Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  “Persephone,” cries Mrs. Redbone, “I’ve been looking for you. This is our special guest, Mr. Wakefield.”

  “Where is Redbone, by the way?”

  That’s what Wakefield wants to know.

  “You know him, he’ll be up when he’s good and ready. You’ve been here a month now, darling. The longest visit since we were at Gable.”

  “The tragedy,” sighs Persephone, “of the provinces!”

  “Come, come now, princess. You love it here and you know it.”

  “You look like … art!” Wakefield blurts.

  “Let me tell you about art. That idiot drooling over that lovely whore over there owns more art than anybody west of Philadelphia. I was married to him and his art for eight years. We had to live in a hotel for two years while Philip Johnson built us a nasty cube in Houston, but it was better than the damned cube. The windows leaked, the air-conditioning didn’t work, nothing stayed level, and there weren’t any closets. After a week, I checked myself into a psych hospital in New Orleans.”

  “Ah, your Citizen Kane past!” Mrs. Redbone consoles her. “That man also owns more newspapers than Hearst, but I agree with Perse. He’s a boor.”

  The boor turns from Claudette and catches sight of his ex. He heads over and peers under her hat, without acknowledging either his hostess or Wakefield.

  “They still get to me, those eyes.”

  “Fuck you,” intones Persephone.

  The party moves into a huge dining room, where the seating arrangement has been strictly organized, despite the bohemian theme of the evening. While they wait to be seated, Palmer identifies a sympathetic city councilwoman (“I think she used to strip in San Francisco”), an undecided shipping heiress (“undecided about whether to join a cult or give her money to us”), the most-powerful-defense-attorney-in-the-West, the curator-boyfriends of various collectors, board members (“of every board I can think of”), the curator-girlfriends of board members (“you’d need a flow chart to keep that straight”), and assorted nouveau-riches with Philanthropy Angst, all well on their way to being four sheets to the wind. Seated at last, between Mrs. Redbone and Persephone, Wakefield toys with the lemony soup of the first course and sinks into the bath of voices and music. Still no sign of Mr. Redbone, but he has a good view of a Max Ernst Loplop painting, hung over an omphalos with a skyward erection, ca. 1200 BC.

  Palmer, as the stripper-artists’ representative, is the master of ceremonies. He taps his knife on a wineglass and addresses the patrons of art:

  “The Greeks, ancient and contemporary, thank you. The agora and Athens thank you! The vestals, the temple whores, the butterflies of Pigalle, and Madame Coit’s girls, all thank you. And the Sex Workers’ Union is exceedingly grateful!” Palmer is still recounting the history of hookers through the ages when a basso voice interrupts.

  “Get to the point, Palmer. Tell them to pull out their checkbooks!”

  Mr. Redbone is as solid and square as a gold brick, his eyes overhung by enormous black eyebrows. He’s no “art slut,” appearing as he does, beneath Loplop next to omphalos, in an elegant black suit. An unlit cigar juts from his lips, perpendicular to the phallus of the omphalos.

  Palmer laughs nervously and cuts his spiel short.

  So, this is the man, his phantom patron. Wakefield stands up to shake his hand, but Redbone pushes him back down in his chair.

  “Eat, eat! I don’t want a hungry audience,” he says to Wakefield. Wakefield usually feels the same way, though he himself never eats before a speech.

  Tunicked waiters are circling the tables, filling glasses with wine.

  “How do you like the avgolemono?” Mrs. Redbone asks Wakefield. “They say it was first served at the table of Aristophanes after he wrote a play about the meeting of a chicken and a lemon.”

  “That’s lovely,” interjects Persephone. “I thought it was first served at the Greek diner on Twenty-third Street where I first had it.”

  Avgolemono is a lovely soup, light, pale as the crest of a wave, filled with sun, the rice like grains of sand on the beach at Kios. I must be getting soft, thinks Wakefield: I’m making soup metaphors. I’ve got to toughen up. He searches his psyche but can’t find “tough.” He’s even appreciating Persephone’s alien wit.

  “What is it you do, Mr. Wakefield?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “I hear you’re a paid guest. Me, too, except I’m the one who pays. Every three or four parties I am so depleted I have to have surgical repair.”

