Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  Susan remembers a pleasant, dusty smell. “I love the smell of a dark room filled with old books. I’m hiding while two people I can’t remember are making love, not knowing of course that I’m watching. The scent of dust and sex.”

  “That was in our house!” says Tiffany. “The spare room where Professor Teleskou stayed.”

  “This was a long time before he moved in. I was only three or four,” says Susan. There is an edge in her voice, and Professor Teleskou’s name hangs in the air for a brief moment. Some tension passes between the sisters. Wakefield believes Susan that she didn’t have an affair with Teleskou. On the other hand, Tiffany may have. He remembers Teleskou’s melancholy smile on the jacket photo of his book, and feels an unaccountable kinship with the dead man. It’s so familiar! Suddenly he knows it: that smile is the expression of someone who has also met the Devil. Teleskou is a brother unto Mephistopheles.

  All of them agree that they love the smell of overripe apples.

  After bowls of cabbage soup and piroshki with sour cream and apple sauce, Tiffany and Milena leave for a photo shoot, “a cover and spread” for a big fashion magazine. Wakefield parts regretfully from the living delight of his new friends, though he’ll see them again, reproduced on the covers of a million magazines. Good-bye, real faces! He kisses them both, first on each cheek, then on each hand, like a European gentleman. Their perfume lingers, and he thinks how unbelievably intimate the act of touching a hand to one’s lips is. His catalogue of scents grows by one delicious memory.

  Wakefield notices that Susan is watching this ceremony a little enviously. Men always fall for Tiffany, and they fall double hard for Tiffany and Milena. But walking to the Tribune Tower to meet Susan’s journalist friend, it’s just the two of them.

  The Tribune Tower’s American Gothic body is embedded at street level with stones from some of the world’s übermonuments: Jesus’ birthplace in Bethlehem, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, and the Berlin Wall. These fragments are the souvenirs of hubris, of tourists who thought nothing of taking chunks out of the world’s most sacred and awesome places to bring home for triumphant display.

  “It testifies to a touching innocence, don’t you think?” Wakefield observes. “Or was it arrogance? Insensitivity? Maybe some kind of naïve homage to History, with a capital H?” Actually, the pilfered stones remind him of the salt spoon in his pocket, an offering to the Devil. Perhaps these tourists, all tourists, maybe, pilfer things for the Devil. His Malignancy must be drowning in his collections of love offerings.

  Susan is of a generation of museum curators who, unlike her predecessors, was schooled in sensitivity to other cultures and places, but she has no romantic illusions. “American collectors saw nothing wrong with bringing home from abroad whatever they could get their hands on. We owe our great collections to crude millionaires who basically bought Europe and Asia wholesale. The University of Oklahoma, for instance, has this great archive, Giordano Bruno manuscripts, annotated Galileo first editions, all of it bought by one Okie oilman on a Grand Tour. Tell you the truth,” she says, thinking of her unshaven Pop in the city pokey, “I sometimes think we should buy some countries wholesale and move them physically to Wyoming.”

  In the grand lobby of the Tribune Tower she directs Wakefield’s attention to a motto, inscribed in gold. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

  “In the twenties the publisher of the Tribune made an appeal to architects to design ‘the most beautiful office building in the world’ as an homage to free speech. There was a hundred-thousand-dollar prize, and two hundred and sixty entries came in from twenty-three countries. One of them was a design by a Finnish architect that was a Dada sendup of the words capitol and capitalism, but the jury didn’t take freedom of speech that literally, so they opted for a Gothic skyscraper.”

  Susan knows her city’s history; there is passion in her exposition. Wakefield repeats to himself Daniel Burnham’s motto, and is moved by that “magic to stir men’s blood.” There is something troubling in those words in connection with Susan; she has lived her life surrounded by men who believed in blood-stirring magic, her father and Professor Teleskou being prime examples. Wakefield wonders if she sees herself as a pacifying force among them.

  They take a brass and marble elevator to the fiftieth floor, where the journalist, Jackie Lopez, is waiting for them in a storm-tossed office. She is a small, no-nonsense woman who moves energetically among towers of tilting books, piles of folders reaching to the ceiling, a photo-covered desk atop which two laptops are humming, and crumpled wrappers of old lunches that never quite made it into an overflowing wastebasket. The friends hug, and Susan introduces Jackie to Wakefield. “Jackie investigated Professor Teleskou’s death.”

