Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  Waiting to board his flight, Wakefield checks his e-mail. There’s one from Marianna: “I hear you’re coming to my city. Call me, we have things to discuss.” Damn, she must have seen his talk advertised in the paper. Marianna moved to the Wintry City after their breakup, when she decided, after years of avoiding her roots, to reconnect with them; the large Romanian community there had apparently been the draw. Okay, Marianna, I’m not gonna call, but if you find me, you find me.

  A message from Ivan: “You missed a great party. Our new mayor decided to live up to his election promises and arrested sixty cabdrivers, most of them Arab and Russian, for not having proper licenses or for having bought them illegally. I was not one, but then I paid more and I know the guy—he used to drink at the bar. Anyway, they released them all today with a fine and everybody’s driving again because there are fifty thousand neurosurgeons in town and, man, you should see their wives! They smell good!” Strange that Zamyatin writes English without an accent. When he speaks, his accent is always with him, but his English grammar varies according to weather, mood, or vodka. He can sould like a Cambridge professor or like a breathless greenhorn, as if language was itself some kind of weather or mood or alcohol. Wakefield feels a longing to be back home hanging out with Ivan in his slapdash, tolerant, corrupt semitropical city.

  The next e-mail is from the publisher of a new magazine interested in a travel piece about anything, 1,500 words at $2 a word. That’s $3,000, but Wakefield rarely writes articles anymore, having parlayed his writing career into the much more lucrative lecture business. He still receives regular offers, though, because he acquired a reputation, and a readership who sensed that beneath his descriptions of ice floes, tribal rituals, restaurants, lodges, and festivals, there was a certain darkness that resonated like a hidden architecture, an occult subtext. Fans of his writing actually created his lecture career; some of them were high-income professionals charged with hiring speakers for their annual conferences. In the hope of finding out what it was that lay behind Wakefield’s prose, they hired him to speak at their luncheons.

  Talking to people about things he knew well was easy; he tried to describe his experiences spontaneously and he allowed himself the luxury of thinking out loud, as if he were among friends. Sometimes the audience lost interest when it became clear that he was working against the grain of their hopes and dreams, but still they sat quietly, anticipating lunch. Some audiences didn’t appreciate his little icebreaking jokes at the expense of their chosen profession, but others were fascinated by his lack of respect and listened to every word he said with a kind of awe. Wakefield himself was astonished when reports of this effect filtered back to him. “Fantastic,” “a prophet,” “visionary” were some of the more embarrassing estimations of his skill. If Wakefield had been a preacher, he might have taken such praise as his due. As it was, he really had no idea what it was they had heard. He understood his effect even less now, many years after his first engagement. When people asked him to define what he did, he said simply, “It’s a kind of performance art.”

  Ever practical Ivan Zamyatin made light of Wakefield’s insecurity. “Do what you’re doing!” boomed the Russian. “The more you do what you’re doing, the more they’ll pay you. More rubles, my friend, more rupees and pesetas!”

  But Wakefield couldn’t just go on doing what he did, because he had no clear idea of what he’d done. In his very first paid speech, he had described an adventure that had taken him in search of the lost city of the Incas. He had speculated about what it must have been like to live in a layered and terraced world that stratified its inhabitants by rank and wealth. Then he’d gone on to talk about the people who must have lived between the layers of such a world, hidden people whose social functions were not clearly defined or understood, and who might have been much like artists and drifters in our time. As he spoke he closed his eyes and imagined them, inspired by their presumed existence and by their strange relation to their hierarchical society. This closing of eyes was interpreted by the audience as either a rhetorical trick or a genuine moment of rapture, but it was for Wakefield a nearly unconscious gesture, a way of concentrating. The more he talked, the more clearly he saw the “hidden tribes,” as he called them, and the more articulate he became in defining and defending them. He didn’t even realize that in addition to speculating as to their existence—everywhere, not only in Peru—he was finding reasons for their existence, and not just reasons but imperatives as well, and he felt himself becoming a spokesman for the “hidden tribes” whose existence no one had proven. He ended up asserting that he was himself a member of such a community, and that his existence was proof of theirs.

