Wilde Stories 2014

by Editred by Steve Berman

  A Tale of the City

  Let me call myself, for the present, Adam Wilson. My true name is not well known outside certain circles, but within those circles it is known too well, and the knowledge associated with it is more hearsay and fantasy than truth. Perhaps after my death, the truth of my life can be aligned with the truth of my name, but I do not believe such an event is possible while I am alive.

  As a young man, I was passionate and indiscreet. I had been raised on a farm in northern New York, and had no knowledge of the world until I had nearly reached the age of maturity. My parents were taciturn country people, God-fearing and serious, the descendants of Puritans who escaped England and helped found the colonies that became our Republic. Ours was a singularly unimaginative race of people, but stubborn and loyal. My childhood was not what I would dare deem a happy one, yet neither was it painful or oppressive; instead, it was a childhood of rules and routines, most of them determined by the sun and moon, the weather, and the little church at the center of the town three miles south of our farm, the church we traveled to for every Sabbath, holiday, festivity, and funeral.

  As I advanced in years, I became aware of desires within myself to learn more about a world beyond the narrow realm of my upbringing. Ours was not a family given to frequent newspaper reading, but I had read enough to know that the life I lived was not the only possible life. I dreamed of cobblestone streets, tall buildings, and crowds of people. Now I know mine was a common dream, but when I was the dreamer, I thought my dream must be unique in the force of its import and portent. My fate was, I was certain, a great one.

  With only the hope of my naïve yearnings to sustain me, I borrowed a few dollars from my parents and rode in the carts of merchants taking their wares toward Manhattan. I don’t remember how many days it took to wind a serpentine way to the isle of my dreams. My memory of that time is obscured by all that befell me, for within a day of arriving I had been most violently shown the enormity of the chasm between my imagined city and the one to which I had brought myself. Desperate and hungry, I found what work I could, but I knew no-one and could rely on only the barest charity. Huddled by night in shadowy corners, trembling from cold and starvation and fear, I gave thought to returning home, of settling down to the simple life that seemed to have been predestined for me, but the very idea filled me with a nausea of defeat, for I would have rather thrown myself into the river’s muddy torrent than retrace my journey. An evil luck brought me into acquaintance with a certain group of young men who showed me a way to profit from certain men’s dark desires, and soon I did not have to hide myself on the streets, for I could afford a small room in a ramshackle building among the most disreputable of the city’s inhabitants. It was here I lived and here I sold the only good that I possessed: myself.

  After I had worked for a time in this most shameful of all employments, one of the men I provided services to asked me if I would like an opportunity to work in pleasanter surroundings, for a better class of customers and certainly more income than I might otherwise make in my debased and impoverished conditions. I was wary at first, having, after bitter experience, become something of a cynic, but this was a man who had been particularly kind to me, his tendency always toward gentleness, and I knew from his attire and mode of traveling that he was a man of means. Habit kept me obmutescent at first, but he persisted every time he saw me in saying how suited I was to the work, given my fair and feminine features, and I believed he was sincere when he said it pained him to see me in such low circumstances as then composed my life. Therefore, one Sunday morning late in the spring of 184—, after we dined together in my room, I accepted his offer and he provided me with an address at which I was to present myself two weeks hence.

  During the time between that Sunday and the later night, I imagined countless and baroque possibilities for what this place might be. It was an address near Thompson Street, an area I knew well enough, though I did not frequent it, my haunts being more to the east, and in the fortnight between receiving the address and going to my appointment there, I carefully avoided the vicinity, for I have always been a superstitious man, and I feared some ill might punish my curiosity. The closer the moment came to present myself at the address, the longer the time stretched out and the more excited grew my imagination. I slept fitfully, my dreams alternately haunted by visions of great pleasure and nightmares of grotesque, delirious pain. Entire lifetimes seemed to pour themselves into the last hours before I set out from my gloomy little room.

