Kafka:
“I have always looked upon my parents as persecutors.”
Brod (to Felice):
Franz was furious when his mother read your letter to him. But “Franz, thank God, is gratifyingly stubborn and sticks precisely to what is good for him. His parents just will not see that an exceptional man like Franz needs exceptional conditions to prevent his sensitive spirit from withering . . .”
Brod walks downstage and sits on the edge of the stage, while around me the dour man snorts, the Count squirms, Spike restlessly taps her foot, but I don’t see the Turkish poet, though he must be here, exultant with these confabulations before us. My beloved father was a persecutor and a pleaser. One night he took me out to dinner, and, after he paid the bill, he looked sad, I asked him why, and he said it wasn’t good enough, he’d wanted to take me for a very good meal, he was sorry it wasn’t better, he repeated downcast, as if everything had depended upon this dinner, which I remember now, but don’t know why.
Felice:
I love my garden. I want to grow roses for you. Roses are ancient. They are Aphrodite’s tears and Adonis’s blood. I want you to be happy. I will sit beside you, nurse you. But each letter upsets me, each of your thoughts undoes the previous one. My mother grows increasingly upset, too. When will we marry, she asks. I am weary sometimes. I don’t want to be a burden.
Kafka:
“You know, there are wonderful sanitoria in this wide world.”
The Narrator:
Do not laugh at a blind man nor tease a dwarf nor injure the affairs of the lame, Kafka.
Kafka:
I? Never. Aren’t I afflicted, too?
Brod points his index finger at the narrator, scolding her, then she puts her script aside and, with mirth, points her index fingers at the audience. Saint Rita harumphs loudly to the Frenchman beside her, who courts and esteems evil and smiles with glee, then Rita’s mouth screws shut in a universal sign of disgust, while next to the Frenchman, the Magician appears rapt. Where is Contesa sitting or hidden, I wonder, she’s quoted the Count about the lame, from his “Dead Hand Notes” lecture. My skin seethes with vermiculations, which promiscuously derange my body, and now the Count encloses my warm hand inside his icy one, and I jump at the surprise.
The Narrator:
To Kafka, a bourgeois marriage was a strangulation. According to his friends, he was humorous. He was full of fun, a barrel of laughs. But for him marriage wasn’t funny, and he feared he’d become a fat bourgeois.
Kafka (walking quickly from side to side onstage):
There was a very religious man who never doubted God’s existence. One day a flood came, and he went to the top of his house and sat on the roof. People passed by in a boat and offered to row him to safety. No, he said, I’m waiting for God to stop the flood and deliver me. A second boat came by, filled with people, and then a third. Each time the religious man said he was waiting for God’s deliverance. Finally, his house collapsed, and he drowned. The man went to heaven, where he beseeched God: Why did you fail me? God said: I sent three boats.
Kafka holds his sides and laughs demonically, Felice isn’t laughing, standing at the edge of the stage, and will she jump off in a symbolic suicide? Just now she reminds me of my sleeping-pill-addicted friend, whose infuriated neediness could only be quieted with barbiturates, and maybe she enters because it was in a theater when I last spotted this former friend, but because she’d had plastic surgery and looked similar to herself at the age when we met, I couldn’t tell if it was really her or someone who looked like her, but younger, and I didn’t say hello, because it’s often better not to say anything. The person I thought she was could have been her daughter, or it simply may not have been her, but whoever it was was crying.
Brod:
She hoped that the mordant man, who abhorred violence, would be the right one for her. A good husband. He explained to her he couldn’t be. But Felice was a slave to her love.
