Wakefield (2 page)

“You're assuming, dear sir, that you have one, but whether you do or you don't, I don't want it. I want a
thing
, pure thingness, something that proves you found this so-called true life. Beyond that, the vortex of terror and self-doubt my simple request has created in you is adequate compensation. We have a deal, Mr. Wakefield, if you agree to these terms. I'll give you one year. It's an outlandish opportunity, but now that my existence has been proved by the discovery of black holes, I can afford to be a little generous.”

Wakefield considers the practical aspects of his journey. “What about all the people who depend on me? My ex-wife, our daughter, the credit card companies, the people listed in my cell phone?”

“They won't even notice that you're gone.”

“So when would this spiritual scavenger hunt begin?” Wakefield asks, sounding more relaxed than he feels.

“You must listen for the sound of the starter pistol,” says the Devil supermysteriously, holding up his empty glass, “but for now, you can pour me another drink.”

PART ONE

OLD QUARTER

Wakefield lives alone in the old quarter of an indulgent port city known for its vigorous nightlife. It is in fact nighttime now, a rainy night about ten o'clock, and Wakefield has just concluded his deal with the Devil. Energized by that encounter, he grabs an umbrella and, as is his habit, heads for the corner bar, his home away from home. He bumps into a mob of tourists obstructing the sidewalk. They are clustered around a caped guide, leader of a ghost tour. They look sad, wet, lost, and a little scared. Adhesive badges identify them as members of the group so that nonpaying customers can't attach themselves to the tour for free.

All the tour guides in the city have their own stories, and ghosts to go with them, and they are fiercely, even combatively, competitive. Rumbles can break out between the costumed guides, and often do: silk-caped vampires attack other silk-caped vampires, and tourists sometimes get hurt in the process. Ordinarily, Wakefield avoids these groups like the plague that they are. This guide seems to be pointing directly at him, but Wakefield knows that the gesture is meant for the building behind him, the city's first icehouse, now a hotel where the ghosts of Confederate soldiers make frequent appearances. Some of the tourists have rooms in the hotel and yelp with delight at the guide's revelations. Others stare at Wakefield as if he is a ghost. He evades the gawkers and quickly arrives at his destination.

Ivan Zamyatin, Russian émigré cabdriver and unknown American philosopher, is sitting at his usual post in the bar, at a window open to the street yet shielded from the rain. He can be found in this place most evenings after five; the bar is his living room, just as his taxicab is his office.

Wakefield closes his dripping umbrella and takes the stool next to Zamyatin's. “Have you ever read any Hawthorne?” Wakefield asks his friend by way of greeting.

“I know
The House of the Seven Gables
, and the story ‘Young Goodman Brown,' about this poor young man who meets the Devil in the forest and there is a witches' sabbath and everyone in town is involved.…”

“No, not that one. There's this other story, about a guy who leaves his wife and home and everyone thinks he's dead but he shows up again after twenty years, no explanation, no questions asked.”

Zamyatin scratches one of the luxuriant sideburns that descend from his bald pate.

“In Russia, if someone disappears, everyone knows what happened. KGB picks him up and ships him to Siberia, if they don't kill him on the spot.”

Wakefield gives his friend a sideways look. “That's not the point. This guy was living in England, a democratic country, where they respect privacy and the rights of individuals. He wanted to split, and he did it, and then he came back. Period, end of story.”

Ivan is not impressed by people who disappear voluntarily, having himself been disappeared by the State, first for six months in a mental institute. After that experience, he had worked for five years below the Arctic Circle, but he didn't regard that quasisolitary episode as a “disappearance.” It was more like a gradual reentry into the world. In America, he had purposefully shed his taste for solitude.

“You know,” he says, looking deeply into his vodka, “I smoke in restaurants, park my taxi by fire hydrants, talk to everyone I meet. I leave many clues, so people can say, ‘Ivan was just here a minute ago, I gave him a parking ticket, I talked to him at the bar, he's alive, he's okay!' Not like Russia, where it's poof! Gone in a New York minute.”

Wakefield is silenced for a few minutes by this undeniable wisdom, typical of Zamyatin.

