Mao II (13 page)

“Eleanor Baumann.”

“God yes. Fantastic woman.”

“She was smarter than both of us put together.”

“Crazier too, unfortunately.”

“Strange-smelling breath,” Bill said.

“Fantastic letters. She wrote me a hundred amazing letters.”

“What did they smell like?”

“For years. I have years of letters from that woman.”

Charlie sat parallel to his desk, legs extended, his hands joined behind his neck.

“I was glad to hear from you,” he said. “I talked to Brita Nilsson when she got back and she wouldn’t tell me anything except that she passed on my message. Took you a while to call.”

“I was working.”

“And it’s going well?”

“We don’t talk about that.”

“Took you a month. I’ve always thought I understood precisely why you went into isolation.”

“Is that what we’re here to talk about?”

“You have a twisted sense of the writer’s place in society. You think the writer belongs at the far margin, doing dangerous things. In Central America, writers carry guns. They have to. And this has always been your idea of the way it ought to be. The state should want to kill all writers. Every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere.”

“I’ve done no dangerous things.”

“No. But you’ve lived out the vision anyway.”

“So my life is a kind of simulation.”

“Not exactly. There’s nothing false about it. You’ve actually become a hunted man.”

“I see.”

“And that’s what we’re here to talk about. There’s a young man held hostage in Beirut. He’s Swiss, a UN worker who was doing research on health care in the Palestinian camps. He’s also a poet. Published maybe fifteen short poems in French-language journals. We know next to nothing about the group that has him. The hostage is the only proof they exist.”

“What’s your involvement?”

“I’m chairman of a high-minded committee on free expression. We’re mainly academics and publishing people and we’re just getting started and this is the crazy part of the whole business. This group takes a hostage simply because he’s there, he’s available, and he apparently tells them he’s a poet and what is the first thing they do? They contact us. They have a fellow in Athens who calls our London office and says, There’s a writer chained to a wall in a bare room in Beirut. If you want him back, maybe we can do a deal.”

“Buy me lunch, Charlie. I’ve come all this way.”

“Wait, now listen. I’ve been talking to the chap in Athens whenever I can reach him. On and off for weeks. Sometimes his phone rings, sometimes I hear an oceanic roar, sometimes he’s there and sometimes he’s not. We’ve finally agreed on a plan. We want to have a news conference, small and tightly controlled. Day after tomorrow in London. We talk about the captive writer. We talk about the group that has him. And then I announce that the hostage is being freed at that moment on live television in Beirut.”

“Sounds pretty fucking fishy to me.”

“I know. An element of mutual interest. But listen.”

“Your new group gets press, their new group gets press, the young man is sprung from his basement room, the journalists get a story, so what’s the harm.”

“Right. And with this one success we can open up everybody’s thinking. How do you create a shift in rooted attitudes and hard-line positions if not through public events that show us how to imagine other possibilities? Besides, it’s the only way to get this poor guy out of there. Isn’t that enough, all by itself? We’re obligated to do everything we can to save him and if we learn something about the people who took him, so much the better.”

“Where the hell do I fit in?”

“If I hadn’t run into Brita that evening, you wouldn’t fit in at all. But when she said she was taking your picture, bells went off in my head. If you’re willing to be photographed after all these years, why not take it one step further? Do something that will help us show who we are as an organization and how important it is for writers to take a public stand. Frankly I’m hoping to create a happy sensation. I want you to show up in London and briefly read from the poet’s work, a selection of five or six poems. That’s all.”

“Get a Swiss writer. Won’t the Swiss feel left out?”

“I can get any writer I want. But I want Bill Gray. Look, I didn’t tell anyone you were coming here today. Not even my secretary. Because if I had there’d be a queue outside that door stretching like a conga line into the distance. There’s an excitement that attaches to your name and it will help us put a mark on this event, force people to talk about it and think about it long after the speeches fade. I want one missing writer to read the work of another. I want the famous novelist to address the suffering of the unknown poet. I want the English-language writer to read in French and the older man to speak across the night to his young colleague in letters. Don’t you see how beautifully balanced?”

Bill said nothing.

“This is the soul’s own business, Bill. I think it’s something you need to do. Get out of your room, away from your preoccupations. And I make these promises. There will be no advance announcement of your presence. No interviews after your appearance. Still cameras only. The conference will be kept to fifty or sixty people, all inclusive. I want a ripple effect. Word will spread, follow-up stories will appear, curiosity will build. I want our work to have a future. Your French still passable?”

Bill began searching for a cigarette. There was a silence, a period of thoughtful review. The bright badge at Bill’s lapel read Visitor Access Only.

Charlie said softly, “We used to argue on street corners at three in the morning.”

“It’s true, Charlie.”

“There were times you made me furious. All those infamous ideas of yours. I felt so sensible and petty. You were almost always wrong but there was no chance I could ever win an argument in any way that really counted.”

“I think I’m supposed to be out of here soon.”

“Don’t you find yourself remembering? Things come flooding back with a force that’s overwhelming. Christ, Bill, I’m happy to see you.”

“I remember everything. Almost constantly.”

“What do you hear from Sara?”

“Are we doing my former wives in chronological order?”

“What do you hear from her?”

“She’s okay. She likes to stay in some kind of touch. It means a lot to her that we still talk once in a while.”

“Of course I barely knew her. You had some kind of quarantine in effect.”

“She was young, that’s all.”

“Too young. Not ready for the hopeless task of wifing a writer like you.”

“They’re all like me.”

“Not that I was any readier. I was never sure what I was supposed to be guilty of.”

“You were guilty of being my editor. A writer has complaints.”

“Well, this is surely true.”