  “You wrote this morning’s editorial,” Wakefield observes. “Very insightful editorial.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s insanity, and the surprising thing is that more people haven’t been killed.” She shifts gears. “Would you like to go to the top of the tower? Maybe we can go for a drink afterward and talk about how to help your father, Susan. He’s got a bad case of something I call ethnic PMS. I think it sounds nicer than ‘bloodlust.’”

  A special elevator takes them to the observation deck below the tower’s buttresses. Wakefield stands under the rib of an arch and holds his breath. Around them the city’s skyscrapers, like a race of giants, lean against the wind, each one an entity seeming to enjoy the intimacy and proximity of the others. Jutting out of the buttress he’s under is a gargoyle that’s missing an ear. Wakefield looks around; there in the snow is the stone ear, chipped and dirty. Quickly he picks it up, holds it for a moment in his hand, then slips it into the pocket with the wooden salt spoon.

  The ear of a gargoyle from the oldest tower in Wintry City! Wakefield announces to himself, holding it out for Satan.

  The Devil laughs. All gargoyles, he says with a hint of pride, are representations of myself. What makes you think that an ear ripped from one of my images would please me? What does it have to do with you, anyway?

  Wakefield doesn’t yet know what the gargoyle’s ear has to do with anything, but he knows that it’s hard as hell to please the Devil. Is there any one thing in this world that the Devil doesn’t already own in multiples? Maybe that’s the point, and this is why the Devil is laughing. It would be easier for Wakefield to define his “soul” than to muck about the world trying to find unique tchotchkes to please the Prince of fucking Darkness.

  Turns out Jackie is a poetic observer. “I believe that buildings have multiple, borrowed souls that change with time and distance. The soul of this tower has lent most of itself to the buildings around it. All the new buildings quote a little from ours.”

  Indeed, they do. Each one wears a cupola or scroll in its honor. If buildings can have souls, thinks Wakefield, then surely human beings do.

  Descending from the tower, they make their way to a popular reporters’ bar-and-burger joint, where Jackie orders a beer and a cheeseburger and Wakefield and Susan have bourbon on the rocks. Wakefield notes that Susan has switched to his drink and wonders what it means. Does she fancy him? It is certainly deliberate. And flattering. He catches her eye and something flits there, holding both of them. Wakefield knows this feeling: it’s like a tiny opening in a curtain that can lift at any moment, plunging him (again!) into a sentimental drama for which he has never figured out a resolution, except flight. He’s tired already, and nothing has happened yet.

  For the moment he’s still safe in the shadow of the great tower. Did the builder of this grand structure believe that it conferred immortality, like the pyramids? He toys with the idea, sipping his whiskey. Perhaps there exists a tribe of Immortalists who, unbeknownst to anyone, live inside great buildings, parasitically wedded to the time-proof structures, safe from human relationships.

  The women are discussing Mr. Petrovich, who is well known to Jackie. “Granted, he’s a peculiar man, your pop.” She takes a h
uge bite of her juicy cheeseburger. “I think something about Teleskou set him off, in a way. Bear with me for a second.” She wipes mustard off her chin with the tablecloth. “Your pop was raised in the Marxist faith, so he believes in dialectical imperatives, whether he admits it or not. Everyone thought of Teleskou as a peacemaker because he was a nice guy, a sweetheart, really. But his philosophy was really disturbing, very disturbing to someone like Slobodan, who was once a high-ranking ideologue. And Slobodan cared about him, loved him, so when he was killed by men who were most likely of the same ideological provenance as your father, he did the dialectical thing. He abandoned his materialist atheism and went in a completely different direction.”

  Susan is not happy with this line of reasoning. “My father had already started going to church before Mihai was killed; it wasn’t a sudden thing after his death.”

  “Well, but the church is similar to the Communist party. Your father tried to defend himself against Teleskou’s mysticism by taking refuge in another dogmatic, ideological structure, where he also became involved with the nationalist, racist cause.”

