The Order of Things - Story III - Conculsion

“Your name means slave in Italian, you must know that?” she said, and although Servi knew full well what his last name meant, he allowed her to believe he was hearing it for the first time.   

What was the harm?  Listening to the cadences of her accented English brought Servi back to his Rome.  Of course he could speak Italian to her, and she would respond, but mostly she wanted to practice English.  But with Servi, she kept sliding into her Italian with ease and suddenly Servi was back in Italy.  She spoke with that peculiar and enchanting trilling of the R’s of a life long resident of Trastervere.  That was enough to stamp, in Servi’s mind, this woman as something far more than a mere female.   

But there was more: it was her very posture, the stance of her body, the imprint of the expressions on her mobile, lively face… she learned it all in a thousand subtle ways from birth in a three thousand year old city, and now expressed them all fluidly, automatically, as a spring oozes water from an ancient hillside.  Even the way she played with the shiny black hair which fell over her forehead evoked, for Servi, an ancestral urge within him akin to a salmon swimming upstream.

            “Slave,” he asked, and she nodded.  “Well, that seems about right,”

            “Yes,” she explained in her overly precise English, as if she was translating word for word in her head.  “Are you Jewish?”  Servi shook his head.  “Well, you have Jewish ancestors somewhere back there.  Servi is an Italian-Jewish name.  The, how do you say,” she snapped her fingers to conjure up the English work, and when that failed, switched to Italian, “legend is that when Titus brought Jewish captives back to Rome from the Jerusalem campaign, he enslaved most of them.  Some of them were forced to take the last name Servus in Latin, Servi in Italian.  You know, Aaron the Slave.  There are a huddle of little Jewish slaves somewhere back in your past.  This explains a great deal.”

            “In what way,” Servi answered in Italian.

            “Well,” she continued, taking her little brown hand out of the sand, where it had just burrowed, “that book you are reading, by Marcus Auerlius, that would be the Italianate portion of your heritage.  Your Stoic ancestors are calling you back to their fold… little grim Romans controlling every facial tick.  Even that beard you sport,” and here she reached out and playfully tugged it. “You look like you should be striding toward the viewer in The School of Athens.  Then there is the Jew in you… or the Hebrew.  Your sense of absolute morality … that is the Jew in you, praying and wailing on the banks of the Tiber, crying for your poor destroyed Temple.”

            “You would be the person to find out,” Servi said in English, and then finished in Italian. “But you paint too exotic a picture of me.  There is not that much here.”

            “Even the humility of the philosopher…” she said in English, and then switched to Italian.  Servi found the back and forth flow of the languages narcotically lulling.  Her voice, and the distant, pounding surf, made him suspect that this was really a dream.  For this kind of graceful ease had not been part of Servi’s life in many months.  

            He had returned to New York from Italy after a year and a half of delusory study.  His father had, during the first six months of his stay, sent half-pleading letters to him to return, after it was apparent to Servi and his father that his journey to Italy had been a mistake.  But Servi would not give up the Latin ghost.  His father prodded him to take a job in a bank in Manhattan, but this prospect only made Servi more intent to remain in Rome, were he could at least stay busy with idleness  There followed six months of icy silence between father and son.  Then, another six months of renewed offensive, of blatant threats from across the Atlantic.  Weakened by poverty, slackened by loneliness, Servi ate his own version of Italian crow when he had to ask his father to wire money for his return flight. 

            As he sat on the Al Italia red eye to JFK, Servi felt very much like his surname: the slave to his father, the slave to his native city, the slave to the tangled destiny which always led him back to New York.  The slave to destiny.  He lived with his father for an unbearable month, and then the couch of his best friend Jack, matriculated at NYU’s law school.  Servi had no real plans for his future.  He felt so hollowed out by the present that it seemed unwise to place hope on such a thin abstraction as the future.  So he began to read the Stoics again, Epictetus, Seneca, but especially Marcus Auerlieus, and depleted time with Jack’s new girlfriend, Francesca, who was, felicitously enough, a native of the city, which had just ejected Servi like Jonah from the belly of the whale. 

