by Susan Daitch
Citizen Q declares it’s L who has a history of lying. Nobody takes her seriously. She, in effect, fucks everyone and anyone like crazy. Q is told enough already, you’ve made your point. This command could not have boded well for Q. L asks for it, he barges on. Look at her! Look at the way she dresses and stands. Q imitates L swishing down the street, his sandals flapping. He’s a complete clown. Unfairly, I imagine him acting like Mel Brooks’ very confident Thousand Year Old Man, and L’s laughter, like a sucker punch, stops Q in his tracks, baffled. L’s laughter at his mimicry disarms him, leaves his defense in ruins, makes him look like a liar or a fool, a role that doesn’t advance his case at all.
Fools were the first to be fed white clay, choking on their words, their comic routines reduced to bile. On the other hand, suppose the accused, framed and convicted, survives the ordeal, but someone needed the ingested text to be destroyed. The ancient murderer, who knew nothing of digestion or anatomy, could not be sure the body would do this work for him, and therefore would personally resort to the blade to finish the job.
Out my window I could see a plane skywriting a series of letters that finally spelled out: Luna Park. I turned back to reading the scroll in my narrow rooms, as if it were no more rare or unusual than Sunday morning funny papers. The apartment next door had been broken into twice in the middle of the day. I’d been home during one incident and hadn’t heard a thing. The safety of the scroll wasn’t a major concern; rare would be the thief who knew or cared what the hell this thing was. In case of fire the scroll was kept in the freezer, which was usually empty anyway. On one occasion, my neighbor who lives on the floor below me nearly burned the place down when one of her candles fell over and ignited a dishrag. There’s a fire house a couple of blocks away, and with little traffic in the middle of the night, they managed to get here instantly. My downstairs neighbor writes a syndicated astrology column, and even though she writes under a pseudonym and makes no bones (to me at any rate) about the fact that all her predictions are stabs in the dark, she’s not the kind of person who will ever give up candles scented like vanilla, gardenia, and a chemically produced lemon that smells like floor cleaner. We all ran out into the street. While others worried about clothes, photographs, valuables and jewelry left upstairs, and how lucky we all were to get out in time, all I could think about was the contents of my freezer. The astrologist babbled, in black pants and pink shoes ready to go clubbing, to go see Stiv Bators at Darinka or 8BC, high as a kite: Virgo this, Capricorn that. No wonder she hadn’t been able to predict the fire in advance. No flames licked the windows. The fire department contained the blaze to her place, and red-eyed, we all trooped back in. The phone rang. Ada Koppek, who else?
“Ada, we just had a fire here. I have a headache from the smoke. Call back another time.” The building smelled of burnt astrology books.
“Darling,” I could hear her playing with the silver links on her watch, “why don’t you just swallow a tablet? Adam, my one and only grandson, a headache isn’t the end of the world.”
The fire was too large and potentially catastrophic an event for her to assimilate. She would skip it altogether. I agreed with her, yes, most definitely I’d made a mistake. I’ll eat my words. The Williamsburg clock tower was shrouded in black netting, as it was being repaired, but I was aware of the time. I wanted to get back to work, to find out what would happen to Q and L.
“So do you know where your sister, Ruthie, is? I heard she’s getting married.”
“Yes, I know, I’m her husband. She’s already married.” I didn’t tell Ada we were in the process of getting divorced. There was no point. It was more information than she could handle.
“Not you. To someone else. A Choiman. Listen, a Choiman from France. I told you. His uncles read Gerta from Nancy to Drancy. Who was Gerta?”
Translation: someone read Goethe from Nancy to the transit camp at Drancy. Ada was baffled. No one told her anything. She sat in the dark. But maybe she was right, and in a moment of lucidity she realized that she wasn’t talking to her grandson, but to me, and Ruthie was, in fact, planning to marry Saltzman.