  “So what do we do, Jackie? You know the district attorney, the mayor, everybody. Can we get him out and make him understand that he’s got to stop?”

  “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Chernishevski asked it. Lenin. ‘What is to be done?’ The answer is: ‘We just do it.’ We’ll bail him out again, if I can get the judge to set bail, get a restraining order so he won’t go home and kill your mother, although I doubt he would, and then I’ll sit down with him in a small room and break him like a Commie policeman would.”

  “You’d do that for me, Jackie?”

  “For everybody, not just you. This madness has to stop, to quote my editorial self. Besides, if we can calm your pop down, his dumber cohorts will follow. Of course, this may be unnecessary. Did you see the news today? People are out in the streets of Belgrade. Milosevic could be gone by tomorrow and the NATO bombing would stop immediately. Then there will be boring, practical reconstruction stuff to tend to. They’ll stop fighting and worry about how to get on the gravy train.”

  “From your lips to God’s ear,” says Susan.

  Wakefield puts in his two cents’ worth. “Why didn’t the Communists make any lasting impression? Official atheism? Where the hell does this religious passion come from?”

  “From hell, right you are. This religious-nationalist stuff apparently had an underground existence, suppressed, but when Communism ended, the old beliefs were revived intact. Maybe that’s why it seems so primitive. They were frozen when the Communists took over after the Second World War, but thawed when the Commies lost control. Why do you think they called it the Cold War? It was intellectual refrigeration. The curious thing is that the Communists toppled themselves, they really did fall like the famous dominoes, but those same people are in power now, reincarnated as nationalists. They are the ones encouraging the fighting.”

  “But why?” Wakefield is sincerely baffled.

  “Power,” says Jackie. “What else? But also that indefinable quality called Stupidity, evidently stockpiled by the People the Commies held so dear. The belief that the stink of your own tribe is superior to the familial stink of the neighboring tribe, that your language is wittier and deeper; that the music you make when you wail about the muddy ravine where you were conceived is much, much more melodic than the wailing of your neighbors; that the smoke-darkened icons that hang on your wall are representations of the only gods worth praying to, and that the gods and prayers of the people over the hill are unspeakable offenses for which you must kill them.”

  “So you think that’s what it’s all about? Stupidity?” Wakefield is quite stunned, by Jackie’s eloquence and the manifest truth she’s revealed.

  Susan doesn’t say anything and Wakefield knows that she can’t. It’s too much to process.

  “I’m sure Teleskou was stupidly killed by some very stupid people,” Jackie continues. “These guys probably think that the fables he published in obscure literary magazines are coded descriptions of their conspiracies.”

  “And here we are having a nice time under the Freedom of Speech tower,” sighs Wakefield.

  “Ah, yes, freedom of the press,” says Jackie. “A fragile concept. The paper I work for exercised that freedom with some honor when it defended Lincoln during the Civil War. Later in its history it became a mouthpiece for the publisher’s protofascist leanings, campaigned against America’s entry into World War Two, and was totally ready to dispense with freedom of the press.”

  “Didn’t his family force him to retire?” Susan asks, refering to the fascist-leaning publisher.

  Jackie nods, a master of the political history of her world.

  Wakefield admires her authority and the ease of her command in the light of day. But there is always the night, and its ill-defined terrors.

  Susan takes Wakefield home to her apartment in a hip part of town, a former bohemian ghetto now gentrifying. A few years ago there was a thriving art scene in the neighborhood: small theaters, guerilla publishers, music studios, galleries, and coffeehouses, all because of the cheap rent. One day the neighborhood became fair game for real estate speculators attracted by the colorful improvements artists made to their lofts and apartments, and now there was war (another one!) going on between the original settlers and the profiteers.

  “Some artists are putting up a fight, but mostly they are migrating in search of lower rents,” Susan explains. She lives in a loft in a former dry-goods warehouse that a few years ago was a warren of studio apartments. Her neighbors are bankers, lawyers, and art administrators.

  Wakefield knows that this process has happened in many cities; what’s new is the speed of the displacement. Almost overnight, the artists who established the studios were cut out by heavily capitalized developers.

