Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  Wakefield is encouraged: Farkash has responded the way his Austro-Hungarian ancestors might have interacted with any performance: they stood and shouted and expressed their feelings. If he can bring out the eighteenth century in a shy mathematician, he should have no problem lifting optimistic fin-de-twentieth-century Americans to the peak of confusion—before he dashes them on the rocks, of course.

  “Money undergoes a conversion when one has more of it than is strictly necessary. When there is enough of it to move beyond the strict survival mode, money goes in search of beauty. That is to say, in search of the abstract and the imaginary. Just like poetry, which is the distillation of an excess of language. Too much money and too many words tend toward the poetic. Most people stand between their money and what money wants to do, because people are afraid, and fear leads to boredom. Not many people have a natural inclination to spend their money on objects of art or fanciful ideas. These bored, frightened people want money to simply reproduce, repeat itself. This activity of unimaginative repetition takes a great deal of attention and intention and leaves people exhausted and empty and keeps money prosaic. If you can’t use it imaginatively, it’s better to let money do its own thing. Money is becoming more and more imaginary all the time: the tenuous agreements that make for value are changing faster than you can think about them.”

  Fine, thinks the Devil. He leans out of the window of the projectionist’s booth and in an instant evaporates the contents of the audience’s pockets and purses. Their wallets, cash, credit cards, IDs, PDAs, cell phones, pagers, and keys, all gone. Everyone feels lighter. They shift in their seats, unaware that they’ve been pickpocketed.

  Voices from the crowd: “Is the value of art obvious?” “What about poetry?” “Whose money are you talking about? Not mine, I hope!” He’s got them: confusion reigns, the anxiety is real.

  “I’m getting to that. The only thing more useless and unique than a Robert Motherwell painting is a poem. Take this poem:

  “I don’t think that I shall ever see

  “A poem as beautiful

  “As my TV.”

  Wakefield draws a C inside a circle in the air, then asks the audience to repeat after him:

  “I don’t think that I shall ever see

  “A poem as beautiful

  “As my TV.”

  This time the audience joins in, although several people leave the theater. Maggie is laughing her sudden laugh.

  “This poem is worth one billion dollars. Why? Because I say so. A friend of mine wrote it. If you want that poem, you’ll have to give him a billion dollars. If you all agree that this poem is worth a billion dollars—and I don’t see why you shouldn’t—then that poem is worth a billion dollars, and if you buy it you can memorize it and it’s good anywhere you go in the world—you just go to the bank and draw as much as you want on it.”

  Scattered laughter, some applause, then a few sounds of distress. Some people, conditioned to pat their wallets whenever the subject is money, pat their pockets and don’t feel their wallets. Discreetly, they begin searching their pockets.

  “Just because this poem is made out of language and anyone can write it down or remember it and ignore that small C with a circle around it that I just drew in the air without anyone noticing … But really, you think it’s worthless, don’t you? Well, let’s look at it a little closer. It isn’t a very long poem, so it shouldn’t take very long to take it apart. It only has two ideas in it: the idea of Beauty and the idea of TV. The poem itself is a ripoff of an older poem that used the word tree instead of TV: ‘I think that I shall never see / a poem as lovely as a tree.’ So it’s not even very original, not like a poem by Cavafy, for instance. So these two ideas, Beauty and TV, are made equivalent here, which is as solid a base for equivalency as the one between gold and currency used to be. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, so it’s firmly in the realm of the imaginary, just like money. On the other hand, TV is composed finitely of what you people are fond of calling content, which pours out in huge gobs of slop into American homes every day. Beauty will always be ahead of any ‘content’ produced now or in the future, because I can change the shape and meaning of it at will, or as much as my imagination can imagine. So the equivalency between beauty and content is only provisional, just like gold and money used to be, and if I decide to take beauty off the content standard, then nobody but me will have the key to it. This is precisely the fear that drives content providers now, the fear that people will change their minds about what constitutes beauty. It’s a completely well-founded fear because people do change their minds about content. They are quickly bored and they demand greater and greater imagination in their content. Matter of fact, the only certainty driving the economy is the certainty that boredom at faster and faster rates is inevitable.”

