Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  Reverend Telluride takes off her wings. “Do you mind?” she asks, deftly stepping out of her feathers. She hangs them inside an armoire and Wakefield glimpses a row of wings in a rainbow of colors. Then she sits down behind the desk and takes a deck of well-worn cards from a drawer.

  “It’s a Braille tarot, if you’re wondering. Now tell me what it is you want to know.”

  Zelda busies herself lighting a stick of sage incense.

  “I’ll be frank with you,” Wakefield begins. “There is a man next door who is hammering on my wall. I want him stopped.”

  “I don’t do black magic,” the Reverend frowns, and Wakefield sees by the soft furrow between her eyes that she’s younger than he thought. “But tell me what it’s all about anyway,” she says, the furrow disappearing. “Why is he hammering?”

  Why indeed?

  “He’s hammering because he’s jealous,” interjects Zelda. “Oops, I said I’d be quiet.”

  “Over a woman? I might be able to do something about that. Did you steal his girlfriend? I have prayers and potions for any love situation.”

  “There’s no woman,” Wakefield says firmly. “The man has embarked on an endless restoration project. Actually there is a woman there sometimes, maybe she’s his wife, but she never seems to stay long. Probably can’t stand the hammering.”

  “Some women like hammering. Some women like to get hammered.” Both angels laugh. “So why is he jealous?”

  “I didn’t say he was jealous, but I don’t know, maybe he is. He’s making it impossible for me to work. Maybe he hates me because I’m sort of famous. But to tell you the truth,” Wakefield says, suddenly weary, “I think he’s the signal that I should try to find my ‘true life,’ whatever that is.” He’s decided it would be too complicated to explain the whole thing with the Devil.

  “Well then, that’s another matter. Why don’t you help him, so he can finish faster?”

  “I don’t think so.” Wakefield would rather kill himself than help his enemy.

  “There is no woman?” she asks again, and Zelda laughs.

  “Why does there always have to be a woman?”

  “Okay. How long have you lived with the hammering?”

  Wakefield doesn’t like this game. “Since birth,” he answers sarcastically, “but with this particular hammering, about two months.”

  The Reverend puts the tarot deck back in the drawer. “I’m going to read your feet,” she says. “Zelda will learn something new.”

  “All right!” the ever enthusiastic body practitioner exclaims.

  Wakefield is confused. “Read what?”

  “Your feet.”

  Wakefield thinks about his feet. They are sturdy. They have walked the earth. Why not? “What do you call this? Foot reading?”

  “Piedaterrology.” The finest hint of a smile, like a floating feather, passes over her face. “Take off your shoes and lie on the sofa.”

  Wakefield obeys. He can feel Zelda watching as he takes off his socks and shoes. At least they’re clean. The Reverend pulls up an ottoman and takes his naked right foot between her hands; he’s startled by her light, warm touch. The foot is calloused; it’s climbed in the mountains, pounded city pavements, survived thorns, ant bites, and tropical crud, and now it’s held in an angel’s soft black hands like a sensitive instrument.

  “You’re a traveler,” the Reverend says, tracing a line from the ball of his foot to the heel. “There’s a long line, strong, it keeps straightening itself out.”

  It tickles. Wakefield tries to keep from laughing, but when he looks at Zelda’s studious face he giggles.

  “That’s the past.” The Reverend smiles. “Now let’s see about the future.” She takes hold of his other foot and traces other lines with a warm finger. “You are going to stay home awhile,” she says, pressing down hard with her thumb on a spot apparently connected to his entire body. Wakefield shudders.

  “She’s doing some reflexology in addition to reading,” says Zelda. “It will probably cost you extra.”

  Reverend Telluride chuckles. Wakefield doesn’t care; it feels good. Maybe he has been barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. Maybe his body is the only home he’s ever had, and he should stop thrashing around like a fish out of water.

  “This point connects to the spinal cord.” Her fingers dig into the arch, putting pressure, on the maze of lines there. “The arch, it’s your destiny,” she tells Wakefield.

  Wow, the arch, of course. His foot is architecture! His brain tries to keep up. “I’m an architect, sort of, an arch fancier, I guess,” he stammers, his whole body relaxing.