            During Jack’s long hours of study, the idle Servi took Francesca to cheap restaurants, a Fellini film festival in the Village, long talks in Washington Square Park.  A friendship developed between them, which, in two single people, is often a presage of love.  But Francesca was smitten by Jack, apparently, even as she was drawn to Servi; even as she spent more time with Servi than Jack, and drew him into her irresistible orbit.   

           If love had not seemed to Servi an entanglement of the basest form, he would have fought to get her.  But why should he want more from her when he had so little to give?  She was right here, after all, spending all her free time with him.  If she spent the night in Jack’s bed, what did Servi care?  He didn’t even own a bed.  Servi would love her with pure love, detached from the body.  He would do Plato proud.

            They had been resting in the sand, which Francesca found endlessly fascinating.  She ran it through her little brown clenched fist, and it fell in a thin stream as in an hour glass. But soon they picked up their bicycles and pointed east.

            “Were do we go?” she asked, her fine brown face illuminated in the bright sun.  Her black hair, with artificial blond highlights, blew about her face and neck, like a black and white pin-wheel. 

            “Oh, let’s go to Kismet.  It is the next town over.  I’ve never been there.  Nothing special there, I suppose.  I think there is a little restaurant with good crab cakes near a marina.”  On hearing this, Francesa waved her hand in a typical Roman gesture of good natured indifference.  Servi knew her experience of America was bracketed between Washington Square Park and the Battery.

            Servi watched her cycle.  Her posture on the bike was casual, but he could sense that pedaling was an exertion.  A small stain of sweat formed on the back of her shirt and he watched her slim hand pull her it away from her skin --- for she detested the plebeian experience of perspiration.  A hint, a mere rumor of a tremble developed in her brown legs.  Her arms had difficulty keeping the bike steady on the sand.  Servi doubted they would reach Kismet.

            She suddenly stopped and got off the bicycle.  Servi pulled alongside and looked at her.  She frowned

“I’m sorry Servi,” she said through down turned lips.  “I haven’t ridden a bicycle since I was a tiny girl,” and then, in Italian, “and this God damned sand.  It’s no good for anything but making glass.”  Servi laughed, and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.  This gesture was enough to trip the wire:  she pushed her lips against his; they were moist and warm.  She grasped him and pulled him forward, almost toppling him from his bike.  For such a petite girl, she was surprisingly fierce in a clinch.  She gripped Servi and kissed him fiercely, more from anger than affection, as if he whole attraction to Servi repelled her, and she wished to concentrate it in a single kiss.  Then she pulled away and cast a hot, liquid gaze at Servi.  Servi got off the bike, striding away.

Servi kept walking, although he could hear her behind him, saying things in rapid fire Italian, mostly in the Roman dialect, as she always did when angry.  She pelted Servi with a mix of sentiments, some loving, but most hurtful and filled with malice, even scorn, for not kissing her back.   
She seemed both affronted by her rash act and hurt that Servi did not fall with her, brazenly, into an abyss.  Servi let her catch up to him.  Where could he go?  They were on an island half a mile at its widest point.  She grasped his arm and was suddenly in front of him.  The fusillade of Roman dialect continued.  She was forming some sort of theory on love which he had heard her, in various versions, formulate before.  He had thought nothing of it, believing it some Latin erotic preoccupation, but now she plugged Jack and Servi into those abstract equations, and it all made sense.  She spoke of gradations of love, and how it was possible to love two men, even three men, in different shades.  There should be more than one word for love.  They should be twenty, to catch the nuances. 

“That’s funny,” Servi answered in Italian. “You seem to think love is something that just litters the streets.  In my experience, most people have problems loving just one person.”

“Maybe you, Servi,” she spat, angry again, her D’s gone in a hail of dialect, “with your cold philosopher’s heart.  You love the form of a woman, but can’t love her body.  It’s sick,” and then her dispensation turned toward the psychological, and she began to speculate on Servi’s psycho-sexual ailments.  Servi listened, enraptured by this version of himself being conjured up before him, like the witch raising Samuel’s reluctant ghost.   
But then she stopped.  They both heard a rustling in a swale of beach grass around the bend.  They took a few tentative steps toward it, and quickly saw a small deer tangled in a bale of wire.  It fought a valiant battle to free itself, but Servi could see that the wire had twisted itself hopelessly around a bud of its antlers.

“What in God’s name is that, Servi?” Francesca asked, drawing near him.

