Jamestown (38 page)

“So much the worse for both of us if you do.”

“I'd kill the world itself to spend an hour in bed with you.”

“Have you not noticed it's already dead? And you're the maggot that feeds on its rotting carcass.”

“A better, stronger maggot, then, than either maggot I just squashed, a maggot who can mine the corpse's best meat.”

“I'd squash you if I could, you disgust me, you horrify me!”

He swings his bulk along the levers of his arms till he arrives at one of the small knives whose blade's still wet and red with blood. He brings it back and gives it to her handle first. He rolls his head back on his neck. His throat is skyward now, and as it strains to hold that molten rock, his head, in place, its veins and tendons pop up to the surface of its skin. She need but make one shallow slice to end his life. She holds the knife a half an inch from it. She holds the knife and keeps on holding it. “I can't. I won't.”

He swings his head back up and nestles it between her legs. He lets first one sawed-off arrow end and then the other roughly rub each inner thigh. “I love you.”

“You want me.”

“I want you.”

“I don't want you.”

“You do.”

“I want—”

“What?”

She weeps. He's won. I can't believe my eyes and ears, and wish I never could.

Johnny Rolfe

I touched her thick and scuffed-up neck as is my wont and barely felt a heartbeat there. I sat and trembled for an hour by her bed in the La Belle Sauvage suite of the Plaza Hotel, in which she was meant to convalesce but wasn't convalescing.

She woke and took a couple rasping breaths and sucked synthetic milk from a sponge at the end of a stick I held to her lips.

“Nice milk,” she said.

“Thanks.”

‘“Where do your sponges come from?' Remember that one?”

“No.”

“You said it.”

“I did?”

“Some bullshit like that. Fucking
where do your sponges come from?
Good times. Reminds me of a song:

“Nice song.”

“It's one my people have sung down the years, all the more beautiful now that it's true.”

“How do you feel?”

“As if there'll be no tomorrow.”

“Don't say that.”

“Too late.”

Lacking strength to sit on her own, she was propped on a bunch of depleted pillows on the tired bed in the hotel suite.

“I always thought a New York hotel would have more pizzazz than this. You know your civilization's finished when your best hotel's a careworn fleabag.”

“You seem in a good mood.”

“Won't you be in a good mood when you're soon to depart this slaving meatwheel? Please don't wince every time I mention my death. Stop kidding yourself and help me face it.”

“I don't want you to die.”

“Oh, Mr. Johnny, I ain't aworried much. If the Lord is ready, 'tain't for me to hesitate.”

“Why don't you want to live?”

“Why don't you want to die?”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously? You're a good man in some extremely limited ways, occasionally a kind and intelligent man, but in sum our love has yielded me less fun than pain, and because my means are few, my mind poor, and my need of you great in this strange land, the only way I have to pry myself loose of you is to die.”

“You've got a weird sense of humor. Why won't you even try to live?”

“I'm trying! But I've noticed I ain't gonna succeed. I'm not willing myself to die, I'm being killed by some idiotic disease I probably got from you or one of your pals. So before you get all moralistic about ‘trying to live,' first try dying and see how moral you feel. Anyway, since when have moral considerations affected anything you do?”

“You insult me repeatedly.”

“I mean it. After I die, what are you going to do?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well get one. I mean it. Despite the oath you've sworn to anemia as a philosophical worldview and way of life, you're a moderately capable young man and you might want to consider getting off your ass and doing something to ameliorate the world you live in.”

“I don't feel like talking about this right now.”

“How about starting really small by ameliorating, you know, me?”

“How can I if you refuse to ameliorate yourself?”

“No, I mean make the end of my life as decent as it can be, under the circumstances. And stop badgering me.”

“So, what should I do, tell you a joke?”

“Do you know any?”

“Why'd the girl fall off the swing?”

“She was dead.”

“You've heard that one before.”

“You know what else you could do for me? An excellent funeral.”

“I'll promise you the finest funeral in the world, only you must get well first.”

“I want a long procession. I hope all the wonderful folks I've met in this beautiful town turn out in full, and I hope it don't rain. I want to go to meet my maker with plenty of bands playing. I want to ride up to heaven in a white velvet hearse, silk velvet. Purple satin inside the casket. I wants them folks' eyes to bulge out. And another thang: I want horses to the hearse, I don't like the smell of gasoline.”

She hawked and spat a mauve and chartreuse wad of phlegm into a plastic bowl beside her bed, and lay back on her hard, thin pillow in dismay.

“I've got one for you,” she said. “Why did the king fall off the throne?”

“He had no legs.”

“We are so in synch right now! You know another thing you could do for me?”

“What?”

“Depose him.”

“Done.”

“He's one of those people whose life I find hilariously funny to contemplate, a little funnier than standing alone in a room looking at nothing, listening to nothing, tasting nothing, smelling nothing, feeling nothing, thinking nothing.”

She closed her eyes and her mind seemed to leave me for a while, a thing I'd dearly like my mind to do, but it never can except in sleep, which rarely lasts even an hour.

“For real. What do you propose to do?”

“Do?”

“About him.”

“Who?”

“John Martin.”

“I propose to endure him.”

“Sheesh, who's got legs and who has none? ‘Please know I'm not one with all the programs, intentions, wishes, and behaviors of the gentlemen I am visiting your region on business with.'”

“What?”

“I'm quoting you.”

“When'd I say that?”

“A while ago in a letter to me. And ‘… my distaste for this adventure's conception, its goals, its trajectory, its management, its personnel, its scope, its methods, its avoidable failures.'”

“I don't remember writing that.”

“You didn't write it.”

“I don't remember saying it.”

“You didn't say it, you thought it.”

“How do you know?”

