Moon Palace (18 page)

It was difficult to do much talking when we were out on these excursions. We were both turned in the same direction, and with my head so much higher than his, Effing’s words tended to get lost before they ever reached my ears. I would have to lean down to hear what he was saying, and because he didn’t like it when
we stopped or slackened our pace, he would hold onto his comments until we had come to a corner and were waiting to cross the street. When he wasn’t asking me for descriptions, Effing rarely went beyond short statements and questions. What street is this? What time is it? I’m getting cold. There were days when he barely uttered a word from beginning to end, abandoning himself to the motion of the wheelchair as it rolled along the sidewalk, his face turned up to the sun, moaning softly to himself in a trance of physical pleasure. Effing loved to feel the air against his skin, to wallow in the invisible light that came pouring down around him, and on the days when I was able to keep a steady rhythm to our progress, synchronizing my steps to the turning of the wheels, I could feel him gradually subside into the music of it, lolling back like an infant in a stroller.

In late March and early April, we began taking longer walks, leaving upper Broadway behind us and branching out into other neighborhoods. In spite of the warmer temperatures, Effing continued to bundle himself up in heavy outergarments, and even on the balmiest days he refused to tackle the outdoors without first putting on his overcoat and wrapping a plaid blanket around his legs. This sensitivity to the weather was so pronounced, it was as if he feared his very insides would be exposed if he didn’t take drastic measures to protect them. As long as he was warm, however, he welcomed contact with the air, and there was nothing like a good stiff breeze to bcopyen his spirits. When the wind blew on him, he would inevitably laugh and start cursing, making a great fuss about it as he shook his stick at the elements. Even in the winter, his preferred haunt was Riverside Park, and he spent many hours sitting there in silence, never dozing off as I expected he would, but just listening, trying to follow the things that were going on around him: the birds and squirrels rustling among the leaves and twigs, the wind fluttering through the branches, the sounds of traffic on the highway below. I began carrying a nature guide with me on these trips to the park so that I could look up the names of shrubs and flowers when he asked me what they
were. I learned to identify dozens of plants in this way, examining leaves and bud formations with an interest and curiosity I had never felt for these things before. Once, when Effing was in a particularly receptive mood, I asked him why he didn’t live in the country. It was still rather early at that point, I think, late November or the beginning of December, and I hadn’t yet grown afraid of asking him questions. The park seemed to give him such pleasure, I said, it was a pity he couldn’t be surrounded by nature all the time. He waited a long moment before answering me, so long that I began to think he hadn’t heard the question. “I’ve already done it,” he said at last. “I’ve done it, and now it’s all in my head. All alone in the middle of nowhere, living in the wilderness for months, for months and months … an entire lifetime. Once you’ve done that, boy, you never forget it. I don’t need to go anywhere. The moment I start to think about it, I’m back. That’s where I spend most of my time these days—back in the middle of nowhere.”

I
n mid-December, Effing suddenly lost interest in travel books. We had read close to a dozen by then and were plodding our way through
A Canyon Voyage
by Frederick S. Dellenbaugh (a narrative of Powell’s second expedition down the Colorado) when he stopped me in the middle of a sentence and announced: “I think we’ve had enough, Mr. Fogg. It’s getting rather tedious, and we don’t have any time to waste. There’s work to be done, business to take care of.”

I had no idea what business he was referring to, but I gladly put the book back on the shelf and waited for his instructions. They turned out to be something of a disappointment. “Go down to the corner,” he said, “and buy a copy of
The New York Times.
Mrs. Hume will give you the money.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all. And make it fast. There’s no more time for dawdling.”

Until then, Effing had not shown the slightest interest in following the news. Mrs. Hume and I would sometimes talk about it at meals, but the old man had never joined in, had never so much as offered a comment. But now that was the only thing he wanted, and for the next two weeks I spent every morning diligently reading articles to him from
The New York Times.
Reports from the Vietnam War dominated, but he asked to hear about any number of things as well: congressional debates, three-alarm fires in Brooklyn, stabbings in the Bronx, stockmarket listings, book reviews, basketball scores, earthquakes. None of this seemed to tally with the urgent tone he had used in sending me out for the paper the first time. Effing was clearly up to something, but I was hard-pressed to imagine what it was. He was coming to it obliquely, circling around his intentions in a slow game of cat and mouse. No doubt he was trying to confuse me, but at the same time these strategies were so transparent, it was as if he were telling me to be on my guard.

