Fraud (13 page)

Coming up to my final weekend as Christmas Freud, I start to feel bereft in anticipation of having to take down my shingle. I began as a monkey on display and have wound up uncomfortably caught between joking and deadly serious. A persona that seems laughable at times, fated for me at others. I know this will fade, but for the moment I want nothing more than to continue to sit in my chair, someone on the couch, and to ask them, with real concern, “So tell me. How is everything?”

I’LL TAKE THE LOW ROAD

The very unshaven young priest from Italy on the train up to northern Scotland has the handsome, tormented look of a defrocked cleric from a De Sica neorealist flick. He wears the uneasy countenance of a man made to question his beliefs, having tasted the apostate joys of, say, carnal love with a beautiful widow. Or perhaps his anguished expression is the result of the egg mayonnaise sandwiches in the dining carriage. To avert just such a crisis of faith, I’ve brought my own
sopresatta
and cheddar on rye, much to the delight of the Seeing Eye dog who immediately goes rooting through the bag of food I have placed at my feet. “He’s not nicking your lunch, then, is he?” asks the dog’s owner, seated beside me. Well, he would know if his dog was nicking my lunch, because he turns out to be one of those very special blind men who can actually see. Whatever his visual impairment, it must be minimal because, no joke, he spends the entire train journey reading and writing voluminous notes on the rules of conduct for some sort of tournament. His handwriting is better than mine, so it makes me wonder if perhaps I am witnessing an Easter miracle, right here on British Rail.

It has been sixteen years since I was on a train moving northward through Britain. The last time was at age nineteen when I was on my junior year abroad in London. Sitting across from me then had been a beautiful young American with a backpack. We made pleasant if not fairly stultifying conversation. He was from the Bay Area and let me listen a bit to his Windham Hill tape,
Colors
or
Songs for the Road Within
or something. Music that, if you’re not buying a futon at that very moment, is essentially aural torture. With little to talk about, the subject turned to movies, as it does.
Amadeus
had just come out in the States, and I asked him how it was. “Well, if you like Bach, you’ll love it,” he told me.

A dog’s head is far heavier and generates a great deal more heat than you might imagine. After three hours my feet are crushed and very warm, but it seems like bad form to kick a Seeing Eye dog. Perhaps this is to be my penance for having skipped Passover in favor of coming instead to Britain to see friends. The significance of my actions still weighs upon me, however. I experience no small amount of guilt about not celebrating at least in some way a holiday that I’ve never been crazy about. To be sure, I’ve had some lovely Passovers past with family both blood and fictive, but Pesach’s extreme levels of human contact, group activity, and plate clearing also make me a little claustrophobic. Me, I like Yom Kippur.

Still, I find myself in need of some spiritual succor at this holiday time, with my mind full of thoughts of visitations of plagues, of waters pulled asunder for the safe passage of a persecuted people, and an eternal code of ethics handed down in the desert. Going off in search of like-minded people who have placed their faith in the unseen, the metaphysical and intangible, I take my leave of my friends in both London and Glasgow and embark upon my journey. Humming the songs of
my
road within, I am making my way up to Loch Ness.

The medieval
Life of St. Columba
tells of how the early Christian, when traveling up Loch Ness to the Highlands to convert the heathen, comes upon a monster with a man in its jaws. Invoking the name of almighty God, Columba subdues the beast and frees the man. Taming a chimera and mastering the godless forces of nature is basic PR for the holy, like St. Patrick and the snakes. Given the harsh, rocky landscape I am riding through, it must have been a miracle only too easily swallowed by an ancient pagan populace.

Things get pretty quiet after Columba, monster sighting–wise, until about
1933
, when the first road was built around the Loch. That’s when all manner of eyewitness accounts and photographs (including “the surgeon’s photograph,” that most famous picture of the goosenecked silhouette rising out of the water) helped to make the Loch an international locus of phenomenology and, from the looks of the tourist shops in Inverness, the city immediately to the north, clearinghouse for the world’s supply of green plush dinosaurs.