“Ada, I’m watching the news. Call me later.” I hung up knowing Ada would forget the conversation we just had and call me again within the week. More pictures flickered across the screen: desert explosions, oil refineries on fire, a glimmer of an interview with an Iraqi soldier who hoped the war with Iran would end soon.
“Why don’t you get out and walk?” Southern Gentleman Gambler “You can’t put me off a public conveyance!” Gatewood, banker
Stagecoach
John Ford, 1939
THE PHONE RANG AGAIN.
“Hello. Ariel Bokser?”
“Yes.”
“This is Ariel.”
“Who?”
“It took me a while to find you, but I’m at the corner of Neptune and Coney Island Avenue, at Mezzenotte Pizza. This is near you, no? I’m waiting. Come as soon as you can. We shouldn’t be seen together, but we need to meet.”
I recognized the voice and unmistakable accent before I had a chance to speak. The intersection of Neptune and Coney Island isn’t near where I live, but I rushed out the door to the subway. A train was just leaving as I ran down the stairs to the platform. The platform, the subwayness of the subway made it difficult to retrieve images of the city almost halfway around the world. Every detail of my present city bombarded.
While I waited, leaning against a blue column, I noticed someone had made an origami swan out of a white gum wrapper. The tiny bird was stuck to the column with bits of gum, so it looked like it had stopped mid-downward-swoop. It occurred to me that I spent a lot of my life underground, and I was reminded of a song on a science record I had when I was a child. The earth is like a great big grapefruit. Twenty-five thousand miles around. You could dig from here to China, if you could dig through the ground. The lyrics were followed by tinkling music that was meant to sound Chinese, then the voice resumed by saying in a minatory tone: But you can’t.
Ten minutes later the next train arrived, crowded because of the delay. A deaf mute entered the car honking a series of horns in a rendition of Oh What a Beautiful Morning! He moved his head back and forth in time, and he lurched when the train swerved. He must have suffered a stroke at some point in the past, because half of his face had fallen. “Yo, Harpo, c’mere,” a man standing next to me shouted in futility as the deaf mute approached our part of the car, then we staggered toward him to put some coins in the paper cup, our change falling to the floor, quarters, nickels swallowed up, disappearing. It’s rare to see subway performers this far out on the line, but then the deaf mute got off at the next stop, crossed over to the opposite platform, honking out his songs up the stairs in order to reverse his trip.
The train stalled between Kings Highway and Avenue U, but forty minutes later I was at Mezzanotte Pizza. The walls were covered with drawings of local people and celebrities who ate there: Tony Bennett, Abe Beam, Barbara Stanwyck, if you could believe it. Teenagers sat conspiratorially in one booth, an old man sat in another, but that was about it. No Rostami. I ordered a slice at the counter and asked if anyone fitting his description had come into the restaurant in the past hour.
“A guy who looks kind of like you?” the fellow at the cash register asked. He drew with a pencil whose silver finial was chewed down to a molar-shaped nugget.
I nodded.
“Yes, he was here for a while, then he left.” He held up his sketch. On the back of a receipt he had drawn a picture of Javanshah Rostami. He was here.
I expected to hear from Jahanshah Bokser again, but in the days that followed not even Ada Koppek had any interest in talking to me. Rostami wasn’t listed in the phone book under my name, his own, or some hybrid combination of the two, unless he’d devised an unknown anagram. The shells of Bokserness can easily be shrugged off like a snake’s old skin, passport tossed out, lying in a landfill upriver. There are always those pieces of home under your fingernails that you
don’t want to clean, and leave as they are for as long as possible. Or you gather around you all the rags of your past life that you can muster until they become a kind of shelter. Rostami had left his children, his family, a longing greater than any I could imagine. Followed by now unemployed Savak agents, I imagined him as me reunited with Ruthie, teaching at a university with office hours and assistants to look up details about the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 that divvied up Persia.