  “Well, that’s what architecture is,” she says. “The arch of the foot, the work of the hand. The foot and the tool, the arch and the grasp. The whole human story. Your story. There.” She brings his feet together and cradles them, gripping his toes hard. Eyes closed, he considers getting up but feels that he can’t.

  “You’ve got me by the balls … of my feet.”

  “Redress. Think of Chinese women. Their feet bound, they had to think on their backs. They wrote poetry.” Holding his feet, Reverend Telluride recites: “‘My lover will not walk to me tonight, I cannot walk to him. Wind, carry our love.’ Tien Li, third century.”

  “That was our story,” says Zelda. “The weather, every time.”

  Wakefield would like to get back to earth. “The hammering guy, what do my feet say about him?”

  “He’s really you,” the angel says softly, concentrating. “You walk his walk, but you have both lost your way.”

  She speaks like a fortune cookie. And she’s wrong, he thinks. Not only is the madman not him, he’s going to squash him under his foot like a bug. Crunch.

  “How is he me?” Wakefield is losing patience with this poetry.

  “Restoration, renovation, it’s your need. You need to be restored, rededicated, start fresh. He doing it to a house, you need to do it for yourself.”

  Wakefield recognizes this as gobbledygook, but it’s true-sounding gobbledygook. Of course he needs to work on himself, but first he has to get rid of the madman. One project at a time. Besides, it doesn’t do to mix reality with metaphors. The madman is real; spiritual “restoration” is just a metaphor, and a silly one at that. People are not “restored,” they become ruins and then they die. Cryogeny and transplants are not in his future.

  “What did you call this, piedorology?”

  “No, piedaterrology, as in pied-à-terre, a home base, a place to be for a while. I read where you’ve been, where you’ll be.” He feels a slow, tentacular languor, like a vine climbing lazily from his foot, up his ankle, into his hips. He pulls his feet away from her hands and fumbles for his socks and shoes. “I’ve heard enough, thank you.”

  “Okay,” the Reverend says, “I have to go to work anyway.”

  “To work?” Suddenly Wakefield is sorry he ended the reading so soon; he misses her touch, he wants her to tell him the names of places he’s been, places he’ll go, hidden places he’ll discover. He wants this angel, this voodoo queen, this pieda terrorologist to tell him what to do next. He looks to Zelda for reassurance, but her eyes are closed, her knees to her chin, her arms around them, her wings folded.

  Reverend Telluride is already changing from sandals to athletic shoes. “I’ve got appointments to keep. I just squeezed you in for my girl here.”

  Wakefield thanks her, pays her the twenty dollars she asks for, no extra charge for the reflexology.

  Back in the car, Zelda gives him some background on Reverend Telluride: she was adopted by a Jewish couple in New Jersey, but when she was eighteen she traveled to Haiti, where she was initiated in voodoo by a babalao called Audevie and learned divination by means of cards, shells, coins, coffee grounds, tea leaves, hands, feet, and foreheads. Then she lived for a year in Telluride, Colorado, where she found her name. Now, in addition to moonlighting as an angel, she ministers to a voodoo congregation plagued by angry ghosts.

  “What’s wi
th the ghosts?”

  “Well, there seem to be more than ever,” Zelda explains, turning onto his street. “The Reverend just exorcised three ghosts from a house where three wives of one man had committed suicide. There are so many ghosts in this town, even the bars are haunted.”

  “Whoa. She’s some powerful chick. The stuff she did to my feet …”

  “Your feet are your primal hands, that’s why it’s important to read them.”

  “Come on, Zelda. Primal hands?”

  “Feet are to your hands what the body is to the mind. They are not the tool users, they carry the whole toolbox around. If you want to know where you’re going …”

  She stops in front of his building. As usual, a ghost tour is clustered next to the hotel across the street. Zelda waves to the vampire guide.

  “You know him?”

  “I own him, so to speak. Crossroads Travel is doing city tours now. Do my multiple personalities bother you, Wakefield?”

  “It is a little hard to keep up. Where’s your girlfriend, by the way?”