Inverness is storybook pretty, most especially along the road that winds along the river Ness, with its castle looming high over the water, facing a row of churches and handsome stone hotels. But I am not staying here. I am headed to a small town some thirteen miles southwest on the shores of the Loch proper. I kill the few hours before my bus ride eating a rather ancient piece of fried halibut, walking about the streets, and wandering in and out of the many whiskey shops, kilt makers—where I am assured that, even though my people were necromancing, chicken-plucking Jews from deepest Latvia and Lithuania, we, too, have a tartan—and shop after shop selling countless items featuring the smiling, three-humped green creature, seemingly all of it printed with the slogans “Och, Aye, It’s Nessie!” or “I’m a Wee Monster.”

People are out in droves, enjoying a rare bit of sun. In a pedestrian mall I chance upon a small trailer devoted to protesting the use of poisons and inhumane traps against birds of prey. There is a table arrayed with leaflets and petitions. A man addresses the small crowd through a megaphone even though we are standing only a few feet away. Despite the amplification, the five very large birds of prey sit sleepy and unmoving on their wooden perches. There is desperation to the man’s plea for understanding on behalf of these animals, and one can immediately see why. It must be hard to drum up sympathy for the peregrine falcon with its talons, sharp beak, and bloodless, topaz stare. It briefly fixes its remorseless, murderous eyes upon me, and I am relieved to see that it is tethered to its log.

The bus is delayed a few minutes after we board, which allows all of us seated on the right side to look over at the next platform, where two skinny fourteen-year-olds kiss good-bye. The boy looks to be fishing his house keys out of the girl’s throat with his tongue. Her friend waits, watching them unembarrassed, eating a chocolate bar all the while. The snog takes a full two and a half minutes. Their heads part, a silver thread of saliva still briefly joining them together. The boy wipes it away with the back of his hand to polite applause on board.

My destination, Drumnadrochit, is a small town of seven hundred perched on the banks of Urquhart Bay. Drumnadrochit is Nessie Central, being home to no fewer than two museums devoted to the monster, the Official Loch Ness Exhibition Center, a.k.a. “Loch Ness
2000
,” and the Original Loch Ness Monster Museum. They are approximately five hundred feet apart and both closed by the time I arrive in the gathering, drizzling dusk. My hotel—aptly described in the guidebooks as “hideous”—sits between them. It is a modern, boatlike structure with sad touches of gentility, like the frilly sheer curtains on the windows of my tiny room that only partially obscure my view of the Dumpsters out back.

I take a brief constitutional up and down the shuttered main drag of the town, in the appropriately Scottish gloaming. I am much relieved to find the Nessie Shop still open. Here in Drumnadrochit, too, I will have ample opportunity to buy a kilt, tam-o’-shanter, dish towel printed with a shortbread recipe, tartan rain gear, Nessie fridge magnet, giant pencil, squishy bookmark, Nessie-emblazoned golf balls, eraser, or pair of “Och, Aye” or “Wee Monster” socks. And just in case the twenty-foot walk from my hotel proves too arduous, I can pop into the Keeper’s Cottage gift shop just across the driveway, where, in addition to much of the above, I might also purchase a sack of chocolate Nessie “droppings.” Ditto haggis “droppings.” Candy shit from two completely implausible sources, the former fictional, the latter an inanimate foodstuff. Perhaps in reaction to all of this imaginary yet delectably edible feces, they also sell small sachets of potpourri, filled with local aromatics, attractively named “tiny lace smellies.”

Taking my supper in the hotel dining room at an ungodly early hour—makes for a nice long evening, as they say—I try to glean a demographic of the other diners. Certainly no one else is traveling alone, and no one else appears to be looking to fulfill their Pesach jones by coming here. Most everyone sounds British, and they look fairly normal, if not just a little bit vacation trashy: the palette a tad brighter, the hair just a mite bigger than usual. I sincerely hope the foursome at the next table is talking about a nature TV program, because if not, one of the men’s co-workers is an extremely accident-prone vacationer. She keeps on meeting up with huge reptiles and somehow always finds herself about to have her limbs snapped clean through by the extraordinary pressure in a crocodile’s jaws. She has had thirteen operations. Their food comes. “Oh, mine looks scrummy!” exclaims one of the wives.

