzy spells and smothered breath, with detailed descriptions of Bill leaving his desk to walk to the bathroom and spit up mucus, and we see photographs of ellipsoid clots of cells, water, organic slimes, mineral salts and spotty nicotine. Or descriptions just as long and detailed of Bill staying where he is and swallowing. These were his choices, his days and nights. In the solitary life there was a tendency to collect moments that might otherwise blur into the rough jostle, the swing of a body through busy streets and rooms. He lived deeply in these cosmic-odd pauses. They clung to him. He was a sitting industry of farts and belches. This is what he did for a living, sit and hawk, mucus and flatus. He saw himself staring at the hair buried in his typewriter. He leaned above his oval tablets, hearing the grainy cut of the blade. In his sleeplessness he went down the batting order of the 1938 Cleveland Indians. This was the true man, awake with phantoms. He saw them take the field in all the roomy optimism of those old uniforms, the sun-bleached d.i.n.ky mitts. The names of those ballplayers were his night prayer, his reverent pet.i.tion to G.o.d, with wording that remained eternally the same. He walked down the hall to p.i.s.s or spit. He stood by the window dreaming. This was the man he saw as himself. The biographer who didn't examine these things (not that there would ever be a biographer) couldn't begin to know the catchments, the odd-corner deeps of Bill's true life.

His book, smelling faintly of baby drool, was just outside the door. He heard it moan solemnly, the same grave sound that welled in his gut.

In the morning there was a knock at the door. Bill was sitting in a chair, dressed except for shoes and socks, cutting his sepia toenails. The visitor was George Haddad. Bill was only slightly surprised. He went back to the chair and resumed tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. George stood in a bare corner with his arms folded.

"I thought we might talk," he said. "I felt we were slightly inhibited with Mr. Everson in attendance. Besides, it's difficult to have a productive dialogue with bombs going off. And one can't talk in London anyway. It's the latest language hole in the Western world."

"What do we want to talk about?"

"This young man can't be saved. I'm not even saying released. He can't be saved, his life is at risk unless we're able to work without organizational pressures and without a constant police presence. "

"You said his freedom is tied to the media. Do we work without them?"

"London has failed. Everyone has a script he brings along. No one talks about ideas. I think we have to reduce the scale of this operation."

"The bomb has done that."

"Reduce it radically. You and I need to trust each other enough to start over, just the two of us, somewhere else. I live in Athens now. I'm conducting a seminar at the h.e.l.lenic-American Inst.i.tute. It's very possible, although I can't actually promise, but it's possible I can arrange for you to meet the one man who can literally open the bas.e.m.e.nt door and let the hostage go."

Bill said nothing. A moment pa.s.sed. George sat in the chair near the window.

"There's something I wanted to ask the other evening at dinner."

"What's that?"

"Do you use a word processor?"

Bill had his right foot bent into his left hand and was working the curved blade of the scissors under an inward twist in the hard thick nail of the big toe and he paused briefly, pursing his lips and shaking his head no.

"Because I find I couldn't conceivably operate without one. Move words, paragraphs, move a hundred pages, plus instant corrections. When I prepare material for lectures, I find the machine helps me organize my thoughts, gives me a text susceptible to revision. I would think for a man who clearly reworks and refines as much as you do, a word processor would be a major blessing."

Bill shook his head no.

"Of course I've asked myself what you have to gain by traveling to Athens under circ.u.mstances that might be called-what do we want to call these circ.u.mstances, Bill?"

"Shadowy."

"I've asked myself, Why would he say yes? What does he have to gain?"

"And what's your answer?"

"You have nothing to gain. There is no guarantee of accomplishing the slightest thing. There is only risk. Any adviser would stress the possibility of personal danger."

"I'd have to buy a shirt," Bill said.

"It's possible to talk in Athens. Beneath the frantic pace there is something I find conducive to reason and calm, to a settlement of differences. Not that I think you and I have deep disagreements at the level of ideas. Just the opposite in fact. We'll have a dialogue, Bill. Unfettered. No one coming round to set guidelines or issue ultimatums. I have a terrace with a sweeping view."

Bill had breakfast with the doctors. Just before noon he packed his bag and then paused by the open door and looked back into the room to make sure he'd left nothing behind. He went down to the lobby, checked out and walked a couple of blocks to a taxi rank. Look left. Look right. He imagined Charlie standing before a mirror knotting a brilliant necktie and waiting for the phone to ring. A cab came around a corner and headed toward him, the dark surface worked to a high shine. He got in, rolled down the window and sat back. For the first time he thought about the hostage.

