TWENTY-TWO
It was in the air. One could feel it in London. It seemed to vibrate the telephone wires, rattle the panes of glass, pulsate and roll across the slate gray sky like Ezekiel’s celestial chariot.
If you motored to the south coast, which we often did, it was even more apparent. The incessant and ceaseless movement of men and machines along narrow wet roads. Identification numbers were blacked out and insignia carefully taped over. There were night maneuvers in full swing. Gavin and I pulled to the side of the road and allowed a convoy heading south to swing past us. Sometimes charcoal blacked out faces met us along twilight roads. Black, charcoaled faces are curiously and unsettling impassive. They are secret faces, reluctant to reveal the innermost heart of their warring souls, their placidity is an oddly inhuman thing. It is almost as if, gazing into one, you saw a caricature of an ideal of what a human face should resemble. And like all ideals, it was simply a distillation of our most common elements; part fraud and part truth.
I knew it was decidedly forbidden to spread rumors during wartime. It was well known that gossip literally sank ships. The propaganda posters of the day were perversely literalistic; they controlled the industrious wartime masses with such stark reminders of the individual’s power to destroy the war effort with such gems as this: an image of a sailor drowning in choppy, debris strewn waters; his hand outstretched in one last desperate attempt to stay afloat, his face twisted in agony, fear and despair. The caption below reads: “Someone spoke!”
Another poster plastered on walls and doors featured a stylish man in a fedora and pin stripe suit driving a convertible down a pleasant, tree lined two lane highway. In the passenger seat sits a rather grim and humorous black line outline of Adolph Hitler himself; the caption reads: “When you ride alone you ride with Hitler.”
And another: curled at the left-most top of a piece of cartoonishly styled paper, is an assemblage of everyday household items purposefully arranged to resemble a scowling, demonic Fuhrer, his nose a down turned stopper and an opposing brush from a rubber cement cap, the crease between his eyes a paper clip, a staple remover a satanically twisted over a metal washer eye, a rubber band standing in for a lower wrinkle and pins, arranged around his nose and mouth, the stress lines of an all too active mouth. Above it all reads the distressingly literal caption “Waste Helps the Enemy, Conserve Materials”.
Further down the wall is a poster with a hand, whose arm is off stage to the right, is holding a frying pan full of cooking oil. The vicious liquid falls with the force of gravity into a ball of incendiary matter, bright orange and yellow, and from that tumult emerge a host of moving ordinance, traveling toward the viewer. The caption, sandwiched between the pan and the snubbed torpedoes reads “Save Waste Fats for Explosives. Take them to your meat dealer.”
Some were of a more ominous character: a hooded Hun, bolts jutting out of his helmeted temples, bright slitted yellow eyes peering over a dull black wall, his noir penetrating pupils the very embodiment of a noxious evil that only Germany can produce in the eyes of its enemies. The caption, in white block letters against the black, featureless wall, reads: “He’s watching you,” the You twice the length of the ‘he’s watching’ segment, as if to prove that no one is immune from the Hun’s supernumerary skills.
Brown eyes gaze from a deceptively placid face whose malevolence is only revealed by an unkind slant of an upturned brow, and the subtle maniacal smile pressed, reluctant and duplicitous, from anemic white lips. Above, the disquieting caption is in newsprint black, capitalized like a scandalous headline in some yellow daily rag” “WANTED! For Murder: Her Careless Talk Costs Lives.”
It was a time when such unmediated and drastic events seemed all too probable. It was as if the laws of cause and effect were no longer fully functioning. One could speak to a neighbor about a ships movement in the North Atlantic and through a feat of mystical connection lead to its utter destruction
In such a supernatural environment of fabulous case and effect, it was best to keep one’s mouth firmly shut.
But the conclusions were there for the picking: this was the staging for the largest invasion in the history of humanity.
As if in a counter poise in my life, situations accelerated. A certain unwavering momentum had brought me to this dreadful moment.
Back in London again: I kissed Clare’s fleshy, salted lips. Her small quick tongue darted in and out of my mouth. She sat on my lap, her elongated fingers caressing my temples, stroking the hair on the back of my neck, brushing along my broad shoulders with her feathered finger tips. I pulled up her little blue and white fisherman’s jersey and followed the pleasing bulge of her smooth abdomen. She was panting with pleasure. Situations were accelerating. Suddenly, as she sat in my lap, lapping from my mouth, Clare spit the words out:
“You’re such a fraud,”
“What do you mean? There is nothing false about me at all. What you see is what you get.”
“I just don’t know,” she said, leaning her slim arm over my shoulder, running her spindly fingers through the short hairs of my neck. “Something about you just rings hollow, untrue. Despite your obvious presence here, there is a part of you that you’re holding back.”
“It’s all there for you to see, darling,” I said with duplicity.
“No. There are times when I get the fleeting impression that you are more than one chap. It happens more than you may suppose. When you’re not looking; when you’re turned around; when you’re guard is down; when you’re drunk, or when you too painfully sober…”
“What happens?” I asked with a noticeable tremor in my voice.
“A part of you detaches itself from the main bulk, I think, and takes on a life of its own…”
I prevented her from speaking any further. My tongue moved into the furthest recess of her mouth. I carried her to the bed; she wrapped the pale yellow high green downy forearms around my neck. She was all beneath me; slow, lugubrious, quiet, purposeful; a full fusion of Clare and us.
When we were through we lay still on the bed. Her soft hand was still wrapped around my head, cupping the lowest portion of my skull, at the bumpy protuberance where spine joins skull .
“You’re still a fraud,” she said, tickling the lobe of my ear.
EIGHTEEN
What I did was an inherent risk of choice making. I hid Mother away. I knew, when I committed such an act, that vital elements that were endlessly at attention, forever ridged and waiting for their orders, had effectively been forever dismissed. I let them go and they would never return. I knew what I was doing. I blame no one but myself.
Four days before leaving for Harvard I broke through Mother’s sanctum sanctorum. I confidently strolled over the threshold of her self-imposed exile and confronted her.
In my youthful hubris, with my newly won rogue’s dash (I was eighteen, after all, and the center of the universe) --- I wanted to impose order on Mother. I felt like Tiberius brashly and unceremoniously tearing through the curtain separating the most holy precinct of the Temple from the profane counter-quarters, where the High Priest enters but once a year.
There was no ark in this temple, however. I found a disheveled and surly old woman stooping over some sowing, the only light filtered through some mangled Venetian blinds as if a creature with ragged claws had mangled them for no better reason than to see if he could. She looked up at me immediately. Of course I had seen her many times in the last six years, but never in her realm. A confrontation was long overdue.
I was leaving New York. This ludicrous Gothic game was over. I was beginning a fresh, wholesome start. Before I left I intended to leave a retainer in my place to manage Mother, Homer, and the servants that remained in our employ. I was here to impose a substrate on this infernal mess. She lowered her sowing and fixed her sloping, myopic eyes on me. I could see she was having problems focusing on me.
“Homer?” she asked.
“No, Mother, Langley,” I said. She wrinkled her nose and took up her sewing. “Why are you here Langley?’ she asked indifferently. Indifferently! And here I was working so hard to set right what had lain broken for so long!
“I’m leaving next week Mother and I wanted to discuss some arrangements I’ve made for you and Homer.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, squinting at a piece of cloth, holding it to the pale swatch of light filtering dustily through the blind. “To school mother, to Harvard. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh,” she said, suddenly rising, “that’s in Boston…” She left the Sitting Room and inexplicably entered the bedroom. Mother never obeyed stage directions.
