A Kind of Compass

by McKeon, Belinda; Rahill, Elske;

  She pressed her napkin to her mouth. Her lipstick was gone now.

  ‘Here,’ she said, sliding her hand across the table. ‘Tomorrow’s tram fare.’ Another fifty-schilling note with a wrinkled picture of Freud.

  In the end, I went with Kotoko to the nursing home the next day and the day after that. I never visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum or toured the Schönbrunn Palace or rode the little train in the Prater Park. I went nowhere at all but the nursing home. And all the while, Johan’s condition seemed to deteriorate. But Kotoko sat quietly on the stool by his bed, slowly blending into the atmosphere of the sick room – as though she had been there all along.

  Every so often I would go out to get some fresh air in the garden. Walking along in front of the terrace, I would look at the flowerbeds and then sit for a moment on the edge of the fountain. Sometimes I would even venture into the woods and linger for a long while, fascinated by the sunlight filtering through the trees. No one ever stopped to speak to me on these outings, and the elderly residents kept their eyes on the ground ahead of them as they walked. When I got back to the ward, Kotoko was where I had left her, with no sign that she had moved a muscle.

  Every half hour or so, she would tap me on the shoulder. ‘Is he still breathing?’

  In response, I would put my cheek close to his mouth to feel the faint puff of breath and listen for the quiet gurgling deep in his throat.

  ‘Yes, still breathing,’ I would tell her, but she continued to study him with a dubious look on her face. She could easily have allayed her fears by checking for herself, but she apparently lacked the courage to do so, and a few minutes later the tap on my shoulder would come again.

  Each time he made a sound – a burp or a cough or some other indeterminate noise – or when his eyes seemed to move about under the lids, we would start and lean forward over the bed. Then it was necessary to check whether he was breathing all over again. And at some point in all this, it occurred to me that we were actually waiting for him to die.

  When his hand pushed out from under the blanket, Kotoko would ever so warily take hold of his fingers. She would stroke his hair or straighten the collar of his pyjamas or moisten his lips with a piece of damp gauze. But she did all this with the greatest reticence, as though to announce by her manner that she had no right to do so and would instantly retire when some more appropriate person appeared to care for him.

  Johan breathed his last on the afternoon of the day before we were due to leave Vienna. I have no idea what became of the other people who had been on his list, but the fact was that Kotoko and I were the only ones there at the end.

  No doubt because the staff was so accustomed to the work, everything happened with amazing speed and efficiency. Once the doctor had confirmed that there was no pulse, each player performed his part seamlessly. We stood aside and watched as they cleaned the body and then took it away to the chapel. Then a different attendant put clean sheets on the bed.

  Several of the residents came to offer their condolences. They were warm and kind. Some of them wept as they praised the deceased and urged us to be brave. They embraced us, Kotoko first and then me. Though we were unable to understand a single word they said, their sympathy was abundantly clear.

  As I stood enfolded by those old arms, feeling old hands on my back, the sadness slowly began to spread through me as well. Though I had no connection to the dead man and had never exchanged a single word with him, I could sense the pain that all those present were feeling. It bathed me like the waters from a chilly spring.

  I took Kotoko’s hand. The name of our hotel that I had written on her palm had faded and would soon vanish altogether.

  When everything in the ward had been cleared away, the only remaining trace of Johan was the plate with his name attached to the foot of the bed. The new sheets were smooth, and any lingering body heat in the mattress had dissipated. A fresh, carefully fluffed pillow had replaced the old one.

  The nameplate swung gently back and forth, though the air was still. I took hold of it – a simple label encased in plastic.

  Joshua it read.

  ‘Joshua,’ I said aloud. ‘That wasn’t Johan, Kotoko. That was Joshua.’

  Kotoko’s mouth fell open and she blinked several times. She took the nametag from me and turned it over in her hands, rubbed it with her fingers. But that didn’t change the fact that Johan was Joshua.

  ‘But what are we going to do?’ she said, breathing a quiet sigh.

  ‘There’s no need to do anything,’ I said.

  ‘And to think I even kissed him …’

  ‘Don’t give it another thought. You did exactly the right thing.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Everyone needs someone to be with him at the end, no matter what his name is. You were simply being that someone.’

