Wakefield (34 page)

It is always a confusing pleasure to listen to the Russian, especially after a few drinks.

“I've seen many American cities,” Zamyatin expounds. “Nearly every building in them has been demolished so that no one can revisit their past except in memory, and people's memories now must accommodate a great many things because of what they see on television. Maybe when they think of their old house, they substitute for it a Venetian palazzo, a Mongol yurt, or a Buddhist temple from a travel documentary. It must be exhausting to squat in someone else's memories.”

The restorationist next door continues his maddening work, treating every historic brick as if it were a sacred object. His workmen carefully deconstruct each wall, scraping the slave-made bricks clean with historically correct tools, and then they mortar them back in place, but often the restorationist is not completely satisfied with the results, and the wall comes down again in an endless, demented cycle of noise and dust.

On every side of the historic house are the bedrooms and studios of other neighbors inconvenienced by the work. Some of them have complained about the hammering, chiseling, and scraping; one even called the police, but the restorationist is authorized by his permit to work from seven in the morning until seven o'clock at night. Like Wakefield, some made calls to the city agency that issued the permit, but their complaints went unanswered; their calls were not returned. Soon they simply stopped hearing the racket, and Wakefield reflects that in this they are like many Americans: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Their lives go on quite normally, but Wakefield's does not.

“Oh, my poor
casa,
” he laments every day as the banging begins. He doesn't use the English word
house
because it doesn't adequately describe his cozy nest. An American house is not a French
maison
or a Spanish
casa;
his apartment is shuttered against the heat of noon and his balcony is shadowed by a magnolia tree with deep green leaves, and the courtyard walls are covered by flowering vines. Beyond them could be the Mediterranean, the lights of Morocco dimly visible across the water. Not only has his peace been shattered, his sweet illusion of elsewhere is also dimming.

Under other circumstances, Wakefield might have shared his neighbor's passion for preservation, but the more he thinks about what's happening, the angrier he becomes. The interior partitions have been removed from the old house and what was once a dozen apartments is now an empty, hollow space. Its accumulated history has been erased, its secret places dismantled, and its ghosts, if they remain, now share the attic with new central air-conditioning ductwork. The soul of an old city is the aggregation of human souls over time, and such aggregations are rare in America. The old quarter where Wakefield lives is one of the few, and it should be preserved, but the restorationist is eliminating the secrets of the house and killing the ghosts that have lodged in it over time. And in the process, he's killing Wakefield.

At about the time of the second rebuilding, Wakefield opens the small window between his bathroom and the neighboring courtyard and screams, “Stop! Just stop that infernal noise!” The workmen look up from their bricks, and the restorationist appears on the scaffolding.

“Don't swear at my men!” he shouts back. “They are master bricklayers!

Master bricklayers! Perhaps Italian Renaissance craftsmen just arrived by packetboat from Carrara!

“This is my home!” yells Wakefield, sounding slightly hysterical. “I must have quiet!”

“Get a job!” screams the madman, and just then a brick, which all the banging has dislodged from Wakefield's side of the wall, falls on his bed with a thump. Wakefield slams the window shut. Smoldering, he fits the fallen brick back into the hole it came from, trying to process what has happened. The man is obviously insane, and that crack about getting a job, it's a declaration of war!

That afternoon the madman fires his “master bricklayers”: Wakefield hears him screaming like mad King Ludwig, except King Ludwig eventually finished his castle after bankrupting the kingdom. He calls his crew dreadful names when they refuse to take down a wall for the umpteenth time. After the master bricklayers have gone, the madman starts going it alone.

Now Wakefield is certain that the first hammerstroke that shattered his peace was the Devil's opening salvo. The continuing racket is just some kind of torture. Normally a starter pistol fires just one shot, he fumes. But it occurs to Wakefield that there was no clause in the contract as to the
duration
of that shot. In fact, there was no written contract at all. I should have known! The Devil is a lawyer, it's in every book, and I've been tricked!

El Diablo, are you out there? I get the message, but I'm not going anywhere, you bastard! Fuck authenticity! I'm home and I'm staying!

Wakefield waits for the Devil's angry reply, but it's as if El Sataniko has gone on a long vacation. When he gets no answer, Wakefield begins to worry. Is the Old Goat okay?

There is no way to explain to a person living in a quiet neighborhood, by a placid lake perhaps, what the unending racket has done to Wakefield's psyche. He begins to feel that the insane man with the hammer has always been there, that the torture will never stop, that his entire life has been a dream, now a nightmare, punctuated by the Hammer. He resolves to resist, to fight, and he begins to plan. He studies his neighbor, observes his movements, and in a little notebook makes a chart of his comings and goings.

One afternoon he calls Zelda. She's hurt by his not calling sooner, but they agree to meet at the café in the square where they went when they were dating. Wakefield wonders if the weather will hold, and buys an umbrella just in case.

In the days before the restorer, all he had to do was walk out of his
casa
and head for the square, where amusing and spontaneous spectacles always restored him, tonic for the soul. As he walks now he merely notes the familiar buildings on his street; he knows exactly which façade hides a hideous suburban-style renovation and where the attic and the new kitchen join, leaving a dark hollow perfect for a small acrobat. He can tell from the slant of a roof where a forgotten chamber is hidden by the latest partition.