The Frenchman applauds inappropriately, I don’t know precisely why, though he may cherish enslavement, and Saint Rita moves farther from him. Is there a way to avoid such metaphors? I can take apart a chair, even a beloved chair, because it can be taken apart and is only a chair, and slavery is also slavery. I’m tense, preparing for a decisive event, or wishing for it, because, without a complement of elements cresting conclusively, I may not feel satisfied, fulfilled, or able to rest. Where will things go? Where will these images and words go when we’ve left here? I like to place objects where they should be, in the right containers, to avoid mess and spills, and, at the end of the day, dirty dishes in the sink are sometimes maddening. Yet the trivial, broken, and incomplete are dearer to me, more precious, since what can’t be spliced together, cleaned up, and unanimously credited propels novelty, as an antic irrelevance may also parent art and science. I want contentment and satisfaction, things falling into place, not apart, which is incongruent with my impulse to take apart and leave things in pieces on the floor. But, generally, I would prefer to be indifferent to every outcome.
Felice:
I might soar if I were not stuck to the ground by his exceptions and rebukes. His strange writing! I am lost to it. I never see him, he never visits, he breaks our appointments. He writes me every day, twice a day. I should leave him. But his words are life to me now, and he loves me. He needs me.
The Narrator:
Woman, beware your needs!
Brod:
Ach, ach . . .
Kafka:
“The first evening we met . . . what a lot has happened between that evening and now, and since to blush is to admit, your blushes on that occasion . . . implied the following: ‘Yes, he loves me, but for me it is a great misfortune. For he thinks that because he loves me, he is free to torment me . . . He always talks in riddles.’ Dearest Speaker: I would give my life for you, but I cannot give up tormenting you.”
Felice’s and Kafka’s torment is that his love is a torment, so agitated when I’m supposed to be calm, I turn from the picture onstage to the picture window that frames the dark forest beyond the Rotunda Room, whose jumpy spirits may be quivering, fornicating with abandon, or sleeping, though they don’t need to rest. Beyond the window lies the beauty of the world, I tell myself, not believing in spirits or the world’s beauty, yet the ideas aid me, pull me off Kafka’s words, and soothe me like a subtle emollient on the skin or a lovely description of a facial, and I wantonly reckon the possibility of there existing a magic that has the power to console, and, if so, how it might trick me, if it hasn’t already.
Some believe cats are magical creatures, I don’t, but I have a limited idea of magic, I like illusion, and don’t need to believe it, but cats have the power to console. An affectionate cat lying on your chest, as it purrs, is a consolation for the horrors of the world, though its being in no way alters the plight of the world, apart from fostering your sense of well-being in a reclusive, evanescent moment. A cat can sense when you’re unhappy, even my wild cat once lay on my back when I cried, he didn’t lie on it for long, but since it was the only time he did, and I was crying, I believe he knew I was unhappy and he was trying to help me. He may be purring now, keeping my mother company, if her old cat permits, as she and her brain age, I know of a dog who lies on the beds of dying people in hospitals, he always knows when a person will die, he senses death coming, and he’s always right, or my cat could be in a corner, lonely for me, which I doubt, but in some way I’d like him to miss me though not be miserable. Actually, I want to be surrounded by many cats, hundreds, if I didn’t have to take care of them all the time and be responsible for cleaning their litter boxes, because when looking at them, at their sleek coats, their serene indifference, their implacable calm, unless they’ve gone mad like my cat who stalked and attacked me, the world’s horror leaves temporarily.
The disconsolate woman and tall balding man come to the center of the stage, hold hands, and stare into each other’s eyes. They embrace and slide back and forth
across the stage, wordlessly, and, with each movement, Kafka tightens his grip, so her anorexic body disappears inside his embrace, she is affixed to his body like a stamp, then he pushes her away from him, and this happens again and again. At last, Felice shakes her head and disengages, wrests her painfully thin person from him, while she covers her face with her hands and then, in or out of character, weeps softly.
The Narrator:
If Felice could fly. If she had wings! They’d be clipped by her Kafka. He created her for himself He didn’t talk about her to his friends. In fact he didn’t talk about her ever. When her name came up in conversation, he pretended he didn’t know her. He hoped a visiting friend would bring news of her, unaware.
