Wakefield (36 page)

The City Club has a long and sometimes scandalous history. It has stood for a century in the middle of what was once a notorious red-light district, and husbands of a certain era were said to be “at the Club” if anyone asked. When an overzealous mayor shut down the district after World War One, the club remained, and some of the district's sexual services moved discreetly inside in the form of an ever changing crew of masseurs and masseuses skilled at soothing both flesh and spirit.

Wakefield feigns interest in becoming a member and is admitted on a three-month guest pass. Once inside, he puts himself into the hands of an old masseur, under whose ministrations he learns, for a tip, that the Historical Preservation Commissioner has been known to issue permits in exchange for favors, while cruelly persecuting anyone who runs afoul of the strict preservation regulations in the old quarter.

After the massage, Wakefield helps himself to a bottle of fancy water in the dark-paneled bar and reading room. The bookcases hold bound volumes of the club's weekly magazine, written by members for members. In an issue from 1891, a judge writes candidly that he will be happy to help club members who might find themselves in his court accused of anything short of murder, for which charge he advises “a prolonged sojourn in the Orient.” However, “alienation of the affections of a mistress” was an unthinkable offense and one to be resolved with pistols. Dueling is mentioned in the journal often, sometimes offhand, sometimes cryptically. “Dr. LB will be greatly missed. We have commissioned a medal made from the bullets that killed him and will bestow it on Mr. KD, the most likely among us to end the same way.” Racist jokes and choice crudities about the female sex abound in short poems and cartoons. The content of the current newsletter is slightly more self-conscious, but the candor of the members is still evident. In the first issue of the current year Wakefield finds a satirical comment by the Historical Preservation Commissioner about the purchase of the historic townhouse next door to Wakefield. “Our good friend, P., has acquired a former bordello in the illustrious old quarter. He has sworn to me that he will restore it to perfection, sparing no expense. I hope that he means this in both form and content. Sex is such a trifle these days, one misses the ‘sporting life' enjoyed by our forebears. I have wagered him an original Blue Book if he succeeds.”

The Blue Book was published monthly in the heyday of the red-light district, listing all the fancy brothels, including portraits of the prettiest girls, and their prices. An original Blue Book is a sizable wager, worth quite a lot on the rare book market, and gambling is one thing that the members of the club have taken seriously since its founding. The members have regular card games, too, and large sums are won and lost.

Wakefield lingers in the deep chair, soaking in the masculine atmosphere of the room. Rows of trophies line the shelves, and the faded photographs of men in trunks and boxing gloves, men lifting weights, holding tennis rackets, bending over the green felt of a billiard table, or hefting a glass, generate an aura that envelops Wakefield, as does the lingering aroma of Cuban cigars and Irish whiskey. It is the lair of his enemy, Wakefield thinks. I'm here to hunt him down, maybe catch him in some illegality that will put an end to the restoration. He decides to continue his investigation in the steam room.

With a towel draped over his head and one wrapped around his bottom, he lounges in the fog with a liquor distributor and a city court judge. They are discussing a liquor license for a new bar, talking right over his head as if he isn't there, and maybe he isn't. In the dim, steamy room he is truly invisible, his lifelong urge to disappear gratified. Wakefield returns to the club every day on his free introductory pass, picking up interesting information, becoming more and more inconspicuous now that he's a regular.

One day he overhears a bit of intriguing news. In a few weeks the city will conduct its annual termite fumigation, a foggy and poisonous affair. For three nights in the tropical spring the termites swarm; hordes of insects funnel out of the buildings and swirl around the streetlamps. Walking through the bugs is an ordeal, and most citizens stay indoors while city trucks pass through the streets releasing dense clouds of pesticide. The unfortunates caught on the streets get the dying insects under their eyeglasses, in their ears, and on their skin, transparent wings glued by sweat to their every pore.