  Eventually, the waiting time dissipated and I found myself walking almost without awareness from street to street at dusk on the appointed day, the scrap of paper on which the address was written clasped in my hand, for though the address itself had long ago lodged in my memory, I conceived the paper on which it was scrawled to be a fetish, a charm against forces I could neither predict nor apprehend.

  I arrived at the address as twilight gathered darkly and more darkly through the city streets. Though I had prepared myself to expect nearly anything, I was not expecting the address to lead to a few small, crude steps descending to a weathered grey door. Not knowing what else to do, I knocked.

  This is one of the things I most dislike about fiction: the need to set a scene. Certainly, when writing a historical narrative there is context that has to be established, but it’s not the same—here what we have is brazen lying. I know nothing about what the exterior of this building looked like. I don’t even know that it was on or near Thompson Street. It was somewhere on the island of Manhattan, I do know that, but to be more realistic, I probably should have put it at one of the more remote areas—maybe up north in the 12th ward somewhere. I chose the location I did because once you move too far out of the city as it was in the 1840s, you get away from the sorts of buildings that could house the events that are central to the story. Honestly, I expect it all actually happened in Brooklyn, but the person who told me the story specifically said it took place in Manhattan, and so I am sticking to that.

  My mood is bleak today, and it’s affecting my writing. Adam came over to pick up some of his stuff, and inevitably we had to have a Conversation (I yearn for the days when our conversations were lower-cased). It ended when he asked me how I was doing and I told him it was none of his fucking business. I regretted it immediately, but regret is a useless emotion. He walked out. Just walked. Didn’t storm out, didn’t slam the door, didn’t break windows or anything like that. Walked out. Again. Without a word.

  Words. That’s part of my problem: I’m trying to capture at least some of the diction of this character, and spending hours with the OED, looking up the histories of one word after another to make sure it’s historically accurate, or to find others that are more appropriate. It took me all afternoon to write one paragraph. It’s stilting the voice. I can’t go on like that. I just need to write and not worry about the historical veracity of the vocabulary and syntax.

  I’ll never forget Adam unless I write this. The nights when we drank cheap wine and played word games, the delirious night when we fell into each other’s arms screaming our various pronunciations of “Ulalume” and “Angoulême,” and the one glorious night when silence was enough. I loved his blue eyes, his wild blond hair, his crooked tooth. (“My own little Aryan,” I called him.) We told each other stories of our pasts, and his were always full of adventure and excitement—because they were never true, and I knew it, and I loved him for it, and he told me I should loosen up and let go of myself and let my imagination play. I never could, and never dared try, and I hated him for it.

  He accused me of being a slave to the facts, and later on, in the nightmare days, I accused him of writing potboilers. The worst nights were when he did more drinking than writing. “Great writers have written stories like mine,” he said after half a bottle of Jack one night. I laughed at him and said, “Keep telling yourself that. Crappy writers always think they’re great. And drunken assholes figure if they drink like Poe, maybe they’ll write like him.” He took
a swig from the bottle and then spat it in my face. I can hardly blame him. I knew the nerve I was hitting. Still, I was angry. “You’re a fucking hack,” I said, “and your stories are pathetic and disgusting. They wouldn’t scare a child.” At the time, I thought it was the beginning of the end, but really, it was the middle. The truth is, I’d never liked his stories, even when we first started dating.

  Anyway…

  The door opened, no more slowly or quickly than any other door might, and a small man wearing the most ordinary clothes imaginable stood there in front of me. I showed him the slip of paper I had brought with me, but he didn’t look at it. Somehow, he knew I belonged here. He gestured to his side—his right, my left—and I followed his gesture through a nondescript room and perfectly ordinary, if narrow, hallway, to another, and unmemorable, door. I knocked, but there was no answer, and so I turned the knob and opened the door, revealing a set of carpeted stairs leading down. I descended. The air grew musty and cold, the stairway became grey and then dark, and I felt my feet hit stone. I looked down, thinking I had reached some sort of bottom, but in the greyness I could make out more steps, now made of stone. Granite. Descending.

