“Slow down now, slow it way down. Old man, old ears. All righty, all right. You caught me, got me with my toes in a snare. Seen me probably with that other fellow, right? Story is this, met you first, don’t doubt that, and I had so much funplus enjoyed the free drinks I won’t lieand I liked a soft ear. Bought myself another ring, got some problems solved and you did too no doubt and I’m still just old Tom. There it is.” He paused. “Don’t believe me, do you? I don’t blame you, OK, all right, you had me pegged, don’t goose a goose they say, you’re a smart boy. Let me show you something.” He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of gold rings and dumped them onto the table; one rolled off and into a dark corner.
“Ah ha, so they’re not magic at all!”
“Wrong, listen and shut your mouth. They’re all magic, when you put them on. Right now, on the table, they ain’t magic, you’re right there, but put it on a finger with a tale of spirits behind it and watch out, suddenly you got magic! You put the magic into it yourself, good or bad. I just give you the means, and you can’t call it a bamboozling either because I don’t sell them, I give them away and maybe quench my thirst in the bargain and what do I get out of it? Nothing but the magic.” He collected the scattered rings (except the one in the corner, he left that one where it was), put them back into his pocket, then he winked at Nicolai and slipped one onto his finger. He stood up, arranged a hair gone awry and winked again. A woman came over to him and with only a closing word to Nicolai, they left together. What he said was a continuation of his previous thought, “All I get is the magic...and a cute little dixon or two.”
Nicolai shrugged. “I hope at least that reunion time is over.” Rings, rings, rings; rings for Rifka, rings for Rooka, rings for Nicolai and Tom, rings for Elizabeth and Simon. Back to business I suppose. He made some cursory marks in the schedule of possible destinations and then went over to a large map on the wall to examine his choices more closely.
Chapter 8 and One-half
The fountain bubbled. Nicolai sat on the edge of it and the spray of water that it produced was icy cold. On the side where he sat, the east side, was a wide lawn terminating at a large marble structure, the public library. Before the library, at the head of the grass, beneath a white arch, sat an old man in robes, that is: a statue of an old man in robes. Down two ranks of steps (Nicolai only bothered to count the lower seven), it looked upon Nicolai’s crumpled form sitting on the small ledge of marble that formed the perimeter of the fountain. The wind was to the east. It was around two o’clock. He had his ticket, a train ticket to Chicago and then a connecting bus to Champion, Colorado which he couldn’t find on a map in the terminal and so seemed remote enough; and also familiar, as if he’d been there or knew someone who had. The train didn’t leave until 5:30 however, so he’d walked over to Bryant Park (recommended by the attendant as a nice place to sit) which was only three blocks from Grand Central Station. It was a nice place to sit, in a way, at least it might have been in a better season or brighter day. Today however was dreary, and the only people in the vicinity were the scads of bodies scattered on the lawn (living or dead he did not know, but if they were dead somebody would do something about them, no?), a few mid-day lunchers, a pipe smoker (just the one, a lost art), and lots of flies (not people per se, but close enough to many whom Nicolai had met). The copse of what might at times be a beautiful garden circumscribed the field. It brought to mind an image from one of the few literary works he’d taken an interest in:
Darke, dolefull, drearie, like a greedie grave,
That still for carrion carcasses doth crave
That is what he’d dug for himself, a grave. They would be doubly suspicious of his running away, it would clinch the idea of his guilt in their minds, Shyster’s in particular. And of him Nicolai was ever suspicious, convinced that he played a larger role in the whole mess than that to which he’d confessed. Why would Rooka deliberately choose someone so shifty to handle his affairs? Ah, but he does have that soothing voice. It’s effect, to be sure, is momentary, the lapping waves’ wetness on the beach, but it does leave residue behind, even now Nicolai thought of calling him for advice, to double-check before chucking it all. He prudently decided not to.