  He had worried, that first time, about his paycheck. After the lecture his host, in whose pocket the check lay, shook his hand with evident emotion. Not only had he not thought Wakefield was insane, he had been genuinely moved. If he’d had two checks, he’d have handed them right over. So Wakefield learned not to worry about where his talk might take him; he just went with the flow.

  This is what he tried to tell Ivan. Sure, the money was good. His price crept up, then shot up. He wasn’t alone. It was a time of tent revivals, just like in the mid-nineteenth century. Snake-oil salesmen and gurus of every stripe were making bundles preaching to the crowds. Putative paradises achievable through patented formulas were conjured from thin air and made instantly available. America was rolling in money and a not inconsiderable portion of that gravy slopped generously into the bowls of smooth talkers and charlatans. Wakefield read some history and found that his own age was very like the Jacksonian era before the Civil War. At that time everyone from mesmerists and channelers of the dead to writers like Mark Twain were raking in the chips. It was about that time, too, that Hawthorne’s Wakefield decided to drop out. Nineteen-nineties America was just as enamored of bathos and fantasy as Jacksonian America had been. It made Wakefield feel even more like a fraud. So he stopped accepting writing assignments and began to think about gradually retiring from the lecture circuit. His plan seemed reasonable, but he was still stricken with an unspecific dread.

  He went to see a doctor. “Not unusual,” his doctor said, prescribing a new antianxiety medicine. “Everybody takes these now,” the doctor assured him, “though I don’t quite know what’s making people so anxious. Stock market is doing great, people are traveling, there’s a new restaurant on every corner.” The doctor, a younger man than Wakefield, became reverent. “My wife and I have reservations at Marlene’s.… I hear she does for crab what Perlman does for the violin.”

  On the way home Wakefield couldn’t shake the image of Chef Marlene torturing a poor crab to draw the music out of it. That night he dreamed that he was in a casino among a crowd of people all looking up at some kind of board. Only there wasn’t any board, or any roof, for that matter; the mob was staring at a cloudless blue sky. This is the casino of the dead, his dream voice told him; they’re waiting for you to make a speech.

  Not long after, the Devil showed up.

  Now Wakefield writes the editor of the new magazine a polite e-mail, turning down the essay invitation. He quickly scans the title headings of his other messages, erasing the usual promises of paradise: Viagra, penis enlargement, breast augmentation, diet pills.

  Quit while you’re ahead, Wakefield thinks, as he boards his flight out of Typical. This will be my last lecture tour. He’s concluded the first leg successfully (and without Viagra), and the next stop should be a breeze. The third and last gig worries him, though. Other than his attending a party for his usual lecture fee, he hasn’t been told a thing. His agent had reported that the man who hired him only said, “I’ve heard him speak, now I want him to listen.” Wakefield wonders about that. Maybe he’s a lousy listener. He wonders, too, if he’s really ahead of anything. He’s racing alright, but the race hasn’t even begun. Zelda once asked him, when he’d scheduled five flights in one week, “What are you running from, Wakefield? Somebody chasing you?” At that time there was
no Devil, and Wakefield hadn’t the slightest idea why he was running, or even that he was running, and it had never occurred to him that anyone or anything was chasing him.

  “Why do you think I’m running, Zelda?” he’d asked her. She’d taken her time and then answered, not surprisingly, “Your daemon.”

  “My demon?” Wakefield thought he’d heard her say.

  “You know what I said, Wakefield. Your daemon. If you persist in mistaking your daemon for a demon, you’ll get what you wish.” Guess she was right. Zelda had explained the “daemon” to him before: it was the angel of his fate, the particular guide and guardian of his unique life. Running away from one’s daemon was a spiritual crime in her book, one of the gravest.

  PART THREE

  WINTRY CITY

  Wintry City’s almost home, Wakefield’s been here so often over the years, so he’s excited when the airplane approaches low over an immensity of solid brick neighborhoods, alive with ethnic old-timers, new immigrants, and blue-collar families.