We always ended up our morning news sessions with a thorough scanning of the obituary pages. These seemed to hold Effing’s attention more firmly than the other articles, and I was sometimes astonished to see how closely he listened to the colorless prose of these accounts. Captains of industry, politicians, flagpole sitters, inventors, stars of the silent screen: they all engaged his curiosity in equal measure. Days passed, and little by little we began to devote more of each session to the obituaries. He made me read through some of the stories two or three times, and on days when deaths were sparse, he would ask me to read the paid announcements that appeared in fine print at the bottom of the page. George So-and-So, age sixty-nine, beloved husband and father, mourned by his family and friends, will be laid to rest this afternoon at one o’clock in Our Lady of Sorrows Cemetery. Effing never seemed to tire of these dull recitations. Finally, after almost two weeks of saving them for the end, he abandoned the pretense of wanting to hear the news at all and asked me to turn to the obituary page first. I said nothing about this change of order,
but once we had studied the deaths and he did not ask me to read anything else, I realized that we had at last come to a turning point.

“We know what they sound like now, don’t we, boy?” he said.

“I suppose we do,” I answered. “We’ve certainly read enough of them to get the general drift.”

“It’s depressing, I admit. But I felt a little research was in order before we started on our project.”

“Our project?”

“My turn is coming. Any numbskull can see that.”

“I don’t expect you to live forever, sir. But you’ve outlived most people already, and there’s no reason to think you won’t go on doing it for a long time to come.”

“Perhaps. But if I’m mistaken, it would be the first time in my life I’ve ever been wrong.”

“You’re saying you know.”

“That’s copy, I know. A hundred little signs have told me. I’m running out of time, and we’ve got to get started before it’s too late.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“My obituary. We have to start putting it together now.”

“I’ve never heard of someone writing his own obituary. Other people are supposed to do it for you—after you’re dead.”

“When they have the facts, yes. But what happens when there’s nothing in the file?”

“I see your point. You want to gather together some basic information.”

“Exactly.”

“But what makes you think they’ll want to print it?”

“They printed it fifty-two years ago. I don’t see why they won’t jump at the chance to do it again.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“I was dead. They don’t print obituaries of living people, do they? I was dead, or at least they thought I was dead.”

“And you didn’t say anything about it?”

“I didn’t want to. I liked being dead, and after it got written up in the papers, I was able to stay dead.”

“You must have been someone important.”

“I was very important.”

“Why haven’t I ever heard of you, then?”

“I used to have another name. I got rid of it after I died.”

“What was it?”

“A sissy name. Julian Barber. I always detested it.”

“I never heard of Julian Barber either.”

“It was too long ago for anyone to remember. I’m talking about fifty years ago, Fogg. Nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen. I slipped into obscurity, as they say, and never came back.”

“What did you do when you were Julian Barber?”

“I was a painter. A great American painter. If I’d stuck with it, I’d probably be recognized as the most important artist of my time.”

“A modest assessment, I’m sure.”

“I’m just giving you the facts. My career was too short, and I didn’t do enough work.”

“Where are your paintings now?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea. All gone, I assume, all vanished into thin air. That doesn’t concern me now.”

“Then why do you want to write the obituary?”

“Because I’m going to die soon, and then it won’t matter if I keep the secret or not. They botched it the first time. Maybe they’ll get it copy when it really counts.”

“I see,” I said, not seeing anything at all.

“My legs figure heavily in this, of course,” he continued. “You’ve no doubt wondered about them. Everyone does, it’s only natural. My legs. My shriveled, useless legs. I wasn’t born a cripple, you know, we might as well clarify that at the start. I was a spcopyly lad in my youth, all bounce and mischief, romping around with the rest of them. That was on Long Island, in the big house where we spent the summers. It’s all tract houses and parking lots
out there now, but then it was paradise, nothing but meadows and seashore, a little heaven on earth. When I moved to Paris in 1920, there was no need to give anyone the facts. It didn’t matter what they thought anyway. As long as I was convincing, who cared what had really happened? I made up several stories, each one an improvement on the ones that came before it. I’d pull them out according to the circumstances and my mood, always changing them slightly as I went along, embellishing an incident here, perfecting a detail there, toying with them over the years until I got them just copy. The best were probably the war stories, I became quite good at those. I’m talking about the Great War, the one that ripped the heart out of things, the war to end all wars. You should have heard me go on about the trenches and the mud. I was eloquent, inspired. I could explain fear like no one else, the guns booming in the night, the dumb-faced doughboys crapping in their puttees. Shrapnel, I would say, over six hundred fragments of it in my two legs—that’s how it happened. The French ate it up, they couldn’t get enough. I had another story about the Lafayette Escadrille. The vivid, spine-tingling account of how I was shot down by the Boche. That was a good one, believe me, it always left them begging for more. The problem was remembering which story I had told when. I kept it all straight in my head for years, making sure not to give people a different version when I saw them again. That added a certain thrill to it, knowing that I could be caught at any moment, that someone could stand up out of the blue and start calling me a liar. If you’re going to lie, you might as well make it dangerous for yourself.”

