Moon Palace (26 page)

Almost from the very start, I kept expecting him to tell me about his legs. The rocks of Utah struck me as a likely place for such an accident, but each day his narrative advanced a little farther, and still he made no mention of what had crippled him. The trek with Scoresby and Byrne, the encounter with George Ugly Mouth, the shootout with the Greshams: one by one, he had come through these events unscathed. Then he was in San Francisco, and I began to have my doubts that he would ever get to it. He spent more than a week describing what he had done with the money, enumerating the investments he had made, the financial deals he had pulled off, the frantic risks he had taken on the stockmarket. Within nine months he was rich again, almost as rich as he had been before: he owned a house on Russian Hill with a staff of servants, he had women whenever he wanted them, he traveled among the most elegant circles of society. He might have settled permanently into this kind of life (which in fact was the same life he had known since boyhood), if not for an incident that took place about a year after his arrival. Invited to a dinner party with about twenty other guests, he was suddenly confronted with a figure from his past, a man who had worked as a colleague of his father’s in New York for more than ten years. Alonzo Riddle was an old man by then, but when he was introduced to Effing and shook his hand, there was no question that he recognized him. Overcome by astonishment, Riddle even went so far as to blurt out that Effing was the spitting image of someone he had once known. Effing made light of the coincidence, joking pleasantly about how every man is supposed to have an exact double somewhere, but Riddle was too stunned to let go of it, and he began to tell the story of Julian Barber’s disappearance to Effing and the other guests. It was a horrible moment for Effing, and he squirmed through the rest of the evening in a state of panic, unable to free himself from Riddle’s wondering and suspicious eyes.

After that, he understood how precarious his situation was. Sooner or later, he was bound to run into another person from his past, and there was nothing to guarantee that he would be as lucky as he had been with Riddle. The next person would be surer of himself, more belligerent in his accusations, and before Effing knew it, the whole thing could blow up in his face. As a precautionary measure, he abruptly stopped giving parties and accepting invitations, but he knew that these things were not going to help him in the long run. Eventually, people would notice that he had withdrawn from them, and that would arouse their curiosity, which in turn would give way to gossip, which could only lead to trouble. It was November 1918. The Armistice had just been signed, and Effing knew that his days in America were numbered. In spite of that certainty, he found himself incapable of doing anything about it. He lapsed into inertia, could not make plans or think about the possibilities that were open to him. Overwhelmed by guilt, by the terrible thing he had done to his life, he indulged in reckless fantasies of returning to Long Island with some colossal lie to account for what had happened. That was out of the question, but he clung to it as a dream of redemption, tenaciously conjuring one false exit after another, and could not bring himself to act. For several months, he shut himself off from the world, sleeping in his darkened room by day and venturing out to Chinatown at night. It was always Chinatown. He never wanted to go there, but he could never find the courage not to go. Against his will, he began haunting the brothels and opium dens and gambling parlors that were hidden in the labyrinth of its narrow streets. He was looking for oblivion, he said, trying to drown in a degradation that would equal the loathing he felt for himself. His nights became a miasma of clattering roulette wheels and smoke, of Chinese women with pockmarked faces and missing teeth, of airless rooms and nausea. His losses were so extravagant that by August he had squandered close to a third of his fortune on these debaucheries. It would have gone on until the end, he said, until he had either
killed himself or run out of money, if fate had not caught up with him and broken him in two. What happened could not have been more violent or sudden, but for all the misery it unleashed, the fact was that nothing less than a disaster could have saved him.