“A deer,” Servi laughed. “Haven’t you ever seen a deer before?”

“It’s the size of a feral dog.  In the Alps, they get as big as bulls.”

“They’re small on this island,” Servi explained.  “There isn’t much food or fresh water.  But people feed them, and now they get into all sorts of mischief, like this.”

“Let’s go back to the car and go back to the city,” Francesca yawned. “This country air is exhausting.”

“We can’t just leave it here.”

“Why not?” she explained wearily.  “Someone else will come along and help.”

“You’re in New York for less than a year and already you are ignoring Kitty Genovese?”

“Who is she?  Your secret girlfriend?  One of those Italian-American bitches from Bayside in their tanks tops and cut off jeans?” she said angrily, but then laughed. “But it can’t be.  As far as I can tell, you don’t even have any friends but Jack.  How do you say, you are a loser.”

“A loner,” Servi corrected, he hoped. “Come on, help,” Servi moved toward the beast, but Francesca stood still.

“I don’t touch animals, Servi,” she explained casually.  “You’ll get, how do you say it in English,” and finding the word lost, found ‘rabies’ in Italian.

Servi began to wrestle with the diminutive deer.  He tried every configuration to free it, turning its head, its body, even lifting it briefly off the ground.   
And this did the trick: the wire snapped, and the deer was free.  Servi continued to hold the animal aloft for a moment, and it seemed to find the hold appealing, as if faced with the possibility of immobility in the wire or in Servi’s arms, it chose the latter.  But Servi let go, and when its feet landed on the sand, the lever of its instincts clicked into place, and it began to leap and bound away, its ass springing forward at strange angles, to thwart some pursuing predator.  Francesca clapped her hands with vigor.

“Bravo! Bravo!” she intoned, and walked up to Servi.  “My American hero.  A true American, a man of action, at home with, how do you say, Mother Nature,” and she pulled Servi up to her, and he did not resist.  She was smaller then him, her head reaching his shoulders, so he lowered his jaw and their lips met.  He felt her tongue, soft and humid, enter his mouth.  The points of her conical breasts, bra-less beneath the sun dress, pressed against his chest like two twin muzzles of some piece of ordinance, ready to discharge.   Servi felt a liquid warmth settle over him, like a molten wave cresting his body. 

When Francesca pulled away, she smiled at him slyly.

“Come on hero,” she smiled, and tugged at his beard.  “Take me back to New York.  You had your chance.”

Magna Mater VI

That night, when Francesca did not arrive at Servi’s room, he got on the Metro and rode to her apartment.  After a few moments she opened the door in a robe, her hair in uncharacteristic disarray, a sly smile of unknown but pleasurable satisfaction on her face at seeing Servi in her threshold. 

            “Go away, Aarone.  You had your chance.  I found a man to fuck me!” and she slammed the door in Servi’s face.

CLUTTER, 41

TWENTY-THREE


Outside a convoy of Canadians was clogging the narrow lane immediately in front of Clare’s flat. Caught off guard, we were pressed against the flecked chimney red brick of a street facing facade as it passed, one dull green truck melting into the next, the canvas coverings stiffly flapping across metal crossbeams. I pulled Clare close to the wall to protect her. I pushed her, her gray felt coat responding to the pressure of my hand.


“Careful Lang, you’re constricting my air a little,” she screamed above the engines.


“Sorry,” I screamed back.


The vehicle section of the convey ended; then a long row of troops, four abreast, followed; they kept us pinned to the wall as well, their fatigues were a dark olive green and their faces blacked out with dull black grease, while their helmets, wreathed with twigs and branches, gave them the appearance of so many forest dwelling Mercuries.


Down the alley a truck backfired. The noise reverberated in the street, rattling the windows as if a cannon had fired, a herald to announce some ill-tiding.


Clare leaned close, her peppermint essence enveloped me.


“I know your secret!”


“What is it?” I said, dangling my ear over her round, animated mouth.


Another backfire, and her words and the concussion meshed. But I heard them; I could see the form of what she said like a light outline etched in white on a black backround.


She broke free from my embrace. Her pale yellow eyes reflected the dull twilight of the blank London sky. I saw the sickly recognition of bifurcation in her pupils. The backfiring continued. I grasped her but she broke free from my arms again and smiled. The black-faced soldiers enveloped her; she disappeared in their ranks; row after row continued down the lane as one an endless stream. A single plane, its low hum merely a rattle in the sky, was the audible coda to my next stage.

