Mao II (17 page)

It took her a while to reach the picture that had attracted her. A silk screen on canvas measuring roughly five feet by six feet. It was called
Gorby
I and showed the Soviet President’s head and boxed-off shoulders set against a background of Byzantine gold, patchy strokes, expressive and age-textured. His skin was the ruddy flush of TV makeup and he had an overlay of blond hair, red lipstick and turquoise eye shadow. His suit and tie were deep black. Brita wondered if this piece might be even more Warholish than it was supposed to be, beyond parody, homage, comment and appropriation. There were six thousand Warhol experts living within a few square miles of this gallery and all the things had been said and all the arguments made but she thought that possibly in this one picture she could detect a maximum statement about the dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the public figure, about how it is possible to fuse images, Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Marilyn Monroe‘s, and to steal auras, Gold Marilyn’s and Dead-White Andy’s, and maybe six other things as well. Anyway it wasn’t funny. She’d taken the trouble to cross the room and look closely at this funny painted layered photo-icon and it wasn’t funny at all. Maybe because of the undertaker’s suit that Gorby wore. And the sense that these were play-death cosmetics, the caked face-powder and lemon-yellow hair color. And the very echo of Marilyn and all the death glamour that ran through Andy’s work. Brita had photographed him years ago and now one of her pictures hung in a show a few blocks down Madison Avenue. Andy’s image on canvas, Masonite, velvet, paper-and-acetate, Andy in metallic paint, silk-screen ink, pencil, polymer, gold leaf, Andy in wood, metal, vinyl, cotton-and-polyester, painted bronze, Andy on postcards and paper bags, in photomosaics, multiple exposures, dye transfers, Polaroid prints. Andy’s shooting scar, Andy’s factory, Andy tourist-posing in Beijing before the giant portrait of Mao in the main square. He’d said to her, “The secret of being me is that I’m only half here.” He was all here now, reprocessed through painted chains of being, peering out over the crowd from a pair of burnished Russian eyes.

Brita heard someone say her name. She turned and saw a young woman in a denim jacket slow-mouthing the word Hi.

“I heard the message on your machine about how you might be here around seven or eight or so.”

“That was meant for my dinner date.”

“Remember me?”

“Karen, isn’t it?”

“What am I doing here, right?”

“I think I’m afraid to ask.”

“I’m here to look for Bill,” she said.

 

 

He lay in bed open-eyed in the dark. There were intestinal moans from his left side, where gas makes a hairpin turn at the splenic flexure. He felt a mass of phlegm wobbling in his throat but he didn’t want to get out of bed to expel it, so he swallowed the whole nasty business, a slick syrupy glop. This was the texture of his life. If someone ever writes his true biography, it will be a chronicle of gas pains and skipped heartbeats, grinding teeth and dizzy spells and smothered breath, with detailed descriptions of Bill leaving his desk to walk to the bathroom and spit up mucus, and we see photographs of ellipsoid clots of cells, water, organic slimes, mineral salts and spotty nicotine. Or descriptions just as long and detailed of Bill staying where he is and swallowing. These were his choices, his days and nights. In the solitary life there was a tendency to collect moments that might otherwise blur into the rough jostle, the swing of a body through busy streets and rooms. He lived deeply in these cosmic-odd pauses. They clung to him. He was a sitting industry of farts and belches. This is what he did for a living, sit and hawk, mucus and flatus. He saw himself staring at the hair buried in his typewriter. He leaned above his oval tablets, hearing the grainy cut of the blade. In his sleeplessness he went down the batting order of the 1938 Cleveland Indians. This was the true man, awake with phantoms. He saw them take the field in all the roomy optimism of those old uniforms, the sun-bleached dinky mitts. The names of those ballplayers were his night prayer, his reverent petition to God, with wording that remained eternally the same. He walked down the hall to piss or spit. He stood by the window dreaming. This was the man he saw as himself. The biographer who didn’t examine these things (not that there would ever be a biographer) couldn’t begin to know the catchments, the odd-corner deeps of Bill’s true life.

