The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (10 page)

“Chauf … chauffeur! Chauffeur … listen. The great Stolz. He . .. hired him! Chauffeur. I didn’t know that Peter. .. that Peter had wanted to commit su … su . .. suicide. He doesn’t admit it. Or he does, but only as a joke,” the suave voice from long ago said.

“Suicide. It’s no longer about walking ten dogs in the park at five
dollars an hour. Or triage at the post office. This is something else altogether.”

Lu paused to gather her strength. The couple had obtained drivers’ licenses, before leaving for America. They didn’t have a car, but they knew that it would be impossible to get by in America without driving. They took driving lessons; they took the test, theoretical and practical, and there was also, of course, the inevitable Balkan socialist bribe. Nothing was possible without it. Gora knew this well, as he’d gone through the same ritual himself. The examining officer took home a private bonus for every license obtained. Conscientiously, Lu took the exam and received the license that had already been paid for. Peter didn’t even show up. He received the license in an envelope, in the mail. For the same fee, of course. Yes, Gora remembered the procedure well.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing. At all. He has no driving experience, at all. But he says he’s fascinated by the Lunar City. As a chauffeur, he’ll scour the cosmos. ‘The lunar monster is made for us somnambulist wanderers,’ he keeps saying.”

Silence. She seemed as frightened by her own words as by the potential digression into another subject. Silence. Gora didn’t feel capable of deviating, either.

So as not to prolong the danger, Lu began to string together the wonders to which Peter aspired, quickly, like a labored recitation from a touristic guide: the Brighton Beach’s Moscow, Little Italy’s Naples, Queens’ Balkans, Pakistan and India, Chinatown, Harlem’s Senegal, Hasidic Brooklyn.

The iceberg of silence that spanned two decades wouldn’t thaw. Gora promised to talk to the potential suicide. To no effect, of course.

He was left only with the echo of Lu’s voice. That wasn’t nothing.

On his first day of work, Peter was to present himself at the house of a certain celebrity, driving one of Stolz’s limousines. A top-level university personality, a politician, a diplomat, it wasn’t too clear. A VIP, that was all, and the rest didn’t matter. He was to take the celebrity to the airport. After that, the taxi-limousine was to arrive at
another address, and another, the schedule established by Stolz’s dispatcher.

The novices had trained for two days, three hours per day, in a car that belonged to the porter of the small hotel where they lived.

“Key in the ignition, foot on the gas. Brake. Left, brake. Mirror! Mirror, watch the mirror,” warned the Mexican, sweating in panic. “Slow. Not that slow. Not enough gas. Back! That’s it, left. Your foot, your foot, yes, on the brake. Foot on the brake! Gas, yes. Left. Mirror! Right, mirror on the right. Check the mirror. Always check the mirror.”

The Mexican’s hair was greasy now from perspiration and fright; his small, grimy hands were trembling, his eyes popping; he was crossing himself; he was gripping his small head between his small hands, covering his face so as not to see the next moment. Peter, on the other hand, was perfectly calm, grateful for the training; he liked the wheeled dragon.

He muttered the same word over and over, “Slow, slow…” He’d found his prayer and motto: slow. That was all he needed to keep saying; the mantra would mollify the gods. Slow, go slow, you have time to correct your mistakes. The death race, the burlesque horror movie.

The car engaged, but the driver didn’t. Slow commands, demonic, left, slow, stop, foot, brake, like that, gas, brake, foot, slow, left, too much, too much, now right, slow, mirror, watch the mirror, left, that’s it, stop. Red light, stop.

The prehistoric driver at the wheel of the modern car remained calm and absent. Slow bouts, short commands, the prayer slow. He didn’t hear the apocalyptic uproar of the road; the prayer was protecting him. Slow, slow, as the prayer says.

“The suicidal syndrome,” whispered Lu at one point, in the back seat and in Gusti Gora’s dream.

That’s it, left. Foot! Foot on the brake. Gas, that’s it. Right, the right-side mirror. Slow, stop. Red light! Stop! Collision, stop. A miracle! Arrival! Slow, slow, easy curbs, calm changes of direction,
the blare of horns, the despair of drivers who passed alongside like comets, their fists raised to the sky. Happy ending: stoplight.

The gods had spared him; the stoplights had spared him; he believed in salvation. Slowly, terror-stricken, he’d arrived! When, how, who knew but here he was downtown. Little Italy, the celebrity’s residence.

He’d closed his eyes, exhausted, bent his head over the steering wheel, to sleep forever, to pass long minutes of dizziness and elation. Should you kill yourself? Dance every second, in front of the sacrificial altar. The pagan altar. The unknown around you and within you. Above the eagle of destiny, around, life, the primordial wedding. Fear, too, he felt fear, a gothic, luxurious horror. Gas, brake, mirror, horn. Left, right. Slow. Red. Stop. Saved! Short, unpredictable. Liquidated! Saved.

He woke up, smiling, in the mirror, over the wheel, kissing the complicit wheel; enlivened, he looked again at the wheeled monster. It was as if he were perceiving the magical machinery of death for the first time.

He climbed out of the car, rang the bell at the celebrity’s door. A short, agile gentleman. White moustache, a brush of white hair on his calabash of a head, blue bow tie, large hands, large nostrils, hurried, well disposed. He introduced himself quickly, threw the small valise on the backseat, and sat in the front passenger’s seat, near the hussar.

“How … what did you say your name was? Kaspar? Kaspar Hauser? The famous character? Is that it, Kaspar Hauser?”

The driver stared at him, lost at sea. He’d hit on a talker! He was ready for any conversation, if only it could be long, long, so that he’d never need to start that engine. He’ll talk about Kaspar Hauser until nighttime with this fabulous client, and he’ll forget all about the death race.