  “Her surgeon is a regular architect,” Mrs. Redbone intervenes. “Are you interested in architecture, Mr. Wakefield?”

  “Yes, the architecture of adolescence.”

  “Ah, you’re a chicken queen,” Persephone sighs.

  “The lamb!” announces the chef, and a whole roasted lamb is carried in on a silver platter. The golden brown body lies on a bed of white rice; the head, with its poached black eyes and budding horns, nestles against a golden bowl of steamed and seasoned brains.

  After dinner, Wakefield follows Mr. Redbone to the oak-paneled library, where they stand before a bookcase full of volumes bound in reddish Moroccan leather.

  Mr. Redbone growls, “So you went to a good school, make a bunch of money spewing BS to a bunch of geeks, you have employment and shelter, then you go on to badmouth everything because … it’s too fast. You slay me, Wakefield!”

  Wakefield isn’t sure exactly what Redbone is referring too, but it is most decidedly aimed at him or, at the very least, at his opinions.

  “I’ve been reading your stuff, even have some transcripts of your, what do you call them, speeches? The ‘material world is disappearing,’ huh? You must be out of your mind.”

  He doesn’t know what to say. Wakefield may be out of his mind, but he’s still wondering what the man is getting at. “I’m here to listen, as you asked,” he shrugs, “but I hope it’s a conversation, not an indictment.”

  “Conversation, my ass. I’m going to show you some things, then you tell me what’s disappearing. Let me tell you something, Wakefield. When my great-great-grandpa came out here from Philadelphia, this town didn’t exist. He had to start from scratch, in a log cabin he built with his own hands. That cabin, by the way, still stands. There is no shopping mall there. Anybody doesn’t want their precious home bulldozed better feel strong about it. Can’t anybody take it from him. The right to property is sacred, but it’s gotta be defended. We agree on this?”

  Quite. Wakefield owns only an apartment, but he’d certainly defend it if anyone tried to take it from him.

  Redbone leans against the bookcase and it swivels out of the way, revealing a heavy wooden door. He pushes this open, too, and suddenly they are outside. The rain has stopped, the starry night is lit by a full moon, and Wakefield can smell the redwoods and the ocean. Redbone leads him through a formal garden dotted with marble statues to a neoclassical temple guarded by two naked Aphrodites. Redbone touches one of the marble breasts and the statue swivels off its pedestal; beneath is a narrow marble staircase. Wakefield is reminded of his trick box long ago, so simple and yet so difficult. The stairs are bathed in white light. Redbone leads the way and Wakefield follows, down hundreds of steps that end in a vaulted room. Four corridors with veined marble walls lead away into the darkness. “Down through there”—Redbone points to one corridor—“and you’re under the bay. That’s the defense area. I’ve got everything there, a nice submarine, a seaplane, smoked salmon, ham, and enough cans to feed Troy for five hundred years. Through there”—he points down another corridor—“is Ali Baba’s treasure. I’ve got everything but the Elgin marbles in there. Plus some cannon and acoustic grenades. This other way are living quarters for fifty good-looking guests interested in spending eternity in comfort. The baths alone make you want to stay forever.”

  “How about the fourth? What’s down there?”

  “That’s the command-and-control center for our commonsense vision. It’s being brought on-line now. We can continue t
o function even if they shoot down our satellite, which I hope to God they don’t. Can’t go in there now, people are working.”

  “What kind of people work down here?”

  “Good people, Wakefield. You’re going to be one of them.”

  Wakefield hopes he didn’t hear that right. Redbone grins.

  “Let’s go see Ali Baba. You’re an art guy, you’ll appreciate it.” Redbone is nothing if not literal. Ali Baba’s cave is a series of round rooms festooned with treasure like a pirate’s lair: half-open trunks spilling jewels, paintings propped against the walls, sculpture, Greek and Roman pottery, strongboxes full of gold coins. Everything seems at least two thousand years old. Redbone gestures to a set of carved chairs and sits in one himself. He offers Wakefield a cigar and lights it for him. He pours brandy from a Roman glass decanter.