The moldy chair that held my body creaked as I shifted my weight. Outside, the leaves of a Norway maple were wilting from the summer sunshine. Inside an air of expectation, a cool and damp counter-point to the stifling outside, clung drearily to the room.
I gazed to my left: a small bottle rested on a carved wooden niche. Holding it up to my face I blew the dust ceilingward and found it was what I thought it to be: the Bonhomme Richard carefully tucked into its bottle by Langley Vandemark, ten years before. The rigging was disintegrating, the hold was peppered with black soot, the masts carefully folded to fit the hull into the bottle and the raised in situ; the ship had become detached from its mooring and listed to the right. The ship was carefully laid out on a stylized blue-green ocean of molded rubber, and had shifted from the indentation where it had rested for years and was sliding across the surface anchored only by the bow, which, through some miracle, remained fixed with a pin point of adhesive glue.
“Mother!” I cried, rousing myself, for I had not yet begun to fight, “Mother, I’ve hired a man to look after the house, you and Homer when I’m at Cambridge.”
No answer. Silence. There was a racket of fumbling in the next room. The sound of Mother rifling through her cluttered possessions. I entered the bedroom. She was stooped over a large chest. Her long matted gray hair hung down over her forehead, concealing her face. Her skinny arms were surprisingly agile as she rolled a bolt of lime green fabric from the chest to the floor.
“I wish this didn’t happen,” she said witchily.
“What? What do you wish never happened?” I asked.
“I wish you boys didn’t come into this room and disturb my things. You know I don’t want you boys coming in here without my permission.”
“But we don’t Mother. No one comes in here but you,” I answered testily.
She looked at me with her gray-yellow eyes. Time stood still in those dim orb; dull orbs that hung down in the darkness.
SEVENTEEN
A possible genesis: from the murky vault of my memory I can produce an incident that could expose all my subsequent ills to the light of day, give them a pattern, a delicate explanatory weave we can lightly trace with the tip of the index finger like a finely wrought spider’s web.
What a fraud the world is! Can the etiology of my ills really be reduced to the following banal story of childhood? A cliche schoolyard tale that once revealed, is torn apart like a holiday turkey ceaselessly, monotonously, picked from the bone, in an annual orgy. Would it, could it be that simple? It all began with a gross overstatement, an amplification of a promise to promote security and confidence and trust, that backfired, producing the opposite character traits… that ended in…
Mother again. Sweet, beautiful, ruinous Mother. She is wearing a cotton summer dress with a floral pink pattern. As I walked beside her, her peppermint fragrance was my protective cloud. Her slim wrists and tiny hands were holding my miniature six year old hand. When I leaned far enough to the right, I could brush against her thigh, my hand could dangle against her firm calf. But she would constantly hoist me upright, lever my arm to get me to stand up straight and continue the march toward the nursery school.
The nursery school was a spatiophobic’s daymare. Everyday it swarmed with different mealy-mouthed children. There was no opportunity to develop respectable, repeatable patterns and rhythms. Everyday I was expected to change with the prevailing conditions. Even at so tender and unformed an age, the open-endedness of the nursery resounded hollow and dull in my cavernous head. Moving from table to table, activity to activity, each motion drenched with meaning and choice, made young Langley Vandemark freeze with decision dread.
My mother was sure to give me, everyday without fail, a wad of handkerchiefs for my perpetually runny noise. I packed the handkerchiefs in a tight bundle and bunched it in my pocket and pretended it was a turtle. It was my turtle, hidden away, given to me by my dear, sweet, trustful mother; a turtle, a creature that carries its simple home on its back was the fitting metaphor for my Vandemark microcosm.
I’m fussing. Mother tugged at me gently.
“Now Langley, you’re not to fuss.”
“But I don’t want to leave you Momma. I want to marry you. Are you really gonna wait outside for me?”
“Yes, Langley, I never go home. I always wait outside for you. And you can’t marry me I’m married already.”
I was in the big room, sitting at a table cutting large hearts from red construction paper. It was Valentine’s Day. It was for Mother. But the day outside was unseasonably warm. A bright sun, perfectly illuminating the world so that every absence could be noted (the perfect sun to illuminate a primal loss), blared down like house lights in a theatre.
We children were marshaled out into the cobbled schoolyard. The school yard was a featureless escarpment with unimpeded, views of the surrounding neighborhood for fantastic mile after fantastic mile. Young Langley squinted into that awful white illumination. Fearful Langley surveyed the scene as tears rolled down his puffy cheeks. She was not there. She was not by the lamppost. She was not standing on the trolley platform. She was not in the tobacco shop where she supposedly bought me chocolates. She was nowhere to be found. The street was empty.
Like all scenes of primal loss this moment was not without its mythological import. A creepy, uneven shadow crept across the uptown city-scape. What exactly was happening here? A presence seemed to leave the world, a presence largely benign. What replaced it was a shadow entity. An idea that perhaps there was more to my narrative self than I am revealing; a shadow entity lurking in the crevices, stoking me to the gills with pathologies that are not my birthright. A parallel track that is strangely akin to mine yet wholly divorced and alien. It crawls along at the margins and demands a portion of a patrimony that belongs to him and to him alone, the nasty fraud!
Eventually, Young Langley, reduced to near hysterics, is segregated from the other children. He was kept aside and monitored, with the hopes that he will calm down.
Eventually he did, of course, but a slight flutter was introduced into an otherwise simple system of checks and balances. Mother was no longer a unitary creature of unalloyed love and worthiness. From this conclusion a simple analogy was constructed: if mother is flickering and unstable then the world cannot exist on a solid foundation. If the world does not exist on a solid foundation then the world may not exist or may exist in several senses. The flickering life began.
“I was out buying you chocolates, Langley, that’s why I wasn’t there.”
Ah, yes, and it was true. Chocolates always awaited me when beautiful Mother, her pale blue eyes glistening with love and tender recognition as she picked me out of the crowd of pre-schoolers for the leisurely walk to the brownstone.
And then, once home, the handkerchief turtle became yet another square of white cloth again, and the world became a uniform, wonderfully bland globe of undifferentiated love, acceptance and deception. But the crack was there: focus in on young six year old Langley and you could see the fine fissure running from the small of his back up and around his waist until it halts somewhere near his sternum, that inadequate plate of bone that is supposed to protect the heart, which is erroneously described as the seat of emotions.
This scheme has worked against me as well.
Flip flop the roles and see how it works reversed:
“Why don’t we marry?” I asked Clare, lifting up my bulk on a ninety degree elbow and forearm, casting a critical glance at the gray-green haze that was Clare Mumpy.
“I don’t believe in marriage during war. People get married for the wrong reasons.”
“But you’ll become an American,” I told her.
“Why would I want to be an American,” she asked.
“Everyone wants to be an American.”
“That’s rot. I hate Americans. I want to stay single. I want to keep my options open. Why would I want to tie myself down?”
And she was right. I was galled because I was on the dirty end of the stick, but she understood, in excellent Vandemark fashion, that every choice, no matter how fabulously dense in its evocative hope, however expansive in rich glittering vistas of possibility, is a form of death.
For at the beginning of the race we stand naked and ready to face a world dense with sinuous branches. The hope, that hope, that we can be or do anything is only extinguished by forward momentum, by natural capacities tested or by concomitant failures acknowledged and abandoned, by circumstances or accidents beyond control, and by our own unfailing need to constantly make choices.
