The Magician explains that we are supposed to center and open ourselves to what is out there, way out there, and also in us.
—Death is the master of transformation, he says in his mellow, nasal voice. Some believe there is no death, and the spirit or soul continues after death. We learn from physics that matter doesn’t die. You could say we survive death, because human beings are matter. In the seventeenth century, the scientist Emanuel Swedenborg believed that when a person dies, they’re welcomed by angels. In the hereafter, they live the style they did on earth.
—The same lifestyle? Is this patter? Spike asks.
—Please don’t interrupt him, Contesa urges, gently.
—I get your skepticism, the Magician says, but what I’m trying to do with you here—actually I’m not sure what it is. I’m not above entertainment, that’s true. But, for what it’s worth, I recently lost my mother.
—I recently lost my best friend, the young married man says.
—I lost my older sister, Contesa says.
—I lost my wife, the Count says.
Is the Count’s wife dead, I wonder again, lost, literally lost, or is it figurative, she’s lost to him?
—My dog died two weeks before I got here, the disconsolate woman says.
—I don’t know anyone, no one I love, anyway, who’s dead, says Spike, her unmarked face an embarrassment of riches.
—I can see that, Moira adds gravely, lowering her eyes.
The Turkish poet exhales operatically, straightens up in his chair, and begs the Magician to get on with it.
—Please. I am inspired by you, my blessed, extravagant companions. The Turkish poet’s hands are outstretched, palms peacefully up.
—And by whatever spirits come, even if they don’t. I’ve lost . . . I am not so brave anymore to admit, maybe like you.
—Everyone, please, close your eyes, and let’s be quiet now, the Magician says.
I shut my eyes reluctantly and reflect on the history of spiritualism that lives in this room, which we twelve now occupy, in a building not far from where witches burned at the stake in the 17th century. I consider that if there’s death in life, that is, we recognize death will come and live with it, there might be life in death. In Zulu the verb fa means to die, the noun fa means inheritance, which encourages solace, since when someone dies, there’s something you inherit, death leaves a gift.
A blast of arctic air sets me shivering.
—Everyone here, the Magician goes on, except for Moira, Violet, and me are nonbelievers. In the nineteenth century, mediums didn’t allow nonbelievers into a séance, because of their negative energy.
—Everyone wishes to speak to the dead, Moira announces, definitively. It is a universal wish.
—Good, the Magician pronounces.
The Magician says you have to want to believe, and then, to my surprise, the Count admits that against reason he hopes for belief, at least now, since belief might soothe him in time, though it’s time that might heal, but he can’t let go of reason.
—What’s so great about reason? our Felice demands.
This leaves Arthur, Henry, the young married man, our Kafka, Spike, and me.
—What are we supposed to do? Spike asks. Believe or not not believe? The young married man cracks up.
—We’re not supposed to do anything, Contesa says.
—Double negatives, Arthur intones dolefully. We’re here, right. Is our belief really essential?
Arthur speaks, at once serious and ironic, on both sides of the issue, then he and Henry, in unison, look with a passive or benign contentment at the Magician.
The Magician rises slowly, not to alarm us, and walks around the table, demonstrating that there is nothing attached to him, and, as he does, he explains that in the 19th century it was revealed that many mediums were hoaxes, the séances rigged, that the medium had helpers, which he doesn’t have, that the medium might have a signal or two for the helper, and that the notorious ectoplasm, a luminous substance believed to ooze from a spiritualistic medium’s mouth, was sometimes regurgitated surgical gauze, that mediums who suddenly levitated were discovered, when the lights were switched on by nonbelievers, to be standing on a chair, but he had no tricks up his sleeve or under him, no assistants whose voices doubled for him or our loved ones. Some probably still fear that the Magician will pickpocket them again—I notice the Count clutch his Breguet in his right fist—but soon the Magician extinguishes the candles on the table and has the tall balding man turn off the various lamps in the Rotunda Room. In the semi-darkness, there’s easy and labored breathing through the nose and mouth, bodies shifting and settling in their chairs, shoes tapping and shuffling on the hardwood floor, legs shaking in place, and rocking, and I feel uneasy, everyone must feel uneasy except Moira, the Magician, and Contesa, who have experience with spiritualism and its manifestations, but apart from a narrow beam of light coming through the windows from the moon, the lantern on the lamppost outside, or an occasional car’s headlights, the near-dark cloaks us, and, separate from each other, we are shapes, shadows, or shades of our corporeal selves.