  “Why?” asks Wakefield, not knowing what else to ask in the face of this excess.

  “It’s a big country,” Redbone says, “but it ain’t getting any bigger. From now on it’s just got to get deeper. You know what I’m saying, friend?”

  Wakefield does not. Redbone presses a button on a handheld remote control, and a holographic map of the United States a good eight feet across and five feet tall appears.

  “What do you see, Wakefield?”

  “A map of the United States?”

  “Yes, indeed. The American Homeland.”

  Wakefield feels even more distressed than he felt the moment they descended into Redbone’s labyrinth.

  “What do you mean, homeland? That’s such an odd word.” Creepy, actually. In his mind, “homeland,” along with “fatherland” and “motherland,” is associated with the warlike rhetoric of Slobodan Petrovich and his ilk. In countries so small that land is actually an issue, it’s possible, perhaps, to feel paranoid about the homeland, but here, in the country of free trade, globalization, virtuality, what’s the point? But he’s being paid to listen, so he bites his tongue.

  Redbone runs his finger along the West Coast.

  “What do you see?”

  “The West Coast, the Pacific Ocean?”

  “That’s what you and your liberal globalist weenie friends see. What do you think the Japs saw during World War Two?”

  “North America?” tries Wakefield.

  “That’s right, my friend. The United States. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, all the in-between. Your pal What’s his name, with the empire in cyberspace, he doesn’t see this coast. Well, guess what I see?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “I see a threatened border. I see how they see us. A big fat sheep with no sheepdog, no shepherd. I see the Pacific, too, but it’s our ocean, not theirs. We lose that to some cockamamie idea of a borderless world and we’re fish food.” Redbone outlines the East Coast to the Mexican border. “Everything inside here is the American Homeland. Outside, it’s sharks and wolves massing for the kill. We are fat, we are asleep, we are lambs. You know what we look like to them? Like that thing on Mrs. Redbone’s table. And you know what we are doing about it? Nothing, my friend. Think about that. The Russians were pussies compared with what’s out there now.”

  Wakefield’s feeling a little sick. America is unassailable, isn’t it? Who’d dare come up against a country, a continent, armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines, armies, navies, air forces? I must be crazy, he thinks, to be down in a bunker with a paranoid gazillionaire.

  “Mr. Redbone, are you sure our enemies are external?” Wakefield ventures to ask, almost hoping to hear the familiar litany against Jews, bankers, globalists, and professors—the stock characters of the right-wing, fundamentalist operetta.

  “Not to the extent you might imagine. I’m not a kook, Wakefield. Why do you think you’re here? The battle within is being fought on intellectual ground. Sure, there are plenty of paranoids and crazies crawling around in the mountains waiting for the ATF to get them, but those are not my people. I don’t deny having pragmatic relations with a number of patriots, but they are not pragmatic people, for the most part. I am not paranoid.”

  “I didn’t say you were. But your fears sound out of date to me. The Cold War is over; we have a finely tuned military defense. Who wants to come after us? America is just an idea now, a very good idea that can lead the world into a future where land is just a link in a production chain or a right-of-way to somewhere else. And if it’s picturesque land, then a place to vacation. Whatever you want to call this place, we’re not going to be invaded. Borders don’t mean anything in the new economy.”

  “That’s the bunk stock-market visionaries want us to believe, pal. The same thing that makes the borders vanish makes them permeable. If there are no frontiers, it means we’re vulnerable. What’s to stop people from using our technology against us?”

  Redbone makes the map vanish. Wakefield’s mind is racing.

  “There was a controversy after Germany surrendered, Mr. Redbone, about what to do with Hitler’s bunker, make it into a museum or pave it over. They paved it over. Good move. To my mind, hiding in a bunker is inimical to everything the American people believe in.”

  “What do you believe in, Wakefield?”