  “The vanguard of real estate doesn’t even have to be art at all, just a threat of art, a soupçon of style,” Susan tells him, teacherlike. “Any hint of an emerging arts community, the speculators smell blood.” There is a fundamental reason, Susan thinks, why living art communities should take precedence over profit, and she’s got a point. Artists use the available materials of a place to fashion a city’s identity, an identity that is an evolving collaboration between the past of the buildings they inhabit, the present of new technology, and the esthetic of the future. No urban planner or real estate developer, no matter how enlightened or forward-looking, can do the job as well.

  “What they should do is protect cheap-rent areas from indiscriminate development,” she concludes, unlocking the double-bolted door of the airy loft. Inside are two lemon trees in wooden barrels, one spidery-looking exercise machine on the floor, a futon bed surrounded by art books, and a striped cat named Maggie.

  “Why did you name her Maggie?” Wakefield asks, scratching the cat behind her ears.

  “Oh, you know. Tennessee Williams. Maggie the cat on a hot tin roof.”

  Jeez. Wakefield can’t possibly make a move on a woman who has a cat with the same name as the last woman he slept with. Not possible, as the French say, though he suspects that Susan is truly in need of comfort after all that has happened in the past twenty-four hours. But watching her open a bottle of red wine, he doesn’t feel any sexual attraction. She makes him nervous, and his unease grows when she puts on a CD of Spanish guitar, classically seductive music, and lights a scented candle.

  The apartment is dim and cozy; beyond the large windows, street lights and swirling snow. If she asks, he’ll say yes out of politeness, not desire. He can draw on the libidinal store of images that always arouse him: a girl (he’d picked her up hitchhiking) taking a bath in a motel tub, Marianna dancing in her panties to a pop tune on the radio. There are also some not-yet-tested arrangements in his storehouse, among them the entwined but blurry shapes of Milena and Tiffany, mostly Milena. He turns on the small television on top of the bookcase, and a CNN anchorwoman bursts into the room, dispelling the atmosphere of
intimacy. There are images of streets filled with demonstrators. “Milosevic has abandoned the palace,” exults the anchor, “and the protesters have occupied the former presidential suite. NATO bombing has ceased everywhere in the former Yugoslavia.”

  Susan leaps up and throws her arms around Wakefield’s neck. “Jackie was right. The madness is over for now! Let the boredom begin!” She grabs her wineglass and waits for Wakefield to raise his. They toast. “To Mommy and Pop,” Susan says.

  “To you,” adds Wakefield, relieved to see the (temporary) end of Susan’s anguish and a nation’s suffering. The end of the war will not be the end of her heartache, but for now she can celebrate along with the world, and Wakefield rejoices with her.

  A high-level meeting on the New World Order has been called, and our Devil knows he can’t afford to miss this one. He’s one of the few old-timers left who is allowed, by virtue of seniority, to indulge in private whims such as the making of deals with individuals. Everyone else works full time on bigger and far more boring projects—problems involving hundreds of thousands, even millions of souls at a pop. Global work, no micromanaging. The bosses have sent out a rambling memo taking the workforce to task for various lax practices.

  “You’ve got to take yourselves more seriously,” the T-memo says, “at least as seriously as aliens who, hick reports notwithstanding, communicate not with individuals but with species. Contrary to popular belief, they do not extract kidneys and sperm, they instruct kidneys and sperm, with consequences for all humans. In the end, this whole human thing has to be deemphasized and we must research alternative biounits for heat and information storage. Many of you are attached to the old forms of demonic appearance for ontological reasons. Desist and imagine! You can look like anything you want. The upcoming conference concerns the New World Order. Not, of course, the one proposed by certain American politicians, but the real New World Order, ours. Attendance is absolutely required.”

  Our Devil shows up for the meeting on time because the meeting place, Mount Eumenides in Thrace, is just above his favorite cave. This place has been chosen because there is a natural amphitheater big enough to accommodate thousands of devils, and inside the hill itself are layered Celtic-Roman-Gothic-Greek-Avar-Bulgarian-Hungarian-Serbian-Croatian-Turkish-German-Austrian and Russian bones, the bones of Swedish, Tartar, French, Swiss, Mameluke, Syrian, and Persian warriors. In other words, the remains of every people in recorded history that has ever occupied the site.