By exercising this doggedly persistent impulse we actually destroy the one mechanism we possess to guide our life. We chose our own deaths. We make a choice and guide ourselves down a path that narrows with each fork; and the forks, as we progress, become fewer and far between, until we reach the point of absolute nullity, that infernal spot with no choice inherent in it; a spot that no one can squirm out of…
But for young Langley Vandemark, hat perched jauntily on his broad forehead, wrinkled jacket rakishly thrown over his bulky shoulder, lightly skipping toward a Chock Full O' Nuts truck on the corner of Madison and 42nd, death had been given a decisive knock about the head and neck. And Clare, escaping from my rascally clutches, had shape shifted away from a possible world, and delayed, much to her credit and to my immeasurable shame ---- the impending tick-tock of the maw.
Or shift to the daylight realm and take Rhonda Boule a little before the war. I was twenty-five, she, a tender twenty-one or two. She was one of those marvelously adaptive young women one encountered before the war who does not get much press.
She emigrated from some grid-plan capital city of some spacious Midwestern state, settling down in New York for vague aesthetic and professional motivations. She lived alone, on her own income, frugally but with a certain flashy style.
She decorated her single room Murray Hill apartment with baubles won for her from brawny, brainless beaus on hot summer’s evenings at Coney Island amusement concessions. Stiff maroon animals stuffed with unpliable saw dust sat impassively on a small shelf; a marksmanship trophy stuffed with wax apples rested on the lip of the window sill; a diorama of a bowling alley, decorated with colorfully painted, minature bowlers, the paint, distractingly enough, unevenly applied and skewed during mass production: the bowler’s facial features dripping on a collar, or a flesh colored paint snaking up a sleeve.
Rhonda herself held her firm sturdy, corn fed body upright from mere youthfulness alone. Everything that would eventually sag from weight and persistent gravity was tight and round with a certain solid, symmetrical configuration. She had auburn hair with jet black roots, a shinning button nose that she constantly dulled with granulated white talcum powder. She rouged her half apple cheeks and applied bright primary colored lipstick to her broad honey sweet lips as if it was erotic war paint or she was eros’ medicine man.
Taking a mid-town subway on a summer night (for it was a summer romance, and so all the more heartbreaking in its pathos: it is speckled in my memory with late day hazy humid sunshine beneath the dusty Norway maples of Murry Hill. It is sound tracked by the sudden after work cessation of traffic of bustling mid-town; it is scented by the ozone humid detumesence that follows a brief summer shower.)
Take a look at strapping me in my white summer suit, some kind of profusion of posies in my mitts, striding up the subway steps two at a time, bright floral tie flapping out of my seersucker, light straw hat perched high on my oblong Vandemark pate, joyful because I’m at a fork and I haven’t chosen a path yet, gleeful because I can see my life cleaving in two, forming parallel paths after they separate from a single stubborn point… and I’m dawdling; I am savoring the sensation of my own lassitude.
If life wants to force me to show my hand (and it has that power, it reserves that right, of course), then I can be petulantly playful as I lower my cards. I can savor the dread as fate awaits even the slightest twitch of my globular hands.
She is unstrapping her garter belt and removing her stockings. She is folding her girdle neatly over a wooden chair. Her deflated dress dangles from a wire hanger just over her vanity mirror. She sits perched on her wicker stool, rounded buttocks spilling over the leather confines, forming pleasant roundlets, and brushing her hair repeatedly, fifty strokes for each side of her evenly parted straight hair.
Soon that hair will spread out in wild sprays on the pillow when we make love. I stand behind her running my hands over her pale shoulders, occasionally cupping her prodigious breasts. She squirms, letting out peels of girlish laughter. Her reflective, imitation, immature little girl blue green eyes sparkle at me from the mirror, approving and disapproving in gorgeous simultaneity all of my naughty forays.
I will marry this plump little girl. Her firm baby fat body will incubate as many robust Vandemark’s as eggs she posess and sperm I can implant. And I will don a suit, and ride the subway downtown. And in the gray-green twilight I descend in the elevator and ride the careening subway uptown. And mundanely, she will be there, baby-fat more mature, less firm, surrounded by a brood of children. I will eat and drink, urinate and defecate, age and work, reproduce myself and die.
I let my hand drop from Rhonda’s broad shoulder. It is late at night. I look out the window and see the line of cars stopped at a red light on Madison Avenue. The light turns and the cars surge ahead to the next set of lights that turn red almost immediately.
I finished. I lay on the bed exhausted. Rhonda snuggles up and kisses my lips. Her heavy breasts pressing against my forearm. I can feel dead-weight on my brain for the first time in my twenty-five years. I realized, as those soft hands gropped about my body, that possible worlds were a cruel lie and impossible duty for a man whose vision was not just a keen twenty-twenty, but supernaturally acute --- from that point on I would use all my weight to halt forward progress.
As I rode Rhonda’s elevator down and pushed the sliding door, its rotating plates of glass glittering in the morning sun and stepped heavy footed and certain unto the terra firma of Madison Avenue, I knew that I would never marry that plump, solid, loving, perfectly acceptable girl.
I would never look back (and I did not, until now). The garters would hang limply on the chair, the bra would be slung over the vanity mirror, but some other man would leave a depression in the bed next to Rhonda after he rose to go to work. Some other man would stand stiffly down the aisle as a veiled Rhonda, donned in virginal white, took the somber teary stroll on her father’s arm. She would lock in her future with a certitude I could never dream of; she would never balk at the crossroad when it came. She would make the ontologically sound choice. She was not, after all, a Vandemark.
The moors were a dark sea, and I wrapped my cape around my squared shoulders, pulled my cap down over my beetled brow, and stepped deeper into that gloom… hoping against all odds that the driving pelting rain, the cold brutally sheering wind, would somehow destroy that part of my soul that refused to surrender, that malignant growth that had grown so fearsome in its state of advanced decay it had dovetailed and given me wholesome, super numinous strength.
I felt it inside myself, a perfect black orb, shinning, metallic, attracting and repelling the world of objects, and the collision of ideas and sensations inside of my head were rankly abused by its infernal attractions, drawing all that came into its path, into the unwholesome encumbrance of its pull.
What could I do, when everything that came within my grasp eventually found its way into that orbit? What could I do, when my orbit, by necessity of its telos and design, bent and forged those objects until they were something else? My dilemma was not mere solipsism but something far graver in its scope. My mind took from the world and did not reflect itself --- took from the world through a process of hideous distillation, just what it wanted, and that was all. And even then, it was not enough. It needed to fashion the materials until they were indistinguishable from itself.
I did not so much walk out into the moors as the moors walked out into me. Every blade of grass, every granule of gray distinctless English soil struggled in a pitched battle to enter my already crowded psyche. I was crammed to the hilt with experience. Experience sought me out as if my mind had no sensory portals, but was an open funnel. I found myself running over the undulating hills. The rain, a vaporous hail of mist that fell up and down simultaneously was both a soothing tonic and an elixir of excitation.
I would crest a hill, but my legs were unready for the landing, and I would rise, upward, and before I could adjust to it, the hill would descend, and my legs would topple beneath me, and I would stumble free-fall, legs unready for a drop. Then the process repeated itself until I became giddy with the expectation of my own loss of kinetic control.
