Little Caesar (21 page)

The cabbie who took me to my father I paid with dollars my mother had given me, making me a child of both. Brightly colored flyers lay on the pavement before the gallery, the remains of this morning’s demonstration, the daily boycott. The dark tarpaulins hung motionless, as though they surrounded the black stone of Islam. It had to be irony, a joke on the part of the gallery owner, to exhibit a work of extreme desecration with the trappings of a shrine. The cleaving of the stone. The space which served as the office was in the back of the gallery, bathed in caustic light. At a desk was the man I had seen yesterday. An old, bedraggled Labrador lay at his feet. I wanted to talk to that man, but first I had to work my way past the bespectacled secretary, who had adorned herself for the occasion with all the disdain in the world.

‘Ma’am, could I . . .’

She raised her hand.

‘Just a minute,’ she said.

She rose from her chair and slid a folder back into the rack above her head. Then she looked at me over the top of her glasses, which struck me as a strange habit, looking at people over the top of one’s glasses.

‘There’s something I need to ask that gentleman over there. Mr. Steinson, is it, or Mr. Freeler?’

‘Neither, actually,’ she said. ‘And you are from . . .?’

‘I’m not from anything. I just have a question.’

The man looked at us.

‘What can I do for you?’ he called out.

The secretary resumed her position at the Mac, her fingers with their long, painted nails hovering over the keys like a pianist before the concert starts. The man slid his chair back and came over to me. The dog lifted its head with a sigh.

‘You wanted to ask something about the show?’

‘About the maker, actually.’

‘Have you seen the catalog?’

‘Yes. But it didn’t say whether he’s still working on his project, on
Abgrund
.’

‘As far as I know, he’s still there.’

‘But how do you get hold of his work? Does he bring it himself, or do you go and fetch it?’

The dog came up behind the man, leaned against his legs. The look on the gallery manager’s face changed, became cautious, distant. Why did I want to know all this? he asked. Perhaps he suspected that I was a demonstrator, a disturber of the peace. I asked, ‘Is it possible to meet Schultz, as far as you know? That’s what I’m interested in.’

‘It would be easier to schedule a meeting with the President, I’m afraid. I can’t remember . . . no, no interviews, nothing.’

‘I saw the film,’ I said, ‘yesterday. I . . . What I’m curious about, actually, is how you should look at something like this, about what kind of art you’d call it.’

He nodded.

‘I remember a happening,’ he said, ‘sometime in the late Sixties. It was the first time I saw an artist destroy his own work. A funny guy, very mild-mannered, really. Wolfgang Stoerchle, he drove a car over his own work, his paintings. Died quite suddenly. Otherwise . . . well. It’s fuck-you-work, in fact. About ten years ago the guys from the Survival Research Lab did a show at Joshua Tree. They blew up things in the landscape, accompanied by deafening music from Einstürzende Neubauten. A bit of a failure, really. A pile of debris went “blooey”, and that was pretty much it. Mark Pauline still likes to blow up things, he even lost a hand in an explosion, but that was by accident. I don’t know whether Schultz saw the stuff at Joshua Tree, whether that gave him the idea. And, of course, you’ve also got Roman Singer’s Action Sculptures . . .’

‘The Chinese,’ the girl behind him said without looking up from her terminal. ‘The Chinese do explosions, too.’

‘Fuck-you-work, all of it,’ the man said. ‘But anything like Schultz, there’s never been anything quite so, so grand. And so malicious.’

‘You think it’s malicious?’

‘Oh yes, definitely. No doubt about it.’

I thanked him for his time and said I was going to watch the film again.

‘No problem.’

I parted the tarps for the second time and went in. Sitting on the front bench, bathed in blue light, was an older couple. Again I submitted myself to his prophetic rage, cryptic as a language without vowels. The camera homed in on the workers far below as they carried off stones, the wind rasped in the mike. He ridiculed them.

‘Created for obeisance. To have gods above them, not to be gods. The radical imperative. Every man is an abyss . . . but the audacity needed to be
someone else’s
abyss . . . Unflinchingly. That’s what it is to have backbone, to be someone else’s abyss . . .’