Sometimes I sensed a man or woman was following me, but it may only be that I was anticipating Jahanshah to overtake me, tap me on the shoulder. Once in midtown a woman in a leather jacket with very wide lapels and sharp-toed boots seemed to be only a few yards behind me. Every time I turned around, there she was. This went on for blocks. I watched out of the corner of my eye as if I were a garment district tourist looking in windows as I slowly made my way across 36th Street, taking in windows full of mannequin parts, felt hats, feathers and buttons, small plastic toys from Japan. There was a Pronto Photo at one corner that guaranteed one-hour processing time. A dusty cardboard blow-up of Cybill Shepherd on a bicycle occupied most of the shop’s small plate glass window. She turned and held an instamatic camera, her expression hopeful, the edges of her blonde head frayed; she was larger than life. A man in a stained shirt and thick glasses entered the window to remove a projector from the display. He put his hand in Cybill Shepherd’s crotch in order move her to the left. He saw me watching and winked as he wiggled his fingers in the cardboard shorts, but I wasn’t watching him; I wanted to see if the leather woman was still following me. I turned around slowly, and there she was, but when I waved at her like a bobble-head with hands, she disappeared into an office building.
One night coming home late I was mugged, but it was a random mugging, the kind of thing that happens at two in the morning in the entrance to my building. The mugger was incoherent, but he had a knife, and took my wallet. He didn’t threaten more than that, or force his way upstairs to ransack my apartment, looking for a Suolucidiri relic that provided an uncanny model for the construction and contestation of competing notions of the truth and crime.
Wearing surgical gloves I continued to unroll the scroll, but the Q and L story was left unfinished. What remained were just clumps of letters that didn’t seem to form words anymore, at least not any I could find a translation for. Unless the remainder was written in another language, though the alphabet was the same, the writing no longer made any syntactical sense. I held the cylindrical case up to my eye as if it were a pirate’s spyglass, then tossed it on the table. My neighbor’s cat, who came in via the fire escape, played with the cylinder, found interesting smells in the decades-old leather. She sniffed it from end to end, batted it off the table, reached a long paw into the case, but it rolled under the couch. She was desperate for this new toy, so I moved the couch to retrieve it. Under the couch were dust bunnies the size of Mars, loose change, chewed pencils, subway tokens.
[Money] only made its way into certain sectors and certain regions, and continued to disturb others. It was a novelty more because of what it brought with it than what it was itself. What did it actually bring? Sharp variations in prices of essential foodstuffs; incomprehensible relationships in which man no longer recognized either himself, his customs, or his ancient values. His work became a commodity, himself a “thing.”
Fernand Braudel
The Structures of Everyday Life, 1979
MONEY WAS RUNNING OUT . THERE was no institution or foundation that would fund work translating a stolen artifact. Necessities had to be balanced: rent, food, electricity, telephone, how long could each remain unpaid? Subway ads that ran headlines like Need Cash? or Is Debt Your Middle Name? beckoned. I wrote 1-800 numbers in the margins of papers but didn’t make the calls.
I began to construct imaginary Suolucidiri relics, made from all kinds of junk salvaged from dump sites near the Gowanus Canal: a god made of bathroom tile (though the Suolocidiris weren’t idol worshippers), a weapon made of orange insulating wire and rusted box-cutter blades, a funerary ornament from soles of Nikes hot-glued to a diamond-shaped piece of sheetrock. More exact might be a simurgh, the phoenix-like bird, made of gaskets, dead batteries stripped of their plastic coating, horns and claws made of dental picks and bent nails. My neighbor Alyssa, the astrologist, who had a habit of knocking on my door from time to time to borrow things, asked if she could photograph this ersatz simurgh. The idea of recycled, reinvented deities made of yogurt containers and electrical wire intrigued her. She didn’t actually ask, but just appeared, camera in hand. I saw no reason to object, sure Alyssa, go right ahead.