After his review of the street, he occupies the corner table at the café, but today the square doesn't amuse him. He sees only the broken paving stones and the panhandlers. Once called the Place d'Armes, it was the site for public whippings and the occasional hanging. Today he thinks he can see the outline of an ancient gallows. Actually it's a bit of scaffolding erected on the façade of the old cathedral, but still the tourists gathered there look to him like spectators to an execution. Their fat bellies and stupid T-shirts seem particularly sinister. Many times he's heard people from Japan or France remark how “European” the city is. Now he sees that the source of their delight is the smoke of a murderous history that fills their minds when they inhale.

Wakefield orders an amaretto and an espresso and waits for Zelda to turn up. Someone has put an old phone book in the wire trash container and he retrieves it, reading it randomly to pass the time. There are eighteen pages of “occult businesses,” including Zelda's own Crossroads Travel, along with palmists, aura readers, past-life therapists, exorcists, shamans, telepaths, channelers, and musical magicians. He looks up attorneys, whose listings take up at least as many pages—he thinks he might need one to stop the restorationist, or even to draw up the terms of his deal with the Devil. Then he looks up plastic surgeons; if he looked like someone else, he could go to a psychotherapist to
feel
like someone else. This Someone Else would be tolerant and philosophical about the madman, and he would bear the sound of the hammer as lightly as a feather. Then his lawyer would see to it that silence was restored.

Across from the café is a small museum. A mysterious object was displayed in its forecourt for years: an iron blimp, a Surrealist dumpling, thought to be the world's first submarine. It had been fished from the bottom of a lake, and no one knew how it got there. The thing had made Wakefield happy because it had a childlike absurdity, but now he notices it's gone, removed while he was away. A larger-than-life-size fiberglass figure of Marilyn Monroe, standing over the subway grate holding on to her skirt, has taken its place. The absence of the submarine is a blow to Wakefield. What does it mean? And where is Zelda?

An angel-girl wearing a short white skirt, golden sandals, and big white wings crosses the square and leans casually against Marilyn. Wakefield hasn't seen her around before; she's not one of the regular “statues” who make their living standing still while tourists challenge them to blink. She looks directly at Wakefield, an ice-blue gaze. He wouldn't be surprised if the new angel doubled as a hooker, yet the gaze is not mercenary. He beckons her over, and for a second it seems as if he's insulted her, but then she smiles faintly, flaps her wings, and sits down at his table.

“What's the matter, Wakefield? Don't you recognize an angel when you see one?” Zelda asks, kissing him on the cheek.

She's dressed for a costume party for the Jungian Therapist Convention in town this week and she's determined to take Wakefield with her. He balks, but the angel Zelda is very persuasive and so is the nearly imperceptible jiggling of her heavenly breasts, and he finally succumbs to her charms.

As Wakefield helps Zelda wiggle into the driver's seat of her car, one of her wings catches in the door and he gently frees it. The wings look so natural, he touches the place where they join her shoulders. It really does feel as if they've grown there, and Wakefield is tempted to believe that they have. After all, he didn't doubt the reality of the Devil. And where the devil is that devil, anyway?

The party is being staged on somebody's fancy houseboat on the lake. As they drive Wakefield tells Zelda the saga of the madman, the restoration, and his own pathetic desire to live in a tent.

Zelda is frowning. He knows that frown; it will translate itself in a minute into a flood of advice. “The trouble with you, Wakefield, is that you don't take care of your karma. The guy next door is obviously a demon you let in yourself. What we should do is work on the healing angle. There will be some people at this party you could talk to.”

“Can't I just kill him?” Wakefield says, thinking this will shock Zelda.

“Sure, but the next demon will be worse.”

They drive on in silence.

Wind is blowing at the lakefront; the water is choppy and the swaying houseboat looks like a sunburned egg with smoky windows. The Jungian therapists are crowded inside, and the crowd and the quaking make Wakefield feel slightly queasy. He loses Zelda pretty quickly in the mob and wanders among the Jungians, all costumed as archetypes of one sort or another, including Liberace and Elvis. There are lots of other angels, and a number of devils and demons, and everyone is shouting at the same time, amazed, he presumes, by the myriad synchronicities that attend their Jungian lives every second. After accepting a pink drink dipped from a silver punch bowl by an aging Elvis, Wakefield finds Zelda seated on a couch with one of the other angels, a Black one.

“Wakefield, meet Reverend Telluride. I was just telling her about your problem. The Reverend is a voodoo priestess. Actually, I'm her student. She's willing to take you on as a client.”

Wakefield would like to say no thanks, but the Reverend's eyes are looking through him, orbs of cloudy onyx, and Wakefield realizes she's blind.

An hour later Zelda is driving the three of them to the Reverend's place, a narrow shotgun house shaded by thick hedges of ligustrum. The houses on the block lean against one another as if for support, their meager backyards separated by improvised sheds and rusting appliances.

The front room is lit by two sputtering black candles. Wakefield makes out various items displayed on what look like discarded magazine racks: herbs, oils, incense, candles, salts, and jewelry. There are some large African statues in the corners and some smaller ones on a black desk. Behind the desk is an old-fashioned photo booth with a ratty velvet curtain.

“I'm only here to observe,” says Zelda. “I'll be very, very quiet.”

That would be a first, thinks Wakefield, who has no idea why he's here, but then, that's his m.o., isn't it?

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.