Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  PART FIVE

  HOME

  Zamyatin is waiting for him outside baggage claim, leaning against his taxi like a bearded bush. There is no sign of the Devil.

  “Back just in time for the Library Convention, my friend. Fifty thousand librarians with bodies on fire under their boring librarian clothes for a whole week! Can you imagine?”

  Wakefield throws his bags in the backseat. He’s home; the air is as thick as soup, saturated with humidity.

  “When I was a kid I got under tables in the caféteria and looked up ladies’ skirts. When they chased me away, I went to the library. Ah, Soviet librarians! Severe creatures filled with horniness!”

  “I brought you something, Zamyat.” Wakefield fishes the tiny salt spoon out of his pocket. “I stole it from the salt bowl at a Polish restaurant where I dined on cabbage with three beauties. Jealous?”

  “Salt! You collected the beauties’ salt right at the table? There is a library in St. Petersburg made of salt, it blinds you when you see it on a sunny day. It’s the Borges library, it’s infinite. Or maybe that’s the bibliothèque on Captain Nemo’s submarine. There is a salty, red-haired beauty standing by each shelf, reading over the top of her glasses.”

  Wakefield indulges Zamyatin’s excessive verbal fantasy; it’s how the Russian expresses his happiness. Wakefield loves libraries, and has forever inscribed in his memory a schoolgirl masturbating quietly in government documents.

  “The library is the eminent symbol for opposing barbarity,” Zamyatin goes on, as he does (Wakefield calls him Volga sometimes for his speech-fleuve), “it is synonymous with civilization. Great libraries are the secular equivalent of the great cathedrals. Public libraries are sanctuaries for the homeless. Think about it, the librarians are like nuns, I bet they can’t wait to get to work in the morning, to wash and feed the crazies.…”

  Wakefield has his doubts. “You’ll have to ask the librarians, but take me home first so I can shower. I feel like the grunge of the nation is on me. Anyway, I don’t think that Andrew Carnegie had the homeless in mind when he endowed public libraries.”

  “It makes no difference what imperialists like Carnegie think. We are going to have a drink at the window, then you can retake possession of your cave. There are a lot of things that we should discuss, and not a single one of them is important. Actually, nothing big has happened while you were gone.”

  That’s how Wakefield likes it. Home should be immutable, unchanged. Let the big things happen elsewhere, not in my fun-loving town. Zamyatin actually has an apartment Wakefield has never been to, but he knows it’s in one of those buildings next to the freeway, halfway to the airport, where people who are never at home live.

  “Do you ever take the ‘bartenderess’ to your place, Ivan?”

  “Are you joking? I take her everywhere. In the taxi, behind the bar, once at the library. I take her any place. Right where you are I have taken her.”

  Wakefield fidgets. Didn’t need to know that.

  “You know what this taxi is? This taxi is a library, my friend, the greatest library in the city! Whole books come in here. I had a church guy the other day who tells me he fell in love with a Ukrainian girl at a mission in Kiev. He divorced his wife, brought the Ukrainian beauty to America, she runs away from him, and he follows. Now he chases her everywhere. She is a high-class prostitute, I know her. She takes my cab. The whole time this guy is telling me the story, I’m thinking, I know her, small world. It’s like a book, for sure.”

  “Maybe I should drive a taxi, too. I think I’m done flying!”

  “That would be great, Wakefield. You could be the only native-born taxi driver in the whole city. Join the Russians, Pakistanis, Haitians, Palestinians, and Mexicans. You could be an ethnic group of one, you could read your fares instead of books, and the stuff you’d hear! I’m like a priest and this is the church.”

  Wakefield can’t believe how happy he feels to be back in Ivan’s company.

  “On the other hand,” Zamyatin laughs, “foreigners are loud, freaky loud. When three Russians are together the noise is impossible. Five Russians, you can’t even hear a police siren. You stay away from fellow cabbies, you’ll be fine in taxi-library, Comrade.”

  These are the days of full employment in America. The huddled masses drive yellow taxis. The taxis are libraries. Their drivers are poets.