  “Oh, she met this Peruvian guy and went straight. I’m practicing abstinence now. It feels good. You should try it, Wake.”

  “Do you want to come up?” Wakefield asks, ignoring her suggestion. He glances at his watch. It’s six o’clock. “One hour of terror to go, you can hear it for yourself.”

  “Some other time, honey. I have to get out of my wings and check in with the office. Don’t forget what Telluride said, it’s all about self-restoration. And don’t worry, I don’t kill my old selves, I’m everybody I ever was, but I’m only one person at a time. When I’m that person, the others have to keep quiet and watch me work until their turn comes. They wait in the wings as ghosts, afterimages, spectators. Then after a while, they get a chance to act and then the one I just was becomes a specter. Everybody I am was a ghost once and will be a ghost again. The angel will be a piedaterrologist and then a travel agent and then a—”

  “Zelda, I have no freakin’ idea what you’re talking about!”

  She kisses his cheek. “Never mind. The working self. It’s not easy for actors to wait patiently for their moment, it takes discipline, staying in character, getting along … that kind of stuff. It takes readings, rehearsals, steady nerves, soothing words, massage, confessions, confidence … I call all that the restoration of the working self. It’s a never ending job.”

  Zelda’s litany is actually scaring him. Do lots of people believe in this business of multiple personalities? Is it a cult? In the sixties he knew spiritual seekers who made long and convoluted journeys to “find” themselves, but most of them gave up when they discovered that the cosmos didn’t give a crap about them personally. Wakefield assumed that the wave of seekers had left behind only a flotsam of tarot readers, holistic body workers, and people like Zelda. But Reverend Telluride … she’s something else, a blind woman with a closet full of wings, the queen of feet.

  One night, in addition to the dust and bits of mortar that are chronically knocked from his bricks by the madman, Wakefield notices a viscous substance oozing through the wall by his bed. He decides to sleep on the couch, afraid that the wall will collapse and kill him.

  Influenced by his contact with the Jungians, he’s been reading a book on Greek myths, but he never gets through more than a few pages before he dozes off. This night when he opens the book he finds the story of the Labyrinth at Minos, and it electrifies him.

  The Labyrinth was built as a prison for the Minotaur, a sad, hoofed creature whose only sin was that he was freaky. Wakefield realizes in an instant that the story concerns him. The Labyrinth was infinite, built by the father of architecture himself, Daedalus, on orders from the king. For Daedalus the meaning of the prison was in its construction; he didn’t care about the sad Minotaur trapped there in the dark with nothing but his own thoughts of revenge, forced to survive on the flesh of the assassins the king would regularly send to kill him. The maniac next door is building a Labyrinth, Wakefield realizes, and the creature trapped at its center is me.

  All night he lays awake thinking about the sad Cretan beast. Maybe all architecture denies nature, and so requires blood sacrifice. He remembers the wrenching story Mrs. Petrovich told, of the mason who built his daughter into the wall so that the mosque might stand. Perhaps any shelter that is not a cave transgresses the natural order and offends the gods, who must then be placated. Wakefield imagines an unending labor of construction; the night becomes filled with the hammering of architecture and the howls of its sacrificial victims.

  Clearly the insane man next door is the slave of Neurotic Architecture, he concludes, and I am the sacrifice. He has an archetypal hereditary disease that afflicts the descendants of Daedalus. It takes all kinds of forms. Like the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, who so feared the spirits of Indians killed by her dead husband’s guns that she consulted a psychic, who instructed her to build an endless house full of hidden rooms and corridors. She hid there from the angry ghosts, her carpenters working twenty-four hours a day until her death.

  Somehow he must have managed to fall asleep, because when Wakefield opens his eyes it is morning. He hears the hammering, then a woman’s voice. She’s pleading, “Please … no … don’t.…” Wakefield stumbles to the bathroom window. There’s the maniac standing on the scaffolding, holding a hammer. He is alone. Wakefield no longer hears the woman’s voice, but he’s convinced he wasn’t dreaming. The madman has made a blood sacrifice, he’s sure! It’s absurd, but he calls the police anyway and a couple of officers come and investigate. The restorationist’s wife is just fine, they report, and they obviously think Wakefield is nuts.