10.

Scott was still doing lists, moving toward late May now, making lists of things that needed doing, doing the things, going along project by project, room by room. Of course the lists of things were also things. An item on a list might generate a whole new list. He knew if he wasn't careful he'd get mired in a theory of lists and lose sight of the things that needed doing. There was pleasure in lists, taut and clean. Making the list, crossing off the items as you complete the tasks. It was a small whole contentment, a way of working toward a new reality.

He knew where Karen was but not a word from son of a b.i.t.c.h Bill.

He went through the house, noting things that needed doing, determined to do them, bills, mail, some minor caulking and sc.r.a.ping, all the rearranging of papers. The point of these lists and tasks seemed to be that when you performed each task and crossed off the corresponding item on the list and when you crumpled and discarded all the lists and stood finally and self-reliantly in a list-free environment, sealed from worldly contact, you were proving to yourself that you could go on alone.

He sat at the desk in the workroom now, cleaning the typewriter. He blew on the keys, using a damp rag to lift dust and hair from the felt pad. He opened the drawer to his left, thinking of the next major item on his list, a plan to reorganize reader mail. The drawer held a couple of old wrist.w.a.tches and some stamps, rubber bands, erasers and foreign coins.

Bill was not a list-making novelist. He thought sentences lost their heft and edge when they were stretched too far and he didn't seem to find the slightest primal joy in world-naming or enumerating, in penetrating the relatedness of things or words, those breathy sentences that beat with new exuberance.

Scott stood and looked at the wall charts, the blueprints of Bill's long book. In over eight years here, he'd never had so close a look. Large foxed sheets filled with mystical graffiti. Even the tape that fixed the paper to the wall was sun-stained and coming loose. These were interesting things to study, all the arrows and scribbles and pictographs, the lines that connected dissimilar elements. Something primitive and brave-natured here. At least that's how it looked to Scott, examining each sheet. Themes and characters attempting to draw together, linked in squiggles and dash trails, an obsessive need to meet and maintain. Bill's long-suffering book. And Bill's own scratchy voice in one of his clear-souled semidrunks of some years ago, saying, "Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror."

Charles Everson was not returning calls. Not that he knew where Bill was and not that he would tell Scott even if he knew. No one knew. This was the essence of Bill's disappearance as Scott understood it. Scott understood it as a kind of simulated death.

He sat at the desk again, putting his face to the keys and blowing hard.

Bill had his picture taken not because he wanted to come out of hiding but because he wanted to hide more deeply, he wanted to revise the terms of his seclusion, he needed the crisis of exposure to give him a powerful reason to intensify his concealment. Years ago there were stories that Bill was dead, Bill was in Manitoba, Bill was living under another name, Bill would never write another word. These were the world's oldest stories and they were not about Bill so much as people's need to make mysteries and legends. Now Bill was devising his own cycle of death and resurgence. It made Scott think of great leaders who regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns. Mao Zedong of course. Mao was p.r.o.nounced dead many times in the press-dead or senile or too sick to run a revolution. Scott had recently come across a photograph of Mao taken in the course of his famous nine-mile swim at the age of seventy-two, following a long disappearance. Mao's old pelt head sticking out of the Yangtze, G.o.dlike and comic.

He opened the drawer to his right and found some more foreign coins, some binder clips and lapsed driver's licenses. He knew where Karen was, blank-faced in Manhattan, all receptors working. The next major item was reader mail, how to take it out of chronological order and structure it geographically, country by country, state by state.

He put his face to the keys and blew.

He raised the front end of the typewriter and rubbed the damp cloth over the pad, lifting dust and hair.

Mao used photographs to announce his return and demonstrate his vitality, to reinspire the revolution. Bill's picture was a death notice. His image hadn't become public yet and he was already gone. This was the crucial turn he needed in order to disappear completely, even from those he'd loved and trusted all these years. He would return in his own way, living somewhere else, more remotely, in one or another kind of disguise. Scott thought the photograph might make him look older. Not older in the picture but older as himself, after the fact of the picture. The picture would be a means of transformation. It would show him how he looked to the world and give him a fixed point from which to depart. Pictures with our likeness make us choose. We travel into or away from our photographs.

He opened the middle drawer and found a narrow black brush, some stamps, some rubber bands and old lead pennies and a bottle of typewriter correction fluid.

