The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “My office,” became your standard reply to the frequent question of Kenny, “Where have you been all day?” and the occasional question of I., “Where’ve you been keeping yourself?” A question that I. asked more often than that, “Have you had a chance to sneak a glance at my novels?” bothered you for its echo of Knox Ogden and made you wonder if your failure to have sneaked a glance at his novels would drive him to drink. But he was already driven to drink, so you couldn’t be blamed for that. You would look at I. and smile and imagine writing down on a card, The reason I have so little time for you is that I am spending all of my time on your “assignment.” But then you would try to be polite and friendly and as accommodating as you could, to both I. and Kenny, leaving them both to believe that the beginning of the term had simply overwhelmed you with responsibilities and that you hoped later, sometime conceivably later, to accept I.’s invitation to take you to a movie, and to do something about Kenny’s marvelous, expanding libido, manifested in his more frequent telling of the latest risque joke or story he’d heard or read. The chess set collected dust. “Let’s play something,” Kenny urged you one night. Soon, you promised. Soon, but for right now you had an enormous job to complete.

  And finally, just in time, on Thursday, the day it was due, after an all-night session with the dictionary and your new thesaurus (“A good writer,” Professor I. had told the class, “will wear out, entirely wear out, at least one thesaurus a year”), it was done and remained only to be made presentable. Marilyn the secretary, who was so kind and amenable, gladly agreed to type it for you, appropriately on her latest-model futuristic IBM Executive. “One of my favorite students,” you explained to Marilyn, “is too poor to have a typewriter and needs this for another class.”

  Chapter seventeen

  April 24, 2021

  Cathlin Ursula McWalter, the popular novelist known as “Scotch Mist” to her many readers, died yesterday in her hotel suite at Suwanee, North Carolina, at the age of sixty-nine. The editors of the New York Times are pleased to publish herewith the first document produced by IBM’s newly developed Telemedium, the machine capable of recording messages from the afterlife.

  Excuse my dust. It won’t take me as long to get the hang of this thing as it did to discover that there are no guides over here, no officers, no bureaucrats, no delegates, no committees. Of course there aren’t any restrooms or restaurants either, but I wasn’t expecting those. I was hoping I’d be met, however, and it came as a surprise to discover that there’s nothing social about death: It’s the most solitary condition imaginable.

  The first thing you’d like to know, if I’m reading your mind correctly from this distance, is: Who done it? I was in good health. Certainly I drank more than was good for me, but year after year my doctors said that wouldn’t kill me. Every day, including yesterday, just before my death, I went for a twelve-mile hike into the mountains, collecting young specimens of the elusive Cathlin-weed (Datura mcwaltera) for inclusion in the book that looks like it’s going to have to be posthumous, volume two of my avocational Wicked Weeds of the Western World.

  There was nothing organically wrong with me. And I had scarcely one white hair among the thousands of scarlet strands that prompted so many of you to write me complimentary notes about my appearance, my fantastic jewelry and eccentric hats as well as my flaming hair. Thank you. It might pain you to learn that we don’t have any appearance over here, not even phantasmagoric—not even smoke, not even, if you’ll forgive me, Scotch mist.

  Speaking of which, I’m bound to point out that all of the McWalters of that ilk were notoriously longevous, and I should’ve lived much longer than a mere sixty-nine years. My great-great-way-back, Parlane McWaltir, he of Auchinvennell, in the shadow of Ben Lomond in Dumbarton, the first of our line to leave the ould sod and emigrate to North Ireland in 1609, lived to be almost a hundred, and many of his male descendants, including my grandfather Francie McWalter, of Londonderry, where I was born in 1953, managed to reach the age of at least ninety.

  Of course, there were some who met untimely ends: Margaret McWaltir, a Covenanter, was tied to a tidal stake and left to drown in 1685, and Joanna McWalter, my aunt in Londonderry, leapt to her death in the Foyle River.

