The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Part 6

And her saying, "Why?" Not one of the responses I had antic.i.p.ated.

"I'm working on a story. And I was wondering if you'd be interested. Either of you. Or both."

Claire drew back an inch and smiled polite incomprehension. How could she know what I meant? I hardly knew myself.

"It's a story about food," I improvised.

She stopped chewing. Swallowed and hardened her eyes, showing, I suppose, that you can carry this silliness too far.

"Not about food actually, but a chef. I'm basing it on a real person. Named Hadashi. Who has a reputation for giving performances that are a bit over the line. Dinner extravaganzas, that sort of thing. He cooks children or something."

Claire spread b.u.t.ter on her bagel, bit, and chewed provocatively. "Hmmm. What does he really do?"

"A little magic, a little culinary art, a little p.o.r.nography. At times I think he can be a bit indelicate, so if you're put off by ..."

"He's some kind of performance artist, right?"

"Look, the only thing I know for certain is that there's s.e.x above and below and inside of everything we put into our mouths...." I waited, and she waited with me to see how this new silliness would end. "And that your other housemate, Samantha ..." I drew my finger through the faint film of grease coating the tabletop, making an elegant snail's path that stopped in front of her plate, where I pressed down hard, then lifted, so that the residual stickiness tugged at the skin of my fingertip. "... and her friend Jamie were making love on this table exactly one minute before you sat down."

She laughed out loud.

Perhaps that was when I fell in love. I don't know. It was hard to tell at the time, and I was as vacant as an empty room. I knew that Claire was one of the little literary girls who hang around every literary event at every college in the country. Then disappear. So I must have known from the start that I would lose her. I just didn't know what it would mean. I suppose I thought the story itself would save me.

I mean, if you're the writer ... right?

7.

Hadashi did not look beyond our table when he asked for volunteers. And he was reaching out his hand even before Claire rose up from her seat. Whispering to her while she ascended the stairs, as if I had nothing at all to do with this part of the story. My friend Robert, always on the periphery of darkness, stood close enough that I could see the confusion, then the alarm, spreading across his face.

"I thought she wanted to go home," I shrugged.

He gave me a tense smile, Robert did, and then slipped away to the bar, where he engaged one of the waitresses in conversation, both of them glancing at me from time to time. Though I gave them nothing in return. My eye stayed upon Hadashi and the magic he was working in the delicate light that I had seen somewhere before.

When he hypnotized her, it was like a courtship. He did it without orb or pendulum, just soft words and slight touches of the hand, caressing her shoulder as he whispered, lifting one of the wavelets of her hair-all the things that I myself had not thought to do. And soon she was asleep, responding occasionally with a murmur or a moan too private to be translated. Until finally Hadashi lifted Claire's hand into the light, where it seemed to float. Then he lowered it, soothing her body at the same time with those wavering motions of his hand. Then he brought his face closer to hers and gave her the same kiss he had given the moth.

I had to blink to convince myself I had not been hypnotized as well.

During this interlude a mute, faceless corps of attendants began to rearrange the stage. They transformed the empty s.p.a.ce into an imaginary banquet hall, with pasteboard columns and crumbling arches. The veils and tapestries of a castle. A wooden table as long as a ship-one chair at either end and a vast expanse between. All of this accomplished against a backdrop of half a dozen figures straining to roll a crude new shape onto center stage, a machine of some sort, an iron engine with levers and dials and hinged doors leaking an orange glow. It was as ma.s.sive as a locomotive and, very soon, as loud. What it gave out was the rush of a blowtorch, and what we saw inside, through the one low portal, was a hurricane of fire.

Then four more attendants emerged, carrying on their shoulders a metal tray, which they lowered onto the banquet table. It looked like a shallow coffin, blackened by fire and dented by long use, its meaning made more obscure by the last figure to leave the stage, who emptied two buckets of water into its length. The whole scene was like watching a circus, our eyes flitting among dark impressions and being drawn back inevitably to the one figure whose slightest movement suggested new illusions and new meanings. And it was not long before he had refocused our attention by making the most mundane of gestures. Hadashi took up a pair of scissors from his table of props and raised them above his head, making several snips into the air. Nothing mysterious, he seemed to be saying. Scissors. Just like the ones you use at home.

Then he stepped behind Claire, making with his left hand a sweeping gesture as if to offer, ladies and gentlemen, an appreciative view.