  “I believe in … the tent, nomadism. The bunker is the opposite of the tent, it’s the antimobile home. I realize that the bunker is an idea as old as the tent, a pair of opposites dancing across the human sky …” Wakefield stops himself. He doesn’t want to sound crazier than Redbone. “Granted, it’s possible for some lunatics to exploit our openness,” he starts again, more reasonably, “but why do you, at this point in history, reject the benefits? Instead of fortifying ourselves in compounds, we should build housing for everyone in the world, that’s what I think. Forgive me, Mr. Redbone, but you are stuck in a religious tradition … waiting for doomsday and surviving it, one of the chosen … like you are expecting the Second Coming.”

  “Don’t insult me, Wakefield. Look around. Do you see any Christian paraphernalia? All this stuff’s older than Christianity, older than the first coming, for God’s sake!”

  “Sorry. I just thought …”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what’s really American. The fort was our first structure. It’s going to be our last. Now, my purpose in bringing you here is not just to listen to me yammer. I want to offer you a place in our community, because my wife thinks that you are one of the most original thinkers of our time, a conclusion based on rather thin evidence in my opinion, but I looked into it myself and she may be right, if you can see the light. We need smart people for our broadcast studio. It will be the only one left functioning after the war, and your face could be the face of hope for anybody left out there.”

  Wakefield doesn’t know if he should be flattered or run as fast as he can. He’d like to laugh, but he can’t do that either. He’s just been offered a comfortable afterlife, a hell of a lot better deal than the one he has with the Devil. But for some reason, he trusts his own Devil a lot more.

  “You don’t have to give me an answer right away, Mr. Wakefield,” Redbone says, reading him like a newspaper, “but give it some thought. Here’s something to help you ponder.” Redbone holds out a gold coin. “Here, take it. It’s Greek, fifth century B.C., the golden age of Pericles. It’s a bonus. Your fee has already been deposited in your bank account.” He takes Wakefield’s hand, puts the coin in his palm, closes Wakefield’s fingers over it. “And I appreciate your keeping all this confidential.”

  “Sure thing,” he promises, wondering what will happen to him if he doesn’t. He drops the coin in his pocket.

  Back at the party everyone is dancing to the very dance-able sounds of the Three S&M Graces.

  “Where you been?” shouts Palmer. “We’ve raised a shitload of money! These girls are going to turn the art world upside down!”

  “And Art will dig it, that’s for sure,” says Wakefield.

  While the party parties on, Wakefield keeps up a mental conversation with Redbone, thinking of things he should have said. Redbone himse
lf has disappeared again and Wakefield resists, graciously, he hopes, the assaults of Persephone, Mrs. Redbone, and his new stripper friends, who all try to get him to dance. Redbone, his fantasy conversation continues, you’re suffering from a mental illness. A very American illness, I must say. Going it alone, making it in the wild, surviving a hostile environment, that’s us. The fort was our model and necessity until, let’s face it, the genocide of the Native Americans was complete. But even then, the fort mentality and the terror of the outside didn’t leave us for long. In the fifties people had backyard bomb shelters, and they expected to be nuked any minute. And after the nukes, what? Eating Spam in the dark for years? Wakefield tries to imagine himself underground after the nuclear war, seated eternally between Mrs. Redbone and Persephone, taking lit cigars from a solicitous Mr. Redbone. He’d rather die in a plane crash. The only good thing about bomb shelters was that they gave teenagers a place to lose their virginity. The best efforts of this country were not spent on bunkers. During the Depression and the Second World War, Americans pulled together and built highways, dams, and bridges. Why then, in the wide-open age of the Internet, do you want to hide, Mr. Redbone? And not just hide, but hoard the wealth of several small nations? A future architectural psychologist will look at your doomsday structure and will find in you a perfect example of millennial psychosis. America has served the world as a place of escape from fortified homelands for three hundred years; why turn the place into an armed camp now?

  Wakefield wishes he’d made these arguments to Redbone, but somehow he can’t even convince himself. Why does Redbone’s vision of the threatened “Homeland” disturb him so? He believes, or thought he did, that humanity lives in an uprooted, deracinated, global, nomadic, and permanently exiled state now that we’ve traded the territorial idea of “homeland” for the freedom of living peacefully nowhere. In cyberspace, or hyperspace. But Redbone has put a major dent in his recently acquired feelings of well-being, joy, and spiritual satisfaction. Damn.