I ploughed through an oblong puddle of thick mud which pleasantly coated my hands and face. I rolled through it, only to see my way out on the other side to a thorny patch of nettles.
My water logged cape tore and ripped as I struggled to break free of the dense bramble. I rolled again, but instead of freeing myself of the nettles I seemed only to land more deeply in the briar. I could feel my skin rip; I could hear the sound of rip, as if I were being torn along an already existing suture line.
But it was not effective, I broke free, and I was running once again, my cape still on my back, but cut to ribbons, streams of delicious blood pouring down from cuts along my hair line, my neck, my chest, and the ubiquitous rain, drenching, bogging down my run, halting me as if it were quicksilver.
I ran. I ran faster. I drew off reserves I did not know I had. I calculated that I could continue north well into Scotland and perhaps I would just run out of calories… my body would burn fat, then muscle, until nothing was left and I literally fell apart into a distilled jelly that was a running human form one second and then, the next, a shapeless mass, a puddle just beneath the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall.
But I stopped. The swirl of wind and rain, so fearsome, circled around me as if I were the nexus of its concerted action, as if the snug egg of my small human habitation was somehow dreadfully important to the functioning of Nature.
When I cleared my mind of warring thoughts, and I did, I allowed them to just fall away as if I had removed a heavy suit of mail, my discipline dissolved, it was over and the tempest just disintegrated. One moment it was a black swirl of water and wind, the next, complete, deflated silence.
The rolling pitch of the moors stretched out before me, and I could have wept at their utter, stupid simplicity. They were in my mind’s eye --- they were out there, but I could not discern the difference nor did I care. The clouds peeled away at the horizon. The rip slid from the earth up the meridian of the sky and each star twinkled in understated luminosity…
When I heard the wolfhounds I didn’t believe my ears. I cocked my head from side to side to catch subtle variations in their movement. It was too good to be true --- too cinematic in its scope. To have one’s bodily essence shredded by creatures who mirror one’s own undeveloped grainy soul was perfection consummated. It was a honeymoon for my empty soul, a soul that pushed and bubbled against my hulking full, extended body. I could feel that soul essence butting against my ribs, ineffectually pushing on my spine, slouching around my pelvis like a ghostly fetus. Time for a final reckoning.
I could hear them. They surrounded me in the gully. They knew I was there. They could smell me. Any direction I moved I would encounter them. I wanted this awful consummation. For I knew, intuitively, that if I survived this encounter I was doomed. Eternally --- gothically doomed.
I stripped nude. I wanted to give the beasts a sporting chance.
Naked, hulking, absurdly large, all out of proportion to the surrounding scale of nature. I stepped off the small precipice. Red eyes, snarled teeth, a low hiss, the ragged claw over soft homo sapien skin, and the musky odor of hides, dog-breath and warm dripping saliva. I was end over end, jaws in an arm, a leg, back neck… but my integrity was maintained. Almost immediately the venture had failed. All that was broken was my heart. Naked, ripped, yet essentially whole; I wept like a babe.
FOURTEEN
“Do you feel better?” Clare asked me. “My God, for such a seemingly robust man you do get sick an awful lot.”
“No, not sick, just accident-prone,” I said, sitting up in bed.
“I don’t think any of your calamities since coming here are an accident. You want to be in harms way, I think” she said in an astute tone.
“Why?” I wrapped my arms around her slender boy-like waist.
“Some sort of childish death-wish,” she said sternly.
“Then how come I feel so alive, so virile?” My hands roved over her body.
“That proves nothing,” she said with evident bile, “even sick men are randy. Even wounded boys can furiously desire sex. You satisfy the drive to perpetuate the species, and then with nothing to fill the void you leap over the precipice. Its animalistic --- primitive and not to your credit at all. It doesn’t show that you are robust. Just that you have animal desires that you share with slugs.”
I moved a hand to the small cleft between her legs.
“I think I have finally figured you out,” she said analytically. I momentarily stopped my groping and looked at her curiously, “you’re some sort of binary freak. There is no one Langley Vandemark, there’s two.”
“That’s not incredibly profound,” I started to pull down her short skirt, my massive digits fumbling with the tiny bird beak clasps.
“Maybe so, but it means everything to an understanding of your psychology…. one moment you are completely full of yourself, in absolute self-possession. And then something happens that deflates that expansive ego, and you are shrunken, defeated….”
The dress was off. I had her bent over a dresser. Her pale body was shimmering in the darkness.
“Langley,” she bent back and whispered huskily in my ear, “you can do a lot in this world but you can never hide from yourself.”
We copulated furiously.
When it was over, I lay spent next to her in the cold manor bedroom. Her bird hands were resting on my chest. The black clouds had finally arrived and a steady rain was pelting against the smeared, wet window. Clare turned away from me to sleep. I wrapped her nude body in a blanket. I stood up and looked out at the darkening landscape. The undulating hills were as black as coal, as black as the storm sky. In the distance, far in the moors, I heard the baying of a hound.
This was what I need, I thought to myself and then thought it again, harder, deeper than I thought possible. I peeled the layers of cognition back again and again: here it presents itself, a rough, tempestuous scene to tear myself asunder. Nothing else had worked. My body had proven to be too vigorous a vessel for my soul. It was bulging and the pressure was unbearable. It seemed destined to propel me from one nonsensical venture to another. I obviously needed a destruction cinematic in its scope to end this escapade… to clip it before someone beside myself actually was harmed.
I looked back at Clare’s sleeping form. Her rib cage rose and fell. She didn’t seem quite human, but small, detached, insignificantly reduced. How did I even become involved with this world? I took a few steps toward her and looked down. I loomed over her. Somehow, through a thousand series of minute and discrete stages, so miniscule in their shifts I never noticed it occurring I had become something essentially non-human. I had an urge to destroy the room, myself, the manor… but instead I picked up my cape from the coat rack and calmly walked out of the room…
THIRTEEN
The half way point of the century, nineteen fifty, when I have been home from the war nearly five years, seemed like a good time to shut off water, gas, and electricity from our brownstone.
I had already been harassed by some of the petty officials at the companies that supplied me with the so-called necessities of life. I had become niggardly in my payments, not from a lack of funds (Vandemark money never runs out, even under the grossest mismanagement) but from a philosophical principle: from the simple premise that if I was to lose nothing more then no more should go out.
In my zeal I had forgotten that those on the outside would require a unit of money for a unit of labor or product I received, that they too had the integrity of their systems to uphold and maintain. A typical exchange with some officious official would go like this:
Opening the door, my head almost above the jamb, I would stoop to see the intruder or bend over and step into the strong daylight, quickly realizing that dozens of street eyes were watching me.
“Yes,” I said deeply, as if with a bed of gravel in my gullet.
“Mr. Vandemark? Mr. Langley Vandemark?” I nodded. “I’m Mr. Coalpepper from Consolidated Edison. I’m afraid I’m here on some very troubling business. You see…
“How much is the bill?” I asked.
“One hundred and twenty five dollars and sixty cents, sir.”
I bent down and low bridged it back into the house. Fumbling in my desk I could see Coalpepper’s mottled, greasy head scanning the dark interior of my house. Behind him several black people were craning around Coalpepper’s slim form trying to catch a glimpse. Catching the trick latch on the desk I opened the trick drawer and took out a wad of cash. I counted out the money and gathered up the odd assortment of change. When I emerged outside I handed him the wad. He was startled.