CLUTTER, 36

The Charles River was ruby red in the early morning sun light. A single beam of radiant sunshine cast a glow over the narrow bend of grass along the esplanade. A new start, a new day, never to return to the old worn fruitless grooves…



The genesis of the college semester is always late summer, and so, by necessity it has the penultimate sensation of the final gently curving spike before the precipitous fall of autumn. For the spasms of expansion are more severe just prior to the final expulsion than in the building of contractions. The strongest sensation comes just before the summit: just at the pleasant moment when the object, hurled rudely skyward, appears to stop just when it should be accelerating to a loftier altitude.


So the semester begins with a leafy bower of dusty oak leaves perched, cross hatched and intertwined, over the clipped ripe grass of Harvard Yard. The ivy, green, waxy and abundant, snakes up the marble facade of the Houghton Library, and the numerous portals of exit and egress to the yard, like wide open veins and arteries with no specialization of function.

And surrounding this garden of repose is Cambridge, like an American Athens, hemmed without concern, demarcated without conceit or desperation by the gentle, fluid curve of the Charles River. And in the pre-dawn hours, standing on its banks, where the concrete escarpment fades and cracks to a field of mud, and the mud, stirred and churned by the lapping water, blends into the brown green ebb of the river, a low hanging lacy mist dangles just above the lapping froth of the river water: and the smell, an odor that still makes incursions into my nostrils in an apish imitation of an actual perception, a legitimate sensation, that mingling of matter both fresh and the decaying.

But standing on the shore, it was easy to look beyond the specific and move to dazzlingly broad generalities, to the luminous ideal, to peer through the congenitally defective mists and to see, out there in the center currents, the slim, muscular biceps poking through the classically trim tee shirts and crew tops, the rounded tip most portions of well honed legs propped stiff against the transverse wooden struts of the scull, as oars, slim shinny sticks in the gathering morning light, break the smooth glassy surface.

And then the scull, like some magical soundless skiff across the translucent Charles, and I know, as sure as my lungs gulp another breath of frosty morning air, that each particle of water, each conjoined molecule of hydrogen and oxygen, is perfectly, immutably placed. It is unchallenged in its supremacy. Its hegemony is secure.


I lost the scull under the bridge, but it is replaced, in a moment of instantaneous transfer, by a column of sunshine, that rises above the humped skyline of Boston. And Cambridge, its academic towers and gables are suddenly not merely a conglomeration of stone, mortar and brick, but a splendid heap of organized flesh, a profusion of nubby forms, alive and pulsating, caressed to animation by the rosy fingers of dawn.


For all Vandemark men, the robust ones anyway, are the recipients of this transensual gift. It is a heightened anticipation of the possible connectivity of all the sinewy joints in the sub-lunar sphere. It is a knowledge brought not by the mind but the pulse of light, the vibratory undulations of sound, the damp molecules carried aloft by the summers high wind.

For what is a man but a sponge to the world? And what is a sensation if it is not drenched, if it fails to convey to us, in each wrenching moment, that we are but a link in a chain, a causal accident that can be easily replaced by some more convenient or readily accessible contingency. We can be replaced! It is the mechanism that is firmly in place: we just need the one tenth the gumption necessary to test the works, to jiggle the contraption to see if it collapses.


The Charles River water lapped at my new suede shoes. The dampening creases of water were spreading laterally around the aft portion of my feet until they were drenched. Someone behind me yelled, contritely:


“Hey, careful, it drops off steep there,” and moved on. I noticed, chuckling inwardly to myself, that I had begun to wade out into the stream. In the not so distant distance I could see three more sculls skim effortless through the water.

But I was much closer this time, and could see, with concave clarity, the young strong faces set with trim noses, sweaty flaxen hair and damp, perspiration smeared brows, the sheer exhilaration of the exertion of efficient bodies. For the generation of men are like the leaves on a tree. If the tree remains, it is a fortuitous calamity, for the leaves, by the very exertion of their existence, carry with them the stamp of their ultimate doom. For what do we care of other men? We care for the tree only because it nourishes us with a precious drop of sap, a mere speck from the reserve of the whole.


