by Susan Daitch
But what about meteors and fossil beds, my potential employer asked? Have you written about cloud formations, extreme weather (tidal waves, typhoons, hurricanes), evolutionary theory, the possibility of life on Mars? She played with Boris and Natasha Pez dispensers, explaining that she was trying to quit smoking, and the Pez candy gave her something harmless to suck on.
We need someone whose expertise is varied, she said, but nice to meet you, and we’ll be in touch. It was over in an instant. I shook her hand and left to wait for the elevator in an empty hall paved with the kind of composite stone that looks like black vomit with white chips. If the city, just before it collides with the sun, becomes someone else’s Suolucidir, then these crappy office towers are the nymphaneums, arsenals, temples, and coliseums of the future. Good luck, dude, trying to figure out what went on in these cubicles.
I decided to walk east to grab the F train. The fruit man, a big, bearded Dominican with a square face, long hair in a ponytail, stood on the corner of Houston and Broadway stacking bags of plantains and avocadoes. Paintings of pineapples and bananas still floated on the side of his stall, but there were far more people walking through this intersection than there had been before I’d left the city. A bank had replaced an old man who repaired sewing machines. A hardware store had become what looked like a showroom for shoes that resembled small sculptures you could hold in your hand. I still wasn’t acclimated to large crowds. Then I saw her: Ruth, across the street, laughing, arm and arm with someone, another ponytailed man, though his was short and looked like a shaving brush. I took him to be Saltzman, but it could have been anyone. I didn’t know Ruth was back in the city, but why would I? I started to cross the street to talk to her, then stopped, because I didn’t know what I would say. Ruth, I found the lost city, I was left for dead in a pit, Ruth, call your grandmother? I turned on my heel and ducked into a bar that catered to tourists. It was dark and loud, but the swinging double doors were right there, so I stood at the zinc or zincish counter and ordered a beer. A man in a sweatshirt that read, If there’s no gambling in heaven, I’m not going, pored over a guidebook, and I was about to ask him if he needed directions when I heard a voice calling my name. My first impulse was to be happy to hear the cheery Ash-shor, but this reaction was quickly followed by a different instinct: oh fuck. It was Ruth, smiling as if glad to see me. She had cut off her hair and was wearing big silver Frida Kahlo–like jewelry. Her voice had a new slightly Mexican accent when she said words with r in them. If only I’d chosen another bar, or gone deeper into this one. Larry hung back a few feet away, holding a rolled-up newspaper in one hand while he put change in a telephone near the entrance, and looked up briefly to give me a smile that would only tax his face for a second until he got back to more pressing matters. Phone wedged between ear and shoulder, he had a concerned expression on his face, so I hoped the call would last a good half hour at least.
“I saw you from across the street. Didn’t you hear me? How have you been?”
I ping-ponged the question back to her, though I didn’t really want a response, and knew I’d get one whether I wanted one or not. She and Larry were only in the city for a week, then they would return to Mexico where they were now working, making a film about Augustus Le Plongeon and his photographs of Chichén Itzá. There was no monkey with a monogrammed case, but she was interested in the story about the platform of the Eagles and Jaguars high on the calendar pyramids, the spot Le Plongeon said was the burial place of Chacmool, prince consort to a dethroned Maya queen who had escaped to Egypt. From the Chiapas to Ghiza, they planned to follow a footpath of memes. They had gotten enormous amounts of grant money from Kodak. When she asked me what I was doing I told her I had a job producing films for NASA on interplanetary travel. I was so preoccupied figuring out how to illustrate jumping from Jupiter to Mars, in other words, that I hadn’t heard her call my name.