—Be still, everyone, be still, the Magician commands. We must keep still. Empty your minds, release yourselves, open yourselves up, stop thinking, and breathe. Don’t move around. That’s important. Remember everything you can about the loved one you want to contact. Feel their presence beside you. Will it. I will act as your conduit, your medium, to the great beyond.
There’s a single guffaw, probably Spike’s, a few more minutes of freighted silence, during which, my eyes shut, I hazard believing or not disbelieving, because when I adumbrate my various zeals, that chairs communicate ideas, emotions, and values, that democracy is conflict, that justice and truth are often opposed, or that a subtle design could one day cause a revolution, though subtlety is usually derogated, I see myself avow one idea, drop another, see that I change my mind, but not easily. In the here and now, I could momentarily embrace spiritualism, as I could, in the abstract, a poorly designed or uncomfortable chair.
Contesa’s head drops or falls onto her chest, she may be asleep, but then her head flops from side to side, and, adjusting to the darkness, my eyes fasten on her, as she begins to mutter phrases just beyond decipherability. Her voice is a strangled or undulating moan. The Magician whispers that Violet is in a trance state and we are to continue our reveries and investigations, to let her be wherever she is, to follow our memories to our loved ones and feel their presence beside us, to let go of the now and reach out to a world with no past or future.
The odd inquisitive woman, Moira, erupts into the stillness in a voice that sounds drugged, hers is a thick, slurred speech, which may signal her submission to or immersion in the otherworld, or this may be the otherworld’s speaking voice, since if the dead speak, their speech must undergo transformation, too.
—Your aura, Ataturk, I see it.
With her eyes shut, she delicately indicates the Turkish poet.
—It is blue, sky blue. The color of hope, yes, there is hope in you and for others.
The Turkish poet acknowledges her murky address with a rich sigh.
—I am no Ataturk, he says mournfully. I wish for him.
—Everyone wishes to speak to the dead, Moira asserts again.
Silence. Breathing.
Then Moira, agitated, shouts: “Get off me, leave me. Go to her! To her!”
Contesa awakens or, rather, lifts her head, and she also speaks slowly, as if drugged, dragging her words and placing many breathy pauses between them: “What, what? You’ve come, my sister, you’re back. I did NOT steal Mother’s ring. She gave it to me. You’re the selfish one. Your husband is terrible. He . . . No. Yes. Stop it, that’s not true. No, I didn’t turn my back on my people. Never, no. But don’t go. Can’t we . . .? Please stay.”
A defiant quiet surrounds us, it or solitude penetrates me severely. I don’t know where to set Contesa’s admissions and entreaties, since I heard what I should never h
ave heard and can’t accept, I did hear her, and, for this reason alone, I should run away. But I don’t, I can’t, my legs are leaden, my head and skin throb, and I’m stunned and humbled by seeing and hearing what I don’t believe.
The Magician waves his hands in the air, directs his gaze at the table with an aspect both friendly and stern, but he makes me nervous and tired. I close my eyes, I open my eyes, Contesa’s eyes are closed, she doesn’t stir, I close my eyes. The unique quiet mutes my incredulity, its constant eeriness has substance. The roof becomes alive, a giant animal, my chair arouses me, the round walnut table creaks with suspense, the brash wind hurls itself against the antique windows. The room is agitated by the racket and rustling, by hawks nesting on the roof, where Birdman must have crawled to rescue a wounded tree sparrow, where nocturnal cats chase each other.
The Magician performs another ceremonial incantation and requests us once more to unburden ourselves.
