I Am Max Lamm (5 page)

Another student answered, but Mr Lewski stared at Weinberg, back at carving his desk with a drawing cornpass. Who’d have thought the kid gave a shit? And watching Mr Lewski watching Weinberg, Max Lamm recognized the unadulterated joy he’d observed in toddlers running headfirst into a sprinkler on a hot summer’s day, a good ten years before they grew up enough to stop being happy. Mr Lewski stood there staring at the most insolent, disagreeable kid he’d ever taught, enraptured the way the black-hatters at the Yeshiva, the bearded Orthodox with their nine kids in a Toyota van, would feel if they chanced upon the Messiah late one Friday afternoon at the deli while they waited for pickled herring.

How, Max Lamm wondered that moment in the classroom and again eleven years later with the teacher’s ghost in Hyde Park, did Mr Lewski sustain his unforced love of learning? For thirty-four years, the enlightenment he experienced through enlightening others. The unartificial effervescence that Lewski applied not only to educating his students, but to life as a whole! A man whose existence, it was obvious now that Lamm’s had disintegrated, had been phenomenally charged with charity, selflessness, responsibility, common sense.
The right priorities.

That’s
what invigorated your English teacher; an ordered life. Cohesion from chaos; the noble challenge of moulding critical young minds against the relentless flood of informationless info, of manufactured news, of encrypted advertising that submerges the kids every time they turn on the TV. Never won a bravery award like the guy who saved your life in the East River, but Lewski
was
a hero. He battled stupidity’s entropy, the ignorance implicit in assumptions.
Order against disorder.
That was your teacher’s oxygen until the cancer won. Mr Lewski was everything that you’re not.

In the wet bushes, the teacher’s ghost – or your hallucination? – shimmered in the lilac hue of the chopper’s distant searchlight.

‘
Mr Lewski!
’

Lamm shouted the teacher’s name, aware that he was, of course, giving away his hiding place. This is the way they’ll catch you? He remembered a story he read in
New Scientist
magazine at a chiropractor’s waiting room. A team of physicists, from Lawrence Livermore or another of the Pentagon’s military weapons labs, had researched how to use lasers to make sounds in the sky. Their aim was to simulate Allah’s voice in the clouds above Saddam’s armies, thunderously instructing the soldiers to leave Kuwait and go home for prayers.

‘
Mr Lewski!
’

No reply.

Gone. But the tweed jacketed phantom remained burnt into Lamm’s retinas.

It
was
a ghost? Because if merely a figment of psychosis, then Mr Lewski would’ve said something? Crazy people hear voices, right?

Lewski stared at you silently. The ghost of condemnation.

Throughout Hyde Park, the police helicopter whirred like a mosquito through a radio. After twenty minutes of creeping through dewy foliage, Lamm trampled into an overgrown grove. The width of half a tennis court, its uncut grass bathed a sepia hue beneath pregnant purple clouds and smog eclipsing stars. At the centre a barbeque; this was once a pleasant, lavender-scented grotto ideal for picnics in springtime. Not so popular now that four fried chicken franchises crowded the block between Selfridges and Great Cumberland Place. The barbeque’s knobs, Lamm noticed, were crisscrossed with stale spider webs.

Streaks of dawn pierced the fog. He sat atop the filthy forgotten grille. Rubbed his numb feet, exhaled, and thought: this new life. This abhorrent new life because the poor fucker’s dead. What might have saved the kid? Neurosurgery?
You killed him.
Say a prayer, murmur
kaddish
at the dribbling sky. Do you remember the words?

Comatose pupils don’t dilate like
that
, like a leaky hose. Time decays in one direction. Lamm recalled the dull lifeless thud of Malik Massawi’s head striking the gutter. The stillness, the disconcerting lack of bleeding. The glassy absence in those brown eyes fixed at the bus shelter’s perspex roof. It didn’t take a physician to discern that the essence of survival – the dull clack-clack-clack of being alive, like a train on worn tracks – had irretrievably disappeared when the Pakistani boy lay on the Camden pavement like an undersized fish asphyxiated on the floor of a sinking dingy.

The helicopter had returned. In less than a minute loudening from a distant buzz to thunder overhead, its searchlights crisscrossing the park. Discernible in the spotlight’s spill:
METROPOLITAN POLICE
in blue letters beneath the cockpit. Lamm crouched behind the barbeque.
Run into the bushes? Or stay still?
The rat-a-tat loudened, leaves shuddering in the gale of rotors two hundred metres away.

Crawl for cover? But they’ll see you!