“I saw you last week on the Q train platform at Union Square, and yelled your name, but you didn’t turn around then either. Your train came, and you disappeared.” While pronouncing this sentence she became annoyed, accusing me of avoiding her, of making our split more of a cataclysm than it needed to be. Insisting that the unpaid delinquent taxes and late fees that still dogged her, all of it was my fault, I’d disappeared into what was it called? Soul Disappear? Sole Sidur? No, Suolucidir. Okay, yeah, where should she send all the letters from the IRS? The gust that began sort of friendly turned into a tornado: your enthusiasm is like a firehose, you don’t take anyone else into account, she shouted over the man in the gambling sweatshirt who was asking the barmaid how to get to Grand Central. He wanted to take a train, not a shuttle, and didn’t seem to understand that the shuttle was a train. Why are you telling me all this now? I shouted. Ruth kept raising her voice. She remembered when she wanted our apartment to be a meat-free zone, and I brought home smoked shoulder of something, some animal, just to spite her, and the apartment was filled with the smell of meat, spicy and salty, the air made you hungry every time you inhaled. The time I left her waiting at the airstrip because in my experience, arriving flights to central Chichén Itzá were always late, and I assumed her plane would be, too. I’d landed a few weeks earlier in order to set up camp, so I knew the odds of an on-time arrival were small. How was I to know that one time the plane would be on time? Ruth was alone, pacing the airstrip in front of a small one-room structure that served as a station, you couldn’t really call it an airport. Even the woman who sometimes sold polenta and chilies wrapped in banana leaves to passengers, even she was gone. Ruth had steam coming out of her ears. It was not an image I wanted to remember. I began to wish Larry would get off the phone already and tell her they needed to leave immediately in order to make a bus to Susquehanna to see a man about a hat company.
“I didn’t take a Q train last week. I never take the Q and less than never from Union Square. It must have been someone who looks like me.”
“No one looks like you.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I figured.” It was familiar joking banter, and though she smiled almost sweetly, full typhoon averted, when she spoke, I glanced casually at my watch, calculated that if I didn’t leave soon the conversation would spiral and include the new boyfriend, so I left Ruth with my half-finished beer, tipped my hat at Larry, still on the pay phone as I passed him on my way out.
When I got to my building the astrologer was leaving her apartment, taking out a stack of old newspapers, archival evidence of her columns giving love and money advice for a future that will never happen.
“Are you having work done in your apartment?’
I shook my head.
“Someone was making a racket up there.”
“When?” I shouted at her as I leaped up the stairs two at a time, looking down at her hair dyed in olive and grape-colored feathers. She shrugged.
The door was ajar. I only had to look in at the stuff thrown all over the place in my apartment to know the refrigerator door would also be open, swinging in the breeze, orange juice concentrate melting and pooling into a small lake. The scroll and the simurgh were gone, as was Sidonie Nieumacher’s notebook, and Rostami had left no forwarding address.
“Ariel? Thank God it’s you. I’m still looking for Ruthie, and now I’m getting very worried. Did you see the paper this morning?”
“No, Ada, no, I haven’t read anything yet.”
“There’s an obituary for Ariel Bokser, a thirty-six-year-old man who lives in Brooklyn, left an ex-wife and a stepmother behind, but no other relatives. “
“It must be someone else because you’re talking to me.”
“Well, I don’t think so. It sounds just like you. How’s your stepmother?”
“I don’t know I haven’t talked to her in a while.”
“A strange woman. She argues with everyone, and she can’t stop talking. It’s like there’s a button on her butt, and when she sits down you
can’t shut her up. I don’t know what your father saw in her. You can’t trust Tchoimans.”
Ada, who often appeared to be easily steamrollered, but in fact was no pushover, said this about a lot of people. The truth was I didn’t know my stepmother very well and needed to get the paper to see if I’d died overnight, but Ada diverted from the subject of my demise, carried on about my stepmother, a woman she’d only met at my wedding — an event she otherwise claimed to have no knowledge of.
“If she told me once, she told me a hundred times that Bokser means carob, a tree that doesn’t bear fruit for seventy years, so you plant knowing that even though it will offer you nothing, the tree will benefit someone in the future. Like by telling this story she proved that she, a Bokser by second marriage, was providing for her grandchildren while the rest of us were deadbeats. What she was really doing was stealing from you and Ruthie.”
“Ada, are you at home?”
“I’m not going anywhere.” She sighed, remembering our conversations were often short. “Call me if you hear from Ruthie.”