“Says so right here.”

“Where?”

“In my mind.”

“So now I have to be accountable for all my thoughts?”

“To know and not to act is not to know, Gianni.”

She closed her eyes again. To make her open them, I asked her what she'd have me do.

She sat up, tried to speak, and lay back. She coughed and spat and missed the bowl. Her black hair was pasted to her head with sweat.

“Do you want to hear some music?”

“Do you know how to play music?”

“I know how to press a button on this machine that plays recorded music.”

“Where'd you get the machine?”

“John Martin gave it to me when he appointed me vice president for communications of the newly consolidated New York Company.”

“I thought he considered you his enemy.”

“He does.”

“So why'd he make you vice president?”

“Because it's worse than jail or death.”

“You could refuse to serve.”

“Then he'd jail or kill me.”

“How'd you get the juice to run the machine?”

“I traded a week of my life for it.”

“What song are you going to play me?”

“Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.”

I pressed
PLAY
. A thundercloud of music darkened the room. After less than half a minute she said, “Turn it off!” I did.

A green sunbeam came in the dim window and limned her veridian skin. Sun and skin were one; she nearly disappeared. From within this haze of light I saw her pale mouth move: “That's the worst sound I ever heard.”

“It's pretty awful, yes.”

“Why do you listen to it?”

“I think it's beautiful.”

“What's beautiful about it?”

“That a hundred people sat in a room and succeeded in the complicated and difficult activity of playing a symphony together without murdering each other.”

“But people did such things together all the time back when Earth produced a seemingly limitless supply of food and fuel. That can't be all you like about that noise.”

“It reminds me of my hometown.”

“This?” she said, and gestured toward the dirty window with her eyes.

“That.”

“Why would you want to hear the culmination of centuries of blundering and horror represented in your art?”

“Because art that represents centuries of blundering and horror makes them slightly more bearable, if not more comprehensible.”

“So you're prospering from this program you find
distasteful
and are
not one with
and
want no part of
by accepting scarce and valuable fuel from your imperial overlord so you can play—who'd you say that music was made by?”

“Beethoven.”

“So you can play music made by Bait Oven. Great. I'm not kidding, you know.”

“About what?”

“Doing something.”

“About John Martin?”

“About John Martin.”

“What?”

“I can't tell you what.”

“You want a revolutionary leader? Talk to Jack Smith. He's a better candidate than I.”

“He's too pragmatic. He's good at making things run, but a revolution needs someone impractical and unrealistic to tell guys like him why and where to go.”

“Have you ever done such a thing in your life?”

“Yes!”

“What?”

“I can't believe you have to ask me that.”

“I'm not asking to challenge you, I'm asking because I need guidance.”

“This is what I'm saying. Someone has to be the one who doesn't need guidance.”

“I assure you I'm not such a man.”

“All right. Do this. Wait nine months.”

“Nine months from now?”

“From when I die. From now, yes. I should be dying in the course of a difficult childbirth, but a single glance between my thighs will demonstrate I ain't. The tiny hope of a nation from my loins does not squeeze forth into the world so it'll have to come from someplace else. I hereby plant a seed in that virgin mind of yours from which a miraculous idea will spring forth nine months hence.” She closed her eyes.

“Don't close your eyes! What about the one more thing you said you still had to know?”

“Now it's yours.”

“What is it?”

“You know what's strange? I really want to live,” she said, and died.

The Names of the Dead

George Kendall, Herb Mangold, Matthew Bernard, Gerald Mankiewicz, Happy Lohengrin, Albert, numerous fops, Bill Breck, John Ratcliffe, Stickboy, Powhatan, Chris Newport, James Stuart, Philip Habsburg, most men's best intentions, Pocahontas, whose secret name you must not speak lest you find your own on this list.

Johnny Rolfe

To anyone willing to act selflessly in service of a vision of world improvement:

I write to you in my capacity as Vice President for Communications of the America Company. That is, I write as no one to no one.

I'm in the study of my ramshackle and dilapidated house—I work from home a lot these days—on a hill surrounded by a barbed wire fence and a moat of hydrochloric acid in Riverdale, the Bronx, one of many neighborhoods in this vast, exhausted land I love that my protector and boss, John Martin, a philosopher king with an enormous head and massive treelike arms, has taken back from terrorists and secured with armed guards. Not long ago, on this momentous morn, I could hear my friend and roommate, Jack Smith, Vice President for Strategic Planning, mill around downstairs before he left the house. Today is one of many days when even hearing him touch two dishes together in the kitchen makes me want to kill him. I think he wants to kill me half the time as well. Murderous rage may be where the passion is in this second, passionless marriage for each of us. But the presence of his body in these rooms is also a great and almost adequate consolation to me. To meet him by the long-defunct fridge and be wrestled off my feet, to have him press my face into the ancient wooden boards of the kitchen floor—boards that lay between dropped cubes of cheese and the sodden earth long before we were born—is a way to spend a morning that I find more bearable than most. With Jack at any rate it beats conversation by a mile. He's boring. He tells in great detail about adventures he's had and ones he plans to have, long stories with no point except that he's telling them and they happened to him, or could. And nights up in the Bronx are long. Once in a blue, Jack goes out late, passes through the three security checkpoints, and roams the streets in search of danger, but to do that he must once again be in love with death, which is to say in love with life, which, like me, he's mostly not, though on those rare nights he tries to be again. On other nights, he wanders through the house, burping and groaning and breaking things. He approaches the study door, which I've locked, and says, “What're you doing in there?” “Working.” “On what?” “Communications.” “Who you communicating with?” “The dead.” “What do they say back?” “Nothing.” “Can I come in?” “No.” “When will you be done?” “Never.”