“My name isn’t Kaspar Hauser. That was a joke. Karl, that’s my name.”

“Karl? Marx? Karl Marx?”

“No. Rossmann. Mynheer Karl Rossmann.”

Peeperkorn would have been too much, Rossmann seemed all right.

“Mynheer? As in,
mister? Monsieur
Rossmann,
Herr
Rossmann?”

The passenger stared at him for a long time. Smiling. Ready to burst into laughter, smiling; he liked the game; he liked his playing partner. He was no longer hurrying to the airport. He’d found himself a talker, too!

“Rossmann, you say? Karl Rossmann? Kafka? The American novel? America seen from Prague?”

The driver smiled, too, convinced that the voluble gentleman could even have talked to Peeperkorn. It wasn’t easy to interrupt him, he was jumping out of his seat to find out the immigrant’s biography, his country, his profession, the languages he spoke. He knew a few languages, wasn’t that right? That was the fate of little countries, many languages, wasn’t that right?

“And your name? What’s your name, in fact?”

“RA0298.”

“What’s that you say?”

“My name has become a number. It’s engraved on my arm, just like … would you like to see?” The passenger’s eyes widened.

“You mean to say … no, no, you’re too young. That’s a bad joke. Auschwitz is a bad joke.”

“Okay, okay. It’s a bad joke, I’ll give you that.”

“So then, what is it? Your driver’s ID?”

“Resident Alien. RA 02987896. RA 0298, for short.”

They spoke endlessly, that is, for five minutes. Little Italy, like America, was hurried, pragmatic, energetic, hurried. The engine needed starting.

The driver started the engine. He stepped on the gas, repeated the magic formula of the devil that had brought him to Little Italy and that will take him further. Slow, slow . .. Gas, and so on. Foot, yes, foot on the brake, left, mirror.

He stopped. No more than a few meters, and he stopped. Happily,
he stopped. A stoplight. A divine, red light. The talkative passenger had stopped talking. Stupefied, he watched the taxi driver. The driver waited a second, the light turned green, he waited another second, “Slow, slow.” Another one-two-three seconds. He could hear the horns behind him, but he had the magic formula. Slow. There was no other solution. That was how he’d gotten to Little Italy, and that was how he’d get to the cemetery of the airport. Slow, this was the only password the devil understood.

He started again, cautiously, was just about going.

“No, no!” The mustached gentleman yelled. “Enough. This isn’t working. No, no, it’s not working,” the VIP was screaming, exasperated. “This isn’t working,” or, “this isn’t working anymore,” or whatever he was jabbering. Red in the face, on the brink of apoplexy.

“Stop! I’m getting out.”

The driver stopped, waited for the elegant gentleman to ask for his valise and for the scandal to start. The celebrity forgot about the bag, however; he didn’t even look in the backseat.

“Get out! You get out, too!”

The driver didn’t understand. He watched the client in a daze; he didn’t understand; he lacked the courage to understand. “Get out. We’ll change places.”

He got behind the wheel, and by the time they arrived at the airport, they were friends.

Before heading over to the departure corridor, Larry forced Peter Ga
par to call Stolz, to say that he’d gotten sick at the airport and he’d left the car in the parking garage, and someone should come and get it.

“Here’s my card. I run a college. It’s small, bizarre, but vibrant; I don’t have open positions right now; I can’t offer you anything. If you can’t get by, call me and we’ll figure something out. Give up driving. Choose poison or a bullet. Death at the wheel is trivial, and you’re a sensible man.”

Peter stared, bewildered, at the card. Bedros Avakian! Professor Bedros Avakian. That was all it said. It meant that he was famous, there was no need of other details. Bedros Avakian. So then,
Larry! Peter the Driver, alias Kaspar, alias Karl, had decided to call him Larry.

That’s how he’d met Larry. In later retellings, the immigrant Peter would identify through the same generic name, Larry, all the harbingers of his American destiny.

After the failed meeting with Death, the improvised taxi driver was hired by Stolz at one of his gas stations. Lu became the assistant to Dr. Koch. The couple’s situation improved somewhat.

Peter never forgot the first Larry’s advice. Any other kind of death is better than death at the wheel. Even falling off a trampoline.

He’d become friends with the manager at the gas station, a Syrian with his own network of schemes and shady earnings. Cars came and went; it was the sexual hum and hub of the city. A city with no equal, muttered Peter, in love with the Lunar City, unique and unifying.

A seasonal observer of the sky, Peter Ga
parobserved, without actually taking in, the red sky. The Hamletian clouds, astral and archaic symbols, birds of every color, elephant bodies riding the improbable batons of their legs. A drizzly twilight. The new Babylon was brashly raising the arrows of its buildings. Pylons stuck into the sordid subterranean depths, where rats, vagabonds, roaches, beggars, moles, and murderers—the fauna of the metropolis—teemed. “A marvelous city,” the wanderer murmured, dumbfounded in the face of the impassable Syrian. A mountainous cheek made of clay, secular whetstones, wilderness in full view.

“Change those bulbs,” a hoarse voice said.

He found the bulbs, grabbed the ladder and went out. He’d been putting off changing them for a few days. One step, and another, hands on the ladder, a rung, then another, left hand holding the side, the right hand outstretched toward the post to unscrew the burned bulb. Hand in the air—boom! Explosion. Not the bulb, but the ground. The mammoth mass hits the earth like a meteor, shaking the pavement.

In the ambulance, the dead hallucinated, “Hauser. Finished,
liquidated. Airways. Kennedy.” Kennedy and Airways were easy to distinguish. “Hauser. So little. Liquidated.”

The dead tossed around over the steering wheel in his dream. Those dear, red lights. “Irres … ir-re-sponsible. Liquidated.”