  Wakefield has no choice but to move to the hotel across the street, taking with him only what he would carry if he were traveling out of town for a lecture gig.

  The woman at the reception desk knows his face, and greets him quizzically. “Don’t you live across the street?” Wakefield just hands her his credit card and she assumes her usual mask of discretion. She’s been in the hotel business a long time. He could tell her that his apartment, a place of refuge and solitude, has been destroyed by a yuppie with a bank loan and she wouldn’t bat an eye. But Wakefield isn’t interested in fraternizing. He has a plan.

  He takes a suite twice as big as his apartment and well placed for his purposes. Behind louvered shutters, the window overlooks the front of both buildings, his and the madman’s. The suite has its own patio and a tiny oval swimming pool. The furnishings are comfortable, even luxurious, especially the pharaonic-size bed. The suite is impersonal in a naughty way: the air shimmers with the afterglow of quick trysts and improvised parties; salesmen, conventioneers, and honeymooners have done unmentionable things there, leaving behind a psychic substance both human and forgivable. No amount of cleaning can remove it, it has accrued over time, it adheres to all new guests, filling them with giddy but functional stupidity. Wakefield breathes it in; it comforts him. Maybe I am still human, he sighs.

  When darkness falls, Wakefield sits at his window watching the entrances of the buildings across the street. People come and go from his building, carrying in groceries, going out for the evening. No one goes into or out of the madman’s house. Wakefield’s sleep is wonderfully untroubled for the first time since he returned.

  In the morning he takes a swim in the oval pool, showers, then peeks between the louvers. The madman’s truck is parked outside; he must be in there hammering. Wakefield has breakfast in his suite: coldish scrambled eggs and bacon with burned toast, four cups of coffee. Then he dons a baseball cap and sunglasses, stuffs a hotel towel into a gym bag, and heads for the City Club, the health club where, he’s discovered, the restorationist works out. He walks through the square; it’s empty, too early for the fortune-tellers and the living statues. Marilyn doesn’t look too bad, holding on to her skirt, though he still misses the iron blimp, his personal monument to the absurd.

  The City Club has a long and sometimes scandalous history. It has stoo
d for a century in the middle of what was once a notorious red-light district, and husbands of a certain era were said to be “at the Club” if anyone asked. When an overzealous mayor shut down the district after World War One, the club remained, and some of the district’s sexual services moved discreetly inside in the form of an ever changing crew of masseurs and masseuses skilled at soothing both flesh and spirit.

  Wakefield feigns interest in becoming a member and is admitted on a three-month guest pass. Once inside, he puts himself into the hands of an old masseur, under whose ministrations he learns, for a tip, that the Historical Preservation Commissioner has been known to issue permits in exchange for favors, while cruelly persecuting anyone who runs afoul of the strict preservation regulations in the old quarter.

  After the massage, Wakefield helps himself to a bottle of fancy water in the dark-paneled bar and reading room. The bookcases hold bound volumes of the club’s weekly magazine, written by members for members. In an issue from 1891, a judge writes candidly that he will be happy to help club members who might find themselves in his court accused of anything short of murder, for which charge he advises “a prolonged sojourn in the Orient.” However, “alienation of the affections of a mistress” was an unthinkable offense and one to be resolved with pistols. Dueling is mentioned in the journal often, sometimes offhand, sometimes cryptically. “Dr. LB will be greatly missed. We have commissioned a medal made from the bullets that killed him and will bestow it on Mr. KD, the most likely among us to end the same way.” Racist jokes and choice crudities about the female sex abound in short poems and cartoons. The content of the current newsletter is slightly more self-conscious, but the candor of the members is still evident. In the first issue of the current year Wakefield finds a satirical comment by the Historical Preservation Commissioner about the purchase of the historic townhouse next door to Wakefield. “Our good friend, P., has acquired a former bordello in the illustrious old quarter. He has sworn to me that he will restore it to perfection, sparing no expense. I hope that he means this in both form and content. Sex is such a trifle these days, one misses the ‘sporting life’ enjoyed by our forebears. I have wagered him an original Blue Book if he succeeds.”