It was raining that night, Effing said. He had just spent several hours in Chinatown and was walking home, all wobbly with the dope in his system, barely conscious of where he was. It was three or four o’clock in the morning, and he had begun climbing the steep hill that led to his neighborhood, pausing at nearly every lamppost to hang on for a moment and catch his breath. Somewhere at the beginning of the walk he had lost his umbrella, and he was soaked to the skin by the time he reached the last hill. With the rain pounding on the sidewalk and his head swimming in its opium stupor, he didn’t hear the stranger come up from behind him. One moment he was trudging along the street, and the next moment it was as though a building had fallen on top of him. He had no idea what it was—a club, a brick, the butt of a revolver, it could have been anything. All he felt was the force of the blow, a tremendous thud at the base of his skull, and then he went down, immediately collapsing onto the pavement. He must have been unconscious for only a few seconds, for the next thing he remembered was opening his eyes and feeling a spray of water against his face. He was sliding down the hill, shooting down the slippery street at a speed he could not control: head first, on his belly, arms and legs flailing as he struggled to grab hold of something to stop his wild descent. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop, couldn’t get up, couldn’t do anything but roll about like some wounded insect. At a certain point, he must have twisted his body in such a way that his trajectory began to carry him down the sidewalk at a slight angle, and suddenly he saw that he was about to vault off the curb and go flying into the street. He braced himself for the jolt, but just as he came to the edge, he spun out another eighty or ninety degrees and went straight into a lamppost, his spine smashing into the ironwork at full force. At the
same instant, he heard something snap, and then he felt a pain that resembled nothing he had ever felt before, a pain so grotesque and powerful that he thought his body had literally exploded.

He never gave me the precise medical details of his injury. The prognosis was the thing that counted, and it wasn’t long before the doctors had reached a unanimous verdict. His legs had died on him, and no matter how much therapy he subjected himself to, he would never walk again. Strangely enough, he said, this news came almost as a relief. He had been punished, and because the punishment was a terrible one, he was no longer obligated to punish himself. His crime had been paid for, and suddenly he was empty again: no more guilt, no more fears of being caught, no more dread. If the nature of the accident had been different, it might not have had the same effect on him, but because he had not seen his attacker, because he never understood why he had been attacked in the first place, he could not help interpreting it as a form of cosmic retribution. The purest kind of justice had been meted out; a harsh and anonymous blow had descended from the sky, and he had been crushed, arbitrarily and without mercy. There had been no time to defend himself or plead his case. Before he knew it had begun, the trial was over, the sentence had been handed down, and the judge had disappeared from the courtroom.

It took him nine months to recover (to the extent that he was able to recover), and then he began making preparations to leave the country. He sold his house, transferred his assets into a numbered Swiss bank account, and bought a false passport under the name of Thomas Effing from a man with anarcho-syndicalist affiliations. The Palmer raids were in full swing by then, Wobblies were being lynched, Sacco and Vanzetti had been arrested, and most members of radical groups had gone into hiding. The passport forger was a Hungarian immigrant who worked out of a cluttered basement room in the Mission, and Effing remembered paying dearly for the document. The man was on the verge of nervous collapse, he said, and because he suspected Effing of being
an undercover agent who would arrest him the moment the work was done, he delayed the job for several weeks, offering farfetched excuses each time another deadline passed. The price kept going up as well, but because the money was the least of Effing’s concerns at that point, he finally broke the deadlock by telling the man that he would double his highest asking price if he could have the passport ready promptly at nine o’clock the next morning. It was too tempting for the Hungarian not to risk it—the sum was now more than eight hundred dollars—and when Effing handed him the cash the next morning and did not arrest him, the anarchist broke down and wept, hysterically kissing Effing’s hand in gratitude. That was the last encounter he had with anyone in America for twenty years, and the memory of that shattered man never left him. The whole country had gone to hell, he thought, and he managed to say good-bye to it without any regrets.

In September of 1920, he boarded the S.S. Descartes and sailed to France by way of the Panama Canal. There was no particular reason for going to France, but neither was there any reason not to go. For a time he had considered moving to some colonial backwater—to Central America, perhaps, or to an island in the Pacific—but the thought of spending the rest of his life in a jungle, even as a petty king among innocent and doting natives, did not whet his imagination. He was not looking for paradise, he merely wanted a country where he would not be bored. England was out of the question (he found the English despicable), and while the French were not much better, he had fond memories of the year he had spent in Paris as a young man. Italy also tempted him, but the fact that French was the one foreign language he could speak with any fluency tipped the balance to France. At least he would eat well there and have good wines to drink. It was true that Paris was the city where he would be most likely to run into former artist friends from New York, but the prospect of those encounters no longer fcopyened him. The accident had changed all that. Julian Barber was dead. He wasn’t an artist anymore, he wasn’t anyone. He was Thomas Effing, a crippled expatriate confined to a wheelchair,
and if anyone challenged him about his identity, he would tell him to go to hell. It was that simple. He no longer cared what anyone thought, and if it meant that he was going to have to lie about himself now and then, so be it, he would lie. The whole business was a sham anyway, and it made no difference what he did.

