by Bruce Wagner
“So it’s eighteen thirty-four then—”
“Man, are you daft? Of course eighteen. We’re not in Utopia yet, are we?”
“Most certainly not! But well—could you—can you tell me about it? Something—say, about where you were raised?”
“Epping Forest, man! That’s where we moved, when I was six. That’s what’s most vivid. A mystical place: boon and balm to a child. Lived at Woodford Hall. Now, that was fifty acres and six hundred pounds to let, six hundred the year. For the rest of my life I never paid more, not even at Kelmscott. So you can see how lavish it was. Father’d made his fortune in copper, so we were set.” His eyes crinkled and gleamed. “Had my own coat of armor as a boy. A smithy did it up, all to my design—well, perhaps I ‘borrowed’ one or two touches from a Negrolian ‘bat-wing’ burgonet—quite the swashbuckler I was! We (all the garrulous Waverly boys) lived and breathed Walter Scott. Rode ponies past blue plums and pollarded hornbeams to watch low-slung craft loiter on the glassy river: then on to Shooter’s Hill and the wide green sea of marshland at Essex.”
Maybe, thought Gilles, Will’m had been a professor, a professor at Oxford who was visiting the States (one somewhat eccentric to begin with), whose mad cow virus kicked in halfway through term at Claremont or USC, the insidious Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy herding him to skid row and such. Maybe if he got to the bottom of it, Gilles could help.
“But how, Will’m—how did you get here?”
“Do you mean the Abbey?”
“Well … yes! If that’s where we are now.”
“Then if you don’t know—!” He began to laugh.
The baker, yet again mindful of his wife and seeing himself pummeled and bleeding as the morning’s first cheerful customers arrived, thought well enough of today’s session being done. So they worked in relative silence, with Topsy back to his mopping, on occasion muttering epithets toward “those bilious Frankish people,” until the store opened and the lapsed don discharged.
Watching him leave, Gilles Mott ruminated awhile on Paris and that long-lost fiancée; someday if possible he would make amends. Until then, he felt like one of those characters he read about in the paper, who, ensconced in happy second lives, await authorities to enter the workplace and handcuff them so they may at long last answer charges from another time.
There was too much to do. There were designs for textiles that crowded his head like vernal snowflakes; the medieval cathedrals—and St. Mark’s, in Venice—that needed to be cataloged by his Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings; a mental inventory of stained glass and tile, wood furnishings and tableware; correspondence to be kept up, with Ruskin and Rossetti and Georgiana Burne-Jones; fresh lectures on socialism and the decorative arts; and the charting of his daughter’s seizures and wife Jane’s infidelities. Most important, he must continue his life’s work, a book written in his own fine hand, a book called News from Nowhere. He kept it in a downtown locker and went there to work on it three times a week. And so it began
This is the picture of the old house by the Thames to which the people of this story went. Hereafter follows the book itself which is called News from Nowhere or An Epoch of Rest & is written by William Morris.
For that is who he thought he was: William Morris, robust, protean, Promethean William Morris, the Victorian genius of design.
While it has become simple for laymen to know a ruined mind when they see one—any worthwhile psychotic hears voices through teeth or television—the gods of madness are surely in the far-fetched details that often astonish with the fabulous, unexpected poignancy of cracked new worlds revealed. Those unhinged men and women, having left the ocean of our experience, now reside in stagnant pools and brackish backwaters, encamped by polluted river or stream from which there is no return. Before his descent (until we know his Christian name, we will oscillate between Topsy and Will’m), a friend at his workplace found him acting strange. When told as much, Will’m recounted a dream he’d had that affected him in a most peculiar way. A group of ghouls, he said, asked if he would please to consider the newly formed position of Chairman of the Disembodied. The co-worker laughed uncomfortably, before asking how he replied. “I told them yes,” said Will’m. But his addendum is what set the listener’s teeth on edge: “Because I knew I would soon have time on my hands.”
Now he did have time—Time, like a blue-indigo stain on arms and hands, on beard and triple-E feet: time to rove and decorate cardboard Manor, time to send dispatches of news from nowhere on the onionskin paper of a hand-stitched cloth-bound book, time to dream (as William Morris had a greater century ago) of Iceland and its heroic sagas, time to worry over daughter and wife—time to appropriate a “troublous” life of startling historical richness.
