by Tito Perdue
This time he marched along the tracks for perhaps a quarter-mile before he came back and, after loading a mint-new blade, shaved carefully in the small light of his not-very-good kerosene lamp. The dew was mostly gone by now and he was able to return to the tracks and proceed forward without drenching his well-polished shoes. By good fortune, he had drawn a particularly tasty cigarette that sorted ideally with the weather. But instead of lifting to the sky, the dark blue smoke simply fell to ground and lay there. Other than that, he encountered almost nothing else during the half-mile excursion that carried him to town.
First, he had to report to City Hall and pay some $1,251 of back taxes on the purchase of his home. He was required to produce a deed, too, and signatures, and to fork over monies he would have preferred to use for the purchase of certain volumes of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica that were still lacking from his collection. Not that he hoped ever to possess the full set, or have the time to read it, or even find a place for it among his shelves. He did have three volumes of Yar-Shater’s Bibliotheca Persica, which sufficed to keep him from feeling absolutely naked.
Having by now frittered away more than $2,388 in checks, he proceeded to the library, a short trip that required him to encounter and to be seen by nine different individuals using the same path. He passed shopkeepers at work, a cobbler, barber, a plumbing supplies man posing proudly among his wares. Did they not understand that minute by minute they were moving to the top of Death’s agenda? Even so, they were a good people, these, especially the plumber whose destiny, Philip believed, would carry him direct to paradise. But even the worst of them (the barber) was trying earnestly to hold up his part in the economy of life. How Philip envied them, as he did all those who imagined that what they were doing was important. He passed a beauty shop in which two beauticians were working on each other’s hair, and then a mail carrier bent under the weight of so many hundreds of letters written by so many people who really had nothing to say.
In his long absence, the librarian had set up a display concerning the work of a best-selling author whose photograph revealed the sort of person she was. Himself, the librarian was sitting in his office snipping out book reviews from various journals. Philip, who had not exchanged words with a literate person in more than a month, went immediately to the man and invited him to the half-acre patch of willow trees down by the railway tracks.
“So,” the fellow said. “You again.”
“I wish to lodge a complaint concerning your administration of our public library.”
“Well, go ahead and lodge it then!”
“Aren’t you going to write it down?”
They looked at each other. Philip, with his extraordinary brain, recognized that the man was larger than himself. Watching him take out a pen and tattered envelope and begin actually to write something down, the linguist admitted to himself that he was having a wonderful time.
“First, I was appalled to find no trace, none whatsoever, of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Secondly, that the water fountain tastes bad. Thirdly, that…”
“Hold it! What was that…”
“Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Want me to spell it?”
“No, I don’t want you to spell it! What is that, Latin or something?”
The linguist watched closely as the functionary strove, slowly, to write out the title. He was doing as well as he could, and there was something laudable in his efforts.
“You’re doing admirably.”
“Fuck you. OK, how do you spell ‘Menta…’ or whatever?”
Philip laughed out loud, only his fourth such outburst since New York. Truth was, he rather liked the fellow. He said:
“Don’t see how you can be a librarian without Latin. Me, I know seven languages.”
“One’s all you need.”
“Want to test me?”
“Hell no, I don’t want to test you! You’re just the best thing since sliced bread, is that what it is?”
“Why, yes. You can’t begin to understand a person like me, able to think simultaneously in several languages.”
“Bullshit. You can’t even walk at the same time.”
Philip laughed. Across the way he saw a good-looking woman, pretty good, coming toward them in a scarf that accorded with the color of her hair. He was so tired of these artifices.
“I knew you were pretty weird,” the librarian was saying. “Say, if you’re so special, how come you aren’t famous or something?”
“Famous among humans?”
“Well, sure.”
“I’ll pass.”
By this time the woman had moved beyond them and appeared to be aiming for another section of the park. In this light, her face showed itself to best advantage, and yet he knew what a close inspection would do to that delusion. He sat still for it, did Philip, as the librarian plucked a cigarette from the linguist’s shirt pocket and ignited it.
“All right, just tell me this, then — have you ever actually achieved anything? I doubt it. Apart from just talking about it, I mean?”
“We don’t achieve, people like me.”
“I didn’t think so. What do you do then, hm?
“Speculate. Twenty-four hours the day.”
“And what good does that do me?”
“You? You should be doing things for me. Angels are served. They don’t do the serving themselves.”
“So now you’re an angel.”
“I thought you knew. Just look into my face. No one else looks like that.”
“Thank goodness. No, actually you’re pretty much of an ass, aren’t you?”
(Both men laughed. Not to do so would have been impossible.)
“You’ll be sorry when I’m gone.”
“Oh? Let’s try it and see.”