He continued with the story for another two or three weeks, but it no longer gripped me in the same way. The essentials had already been covered; there were no more secrets to be told, no more dark truths to be wrenched out of him. The major turning points in Effing’s life had all taken place in America, in the years between his departure for Utah and the accident in San Francisco, and once he arrived in Europe, the story became just another story, a chronology of facts and events, a tale of time passing. Effing was aware of this, I felt, and although he didn’t come out and say it directly, the manner of his telling began to change, to lose the precision and earnestness of the earlier episodes. He digressed more freely now, seemed to forget his train of thought more often, and even fell into a number of outcopy contradictions. One day, for example, he would claim that he had spent those years in idleness—reading books, playing chess, sitting in corner bistros— and the next day he would turn around and tell me of complicated business ventures, of pictures he had painted and then destroyed, of owning a bookstore, of working as an espionage agent, of raising money for the republican army in Spain. There was no question that he was lying, but it struck me that he was doing it more from habit than from any intention to deceive me. Toward the end, he spoke movingly about his friendship with Pavel Shum, told me in great detail how he had continued to have sex in spite of his condition, and launched into several lengthy harangues on his theories of the universe: the electricity of thoughts, the connectedness of matter, the transmigration of souls. On the last day, he told how he and Pavel managed to escape from Paris before the Germans marched in, went through the story of meeting Tesla in
Bryant Park again, and then, without any warning, stopped dead in his tracks.

“That’s enough,” he said. “We’ll leave it there.”

“But we still have an hour to go before lunch,” I said, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece. “There’s plenty of time to start in on the next episode.”

“Don’t contradict me, boy. When I say we’re done, that means we’re done.”

“But we’re only up to 1939. We still have thirty years to account for.”

“They’re not important. You can dispose of them in one or two sentences. After leaving Europe at the beginning of World War II, Mr. Effing returned to New York, where he spent the last thirty years of his life.’ Something like that. It shouldn’t be difficult.”

“You’re not just talking about today, then. You mean the whole story. You’re saying that we’ve come to the end, is that it?”

“I thought I had made that clear.”

“It doesn’t matter, I understand now. It still doesn’t make any sense to me, but I understand.”

“We’re running out of time, you fool, that’s why. If we don’t start writing the damned obituary now, it will never get done.”

F
or the next twenty days, I spent every morning in my room, typing out different versions of Effing’s life on the old Underwood. There was a short version to be sent out to the newspapers, five hundred deadpan words that touched on only the most superficial facts; there was a fuller version entitled “The Mysterious Life of Julian Barber,” which turned out to be a rather sensational account of some three thousand words that Effing wanted me to submit to an art magazine after he died; and finally, there was an edited version of the complete transcript, Effing’s story as told by himself. It came to more than a hundred pages, and that was the one I
worked hardest on, carefully eliminating repetitions and vulgar turns of phrase, sharpening sentences, struggling to put spoken words into writing without diminishing their force. It was a difficult and tricky process, I learned, and in many instances I had to reconstruct passages almost entirely in order to remain faithful to their original meaning. I didn’t know what use Effing was intending to make of this autobiography (in the strictest sense, it was no longer an obituary), but he was obviously keen on having it come out just copy, and he pushed me hard on the revisions, scolding and shouting whenever I read him a sentence he did not like. We battled our way through these editorial sessions every afternoon, ranting at each other over the smallest stylistic points. It was a draining experience for both of us (two stubborn souls locked in mortal combat), but one by one we eventually agreed on the different articles, and by the beginning of March the job was done.