  Could my untimely exit, you’re asking, have been suicide? Not me. Oh, certainly the reception given by critics in the popular press to my last novel, my thirty-second and possibly best book, Lady McBovair, would have depressed any author to the point of self-murder as a substitute for not being able to murder the Times reviewer who called it “watered-down—or McWaltered-down—Flaubert.” But what the hey? as they say; it was both a BOMC and a Literary Guild selection, and it made a mint, which I didn’t need, despite what my first writing teacher said forty years ago—a forgotten novelist named I.: “You’ll never get rich from writing anything.”

  Do you think I might have been done in by some person driven mad by envy of my riches? (Even Professor I. himself?) Then why didn’t he or she murder me thirty-five years ago, when my first novel, Geordie Lad, catapulted me to fame? Or when my collection of retellings of Boccaccio, The Ten Ludic Rooms, brought me serious literary recognition as well? The time to have murdered me out of envy or spite would have been right after the appearance of The Long Sleep, my epic psychobiography of Rip Van Winkle, which more than any other volume probably got me my Nobel in 2007.

  I wasn’t ready to die, and no one was more shocked by it than I was. But I’ve lived all my life by Murphy’s Law (although he was Irish, not Scot) and to the extent that extinction of one’s life is something gone wrong, it sure went wrong. And yet I had so many things going right for me: that lovely suite of rooms on the top floor of the Moonbeam Hotel, with Jacuzzi and Jenn-Aire, with my own futuristic kitchen where I could whip up one of those chicken dishes that grace the pages of Cathlin’s Quick Chick Cookbook; a dozen absolutely beautiful cats of every color and breed who were contented beyond their wildest expectations by the attention lavished on them by their owner and by Miss McTavish, my maid; and my almost completed research on John Ross, the Cherokee Indian chief (half Scotch) who grew up in these mountains and came to lead his people into exile from them. At the moment of my death, I still had not determined whether Ross would be the subject of my next novel or of my fifth nonfiction book on American Indians. And now he will be neither…unless the IBM people aren’t lying when they brag about their Telemedium.

  And I was scheduled to start, this very afternoon, a best-of-seven match with American Grand Master Billy McFarland, who, even as I speak, is down in the lobby crying his little heart out. He would have beaten me, of course, and probably with several of his clever Sicilian Defenses, but just to mate him once would have made the day, the month, the season, for me.

  Is he a suspect? Not Billy: He has already convinced the detectives that he was still on his bicycle, pedaling this way but ten miles off, at the moment the death occurred, and they, not even knowing he’s a grand master but taking some account of his age, eleven, have let him go and are concentrating all their brutal “grilling” on poor Timmy McLachlan, my houseboy. That’s stupid. Timmy is…Well, no, it’s stupid to suspect Timmy. I have never denied that I hired him because he reminded me of Geordie McGraw, the model for the hero of Geordie Lad. But now, for heaven’s sake, he’s pushing fourteen and was planning to leave my employ next week.

  So who are the suspects? I’m a writer, after all, and I can’t give away endings, and this isn’t the ending. You haven’t heard the last of me. But my devoted readers who are familiar with my memoirs, Louder, Engram! will recall that I spent some years in my early twenties incarcerated in Armagh prison for my part in the Belfast riots of 1976, and that subsequently I was committed to the Ulster Psychiatric Hospital in Coleraine, where I came under the “care” of a Dr. Fomin Bolshakov, a Viennese-trained psychoanalyst whose job apparently was not to “treat” any real mental disorder I might have had but to punish me by giving me a mental disorder. For three years, this Fomin Bolsh
akov tried everything he could to drive me insane, and in the process he developed an overpowering sexual lust for my body. He was unsuccessful in both. For the rest of my life thereafter, following the daring escape that Geordie McGraw helped me make and that I have truthfully recorded in the otherwise fictional Geordie Lad, I was certain that Fomin Bolshakov was still, literally, out to get me: that he was bent upon finding me and obtaining revenge for my frustrating his efforts and his desires.

