Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  They go to matinees when it’s still light outside and come out after dark, and everything seems changed. Reality is so tawdry compared to the screen; melancholy and sadness rule the wet sidewalks, the dirty walls, the stupid faces. He feels disoriented, cast out of the light into this solid weirdness. And he’s not used to walking with someone who sometimes takes his arm and leans close to him, puts her head on his shoulder.

  Part of the problem with the movies, he thinks, is that a film can tell a whole life story in two hours, whereas real life takes years and years, and though you can talk about your life—as Wakefield does with Margot, in short installments—you can never tell how the story ends. The moral of the movies is that everyone’s life can have a plot, but life is really more like the parking lot outside, mysterious and unscripted. You can drive off it and get killed, but it wouldn’t make any sense. Margot, however, is excited and animated after each film. Sometimes she calls Marianna from the bar (where they go for a drink after the movies) and tells her the plot, as if the film has somehow advanced her to a new level of understanding.

  Every night he walks Margot back to her hotel, usually pretty drunk by then, and they laugh about Zamyatin’s increasingly desperate come-ons. He sees Margot as his ideal librarian with perfect muse potential, and he knows she’s perfectly unattainable since she’s Wakefield’s daughter. Every night Wakefield returns to his apartment and lies awake, worried about the racket he knows will start promptly at seven A.M. His brief, violent dreams are like movies without a script, and every morning he wakes up as cranky as a kid at the first thud of the hammer.

  The day before Margot’s scheduled departure Wakefield experiences an unfamiliar feeling. He’s going to miss her when she’s gone. Walking through the dark streets after their last movie, he tells her about the night manager of the bookstore where he’d worked, the saddest person he ever knew. Every afternoon this man would go to a movie, and when the shift was over at midnight, he saw another one. In those days disaster movies were fashionable. People liked to watch people die or be saved from towering infernos and man-eating aquatic creatures. He would stay in the theater until dawn, then go home to sleep until the next matinee. This man was happy only when he was at the movies. Reality, of which the bookstore clerks were such a substantial portion, disgusted him.

  “I suppose when you’re gone,” Wakefield concludes, “I’ll just have to keep going to the movies.”

  “Maybe you can take a date to the movies now, someone who’s not your daughter, so there will be no incest taboo.” She lays her head on his shoulder.

  When Wakefield was about twelve he had taken his first date to the movies, but he was too shy to put his arm around her, so he held her watchband for two solid hours. The movie was a Western. He can still remember thundering herds of cattle and the smell of her cheap cologne. When they left the theater he felt worn out, like the grass trampled under the hooves of the movie herd. Maybe only adolescents can take the movies, thinks Wakefield, which is why most movies are made for them. They use the dark theater to project their own films of stickiness and desire; the feature film is only background to the more intense drama in the seats.

  “I read somewhere that movies are actually alien entities,” Margot tells him. “They’re beings made out of light who slowly remake our lives in the shapes of the stories they tell. Don’t you love that? Isn’t it scary?” She says this as if she doesn’t think it’s scary at all.

  Wakefield thinks it’s very scary, but he doesn’t let on. He kisses Margot good-bye on the lips and feels for a moment the hidden body that Zamyatin had no doubt intuited correctly. He’s glad that whatever Margot’s narrative expectations of a dad had been, they were briefly met. He silently wishes her many, many more movies, better and better endings.

  With Margot gone, and the infernal hammering showing no signs of abating, Wakefield starts to fantasize about living in a tent somewhere in a vacant lot or, even better, in a swamp or a national park. He reads books about portable houses and nomadic furniture. Anything you can’t fold up and take away with you is a blight on the environment and an insult to liberty, one nomad author claims. Wakefield makes a note on a cocktail napkin: I believe in the tent, the foldup table, and the trailer. He reads the stats on contemporary nomadism: lots of people, driven mad by instant suburbs, renovation, restoration, and condoification, are leaving everything behind and taking to the road. For every housing development carving up the land, a flock of houses on wheels and pontoons is taking off somewhere. The mobile home, the floating boat house, the tent—these are the abodes of the future! Even newly constructed houses are impermanent. A house in the suburbs is not portable but is certainly interchangeable with any other house in any other suburb, while the suburbs themselves evaporate rapidly and without a trace. America is on the move. Redbone can keep his bunker!