The entire river scene shimmered and shook as if the very exertion of stability was more than it could bear. It was blank, then full, a speeding rampage and a quiet, reserved river walk. The Vandemark curse (which is also the Vandemark boon) is to see the spindly web of connection arching across the world.


The peace descended. But then, the ruination. For the shadow presence was snaking along the river path. My old enemy, that dark brother, was making its hegemony known by rattling my cage in the only way it knows how, through a brute show of force. But is had only temporal powers, and quite limited at that.

Believing, quite erroneously, that IT has absolute mastery of my world, it began its little dance of unbridled frivolity: it capered and shimmied, all along hoping, through these showy displays, through these pantomimes of mock combat, that it could somehow kowtow me into meek submission. That is could (oh that double crossing semblance of a being, that shadow behemoth who thinks he has weight but is only a massive will-o-wisp) could brow beat me into coordination with its goals and designs just by casting its long shadow over my healthy body.


I stepped over, I ducked under, I bent from the waist down to the thin wedge of my shin bone, and, by torquing my body, gently but deftly to an unforeseen attitude, slipped away, once more, from my dastardly twin.


Take that, my proverbial second half! Stand down, for your hold is not as steely as you may believe!


For my brother is never self-depreciating. No, I’m afraid he holds to his precious piece of turf as if it were the entire span and width of the globe. He mistakes, in the classic form of all darker reflections, form from substance.

For where an outline will suffice why flesh out the body? And where a body is fleshed, why trouble yourself about the contours? The shadow self, that creature of accidents and misapprehensions does not set its intellect to discern the true from the false, the deep from the shallow. No, it piddles with trifles.

CLUTTER, 25

When the door was closed behind Mr. Pennyworth it grew cool again in Vandemark Manor. The moist summer air was dispersed in the silent, cool hall, so dark I could barely see my hands in front of my face. The tall ceilings, blackened walls, and the sudden hush as the noise of traffic and people were sealed from the outside, made the whole proceeding seem like the closing of some especially heavy  door.



I turned to race down the hall to inform Homer that we were free, but my head rudely butted a beam that I could normally easily clear. I rubbed the sore spot on my head with my palm. My shoes felt a little tighter. I knelt down and examined the old worn out loafers.

I loosened the laces, but that didn’t seem to help, so I untied them entirely. Still they pinched my feet, so I pulled the laces through. Running up the stairs in a fit of nervous tension one slid off and I stumbled to my knees. I suppose the wood had so rotted that it could no longer support my weight, for it indented the step.

When I stood up to take another step I rested my hand on the banister, the weight splintered the dowels. By the time I reached the upper landing I had left an inexplicable wake of broken wood. I became momentarily confused. In the throes of a B-monster movie style rampage I did not know where I was. I was lost in my own maze of beams, iron, car parts, broken furniture, newspaper stacked to the ceiling, bed frames, and flaying with my arms in front of me, chopping through obstacles like old faulty scissors, blinded by a will to control, I somehow was transported to the attic. I stood panting, excited, flushed…. then, in the next moment, an eerie calm descended on me, and I stood, stock still, straight, calm emotionless, like a golem that had just had the sacred words removed from under his tongue --- suddenly inert.


The attic was a wonderful place to end a rampage of this sort, since it contained not mere concrete junk, but ephemeral memories. It was the unlikely top-heavy anchor of the entire house, of my little fairy world.

I tried to stand up straight (I usually could) but hit a beam. I bent down. One of mother’s dresses, now quaintly out of fashion, hung loosely from a hanger on an old garment dolly. I took it with my hands. The fabric was not strong and easily came apart in my hands as if it had reverted to puff cotton. But it wasn’t the texture that I wanted to feel, or the sight that I wanted to satisfy, it was smell that I wanted. Gripping the dress in my paws I feverishly searched for the fragrance of peppermint.

My nose groped about the decaying garment for even the minutest patch of that wonderful distilment. Nothing but mold and dust and perhaps, and this may have been a mixing of memory and desire, the merest hint of after bath powder, sprinkled about the fragile armpits of the decaying garment.


The veil was removed from my eyes. I descended the attic stairs. I groped about in the dark. My orientation was returning. In the hall I passed the only mirror in the house that was still clean enough to provide a decent likeness.