“The Devil showed up today,” he finally says, knowing he can trust Ivan with anything, no matter how absurd.

“What you talking about, the devil!” Ivan looks disgusted. “Don't be stupid. We Russians are sick of the devil, he did enough for us already. I come here to get away from devils. You a rich American, not too ugly, you have money to eat out, go to a show, anything you want. What you need the devil for, or God, or any of that stuff?”

Zamyatin has no time for devils. He's too busy leaving his mark on everything, filling space with smoke, noise, lewdness, strangers. If a witch tries to eat him, all the people he met (maybe just once, but marked real good) will come to his defense.

Wakefield is quite a busy man himself. He is a travel writer and a lecturer on almost any topic, including travel. He often lectures in places he's already written about, giving the natives a quaint “outsider” perspective on their familiar world. Maintaining a trademark naïveté, he will discourse on anything: life, money, art, or architecture.

His subjects are not at all academic to Wakefield. He has lived what he considers an interesting life, and his observations are based on experience. He feels that his insights make people better human beings somehow and that he's contributing to the common good, and his casual air of knowing whereof he speaks gives him authority, so people trust that under the skin of the studious traveler there lies a beating heart. He's even developed a reputation as a “motivational speaker,” though not a typical one, far from it. He's not the type who helps people find their inner selves through juggling, for instance. There is something about Wakefield's point of view that is quite dark, even dispiriting, making it hard sometimes for his audiences to finish the salad, to say nothing of the infamous “convention chicken.”

The lecture business pays well: employers shell out a fortune to “motivate” workers, with the result that most employees are over-motivated and radiate so much positive energy that their companies are forced to grow to provide new (sometimes fictitious) outlets to contain this boundless enthusiasm. Some shrewd CEOs quietly seek out realists, even pessimists, to temper the aggressive good cheer. Wakefield's brand of motivation uniquely fits this latter need, and his schedule has become very busy.

“How is the lecture biz?” Zamyatin asks, dismissing the devil from the conversation.

“Terrific, actually. There is a shortage of nonpositive points of view,” Wakefield explains, “so it's a seller's market. I've heard that corporations are even importing speakers from ex-communist countries where a nonpositive perspective is the norm, correct me if I'm wrong. Unfortunately, you imports don't speak English too good and that makes it difficult for you to convey your bleak beliefs to a large audience. You could make a mint, Ivan, if only you were more intelligible.”

Ivan is used to Wakefield's provocations, but still he bristles. “What's wrong with my English? Anyway, no fat cats want to hear what I think: everything is shit. That's ‘nonpositive,' okay, but you should also be happy anyway, and that's optimism.” He turns away from Wakefield and shouts, “Beautiful bartenderess, two vodkas, if you wouldn't mind!”

“Optimism,” Zamyatin continues, “was the official product of communism, but the people couldn't eat optimism, so they became pessimists. God forbid such a thing should happen in America! We produce enough to feed everyone and we need pessimists to make us feel okay about not being hungry. Here are the vodkas!”

Zamyatin's English is evidently good enough to charm the bartendress, who has poured two huge shots. She sets one on a napkin in front of Zamyatin and sloshes the other carelessly on Wakefield's shirt. As she walks away she wiggles her tiny blue-jeaned butt for the Russian and glares at Wakefield.

“It's hell in here,” Wakefield remarks to her sympathetically, gesturing toward the crowd at the bar waving money to get her attention. He wants her to like him.

“Hell's okay if you can keep up with it,” she shouts back, pouring with both hands.

Ivan resumes the conversation. “I met a man in my taxi today. He said he was a money manager, so I asked him where I should invest. He said buy a place in the country with chickens and goats. Fill the basement with soup cans and toilet paper. I said that's just like Russia, I don't live there anymore. In America everybody's making money on the stocks. This country believes in the future. He said it's all a scam. A bubble.”

“It's easy to make money in the market,” interjects a grungy person who's been studying the jukebox. “All you do is buy IPOs. I'm a musician and with the money I've made I've been buying instruments I only dreamed about back in Ohio. I have two e-trade accounts and I'm rolling in it.”