  “Personally, I like a place with some history,” Zamyatin says as he and Wakefield nurse their drinks, “but too much history can be bad for your mental health.” He has a theory that poets should live in one place just long enough to acquire nostalgia for it. When that putative Eden is destroyed by History (and History inevitably destroys everything), poetic invention begins. “In your trailer parks,” he says, rather gravely for Zamyatin, “paradise has already been compromised, perhaps by the sins of immigrant parents. I think the presence of wheels under one’s consciousness permeates the body with unsteady vibrations that are not conducive to creation.”

  “The guy next door probably grew up in a trailer on the edge of a swamp subject to tidal instability, and that’s why he’s obsessed with bricks,” Wakefield agrees.

  Zamyatin closes his eyes oracularly. “His body vibrates and it is only when he touches bricks that he becomes momentarily calm. Maybe he is a poet, like me.”

  It is always a confusing pleasure to listen to the Russian, especially after a few drinks.

  “I’ve seen many American cities,” Zamyatin expounds. “Nearly every building in them has been demolished so that no one can revisit their past except in memory, and people’s memories now must accommodate a great many things because of what they see on television. Maybe when they think of their old house, they substitute for it a Venetian palazzo, a Mongol yurt, or a Buddhist temple from a travel documentary. It must be exhausting to squat in someone else’s memories.”

  The restorationist next door continues his maddening work, treating every historic brick as if it were a sacred object. His workmen carefully deconstruct each wall, scraping the slave-made bricks clean with historically correct tools, and then they mortar them back in place, but often the restorationist is not completely satisfied with the results, and the wall comes down again in an endless, demented cycle of noise and dust.

  On every side of the historic house are the bedrooms and studios of other neighbors inconvenienced by the work. Some of them have complained about the hammering, chiseling, and scraping; one even called the police, but the restorationist is authorized by his permit to work from seven in the morning until seven o’clock at night. Like Wakefield, some made calls to the city agency that issued the permit, but their complaints went unanswered; their calls were not returned. Soon they simply stopped hearing the racket, and Wakefield reflects that in this they are like many Americans: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Their lives go on quite normally, but Wakefield’s does not.

  “Oh, my poor casa,” he laments every day as the banging begins. He doesn’t use the English word house because it doesn’t adequately describe his cozy nest. An American house is not a French maison or a Spanish casa; his apartment is shuttered against the heat of noon and his balcony is shadowed by a magnolia tree with deep green leaves, and the courtyard walls are covered by flowering vines. Beyond them could be the Mediterranean, the lights of Morocco dimly visible across the water. Not only has his peace been shattered, his sweet illusion of elsewhere is also dimming.

  Under other circumstances, Wakefield might have shared his neighbor’s passion for
preservation, but the more he thinks about what’s happening, the angrier he becomes. The interior partitions have been removed from the old house and what was once a dozen apartments is now an empty, hollow space. Its accumulated history has been erased, its secret places dismantled, and its ghosts, if they remain, now share the attic with new central air-conditioning ductwork. The soul of an old city is the aggregation of human souls over time, and such aggregations are rare in America. The old quarter where Wakefield lives is one of the few, and it should be preserved, but the restorationist is eliminating the secrets of the house and killing the ghosts that have lodged in it over time. And in the process, he’s killing Wakefield.

  At about the time of the second rebuilding, Wakefield opens the small window between his bathroom and the neighboring courtyard and screams, “Stop! Just stop that infernal noise!” The workmen look up from their bricks, and the restorationist appears on the scaffolding.

  “Don’t swear at my men!” he shouts back. “They are master bricklayers!

  Master bricklayers! Perhaps Italian Renaissance craftsmen just arrived by packetboat from Carrara!