Then Felice, or the disconsolate young woman, heaves and sobs, she weaves in place, circles the stage, and stops short, then she collapses, still weeping convulsively. Her breath comes in fast bursts, she can’t rise. “She’s hyperventilating,” shouts the stout Wineman, as he approaches the stage. Her wailing can’t have been scored in Contesa’s play, though it is spectacular and would be a feat if the disconsolate woman were acting, but now an anxious staff member rises from his chair and the Magician as well as the Count rush forward to help, I move forward also, and everyone is clustering around her downcast, skinny shape on the floor. The Wineman turns her over deftly, strokes her forehead, breathes into her mouth, counting one two three four, then breathes into her mouth again, until her breathing regulates itself, and she settles down, her body released. The residents spread out and give her more room to breathe and orient herself, as well as themselves, while the tall balding man caps his hand over his bald spot, rubbing it in circles, and the Count and I stand by, not knowing what to do, or if anything more is required of us. Usually, I believe, a paper bag is slapped over a hyperventilator’s mouth.
Silence sounds like a clap of thunder.
At last, Contesa calls out that her play is over, even if it’s not finished, and please everyone return to the lounge or your rooms, have a drink or a tea, and then she declares that our Felice will be fine. Each of the emerald-green tufted-velvet chairs is empty, except for the Frenchman’s, who remains and glares in her direction, also the site of the unplanned spectacle. He doesn’t seem to be at a loss the way the rest of us are, he appears miffed or outraged, as if he might be a sophomaniac, which, according to the Medical Sex Dictionary in the library, is a form of insanity characterized by a belief in one’s own supreme wisdom. He approaches the stage area with a saturnine visage and confronts the Count and me, asserting, in a still-charming French accent, that when Galileo was tried during the Inquisition, as he rose from his knees after he swore the earth was the center of the universe, not to be a liar, he muttered, “E pur si muove.” With force, the Count repeats in English, “Nevertheless it does move.” “He was a fool to die for this idea, it would be found true, anyway,” the Frenchman spits out, and takes off, looking back at me, daring me to rebuke or despise him, a look that might have sexual connotations. The Count remarks, casually, “I’ve met others like him.”
I have also, and in the past I might have wanted to have sex with him, a bitterly provocative man, whose active disdain for common things and a love of evil might have carried the day and myself to his bed, briefly. But I don’t like his skin, which is rough with large pores and a few blackheads around his nostrils, his tidy moustache, which hyphenates his lower from his upper face, and his height, he’s too short for me. Imagining myself with him feels athletic and tiring, as if we’d played sex against each other in the Olympics. I once regularly used to carry a torch, but I no longer want to die for love, I might for an idea, but maybe that’s also a romance, because I’d like to die for something and not nothing, which is probably my fate, and I’m here, with time off and on my hands, as well as the ambiguous luxury to consider such questions.
On July 3, 1826, Thomas Jefferson was in a coma and awoke long enough to ask, “Is it the fourth?” They were supposedly his last words, he died on July 4, 1826, at 12:20 p.m., and John Adams fell ill and died later the same day, at 6 p.m. His last words were: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” At my finale, I’d like to have inspiring words like those on my dry, feverish lips, and someone to hear them and care enough to write them down, the way my dermatologist writes about my skin in his file that grows bigger and bigger. The Frenchman also has a regrettable brown mole on his cheek, its border is regular, if it were irregular, especially a new brown lesion, I might be compelled, though I wouldn’t want to interfere or importune, to advise him to see a dermatologist, but I believe it is benign, even if he’s marred in my eyes by an indefinable unsightliness and by his stupid beliefs. I can’t understand why he, and many others with ugly growths on the face, especially when there is more than one, doesn’t have it removed.