It was a beautiful oblong, gilded affair in the Empire style, now reduced through age and neglect to a queer extended brown smudge on the wall. I stopped to look at myself. Perhaps I had not done this all-too-human exercise in three or four years. For a man that spent his time almost exclusively indoors, emerging only at night, my skin was a pleasingly uniform chestnut brown.


I pushed open Homer’s door. He was sitting at his little desk building a model of a Messerschmidth fighter. When he built models of this sort he would check with me periodically to see if he was constructing it properly. His tactile judgments were seldom wrong. It was arranging of the decals where he traditionally faltered. When I entered his room his bone white face turned toward me. His albino eyes, pink and rabbitty, were pointed in my direction but wandered aimlessly around that entire area of the door.


“Lang,” he said in his adolescent twang, “come and see if I mounted this darn engine right.”


I walked over. He seemed paler than usual, and his body slighter and squatter in the chair. He was struggling to get adjusted to his new work attitude without realizing the mechanism behind the change. I took the plane gently in my hands. My thumb and forefinger pinched two opposing holes in the fuselage and met in the hollow center.


“Ahhh shit,” I said.


“What Lang,” he asked breathlessly, “what happened?”


“I’m sorry Homer, looks like I busted it a little.”


“Awww,” he squealed, “let me see… is it fixable?” He took the plane gently in his small soft hands, as if he was examining a delicate hummingbird. He caressed the body, quickly finding the two holes.


“Lang, what were ya thinking? I can’t fix this, it’s a hole,” he whined.


“Maybe we can Gerry rig something,” I said huskily, taking the plane again. This time I snapped a wing off.


“Crap!” I said. Homer was silent. I handed him back the plane. After a moment of respectful silence, I backed away from him and said, “I’ll order you an identical one, Homer. I’m awfully sorry.


He fingered the plane all around its damaged surface. I could see the beginnings of yellow tears perched under his blank, vacant eyes, ready to flow down his sunken cheeks. When I turned to leave the room, I knocked my head against the door jamb

CLUTTER, 23

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.

CLUTTER, 23

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.”

CLUTTER, 21

I followed Clare down the ravine, which ended in a small rounded depression filled with brown water. She held my hand and led me to the lip of the moors. They stretched out before us, uniform, brown undulating hills reaching the horizon, where a darker, black brown line penciled at the horizon indicated a tree line.



“Where are we going?” I asked.


“Don’t be so curious, you’ll ruin it. I really think you want to destroy everything, you and that big brain atop that large body.” she smiled leeringly, “It’ll be your ruin. I have something of the prophetess in me, you know. I see things I don’t always understand. But often I see them come to pass.”


“What do you see for me?”


“I see,” she said, still leering at me penetratingly, “a smaller person next to you, or alongside of you. You control him or her, but he or she also controls you, and its an odd little war that neither side will win. What’s its called when you have a living double that haunts you?”


“A doppelganger,” I answered.


“Yes, that’s right.”


“What is this other person, this other side like?” I asked.


“I can’t see it directly, just indirectly. Its like an impression or depression where a person should be, if you get my meaning.”


“It sounds like us,” I said. “In that case, who has the smaller presence and who has the larger?”


“I should think you have the smaller presence,” she said, suddenly stopping and turning around, hugging me, her head burrowed into my chest. Her hair was blowing fiercely in the open air, covering my face. I returned her embrace. She looked up at me, her hard small face a contrast of dull and bright, ruddy reds and sickly planes of grays.


“What’s the end-point of our journey Clare? We’re halfway to Nothingham by now?”


We scampered down a hill, gaining speed near its base, and suddenly crested another small knob of a hill that contained a jumbled mass, which, as we approached it, revealed itself as a  rock outcropping. It was a wall of irregular black stone, scored with deep fissures. One gash, an especially long dark crack, stretched from the rock’s base to its top and oozed with a peculiar moisture. Clare easily slipped through the crack and called to me.


“Come on Lang, its worth it.” Sucking in my chest, deflating my diaphragm, I followed her. The opening was large, but as we progressed it grew narrower. My girth expanded, filling the crack. I looked up at the thin sliver of gray sky above us to prevent from getting sick, but the perspective seemed to worsen it.