  I glanced at the nametag on the neighbouring bed.

  Johan.

  There he was – as feeble as Joshua had been, with very little to distinguish them. Except that he was still alive. He was sleeping, the pupils like caramels concealed beneath nearly transparent eyelids. We stood looking back and forth between the real Johan and the empty bed, and then we pressed our palms together and said a prayer for Joshua who was now so very far away

  THE UNINTENDED

  Gina Apostol

  18. The insoluble puzzle at the heart of the labyrinth is not Magsalin’s to bemoan

  For the mystery writer, it is not enough to mourn the dead. One must also study the exit wounds, invite the coroner to tea, cloud the mind with ulterior motives, typically in triplicate. In addition, pay credit card bills for the grieving, if such bills are extant.

  The translator and mystery writer Magsalin has undertaken (yes, no, pun) some of the above duties at previous incidents; but the insoluble puzzle at the heart of the labyrinth, the Icarian cry, is not hers to bemoan. That is up to the dead man’s kin, who are, fortunately or not, also dead. It is said, for instance, that the writer Georges Perec’s mother died in Auschwitz, his father of shrapnel wounds before the war even started. The writer Georges Perec had a wife. She is a widow. Her heart must be broken. (Magsalin cannot do that for her.)

  For the mystery writer, there are the sheaves of paper, the umbrellas from James Smith and Sons (owned by the wife, shipped from Bloomsbury in London), the clippings of newsprint events of general interest, such as the Tunis-Marseille ship schedule, lottery numbers, and election results for mayor of the commune Ivry-Sur-Seine, 1979 (the winner is a communist). For the mystery writer, everything could be a clue, and a word has at least two meanings, both of them correct. And it is not right to jump to conclusions, especially when it becomes apparent that one’s sorrow is misplaced, in this case.

  First, the writer has been dead for some time. Second, she has read only two of his novels. Third, he does not figure at all, except as premonitory prompt, a standby ghost, in this story of disappearance Magsalin is about to foretell as she slips a horde of facts into her handbag (leather, from Cleo and Patek, aubergine with olive handles, always admired by salesladies): the writer’s income tax returns, dental appointment cards, shipping receipts from James Smith and Sons Umbrella Shop of Bloomsbury, London, photographs bought from the Library of Congress, 3½ x 7 note cards that slip out from envelopes, a stash of library books the writer thought he would have time to return.

  19. Everything in the world is doubled

  In Las Vegas in 1969, everything in the world is doubled – the chandeliers, the plush of the blackjack tables, the old women (in furs and mohair caps with rhinestone hatpins) swinging their sequin purses, the sheen of noiseless slot machines. Virginie is staring at an old woman clutching an empty pail in her hand, the name The Sands somewhat erased in a winding circle around the pail’s dull tub. She stares because she and the woman are wearing the same Schreiner brooch: a pink rose. It is a coincidence. The woman’s mouth opens in silent despair. But the only sound Virginie hears is the scratch of Luca’s pen (it is a 1940s Esterbrook, a m
iniature in pale green, one of hers). Her husband is so young. This fact touches Virginie, though she is six years younger than Luca. Virginie’s diplopia has the odd advantage of centring her focus only on the sound of Luca’s writing. She sees double but hears nothing but scratch. Scratch scratch scratch scratch.

  4. Chiara Brasi’s trip

  Chiara Brasi affirms to Magsalin that she is the daughter of the director of The Unintended.

  Magsalin confesses she saw the film several times in her teens.

  At one point, memorably, she recalls watching it frame by frame in a muggy class along Katipunan Avenue, a course called Locations/Dislocations, about the phantasmal voids in Vietnam War movies shot in equally blighted areas that are not Vietnam. The disturbing web of contorted allusions, hidden historiographic anxiety, political ironies, and astounding art direction resident in a single frame, for instance, of a fissured bridge in the Philippines, in real life dynamited by the Japanese in 1943 and still unrepaired in 1976, and rebuilt specifically and re-exploded spectacularly in the film’s faux-napalm scene against a mystic pristine river actually already polluted by local dynamite fishers – the movie, for whatever reason, kept putting Magsalin to sleep, though she omits that detail before the filmmaker’s daughter.