When Topsy got to the 7th Street Viaduct, there was nothing left—the Cadillac had been razed—and Half Dead and Fitz, his one-legged keeper, whose very skin matched his faded seersucker suit and who wore the aspect of an accountant-turned-assassin, stood skittish sentinel. If street rumor had it that George Fitzsimmons was a legendary Department of Children and Family Services caseworker turned out by crack cocaine (rendering him a rather too baroque cautionary tale)—if such talk remained unsubstantiated, then scabby sores from relentless scratchings and general dermatological reconnaissance could be confirmed as easily as the absence of his left limb. The owner of Half Dead, though not quite half, was definitively not quite whole, thanks to diabetes and the great white hacks of County General. One of the mission wags had bestowed on the man and his dog a sobriquet: Half ’n’ Half.
“I’m telling you, Will’m, the Department had one very large, ugly hard-on for your personal effects! I told ’em: Hey! Fold the man’s Cadillac down and he’ll be by to pick it up. This is the man’s home. Would not do it. Proud little shits took everything away. ’Most killed Half Dead while they were at it.”
The deformed pit bull chased a rat. He limped from broken bones never properly healed and his coat oozed, in spite of Fitz’s unfailing application of vitamin E and antibiotic creams that an outreach worker had wheedled from a sympathetic veterinarian. In glory days, the hapless animal was the warm-up act in South Central dogfights—featured warriors chewed on him in prelims to get their blood up. Fitz had liberated the beast from the pound; the neighborhood handle, with variations, stuck.
“C’mawn, Baby Half,” he chastised. “Don’t you play with them dirty old things.”
He loped over while Topsy stood on the patch of earth where his house had been. He closed his eyes and imagined the crosshatched honeycomb on the boxes—bugs and marigolds, hawthorn and snakes-head, hummingbirds, cabbage and eglantine that took weeks to evoke. He sighed; his enormous chest heaved skyward. He would not go to Misery House tonight. There was another place he knew, with rooms towering high above the city. As he set out, Half Dead barked halfheartedly while his master ranted against Sanitation and all Departments thereof.
Dusk: a zealous menagerie of untouchables traversed the bridge in a parody of corporate commuting. Where were they bound? Some gesticulated, some nearly loitered, most just rushed along. At least they might take the same direction—but this was a dystopian crusade, all fervor and no cause. At night they built fires at the curbs; by day, they were ticketed for jaywalking by latex-gloved police.
It was close to suppertime and he waded past Misery House and the Midnight Mission with their long lines of the wretched of the earth. A daffy civic-center sign—TOY DISTRICT—loomed on a sidewalk pole, the city’s lame, futile proclamation of a “famous” area. A few of the disenfranchised called hello from their boxes, for the man in tweed was well regarded on the street, and respected for his prodigious physical strength.
Someone-Help-Me gave a shout. Hassled by cops, he had abandoned his stint at the Hard Rock Cafe. He needed a new sign; Will’m made the last, a real crowd pleaser. The vagrant wanted it spruced and was not pleased his greeting went unreturned.
The hulking figure rounded the corner of
St. Vibiana without glancing at the notice on the wall: CATHEDRAL CLOSED.
Darkness fell as he reached his destination, a beleaguered ten-story sandstone-finished façade, vacant for decades—brass knobs and piping long since purloined, with shardy windowpanes whose twisted blinds looked as if they’d gone mad before dying; a smell that knocked at the solar plexus, then gusted low over a hellish carpet of syringes, diapers and tampons, soiled to a man, gracing the once illustrious entrance of the Higgins Building, put up in 1910 by the eponymous Thomas H.—who’d made his fortune in copper, as, we may remind, had the father of the original William Morris. Our Will’m arched his neck to read the spray-painted legend
Isa 23—Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for it is laid waste,
so that there is no house, no entering in
then closed his eyes and imagined: saw women in high collars pass to and fro and bowler’d men from trolleys they called Red Cars: then buggies, bustle and Arrows (Arrows he had gathered from library visits). The main entry, reluctant to admit squatters who blackened marble and checkerboard mosaics with casual fires and human waste, had been welded shut, but Will’m knew another way—the alley.