Had he done it, hadn’t he done it? The confusion drove him mad. He certainly believed himself capable of doing it, physically, philosophically. He’d killed Rifka, or at least not mourned much. Oh, he’d feigned at mourning, he’d falsified tears, felt he should have felt bad (and felt bad for the fact of that), but felt more guilty than anything else and glee at her exclusion from the will. So he might murder if he wasn’t prevented by fear, but he was certainly notnever had beenprone to rages and always needed a damn good reason to do anything. He reasoned then that even if he had killed Rooka and forgotten, he would not have forgotten the internal debate it would have taken to bring him to that point; unless it had been an act of passion (not rage, but the moment), or accidental as it was in the dream. On that point there is another question: so many people were there, a sizable portion of the village’s population, someone, someone would say, even if only in passing, why yes, that’s right, we rioted up there the other day! But no one hadas far as he knewfor then such rash conclusions would never have been drawn.
Then there were A, B, and C. Exhibit A was no doubt the money plate found blood stained on the mattress (and the American, did they have him? No, probably in Rome sipping cappuccino, if he existed at all; too many competing realities), Exhibits B and C must be the lost receipts (bags plundered), oh yes and D, exhibit D was the dream, if it was a dream and not simply an incomplete extended recollection. And that formed the worse case against him: if his own mind was not clear on the matter, he could never convincingly plea: “I’m innocent, damn it!”. No, no it was all too muddled, if this, if that, but the dream, woe is me (truly that) all colliding and crashing in his brain. Innocence and guilt were behind him, his most urgent battle was with sanityor insanity in search of the sanethe same part of his brain that he couldn’t yet claim. The general had control of those fronts and was nowhere to be seen, off having tea in the officers mess no doubt; no servicemen allowed. Nothing to be done but to wait for him to emerge, and Nicolai would wait in the woods where it was safe and free (no numskull he). Poverty would be his comfy chair. He would live as they had of old, sleeping and hunting and gardening, urinating in the open. Nicolai had always had a sinking suspicion that many of the worlds woes were due to the horrible shame of urinating repeatedly on top of other people’s urine. He believed whole heartily, as Rooka had told him, that “the pee-pee is to the man as the blood is to the bat, though I haven’t qvite figured out vhy, yet”. He felt a great disgust whenever necessity called in a public place and he was forced to hover over a pisspool of strangers’ urine carrying competing scents in order to satisfy his own desire. In the wilderness that will be different. I will piss where I like, in a different place every day!
Perhaps, eventually, he might come to a small village, or might find others of a like mind. A modern Arcadia they would weave for themselves, living a life of merriment, making songs to sing to invisible maidens and farm girls. “A Dulcinita [ea, but smaller] for every man!” would be the call. They would choose new names (a necessary act in any case during his banishment). What would be appropriate? He never liked ‘Nicolai’, it was far too Russian, too harsh in the throat, beginning, unappealingly enough, with a muffled nasal push which ceased with a rough drag in the back of the mouth and ended, as if nothing had happened, with a soft open vowel, the sigh at the end of a sneeze, oh my. His new name couldn’t be anything too similar, so the anglicized ‘Nicholas’ was out, as were the appealing Nicolichi and Nicolito; though he felt like a little Nicolai, a tiny porcelain statue of his former self which had fallen off of the continental shelf and cracked. He thought of the months and seasons: ‘Winter’ would fit his disposition, but this he wished to change, ‘Juno’ was far too bold, and ‘August’ far too somber, giving
the feeling of waning youth, ‘Julian’ was too soft, fit for rhyme and meter but no man, it slipped past the palate and throat and was made more of air than earth, with it the thoughts of a too warm summer, the spring of life behind, the winter far away. No matter in any case, the choice was pre-ordained like or no. He would have to be ‘Niculoso’ and in that become the living, mad-man’s fantasy.