—Speak as you wish, freely, at will. If the spirits want to, they will show up. You will feel their presence. Stay as still as you can and absorb the darkness. Open yourselves and unburden your heart.
I cringe and feel glad, too. I see something like a cloud or smoke issue from his mouth.
The Turkish poet chants drowsily in Turkish, his sounds pleasing and harmonious, until he switches to a halting English, and, with his head wrapped in his hands and his eyes shut, makes a confession: “I want to be in serenity, because once a long time ago, I did very wrong thing to a friend. Now that friend he is dead, and I would give him my true feeling, if he would come now to me. I am sorry, more sorry each day I live. I can say this. I admit. When I look to the sky, I am seeing your face. I tell you this, I took your friend for me, your final lover, with lust, I did sex, and I told him what I knew bad about you, and it was not true. He came to me, we lay, but you never knew it. I am in shame. If you come to me, I plead your forgiveness. I want to speak to you.”
He yawns, and his face relaxes.
My brain-damaged mother often talks in her sleep to her dead husband m complete sentences, holding a conversation in which she asks him questions and responds to answers that only she hears, while her voice remains steady and low, and, though unsated, fatigued in sleepless sleep, she awaits answers that may imperil her contentment.
The Turkish poet drops his head, like a supplicant or penitent, and there’s muttering in the tremulous semi-dark. “But even so,” he protests, in a low, guttural monotone, “I can believe truly for more sex in everything.” With his head down, he slaps the table. “More sex in everything” raised, apparently, for my benefit, since he’s inexplicably insisted on this point to me before, but not in such a strange context. The young married man’s voice comes in a cry from across the room, he must be far from me or the table: “You’re all crazy, this is nuts, but Arthur’s right, I’m here, and I’m sitting in this crazy room with you. But so’s the devil, he’s in this room, you know, he must be. He’s in me, I’m evil, and that’s my perverted wisdom.” I hear a bizarre, intermittent cackling and chortling from him, but others say he ranted about ravishing infidelities and an insatiable hunger for stray women, even on his marriage day, when he had sex with his best man’s girlfriend behind a boathouse. Two years later, his best man died in a boating accident, in a motorboat stored in the adulterous boathouse, and it is to him he addresses himself, begging him to return so he can ask forgiveness. Between the scratchy noises or static, I believe I hear him calling a name over and over, until the young married man sobs, I hear him, I do, I know it’s not me. Contesa and Moira awaken or sleepwalk over to him, to wherever he’s gone, to comfort him.
—The devil’s here? Come on.
That’s Spike.
—No one said this would be easy, a voice says.
That’s Henry, I’m pretty sure.
—That’s right.
Arthur is agreeing with him.
I press my eyes closed more tightly and assure myself it’s not bizarre, just uncanny, when raging fires and words written in scarlet ink cross my eyes, the Reverend Samuel Willard’s account of Elizabeth Knapp, a Salem girl possessed by the devil: The devil has oftentimes appeared to her, presenting the treaty of a covenant, that he urged upon her constant temptations to murder her parents, her neighbors, our children, especially the youngest, tempting her to throw it in the fire.
I might have recited this to everyone, I’m not sure if I’m speaking or when I’m speaking what I’m saying. In my head, I’m awake, aware of everything, the way I am when I’m breathing nitrous oxide, inhaling its sweet sickness, on the chair of my earnest periodontist, who keeps the radio tuned to public stations, whose programs become confused with my thoughts, so I may be speaking aloud to the host and his guests, but then I don’t care, because waves of pleasure slap inside my body, during which my periodontist often asks me to open my mouth wider, but I believe my mouth is open wide.
—My skin is so dry, you can write on it. I need to shed it.
—Like a snake.