  Eventually, light slipped through the darkness from candles set on shelves at the bottom of the stairs. I know now that the stairs were not miles long, but that is the impression they gave during that descent. Certainly, the caverns they led to were deep, and the edifice as a whole a marvel of architecture and engineering, but there was nothing supernatural about the place, at least in its design.

  What the stairs led to was a series of small rooms with rock walls. Within moments of my arrival, a dark-skinned young man dressed as a servant brought me to one of the other rooms, a place filled with piles of women’s clothing. In the dim light, the clothing looked expensive and impressive, but soon the young man held some pieces out to me and instructed me on how to wear them, and touching the fabric I saw that it was tattered, torn, and stained. I should say here that I had not worn women’s clothing before, nor had much cause to examine it closely—a fact that had purely been a matter of chance, given how many of my compatriots were instructed at one time or another to unsex themselves for their men—and so I was awkward and required much assistance from the young man. His touch was gentle and soothing, as if he expected me to be frightened or disgusted, but given the circumstances of my hiring and the strangeness of the setting, I felt little surprise at the necessary attire. “What is your name?” I asked him. His smile was unforced and uncertain, as if it was the strangest query he’d encountered in many days.

  “You don’t need to know me,” he said, averting his eyes.

  I shifted my gaze to grasp his again, then took his hand in mine. “Necessity is the least interesting force in the universe,” I said, parroting an aphorism once uttered by a priest who insisted on philosophizing whilst I pleasured him.

  “My name is Charles,” he said. “But please forget me. They’ll call you to the stage in a moment, and you need to be ready.”

  “Will we meet again, Charles?”

  I pulled him closer to me, but released his hand when I saw tears in his eyes.

  Hands gripped my shoulders, spun me around, pushed me forward into light. Whiteness enveloped me, blinded me. I stumbled forward, knocking my foot against an obstacle. I heard chattering voices, the rumblings of impatient conversation. My eyes adjusted slowly, bringing shapes and colors into focus, and then I saw where I stood: a living room with a long couch, three chairs, and a low table. No—as my eyes accustomed to the light, I saw beyond it, beyond what I had taken to be walls and windows—beyond the whirlwind of lamps, mirrors, crystals, and smoke that obscured the view—I saw faces stacked in a small and narrow amphitheatre: the leering, lusting faces of men.

  Breathless, my knees trembling with infirmity, I staggered to the couch and fell upon it. At that moment, a figure appeared from somewhere behind me. A man in a swallow-tailed black coat—his visage concealed by a black silk mask, his hands protected by white gloves—moved forward and presented himself to the audience. The men applauded vigorously.

  I sat up on the couch and whispered, “Who are you?”

  The masked figure rushed to me, his hand struck my face, and I fell back onto the couch. My cheek burned, my forehead ached, blood crossed my tongue. Ringing filled my ears, but then I heard the audience through the noise: their laughter, their rallying cries. His hands pulled me up, turned me to face him. The fabric of his mask was wet at the mouth and nose; his breathing made the silk pulse like a sail in a storm. Again his hand hit my face, and then the other hand, and then again, again—and all the while, the audience applauded, their claps in sympathy with each slap across my skin.

  My abraded cheeks bled, my nose and lips bled, blood filled my mouth, I coughed. His hands grasped my throat and pushed me back onto the couch. Men whistled and stomped their feet. He tore the dress at the shoulder, snapping its seams. He wrenched it down. I pushed at him feebly, my arms and muscles moving by instinct, but he was stronger than I and easily held me back against the couch. His fists hit my stomach, my kidneys, then the bones of my ribs, knocking sense and breath from me. I keeled forward, and again he pushed me back, slapped my face, grabbed my hair. My eyes saw swirls of colors more than shapes, but soon I discerned that he stood over me and was pulling back his mask. I expected any face except the one I should have known would be there: The face of the man who had so gently implored me to come to this place. His eyes, which I had once, briefly, thought displayed a kind of love for me, now burned with contempt.

  My recognition fired his fury. He rained more punishment upon me, and then, as I lay on the couch, my body throbbing, my eyes blurred with tears, he lowered his face to my chest, and the familiar tenderness there found its parody in his nuzzling kisses. The audience grew silent, their attention rapt, and yet soon there were stirrings—they became restless.