Only a cat could slip through the twisted iron; so he twisted it more with brute hands, and took a minute to shimmy his large body through. Like a circus strongman, he closed the metal back behind him and went in, letting eyes adjust to the dark.
He made his way to the lobby, where the remnants of an announcement from a previous incarnation was glued to a long faux-wood slat:
Debris, shit and more shards. Tumbleweeds of newspaper flecked with concrete dust amid tangle of fluorescent tubes in cool dead brittle bunches. A gang of sullen, sleepy pigeons as he took the stairs, their panicked population increasing on the upper floors, where he headed. Perhaps they were the ones he’d find strutting on lintels in bowlers and high collars—then he’d know once and for all he was truly mad.
What did this place remind him of? Rather, to what place did he let himself drift back? The ruins of the gabled “old stone Elizabethan house” he called Kelmscott Manor … that place was near a bridge, too—Radcot Bridge, on the baby Thames. He thought of the estate as he climbed the littered steps, conjuring drawing room and attic, with rugs and upholstered furniture of his design: motifs of rose and thistle, corncockle and windrush, lily and pomegranate. His blood boiled recalling his dear friend Rossetti’s carryings-on with Janey … dear friend! Beautiful wife! That rankled him and, losing his footing on a droppings-slick landing, he stepped into a crowd of hot, feathered bodies and roared, sloppily killing two with a swat as they rose to escape.
He found a room on the ninth floor he had once used when the night was inclement. Will’m stood by the window a moment, peering at St. Vibiana’s battered cupola; wearily, he lowered himself onto scarred tiles. He heard voices of faceless old cohorts on the telephones and for a moment was not himself. I might yet work myself back, he thought—but what did “back” mean? From what? His duties as Chairman of the Disembodied? And to what? He puzzled, then something stirred behind a closet of besmirched and frosted glass—he would have to rout the animal out before sleep. He stood, opening the warped door to let it scamper: there crouched a wild-eyed girl. She saw his face and dissolved.
“Topsy!” She smiled, then began to laugh. “I was so scared—”
He reached out, and she tumbled to his arms. Her laughter turned to sobs. He held the orphan to his tweedy breast as she cried and cried, and (to his surprise) he along with her.
CHAPTER 10
Shelter
After a storm of tears, they laughed and wept until laughter won out, and were forever bound.
Amaryllis told him how her mother had been a dead person all this time and how she had been afraid to tell anyone, even Topsy himself, who had been so kind and with whose food she had nourished the babies. How she was going to tell him but was sidelined by a strange troupe of children who were making a movie—a know-it-all girl, a crippled tall-headed boy with mask and gloves, and a wisecracking flaxen-haired star—the orphan waved All About You! before him to prove the celebrity’s pampered, extolled existence. (Amaryllis wasn’t sure why, but she withheld mentioning the boy who on first introduction called himself Toulouse, and Tull ever after.) Then she told him how the police took the precious ones and the Korean gave her away and she’d only managed to escape by dint of what she now felt to be a miracle—or hoped would eventually be recognized as such. And how, because St. Vibiana’s was impregnable, she had come to this place for sanctuary instead …
Topsy listened, moved to sweet astonishment, running oversize fingers through friendly tangle of beard. He had in his vest pocket, visible through a foggy Ziploc’d window, some crushed notes of almond and pomegranate seed, residue of croissant plucked from a dessert song. He spread the sack open and the starved thing dipped in two nail-bitten fingers.
Suddenly, her voice broke. Where did they take the babies? she asked plaintively. They’d be so frightened without her! She sobbed again and couldn’t catch her breath.
“There, there,” said Topsy, patting her shoulder. “They’ll be fine—just fine. And right along, and right along.”
He made her tug from a tap-water canteen, then watched as she cried herself to sleep.
