The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  “STOP TALKING LIKE THAT!” sang Mother radiantly.

  Pastor Tom nodded.

  Amelia had tears in her eyes.

  “The population, the audience, without question wants to hear its own story. They want to tell it and they want to hear it. They want us to know what it is without them telling us, assuming we have the same story they do, and will tell it. We are all San Franciscans, we are all Americans, and so on. There is great trust in these names. But they have in truth failed to remember accurately what has happened. They have lost the power of accurate memory. We all have. If in fact we ever had it. But particularly within the confines of this ruined city we are merely branded automatons.”

  “But the city is no longer ruined, Charles,” said Amelia, walking her tone perfectly along the line between perplexity and helpfulness.

  “Have it your way,” said Charles. “I would think, though, that you of all people, you and Tom, would know that all the cities of the pleasure planet are ruined, that there are many who actually like wholesale destruction for its own sake, that is to say, someone honestly if hideously committed to, how shall I say . . . to change. ‘Thou (the human being) are that which is not. I am that I am. If thou perceivest this truth in any soul, never shall the enemy deceive thee; thou shall escape all his snares.’ Can anybody tell me who said that? No? Saint Catherine of Siena. My theater will be a rough and immediate theater, but it will above all be a holy theater. A holy theater in an empty space.”

  “Empty space: of that there can be no doubt!” said Mother. As for holiness, I think rather ‘spitefulness’ or ‘mean-spiritedness’ is the word you are looking for.”

  “No, ‘holiness’ is the word.”

  “Boring,” said Mother. “Boring, mean-spirited theater in an empty space.”

  “Well,” said Charles mock-amiably, “I sure hope not. But people will be bored no matter what you do.”

  “Wrong side of bed, Chick?” asked Father.

  “No,” said Charles. “I levitated.”

  “You know I don’t care for sarcasm,” said Father, smiling, “especially from my sons.”

  “You have been taking jabs at everybody here,” said Mother. “You have hurt everybody here with your nonsense. Can you please tell us why you have embarked on such a course? I want to blame Sir Edwin because I am surprised and disappointed at what a stinking drunkard and fraud he is, but you cannot be so easily—”

  “—and swiftly replaced?”

  “—excused.”

  “I am rehearsing my life.”

  “I asked you once before,” said Mother quietly. Then she really let go with everything her extraordinary voice had to give: “STOP TALKING LIKE THAT!”

  Because she had sung it, Charles applauded, briefly, politely. And said, “Father, if I hurt your feelings with what I said about destruction and change, please forgive me. It wasn’t meant to hurt you or even refer to you. Everything I know about the world I’ve learned from you and I am grateful for every last bit of it.”

  “Of course I forgive you,” said Father.

  “The sarcasm is a weakness I hope I can learn to do without.”

  “I’d rather you were sarcastic,” said Mother, “than humorless.”

  Amelia wiped her eyes and smiled. Tom nodded. The twins veiled their interest somewhat successfully. Mother glared and trembled, so finely that it could not be seen by the others save the strange rigidity. Socially Darwinian Christians, thought Charles, laboring for the glory of a Socially Darwinian Jesus Christ and the Socially Darwinian Regeneration of Socially Darwinian San Francisco when—and this was the kicker—they didn’t know the first thing about Darwin! Everything was an accident. Father paid lip service to the idea when he said everything that was lost could easily and swiftly replaced, but he didn’t understand what he was saying. If he did, he would save his numerous foes the trouble and shoot himself in the head.

