The Business of Naming Things (17 page)

The curtain—or rather, a scrim—rises. There's Fiona Shaw.

He'd seen her twice before—once at a party at the Irish consulate and then as Winnie in
Happy Days
, right here at BAM in a Deborah Warner production. At the party, a good ten years ago, Fiona was bright and vivid in look and talk, apple-cheeked, if not a bit windburned, her speech quite fast and a total delight, a sharp sweetness like, say, mint chocolate, her brogue. She sipped a whiskey, neat, and beamed at various men as if they were fascinating. In the Beckett play, she was too young for Winnie, Liam thought, her arms too gym-taut for a woman buried to her waist in a mound of dirt; and again tonight, she is too young for Gunhild Borkman, the shrewish wife of the disgraced John Gabriel. Sadly for Liam, Fiona Shaw is too young for him, as well.

She gives vivid speech once again as the play begins. Standing erect at center stage in blocky nineteenth-century shoes, she knifes the air with powerful strokes, cuts and shreds the space around her: Gunhild Borkman, disgraced wife of a
disgraced banker, cannot be budged or fucked with; she'll gut you with flashing hands. She is emphatic and shrill. Her husband has cast the entire family into eternal shame by screwing investors, it would seem, and she's living with it, and he's living with it, in his eighth year of house arrest, or something like that, upstairs. Alan Rickman, as Borkman, once he arrives, drips scorn on everything with slow delight, ladling out bile. It's as if he's lost everything, including the chance to die. Everyone in the audience must be reminded of Bernie Madoff, thinks Liam. But Liam is reminded of himself.

T
HE NIGHT AIR SMELLS
. Intermission. Liam stands outdoors on the top of the steps, where he'd be having a smoke if he still smoked. He is surprised that Borkman had gotten to him. He's never liked Rickman since his snotty embodiment of Eamon De Valera once. Unfair, yeah. But this one burned. Lost in thought, Liam is thinking about how lost in thought he is, which centers him a bit, and catches him up with time. He won't even sneak a drink in. A couple of typical BAMers ever so politely jostle him out of his way, assuming he is smoking out there in his big overcoat, but, rather, he is just then hunched slightly, trying to work the keys on his BlackBerry. A Google search:

            
BORKMAN is of middle height, a well-knit, powerfully built man, well on in the sixties. His appearance is distinguished, his profile finely cut, his eyes piercing, his hair and beard curly and grayish white. He is dressed in a slightly old-fashioned black coat, and wears a white necktie.

Liam looks down at his shoes. The mica or schist or whatever it is twinkles like starlight in the cement—distant worlds beneath his Mephisto loafers. He has forgotten which tie he is wearing—flips it out and peers: the pearl grey Bax Agley. Almost like Borkman's. But he's not, what is it—“well-knit and powerfully built,” but he's got a decent profile. He thinks. He shakes this thinking off—and Googles Fiona Shaw. . . . For crissakes, she's a lesbian, and they are flashing the lobby lights and he's got those stairs to climb and then the wedging in of bony ass to the unforgiving seat next to his wife of five years. As he makes his way slowly up the long cattle ramp, many of his fellow bovines slower moving than he, he gets in a few last glimpses at said BlackBerry: his e-mail. The Guggenheim, any day now, any day now. C'mon. Make me a Fellow or shoot me already. He has alerts set up—anyone who blogs with the words
Guggenheim Fellow 2011
will be a signal—to let him know who's won. No such alert. But here's one, from the “Brogan” alert. Something about his son from his son. What am I in, thinks Liam Brogan, a Paul Auster novel? The second act is gonna feature me?

He has no idea.

II

You gotta wonder why he showed me this, right? I mean
, Taxi Driver.
I was six or so, I can still remember it. Just because he and Mom had seen it in England, who gives a shit—not a six-year-old seeing a bloodbath and a guy with a scary Mohawk, all in slo-mo. What the fuck. So it meant something to him. Maybe it reminded him of the disaster their marriage was? Of which I was the—whaddycallit?—issue. Fucking ironic. Here I am in a cheap motel, watching a cheap TV, watching Travis Bickle; watching Travis Bickle watch TV on TV, leaning back, tapping
at the TV with his boot, like I could with mine, tap, tap, tap. Fucking boom it goes down. I could do the same but I can't afford it. I'll turn the sucker off
.