  “This is great country!” the Russian exults. “In other countries every man has to have his own books, he only goes to the library for the librarians, not the books. One day, I drive a Mexican couple from Oaxaca. The man says he lives in a house of books, because he has to own every book he needs for research, he can’t get books outside Mexico City, no interlibrary loan, no computers. His wife, very beautiful woman with eyes like black diamonds and black, black hair, says to me, Zamyatin, you love books, move in with us in Oaxaca, we have thousands of books and many pets, and sexy sculptures made by our artist friends. They live in mysterious mountains, the home of Mayan gods, and she smiles all the time. The husband laughs, and they are both like seventy years old. And then you know what she says?”

  “I’m sure you’ll tell me.” Wakefield is envious. Sounds like heaven; he’d move in with the Mexican couple himself.

  “She says, the thing you will like is we have all the Russian poets in the Russian language in our house and we read them all the time because they are like Mexican painting, close to majesty of death. If you live with us, you can read Russian poets to us in your language and we listen and die happy! Can you believe it?”

  Not really, but there is no telling. Wakefield doesn’t like to think about death, which is why he keeps away from Russian poetry, though all poetry does tread close to death, either in slippers or in boots. What he fears is that death will not be comforting like poetry, but painful and hissy like a steam vent, agonizing and slow like a wire tightening around his neck. No, he would rather be an old man, forgotten by death—pursuant to the successful conclusion of his pact with the Devil—working on the top floor of an old library, in an office with a window that looks out on a melancholy, autumnal square. He knows the place: in the square there’s a statue of George Washington holding a scroll. From the bottom of the hill, the scroll looks comically like an erect penis, and fathers bring their sons there and say proudly, “See? This is why they call him the Father of our Country!” The square is covered with fallen leaves, and pigeons sit on George Washington’s scroll. He will look out the window of his corner office at the square, watching the leaves swirl. He will read. Seasons will pass. There is no hurry.

  Zamyatin is still talking. “Computers are dangerous to the imagination. The blinking screen will never replace the book, no matter how much memory your machine has. Books are erotic, they mix public and private, expand both inner and outer life. You know those lions at the Public Library in New York? I met a girl there once, like in all the movies. We go inside, my cock is up to here.” He takes his hand off the wheel to make a gesture halfway up his chest. “Think about it! This convention is filled with the daughters and mothers of all the books! I can’t stand it. I’m biblio-aroused!”

  Librarians! His daughter, Margot, finished her degree in library science last year. She’s probably here with the rest of them. He feels guilty, but he doesn’t really want to see Margot right now, or rather, he doesn’t want to hear Margot. He would like to see her face, though, see if she’s happy. Before graduate school, she smoked like an existentialist, danced like a demon, and looked like a hippie. She paused only now and then to yell into her cell phone at her absent father. Wakefield had a hard time with her in those days, and started calling her a Digital Hippie, a generation-gap insult.

  Ivan parks the cab in front of the bar. Wakefield relaxes. The bartendress is not at her post; the Irish boy who tends bar before her is still on his shift, and he likes Wakefield.

  “Hey, Mr. Wakefield. Welcome home. An Irish coffee? I know what you want, taxi man. She won’t be in for an hour.”

&nb
sp; There are only a few customers, so the boy pours himself a Guinness and sits down with them. Wakefield feels cozy.

  “It’s good to be home,” he admits.

  The barman laughs. “I haven’t been home in six years. I miss good old Belfast.”

  “Home is weird, though. I mean, I live in a place where most people are tourists walking around with guidebooks, and they never seem to know where they are,” Wakefield says truthfully.

  “Yeah, but you know where you are, right?”

  “Maybe.” He’s been thinking about writing an imaginary guidebook to the city. He’d make up restaurants, hotels, cafés, history, and the tourists would never know they weren’t real. He feels like he’s just been a tourist himself, roaming around with an imaginary guidebook. Then he remembers Maggie and Susan, Sandina and Redbone. He hasn’t been on vacation, exactly.

  “It must be great to travel,” the Irish boy says. “I’m stuck behind the bar. One of these days I have to go home to see my mum.”