  Though Germany had declared the North Atlantic a war zone, Father and Mother left the next week for New York, where they boarded a ship that took them to Iceland. For the fly-fishing, Father had said, in no mood to talk to Charles about anything serious, or anything at all, really, even though he said he had forgiven him. For the salmon. Indeed it was possible they were going for the salmon and the sea trout. There was a joke in there somewhere about brown trout and German submarines, but no one felt like making the effort. Charles had fished with flies a great deal when they had lived in Paris but summered in Scotland—not to mention golden days camping with Andrew and Alexander and even Father on the rivers of northern California—and if he could not help but continue to remember it as a pleasant pastime, indeed as golden, he could no longer find the time or rather the inclination to find the time to go fishing. Strangely, he could no longer even imagine himself standing in a river making a cast. He could see such a picture—could not help but do so, but it wasn’t himself he was seeing: it was a kind of photograph of Charles Minot, someone he had once known but lost touch with. An old friend, if he could be said, as the quaint old saying had it, to have had any friends. A character he had played, more likely, the idea of which still made him nervous, alert, ready for performance. He knew he ought to examine that inability to truly imagine himself fishing, but chose not to—or rather, he could admit it, was afraid of it—as it appeared to have something to do with wishing to fish in the dark. The dazzling dark of the Sufis, the dark light of the Gnostics, he thought. Was that a good, true image, from Zoroaster’s Good Mind? Or was it a bad image, from the Destructive Mind of a Person of the Lie? What he believed, secretly and more deeply than he thought possible, was that in the pitiful understanding of men, universal darkness was called celestial light.

  Because they were afraid of the dark.

  Because they were Bronze Age bullies and nitwits who worshipped the sun.

  The Devil lives in darkness because he hates the light? Demons crouch in dark corners? He begged to differ: the Devil lived in merciless light, light that showed through bodies, that exposed everything to everybody, that extended into space, a line, a bit of geometry that winked out once it left a man’s weak and suffering mind and entered the super-abundant emptiness of the heaven he could not imagine, could not perceive, but which he would come into, be born into, just as he had been born into life and light.

  He had seen this light at work: it had destroyed Little Joe. He was crouching in the dark and he was not a demon and the light had destroyed him.

  He could quote Tennyson, if anybody wanted to get tough with him:

  “Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

  Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

  Forever and ever when I move.”

  Heaven was dark.

  Heaven was a dark theater.

  A dark theater, the lights of which picked out Evil.

  The mounted policemen began cantering toward the little platform stage that the antiwar people had erected. The crowd, entirely pro-war as far as Charles could tell, was either unwilling or unable to disperse. People, mostly young men and boys, ran here and there and shouted. Charles thought he heard screaming as well. Distant screaming, which was hard to be sure of. In all likelihood it was feigned screaming, coming from behind and below him in the brand-new theater that Mother and Father had built for him—it was nearly impossible for them not to, if you understood that it was simply a consequence of rebuilding the city—exactly where the old theater had stood. He stayed with his arms spread and his hands on the handles of the French windows as if he had just flung them open and was going address the nation, until the crowds, dispersing and gathering and dispersing, were gone. Everybody seemed to be laughing, no matter what they were doing: getting smacked with a baton across the back of the head, watching someone else get smacked with a baton across the back of the head, smacking someone with a baton across the back of the head. It made no sense. Mounted policemen had made their way through group after group, but it had seemed like a carnival. He had heard screaming, h
e was sure of it, but had seen no one lying in a pool of blood, within a circle of strangers. The sun was setting, and in the deep clear twilight some fireworks were being discharged somewhere near; they rose and shone as if they were not only on fire but gave off a kind of glossy, lacquered light—everything looked that way, buildings, people, earth, sky—but he could not tell if they were the fireworks of patriots or of radicals. It was a carnival, and its theme had been the war in Europe. No. It made no sense. People would not be celebrating carnage and horror. Perhaps it was not supposed to make sense . . .? Why did he wish anything to make sense? He of all people! He went back down the stairs and into the theater and stood at the railing of the little balcony. The stage was now full of people. His people. “Friends.” They were arranged in small groups and engaged in discussions. Some of these conversations were calculated, their subjects free of apparent context or even forthrightly nonsensical, their objectives contrived and variable, delivered with courtly animation from angelically bright faces—this was a vision of hell. The other conversations were conducted in dusty darkness, or at least away from the pools of light, by nearly immobile and featureless figures, and this was heaven.