His book, smelling faintly of baby drool, was just outside the door. He heard it moan solemnly, the same grave sound that welled in his gut.

In the morning there was a knock at the door. Bill was sitting in a chair, dressed except for shoes and socks, cutting his sepia toenails. The visitor was George Haddad. Bill was only slightly surprised. He went back to the chair and resumed trimming. George stood in a bare corner with his arms folded.

“I thought we might talk,” he said. “I felt we were slightly inhibited with Mr. Everson in attendance. Besides, it’s difficult to have a productive dialogue with bombs going off. And one can’t talk in London anyway. It’s the latest language hole in the Western world.”

“What do we want to talk about?”

“This young man can’t be saved. I’m not even saying released. He can’t be saved, his life is at risk unless we’re able to work without organizational pressures and without a constant police presence. ”

“You said his freedom is tied to the media. Do we work without them?”

“London has failed. Everyone has a script he brings along. No one talks about ideas. I think we have to reduce the scale of this operation.”

“The bomb has done that.”

“Reduce it radically. You and I need to trust each other enough to start over, just the two of us, somewhere else. I live in Athens now. I’m conducting a seminar at the Hellenic-American Institute. It’s very possible, although I can’t actually promise, but it’s possible I can arrange for you to meet the one man who can literally open the basement door and let the hostage go.”

Bill said nothing. A moment passed. George sat in the chair near the window.

“There’s something I wanted to ask the other evening at dinner.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you use a word processor?”

Bill had his right foot bent into his left hand and was working the curved blade of the scissors under an inward twist in the hard thick nail of the big toe and he paused briefly, pursing his lips and shaking his head no.

“Because I find I couldn’t conceivably operate without one. Move words, paragraphs, move a hundred pages, plus instant corrections. When I prepare material for lectures, I find the machine helps me organize my thoughts, gives me a text susceptible to revision. I would think for a man who clearly reworks and refines as much as you do, a word processor would be a major blessing.”

Bill shook his head no.

“Of course I’ve asked myself what you have to gain by traveling to Athens under circumstances that might be called—what do we want to call these circumstances, Bill?”

“Shadowy.”

“I’ve asked myself, Why would he say yes? What does he have to gain?”

“And what’s your answer?”

“You have nothing to gain. There is no guarantee of accomplishing the slightest thing. There is only risk. Any adviser would stress the possibility of personal danger.”

“I’d have to buy a shirt,” Bill said.

“It’s possible to talk in Athens. Beneath the frantic pace there is something I find conducive to reason and calm, to a settlement of differences. Not that I think you and I have deep disagreements at the level of ideas. Just the opposite in fact. We’ll have a dialogue, Bill. Unfettered. No one coming round to set guidelines or issue ultimatums. I have a terrace with a sweeping view.”

Bill had breakfast with the doctors. Just before noon he packed his bag and then paused by the open door and looked back into the room to make sure he’d left nothing behind. He went down to the lobby, checked out and walked a couple of blocks to a taxi rank. Look left. Look right. He imagined Charlie standing before a mirror knotting a brilliant necktie and waiting for the phone to ring. A cab came around a corner and headed toward him, the dark surface worked to a high shine. He got in, rolled down the window and sat back. For the first time he thought about the hostage.

S
cott was still doing lists, moving toward late May now, making lists of things that needed doing, doing the things, going along project by project, room by room. Of course the lists of things were also things. An item on a list might generate a whole new list. He knew if he wasn’t careful he’d get mired in a theory of lists and lose sight of the things that needed doing. There was pleasure in lists, taut and clean. Making the list, crossing off the items as you complete the tasks. It was a small whole contentment, a way of working toward a new reality.

He knew where Karen was but not a word from son of a bitch Bill.

He went through the house, noting things that needed doing, determined to do them, bills, mail, some minor caulking and scraping, all the rearranging of papers. The point of these lists and tasks seemed to be that when you performed each task and crossed off the corresponding item on the list and when you crumpled and discarded all the lists and stood finally and self-reliantly in a list-free environment, sealed from worldly contact, you were proving to yourself that you could go on alone.