In a moment it was over. I was standing next to Clare in a circular rock enclosure. All around were broken bits of stone of different sizes: slabs, spikes, bars, strewn haphazardly as if a bomb had exploded. All that stood was the massive circular wall, three or four times higher than me, tapering off at the top in a chimney shaped bulb.


“People argue whether this is man made or natural. It could be some sort of natural formation or a Celtic fortress of some sort,” Clare said looking at the steep walls, her thin arms dangling at her sides, “What do you think?”


“Hard to say,” I said, fingering the stones. “Why would anyone build anything so hard to get into, even for defensive purposes. Maybe for storage… to hide things away in times of trouble…”


“Well,” she said, “it has its contemporary uses as well.”


She pushed me down onto a flat stone. She straddled me, curling her loose jointed arms around my neck. Her slick tongue darted in and out of my mouth, imitating the motions of copulation. I pulled her cape off and ripped her flimsy shirt open. She was still warm and flushed from sleep. Her small braless breasts sprang out. They disappeared in my hands. We struggled out of our clothes. As we joined, I held her as close as possible.

We were so close we could barely move to simulate the motions of sex. There was a struggle, as we each tried to push the other away in the embrace, and then draw the other one back; it was an inverse ratio of action and reaction… a delicious stalemate.

Finally, I pushed her away from me with all my strength. I placed an open hand on the small of her back and another hand on her gray-green stomach. She took me fully now, and met my motions with equal counter motions. Her tongue flickered in and out of her small rounded mouth. Her yellow eyes looked up at me, and then disappeared behind her dusty eyelids. Her hair was thrown back, resting behind her pointed ear tips. A low moan issued from somewhere deep in her long snake throat. She thrust her arms outward, finding handholds on nearby rocks, and seemed, for a spellbinding moment, to float above me…

CLUTTER, 20

TWELVE



I took Clare’s hand in mine. We arose early before the rest of the house realizing, in a way that perplexed us both, that we had never, with the exception of sleeping together, been truly alone. In war this is not an uncommon experience. War is boredom, mind numbing waiting around with hands in pockets, but war is transition as well. In wartime, unless one closed the door and bolted it, it was bound to be opened by someone who wanted in or out.


We silently slipped out the kitchen door and into the yard. A fog whose fragrance was like wet mildew wrapped the land. Over at the stables the grooms were already readying the horses for the fox hunt. Old wiry men milled about in soft caps and tweedy jackets with reins and saddles, and young boys dressed in overalls with buckets and brushes, all completely oblivious to us.

Clare and I, donned in our capes and hats, strolled past them and down a small ravine. The ravine contained a rushing stream. The water foamed and gurgled down the channel, draining into circular pools at regular intervals down the slope. Small flowering shrubs, just beginning to show their waxy buds, clung to the rock walls in dense, damp clumps. I hopped down into the ravine and finding sure footing reached out for Clare’s waist. I pulled her down to me. As she slid down over my body her lips gently brushed mine as she wrapped her arms around me. I enclosed her me, pulling my cape, over her, effectively enshrouding her.


“Its cold for April,” I said.


“The breeze is stiff is all,” she said with her peculiar accent.


“I suppose we are having a war time affair,” I said huskily into her tiny ear. She looked at me with a twinkle in her gray eyes.


“I can’t distinguish it from my other affairs. Except we are in uniform, of course,” she said. I squeezed her tighter. “Why don’t you let me go Lang and I’ll show you something quite special.”

The shift was happening. The dull pearl gray of her dancing eyes was turning a sparkling yellow, her pale pallor, flushed from the breeze, was noticeably transforming under the secret, active agent that seemed to guide her into a darker honeyed hue. It was as if, in the effort to avoid being captured in a snare, she sacrificed a limb which she knew, in more favorable climates and circumstances, she could regenerate.

She trawled along the perimeter; she peered with her penetrating glance to the other side, but had no desire to pierce the tension, to break the cycle of compulsion that was so readily viewed, so idiotically and easily halted. For I do not believe in will. I do not believe in behavior. Compulsion is my herald and my god. And when her due is not paid, a correspondingly dear price is exacted from other arenas. Compulsion does not need individuals, it demands meat. It extracts carrion.

CLUTTER, 15

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.