  “This is my home!” yells Wakefield, sounding slightly hysterical. “I must have quiet!”

  “Get a job!” screams the madman, and just then a brick, which all the banging has dislodged from Wakefield’s side of the wall, falls on his bed with a thump. Wakefield slams the window shut. Smoldering, he fits the fallen brick back into the hole it came from, trying to process what has happened. The man is obviously insane, and that crack about getting a job, it’s a declaration of war!

  That afternoon the madman fires his “master bricklayers”: Wakefield hears him screaming like mad King Ludwig, except King Ludwig eventually finished his castle after bankrupting the kingdom. He calls his crew dreadful names when they refuse to take down a wall for the umpteenth time. After the master bricklayers have gone, the madman starts going it alone.

  Now Wakefield is certain that the first hammerstroke that shattered his peace was the Devil’s opening salvo. The continuing racket is just some kind of torture. Normally a starter pistol fires just one shot, he fumes. But it occurs to Wakefield that there was no clause in the contract as to the duration of that shot. In fact, there was no written contract at all. I should have known! The Devil is a lawyer, it’s in every book, and I’ve been tricked!

  El Diablo, are you out there? I get the message, but I’m not going anywhere, you bastard! Fuck authenticity! I’m home and I’m staying!

  Wakefield waits for the Devil’s angry reply, but it’s as if El Sataniko has gone on a long vacation. When he gets no answer, Wakefield begins to worry. Is the Old Goat okay?

  There is no way to explain to a person living in a quiet neighborhood, by a placid lake perhaps, what the unending racket has done to Wakefield’s psyche. He begins to feel that the insane man with the hammer has always been there, that the torture will never stop, that his entire life has been a dream, now a nightmare, punctuated by the Hammer. He resolves to resist, to fight, and he begins to plan. He studies his neighbor, observes his movements, and in a little notebook makes a chart of his comings and goings.

  One afternoon he calls Zelda. She’s hurt by his not calling sooner, but they agree to meet at the café in the square where they went when they were dating. Wakefield wonders if the weather will hold, and buys an umbrella just in case.

  In the days before the restorer, all he had to do was walk out of his casa and head for the square, where amusing and spontaneous spectacles always restored him, tonic for the soul. As he walks now he merely notes the familiar buildings on his street; he knows exactly which façade hides a hideous suburban-style renovation and where the attic and the new kitchen join, leaving a dark hollow perfect for a small acrobat. He can tell from the slant of a roof where a forgotten chamber is hidden by the latest partition.

  After his review of the street, he occupies the corner table at the café, but today the square doesn’t amuse him. He sees only the broken paving stones and the panhandlers. Once called the Place d’Armes, it was the site for public whippings and the occasional hanging. Today he thinks he can see the outline of an ancient gallows. Actually it’s a bit of scaffolding erected on the façade of the old cathedral, but still the tourists gathered there look to him like spectators to an execution. Their fat bellies and stupid T-shirts seem particularly sinister. Many times he’s heard people from Japan or France remark how “European” the city is. Now he sees that the source of their delight is the smoke of a murderous history that fills their minds when they inhale.

  Wakefield orders an amaretto and an espresso and waits for Zelda to turn up. Someone has put an old phone book in the wire trash container and he retrieves it, reading it randomly to pass the time. There are eighteen pages of “occult businesses,” including Zelda’s own Crossroads Travel, along with palmists, aura readers, past-life therapists, exorcists, shamans, telepaths, channelers, and musical magicians. He looks up attorneys, whose listings take up at least as many pages—he thinks he might need one to stop the restorationist, or even to draw up the terms of his deal with the Devil. Then he looks up plastic surgeons; if he looked like someone else, he could go to a psychotherapist to feel like someone else. This Someone Else would be tolerant and philosophical about the madman, and he would bear the sound of the hammer as lightly as a feather. Then his lawyer would see to it that silence was restored.