He sat at the desk in the workroom now, cleaning the typewriter. He blew on the keys, using a damp rag to lift dust and hair from the felt pad. He opened the drawer to his left, thinking of the next major item on his list, a plan to reorganize reader mail. The drawer held a couple of old wristwatches and some stamps, rubber bands, erasers and foreign coins.

Bill was not a list-making novelist. He thought sentences lost their heft and edge when they were stretched too far and he didn’t seem to find the slightest primal joy in world-naming or enumerating, in penetrating the relatedness of things or words, those breathy sentences that beat with new exuberance.

Scott stood and looked at the wall charts, the blueprints of Bill’s long book. In over eight years here, he’d never had so close a look. Large foxed sheets filled with mystical graffiti. Even the tape that fixed the paper to the wall was sun-stained and coming loose. These were interesting things to study, all the arrows and scribbles and pictographs, the lines that connected dissimilar elements. Something primitive and brave-natured here. At least that’s how it looked to Scott, examining each sheet. Themes and characters attempting to draw together, linked in squiggles and dash trails, an obsessive need to meet and maintain. Bill’s long-suffering book. And Bill’s own scratchy voice in one of his clear-souled semidrunks of some years ago, saying, “Stories have no point if they don’t absorb our terror.”

Charles Everson was not returning calls. Not that he knew where Bill was and not that he would tell Scott even if he knew. No one knew. This was the essence of Bill’s disappearance as Scott understood it. Scott understood it as a kind of simulated death.

He sat at the desk again, putting his face to the keys and blowing hard.

Bill had his picture taken not because he wanted to come out of hiding but because he wanted to hide more deeply, he wanted to revise the terms of his seclusion, he needed the crisis of exposure to give him a powerful reason to intensify his concealment. Years ago there were stories that Bill was dead, Bill was in Manitoba, Bill was living under another name, Bill would never write another word. These were the world’s oldest stories and they were not about Bill so much as people’s need to make mysteries and legends. Now Bill was devising his own cycle of death and resurgence. It made Scott think of great leaders who regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns. Mao Zedong of course. Mao was pronounced dead many times in the press—dead or senile or too sick to run a revolution. Scott had recently come across a photograph of Mao taken in the course of his famous nine-mile swim at the age of seventy-two, following a long disappearance. Mao’s old pelt head sticking out of the Yangtze, godlike and comic.

He opened the drawer to his right and found some more foreign coins, some binder clips and lapsed driver’s licenses. He knew where Karen was, blank-faced in Manhattan, all receptors working. The next major item was reader mail, how to take it out of chronological order and structure it geographically, country by country, state by state.

He put his face to the keys and blew.

He raised the front end of the typewriter and rubbed the damp cloth over the pad, lifting dust and hair.

Mao used photographs to announce his return and demonstrate his vitality, to reinspire the revolution. Bill’s picture was a death notice. His image hadn’t become public yet and he was already gone. This was the crucial turn he needed in order to disappear completely, even from those he’d loved and trusted all these years. He would return in his own way, living somewhere else, more remotely, in one or another kind of disguise. Scott thought the photograph might make him look older. Not older in the picture but older as himself, after the fact of the picture. The picture would be a means of transformation. It would show him how he looked to the world and give him a fixed point from which to depart. Pictures with our likeness make us choose. We travel into or away from our photographs.

He opened the middle drawer and found a narrow black brush, some stamps, some rubber bands and old lead pennies and a bottle of typewriter correction fluid.

Bill would make a return to the book. This was the essence of Bill’s return. He would work on the novel with fresh energy, cut it back, gut it, strip it six ways to Sunday. He’s a new man now. He has the power of a reconstructed secret. Scott imagined him hunched over a desk, working the old spare territories of the word.

He lifted the typewriter cover and cleaned the hammers with the black brush.