  Zamyatin is watching baseball, the Tigers are mauling the Twins on TV. He loves baseball.

  “Even after all this time, you still think baseball is American democracy and the other way around, don’t you?” Wakefield winks at the Irish boy.

  “Baseball relaxes me,” Ivan explains, never taking his eyes off the pitcher. “It’s pleasure, not politics. You should say a prayer of thanks that the crowd calls only for hits, not blood. That is the difference between crowd and mob. Any crowd can become mob, but this game of baseball stands between, not letting it happen. Look at soccer, crowds go mob all the time, and kill each other, make riots.”

  The only traveling Zamyatin does anymore is to ballparks; old, intimate ones like Wrigley Field, and newer ones like the Astrodome in Houston, and he always comes back happy. Stadiums define cities, he often claims, more than the teams do: “Baseball players are traded and sold and have no problem playing for their old enemies, and that’s great. The stadium is a community, the people eat hot dogs and drink beer and love their team no matter where the pitcher is from.”

  “What’s your favorite stadium, Comrade Zamyatin?” the bartender asks.

  “Don’t have a favorite,” says Ivan, “but I hate the one in Chile where Pinochet executed people.”

  Wakefield basks in this familiarity. His friend has a sense of belonging and of time quite unlike his own fractured one. He’s painfully aware that he has more moods than the weather.

  His slave-quarter apartment smells dusty and warm, an evocative aroma, like that of an old lover, or rather, of all his old lovers. His bed, behind its velvet curtains, sighs with pleasure at his return. He opens the shutters and lets in the light; it filters through the branches of the old magnolia. A branch has bent over his chaise longue on the balcony, which is covered with leaves. A spider has made a magnificent web over one of the bookcases.

  The profound silence of late afternoon in the old quarter is deeper than he remembers. There’s only the gurgling sound of the angel in the courtyard fountain, holding the fish spout. He puts a Bach compilation in the CD player and unpacks slowly, laying out the trophies of his journey on the mantelpiece: the whiskey glass from the Home of the Future, the gargoyle’s ear from the Tribune Tower, the dirty quartz from Gatobilis, the finely milled eucalyptus-oatmeal soap from paradise, a gold coin from the age of Pericles. He shakes out his kilims and drapes them over the balcony railing to air, sweeps the floors, dusts the bookcases, changes the sheets, then lies down on the freshly made bed and drifts off to sleep to a Baroque melody.

  He dreams he’s in a seventeenth-century casino. Elaborately coiffed ladies and gentlemen are frozen around the gaming tables, and everything is as still as a painting. Wakefield wanders among the figures—he touches one—they are made of wax. A voice says, “They are waiting for you to make a speech.” There’s a sound like a judge’s gavel falling on a wooden desk and the figures become animated.

  Wakefield awakens at the sound of the gavel, but it keeps pounding. Slowly, it dawns on him: this must be the Devil’s starter pistol! He looks around the room, but there’s no one there. The hammering continues, joined a few minutes later by a strange scraping sound. Wakefield sits upright in bed and looks at the clock. The digital face is blank; it must have come unplugged. The hammering and scraping become more and more frantic; Wakefield goes into the bathroom and opens the small window that looks onto the courtyard next door. His neighbor, whom he has seen but never met, is standing on a ladder, hammering on the brick wall his courtyard shares with Wakefield’s bedroom. Several workmen are milling about, scraping mortar from loose bricks and stacking them in a huge pile.

  Wakefield calls out and asks his neighbor what’s going on.

  “Restoration!” the man shouts back.

  “Well, bully for you, but the noise is unbearable!”

  “I have permits!” the man shouts, and keeps hammering.

  We’ll see about that, thinks Wakefield, closing the window.

  The hammering stops at dusk and recommences at dawn. Wakefield makes inquiries; the man has indeed been certified by the city to restore the old building next door. The townhouse was the birthplace of a famous jazz musician in the nineteenth century, but over generations it has been carved into a warren of cheap apartments, housing winos, whores, bohemians, and sailors on leave. Now the real estate is extremely valuable, and his neighbor plans to restore the house brick by brick to the original splendor into which the bawling baby musician was born. The powerful city agency charged with preserving historical authenticity has given him the permit. No one can tell him how long the project will take.