It was approximately 11:42 when Philip, indignant for having to carry his own art supplies, set out toward home. He did not understand why he wasn’t already where he wanted to be, and why he must do the work himself instead of having the finished canvases delivered to his door. It is true that he could hear a train in the distance. When he died, he wanted to die from too much beauty too long endured, or from a heart attack, or drugs chosen for the purpose; the last thing he wanted was to see his Grecian face flattened under the wheels of a locomotive. Accordingly, he moved away from the tracks and set up his easel in the edge of the woods. The following train was freighted with agricultural machinery mostly but also carried a quota of human beings. He exchanged quick glances with a dignified man sitting alone in the dining car. No need to read that person’s biography; Philip saw right away that his life had been a series of disgraceful actions which he had only now begun to regret. A thousand years of purgatory Philip granted him, preceded by still another thousand of the worst kind of limbo. And then back to purgatory once again! They had just the time, the two men, to nod to each other across the distance.
If was as if the train had ripped away a crucial stretch of the “membrane” (Philip now called it) that so far had cut humankind off from the uninterrupted beauty that awaited those who could appreciate it, painters that is to say, and linguists to a certain extent. Or rather, it was as if he was being vouchsafed this perfect view as a reward for turning into an angel before his time. The pines, forest green (naturally), contrasted with the turquoise sky in a way that no-one could have predicted from a color chart. Open fields were also revealed, each offering a cowscape in which the animals had distributed themselves for maximum aesthetic effect. And then, in the extreme distance, an ancient ruin meant to simulate the broken towers of far-famed Ilium.
He couldn’t begin to paint it adequately, not with his oils as turgid as they still were from the long winter. In fact, he got only so far with it before gathering his materials, putting them away in his satchel, and then arranging the stillborn painting in such a way that the next train might enjoy it without charge.
Nineteen
He had been wanting rain, and now at last he got some. He liked to come out o
nto the porch with his coffee and allow himself to imagine that the whole world had been washed away by the downpour, bringing a final end to the vanity, the egotism and activities of others. The wind, too, it threatened to push the little colored cottages off their foundations and into the valley down below. Thunder and lightning. And yet in his whole life he had never witnessed thunder that was loud enough, or lightning he considered sufficiently bright. Such was his condition when an old Ford car turned into his driveway, parked, and an irritated-looking individual came running to the house. He was both bald and without a hat, a bad deposition in rain like this.
“This had better be worth it,” he said. “You the one?”
“Yes,” Philip replied. (He would have thought the man could see that for himself.)
“All right, let’s go inside.”
The living room was not as tidy as it should have been, the result of the woman spending all day in the kitchen. A person could see three exhausted coffee cups and half a glass of wine.
“Take off your shirt.”
“Sir?”
“I’m in a bit of a hurry you understand.”
Philip began to unbutton himself. The visitor had brought a little black bag that gave the final clue. One could imagine the drugs that bag contained, the needles and scalpels. That was when Philip’s sexagenarian roommate came and stood in the door. She had been drying her hands with a towel and continued to do so long after the need had passed.
“I asked him to come,” she confessed.
“The devil, you say!”
“It’s bad, real bad. He’s always coughing and so forth. He just about died last Wednesday!”
“I asked him to take his shirt off. Guess I’ll have to ask again.”
Never had Philip experienced a stethoscope as chilly as this. He stood still for it however.
“How long have you been like this?”
“Oh, he’s always been like this. Long as I’ve known him anyways.”
Philip remained without speaking. The man was exploring his entire thoracic region, both front and behind.
“I need you to come down to my office.”
“He won’t.”
“He’d better.”
“It’s bad, ain’t it?”
“It’s not good. I want to see you tomorrow, understand? Early. Nine o’clock.”
“He dudn’t get up till around noon. Or there abouts.”
“Nine o’clock.”
“Yes, sir.”
Philip observed as the fellow abandoned the house, ran through the rain, and then came back for his little black suitcase. A brusque man, Philip nevertheless foresaw for him a larger time in heaven than in hell.
He passed the balance of that day, Philip, adoring the rain from the perspective of his desk. His Greek was getting better but his reading ability in early Anglo-Saxon was attenuating in proportion as he neglected it. And then, too, he had been fuddling about pointlessly with the Mayan system. At one time he had demanded it of himself to know sixteen languages, an ambition recently reduced to just half that number. His head had been full of grey cells in those days, his mind as keen as the sharpest weapon, and once he had owned a pair of real thin glasses that assisted him when reading at long distance. Or lying in bed.
Twenty
One more time he hiked to town. He wanted to have his last will and testament notarized by the town’s registrar, who insisted upon reading the full document before affixing her name and date and the wax seal still used in these parts.
“You ought to have a lawyer for this,” she said.
“Aren’t you a lawyer?”
“Not exactly. But my husband now, he...”
“No, no; I don’t put any more stock in lawyers than in doctors.”
Again, she read through the neatly typed pages, lingering over certain parts.
“And so you plan on leaving all that money to Magda. And the house, too?”
“Magda?”
“That woman you’re living with!”
“Ah!”
“And the truck goes to Hans.”
“Hans?”
“He won’t take it. He’s already got more trucks and cars than what he needs. No, I’d give it to Kurt, if I was you.”
“Kurt?”
“My son.”
Philip allowed her to make the change.
“And all these books. I don’t see anything here I’d ever want to read. However... Rolfe might want ’em. Some of ’em.”