  Charles breathed evenly and slowly though he could feel his heart pounding in his fingertips and teeth, and he smiled faintly as these visions appeared and disappeared before and below him. The feverish light did indeed seem to determine the quality of life, as he had always suspected. He had read, in an account of the Indian wars, that one great and defeated chief had weighed his options and declared that heaven was no place for a man and he wanted nothing to do with it—and yet his place, Charles thought, was so clearly here on the border of heaven and hell that he could not help but feel some relief at the sight of it.

  An actress he hoped might prove suitable for the big roles sat wrapped in mummy-like winding sheets approximately in the center of the little theater, under its chandelier, which hung from the underside of a shallow dome painted with peacocks, owls, a buck deer and doe, vines with berries and flowers, and a wizard with a flask out of which streamed a banner with the words eamus quesitum quattuor elementorum naturas.

  Her name was Vera.

  Vera K., born of Russian parents in Muscatine, Iowa, where she had worked in a button factory.

  Muscatine was the Button Capital of the World.

  He picked up a sheaf of papers from the seat next to him, riffled through them until he found the page he was looking for, then read it aloud but not loudly, looking down at her. She probably couldn’t hear him, but would she turn round, look up?

  “What is for you the greatest unhappiness?”

  “I sometimes, too often, think I am no longer competent to live in the world.”

  “In what place would you like to live?”

  “The world.”

  “What is your ideal of earthly happiness?”

  “Forgoing happiness.”

  “For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘fault.’”

  “What is your principal fault?”

  “Ah: my recurring inability to believe I can live in the world.”

  “What would you like to be?”

  “Oh! What all the young women have said to you goes double for me: the star of your shows!”

  “What is your favorite quality in a man?”

  “A fine critical apparatus focused on whether or not I am kidding.”

  “What is your favorite quality in a woman?”

  “A fine critical apparatus focused on whether or not I am kidding.”

  “What is your favorite occupation?”

  “Acting truly.”

  “What is your present state of mind?”

  “A nearly overwhelming feeling of joy that I can live in the world after all.”

  Vera, alone in all of histrionic San Francisco, had been worthy of the Polite Parlor Questionnaire. In her presence, as she answered the questions slowly and eloquently, he had not been able to feel like anything but a prince in a fairy tale.

  He stared down at her intensely, imagining taking her sheet off and finding her naked beneath it, moving his hands over her neck and shoulders and breasts, kissing her deeply but languidly—and falling again under the spell of imagination, believing for a moment that he could cause the seduction to happen simply by staring down at the woman with his remorseless will.

  It had happened before, and more than once.

  Of course he would hold and kiss her in coming rehearsal many times, but the emptiness of those experiences would confound her completely—he would see it in her big glistening brown eyes—and throw so profoundly the question of the nature of pleasure into terrible doubt, that he would be forced to refuse to acknowledge those embraces as in any way representative of what he hoped to accomplish. He supposed that he was compensatorily cold to her. And the nature of what he “hoped to accomplish” was decaying swiftly too, anyway, after some ridiculous failures in New York that winter—from what had seemed at first simply a case of ceasing to neglect the pursuit and seduction of women, as he certainly had, in favor of the cultivation of artistic vision, to a struggle with physical impotence, the staving off of something pathological.

  He was quite sure she could not act, and had cast her—the others as well—precisely because he was sure she could not act. The skills usually acknowledged as essential to or at least encouraging of dramatic presence, when they had been displayed for him, to him, for his approval and pleasure, only made him uneasy. It was like he had said to Little Joe ten years earlier: he would rather watch the stagehands. If such displays went on too long, they began to fray his nerves. That she made him feel like a prince had nothing to do with anything.

