Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

“Look in on Adam, will you, Paul? Right now, another person’s attentions might be better medicine for his blues than mine.”

  I looked in on Adam. He was sitting on the drafting table, his stack of read and unread library books teetering at his knees. Although he heard me enter, he refused to look up. We were alone together in the tall drafty expanse of the studio. Despite the room’s chilliness, my hands began to sweat.

  “Adam,” I said. “Don’t feel bad about going after that Contact Cable turkey. If it had been me, I’d’ve bit him.”

  The habiline looked me in the eye. His upper lip drew back to reveal his pink gums and primitive, powerful teeth. I looked away. When I looked again, Adam’s gaze had gone back to his book.

  “Let me congratulate you on becoming a father, Adam. The kid’s a crackerjack.” No response. “What’s that you’re reading?”

  The cloak of civility he was trying to grow into would not let him ignore a direct question. He lifted the small volume so I could read its title. Ah, The Problem of Pain again, on which Adam had foundered shortly after his arrival. I turned the book around and saw that now he’d run aground on the beginning of Chapter 9, “Animal Pain.” One sentence jumped out at me as it may have already jumped out at Adam: “So far as we know beasts are incapable of either sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it.” My belief that this sentence may have wounded Adam was predicated on the feeling that although RuthClaire had accepted him as fully human, he had yet to accept himself as such.

  “You ought to try Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet,” I said. “It’s a helluva lot more fun than his theology.”

  Adam tweezered the book from my two-fingered grip, pulled it to his chest, and then flung it past my head to the far end of the studio. Like a broken-backed bird, it flapped to a leaning standstill against the baseboard. Adam took advantage of my surprise to hop down from the table. Exiting the studio, he put me in mind of a lame elf or an oddly graceful chimpanzee: there was something either crippled-seeming or animalish about his walk. “Shame on you, Loyd,” I scolded myself.

  *

  Papa, Mama, and Little Baby Montaraz went back to Atlanta. The international media descended upon their home not far from Little Five Points, a two-story structure with a ramshackle gallery, lots of spooky gables, and a wide Faulknerian veranda. The house became almost as famous as the kid.

  As for little Paul, he rapidly turned into the anthropological prince of American celebrity. Everyone wanted a piece of him and his parents. People, Newsweek, Life, 60 Minutes, 20-20, Discovery, Nova, Cosmopolitan, Omni, Reader’s Digest, and a host of other publications and programs sought to report, analyze, or simply ride the giddy whirlwind of the Montaraz Phenomenon. Indeed, it took better than a year for the extravagant circus surrounding the family to dismantle its tents and mothball its clown costumes, but, for long afterward, a carnival of revolving sideshows kept the promise (or threat) of an even dizzier Return Engagement before the public.

  But I’m running ahead of myself. Let me back up.

  In the absence of an attending physician, Tiny Paul required a birth certificate. Because his parents had left Paradise Farm early on Sunday morning, there was no way for them to obtain a file form on which to apply for a certificate from the Hothlepoya County Health Department. On Monday, then, I drove to Tocqueville to pick up the form. I filled it out standing at the registrar’s counter. Surprisingly, she treated the application as a routine matter. When I questioned her, she told me that the form would now go to the Office of Vital Records in the state-government complex in Atlanta.

  “What about the birth certificate?”

  “Send in a three-dollar filing fee and they’ll send it. It really doesn’t take long.”

  “If I write the check, should I specify that the certificate itself should go to the parents’ Atlanta address?”

  The young woman—trim, deftly mascaraed—looked at me with a flicker of interest. “Why would they send the certificate to you? Writing the check doesn’t make you the child’s father.”

  “Then it isn’t necessary?”

  “Of course not.”

  Irritated, I sought to shock her. “What if I did happen to be the kid’s father?”

  “Then it’s awfully big of you to pay the filing fee,” she said smoothly.

  I grunted, pocketed my checkbook, and left.