“And shut it off.” I said.
“Excuse me, Mr. Vandemark?” he whimpered.
“Shut off the electricity. I won’t be needing it anymore.” He looked up at me with awe, as if I had broken some incest taboo and had the audacity to scream it out loud in the public square. He backed away and melted into the large, still gathering crowd.
When Mr. Wasserman came to collect the water bill I dispatched him in a similar manner. I gave him his proverbial walking papers with the words “Shut the water off I won’t be needing it,” no doubt my phrase was ringing in his ears as he walked away like a secret name of God some fool had the temerity to scream at the top of his lungs on the courthouse steps. He backed away from my long shadow at the base of the steps, pad of cash in hand, and was subsumed into the street sidewalk crowd.
The most troublesome character in this ensemble cast was Mr. Pennyworth, a representative at the bank that held our mortgage. He was a man to be reckoned with. After repeated written inquiries (all strongly worded admonishments) followed by a regular schedule of verbal harassment (visits at odd hours, his minions facing my stubbornly closed door), Pennyworth arrived one stifling summer morning with two police officers and sharply folded foreclosure papers for me to sign unless I could provide the full balance of the mortgage immediately in cash or cashier’s check.
The men stood impassively in the hall. Pennyworth was a worthy opponent; the others had been mere company snivelers, flaccid lackeys, one and all. At least Pennyworth showed up with the law; he knew how to flex a taut muscle. The man knew how to exchange hit for hit. Faced with such papers (documentation has always cowed me) my bluff was called.
“What is the balance, Mr. Pennyworth?”
“Two-thousand four hundred and thirty seven dollars and seventy-two cents,” he related impassively.
I cleared a space from my desk. It was recessed in a nook of the living room so neither Pennyworth nor his charges could see my manipulations. When I emerged I handed Pennyworth the full amount in cash and change. He was momentarily stunned; his poker face showed a glimmer of surprise. He could see how I was living, the state that I was in and how my surroundings were arranged. He gave me a receipt and without further word showed himself out.
Before dinner I nosed around the kitchen to get a peek at the victuals. There was not much fresh food around, owing, of course, to wartime shortages. Much of what was there was in cans and jars, most of it of some age. McVitie’s Digestives and Walker’s Shortbread Fingers were being daintily laid out on a serving tray. There was a opened can of Batchelor’s Mush Peas and Broadland Vegetable Suet, and generous amount of Gentlemen’s Relish, and a massive jar of Norfolk Manor Mincemeat.
When we finally sat down to eat, a Welsh rarebit was served up on a slice of bread that was left too long in the broiler. It was singed and scored by flame scars. Next, a bowl of bangers and mash that was too watery on the top, and correspondingly viscous on the bottom. Then, in quick bewildering succession, Tatties and Bashed Neaps, Toads-in-the-whole, and as the avez-vous faim, a supposedly choice bit of game bird, a Barbary duck shot that morning, or I suppose more specifically, a duck breast fried.
Duck has a solid layer of fat under the skin, and consequently needs a lengthy cooking time, but the inside of the beast should be red and juicy. Fantastically, this carcass seemed to be prepared in the opposite manner, its insides were burned, while the layer of exterior fat remained pink and gamey. The pudding served for dessert had a host of mysterious suspended particles in its milky contents, and the surface layer, which I broke with a spoon, an uneven, questionable sheen.
In fact these dinner parties, when I view them from my present vantage, now seem like the dividing line between what people were like before the war and what they would be forced to transform into after the war.
And I am not talking about stage props like dress, sexual mores, aesthetic tastes or habitual inclinations. These are the mere surface fringe of the creature known as human. No, what was at stake was far more sinister. Like all clever and acute people whose basic desires go largely unsatisfied --- I am a perfect medium to sense the barely perceptible stirrings of a human sea change, and the first tugs at the strings of epoch turning --- of shape shifting toward the unknown, next avatar of homo sapien sapiens. I am much like an animal before an earthquake: for inscrutable reasons I sense the tremor, for my middle ear vibrates like a minute harp long before the side walk begins to crack.
“Quite to the contrary,” Gavin continued speaking, trying to cut his meat with one arm, for the other was in a sling, as he had been thrown from his horse in the hunt, “I do not believe that this war will bring a lasting peace. This century will be marked by almost perpetual war. Once this conflict is over we shall be butting heads against the Bolsheviks, and how do you suppose that will turn out?”
“But the Russians are our allies.” Lesley said, turning her cross eyes to Gavin.
“Oh Lesley, darling, you’re so naive. Allies and enemies are not some intrinsic state, but situational. One’s enemy today is one’s friend tomorrow, and vice-versa. One never knows what is in the cards. In fact, I’d go so far to call it my life’s philosophy: everything transforms into its opposite, eventually.”
“That maybe true in politics, old boy,” said Edmund Fitzroyce, a slight man in an RAF uniform who was at the hunt that morning, “after all England is now fighting with the United States and we came damn near close to coming in on the side of the Confederates in their Civil War for all that cotton, but human nature is entirely a different matter. People just don’t change. There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to people. The model always remains the same the world over.”
“There I would most vociferously disagree,” I chimed in, pointing a meaty finger at my fellow guests like a visually suspended accusation, “so called human nature is the most malleable of all things --- more than politics, more than that shape shifting whore known as history. In fact, I would go so far to state that there is nothing called human and nothing called nature.”
“Oh really,” Lesley said, “then what are we, if not human.”
“Langley thinks we are what we believe we are,” Clare said flatly.
“Not entirely true,” I said, “I would never make facile generalizations about what it means to be what we are. Whether we construct or own realities or it is constructed for us isn’t really the point, actually, it’s the crushing weight of reality that matters, what makes you feel alive and dead, what is empty and what is full. Its up to you to run to the side that gives you what you desire. People say ‘human nature’ and pin attributes on it as if it were a coat rack. But what the coat rack is no one really investigates. Are we only attributes? If that is so I’m deadly afraid. I’m fearful to my bones. I think if anyone decided to move the coats aside what they saw at the center would so shake them to the core they would jump off the cliffs of Dover.”
Luckily, more dreadful foodstuffs were brought in by limping and gouty servants. As I was quickly discovering, Budge Manor and Crotchford Downs, with its cool mists and perpetual cloud cover, was a breeding ground for English diseases supposedly eradicated in the last century. Gout brought the mutton; scurvy the potatoes and giblets; a mild case of consumption the overstuffed, bland dessert. My diatribe, painfully out of sync with the general flow of conversation, had down shifted the discussion to mere pleasantries about the weather. Even my impish Clare, not completely of this earth, had gripped my hand during my monologue as if to say “There, there love, don’t let everything out.”
After dinner we retired to the front hall. Although it was a chilly night I found myself bathed in hot sweat. I held a cigar in one hand and a brandy in the other and tried to control the tremors and spasms passing over my body like uncontrollable waves. I saw Gavin looking at me and politely trying to ignore my state.
“I’ve heard through some chums of mine at the BBC that some sort of decisive battle is taking place near some town in Tunisia known as El-Alamein. Its so hot down there that those lads can fry eggs atop their tanks. Can you imagine being inside one of those dreadful boxes in those conditions?” My shaking had managed to spill some cognac on the floor. Gavin looked at me with a disapproving, concerned eye.
“Langley you look horrid. Are you coming down with a chill? For heaven’s sake get yourself to bed, will you.”