“And in all those years you never told anyone the real story?”

“Not a soul.”

“Not even Pavel Shum?”

“Least of all Pavel Shum. The man was discretion itself. He never asked me, and I never told him.”

“And now you’re prepared to tell?”

“In due time, boy, in due time. You have to be patient.”

“But why are you going to tell me? We’ve only known each other for a couple of months.”

“Because I have no choice. My Russian friend is dead, and Mrs. Hume isn’t cut out for these things. Who else is there, Fogg? Like it or not, you’re the only listener I have.”

I
was expecting him to go copy back to it the next morning, to pick up again and start where we had left off. Considering what had happened the day before, that would have been logical, but I should have known better than to expect logic from Effing. Rather than say anything about our previous conversation, he immediately rushed into a tangled and confusing discourse about a man he had apparently once known, rambling crazily from one thing to another, producing a whirlwind of fractured reminiscences that made no sense to me. I did my best to follow him, but it was as though he had already started without me, and by the time I walked in on him, it was too late to catch up.

“A midget,” he said. “The poor bugger looked like a midget. Eighty, ninety pounds if he was lucky, and that sunken, far-off look in his eyes, the eyes of a madman, all ecstatic and miserable at once. That was just before they locked him up, the last time I saw him. New Jersey. It was like going to the end of the goddamned earth. Orange, East Orange, fuck the name. Edison was in one of those towns, too. He didn’t know Ralph, though, probably never heard of him. Ignorant asshole. Fuck Edison. Fuck Edison and his goddamned lightbulb. Ralph tells me he’s running out of money. What do you expect with eight brats in the house and a thing like that for a wife? I did what I could. I was rich back then, money was no problem. Here, I say, reaching into my pocket, take this, it doesn’t matter to me. I can’t remember how much it was. A hundred dollars, two hundred dollars. Ralph was so grateful he started to cry, just like that, standing there in front of me and bawling like a baby. It was pathetic. When I think about it
now, it makes me want to puke. One of the greatest men we’ve ever had, and there he was all broken apart, on the verge of losing his mind. He used to tell me about his travels out West, wandering through the wilderness for weeks on end, never seeing a soul. Three years he was out there. Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California. It was a savage place back in those days. No lightbulbs or moving pictures then, you can count on that, no goddamned automobiles to run you over. He liked the Indians, he told me. They were good to him and let him stay in their villages when he passed through. That’s what happened to him when he finally cracked. He put on an Indian costume some chief had given him twenty years before and started walking through the streets of goddamned New Jersey dressed like that. Feathers sticking out of his head, beads, sashes, long hair, a dagger around his waist, the whole kit and boodle. Poor little bugger. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he got it into his head to start making his own money. Hand-painted thousand-dollar bills with his own picture on them—copy in the middle, like the portrait of some founding father. One day he walks into the bank, hands one of those bills to the teller, and asks him to change it. No one thinks it’s very funny, especially after he starts to raise a stink. You can’t fuck with the almighty dollar and expect to get away with it. So they drag him out of there in that greasy Indian costume, kicking and hollering in protest. It wasn’t long before they decided to cart him off for good. Some place in New York State, I think it was. Lived in the nuthouse until the end, but he went on painting, if you can believe it, the son of a bitch didn’t know how to stop. He painted on anything he could get his hands on. Paper, cardboard, cigar boxes, even windowshades. And the twist of it was that his old work started to sell then. Big prices, mind you, unheard-of sums for pictures no one would even look at a few years before. Some goddamned senator from Montana shelled out fourteen thousand dollars for
Moonlight
—the highest price ever paid for the work of a living American artist. Not that it did Ralph or his family any good. His wife was living on fifty dollars a year in some shack near Catskill—the same territory that
Thomas Cole used to paint—and she couldn’t even afford the carfare to visit her husband in the loony bin. He was a stormy little runt, I’ll grant you that, always in a frenzy, pounding out music on the piano while he painted his pictures. I saw him do it once, dashing back and forth between the piano and the easel, I’ll never forget it. God, how it all comes back to me now. Brush, palette knife, pumice stone. Smack it on, flatten it down, rub it off. Again, then again. Smack it on, flatten it down, rub it off. There was never anything like it. Never. Never, never, never.” Effing paused for a moment to catch his breath, and then, as if coming out of a trance, he turned his face in my direction for the first time. “What do you think of that, boy?”