Lamm noticed an iron grate set into the barbeque’s limestone base. He pulled at the rusty hinge, tripping backwards when the latch gave way. Inside, a shallow cavity containing gas pipes. Not fit for a temporary grave, but inside it he crawled. In apartments overlooking Hyde Park, bedside lamps flickered on as hedge fund managers and PR executives awoke to the chopper’s racket. This fucking noise at four-thirty in the morning! There’s a doorman downstairs, surveillance cameras in the elevators, still a searchlight’s piercing my curtains!

The light hit the old barbeque. Nothing.

Nine hours Lamm stayed down there. Sleeping thirty, forty minutes at a time, his eyes fleshy pink bulbs, the hunger and headache unprecedented. This hunger making Lamm giddy, its hollow intestinal tentacles climbing up, up his throat to suck everything from anything. Too exhausted to risk buying food; he’d climbed outside once already, to piss and dump the trash left by the hole’s previous degenerate tenant. Too dangerous for his flat in Golders Green, the one-bedroom rental where his rotting mattress grew an undiscovered species of mould, where fat termites devoured the chipboard mantelpiece. The hundred-quid-a-fortnight place that Lamm shared – at least for that month – with a typically hairy, stoned Israeli backpacker named Avi. What if the police had somehow identified him from the CCTV footage? What if they had collected his DNA from the crime scene and made a match to a database that he didn’t know existed? They might be watching his address.

Or they haven’t identified you?

Either Lamm remained anonymous, or the area was under surveillance unmatched since the Hyde Park bombing of 1982, when an IRA nail bomb killed four men and seven horses of the Queen’s Household Cavalry parade.

If you fall asleep, the hypothermia’s guaranteed. So, when Lamm heard only squirrels clawing oaks and the faint hum of Oxford Street taxis, he crawled outside. With his lighter (dry in a crushed pack of Marlboros), he lit the gas barbeque at ‘medium’ on the dial. A cruel end for the spiders roasting inside (yet no crueller than being eaten by your mother, as baby spiders often are). Twenty minutes later when he turned off the gas, the subterranean hideout was warm as a Park Lane penthouse. Down the hole, Lamm loosened his scarf and exhaled like a walrus.

Your alarm might go off!
Lamm fumbled for his mobile phone, encased in dust. But it wouldn’t turn on; the battery was flat. Lamm bit his tongue.
You were meant to charge it last night!
And the charger is on your bedside table, plugged into the one reliable socket in your decaying bedroom. Yes, there are phone boxes along Bayswater Road, decorated with prostitutes’ flyers showcasing women photocopied from Russian porn magazines. But it’s too dangerous to leave the park.

And who would you call?

His jacket hood a pillow, Lamm lay on the toasted bricks. Sleep, until your nails grow like a badger’s and skin covers your eyes like a mole’s! He looked up through the grill at the glowing coals. Funny, the way those hot rocks look fuzzily unreal, like an oil painting in the subterranean dim. The blurry coals of hell, as depicted in the Renaissance masterworks – Rubens, Caravaggios, Raphaels, et al – that his art teacher, Ms Komesaroff, stuck on the walls of the painting room at Mount Scopus College. Always she praised the overblown religious imagery in those sixteenth-century oils – Adam and Eve, archangels and apples, serpents and Satan – all the Pope-appeasing excess that Principal Rubin and Rabbi Gringlass appreciated as Great Art, instead of the degenerate works – the bloody aneurysmic hell of Hieronymus Bosch, the gory Goyas, or something contemporary like a bloodlusty Francis Bacon or a technicolour collage of posh Gilbert and George fucking each other in the arse – that engrossed Lamm in their glorious transgression.

Max Lamm: sports champ
and
a lover of art. A combo that typically gets annihilated in the one person the way matter and antimatter disappear in a flash of light. Ms Komesaroff pasted Caravaggio’s portrayals of hell upon the art room walls, but, Rabbi Gringlass informed the students, Jews don’t really believe in hell. Hell’s for drunk Irish priests and nuns blessing their spaghetti in the Vatican courtyard. The Jewish hell – the most recent Jewish hell in the four-thousand-year-old lineage of Jewish hells – was sixty years ago. If Hieronymus Bosch saw Adolf Eichmann’s handiwork, he couldn’t paint it. No paint’s bloody enough for the blood, black enough for the black.