  Nervous whispers in the crowd are beginning now. “Damn, I must have left everything in the office!” “Where the hell are my keys?” “What the fuck?” But rising clear above these whispers is the sudden voice of the Hungarian billionaire: “Now you’re getting somewhere, Mr. Wakefield!”

  The Devil is amused but anxious. He’s enjoying the rising tide of distress in the room, but he fears that Wakefield really may get away from him. He’s turning what had been a fairly simple deal, based on the clear understanding that his life might continue if he could prove in a material way that he was worth the Devil’s time, into something far more murky: quite cleverly, Wakefield has introduced into the equation imagination, a realm where anything is possible, even the nonexistence of the Devil himself. One thing about a deal, any kind of deal: it must take place firmly within the bounds of Newtonian physics. Still, the Devil cannot quite believe that Wakefield isn’t after something tangible. He’s a con man, after all, a tent preacher. The Devil has conned lots of people himself, judging by the number of them sticking those stupid fish emblems to their car bumpers.

  “So imagination, or the lack of it, is a problem for both producers and consumers. To stay competitive, content providers need more and more imagination, and the more they use up, the more people want. The speeding cycle of production-consumption-consumption-production has been analyzed by economists and by sociologists, but what they ignore is that this cycle is taking place within the realm of the Imaginary.”

  Right, Mr. Wakefield. Let’s have the punchline.

  “And in this realm, which doesn’t resemble in the least the models economists or sociologists use, poets hold all the cards. If I go back to the original of my billion-dollar poem, I, too, can say ‘only God can make a tree.’ So we are back to God. TV and what it gives us can be the equivalent of beauty in a bad parody, but the truth of the matter is that the natural world remains the basis for all value. So it is in relation to the natural world, or ‘nature’ that we must measure our human world. Or, to put it another way, virtuality has a boss: Reality.”

  Farkash is out of his seat. “You are contradicting yourself! Reality is a construct!”

  The impatient Diablo puts a lump in Farkash’s throat, making him unable to speak. Butt out, Farkash. Of course Wakefield is contradicting himself. But nature, that’s his beat and he likes to hear it praised.

  “Yes, Mr. Farkash, but Reality is the oldest virtuality there is, and it has more layers than we can ever understand. Money is virtual, but of recent vintage. The best hope for people who have too much of it is to turn it into something ‘natural,’ but it’s hard to say what that is anymore. The only thing people know—and they are right—is that the road to this ‘nature’—and I don’t mean the kind you see in SUV commercials—goes through the kingdom of the Imaginary. There is no other way to it. Not-yet-written poems are the most valuable commodity your money can buy. They are money. Of course, the poem or the painting, once it is purchased, self-destructs, and in so doing destroys its owner. The ‘content’ of any work of art is an attack, or at the very least a satire, on materialism. What is most interesting about a work of art cannot be owned, though it can be di
splayed. But at night, when your guests have gone home, you better turn the damn thing with its face toward the wall, or cover it with a tarp, or lock it in a safe, if you don’t want to have nightmares. The content value of art is proportional to the amount of anxiety it produces in its owner.”

  Pandemonium breaks out. People are hunting for their wallets under the seats in front of them. Some of them are simultaneously scratching and searching. There is cursing in several languages. Only Paulee, who is sitting in the front row, is smiling calmly. He knows precisely what Wakefield means: he owns more artworks than anyone in the room, but he doesn’t live with them. He has stashed them all in bank vaults and lives in an airplane that is spare and clean, containing only a working desk, a baptismal fountain full of wine, and a bed. In addition to the physical art he has stored in places where he rarely looks at it, he has bought the electronic rights to most of the acknowledged masterpieces in the world, including the collections of the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Hermitage, and those images rest quite safely in cyberspace, available by subscription to anyone who needs them. The image of a weeping first girlfriend abandoned in a cornfield in Iowa slips right off the polished surface of Paulee’s mind. So what if his pockets are empty.

