The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (11 page)

He leaned the evening up against the wall. The burned bulb on the post in the front of the station. The new bulb in his right pants pocket. He’d gotten to the top, and the rain was hammering down. His hand extended toward the post, his hand and his mind up in the air. Wet pavement. Twisted ladder, the elephant toppled to the ground that once bore him. Boom! The cadaver on the pavement.

Emergency visits don’t require insurance, the hospital has to receive anyone who arrives in an ambulance, this much the Syrian knew, as well as Stolz the proprietor, who didn’t offer the immigrants he employed any health insurance. The doctors woke the victim from his blackout to inform him that he’d crushed the bones in both of his legs. He urgently needed surgery, the soldering of crushed bones, implantation of metal rods to make them straight again. The Pakistani surgeon relayed the miracle: Stolz paid a spectacular sum out of the pocket of his former friend Mike Mark, the sensitive shark.

Once revived, Peter Ga
par was spared all further medical costs, but the incident aggravated the misunderstanding between the cousins, it would seem.

After his return from London, Dr. Avakian inquired about the chauffer Ga
par. Professor Augustin Gora, once given an honorary title by Avakian’s institution, received a call from the president’s secretary. She was asking if he knew anything about that bizarre compatriot of his.

“So then you know Ga
par,” the historian exclaimed after a second. “Ga
par! RA 0298! Peter Ga
par.”

“Yes,” Gora responded, stammering. “I know the name … and more, believe me, much more!”

“No, no, we’re not just joking around. There’s more, believe me. Death is the matter at hand. The paradoxical messenger of death.”

Gora was silent, suddenly overwhelmed.

“Death! That’s the institution your compatriot represents. At first I thought he didn’t know the city, that he was mixing up addresses, that he’d gotten confused. I was trying to divert his attention from the madness of driving, I talked about Little Italy, the neighborhood where he was hunting for death, who was hunting for him, and about Kaspar Hauser, about Brecht, the troupe from Vilna, Kafka, anything. I’m a historian, but I’m also a reader, of course, and not only that. How to distract his attention from driving? No one else could do a better job of this than he himself. His eyes opened wide to the chaos through which he was navigating, but his mind somewhere else, in hell, in heaven. Intangible! He groped around blindly, slowly, extremely slowly, meticulously, horrified. His feet fumbled for the pedal, his eyes electrified, in prayer. Pure terror. Pure, my good man!”

Gora was preparing his questions, in his mind, but Avakian didn’t allow any pause.

“Should I keep him talking about things that he knows? Should I try to steel him up? This wasn’t a time for conventional solutions.”

President Avakian was laughing heartily, happy that he’d beaten Death.

“You know that Ga
par, as a man, is quite …”

“Miraculous! You mean miraculous? He’s a miracle, no more, no less. I escaped with my life only through a miracle. He didn’t care at all. About me, about himself, about the car, New York, it was all just a spectacle, that’s all. The spectacle before the catastrophe, and the spectacle of the catastrophe.”

The historian couldn’t forget that experiment, and wouldn’t allow himself to be interrupted from recounting the morbid screenplay, which he’d probably already recounted many times over.

“The business card he gave you represented …”

“A letter of thanks! A reward. He was about to hand it over, the next occasion, to his boss: Death. A cash reward, no matter how big, would have been merely trivial.”

“You’d be disposed to see him again, then? To … ”

“To see him again? As a pedestrian … as a pedestrian, Mr. Gora! As a pedestrian, anytime! Disposed? Obligated! That’s how I see it. A matter of conscience, I can’t forget that. A miracle can’t be repaid in any other way.”

No one could have pleaded Peter’s cause better than Bedros Avakian himself. There was nothing to add; you simply had to let him exhaust his inexhaustible discourse.

“I was, you understand, in the heart of Experimental Theater . .. Experimental History. The great experiment of the other world. Martyr and guinea pig. In less than a half an hour, death had kissed me everywhere. I was powerless. But I escaped, after all! The madman at the wheel has no escape, however, that’s for sure! Now or in an hour or tomorrow, the holocaust, an atomic bomb, a worldwide earthquake, or a cosmic hurricane will meet him. That’s certain! Should I call the police or the taxi company, or should I hire him instantly at the university? You know how people are, always in a hurry—I was in a hurry to arrive in London, at a conference about the Armenian genocide in Turkey, I was presiding over the conference. Not even after I eluded death did I forget that I didn’t have time to spare, I needed to get to London. And I did.”

“So, then, Ga
par could … I wonder if he might call you,” Gora ventured to say. “He kept your card, this I know. I could, eventually …”

“If he’s alive! If he’s still alive. If the miracle revalidated itself. It would be beyond my understanding, as well as the understanding of any rational being. I’d do anything, Professor, for such an intangible being, anything. I’ll hire him to teach the occult! Spells and magic and astrology?”

Dr. Avakian was laughing, quite pleased with himself. At the height of his frenzied monologue, probably to perfect the dark humor of the incident, he asked for a letter of recommendation for Peter Ga
par.

In the folder on Gora’s desk, there was a heap of documents related to Peter. Yellow, white, blue sheets; Gora liked to jot notes quickly, on colored paper, details, whether real or imagined, thoughts, information
that might someday be useful to him. He collaborated, under a pen name, with the journals of the exiles; he also wrote brief, ironic obituaries. He prepared them carefully, while the dead were still alive. Then he would thin out the compositions, without giving them up all together. The passages seemed too short, as the results of such extended research. How to make a simple, ephemeral inscription out of a biography that accumulates and burns through so much? A cynical frivolity, a bow in the face of unavoidable ferocity.

The deceased deserved more than the bureaucratic summary of visible existence! One should capture not just what was, but also what could have been, the potentialities that dissipate at once with the deceased. What he endeavored only in his mind, what he sketched out only in thought but never brought to fruition or had the courage to admit, even to himself. The secret life, often unconscious, surrounding and stemming from the heart of the ephemeral, time and space extended beyond the immediate present.