  On Wednesday, I received a long white envelope from Atlanta, not from the Office of Vital Records but from RuthClaire and Adam. The notes inside were both in Ruthie Cee’s peculiar El Grecoish script—tall, nearsighted characters in anguished postures—but the second was reputedly dictation from Adam. Even in my ex’s etiolated script, Adam’s was the more original and perplexing document:

  Well-loved Namer of our Son,

  We are back, but are we home? My homes keep jumping around. Paradise Farm I love for there I met RuthClaire. For a while now it is the only one of all my homes that does not jump. Tiny Paul has just jumped into the world from my one home that stands somewhat still. You are like a fierce seraph that holds down the corners of my jumping Eden. Thank you, sir, for doing that.

  I must say two more things and maybe a little else. First, thank you for bringing me books on your card about God and thinking on Godness. Some of these I have regotten on my Atlanta card, so much am I interested. Second, deeply sorry for throwing one book—even if it was my own—across your room in my bitter fit of not behaving right. It makes me laugh a little, with angry mirth, to say or see that title, THE PROBLEM OF PAIN.

  I am also sorry for attacking the vile man Barrington. I should write to him to say so, but he should write me to say himself sorry a THOUSAND times. He should write Miss RuthClaire. He should write YOU. He should quit his name from the station that sends him forth. God and thinking on Godness should quiet my anger, but (too bad) they do not. Barrington needs better etiquette and also probably religion. So do I. But I have a long walk to get there.

  This is my last “a little else” to ask you. One day this year Miss RuthClaire may ask you to come see about her seeing about me. Some doctors at Emory are plotting now a surgery to humanize me for this time and place. Do please come when she asks. We will reimburse—a pretty word—all losses. If both agree to the niceness of using one bed during my hospital stay, I have no argument or jealousy to put against that wish.

  Sincerely,

  Adam

  P.S. Miss RuthClaire has written my last a “little else” in some anger. I must learn, she says, that no married person except maybe an Eskimo has a right “to dispose of the other’s affections.” I am telling her that I knew THAT already, and that the words if both agree prove I am not indisposing, without consideration, her body self. Good etiquette. Moral integrity.

  P.P.S. Tiny Paul does well. Sleeping at night very well. Making no noise. Good baby etiquette.

  P.P.P.S. I would like—much—a pen pal on spiritual stuff, but you undoubted lack for time?

  I reread this letter closely several times. What wouldn’t a reporter give to lay hands on it? I thought briefly of letting different outfits bid for it, but once I had rejected this course as vile beyond even my notorious reverence for the profit motive, I never looked back. Adam was no longer my rival, he was my friend.

  I tried to imagine what sort of surgery the specialists at Emory were planning for Adam, but could adduce only such routine operations as appendectomy, tonsillectomy, molar extractions, and, forgive me, circumcision. Then it occurred to me that the doctors might be contemplating more exotic procedures, viz., rendering Adam’s thumbs wholly opposable, surgically removing his sagittal crest, or increasing his body height by putting artificial bone sections in his thighs or lower legs. The first and third options would perhaps make it easier for Adam to function among us, but the second was a potentially dangerous sop to his or RuthClaire’s (vicarious) vanity—for which reason I struck it from my catalogue.

  What then? What were they going to do to Adam?

&n
bsp; I folded the notes back into their envelopes, feeling good about having decided to consider Adam my friend. Now I must act on that decision and enforce it by framing a reply. I found a grungy 13-cent postcard and wrote on it the following message:

  Dear RuthClaire and Adam: I will come any time you need me. Just ask. No sweat about throwing C. S. Lewis across the room. I was once tempted to do the same thing. I’m the wrong pen pal for discussion of God and Godness, grace and salvation, extinction and immortality, even good and bad etiquette in situations with a moral angle. For that reason—not lack of time—I can’t promise anything.

  Kiss the kid for me.

  Love, T. P.’s Godfather

  *

  Christmas came and went. In Atlanta, the circus had begun. I wondered if my postcard had passed under prying eyes, thereby triggering the Montarazes’ ordeal with the press. In the future, sealed letters only.

