Wakefield (14 page)

Now wouldn't the Devil have just died laughing if Wakefield chose the Home of the Future in which to make his “authentic” life? Of course, there's no good reason why the “authentic” couldn't occur in the most artificial environment. Authenticity may not even be possible unless it's deliberately constructed. The Devil may have, in fact, known only too well that “authenticity” is hugely misunderstood by humans. For most of them, Wakefield included, it means something like “spontaneity,” or “innocence,” or “soul mate,” all words that refer to a lost paradise possible only in the thrall of romantic reverie. In reality, modern humans, like the world we live in, are meticulously constructed and designed, utterly inauthentic and mechanical creatures. But Wakefield refuses to believe it. He's convinced that though reality may be a construct, it's built on something else, something
authentic
, and that he can discover it.

Maggie and Wakefield make love one more time in his hotel room, then she drives him to the airport through the snowy fields. The squat, modern buildings of The Company look like alien landing craft.

“It's hard to believe we grew corn there,” Maggie says. “Poor Daddy. But it's not so bad, actually. It's been great for me.”

No, it's not bad. It's quite wonderful, in fact. Some of the great brains of the age and the busy bees of American prosperity have made a home here; the spices of the world have wafted in and educated the palates of people who once thought french fries were haute cuisine. And Maggie is beautiful, sweet, and intelligent. Typical is a pretty great place.

But it's not time to settle yet, Wakefield tells himself. I haven't even heard the starter pistol, I can still play at life. But how long can he be a spectator of his own life? He feels suddenly desperate, like a tourist looking into the windows of a building where everyone is at home, relaxed, playing with their children, reading, watching television. That could be his life, but something prevents him from going in, a “something” that keeps pushing him on. He looks fondly at Maggie, who seems to expect something from him, more than “I'll give you a call.” It's another “something” Wakefield finds impossible. He tears a page from his notebook and scribbles down his home number and private e-mail address and hands it to Maggie, who looks disappointed in him.

To his credit, Wakefield has begun
some
preparations for eventually honoring the Deal with his Satanic Majesty. He has wrapped the whiskey glass from the Home of the Future inside a sock and has wound a T-shirt around the sock for extra protection. It's inside his carry-on bag, and is intended to be the first in a series of objects that he will eventually present to the Devil as proof of the sincerity of his search, if not actually proof of his success. Damn you, Beelzebub, he swears silently, why don't you fire your freakin' pistol now, so I can seriously get going? For a moment he wonders if the shot wasn't already fired and he didn't hear it because he was too busy talking.

Waiting to board his flight, Wakefield checks his e-mail. There's one from Marianna: “I hear you're coming to my city. Call me, we have things to discuss.” Damn, she must have seen his talk advertised in the paper. Marianna moved to the Wintry City after their breakup, when she decided, after years of avoiding her roots, to reconnect with them; the large Romanian community there had apparently been the draw. Okay, Marianna, I'm not gonna call, but if you find me, you find me.

A message from Ivan: “You missed a great party. Our new mayor decided to live up to his election promises and arrested sixty cabdrivers, most of them Arab and Russian, for not having proper licenses or for having bought them illegally. I was not one, but then I paid more and I know the guy—he used to drink at the bar. Anyway, they released them all today with a fine and everybody's driving again because there are fifty thousand neurosurgeons in town and, man, you should see their wives! They smell good!” Strange that Zamyatin writes English without an accent. When he speaks, his accent is always with him, but his English grammar varies according to weather, mood, or vodka. He can sould like a Cambridge professor or like a breathless greenhorn, as if language was itself some kind of weather or mood or alcohol. Wakefield feels a longing to be back home hanging out with Ivan in his slapdash, tolerant, corrupt semitropical city.

The next e-mail is from the publisher of a new magazine interested in a travel piece about anything, 1,500 words at $2 a word. That's $3,000, but Wakefield rarely writes articles anymore, having parlayed his writing career into the much more lucrative lecture business. He still receives regular offers, though, because he acquired a reputation, and a readership who sensed that beneath his descriptions of ice floes, tribal rituals, restaurants, lodges, and festivals, there was a certain darkness that resonated like a hidden architecture, an occult subtext. Fans of his writing actually created his lecture career; some of them were high-income professionals charged with hiring speakers for their annual conferences. In the hope of finding out what it was that lay behind Wakefield's prose, they hired him to speak at their luncheons.