Hours later, Topsy started to a ruckus: someone coughed, stumbled and cursed in the adjacent hall. A shout and filthy flurry of sleep-drunk birds roused the girl, who shrieked as he stood like a colossus to repel the invader. Whoever it was had candlepower, and that meant official trouble. As the beam pierced their room, Topsy snatched the flashlight, punched the interloper’s stomach (which gave the giant no pleasure), hoisted Amaryllis up and fled. The night was moonless; once recovered, the guard would be slow to leave.
She felt secure holding on and was unaware that he held her, too, arm bent behind him in support like a pale, muttony wing. He took the stairs in gulps; he was magnificent. She sweated, and his coat scratched her face as she clung. More than once the orphan girl thought she’d be pitched into blackness of space and die if she didn’t hold tight.
The lobby was vaguely lit by street lamps. Outside, he set her down by the bent iron, then pulled her to shadow as two squad cars wailed and bleated by; they were meant for some other poor souls. Amaryllis climbed through and stepped to the sidewalk as delicately as a girl at cotillion, while Topsy took longer, doing some damage to the gate. He shouted at her to come back toward him, out of the light. Free of the Higgins now, he took things in full-scope. Where would he go? at four in the morning, with a child on the street? Then it came to him: but if he wasn’t careful, the little sweetheart would land in gaol and they’d throw him in stocks or worse. Kidnapper! Deviant! Monster …
He lifted the girl to his back again then cloaked himself so that his jacket fell over her like a tarp—under cover of night, to an idle observer, she might be a mindless backpack of belongings, queerly squirreled away.
Topsy left the alley in unbreakable stride. For a while it seemed there was someone behind them, but whatever it was soon fell away, swallowed up in his powerful wake. Amaryllis imagined herself the Royal Kumari, freshly absconded, scooped from village seat by a Special Selector—what adventure! She thought of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and how in fact Topsy was a worthy nominee: he was humble and had endured great hardship; he was full of heroic virtue and venerated by the homeless community; and he had now performed the miracle of spiriting her away. From 2nd to Broadway he marched, over streets dream-like and bereft. In the duo’s presence, the Hall of Records remained unfazed. The steam-engorged Central Heating and Refrigeration Plant appeared ignorant of their passing, as did the democratic wooden fence that fronted the burgeoning Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, postered over with an orderly procession of schoolchildren’s acrylic saints (Edith Stein not among them). The sepulchral Hall of Administration slept; the Board of Supervisors and Health Department Administration buildings yawned, then shut their granite eyes.
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br /> As the leviathan and his charge ducked beneath the 110, Topsy felt the whole of downtown rise off him like a corroded weight—but they were in danger, because there were no more buildings to hide in and the infamous Rampart station was yet to come.
He slowed so as not to seem in flight past lumpy fields and grassy hillocks on both sides of the wide macadamized road. He could hear the furtive, alien rustle of encampments as they rushed by (Fitz and Half Dead in there somewhere, for all anyone knew). “It’s fine, child, it’ll be right fine,” he said, like a lullaby, turning his whiskery head so she’d hear. “There, there.” When taxis or trucks passed and they were alone again, he let slip the coat from his shoulders so her head struck fresh air. A naked man crouched in the middle of the street defecating, like a figure in an outlandish prehistoric diorama; Topsy thought it a neat diversion for his and the girl’s potential pursuants.
Now, who else roamed this strange place? It was not Epping Forest! How must the entirety of it have looked to a man like William Morris? Tonight, the Victorian age was but a vapor between him and the vast metropolis. The girl had seen to that—the sweet turtleshell stuck on his back had crimped his delusions, the pure unselfishness of his concern for her leeching air from the bubble within which he normally moved. He nearly heard the hiss. He accelerated past the blurred, sleepy storefronts—Salon del Reino de Los Testigos de Jehova—SIGNS-BANNERS—Botanica—Psíquica—Carniceria—Panadería—to a street called, most curiously, East Edgeware. Topsy broke a cool sweat as they swept past the abandoned hotel with the faded advertisement painted on its side—ALL ROOMS WITH BATH & SHOWER $2.50 UP. FIREPROOF—around the stucco face, its crumbly chicken wire disabused by a hundred careless fenders. Another alley: and then he let Amaryllis down behind the shop. They walked a few paces and huddled in the shadow of a dumpster.