Johnny turns it off, from where he lies, on a bed, spread-legged, boots up, jeans, T-shirt, navy blue wool cap on with a big red
C
on the front (“Bears!”), in room 19 of the Motel Six outside Elyria. A Thursday.

He also told me fucked-up stories, like the one about Peanut. Stupid name for a dog, but it was a real dog in a real story and I came to love this story. But why? Peanut was a dog some farm family had back in the old hometown when he was kid. A big family—as opposed to Dad's, of course, poor little adopted boy and never had a dog, et fuckin' cetera—and a little boy in the big family sees Peanut, the family dog, a collie in my mind anyway, fuckin' around with a fox in a field as the kid is walking home from school or the milkin' or whatever, and tells his father, who thinks, “Rabies,” and quarantines old Peanut by himself, because he's a cheap old farm fuck and rather than call a vet he figures to just keep an eye on the dog in the barn for two weeks and if no symptoms develop, then no rabies. The kids visit the poor thing, who was a proud farm dog, a hunter, every day and night, bringing him food and shit. And though he howls like a motherfucker at night, the kids hear him from their beds, staring at the ceiling, but Peanut looks healthy as hell, no problems, no problems develop, no hydrophobia, no foaming, and the old man decides it's high fuckin' time to let Peanut out, clean bill a health and everything, and they all go down to the barn to release Peanut before breakfast one Saturday and Peanut busts the fuck out of there past everyone and never looks back and they never see him again, off into the woods
.

Dad—I'll call you Dad, okay Dad?
[He says this, then turns to the little mirror over next to nothing].
Dad said the story
was about dignity; how Sir Peanut here felt wronged or could not understand what was happening to him, concluded, therefore, in the manner of canine deductive logic that these humans were crazy or just couldn't be trusted by the dog world, and he just plunged out into the unknown, rather than run the risk of something truly nuts going on. Survival instinct. So Dad, just what is you telling me he-ah, to do the same fuckin' thing? To you? But I can't. I'm not a fuckin' dog, Dad. I am not, sir. Not a. Fucking. Dog
.

Johnny goes out into the parking lot and looks around. He looks around and thinks, Parking lot. I'm in an American parking lot, a way station, a place for my car. A place that waits for my car and a place my car leaves. It waits for every car, was built for it—any car can come. And leave. Every parking lot looks the same, standing on its flat pan—the faded black asphalt, the slowly erasing lines marking where to park, and not; the inevitable gravel, those small gray stones scattered like baby teeth. This lot is empty. He walked here, so it is partially his fault. But tonight—what night is it, what month?—Feb—the businessmen and, he thinks, out-of-town ball team are out to dinner or their game. They'll be back, in buses, in rented Hyundais. But right now, it is just him, Johnny Yeats Brogan, under an Ohio sky, and he's crying.

III

I
T
'
S STARTING TO RAIN HARD IN
B
ROOKLYN
, hissing in sheets outside against the terra-cotta of the old Academy. The rain, and the trains rumbling underneath BAM, lend the third act a haunting musical score, as if things are about to collapse above and below. In the Ibsen play, set “in the neighborhood of Christiania,” more weather—the wind howls outside the (one supposes) drawing room where the characters stand
around and make speeches at one another. Borkman is in a strange spot for much of the act, literally—staked out near the wing. Marginalized. Liam has slowly become entranced by Rickman/Borkman. Rather, Rickman/Borkman/Brogan. That is, he identifies.