“Playing any music?” the vixen on the next bar stool asks, joining the discussion. She has a nose ring, a tongue stud, floral tattoos up and down her bare arms, and a bursting sun on the back of her neck. “I'm making like six hundred bucks a day on e-trades, but all I do now is sit at the bar and drink.”

“Me, too,” admits the musician, sitting next to her, “but at least I've got the instruments. When I stop trading, I'll play some gigs.” They begin comparing tattoos and their conversation becomes inaudible.

“No pessimists here,” Wakefield whispers to Ivan, “they've got a future: drinking at the bar and planning which body part to pierce next.”

“Meanwhile, they may fall in love, like me. I'm in love with the Beautiful Bartenderess!” Ivan bellows, kissing his fingers and throwing the kiss her way.

“People of the world, drop your schmaltziness.” Wakefield suspects that “love” is dangerous. It makes people euphoric and delusional. Herman Melville wrote something to the effect that the universe was formed in fright by an invisible sphere of dread. Then Walt Whitman came along preaching brotherly love and New World optimism. They proposed these different visions of the universe, and ever since, he thinks with some annoyance, we have believed one or the other. He imagines Melville and Whitman bent over a crystal ball, watching at the moment of creation. “Evil,” pronounces Melville. “Love,” effuses Whitman.

Wakefield takes out his pen and scribbles this idea on a napkin. He'll work it into his speech on “money and poetry (with a detour in art),” a speech he hasn't written yet, though he'll deliver it in less than thirty hours. Ideas always come to him randomly, from books, items in the newspaper, conversations overheard. “I belong to the Ted Berrigan school of ‘I can't wait to hear what I'm going to say next,'” he tells the people who hire him to lecture. Ted Berrigan was a New York poet and a genius talker who lived by a maxim attributed to another poet, Tristan Tzara: “All thinking is formed in the mouth.”

Zamyatin, meanwhile, is absorbed in watching two attractive women on the sidewalk studying a map. The street is atmospherically lit by the old-fashioned gaslights the city has recently installed in the historic district.

“Can I help you?” he calls to them. “I'm a taximetrist!”

The women lay their map on the windowsill in front of Ivan. The rain has stopped.

“We want to know exactly where we are,” one of them says. “I think we may be lost.”

You're tourists, thinks Wakefield, of course you're lost. It's your destiny. You're part of a sad fin-de-siècle tribe that wanders the world looking for an excuse to return home as soon as possible. You are a pox, a plague, an obstructive cloud of locusts, a human wall of potbellies and dewlaps! Wakefield despises the actual creatures, though without them he wouldn't have a penny to his name; he'd be an office worker or an alcoholic slacker playing the market. The paradox doesn't bother him, though.

Zamyatin actually enjoys tourists. He likes everybody, except the police. “You are at the best bar in the whole city,” Zamyatin tells them. “The martinis are incomparable, the people are very friendly, with the exception of this man here. I'm his only friend, but don't let that scare you. Come in and have a drink and when we are finished I will give you a tour in my taxi. Where are you from?”

They name a large, industrial city in the gray middle of the country. Wakefield knows it well: they make tires there, and plastic, and eat pork sausages and drink beer. The women accept Ivan's invitation. They come in and pull two stools over to the window.

“What are you writing?” one of them asks, picking up the napkin Wakefield's been scribbling on.

Ivan's beautiful bartendress brings the ladies martinis and gives the Russian a dirty look. Wakefield she ignores completely.

“Mel., Whit., looking into cryst. ball,” the visitor reads from the napkin. “Who are they? Mel and Whit?”

“They are a couple of guys waiting for chicks!” chuckles Ivan.

The tourists laugh. They aren't lost anymore, they are at home, in Zamyatin's world. One of them folds the map and puts it back in her purse. “Our husbands are at the convention,” she explains to the gentlemen.

“Ah, the convention! There are three conventions in town right now. Dentists, geographers, and cardiologists. Which one?” Ivan has been driving dentists, geographers, and heart doctors for three days.