  My tormenter paused. He now prepared the pièce de résistance of his performance. Holding me under the arms, he pulled me up to stand. The dress I wore sagged around my hips. He wrapped his right arm around my neck and with his left arm pulled—slowly but fiercely—the dress and all my underclothing down toward my knees. He could not hold my neck and further undress me, and so he pushed me forward—I braced myself with my arms, but fell hard on the floor, cracking a bone—and then felt myself hoisted backward as he ripped the shredding dress and all the rest from me until I was entirely naked in the hot fire of the lights and the hateful glare of all the men.

  He retrieved his mask from where it had fallen beside the couch. He covered his face with it, sat on the couch, and removed his shoes. His feet bare, he walked toward me, then slowly, gently, took off each piece of clothing until only his mask remained. I glanced at him, not letting my gaze linger, for the pains coursing through my body demanded most attention for themselves. A quick look was enough for me, though, for I knew his strong, supple body well, and the sight of it above me now filled me with terror—the engorgement of his desire offered no thrill for me—rather, he seemed entirely grotesque, a demon, a force of unimaginable agony.

  Even now, decades after the events, I cannot describe his actions without bringing myself to tears and raising aching memories across my skin.

  I do not have the words to describe his final abuses, nor do I want to remember all he did to me or to remember the wild joys of the crowd.

  I don’t remember writing the scene I just wrote. I would never write such an absurd phrase as “the engorgement of his desire”. It’s disgusting and ridiculous. Those are not words I would choose. I should erase them now, I should get rid of this whole thing. And yet I know I won’t. I’ve written those words there—“I should erase them now, I should get rid of this whole thing”—to let myself off the hook. I had no intention of erasing any of this. I’ve enjoyed writing it. I’ve gotten out of myself, away from the shitstorm with Adam. I don’t believe a word of what I wrote above about responsibility. That’s not true, either, though
. I believe in the idea of it. But it has no visceral meaning for me. Because I really am writing this for myself. Really. It’s an escape, a bit of fun. Meaningless. Really. I don’t need you to read this. I don’t need you.

  (The memories rest as jagged shards, sharp and ready to freshen wounds.)

  The light burns and stings its smoke into my eyes. My body moves, pulled over the wooden stage, splinters pricking my knees and legs. Darkness, then soft candlelight. Fingers trawl my skin. Cold water washes me. Charles won’t meet my gaze. I realize why he had tears in his eyes. He knew. There are many words I would like to say to him, but my tongue is thick and my mouth dry. He dresses me carefully in the clothes I arrived in. Shadows shift in the room and take hold of me and drag me up the stairs and outside into early morning air, and I am carried around corners and dropped in an alley onto soggy newspapers and chicken bones and scattering rats. They toss coins at me.

  I do not move. Movement is pain. I barely breathe.

  (The subsequent memories are more dreamlike, less present, and they do not wound.)

  The sun rose somewhere above me and distant voices fell and echoed through the air. A rat bit my leg. I coughed and yearned for water or, better, gin. I swept the coins from my chest and hid them away in my pants. My employer had been correct that this was more lucrative work for me—these were good coins, more than I would earn in a month usually—but the cost was too much.

  I leaned against a brick wall and inched my way toward the street. Somewhere in this Herculean effort, I met my savior. He was a thin man, disheveled, and his attire making it seem that he, too, might have been dropped in an alley, but he sported no wounds to his bones and skin, just sunken, bloodshot eyes and an unsteady step.

  I do not remember what conversation we had. I drifted from awareness to a kind of half-sleep where I was awake but uncomprehending. Somehow I told him the address of my room, and somehow he took me there. My first thought was fear: did he intend to add to my abuses? He seemed afraid to touch me, though, and so I did not long fear him. My second thought was embarrassment: at the squalor of my tiny room, at the weakness of myself. I had little reason for such feelings, though, for soon he had lain himself down on the floor and fallen asleep.