  Wakefield is now shouting over the din: “Take another quality of money: strength. Money confers strength on its owner, which can turn into power if used with any degree of skill. Strength is the ability to live with paradox, to keep two or more contradictory things in mind at the same time. That’s also Freud’s definition of sanity. If you can live with a painting that aims to kill you in your sleep and you know it, you are strong. Of course, if you don’t know it, you are just stupid and that’s not strength—your vanity will sooner or later be revealed.”

  Wakefield is on a roll now. He could care less whether the Devil himself is in the audience.

  The Devil senses his defiance and is getting angry. Maybe now is the time for the starter pistol, Wakefield. We’ll make it real loud and clear and unmistakable. He positions a small cannon at the window of the projection booth. What kind of missile should he use? An exploding apple full of nails? A rain of wallets and keys? A huge ball containing the compressed contents of Wakefield’s apartment? But he checks himself. Why rush things? They are just getting interesting. Has he become so accustomed to the intellectual frailty and moral softness of postmodern man that he can’t handle a real adversary? If Wakefield is one. He may be a real idiot, and all this talk just a smokescreen for hiding his fear. Patience.

  “The reason most people want to have a lot of money is so that other people won’t laugh at them. In the past—like the 1980s—the rich were purposely ostentatious and so obviously nouveau riche that everybody laughed at them.

  “But these days the horror of being laughed at has overcome the temptation to feel giddy about money. In addition to that understandable terror of waking up and having hair like Donald Trump’s, having too much money can make a person feel guilty. Understandably, people want to assuage their guilt with philanthropy. Generosity, a.k.a. philanthropy, is as American as … well, you know, french fries. An unphilanthropic American is a failed citizen, an aberration that our national identity will not tolerate. Even Al Capone set up soup kitchens.”

  There is some applause, but most of the remaining people are so upset about their empty pockets, they fail to rise to a higher plane. Only Farkash, unable to speak, experiences a conversion. He begins planning a charitable foundation to propel Hungary into the twenty-first century.

  “But here again we run into the problem of the imagination. You can give your money to gray bureaucratic institutions and assuage your guilty conscience, but you will remain outside the creative process. Money is a language and, just like language, it can be boring or it can be inspired. The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca said, ‘No se puede vivir sin amor,’ and I’ll paraphrase that: ‘No se puede vivir sin imagination.’”

  The Devil knows suddenly that he’s right to have waited. Here comes the pitch.

  “For all these reasons I have created the School for the Imagination. The school caters to people who want to understand and create a poetics of money. Some of you may be suffering from SWS (Sudden Wealth Syndrome, i.e., ‘I got the house and the boat, now what?’) or from TBS (Terminal Boredom Syndrome). Our staff consists of poets. Some of the course offerings are: How to Speak Money and Create Giddiness & Freedom in the World, How to Set Up Simple Religions That Employ Small Gods & Deprogram Fanatics, Enjoying Simple Pleasures Without Reaching for Your Wallet, Feeling Loved While Everyone Hates Your Guts. Students are taught how to regain the imaginations they lost as their fortunes were gained. Using a ten-point system in which each million dollars is regarded as losing its owner one full IU (Imagination Unit), the program seeks to attenuate the sterility and affective waste that can lead, in extreme cases of billion-dollar fortunes, to a total loss of humanity.”

  Wakefield hasn’t been so good in years—never been hotter, in fact. A half-mocking voice from the crowd asks: “Where do we sign up?” Wakefield gives them the school’s imaginary URL: schoolfortheimagination.com.

  “Thank you for your time, ladies and gentlemen, I hope I have stimulated you! Now, if anyone has a question?”

  A dozen people stand up in the audience, waving their hands. “Where’s my wallet? You’re just a cheap magician! You’re no Houdini! Give it back!” A very serious young woman can be heard above all others: “Are you trying to tell us that we live in a dream world?”

  Instantly Wakefield answers: “Yes. When you are dreaming, you don’t know that you are dreaming. You just get a clue now and then and it scares you. It scares me. I made a deal with the Devil and I’m waiting for the starter pistol. But that’s another story.”