The termites have been bad news for the city for decades, a century, but now, Wakefield hears a termite specialist explain to his companion in the steam room, Formosan termites, a new species, have arrived. The foreign bugs have a voracious appetite, fifty times more destructive than the native variety. They can consume an entire wooden building in less than a month, and killing them is almost impossible: houses have to be enclosed inside a plastic tent for ten days until poison gas penetrates every crevice. The specialist is not optimistic. The insects collected so far are being studied at the city's Termite Bureau. The peculiar distinction of this termite is that it is not detectable on the surface of the wood; it eats it from within until the beam or plank becomes sheer gossamer, or as the specialist puts it, “lace.” When someone steps on, let's say, a stair tread that looks for all practical purposes sturdy, his foot goes right through the board. “Just five of those bastards could gut a floor joist in twenty minutes,” the entomologist confides in his friend. Wakefield files this information away in his Catalogue of Horrors, which is housed in his memory opposite his Libidinal Store and has no connection to it, at least none he's aware of.

Weeks pass before Wakefield gets the information he's really after. The Commissioner of Historical Preservation and the mad restorationist stroll into the steam room one morning, wrapped in identical black towels. The commissioner is portly and jowly, the restorationist muscular and hard. They sit on the bench opposite Wakefield, involved in a conversation that must have begun on the treadmill.

“Dogs,” says the commissioner. “You train 'em to sniff for genuine period. If something's fake, the dog sits down just like a drug dog. Add dogs to plainclothes looking for illegal additions and we got them.”

The maniac approves: “Dogs! Damn! Walking up to doorknobs. Sniff, sniff. It's fake! Not 1823 by a long shot. They could smell acrylic paint, fiberboard, all kinds of synthetics …”

Amused, the two friends try to outdo each other thinking up means to detect inauthentic restoration: an elaborate system of mirrors that can catch people cheating on paving stones in courtyards; video surveillance to bust them replacing genuine Victorian fountain angels with cement replicas; piercing alarms that go off when someone repairs an old wall with new bricks.

At the mention of bricks, Wakefield listens even more closely.

“Bricks are a big problem, Chief,” the restorationist confides. “Antebellum bricks are selling for five dollars each. I'm being bled dry by my supplier.”

“I might be able to help you with that,” the commissioner says, lowering his voice.

Wakefield hopes he really is invisible, and pulls his towel over his face.

The black market source for old bricks—Wakefield strains to hear now, they are whispering—is somebody called the Grave, or Gravier, who gets them from historic cemeteries, for which the city is famous. Wakefield gathers that this Gravier dismantles old tombs under cover of darkness, replacing the old bricks with new, and he sells the stolen bricks at a fraction of the legitimate market price.

“The guy is great with faux finishes, covers over the new stuff with cracked, stained plaster,” snickers the commissioner. “The parvenus never notice the difference.”

Wakefield can hardly breathe. The two conspirators go on discussing the nasty business of grave robbing. “Can't let them sniffer dogs anywhere near the cemeteries,” laughs the madman. “Not 1823 by a long shot.”

Wakefield is a mass of sweat-stung wrinkles and he feels as if he is about to faint. When the steam-room door opens and a fat man with loud flipflops comes in, Wakefield slips out, unobserved.

A few days later he's watching from behind the louvers of his hotel room as a truckful of old bricks is unloaded across the street. He fancies he can even smell the dankness of the graves they came from. He can't quite believe the brazenness of the scheme, even though he heard it from the mouths of the conspirators, men charged with a public trust, looting the city's true historical past for the purpose of “restoration.”

More and more, Wakefield feels enveloped in invisibility: people in the street don't seem to notice him. Acquintances pass him by without a glance; even Ivan acts as if he isn't there, and he's blasé when Wakefield tells him about the cemetery thefts.

“Big fucking deal, that's how business is done everywhere, my friend. You want that the dead should have the best houses? Look, this whole detective thing is stupid. You should just take a vacation,” he says, but Wakefield continues his surveillance.

One afternoon the courtyard gate is left open and Wakefield trains a pair of opera glasses on the construction site. The project looks in a sorry state, more unfinished than ever; there is scaffolding in the middle of the courtyard, on top of which is a wooden chair where the madman sits surveying the chaos. He's a long way from getting that Blue Book, Wakefield concludes.