  “How is my favorite melting pot?” he asks the Arab cabdriver who takes him from the airport to his usual hotel, an old gangster hangout circa 1925, recently restored, but not too much, he hopes.

  “Pot of boiling shit,” the cabbie says.

  They pass a familiar diner Wakefield remembers as having the best potato pancakes in the city; around the corner is an ancient Polish Dog stand huddled right under the elevated tracks. His mouth waters; sauerkraut and spicy brown mustard. Yum. The cabbie curses. The street to the hotel is blocked off by police.

  “Maybe a riot or a festival. Never can tell.”

  When Wakefield was last here, he noticed that the city was undergoing a transformation. Once a fairly grim blue-collar town where men went home after work to corned beef and cabbage, it had become almost lighthearted, constantly celebrating festivals, fiestas, and ethnic parades. When he bails out of the cab at the end of the block the driver tries to overcharge him by ten dollars. He argues; it’s a principle.

  “My friend, your meter is fast. I come here all the time, I know how much it should be.”

  “Look,” says the driver, “I’m sorry, but my rent goes up five hundred dollars last week. I don’t know what now. Five children, wife has no job.”

  Wakefield is interested. “How could your rent go up so much all at once?”

  The cabbie hangs his head. “Two weeks now a foreign woman buys my building with suitcase full of cash. Next day, everybody work there gone, maintenance guys, boilers man, super, janitor, everybody. These men come instead, all foreign, they speak no English, not a word, they wear nice suits, black shoes, sunglasses, all young, no smile, very very frighten. Then rent goes up. Tenants there, maybe fifteen years, they complain. Owner say, they the new maintenance, they also can beat you up. You pay or leave. Half the people, all the old people, they leave. Some have family, other to the bum shelter. You tell me what I do.”

  Wakefield is indignant. “These are not the old gangster days. You go to a lawyer, sue the woman, this is America.”

  The cabby smiles ruefully. “What America you come from? This is old days now. Gangster from Communist, from Russia, Ukraina, Romania, worse than Al Capone.”

  Wakefield pays him the extra ten dollars.

  His large room on the eighth floor, though newly renovated, still feels old-fashioned, with windows that actually open and a gorgeous view of the lake. When he looks out he sees an astonishing sight: hundreds of yellow cabs parked like a flock of birds on a cement pier on the shore. Beside each cab a driver is bent in half on a prayer mat. Rush-hour commuters whiz past them on the freeway; their prayers fly over the lake toward Mecca; gangsters from ex-Communist countries terrify their families; their cheating meters are fast.

  After a long, dreamy soak in the huge lion-clawed bathtub, Wakefield descends to the lobby to have a drink. He finds a seat in a deep leather booth and lazily examines the Deco fresco adorning the walls, and the huge mirror behind the long mahogany bar.

  Sipping his whiskey, he calls Zamyatin on the cell phone.

  Ivan is in his cab conveying “precious cargo” to the airport. In Ivan’s lingo, precious cargo means one or more beautiful women.

  “I’m in a city oppressed by your people, Zamyatin,” Wakefield tells him. “It seems that the ex-Commie mafias are taking over where Al Capone left off.”

  “So what am I supposed to do about it? Come over there and kick ass? (To Precious Cargo: Pardon me, language like this makes me ashamed of myself.) Listen, my beautiful person, if you pay my ticket, I come be your translator, Superman. (To Cargo: My friend, you see, has complex on saving the world. I only want to save money.…) Call me again when you need good, sane person talk, right now I must explain road to Precious Cargo. Okay, my friend?” Zamyatin is talking funny English for the sake of his precious cargo.

  Wakefield hasn’t had much time to make many friends. He has quick, extravagant encounters, thousands of acquaintances, But there is only one person he can call in the middle of the night. Ivan doesn’t sleep much anyway, and is always (gruffly) glad to hear from him, and Wakefield has become dependent on his frankness, which never wavers. He could call Zelda at 2 A.M., but she’d interpret it as a “cry for help” and would offer not advice but “therapy.”