“Rolfe?”
“That’s right, yes. He runs the library. Or used to.”
“He doesn’t run it any more?”
“Wouldn’t know. We don’t go there very much, people here.”
Hearing that, Philip went back into the document and apportioned a $10,000 gratuity to the fellow.
The journey home would of necessity carry him past the subliminal landscape seen briefly by him a few days previously. But not today. Perhaps he had been looking down at the ground, or had let the smoke from his cigarette cut off the view. Or perhaps his recent behavior hadn’t been good enough. In any case, he arrived home at exactly 2:58 to discover the woman watching television.
“Ha,” he said. “And so this is how you spend your time!”
“I was just fixing to turn it off.”
“Wait.”
He saw something, and what he saw and heard was a haughty newscaster tossing the hair out of her eyes while condescending to the ignorant masses out in television land. But there never had been any hair in her eyes to begin with.
“Look at that,” he said. “She doesn’t have any hair in her eyes, for Christ’s sakes!”
“I know it. But that’s just the way they do it these days.”
“Yes. I seem to see her tumbling head over heels in white hot lava. Any mail today?”
“Bills. And volume nine of the MGH. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.”
He laughed out loud, Philip, patted her on the head, and then retired to his quarters. The woman had dusted the place and decorated his desk with some genuinely good-smelling flowers that carried him back in memory to something that had happened one time. But he couldn’t remember what it was. It wasn’t that occasion when he had run into the closet with his girlfriend and kissed her twice on the forehead. Nor the time he had climbed to the top of an abandoned forest tower and had confirmed the curvature of the world. Nor did it hearken him back to the best dream he had ever had, the one that had him floating face-down about twenty or thirty miles above the surface of the earth. None of those.
It also seemed to him that volume nine (volume nine of the Scriptores segment) was not quite all that it should have been; even so, he ran quickly through three or four pages of it, fortifying his knowledge of those times. His one great fear was to discover that medieval people were no better than the current ones. They did, however, seem to believe in something, a debilitating psychosis, according to the modern age. And if it were true that at one time he had been able to read fifty pages at a sitting, nowadays he was fortunate to get through one-tenth that number before padding off to bed.
They dined on seafood, and never mind that the nearest ocean was hundreds of miles away. The woman was good with oysters while Philip was superior in forcing open their shells. He would have liked to see the expression on her face when finally she had the resources for all the foods and clothes and television sets available anywhere. Today, she seemed somewhat younger-looking than before, perhaps because she was spending more and more time in town searching for a groom.
“Very good oysters, Rolfe,” he said.
“I’m Magda.”
“And shrimp. Just excellent.”
He adored the night, rain and night, night, rain and listening to the second, third, and final movements of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Of course it had a melancholy effect, that music, but was worth the trivial price exacted by that. In this matter, he agreed fully with the American writer E. A. Poe, who had shown there could be no beauty wi
thout some tincture of sadness connected to it. Having heard the music to its end, he then stepped out onto the porch, played it again, and then added it to the list of things he would regret once he had graduated from the world.
He preferred to sleep for short periods, and then come awake with his books spread out around him. He liked the view from his window, and the far-away sight of a lantern in the woods. Rain has been mentioned, as also the smell of honeysuckle, mildew and pine resin. He was proud of his ties, all four score of them. As for his profile, it still thrilled him each time he came to within reach of a mirror. Finally, having satisfied himself with five hours of sleep, he rose, gathered his favorite quilt, and then set out on the trek that ought to reveal the source of the lantern that so intrigued him.
It was almost June, he believed, and the weather in Tennessee was just about perfect for crickets and cicadas and the enormous frogs endemic to the region. The moon, too, met all his requirements and gave off no insignificant portion of light. He could see fairly well, therefore, and what he saw beckoned him across the tracks and into the forest itself. The lantern had disappeared, due either to the foliage or because the owner had seen him coming. He disliked how the briars caught at his suit, and never mind that his clothing had become unimportant to him by now. He heard what probably were coyotes, a wonderful sound that seemed to express the general woe of the world and forest-bound things. He heard crows, or mayhap blackbirds complaining nonstop in the upper branches of the trees. All creatures dread the night save only Philip, who delighted in it.
He never found what he had come for, and after roving about at random for another twenty or thirty minutes, he made up a pallet of leaves and pine straw. All his life he had felt himself to be much safer in the woods than anywhere else.
Twenty-one
On June 19th, he finished his coffee and got into a satin-lined pale blue summer suit. The woman had lately moved the television set into her own room, where she was free to use it at all hours. She didn’t approve of Philip straying into the kitchen, her own special preserve, and he had to move on tiptoes to retrieve a can of tuna, salted crackers, and a bottle of his preferred root beer with an Old Testament sort of person pictured on the label. All these he put away in his satchel along with his paints and brushes, his penknife, his Icelandic grammar, and the small remains of a bottle of Amaretto. The day was bright and lovely and he was impatient to be out and among the hills and honeysuckle, the little birds, the bright green grass and the rest of all that.