“Yes, I think I will” I said, my field of vision was tunneling down a narrow funnel and then widening again and then back on the same circular path, heading down the narrow funnel once more.
“Shall I take you?” Clare asked.
“No,” I said, “I can make it myself. Stay here and enjoy myself --- yourself I mean.”
I mounted those calamitously steep stone stairs to the upper wrap around landing above the central hall. My vision was tunneling funneling in the narrow corridor. Instead of finding our bedroom door I must have slipped through one of the openings leading to the disused, crumbling sections of the house.
At first I was in a narrow corridor that resembled the hall leading to our room, but when I reached the end I was in a round, crumbling chapel. The central altarpiece was conspicuously missing, but some of the stained glass windows were still in place. Apostles hauling fish in a net, Jesus walking on a storm tossed Sea of Galilee, St. Peter being crucified upside down.
Broken pews littered the floor. I started stumbling over them, cartwheeling, end over end, as if I were drunk, and when I finally found my footing I had been transported outside the chapel into a long vaulted hallway.
I followed it; it kept crumbling until there was no roof but merely a series of blocks and stones cascading forward over a low hill. Looking back I saw the hulking black bulk of the manor. In front of me was the black sea of moors. Only the sky, a peppered gray of racing clouds, offered any contrast to the utter darkness. I looked at my large black hands. They pulsed before my disbelieving eyes.
A fox, red and glistening with the moisture of the brown, sodden fields, scampered over the fence and across the moor. He followed the gully, hoping that the water would cast off his scent, or that the dogs would get caught in the maze of rock and sluices of swift flowing water.
I saw a wet, fearful eye, the flash of a bristled whisker and a panicked scurry, for the beast’s only chance was to reach the forest. Being the consummate Manhattanite, I had never seen a fox before. I imagined they would be crayon red, or the bright crimson of the cartoons, but in actuality it was a dusty brown.
Squeezing through the cleft in the rock I caught a glimpse of the animal’s backside, as if I were a hulking Moses and he were a canine-God. There was a boom, and a burst, and a scattering flurry of birds heavenward, and the dogs came charging, multicolored hounds of black and white, brown and yellow, baying and howling, stalking low to the ground as they followed the fox’s musky scent.
Once the hounds departed there was a moment of calm. I heard Clare emerge from between the cleft behind me. She did not have all of her clothes on yet, only her skirts and my cape which she clasped to her bare shoulders and neck. I glanced back at her.
“It seems the hunt is on,” she said.
There was a thunderous clomping of earth and the horses reared above the hill. Ten to fifteen black and brown equines foaming with sweat, and riders, wearing plush red jackets, tar black riding pants, and shinning knee high reflecting boots, shot by in a flash. Some momentarily glanced at us, but most leaned forward on their mounts, oblivious, intent on the hounds as the hounds were intent on the fox.
One of the last riders was Gavin, sitting surprisingly high on his saddle. He glanced at us, and as if to acknowledge our presence he raised his crop before disappearing behind the far side of the rock face. The hooves shook the ground, there was a rattle as the stones around us shook, then it was quiet again.
“That was unexpected,” I said.
“I’m afraid none of the Budge’s are excellent horseman. Gavin’ll probably spill and break a bone. But he fancies himself a sportsman,” Clare said, and then added, “I’ll get fully dressed.” She disappeared back into the crack.
I sat on a stone and lit a cigarette. The sky was a dull English gray, but the disk of the sun, a pasty yellow, was trying to break through the opaque sheen. The ubiquitous black rain clouds fringing the horizon had yet to produce a single drop of moisture. England, a dark smudge, a rolling plain of expansive uniformity. And these people, enveloped and smothered on an island of dreadful drafts and mists had, until recently, conquered most of the world worth conquering.
“What are you thinking of?” Clare asked.
“About England.”
“There is no England,” she answered, settling down on my knee, taking a drag of my cigarette.
“How can you say that? You’re staunchly English, even a Royalist!”
“There is no one England,” she snorted, “before the Norman invasion there were several, now there is the illusion that there is one. Just like England needed a Chaucer to speak one English language, England needed one government to be an England.”
I sat silently for a moment. Uncle Albert stood in front of me. He looked like a fine, average, Anglo-Dutch American from all angles. But then there were some Vandemark cousins high in the hills of the Catskills, and in broad daylight traces of their ancestry shown on them like projections from antique silhouette projection lamps.
Then my father, not much there to be concerned about except a flat nose. Homer had curly, wavy hair, but his chronic illness wiped concerns of ethnicity from his defining essence and left only sickness, which classifies a person in their entirety.
“No, there is one America.” I said.
“Hah,” she laughed, “I lived in your United States Langley. What about your Negros? What about your Indians?”
“All assimilated,” I said, smiling faintly, “especially the light skinned ones.”
“Your historic sense is totally daft, completely skewed,” she said, taking my cigarette and making it her own. I quickly lit another one. For a few moments the yellow disk of the sun burned through the clouds and we were in murky sunshine. I felt post-coital lucidity.
“We Vandemark’s are in a unique position to judge our nation’s history, my dear girl, since we are some of its oldest white residents. Marteen Van de Mark was one of the original settlers of New Amsterdam. His son, Roote Vandemark was a patentee in the nascent hamlet of New Paltz.
During the Pequot War of 1680 he served with distinction and valor and was given a patroonship on the upper Hudson River. Unfortunately, after the British took control of the region they did not recognize such a feudal structure as a patroon, so he lost it. But Roote landed on his feet. He settled in Brooklyn and started a successful import trade… all Vandemark’s in the New York area are descended from good old rusty Roote.”
The wind blew Clare’s hair across her face. She brushed it away from her eyes and gave me a satirical, wry look.
“I think that’s shit,” she said, stamping out her cigarette with her small hoof, “pure unadulterated shit. Americans don’t know who they are. They bloody mutts.”
ELEVEN
Homer had gotten loose. He lacked a fundamental understanding of what sacrifice it takes to staunch an irreversible negative flow of energy… a drain downhill to entropy.
I loaded the tray with ointments, salves, that month’s round of special foods and vitamins, and when I opened the door of his room he was nowhere to be found. I checked under the bed. I had already sealed shut his closet. Most of the rooms had too much debris to maneuver about in, but I checked some overlooked crawl spaces and dead ends on the second floor, but he was nowhere to be found. I started turning over boxes, boards, old disused furniture.
I took out a flashlight and stabbed the dark, probing along the outer edge of the upper landing of the stairs, which by this time was a unnavigable maze of broken pieces of cars, mattresses, box springs, crates and used barrels. He was not there. After a more than cursory search of the first floor which still had, at that time, a relatively large amount of open space, I decided, to my utter disbelief, that he had somehow gotten out of the brownstone. Homer, at this juncture, was ninety five percent blind, unaware, even in a glancing sense, of how baroque and clustered his surroundings were. To me, his escape was unimaginable.
I sat on a hard wooden bench in the hall way, the bench I would take my winter boots off on when I was a boy and gripped my temples with my massive hands. A little glint of anger, diamond hard, was lodged in my mind. Above me a bulb suspended from a frayed wire swung with the counter rhythm of my swaying. My shadow swung around me in dizzying circles.
I stood up decisively and moved the debris in front of the street door, an entrance not used in three or four years. With great effort I pushed it open. Rain was pouring down. Running breathlessly around the house I looked for holes. I did not need to look long.
