Moon Palace (26 page)

He spent the whole of the next day preparing to leave. He straightened the furniture, washed off blood stains wherever he found them, and stored his notebooks in the cupboard. He regretted having to say good-bye to his paintings, but there was nothing else to be done, and so he stacked them neatly at the foot of the bed and turned them against the wall. It took him no more than a couple of hours to do this, but for the rest of the morning and all through the afternoon, he stood out in the hot sun collecting stones and branches to block up the mouth of his cave. He doubted that he would ever be coming back, but he nevertheless wanted to keep the place hidden. It was his private monument, the tomb in which he had buried his past, and whenever he thought about it in the future, he wanted to know that it was still there, exactly as it had been. In that way it would continue to serve as a mental refuge for him, even if he never set foot in it again.

He slept out in the open that night, and the following morning he prepared himself for his journey. He packed the saddlebags, he gathered up food and water, he strapped everything onto the three horses the Greshams had left behind. Then he rode off, trying to imagine what he would do next.

I
t took us more than two weeks to get that far. Christmas had long since come and gone, and a week after that the decade
had ended. Effing paid little attention to these milestones, however. His thoughts were fixed on an earlier time, and he burrowed through his story with inexhaustible care, leaving nothing out, backtracking to fill in minor details, dwelling on the smallest nuances in an effort to recapture his past. After a while, I stopped wondering whether he was telling me the truth or not. His narrative had taken on a phantasmagoric quality by then, and there were times when he did not seem to be remembering the outward facts of his life so much as inventing a parable to explain its inner meanings. The hermit’s cave, the saddlebags of money, the Wild West shootout—it was all so farfetched, and yet the very outra-geousness of the story was probably its most convincing element. It did not seem possible that anyone could have made it up, and Effing told it so well, with such palpable sincerity, that I simply let myself go along with it, refusing to question whether these things had happened or not. I listened, I recorded what he said, I did not interrupt him. In spite of the revulsion he sometimes inspired in me, I could not help thinking of him as a kindred spirit. Perhaps it started when we got to the episode about the cave. I had my own memories of living in a cave, after all, and when he described the loneliness he had felt then, it struck me that he was somehow describing the same things I had felt. My own story was just as preposterous as Effing’s, but I knew that if I ever chose to tell it to him, he would have believed every word I said.

As the days went by, the atmosphere in the house became more and more claustrophobic. The weather was ferocious outside—freezing rain, ice-covered streets, winds that blew copy through you—and for the time being we had to suspend our afternoon walks. Effing began doubling up on the obituary sessions, withdrawing to his room for a short nap after lunch and then storming out again at two-thirty or three, ready to go on talking for several more hours. I don’t know where he found the energy to continue at such a pace, but other than having to pause between sentences a bit more than usual, his voice never seemed to let him down. I began to live inside that voice as though it were
a room, a windowless room that grew smaller and smaller with each passing day. Effing wore the black patches over his eyes almost constantly now, and there was no chance to deceive myself into thinking there was some connection between us. He was alone with the story in his head, and I was alone with the words that poured from his mouth. Those words filled every inch of the air around me, and in the end there was nothing else for me to breathe. If not for Kitty, I probably would have been smothered. After my work with Effing was done, I usually managed to see her for several hours, spending as much of the night with her as possible. On more than one occasion, I did not return until early the next morning. Mrs. Hume knew what I was up to, but if Effing had any idea of my comings and goings, he never said a word. The only thing that mattered was that I appear at the breakfast table every morning at eight o’clock, and I never failed to be there on time.