But he had fantasies of his own, and he found them and birthed them in soil that he’d once believed infertile. Yes, he thought, this country life appeals to me. For a short time, I will necessarily wander the woods eating berry and bunny, but then I am sure to find some small village that will have me (whether American or no, who can tell?); either that or I shall build a home of my own, perhaps beginning as a simple lean-to, but then, after years of collecting this stick and placing that stone, it may grow to be a comfortable cottage, and I’ll have a nice little garden at the front with enough food for the two of us. Yes, the two of them. It wouldn’t be long before some coy, but thrill loving, farm girl, a country peasant, fell for his European charms. British, of Russian decent. Ooo, Russians are big and scary. Well, scary no, the other will depend on personal experience. You’re funny. I know. Make love to me. OK. He imagined his house then (getting ahead of himself): it might start out small, a single room, but when he took Dulcinita, his little sweet one, to wife additions would be in order, a bedroom for the two of them, a kitchen for her (she will cook such sweet meats that I bring back with singing bow and empty quiver), closets (though the clothes they have they will wear on their backs), and a billiard room. Always wanted to have a billiard room he did, the proper kind, Carom billiards. He would build it himself from felled tree and elephant (for the ivory, in lieu of elephant he could, of course, use walrus). At night he would entertain her with songs composed in her honor:
Oh, Dulcinita, sweet thou art
And lovely are thine eyes.
I swoon to simply hear thee fart
And fill my heart with swoon-like sighs.
Then he’d have a study too in which to compose his memoirs, The Sad Life of a Banished Rogue, ‘banished’ would have three syllables. And she would stitch a hole in his pants while he worked. I’m going out to pick supper from the garden, peppers and celery and cucumbers. Yes, and pick some strawberries for after, I milked Jonas today for the cream (Jonas is what he’d name his cow, only one and a bull for breeding).
The fantasy was complete for him at that moment, true, she passing in front of the window, her brilliant beauty flashing red in his eyes, her sighs like sirens, her sighs like sirens. Enough sighing already, my precious. No response. He looked up through the window and the flashing continued and an angry voice commanded, “We have the house surrounded. Come out, Nicolai Vicoff, alias Niculoso, and face the crimes committed in years past. Well, well, they have found me at last and sent a gung-ho gotham cop to the hinterlands for his prize.
“I won’t come willingly,” he said it aloud in the park even as it unfolded in his brain, hurriedly scribbling in the end of his memoirs as the lights and sirens grew greater and the law became a deluge, their long arm, fist clenched, smashing the glass at his desk-side window and choking him by the collar.
He could see the whole fantasy unfold before him in the water of the fountain, in an eddy of still water created by interfering currents. However, as the last foot soldier ran toward him, body hunched, weapon at the ready, the smooth surface of the torpid water filled with froth, bubbling dots of black and white, as the currents surrounding it engulfed it; the wind had changed. It blew now from the east and carried with it a fowl, evil stink. Nicolai turned and looked into it. He caught the statue’s eye and scanned the field of bodies, it was from them that the unpleasantness rose. Whether they were truly dead and rotting, or simply sleeping and unwashed, he could still not tell, but they smelled like death. It looked as if some great battle might have been fought there and these were the unclaimed bodies of the slain.
A police man walked by (it’s a fair cop) and Nicolai thought he was had, but the man ignored him and instead went over to one of the lying figures. “Get up, you bum.” He gave him a swift kick in the ribs and the sleeper stirred. He then went to each of the indigents in turn and roused them, then he left. Some of the men rose and wandered off, others went back to sleep, one proceeded to engage in a long picking of the nose (full spring cleaning going on in there), most remained where they were, but stayed awake used, no doubt, to the quick retribution of the law. One of them, though, one of the bums, stood and remained where he was, standing, and surveyed the field. He was the most ragged, most dole-filled (that and double), one of the lot too. His hair was greasy and hung down in long locks to his shoulders, and covered most of his face. What could be seen of that face was enough to birth dread in the breast of even the most stout-hearted. It was sorrowful, terribly, terribly sorrowful, every chink in it, every dimple, the hollows of his cheeks, the deep sockets of his eyes, were filled with sorrow, but not a remorseful sorrowfulness, not a pitiable sorrowfulness, a sorrowfulness rather of self-loathing, of loathing in general, loathing of life, loathing of all that grows on bush or tree, ground or pot, and all that walks or flies. Beyond that gray gauze of depression, beneath that thick film of greasy disgust, were the raw bones of hunger, so raw, so well defined, that they made him seem a walking bundle of bones and the rest of his body might have appeared so as well if it were visible beneath the ragged robe of hastily stitched torn fabric and nameless animals’ pelts which he clutched tightly about him.