  Across from the café is a small museum. A mysterious object was displayed in its forecourt for years: an iron blimp, a Surrealist dumpling, thought to be the world’s first submarine. It had been fished from the bottom of a lake, and no one knew how it got there. The thing had made Wakefield happy because it had a childlike absurdity, but now he notices it’s gone, removed while he was away. A larger-than-life-size fiberglass figure of Marilyn Monroe, standing over the subway grate holding on to her skirt, has taken its place. The absence of the submarine is a blow to Wakefield. What does it mean? And where is Zelda?

  An angel-girl wearing a short white skirt, golden sandals, and big white wings crosses the square and leans casually against Marilyn. Wakefield hasn’t seen her around before; she’s not one of the regular “statues” who make their living standing still while tourists challenge them to blink. She looks directly at Wakefield, an ice-blue gaze. He wouldn’t be surprised if the new angel doubled as a hooker, yet the gaze is not mercenary. He beckons her over, and for a second it seems as if he’s insulted her, but then she smiles faintly, flaps her wings, and sits down at his table.

  “What’s the matter, Wakefield? Don’t you recognize an angel when you see one?” Zelda asks, kissing him on the cheek.

  She’s dressed for a costume party for the Jungian Therapist Convention in town this week and she’s determined to take Wakefield with her. He balks, but the angel Zelda is very persuasive and so is the nearly imperceptible jiggling of her heavenly breasts, and he finally succumbs to her charms.

  As Wakefield helps Zelda wiggle into the driver’s seat of her car, one of her wings catches in the door and he gently frees it. The wings look so natural, he touches the place where they join her shoulders. It really does feel as if they’ve grown there, and Wakefield is tempted to believe that they have. After all, he didn’t doubt the reality of the Devil. And where the devil is that devil, anyway?

  The party is being staged on somebody’s fancy houseboat on the lake. As they drive Wakefield tells Zelda the saga of the madman, the restoration, and his own pathetic desire to live in a tent.

  Zelda is frowning. He knows that frown; it will translate itself in a minute into a flood of advice. “The trouble with you, Wakefield, is that you don’t take care of your karma. The guy next door is obviously a demon you let in yourself. What we should do is work on the healing angle. There will be some people at this party you could talk to.”

  “Can’t I just kill him?” Wakefield says, thinking this will shock Zelda.

  “Sure, but the next demon will be worse.”

  Th
ey drive on in silence.

  Wind is blowing at the lakefront; the water is choppy and the swaying houseboat looks like a sunburned egg with smoky windows. The Jungian therapists are crowded inside, and the crowd and the quaking make Wakefield feel slightly queasy. He loses Zelda pretty quickly in the mob and wanders among the Jungians, all costumed as archetypes of one sort or another, including Liberace and Elvis. There are lots of other angels, and a number of devils and demons, and everyone is shouting at the same time, amazed, he presumes, by the myriad synchronicities that attend their Jungian lives every second. After accepting a pink drink dipped from a silver punch bowl by an aging Elvis, Wakefield finds Zelda seated on a couch with one of the other angels, a Black one.

  “Wakefield, meet Reverend Telluride. I was just telling her about your problem. The Reverend is a voodoo priestess. Actually, I’m her student. She’s willing to take you on as a client.”

  Wakefield would like to say no thanks, but the Reverend’s eyes are looking through him, orbs of cloudy onyx, and Wakefield realizes she’s blind.

  An hour later Zelda is driving the three of them to the Reverend’s place, a narrow shotgun house shaded by thick hedges of ligustrum. The houses on the block lean against one another as if for support, their meager backyards separated by improvised sheds and rusting appliances.

  The front room is lit by two sputtering black candles. Wakefield makes out various items displayed on what look like discarded magazine racks: herbs, oils, incense, candles, salts, and jewelry. There are some large African statues in the corners and some smaller ones on a black desk. Behind the desk is an old-fashioned photo booth with a ratty velvet curtain.

  “I’m only here to observe,” says Zelda. “I’ll be very, very quiet.”

  That would be a first, thinks Wakefield, who has no idea why he’s here, but then, that’s his m.o., isn’t it?