Once he left the cave, Effing said, he traveled through the desert for several days before coming to the town of Bluff. From then on, things became easier for him. He worked his way north, slowly moving from town to town, and made it back to Salt Lake City by the end of June, where he linked up with the railroad and bought a ticket for San Francisco. It was in California that he invented his new name, turning himself into Thomas Effing when he signed the hotel register on the first night. He wanted the Thomas to refer to Moran, he said, and it wasn’t until he put down the pen that he realized that Tom had also been the hermit’s name, the name that had secretly belonged to him for more than a year. He took the coincidence as a good omen, as though it had strengthened his choice into something inevitable. As for his surname, he said, it would not be necessary for him to provide me with a gloss. He had already told me that Effing was a pun, and unless I had misread him in some crucial way, I felt I knew where it had come from. In writing out the word
Thomas
, he had probably been reminded of the phrase
doubting Thomas
. The gerund had then given way to another:
fucking Thomas
, which for convention’s sake had
been further modified into
f-ing
. Thus, he was Thomas Effing, the man who had fucked his life. Given his taste for cruel jokes, I imagined how pleased he must have been with himself.

Almost from the very start, I kept expecting him to tell me about his legs. The rocks of Utah struck me as a likely place for such an accident, but each day his narrative advanced a little farther, and still he made no mention of what had crippled him. The trek with Scoresby and Byrne, the encounter with George Ugly Mouth, the shootout with the Greshams: one by one, he had come through these events unscathed. Then he was in San Francisco, and I began to have my doubts that he would ever get to it. He spent more than a week describing what he had done with the money, enumerating the investments he had made, the financial deals he had pulled off, the frantic risks he had taken on the stockmarket. Within nine months he was rich again, almost as rich as he had been before: he owned a house on Russian Hill with a staff of servants, he had women whenever he wanted them, he traveled among the most elegant circles of society. He might have settled permanently into this kind of life (which in fact was the same life he had known since boyhood), if not for an incident that took place about a year after his arrival. Invited to a dinner party with about twenty other guests, he was suddenly confronted with a figure from his past, a man who had worked as a colleague of his father’s in New York for more than ten years. Alonzo Riddle was an old man by then, but when he was introduced to Effing and shook his hand, there was no question that he recognized him. Overcome by astonishment, Riddle even went so far as to blurt out that Effing was the spitting image of someone he had once known. Effing made light of the coincidence, joking pleasantly about how every man is supposed to have an exact double somewhere, but Riddle was too stunned to let go of it, and he began to tell the story of Julian Barber’s disappearance to Effing and the other guests. It was a horrible moment for Effing, and he squirmed through the rest of the evening in a state of panic, unable to free himself from Riddle’s wondering and suspicious eyes.

After that, he understood how precarious his situation was. Sooner or later, he was bound to run into another person from his past, and there was nothing to guarantee that he would be as lucky as he had been with Riddle. The next person would be surer of himself, more belligerent in his accusations, and before Effing knew it, the whole thing could blow up in his face. As a precautionary measure, he abruptly stopped giving parties and accepting invitations, but he knew that these things were not going to help him in the long run. Eventually, people would notice that he had withdrawn from them, and that would arouse their curiosity, which in turn would give way to gossip, which could only lead to trouble. It was November 1918. The Armistice had just been signed, and Effing knew that his days in America were numbered. In spite of that certainty, he found himself incapable of doing anything about it. He lapsed into inertia, could not make plans or think about the possibilities that were open to him. Overwhelmed by guilt, by the terrible thing he had done to his life, he indulged in reckless fantasies of returning to Long Island with some colossal lie to account for what had happened. That was out of the question, but he clung to it as a dream of redemption, tenaciously conjuring one false exit after another, and could not bring himself to act. For several months, he shut himself off from the world, sleeping in his darkened room by day and venturing out to Chinatown at night. It was always Chinatown. He never wanted to go there, but he could never find the courage not to go. Against his will, he began haunting the brothels and opium dens and gambling parlors that were hidden in the labyrinth of its narrow streets. He was looking for oblivion, he said, trying to drown in a degradation that would equal the loathing he felt for himself. His nights became a miasma of clattering roulette wheels and smoke, of Chinese women with pockmarked faces and missing teeth, of airless rooms and nausea. His losses were so extravagant that by August he had squandered close to a third of his fortune on these debaucheries. It would have gone on until the end, he said, until he had either
killed himself or run out of money, if fate had not caught up with him and broken him in two. What happened could not have been more violent or sudden, but for all the misery it unleashed, the fact was that nothing less than a disaster could have saved him.