The hotel where Wakefield has taken refuge was built on the site of a Civil War hospital, and every evening he listens to the ghost stories of the tour guides as they pass under his windows. Then one night he actually sees a spectral soldier with blood-soaked bandages and a comely nurse hovering in midair over his bed. “Why are you here?” he asks telepathically, and they dissolve into a plume of white smoke. When he falls asleep he dreams that flames are licking the walls and soon he is lying in a sea of fire, but he's not afraid. The fire is on its way somewhere else, only coincidentally going through him. He wakes up feeling cleansed somehow, and that's when the solution to his problem comes to him.

The night guard at the hotel is a bored ex-con, a guy trying to keep his probation but on the lookout for any scam. Wakefield has seen him hustling hookers to guests, paying bookies, selling dope. The guard smiles and smooths down his khaki pants when Wakefield approaches. Wakefield gets right to the point.

“How would you like to make, let's say, a couple of thousand dollars?”

“You kiddin', man? I'd hang myself for that much fucking money.”

“Then you couldn't enjoy it.”

“You got a point. What would I have to do, brother?”

“Steal some bugs.”

The guy laughs. Then he listens.

And where, one might ask, has our Devil been all this time? It's not an easy story to tell, not even for the Devil, who is a master at telling his own story. He is, in fact, doing just that, but not to us: he's telling it to a psychiatrist, of sorts. Not just any psychiatrist, of course, but a supernatural mental health professional charged with the rectification of wayward demons. In short, after the Devil made his revolutionary speech at the demonic conference and then stormed back to his cave, the Dark Powers-That-Be had a closed-door meeting. The Devil, the Dark Powers concluded, is suffering from depression. The inevitable transitions ahead have upset him because he is overly attached to the beings it is his job to torment. Instead of just doing his job and collecting what is objectively his due, he's allowed his clients to identify with him and they have become prideful, believing in their own demonic divinity. Now he's allowed one of his clients to flaunt the terms of the Deal! Hubris in humans, as everyone knows, screws up the universe, which is supposed to be coldly efficient in every circumstance. The Ancient One has gummed up the works and he has compounded the situation by threatening to awaken the sleeping God, a prospect so terrible to every right-thinking citizen of Hell that it can hardly be imagined. To wit, this Devil is out of control. An intervention, followed by therapy, is called for and approved.

Our Devil looks inside each of his colleagues and sees nothing but his own reflection. Perhaps he has existed entirely too long, and exhausted himself in the effort, admittedly futile, of prolonging the Romantic era into the postmechanical age. His malignant minders authorize a raid on his quarters, sealing him in his cave with the aforementioned “psychiatrist.” The Devil is reminded of times when he was in similar predicaments: chained to the bottom of a well, imprisoned inside a labyrinth, tied to a rock with vultures pecking his liver, paralyzed by John of Patmos, hurled into an abyss by Milton. But during all those ordeals he had been alone. He's never before had someone to talk to while he contemplates his singularity, certainly not some kind of demon head doctor. But that's progress, he sighs, and begins to talk.

He does admit that awakening the sleeping God could have unforeseen consequences; God is asleep and dreaming the universe and His anger at being awakened will be incalculable. If His dream is lost, so are all things. He asserts that his own attachment to humans, including Wakefield, is a whim, with no great echoes. If humans can choose their mates and companions, why can't he, a loner and a bachelor, whose infinite solitude could use a bit of solace? In addition, the Devil sees no reason whatsoever why waste, corruption, and confusion should be eliminated for the sake of efficiency! Humanity has for all its existence done what the universe has asked of it: it has multiplied, it has recorded, it has abstracted, it has slaved. They've earned their R and R, by Jove. Now let them play.

The Devil argues and berates the representative of the Dark Powers-That-Be. He would rather be actively participating in the long stretches of Wakefield's story he's been left out of, but he's currently a prisoner of his own kind. Of all things!

It's the usual evening hour for Wakefield to go to the bar, but he walks past it and no one hails him from the window. He can hear foghorns on the river; the quarter is blanketed in haze. There is a little café in an alley behind the cathedral, a mysterious place with a few tables outside and a dark, inviting interior. Two women are sitting at the bar chatting in French with the bartender. He's explaining that they should stay indoors tonight because this is the night of the swarming termites and the poisonous gas. Indeed, the moon is already obscured by clouds of flying insects.