  When he sees Zamyatin and complains about the noise, his pragmatic friend is not sympathetic.

  “The economy is booming, there’s construction and renovation everywhere. It’s progress, comrade! Why should this optimistic noise stop because you want some peace and quiet?”

  It is true, the sound of pneumatic drills and hammers is as ubiquitous in America as the crowds lined up in front of new restaurants on Friday nights. But Wakefield has a feeling that the project next door is of another order. It is neither construction nor renovation: it is something called restoration. He’s not even sure what that means, but it sounds ominous, like the guy wants to reestablish a monarchy or something. Maybe Wakefield is being punished. The high tide of prosperity has lifted all boats, including his, and now he feels seasick and sad.

  “It’s not a crack in your head, it’s a flaw in the universe,” Ivan says, mocking his queasiness. “Let’s see, what have you done to deserve this? You seduce anxious rich people and cause them to take their anxieties to tropical islands and exotic cities, driving up real estate values and increasing my business, and I thank you! You are like a pimp,” he adds, ordering another vodka on Wakefield’s tab. “You can’t be a pimp and suddenly hate prostitution.”

  Every day, all day long, the hammering continues. The guy next door seems possessed by demonic, maniacal energy, and Wakefield spends more and more time away from his apartment to escape the noise.

  One afternoon, while he’s reading Crime and Punishment in the bar and Zamyatin is chatting up some sexy librarians, a young, smiling woman appears at the window. “It’s me, Dad, Margot. I thought I might find you here.”

  Wakefield hugs his daughter, profoundly ashamed for his neglect. “You look great, honey! You know, I just got back.… How did you find my hangout?”

  “I have my sources.”

  She sits down with him and orders a beer.

  “My life’s a mess. My shrink says we need to talk.”

  “Sure, sweetheart,” Wakefield says, trying to quell his anxiety, “what do you want to talk about?”

  “My shrink says that I have a problem with men because of you. I really don’t know you, you know? Marianna says nobody can know you. She says you’re a cipher.”

  So it’s judgment day, just as he feared. Wakefield is aware that he’s been, at the very least, a complete jerk.

 
“What can I say? I could tell you everything that’s ever happened to me, but it won’t help much, I promise. Psychiatrists are full of shit, you know.”

  Margot seems to have expected this resistance, and she’s come prepared to breach her father’s defenses. She begins reciting a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It’s a sad poem about a guy driving around in a car with changes of clothes for all his different lives. The last line of the poem is about his children: “they’ve dropped out into the Jungian nothingness / with parents their own age.”

  The pathos gets to both of them, actually, and Margot ends up sniffling. Wakefield puts an arm around her and smooths her brown hair with a caress.

  “Maybe we just need some time together,” she says, wiping her eyes.

  Wakefield feels like the most abject bastard on earth. “I never had much time, honey, but you’re right. We should be together while you’re here.” He thinks for a moment. “Maybe we could go to a movie.”

  He’s struck gold; Margot’s eyes light up. “I love the movies. The Moviegoer is my favorite book. I’ll skip the cataloguing workshop.”

  For the next three days, Wakefield and his daughter go to the cinema, something Wakefield wouldn’t ordinarily do. He’s always disliked the feeling he gets on reentering reality when the film is over, and being with Margot makes it even stranger. He feels her presence in the dark, his spawn, his flesh and blood, as they say, but she’s an alien presence. In some ways, though, Margot is very much him, with her own specific questions. On the one hand, she has questions about herself, her mother, and him that seem to Wakefield a different order of inquiry from his own; they are female concerns, they deal with the dimensions of the intimate circle, and he fears intimacy. On the other hand, her mind moves quickly from the particular to the general. Whether because she is well read or because she is a librarian whose profession demands that she answer questions ranging from the trivial to the cosmic, Margot has sudden insights that startle Wakefield as if they had come from his own mind.