Borkman's got an embittered wife and a scheming ex-lover and these two women happen to be twins. The two women weirdly struggle over the fey son/nephew, young Erhart Borkman, a student, who is bland and unremarkable. No one gives a shit but the two women. Even Borkman's regard for his only son seems feigned. The lad's a fop—unlike Liam's Johnny, a tough, smart man who can handle himself, if a little too well; and his own wife, well-connected, coolly vain (hence distant: nice) and minding her own business—she has a difficult sister, true, but that's true of all three of his wives—endemic to sisterhood, it would seem. Still, when the self-possessed though ruined Borkman attempts to enlist his son in a new venture—what balls after his conviction for defrauding investors—a venture that will recover the family's pride and fortune, you have to admire the guy. Liam does anyway. Spunk. Defiance—acceptance of his guilt but, like, over it; others can be disabled by it—shamed; not him. That's what Liam needs—a little Norwegian backbone. A little courage; the word for it is
mot
. To stand there, as Borkman does, full-bellied, three-piece suit, accepting his guilt and yet radiating a defiant You can't kill me! Brogan takes this as a sign. He'll call Johnny tonight, or this weekend.

IV

ACT IV

BORKMAN
.

[Not listening to her.] Can you see the smoke of the great steamships out on the fjord?

ELLA RENTHEIM
[his sister-in-law].

No.

BORKMAN
.

I can. They come and they go. They weave a network of fellowship all round the world. They shed light and warmth over the souls of men in many thousands of homes. That was what I dreamed of doing.

ELLA RENTHEIM
.

[Softly.] And it remained a dream.

BORKMAN
.

It remained a dream, yes. [Listening.] And hark, down by the river, dear! The factories are working! My factories! All those that I would have created! Listen! Do you hear them humming? The night shift is on—so they are working night and day. The wheels are whirling and the bands are flashing—round and round and round. Can't you hear, Ella?

ELLA RENTHEIM
.

No.

BORKMAN
.

I can hear it.

ELLA RENTHEIM
.

[Anxiously.] I think you are mistaken, John.

BORKMAN
.

[More and more fired up.] Oh, but all these—they are only like the outworks around the kingdom, I tell you!

ELLA RENTHEIM
.

The kingdom, you say? What kingdom?

BORKMAN
.

My kingdom, of course! The kingdom I was on the point of conquering when I—when I died.

ELLA RENTHEIM
.

[Shaken, in a low voice.] Oh, John, John!

BORKMAN
.

And now there it lies—defenceless, masterless—exposed to all the robbers and plunderers. Ella, do you see the mountain chains there—far away? They soar, they tower aloft, one behind the other! That is my vast, my infinite, inexhaustible kingdom!

ELLA RENTHEIM
.

Oh, but there comes an icy blast from that kingdom, John!

BORKMAN
.

That blast is the breath of life to me. That blast comes to me like a greeting from subject spirits. I seem to touch them, the prisoned millions; I can see the veins of metal stretch out their winding, branching, luring arms to me. I saw them before my eyes like living shapes, that night when I stood in the strong-room with the candle in my hand. You begged to be liberated, and I tried to free you. But my strength failed me; and the treasure sank back into the deep again. [With outstretched hands.] But I will whisper it to you here in the stillness of the night: I love you, as you lie there spellbound
in the deeps and the darkness! I love you, unborn treasures, yearning for the light! I love you, with all your shining train of power and glory! I love you, love you, love you!

ELLA RENTHEIM
.

[In suppressed but rising agitation.] Yes, your love is still down there, John. It has always been rooted there. But here, in the light of day, here there was a living, warm, human heart that throbbed and glowed for you. And this heart you crushed. Oh worse than that! Ten times worse! You sold it for—for—

BORKMAN
.

[Trembles; a cold shudder seems to go through him.] For the kingdom—and the power—and the glory—you mean?

ELLA RENTHEIM
.

Yes, that is what I mean. . . .

BORKMAN
.

Ah—! [Feebly.] Now it let me go again.

ELLA RENTHEIM
.

[Shaking him.] What was it, John?

BORKMAN
.

[Sinking down against the back of the seat.] It was a hand of ice that clutched at my heart.

ELLA RENTHEIM
.