  Wakefield once confided to Ivan his fetish for hiding and secret spaces. “Your ‘harmless habit’ as you call it, is a gold mine,” Ivan had said. “You have notebooks on secret hiding places? That’s money in the bank, bozhe moy, you could be a cat burglar, a diamond thief, a James Bond spy … And there’s also personal profit, watching all those people fucking!” Ivan got very excited about this hidden potential.

  Wakefield told him that he was interested simply in forgotten space created by renovation and disuse, but the more he explained, the more poetically elaborate the concept became. “This architectural amnesia is the real estate of poets, born of layering, history, forgetting. It can only be inhabited stealthily after it’s found; it cannot be rented or distributed. It would be immoral to profit from it. You may not get this, Ivan, but there is a kind of altruism involved here, an experimental altruism. I don’t hide in order to spy on people: I hide to fill the forgotten places that need to be filled in some way. People believe in house spirits, in ghosts, in all kinds of presences that they claim to dread but actually crave. I see myself as a kind of household deity, a spiritus locus, if you will. Beyond that, I don’t want to think about it. I am simply a cartographer of lost space.”

  Ivan had shrugged and redirected his energy to a person of the opposite sex.

  It’s gotten dark now and Wakefield remembers he’s still hungry for that hot dog. All space is “lost space,” there is no charting it, Magellan’s job has grown huge in speeded-up time. He looks around for a sympathetic face at the bar, but there are only stiff young executives gazing at themselves in their giant martinis.

  After a night of dreamless sleep, bathed and shaved, wearing his all-purpose jacket and his heavy wool overcoat (thank you, Zelda), a cup of very black coffee in hand, Wakefield waits in the lobby for Susan, his contact from the World Art Museum. He has the feeling that he knows her because they have been e-mailing each other about the gig and their messages have become friendlier and more revealing with each round. He knows that she is a second-generation American, of Serbian-Bosnian descent, who might have been named Fatima or Nina, but her newly naturalized parents wanted her to have a head start in America. She grew up “Susan” and became a curator and administrator for the World Art Museum, currently holding an exhibition of Communist-era dissident art, for which Wakefield is the opening-night keynote speaker. He knows that she is also a vegetarian. Her parents are conflicted about everything, including her current job, because she has plunged with such gusto into the intricacies of the world they left behind, but also proud because they believe she has transcended their past and become a refined American person, a Museum Susan. Since the start of the war in Yugoslavia, there has been tension betwee
n her Serbian father and Bosnian mother. She wrote him about her neighborhood, its eight Orthodox churches, two Greek, two Russian, the Serbian, the Armenian, two Romanian, and two mosques for the Albanians and the Bosnians, and two Polish Catholic churches. She attended none of them when she was growing up, because her father, who’d been a Communist party official, was an atheist, but not long before the war started he suddenly got religion, began going to the Serbian church, and joined a nationalist group. Wakefield also knows that she’s single and she’s had boyfriends who horrified her parents.

  Wakefield imagines that she is petite, with long, dark hair and brown eyes, and is a sloppy dresser. He is also certain that she’ll be late. He is surprised when she shows up on time, a slender, short-haired blonde, elegantly hip, her tight-fitting jeans a designer brand, her tan sweater cashmere, and her peacoat pure Goodwill. Her fur-lined booties are Finnish. Her black leather gloves are Italian, and the rabbit-fur hat with earflaps is Russian. Wakefield instantly imagines her naked, the pert breasts, the soft, spa-massaged skin, the trimmed (possibly red) pubis, the long, flexible toes, the tight boyish buttocks. So much for electronic intimacy.

  Nor does their cyberacquaintance help the initial awkwardness of meeting in person. Driving her vintage VW bug to the museum, Susan is thoughtful as she explains that the exhibit, which brings together artists from the various warring zones of the Balklands, has become the subject of heated controversy in the past week. She tells Wakefield to expect pickets at the opening when he goes to deliver his speech.

  “Oh, bring it on!” Wakefield says. “I enjoy a good fight.”

  “It’s personal for me. My parents have barely talked to each other since the war started back home, but I thought that they might come to see my big moment. But they won’t come to the exhibit. I was actually hoping that maybe you could talk them into it,” she says sheepishly.