  Early in February, RuthClaire wrote to say they had received Tiny Paul’s birth certificate. She included three dollars to cover the cost of the registration fee. I sent the money back. But with the bills and the note was a printed invitation to Adam’s first exhibition of paintings at Abraxas. A wine-and-cheese reception in Adam’s honor would precede the show, and I was also invited to that. On the printed card RuthClaire had written, “You’d better be here, Philistine!”

  The reception was on a Tuesday evening. I closed the West Bank after our midday meal, gave Livia George and the others both that evening and Wednesday off, put a sign on the door, and set off for the Big City . . . just in time to collide with rush hour.

  Dristle kept my windshield wipers klik-klikking, and it was almost completely dark when I finally made my way up Moreland Avenue to Little Five Points and the Montaraz house on Hurt Street. That house, how to describe it? Its silhouette oozed a jolly decadence suggesting Mardi Gras, shrimp creole, tasseled strippers, and derby-hatted funeral processionaires. A pair of lamps on black cast-iron poles shone on either side of the cobbled walk, their globes like spheres of shimmering, honey-colored wax. By their light, I saw two indistinct figures come out on the front porch, down the steps, and hand in hand through the mistfall to my car. I let them in.

  RuthClaire and Adam, of course, in polished boots and fleece-lined London Fog trench coats. From their bodies wafted the smells of soap, cologne, lipstick, aftershave, winter rain, and something peculiarly oniony.

  “Don’t I get to come in?” I squinted at my invitation. “This is a wine-and-cheese reception, not a dinner.”

  Adam sat next to me, but his lady had slid into the back seat. “David Blau,” she said, leaning forward, “asked us to come a tad early, Paul. We’re letting you drive to throw the press off. They’ll be looking for our hatchback.”

  “I thought they always had your place surrounded.”

  “Until we got Bilker Moody, they usually did. Tonight, though, the majority’s already at Abraxas.”

  I asked about my godson. He was with the sitter, Pam Sorrells, an administrative assistant at the gallery who had sacrificed her own attendance at the opening to free Adam and RuthClaire for the event. An armed security guard—the aforementioned Bilker Moody—was also in the living room to protect La Casa Montaraz from uninvited guests. Bilker was nearly always present. That was the way their little family had to live nowadays.

  “Look, the show’s not officially over until eleven, Ruthie Cee. My stomach will be rumbling like Vesuvius by then.”

  Adam reached into the pocket of his trench coat and withdrew a McDonald’s cheeseburger in its Mazola Oil-colored wrapper. It was still warm—warm and enticingly oniony-smelling. I glanced sidelong at this object of gastronomical kitsch.

  “Dare we offer a five-star restaurateur a treat from the Golden Arches?” RuthClaire asked.

  “Ordinarily, only at your peril. Promise not to tell anyone, though, and tonight I’ll discreetly humble myself.”

  I ate the cheeseburger. Adam produced a second one. I ate it, too. For dessert, RuthClaire handed me a (badly needed) breath mint. Then off we drove. A nondescript pickup truck materialized about midway along the block behind us and tailed us all the way to the gallery.

  The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines abraxas as “a composite word composed of Greek letters formerly inscribed on charms, amulets, and gems in the belief that it possessed magical qualities.”

  In Atlanta, the gallery called Abraxas is an influential but underfunded alternative-arts center in a predominantly black section of the city. The buildings making up the complex—a print shop, a theater, the galleries, and the studio wing—used to belong to a school. With the exception of the print shop and the studio wing, they were built early in the century in a stolid red-brick architectural style giving them the grim look of a prison or an oversized Andrew Carnegie library. Coming toward Abraxas from the east, you swing back and forth along Ralph McGill Boulevard between modest clapboard and brick houses until you attain the crest of a hill that plunges precipitously toward the foot of yet another hill. Abraxas, though, sprawls along the weedy mound of the first hill, partially obscured by the fence of a factory parking lot.

  I was cheerfully dive-bombing the Mercedes past the gallery when Adam tapped my knee and RuthClaire cried, “Stop, Paul, you’re missing it!”