  There was something both engrossing and pathetic about it, about reconstructing the trauma of whole countries through a movie’s illusive palimpsest, and what was most disturbing, of course, was that, on one level, the professor’s point was undeniably true, our identities are irremediably mediated, but that did not mean Magsalin had to keep thinking about it.

  Chiara seems unconcerned, however, by the scholarly implications of her father’s cult classic; at least she seems unburdened. She nods absently at Magsalin’s squinting recall, as if she, Chiara, has heard it all before, as if she needs another Adderall. What she really needs, Chiara says, almost upsetting Magsalin’s cup of chai, is someone to accompany her on a trip.

  ‘Where to?’ asks Magsalin.

  ‘I need to get to Samar.’

  20. Why Samar?

  Luca pours out his dreams to her, and Virginie always restrains her own, as if hers should be checked so his can run free, though no one has established the rules. She knows it will be no honeymoon because he is still in the throes of thinking, a terrible condition, the way he renews his acquaintance with his demented plots: an epic about Rotarians; a love story involving Gus, the famous dying polar bear of Central Park Zoo (one of his weird obsessions); a musical about dwarves in space (a physicist’s dream); an Italian soccer fantasy film with himself in a cameo, of course, as a deaf-mute goalie; a murder mystery set in Vietnam but in fact about pyromaniac grief, gruesome and disconsolate; an adaptation of Tale of Genji in a World War II Japanese internment camp (also a musical). He always has a jungle of ideas from which he zooms into his desire – his obdurate cathexis: the four-leaf clover she has missed. It is admirable how his desire just cuts through the brush, when Virginie can barely figure out which pin to wear: the pink Schreiner rose, one of her fabulous fakes, or her mother’s choice, an antique pearl in an abstract coil.

  The Colt .45 was invented to kill the Filipino juramentados, violent insurgents out of their minds, during the Philippine-American war. That much she is told. She has learned more than anyone will ever need to know about the Philippine-American war in the years she has been married to Luca. The genealogy of the genocidal Krag-Jørgenson rifle (Sweden, 1896), ignoble prop of a dirty war; the melancholy artistry of bamboo snares (Samar, 1899), useless prop of a hopeless war; the advent of stereoscopic photography (Underwood and Underwood Photographic Company, 1900), propaganda tool for the imperial wretchedness of this war. Luca keeps the gun on his desk as he researches, poring over maps he has ordered from the Library of Congress. As he shows her the trail they could take, using the gun to make his point, from the infernal streams of Samar’s interior to the mountain passes above the Caves of Sohoton, she wonders if her husband has imbibed it, the spirit of his juramentados. Still, she knows she will go.

  Virginie, too, has a sense of the wild, though it is not apparent in her outfits. She is dressed in brocade and gold. She glitters like a sunfish. She wears the metallics and embroidered dresses that she wore in the days she had first met him. Her mother, Chaya Sophia Chazanov of Sosnitza along the Dnieper, Cassandra Chase to immigration authorities, and now Madame Rubinson of Rubinson Fur Emporium on Park Avenue, had always favoured old-world props, lace and lamé. Madame Rubinson was a former set designer who, not quite by intention, married rich. It was Virginie’s secret that she bore a sense of trauma that the world around her mocked – she was cosseted from birth, showered with toys after all; but she has this subliminal perception of a wound without root or reason, that not even she can see.

  She had gone to the zoo that day in one of those bouts of ennui that took teenage girls like her, who had an excess of wit and indolence, into parts of the city that enthralled children and manic-depressives. It was September, 1958. She lived only a few blocks from the animals, the hippos and the polar bears and the penguins, but she had never seen them up close. It was not proper, said her aunts, to do things in solitude: the devil is on the lookout for lonely minds. And zoos were for the vulgar. Every day after school, passing the zoo as a child, she would hear the chime of its hours, tinkling in a sunlit, dying fall, like the charmed suspiration of the endless tedium that lay ahead of her. That day, playing hooky, she found herself next to the sea lion tamer, studying as if magnetised the sleight of hand with which he fed the animals their mid-day, gleaming fish. The act’s doubleness enthralled Virginie – the way she believed absolutely in the spectacle of beastly affection, at the same time that she saw the bait that fed it.