Bill would make a return to the book. This was the essence of Bill's return. He would work on the novel with fresh energy, cut it back, gut it, strip it six ways to Sunday. He's a new man now. He has the power of a reconstructed secret. Scott imagined him hunched over a desk, working the old spare territories of the word.

He lifted the typewriter cover and cleaned the hammers with the black brush.

He put his face to the keys and blew.

Karen's life had no center with Bill on the lam. She was all drift and spin. Scott missed her in more ways than he could name. He was left with the memorized body, the ageless shape and cadence and the way she arched and twisted, dull-eyed in the near terror of this approaching thing, then all the noise descending on their last held stroke. It was broken down to match-light in his brain. He half hated her and badly wanted her back. She was the one love, the routine astonishment, someone you could dream of as your sister and then wake to find next to you in bed, without shame or contradiction. Every time she heard a creak in the floor she thought it was an armed attack. Always on nameless alert. She used to say to him, If people knew what I was thinking they would put me away forever. But they would put us all away, he said. They have put us away. We are put away for our thoughts, one way or another. We have put ourselves away, he said. Pleasure in lists. The old black keys were smudged by years of anxious pawing. He used the damp cloth, rubbing one key at a time. There was happiness in these little fixit missions, the dignity of keeping on.

Everson was tight-lipped in his tower redoubt. Mao aswim in his river. The night before on TV Scott had seen some footage shot by a tourist in rural China and it showed strange things, it showed a Chinese Christian cult in a meeting by a river and they were in the midst of a collective ascension with young men and women walking into the river arms aloft, faltering, swirling, many swept downstream. The footage was shaky and had a quality of delirium, an abnormal subjectivity, the kind of offhand amateur fleetness that was hard to trust, but they used slow motion and stop-action and they circled floating heads and then they ran it all from the start, people dressed mainly in white marching into the river in sets of two and three, arms still flying as the heads disappeared. And Karen not here to see it. A bonanza for our gal Karen. And Karen drifting and spinning. He looked at the wall charts. He could arrange the reader mail geographically or maybe book by book, although there was a great deal of mail that referred to both books or neither book, the philosophical mail, the stories of writerly desire, the verities and nullities. Bill was hiding from his photograph. He'd engineered the whole d.a.m.n thing the same d.a.m.n way he developed impressionistic ailments that he could then control with medication.

He put his face to the keys and blew.

He opened the lower righthand drawer, the deep compartment designed for files, and he saw some old pa.s.sports, old bank books, he saw some postcards from daughter Liz.

Bill's return would not be complete without Scott, of course. When the time was right Bill would contact him. A phone call, a few terse instructions. Scott would deal with the house and furnishings, all the legalities of selling and closing, and he would spend many days packing ma.n.u.scripts and books and shipping them to Bill and would then work out the final quiet arrangements and do the last little things and drive off in the long night to join Bill and make their new beginning.

There was a packet of letters from Bill's sister. He knew Bill had grown up with an older sister in various places in the Midwest and the Great Plains but the most recent of the letters was eleven years old, so maybe she was dead. He found Bill's army discharge papers and some insurance policies and a doc.u.ment labeled Notification of Birth Registration. This piece of paper advised that there was a record of birth preserved in the state office for the registration of vital statistics, Des Moines, Iowa. Near the bottom of the page was a seal marked Department of Commerce. The date on the doc.u.ment corresponded to Bill's date of birth, which Scott had seen many times on records and forms, and the name of the child was Willard Skansey Jr.

He put his face to the keys and blew.

He moved the typewriter and other objects to the radiator cover and ran the damp cloth over the desktop.

He took a closer look at the army discharge and saw the same name that appeared on the birth registration.

Bill was not an autobiographical novelist. You could not glean the makings of a life-shape by searching his work for clues. His sap and marrow, his soul's sharp argument might be slapped across a random page, sentence by sentence, but nowhere a word of his beginnings or places he has lived or what kind of man his father might have been.

He put the typewriter back on the desk.

A bank robber's name. Or a tough welterweight of the 1930s with his hair parted in the middle. A bank robber lying low between jobs.

He read some of the letters. He read the postcards from Liz, he looked at the photographs in the canceled pa.s.sports and read the place names stamped on the old pages, thick and web-engraved. He read the rest of the letters from sister Clair, moving the chair nearer the window as dusk fell, ordinary news of weather and children and croup, pale-blue ink on lined paper.

There's so much paper in this house.

Then he turned on the lamp and went to work on his lists until it was time for dinner.