Order vs disorder.
At Lamm’s core was the instinctive force – a raw non-negotiable force – betraying the grey world of rules, regulations, polite expectations. The timeless pull of heroic failure:
that’s
what intoxicates you. For thirteen years, from adolescence until he tried to drown himself in the East River, Lamm was consumed by: (1) competitiveness, incorporating his mysterious talent for tennis; (2) painting, as he tried to portray on canvas his warped love of the female form; and (3) the fleshy gash revealed by a statuesque girl’s thighs akimbo, during the final prepenetrative moments before primal anticipation yields to the urge’s clockwork thrust.

At Melbourne University Law School and again when he took a semester at NYU, the obese volumes of legislation numbed those human impulses. Numbed the uncooked essence of existence –
flee
,
fight
,
fuck
– portrayed in the paintings he loved. The paintings in expensive books that, when he was fifteen years old, Lamm permanently borrowed from the art room at Mount Scopus. After three hours of gazing at the monotonous baseline, service line, net, at fuzzy yellow balls bouncing blurry top spins, Lamm relaxed not as his fellow tennis champs did – i.e., watching TV sports or blabbering over a $17 salad in a chrome café – but by sitting in leafy Caulfield Park on the way home and losing himself in those canvasses; the depraved images that confused his father, to whom art meant the
Mona Lisa
and the painting of dogs playing poker.

Since his schooldays raiding the bookshelf in Ms Komesaroff’s art room, Lamm had loved Francis Bacon. Bacon’s green gorilla skulls atop stark slabs of meat, his bloody purple rendering of Pope Innocent X on a melting gold throne, his mouthy pink coathangers of fleshy Soho queens decamped on garish beds of blood, cum, saliva, sweat. A lot beautifully, truthfully pornographic in Bacon’s convulsions of bones, lips, cocks, skin; revoltingly animal yet arousingly human. Bacon’s orgasmic deathly eruptions spoke to Lamm, to a black cranny inside this nice Jewish boy, and Lamm aped the master’s technique – the burst aneurysms of white, the haemorrhaging globules of congealed red – when he spent six months working on a canvas of a terrified fox fleeing its hunting party. Lamm loved Goya too.
Los Desastres de la Guerra
illustrating what soldiers do when violence becomes victory’s end, not its means. Disembowelment. Dismemberment. Decapitation. How superbly,
lovingly
, Goya etches a cockless, headless body draped over a tree stump! Or
La Maja Desnuda
, the first totally profane nude in Western art, portraying the Spanish master’s plump mistress begging for it.

What most captivated Lamm in Ms Komesaroff’s art room, so that he slipped
The Collected Paintings of Francisco Goya
into his schoolbag, was
Saturn Devouring his Son.
Naked wild-haired Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture (who resembles an unwashed homeless bum) is tearing his baby son into pieces. Ripping the infant’s head off, arms and neck too, drenched in newborn fluids, inside a dim cavern not dissimilar to the hole beneath a barbeque in Hyde Park. Saturn devours the son who, it had been prophesised, would overthrow his father. Deaf, hallucinating with encephalitis, Goya painted the cannibalistic horror onto a wall in his villa ‘Quinta del Sordo’ – the ‘House of the Deaf Man’ – by the Manzanares River outside Madrid.

Beneath Hyde Park, Lamm saw that painting shimmer in the barbeque’s orange coals. The way Goya portrays the bloodstained, shitstained wound of a wasted existence. The wound of your mistakes consuming you, so that you eat your future, your son;
that’s
the fact fogged over by respectable Law. The ugliness! A savage truth concealed by the volumes of legislature, professional practice, tax guidelines and precedents that you were told to study two hours a night. Two hours’ staring at the impenetrable page, at the jargon . . .
a tale told by an idiot
,
full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.
Macbeth knew the same infernal frustration.

New York University, February 2003. Max Lamm with haunted pink eyes, sitting up the back of a lecture in international criminal law. He pretended to ignore the jeers, sneers, sniggers sent his way by classmates, lecturers, even Sergei the janitor who evidently read the
New York Post
sports pages. The scandal broke and inevitably, Lamm was asked to ‘take time off’. The first exchange student ever expelled from New York University Law School. Sure, Ted Kennedy was expelled from Harvard and returned to graduate. But Ted Kennedy was a Kennedy. Walking out of the law school’s grand lobby for the last time, Lamm glimpsed the future, how he’d likely be remembered: not as a tennis champ upon the winner’s podium, nor as a crusading attorney, painter, writer, thinker, animal lover, renaissance man-child of exceptional unrequited talents, but as the downloaded ghoul who lost his student visa by fucking a Salvadorian beauty on a concave bed in an illegal whorehouse on Second Avenue.