Just so he stood, surveying the field, until his attention turned to Nicolai. Slowly he came over to the fountain and sat on its edge five feet (circumference-wise, less as the duck swims) to his left. Nicolai thought he recognized the man, had seen himperhaps just glimpsed him or passed near him on the streetbefore, once recently, perhaps (he was unclear), it seemed that they’d spoken, but Nicolai could not find a place for this feeling and so chucked it and ignored the man as much as he could without leaving, which, though appealing, he strangely did not desire.
Nicolai spoke, though he was not required to do so by any law of courtesy, “Fine day, isn’t it?” It wasn’t really, but how else should one begin a conversation?
“Fine as any, worse than many,” the man replied; his voice was like a viscous glass of liqueur. Nicolai grunted and stood, but the man halted him with a question (should have never started a bloody conversation in the first place), “Where are you going?”
He stopped and turned, unheard an owl had flown over and perched atop the man’s head, the man didn’t seem to mind. “Nowhere. Just going to walk around a bit, if that’s all right with you, of course?”
“Why shouldn’t it be? But if you are going nowhere then you might as well stay.”
“Yes, true, if I really was going technically nowhere, but you see I am actually going just over there, which is to say nowhere important, but somewhere none-the-less.”
“Ah, I see now.”
“Thank you.” He began to move again.
“But,” Nicolai stopped as the man spoke, “that presupposes that that place is in some way better than this, which in itself is based on a belief that any one place is better than some other.”
What a perfectly ridiculous conversation, Nicolai thought, I have no obligation to respond; but he did: “No, not better necessarily, but if better then better for being different and one perhaps seeks out the different for enrichment of spirit and growth.” Ha, got you there. The owl hooted in agreement.
“That implies,” does he never shut up?, “that change is growth and even that growth is good. Replant a growing tree in different soil and it may die. Let a weed continue to grow and it will soon kill its neighbors. A gardener prunes his plants so that more flowers can grow and does not move his garden about the Earth like cattle and as for cattle, they are moved about, milled about, only to prepare them for the slaughter, and even the Earth moving around the sun brings only winter, and yes then summer again, but t
hen winter again which is terrible for a cold.”
The owl hooted again, he had been swayed.
Nicolai sat. These strange, ridiculous words somehow affected him and so few words at that. An orator of Antony’s class this one was. I am the weed that grows and I have killed. Too true, too true, but not my thoughts, his, supplanted now and rooted deep; the weed begets the weed. What good is there in running. Running, moving, change has not been kind to me so far. He knew in his brain that the man spoke nonsense, the ridiculous speech of preaching literature and not people, but in his heart, there it struck him and made the most perfect sense. Why had he begun talking to this shrouded broker of doom? Look at me, I’m beginning to sound like him (and getting my senses jumbled in the bargain).
He continued, “Who can tell what a life may bring? But surely among its promises are fear, sickness, age, loss, labor, sorrow, strife, pain, hunger, and cold. Perhaps of this day-old, age-old dim sum you have already tasted, why then would you go back for more? Once the milk is found to be spoiled does one continue drinking? And friend, your milk’s been spoiled, I can see that in your eyes.”
Life did taste a bit like sour milk these days, like something that had once been good and now was bad, though it was never all that good. Where did that come from?
“You’ve got the idea now. You didn’t chose to live, but you may always choose not to. Very few discover that jewel of wisdom before they are too far along. It sounds simple, but it takes a wise man to leave a burning building. An intelligent man (without the gift of wisdom) will debate which little trinket or treasure that he has collected is most important to him and debate that too long and be subject to the flames’ desire before his mind is made up; a wise man contrariwise knows to leave his tin and wood behind and follows the path to escape.”
I Thought My Uncle Was A Vampire, But He Was Just A Creep Page 20