A piece of rotting wood had been kicked away from a rear window barrier and he had apparently slithered through the narrow aperture. Shinning the flashlight on the ground I could see drag marks leading away from the building toward the abandoned yard in the back. I found him face down in the mud. He was looking for a chink in the fence, inadequately groping his way along the perimeter. I got down on my knees and roughly turned him around.
“Ahhhhh!”he screamed, he cried, his face was seized by panic sorrow, dread, simultaneously. I felt all my defenses slide and slip and I was naked before him, in a complete fusion of empathy and then they clicked firmly in place again and my resolve was back. At first I wanted to hold him and then I wanted to slap his face. All I managed to do for that awful moment was to vigorously shake him. “Ahhhhh,” came that scream again, this time unmistakable, sorrow
“Ahhh Langley, I know that you know better, that I don’t know nothing… but its… I can’t…. It’s just…” He started a round of machine like sobbing. He seemed to be choking on the rainwater that was drenching on both of us. His small feet were kicking in the mud with spasmodic jerks.
I pulled him close to me and tried to hoist him up. He clenched his little fetal fists and was quite ineffectually hitting my chest. I gathered him up, trying to shelter him from the rain by wrapping him in a loose tarp that was clinging to the fence. I lifted him, a senseless, sobbing bundle, back to the house.
NINE
While Homer disintegrated, shrank and emaciated to his marrow, I expanded. The simple and necessary observation was hard to ignore: we somehow lived and grew in an inverse ratio to each other. Even later, when the opposite state seemed to be wholly true, when I did not know where he began and I ended, there was still the problem of delineating a boundary, still the doggedly persistent inability of separating me from him.
If we were both robust and healthy perhaps our unbalanced symbiosis would never have occurred. If I grew to be a giant out of all proportion to my surroundings, then I needed a helpless Fay Ray to obligate me to reference the world. I would have simply grown so utterly out of human dimensions that I would have no longer belonged to the ranks of humanity at all. For growth and decay, diminishment and flourishing, expansiveness and decline, all exist on the same fluid slope. Never did I believe that I would ever rise above my antinomies. I could never hold both polar impulses without my own Homer, without my blind bard as a divining rod…
I thought if I cured Homer and he recuperated that this shrunken homunculus would grow to a full man and destroy this dance with opposites. I held the hope that if Homer could yet rise from the exile of physical penury that nature had imposed on him, that somehow the Vandemark line would not continue to be the withered stump it had become.
Somehow the House of Vandemark would have its heir; would receive its rightful measure in due and just proportion from country, clan and history. I did not care what this new embryo would become. As long as there was a progression to new life! If there is any torture in dualism it comes from the knowledge that it often fails to be procreative; that simple exclusive categories can be juxtaposed, conjoined, but yield nothing from their efforts, or merely a stalemate of mutually exclusive blocks… a dull thud as they collide, and then they resume their course, as if nothing happened… as if the event never occurred!
So when I inherited the House of Vandemark I decided to clear the plate. I firmly resolved to embark on a set of drastic measures to put my house in order.
The first, obvious step was Homer. Medical science had failed him repeatedly, so I had to fill the void. I had volumes of Father’s medical books to use for consultation. Since specialization, that great innovation of modern medical rigor, had failed him, perhaps pastiche would succeed. I made him sit for hours with a poultice of vitamin C and aloe over his spent eyes. He was required to eat large quantities of specific foods, while eliminating others entirely, to build up his spindly body, to give healthfulness an adequate platform to prosper.
These binge diets lasted for weeks on end, and then would cease abruptly and shift gears. First he was required to eat all protein and no fat. Then, in a dietary about face, all fat and no protein. The massive doses of vitamin C were quickly followed by a regimen of vitamin C from natural sources: navel oranges, grapefruits, and tangerines in quantities all out of proportion to any scale of normalcy. Another month, he ingested vast amounts of vitamin D; then I depleted his diet of vitamin D for the following month. Then I sat him on our roof in July, that year the sunniest July on record, incidentally, and allowed his pasty white skin, under my careful monitoring, to grow a deep amber, than a resilient bronze.
Homer tried his best to cooperate with my schemes, deferring to my superior knowledge and experience. And my brother’s body seemed to be an extremely pliable object; as a medium it responded marvelously to all manner of stimuli, oral, physical and topical (unlike my body --- which is as impermeable as stone). But it was hard on him, my poor brother, it taxed his spirit; he was always a weak little stripling, and if it were not in the name of progress I would have discontinued the regimen and let him just rest. But I felt, not without some clinical basis, that with enough trial and error, enough blind stabs into the clinical darkness, I could find the perplexing source of his blindness, and bring him from perpetual night to everlasting day.
I looked down on his wan, exhausted face, so similar to mine in every detail except bulk, and administered one more fad ointment, spoon feed him yet another vitamin mash, and a little more darkness would envelope him.
Nothing worked. And as I looked around me, and what my world had become, I realized, as a thin sliced removed from a cataract, I was totally incapable, even in such a rich world I had created, to make my way out of the confounding maze.
A military convoy was on our right heading south to the coast. Gavin, sitting in the drivers seat, pointed out the nationalities of the different vehicles.
“There are Canadians, and these, let’s see, look like Aussies. Looks like troops from South Africa there. Those chaps are Indian, they are Sheeejs with those bloody turbans. And here are some of your chaps Langley.” I saw a blur of khaki and several low green jeeps. Clare, seated next to me in the back seat, disinterestedly turned her head to see the Americans. Lesley was seated in front with Gavin. She was wearing at a jaunty angle on her elongated head one of the pre-helmet Great War peaked caps I retrieved for her from my lair. It was a mild mid-April day. The top was down and the wind pleasant and cool, with a spring mist burning off in the brightening sun.
We were driving through a broad flatland under cultivation. Fields were bisected by crisscrossed rows of shrubs and small trees. Farms dotted the landscape --- low built indistinct and brown cottages, surrounded by a maze of stone fences with sheep and cattle safely penned. The grass was poking above the muddy wet fields.
“I don’t care what that bloody Anglo-American says, I think April is a grand month. Even in war time.”
“I agree,” chirped Lesley. I leaned forward toward them.
“Is Crotchford Downs in country like this?” I asked, the openness, the vast space!
Lesley giggled. “Not quite like this,” replied Gavin, “no, old boy. I should say a little more rocky and stony. Not much under cultivation. A trifle less sunny was well. The weather changes rather abruptly once we reach the uplands. More sheltered here, I’d say, and milder than Crotchford. What do you say Les?”
“Yes, quite.” she beamed.
We drove for sometime in silence. The car moved steadily toward a row of uneven hills at the horizon. I thought I heard a buzzing sound. The engine? But if came from above. Before any definitive spatial awareness dawned on me a low flying plane was above us, emerging from our blind spot. Smoke trailed from its propeller. I could see the black swastika on the nose and tail. It looped in the sky rather gracefully over our heads, then leveled out along the road ahead of us.
“It’s going to strafe us!” I yelled, but it was too late for Gavin to swerve. Bullets tore at the concrete in front of us, one hit Lesley’s vintage hat, and the cap flew angularly to the side of the road. Another hit my chest with a dull thud and a pop that somehow sounded delayed.
Gavin pulled the car to the side of the road. The plane, obviously disabled, disappeared behind a row of trees. Seconds later we heard a substantial crash in the distance.
“Is everyone alright? My God!” Gavin exclaimed, his eyes moving from face to face.