Talking to people about things he knew well was easy; he tried to describe his experiences spontaneously and he allowed himself the luxury of thinking out loud, as if he were among friends. Sometimes the audience lost interest when it became clear that he was working against the grain of their hopes and dreams, but still they sat quietly, anticipating lunch. Some audiences didn't appreciate his little icebreaking jokes at the expense of their chosen profession, but others were fascinated by his lack of respect and listened to every word he said with a kind of awe. Wakefield himself was astonished when reports of this effect filtered back to him. “Fantastic,” “a prophet,” “visionary” were some of the more embarrassing estimations of his skill. If Wakefield had been a preacher, he might have taken such praise as his due. As it was, he really had no idea what it was they had heard. He understood his effect even less now, many years after his first engagement. When people asked him to define what he did, he said simply, “It's a kind of performance art.”

Ever practical Ivan Zamyatin made light of Wakefield's insecurity. “Do what you're doing!” boomed the Russian. “The more you do what you're doing, the more they'll pay you. More rubles, my friend, more rupees and pesetas!”

But Wakefield couldn't just go on doing what he did, because he had no clear idea of what he'd done. In his very first paid speech, he had described an adventure that had taken him in search of the lost city of the Incas. He had speculated about what it must have been like to live in a layered and terraced world that stratified its inhabitants by rank and wealth. Then he'd gone on to talk about the people who must have lived between the layers of such a world, hidden people whose social functions were not clearly defined or understood, and who might have been much like artists and drifters in our time. As he spoke he closed his eyes and imagined them, inspired by their presumed existence and by their strange relation to their hierarchical society. This closing of eyes was interpreted by the audience as either a rhetorical trick or a genuine moment of rapture, but it was for Wakefield a nearly unconscious gesture, a way of concentrating. The more he talked, the more clearly he saw the “hidden tribes,” as he called them, and the more articulate he became in defining and
defending
them. He didn't even realize that in addition to speculating as to their existence—everywhere, not only in Peru—he was finding reasons for their existence, and not just reasons but imperatives as well, and he felt himself becoming a spokesman for the “hidden tribes” whose existence no one had proven. He ended up asserting that he was himself a member of such a community, and that his existence was proof of theirs.

He had worried, that first time, about his paycheck. After the lecture his host, in whose pocket the check lay, shook his hand with evident emotion. Not only had he not thought Wakefield was insane, he had been genuinely moved. If he'd had two checks, he'd have handed them right over. So Wakefield learned not to worry about where his talk might take him; he just went with the flow.

This is what he tried to tell Ivan. Sure, the money was good. His price crept up, then shot up. He wasn't alone. It was a time of tent revivals, just like in the mid-nineteenth century. Snake-oil salesmen and gurus of every stripe were making bundles preaching to the crowds. Putative paradises achievable through patented formulas were conjured from thin air and made instantly available. America was rolling in money and a not inconsiderable portion of that gravy slopped generously into the bowls of smooth talkers and charlatans. Wakefield read some history and found that his own age was very like the Jacksonian era before the Civil War. At that time everyone from mesmerists and channelers of the dead to writers like Mark Twain were raking in the chips. It was about that time, too, that Hawthorne's Wakefield decided to drop out. Nineteen-nineties America was just as enamored of bathos and fantasy as Jacksonian America had been. It made Wakefield feel even more like a fraud. So he stopped accepting writing assignments and began to think about gradually retiring from the lecture circuit. His plan seemed reasonable, but he was still stricken with an unspecific dread.

He went to see a doctor. “Not unusual,” his doctor said, prescribing a new antianxiety medicine. “Everybody takes these now,” the doctor assured him, “though I don't quite know what's making people so anxious. Stock market is doing great, people are traveling, there's a new restaurant on every corner.” The doctor, a younger man than Wakefield, became reverent. “My wife and I have reservations at Marlene's.… I hear she does for crab what Perlman does for the violin.”