There was a story Ruth had told me about a wealthy Mexico City doctor, a Dr. Saenz, who, one afternoon in 1966 received a phone call suggesting that if he flew to the town of Villahermosa in Tabasco, good news lay in store for him. He was interested, and he was fearless, no reservations tugged at his sleeves, no thoughts that anonymous calls directing you here or there might not be in his best interest. He followed the anonymous caller’s instructions to the letter. When he reached Villahermosa, he was met by two men who marched him to a small private plane, and off he flew once again. Although the plane’s navigational equipment was deliberately concealed from him, Dr. Saenz sensed they were flying farther south toward the Guatemala border, and he was correct. Landing on what could only have been a makeshift jungle airstrip, they were met by a group of local men who immediately offered Saenz a series of objects they claimed had been dug up recently. A man holding a rough wooden box was particularly persuasive, and Saenz opened it to discover a codex the man explained he had unearthed in a nearby cave. Most Mayan books, all but three, had been burned by the conquistators, so this was a spectacular find. Saenz snapped it up, but serious questions remained. When had the codex been hidden in the cave? 1532? 1962? The location of the cave was and remained unknown, so the authenticity of the Saenz Codex is still questionable.
You are free to imagine the contents of the last codex, the pages of symbols and drawings, the last evidence, like the last phone book, encyclopedia, catalogue of science, philosophy, religion, and pornography. A whole forbidden world in one book that may or may not be decipherable. Possible secrets: how to heal, cure, travel to other planets, etc. How to do everything that we aren’t.
Once removed from its context in the site, whether a grave or a temple, it’s impossible to know the meaning or use of the stolen object, Ruth had explained, as if I didn’t know. She stole from sites, too, at least once. The thing’s history is then erased, broken off, too much time between death and the present to follow any story, it could have been a doorstop or a cigarette case. Suppose you’re offered a jade mask that you know was probably made to replace the head of a ruler who had lost his own in battles. When his body was discovered, his subjects buried him with jade replacement parts and five or six adolescent boy sacrifices, sealed alive in the tomb, that was the practice, and when dug up hundreds of years later, their skeletons were just by him, along with incised bones, obsidian flake blades, jade beads and stingray spines used for ritual bloodletting, or so you’re told. Without actually traveling to the site and comparing chisel marks, footprints, depressions left in the dirt, you can’t prove these things came from that particular place. Match between site and object can’t be declared beyond a shadow of a doubt.
The object scuttles around the boundaries of its meaning: had it been used in ritual sacrifice or was it a can opener with a face? The mundane and the sacred jumbled together with no way out of the maze of connotation, no way to organize them into hierarchies, and the divine was often tied to the treacherous. I was busy constructing my own personal version of the Saenz Codex. Ruth would be the first one to taunt me, to ridicule the hot-glue gun and imaginary gods. I pushed my artifacts aside.
Sitting at my kitchen table circling jobs I had no qualifications for, finally led to an interview for a position writing voice-over scripts for a series of science programs: this is what happens when you mix the
rmite with liquid nitrogen, this is how the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, these are the invertebrates that live in a range of underwater volcanoes in a section of the Pacific as big as New York State. I’d been late to the interview at a small company run by a woman whose desk and Steenbeck editing machine were one and the same L-shaped surface overflowing with reels and coffee cups. She, herself, was a flowering plant with jagged petals of rusty blonde hair and black-framed glasses, a perennial producer of projects, perhaps only a fraction of which ever got off the ground. In describing them to me, one sentence, half finished, led to the next, and so on. The principle behind the series was that any naturally occurring phenomenon, could be taken apart and explained in terms of its smallest parts: molecules, atoms, quarks. Protons, photons, futons, electrons, neutrons, wontons. Her partner, who handled the technical side of the company, produced special effects for commercials: the glow on Eveready batteries, the twinkle on Mr. Clean’s earring. He was fed up with television ads and wanted to do something other than enhance or propel animated objects to make them more enticing to prospective consumers. Can you blame him? she asked me, though she didn’t expect an answer. She inquired about my work in eastern Iran. In the words eastern Iran, she confessed, she heard only American hostages. It was an impossible jump cut. I told her the truth. I had been nowhere near the embassy where the hostages had been taken.