Then raised the scissors again with his right hand and gave two distinct snips above her head. The blades sliced through the air, and Claire's dress fell to her feet. Then her underclothing, rings, watch, and necklace fell away with the second snip. I saw it and did not doubt the magic, because I already knew the truth of her. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s hardly noticeable except for their delicate whiteness. Her body straight and sad. A pillow of thick, dark hair where her legs met. She was as frail and lovely as a luna moth. And as cold and quiet as a corpse.

Hadashi stiffened the fingers of one hand and by degrees levitated her, suspending Claire, the girl who wanted to go home, above the metal coffin. Then lowered her with barely a ripple. The rest was either frightening or not, because of its familiarity. He used the same sword that he had used before. And he moved in a sort of ballet. Slicing the fruit and floating it next to her body. Scattering chrysanthemum petals over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Adding plums, peaches, water chestnut, and mushrooms. Coating her with honey and caressing the unresisting form of her. Then kissing the apple and planting it deeply between her legs. Until at last he gave a final, soothing pa.s.s of the hand as if to urge her into a deeper sleep. And the metal lid descended, and was clamped shut. The a.s.sistants carried her the way they would have carried a casket, opened the iron lips of the oven, and let the flames lick forth. It was Hadashi himself who shoved her into the inferno.

And then we waited.

There were more tricks of course, more spectacles. Perhaps an hour of them, I'm not sure. My eyes found their occupation among the orange and blue flames. Until finally. They drew her forth again and set the sarcophagus upon the banquet table once more. Someone poured water over the lid, creating an immense cloud of steam that drifted over us, the audience. A man with quilted gloves unclamped the lid, and Hadashi himself lifted the cover, his face obscured by more escaping steam. Then he dipped a ladle into the mixture, tasted it ruefully, smiled. And we smiled with him. We were amused. It was all so absurd.

He had transformed her into an old woman, a sleeping spinster with boiling liquid gurgling all about her. The skin had cracked and peeled in places, turned shiny and dark in others. Her belly had grown soft and swollen, while vague strips of flesh hung loosely at her hips and thighs. It was marvelous, said a woman at a near table, as real as a roasted turkey: no one is more exacting than the j.a.panese magician. There was ripe applause as people stood on tiptoe to get their look-skin pulling away from wrist and ankles, the hair on her head and the now tiny patch between her legs looking as though it had been spun from sugar, charred, and some of it burned away. It was all too much, they agreed. Not a detail left undone. Even the face had its perfect sheen, the surface drawn back by the fire's delicate fingers and melded to the skull. The lips as though they had been sewn shut. The eyes like varnished slits. And nervous laughter all around.

It took a moment for Hadashi to silence the crowd, but, as Robert had said, we had given ourselves over to the perfect showman, and he was insistent upon his final effect.

He reached out his hand and clutched the air, pulling invisible strings toward him; and the body began to stir. The woman in the coffin raised one knee slightly and moaned, some of the liquid sloshing, sizzling against the sides. The head turned to face us, and one of the eyes cracked open. She seemed to be examining her own arm like a mummy just awakening from its long sleep, but I do not think she was surprised by the crumbling flesh. I think she was looking at me, searching for something I could not give or say. And it was the j.a.panese magician who kissed her hand and laid it gently over her breast and brushed her lips with his own.

When the lights came on again, the stage was clear.

8.

What I have discovered is that the floor of my hospital room is as bright and chitinous as a beetle's sh.e.l.l. When I look down, I see my face floating several inches beneath a surface of stone, distorted, like moonlight stretched across water. Maybe that's the way she sees me now. Or maybe that's the way she sees my story, because she's looking down herself, and the blanket has slipped from her lap and made itself into a mountainous island upon a faraway sea. And the face that she has found, I suspect, is not mine, but her mother's face. I think she's beginning to understand.

"Why would you make up something like that?" she said. "Why would you tell me a story like that?"

"Because I never fell out of love with her. Ever."

"You divorced her. And then she died."

"Of breast cancer, two years, three months, and six days after. I know. That's why I'm telling you what really happened."

"It's not going to happen to you."

"No, I'm not afraid of that. What I'm trying to tell you is that, shortly before your mother died ..."

"Look, you don't have to do this."

"... I began taking my students to lunch."

"Pop ..."

"I would put them into my stories-it would never amount to much-and they would be sweet and delicious for a while. Then they would drift away. Marry their young men. It certainly wasn't real to me, and I doubt that it was for them. But each time they drifted away, there was this little pinp.r.i.c.k that reminded me of something."

"Is that what happened with Claire?"

"I suppose."

"And it reminded you of what?"

"That I was famous for a while. After that first book. Then the novel came along, and I developed a taste for the real thing. It's what fame will do; I'm just surprised at how little it took. To ruin things, I mean."