I retire to the bar, only five feet from my table, where I can smoke and, this being the Highlands, drink some of the local single malt. The bartender pours me a scant, Biafran finger of amber liquid. It is stronger than any Scotch I have ever had. It savors of masculinity: a tongue-numbing combination of wood, leather, smoke, and age; like drinking the board of directors of Standard Oil. After just a few sips I am thoroughly warmed, and I abandon the thought of walking back out into the town, now that it is dark and raining quite heavily. I climb the hideous stairs to my hideous room. The sheets on my single bed have been boiled and starched countless times. Appropriately, they crackle like bleached matzo as I lie upon them.

Maybe it’s the time of year, or maybe it’s the time of man, or maybe it’s just the Scotch, but as I turn on the television, everything seems shot through with breathless anticipation, a fervent hope for the glorious arrival of some numinous presence. I watch a
Nightline
-style treatment of the resurrection story, reported as if it were late-breaking news with video remotes and on-camera correspondents. It is a valiant attempt at making religion hip and palatable for the information age:
Jim, I’m standing here in the Old City at the grave only recently alleged to have been vacated by Jesus, the renegade rabbi known to his small band of followers as Christ the Savior.
The camera pans down to the open grave and stays there.
Coming up: the woman who claims she is this son of God’s mother,
and
,
a virgin! Her story when we return.
I never thought I would be nostalgic for Charlton Heston (a dangerous, horrible man who I sort of hope dies in a hail of gunfire one day), but it seems like a gross oversight that not one of the stations is broadcasting
The Ten Commandments.
Instead, changing the channel, I come upon a science-fiction movie where a veritable army of people waits motionless in the Nevada desert for Martian spaceships to arrive.

My thoughts drift outside my window, over the Dumpsters to the deep black water and the mythic creature under its rain-pebbled surface. Dropping off to sleep, I witness the evening’s final bit of sacrilege as the vindictive Martians graft Sarah Jessica Parker’s head onto a Chihuahua’s body.

A large plastic model of what the monster “may” look like turns in a slow circle in the pond outside the Loch Ness
2000
exhibit, housed in a beautiful old stone building. The beast resembles a rather elegant, long-necked brontosaurus (which, as any eleven-year-old dinosaur-mad dweeb can pedantically tell you, is now known as an apatosaurus). Waiting for the museum to open, I stand at the pond’s edge beside Lucy, a four-year-old with a blond bob, rosy cheeks, and bright blue eyes. She is a china doll in a dress of eyelet cotton and patent-leather shoes.

Before I can ask, “Where are your parents, little girl?” actually planning to say the words
little girl,
in my best benevolent, avuncular latter-day Fred MacMurray, Lucy screams, “Ah wona kehl the monstahr!” in a full-throated Glaswegian battle cry as she throws rock after rock. She has a surprisingly good arm for someone under three feet tall. The pebbles make a hollow
ping
as they ricochet off the animal. For now, it is just the two of us, and Drumnadrochit still seems a sleepy little Highland town, its vaunted tourist reputation as arguable as the monster itself. By eleven
A
.
M
. I will find the place overrun with families making their way across the asphalt between the four souvenir shops, their children’s faces smeared with melted Nessie droppings, arguing over who next will carry the green stuffed animal.

Loch Ness
2000
is a sound and light show of surprisingly high quality, leading from room to room, the first of which has underwater cave walls embedded with plaster saurian skulls. We are told of the legacy of continental drift, the movement of landmasses and the vast prehistoric continent of Pangea. The long, steep-sided, flat-bottomed gully that became Loch Ness—the largest volume of fresh water in Britain, big enough to immerse the world’s population three times over—was carved by a glacier.

All of the photographic evidence that exists is revealed to be either a shadow, bird, branch, boat’s wake, or outright hoax, a number of them perpetrated by one man, a professional charlatan. This is the very man who created the surgeon’s photograph. The eponymous physician was nothing more than a complicit stooge.