  Because one of the plays they were rehearsing was Romeo and Juliet (the other two were August Strindberg’s The Spook Sonata and Henry James’s The American), swordplay had broken out on the stage and in the auditorium. Swordplay often broke out if Charles was even momentarily absent, because actors were like children and directors were like forbidding fathers. Most of the group of fifteen were the legendary friends or friends of friends from Berkeley, if he could be said to have friends, but there was no mistaking it: a father and his children.

  With the probable exception of Vera in her grave shroud.

  Two duels were taking place, one in exaggeratedly slow motion that seemed Oriental in its precision, the other fast and awkward and accompanied by a great deal of laughter, yelps of pain, and shouted apologies. Five other young men were trying to sort out the fundamental moves of a brawl, made uneasy by Charles’s suggestion via Sir Edwin Carmichael that choreography was the antithesis of violence, that a fight was ugly and embarrassing, and that all attempts to make it a pleasing dance must be in vain. The different son of a different plumber and one of his older brothers were clacking lengths of doweling with each other. Charles, to no one’s surprise, had been schooled in fencing since he was old enough to wave a small toy sword, and was in fact the ensemble’s Romeo, but was concerned that hour with The American and so was armed only with monocle and walking stick. As he watched and breathed and was content—for a moment—to feel the blood pulsing in his extremities, over the din of mock-fighting and outside the theater, he thought he heard more firecrackers going off.

  There was a release of light somewhere over his shoulder and a withdrawal of it and a faint clap, followed by the shushing of heavy fabric over the carpeting of the balcony’s center aisle; he could just barely hear it over the voices below. Then came the cloud of smell: stale tobacco and fresh burning leaf, alcohol on the breath and in the cloth, some kind of ammoniac solution, and an alarmingly bracing body odor. This was the theater’s artist in residence, Sir Edwin Carmichael. He was visiting from Verona, where he had his own theater and school of design, named after its principal funder, Lord Howard de Walden. He had acted with Henry Irving and designed sets for Konstantin Stanislavski. He had designed and directed a production of Dido and Aenea
s that had almost single-handedly revived interest in the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell—which was where Mother had come in. The man wrapped his cloak more tightly around his frail and trembling body, trapping the stench of himself but allowing the fabric to send eddies and gusts from its folds. He was an artist’s artist and his black, bloodshot eyes were in no way diminished by the shadow of his great slouch hat. He was shivering in the wretched cold of the peninsula’s summer, but all he could think to say to his young hero was that his dinner disagreed with him; he was digesting it poorly—belly inflated like a medicine ball and shooting fireworks at the back of his throat—and could not think straight. His breath was unbearably laden with garlic and deeper evidence of the indigestion, and Charles leaned away. That Sir Edwin could not think straight, and yet was up to admitting it, this was a confusing sign in his experience: too much steam building up in a kind of self-conscious engine already starting to shake and rattle its bolts. Sir Edwin claimed to be a futurist, but Charles was hard pressed to understand what such an identity entailed. More specifically, but even less clearly, he was a vorticist—that was to say, not Italian, but something “like a futurist” from “the vortex of London.” He preferred “found sound” to composed and performed music—but was an acknowledged influence of the Second Viennese School—and was very much in favor of the war: war was “the one great art,” and the only way civilization had to remove the more “festering and stinking of humankind’s many gangrenous limbs.”

  Charles and Sir Edwin watched the rehearsal, its director absent but lurking, disintegrate: acrobatic silliness, exaggerated, mask-like mimicry of primary emotional states in ridiculous contexts, and the kind of mincing mock-violence that had actors chasing each other around tables with very small steps, furiously waving their arms and puffing their cheeks out, not knowing what to do once, for instance, one character succeeded in getting his hands around the neck of another character, whom he ostensibly wished to throttle to death. The plumber’s sons broke off their swordplay, and Sir Edwin suggested to Charles that even the children found it all unbearably childish.