  My first good look at Abraxas left me chilled and skeptical. A one-person show at this abandoned school, I mused, could hardly have any more cachet or impact than a violin recital in a garage in Butte, Montana. Adam’s show was clearly small potatoes. The movers and shakers of the Atlanta art community had granted him this venue because his work had nothing but its novelty (“Prehistoric human relic actually puts paint to canvas!”) to recommend it. Maybe they had given him this show as a courteous bow to RuthClaire, in the hope that she would contribute to the center’s funding. This decaying three-story shell of chipped brick and sagging drainpipes was Abraxas?

  RuthClaire seemed to be monitoring my thoughts. “It’s better inside. You have to park around back.” The lot had already begun to fill. We inched along behind earlier arrivals before finding a space under an elm tree at the end of the studio wing. Quite a crowd. “The third-floor gallery has three main rooms,” RuthClaire explained. “Adam’s paintings occupy only one of them. Some of these people have come for the Kander photographs or the Haitian show.”

  We got out and crossed the lot to a plywood ramp leading into the old school’s first-floor corridor. A security guard saluted RuthClaire and Adam and directed us up the cold inner stairs to the third floor. Little inside the place contradicted my first impression of it as a candidate for the wrecking ball. At last, a formidable door, preventing entry to the gallery. Adam pressed a buzzer on the crumbling wall next to the door.

  “I need a password,” said a muffled male voice beyond it.

  “Chief Noc-a-homa,” RuthClaire said. This was the name—the stage name, so to speak—of the Indian who served as the official mascot of the Atlanta Braves. It was also the necessary password. The door opened.

  “Welcome to the Deep South franchise of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land,” said a tall, disheveled man in a lime-colored sweater and a gray corduroy jacket with elbow patches of such bituminous blackness that it looked as if they would leave smudges on any surface they touched. The wearer held his elbows close to his sides as if to keep from leaving charcoal blots here and there about the gallery. This was David Blau. He was nearly my age, but he exuded a boyish enthusiasm that seemed a permanent attribute of his character. RuthClaire made the introductions, and we went around the corner into the director’s huge, drafty “office.” In the middle of the room, a set of unfinished stairs climbed to a jutting mezzanine that may have been a jerrybuilt studio loft. A lumpy sofa squatted with its back to the steps.

  People milled about between the sofa and its coffee table, between Blau’s desk and a metal desk piled high with tabloid art publications. Other people, wine glasses in hand, sat on either the steps or the sofa, chatting, laughing, enjoying themselves. Blau said they
had a perfect right. Most of them had worked hard for the past ten days to make this opening possible. A woman in designer jeans and high heels approached with a tray of wine glasses and decanters of burgundy and white. Each of us took a stem, and even Adam drank, sipping at his glass rim as suavely as any cocktail-party veteran.

  “Hey, Paul,” RuthClaire whispered, “still think this is the Siberia of Atlanta’s art world?”

  Blau overheard her. “It’s the High Museum that’s the real Siberia. Every time I look at it I see a heap of trash-compacted igloos.”

  “I like it,” RuthClaire said. “It’s a lovely building.”

  “It’s cold,” Blau retorted. “Cold and sterile.”

  “You’re not responding to the architecture, David. You’re responding to the fact that its exhibition policies are different from your own.”

  “Southern artists can get shown in Amsterdam or Mexico City more easily than at the High,” Blau told me. “The High’s safe. Colorful abstracts with no troubling political or social messages. Artists safely dead or with one foot in some collector’s anonymous Swiss bank account.”

  “It’s supposed to be safe, at least in comparison to Abraxas. It’s Abraxas that’s supposed to be dangerous.”

  “Is Abraxas dangerous?” I asked Blau.

  The Journal-Constitution art reporter—a young man with the clean-shaven look of a stockbroker—interrupted this conversation to ask RuthClaire if he could interview Adam. RuthClaire made a be-my-guest gesture and hooked arms with Blau and me to escort us in prankish lockstep out of the curator’s office and into the first gallery room. I glanced over my shoulder to see the reporter and Adam eyeing each other with polite perplexity. Adam’s, however, was feigned.

  “That wasn’t fair,” I said. “That guy didn’t strike me as another Barrington.”