The residents amble, reluctantly or moodily, toward the thick wooden double doors, where the Turkish poet looks distressed, so I wave at him wanly, he returns the wave, then disappears with Henry and Arthur to discuss this local and other more exotic scandals over cognac. But I feel suspended or caught and don’t leave, or can’t, so time passes, and, like much of time, I can’t remember its passage, where it went, what occurred to me, only that for a while my legs were wooden and dense as a chair by Wright, and I stared into the room, not seeing, and, as in a dream when a monster appears, I couldn’t budge, but I didn’t faint or even come close to swooning. A former enemy once turned her back on me, and I couldn’t move, but then she died, one of the three enemies to die, extraordinarily, within the same year, which left a vacuum or more space, and then I could travel safely in territories where once they might also have been, inhibiting my movements and spurious sense of freedom.
The disconsolate young woman’s heaving sobs bother me. Her rebellious body intimidated and stunned us with its bursting, explicit urgency, exceeding the bounds by which we residents are circumscribed, and, while Kafka and Felice were subject to exquisite conflicts, the disconsolate woman’s, involuntarily revealed, disconcerts me more in the moment. Curiously, her self-exposure awakens the balcony scene in which the inventor was displaying his peachy ass, though the two events had different causes, motives, and held very different excitements. I become aware of myself alone in the Rotunda Room, surrounded by empty, plush green velvet cushions on black wood chairs, and, in a sense, its many ghost stories, as well as Kafka’s and Felice’s, so when a loud crash at a window startles me, though probably just a stiff wind, the sudden sound jars me, and I shoot out of the room through the rustic, dark, and heavy double doors downstairs to the main room, where some residents linger, JJ, the demanding man, one of the disconsolate women, not our Felice, and others. They are also confounded by her naked collapse and talk about it among themselves, but I require quiet and need to be in my room quickly, to undo the unforeseen, unsettling events, though I know that’s impossible, so I turn toward the external door, stepping lightly and keeping to an imaginary line on the wooden floor, hoping to be invisible, to leave without further contact, since there’s been enough socializing and vivacious or rigorous content to last for days. Perhaps I should round up Contesa for a heart-to-heart, but she must be with her actors, and the Count and she, more than anyone, will understand my need for flight, as she regularly flees, and, with that, I escape with relief, but outside on a pathway leading either to the library or one of the guest or resident houses, I notice the Magician, who is scowling or concentrating hard, with an incandescent light from a lamppost illuminating him.
He crooks an index finger at me. I walk over without thinking about why he beckons me; actually I don’t think at all, I over, drawn too easily.
—Helen, like I said, I have this feeling about you, you were the only one who didn’t freak out when I did my trick. Did you see their faces? They wuz robbed.
He contorts his face to mime comic displeasure, then waits a second for me to speak, but I don’t, so he goes on.
—Anyway, here’s the proposition, it came to me in the room, with
Violet’s stuff going on and all, the play or whatever it was. Would you like me to conduct a séance?
I say nothing.
—I’m serious. Violet would, I mean, the room’s perfect. If I’m ever going to do it again, it’d be right for me to do it here. The room has that history. I’m ready to give it a shot. What do you say?
—A séance?
—I told you I’m not staying here long, so now’s the time.
—But I don’t believe in spirits or séances.
—I’m a skeptic, too. Big deal. Why not give it a shot? How about a genuine experience? Isn’t that why you’re here?
An excellent question, I tell myself, not the Magician, and it also doesn’t matter what I think, since I also believe it’s good to change my mind or open it, and I’m not willing to doubt everything all the time, because then doubt isn’t doubt, but a form of certainty. What I may need is greater than my capacity for doubt or knowledge, for instance, about the workings of the universe, about which scientists can’t rest, driven day and night to fit its entire machinations inside a total theory. I might try a séance, since the most improbable experiment could beget auspicious progeny, and, even though I don’t believe in the dead returning and speaking, the idea draws me to it. I like surprises, and I can’t stop myself.
—I have reservations, I admit.
American Genius Page 29