It was raining that night, Effing said. He had just spent several hours in Chinatown and was walking home, all wobbly with the dope in his system, barely conscious of where he was. It was three or four o’clock in the morning, and he had begun climbing the steep hill that led to his neighborhood, pausing at nearly every lamppost to hang on for a moment and catch his breath. Somewhere at the beginning of the walk he had lost his umbrella, and he was soaked to the skin by the time he reached the last hill. With the rain pounding on the sidewalk and his head swimming in its opium stupor, he didn’t hear the stranger come up from behind him. One moment he was trudging along the street, and the next moment it was as though a building had fallen on top of him. He had no idea what it was—a club, a brick, the butt of a revolver, it could have been anything. All he felt was the force of the blow, a tremendous thud at the base of his skull, and then he went down, immediately collapsing onto the pavement. He must have been unconscious for only a few seconds, for the next thing he remembered was opening his eyes and feeling a spray of water against his face. He was sliding down the hill, shooting down the slippery street at a speed he could not control: head first, on his belly, arms and legs flailing as he struggled to grab hold of something to stop his wild descent. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop, couldn’t get up, couldn’t do anything but roll about like some wounded insect. At a certain point, he must have twisted his body in such a way that his trajectory began to carry him down the sidewalk at a slight angle, and suddenly he saw that he was about to vault off the curb and go flying into the street. He braced himself for the jolt, but just as he came to the edge, he spun out another eighty or ninety degrees and went straight into a lamppost, his spine smashing into the ironwork at full force. At the
same instant, he heard something snap, and then he felt a pain that resembled nothing he had ever felt before, a pain so grotesque and powerful that he thought his body had literally exploded.

He never gave me the precise medical details of his injury. The prognosis was the thing that counted, and it wasn’t long before the doctors had reached a unanimous verdict. His legs had died on him, and no matter how much therapy he subjected himself to, he would never walk again. Strangely enough, he said, this news came almost as a relief. He had been punished, and because the punishment was a terrible one, he was no longer obligated to punish himself. His crime had been paid for, and suddenly he was empty again: no more guilt, no more fears of being caught, no more dread. If the nature of the accident had been different, it might not have had the same effect on him, but because he had not seen his attacker, because he never understood why he had been attacked in the first place, he could not help interpreting it as a form of cosmic retribution. The purest kind of justice had been meted out; a harsh and anonymous blow had descended from the sky, and he had been crushed, arbitrarily and without mercy. There had been no time to defend himself or plead his case. Before he knew it had begun, the trial was over, the sentence had been handed down, and the judge had disappeared from the courtroom.

It took him nine months to recover (to the extent that he was able to recover), and then he began making preparations to leave the country. He sold his house, transferred his assets into a numbered Swiss bank account, and bought a false passport under the name of Thomas Effing from a man with anarcho-syndicalist affiliations. The Palmer raids were in full swing by then, Wobblies were being lynched, Sacco and Vanzetti had been arrested, and most members of radical groups had gone into hiding. The passport forger was a Hungarian immigrant who worked out of a cluttered basement room in the Mission, and Effing remembered paying dearly for the document. The man was on the verge of nervous collapse, he said, and because he suspected Effing of being
an undercover agent who would arrest him the moment the work was done, he delayed the job for several weeks, offering farfetched excuses each time another deadline passed. The price kept going up as well, but because the money was the least of Effing’s concerns at that point, he finally broke the deadlock by telling the man that he would double his highest asking price if he could have the passport ready promptly at nine o’clock the next morning. It was too tempting for the Hungarian not to risk it—the sum was now more than eight hundred dollars—and when Effing handed him the cash the next morning and did not arrest him, the anarchist broke down and wept, hysterically kissing Effing’s hand in gratitude. That was the last encounter he had with anyone in America for twenty years, and the memory of that shattered man never left him. The whole country had gone to hell, he thought, and he managed to say good-bye to it without any regrets.