He began making his way down, gray sky above, the exhausted greenery lurching below. Schultz was humming, you could hear the gravel crunch beneath his shoes. He sang a line of the song, repeated it at intervals.
Denn alle Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit
. He stopped, aimed the camera at a higher spot. The lens slid across the lesions.

‘All that remains is what is gone. Deep, deep eternity. But they want a Creator. To have their existence confirmed. Oh, the cowardly sanctification of Creation. The emotion! The ideals! The piss-ants! Their
mysterium tremendum
! But destruction is the only thing with permanence. The future belongs only to the anti-Creator.’

The laughter of someone who has been alone too long. I felt like running away or weeping, how could this jousting with the gods and with people end in anything but self-destruction? I didn’t run, however, I remained seated until the film came back to the moment where I had arrived the day before, the explosion of the mountain’s face; only then did I leave the Ka’abah.

The street didn’t help me catch my breath. This man, and I was his son.
Abgrund
rolled you in the coils of a man’s inner world and squeezed the life out of you. Now I had two parents in need of saving.

My life of nights began. The symbiosis. Nights during which her face beneath me against the white sheet flowed into other, all-too-familiar faces. Perhaps it was the fatigue, perhaps the ecstasy, but I often saw those faces rise up through hers like air bubbles – when we made love, or afterwards, when I lay on her like a gravestone and felt her heartbeat gradually diminish. Before my eyes, as they searched for a grip in the dusky darkness, I saw my drawing teacher Eve Prescott appear, and once, to my surprise, that of Daisy Farnsworth, a homely girl from my class. I closed my eyes to Paula Loyd, when she came swimming towards me through the milk of the night; when I opened them again it was Sarah looking at me. Let me be frank and admit that sometimes it was my mother’s face as well, and that I was powerless when it came to my brain’s nocturnal projections.

And so we drowned in each other, and were washed up at the first light of day in that little room somewhere in the world.

‘I have to get going,’ she said. ‘Stay as long as you want.’

She sat straight up in bed. She looked at me, the smile of someone still halfway in the dream. I had become a stammerer, someone who said, ‘You, your back, nice.’

My fingertips slid over the curve of muscle beneath her skin.

‘What are you going to demonstrate against today?’

A little sound of protest.

‘You know, some people have to hold down a job too, Ludwig.’

A few mornings a week she went to La Cienega to raise her voice against Schultz’s work. I had been waiting for the right moment to tell her, but the longer I put it off the more of a secret it became. I feared what might come of it. Euphoria and dread were never far apart, they took turns racing like relay runners. I was going to tell her. Soon. She would understand that I wasn’t him, that his hateful, pitch-black visions were not hereditary. I asked myself why I didn’t tell her right away. Was it because I wasn’t entirely sure of how they, Schultz and my mother, manifested themselves in me? Mightn’t the perversion and violence smolder on in me, Caesarion, the confluence of those two egos who had sought to reproduce themselves?

Sarah sighed and climbed out of bed, picking from among the things lying on the floor what she would wear that day.

The afternoon after seeing
Abgrund
for the second time, I went to Venice to wait for evening. A bar at beachside, a hamburger and a Coke, please (I’m in America, goddamn it, I’ll bloody well eat whatever I like), and inside me the certainty that I will go in search of him. Not now, not right away, but I would find him, as soon as my mother and I once again had solid ground beneath our feet. What makes me think that he longs for me the way I do for him? What makes me think that I can comfort him? That I am the only one who can enter the cage without him devouring me? In my thoughts he is always
Schultz
, never
Father
or
Papa
.
Papa
sounds preposterous, like sticking your tongue in someone’s ear the moment you meet them. I whisper
Papa
to him, a few times in a row,
Papapapa
, and can’t help laughing, it sounds more taunting than intimate.

‘Your Coke, sir. Hamburger’s on its way.’