"You don't need to do this, Jack."

"You've got a family, a real family. You can do better."

"You don't have to do any of this."

"I know. I'm just trying to tell you where I've been for the past ten years. Besides, how was I supposed to know it was a love story?"

"Go back to sleep. I'll be there when you wake up."

"The trick, you see, is to face all this without falling into sentimentality. That's the trick. I just ... I loved her so much."

9.

"You mind if I ask you something, Jack?"

I can hear Robert's voice, and when I open my eyes, I can see his lugubrious face. He reminds me of Bogart just after the plane leaves. Every time I come to the club I expect to see him in a gray fedora and double-breasted suit, except that would be too informal. Robert is a tuxedo man. The starched shirt, the satin stripe and satin lapels seem to hold him together, to frame his overriding decency in a way that words cannot. And for the first time, in any version of the story, I wonder what I look like to him. Maybe like a drunk just lifting his head from the bar.

"What ...?"

"You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm okay. Where is everybody?"

"Gone."

"The kid I was with?"

"You took her home, Jack. You don't remember that?"

"No. How about Hadashi?"

"Gone. They're all gone. I mean, h.e.l.l, Jack, it's your story. You're telling me you don't know what happens?"

"Is that what you were going to ask?"

"No. No, as a matter of fact, I was going to ask why you picked the thirties. I mean, you weren't even alive then, right?"

"I don't know. I suppose I thought it was safe-innocent or something. The time before the war and all that. Maybe stories I heard from my parents. I don't know."

"Because, you know, what it looks like from this side ... kind of like it's all starting to unravel on you."

"Just tell me one thing, Robert. Do you remember a c.o.c.ktail waitress named Ann Marie?"

"That's who you're looking for, somebody named Ann Marie?"

"Yeah."

Robert walks behind the bar and selects a half-empty bottle from among the rows. Balances two gla.s.ses in the palm of his hand. "Nope. I don't remember anybody by that name. And I remember 'em all; it's my job."

"That's too bad."

One of the waiters has upended the last of the chairs, and now the tables all look as if they're wearing crowns. Someone is sweeping near the piano. And someone else is wringing out a mop, then making long liquid strokes, turning the floor into a reflecting pool. There's a hint of daylight around the window frames, maybe enough to suggest that the night is finally over. Robert pours two drinks and slides one in my direction.

"Tell me something else, Jack. Back there when you said you were going to make some changes ..." He raised his gla.s.s in my direction, then took a sip with his eyes closed. Popped his lips apart and planted his elbows on the bar. "What was that all about?"

I raised my own gla.s.s, and we took another long drink together. Finally he understood.

"I'll be taking over the club myself for a while."

"Ah."

"I appreciate everything you've done, Robert. I really do."

"Yeah. Thanks."

"It's getting a little late, I realize that. And I'm sorry, I really am."

"It's okay, Jack. You don't have to be sorry."

"It's just something I have to do."

"Yeah." He finished his drink and came out from behind the bar. We shook hands in front of the stage where Hadashi had worked his magic.

I was afraid at first that Robert would not see the door, but I need not have worried. Like all great politicians, my good friend had known from the first how to take his exit. He straightened his jacket and, from a distance of eight or ten feet, gave a modest wave as he turned toward the corridor. Walking a bit stiffly perhaps. But, unless I am very much mistaken, Robert Ha.s.sard gave me a quick wink as he faced the long hall; then, smoothing back his hair just as Bogart would have done, he fronted the door and reached for its handle. There was a cold light that fanned out across the floor and a vague movement on the other side of the threshold. Then he was gone.

The sweeper went back to his sweeping. I rocked the ice in my gla.s.s and thought that, if he had only asked, I would have gladly walked with him into the light.

Abduction.

Here's a flash. If I phone them, it's a story. If they phone me, it's therapy. No exceptions. And that's the tabloid truth. So usually I say this-I ask 'em, I say, you got pictures? You got some way I can verify this c.r.a.p? And then of course about half of them hang up. The other half are inventive. It's why I throw away my life in Best Western parking lots, isn't it? Waiting for Elvis or some woman with a two-headed baby. Because you never know.

So, anyhow, this kid's cracking the door just enough to show one of those flannel granny gowns. Pink d.a.m.n flowers from neck to ankle, one hand on the k.n.o.b and one on the chain like some old lady who's suddenly got second thoughts about turning in the Satan worshiper across the street. And I'm outside in what pa.s.ses for a hallway thinking, okay, okay, at least you believe, while I flash her some ID and start crooning. "Hi. I'm Barry Nussbaum. From the Global-Star?"