“You were guilty of being in the vicinity. No matter what you said or did, I had a way of using it to my bleak advantage.”

“For many happy years I’ve listened to writers and their brilliant kvetching. The most successful writers make the biggest complainers. This is so interesting to me. I wonder if the qualities that produce a top writer also account for the ingenuity and size of his complaints. Does writing come out of bitterness and rage or does it produce bitterness and rage?”

“Or both,” Bill said.

“Everyone complains about the loneliness. The solitude is killing. The nights are sleepless. The days are taut with worry and pain. Bemoan, bemoan. The novelists are doing interviews. The interviewers are writing novels. The money is never enough. The acclaim is falling short. Come on, Bill, what else?”

“It must be hard for you, dealing with these wretches day after day.”

“No, it’s easy. I take them to a major eatery. I say, Pooh pooh pooh pooh. I say, Drinky drinky drinky. I tell them their books are doing splendidly in the chains. I tell them readers are flocking to the malls. I say, Coochy coochy coo. I recommend the roast monkfish with savoy cabbage. I tell them the reprint bidders are howling in the commodity pits. There is miniseries interest, there is audiocassette interest, the White House wants a copy for the den. I say, The publicity people are setting up tours. The Italians love the book completely. The Germans are groping for new levels of rapture. Oh my oh my oh my. ”

“And yourself, Charlie.”

“I’m adjusting to the new style.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Two years.”

“Who owns this company?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Give me the whole big story in one quick burst.”

“It’s all about limousines.”

Bill leaned down to lace his shoes.

“All right. Who else is dead that I should know about?”

“Do we really want to do this?”

“Probably not.”

“We’re next,” Charlie said.

“I’m next, you bastard.”

“I want the new book, Bill.”

“I’m still working.”

“Whatever relationship you maintain with the old dusty lovable skinflint house.”

“I’m in the final pages.”

“Whatever crumbling remnants of a contract, there are ways around it.”

“I’m polishing. That’s what I’m doing.”

“I want this book, you bastard.”

They stirred in their chairs. Charlie flexed his right knee, grimacing. They got to their feet at the same time and stretched, working their shoulder muscles. Bill looked out the east window into a sky mural of bridge spans and ship cranes, factory smoke over Queens.

“You’re not the hermit, the woodsman-writer, you’re not the crank with a native vision. You’re the hunted man. You don’t write political novels or books steeped in history but you still feel the clamor at your back. This is the conflict, Bill.”

“I think I got rooked on these shoes.”

“You’ll call me about London at home tonight. Here’s my number. Or tomorrow at the absolute latest, right here, by noon if possible. I’m taking a night flight. It’s something I think you need to do. Remember. One less writer in the hands of killers.”

The guard was waiting in the reception area. Bill asked him where the men’s room was. The guard had a key and stood by the drying machine as Bill went through his pockets looking for the tin with his mixed medications. He took precut segments of three brands of amphetamine tablets out of the tin. The colors were a blue, a white and a pink. He placed them on his tongue but when he realized the tap would not deliver water unless he kept his hand on the valve he took the pill fragments out of his mouth so he could ask the guard to turn on the cold water for him. The guard was willing to do this. Bill put the pieces back on his tongue, cupped his hands under the spout and brought the water to his mouth and drank, throwing back his head when he swallowed. The guard looked at him as if to ask whether everything had gone as planned. Bill nodded and they went out to the elevator and rode to the lobby together.

Bill stood near the entranceway, about fifty feet from the oval desk and directly in front of the register that listed the building’s occupants. He could see Scott waiting just outside, standing at the far end of a shop window that jutted at an angle from the recessed entranceway, forming a border extending to the sidewalk. He carried a small package, books probably, and had his back to the shop window. Bill stepped away from the glass doors and smoked a cigarette. He stood in thought, his arms folded and his head cocked slightly left. His gaze seemed to end at the tip of the cigarette dangling from his right hand. When he peered out again, Scott was nearer the entranceway but had turned to look in the shop window. Bill walked across the front of the lobby past two sets of revolving doors. He exited by the last single door, peeling the visitor’s badge from his lapel and moving out onto the sidewalk, where he joined the surge of the noontime crowd.

T
he boy took off the prisoner’s hood when he came to feed him. The boy also wore a hood, a crude cloth piece with ragged slashes at the eyes.

Time became peculiar, the original thing that is always there. It seeped into his fever and delirium, into the question of who he was. When he spat up blood he watched the pink thing slug into the drain and it carried time quivering in it.

It made the prisoner anxious, not knowing why the boy needed to be concealed.

They drove him here in a car with a missing door. He saw an old man with no shirt who was stuck to a coil of military wire in a sewage meadow somewhere.

Be alert and note the details said the conscientious tape running in his head, the voice that whispers you are smarter than your captors.

The prisoner felt the boy come close to pull away his hood and stuff his face with food and he looked into the eyeholes of the boy’s own hood.

Time permeated the air and food. The black ant crawling up his leg carried time’s enormity, the old slow all-knowing pace.

Poor old guy probably lost at night wanders dizzy into the wire, senile, shirtless, pinned, still living.

He waited for the moment when he could count the launched rockets flashing. When he heard the rockets he also saw the flash although he wore a hood that had no eyeholes.

He was new at this and eager to succeed. All the time he chewed his food he estimated meters wall to wall. Measure the walls, then the bricks in the walls, then the mortar between the bricks, then the hairline cracks in the mortar. See it as a test. Show them how advanced you are.

He saw laundry lines going through shell holes in gray masonry, looking through the missing door.

The boy pulled away the hood and fed him by hand, always too fast, pushing food into his mouth before he was finished chewing the previous handful.