  She needed to go out more.

  In this way, she failed to see the filmmaker catching her figure, out of place in her sequined outfit and spotted leopard coat from Rubinson Fur Emporium. She had intruded onto his picture, but it was semi-neorealist anyway (i.e., done on the cheap). He was filming his pro-animal masterpiece, tentatively called Maniac in the Ark, about an insane killer who turns out to be a zookeeper (of course) who wreaks mayhem to extort funds from the Mayor of New York to find a cure for his great love (Gus the Polar Bear, of course). No distributor bought it, yet Luca still thinks of the plot fondly. Luca caught her like this, a truant in his mise-en-scène of dubious enchantment, and when he asked her to sign away her right to privacy, asking also for her phone number, she did not see the symbolism – the tamer at play with a hungry beast. She took his bait.

  The life of a filmmaker is one of scraps of plots sandwiched between the lack of means to fulfil them. The life of a woman in the fifties is one of scraps of plots sandwiched between the lack of means to fulfil them. It is hard for Virginie to grasp that she has agency, just as in those old films of femmes fatales dying in grisly circumstances (Garbo in Camille, or Garbo in any other role), the viewer starts shouting at the doomed woman who fails to grasp that she has agency – don’t fall for that lousy count, you nincompoop! – and so she dies of consumption or jumps in front of that speeding train anyway. Eloping with a bearded artiste she meets at the zoo does not strike Virginie as a cinematic cliché. It seems like freedom. In the dark of the screening room, she watches the shreds and patches of the scene he has filmed. She clutches his hand in the scene of murder in the Arctic cages, as the killer raises his bloody axe. She screams. He tells her – look, it is just sleight of hand. All of your terror lies in the cut. No penguins were harmed in the filming of this movie. She does not look. But she keeps watching him rolling his film, feeding his gleaming reel.

  He stops and starts and cuts and discards, including her scene with the sea lions (he says the metaphor is sublime but the lighting is not). And the power of that – the certainty of his director’s vision – gives her invidia: a disease of empathy. It’s that envy of the artist that arises in certain readers: a visceral connivance with his dreams matched only by the desire to kill him for fulfilling t
hem.

  21. Before the weeping and the cursing and the tantrums

  Virginie’s first trip with Luca to Las Vegas is that date in 1969. They are still childless. She hates leaving Manhattan but wishes to appreciate her husband’s way of life. Luca prefers the Grand but she chooses the Hilton. There are lines of women in beehives and stilettos. It distresses and pleases her, to see herself as if in a mirror, to see so many women looking like her, all in a line to see a show. The rows of women give Virginie this rush, this thrill that comes over her in discordant places. The fact is, she is scared of crowds. She hides behind her husband’s new fame, his monstrous vitality; in the photographs, she always strikes this sub-alar pose, like a puffin cub taking cover. She hates going to premieres. She discovers too late that she hates the movies, a detail that amuses her husband: the visual effects strain her nerves. She cannot help it. She imagines, as the train rushes straight at her, that she will fall with the hero into the abyss.

  This neurological defect in Virginie draws her husband to her. Her sense that fantasy is never an illusion and that the purpose of art is hypnosis, a form of body snatching, arouses in Luca both tenderness and calculation. She is the ideal viewer for whom he makes his thrillers, but that does not mitigate the convenience of marrying a reliable investor.

  It might be fun to see the shows, she says on the spur of the moment. Sure, Luca says, why not. Grist for the mill. Luca can write anywhere. But truth be told, he prefers the casinos. By the baccarat tables, he likes to spread out his 3 x 7 note cards, ruled. Security and waiters leave him alone. They are used to oddballs with money. He ponders a sequence then he shuffles, inserts a note card into a middle set, moves a top card to the second column, recording his rearrangements on a yellow legal pad, ruled. He’s an orderly man and scratches his reconfigurations of the plot in a neat list of rejumbled numbers with corresponding new scenes. The arranging of movie scenes via numbered index cards is like playing solitaire with a set of laws that he is inventing. He is improvising, second-guessing. He can see the scenes coming together then he doesn’t. The end is always elusive. His wife taps him on the shoulder.