That’s Spike speaking, after me. Maybe I told her human beings shed their skin completely every twenty-eight days. No one Spike loves is dead, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing here, except hanging out, so she proposes in a singsong voice to implore Einstein to return, which strikes her, a young mathematician, as ridiculously comic and tragic, so she can barely sit still, jumps away from the table, and races out of the room through the wooden double doors, only to return, because she doesn’t know where she is otherwise or what to do, and she may anyway be asleep. I don’t know how much time has passed, when the Count rouses himself I’m sure my eyes are open, I see him as plain as day tuck his Breguet into his coat pocket, satisfied it won’t be pickpocketed again, then watch him as he gathers himself together to address the Magician, Contesa, or his lost wife, sometime before I rouse myself and say whatever they tell me I did, about which I have intermittent and vague recollections. The Magician hasn’t talked yet with his mother, though she’s the dead person he wanted to contact, the motive for the séance—which is no longer a séance to me; I don’t know what it is, except an extension of so-called reality into so-called hyperreality or unreality, though in my head nothing is unreal, I don’t know what unreal is. Dizzily, I try to catch hold of it, it slides away, splitting into pieces.
The Count murmurs and rises, even more angular than I recall, in shadow he’s a portrait by El Greco, and he flings and jiggles his arms, maybe pushing off something, a spirit, but that’s unlikely, since it wouldn’t have mass. The Count’s voice sounds dreamy, even though he appears to be lecturing someone, partly because he’s standing at attention as if behind a lectern, but his eyes are shut and there are many pauses between his words: My rare horological artifacts. French and English, I bow to their artistry. Serviceable clocks, to be blunt, ugh, grandfathers, grandmothers, wall units. Comme il faut. American Blind Watch, yes, ingenious. Big numbers for the vision-impaired. Ingenious. He swings his arms again and yawns.
—Let me say this about the devil: He exists. Made his acquaintance, many years ago in the South. My family, in my town. I ran as far as I could. RUN. I told you to run. You. Not to leave me. Run from me, and now you’re . . . A barn door face. You said it. I don’t know where. No answer is an answer . . . My darling, when I leave this world and join you, to be with you again, wherever you are, would you . . . Oh, please, let me leave this necropolis.
Perfectly still, not shuffling and shifting, we’re waiting for the end or hanging on to dear life, expecting to hear another outburst about what the dead have in store for us.
The Count drops to his seat, breathless, as if he had been running, and his head also drops, like Contesa’s, and rests on the table, where soon he falls asleep or slides into elsewhere. I’m witness and participant, spilling from one to the other, I can’t tell inside from outside, I mean, I can’t control my utterances or guide my thoughts.
—Helen, Helen. Listen to me, you’re safe here.
It’s the Magici
an’s mellow voice.
—No, I’m not.
—Helen, it’s your turn.
—No, it’s not. It’s . . .
I point to our Felice and our Kafka, but they are fast asleep or dead to the practical world.
—This is not what I believe at all. What’s happening is unacceptable to me.
—Be yourself, the Magician says. Use your intuition.
—I hate that stuff. I think I’m dead.
—Maybe you are.
—That’s all right, then.
—Stop fighting.
I’m always fighting, I shake myself, I may not be dead, but I don’t want to withdraw from this ghost theater in which I’m a spectacle to myself and where I must shuck off disbelief to reap any benefit, though benefit is unlikely. I will disbelief, and this is when the events occur for which I was definitely present and also not. I let my body slacken, knowing my father preferred me to sit up straight, while mentally urging him near me and invoking his spirit, thinking my posture shouldn’t matter anymore to him.
—I want to . . . I’d like my father to talk to me. And my dead friends, I really want to hear their voices again.
I announce this abruptly.
—But I know it can’t happen.
I need to concentrate on one dead person, my father, instead other faces crystallize with wispy features and deathly poor complexions, they zoom in and out, stagger by, now my dead friends’ faces, their deaths cavorting in a murderers’ row, where arbitrary mortality judges and sickens me. I open my eyes and with horror notice the other sitters’ critical expressions, so I might be on a jury, I’m litigious, American, I like to watch vicious trials, I’m probably a judge. My breathing quickens, then slows, quickens, then regulates itself, so I forget it, but my sweater scratches me like crazy, I could suffocate inside my skin, I need air, melancholiacs are helped by a change in air. I command myself to smash the decayed faces thrust in front of mine.
American Genius Page 32