I borrowed a paper from my neighbor’s doorstep and quickly turned to the obituaries. It was true. Ariel Bokser had died, no memorial service, no dearly missed stepson, etc. Just a short notice:
Deceased: Ariel Bokser, Aged 32. Born May 19, 1950 Brooklyn, New York. Died suddenly of unknown causes, March 18. Graduated from the University of Chicago. Did field work in Iran. Survived by former wife, Ruth Koppek Bokser of Mexico City and stepmother, Miriam Raub Bokser. Contributions can be sent to the Zafar Institute.
I didn’t know whose body was found in the Gowanus Canal. It couldn’t have been Rostami, because Ruth had seen him (mistaking him for me) waiting for a Q train at Union Square. Assuming Rostami wanted to shed Bokser, but didn’t want to kill me, perhaps he’d found some anonymous shmuck on whom to plant my passport, fake tax returns, whatever, and put an end to him, so Rostami could become Jahanshah again. Well, it’s a theory. Now I, too, was going to have trouble being Ariel Bokser. I could no longer apply to the Zafar Institute in order to return to Suolucidir, for one thing. I was floating, like a man walking on a wire between tall buildings, or only navigating the possibility of a short drop between sawhorses weighted down by sandbags, not sure whether the risks of reinventing myself were life-shattering or more inconsequential than one might think.
Pin Trays (first half of the nineteenth century), although they are authentically of the seventeenth century; nonetheless, this description leads one to believe they were in fact used as pin trays in the period indicated by the antiquaries of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Apollinaire’s version of Cinderella,
cataloging the fate of her renamed squirrel-fur slippers
“MY TELEVISION ISN’T WORKING, AND I need to watch the Iran Contra hearings.” Alyssa, who lived downstairs, was at my door holding her cat, Catullus. This seemed out of character for an astrologist; perhaps it was just an excuse. Alyssa was wearing a striped man’s shirt over black tights, not something she would wear on the street, I’m guessing, possibly something one would sleep in, so it did occur to me that watching the hearings wasn’t the only reason she’d knocked on my door.
“Sure, Alyssa. I was just about to turn them on.” This wasn’t exactly true, but my apartment was small, and if one person was watching television, everyone else present was as well. I flipped on the set, fiddled with the channel until Oliver North’s gap-toothed hound dog expression filled the screen. His voice trembled, he pointed to the ceiling and talked about his willingness to meet Abu Nidal anywhere at any time.
Alyssa flopped into a chair and put her feet up on the table, littered with my artifacts constructed from found junk. I looked at her feet, but she was oblivious. Among the pieces of tile, bottle caps and the hot-glue gun was a letter from the Red Cross office in Zurich that still handled queries about possible World War II refugees. She picked it up and looked at the envelope.
“A registered letter? Ariel? Do you owe someone a lot of money?” She flicked the envelope making a snapping noise as fingers hit the return address. “Are you studying to be a doctor? We’ll be sorry to see you leave, but Zurich is a cool place. You can hang out at the Dada café, Apollinaire’s, around the corner from where Lenin plotted the revolution.”
“It’s Café Voltaire, not Apollinaire.” Who was the royal we who was going to miss me when I left to work for the Red Cross in Switzerland? Alyssa and the spirits?
The letter confirmed that a Bruno and Sidonie Nieumacher had been students in Berlin, moved to Marseilles, and a year later were listed as passengers on Le Faroan. The dates of the International Red Cross records and the dates in the Nieumacher documents coincided.
“If you can predict the future, why do you need to watch? I mean don’t you already know the outcome?”
“That’s not what I do. I just write an astrology column.”
“But it’s related.”
“Not really. I’ve told you before, my horoscope predictions are all pretty much made up, and listen Ariel, that’s just between you and me. Give it a rest, hey, I want to listen to this.” But she got up from the chair, walked into my kitchen, looked through my fridge, found some orange juice and vodka, and made herself a drink.
“Make yourself at home,” I said.