  I’m not going to tell you, yet, who killed me. But I can say this much: Fomin Bolshakov is actually at large. He is out there, even in the vicinity of the Moonbeam Hotel on its hilltop in Suwanee, North Carolina. In my present condition I no longer need to wear the very dark glasses that I wore all my life because of photodysphoria, and I can see him clearly without them. I could bore you with a long analysis of Fomin’s Bolshakov’s own peculiar mental disorder, a delusion that all “reality” must conform to his own limited concept of what “reality” is, and I could warn you he is out there, waiting for all of you. But I won’t. It would take away what little pleasure you find in your remaining physical inhabitance of that earth.

  Please tell those guys to put away that Hammond organ and bring out instead a Steinway grand. For my funeral I want them to play, as you’ll discover when you take the trouble to open my will, the Piano Concerto no. I in B-flat Minor by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

  Chapter eighteen

  I was mighty proud of you, Kat. It remained to be seen what I. would think of it, but I personally thought you did a splendid job, an inspired job—although I must disclaim any direct influence on your brilliant decision to write the piece as if you were a ghost, a true ghostwriter, ghosting that “Cathlin” on behalf of Ekaterina. Of course I immediately understood that your alias names were allusions to your own: Cathlin being the North Irish form of Ekaterina, McWalter a Scots form of Vladimir, and that middle name, Ursula, as close as you could get to Dadeshkeliani, both deriving from bear. Would I. catch these allusions? You were gambling that he would not. You were distracting him with the multiple allusions to Nabokov to keep him from catching the more subtle allusions to yourself. I was nervous about that “Suwanee, North Carolina.” (There is no such place, although there is a Swannanoa, North Carolina.) Wouldn’t he recall that he’d told you about Florida’s Suwanee River and Tennessee’s Sewanee and wonder about the “coincidence”? You were gambling that he would not.

  I was especially pleased with your development of the Scottish angle: I suppose there’s sufficient topographic similarity between the Highlands and Svanetia for you to feel “at home” there in your imagination. My ancestor Glendenning “Mountain Horse” Montross, who emigrated from Scotland to Connecticut and fought in the American Revolution, had been a feuding crony of some of those McWaltirs of Dumbarton. Your research was almost as meticulous as the research that “Cathlin” had been conducting into the life of the Cherokee John Ross (about which, as they say, more later).

  And I think I understood why you took the risk of keeping Bolshakov’s actual name, as an afterthought following an unsatisfactory attempt to disguise it as Fomin (which is also Russian, a form of Thomas). Bolshakov himself, with his insistence upon authentication and “reality,” would have disapproved of becoming a fictional character. Would I. wonder how a Russian psychiatrist could come to be practicing in Northern Ireland? You were gambling that he would not.

  The only minor correction I would have made to your otherwise flawless piece (your newfound grasp of English astonished even me) was “Cathlin’s” assertion, in the beginning, that “it came as a surprise to discover that there’s nothing social about death: It’s the most solitary condition imaginable.” This isn’t, as I hope you’ll find, strictly true. At the moment of arrival at “the other side,” the lifeless are often overwhelmed to find that everyone is there! I’m reminded of those surprise birthday parties, only with, if you can possibly imagine it, the entire departed population of earth in attendance. The lifeless are free to pick and choose which of those billions they may communicate with, but all of them are there, almost like a multitude of angels dancing on the head of a pin. So death, angel, is unimaginably not solitary but social.

  Unlike your classmates, you didn’t have to wait a whole week to find out what your instructor thought of your obituary. The very night after you’d handed it in, he arrived at your door with a drink in one hand and a stack of papers in the other, asking, “Want to have some fun?” and then explaining to you that he had assigned his Narrative class to write their own obituaries, and here were the results, and some of them were pretty darn good, if you’d care to read them. This one. And this one. Here, this guy writes it as if it appeared in a newspaper on Mars. And this lady writes a very short but funny piece from her hometown newspaper as if her wake had been held in a swimming pool. What do you think? Wait, here’s a great one. Read this one. I want to know what you think of this one.

  Reading it and pretending, like the very best writers ought to be able to do all the time, that what you’d written had been written by someone else, you couldn’t suppress a giggle or two, particularly over Lady McBovair and Cathlin’s Quick Chick Cookbook. And when you finished it, you felt that sure enough this Cathlin student of his was pretty darn good, certainly better than the others whose obits you’d just read.