“I think Langley was hit,” I heard Clare say, but not very well. The world seemed to undulate between moments of crystalline clarity and smoky semi-darkness. I tried to speak but nothing came out. I saw a shimmering, wavering Gavin, as if he was composed of bright pixels, leaning over the front seat, examining my clothes.
“But I don’t see any blood, blast it where is he hit?” Finally, little bursts of air came wheezing out of my mouth. My diaphragm was working again.
“Alright… I’m alright…” I reached into my breast pocket and pulled out the metal cigarette case. There was a neat divot where the battle of the Somme had been. The little roses and thorns now circled the deep cavity. A bright iridescent bruise, like a purple heart, was swelling on my chest.
“I say, you’re lucky,” Gavin marveled.
“Damn lucky,” Clare concurred, “it’s like something out of a movie.”
I stood up on the road and twisted my torso about to check for broken ribs. I appeared to be intact. Gavin stood beside me and looked at the thin stream of smoke rising beyond the treeline.
“We should go find that plane Lang, if you’re up to it.”
Lesley and Clare drove to the nearest farmhouse to phone the Home Guard. Gavin and I hopped over the guardrail and took to the fields. Gavin produced a useless revolver out from the glove box and held it in front of him like a limp bird. Its sight was skewed to the right, and when it discharged it leaned to the left, but even with this self-correcting mechanism he could never get it to shoot straight. If we actually came across a desperate Luftwaffe pilot with an indeterminate amount of time in a POW camp his only future possible world, we would be on the losing end, done for....
Up ahead, near the crest of a small hill that was capped with bobbed red flowers we saw a piece of smoldering wreckage. It was the tail. A sunburst glimmered on the swastika. On the crest was the fuselage. It was almost intact, but gasoline was pooling everywhere, showing that it was ruptured somewhere out of view.
The propeller had cut up the muddy ground in a deep, irregular gash before coming to a halt. The pilot was about thirty feet from the fuselage. He had crawled away from the wreckage, or stumbled a few feet and then fallen face up. He had removed his helmet. Gavin carefully walked up to him and gently touched the body with his foot. He was obviously dead.
“He’s dead. Damn shame in a way, bloody good looking boy. But it serves him right, taking pot shots at us like that. Damn near killed us all. Come have a look Lang.”
I did. It was odd, he looked like a younger version of Gavin, all soft downy blond, but with a round face, puffed up with baby fat, from rich Teutonic mother’s milk, no doubt, which was now twisted obscenely in death, as if he had struggled in the final moments with that flesh and refused to give up the ghost. I bent down as if to touch him.
“Don’t touch him, old chap.” Gavin said calmly, “They’re real sticklers about that sort of thing, you know. Absolutely no souvenirs of any kind. When one of these crates falls from the sky it’s an intelligence gathering exercise. Check for chinks in the armor and all that.”
The German’s blue eyes were open. All I wanted to do was to close that blank stare, that oppressive empty gaze. Gavin and I stood quielty several feet apart waiting for the guard to turn up and secure the location. We could see them coming up the road in the distance, two small blue trucks with red lights blinking atop the roofs. I took out the Somme for a cigarette. I fingered the dimpled hole around the missing battle. All the cigarettes had disintegrated and blown away like brown lint in the stiff, English country breeze.
Down in my underground office water was cascading from an ever-widening crack in the ceiling. I kept placing Great War surplus helmets under the brown streams. Eventually I pulled out an old moth eaten trench coat, a literal coat for the trenches, and hunching over my desk, tried to conceal my papers from the circles of dripping water.
I lifted my head up to look at the ceiling. A stream of water pulsed into my eyes. When I opened them Gavin, downy and angelic in his softness, like an angel that had stepped off of Jacob’s ladder, was standing in front of me.
“Look at you, old boy, you look like you’re ready for the Ypres Salient in that get up. Now that was a show.”
I mumbled something in reply. He ignored me.
“You know, with all this Great War surplus it seems the Higher-Ups thought that bloody war would never end. I’ve heard there are warehouses of this stuff outside of town that makes what we have look like an overstuffed closet. Good God the waste. I say,” he continued, “I’m dreadfully hung over, are you?” he gripped his temples.
“A little.”
“It’ll be good to take a bit of a holiday. I had to pull some dreadfully long strings to secure the time off but it’ll be worth it. They’ll be some fox hunting, old boy, not something you see in Manhattan everyday, although it’s a bit out of season.”
“Where is all this water coming from, anyway? Did a pipe burst?”
“The what?”
“The water,” I said, pulling the trench coat’s lapels tightly around my neck.
“Oh, it’s Thames water. The river is flowing in its spring tide now, and I think technically this room is under the river. It’s a wonder everything down here isn’t water logged. Cheer up, old boy, no sense in getting glum, especially with you and Clare hitting it off. Just as I planned! I’ve secured an auto and petrol. We’ll soon be on the open road.”
Gavin left the room. More water poured down on my head. It seemed greasy, viscous, and it spilled onto some requisitions, and then piddled over to the phone in a little rivulet. I picked it up, thinking I’d dial the janitor for some buckets, but the line was dead.
I stepped out into the hall. It was drier than my office. I walked to the storage room and pushed open a door. It stunk of mud and offal, as if a parcel of some Great War redoubt had been transplanted Thames side. I kicked open a box. It contained boots. I opened another, more boots and some wool hats. Then a box of rusting bayonets. A crate with some empty cartridges. Then what looked like spades; some molding medical equipments: cotton swab wrappers with red crosses emblazoned on them, the cotton, apparently, eaten by insects; a box of gas masks that reeked of old rubber and mold.
On the floor I spied a shiny object. It was a bright metal cigarette case. Someone, some solider, had rather intricately carved the names of several battles he had participated in: Verdun, Pascidilly, the Somme, Hammel Wood. Surrounding the names was carved a snaking rose vine with spiky, glistening thorns. That he had survived all those engagements was odd indeed.
For the odds of surviving such complex, bloody engagements were astronomical. How had he done it? After each battle, how did he recover from the initial shock of combat and then, mind jarringly enough, steel himself for yet another engagement, another battle that virtually guaranteed his absolute destruction?
That was the trick, really. Every time he flung himself over the parapet and began the slow march across no man’s land behind some creeping barrage --- his death warrant was all but signed and sealed. Yet somehow, through some fortuitous celestial alignment, through the benevolent influence of the shining countenance of some unknown god, when the last shell was fired, the final machine gun silenced, this man, this indefatigable beast was left standing on a bare, brown black pock marked patch of Western Front --- alive. With each battle, with each successful cheat of death he must have wished that the inevitable would occur! Just to prove to himself that we was just flesh after all.
The brute! And I pictured, in my roving all to active mind’s eye, not some superman, but some common man from Lincoln or Cheshire or Northampton. Just a simple bloke, not much education, short of stature, perhaps weak eyes inadequately rectified by thick, circular eyeglasses, a plumber or carpenter.
There is no special mark that has sequestered him for redemption. He is either chance’s charmed plaything, or a metaphysical principle made all-too-human flesh: an incarnation of naked duality. Life or Death were his only end-points. And somehow, through a thousand million variables seen and unseen, life was always at the end of his fork. Try as he might he was never destroyed. He always lived to see another day --- whether it be gray and listless or bright and new.
I would have sold my birthright to be that achingly simple man.
I grasped the case in my hand and slipped it into my breast pocket.