On the way home Wakefield couldn't shake the image of Chef Marlene torturing a poor crab to draw the music out of it. That night he dreamed that he was in a casino among a crowd of people all looking up at some kind of board. Only there wasn't any board, or any roof, for that matter; the mob was staring at a cloudless blue sky. This is the casino of the dead, his dream voice told him; they're waiting for you to make a speech.

Not long after, the Devil showed up.

Now Wakefield writes the editor of the new magazine a polite e-mail, turning down the essay invitation. He quickly scans the title headings of his other messages, erasing the usual promises of paradise: Viagra, penis enlargement, breast augmentation, diet pills.

Quit while you're ahead, Wakefield thinks, as he boards his flight out of Typical. This will be my last lecture tour. He's concluded the first leg successfully (and without Viagra), and the next stop should be a breeze. The third and last gig worries him, though. Other than his attending a party for his usual lecture fee, he hasn't been told a thing. His agent had reported that the man who hired him only said, “I've heard him speak, now I want him to listen.” Wakefield wonders about that. Maybe he's a lousy listener. He wonders, too, if he's really ahead of anything. He's racing alright, but the race hasn't even begun. Zelda once asked him, when he'd scheduled five flights in one week, “What are you running from, Wakefield? Somebody chasing you?” At that time there was no Devil, and Wakefield hadn't the slightest idea why he was running, or even that he
was
running, and it had never occurred to him that anyone or anything was chasing him.

“Why do you think I'm running, Zelda?” he'd asked her. She'd taken her time and then answered, not surprisingly, “Your daemon.”

“My demon?” Wakefield thought he'd heard her say.

“You know what I said, Wakefield. Your daemon. If you persist in mistaking your daemon for a demon, you'll get what you wish.” Guess she was right. Zelda had explained the “daemon” to him before: it was the angel of his fate, the particular guide and guardian of his unique life. Running away from one's daemon was a spiritual crime in her book, one of the gravest.

PART THREE

WINTRY CITY

Wintry City's almost home, Wakefield's been here so often over the years, so he's excited when the airplane approaches low over an immensity of solid brick neighborhoods, alive with ethnic old-timers, new immigrants, and blue-collar families.

“How is my favorite melting pot?” he asks the Arab cabdriver who takes him from the airport to his usual hotel, an old gangster hangout circa 1925, recently restored, but not too much, he hopes.

“Pot of boiling shit,” the cabbie says.

They pass a familiar diner Wakefield remembers as having the best potato pancakes in the city; around the corner is an ancient Polish Dog stand huddled right under the elevated tracks. His mouth waters; sauerkraut and spicy brown mustard. Yum. The cabbie curses. The street to the hotel is blocked off by police.

“Maybe a riot or a festival. Never can tell.”

When Wakefield was last here, he noticed that the city was undergoing a transformation. Once a fairly grim blue-collar town where men went home after work to corned beef and cabbage, it had become almost lighthearted, constantly celebrating festivals, fiestas, and ethnic parades. When he bails out of the cab at the end of the block the driver tries to overcharge him by ten dollars. He argues; it's a principle.

“My friend, your meter is fast. I come here all the time, I know how much it should be.”

“Look,” says the driver, “I'm sorry, but my rent goes up five hundred dollars last week. I don't know what now. Five children, wife has no job.”

Wakefield is interested. “How could your rent go up so much all at once?”

The cabbie hangs his head. “Two weeks now a foreign woman buys my building with suitcase full of cash. Next day, everybody work there gone, maintenance guys, boilers man, super, janitor, everybody. These men come instead, all foreign, they speak no English, not a word, they wear nice suits, black shoes, sunglasses, all young, no smile, very very frighten. Then rent goes up. Tenants there, maybe fifteen years, they complain. Owner say, they the new maintenance, they also can beat you up. You pay or leave. Half the people, all the old people, they leave. Some have family, other to the bum shelter. You tell me what I do.”