  Indeed. The Devil abandons the projectionist’s clothes behind the booth and takes off to his first cave in the Balklands for some R and R. People these days can be so taxing! Oh. He waves a hoof over the room, and the audience’s belongings return to them. He sips a bit of the ensuing confusion like a tropical cocktail through a straw. Mmm. Nothing like it: fruits of mayhem.

  Maggie bounds onto the stage smiling. “Friends, let’s not tire our guest. Let’s give him a good hand, a strong round of applause. I’ve learned a lot.”

  Maggie whisks Wakefield backstage to a door leading outside, applause dying out behind them. She hustles him into her SUV before anyone in the crowd has a chance to follow and, perhaps, rough him up.

  That night, Wakefield and Maggie have a quiet dinner together.

  “What the hell was that about?” she asks him.

  Wakefield laughs. “Damned if I know.”

  “I’ll have to do some serious damage control,” she says, but she’s not angry. On the contrary. She’s aroused.

  A not-so-mysterious feeling passes between them. They have a nightcap in his room.

  “Adultly speaking,” says Wakefield, “should we fuck?”

  “If there is some lovemaking involved,” says Maggie.

  The thing between them thickens and vibrates like an orange made out of light, and soon Wakefield is inside Maggie, thinking nothing, imagining nothing. He sinks. They travel. Afterward, exhausted and sweaty, he thinks that ideally all journeys should be the kind people have while making love.

  “This is why I travel,” he says out loud, knowing he shouldn’t. It sounds crass.

  Maggie opens her eyes lazily. “What do you mean by that?”

  He explains that a long time ago he used to hide. It was a compulsion that had begun in his childhood. He hid from people, but it was not from shyness or fear. Hiding excited him. Then he became a restless traveler, and sometimes it seems that all his journeys end in women. He tells her about Marianna, how he found her at the very moment he had decided that travel leads nowhere.

  “I know,” says Maggie, lying on her tummy, her lovely ass rising above her dimpled coccyx, “that you think I want you to tell me about your ex-wife, and maybe I do, but I’m mo
re intrigued by this hiding business. What do you mean you used to hide? You bury the bone pretty good.…” She looks up at him and smirks approvingly. “Is that what you mean? Hiding the bone? Or however that expression goes?”

  “Burying the bone. Hiding the sausage.” Wakefield tries to sound pedantic.

  “Whatever. About the hiding,” she persists.

  This is difficult. Wakefield has a neurotic habit he doesn’t often disclose. He told his ex-wife and soon regretted it. The only other soul privy to this information is Ivan. He’s only just met Maggie. On the other hand, confessing to a stranger …

  Maggie’s right on top of his dilemma. “I did a stint tending bar, you know, and people told me everything. Bartenders are like priests, they say.”

  “Maybe you could get it out of me with torture?” Wakefield teases.

  She leaps on top of his back and grabs his hair and pulls. Ouch. “It’s torture if you don’t tell me. Or death. You tell me, I let you live, Scheherazade.” She reaches under his hip and takes hold of his revived interest, sticky in her hand.

  All right then, he’ll talk. Little Wakefield was a hider. When he was very small he would crouch behind a dresser, or roll in a ball under the kitchen table, or stretch out as still as a corpse under his parents’ bed, listening for their true thoughts. Their conversation was different when they were alone. When they spoke to each other in front of Wakefield it was somehow false. And when there were other grownups around they never spoke to each other. Or to Wakefield.

  His parents were weekend tourists. They would drive to little towns to visit courthouses and churches. Sometimes they went to museums in bigger cities. They ate out at cheap restaurants. When they took Wakefield with them on these trips, he would look for places to hide. After he learned to write, he kept a list of places where he had hidden.

  He recites for Maggie Young Wakefield’s List of Best Hiding Places:

  “HOWARD JOHNSON’S outside Gambier, Ohio. You go to the bathroom but instead you go to the door and come up behind the cashier. The COURTHOUSE in Springfield. Under the big desk. The RUBBER MUSEUM in Akron, Ohio. Between the rubber ashtrays and the space suit. The HENRY FORD VILLAGE, Detroit. Inside the Model T. The DETROIT MUSEUM OF ART. Under the bench in front of the big painting of a fat naked lady.”