“Well, I wasn’t sure you would offer. I’ll make you one, too. Actually, you may find this hard to believe, but I’ve found watching the hearings helps me with my work. My column’s not all love and romance and money, money, money, money.” She sang the last words to the tune of the O’Jays song. “You’ve seen Fawn Hall,” she said. “If I looked like Mrs. Oliver North, and my husband had a secretary who looked like that, fuck Iran, I’d be worried about something else.”
The astrologist walked back, paused to swallow, then handed me my drink.
“So I write: Taurus, watch out for a threat to you that is present in a loved one’s life. Perhaps you never thought about this person. He or she could be someone you overlooked or took for granted, but they might very well spell trouble.”
So that was how it was done. I was impressed.
“Did you watch any of North’s testimony?” she asked.
I nodded. I had seen Oliver North testify that he met Iranian arms merchant Manuchar Ghorbanifar in a men’s room, and it was here, leaning against a wall graffitied with initials, penises and jokes about bodily fluids, that Ghorbanifar had given him the idea to divert profits from Iranian arms deals to the Contras.
“A men’s room. I ask you,” Alyssa commented, though she didn’t say what exactly she was asking. “Reagan uses an astrologer to make decisions. I’d bet my life on it.” She didn’t have a very high opinion of her colleagues. I began to realize this was just a day job for Alyssa, though I never found out what she did when she wasn’t writing her column.
“Sometimes you have to go above written law,” Fawn Hall squeaked into her microphone. “You have to heed a higher law.”
“What fucking higher law?” Alyssa shouted at the screen. She sounded like my grandfather, a cranky alte kahker, yelling at the radio during the McCarthy hearings, the Rosenberg trial, when election returns were announced. “Dumb shite. Look at that hair! She looks like she’s got a Pekingese puppy sitting on her head.”
Hall had shredded a stack of documents relating to the illegal war against Nicaragua, a war effort funded by the sale of arms to Iran. The known dimensions of the stack measured a foot and a half high, but it was probably bigger, and included memos, codes, telephone logs, notes of all kinds. This speaks of spectacular patience and stamina in the face of a boring, time-consuming, repetitive task. Fawn Hall, patriot and former Playboy Bunny, had the strength of her convictions. Sometimes pouty and biting her lip, yet Hall voiced no doubts that she had done the right thing. Confident of the body she inhabited underneath the loose shirt and tight skirt, she invited anyone who watched her to imagine her standing over the shredder, long fingers slipping one document after another into the
moving blades, long strips of confetti coming out the other end.
“These are like the people who advertise on late night TV or in the margins of magazines, promising miraculous vegetable peelers, extra sharp knives and certified gold dust for sale.” Alyssa insisted on the banality of the players on the screen that night, they were too fundamentally bland to be perverse, too empty to house dark secrets, no gargoylish imps scampering around in their brains. “Believe me, I’m an astrologist,” she said, “though not a committed one,” and I laughed with her, though I wasn’t convinced the parade of the indicted and subpoenaed were just any old anybodies for whom the sale of missiles (huge profits skimmed off the top) to Iran was just a day at the office.
We argued back and forth for a while. The masterminds were very ordinary people who wiped inky fingers from reading newsprint off on their pants and then took out the trash, or, no, they were devils of ingenuity and originality, architects of secret second governments, coups, the man or men behind the curtain. Alyssa made herself another drink, then fell asleep on the couch. I touched her shoulder, close enough to smell her orangey breath, but she didn’t move. The big shirt wasn’t big enough to cover her butt when she snoozed on her side. It hiked up to reveal a band of sunburnt skin. When she woke Alyssa would be embarrassed to find she had conked out on my couch. My neighbor liked to present herself as the kind of person who could eat nails for breakfast, but I turned off the television and let her sleep. Her olive feathered hair was brown at the roots, and her ink-stained hands were partially hidden under her head. Catullus was nowhere to be found.
Alyssa stopped me in the hall. She had signed for a flat package, a ten-by-fourteen-inch envelope, but she admitted she’d been sitting on it for awhile.