Schultz was right, eternity belongs to that which is gone. In the same way that he, his running away, has established the course of our lives. We have lived around his absence. And then, clear as can be, the insight that she, Marthe Unger, has re-entered the light in order to be seen by him. She shows herself to the world in the hope that, somewhere in that world, his eye will fall on her. The splendor of her body, which she has kept for him, and now given back to the marketplace. The marketplace she had left because she loved him – a sacrifice he hadn’t asked for and perhaps hadn’t even wanted. Had it excited him to possess the woman who elicited such boundless desire? Was his interest, his fire, extinguished once she had given up that role for him? There had been no great crises, no drawn-out arguments poisoning the relationship, nothing had occurred that might have justified his leaving. Perhaps, when he came up to her in New York and introduced himself, he had assumed the desire of all those others, perhaps it had fed his love for her, and he had realized his mistake only on Rue Mahmoud Abou El Ela, once the others were no longer around; they were alone together now, they had only each other to fall back on.

A ragged procession of joggers, cyclists and skaters moved past the restaurant patio. I read free tabloids till the afternoon was over. Suddenly there was the encirclement of mist. The temperature dropped sharply. I paid the tab and walked into the cloud, which seemed to drip lightly, a bedewed spider’s web. I followed the trail back. I was a man on his way to claim his prize. The sensation of being able to look through walls, to see their little lives. I padded lightly down their streets, the shadow of an unstoppable predator sliding across the house fronts.

The little car was parked in front of her house, one wheel up on the curb. Two steps at a time I ascended to her castle in the air and barged into her world with a bang.

‘Jesus, Ludwig!’

Candles, incense.

‘I’ve been running all day,’ I said. ‘All I can do is run. I don’t know what it is.’

She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing a white undershirt with wide armholes.

She said, ‘I spent ninety minutes in traffic and sang real loud along with Lenny Kravitz. So don’t I deserve a kiss?’

Yes, that and more. We rolled around on the bed like young cats, at the center of that little galaxy. At the head of the bed a votive candle was burning in front of a photo I hadn’t noticed before. Disentangling myself, I leaned on the mattress in order to get a better look. Two hands cupped to form a shallow bowl, in them something unformed, a slimy wad, black, tarlike. I exhaled loudly and said, ‘What is that for a mess?’

I recognized my mistake right away, saw how she answered my disgust with even more disgust. She rolled away from under me and was standing beside the bed in the same motion. Moving to the little window, she stood there, her arms crossed, ponderous, silent. This was what I had been afraid of, the wrong word, the evil charm that signaled the start of the destruction. I gasped for air, for words. I had to undo something, but didn’t know what I’d done.

‘Sarah, what’s wrong?’

‘Don’t say anything.’

Disaster was flying in on huge wings, the message it croaked was the inconstancy of all happiness. One wrong move and you find yourself irrevocably out of love. I stammered apologies and climbed off the bed. Across the twilight-blue room the severity fell from her slowly, like dry husks. The picture behind the candle, I saw now, was like a domestic altar. On the shelf there was incense, a silver rattle, something that looked a pile of herbs.

‘That,’ she said at last in a voice that didn’t seem like hers, ‘is Dylan.’

She took a deep breath. Her shoulders sagged.

‘Dylan was born four months prematurely.’

The ground opened up beneath me.

‘Afterwards, Denzel left me.’

‘His swimming trunks,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.’

The gratitude when she glanced at me again. The life that may have been coming back.

‘Denzel,’ I said, ‘was he black?’

‘Afro-American, yeah.’

I knew nothing about the world, a rank beginner. She was a lifetime ahead of me.

Days later, when she had closed the door behind her early in the morning and left me there alone, I blushed again when I thought back on that moment. I turned onto my side and looked at the black fetus in his cloak of blood and slime.

‘Hi, Dylan,’ I said.

I didn’t know whose hands were holding him. White hands, maybe hers. After a while she had started going out with men again, some of them became lovers, with none of them had it become anything more than that.

At night she said, ‘You have soft skin. Like a girl’s.’

‘So do you.’

A man and a woman laugh quietly in the dark. The words:
We were together. I have forgotten about the rest
. She took my hand and pushed it between her legs. The coarse hair, the slipperiness of her cunt.

‘Another one,’ she groaned, and twisted her body until four fingers were in her.

They moved slowly inside her, I barely had to do a thing. She breathed loudly through her nose and made little noises, the air burst from her lungs when she came. I had never been so hard, and slid right into her – I could smell my fingers beside her face, the slight sourness, the hint of iron.