  “Well?” said I.

  “Clever,” you said.

  “More than clever,” said I. “Dynamite. Out of this world. The real George.”

  “George?” The name grabbed you, but it wasn’t a name.

  “State of the art. Something else. Cracking. This is some kind of superfuckingfantastic.”

  It was the highest accolade you’d ever had, and you came perilously close to saying, “Thank you.” But all you said was—or, rather, you wrote it on a card—You have some talented students in that class. You must be enjoying them.

  “Yeah, but the work load is driving me crazy. I’ve got forty papers to correct and grade for this class, and sixty short stories to read and correct for my other classes. I need to take a break. Want to go to a movie?”

  You wrote, Yes. I am not so busy, now. I have finished project. Let us see movie with three X’s.

  He read it, and his eyebrows went up. He coughed. “I don’t guess they have those in Russia. Or Georgia. But sure, let’s go find one, if you want.”

  Yes, there are certain places in Leningrad (or Saint Petersburg, as it has regained its real name), and even in Tbilisi, where one may watch a pornografeechyesky feelm, but you had never seen one before. Driving you downtown in his Blazer, I. gave you the American synonym, skin flick, and said he hoped you would be ready for it. You strolled together down the street of cinemas, reading triple-X’ed marquees. “Take your pick,” he suggested. “They’re interchangeable. One is as good—or as bad—as the other.” You discovered that The World According to Gwyn was no longer showing at the place where the lady in the booth had suggested you come back with your boyfriend. Now you had your “boyfriend,” but the movie wasn’t there. It was, however, showing at another theater just down the street. Interchangeable. “I don’t like that title,” I. protested. “It reminds me of a guy I would have liked to ‘do in,’ to quote that Cathlin’s obituary, because I was driven mad by envy of his riches.”

  But you and I. went to see it. It bore not the slightest resemblance, I. told you afterward, to the novel about one Garp. The actress Gwyn Tiffany (not her real name; she was born Thelma Jean Mankowicz) was a sudden surprise when first you glimpsed her, because of her resemblance to Cathlin McWalter—except that Gwyn’s flames were not the gaudy scarlet of Cathlin’s: rather, a more tasteful shade of sienna ginger. But she wore much jangling jewelry, and dark eyeglasses! At least in the beginning, because it was California and the sun was hot and bright. Soon she took them off. Soon she took everything off. So did some male, the actor Scott Irish (real, but pseud.). You did not understand the role of the male in the plot; perhaps his function was to persuade he
r to undress. His nakedness was utter: even his dangling qvem, his generative organ, was exposed to full view. You said aloud, “Ot!” which is “Oh” in Svanetian. There was a great contrast of skins: hers light, undulant, soft, flowing, circular, flowerlike; his dark, knobby, hirsute, hard, lumpy, diagonal, animal-like. You were reminded then, and throughout the movie, of the things you do not like about grown men, mature men, developed men: their hairiness, their musculature, their swagger and aggression, even their smell, which you were almost certain you could detect here: the excrement of certain fungi and bacteria that infest only the full-grown man. “Ot!” you could not help saying again as the smelly man put his hand on Gwyn’s head and forced her to her knees, where she was required to devote the next many minutes to the use of her vishkv, which in Svanetian means “face” or “mouth,” or both together, especially her nin, tongue. The eye of the camera, which reminded me in a limited way of the telescopic and microscopic vision we have here in the happy hunting ground, kept zooming in to reveal the wet quiverings of the frenulum and the glans, making them gigantic and scary, like certain mythical toadstools you’d seen only in dreams. Was Gwyn allowed to stop when she had the thing ready for its proper use? She was not: She had to continue, many minutes, until, with the aid of her jugvmard, fist, as well as her vishkv and nin, she caused the toadstool to erupt and spew its spores, which resembled dollops of toothpaste, all over her pretty vishkv. “Ot! Ot!” you cried, not even aware you spoke.

  I. must have heard you, however limited his powers. “Want to go?” he asked.